Atlanta murders of 1979–81

The Atlanta murders of 1979–1981, sometimes called the Atlanta Child Murders (despite several of the purported victims being adults), were a series of murders committed in Atlanta, Georgia, United States from the summer of 1979 until the spring of 1981. Over the two-year period, at least 28 African-American children, adolescents and adults were killed. Wayne Williams, an Atlanta native who was 23 years old at the time of the last murder, was arrested for and convicted of two of the adult murders, and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Police subsequently have attributed a number of the child murders to Williams and closed the cases, although he has not been tried or convicted in any of those cases. The Murders: In the summer of 1979, Edward Hope Smith, also known as "Teddy," and Alfred Evans, also known as "Q," both aged 14, disappeared four days apart. (Terry Pue, who later went missing in early 1981, lived in the same apartment as Smith.) Their bodies were both found on July 28 in a wooded area, Edward with a .22 gunshot to his upper back. They were believed to be the first victims of the so-called "Atlanta Child Killer". On September 4, the next victim, 14-year-old Milton Harvey, disappeared while going to a bank on an errand for his mother. At the time he was riding a yellow 10-speed bike, which was found a week later in a remote area of Atlanta. His body was not recovered until November 1979. On October 21, 9-year-old Yusuf Bell went to a store to buy snuff for a neighbor, Eula Birdsong. A witness said she saw Yusuf getting into a blue car before he disappeared. His body was found on November 8 in the abandoned E.P. Johnson elementary school by a school janitor who was looking for a place to urinate. When found, Bell's body was clothed in the brown cut-off shorts he was last seen wearing, though they had a piece of masking tape stuck to them. He had been hit over the head twice and the cause of death was strangulation. Police did not immediately link his disappearance to the previous killings. On March 4, 1980, the first female victim, 12-year-old Angel Lenair, disappeared. She left her house around 4 pm, wearing a denim outfit, and was last seen at a friend's house watching the television program Sanford and Son. Lenair's body was found six days later, in a wooded vacant lot along Campbellton Road, wearing the same clothes in which she had left home. A pair of white panties that did not belong to Lenair were stuffed in her mouth, and an electrical cord bound her hands. The cause of death was strangulation. On March 11, one week after Lenair's disappearance, 11-year-old Jeffrey Mathis disappeared while on an errand for his mother. He was wearing gray jogging pants, brown shoes, and a white and green shirt. Months later a girl said she saw him get into a blue car with a light-skinned man and a dark-skinned man. The body of Jeffrey Mathis was found in a "briar-covered patch of woodlands", 11 months after he disappeared, by which time it was not possible to identify a cause of death. On May 18, 14-year-old Eric Middlebrooks disappeared. He was last seen answering the telephone at home and then leaving in a hurry on his bicycle, taking with him a hammer to repair the bicycle. His body was found the next day next to his bicycle in the rear garage of an Atlanta bar located next door to what was then the Georgia Department of Offender Rehabilitation. His pockets were turned inside out, his chest and arms had slight stab wounds, and the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. A few weeks before he disappeared, Middlebrooks had testified against three juveniles in a robbery case. On June 9, 12-year-old Christopher Richardson went missing on his way to a local pool. He was wearing blue shorts, a light blue shirt, and blue tennis shoes. His body was not found until the following January, clothed in unfamiliar swim trunks, along with the body of a later victim, Earl Terrell. Richardson's cause of death was undetermined. On June 22, 7-year-old Latonya Wilson disappeared from her parents' apartment. According to a witness, she appeared to have been abducted by two men, one of whom was seen climbing into the apartment window and then holding Wilson in his arms as he spoke to the other man in the parking lot. On October 18, Wilson's body was found in a fenced-in area at the end of Verbena Street in Atlanta. By then the body had skeletonized and no cause of death could be established. The next day, June 23, 10-year-old Aaron Wyche disappeared after having been seen near a local grocery store, getting into a blue Chevrolet with either one or two black men. The witness' description of the car matched a description of a similar car implicated in the earlier Jeffrey Mathis disappearance. At 6 pm, Wyche was seen at a shopping center. The following day, Wyche's body was found under a bridge; the official cause of death was asphyxiation from a broken neck suffered in a fall. In July 1980, two more children, Anthony Carter and Earl