January 12, 2018 • 42 mins
Atlanta’s search for a serial killer becomes more and more convoluted.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What we have is raw news footage from WSBTV. We
have seventeen thousand hours of raw news footage. So far,
I've identified six hundred and fourteen clips, but we have
about another one hundred and fifty taps to scrub through.
The Whole time I've been working on this collection, I've
been thinking someone somedays, someone is going to come along
(00:20):
and do this. It was you, guys.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Step aboard our tartists bigger on the inside than it
is on the outside where we're going down to the
sub basement high density storage vaults.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
It's like a rollercoaster.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yes, I can make it go fast if you left.
It's a thirty thousand square foot facility which we keep
at fifty degrees fahrenheit with a relative amidity of thirty percent.
Thirty two feet from floor to the ceiling. Actually the
top of our ceiling there is the floor of the
second floor. Prior to us building this building here was
(01:05):
a Native American settlement of some sort here. If I've
understand what people have told me over the years, everything
is shelved down here by size and then by dark.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
How many records do you think you guys have on
the Atlanta Chalmers in Atlanta. Another bonder wasn't discovered through day,
but twenty third.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
At Police Task Force headquarters, there are twenty seven faces
on the wall, twenty six murdered, one missing.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
We do not know the person or persons that are responsible. Therefore,
we do not have the money from tenderfoot TV in
house to works in Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (01:40):
Like eleven other recent victrums in Atlanta, rogers are currently
was as fixiator.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps
on killing.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
This is Atlanta monster.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
Sketching back then wasn't what it is today. I mean,
some of these sketches they come out with better than photographs.
Back then, you know, you work with what you had,
and it was a pretty good sketch. We had a
composite of it of who this guy would be.
Speaker 7 (02:14):
What it looked like to you. Remember well, it was
a blackmail with bushy hair.
Speaker 6 (02:18):
I remember the composite sketch very well. This is a
folder of paperwork I kept from my time as deministrative
coordinated the Atlanta child murder cases. It wasn't animosity between
the local police and the FBI. One of the main
things is the mayor maina Jackson. He says, I want
every living FBI agent. My police department is basically incompetent
(02:42):
and they can't solve it. We need the FBI to
solve it. So he threw his department under the bus.
None of us want to get involved because it looked
like just a local miss.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
This is Jim Procopio, but he goes by Popcorn. Look,
he worked for the FBI alongside Mike mccomis during the
time with the Atlanta child murders. Mike actually introduced me
to him.
Speaker 8 (03:02):
Probably be interested in talking to Procopio. Yeah, Popcorn is
a good guy. Now if you can get into his
treasure trove, he's got boxes and stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Popcorn dealt with all the records and files in the FBI,
And just like Mike McComas, he stressed the importance of
a composite sketch they received early on in their investigation
from a kid who told police that a man had
tried to abduct him.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
Well, it was a blackmail with bushy hair. I remember
the composite sketch very well.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
After interviewing the kid, they were able to form a
detailed sketch of the suspect. A blackmail with bushy hair.
After only a few minutes with popcorn, you get the
impression that this guy doesn't forget a thing.
Speaker 6 (03:39):
And it goes back to another cultural socioeconomic issue. When
Maynard Jackson became mayor, first black mayor in Atlanta, the
first thing he said was, I want to make the
police department more brown. Police department up with that time
had some black officers, several were majors and above, but
(04:00):
it was mainly a white police department. Well, when the
white officers heard that, they saw they saw the handwriting
on the wall. If you were white, you're not going
to rise rapidly in this department. It's going to be black.
A lot of the older ones, they say, we'll see you,
they retire. So consequently they lost many of their senior officers,
the best homicide investigator. Then they had a big cheating
(04:21):
scandal in the police department. They found out that a
lot of the black recruits in the police academy were
given the answers to tests. So that was another major scandal.
So the police department was left in seventy eight seventy
nine eighty relatively new and inexperienced. So I guess some
of the homicide detectives were not that experienced and they
missed the signs that there were commonalities in the eight
(04:45):
to ten to twelve they had. By time the Bureau
got in, they were up to fourteen ten found for missing. Further,
the FBI does not investigate murders. Murder is not a
federal crime. If it's committed on a government reservation, it
is off as certain federal authority as it is is
killed in the commission of a civil rights violation, it is,
but we don't investigate. Doesn't even investigate murders like you
(05:07):
have on the street every day.
Speaker 7 (05:08):
So we had no jurisdiction.
Speaker 6 (05:09):
We went to the Atlanta Police Department and says here,
we're here to help you. You know, we're greeted by yeah, right,
we won all your files. So it went to roller cases.
We assigned. There were two agents who are one agent
per victim, and we had fourteen of the victims at
the time. So we said go out.
Speaker 7 (05:25):
And redo the case, look through it, give it a.
Speaker 6 (05:28):
Fresh look, come back and tell us what you're fine about.
Ten or twelve of them come back and said, he's
looked like local crimes. We were pretty much convinced that
they were all local homicides that the APD had bungled.
We didn't see any pattern. We didn't see anything.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
The FBI, along with local police, were not convinced they
were dealing with a serial killer, but as the death
toll of black children was growing, they began to recognize
similarities in the murders. It would start with the child
going missing for days, weeks, and sometimes even months. The
FBI became involved in many of the searches. Popcorn recalled
the first big search he was a part of.
Speaker 6 (06:05):
There were one thousand searches all over the city. One
place was red Wine Road in South Fulton County. If
you go there today, it's right off two eighty five.
