Speaker 1: And at that time, man was just so.
Speaker 2: Just to think back, like every that that was everybody
Speaker 2: was scared. It was always be careful, you know, everywhere
Speaker 2: y'all go go in groups, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: It was like everybody was scared, and definitely the people
Speaker 2: from where we grew up, like like.
Speaker 1: Around from where we were from. Everybody over there.
Speaker 2: Scared because that's where they was getting the kids from.
Speaker 2: It it was crazy, man Like at that time, it
Speaker 2: was like the Boogerman he because it's literally somebody going
Speaker 2: around taking kids and they will finding them and telling
Speaker 2: who they were, following them behind buildings.
Speaker 3: That was just our life. When you're living through something
Speaker 3: like that, it's kind of like different. It was just
Speaker 3: something we had to deal with. Watch for the Boogerman.
Speaker 4: My name is Camera. We are in the atl Atlanta,
Speaker 4: Georgia and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia born and Brett.
Speaker 2: And I'm Eric Cameron and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia, also
Speaker 2: West Side to be exact. Yep, he's the big brother,
Speaker 2: that's the little brother. The area we're from is while
Speaker 2: the kids most of the kids were getting missing from
Speaker 2: So the area we're from the West side of Atlanta, like,
Speaker 2: so it was almost like you gotta be real, real careful,
Speaker 2: like can stay out, you always be with somebody. I
Speaker 2: was real, real little so most times I was with
Speaker 2: him anyway, my big brother. But man, that was that
Speaker 2: was a real trying time because we couldn't hang out,
Speaker 2: like I mean, it's a lot different now, man, times
Speaker 2: are different.
Speaker 1: Like back then everything was about going outside.
Speaker 2: Everything was about going outside, like I mean, now everything's
Speaker 2: about being inside playing on computers and games or whatever.
Speaker 1: But it was just a different time.
Speaker 2: They snatching kids, somebody somebody getting kids, so you stand
Speaker 2: a better chance or not getting snatched if it's more.
Speaker 1: Than one, Like if you're with somebody, it was just
Speaker 1: like unthinkable, like who could who? Who could do this?
Speaker 5: It's ten pm?
Speaker 6: Do you know where your children are?
Speaker 7: It's ten pm?
Speaker 1: Do you know where your children are? I still remember that,
Speaker 1: like literally remember that.
Speaker 2: Talking about keeping your kids safe and what other things
Speaker 2: you could do to keep them safe. And I still
Speaker 2: remember that.
Speaker 1: That was that, you know, that was I wasn't at
Speaker 1: Channel two.
Speaker 2: What time that was Monica Copper I think it was
Speaker 2: on Channel two, and they would say that you know
Speaker 2: where are your kids?
Speaker 8: It's ten o'clock, do you know where your children are?
Speaker 8: That statement became a nightly statement. I was Monica Kaufman.
Speaker 8: I'm now Monica Kaufman Pierson. I anchored the five to six,
Speaker 8: the eleven, and the four o'clock news at Channel two WSTV.
Speaker 6: It's the city's oldest television station.
Speaker 8: People needed to know that they needed to keep an
Speaker 8: eye on their boys, in particular because boys were being
Speaker 8: literally picked up off the streets. So there was this
Speaker 8: fear that unless you reminded people to ask, where's your child?
Speaker 8: Do you know where your child is at this time?
Speaker 8: At ten o'clock? Your child should be in your house.
Speaker 8: That people needed to be reminded. There was a monster
Speaker 8: on the prial in Metro Atlanta.
Speaker 6: It was scary. It was very scary.
Speaker 5: Ten nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three two one,
Speaker 5: and I happy in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 9: The year is nineteen seventy nine. Jimmy Carter is our president.
Speaker 9: The Vietnam War ended just four years ago, and it's
Speaker 9: been barely over a decade since the Civil Rights movement.
Speaker 9: My name is Payne Lindsay. I'm a documentary filmmaker. I
Speaker 9: was born in nineteen eighty seven, and I'm from a
Speaker 9: small town called Kinnessaul, northwest of Atlanta. In twenty sixteen,
Speaker 9: I made a podcast called Up and Vanished, where I
Speaker 9: spent nearly two years investigating an unsolved disappearance of a
Speaker 9: high school teacher and beauty queen from South Georgia named
Speaker 9: Tara Grinstead. Tara vanished from her home in two thousand
Speaker 9: and five, and the case remained ice cold for more
Speaker 9: than a decade. But six months after I started making
Speaker 9: the podcast, something crazy happened. The police arrested two suspects
Speaker 9: in connection with TERA's murder, and for the first time
Speaker 9: in nearly twelve years, this small town community had some answers.
Speaker 10: Since then, I've been looking into other cold cases.
Speaker 9: What began as just an idea became something more like
Speaker 9: an obsession. A few months ago, I was in my
Speaker 9: office and my business partner Donald mentioned the case.
