It was May 22nd 1981, at approximately 2:50 am, in Atlanta, Georgia. Officer Bob Campbell, a newly recruited beat cop in his early 20s, sat in his patrol car, watching for any sign of movement on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge over the Chattahoochee River. The bridge was small and poorly lit.
Normally, Campbell wouldn’t be alone on a stakeout, but the Atlanta cops were spread thin. Over 100 officers had been assigned to a task force desperately keeping eyes on every bridge crossing, wooded area, and vacant lot in the city. They took up their posts night after night, week after week.
They had spotted no one suspicious and made no arrests. Yet someone kept dumping bodies. Someone kept killing people.
Some of the victims were young men the same age as Officer Campbell. But most of the victims had been children. And that is what caused the public outcry and gave the series of killings their name: “The Atlanta Child Murders.”
Back on March 16th, the body of a 15 year old boy had been discovered in the Chattahoochee River. Two weeks later, on March 30th, they found the remains of a 13 year old boy dumped in the woods. Then three more victims, all in their early 20s, were discovered at the beginning of April. They had all been murdered in just the space of a week.
Two more victims followed before the month was out. And this madness had carried on for nearly two years. The youngest victim had been seven. Then, on May 12th, a 17 year old boy was found strangled to death in a vacant lot not far from his home.
And now, ten days later, as Officer Bob Campbell watched the bridge and struggled to stay awake, police still had no suspects. Nothing substantial. Yet keeping over a hundred officers on high alert required extra manpower to be shipped in from other counties, to maintain the regular administration of law and order in a city of 430,000 people that already had a high rate of crime. The extra burden was starting to drain the city’s coffers.
Given the stake-outs had so far proven fruitless, the Mayor’s office quietly gave the order to scale down operations, starting in just three days’ time.
Officer Campbell was eagerly waiting for his radio to roar back into life and trumpet the news that his replacement for the rest of the night was on the way. Campbell was exhausted. He just wanted to get home and get some sleep. Then he heard a noise that made him sit bolt upright. He heard a splash.
Soon afterward, Campbell saw a pair of brake lights glowing in the darkness. A car was on the bridge. The driver must have killed his headlights so that Campbell didn’t see him there in the first place. But the brake lights could not be extinguished.
And when the vehicle turned around to avoid Campbell’s patrol car, the young officer saw the brake lights flicker on and off for a moment. The young beat cop leaned forward and squinted his eyes. He couldn’t determine the make of the car. And the vehicle had now begun to drive away from him in the opposite direction.
Campbell grabbed his radio and informed the other patrol cars in the area what he’d seen and heard.
Half a mile from the James Jackson Bridge, the cops pulled over a white station wagon. At 3 am, it was the only civilian car on the road. In the vehicle was a lone male. Mid-20s. Large, thick glasses. Chubby. He looked nervous. The cops asked him to turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle. The man complied. He was only 5’6. Unprompted, the man said, “I know this is about those boys.”
Hardly surprising. The so-called “Atlanta Child Murders” had been front page news for months.
The man presented his driver licence and the cops took down his details. One of the officers asked the man why he was on the bridge at 3 am. The man seemed annoyed by the question and sarcastically replied, “To get to the other side.”
The officer sternly repeated his question. “Why were you on the bridge?”
The man told the officer he was a talent agent in the music business and regularly took on new clients. That night he was driving out to the suburb of Smyrna, 8 miles to the northwest, to interview a potential new singer – a young lady named Cheryl Johnson. Along the way, he had driven to a pay phone to confirm the singer’s address. She hadn’t answered. So the man had decided to drive home.
The officer asked for Cheryl Johnson’s contact information, and the man provided a phone number and an address. The cop jotted the information down in his notebook.
Then the officer asked, “Why did you turn around on the bridge?”
“I didn’t,” the man replied, “I was on my way back from the pay phone. Headed home.”
The cop asked, “Did you stop on the bridge?”
“No,” the man answered, “I drove straight across.”
Meanwhile, another police officer conducted a search of the man’s white station wagon. In the back of the vehicle, the officer found a pair of leather gloves and a 24 inch nylon cord. The officer put the items back where he found them, despite having probable cause to confiscate them as potential evidence. Here was a vehicle that may just have been involved in a body dump and the killer they were looking for was known for using strangulation.
Although the man’s story was suspicious, he was not detained and was allowed to drive home. By his own admission, the man cleaned the interior of the white station wagon the following morning. The nylon cord and the leather gloves, on the other hand, simply went missing.
Three days later, the body of a 27 year old man was found in the Chattahoochee River. The victim had been strangled to death with a ligature of some kind. The body had been stripped naked and the police suspected that the attack had been sexual in nature. There were no signs of penetration, but FBI profilers were operating under the assumption that the killer’s MO was to fondle the corpses and then masturbate next to them, while taking care to leave no trace of bodily fluids.
When police ran the name, phone number, and address of the singer, Cheryl Johnson, they discovered that the phone number did not belong to her, that her address did not exist, and, indeed, there was no such person as Cheryl Johnson at all.
Neighbourhood Ghoul
On July 21st 1979, 14 year old Teddy Smith took his girlfriend on a date to the local skating rink. Smith had some pocket money from doing odd-jobs for people in the neighbourhood. Sometimes this involved getting in their cars and being taken to a second location, but Smith’s mother has said that he never got into cars with people he didn’t trust. Smith and his girlfriend left the skating rink and parted ways at 10 pm. Then Teddy Smith disappeared without a trace.
Four days later, on the night of July 25th, 13 year old Alfred “Q” Evans left his mother’s home to hang out with friends on the street. He was in the habit of staying out all night and was known to run with a group of friends involved in drug use and petty crimes. Evans grew up not far away from Teddy, and also did odd-jobs in the neighbourhood for pocket money. When Evans did not return home that night, his mother was not immediately alarmed.
But when Alfred Evans did not return by the following evening, his mother became anxious. She phoned her son’s friends and found out that they’d last seen him waiting for a bus in order to come home. Alfred’s mother called the police. The cops took the boy’s name and description but assigned the case a low priority because Evans had been a run-away in the past. They reassured Alfred’s mother that he’d probably show up in a day or two. They told her not to worry.
On July 28th 1979, the bodies of two teenage boys were found in the woods in southwest Atlanta. They were later identified as Teddy Smith and Alfred Evans. Teddy had been shot multiple times in the upper back with a .22 calibre weapon. Alfred had been strangled to death.
Homicide detectives soon received a tip that the deaths were drug-related. The boys had allegedly been seen together at a local flophouse smoking pot a few days before they went missing. Both Teddy and Alfred’s mothers denied that their sons did drugs. But the mere allegation was enough. Atlanta PD neglected to follow up on either case and they soon went cold.
Both of the boys were black. Accusations of police racism soon began to circulate. This was Atlanta. The legacy of slavery, public lynchings, and Jim Crow still burned red hot in the public memory, despite the city now having a black mayor, a majority black city council, and a majority black police force (approximately 58%). Outright segregation had only ended 15 years ago. And so, two black kids being murdered, and the police not seeming to care, ruffled a lot of feathers in the inner-city.
On the afternoon of September 4th 1979, 14 year old Milton Harvey got on his bike to ride to the bank and deposit a cheque for his mother. Then he disappeared. His bike was found in a vacant lot a week later. Harvey’s mother reported him missing, but the police did not follow up on the case file. They thought Milton Harvey was yet another runaway. The usual reasoning was applied: Black kid. Rough neighbourhood. Broken home. No dad in the picture. He’d turn up soon.
Milton Harvey’s remains were discovered in the woods two months later in early November. His body was so badly decomposed that the coroner could not determine the cause of death. We now know that it was likely strangulation, but the extent of decomposition prevented neck bruises or ligature marks from being detected on the skin.
On the evening of October 21st 1979, a 9 year old boy named Yusef Bell was playing in the street with some friends. An elderly neighbour, Eula Birdsong, asked Yusef to run down to the shop to buy her some snuff (finely ground tobacco you snort up your nose). Birdsong told Yusef that he could keep whatever change was left. Witnesses place Yusef Bell at the local convenience store buying snuff and some candy.
A separate witness reported seeing Yusef getting into a blue car after exiting the store. Then the 9 year old boy disappeared.
Yusef’s mother, Camille Bell, reported him missing later that night. The police took his description but did not follow up. Camille Bell insisted that her son was not a run-away and not a problem child. Camille kept phoning the police, multiple times a day, for the next two weeks. She canvassed the neighbourhood for witnesses herself.
Then, on November 8th, the remains of Yusef Bell were found behind an abandoned elementary school by a caretaker who was looking for a place to urinate (the water inside had been shut off). The 9 year old boy had been bludgeoned twice in the back of the head before being strangled to death.
The discovery of Yusef Bell happened only a few days after the police found the decomposed remains of Milton Harvey. But police did not link Bell and Harvey’s deaths together, nor link them to the body dumps of Smith and Evans in July. However, before 1979 ended, Yusef Bell’s mother, Camille, began to suspect that all four homicides were related. She thought a killer was in the neighbourhood targeting black children.
In early 1980, she established the “Stop the Murders Mothers’ Committee” and recruited the other families affected. But the Atlanta PD took little notice.
On March 4th 1980, a 12 year old girl named Angel Lanier was at a friend’s house watching Sanford and Son. She left at 5 pm, intending to swing by the convenience store for her mother, before heading home for dinner. She did not make it home. Six days later, on March 10th, Angel’s body was discovered in a forested vacant lot in southwest Atlanta. Her arms had been bound with electrical cord and she had underwear, that was not her own, stuffed in her mouth. She had been strangled with some kind of ligature.
The very next day, 11 year old Jeffrey Mathis left his house and headed to the convenience store to buy cigarettes for his mother. A witness saw Mathis get into a blue car with a light-skinned man and a dark-skinned man. Jeffrey’s body was not found until 11 months later in February 1981. He had been dumped in a thick patch of woods in southwest Atlanta. After such a long time, decomposition prevented the coroner from establishing a cause of death. Strangulation was again suspected.
Meanwhile, back on May 18th 1980, 14 year old Eric Middlebrooks was watching TV at his mother’s home when the phone rang. The teenager answered and, after having a conversation that lasted several minutes, which his mother was not able to overhear, Eric Middlebrooks rushed out of the house and rode away on his bike. The following day, May 19th, his body was found in an alleyway behind a local bar and a parole office.
Middlebrooks had been slashed across the arms and had a few light gouges in his chest. But the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. His pockets were turned inside out and the contents were gone, but there is no way of knowing whether the killer robbed him or if that was done subsequently by a passerby.
A red carpet fibre was found on the sole of his shoe, and, despite fibre analysis being a fairly new science, it was bagged as evidence.
Like many of the other victims, Eric Middlebrooks did odd-jobs around the neighbourhood for a little money. He was particularly good at repairing bikes and had left home with a hammer that he used for that purpose. The hammer was never found.
