* New Claims: Kathy Willets, the Florida...

* New Claims: Kathy Willets, the Florida housewife with the “nymphomania” defense to prostitution charges, has now said she is both a battered wife and a victim of police harassment. She said Tuesday her husband often got drunk and beat her. The next day she said sheriff’s deputies brandishing guns threatened to take her stepdaughter away if she did not incriminate her husband. The Willitses were arrested last July.

* New Charges: A secret tape recording may show that the Ku Klux Klan was involved in the Atlanta child murders. Lawyer William Kunstler Wednesday asked a judge in Atlanta to reconsider the murder conviction of Wayne Williams, found guilty of the 1979 to 1981 killings of 30 black children and young adults, including Lubie Geter. Career criminal Billy Joe Whitaker said police had him wired as he talked to Klan member Charles Sanders: “You killed this Geter kid, didn’t you?” Sanders answered, “Damn sure did,” Whitaker testified in court Wednesday.

* In Court: Writer Hunter S. Thompson and his mother went to court in Louisville, Ky., to get an order against a man who is writing Thompson’s unauthorized biography. The Thompsons said Peter O. Whitmer posed as a flower deliverer in September after badgering Virginia Thompson, 83, for information. Whitmer says he merely dropped by with a bouquet to try to make peace with the family. A judge ordered Whitmer to stay away.

* Out of Court: Judge Jim Garrison, 69, who drew worldwide attention as he tried to prove a conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy, is retiring Nov. 1. As New Orleans district attorney, Garrison prosecuted businessman Clay Shaw for conspiracy in the Kennedy case. Shaw was acquitted. Meantime, Garrison has a part in the forthcoming Oliver Stone movie on the assassination, playing Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, who headed the commission that investigated the killing.