There's a huge shopping center with a Tarja and old
bunch of stores. Back then it was woods. About three o'clock,
the team down on red Wine Road says we found
(06:26):
skeletal remains. So everybody hauled ask and it was like
being in Vietnam again. There were the news choppers overhead.
They got window.
Speaker 7 (06:34):
Where we were.
Speaker 6 (06:34):
All the news choppers were overhead. So I got there
there about five o'clock and I'm walking and I'd park
my car on red Wine Road and I walk in
the woods and something catches my eye at eleven o'clock
and I walk over and there was a skull and.
Speaker 7 (06:48):
More human remains.
Speaker 6 (06:49):
So we had two human remains within one hundred feet
at one another, and this led to.
Speaker 7 (06:56):
One of the most bizarre episodes.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
About one hundred feet below both bodies, we found a
Playboy magazine. It was that week's Playboy magazine. It came
out that Wednesday.
Speaker 7 (07:12):
This was Friday.
Speaker 6 (07:13):
So we found the Playboy magazine and there was a
sticky substance between the pages. I'll let you decide what
that was. So he immediately fantasized the investigators. The killer
came back, came down here to the side of the murders, masturbated,
then took off.
Speaker 7 (07:29):
This is key evidence.
Speaker 6 (07:31):
We packaged it up, raced it out to the airport,
gave it to the captain of a Delta jet heading
for Washington, DC.
Speaker 7 (07:39):
An agent picked it up as.
Speaker 6 (07:40):
Soon as the plane landed, rushed with the FBI laboratory.
They gave it to a ladder lab. They developed prints
and identified the sticky substance. We didn't have any of
the prints on file, so they sent it to the
APD to look up through their files. Within an hour
they identified the print.
Speaker 7 (07:57):
So we went in. We arrested the guy, We searched us.
Speaker 6 (08:00):
He brought him to the Bureau. We polygraphed him. He
passed the PolyGram. What the hell were you doing down there?
He says, well, my wife just had a baby. I
went down there that afternoon. Now, during that time we
were part of the Vice President of George Bush's task
for us. Everything I wrote went to a UNI chief
of the Bureau, went to the director, to the Attorney General,
(08:22):
to George Bush. George Bush read it. So the one
thing he asked us was please don't tell my wife.
Speaker 7 (08:28):
We said, you goddamn idiot.
Speaker 6 (08:30):
Do you know the Vice President of the United States
knows what you did when you went into the woods,
and you know where your wife's going to find out.
Speaker 7 (08:39):
By the way, we code named that. It was known
as the Woodwhacker.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Popcorn's first big lead went nowhere. Popcorn had found the
bodies of eleven year old Christopher Richardson and eleven year
old Earl Terrell. Christopher had been missing for eight months,
an Earl had been missing for six months. To me,
on the surface, these cases seemed open and shut. A
Playboy magazine with semen on It was found near the
bodies with the suspect's fingerprints on it. But after an
(09:06):
extensive interrogation, the suspect passed a polygraph test, and despite
all the bizarre circumstances, the FBI was convinced that this
man was not involved in the murders, so they moved on.
Both Popcorn and Mike Macombis told me that when the
FBI got involved in these cases, there was an extreme
tension brewing in the city of Atlanta.
Speaker 8 (09:23):
Of course, the blacks wanted it to be somebody white
and the whites wanted it to be somebody black. And
I can't speak for the rest of the bureau, but
my partner and I are Larry Ellington. We talked about
it a lot. First off, our profilers said that serial
killers rarely cross races. They'll kill in their own race,
and all these kids were black.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Popcorn and Macomis both mentioned FBI profilers the people who
formulate an idea of who the killer is, who the
FBI should be looking for, and there was one characteristic
that stood out to me immediately.
Speaker 7 (09:54):
It had to be a black guy.
Speaker 6 (09:56):
A white man could not go into a black neighborhood,
pick up a ca we had put them in his
car and drive off without anybody seeing.
Speaker 8 (10:03):
If there's a crime scene. Then the media was just unbelievable.
And with all of the attention this case was getting,
it was almost impossible to get into a predominantly black
neighborhood and not be challenged or approached or whatever. If
you were white.
Speaker 6 (10:19):
It just doesn't happen. In fact, when we went into
black neighborhoods during the investigation, everybody on a street was
out on their front porch as soon as we appeared
in the neighborhood.
Speaker 8 (10:28):
There was one place that I think is gone now.
It was a housing project. They had what they call
the bat patrol, and these were adults that walked around
with baseball bats and looking for suspicious characters or protecting
the community whatever they call them. The bat patrol. We
were over in this housing area. We had two young
black kids that had supposedly seen something we thought, so
(10:53):
Larry and I were tasked to go over and pick
up these two children and their mother. So here we
are in the Brown Ford again. He's driving, I'm in
the passenger side, and we have the mother sitting in
the middle and the two black kids in the back
seat and near the windows, and two young boys, and
I think they were like ten or something, eight, ten, twelve,
I don't know, somewhere around that. And we didn't get
two blocks before we were boxed in by about four
(11:15):
three or four different police cars. And we weren't proned
out that it was coming to that before we finally
got them to look at our identification. Hey, we're FBI agents.
And because somebody had called in, there's two white guys
with some black kids in the car. So it was
tough getting in and out of certain areas, and so
we were kind of convinced this guy had to be black.
He had to be black. We just couldn't figure out
(11:36):
how he was getting them in a car.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Was this a skewed opinion coming from only white males.
Was it that impossible for a white person to walk
around the inner city of Atlanta in the early eighties,
I don't know. I asked Eric and Jasper Cameron, they
grew up in Atlanta during that time, if anything they
would know person.