Middlebrooks was known to perform odd-jobs for men with criminal records and the teenager had recently testified against three other juveniles in a robbery case. There was thus some ambiguity over whether Middlebrooks had been killed out of revenge, or if he had simply been jumped by a shady sort of person. And, if the latter, was it a recently released criminal who had just come out of the parole office, a drunken stranger who had just staggered out of the bar, or was it someone Middlebrooks knew and did errands for?
On June 9th 1980, 12 year old Christopher Richardson departed his house to go swimming at the local pool. He was last spotted walking by the side of the road in the direction of the Rec Centre. Then he disappeared. His remains were not discovered until January 1981. He was found in the woods. Like several other victims, Christopher’s body was so badly decayed that the coroner could not determine the cause of death. Police suspected, but could not confirm, strangulation.
Back on June 22nd 1980, a 7 year old girl named Latonya Wilson was abducted from her parents’ apartment while she was at home alone. A witness saw a man climbing into the apartment window, and later saw him talking to another man in the parking lot while he held Latonya in his arms. Her body was found in a vacant lot four months later in October 1980. This time, local wildlife had reduced the remains to a skeleton and a definitive cause of death could not be determined.
Meanwhile, on June 23rd 1980, merely a day after Latonya Wilson was abducted, 10 year old Anthony Wyche disappeared after exiting a corner grocery store in south Atlanta at 5 pm. A witness said the boy was being led away by a 6-foot tall black man, approximately 180 pounds, with a moustache and goatee. They got into a blue car. The witness was unsure whether there was a second man with them.
A separate witness claimed he spotted Anthony Wyche at 6 pm, unaccompanied, at the local shopping mall. The following day, June 24th, Anthony’s body was found under a railway bridge. Initially, police thought the boy had been playing on the bridge and had fallen off, breaking his neck. But the coroner soon determined that someone had throttled Anthony Wyche with such ferocity that his neck snapped.
By the start of July, almost a year since the killings began, a total of 10 children had been murdered.
Fear and Loathing in South Atlanta
By mid-1980, the newspapers began to pick up the story that black children were being targeted in southern Atlanta. The police began to entertain the possibility that a serial killer was on the loose. However, they deemed it more likely that multiple murderers were operating in Atlanta at that time. Some of the cases might be connected to a child predator or a pair of child predators.
Other cases might be the result of one-off violent deaths. Atlanta was, after all, a pretty rough town. And if it was a serial killer, police were concerned that many of the victims had been abducted in broad daylight, without witnesses noticing any signs of struggle. This implied that the killer was known to the victims.
Perhaps he had even paid some of the children to run errands for him.
Meanwhile, rumours circulated that the KKK was abducting and murdering black children from the inner-city and making it look like it was a lone wolf. Still others in the public argued that there wasn’t a serial killer at all and it was just the result of downtown Atlanta being crime-ridden and violent. As for those who thought it was a serial killer, they mostly entertained the idea that the perpetrator was white.
And, internally, the police broadly agreed with this assessment. Statistically, white men were overwhelmingly more likely to be serial killers than black men. Or so it was thought at the time.
But a white guy in inner-city Atlanta soliciting children would stick out like a sore thumb. How could he have moved around black neighbourhoods largely undetected? And some witnesses had described seeing either a light-skinned or dark-skinned black man.
Naturally, amid all these questions about the killer’s race and the slowly boiling tensions, the public began to accuse the police of knowing who the killer was and covering up for him. Conspiracy theories abounded, accusations of racism mounted. All the while, it seemed like the police were doing little or nothing.
But the blunt truth was the police had no suspects. They had very little in the way of forensic evidence. Witness testimony was patchy and rare. It was therefore a struggle for the police to find any solid leads, even if they wanted to.
And, at this point, they sorely wanted to. Gone were the days when they shrugged victims off as runaways who suffered delinquency-related deaths. The police now wanted these cases solved. If the abduction and murder of black children continued, it would be a public relations nightmare.
And there were fears that it would lead to full-scale riots.
Meanwhile, the African-American inhabitants of inner-city Atlanta began to discuss setting up vigilante groups to track the killer. Parents began forbidding their children from leaving the house. The streets began to look more and more deserted. Even adults didn’t want to leave home. Not for fear of being killed, but for fear of being falsely accused as the killer. Such was the distrust of the police that many black Atlantans feared they’d try to pin the murders on the first half-decent suspect.
On the evening of July 5th 1980, the weather was so hot and stuffy that numerous children were finally permitted out into the fresh air to have water fights, play hide and seek, or enjoy a game of kickball. The decision to let the kids out to play was by no means universal, but more children were seen on the street that night than there had been in weeks.
That evening, 9 year old Anthony Carter’s mother was reluctant to let him go out and join his friends. But she ultimately consented. Anthony and his friends played hide and seek for several hours. He ignored his mother’s 10 pm curfew, and stayed out long after midnight. And then, sometime in the early hours of July 6th, 9 year old Anthony Carter disappeared. He was found the next day, July 7th, lying in an abandoned warehouse. He had been stabbed to death.
On July 17th, the mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson, announced the creation of a police task force that would hunt the perpetrator or perpetrators of the child murders. It would be composed of over 100 police officers and would also bring in Behavioural Science experts from the FBI. Mayor Jackson assured the public that everything was being done to stop the killings and, quote, “Someone out there knows what we’re looking for. Knows who’s doing this insane series of acts.”
One of the FBI agents brought to Atlanta was the now-legendary criminal profiler Ray Hazelwood. He insisted on seeing the neighbourhoods where the kids were taken. He was driven around south Atlanta by two black policemen in a squad car. Hazelwood immediately concluded that the killer was unlikely to be white because, quote, “As soon as we turned onto a street, everything stopped. People just stared. I asked what was going on. The officers just laughed and said it was because they had a ‘honkey’ in the car.”
Ever since the quote-unquote “white flight” of Caucasians to the Atlanta suburbs in the 50s and 60s, white people had become a rare sight in the inner-city. There was no way in hell a white killer could prowl those streets abducting children, much less a large crew of KKK members. Hazelwood felt adamant that the murderer was black. His superiors agreed with him, including John Glover, the African-American district chief of the Atlanta FBI.
Some black Atlantans greeted the theory with suspicion, claiming it was an attempt to quell racial tensions by pinning it on one of their own.
On July 30th 1980, not even two weeks after the establishment of the task force, a 10 year old boy named Earl Terrell went out with a few friends to the local swimming pool. After about half an hour, Earl was kicked out of the pool for roughhousing and threatening a lifeguard. He told his friends that he was going to walk home. But he didn’t make it.
According to the boy’s aunt, she received a phone call that night from a man saying that he had Earl locked in his basement. Police followed up on the tip, but nothing came of it. The source of the call could not be traced or confirmed to have happened at all. In January 1981, the remains of Earl Terrell were discovered in the woods.
Once again, the body was too decomposed to establish a cause of death. But, yet again, strangulation was suspected.
On August 20th 1980, 13 year old Clifford Jones was abducted from St. James and Lookout Avenue while collecting cans to sell. Witnesses claimed they saw the boy leaving with a white man. Jones was discovered the next day, August 21st, next to a dumpster behind a shopping mall.
Strangled. Witnesses later identified a white sex offender from a photo line-up. But then the police task force determined that the man had a solid alibi for the time of the abduction. Not everyone in the black community was convinced the man was innocent, however, and public anger reached new heights.
Then three teenagers came forward claiming that they had seen Jones being raped and murdered in a laundromat by a black man named Jaime Brooks and an unidentified accomplice. Somehow the teens had seen the whole thing through the window of the laundromat, including Brooks cleaning up the evidence. As word circulated, two more witnesses came forward claiming that they’d seen Jaime Brooks carrying the body from his home (not the laundromat) to the shopping mall dumpster. Police did not deem any of these reports credible and Jaime Brooks was not arrested.
The Atlanta Child Murders were now receiving national attention, and the US Attorney General revealed to the media that the case was being followed by both President Jimmy Carter and the Republican Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. The police task force announced that it was offering a $100,000 reward (or $382,700 today) for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Atlanta child killer. The reward generated a flood of tips but no results.
Meanwhile, due to perceived police inaction, black Atlantans made good on their promises to form vigilante groups. The largest of these was “The Bat Patrol”, so named because squads of men would patrol the streets armed with baseball bats in an attempt to scare off child predators. It didn’t work.
The Human Web
On September 14th 1980, at 4 pm, 10 year old Darron Glass returned home from a baseball game. Darron lived with his foster mother, Fannie Mae Smith, in southeast Atlanta. Both of Darron’s parents had died and Darron had been in foster care for the past year, and living with Fannie Mae for just the past three weeks. After returning from the baseball game, Darron left the house again.
Fannie Mae assumed he had gone out to play. But he never came back inside. An hour later, Fannie Mae received a phone call from Darron, who sounded anxious, but the call was quickly disconnected. Then Darron Glass disappeared forever.
His body was never found.
On October 9th 1980, 12 year old Charles Stephens was drawing doodles and watching TV at his parents’ house. Then Charles got up and said he was going to hang out with a friend. At 4:30 pm, a neighbour saw Charles Stephens riding a skateboard not far from his home. The neighbour also spotted a light-skinned black man nearby, allegedly watching the boy.
The man didn’t respond to the neighbour’s greeting. The body of Charles Stephens was discovered the next day, October 10th, in the bushes next to the entrance to a trailer park. Bruises on the nose and mouth indicated someone had smothered the boy. Dog hairs were found on the victim’s body, as were two human head hairs.
A pair of boxers were found lying several feet away from the body, containing two pubic hairs. The boxers belonged to Charles, the pubic hairs did not.
In response, the city council announced a new initiative called “Saturday Searches.” Every Saturday, volunteers would comb the woods, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings looking for dead bodies. This is how the skeletal remains of 7 year old Latonya Wilson were found. On October 30th, the mayor imposed a citywide curfew on all unaccompanied minors.
On the morning of November 1st 1980, 9 year old Aaron Jackson was abducted from the Moreland Avenue Shopping Centre in southeast Atlanta. His body was found the next day, lying face up on a riverbank, next to a bridge. He had been strangled. Aaron Jackson was schoolmates with a previous victim, Aaron Wyche, who had been killed four months earlier in June.
A few days later, on November 10th, 16 year old Patrick “Pat Man” Rogers caught a bus with his seven year old brother Isaac and brought the younger boy home to their mother. Then Patrick Rogers paid a visit to the apartment of his friend, Joe Harper, with whom Patrick wrote music. But Joe’s mother, Mary Harper, told him that her son wasn’t home. Patrick left. Then he disappeared.