Speaker 10: I'd never heard of, the case of Atlanta's missing children.
Speaker 9: I started doing some research on my own time, reading
Speaker 9: old articles and watching news clips, and what I found
Speaker 9: was captivating, a twisted tale that's haunted Atlanta.
Speaker 10: For over three decades.
Speaker 1: As far as the.
Speaker 9: Documentary goes, I didn't really have a plan but I
Speaker 9: just started talking to people and I made sure I
Speaker 9: recorded everything. Okay, let's go back to nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 11: So you think about the late seventies, it's post nineteen
Speaker 11: sixties soul and stacks and all that stuff. Now you're
Speaker 11: sliding into the disco era. This is an era where
Speaker 11: cable is a new idea. Ted Turner hasn't even really
Speaker 11: done his thing with CNN, That's what we're talking about.
Speaker 11: There was no twenty four hour news network or news
Speaker 11: cycle at the beginning of this.
Speaker 9: This is nearly forty years ago now, so needless to say,
Speaker 9: in many ways things are very different. The first thing
Speaker 9: I did was trying to soak in as much as
Speaker 9: possible about this time period.
Speaker 11: This is Colinda Lee. I'm the vice president for Historical
Speaker 11: Interpretation and Community Partnerships at the Atlanta History Center. So
Speaker 11: certainly what you're looking at by the late seventies early
Speaker 11: eighties is that first generation of African Americans who had
Speaker 11: actually benefited from school desegregation, for example, at both a
Speaker 11: secondary and collegiate level by then, right, So people who
Speaker 11: were segregated maybe primary schools and still had those memories,
Speaker 11: but were professionals by the early eighties, African Americans are
Speaker 11: prospering to some degree, still definitely hard hit by the recession,
Speaker 11: but compared to the ways in which they had been
Speaker 11: disadvantaged before, prospering to some degree, largely as a byproduct
Speaker 11: of affirmative action.
Speaker 9: Calinda described a time of fear and helplessness. All around
Speaker 9: her kids were gradually going missing one by one. To
Speaker 9: kids her age, there was this idea there was a
Speaker 9: real life boogeyman out there, in a sense that no
Speaker 9: one was really trying to protect them.
Speaker 11: I was a child in Atlanta during that time. I
Speaker 11: was a nine year old living in Atlanta in the
Speaker 11: Fourth Ward, which was one of the areas from which
Speaker 11: children were taken, and I remember as a child the
Speaker 11: whispers and chatter among children. If you can imagine this
Speaker 11: real life boogeyman is actually out there, this is really happening.
Speaker 11: There was a child who went to summer camp with
Speaker 11: me who was one of the children who was abducted.
Speaker 11: And there wasn't a sense that anything very serious was
Speaker 11: happening to protect us. There wasn't a sense that anything
Speaker 11: about our daily lives was really changing much except that
Speaker 11: we were very afraid, and our parents were very angry.
Speaker 11: Every single one of them was not only black, they
Speaker 11: were also poor. The neighborhoods from which they were taken
Speaker 11: were the most vulnerable, most impoverished within the city. Many
Speaker 11: of them came from public housing projects, and so all
Speaker 11: of that definitely conspired to make folks feel like this
Speaker 11: is something that is happening to the least of us,
Speaker 11: and nobody cares. Atlanta is ashamed of this, I think
Speaker 11: continues to be ashamed of this.
Speaker 1: It is not.
Speaker 11: Something that people really candidly talk about in the open
Speaker 11: very much. I think that it's interesting that there's a
Speaker 11: way in which I think Atlanta remains ashamed of the
Speaker 11: racial bifurcation. That this really shows up when you talk
Speaker 11: to people about their memories of this time. There's a
Speaker 11: really distinct gap. I do a lot of oral history.
Speaker 11: There's a really distinct gap between white at Lantin's and
Speaker 11: Black at Lantins. I think that it's about a sense,
Speaker 11: a profound sense of separate realities and separate societies. It's
Speaker 11: startling to me, as a person who again as a child,
Speaker 11: lived here, to talk to people who are my contemporaries
Speaker 11: who were living in other neighborhoods living in majority neighborhoods,
Speaker 11: who didn't have a sense of that urgency at all,
Speaker 11: who didn't have a sense of that vulnerability at all,
Speaker 11: who didn't even know that it was happening at all.
Speaker 11: I think it's impossible to dissi entangle the race and
Speaker 11: class issues.
Speaker 12: I think if the world was designed with all blacks,
Speaker 12: we might be pressud of the one that's too short,
Speaker 12: the one that might be too tall, the one that's
Speaker 12: ball And I think the same difference if it was
Speaker 12: all whites would be the same thing. I think it's
Speaker 12: just a human illness that we have, and we as
Speaker 12: a people never learned to solve it. It's crazy. Even
Speaker 12: in Vietnam it was the same thing.
