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Michael Lee Jackson, who is fighting the case in the Federal court, pointed out: “Wayne wasn’t defending himself against two murder charges. He really had to defend himself against 12. But the state only had to prove two of them.”
    Jackson is confident that if Graham’s cold-case squad can show that any of the “pattern-case” victims was killed by someone else, he can win Williams a new trial.
    Despite the doubts about Williams’ guilt, there are no protesters out on the streets demanding his release. Los Angeles Times journalist Jeff Prugh who co-wrote the book The List about the Williams case, says this is because the civil rights establishment that had taken over from the old white power structure around the time of the killings found it “politically expedient . . . to sit on their hands rather than to attack the black power structure that they helped put into office”.
    The Reverend Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr Martin Luther King Jnr, blames Atlanta’s current black police commissioner and a black mayor for allowing Williams to suffer such injustice. Lowery himself did not believe Williams responsible for the child killings – indeed, he handed over to the FBI a letter from a reputed Ku Klux Klan member implicating the Klan in the murders. However, Lowery does feel that Williams was guilty of the two adult murders he was convicted of.
    “I think the community settled into the position that if Wayne did not do it,” he says, “at least those who were doing it had stopped.”
    Graham is worried that much of the physical evidence from the original cases no longer exists. Jackson says he would not be surprised to learn it had been destroyed, as were hours of surveillance tapes of Klan members. However, a judge has ordered that transcripts of the tapes, which still exist, should be handed over to the defence. But a review of the material says that the police dropped their investigation into Klan involvement in the murders after seven weeks. Although Klansman Charles T. Sanders voiced support for the killings, he denied involvement. He and two of his brothers passed lie-detector tests. However Williams has another ace up his sleeve. He says that he can prove that the witness who said he saw Williams and Nathaniel Cater holding hands on the night of the murder was, in fact, in jail at the time.
    In a rare interview in 2005, Williams, then 46, told WVEE-FM that he was imprisoned with at least four relatives of his alleged victims, and that even they believe in his innocence.
    “The Wayne Williams you see sitting right here today is just as much a victim of what happened as anybody else that was involved in this tragedy,” he said from Hancock State Prison. “None of us have really had closure in this thing – not the families, not Wayne and not the people of Atlanta.”
    Williams claims that, as a black man, he was railroaded in order to prevent the race war the Klan sought to ignite. However, Janie Glenn, mother of victim Billy Barrett, is not convinced Williams is a victim. Twenty-four years before, on the day after Mother’s Day, her 17-year-old son had cooked her breakfast, then he took the bus to go and pay a family friend for some guttering work he had done on the house.
    “Be careful,” she had said as he left.
    Later that day, his body was found dumped on a road a few miles from home – some witnesses say by a uniformed man in a squad car. He had been stabbed and smothered. Glenn says that Williams knew her son and had cruelly encouraged the smallish boy with a painful stutter into believing he could make it as a singer. A relative also told her that Williams had attended her son’s funeral.
    “I’m not going to say that his hands killed him, but I believe that he knows something,” she says. “If Wayne knows who killed my son and the rest of the kids, then he needs to open his big mouth and let somebody else pay for what they