Patrick Rogers worked as a bag boy at the Moreland Avenue Shopping Centre, and he knew both Aaron Jackson and Aaron Wyche. Patrick also knew Darron Glass and three other boys who would soon become victims. Patrick Rogers was an aspiring musician who had recently met a talent agent. The agent had been walking around Patrick’s neighbourhood the week before distributing flyers advertising free representation and sound recordings to anyone between the ages of 11 and 21.
When Patrick visited the apartment of Joe Harper on November 10th, he told Mary Harper that the agent was interested in recording their songs. After Patrick’s disappearance, the police did not seek to locate the talent agent for an interview.
The body of Patrick Rogers was found on December 7th on the shoreline of the Chattahoochee River, near the Paces Ferry Road Bridge. The cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma to the head. Police concluded the victim’s body had been dropped directly off the bridge into the water.
By the end of 1980, a total of 17 victims had been killed, all of them minors.
On January 3rd 1981, 14 year old Lubie Geter was last seen talking to a light-skinned black man wearing a baseball cap outside of the Stewart-Lakewood Shopping Centre. Geter liked to hang out there selling car deodorizers that he had stolen from a car wash where he had a part-time job. According to the witness, after several minutes’ conversation, Lubie got into a car with the man in the baseball cap. The witness was able to provide enough of a description of the older man for police to produce a sketch.
This was circulated in the media but did not yield any reliable tips.
Lubie Geter’s body was found in the woods a month later on February 5th. A local landowner had passed by, destroying illegal rabbit traps, when his dog made a beeline for the remains. Although the body was fairly decomposed and had been partially damaged by wildlife, the coroner was able to determine that Lubie Geter had died of asphyxiation.
Meanwhile, back on January 22nd, Lubie Geter’s friend, 15 year old Terry Pue, went missing. Pue also lived in the same apartment complex as the killer’s first victim, Teddy Smith. On the evening of the 22nd, Terry Pue was seen turning in empty bottles for money at a depot on Memorial Drive in southeast Atlanta. Pue used the money to treat himself to a meal at the Krystal restaurant. He finished his meal, exited the restaurant, and disappeared.
A month later, an anonymous tip was phoned into the police telling them where to find Terry Pue’s body. The tip proved accurate. His remains were discovered in the woods in Rockdale County. This was approximately 20 miles from where Pue was last seen. FBI profiler Ray Hazelwood suspected that the large distance between the abduction and the dump sites was a message from the killer that he could transport the victims as far as he liked and there was very little police could do about it.
Both Lubie Geter and Terry Pue knew Patrick “Pat Man” Rogers.
On February 6th 1981, a 12 year old boy named Patrick Baltazar left the one-room apartment he shared with his father, stepmother, and two brothers in south central Atlanta. Baltazar headed to his father’s workplace, the Fisherman’s Cove Restaurant, to ask for money. Then Baltazar went to the Three Galaxy Arcade, where he stayed until midnight. After that, Patrick Baltazar disappeared.
A few weeks earlier, Patrick had phoned the police task force telling them that he’d been chased by a man and claimed that the man was, quote, “going to get him.” The police did not follow up on the call.
Patrick Baltazar’s body was found a week later on February 13th. He had been dumped in some overgrown bushes in Corporate Square between the I-85 and Buford Highway. He was discovered by a maintenance worker. Head hairs belonging to a black man and dog hairs were found on the body. Patrick had been strangled with a ligature.
Six days later, on February 19th, 13 year old Curtis Walker was last seen picking up trash in exchange for money in front of the Byron Gun Shop. Sniffer dogs later tracked his scent to a parking lot behind a local school, where a witness had seen a black teenager getting into a yellow car. Curtis Walker’s body was discovered on March 6th, snagged on a log in the South River. Police speculated he’d been dumped off a bridge rather than pushed from the shoreline.
He was naked except for his underwear. Latent fingerprints were found on the body. Curtis Walker also knew Patrick “Pat Man” Rogers.
Around this time, the police task force received a tip that the murders were being carried out by a small cell of the KKK located in suburban Atlanta. Their leader was a man named Charles Theodore Sanders. An informant told police that, in late December, Sanders had threatened to murder Lubie Geter, after the boy hit Sanders’ car with a go-cart outside the Stewart-Lakewood mall. The alleged statement was, quote, “I’m going to choke that black bastard to death with my dick.”
A second informant claimed that, in February, Charles Sanders had told him, quote, “Yeah, I killed the little bastard. We are killing N-WORDs, about 20 of them, and we are going to start killing young black women next.”
In response to these allegations, the police task force wiretapped Charles Sanders’ phone, and the telephones of his family and fellow KKK members. His brothers, Terry and Don Sanders, were recorded having an incriminating conversation. Don Sanders allegedly said, “I might go out and ride around a little bit,” to which Terry Sanders responded, “Go find you another kid? Another little kid?” Don answered, “Yeah. Scope out some places. See ya later.”
Meanwhile, on the evening of March 2nd 1981, 15 year old Joseph “Jojo” Bell swung by Captain Peg’s Seafood Restaurant, where he occasionally did odd-jobs for cash. Then Bell went and played a game of basketball with some friends at a public court. After the game, Joseph Bell’s friends saw him get into a white station wagon with a black man in his mid-20s.
One of Bell’s friends, Eugene Laster, identified the man as a local talent agent. Eugene Laster’s younger brother, John, claimed that Joseph Bell knew the agent’s phone number. The next day, March 3rd, a staff member at Captain Peg’s Restaurant got a phone call from Bell, where he claimed to be, quote, “nearly dead” before the line was disconnected.
Four days later, March 7th, Bell’s grandmother (with whom he lived) claimed she got two strange phone calls from an unidentified female saying that she, quote, “had Joseph.”
Joseph Bell’s body was found several weeks later on April 19th by some mountain bikers testing a new trail through the woods in Rockdale County. The dump site was a two mile hike through the forest from the nearest road. The cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation. Although the man who picked up Joseph Bell that night was identified as a local talent agent, police did not seek to find him, question him, or add him to the suspect list.
It appears that the eye-witness testimony of Joseph Bell’s friends was ignored by the beat cops who questioned them, and they did not report the information to their superiors.
Meanwhile, the task force was still preoccupied with their KKK lead: the alleged statements by Charles Sanders, and the incriminating telephone conversation between Terry and Don Sanders.
Back on March 13th 1981, eleven days after the disappearance of Joseph Bell, the grisly pattern continued. 13 year old Timothy Hill had been close friends with Joseph Bell and they lived in the same neighbourhood. According to their mutual friends, after Bell’s disappearance, Timothy Hill became more cautious whenever he left the house. He refused to talk to strangers.
However, that precaution did not seem to apply to adults whom he already knew, which included a convicted sex offender named Thomas “Uncle Tom” Terrell who owned two houses next door to each other on Gray Street. One of the houses was Uncle Tom’s residence, the other was a flophouse where Uncle Tom encouraged young boys to hang out. Timothy Hill was one of them.
Adults would come to the flophouse on Gray Street in order to engage in sex with the boys for money. A witness, Frank Mealing, later admitted under police interrogation that he had sex with Timothy Hill and another underage boy at the Gray Street flophouse at 5 pm on March 12th. Afterward, Hill went next door and spent the night in Uncle Tom’s place of residence with Mealing and several other teenagers.
Hill left the following morning, March 13th 1981. He was last seen at 4 pm, standing on a downtown sidewalk talking to an unidentified teenage girl. Three days later, on March 16th, one of Timothy Hill’s school teachers, Theresa Swindall, received two phone calls from the boy, during which he was crying and incoherent. That was the last contact anyone had with him.
Timothy Hill’s body was found washed up on the banks of the Chattahoochee River on March 30th. He had been strangled to death. In addition to being friends with Joseph Bell, Timothy Hill was also friends with victims Patrick Baltazar, Anthony Carter, and may have known Alfred Evans, Jeff Mathis, and Eric Middlebrooks.
Both “Uncle Tom” Terrell and Frank Mealing were investigated as suspects in the murder of Timothy Hill, along with the other children in Atlanta. And although they were eventually prosecuted for sex offences, there was no substantial evidence tying the two men to the actual killings. And they both had alibis for many of the dates in question. In Uncle Tom’s case, his alibis were often teenage boys.
Another predator without an alibi named Larry Marshall had reportedly had sex with Timothy Hill at the Gray Street flophouse on March 9th, several days before Hill’s disappearance. Larry Marshall was arrested and held for questioning but was later cut loose as the murders continued.
An unknown number of other PDF-files had gone to the flophouse on Gray Street over the years to exchange money for sexual services. It is possible that the killer was among them. There is also a strong possibility that the first two victims, Teddy Smith and Alfred Evans, had also frequented the flophouse, having been seen there by eye-witnesses back in 1979.
A number of other victims were rumoured to have frequented Gray Street to have sex for money, but these reports were given to police and the media several months after the connection of Gray Street to Timothy Hill had been made public. Too much time to distinguish fact from fabrication.
Two months after Timothy Hill’s body was discovered, the Gray Street flophouse was burned to the ground by a person or persons unknown.
Evolution
In March 1981, famous heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali donated $500,000 to the existing reward for information leading to the arrest of the Atlanta murderer, bringing the total to 600 grand or roughly 2 million dollars in modern money. Numerous other celebrities like Burt Reynolds and Gladys Knight donated money to fund the operational costs of the large police task force. The city of Atlanta also accepted thousands in donations from the public.
On March 11th, jazz singers Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr put on a charity concert to raise even more money for the task force and financial support for the victims’ families. At the charity concert, one of the on-stage photographers was a man named Homer Williams, whose son was an aspiring youth talent agent in Atlanta.
At 7 pm on March 20th 1981, a few days after the disappearance of Timothy Hill, 21 year old Eddie Duncan arrived home to the apartment he shared with his mother and three siblings. Eddie told his 18 year old brother, Ricky, that he’d been offered $200 to help a man move to South Carolina. A neighbour reported a slightly different story, claiming that Eddie Duncan told him around 10 pm that evening that he’d been offered $200 to help someone paint a house.
Police later hypothesised that both these stories were a cover for a $200 fee for male prostitution. Eddie Duncan was last seen around 11 pm, on a street corner, getting into a car with a light-skinned black man.
Eddie Duncan was found on April 1st 1981 on the shores of the Chattahoochee River, a few feet from where the body of Timothy Hill had been found merely a day earlier. Eddie had been strangled. At 21 years old, around 5-foot-9 and 140 pounds, he was the first victim to be a legal adult. Eddie Duncan knew both Timothy Hill and Patrick “Pat Man” Rogers.
Back on March 22nd, two days after the disappearance of Eddie Duncan, 20 year old Larry Rogers was last seen getting into a faded green station wagon with a light-skinned black man on the corner of Simpson Road and Lake Avenue. Despite being a legal adult, Larry Rogers was only 5-foot-2 and 110 pounds. Aside from a burn scar on the side of his face, he very much resembled a child. On April 9th, the body of Larry Rogers was found on the floor of a kitchen in an abandoned apartment building. He had been strangled.