Speaker 9 (11:53):
I felt like it had to be somebody that could
move around in the community. So therefore I felt like
to be somebody black or somebody who wouldn't draw suspicion
because you know, over there we live a white person
walking around over there, they are gonna be you know,
it's gonna draw attention because that wasn't happening then. Now
(12:13):
now you go over there, it's like.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
You know everybody.
Speaker 9 (12:16):
But back then, nah, you know, it would have drew
too much attention. So I always felt like, probably with
somebody who could move around pretty easy, you know, undetected,
without really causing a lot of suspicion.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
But not everyone agreed on that. This is Bernard Parks.
He grew up in Atlanta too, and was also a
child at the time of the murders.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
There are certain guys that you know that they were around.
I mean, you know, it's like it wasn't a lot
of white guys, right, but but.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
There were some.
Speaker 5 (12:45):
Yeah, I mean, like you grew up, you know what
I'm saying. It's like, you know, one or two white
guys that went to my school, right, But that's just
because their family didn't have no money, right, So they
were just around and so you kind of accepted them.
But you know, I always say, you know, they got cousins,
they got friends, they got people that hung around and
we accepted.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
It wouldn't have.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
Normal, though, for in that time, for a black guy
just to walk up and be accepting of a white
guy without somebody understanding what's happening, right, I mean, that
just wasn't normal. I mean you just questioned, period, because
you're in my community and it's ain't your community.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
I asked Monica Pearson, the former news anchor in Atlanta.
Her memory was crystal clear.
Speaker 10 (13:22):
They weren't looking for a murderer. They were profiling. They
decided that that's what it was. And you have to
keep all options open. I think anytime you don't open
up and cast a wide net, you lose the opportunity
(13:43):
of finding someone else who might be involved. It's as
simple as that. You have to look at all the possibilities.
And if you start out by saying it has to
be a black person who did it, because these were
black children, then that's the reason why so many people
in the black community thought it was the Klan. I
(14:04):
think that's short sighted on their part, because you could
easily have a white man in that community dressed as
black people dressed and no one would notice him because
he just looks like a black person. He's in this community.
Speaker 11 (14:26):
Now.
Speaker 10 (14:26):
Most white people would not go into that community because
they would stand out like a sore thumb. But if
you assimilate from the walk, to the clothing, to the attitude,
to the speech, and don't say it can't be done,
I'm just throwing it out there. I think that's shortsighted
(14:48):
to say a white person couldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
A white person could.
Speaker 10 (14:56):
If you know the community you had. A white graduated
a couple of years ago from Morehouse College as a valedictorian.
White folks go into the black community all the time
to buy drugs, and they don't have a problem fitting in.
If you look like the people who live there, and
(15:17):
your skin is just a little lighter than somebody else's,
it's not going to stand out.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
I think they're wrong on that. From her perspective, the
possibility of a white killer was ruled out way too quickly.
I couldn't help but think she made a great point.
Speaker 10 (15:38):
The one thing I remember most about the missing and
murdered children. I still see that visual every day is
Maynard Jackson sitting there with piles of cash, offering a
reward for any information on who was committing these crimes.
Speaker 12 (15:55):
Here's one hundred thousand dollars and it's all you.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
Most gangster picture ever him sitting with that money on
the desk.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
I think that's where they got this shot from for
uh Ransom.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
Remember when Ransom they came in and put the male
gifts and he put all that money on the table
and he was like, now I'm putting his bounty on you.
That was Maina's line.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
I read about this over and over in my research.
The reward money. It started with one hundred thousand dollars
from the city, but private donations, including one from Muhammad Ali,
brought it to over five hundred thousand. Today that would
be around one point five million. As Atlanta struggled to
find the killer, the city needed more and more money.
One solution was a benefit concert.
Speaker 13 (16:41):
Come Fly with Me, Let's Fine, Let's Fine.
Speaker 14 (16:47):
Frank Sinatra will be joining Sammy Davis Junior on stage
at the Atlanta Civic Center. The two figure to draw
a standing room only crowd for the March ten benefit
concert to help the investigation into the crimes against Atlanta's children.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
The city held a huge benefit concert to raise money
for the investigation at the Atlanta Civic Center, but the
FBI was a high alert for the killer.
Speaker 6 (17:10):
I was convinced that that night he would respond to that,
and I was convinced in my mind that he would
drop a body in the fountain right there.
Speaker 12 (17:20):
Frank Sinatra arrived here at Charlie Brown Airport just a
few minutes before six o'clock.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
He's not on his.
Speaker 12 (17:25):
Way to the Atlanta Civic centerwhere he'll join Sammy Davis
Junior for tonight's benefit concert.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
Sammy Davis Junior picked up a phone and volunteered.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
To help Atlanta today. The superstar arrived here on his
private jet.
Speaker 15 (17:36):
Such a horrendous tragedy as this effects, as I said,
it certainly affects all of America.
Speaker 6 (17:44):
I was there that night, and we had cops and helicopters.
There were cars everywhere police because there is no one
could have gotten there with the body.
Speaker 16 (17:52):
It started with police dogs sniffing the entire Civic Center
looking for explosives. The Mayor's office called this routine.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Will you guys are here to catch somebody?
Speaker 17 (18:02):
Oh?
Speaker 7 (18:02):
Hell yeah, that's why we're roll out.
Speaker 18 (18:04):
Officials have been preparing for weeks for this night. Extra
security guards have been hired and extra police officers have
been put on patrol here with just one objective to
keep an eye on children.
Speaker 6 (18:15):
It was overwhelming. The Atlanta Police Department out in full force.
Who had a GBI? I know, the FBI was there,
the Task Force, everybody was there. There's no way anyone
could have gotten in there and done anything.
