>> this is the first time wayne williams has talked on tv in at least a decade. why do you think you were convicted? >> fear. >> what do you mean? >> atlanta, at the time, was in a panic. they wanted any suspect that they could find. and let's just be honest. it had to be a black person, because if it had been a white suspect, atlanta probably would have gone up in flames. it came very close to that. >> do you think you'll ever be free? >> no doubt it's not a matter of if to me. it's a matter of when. >> some 30 years after wayne williams' trial and conviction, there is still debate and some doubt. this time, you can be the judge and the jury. we'll lay out the evidence on both sides and you'll hear from wayne williams at length. then we'll invite you to reach your own verdict, guilty, innocent, or a third choice, not proven. the first clue was found on a dead boy's tennis shoes. the victim was eric middlebrooks. his body left here in a rainy alley. a foster child who rode his bicycle away one night on an errand and was dead by dawn. detective bob buffington saw something red stuck to eric's tennis shoe. >> and i noticed in the flap of the edge of this shoe this tuft of what to me appeared to be wool. and that was it. we could find no other evidence. >> back at homicide, buffington showed the fibers to his superiors. >> the lieutenant made a big joke out of it and told the rest of the squad that if i went over to the lieutenant's house and cleaned out the lint trap in his dryer, we could probably clear out all the cases in the city of atlanta. >> still, buffington sent the fibers to the state crime laboratory. a young forensic scientist, larry peterson, took a look. why was a fiber that was stuck in the crack of a shoe, why was that important? >> because it was somewhat loosely there. people normally don't have tufts of carpet fibers loosely stuck in their shoe. >> from those few thin threads, peterson would begin to build a case to try to catch a killer. how many fibers across the board did you look at every day in this case, when the case really started getting busy? 100? 500? 1,000? >> literally there's going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of fibers there, depending upon the case. >> in the spring of 1980, no one wanted to believe a serial killer was loose in the city, even when bob buffington spotted a disturbing pattern. >> there had been a sharp increase in the number of children under the age of 14 who had been killed. >> when he told his boss at homicide, the major threatened to transfer him. >> and i truly think that they were afraid that there would be a panic. >> it was this mother, after the loss of her 9-year-old son, who finally forced police to listen, but not until almost a year after her boy died. camille bell and her children lived in these project apartments. poor to the eye, but rich in mind and spirit. yusuf bell was an honor student in the gifted program at school. on a warm october sunday in 1979, he walked away on an errand to buy snuff for an elderly lady downstairs. >> he went barefooted in a pair of brown shorts. he got to the store. he bought the snuff. he started back home. >> less than half a block from this store, yusuf bell stepped off this curb and vanished. >> and nobody saw anybody do anything or anything. but they did see him come back across the street. and that's the last that we saw him. >> camille bell called the police. they came and said they'd write a report. that's all. days went by. camille waited with two older children and yousef's 3-year-old sister. >> and so she is terrified. if he can go to the store and they can steal him, then she doesn't want to leave the house. she doesn't want to do anything. >> camille hid her own fear from her children. >> and you've got to hold them together so you can't act as scared as you are. >> the body of yusuf bell was found in an abandoned schoolhouse. >> his body would not turn up for another month. yusuf bell had been strangled. >> all of the what could have been, should have been and probably would have been was taken away, and we'll never know now, because somebody decided that it was all right to just kill a little kid because they wanted to. >> for a long time, the 3-year-old would look for yusuf every time it was a foggy day. >> and we'd go out into the fog and she would go as far as she could into the fog. and i'd say, come back here. and she'd say, i got to go find my brother. and she said, the clouds came and she said, the clouds came down, so yusuf can come down! >> the child, her mother said, had confused the fog with heaven. still ahead -- the boy who was too brave. >> i mean, he was like, man, i want to find this killer and get this reward money. >> a drive-by threat against the fbi chief's child. >> some guy in a pickup truck said, i'm going to get you, nigger. >> and in the end, the curious question of the cia. >> you're 19 years old. you say you worked for the cia. you've been recruited. >> i'll let the document speak for itself. i'm not going to comment on that. >> then -- >> you know how to kill somebody with a choke hold? that's a yes or no answer? >> no, it's not. >> yes, it is, actually! >> no, it's not. >> do you know how to kill somebody with a choke hold? >> no, it's not. 