Atlanta murders of 1979–1981

• 1. Introduction

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  The Atlanta murders of 1979 to 1981, often called the Atlanta child murders, took at least 28 lives between July 1979 and May 1981. The victims were African-American children, adolescents and adults, and the killings unfolded across a single American city over roughly two years. One man, Wayne Williams, was tried and convicted. Yet his conviction covered only two of the deaths, both of adults. Police later tied many of the children's cases to him, but he was never charged in those, and he has always said he is innocent. The way most victims died, by strangulation, appears to have stopped after his arrest. That fact is cited as meaningful, and it is also not proof. This documentary asks how a pattern of disappearances was first recognized, what a frightened city did in response, and what a bridge, a station wagon and a few strands of fiber were made to prove. It also asks why, decades later, families are still waiting for answers.

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• 2. Errands and Playgrounds

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  Edward "Teddy" Smith, aged 14, and Alfred "Q" Evans, aged 13, vanished four days apart in the summer of 1979. Their bodies were found together on the 28th of July in a wooded area. Smith had been shot in the upper back with a .22-caliber weapon. Investigators believe they were the first victims of the person later labeled the Atlanta Child Killer.

  Milton Harvey, aged 14, left home on the 4th of September to run an errand to the bank for his mother. He rode a bicycle, and it turned up a week later in a remote part of Atlanta. His body was not recovered until November.

  On the 21st of October, 9-year-old Yusuf Bell walked to Reese Grocery on McDaniel Street to buy snuff for a neighbor, Eula Birdsong. A witness saw him near the corner of McDaniel and Fulton, getting into a blue car. A school janitor found his body on the 8th of November in the abandoned E. P. Johnson Elementary School. The man had gone in looking for a place to relieve himself. Yusuf still wore the brown cut-off shorts from the day he vanished, with a piece of masking tape stuck to them. He had been struck on the head twice, and strangulation was the cause of death. Police did not at first connect his case to the earlier ones.

  The following year brought the first girl. On the 4th of March 1980-12-year-old Angel Lenair left home around 4pm in a denim outfit. She was last seen at a friend's house, watching the sitcom Sanford and Son. Six days later her body lay in a wooded vacant lot along Campbellton Road, still in the same clothes. A pair of underwear that was not hers had been stuffed in her mouth, and her hands were tied with an electrical cord.

  One week after she disappeared, 11-year-old Jeffery Mathis went out on an errand for his mother. Months afterward, a girl said she had seen him climb into a blue car with two men, one light-skinned and one dark-skinned. His remains were found 11 months later in a briar-covered patch of woodland, too long after death to establish a cause.

  Eric Middlebrooks answered the telephone at home on the 18th of May, then rushed off on his bicycle with a hammer to fix it. His body was found the next day beside the bicycle, in the rear garage of an Atlanta bar. A few weeks earlier, he had testified against three juveniles in a robbery case.

  In June 1980 came three more. Twelve-year-old Christopher Richardson set out for a pool at the Midway Recreation Center, and his body was not found until the following January. LaTonya Wilson, aged 7, was taken from her parents' apartment, and a witness described one man climbing through the window while another waited in the parking lot. Her skeletonized remains were found in October at the end of Verbena Street. The very next day, 10-year-old Aaron Wyche was seen leaving a grocery store with a man, and a witness described a blue Chevrolet. The description matched a car linked to the Mathis case. His body turned up under a bridge, and the official cause was a broken neck from a fall.

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• 3. The List Grows

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  Two more children, Anthony Carter, aged 9, and Earl Terrell, aged 10, were killed in July 1980. Clifford Jones, aged 13, vanished on the 20th of August and was found strangled behind a dumpster at a former shopping center the next day. Darron Glass, aged 10, was reported missing on the 14th of September. His body has never been recovered.

  On the 9th of October, 12-year-old Charles Stephens went missing. His body lay beside Norman Berry Drive the next day, near the entrance to a trailer park, with his T-shirt and one shoe gone. Police found rub marks on his nose and mouth, along with several hairs. The state would later treat his death as one of the cases that showed a pattern.

  Aaron Jackson, aged 9, disappeared on the 1st of November and was discovered strangled on a river bank the next day. Patrick Rogers, aged 16, had known several earlier victims. His body was found in the Chattahoochee River on the 7th of December, and police speculated he had been dropped from the bridge above.

  The new year brought no pause. Lubie Geter, aged 14, disappeared on the 3rd of January 1981, and his body was found on the 5th of February. His friend Terry Pue, aged 15, vanished that same month. An anonymous caller told police where to find the body. Terry had lived in the same apartment as Teddy Smith, one of the first victims.

  In February and March, six more bodies were found and believed to be linked. Among them was Eddie Duncan, aged 21, the first adult on the list. In April three young men were killed. Larry Rogers was 20, and John Porter was 28. Jimmy Ray Payne was 21, and he and Porter had only recently left Arrendale State Prison after serving time for burglary.

