During a period of twenty-two months beginning in July 1979, thirty African American children and young men in Atlanta either disappeared or were found murdered. The string of senseless killings made national and international headlines. In time, in response to public pressure, a special Atlanta Homicide Task Force was created to solve the crimes. The case even attracted then–President Ronald Reagan, who was characterized by one source as “hardly the black community’s most sensitive friend”; in fact, he pledged $1.5 million in federal funds to assist the investigation (Fido 1993, 283).

The case proved complicated, in part because the murders did not always have the same modus operandi, especially regarding manner of death. Thus, early on, detectives believed they were looking for multiple suspects (Fisher 1995, 142).

The Fiber Evidence

As the task force’s work progressed, criminalist Larry Peterson of the Georgia State Crime Laboratory began to identify distinctive fibers found on the victims’ bodies. Among these were yellowish-green nylon fibers and violet acetate fibers—in all, twenty-eight different fibers plus dog hairs were recovered.

In the meantime, the police arrested a young black man named Wayne Williams as a suspect in the homicides. Officers who had a bridge under surveillance heard a splash at about 2:00 AM on May 22, 1981, and stopped the only car that had been on the bridge at that time, which was driven by Williams. A search of his home and car provided numerous fibers similar to those found on the victims’ bodies. In addition, witnesses testified that they had seen Williams with some of the victims, and of course there was the fact that after his arrest the murders ceased.

At trial, Williams’s defense attorneys sought to discredit the fiber evidence, arguing that a particular fiber might be discovered in the vehicle or home of any of numerous people. But the prosecution challenged the jury to consider the limited number of people who would have the particular carpet that was the source of one distinctive type of fiber; out of those, they asked, how many could also be expected to have a particular bedspread that was the source of light green cotton fibers blended with violet acetate fibers? And of the few who might have the same carpet and bedspread, how many would also drive a 1970 Chevrolet station wagon as well as own a German shepherd? And so on. During the time when Williams was known to have been using a rented car, fibers that could be matched to that car’s carpeting were discovered on victims’ bodies.

The jury understood the evidence, and on February 27, 1982, they convicted Wayne Williams of the two murders for which he was tried. He was sentenced to life in prison, whereupon Atlanta’s police commissioner closed twenty-one other murder cases (Nickell and Fischer 1999).

Later that same year, at an international microscopy conference at which I was a presenter along with Larry Peterson, I was able not only to see the criminalist’s impressive presentation of the fiber evidence but to discuss it with both Peterson himself and world-famous microanalyst Walter McCrone (best known for discovering paint pigments on the Shroud of Turin). McCrone had been called on to review Peterson’s work on the Williams case and had done so favorably.

In 1998, after Williams’s lawyers argued that prosecutors had withheld evidence in the case, Georgia circuit judge Hal Craig upheld the convictions. He termed the fiber evidence “the strongest scientific link in this case.” As a result of Soledad O’Brien’s new, in-depth look at the Atlanta child murders, Williams’s guilt not only seems well established, but there is even new evidence. The DNA from two human hairs found inside one victim’s shirt excludes some 98 percent of people in the world, yet it is consistent with the DNA of Wayne Williams who, according to experts, “cannot be excluded.”

Psychic Detectives?

During the Atlanta child murders case that ended with the arrest and conviction of Wayne Williams, something of a parallel “investigation” took place. As Soledad O’Brien reported, the Atlanta Homicide Task Force was inundated with sketches of the alleged serial killer—no two alike—many of them offered by psychics. For example, my friend and fellow skeptic, the late Henry Gordon, told of appearing on a television talk show in Montreal with self-styled Ottawa intuitive Earl Curley. Curley boasted he had been called in on the child murders case by the FBI for whom he provided a composite drawing and descriptive profile, implying that his input resulted in the apprehension of Wayne Williams shortly thereafter. In fact, Gordon (1994, 24) called the FBI’s Press Information Office and was told, “Mr. Earl Curley contacted our Atlanta office (voluntarily) in 1980 and 1981. He sent in some kind of writeup of what he thought the subject would look like, and he sent in some kind of drawing. However, there was no impact on the case as a result of what he sent in.”

The psychics were merely a sideshow to the circus atmosphere that prevailed in Atlanta at the time. Along with Williams’s bold, defiant antics, “psychics were swarming around, all giving their own ‘profiles,’ many dramatically contradicting each other,” stated pioneer criminal profiler John Douglas (Douglas and Olshaker 1995, 211).

