Dick Williams, long-time leader of 'The Georgia Gang', passes away

ATLANTA - Dick Williams, a fixture of Atlanta journalism for the past four decades has died, FOX 5 has learned. He was 77.

Williams was the leader of the Georgia Gang for most of its nearly 40 years – the majority of them on FOX 5.
           
His long career included successful stints in television, newspapers, and politics large and small.

Williams sat down with FOX 5 in March 2019 in his office at the Dunwoody Crier, which he owned and ran for more than 20 years until health problems intervened.

"I can say that I am proud to have been part of the creation of the city of Dunwoody and the city of Brookhaven," he said. "And those are concrete accomplishments our coverage led to.  We provided the community all the facts."

It was the capstone of a long career that saw him lead television newsrooms down the East Coast in the 1970s, ultimately landing at WXIA in Atlanta.

Williams then became a reliably conservative voice as an editor and eventually a columnist for the Atlanta Journal.

He brought a newspaper reporter’s sensibility to the Georgia Gang, which began in the early 1980s to sort fact from fiction in the Atlanta child-murders case and turned to politics when Wayne Williams went to jail.

Dick Williams’ conservative kinship with Newt Gingrich led him to write a book about the Georgia congressman when he became House speaker in the ’90s.

And he had a life beyond work and politics.

A generation of Georgia high school basketball players knew him as a referee for 30 years, including eight state tournaments.
           
Williams was married for 40 years to Rebecca Chase Williams, a former national correspondent for ABC News -- and former mayor of Brookhaven.

They have two daughters, Chase and Clare.