Speaker 16 (18:25):
There are so many news people here, coming from all
over the world, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, London, so many
they had to be regulated to a room in the basement. Meanwhile,
upstairs Atlanta's finance It started to arrive, but the high
points of the show weren't outside. They were in here.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
I've got the world of the.
Speaker 6 (18:57):
I've got this didn't respond and to got a lot
of publicity. I thought he was response to how he didn't.
Speaker 16 (19:06):
And while Sinatra was entertaining as he sang, he was
most touching when he spoke.
Speaker 13 (19:12):
More of my tears are shed for the brothers and
sisters and playmates of the victims to whom terror has
become an unwelcome companion, and to all of the fine,
decent people in Atlanta who are frightened by day and
doubly frightened by night.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
You have my prayers that.
Speaker 13 (19:30):
Is, and that it should pass without further bloodshed.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
The city as a whole was banding together to catch
this killer, and every single law enforcement agency was working
around the clock. All the murders were of black children
from the inner city of Atlanta, and they were disappearing
from their own neighborhoods in their own local hangouts. One
popular place in the city at that time time for
kids to hang out was called the Omni, an arcade
(20:03):
room with food in a movie theater. But the Omni
was also becoming a place where some kids were last seen.
Speaker 9 (20:18):
That's what we did. It was a game room in
the Omni, and we literally would go to that game
room and go to the arcades and all that. So
that's like video games and stuff like that. That's what
we did. Went to the Omni, hung Omni.
Speaker 10 (20:37):
Friday night, date night, get out of the house night,
and the Omnie is packed with youngsters.
Speaker 12 (20:42):
The Omni Complex, a mixture of fine stores, sporting events, movies,
and game rooms, a popular place for the inner city
kid to hang out. That's why the Special Task Force
became interested in the complex as a meeting place. Investigators
first started looking for some type of connection back in February.
Speaker 11 (21:03):
This sign went up today at Electronic America. The manager
doesn't want anyone seventeen or under in here. Wont seven
o'clock hits. The owners realized such strict rules hurt their business,
especially when their business attracts mainly teenagers.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
The nineteen eighties saw the rise in arcades and video games.
But another trend, and one I didn't know about, was
the nineteen eighties fascination with psychics. In fact, psychics even
played a role in the Atlanta child murders. I heard
a lot of weird stories surrounding this case, but so
far this seemed the most bizarre, a true example of
(21:53):
law enforcement grasping its straws.
Speaker 19 (21:56):
Police are now working with more than one psychic to
solve the cases of six murdered and six missing children.
This is how the nationally known psychics spent their Friday
the thirteenth. They are visiting Atlanta courtesy of the National Inquirer. Yes,
the same National Inquirer with those sensational headlines that can
be seen at most supermarket counters. As the psychics scrambled
(22:16):
through the woods where four of the twenty murdered children
were found, psychic Mickey Dane of Miami, kicked off her shoes.
She asked reporters to feel how hot her feet were,
and then declared that two more bodies might be found nearby.
Speaker 20 (22:29):
There is something here, some child out there is trying
to tell us to go further into this.
Speaker 19 (22:34):
Jonathan Bell, whose brother Joseph is among the victims, also
served as a guide. A freelance artist was there too,
sketching psychic's descriptions of suspects.
Speaker 20 (22:44):
I do not care at this point what they think
of me. I'm here to get a killer off the street.
If it takes one person of five thousand. My big
thing is that if I have to do it alone,
I will I feel that they are afraid that if
one person does it, how will they feel? And I
can understand that. But I'm here more so for the children.
And I do not want the reward money that I
(23:04):
put in writing. I do not want the money. I'm
not here for the publicity. I'm just like them. I
want to kill off the street.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
One side gave police and news stations a detailed description
of who the Atlantic shold murderer was.
Speaker 21 (23:21):
He knows in the daytime what he's dealing with, but
at night, he's not really sure, so he kind of
stays to himself in his apartment. Here's a television set.
There's no guns up there, no nothing. He's very smooth
talking when he does talk, which is very seldom. Oh yes,
there's no doubt in my mind that he's walked side
(23:42):
beside probably some of the parents of these children. He's shrewd,
he's methodical. You're not dealing with a guy with the one
hundred and sixty four IQ. He's clean, he's neat, he's
above suspicion. You're dealing with a methodical, a man that's
some systematic what angry now getting more frustrated. I cannot
(24:04):
stop him. I don't have the authority or the power.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
At the University of Georgia in Athens is the Walter J.
Brown Media Archives, a huge, multi story facility that holds
hundreds of thousands of archive documents. In the early nineteen eighties,
this was arguably the biggest news story, especially in Atlanta.
I made a call to Mary Miller, one of the archivists,
to see if we can access their news archives related
(24:32):
to the case, and as it turns out, they have
thousands of hours of raw news footage from WSBTV, the
local Atlanta station. Material that hasn't been viewed by the
public since the early nineteen eighties. In that time, nothing
was digital. It was all on film or tape. But
the team at the University of Georgia worked tirelessly to
gather and digitize as much material as possible, and then
(24:53):
they gave us a personal tour of their vault.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Everything is shelved down here by size and then by
bark code, so thing that you'll notice here, each item
has a barcode on it, and each shelf has a
bar code, and the items are linked together, so it
gives us a barcode and we work by that.
Speaker 7 (25:20):
What we do with videotapes.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Is a little bit different from what we do with
train materials. The videotapes will have to go into coolers
because they need to be acclimated from the cold, dry environment.