Alleged clairvoyant Dorothy Allison, in her day the most famous “police psychic” in America, traveled to Atlanta in 1980. While riding around in a limousine, Allison made numerous pronouncements about the case. Nothing she said was of any help, however, and one mother complained that the clairvoyant failed to return her only photo of her missing son. Forensic professor Walter Rowe (1994, 238) charged that Allison “provided police with 42 different names, none of which was Wayne or Williams.” Although some sources claim she did include the name Williams, the chief of police denied it, and in any case there were 6,913 persons of that surname in the Atlanta phone book at the time (Dennett 1994, 51–52).

In cases in which psychics like Allison do appear successful—aside from making generalizations or actually having inside information (as from a tip)—they are usually relying on what is called “retrofitting” (or after-the-fact matching). For instance, as a New Jersey Police captain said of Allison, her predictions “were difficult to verify when initially given.” He added, “The accuracy usually could not be verified until the investigation had come to a conclusion” (qtd. in Dennett 1994, 46). To see how this works, suppose the psychic saw water and the number seven: after the facts are in, some stream or body of water can usually be associated with the case, and the number linked to a highway, distance, number of people in a search party, or some other possible interpretation. Then again, some psychics falsely claim successes, while others have engaged in attempted bribery or impersonation of police to seek information they could pass off as mystically acquired (Nickell 1994).

Conclusions

As demonstrated by the Atlanta Child Murders case, psychics are absolutely no help whatsoever in identifying serial killers or providing any breaks in these cases. Instead, Wayne Williams was stopped and brought to justice due to diligent police work—primarily the bridge-stakeout strategy and the use of forensic science (fiber comparison and, more recently, DNA analysis). There was one other factor: a jury was able to understand and assess the evidence using critical-thinking skills.

References

Dennett, M. 1994. America’s most famous psychic sleuth: Dorothy Allison. In Nickell 1994, 42–59.

Douglas, J., and M. Olshaker. 1995. Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crimes Unit. New York: Scribner.

Fido, M. 1993. The Chronicle of Crime. New York: Carroll and Graff.

Fisher, D. 1995. Hard Evidence. New York: Dell.

Gordon, H. 1994. The man with the radar brain: Peter Hurkos. In Nickell 1994, 21–29.

Nickell, J., ed. 1994. Psychic Sleuths: ESP and Sensational Cases. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

Nickell, J., and J.F. Fischer. 1999. Crime Science: Methods of Forensic Detection. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

O’Brien, S. 2010. Atlanta Child Murders. CNN television special, first aired June 10.

Rowe, W.F. 1994. Psychic detectives: A critical examination. In Nickell 1994, 236–244.

Skeptical Briefs: So why Trebuchet? What attracted you to this particular siege weapon from the Middle Ages? 

George Hrab: I knew that this album was going to have songs that were about being thrown into situations (or throwing things into situations) or being flung (or being the flinger). Flight, air, movement, attack, a siege, and storming the battlements all played a metaphorical role in most of the songs, so I thought that a catapult would be a great symbol to connect them all. That being said, Catapult is a horrible title, [and] Trebuchet seemed way cooler. Plus, a trebuchet is something that is powered by principles as opposed to potential kinetic energy. I like that a “cocked and loaded” trebuchet is actually much safer but way more deadly and accurate than a “cocked and loaded” catapult. That’s a great concept that brings much nerd joy to my DNA.

SB: Let’s say you just bought a full-scale trebuchet from the Acme Corporation—maybe it was returned by Wile E. Coyote or something—and a really, really, big yard. You open it up and want to test it to make sure it works. What three test objects would you use, and how far would they fly? 

Hrab: 1. [Rush drummer] Neil Peart’s drum set.  [It wouldn’t be] a very far flyer but a wondrous clang would ensue.

2. Glenn Beck. [He wouldn’t be] a very far flyer but a wondrous clang would ensue.

3. I would love to launch a smaller trebuchet just for the pure Magrittian joy.

SB: You, like Phil [Plait] and Richard [Wiseman] and [Ben Radford], are a prominent, bald, bespectacled skeptic. To what do you attribute this curious phenomenon? 

Hrab: Isn’t it obvious? Brilliant thinking causes poor vision and hair loss. Duh.

SB: What did you think of Phil’s famous TAM “Don’t Be a Dick” speech? Some people thought it was brilliant (“Restore respect and courtesy to skepticism!”), while to others thought it seemed like a straw man argument (“Who is saying you should be a dick?”). What’s your take? 