Speaker 10: This is Russell Boltazar.
Speaker 9: He's sixty nine years old currently living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Speaker 9: As a young adult in the late seventies, Russell remembers
Speaker 9: this time period all too well.
Speaker 12: When I left for the Marine Corps, I was seventeen
Speaker 12: years old. They had to flies out secretly in the
Speaker 12: middle of the morning and flies back in the middle
Speaker 12: of the night. Yeah, that's how we used to leave
Speaker 12: here at night. So most of the protesters wouldn't see
Speaker 12: us leaving. We were so close together as a team,
Speaker 12: and what we were fought, we were bled red. We
Speaker 12: ate together, slept together the whole nine yard. It did
Speaker 12: make a difference. But when we flew back to the
Speaker 12: state side and landed on the tarmac, we went back
Speaker 12: all separate ways again. I was active duty in the
Speaker 12: Marine Corps at the time, stationed at Campbell's Ure in
Speaker 12: North Carolina. My father was living in Atlanta. Patrick, Diane,
Speaker 12: and Jacqueline are my three youngest brothers and sisters. They
Speaker 12: got invited there doing this to Atlanta. They decided to
Speaker 12: enroll in school there.
Speaker 9: Even all the way in North Carolina, Russell remembers seeing
Speaker 9: and hearing the news stories about Atlanta's missing children. With
Speaker 9: his younger siblings having just moved to Atlanta, Russell fulk
Speaker 9: concerned for their safety.
Speaker 10: So one day he called his father.
Speaker 12: I asked him, do you think that it's wise that
Speaker 12: those kids should be there? Maybe they need to be
Speaker 12: back in Louisiana. And so he said, well, everything is
Speaker 12: going to be okay. And you know, they were gonna
Speaker 12: go ahead and put him in school and they're going
Speaker 12: to be safe. I says well, I don't have a
Speaker 12: good feeling about it, but you go ahead and hamle it.
Speaker 10: A few months later, his father called him out of
Speaker 10: the blue.
Speaker 1: One day.
Speaker 12: He called me and he asked me, have you seen Patrick?
Speaker 12: What do you mean? Have I seen Patrick? He's in
Speaker 12: Atlanta and I'm in campus. You're in North Carolina and
Speaker 12: he's eleven years old. I think he was just reaching
Speaker 12: for straws, because now all of a sudden he's word, well,
Speaker 12: you know, Patrick thinks a lot of you, and it
Speaker 12: is a possibility maybe got a ticket, caught the bus
Speaker 12: and went up there to see us. Says no, Dad,
Speaker 12: I don't think that would have happened. That's kind of
Speaker 12: odd for you to say that Patrick, young as he is,
Speaker 12: will to try to find me in North Carolina, had
Speaker 12: never been there before, to the base at all. I
Speaker 12: was trying to locate me. I just felt that that
Speaker 12: was something for eleven year old. The way we were raised,
Speaker 12: that Patrick was just I said, I got a bad
Speaker 12: feeling you're not gonna find Patrick alive. And I made
Speaker 12: him anger when I said that I have that feeling
Speaker 12: that you're not gonna find me. A week later, the
Speaker 12: following Friday, that's when we got a phone call that
Speaker 12: they found him.
Speaker 10: Who called you, my dad?
Speaker 7: What do he said?
Speaker 12: Said that they found him your brother dead. He was
Speaker 12: stabbed several times. They claimed that he got beat with
Speaker 12: a round object and strangled. And I told him, I says, well,
Speaker 12: I'm going to talk to my company commander and see
Speaker 12: if I can come out there to be with you.
Speaker 1: And that's what I did.
Speaker 13: Saint Anthony's church was crowded with Patrick Baldassar's family, his friends,
Speaker 13: and classmates. The shock of his disappearance ten days ago
Speaker 13: had barely sunk in when they learned Friday that his
Speaker 13: body had been found. Patrick's fellow fifth grader sat quietly, attentively,
Speaker 13: wondering why their friend had been taken from them. It
Speaker 13: was to these youngsters that Father Patrick Bishop directed his remarks.
Speaker 13: He spoke of a good fear that teaches children to
Speaker 13: avoid danger, and he spoke of a bad fear, terror
Speaker 13: but can't be understood.
Speaker 1: And he made a plea.
Speaker 14: There are things in this life that are dangerous, things
Speaker 14: that we need to protect ourselves from. You can't let
Speaker 14: it change your way of believing about people.
Speaker 13: After the mass, Father John Adamski read a poem. Written
Speaker 13: by Patrick's classmates. It ended with these words, there was.
Speaker 15: Not a word about how you died. It is no
Speaker 15: wonder that we all cried, Patrick, we miss you and
Speaker 15: wish you knew how much your schoolmates agreed for you.
