Serial Murders Georgia

It was 1981, in the heat of the case, and the numbers of outsiders pouring into Atlanta were soaring along with the summer thermometer and headlines shouting, "They Found Another Body." The psychics were there, five of them sent by the National Enquirer. Five out-of-town super-cops dropped in briefly too, as did the man with the tracking dogs and the crime-busting Guardian Angels from New York. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson came and went.

It was 1981, in the heat of the case, and the numbers of outsiders pouring into Atlanta were soaring along with the summer thermometer and headlines shouting, "They Found Another Body." The psychics were there, five of them sent by the National Enquirer. Five out-of-town super-cops dropped in briefly too, as did the man with the tracking dogs and the crime-busting Guardian Angels from New York. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson came and went.

Claiming that Ku Klux Klan members actually committed the murders, attorneys said they would soon file documents aimed at winning a new trial for convicted child-killer Wayne Williams. Twenty-nine children and young adults disappeared in a series of homicides that terrorized Atlanta a decade ago. Williams was convicted of two of the crimes and is serving two life sentences.

The man convicted in the Atlanta child murders case asked a court in Jackson, Ga., for a new trial on grounds that prosecutors withheld evidence. Wayne Williams, convicted in 1982 of killing two young black men, was also linked by police to 20 of 27 other slayings of children and teen-agers. His attorney, Bobby Lee Cook, said police and prosecutors withheld a Ku Klux Klan member's taped confession that he helped to kidnap and kill about 21 of the victims, all of whom were black.