When they move upstairs, it's a little warmer and a
lot more humid, so they have to go in the
cooler so the temperature can come up slowly they can acclimate.
(25:42):
January twenty twelve, when we opened to the public, we've
probably pulled about one hundred and fifty to one hundred
and sixty thousand items, and we've yet not been able
to find everything that's been requested. And I said, he's
going to start coming this way, so we're gonna need
to start walking back this way.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
While searching the archives, I came across several news stories
involving strange leads. This one in particular caught my attention.
According to FBI documents, on January eighth, nineteen eighty one,
an anonymous white male called the Rochdale County Sheriff's Department
claiming that he placed the body of Luby Jeter out
(26:22):
on Sigmund Road. Then he threatened to leave the body
of another child, but this time the child would be white.
Speaker 12 (26:29):
An unidentified man who has been calling the Rochdale County
Sheriff's Department for the last few weeks.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
That man has told deputies.
Speaker 12 (26:36):
They could find Atlanta's missing children on Sigmund Road, and
we've learned that recently he's also called and said he
was going to harm some of the children in this neighborhood.
When the Rockdale County Sheriff's Department arrived at the scene
this morning, all they knew was they had something already
very familiar to Atlanta investigators, the body of a black
mail around fourteen years old line just off Sigmund Road.
(26:58):
There was no apparent sign of a strug. Sheriff Vic
Davis would only say today his department and the others
involved are again very interested in tape conversations with an
unidentified male caller, the most recent call coming the day
before the body was found. The man told Rochdale deputies
victims could be found along Sigmund Road.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Someone was calling the local sheriff's department claiming to be
the killer, even declaring where the next body would be found,
but it seemed at that time the police didn't give
this much merit.
Speaker 17 (27:27):
Some detectives say, since this latest body was found so
far from Atlanta, they may be dealing with the copycat murderer,
or they say the killer or killers may have known
that the Rochdale sheriff was receiving crank calls about the
missing and murdered children and so just decided to dump
a body here to taunt police.
Speaker 22 (27:44):
We're taking a closer look at the calls at this time,
but we still feel that maybe just the publicity drew
the actual killer to this area to dump a.
Speaker 12 (27:55):
Body Sheriff Vic Davis hopes today's discovery and the calls
are just coincidental.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Then I found another story. The video was of a
live newscast featuring a church minister in Atlanta named Earl Polk.
He voluntarily called into a local news station to present
this story, and he was making some very eerie claims
his alleged interaction with the Atlanta child murderer.
Speaker 23 (28:18):
I have received several calls from a person identifying himself
as the one responsible for these crimes.
Speaker 15 (28:29):
I did notify the authorities, but I should like.
Speaker 23 (28:33):
To remind you that I stand readed a minister to you,
and we are protected and covered by the Constitution of
the United States of America. I stand ready to be
directed by you as to a place of meeting. I
will minister to your needs, and you will be protected,
and you will be covered.
Speaker 18 (28:51):
For one thing, the voice on the phone was not
the same one that has called before, so Polk says
his first step was to determine how much.
Speaker 15 (28:58):
The man knew many of the children are crimes are
you involved in? He said, well, let's put it this way.
The first three somebody helped me with them. I said, well,
is he not helping any longer.
Speaker 8 (29:13):
He said no.
Speaker 15 (29:13):
I said why did he quit? He said, well he
got afraid, I mean his wife got afraid, and he
left town.
Speaker 18 (29:19):
Paulk says the man told him he could prove he
was the killer because he could show Paulk a piece
of clothing belonging to Curtis Walker. Walker's body was found
just two weeks ago in a river about a quarter
mile from Paulk's church.
Speaker 15 (29:31):
So I said, tell me how you got the kids
to get in your car. He said, well, I've got
a van, and he says, I tell him I've got
paint jobs to do, and they get into in the
van to go to paint.
Speaker 18 (29:43):
Paulk then questioned the man about his motives.
Speaker 15 (29:46):
I said, well, what makes you do this? What what
caused you to do these crimes? Could you tell me that?
He said, well, I'm I'm impelled or I'm controlled or
forced by voices to do it. I said, well, why
are you calling me now? Are the voices really to
so you could call me? He says, well, I don't
hear the voices right now. I said, why are you
(30:06):
turning yourself in or why are you wanting to come
see me now? He said, well, I'm tired of running,
I'm out of money, and my wife is afraid.
Speaker 18 (30:14):
The man told Paulk he was speaking from or near
a pub on Ponsta Leon Avenue. Paulk then asked him
if they could meet at his church on Flat Shoals Road,
and the man agreed. About a half hour later, a
van pulled into the parking lot across the street, but
immediately sped off. Paulk says he thinks the man spotted
some police cars at a nearby shopping center and may
(30:35):
have thought he was walking into a trap.
Speaker 15 (30:37):
My purpose of even telling the story was hopefully that
he would know that there was no trap set up,
and that per chance he may yet try to make contact.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
After hearing the many stories from the FBI and looking
back on the news archives, I started to get a
sense of how the general public must have felt in
nineteen eighty, completely confused an incriminating Playboy magazine, psychic involvement,
bizarre phone calls, in that mysterious composite sketch of a
black guy with bushy hair, but none of it was
(31:07):
amounting to anything. The media coverage of Atlanta's hunt for
a serial killer was gripping the entire nation. But things
were about to change when a local Atlanta policeman found
what appeared to be the first signs of physical evidence.
Speaker 24 (31:21):
We had a body, a young young boy, on the
behind a building, and we found a fiber on him,
just a one fiber.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
You guys.
Speaker 8 (31:33):
Yes, And.
