African American Shootings Research Paper

In May of 1981, a 23-year-old African-American who was self proclaimed photographer and music talent scout named Wayne Bertram Williams was driving across a Chattahoochee River in Georgia where the FBI and Atlanta police officers were patiently awaiting the white station wagon which had drove away from the sound of a body hitting the water. In the spring of 1980, the city of Atlanta was stricken with fear that a killer was running ramped in the streets, taking the lives of young African-American teen aged boys in the unsettling pattern of strangulation which took place in the daytime. These disappearances and murder infuriated the African-American community simply because the police didn’t care about the disappearances and murders of African-American …show more content…
The police along with the FBI came to the conclusion that the serial killer had to be an African-American him or herself seeing as the serial killer was able to move within the African-American communities without being noticed, law enforcement believed that had the killer been Caucasian, anyone including the young boys would have been even more cautious and more than like there would have been a flood of reports that pointed to a suspicious Caucasian person within the neighborhood, that wasn’t the case however they had pursued a lead that provided a pathway to some bothers that were known members of the KKK also recognized as the Ku Klux Klan, in which their phones were tapped and they were placed under visual surveillance that yielded nothing but a phone conversation that didn’t have sufficient evidence to connect them to any of the murders or any crimes in …show more content…
This proved to be an extremely odd response from Williams, however since no one seen him out of his vehicle, no seen him throw anything from the bridge and there was no body to speak of, Williams allowed the officers to search his vehicle that night and they found nothing that would tie him to those murders even though an investigator said he seen a rope that could have been the murder weapon, only a few days later, washed up not too far away from that same bridge crossing the Chattahoochee River downstream from where Williams was pulled over yet another body of a African-American male was discovered in the same manner that the other victims prior was found. On June 3rd of 1981, law enforcement took Williams into custody for questioning where they also administered a polygraph examination which is also referred to as a lie detector test, after the failure of three polygraph examinations, Williams was again allowed to leave the custody of law enforcement officials but not before several forensic experts combed through