Decatur man arrested in 1985 rape
DNA cleared inmate after serving 21 years in prison

By Bill Torpy, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (free subscription required), February 9, 2007

Kenneth Wicker, who was convicted for a series of sexual attacks in 1985, committed other rapes that wrongly sent another man to prison for 21 years, Fulton County District Attorney announced today.

Willie Otis "Pete" Williams was released from prison last month after DNA tests showed he didn't commit an April 1985 rape he always contended he did not do.

Wicker, 47, was arrested at his home in Decatur today. He is being held at the Fulton County Jail. Wicker served just four years after pleading guilty in 1987 to one count of rape and two attempted sexual assaults. He had gone to trial earlier and it ended in a mistrial. The victims went along with the light sentence because, a prosecutor then said, they did not want to go through the ordeal of testifying in another trial.

The attacks were similar to the two attacks Williams was convicted of in September 1985.

In fact, Williams' attorney, Michael Schumacher, brought up the Wicker assaults in a 1986 hearing while trying to get his client a new trial.

Wicker, at the time, lived in a Sandy Springs apartment on Roswell Road. Both victims who Williams was charged with attacking — one was raped, the other was sexually assaulted but not raped — lived on Roswell Road.

And there are eerie similarities in looking at the police reports from the time.

In all five attacks, the suspect approached women in apartment complex parking lots at night as they were leaving their cars. All attacks occurred in Buckhead and nearby sandy Springs.

In both rapes — one that sent Williams to prison, the other that Wicker admitted to — the victims were driven to a nearby isolated area, were raped in the passenger seat pushed back into a reclining position and then driven back to their parking lots by the assailant.

The attacks that Wicker pleaded guilty to occurred May 4, June 17 and July 5 of 1985. Williams was accused of raping a woman April 5, 1985 and attempting to rape another five days later. He was arrested April 28, 1985 and was incarcerated when the other attacks happened.

The five attacks occurred in two jurisdictions and were investigated by Atlanta and Fulton County police.

An August, 1985 report by a Fulton County detective indicated that he asked Atlanta police for similar attacks but the April attacks were not linked to Wicker because Williams had already been arrested as a suspect.

Williams case was resuscitated by the Georgia Innocence Project after getting a letter from him in 2005. Members of that organization turned over police and court files from the Wicker case to the district attorney's office, who then asked the GBI Crime Lab to compare Wicker's DNA to evidence collected from the rape that sent Williams to jail.