In The Beginning..
When I first started writing this news blog a couple of years ago, I wrote a story about Dr Henry Bello and Charles Lee Thornton. Bello (pictured left) was the doctor that went bat sh!t crazy and shot five people before killing himself in a Bronx hospital in 2017. Likewise a little better than ten years earlier in Kirkwood Missouri, Thornton shot eight people, killing six and injuring two. Thornton (pictured right) was killed in a shootout with police following the murders.
In the article I proposed that black serial killers were different from their white counterparts in respect to their motives. The majority of white mass murderers kill for some type of ideological stance, while the few black mass murderers kill for personal reasons. For instance a black mass murderer will kill for stepping on their shoes, getting fired from their job, sleeping with they women or some type of domestic dispute, while white mass murderers kill you over the color of your skin, your religion, sexual orientation or politics just to name a few. I know about a family of white folks that killed you because you were related to somebody. I can only think of two black mass murderers that killed because of race. By the way only four black mass murderers came to mind while I was writing this article. If you think of any more leave me a note and I will check into it. Anywho, two of the people we have already talked about. The other two black mass murders are Micah Xavier Johnson and Emmanuel Sampson. Johnson was an Army Reserve Afghan War veteran who was angry over police shootings of black men and stated that he wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers. Johnson is the man they sent a robot in to blow up, after the police shooting in Dallas in 2016 and Sampson is the guy who went into a church in Tennessee, shot 6 people and killed one because they were white. Sampson was charged with first-degree murder of a white female with the intent to murder 10 Caucasians. True story. He was convicted and sentenced to living with dangerous, hard rock large muscular white racist convicts, on a Tennessee prison farm for the rest of his “probably” short miserable life.
Black Power!!
Anywho, that brings us to the subject of this article. From 1979 through May of 1981, 28 children were killed in Atlanta. The killings were called the Atlanta Child Murders. Although the newspapers at the time reported the killings by this name, some of the victims were teenagers and adults. The prime suspect in the case was a black man named Wayne B. Williams. As I said before, I could only think of 4 black mass murderers and Williams would make it five. But we need to hold up for a minute, because (1) Williams was never charged with the killing of the children, (2) for the last 36 years williams has said he did not do it. ( I will get back to this point in a minute,) and (3) the in 2019 the state attorney agreed to re-open the case and use modern forensic techniques to lay to rest the inconsistencies of the first trial. Now let get back to point number two. You got to remember when this happened in 1979, it had only been a decade since the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. A significant amount of African American’s still lived in or near the burnt out inner cities caused by the riots a decade earlier, which was a constant reminder of the bitter racial divide and inequities. Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party was in the papers almost daily, a symbol of black power and resistance. Everyone was wearing afro’s and daishiki’s, we were sisters and brothers and black is beautiful was not only a saying, but that’s the way it was.
Wayne B. Williams Trial And Conviction.
It was in this atmosphere that the Atlanta child killings took place. A lot of the bodies were found by a bridge crossing the Chattahoochee River. On the day they caught Williams, a police surveillance team was posted up there. They reported hearing a loud splash as if something had been thrown in the river. The first automobile to exit the bridge after the splash belonged to Williams. This was around the time when the clubs let out. When he was stopped and questioned, he told police that he was on his way to check on an address in a neighboring town ahead of an audition the following morning with a young singer named Cheryl Johnson. However, both the phone number he gave police and Cheryl Johnson turned out to be fake. A couple of days later a body washed up. Reminds me of Marc Char, the Asian who thought he was being treated like a black man. Nah bro. Anywho, a few days later they bounce on Williams and take him down for questioning and a polygraph. He failed three of them. The police also said hair taken from his home was consistent with hairs taken from another victim. So let’s recap what we got so far Marc. The police charged Willam’s based on a splash they heard and a car that crossed the bridge at the time. The autopsy of the first victim revealed he died from asphyxiation but he wasn’t stangled. The hair’s were a consistent match, but not an exact match from the other victim. None of the other evidence from the other 26 black children killed in the murders pointed to William’s. William’s is serving two life sentences for the killing of the two victims based on circumstantial evidence and since he was also blamed for the Atlanta child murders, that case was closed. Marc you ain’t black, so take that sh!t off your face.
