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That time Dave Foulk was considered a possible serial killer suspect
Posted By katie allison granju
I just discovered Dave Foulk, whom I very much enjoy on the radio, has a blog. It’s packed with interesting anecdotes, not the least of which is this one:
I was acquainted with a serial killer once. His name is Wayne Williams and he is serving a life sentence in Georgia for The Atlanta Child Murders. That’s a still disputed number of killings of young,black …mostly males..found around metro Atlanta in the late 1970s and 1980. Wayne Williams was convicted of two of them, and the rest of the cases were closed. I still believe those closed cases without trial were an injustice at least to the families of the victims. They had a right to know how their loved ones died, and whether or not there was sufficient evidence to prove it to a jury.
Wayne was a television photographer who worked free-lance in the days of film, not video tape. I became familiar with him because he would often be at WSB-TV news dropping off film early in the morning when I arrived for work at WSB Radio. Sometimes, Wayne would make a photocopy of a radio news story to tape it to a film can so the morning folks at Channel Two would know what the story was. Williams drove a metallic blue Plymouth that was identical to the Atlanta Police Department’s unmarked cars. He even had the antenna like the police cars, only his was probably hooked to a police scanner so he could listen-in and head to breaking news stories to get the film.
Our shop was one of the first, if not THE first news department to connect the dots and start asking questions about why so many young black males were turning up dead. Eventually we were told by profilers there was a strong possibility the killer would be an authority figure like a law officer or someone with a uniform. Wayne did drive that cop look-alike.
I even came under scrutiny from law officers when I turned up at a number of the crime scenes. It was because I was working on-call as news director at the time, and I had the story by default as much as anything else. I learned later that police had a photo of me taken by an undercover officer, and had taken it by the station to identify me. Then, while I was coaching my son’s soccer team, another coach who was a law officer mentioned to me that he knew more about me than I thought he did…because I had been watched in the early days of the serial killer investigation. I apparently matched one of the many descriptions or profiles of people they had to rule out.
Jan 18th, 2008