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[ male announcer ] stop the uh-oh fast with kaopectate. police were still reluctant to listen to camille bell. >> children were dying on the streets of atlanta in the daytime. >> among them, jeffrey mathis, only 10. like yusuf bell, he walked down the street on an errand to this gas station to buy cigarettes for his mother. she never saw him again. >> what we had here was a predator. and what he was looking for was somebody who was cut off from the herd. and if you don't realize you're in trouble until you're in trouble, then you have no way of getting out. >> it would be another year before jeffrey mathis' body was found in the woods, miles from his home. his mother would join camille bell in forming a committee to confront the city's leaders. >> the reaction of the police was that we were overreacting and that there was no serial killer. >> even though by now, six black children were dead. four others were missing. >> perhaps we were like distraught parents that really needed everyone's sympathy, but nobody needed to do anything. >> for years, it has been a dirty little secret among the press and the police. deaths of blacks draw less attention than deaths of whites. >> nobody cared. so you could have several killings go on and if the people were poor, then no one discovered there was a serial killing. if you were black and poor, then really nobody looked. especially if you're black and poor and southern. >> police were slow to recognize these deaths were different. many of the bodies were left in the woods, far from home, unlike most murder victims who are found where they fall. >> unsolved murders of children is very rare. if a 9-year-old got killed, it was because somebody slapped him across the room, he hit his head and he died. >> police did not create a task force until a year after the first murders began. fbi profiler roy hazelwood came down to help. three detectives drove him around the city and turned into jeffrey mathis' neighborhood. >> as soon as we turned on to that street, everything stopped. a guy cutting the grass stopped. guys playing dominos on the porch stopped. i said, what's going on? i said everything stopped. they said, laughingly, that's because we have a honky in the car. >> john glover, who took over as fbi chief in atlanta that summer, said that's why he and hazelwood decided the killer had to be black. >> the killer is someone who is invisible in the black community and who is invisible in the black community but another black person? >> malcolm harris was one of the first task force detectives. he knew it had to be someone who went unnoticed. >> we felt like it was somebody who could come in the neighborhood and get these children and not draw attention to themselves. >> the question of which race struck a raw nerve. it had been only a dozen years since the murder of dr. martin luther king. on the surface, atlanta was a well integrated city. beneath the surface, it remained separate and unequal. >> my prayer and the prayers of everybody in there was we wanted the person to be black. and the reason why you wanted him to be black, i knew what it would do to this town if it had have been a white person or somebody of another race. >> in the black community, in the early '80s, a black serial killer was unheard of. all the classic serial killers were white. never black. >> didn't mean we didn't have one now. >> today, black serial killers are not rare. in 2009, here in cleveland, as well as in milwaukee and los angeles, each time the accused serial killer turned out to be african-american. dr. eric hickey is a psychologist who keeps track of serial killers. >> overall in my study, one out of every five serial killers is african-american. in the past since 1995, over 40% are african-american. we're finally saying, you know what, blacks do this, too. >> there were whites who fed the fear in atlanta. as fbi chief john glover had moved into this upper class white neighborhood, his 12-year-old son was playing outside one afternoon. >> some guy in a pickup truck, he was out in the yard in our side yard. we were on a corner. we lived in -- we had a corner lot, you know. said, i'm going to get you, nigger, as he was driving by. >> kasim reed, seen in these childhood photos, was only 10 when the first two bodies were found in the woods close to his home in the summer of 1979. >> my life did change. >> how so? >> not out as late as you used to be. not able to ride your bike unaccompanied. >> in 2010, reed would become the mayor of atlanta. but back then, as the youngest boy in his family, his teenage brothers were his protectors. >> and i didn't move without my brothers for about a year. >> the bulk of the victims were boys like you? >> you're right. >> your age. >> you're right. >> black boys. >> yes. >> did you personally feel afraid? >> i can't honestly say that i really felt afraid, except for at moments. you would have a van slow down and everybody was very mindful of vans at the time. >> people were suspicious of everybody. and they were afraid. and you had children walking the street, car go by, you could see some of them were in fear. >> and for good reason. the murders were about to increase to a body almost every week. ♪ the time of trouble ♪ in the time of trouble coming up, a creature of the night. >> being an ex-news reporter and all, you know, nighttime is me. that's the time i'm out most of the time. >> and a mystery within a mystery. >> he walked into the back of the studio and he had horrible scratches on his arms. and he said he had fallen into a bush. with the spark miles card from capital one, thor's couture gets the most rewards of any small business credit card. your boa! 