Speaker 12: My mom's and daddy is from the little town of
Speaker 12: Broughbridge and Cecilia, Louisiana, And this one particular gravesite has
Speaker 12: my grandmother and my aunts and brothers, and the majority
Speaker 12: of the family, my mother and the past, all of
Speaker 12: us has always made a point whenever one of us
Speaker 12: past made sure we went back to that same graveyard.
Speaker 12: When I drove back to Atlanta to pick up his body,
Speaker 12: I stayed there till the wake was over, what they
Speaker 12: called as a memorial. Basically, once they closed the coffin,
Speaker 12: I talked to arrangement with the funeral director and they
Speaker 12: flew the body here. I drove here and waited till
Speaker 12: this body showed help. I made arrangement one of the
Speaker 12: funeral directors here in a little town of Broughbridge. We
Speaker 12: did the funeral services there and buried him there. I'm
Speaker 12: gonna tell you a little something about that. Okay, during
Speaker 12: that era, now we're still talking about the segregation, integration
Speaker 12: going on, and everybody trying to get us to merge
Speaker 12: together as black and white. Well, there in that town,
Speaker 12: being in the South, there were two churches. These two churches.
Speaker 12: One of the churches it is white. The other church
Speaker 12: it's black, same denomination of church. In between the two churches,
Speaker 12: it is a cemetery, white Saberita to the front and
Speaker 12: black Sabit to the black. The cemetery has always been
Speaker 12: set up like that. When the hears showed up, it
Speaker 12: showed up in the front door of the white church.
Speaker 12: I'm standing at that particular church to me, church's church,
Speaker 12: and no problem. They met us outside of that church
Speaker 12: and told us that they couldn't do it. They couldn't
Speaker 12: do his services in that church. And I went over
Speaker 12: and talked to the minister about it. You will have
Speaker 12: his funeral in that church. And this guy that was
Speaker 12: driving the hearse got so angry because it was he
Speaker 12: was a white driver. I think the rule was that
Speaker 12: you do not take blacks in that church, and they
Speaker 12: were and he was trying to hold faster. That didn't
Speaker 12: want to bring him over to the white church to
Speaker 12: get buried to do his service, and he was upset
Speaker 12: because I was demanding for it to happen that way,
Speaker 12: and he mashed on the gas, was kicking rocks, spinning
Speaker 12: in a parking lot. If Patrick bought in the back
Speaker 12: of the hurts, I was trying, I wouldn't trying to
Speaker 12: make any problems for anybody. You told me no, why not, Well,
Speaker 12: you couldn't tell me why you're gonna do a service here?
Speaker 12: I might here raising hell for Patrick to get him
Speaker 12: to be buried. They did his service in the church.
Speaker 12: He's one of the first black kids that ever went
Speaker 12: had a funeral in that church.
Speaker 16: It has proved to be the police department's most baffling problem.
Speaker 16: Eight children kidnapped or killed in the last year. There
Speaker 16: have been massive searches. Civic groups have tried to help out.
Speaker 16: Parents of the children have gotten together to see what
Speaker 16: they could do. Former police officers have donated their time
Speaker 16: to the investigation. But still nothing.
Speaker 11: And I remember I still remember parents organizing to stand
Speaker 11: at the bus stop with the kids and wait for
Speaker 11: them to safely be on the bus and that kind
Speaker 11: so the anxiety that that produced. And remember this is
Speaker 11: a time when we were we were free ranged children.
Speaker 11: We were come home when the street lights came on children,
Speaker 11: so that was a very big deal.
Speaker 17: I am so sorry that what happened to my child
Speaker 17: and what happened to these other ladies' children happen. But
Speaker 17: what I want you to do is to hang in
Speaker 17: there and try your best to see to it that
Speaker 17: it doesn't happen to yours.
Speaker 11: The mothers of missing and murdered children sat in at
Speaker 11: city Hall to demand that a full investigation be launched.
Speaker 11: So imagine the grief not just of losing your children,
Speaker 11: but then having to demand that there be full attention
Speaker 11: to this.
Speaker 17: We are paying people to maintain the safety of the
Speaker 17: streets of the city of Atlanta. If the safety of
Speaker 17: the city of Atlanta is not maintained, then the people
Speaker 17: that we are hiring to do that job need to
Speaker 17: be looked at carefully. If that job is not done,
Speaker 17: then we need to look towards why we are paying
Speaker 17: people not to do a job.
Speaker 18: Part of this crowd agreed that some of the criticism
Speaker 18: of the police was accurate. Tell them, explained there was
Speaker 18: no attempt to show the city as insensitive. Just to
Speaker 18: show how long it took Atlanta and the city administration
Speaker 18: to become outraged.
