The Atlanta Child Murders

Chapter Name

Gearing Up

Popular black attorney Mary Welcome, a former city solicitor, was the first lawyer on Wayne Williams' defense team. Initially she chose Tony Axam, an experienced attorney on major cases, to complement her skills. However, Williams fired Axam and Mary replaced him with Alvin Binder, a capable, but abrasive white lawyer from Mississippi.

Judge Clarence Cooper (left) & Lewis Slaton (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Judge Clarence Cooper, the first black judge elected to the Fulton County bench, had been an assistant district attorney for a number of years and was a protégé of District Attorney and prosecutor Lewis Slaton. Interestingly, Fulton County announced that a computer program randomly selected a black judge who just happened to be pals with the prosecution to be the judge on the Wayne Williams trial. Jack Mallard was the most active member of Slaton's prosecution team.

One very controversial situation was that in the case of Jimmy Payne, the Fulton County medical examiner had written that the cause of death was "undetermined." That is, it was not determined that Payne was, in fact, murdered. Recognizing the difficulty in prosecuting Williams for a death that was not clearly a homicide, the medical examiner conveniently changed his document to indicate "homicide."

Dettlinger points out that when confronted with the change in the death certificate — which subsequently allowed for Wayne Williams to be indicted in the Jimmy Payne case — the medical examiner said he "checked the wrong box" on the death certificate." However, there is no box to check on the death certificate, only a place to type in the word "undetermined" or "homicide."

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1. Setting the Stage
2. The Looming Crisis
3. Ominous Beginning
4. Two More Boys
5. End to the Lull
6. Jefferey
7. A Murderous Rampage
8. STOP
9. Ransom
10. Witnesses to Murder
11. The List
12. Making Sense of the Crisis
13. No End In Sight
14. Links
15. A Murderous Change of Pace
16. The Jo-Jo Connection
17. Chaos
18. A Deadly April
19. The Last to Make the List
20. Dettlinger and His Map
21. A Splash From the Bridge
22. Wayne Bertram Williams
23. Up to No Good
24. Building the Case
25. Pulling it Together
26. Gearing Up
27. The Trial
28. Patterns
29. Damaging Testimony
30. Mounting Evidence
31. On the Stand
32. Going Down!
33. Fiber Analysis
34. Under a Microscope
35. Challenging Evidence
36. Probability
37. Reasonable Doubts
38. Unfair Trial?
39. Race War?
40. More Than One
41. A New Investigation in 2005
42. New Chapter 2006 — Ku Klux Klan Connection
43. New Chapter 2006 — The Child Molester Theory
44. Bibliography