The medical examiner ruled he had died of probable asphyxia but never specifically said he had been strangled. Two days later, on May 24, the nude body of 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater, who had been missing for four days and was last seen with Williams, was discovered in the river. However, both the phone number he gave police and Cheryl Johnson turned out to be fictitious. 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. The first automobile to exit the bridge after the splash, at roughly 2:50 a.m., belonged to Williams. Williams first became a suspect in the Atlanta murders on the morning of May 22, 1981, when a police surveillance team, watching the James Jackson Parkway bridge spanning the Chattahoochee River (a site where several victims' bodies had been discovered), heard a 'big loud splash', suggesting that something had been thrown from the bridge into the river below. He constructed his own carrier current radio station and began frequenting stations WIGO and WAOK, where he befriended a number of the announcing crew and began dabbling in becoming a pop music producer and manager. Williams graduated from Douglass High School and developed a keen interest in radio and journalism. Wayne Williams, son of Homer and Faye Williams, was born on May 27, 1958, and raised in the Dixie Hills neighborhood of southwest Atlanta, Georgia.

Although never tried for the additional murders, he is also believed to be responsible for at least 24 of the 30 Atlanta murders of 1979–1981, also known as the Atlanta Child Murders. Wayne Bertram Williams (born May 27, 1958) is an American convicted murderer and suspected serial killer who is serving life imprisonment for the 1981 killing of two men in Atlanta, Georgia.

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