Speaker 11: That fracture I don't think was ever fully healed within
Speaker 11: the Atlanta community. There was a sense that maybe, you know,
Speaker 11: some folks felt safe or felt safe enough based on
Speaker 11: a degree of economic privilege, and again that these folks
Speaker 11: who were most marginalized already anyway, just were kind of
Speaker 11: left to fit for themselves. If you look at these
Speaker 11: profiles of the children who were victimized, many of them
Speaker 11: were in foster care situations. Many of them had, you know,
Speaker 11: very difficult and unstable home lives, be it because of
Speaker 11: a parental failing or not because of poverty. You know,
Speaker 11: some of them went missing doing things like you know,
Speaker 11: being ten years old and out bagging groceries to try
Speaker 11: to get a little bit of change to help their families.
Speaker 11: So you really get this really palpable in my mind,
Speaker 11: still a very painful portrait of these kids who are
Speaker 11: incredibly vulnerable, who were then taken up in this way
Speaker 11: and go missing and then found in these gruesome circumstances.
Speaker 11: If at all, as we finally got the kind of
Speaker 11: attention that parents were lobbying for for children, it only
Speaker 11: really escalated the fear. There wasn't a real sense of
Speaker 11: reassurance because nobody was being captured, and the ways that
Speaker 11: policies were instated to deal with them, like the fact
Speaker 11: that one of the first official actions that was taken
Speaker 11: was to institute a curfew, which would in many ways
Speaker 11: and for many people, suggest that the people who are
Speaker 11: in the communities that are most victimized by this have
Speaker 11: somehow engaged in some wrongdoing. Right, so you have to
Speaker 11: get home early or you're going to get picked up
Speaker 11: and taken to a detention center.
Speaker 19: The curfew took effect at eleven o'clock last night and
Speaker 19: will be in effect every night for the next ninety
Speaker 19: days from eleven pm until six am.
Speaker 20: People are afraid to let that children go out to play.
Speaker 20: People are afraid to send their children to the store.
Speaker 20: They're afraid to let the children go down to the
Speaker 20: community playgrounds and play in the afternoons and evenings.
Speaker 1: So I think now.
Speaker 20: We will get the support because there are number of
Speaker 20: parents that need to take more time out with their
Speaker 20: children and keep up with our children. So if parents
Speaker 20: won't do it, we some of us have to try
Speaker 20: to enforce some type of curfew so the children will
Speaker 20: be off the streets by eleven pm.
Speaker 19: Police have been instructed to explain the conditions of the
Speaker 19: curfew before enforcing it. However, when police get the word
Speaker 19: to go ahead, they will first take the child home.
Speaker 19: If the parents are home, then they will be cited.
Speaker 19: If the parents are not home, or if the child
Speaker 19: does not give a home address, then he or she
Speaker 19: will be taken to a juvenile detention center.
Speaker 9: I asked Eric Cameron how he felt about the curfew
Speaker 9: as a kid, Like the.
Speaker 2: Curfew came and right in the mix, so the kids
Speaker 2: gein't killed like it was a curfew, Like we had
Speaker 2: to be in at seven o'clock, six o'clock, I'm crazy
Speaker 2: like that that came along right in the midst of it.
Speaker 2: You know, we understood that it was something going on,
Speaker 2: kids getting missing, and I can distinctly remember walking as
Speaker 2: groups and we will see calls the lights of cause
Speaker 2: and we would literally just take off, you know, just
Speaker 2: like somebody coming to get you.
Speaker 11: We always felt like that there's not a sense of support.
Speaker 11: So people were wounded and then kind of rewounded. And
Speaker 11: then in the midst of all of this, there's a
Speaker 11: sense of from some folks, a sense that part of
Speaker 11: what having racial solidarity means, because race relations were still
Speaker 11: very fraught was that you have to support the African
Speaker 11: American mayor, you have to support the African American chief
Speaker 11: of police, and so you shouldn't be out here protesting
Speaker 11: and saying that you know, the city is not supporting
Speaker 11: you well enough. So it's really really fraught, difficult, contentious moment.
Speaker 11: They're also, I think was a really significant habit during
Speaker 11: that time of holding back information in investigations that looks
Speaker 11: very different than what we have now. Right, So some
Speaker 11: of that is probably you know, true crime investigative stuff,
Speaker 11: like you don't want to tell all the details of
Speaker 11: how this body is found because if you find the
Speaker 11: right person kill and then only the killer knows that, right.
Speaker 11: But so and you know, and we're in this moment
Speaker 11: where everybody wants to know every salacious detail right this moment.
Speaker 11: But there was definitely some significant holding back of information,
Speaker 11: and so that only opened the door wider for people
Speaker 11: to kind of reach into their imaginations and also for
Speaker 11: a rumor mil to flourish. And so there were a
Speaker 11: lot of theories, right that people developed that because they
Speaker 11: were all black, because they were mostly male, this is
Speaker 11: you know, this was a KKK conspiracy, or this was
Speaker 11: a racially motivated. These were racially motivated attacks, and that
Speaker 11: kind of thing, and a sense that as Atlanta was
Speaker 11: trying to affirm its reputation and continue to get business
Speaker 11: and tourism and all those things under the moniker of
Speaker 11: the city too busy to hate, that the people who
Speaker 11: were prospering under that just could not afford for that
Speaker 11: thing to be true, even if it were true.