Meanwhile, on March 25th, 23 year old Michael McIntosh was last seen leaving his place of work at the Milton Avenue Foundry. McIntosh was only 5-foot-5 and 116 pounds. His peers deemed him “mentally slow” and he was rumoured to sometimes work as a male prostitute at the Cameo Lounge on Spring Street. McIntosh had done 3 years in prison from ages 18 to 21 for burglary and armed robbery.
McIntosh knew victim Joseph Bell from a local boxing club. Michael McIntosh’s body was found on April 20th on the banks of the Chattahoochee, not far from where the remains of Timothy Hill and Eddie Duncan had been found. McIntosh had been strangled.
Eddie Duncan, Larry Rogers, and Michael McIntosh were all murdered within the space of a week. Duncan had been average height and average weight. Rogers and McIntosh had been smaller. They were all legal adults. Duncan and McIntosh had wound up in the river. Rogers had been found in an abandoned building. Strangulation had been used in all three cases.
The task force added them all to their caseload.
A month passed. At 10:30 am on April 22nd, 21 year old Jimmy Payne (5-foot-7 and 137 pounds) was last seen walking to the Gold Mine Arcade to sell some collectible 1951 nickels he’d acquired. He was a suspect in a coin shop robbery a few days earlier. Payne had also recently been released from prison in December for a similar crime.
Jimmy Payne did not know Michael McIntosh, and they’d served their sentences at different prisons. Payne was supposed to meet with his girlfriend, Catherine Turner, that afternoon but he never showed up. Jimmy Payne’s body was found in the Chattahoochee on April 27th by a fisherman and his wife. Payne had been strangled.
At this point, the Task Force deployed 100 officers to stake-out every river crossing and vacant lot in the city, in the hopes they’d catch the murderer dumping a body. The operation would be expensive, would require the importation of other officers from surrounding counties, and the Mayor’s office warned the task force that they did not have the budget for it to continue for very long.
On April 23rd, the day after Jimmy Payne disappeared, 28 year old John Porter was last seen walking away from his mother’s apartment on Capitol Avenue. He was found the next day in a vacant lot on Bender Street, having been stabbed to death. John Porter had suffered mental problems for years, had previously been institutionalised, and was once accused of molesting a toddler.
When Porter fought with his mother, he would go and stay in an abandoned apartment building with a bunch of shady characters, including an accused and acquitted murderer named James “Old Man” Gates. There were questions about whether John Porter fit the victim profile. He was 5-foot-10 and 160 pounds.
He did not fit the pattern of smaller-statured adults that the killings had recently fallen into, but then again, neither did 5-foot-9 Eddie Duncan, and Jimmy Payne was slightly below average at 5-foot-7, but it was borderline. John Porter had also been stabbed, not strangled, but so was 9 year old Anthony Carter back on July 6th 1980. Finally, there was no clear indication whether or not Porter was involved in male prostitution, but, mentally ill and frequently homeless, it was distinctly possible.
Not wanting to miss any potential leads, the task force added John Porter to their list.
Nearly three weeks passed. At 6 pm on May 11th 1981, 17 year old William Barrett walked down to the McDaniel-Glenn Housing Centre to pay a bill for his mother. A witness then saw him a few blocks away getting into a white car with a black male. As an odd detail, according to the witness, the unidentified black male was carrying a purse.
William Barrett was 5-foot-5 and 130 pounds. His body was found in a forested lot not far from his home the following day, May 12th. The victim had been strangled to death and then stabbed once post-mortem. Dog hairs were found on the body.
Nine days later, at 3pm on May 21st 1981, 27 year old Nathaniel Cater left the Falcon Hotel, where he’d been staying since his parents threw him out of their apartment on April 24th. Cater was 5-foot-10 and 150 pounds. With a moustache and goatee, he most assuredly did not resemble a child. During the day, Cater found work at the labour pool, lining up at 708 Spring Street for anybody who arrived with a truck or van wanting to hire short-term unskilled labour for cash.
At night, Cater worked as a male prostitute at the Silver Dollar Saloon and Cameo Lounge, both of which were also on Spring Street. At 9 pm, Cater left the Cameo Lounge. At 9:30 pm a witness named Robert Henry saw Cater holding hands with a light-skinned black man in front of the Rialto Theatre, approximately half a mile to the northeast of Spring Street. Then Nathaniel Cater disappeared.
A few hours later, at 3 am on May 22nd, a white station wagon was stopped after crossing the James Jackson Parkway Bridge. The officer at the scene had heard a splash. The driver of the station wagon was mid-20s, 5-foot-6, 180 pounds, with large thick glasses. He was a light-skinned black man with his hair in an afro.
The man claimed to be a talent agent and was out that night trying to contact a prospective singer named Cheryl Johnson. He denied stopping on the bridge or turning around on it. The man claimed the station wagon belonged to his uncle. When police conducted a search of the vehicle, they found leather gloves and a nylon cord.
The cops did not confiscate them and let the man drive home. The name on his driver licence was Wayne Williams.
When police looked into Cheryl Johnson, they discovered she did not exist. Wayne Williams had been pulled over three days before the Mayor’s office had planned to pull the plug on the stake-outs. Wayne Williams also bore a striking resemblance to the witness sketch that was released to the media after the abduction of Lubie Geter back in January.
On May 25th, the same day that the Atlanta stake-outs were stopped, the body of Nathaniel Cater was found on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, between the Jackson Parkway and George Street bridges. He had been strangled to death. That brought the death toll to 30 victims.
Meet Wayne Williams
Wayne Bertram Williams was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 27th 1958. His parents were Homer and Faye Williams, both of whom were school teachers. His father also occasionally worked as a freelance photographer.
Both Homer and Faye were fairly intelligent people and they passed that trait onto their son. Several times, Wayne scored above average on IQ tests. Homer and Faye diligently paid off a house in the southwest Atlanta suburb of Dixie Hills.
At the time of Wayne’s birth, it was a middle-class neighbourhood composed of both white and black people. But as the 1960s progressed, “white flight” turned it into a majority black neighbourhood. The denizens of the inner-city moved into the newly emptied houses.
Then, during the 1970s, drug use and the crime rate significantly increased, rendering Dixie Hills little different from the slums downtown. Having already paid off the house, Homer and Faye decided to stay put. They kept a clean and orderly home.
Drug use and drunkenness were forbidden.
There is no evidence that Wayne Williams was abused by his parents. But, being an only child, there are indications he was spoiled with excessive praise, attention, and expensive toys that were the envy of his friends. As he grew up, Williams developed a keen interest in electronics, music, radio, and journalism. At school, Williams was always at the top of his class.
His teachers described him as intelligent, articulate, and polite. However, being short, chubby, and wearing glasses, Williams was swiftly dubbed a nerd by his peers and was occasionally bullied. He became something of a loner. In adolescence, Williams showed little sexual interest in either males or females.
In 1976, Wayne Williams graduated from Frederick Douglass High School with the top grades in his class. Williams was also class president. He could have gotten into any university he wanted and could have applied for a wide variety of scholarships. But, instead, Williams decided to continue living with his parents and to become, in his words, “an entrepreneur.”
After a year of sitting around the house, his parents convinced him to attend a few classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta, studying psychology and business administration part-time. However, he fell short of earning his 4-year degree, for reasons that will soon become clear.
As for his entrepreneurial ventures, Wayne Williams occasionally moonlighted as a radio repairman, a freelance photographer of fires and car accidents for the news, and he also floated around the local radio stations where he befriended a number of producers and announcers. After meeting a radio personality, he would steadfastly put their name down on his CV. Some of the people on that CV later claimed to never have met him. Williams also built a low-frequency radio antenna to make broadcasts of his own.
His parents paid for the equipment, but the venture went nowhere. Williams was very interested in music – particularly R&B, Motown, and Soul, which was all the rage at the time. But he had no musical skills of his own. So he decided to become a talent agent.
The primary focus of Wayne’s recruiting efforts were young boys. He claimed that he was trying to discover the next Jackson Five. He wanted to call the band “Gemini” after his astrological sign. His pattern of recruitment was to hand out flyers in south Atlanta offering free representation.
When boys reached out, he’d privately audition each one, and, if they had talent, he’d cobble them together in a provisional band. Then he’d offer to record a demo of them singing or playing instruments, and send it to various music producers that he claimed to know. Williams told the boys that once they were signed to a label, they would be paid incredible amounts of money.
Williams later claimed that he also contacted all the school music programs in Atlanta on his company letterhead and had an agreement with music teachers to scout for talent. However, no school staff have come forward to corroborate this story, and no company letterhead has been found. It seems likely that Williams just handed out flyers in local neighbourhoods. It was all very small-scale and could quite possibly just have been nothing more than a cover for his predatory sexual designs on children.
But the demos were real. Williams recorded the boys in local studios around Atlanta. He paid for the numerous recording sessions using his parents’ savings. The sound editors who cut the tapes generally thought Williams was a bit of a joke, but they were happy to take his money.
As far as we know, in adulthood Williams had one girlfriend – a woman named Gwen Harden, whom he dated in 1980 and 1981, and who subsequently insisted that he was heterosexual. Williams was also rumoured to frequent child brothels like the one on Gray Street or solicit male prostitutes in bars like the Silver Saloon or Cameo Lounge, but there is no way to confirm this.
By his own admission, Wayne Williams was a night owl. He’d drive around for hours after dark. Frequently he’d listen to a police scanner. If a call came through about a car accident or fire, Williams would drive to the scene, take a few photographs, and then sell the best ones to the newspapers.
In 1980, Williams bought a video camera and sold the footage of fires and car accidents to local TV stations. But these pictures and tapes were infrequent, and it is unclear what else Williams was doing every night. Williams said he occasionally attended gigs and jam sessions. He did not attend many parties.
His parents disapproved of his nocturnal habits, but did not stand in the way of them.
Wayne Williams also had a fascination with the police. He had a few replica uniforms and kept a police light in his car. Back in 1976, shortly after graduating high school, he was arrested for impersonating a police officer. The charge was ultimately dropped.
But theorists have speculated that Williams could have sometimes lured children into his car by pretending to be a cop. In his early 20s, Williams also several times falsely claimed to be a former air force pilot, or, alternately, an operative for the CIA, who among other things had trained him to kill with his bare hands.
”I’ll Be Damned”
After the body of Nathaniel Cater was found in the Chattahoochee River on May 25th 1981, the police task force felt certain that Wayne Williams was their man. He may not have killed all 30 victims – some of them could potentially be victims of perpetrators with a similar MO – but the cops felt certain that Williams had killed at least some of them. FBI agent Ray Hazelwood declared that Wayne Williams fit the psychological profile to a tee. Here, at any rate, after months of little progress and a rising body count, was a prime suspect worth investigating.
