R. Robin McDonald
Fulton County Daily Report
06-26-2007
A defense lawyer for Wayne Williams, the man long identified as the serial killer in a string of 29 slayings that terrorized Atlanta from 1979 to 1981, said that DNA tests of dog hairs recovered from some of the victims are inconclusive.
On Monday, John R. "Jack" Martin -- attorney for Williams -- issued the statement after receiving a report containing the results of comparative DNA tests on hairs taken from Williams' German shepherd mix, Sheba, and dozens of suspected dog hairs recovered from 11 black men and boys whose slayings were attributed to Williams.
Those animal hairs, preserved for more than 25 years, played a key role in Williams' 1982 double-murder conviction.
DNA testing was not available for use in criminal investigations at the time of Williams' 1982 murder trial. Using less definitive testing, the state wove a web of forensic evidence that linked Williams to his victims through blood stains, human and dog hairs and hundreds of fibers from carpets, clothing and bed linens.
Martin said that the results of the DNA tests do not exclude Williams' dog as the source of dozens of hairs found on 11 of 12 victims whose slayings were introduced as evidence in Williams' 1982 trial. But, Martin said, given the nature of the DNA tested, "It cannot be concluded that the hairs came from Mr. Williams' dog. Thousands of dogs in the Atlanta area, including a number of different breeds, possess the type of DNA profile found. ... In sum, Mr. Williams' dog is neither specifically excluded nor included as the dog or dogs whose mitochondrial DNA profile matches the hairs found on some of the bodies."
On Monday, Aimee Maxwell, executive director of the Georgia Innocence Project, cautioned that DNA testing of animal hairs is still "in its infancy." She said DNA testing in animals is "not as discriminating" as human DNA tests because of the interbreeding common among dogs. In addition, if the dog hair evidence did not include the root of the hair, only less precise mitochondrial DNA testing could be done, she said.
Such testing would reveal only the DNA strand inherited from the mother, Maxwell said, not the strands inherited from both parents. "It would not lead to this actual, individual dog."
But, Maxwell added, if there is not even a partial DNA match, then
defense attorneys could safely argue that Williams' dog was not the
source of the hairs recovered from the victims. "That's an absolute
exclusion." If there is a partial match, Maxwell said the results will
likely not change the status of the case.
Williams was convicted of the murders of two men -- Nathaniel Cater, 28, and Jimmy Ray Payne, 21. But the jury found cause to believe that Williams had also killed 10 other victims, ages 11 to 28, though he was never charged with those deaths.
Following Williams' conviction, authorities closed the books on the murders of 24 black boys, teenagers and young men, known as the Atlanta child murders. Five more slayings and a disappearance were never resolved. Williams always has asserted his innocence in all the slayings.
Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Paul L. Howard Jr. plans today to announce the results of the dog hair DNA tests, which were sent to him Friday following testing by the forensic veterinary laboratory at the University of California, Davis, the only private lab in the United States that does animal DNA testing. The report arrived at Howard's office a day after the 26th anniversary of Williams' arrest on June 21,
1981.
Howard is scheduled to hold a news conference at the Midtown studio WAOK-AM, the sister station of WVEE-FM, or V-103, where two years ago DeKalb County's chief law enforcement officer pronounced Williams an innocent man.
In a formal pleading in which he agreed to let the DNA testing go forward, Howard had called comparative DNA tests of dog hairs the "least significant of the trace evidence presented." At Williams' trial, forensic experts had testified that hairs from Williams' dog were a microscopic match to dog hairs recovered from 11 of the 12 victims who figured in Williams' trial.
In asking for the DNA tests, Williams' defense team, Martin and Lynn H. Whatley, had hoped to secure ammunition for Williams' lingering federal habeas corpus appeal as well as evidentiary fodder for an extraordinary motion for a new trial.
On Monday, Martin said defense attorneys are still waiting for "the more important results" of a DNA analysis of two human scalp hairs found on one of Williams' suspected victims. The FBI crime laboratory is doing comparative DNA testing of those scalp hairs with DNA samples that Williams provided voluntarily, Martin said. "These results are much more likely to be definitive. ... It is our hope that the human hair analysis can give us some definitive answers."
If the new DNA tests show no matches between evidence recovered from the slaying victims and Williams or his dog, Martin and Whatley have said they intend to file an extraordinary motion for a new trial. Williams' federal habeas appeal seeking his release from prison has been rejected, but Williams' has an appeal of the district judge's rulings pending before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In addition to DNA tests on the animal hairs, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore last January also approved DNA tests to compare bloodstains found on the backseat of Williams' station wagon with blood from two of his suspected victims. Moore also authorized the DNA analysis of two human hairs recovered from an 11-year-old to determine whether the DNA matched that of Williams.