Hrab: I thought that Phil’s talk was excellent. (His vision and hair were really affected that day.) His argument that being nasty will seldom convince anyone of a proposition, especially when it’s a hard sell like rationality, made complete sense to me. I don’t think that it was a straw man argument because there are times when you should be a dick. One’s “dickishness” should be reserved for appropriate occasions, much like thermonuclear weapons—or live renditions of “Freebird.” I think that being nasty in order to score self-satisfying points in an argument is an understandable urge, but we need to be bigger than that. It’s tough, but all things worthwhile are tough. Like knitting a macramé house.

SB: I attended your Geologic Show at Dragon*Con, and it was great. I do have to ask, however: Are there any puns or double entendres that you especially regret? Maybe they were just really awful when performed, or caused some disease? 

Hrab: I regret nothing. The pope’s wife is not “The Holy C,” and attractive nuns are still hard to come by.

SB: I see from your awesome new CD that at least two of the song titles are actually book titles. What was it about those books that inspired the songwriter in you? 

Hrab: Ideas are always the hardest thing for me to come up with. Once I have a concept, be it for a song, sketch, or interpretive dance involving feather boas, the rest is just details. I love working on the details, but hate coming up with the concept. So if some writer has taken the time to come up with a brilliant title and subject, I figure an “ode” to that book saves me the trouble of being creative on my own. Steal from the best, right? Plus Death from the Skies and God Is Not Great are just phenomenal books. I guess that plays into it too. 

SB: Why do you think it is that people get all weird when you suddenly bring up masturbation? 

Hrab: Not as weird as when you bring up male ass play. Right? Am I right? Hello?

SB: Two of my favorite songs are “Far” and “When I Was Your Age.” Any particular things inspire those songs? 

Hrab: Both of those songs were written in a very brief amount of time, and initially for other people. “Far” was commissioned by the fine folks over at the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. They asked me to write a theme that “didn’t sound like Enya.” Luckily, I minored in Not Sounding Like Enya, so that worked out ok. “When I Was Your Age” was written for the incredible guys in Beatnik Turtle, who were writing and recording an entire album in twenty-eight days. They called and asked if I’d write something for them, so thirty hours later I sent them a demo of “When I was Your Age.” They recorded their version, and I subsequently recorded mine. There must be something to this working on a deadline thing. . . .  

SB: As you know, one of the things that skeptics and scientists often battle is misinformation. Yet you have repeatedly been seen in public associating with a certain Ms. Information. How do you explain this contradiction? 

Hrab: There is little to no misinformation in Ms. Information, just as every adult is not a dolt. 

SB: As you know, there are many famous musical rivalries—Neil Young and Lynryrd Skynyrd, Biggee and Tupac, Pavarotti and Lady Gaga. Many of your fans may not realize that you have also been engaged in a similar musical smackdown of your own. I am of course referring to George Harb, a musician who, according to his website, “can only be described as unique, talented, helpful, and caring.” Yet Harb was quoted as calling you “a punk” who is “pasty and hairless as a newborn camel’s testicles.” [Editor’s note: We were unable to verify the source or accuracy of this quote. It may have come from Harb himself, or been paraphrased by one of his fans, or we may have just made it up.] George, I don’t want to fuel any trash-talking, but do you have an answer for your fans? And can you address the rumors of reconciliation and an upcoming Hrab/Harb “Find the Typo” national tour?

Hrab: Mr. Harb has not responded to numerous attempts at contact and is apparently going on tour with both Lady Goo Goo and Stang. All three artists are touring under the moniker “Vowel Movement” and I am deeply disappointed that I was not asked to open. Or at least help move gear.

SB: You mentioned that songs like “Far” and “When I Was Your Age” [WIWYA] were written for other people. Do you often write songs for others, and is the writing process any different than when you’re writing for yourself?

Hrab: “Far” and WIWYA were unique in that they were commissioned, but the writing process is pretty much the same as when I’m writing for myself. If anything, it tends to be more efficient because there’s usually a deadline involved, and I absolutely stink at motivating myself. Ultimately though, since I figure that someone is hiring me to write the thing, I would guess they want the piece to be “somewhat Geoish”—which might be the title of my next album by the way.

SB: Who do you consider to be the top five living songwriters today and why?