Wayne Williams had been stopped at 3 am, half a mile from a bridge over the Chattahoochee, only a few hours after Nathaniel Cater was last seen holding hands with a light-skinned black man. The officer watching the bridge had heard a splash and had seen a car. Wayne Williams, driving his uncle’s white station wagon, was the only driver that police could find in the area. Williams freely admitted to driving over the bridge.
Twice, back and forth from a payphone. An officer had seen leather gloves and a nylon cord in the car. And the story Williams gave about Cheryl Johnson appeared to be bogus. None of this was enough to lay charges, but it was a good starting point.
The task force ran a background check on Wayne Williams and interviewed his neighbours, former classmates, acquaintances, and business associates. He didn’t have any close friends. The cops avoided interviewing immediate family, or Wayne’s girlfriend, or Wayne himself, for the time being. Most people described Williams as nice, smart, ambitious, and friendly. It was hardly surprising to learn that a potential serial killer was able to maintain a fairly harmless public facade.
The task force tried to get a warrant to search the white station wagon that belonged to Wayne’s uncle and the house where he lived with his parents. They could not find a judge willing to issue a warrant based on such limited evidence. And so, on June 3rd 1981, the police bit the bullet and invited Wayne Williams to an interview at police headquarters in downtown Atlanta. Williams was told it was merely a routine matter of procedure, since he was stopped on the night a victim disappeared, not far from where the victim’s body was later found.
Williams agreed to attend, and arrived on the evening of the 3rd. But the interview turned out to be anything but routine. He was interrogated for 12 hours. He denied having anything to do with the murders.
When confronted with the non-existence of Cheryl Johnson, Williams changed his story saying, at the time, he wanted to supply police with a plausible excuse in order to be let go, when in fact he was just driving around that night like he often did, and was, quote, “just curious as to what I could see in that area.” It was certainly a flimsier excuse than Cheryl Johnson.
Then police asked Williams if he was willing to take a polygraph test – an extremely unreliable technology that law enforcement was still enamoured with in the early 1980s. Williams agreed and promptly failed it. Visibly frustrated, Williams asked to retake the test. He failed again.
Now angry, he asked to take the test once more. Again, he failed. At that point, Richard Radcliff, the FBI agent who administered the tests, turned to Wayne Williams and rather unwisely said, quote, “I’ll be damned. You’re the guy we’ve been looking for these past two years.”
Wayne Williams left the police station just before dawn on June 4th. A surveillance car followed him. The police task force decided not to release his name or address to the public.
However, Wayne Williams had different ideas. After arriving home, he called the local media, explained that he had been pulled in for questioning as a suspect in the Atlanta Murders, and declared that he was going to hold a press conference in his parents’ house later that morning. Within a couple hours, at around 7 am, a handful of journalists arrived.
One of the conditions of the interview was that they could not shoot footage of Williams’ face and could not release his name. Instead the cameras were pointed at the reporters themselves, standing rather awkwardly in the lace-festooned middle-class living room and looking warily at the murder suspect off-camera.
It was an interesting strategy. Williams wanted to get out in front of any public allegations issued by the police. During the interview, Williams not-so-subtly implied that the police were corrupt, racist, and just wanted to pin the murders on him in order to close the case. Quote, “One of the task force captains [on the bridge] pointed his finger at me and said that he was tired of all the BS about working long hours, working the stakeouts, and that he was ready to pull the thing to an end.”
When asked about the children who had been murdered, Williams replied, “Some of these kids were in places they had no business being, at certain times of day and night. Some of them don’t have no home supervision and they’re just running around the streets wild. And I’m saying that, when you’re doing that, not giving anyone a licence to kill, but you’re opening yourself up to all sorts of things.”
Wayne Williams ended the press conference by demanding an apology from the police and FBI.
In response, the Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner, Lee Brown, was forced to give a statement. However, in order to keep things obscure and avoid any accusations that the police were harassing Williams, he told the media an outright lie. Brown said that police believed that multiple predators had been responsible for the murders. Quote, “Based upon all the experience and opinions of those who have consulted with us, we can say with certainty that we do not have one person responsible for the cases of missing and murdered children in our city.”
Behind the scenes, however, the task force was absolutely convinced that the perpetrator of most or all of the murders was Wayne Williams. He did not have a solid alibi for the dates and times of the 30 disappearances. His parents only gave him a partial alibi for the murder of Nathaniel Cater, saying Wayne was home in the evening and left at around 2:30 am.
Under interrogation, Williams had simply replied that, at the times of the various abductions, he was either at home, out driving, taking photographs of accidents, or conducting his business as a talent agent. He was never very clear about dates, times, or any strangers, friends, and acquaintances he may have spoken to.
Wayne Williams had already cleaned out his uncle’s station wagon after being stopped on May 22nd. But following his press conference, neighbours saw Williams and his father painstakingly cleaning their house and carrying several cardboard boxes out to the car, before driving off and returning several hours later without them. The next day, neighbours smelled Williams and his father burning something in their backyard. The neighbours later claimed, judging from the noxious smell, that it was neither wood nor charcoal that they were burning.
When the police task force got word that Williams and his father were potentially destroying evidence, they finally got a judge to grant them a warrant to search Williams’ home and all the family cars. They found blood residue in the house and in the white station wagon. It was a few years before DNA testing, but it could be matched to blood type. Problem was, there were 30 victims with a variety of blood-types.
It didn’t prove much. The police also took fibre samples from the various carpets in the house and hair samples from the Williams family dog – a German shepherd.
Meanwhile, the friends of murder victim Joseph Bell identified Wayne Williams as the man in the white station wagon who had picked him up from the basketball court on March 2nd. Williams was also known to hang out at Cap’n Pegs Seafood Restaurant where Bell occasionally found work.
Under questioning, the sound editors at the various studios where Williams recorded his child star demos claimed that on several specific dates at the height of the murders, they saw him with scratches on his arms and face. These wounds would be consistent with a victim resisting while they were manually choked to death. Indeed, some of the victims had been throttled with bare hands. One sound editor, Kathy Andrews, told police that when she asked Williams about the deep gouges on his arms, he told her that he fell in a bush.
Andrews got creeped out and avoided him after that.
Williams was also connected to murder victim Patrick “Pat Man” Rogers, having told Rogers a week prior to his disappearance that he would like to record a demo of him and his musical partner, Joe Harper. Rogers gave Williams’ name to Joe Harper’s mother, Mary, the day he disappeared. Patrick Rogers, meanwhile, was either the friend or acquaintance of several other murder victims and may have introduced Wayne Williams to them.
Williams was also directly connected to 20 year old victim Larry Rogers (no relation to “Pat Man”). He knew Larry from the neighbourhood and had driven his younger brother to the hospital after Larry’s sibling had been injured in a fight.
Meanwhile, forensic analysts matched the fibres from a carpet in the Williams family home to fibres found on the shoe of Eric Middlebrooks when he was found dead in an alleyway on May 19th 1980. It was a highly distinctive trilobal fibre that could only be matched to a limited number of carpets at the time. Police tracked down the manufacturer to see how many such carpets were produced and sold in Atlanta to strengthen the significance of the match. Not many, was the answer.
After the police searches, Wayne Williams’ name and address were leaked to the public. The media started running the information. Within a few hours, Williams’ street in Dixie Hills was clogged with news vans from all over the country. A gaggle of reporters gathered perpetually outside his front door. A few reporters had come from as far as Europe. Also posted outside his home were officers from the Atlanta PD and agents from the FBI.
Authorities did not deem Williams a flight risk, and did not consider it likely Williams would try to slip away and claim another victim under such intense press and public scrutiny. Nevertheless, the FBI placed tracking devices (still a relatively new technology in those days) on the Williams family cars. For several days, Wayne Williams stayed cloistered at home. Occasionally, Homer Williams would pop outside and tell the reporters to stop trampling the grass.
At one point, Wayne Williams came outside and threatened to sue the reporters for harassment. Then, at night, Williams started taking little drives, with a long convoy of news vans and police vehicles following behind him. Williams would drive around aimlessly for a few hours and return home.
Then, on June 18th, Wayne Williams left his house and drove to the home of Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s Mayor. Williams drove at high speed and the usual convoy struggled to keep up with him. He got out of his car and stood in the street, shouting at the mayor’s front door about how he was allowing the harassment of a private citizen. The mayor did not come outside.
Williams later said of his impromptu protest, quote, “When you’re trying to get into your own home and you have to literally fight your way through a sea of people, it gets frustrating.”
Neither the mayor nor the police task force wanted this circus to continue for much longer. And so, on June 21st 1981, Wayne Williams was arrested for the murder of 28 year old Nathaniel Cater (who had gone missing May 22nd, the same night Williams was stopped on the bridge) and 21 year old Jimmy Payne, who had gone missing on the morning of April 22nd 1981 and had also wound up strangled in the Chattahoochee River. The District Attorney intended to use the rest of the victims as “pattern evidence” at trial. And the DA fully intended to prosecute those cases should his office fail to secure the death penalty or lengthy convictions for the murders of Payne and Cater.
And so, it is with some irony that the only two cases which were going to be prosecuted in the so-called Atlanta Child Murders involved the homicide of two adults.
”Sons of Bitches”
Wayne Williams was arraigned at Fulton County court and denied bail. His trial did not begin until half a year later, on January 6th 1982. While Williams was behind bars, the newspapers triumphantly declared that the murders fitting the Atlanta killer’s MO had ceased, which implied that the cops had gotten their man. Whether or not this is true has been debated.
Both now and at the time. Some commentators have suspicions that the cops just pinned the murders on the first likely suspect they came across. And they point toward a number of murder victims in Atlanta during the rest of 1981.
In regards to African-American minors, 16 year old Clarence Davis was shot in what appeared to be a gang dispute in October, and 17 year old Kenneth Johnson (an employee at Cap’n Pegs Seafood Restaurant) was shot in the middle of the street for reasons unknown in November. Some theorists point toward the significance of the Johnson murder because of Cap’n Pegs. And while strangulation was the Atlanta killer’s most frequent MO, the very first victim from back in 1979, Teddy Smith, had also been shot.
Smith was dumped next to Alfred Evans, who had been strangled, making it highly unlikely that Smith was on the task force’s list erroneously. On the other hand, in November 1981, Kenneth Johnson had been murdered on the spot, rather than abducted, used for sexual gratification and then dumped elsewhere. Thus the shooting did not fit the Atlanta killer’s primary motive.
As for adults who were murdered between July 1981 and January 1982, there were 10 such victims that fit the “young and African-American” profile. Most of them were shot. Two of them were stabbed.
And an unidentified black female in her 20s was found strangled in September, near the Krystal Restaurant where Terry Pue was last seen. But, again, she had been killed where she lay and the murderer had left bodily fluids on the corpse. Then there was 18 year old Kevin Alexander, a student at Georgia Tech, who was bludgeoned to death in his dorm room in November, and his personal effects were stolen (but not his roommate’s).