  On the 12th of May, FBI agents found the body of 17-year-old William "Billy Star" Barrett on a curb in a wooded area near his home. Harold Wood, a custodian from Southwest High School, had run out of gas about a mile away. He described a black man standing over the spot, who then drove off in a white-over-blue Cadillac.

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• 4. Streets on the Map

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  Investigator Chet Dettlinger drew a map of where the victims had been taken from and found. Despite the gap in their ages, they fell within the same geographic boundaries, linked to Memorial Drive and 11 major streets in the area. The author Ginger Strand ties the murders to freeway racism and to Atlanta's sweeping urban renewal program, which tore up African-American neighborhoods.

  The official response was slow to start. Once it gathered force, more than 100 agents were working the investigation. The city imposed curfews. Parents pulled their children out of school and told them not to play outside.

  The first national television look at the case came in 1980 from ABC News 20/20. A team that included Stanhope Gould and Bill Lichtenstein, producer Steve Tello and correspondent Bob Sirkin of the ABC Atlanta bureau took on the story. It began with ABC News president Roone Arledge reading a tiny newspaper item. Police had ruled out any link between a daycare explosion, later blamed on a faulty furnace, and the city's missing children. The cases themselves had never been reported nationally. Within a week the team had covered the dead and missing children. They also broke the news that the police task force was not logging or following up every lead from its own hotline.

  The task force would soon face a very different kind of pressure, with the media attention intensifying and a river waiting at the edge of the city.

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• 5. Stakeout at the River

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  The FBI predicted that the killer, feeling the heat of the coverage, might drop the next victim into water to destroy evidence. Police staked out nearly a dozen bridges, including crossings of the Chattahoochee River. On the 22nd of May 1981, an officer under one bridge heard a splash. Another officer saw a white 1970 Chevrolet station wagon turn around and drive back over it. Two police cars stopped the wagon about half a mile away.

  The driver was Wayne Bertram Williams, 23, who described himself as a music promoter and freelance photographer. The car belonged to his parents. He said he was heading to audition a singer named Cheryl Johnson in nearby Smyrna. Police could find no record of her or any appointment.

  On the 24th of May, the nude body of Nathaniel Cater, aged 27, was found floating downriver a few miles from the bridge. Cater had last been seen at the entrance of the Rialto Theatre by a gardener, Robert Henry. Henry said Cater was holding hands with Wayne Williams. Police concluded that Williams had killed Cater and thrown him in while officers were nearby.

  Other details piled up. Officers who stopped Williams had noticed gloves and a 24-inch nylon cord on the passenger seat. Investigators said the cord resembled ligature marks on Cater and other victims, but it was never taken into evidence. Williams had also handed out flyers in mostly black neighborhoods, inviting people aged 11 to 21 to audition for a singing group he called Gemini. He failed an FBI polygraph test, though such results cannot be used as evidence in court. Fibers from a carpet in his home matched fibers on two victims. Fibers from his other belongings, vehicles and dog were later matched to fibers on more victims.

  Williams was arrested on the 21st of June 1981. A grand jury indicted him for the murders of Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne. News of his status as a suspect had leaked before the official announcement. FBI agent John E. Douglas, who had given an interview to People magazine about profiling the killer as a young black man, then said that if it was Williams, the man was "looking pretty good for a good percentage of the killings." Many read this as the FBI declaring Williams guilty, and the FBI Director formally censured Douglas.

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• 6. The Trial of Wayne Williams

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  Jury selection began on the 28th of December 1981 and took six days. The panel of twelve had nine women and three men, eight African Americans and four Caucasians. Judge Clarence Cooper opened the trial on the 6th of January 1982.

  The heart of the prosecution was fiber analysis connecting Williams to Payne and Cater, the two men he was charged with killing. Prosecutors also drew in 12 other cases, which they called pattern murders, where circumstantial evidence offered many links. Witnesses said they had seen Williams with victims, and some suggested he had solicited sexual favors. In the Charles Stephens case, treated as a pattern case, hairs found on the boy did not belong to him or to Williams.

  The prosecution's handling of the case has drawn criticism, to the point that some jurisdictions might have declared a mistrial. Two FBI special agents testified that it was "virtually impossible" for the victims not to have come into contact with Williams. They based this only on how rare the matching fibers were. Georgia Supreme Court Justice George T. Smith, reviewing the case, judged the evidence, or its absence, inadmissible.

  The jury deliberated for 11 hours. On the 27th of February 1982 it found Williams guilty of both murders. He received two consecutive life terms and was sent to Hancock State Prison in Sparta.

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• 7. Unfinished Business

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  In its September 1986 issue, the music magazine Spin published a report by journalists Robert Keating and Barry Michael Cooper, who later became a screenwriter. They wrote that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had run a secret inquiry into possible Ku Klux Klan involvement, alongside the official task force. The inquiry reportedly found that Klan members may have been involved in the death of Lubie Geter and linked to fourteen other murders. Allegedly, a Klan family outside Atlanta hoped to start a race war in the city and tried to recruit others.