Hrab: Lists are tough, and there are always weird caveats. For example, I think Stevie Wonder is an absolute genius and he’s written enough incredible material to last ten lifetimes but really hasn’t done anything to ring my bell in two decades. But he’s still alive—so do we count him? Same with Sting. Someone like Elvis Costello has pounded out amazing songs, and continues to do so, and is always trying out different styles and sounds and textures, so he’s absolutely on the list. Alf Clausen, who writes music for The Simpsons, is an absolutely brilliant writer/parody/homage/soundtrack composer, but [he] isn’t necessarily seen as a “songwriter” [even though he] has more skill than most of the artists on billboard. Eminem has such a distinct style and approach and is instantly recognizable, but traditional folks would be cautious in calling him a “songwriter.” I love most everything that Sheryl Crow has done—and Peter Gabriel, the Beastie Boys, Paul McCartney, and the boys in Rush are all still technically “alive” so. . .

SB: I’ve had a longstanding debate about meaning in song lyrics. When I was a teenager and in my twenties I hated songs that were catchy but had no discernable meaning. I dismissed songs that were merely catchy riffs, and appreciated narrative songs that spoke to coherent and profound themes. Yet as I have matured as a music listener (if in no other way), I have found myself really enjoying songs whose meanings I can’t decipher—a lot of classic Bob Dylan and the Beatles come to mind. Your music tends to have meaning and message, but where do you stand on this as a songwriter? Do inscrutable lyrics belong in music?

Hrab: There are entire genres and complete catalogs of certain artists where the “words” are essentially nice sounding pitched mouth noises. I love that. There are entire swaths of Yes and Duran Duran that are really cool sounding words put together. I mean, what the hell is a Siberian Khatru? Is The Reflex a lonely child? Really? OK, whatever. . . . Often the guys in the band don’t even know what the songs are about. There are punk and metal acts that pride themselves on the lyrics not only being indecipherable, but unintelligible.

It comes down to using the human voice as a timbral instrument and not necessarily a delivery of “meaning.” That being said, I tend to favor writing songs that have a meaning, and [I] have tried to write nice sounding indecipherable words but somehow my analytic brain won’t let me do that. There is absolutely a point to writing music without words, so conversely there is a point to writing songs with words that are un-understandable. If that’s even a word. . . .

SB: Some musicians, such as Tom Waits, have experimented with non-traditional instruments such as the theremin, pot-and-pan percussion, and so on. How far have you gone in that direction?

Hrab: While recording with the incredible Slau of BeSharp studios, we have experimented a bit with creating interesting sounds through non-traditional ways. We like to manipulate the human voice a lot, and that tends to create some neat otherworldly sounds. The background ghost hum in “Stigmata” from the album Minutiae, and the “Jerrymin” solo on “Hai Yookito ’Ya” from Trebuchet are prime examples of that.

SB: Though you are best known for your musical oeuvre, you have expanded to other areas, including publishing the now-infamous Non-Coloring Book in 2007—which featured drawings of Elvis, the Pope, and Batman in identical poses on the cover. Have you considered expanding into visual media, such as oil painting or performance art?

Hrab: I’ve always dug working in multiple media, and I think I might try to get more into doing some video production. I have a backlog of songs and ideas that just need a commitment of time. In a weird way (that totally sounds pretentious I realize—sorry) I consider most of my performances a weird kind of performance art to begin with. Especially the solo shows. There is a bit of a persona that I adopt to answer audience questions, and I do like the semi-Dada nature of many of my gigs. I hope to work on another book too. It all comes down to time management.

SB: In Terry Zwigoff’s fascinating 1994 documentary film Crumb about legendary underground comix artist Robert Crumb, we learn among other things that Robert is a compulsive masturbator. Are you a fan of documentaries, and if someone were to make a documentary about your life, what are two or three interesting, private facts that the public would learn about you?

Hrab: That’s interesting. I enjoyed masturbating while watching Crumb. Go figure. Anyway. . . I think if someone were to make a documentary of me, folks would be most surprised to learn how lazy and short I am. I think they would also be surprised to see how much of my time is spent alone. That and of course the Crumb masturbation thing. . .

SB: What’s a curious question you have asked a celebrity?

Hrab: I asked Levar Burton what it was like to work with Tim and Eric [of Cartoon Network’s Awesome Show, Great Job!]. This was a question I was very proud of. It took unimaginable amounts of self control to not ask why power from the front array isn’t automatically diverted to the shields in a Red Alert combat situation seeing as that is almost always the primary command directed by the First Officer.