Speaker 24 (31:36):
I removed it off of his shirt, and I think
it was blue, maybe a quarter of inch long. It
looked like a maybe a sweater or a blanket or something,
just a piece of lent. Took the fiber to the
crime lab. That information leaked out through high ranking people
(32:00):
to the media and lo and behold, it wasn't me,
you know, and they were putting anything they can grasp.
The media were at that time, you're talking about vultures.
I mean, everybody wanted to be the one to know
the little tidbit that nobody else knew.
Speaker 6 (32:17):
The Atlanta Journal came out in early February with a
story the police are finding hairs and fibers on the victim.
Speaker 7 (32:25):
Well guess where the next victim wound up? Stripped it
in the river.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
And we were getting victims every ten days.
Speaker 8 (32:33):
We're starting to see bodies in several different counties. We
probably need to come up with a method, or come
up with an idea or a thought to where we
can at least direct this guy, you know, keep him
from spreading bodies everywhere in hopes of course he's catching him.
Speaker 6 (32:53):
What I thought was the dumbest idea I ever heard
when Mike Mcombs and his partner Larry Ellington came to
me and says, we got an idea. And I said, Okay,
what's your idea? And they said, we want to cover
the bridge. Its because it's obvious he's throwing a body
off bridge. And I said, why is that obvious? I
didn't know at the time. Macomas grew up in a
small town in Tennessee on a river, and I grew
up in New York City.
Speaker 7 (33:13):
We didn't know what rivers were.
Speaker 8 (33:15):
The reason is I don't think he would drive down
to the river because the chances are getting caught. And
besides that, I was raised on a river in East Tennessee,
and I know that gets something to float down the river,
you've got to get it out in the middle of
the water or you stand a good chance it say
it's going to come right back to this, to the bank.
Speaker 6 (33:34):
He knew that if you threw something from the shore,
it eventually floats back to land. But if you throw
something off of a bridge in the middle of the river,
it'll float down the river. And I says, how do
you know which bridge? He said, well, we're going.
Speaker 7 (33:47):
To pick fourteen. I said, hey, you know you're going
to pick the right, right one.
Speaker 6 (33:50):
And he looked at me and said, you got a
better idea, dumb shit, And I said not. At the moment, there.
Speaker 8 (34:01):
Was two rivers, and there was the South River and
the Chattahoochee River, and I recommended that we stake those
out the bridges because I felt that that was how
he was getting the bodies into the water, was throwing
them off river bridges, because it would be quick, it'd
be fast, he would get them in the water, and
there was a good chance they would float down stream
(34:22):
quite aways from my idea. I got rewarded of kind
of supervising the detail. It was started every night around
six pm, and we quit every morning at about six.
Speaker 6 (34:33):
It started toward the end of April, first of May,
and we gave them thirty days, and we actually about
one hundred and forty people totally because we had a
cover all night, and we had a cover of weekends,
so we had one hundred and forty people assigned.
Speaker 8 (34:48):
And we were burning one hundred and forty bodies a
night too, because we had so many bridges on the
South River and so many bridges on the Chattahoochee River.
And what we did was is we had to people
on the ground under one side of the bridge, two
people on the other, and then we had two chase
cars per bridge, so if anybody dropped something in the
(35:10):
people underneath would notify the chase cars. And that's the
way it happened. It was quite taxing. I mean, I mean,
you're going seven days a week, twelve hours a day.
It's tough. I was single. The married guys, I don't
know how with families, I don't know how they did it.
But I was single at the time, so it didn't
really have that much of an effect on my home life.
(35:33):
Of course, social life, yeah, but not the home life.
But like I said, we were using one hundred and
forty bodies a night. As a matter of fact, there
were so many bodies that we had to go to
the police Academy and they gave us several recruit classes
that hadn't graduated yet, so the only thing they were
allowed to carry was batons and flashlights because they weren't
qualified on firearms. So, I mean, that's how many bodies
(35:55):
we were burning, and that's why they decided that it
was going to have to come to an end, because
we were just really wearing out man hours and nothing
came of it.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
As an officer with the APD at that time, Mike
Tovey remembers this bridge steakout, and.
Speaker 25 (36:10):
We had just about every bridge, I think every bridge
in Atlanta area covered. They canceled our off days and
we worked ungodly hours like five to five in the morning,
no off days, and we had people under the bridge,
we had people on the water posed as fishermen, and
(36:31):
just about every bridge in Atlanta and even Fulton County
we patrolled it in rafts. We had our guns in
the boat with us, and really we were just grasping
that straws. But it was apparent these bodies were coming
over the bridge.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
On the very last night of the bridge steakout, something
happened that would change the course of their investigation forever.
Speaker 7 (36:54):
Last night, last bridge.
Speaker 8 (36:56):
That night we set up knowing this this would be
the last day, I had about six or eight bridges.
I can't remember that. I kind of kept an eye
on and if anybody had any problems, or if somebody
didn't show up, or you know, logistical problems, whatever happened,
and I was to be notified regardless. I was at
a small bridge south and I heard some radio traffic,
(37:20):
and at the time, our radios weren't as good as
they are today. And I remember getting on the radio
and asking, you know, what's what's going on? And all
I heard was something about is splash. I had a
seventy seven Forward LTD with a four hundred big block
(37:42):
in it, and I can tell you I scorched tires
getting up there because I said something's happening and I
just felt it. We went racing to the James Jackson
Bridge and as I was heading that way, the traffic
started coming in a little clear because I was getting closer.
