August 3, 2007
Georgia
New DNA Report Another Blow to Defense in Atlanta Child Murder Case
R. Robin McDonald, Fulton County Daily Report
A national forensic expert calls the newest round of DNA testing in the
25-year-old murder conviction of Wayne Williams "another nail in his coffin"
that reinforces the credibility of the jury's 1982 guilty verdict against
Williams.
Recently completed tests of eight human hairs recovered in 1981 from the
body of one of the slaying victims represented Williams' last chance to
secure new evidence that might have discredited forensic links tying him to
12 slaying victims at his 1982 murder trial. The Fulton County district
attorney released the report of the DNA test results Wednesday.
Combined with previously released DNA tests of animal hair taken from the
bodies of the victims that were compared with hairs from Williams' dog and
an independent examination of forensic fiber evidence made last year at the
request of the Daily Report, the latest DNA tests strongly suggest that the
jury in the Williams case got it right.
"Any sane, independently thinking person would ... come up with the same
conclusion," said Nicholas Petraco, owner of Petraco Forensic Consulting in
New York and a longtime forensic consultant for the New York Police
Department. "Wayne Williams has been given just about every opportunity for
it to go the other way. It hasn't gone the other way."
DNA testing was not used in criminal investigations at the time of Williams'
murder trial. Using the tests available at the time, the prosecution wove a
web of forensic evidence linking Williams to his victims through
bloodstains, human and dog hairs and hundreds of fibers from carpets,
clothing and bed linens in Williams' home and cars.
On Thursday, Williams' defense attorney John R. "Jack" Martin, called the
DNA report by analysts at the FBI crime laboratory in Washington "pretty
much inconclusive." Martin reserved further comment on DNA tests of human
hairs recovered from the body of 11-year-old slaying victim Patrick Baltazar
until the defense's own DNA expert can review the results.
Martin and longtime Williams defense attorney Lynn H. Whatley had hoped that
the tests would definitively exclude Williams as the source of the hairs
recovered from Baltazar. They would have used the information as the basis
for an extraordinary motion for a new trial.
Martin also lamented the disappearance of blood evidence that was used to
convict Williams. Samples of bloodstains taken from the rear seat of
Williams' car were compared to blood recovered from the clothing of two of
Williams' suspected victims. The bloodstains matched the blood and enzyme
types of two suspected victims who had been stabbed.
Martin said that the blood evidence, unlike the DNA tests, could have
provided definitive answers as to whether the slaying victims were ever in
Williams' car. The one piece of evidence that could provide the most
reliable DNA tests, Martin said, "is missing."
Although Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore has
ordered the district attorney to search for the blood evidence and make it
available for testing, Fulton County District Attorney Paul L. Howard Jr.
said last month, "It's gone."
Williams, long considered guilty of the child murder cases that terrorized
Atlanta from 1979 to 1981, was convicted of the murders of two men --
Nathaniel Cater, 28, and Jimmy Ray Payne, 21. But the jury that convicted
him of the adult slayings found cause to believe that Williams had also
killed 10 other victims ranging in age from 11 to 28. Those slayings were
introduced at Williams' trial, although Williams was never charged with the
deaths.
Following Williams' conviction, law enforcement authorities closed the books
on 24 homicides of black boys, teens and young men. Those closed cases were
among 29 slayings and the unsolved 1981 disappearance of a black child that
authorities considered to be the work of a single serial killer.
Williams, now serving a life sentence in state prison in Georgia, has always
maintained that he is innocent of all the Atlanta child murder cases.
The DNA tests of human hair recovered from one of Williams' suspected
victims completes a re-examination begun by the Daily Report in 2005 of the
forensic evidence remaining from the Williams case.
In 2005, shortly after then-DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham
proclaimed his belief in Williams' innocence and reopened the investigation
into five homicides attributed to Williams, the Daily Report reconstructed
the forensic case against Williams and had it reviewed by some of the
country's top forensic experts. The newspaper hoped to lay to rest some of
the haunting questions about Williams' guilt.
INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION
After months of investigation, the Daily Report succeeded in locating the
fiber evidence from Williams' trial. The paper then persuaded two of the
country's top fiber experts, one of them Petraco, to conduct their own
independent analysis of the fiber evidence. Those experts concluded that the
forensic fiber case against Williams -- now a landmark case in the annals of
modern forensic science -- remained compelling.
The Daily Report then joined with the Georgia Innocence Project and
petitioned the Fulton County Superior Court for an independent DNA
examination of animal and human hairs that, at Williams' trial, had been
used to tie 11 slaying victims to Williams, his home, his car and his dog.
While the court denied the newspaper's request, the Daily Report's actions
prompted Williams' defense lawyers -- in concert with the Innocence Project
-- to secure their own tests of preserved hairs that the Daily Report had
located.
In June, the results of independent tests by one of the foremost
laboratories for genetic animal testing in the country concluded that
mitochondrial DNA extracted from animal hairs retrieved from Williams' dog
and from five of Williams' suspected victims were a match. Those tests could
have eliminated Williams' dog as the source of the evidentiary hairs.
Instead, the tests found that the hair matched that of Williams' dog and
that of about 1 percent of all dogs.
The human hair samples that underwent comparative DNA tests at the FBI
laboratory were recovered from the body of 11-year-old Patrick Baltazar.
Baltazar's body was found Feb. 13, 1981 in a creek that crossed a DeKalb
County office park near Interstate 85. He had been strangled.
Williams was never charged with Baltazar's murder, but the boy's death was
linked to Williams at trial through three human hairs recovered from
Baltazar's body that were a microscopic match to Williams' own head and body
hair; through dog hairs recovered from the body that microscopically matched
those of Williams' dog Sheba; and through nine fabric fibers that had clung
to Baltazar's body that matched fibers, some of them considered unusual or
rare, taken from Williams' house or car.
The FBI's DNA report on the human hairs recovered from Baltazar noted that
he couldn't be identified as the only possible match, but that "cannot be
excluded as a source" of the recovered hairs. According to the report, an
estimated 3.5 percent of African-Americans will have the same mitochondrial
DNA sequence as those found in the recovered and known Williams hairs.
Petraco said that mitochondrial DNA analysis "can't say for certain that it
did come from someone. ... The most you can ever say is the person can't be
eliminated [as a source]." But, he added, FBI analysts' discovery of so many
closely related DNA sequences in the samples they analyzed offers "a fairly
powerful statement statistically" that Williams was the source of the hairs
found on Baltazar's body.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation forensic analyst Larry Peterson -- who
testified as one of the prosecution's forensic experts at Williams' trial --
said Thursday that DNA tests on the human and animal hairs have provided
additional proof "that goes beyond the microscopic level" of an already
strong forensic association between Williams and the slaying victims.
Peterson testified at Williams' trial that the human and dog hairs recovered
from the victims were a microscopic match to those of Williams and his dog.
"It's another layer of evidence tying a victim and the defendant together,"
Peterson said. "It strengthens the trace evidence" and -- coupled with the
fiber evidence in the case -- virtually eliminates any possibility that the
victims were not exposed to Williams, his home or his car. "I feel certain
that if it had been available at trial, it would have been used."
But Joseph L. Burton, now a private forensic consultant who performed
Baltazar's autopsy as DeKalb County's medical examiner, reviewed the FBI
report and noted that the DNA comparison "is not an exact match."
"What that means," he said, "is that there could be something that's caused
the sample from Baltazar to deteriorate. .. There could be reasons there is
not a match, but the bottom line is, if you are going to electrocute someone
or give them a lethal injection based on this test, you wouldn't do it.
"Is the glass half-full or half-empty? It depends on who writes the report.
It could have been written, 'This is not an exact match. But there are
reasons that it may not be an exact match so we could not exclude Wayne
Williams.'"
Jack E. Mallard, who as then-chief assistant district attorney in Fulton
County headed the team that prosecuted Williams, said Thursday that if he
had the results of the DNA tests on the animal and human hair evidence at
Williams' murder trial, he would have showed them to the jury. "We would
have used it, just as we would if the trial were going on now," he said.
---
Source : Fulton County Daily Report
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1186089400880