When Howard acquiesced last January to a defense petition for DNA tests of blood, animal hair and human hair preserved from the Williams trial, the district attorney was careful to note in his formal response to Williams' motion that no matter what the results of comparative DNA tests, they would not have changed the outcome of Williams' trial.
At Williams' trial, experts testified that two foreign scalp hairs recovered from the body of 11-year-old slaying victim Patrick Baltazar were a microscopic match to scalp hair taken from Williams. And they linked samples of human bloodstains recovered from Williams' car to two of Williams' suspected victims -- John Porter, 28, and William Barrett, 16. Experts testified that the stains from the car matched the blood types in combination with rare blood enzymes recovered from the victims' clothing.
Williams' attorneys petitioned for the DNA tests last year after the Daily Report located the 25-year-old evidence in a vault in the Fulton County Courthouse. The newspaper recruited experts to examine the forensic evidence in the Williams case in 2005 after then-DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham publicly asserted his belief in Williams' innocence on radio host Frank Ski's morning show on WVEE-FM. At the same time, Graham reopened six DeKalb homicides that had been linked to Williams, though he was never charged.
In a 2005 interview with the Daily Report, Graham dismissed the legitimacy of the carpet fiber evidence and expressed skepticism as to whether any forensic evidence still existed that could be tested for DNA.
The newspaper found during its yearlong investigation into the forensic case against Williams that DeKalb detectives never sought to locate or review the forensic evidence in the case. After Graham resigned under fire last year, his successor quietly closed the cases, saying detectives had turned up no new information.
Meanwhile, after locating the 25-year-old evidence in a vault at the Fulton courthouse, the Daily Report -- in conjunction with the Georgia Innocence Project -- filed a public records request with Fulton Superior Court Chief Judge Doris L. Downs seeking comparative DNA testing of the human and animal hair and blood evidence. Downs rejected that request, saying that state public records laws -- which permit a review of trial exhibits with the permission either of the trial judge or the chief judge -- did not cover independent forensic testing.
But Williams' defense lawyers accompanied the Daily Report, Maxwell and lawyers from the offices of the Fulton County district attorney and the Georgia attorney general to look at stored microscopic slides of hair and fiber that were preserved from Williams' trial.
Prosecutors subsequently located the rear seat of Williams' station wagon -- from which forensic investigators had extracted blood samples in 1981 in the evidence vault -- as well as the bloodstained clothes of two victims to which those samples had been favorably compared.
Martin said Monday that forensic analysts were unable to extract any blood samples from the car seat, and those used at trial are missing, so no DNA tests could be done.
A short time later, Williams' lawyers sought their own DNA tests under a state statute passed in 2003 that permits DNA testing if the technology was not available at the time of a defendant's trial, if the identity of the perpetrator was, or should have been, a significant issue in the case, or if DNA tests would raise a "reasonable probability" that the defendant would have been acquitted.
The Innocence Project's Maxwell said that, like the animal DNA tests, if the human hair samples do not include the root, the DNA tests "are going to be less discriminating." But such testing could conclusively eliminate a connection to Williams even though it could not provide a conclusive link, she said.
Comparative DNA testing on blood evidence, by contrast, could provide a "full DNA profile" that would link Williams more conclusively to the victims, Maxwell said.
While agreeing to the DNA tests, Howard has played down their significance, stressing, instead, that Williams' conviction "rests primarily" on hundreds of carpet fibers that linked the victims to Williams' home and automobiles he drove. So detailed was the fiber case that it has become a landmark in the annals of forensic fiber analysis and is still studied in college forensic science courses across the country.
Forensic fiber experts testified that hundreds of fibers found on 12 of the victims were identical to fibers found on carpeting in Williams' home and automobile. One rare carpet fiber was only made for a short time and matched a rug in Williams' bedroom.
Last year, the Daily Report asked two of the top forensic fiber experts in the country to review the fiber evidence that the jury saw as well as thousands of pages of testimony by forensic experts at Williams' trial. Those experts contacted by the newspaper concluded that, 25 years later, the fiber evidence against Williams remains compelling and credible.
Stephanie K. McCoy
Paralegal
Cohen Kennedy Dowd & Quigley
The Camelback Esplanade I
2425 East Camelback Road, Suite 1100
Phoenix, Arizona 85016
Ph: 602.252.8400
www.ckdqlaw.com
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