The death is certainly suspicious, but there is nothing else connecting it specifically to the Atlanta Child Murders. Perhaps of the greatest interest was 21 year old Stanley Murray, the uncle of victim Curtis Walker, who was shot near the Bankhead Highway and the location where Curtis disappeared. But Stanley was also killed on the spot.
It could have been an attempt to silence a witness, but there is no supporting evidence for this theory.
Another alternative is that, in June 1981, the killer simply ceased operations or moved elsewhere, in order to let Wayne Williams take the fall.
Meanwhile, for six months, Williams was isolated in a special wing of Fulton County Jail, rather than kept in gen pop, to prevent the other inmates from murdering an accused child killer and PDF file. Williams was kept under 24-hour observation and allowed to exercise for one hour every day. He had no visitors except for his lawyers. Not even his parents or his girlfriend visited him.
Usually, at pre-trial, defence lawyers for a serial killer attempt to get the location changed, since the jury may be stacked with citizens who are highly prejudicial, after hearing about the case in the local media for months on end. In this instance, Wayne Williams’ lawyers declared that they were perfectly happy to hold the trial in Fulton County (aka Atlanta), since the jury would be composed of, quote, “people from his hometown.” This meant black people.
The defence felt his odds were better with a majority black jury than being judged by white people from the suburbs or regional areas. Some of the newspapers voiced concerns that a majority black jury might acquit Williams for quote-unquote “purely racial reasons”, as had reputedly happened as a form of protest in other criminal cases, but the prosecution said this would not be a factor. Williams had harmed children and young men from the black community itself.
They would not be so forgiving.
In the end, the jury selected from Fulton County was two-thirds black, one-third white. 9 out of 12 jurors were women, 3 were men. Judge Clarence Cooper, an African-American, would preside.
The prosecution’s contention was that Wayne Williams was a grandiose narcissist, psychopath, fantasist, liar, and PDF file. He targeted members of his own race, as most serial killers do. Perhaps out of sexual preference, but also because he felt contempt for the inhabitants of inner-city Atlanta.
It was easy to dehumanise impoverished and often delinquent youths who were going nowhere fast, unlike the oh-so-intelligent and respectable Wayne. The prosecution also argued that Williams was a repressed homosexual who initially targeted children because they were easier to deceive and less likely to fight him off. As Williams got bolder, he graduated to young men, particularly sex workers.
Even then, many of his adult victims still resembled teenage boys. The prosecution argued the two female victims, aged 7 and 12, had not yet hit puberty and developed secondary sex characteristics, making it possible they also sufficiently looked like boys. However, it was clear Williams’ preference was for males, which is why they formed the overwhelming majority of his roster of victims.
Judge Cooper ruled that details from the other murders could be used as “pattern evidence.” This was not unusual in Georgia at the time. The prosecution decided to focus on the male victims, since Williams was the least likely to have actually killed the two female ones.
The prosecution presented as evidence the fairly unique carpet fibres found on Eric Middlebrooks’ body that matched a carpet in the Williams family home. The manufacturer confirmed only a few dozen people in Atlanta owned them. The prosecution also displayed 19 fibres found on 12 other victims, including Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Payne, that matched the lining in the back of the station wagon, implying it was regularly used to transport victims. Those fibres were more common, but Wayne Williams being stopped in such a vehicle at a potential body dump was compelling.
Blood residue found in the station wagon and the Williams family home were matched by blood type to some of the victims. But with 30 victims, blood type could only tell you so much. However, the presence of such a variety of blood in the car and the house at all was potentially incriminating.
Dog hairs found on the bodies of Charles Stephens, Patrick Baltazar, William Barrett, and, most decisively of all, Nathaniel Cater, were determined to belong to a German shepherd. The same breed of dog owned by the Williams family. Furthermore, head hairs found on Patrick Baltazar closely resembled those from Wayne Williams’ afro. Meanwhile, Baltazar had kept his hair cut short.
Eugene Laster, friend of Joseph Bell, testified that Williams picked up Bell from the basketball court in a white station wagon the day he disappeared. Numerous witnesses came forward to attest that Wayne Williams was a homosexual who frequented cruising spots, bars, and flophouses. To counter this, the defence later called Williams’ girlfriend to testify that he was as straight as an arrow.
The prosecution’s final witness was a man named Robert Henry, who testified that he saw Nathaniel Cater with Wayne Williams in front of the Rialto Theatre the night Cater disappeared. Quote, “They was holding hands, y’know, like male and female. If you’re holding hands with one of my co-workers and both you are male, what am I supposed to do, turn my head?” Under harsh cross-examination, where the defence brought up his criminal record, Robert Henry stuck to his story and insisted that he was positive that it was Cater and Williams he had seen that night.
The jury found him credible.
The prosecution also argued it was significant that not a single one of the victims owned a car. Therefore, it made it easy for Williams to offer rides late at night, or to a talent audition or demo recording, or to perform some odd-job Williams had fabricated as pretext.
One notable witness was a sound recordist who claimed that Williams often referred to the kids he brought in for demos as, quote, “dropshots.” In local parlance, this meant scum, ghetto trash, hood rats, or people who were worthless and below any sympathy or consideration.
The defence lawyers certainly had their work cut out for them. Especially for court-appointed attorneys who had never properly tried a murder case before. They did not call any expert witnesses to refute the fibre, dog hair, or blood evidence.
They merely argued on cross-examination that the fibres, dog hair, and blood could have come from anywhere – whichis true, but you usually want to back that up with an expert who could speak convincingly about the probabilities involved. The defence called very few witnesses, none of whom could provide a solid alibi for the timespan during which Jimmy Payne disappeared. But Williams’ parents, Homer and Faye, testified that Wayne was with them on the evening of May 21st when Nathaniel Cater was last seen, and had only left the house at 2:30 am on the 22nd, shortly before Williams was stopped by police.
But this alibi didn’t cover the full period of Cater’s disappearance, and it was not considered beyond the realm of possibility that Williams’ parents would lie under oath to protect their only child. Then Wayne Williams decided to take the stand in his own defence. He testified for three days.
For the first two days, Williams was polite and soft-spoken, several times being required to repeat his answer so the jury could hear. He went over what happened on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge, and denied knowing either Nathaniel Cater or Jimmy Payne. He also denied picking up Joseph Bell from the basketball court, claiming he’d been misidentified.
Due to Williams’ soft demeanour, several reporters began to speculate whether such a man could really have killed all those victims. But on the third day of his testimony, Williams began to get agitated. When the prosecution asked him about Robert Henry seeing him with Nathaniel Cater, Williams shouted, “I done told you that I don’t hold hands with no man, nowhere!”
When the prosecution implied that Williams was a killer who hid behind a harmless facade, Williams yelled, “Do you want the real Wayne Williams?! You got him, you fuckin’ dropshot!” The effect of these words on the jury was poisonous.
On February 26th 1982, the jury went into deliberations. They took 11 hours to return the verdict that Wayne Williams was guilty of the first degree murder of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Payne. A week later, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
On the way out of the courtroom, Homer Williams passed by the prosecution’s table. He uttered three words – “sons of bitches” – and left. Reasonable Doubt Since his conviction, Wayne Williams has steadfastly maintained his innocence.
In one interview from prison he said, “The bottom line is that nobody ever testified or even claimed that they saw me strike another person, choke another person, stab, beat, hurt, or kill anybody. Because I didn’t.” Of course, it does not take a direct eye-witness to convict someone of murder.
In some cases, you don’t even need the victim’s body. In Williams’ case, there was a fairly significant amount of circumstantial evidence. Even if you remove the “pattern evidence” (aka the details about other murder victims for which Williams was not on trial) there was arguably enough for a jury to convict him for the murder of Nathaniel Cater: A witness spotted Cater holding hands with Williams that night.
He was on the bridge at 3 am upstream from where the body was found. An officer at the time reported he heard a splash. Williams’ explanation for being out that night was a lie.
Fibres matching the vehicle and Williams’ dog were found on the body. He had no alibi. A nylon cord and leather gloves in the car disappeared.
And Williams and his father were seen removing potential evidence. On the other hand, if you exclude the “pattern evidence”, there was considerably less for a jury to convict Williams for murdering Jimmy Payne beyond a reasonable doubt. Nobody had seen them together.
They were not previously acquainted or connected by mutual associates like some of the other victims. There were no dog hairs on Jimmy Payne’s body. Only fibres from a station wagon, and plenty of people owned station wagons in 1981.
Beyond that, all you have is Williams lacking an alibi and the modus operandi being the same as Cater’s murder. A jury would be forgiven for not sending a man to prison purely on the basis of that evidence. But the “pattern evidence” was permitted.
And it is only when you see the evolving victim profile, the numerous body dumps, the recurring MO, and the same station wagon fibres on many of the victims, that it becomes more feasible to convict Williams for the murder of Jimmy Payne. He was one part of a larger constellation of killings. And let’s not kid ourselves.
Although Cater and Payne’s murders were the only charges, this was very much a trial for all the so-called Atlanta Child Murders. The media certainly treated it as such, and in many ways so did the people in that courtroom. In my personal opinion, after writing up a number of criminal cases over the years, I am wary of the practice of introducing “pattern evidence” or “propensity evidence” or whatever you’d like to call it.
Essentially bringing up unproven accusations of other crimes the defendant may have committed that have not been tried and tested in a court of law. Too often it seems to be used as a tactic by the prosecution to poison the jury against a defendant when the evidence for the actual case being tried seems to be lacking. Pattern evidence often is, to quote a Supreme Court Judge, “more prejudicial than probative.”
And I’m saying that as someone who thinks Wayne Williams is quite likely guilty. Nevertheless, some people go much further than me. After the verdict was handed down, a large segment of the American public, particularly in Atlanta, suspected that the police just pinned the murders on Wayne Williams to quell social unrest.
Indeed, all of the child murder cases associated with Williams were closed after the trial. This ended investigations that may have found a different culprit for some of the victims. Particularly those that did not seem to fully conform to the victim profile or the strangulation and dumping MO, potentially letting other monsters get away with murder and go on to hurt more children.
The idea of Wayne Williams as a fall guy was the view of a sizable minority of black Atlantans in 1982 and remains so today. In fact, the number of people who suspect that Wayne Williams is innocent of some or all of the murders has arguably grown since then – after the shock, horror, and desire to put an end to the killings had finally faded. And the killings largely stayed “ended.”
As mentioned, the Atlanta murders that fit the MO and victim profile petered out after Williams’ arrest in June 1981. This remained the case in 1982 and 1983. There were no strangulations within the victim profile.
Just shootings and stabbings. However, the shooting of Charles Watson in April 1982 is worth mentioning. A few weeks prior, he went to the Atlanta PD claiming that he knew about a child prostitution ring.