The Klu klux Klan Connection
Racist being initiated by the Grand Puba or whatever the !@@!## he’s called.
In early 2004, Williams sought a retrial with his attorneys arguing that law enforcement officials covered up evidence of involvement by the Ku Klux Klan. What!! The Klu Klux Klan in Atlanta Georgia, oh my god!!!! You do know I am being facetious.. right? Anywho, the story goes like this. “According to an August 2005 report, Charles T. Sanders, a white supremacist affiliated with the KKK—and an early suspect in the murders—once praised the crimes in secretly recorded conversations. Although Sanders did not publicly claim responsibility for any of the deaths, he told an informant for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in the 1981 recording that the killer had “wiped out a thousand future generations of niggers”. An anonymous alleged former friend of Sanders told documentarian Payne Lindsey (Atlanta Monster) that Sanders had taken credit for the murders mentioned in a 1986 Spin article, claiming that his brothers were also involved. He did not directly implicate the KKK or lead his friend to believe that anyone else from the organization was involved. Sanders allegedly mused over how lucky he was that he and Williams’ had the same carpet and that they both owned a white German shepherd. The anonymous former friend went on to say that, “Once it was pinned on Wayne Williams, they were through. That was their way out.” Police dropped the probe into possible Klan involvement when Sanders and two of his brothers passed lie detector tests. The case was once again closed on July 21, 2006.” – Weber, Harry R. (August 7, 2005). “Klan Was Probed in Child Killings In Atlanta”. Washington Post. Washington DC.
As I said earlier this was not a typical moment in black history in the United States. It wasn’t like it is today. I’m not saying there was no black on black crime, but there was almost no killing of black children by black people that did not know them, especially mass killings. The author James Baldwin, in his essay The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), raised questions about Williams’ guilt. Members of his community and several of the victims’ parents did not believe that Williams, the son of two professional teachers, could have killed so many. On May 6, 2005, DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham ordered the reopening of the murder cases of four boys killed in that county between February and May 1981 that had been attributed to Williams. The announcement was welcomed by relatives of some victims, who said they believe the wrong man was blamed for many of the murders. Former DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey, who was an Atlanta homicide detective at the time, also said he believed Williams was wrongly blamed for the murders. “If they arrested a white guy,” he said, “there would have been riots across the U.S.” Dorsey was later arrested for the murder of a political rival.
“There would have been riots across the U.S,” is absolutely right. I am telling you when the case came to light, there were very few Blacks who believed that Williams was responsible for the killing. Some of us remember the Beltway Sniper in Washington DC, when John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were caught. At the time it was pennies to a dollar that a white man was responsible for the shooting. Black America was shocked when they caught the pair. That’s sorta kinda the feeling Black America had when William’s was charged with the crime. Although Williams wasn’t caught red handed like Muhammad and Malvo, Black Americans wanted the mess to go away. It wasn’t easy seeing a black man charged with the mass killing of black children, being displayed in the newspapers and television day after day and week after week. There were charges of racism and cover-up, but when Williams was convicted and put in prison, Black America shrugged and the rest is history.
37 Years And Counting…
A Department of Justice study, released in April 2015, concluded that numerous hair analyses conducted by FBI examiners during the 1980s and ’90s “may have failed to meet professional standards.” On March 21, 2019, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields announced that officials would re-test evidence from the murders, which will be gathered by the Atlanta Police Department, Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, and Georgia Bureau of Investigation. In a news conference, Mayor Bottoms said, “It may be there is nothing left to be tested. But I do think history will judge us by our actions and we will be able to say we tried.” Who knows what the future will bring. Maybe Williams didn’t kill those children.. just maybe.
*All Victims
*Victims listed are not in the order as pictured.
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