Victor J. Stenger

Einstein had inserted into his gravitational equation a factor called the cosmological constant that provided a repulsive force to counteract the gravitational attraction that otherwise would make the universe collapse. Although the cosmological constant is often referred to as a “fudge factor,” that is a misnomer. Such a constant is required in Einstein’s equation, although no value is given for it. If positive, it produces a gravitational repulsion. If negative, we have an attraction added to that of normal gravity.

In the early 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble, working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, discovered that many of the diffuse objects in the sky called nebulae were in fact distant galaxies. The universe extended well beyond our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Later in the decade, Hubble and his assistant Milton L. Humason estimated the distances to galaxies using a technique invented by Henrietta Swan. This they combined with measurements of the redshifts of the spectral lines from stars in the galaxies that had been measured by Vesto Sipher.

The light emitted from a high-temperature gas is characterized by “spectral lines” of well-defined frequencies. Different gases have different spectra. By observing the spectra of light from stars, astronomers are able to decipher the composition of the surface of the star. The element helium was observed this way in the sun before it was discovered on Earth. When a spectral line is shifted to lower frequency it is called a redshift. When it is shifted to a higher frequency, we have a blueshift.

Hubble and Humason showed that the galaxies were generally redshifted and so were, on average, receding from us. They found that the amount of redshift from a galaxy was roughly proportional to its distance from us, although there was a lot of scatter in the data points.

Lemaître provided an explanation consistent with Einstein’s equation: the universe is expanding, so as time goes by the galaxies are moving, again on average, away from us. The observed redshift is the Doppler effect that results from their recessional speeds. Hubble’s result showed that the galaxies were moving away from one another as if from a giant explosion, where those galaxies with higher speeds have moved the farthest apart. This became know as the big bang.

When Einstein realized that the cosmological constant was not needed to agree with observations, he called it his “biggest blunder.” For many years the cosmological constant was assumed to be zero, however, no theoretical reason has yet been found for this assumption.

In the meantime, the cosmological constant has resurfaced. In 1980 it was put forward as a candidate for the repulsive force that produced the enormous exponential expansion, called inflation, that the universe apparently underwent during its earliest moments. More recently, the cosmological constant has been proposed for the repulsive dark energy that is responsible for the acceleration of the universe’s expansion discovered in 1998.

In Einstein’s gravitational equation, the cosmological constant is equivalent to an energy density in a vacuum, that is, a space devoid of matter. By equating this density to the density of the zero point energy that is left in a volume after you remove all its particles, you obtain a number that is 120 orders of magnitude higher than what is observed. Such a high value would result in a universe that would so rapidly inflate that galaxies would have no time to form. This is the problem with the cosmological constant.

The cosmological constant problem is used by theists as the prime example of the fine-tuning of the universe that they claim as evidence for God. However, cosmologist Don Page, an evangelical Christian, has pointed out that the apparent positive value of the cosmological constant is somewhat inimical to life because its repulsion acts against the gravitational attraction needed to form galaxies. If God fine-tuned the universe for life he would have made the cosmological constant slightly negative.

Physicist Leonard Susskind calls the problem with the cosmological constant “the mother of all physics problems” and “the worst prediction ever.” The currently favored solution to the problem among physicists is called the “multiverse” in which our universe is just one of a great many others having a wide variation of values for the cosmological constant as well as other physics parameters. We happen to live in the universe suitable for us. Susskind notes that string theory has some 10500 possible solutions, each of which could correspond to a separate universe within the multiverse.

While I have nothing against the multiverse theory, my view is that the cosmological constant calculation is so obviously wrong that it can be ignored. While physicists have not yet reached a consensus on the correct calculation, one possibility that agrees with observations is called the holographic principle.

The calculation of the vacuum energy density of the universe involves a sum over all the zero-point energy states in the universe. The “worst prediction ever” assumed that the number of states is proportional to the volume, but now there is reason to believe that this is wrong. The holographic principle asserts that the number of states in a volume is proportional to the surface area of that volume, as in the case of a black hole. The universe can have no more states than that of a black hole of the same size. The energy density calculated from this assumption is of the same order of magnitude as the vacuum energy density that is determined from observations. Even if this is not the actual source of the dark energy, we can say that the calculation giving a 120-orders-of-magnitude discrepancy is almost certainly wrong.

So, the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant is another God-of-the-gaps argument in which the gap is being filled in by some purely natural mortar.