Speaker 9: In a time were societal in agration between blacks and
Speaker 9: whites was really just beginning. The missing and murdered children
Speaker 9: in Atlanta created a new tension, reopening wounds that had
Speaker 9: never fully healed. In many ways, it was dividing the city.
Speaker 9: From the beginning. There was a struggle to give these
Speaker 9: children equal news coverage and even thorough police investigations. Parents
Speaker 9: of the victims joined together pleading for answers from the city.
Speaker 9: The number of missing children was growing, and eventually the
Speaker 9: story gained national news coverage. In the Atlanta police department
Speaker 9: found themselves in the hunt for a killer.
Speaker 13: Fifty seven percent of the blacks responding to the survey
Speaker 13: said they think the killings are part of a larger
Speaker 13: conspiracy against blacks. The same percentage of whites feel the
Speaker 13: killings are criminal acts with no connection to racial issues.
Speaker 13: The survey polls the question did police treat blacks as
Speaker 13: fairly as they treat whites? The majority of the blacks
Speaker 13: said no. Most of the white respondents said the treatment
Speaker 13: from police's And.
Speaker 8: There are all kind of rumors going on back there.
Speaker 8: I can remember some people in the black communit he
Speaker 8: thought it was a ku Klux klan that was grabbing
Speaker 8: these black boys.
Speaker 6: Other people thought, you know, it's some kind of.
Speaker 8: Weird sexual deviant who's grabbing these boys. And there was
Speaker 8: all this conjecture, but no one ever really knew who
Speaker 8: it was, what was the pattern. I can remember the
Speaker 8: mothers pleading for help. I can remember the white community
Speaker 8: coming together and putting up money to find the person
Speaker 8: who was doing this.
Speaker 6: We were almost paralyzed.
Speaker 8: I hate to put it that way, but the freedom
Speaker 8: of Friday night football wasn't there anymore. Going to basketball
Speaker 8: games for kids wasn't there anymore unless you had an
Speaker 8: adult with you all the time. You know, kids today
Speaker 8: have their freedoms, they go here, they do anything they
Speaker 8: want to do. But during that time period, it was
Speaker 8: a matter of knowing where your child was and keeping
Speaker 8: that child as close to you as possible, particularly if
Speaker 8: it was a black male child. They were young black males,
Speaker 8: and they were poor, young black males.
Speaker 6: It was almost as if it was like.
Speaker 8: A Jack the Ripper character, picking the least served in
Speaker 8: the community and taking advantage of them by taking away
Speaker 8: their children.
Speaker 6: Very vulnerable kids.
Speaker 8: Who would at the drop of the hat because they
Speaker 8: are poor, you offer them something, and they trust.
Speaker 6: That trust was.
Speaker 8: Betrayed by someone who really wanted to kill them. Many
Speaker 8: felt that the police department wasn't doing all it could
Speaker 8: do to find who was committing these crimes, who was
Speaker 8: picking up these children and killing them and then dumping
Speaker 8: them like trash. You know, at first it was one child,
Speaker 8: then it was two, and then you kind of went, okay,
Speaker 8: we actually have a serial killer out there now.
Speaker 6: And that's when the community really did.
Speaker 8: They did come together in jail as a force to
Speaker 8: try to protect the children, to push the police department
Speaker 8: to do even more in trying to find who did this.
Speaker 21: What frustrates police here most is they are convinced someone
Speaker 21: out in the community has enough information to help them
Speaker 21: crack these cases. The problem is so far, at least
Speaker 21: whoever does know isn't talking.
Speaker 22: It's I believe that there's some kids out here that
Speaker 22: have the answers. There's a few kids who may know
Speaker 22: a little bit, but they don't know who to tell,
Speaker 22: or possibly no one will listen to them. What they
Speaker 22: think it's just a child's nonsense. There may be a
Speaker 22: kid out here that has a complete description of everything.
Speaker 1: We want to know.
Speaker 19: More than four hundred police officers and firefighters, beginning Monday,
Speaker 19: will knock on doors from nine in the morning until
Speaker 19: nine at night. They will canvas seven days a week
Speaker 19: until they hit every door in the city.
Speaker 12: You don't have to have all the information.
Speaker 22: Give us what information you think you have or that
Speaker 22: you may have. You don't have to tell nobody your name.
Speaker 22: Just tell your teacher, she'll get the information to us.
Speaker 22: Tell your parents, or if you can find no one
Speaker 22: else to talk to, you call the police department.