(38:02):
The gist of the story was is that the splash
was heard by the police cadets, the guys that had
to leave the academy early to work with us. We
had two people under both sides of the bridge, and
of course we kept them hidden out so that they
brought everything they needed for the night because they weren't
going anywhere. And then in close proximity, we had a
(38:25):
chase car on each side of the bridge, and they
too blended in so that they couldn't be seen. When
they looked up on the bridge from under it to
see what caused the splash. The car appeared to be
just starting up again like it had been stopped, and
it was going two or three miles an hour. Then
crossed the bridge, circled around I think a convenience store.
(38:50):
Then as he came back and that's when our cars
tagged him. We went up the Excerpt ramp, went across
the bridge and then went down, saw the cars sitting
on the other side. They were on the south bound
side and we were heading north and I saw that
there was several blue lights over there with a white
(39:11):
station wagon that was pulled over. Since I was supervising
it and I had the ranking Atlanta police officer on
scene with me, when we got there, we were immediately briefed.
I asked, did to get his ID? And they said yes.
He was still sitting in his car and I still
(39:33):
had my composite sketch and I pulled it out had
these little glasses on, and I drew the glasses and
I held it up and I said, anybody recognized this guy?
And that was Wayne Williams to the tea. I mean
it just it was just Wayne.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Next time on Atlanta Monster, it was the pre dawn
hours of May twenty second.
Speaker 12 (40:10):
The Atlanta Police Bureau and the FBI had been staking
up bridges along the Chattahoochee River for the last two
months and Atlanta recruit heard a splash. Several radio messages
and a flurry of activities soon had a car stopped
and it was twenty three year old Wayne Williams. People
who know Williams say he is a highly intelligent young man,
a good student when he was in school.
Speaker 8 (40:33):
I went up to him and identified myself as special
Agent the FBI, and I asked him immediately if he
knew why he was being pulled over, and he said, yes,
it's probably because about those kids that are missing. Kind
of surprised me. That was an unusual answer.
Speaker 26 (40:53):
I thought, it's like, idep, you want to go to
this you rabbit hole is very, very very deep.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week
with new episodes every Friday, a joint production between How
Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup
and Vanity Set. Audio archives courtesy of WSB News Film
and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries.
(41:34):
For the latest updates, please visit Atlantamonster dot com or
follow us on social media. Why do they call you popcorn?
Speaker 7 (42:02):
Ah?
Speaker 6 (42:04):
When I was in Memphis a first office agent, brand
new out of the FBI Academy, Andy was my training agent.
Andy was about seven or eight years older than me,
a little more experience than the bureau. And Andy had
a three year old daughter, Karen, who's.
Speaker 7 (42:19):
Now in the fifties. And she couldn't say the last
name Procopio. What came out was popcorn. She called me popcorn,
mister popcorn, and it stuck.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Do you like popcorn?
Speaker 7 (42:30):
Sure,
What we have is raw news footage from WSBTV. We
have seventeen thousand hours of raw news footage. So far,
I've identified six hundred and fourteen clips, but we have
about another one hundred and fifty taps to scrub through.
The Whole time I've been working on this collection, I've
been thinking someone somedays, someone is going to come along
(00:20):
and do this. It was you, guys.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Step aboard our tartists bigger on the inside than it
is on the outside where we're going down to the
sub basement high density storage vaults.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
It's like a rollercoaster.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yes, I can make it go fast if you left.
It's a thirty thousand square foot facility which we keep
at fifty degrees fahrenheit with a relative amidity of thirty percent.
Thirty two feet from floor to the ceiling. Actually the
top of our ceiling there is the floor of the
second floor. Prior to us building this building here was
(01:05):
a Native American settlement of some sort here. If I've
understand what people have told me over the years, everything
is shelved down here by size and then by dark.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
How many records do you think you guys have on
the Atlanta Chalmers in Atlanta. Another bonder wasn't discovered through day,
but twenty third.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
At Police Task Force headquarters, there are twenty seven faces
on the wall, twenty six murdered, one missing.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
We do not know the person or persons that are responsible. Therefore,
we do not have the money from tenderfoot TV in
house to works in Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (01:40):
Like eleven other recent victrums in Atlanta, rogers are currently
was as fixiator.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps
on killing.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
This is Atlanta monster.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
Sketching back then wasn't what it is today. I mean,
some of these sketches they come out with better than photographs.
Back then, you know, you work with what you had,
and it was a pretty good sketch. We had a
composite of it of who this guy would be.
Speaker 7 (02:14):
What it looked like to you. Remember well, it was
a blackmail with bushy hair.
Speaker 6 (02:18):
I remember the composite sketch very well. This is a
folder of paperwork I kept from my time as deministrative
coordinated the Atlanta child murder cases. It wasn't animosity between
the local police and the FBI. One of the main
things is the mayor maina Jackson. He says, I want
every living FBI agent. My police department is basically incompetent
(02:42):
and they can't solve it. We need the FBI to
solve it. So he threw his department under the bus.
None of us want to get involved because it looked
like just a local miss.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
This is Jim Procopio, but he goes by Popcorn. Look,
he worked for the FBI alongside Mike mccomis during the
time with the Atlanta child murders. Mike actually introduced me
to him.
Speaker 8 (03:02):
Probably be interested in talking to Procopio. Yeah, Popcorn is
a good guy. Now if you can get into his
treasure trove, he's got boxes and stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Popcorn dealt with all the records and files in the FBI,
And just like Mike McComas, he stressed the importance of
a composite sketch they received early on in their investigation
from a kid who told police that a man had
tried to abduct him.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
Well, it was a blackmail with bushy hair. I remember
the composite sketch very well.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
After interviewing the kid, they were able to form a
detailed sketch of the suspect. A blackmail with bushy hair.
