Today in History - July 17: Guilty of murder, but the FBI could never prove he was the serial killer
A grand jury indicted Wayne B Williams for the murder of two men in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 17, 1981.
But the successful prosecution and imprisonment for life of Williams over the two murders was a bitter experience for the FBI.
Because despite the conviction, the FBI were still unable to prove what they suspected about Williams.
In a two-year span, 30 children and young men were murdered in the city of Atlanta.
The local community had attributed the murders, all targeted at African-American victims, to the Ku Klux Klan.
The FBI believed the serial killer would dump the body of his next victim in a body of water, so they staked out bridges in the area.
Then on May 22, 1981, detectives heard a splash below a bridge over the Chattahoochee River.
They pulled over and questioned Williams a few blocks away, but had nothing they could charge him with.
Two days later, the body of a 27-year-old was found floating downstream.
Having a suspect allowed the FBI to narrow their investigation. He was charged on the strength of fibre analysis and found guilty of two murders.
He was long suspected of the many child murders in Atlanta, but was never charged.
After he was jailed, the child murders stopped.
Under pressure to distance themselves from their German roots, the British royal family changed their surname on July 17, 1917.
At the time, King George V bore the surname Saxe-Coburg, and retained the title of Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and the Duke of Saxony.
But with World War I at its bloody zenith, the king gave in to public pressure and changed his name.
Instead he selected the surname Windsor, after the town and castle.
Other nobles ditched their Germanic names, including Prince Louis of Battenberg.
He instead named himself Lord Mountbatten.
"Arrived Prince Hyde, Departed Lord Jekyll," he sardonically wrote in his son's guestbook.
With the rise of heated British nationalism during the war, King George V (right) was pressured to deny asylum to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (left).
Instead the tsar was kept in Russia by the new communist regime who had overthrown him.
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