Speaker 9: The police department thought the key might be a child
Speaker 9: coming forward as a witness to an abduction or at
Speaker 9: least an attempted one. This is Mickey Lloyd, former APD.
Speaker 23: I was in the homicide unit during that time period
Speaker 23: with the Atlanta Police Department. I got the call on
Speaker 23: the first two bodies. They were on Niskey Lake Road
Speaker 23: in Atlanta, southwest Atlanta at that time. It was a
Speaker 23: dirt road with woods on both sides, and the two
Speaker 23: victims were Edward Smith and Alfred Evans. They were both
Speaker 23: young black kids. Children, but we got to call first on.
Speaker 23: It was Alfred Evans and he was off on a
Speaker 23: hill in the woods, about twenty feet off the road,
Speaker 23: and he had been he'd been dead a while. He
Speaker 23: was mummified.
Speaker 1: If you know what mummified is.
Speaker 23: A term where the skin is dried and it's not decaying,
Speaker 23: but it just mummified. That's from being in the sun
Speaker 23: and the shade. And uh, while we were working that
Speaker 23: crime scene, I kept smelling something like something dead, and
Speaker 23: I got upwind of him and I still smelled it.
Speaker 23: So I sent a patrol alture up through the woods,
Speaker 23: uh Misky Lake, and he found the body of Edward
Speaker 23: Smith and it was down in a dish and it
Speaker 23: was a matter of fact, he was so decomposed he
Speaker 23: was almost liquified. And then as it went on, we
Speaker 23: started getting more young blackmails murdered in different areas of
Speaker 23: the city. And we would meet once a month and
Speaker 23: talk about crime. You know, anything that may be in
Speaker 23: common and I think we had one of those meetings
Speaker 23: and I think we had about six kids dead by then,
Speaker 23: and I got up and made a statement that we
Speaker 23: got a problem somebody killing young blackmails in Atlanta. Next
Speaker 23: thing I know, I'm standing tall in the Chief's office
Speaker 23: wanting to know what I'm basing that on because of
Speaker 23: some media picked up on it, so I guess I'm
Speaker 23: want to spill the.
Speaker 1: Beans on that.
Speaker 23: And uh, I really didn't have anything to be based
Speaker 23: on other than just common sense and working working cases.
Speaker 23: They didn't want to hear it, you know, the community,
Speaker 23: we didn't want to hear it. The police command didn't
Speaker 23: want to hear nobody. Nobody wanted to hear I didn't
Speaker 23: want to say it, and I don't know what made
Speaker 23: me say it, but I just thought we need to
Speaker 23: do something is try to connect these cases, because to me,
Speaker 23: they seem related.
Speaker 9: The first two victims were Edward Smith and Alfred Evans.
Speaker 9: Boths went missing in July nineteen seventy nine. In September
Speaker 9: that year, fourteen year old Milton Harvey went missing, followed
Speaker 9: by nine year old Yusef Bell in October. By the
Speaker 9: end of nineteen eighty, seventeen children had gone missing in Atlanta,
Speaker 9: and by May nineteen eighty one, the number was thirty.
Speaker 9: Edward Hope Smith, Alfred Evans, Milton Harvey, Yusef Bell, Jeffrey Mathis,
Speaker 9: Angel Lanier, Eric Middlebrooks, Christopher Richardson, Latanya Wilson, Aaron Anthony Carter,
Speaker 9: Earl Terrell, Clifford Jones, Darren Glass, Charles Stevens, Aaron Jackson,
Speaker 9: Patrick Rogers, Louby Jeter, Terry Pew, Patrick Baltazar, Curtis Walker,
Speaker 9: Joseph Bell, Timothy Hill, Eddie Duncan, Larry Rodgers, Michael McIntosh,
Speaker 9: Jimmy Ray Payne, John Porter, William Barrett, and Nathaniel Cater.
Speaker 9: Just to be clear, these are not the only African
Speaker 9: American kids that went missing or were murder between the
Speaker 9: summers of seventy nine and eighty one.
Speaker 10: These are only the names that made the list.
Speaker 23: It got so big that I think it got kind
Speaker 23: of convoluted. There was just too many, too many hands
Speaker 23: in the pie. Then the FBI got involved in it.
Speaker 23: They were leading, but we were doing what we were told.
Speaker 24: Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging
Speaker 24: system is not available at the tone. Please record your message.
Speaker 24: When you finished recording, you may hang up or press
Speaker 24: one for more options.
Speaker 25: He my name is Payne Lindsay. I'm currently doing a
Speaker 25: documentary project about the Atlanta child murders that happened in
Speaker 25: the early eighties. I'm looking for the Mike mccombis that
Speaker 25: was working for the FBI at the time on the case.
Speaker 25: If you could give me a callback, I'd love to
Speaker 25: ask you a few questions about it, if you didn't mind.
Speaker 25: My number is three one zero seven nine.