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[ major nutrition ] ensure. nutrition in charge! you know what's exciting? graduation. when i look up into my students faces, i see pride. you know, i have done something worthwhile. when i earned my doctorate through university of phoenix, that pride, that was on my face. i am jocelyn taylor. i'm committed to making a difference in people's lives, and i am a phoenix. visit phoenix.edu to find the program that's right for you. enroll now. so many of the children who died were poor, who earned spending money carrying groceries, running errands for others, or, like lubie geter, peddling car deodorizers outside this supermarket on new year's weekend 1981. his mother worried about his going off alone. >> he said he was a big boy, that they'd have to catch him first. >> lubie was a good student, a sophomore in high school. a witness at the shopping center that day saw lubie with a man and helped a police artist draw this sketch, a man with a baseball cap, perhaps a scar on his cheek. lubie never came home. >> i believe he had been kidnapped. >> police searched the woods around atlanta. they did not find lubie. instead, police found two other bodies, young boys who had disappeared ten miles and a month apart, yet both left here at the same dumping ground. the number of known dead now 15. the unsolved murders of so many children had become front page news around the nation and the world. >> this is the reward -- >> the city announced a $100,000 reward, soon to grow to $500,000. the task force was swamped with sketches of suspects, none of them alike, many suggested by psychics. at the state crime lab, larry peterson was sifting through thousands of fibers, nylon, rayon, acrylic, acetate. is it like looking for a needle in a haystack? >> like looking for multiple needles in multiple haystacks. >> then in january of 1981, a breakthrough. peterson realized they we seeing one green carpet fiber with a unique shape. this is a cross-section of the fiber magnified many times. >> this particular fiber had two very, very large lobes and one short lobe. >> the lobes are the three ends of the boomerang shape. >> the shape was the most distinctive feature of the fiber. >> he showed me a slide taken from another carpet. >> this is a single tuft from the carpet, cut in cross-section. >> yeah, i can't tell that's green. even putting the tiny fibers under the microscope didn't help me. how can you tell what color this is? because in this, this green carpet, because of that light green, looks very whitish. >> the colors seen microscopically is not going to be identical to what overall carpet would be. >> instead, an even more sophisticated microscope. >> so let me just open this up -- >> -- can separate colors to identify a specific fiber. we took another look. oh, now you're talking. now peterson knew what to look for. >> when i was looking at the fiber at first, i had no idea who had made it. i just knew it was very distinctive and i would recognize it instantly. >> but he didn't know where to find it. wayne williams was not yet on anyone's radar. he had freelanced as a tv cameraman who shot fires and overnight news. he told us -- >> i know the streets of atlanta. i've been around a while. being an ex-news reporter and all, nighttime is me. that's the time i'm out most of the time. >> now, almost 23, a wannabe music producer, he was trying to form a singing group modeled after the jackson 5. in fact, the afternoon lubie geter disappeared, williams says this receipt shows he had an alibi, auditioning young singers from 4:30 to 8:30 that evening. >> the studio was a small demo studio. >> kathy andrews was co-owner of that studio. >> to my best recollection, he auditioned young kids for a group that never existed. they were roughly as young as 8 and as old -- for the kids, they were as old as 11 or 12. >> now living in another state, kathy andrews did not want her face shown because of what she saw on another day at her studio. >> at one point in time when wayne came for one of the sessions, he walked into the back of the studio and he had horrible scratches on his arms. >> deep and painful crisscrossing both arms. >> it was more this way and that way and that way and that way and that way and that way and that way. and they were angry looking. and when i looked at him, the first words out of my mouth was, oh, wayne, what happened? that looks awful. and he said he had fallen into a bush. >> 15-year-old terry pugh died late that january. his body dropped by the roadside in a rural county 20 miles from home. he had been strangled. his mother -- >> whoever killed him, he had to tussle with him because he had scratches all over him. >> it gives me chills down my spine still. >> to this day, kathy andrews does not believe wayne's explanation. >> he did not fall in a bush. it was after you realized it, it was fairly obvious. and i don't know what else could have caused that kind of wound on his arm. >> the intervals between murders were shrinking. 19 days from lubie jeter's disappearance until terry pugh's death, then 15 days until the next victim. soon 13, then 11, and before long, a body a week. fbi profiler roy hazelwood says this is not unusual for serial killers. >> they come to believe that they, in fact, are almost immune to mistakes, if you will. and they can take greater risks because it's more exciting and because they're so superior, they don't have to worry about the inferior police catching them. >> after a month, lubie jeter's body would be found in the woods. the boy left naked, except for scraps of underwear. the medical examiner would testify geter apparently had been killed by, quote, a choke hold around the neck, a forearm across the neck. it's a question we'll have reason to ask wayne williams by the end of all of this. it's actually a very simple question. can you kill someone with a choke hold? >> you probably could. and when you're 19 years -- >> you probably could under the right circumstances. >> i know for a fact i could not. when we return, the boy who wanted to catch a killer. >> the body was indeed another victim of atlanta's child killer or killers. >> i just knowed right away it was his body. oh, my god, momma. >> and later, a failed lie detector test. >> it surprised him that he didn't beat that polygraph test. he was convinced he could beat a polygraph test. homicide of young people in america has an impact on all of us. how can we save these young people's li