Wayne Bertram Williams (born May 27, 1958) is an American convicted murderer and suspected serial killer who is serving life imprisonment for the 1981 killings of two men in Atlanta, Georgia.

When stopped and questioned, he told police that he was on his way to check on an address in a neighboring town ahead of an audition the following morning with a young singer named Cheryl Johnson.

Hairs and fibers retrieved from the body of another victim, Jimmy Ray Payne, were found to be consistent with those from his home, car, and dog.

Co-workers told police they had seen Williams with scratches on his face and arms around the time of the murders which, investigators surmised, could have been inflicted by victims during struggles.

[7] Williams held a press conference outside his home to proclaim his innocence, volunteering that he had taken three polygraph tests and all were inconclusive, in any event they would have been inadmissible in court.

Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker said that "although this does not end the appeal process, I am pleased with the results in the habeas case" and that his office will "continue to do everything possible to uphold the conviction.

"[13] In early 2004, Williams sought a retrial again, with his attorneys arguing that law enforcement officials covered up evidence of involvement by the Ku Klux Klan, and that carpet fibers purportedly linking him to the crimes would not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

[16] Williams has maintained his innocence from the beginning and claimed that Atlanta officials covered up evidence of KKK involvement in the killings to avoid a race war in the city.

His lawyers have said the conviction was a "profound miscarriage of justice" that has kept an innocent man incarcerated for the majority of his adult life and allowed the real killers to go free.

[22] Graham, who was serving as an assistant police chief in neighboring Fulton County at the time of the murders, said his decision to reopen the cases was driven solely by his belief in Williams's innocence.

"If they arrested a white guy," he said, "there would have been riots across the U.S.."[23][24][25][26] Dorsey is now serving a life sentence after being convicted of ordering the murder of his election opponent Derwin Brown.

[20] According to an August 2005 report, Charles T. Sanders, a white supremacist affiliated with the KKK and an early suspect in the murders, once praised the crimes in secretly recorded conversations.

Although Sanders did not publicly claim responsibility for any of the deaths, he told an informant for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in a 1981 recording that the killer had "wiped out a thousand future generations of niggers".

While the results were not firmly conclusive, the DNA sequence found appears in only 29 of 1,148 African-American hair samples in the FBI's database, including that of Williams.

[36] A Department of Justice study, released in April 2015, concluded that numerous hair analyses conducted by FBI examiners during the 1980s and 1990s "may have failed to meet professional standards."

Defense attorney Lynn Whatley immediately announced that the report would form the basis for a new appeal, but prosecutors responded that hair evidence played only a minor role in Williams's conviction.

[43] The 2006 song "Wrong Man" by British rock band Deep Purple was written by singer Ian Gillan from Williams' perspective, and the concept of false imprisonment.