Terell, were murdered. Between August and November 1980, five more killings took place. There were no known victims during December. All the victims were African-American children between the ages of seven and fourteen and most were asphyxiated. The murders continued into 1981. The first known victim in the new year was Lubie Geter, who disappeared on January 3. Geter's body was found on February 5. Geter's friend Terry Pue also went missing in January. An anonymous caller told the police where to find Pue's body. In February two murders occurred, believed to be linked to the others. In March, four Atlanta linked murders took place, including that of Eddie Duncan, the first adult victim. In April, Larry Rogers was murdered, as well as adult ex-convict John Porter and Jimmy Ray Payne. After William Barrett went missing on May 16, 1981, his body was found close to his home. The last victim added to the list was Nathaniel Cater, 27 years old. Investigator Chet Dettlinger created a map of the victims' locations. Despite the difference in ages, the victims fell with the same geographic parameters. They were connected to Memorial Drive and 11 major streets in the area. Capturing the suspect: As the media coverage of the killings intensified, the FBI confidentially predicted that the killer might dump the next victim into a body of water to conceal any evidence. Police staked out nearly a dozen area bridges, including crossings of the Chattahoochee River. During a stakeout on May 22, 1981, detectives got their first major break when an officer heard a splash beneath a bridge. Another officer saw a white 1970 Chevrolet station wagon turn around and drive back across the bridge. Two police cars later stopped the suspect station wagon about a half mile from the bridge. The driver was 23-year-old Wayne Bertram Williams, a supposed music promoter and freelance photographer. The Chevrolet wagon belonged to his parents. Dog hair and fiber evidence recovered from the rear of the vehicle were later used in the case against Williams, as identical fibers were found on some of the victims. They matched his dog and the carpet in his parents' house. During questioning, Williams said he was on his way to audition one Cheryl Johnson as a singer. Williams claimed she lived in the nearby town of Smyrna. Police did not find any record of her or the appointment. Two days later, on May 24, the nude body of Nathaniel Cater, 27, was found floating downriver a few miles from the bridge where police had seen the suspicious station wagon. The body had extensive water damage and may have been in the water for up to two weeks. Based on this evidence, including the police officer's hearing of the splash, police believed that Williams had killed Cater and disposed of his body while the police were nearby. Much circumstantial evidence led the police to consider Williams as the prime suspect. First, he was the only person stopped during the month-long stakeout of twelve bridges and that Williams had stopped on the bridge immediately after the splash was heard. Williams himself denied stopping his car on the bridge, instead claiming he had turned around in an adjacent lot. Secondly, police noted that Williams' appearance resembled a composite sketch of the suspect, including a bushy Afro sticking out from the sides of a baseball cap, and a birthmark or scar on the left cheek. Indeed, investigators who stopped Williams on the bridge noticed a 24-inch nylon cord. This cord seemed to match the choke marks on Cater and other victims. Furthermore, Williams admitted to spending much of his time seeking out and auditioning African-American boys whose ages matched many of the victims. Notably, Williams failed an FBI-administered polygraph examination—though polygraph results are not admissible as evidence in criminal courts. Even more evidence seemed to implicate Williams. Fibers matching carpet from the Williams residence matched those observed on two of the victims. Additional fiber evidence from the Williams' home, autos and pet dog were later matched those discovered on other victims. Another was the fact that witness Robert Henry claimed to have seen Williams holding hands and walking with Nathaniel Cater on the night he is believed to have died. On June 21, 1981, they arrested Williams. A Grand Jury indicted him for first-degree murder in the deaths of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne, age 22. The trial date was set for early 1982. FBI Agent John E. Douglas, who had previously conducted a widely reported interview with People magazine about profiling the killer as a young black man, has admitted that when the news of Williams' arrest was officially released (his status as a suspect had previously been leaked to the media anyway), he stated that if it was Williams then he was 'looking pretty good for a good percentage of the killings'. This was widely reported across media outlets as the FBI effectively declaring Williams guilty, and Douglas was officially censured by the director of the FBI.