The cops were going to use Watson as an informant. Then he suddenly fled to Texas. On April 5, a witness saw a group of three unidentified men break into Watson’s Houston apartment, beat him up, and shoot him in the back of the head.
If the Atlanta Child Murders were somehow connected to a wider PDF file ring, beyond the flophouse on Gray Street, then it is possible Charles Watson was a witness. Or else Gray Street may simply have been frequented by Wayne Williams, and that is where he met a few of his victims. Then there’s Nathaniel Cater.
In the years after the trial, new witnesses came forward claiming that they had seen Cater after the night of May 21st/22nd. Two patrons of the Cameo Lounge claimed to have seen him there on the afternoon of the 23rd. And a friend of Cater’s named Jimmy “Tightrope” Anthony claimed that he spoke to Cater in Central Park on the morning of the 24th.
This puts Cater alive after Williams was stopped on James Jackson Parkway Bridge. Another one of Cater’s friends, John Henly, came forward claiming he saw Williams with Cater on May 26th, but then Henly remembered that Cater was found dead on May 25th and recanted his statement. Nevertheless, in some people’s opinion, the three witnesses claiming to have seen Cater alive after May 22nd should be enough reasonable doubt to overturn Williams’ conviction.
Judge for yourselves. Then there’s Jimmy Payne, who disappeared on the morning of April 22nd after he went out to sell some 1951 nickels that he was suspected of robbing at gunpoint from a coin collector. The police were looking into it.
Rumours circulated that Payne had been trying to buy a fake identity card just prior to his death to go on the run before he could be arrested. And perhaps Payne had fallen afoul of a criminal associate. Two witnesses also came forward to dispute the time of his disappearance.
One had seen Payne in a nightclub on the 23rd, the other in a rare coin store on the 24th. Then Payne was found dead in the Chattahoochee on the 27th. Given there wasn’t a lot of evidence connecting Williams to Payne in the first place, perhaps all of this would have been enough reasonable doubt, if it had been brought up at trial.
Then there’s 13 year old Clifford Jones, who was murdered on August 20th 1980, and whose body was found behind a shopping mall dumpster on August 21st. He had been strangled. A white sex offender had been identified as a suspect, but a solid alibi had cleared him.
Then three teenagers claimed to have seen a black man named Jaime Brooks, alongside an unidentified accomplice, sexually assault and murder Clifford Jones in a laundromat. The teenagers claimed to have seen the entire thing through a window, and also saw Brooks wiping down the body. Two additional witnesses claimed that they saw Jaime Brooks dump the body behind the dumpster.
Around the time of Wayne Williams’ trial, Jaime Brooks was arrested on another charge of assault with attempt to rape but was acquitted. A few years later, Jaime Brooks died of AIDS. Since then, rumours have circulated that Brooks also frequented the Silver Dollar Saloon and Cameo Lounge, and knew both Nathaniel Cater and Michael McIntosh.
So here, at any rate, is an alternate perpetrator of the Atlanta Child Murders. It just requires a lot of evidence pointing at Wayne Williams to be entirely coincidental. Speaking of alternative culprits, there’s the two statements made by KKK leader Charles Sanders and the incriminating telephone conversation between his two brothers, Don and Terry.
Charles told a police informant he was going to kill Lubie Geter for hitting his car with a go-cart a month before Geter’s death. Then in February, Sanders told a second informant that he killed Geter, and went on to say the KKK had killed about 20 black children and would start killing black women next. Indeed, the death toll at the time was around 20, but the killings did not evolve to include adult women.
They turned toward adult men. Meanwhile, Terry and Don Sanders had a wiretapped phone conversation where Don talked about riding around and looking for black kids. The recording has since been deleted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations.
Although the police tried to find evidence against the Sanders brothers for months in early 1981, they never found anything. The Sanders brothers had a smattering of alibis for some of the murders. And most of the task force agreed there was no way in hell three white KKK members could patrol inner-city Atlanta for two years unnoticed.
The statements by Charles Sanders have largely been dismissed as a racist asshole spouting hot air, if they happened at all. As for the recorded telephone conversation between Terry and Don Sanders to, quote-unquote, “scope out some places” to “get a black kid”, years later a fairly simple explanation came to light. The Sanders brothers, local KKK members who for many years had been under periodic observation, knew they had been wiretapped – and were fucking with the police.
Another theory for the Atlanta Child Murders is that they were part of a much larger conspiracy: a PDF file ring. Certainly the connection of Timothy Hill, and possibly Joseph Bell, Teddy Smith, and Alfred Evans to the flophouse on Gray Street might imply such a thing. But it doesn’t account for all the murders.
Most of the male child victims do not have a proven connection to Gray Street. The flophouse catered exclusively to homosexual PDF files, so that excludes the two female victims. And it certainly does not explain the murder of six adult victims.
Although at least two of them were sex workers at local clubs, there is no evidence any of them attended Gray Street in their youth. In the years since, there has been nothing connecting “Uncle Tom” Terrell or any of his known associates to outright abduction and murder. Uncle Tom’s MO was to invite impoverished teenagers to his flophouse, give them drugs, and encourage them to engage in sex for money.
He was never known to abduct pre-teen kids directly off the street as they played or walked to the shops to buy their mother some groceries. It is much more likely that Wayne Williams frequented Gray Street, along with luring kids with his talent agent business. That talent business connected Williams to a lot more victims like “Pat Man” Rogers, who as far as we know had nothing to do with Gray Street.
However, if Wayne Williams was somehow involved in a wider PDF sex ring, then it might explain why Williams and his father would have to transport boxes and boxes of stuff (possible pornography) out of their house, and burn even more stuff in their backyard. The thought is all the more unsettling when you consider that Homer and Faye Williams were both school teachers. Even if there was no sex ring involved, you’ve got to ask yourself – what exactly were Wayne and Homer burning?
What was in the boxes? And why was blood residue found in the Williams family home and fibres from a unique rug found on the shoes of Eric Middlebrooks? Were the victims in the house at some point?
All this would imply that Homer, and possibly Faye, knew something about their son’s activities. Finally, there is the consideration that maybe Wayne Williams killed some, but not all, of the victims. Perhaps he killed only the adults and used a similar MO to the previous child murders.
But the matching fibres and dog hairs on some of the child victims make this unlikely. As do the connections Williams had with kids via his talent agency and eye-witnesses placing him with Joseph Bell. But certainly, questions could be raised about the two female victims, Angel Lanier and LaTonya Wilson, the latter of whom was abducted right out of her apartment by two men (one of whom may have been white).
And 10 year old Darron Glass was snatched from the street, and knew some of the other victims, but his body was never found. That makes it difficult to match his death with the strangle and dump MO. Also, John Porter was the eldest victim at 28, and much larger than Williams at 5’10 and 160 pounds.
He was found stabbed, not strangled, in a vacant lot. Porter had mental illness and often lived in an abandoned apartment building with some shady characters, including a convicted murderer. In such a vulnerable and precarious position, a number of fates could have befallen him.
And, eventually, John Porter was removed from the task force’s official list. Ultimately, the only man who could know the answers to all these questions is Wayne Williams. And, over forty years later, Williams still insists that he is completely innocent.
Reopening the Case Wayne Williams appealed his conviction in 1982, but the appellate court rejected it. So, in 1983, Williams elevated his appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court. While he waited, Williams was visited in prison every single week by his parents, Homer and Faye (who, for some reason, had not visited him in the six months before his trial – take that as significant, if you wish).
Williams did not see his ex-girlfriend, Gwen, but he did receive letters from a few female hybristophiles claiming to be in love with him. Williams is known to have politely responded in writing to a few of these letters, but there is no indication that he ever escalated communications to a visit from one of these women. Williams also received ardent letters and visits from activists who believed he was innocent.
Most of them thought Williams was the victim of a racist conspiracy to cover up a series of KKK murders or a white-led trafficking ring to avoid a race riot from occurring in the city. Naturally, some of these theorists claimed it extended through the ranks of the FBI and all the way to the White House. Williams’ appeal went before the Georgia Supreme Court in December 1983.
His lawyers argued that the “pattern evidence” from his trial should not have been permitted. The Supreme Court rejected this argument. There were two dissenting judges, Richard Bell and George Smith.
Bell said that the use of pattern evidence was unjust, and there was not enough proof to place Williams with any of the children at the time they went missing. Bell also pointed out that the MO and victim profile of the killings often had significant variations. But then, without public explanation, Richard Bell changed his mind, withdrew his dissent, and voted to uphold the rejection of Williams’ appeal.
That left Justice George Smith, who also rejected the pattern evidence as, quote, “illustrating the basic unfairness of this trial and Williams’ uneviable position as a defendant who, charged with two murders, was forced to defend himself as to two dozen other separate killings.” Smith also said that the fibre evidence from the white station wagon was hardly definitive, since Cater and Payne could have picked up those fibres in thousands of different locations and in many different contexts. The US Supreme Court refused to hear Williams’ case.
Thus, with his best attempts for freedom having failed, Wayne Wiliams latched onto the theory that the government had framed him to protect the KKK and avoid a riot. Given that the police had investigated George Sanders and his brothers, there was at least some evidential basis for this. Williams gave an interview outlining his allegations.
Quote, “Atlanta, at the time, was in a panic. They wanted any suspect they could find and, let’s be honest, it had to be a black person because if it had been a white suspect, Atlanta would have gone up in flames. It came very close to that.”
The Georgia Bureau of Investigations responded by saying that the Sanders brothers were suspected drug dealers and gun runners, but there was nothing solid connecting them to the child killings. The police also revealed that, in 1981, each of the Sanders brothers had been given a lie detector test and each had passed with flying colours on the first try. While lie detectors are notoriously unreliable and inadmissible in court, it is fairly difficult for three separate people to beat one on the first go.
Nevertheless, the story would not die. In 1985, author and civil rights activist James Baldwin wrote a long essay called The Evidence of Things Not Seen (inspired by the biblical verse Hebrews 11:1). Baldwin evoked the tragedies of African-American history, denounced the initial indifference of authorities to the killings, and heaped scepticism on the legality of Williams’ trial.
Written in the style of an evangelical preacher, the essay was published as a book and had wide circulation. The following year, 1986, Spin magazine printed an article called “A Question of Justice” that revived the KKK theory. The article repeated the statements made by Charles Sanders about Lubie Geter and the telephone conversation between Terry and Don.
The article also claimed that Charles Sanders was seen getting out of a white station wagon owned by a white man who also had a German shepherd. The fact that the Georgia Bureau of Investigations destroyed the recording of the phone conversation and sealed the file on the KKK caused a significant amount of outrage in the public. A campaign was launched to free Wayne Williams.