  The article named Charles T. Sanders, a narcotics dealer and recruiter for the group. It said he told an informant weeks before Geter's body was found that he planned to kill the boy, after Geter backed a go-cart into his car. His brother Don was reportedly recorded saying he was going out to look for "another little boy." Sanders also had a scar matching an eyewitness description of a white man seen with Geter. Investigators were said to have closed the inquiry and sealed their findings in 1981. A handwritten transcript of Klan members discussing the Geter killing reached Williams's attorney, Lynn Whatley, anonymously in 1985.

  At a 1991 hearing on a new trial, Williams was represented by Alan Dershowitz, William Kunstler and Bobby Lee Cook. Atlanta and Georgia investigators testified that they knew little or nothing of the Bureau's inquiry. A Bureau informant said Sanders had admitted killing Geter in 1981 during a recorded conversation.

  In May 2004, DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham reopened five cases from his county: Aaron Wyche, Curtis Walker, Yusuf Bell, William Barrett and Patrick Baltazar. Graham, an original investigator, doubted that Williams was guilty of all the killings blamed on him. DeKalb dropped the re-investigation on the 21st of June 2006. Acting chief Nick Marinelli said nothing had panned out and the department would pursue other cold cases within reach. John Douglas himself wrote in his 1995 book Mindhunter that he believed Williams committed many murders but not all. He added that authorities have some idea who the other killers are, saying, "It isn't a single offender, and the truth isn't pleasant."

  On the 29th of January 2007, Georgia's attorneys agreed to DNA testing of the dog hair used to convict Williams, responding to his appeal. His lawyer Jack Martin argued the results might win a new trial. On the 26th of June 2007, results showed the hairs on the bodies carried the same mitochondrial DNA sequence as Williams's dog, found in only about 1 in 100 dogs. Dr. Elizabeth Wictum, who directed the UC Davis laboratory, called this "fairly significant". She said it did "not conclusively point to Williams' dog as the source of the hair", since the lab could test only mitochondrial DNA, which cannot be shown to be unique to one dog. Later in 2007, the FBI tested two human hairs from a victim. Their sequence would exclude 99.5 percent of people and 98 percent of African Americans, and it matched Williams.

  On the 21st of March 2019, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Police Chief Erika Shields announced a re-test of evidence. Atlanta police, the Fulton County District Attorney's Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation would gather it. Bottoms said, "It may be there is nothing left to be tested. But I do think history will judge us by our actions and we will be able to say we tried." In July 2021 she announced that DNA had been identified in two cases for further analysis by a private lab. Investigators had gone through 40 percent of the original DNA evidence, sent to that lab on the 21st of June 2021. As of December 2022, no results had been made public, despite requests from the victims' families.

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• 8. Echoes in Print and Screen

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  In 1981, the British novelist Martin Amis wrote "The Killings in Atlanta" for The Observer. It was later collected in The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America, published in 1986. In 1982, the writer Martin Pasko dedicated an issue of the comic book Saga of the Swamp Thing to the good people of Atlanta. Its story followed a killer of minority children in the fictional town of Pineboro, Arkansas, who turns out to be a demon possessing a TV host called Uncle Barney, a thinly veiled parody of Fred Rogers. The demon is defeated, but the ending criticizes the social inequality that made those children easy targets.

  In 1985 the television miniseries The Atlanta Child Murders arrived, with a cast including Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, Rip Torn, Jason Robards, Martin Sheen and Bill Paxton. Atlanta officials said it distorted the facts. After negotiations, CBS added a disclaimer saying the film was based on fact but contained fictional elements. That same year James Baldwin published The Evidence of Things Not Seen. It began as a Playboy assignment from editor Walter Lowe and became an examination of the case, the Williams trial and race relations in Atlanta and in America.

  In 2000, Showtime released the drama Who Killed Atlanta's Children?, starring James Belushi and Gregory Hines. Tayari Jones's 2002 novel Leaving Atlanta follows three fictional fifth graders at Oglethorpe Elementary School. Jones herself attended that school and was classmates with two real victims, Yusuf Bell and Terry Pue.

  On the 10th of June 2010, CNN aired a two-hour documentary with interviews by Soledad O'Brien, including Williams. Viewers were invited to vote online. Of the respondents, 68.6 percent said Williams was guilty, 4.3 percent said innocent and 27.1 percent chose "not proven." In 2016, the rapper André 3000 referred to the killings in the song "the ends" by Travis Scott. In January 2018 Payne Lindsey began releasing the podcast Atlanta Monster, with interviews from victims' families, law enforcement and Williams.

  The Atlanta Child Murders, a three-part series from Will Packer Productions, aired on Investigation Discovery in March 2019. In August 2019, the second season of Mindhunter reimagined the case through two fictional FBI agents. One of them insists a single killer is responsible, while Atlanta's Black community suspects the Klan.

  In April 2020, HBO released the five-part Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children, directed by Sam Pollard and Maro Chermayeff. It focused heavily on Williams's appeals. His attorneys had filed a habeas corpus petition, which was denied, and his request for a retrial was denied in 2004.

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