Speaker 7: Telling you this two year story would be a little
Speaker 7: not It wouldn't be in a chronological order, I don't think.
Speaker 7: Because there was so much went.
Speaker 9: On, I got different bullet points I want to hit
Speaker 9: with you, Okay.
Speaker 10: I guess for starters. How big was this case compared
Speaker 10: to others in the FBI.
Speaker 7: We had at least one volume for every victim, and
Speaker 7: that's a lot of volumes. Yea big. There's so many
Speaker 7: files involved. This is seeing the bureau. They have what
Speaker 7: they call major cases, and this was this was major
Speaker 7: case Major case number seven. It was code named AT
Speaker 7: KID A T K I d AT is abbreviation of
Speaker 7: Girlfriend Atlanta and Kid was the kids were missing at kid. Now,
Speaker 7: every case doesn't get a name, No, just the major case.
Speaker 7: You've got one hundred different investigators. You've got GBI, you've
Speaker 7: got the FBI, You've got Atlanta City, you've got the county,
Speaker 7: you've got the Cab County to Cab City. And then
Speaker 7: you know, there was no moss grown under our feet.
Speaker 7: I can tell you that we were. We were humping,
Speaker 7: and we were staying really busy, and it was taking
Speaker 7: its toll on a lot of people too. You just,
Speaker 7: you know, you just can only pick up so many
Speaker 7: dead children off the street before it starts affecting you
Speaker 7: a little bit. You know, these kids came from different
Speaker 7: walks of life, you know, socioeconomically. I think they were
Speaker 7: on the lower scale. It doesn't make them bad kids,
Speaker 7: you know they were. They were good kids. They were
Speaker 7: just street kids. There were night kids less than sufficiently supervised,
Speaker 7: would be my opinion. FBI got involved in this investigation.
Speaker 7: What they did was is they I signed two agents
Speaker 7: to every child that was that was on the list.
Speaker 9: What would you say is your first lead that ever
Speaker 9: amounted to anything.
Speaker 7: There was one kid that came in to the office
Speaker 7: one day and he goes, hey, I was approached by
Speaker 7: a black guy. I got in a car with him
Speaker 7: and something went sideways with it. I'm not really sure
Speaker 7: what happened. There was some type of scuffle. He said
Speaker 7: that the driver tried to push him down in the
Speaker 7: floorboard and he had a partial tag and he gave
Speaker 7: us a composite sketch.
Speaker 1: And at another bonder was discovered from day but twenty
Speaker 1: third at Police Task Force headquarters.
Speaker 22: There are twenty seven faces on the wall, twenty six murdered,
Speaker 22: one missing.
Speaker 1: We do not know the person or persons that are responsible. Therefore,
Speaker 1: we do not have the money.
Speaker 10: From tenderfoot TV in house to forks in Atlanta.
Speaker 20: Like eleven other recent victrums in Atlanta, rogers are currently wasn't.
Speaker 25: Fixing Atlanta was unlikely to catch the killer unless he
Speaker 25: keeps on killing.
Speaker 10: This is Atlanta Monster next time on Atlanta Monster.
Speaker 26: Sketching back then wasn't what it is today. I mean,
Speaker 26: some of these sketches they come out with better than photographs.
Speaker 26: Back then, you know, you worked with what he had
Speaker 26: and it was a pretty good sketch.
Speaker 9: What it looked like to you, remember, well, it.
Speaker 26: Was a blackmail with pushy hair. I remember the composite
Speaker 26: sketch very well.
Speaker 27: He knows in the daytime what he's dealing, but at
Speaker 27: night he's not really sure, so he kind of stays
Speaker 27: to himself in his apartment. He has a television set.
Speaker 27: There's no guns up there, no nothing. He's shrewd, he's methodical.
Speaker 27: You're not dealing with a guy with one hundred and
Speaker 27: sixty four IQ. He's clean, he's neat, he's above suspicion.
Speaker 27: I cannot stop him. I don't have the authority or
Speaker 27: the power.
Speaker 9: Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week,
Speaker 9: with new episodes every Friday, A joint production between How
Speaker 9: Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup
Speaker 9: and Vanity Set. Audio archives courtesy of WSB News Film
Speaker 9: and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries.
Speaker 9: For the latest updates, please visit Atlantamonster dot com or
Speaker 9: follow us on social media.
Speaker 10: Described Atlanta to me.
Speaker 4: In growing up here, man, you know what, a Atlanta
Speaker 4: is a very special special place, and you don't even
Speaker 4: realize how special it is until you get outside of here.
Speaker 4: It's really a place of peace and love to be
Speaker 4: one hundred, which you mean. You know, Martin Luther King
Speaker 4: from here. So it's it's like a gotta it got
Speaker 4: a spiritual thing with it, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: It's a blessed place. I believe no matter how street
Speaker 4: you are, you got a spiritual side here