In 1991, attorneys William Kunstler, Bobby Lee Cook, and Alan Dershowitz (who later represented OJ Simpson) managed to get Williams a hearing in front of a judge. However, the claims made by police informants that Charles Sanders had threatened the life of Lubie Geter and later admitted to killing him, along with 20 other children, were not deemed credible. The first informant had told police about the threat on Geter’s life only after his murder became public knowledge, and both informants had a poor track record of giving false information to police in exchange for payment.
The request for retrial was therefore denied. In 1998, Wayne Williams filed a habeas corpus petition with the Butts County Superior Court, again requesting retrial. Again, he was denied.
Another 7 years passed. By this point, Williams had spent 24 years in prison. Then, on May 6th 2005, the Chief of Police of Dekalb County, Louis Graham, announced he was reopening the investigation into the murders of Aaron Wyche, Curtis Walker, Yusef Bell, William Barrett, and Patrick Baltazar.
Dekalb County borders Fulton County (aka Atlanta proper), and it was in Dekalb County where the bodies of the five victims were dumped. This gave Graham the jurisdiction and authority to reopen the case. He justified the decision by saying that he did not believe Williams was guilty of all of the murders.
Graham also several times publicly invoked the KKK theory. In the press, Graham was accused of reopening the investigations to distract attention from his own poor performance as police chief. The crime rate had shot up under his tenure and there had been a flood of allegations of police misconduct.
The investigation carried on for a year, and police found nothing new to indicate that the KKK was involved, and nothing that pointed toward a new suspect. The investigation was therefore closed. Meanwhile, Chief Graham had staked his professional reputation on the case, and so he resigned.
His replacement, Nick Marinelli, said, quote, “We dredged up what we had and nothing panned out. So until it does, or additional evidence comes our way, or there’s forensic feedback from our existing evidence, we will continue to pursue cold cases that are within our reach.” In 2006, Williams filed another habeas corpus petition.
His lawyers had procured a signed affidavit from witness Robert Henry saying that his claim of seeing Williams holding hands with Nathaniel Cater was a lie. Williams also changed his alibi from being at home with his parents to being in a recording studio the night Cater disappeared. The petition was rejected.
The presiding judge, Beverly Martin, wrote that the affidavit and Williams’ new alibi would not, “have had more than a minimal impact upon the outcome of Mr. Williams’ trial if it had been presented to the jury [in 1981].” Robert Henry later told the media that he had been induced to change his story by one of Wayne Williams’ associates.
He was given a pre-written statement and was told to sign it. Robert Henry refused to say any more on the issue. Theories range between Henry being bribed or threatened with violence to change his story.
If Wayne Williams was somehow involved, it does not reflect well on his claims of innocence. In 2007, Fulton County authorities ran a DNA test on the dog hairs found on a few of the victims’ bodies. The sample only permitted a mitochondrial DNA test, which is much less definitive.
However, the tested hair matched that of the samples taken from the Williams’ German shepherd in 1981, excluding 99% of other dogs. A mitochondrial DNA match of 1 in 100 is less precise than 1 in several billion, but it kept Williams on the list of likely suspects. That same year, Fulton County tested the mitochondrial DNA of the two hairs found on the body of Patrick Baltazar.
Again, the hair matched Williams’ genetics, excluding 99.5% of people and 98% of all African-Americans. Once again, the test did not exonerate Williams but reaffirmed him as a likely suspect. There were insufficient samples of blood residue from the station wagon and Williams’ home to perform DNA tests with the technology available at that time.
Over a decade later, in 2018, documentarian Will Packer began developing a high profile mini-series on the Atlanta Child Murders for Discovery Channel and Apple TV. It roughly coincided with the 40th anniversary of the start of the killings. The mini-series highlighted the fact that Wayne Williams was never prosecuted for any of the deaths of the children, but was locked up for murdering two adults.
It stressed that many families did not feel that they got closure. The documentary also revived the theory that the KKK or a PDF sex ring was responsible for the murders and that Wayne Williams was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The news of the documentary got such a considerable amount of press attention in the run-up to its 2019 release that it revived discussion in Atlanta and the wider United States of Williams’ innocence and the possibility of a government coverup.
In response, a few days before the release of the documentary in March 2019, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced that they were reopening the Atlanta Child Murders case. Bottoms told the press, “There may not be any evidence available that can be re-examined. But we are taking the necessary steps to formally say that we are going to open up every box and look in every corner and see what we have left.
I don’t think it’s any secret that, for many people, there’ve been questions as to whether or not Wayne Williams was responsible for all the murders.” Later in 2019, an Atlanta man named Derwin Davis came forward claiming that Wayne Williams had tried to abduct him in 1979, and a man named Isaac Rogers claimed that Williams had tried to abduct him in 1981. Two years passed with no news released to the public about the investigation.
Then, in 2021, Keisha Lance Bottoms announced that all the samples containing DNA (hairs and residue) had been sent to a private lab in Utah for analysis. In the past three years, the Utah lab has refused to discuss the results of the testing with either journalists or the victims’ families, despite numerous pleas from the latter. Keisha Lance Bottoms finished her term as mayor in 2022 and became senior advisor to the Biden administration.
Much of the political impetus to conclude the investigation departed with her. Like with unannounced results from testing of the Zodiac DNA samples, it is presumed by many commentators that the reason why no formal announcement has been made for years regarding the Atlanta samples is because they have not produced significant, conclusive, or differing results. Officially, however, the investigation into the Atlanta Child Murders remains open.
In June 2023, the city of Atlanta unveiled a memorial to the victims of the Atlanta Child Murders outside City Hall. It is a 55-foot-long curved edifice, onto which the names of all 30 victims have been inscribed. Each name is adorned with a white flower.
At the end of the monument is a flame that burns perpetually, symbolising the victims’ everlasting memory in the minds of Atlanta’s people and the continued search to discover what happened to them. At time of writing, Wayne Williams is 66 years old, having spent 43 years in prison. He is next eligible for parole in November 2027.
Dismembered Appendices The Atlanta Child Murders burned its way so thoroughly into the American psyche that for almost two decades the series of killings was the primary thing that the city of Atlanta was known for in the rest of the United States, or referred to when Atlanta came up in popular culture. This association only faded with the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. Unfortunately, the Games themselves were marred by the Centennial Park Bombing that killed one spectator and wounded 111 others.
In 1985, CBS aired a 5 hour mini-series called The Atlanta Child Murders starring James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, Martin Sheen, and Bill Paxton. It depicts Wayne Williams, played by Calvin Levels, as the villain. Conversely, in 2000, the Showtime network aired a movie called Who Killed Atlanta’s Children?
starring James Belushi, which depicts Williams (played by Clé Bennett) as innocent, and the KKK and government cover up theory as the probable truth. In 2019, the second season of Mindhunter dramatised the events of the Atlanta Child Murders. Again, Wayne Williams is depicted as the likely villain, though some ambiguity is raised at the end about whether Williams killed all of the victims.
Emphasis is also placed on how the victims’ families were deprived of closure. As of 2023, approximately 350 missing children’s cases are active and open in Atlanta. Key Takeaways Wayne Williams was arrested after being stopped near a bridge where a victim’s body was later found.
Williams was identified by witnesses as the man who picked up Joseph Bell, one of the victims. Fibers from Williams’ home and car were found on multiple victims’ bodies, linking him to the crimes. Williams’ trial included pattern evidence from other murders, which some argue was prejudicial.
Despite his conviction, many believe Williams was wrongfully accused and that the real killer remains at large. Frequently Asked Questions What was the name of the task force created to investigate the Atlanta Child Murders? The task force created to investigate the Atlanta Child Murders was composed of over 100 police officers and brought in Behavioural Science experts from the FBI.
What was the first victim’s name in the Atlanta Child Murders? The first victim was a 14-year-old boy named Teddy Smith. What was the name of the officer who stopped Wayne Williams on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge?
The officer who stopped Wayne Williams was Officer Bob Campbell. What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Nathaniel Cater with Wayne Williams? The witness who claimed to have seen Nathaniel Cater with Wayne Williams was Robert Henry.
What was the name of the KKK leader who was suspected of being involved in the Atlanta Child Murders? The KKK leader suspected of being involved was Charles Theodore Sanders. What was the name of the flophouse where some of the victims were rumored to have frequented?
The flophouse was located on Gray Street. What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Clifford Jones being raped and murdered? Three teenagers came forward claiming to have seen Clifford Jones being raped and murdered in a laundromat by a black man named Jaime Brooks and an unidentified accomplice.
What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams holding hands with Nathaniel Cater? The witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams holding hands with Nathaniel Cater was Robert Henry. What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams with Cheryl Johnson?
There was no witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams with Cheryl Johnson because Cheryl Johnson did not exist. What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams with a German shepherd? There was no specific witness mentioned who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams with a German shepherd, but dog hairs found on the bodies of several victims were determined to belong to a German shepherd, the same breed of dog owned by the Williams family.
Key Takeaways
- Wayne Williams was arrested after being stopped near a bridge where a victim’s body was later found.
- Williams was identified by witnesses as the man who picked up Joseph Bell, one of the victims.
- Fibers from Williams’ home and car were found on multiple victims’ bodies, linking him to the crimes.
- Williams’ trial included pattern evidence from other murders, which some argue was prejudicial.
- Despite his conviction, many believe Williams was wrongfully accused and that the real killer remains at large.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the name of the task force created to investigate the Atlanta Child Murders?
The task force created to investigate the Atlanta Child Murders was composed of over 100 police officers and brought in Behavioural Science experts from the FBI.
What was the first victim’s name in the Atlanta Child Murders?
The first victim was a 14-year-old boy named Teddy Smith.
What was the name of the officer who stopped Wayne Williams on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge?
The officer who stopped Wayne Williams was Officer Bob Campbell.
What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Nathaniel Cater with Wayne Williams?
The witness who claimed to have seen Nathaniel Cater with Wayne Williams was Robert Henry.
What was the name of the KKK leader who was suspected of being involved in the Atlanta Child Murders?
The KKK leader suspected of being involved was Charles Theodore Sanders.
What was the name of the flophouse where some of the victims were rumored to have frequented?
The flophouse was located on Gray Street.
What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Clifford Jones being raped and murdered?
Three teenagers came forward claiming to have seen Clifford Jones being raped and murdered in a laundromat by a black man named Jaime Brooks and an unidentified accomplice.
What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams holding hands with Nathaniel Cater?
The witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams holding hands with Nathaniel Cater was Robert Henry.
What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams with Cheryl Johnson?
There was no witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams with Cheryl Johnson because Cheryl Johnson did not exist.
What was the name of the witness who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams with a German shepherd?
There was no specific witness mentioned who claimed to have seen Wayne Williams with a German shepherd, but dog hairs found on the bodies of several victims were determined to belong to a German shepherd, the same breed of dog owned by the Williams family.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: Wayne Williams: the Atlanta Child Killer
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