After only a few minutes with popcorn, you get the
impression that this guy doesn't forget a thing.
Speaker 6 (03:39):
And it goes back to another cultural socioeconomic issue. When
Maynard Jackson became mayor, first black mayor in Atlanta, the
first thing he said was, I want to make the
police department more brown. Police department up with that time
had some black officers, several were majors and above, but
(04:00):
it was mainly a white police department. Well, when the
white officers heard that, they saw they saw the handwriting
on the wall. If you were white, you're not going
to rise rapidly in this department. It's going to be black.
A lot of the older ones, they say, we'll see you,
they retire. So consequently they lost many of their senior officers,
the best homicide investigator. Then they had a big cheating
(04:21):
scandal in the police department. They found out that a
lot of the black recruits in the police academy were
given the answers to tests. So that was another major scandal.
So the police department was left in seventy eight seventy
nine eighty relatively new and inexperienced. So I guess some
of the homicide detectives were not that experienced and they
missed the signs that there were commonalities in the eight
(04:45):
to ten to twelve they had. By time the Bureau
got in, they were up to fourteen ten found for missing. Further,
the FBI does not investigate murders. Murder is not a
federal crime. If it's committed on a government reservation, it
is off as certain federal authority as it is is
killed in the commission of a civil rights violation, it is,
but we don't investigate. Doesn't even investigate murders like you
(05:07):
have on the street every day.
Speaker 7 (05:08):
So we had no jurisdiction.
Speaker 6 (05:09):
We went to the Atlanta Police Department and says here,
we're here to help you. You know, we're greeted by yeah, right,
we won all your files. So it went to roller cases.
We assigned. There were two agents who are one agent
per victim, and we had fourteen of the victims at
the time. So we said go out.
Speaker 7 (05:25):
And redo the case, look through it, give it a.
Speaker 6 (05:28):
Fresh look, come back and tell us what you're fine about.
Ten or twelve of them come back and said, he's
looked like local crimes. We were pretty much convinced that
they were all local homicides that the APD had bungled.
We didn't see any pattern. We didn't see anything.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
The FBI, along with local police, were not convinced they
were dealing with a serial killer, but as the death
toll of black children was growing, they began to recognize
similarities in the murders. It would start with the child
going missing for days, weeks, and sometimes even months. The
FBI became involved in many of the searches. Popcorn recalled
the first big search he was a part of.
Speaker 6 (06:05):
There were one thousand searches all over the city. One
place was red Wine Road in South Fulton County. If
you go there today, it's right off two eighty five.
There's a huge shopping center with a Tarja and old
bunch of stores. Back then it was woods. About three o'clock,
the team down on red Wine Road says we found
(06:26):
skeletal remains. So everybody hauled ask and it was like
being in Vietnam again. There were the news choppers overhead.
They got window.
Speaker 7 (06:34):
Where we were.
Speaker 6 (06:34):
All the news choppers were overhead. So I got there
there about five o'clock and I'm walking and I'd park
my car on red Wine Road and I walk in
the woods and something catches my eye at eleven o'clock
and I walk over and there was a skull and.
Speaker 7 (06:48):
More human remains.
Speaker 6 (06:49):
So we had two human remains within one hundred feet
at one another, and this led to.
Speaker 7 (06:56):
One of the most bizarre episodes.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
About one hundred feet below both bodies, we found a
Playboy magazine. It was that week's Playboy magazine. It came
out that Wednesday.
Speaker 7 (07:12):
This was Friday.
Speaker 6 (07:13):
So we found the Playboy magazine and there was a
sticky substance between the pages. I'll let you decide what
that was. So he immediately fantasized the investigators. The killer
came back, came down here to the side of the murders, masturbated,
then took off.
Speaker 7 (07:29):
This is key evidence.
Speaker 6 (07:31):
We packaged it up, raced it out to the airport,
gave it to the captain of a Delta jet heading
for Washington, DC.
Speaker 7 (07:39):
An agent picked it up as.
Speaker 6 (07:40):
Soon as the plane landed, rushed with the FBI laboratory.
They gave it to a ladder lab. They developed prints
and identified the sticky substance. We didn't have any of
the prints on file, so they sent it to the
APD to look up through their files. Within an hour
they identified the print.
Speaker 7 (07:57):
So we went in. We arrested the guy, We searched us.
Speaker 6 (08:00):
He brought him to the Bureau. We polygraphed him. He
passed the PolyGram. What the hell were you doing down there?
He says, well, my wife just had a baby. I
went down there that afternoon. Now, during that time we
were part of the Vice President of George Bush's task
for us. Everything I wrote went to a UNI chief
of the Bureau, went to the director, to the Attorney General,
(08:22):
to George Bush. George Bush read it. So the one
thing he asked us was please don't tell my wife.
Speaker 7 (08:28):
We said, you goddamn idiot.
Speaker 6 (08:30):
Do you know the Vice President of the United States
knows what you did when you went into the woods,
and you know where your wife's going to find out.
Speaker 7 (08:39):
By the way, we code named that. It was known
as the Woodwhacker.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Popcorn's first big lead went nowhere. Popcorn had found the
bodies of eleven year old Christopher Richardson and eleven year
old Earl Terrell. Christopher had been missing for eight months,
an Earl had been missing for six months. To me,
on the surface, these cases seemed open and shut. A
Playboy magazine with semen on It was found near the
bodies with the suspect's fingerprints on it. But after an
(09:06):
extensive interrogation, the suspect passed a polygraph test, and despite
all the bizarre circumstances, the FBI was convinced that this
man was not involved in the murders, so they moved on.
Both Popcorn and Mike Macombis told me that when the
FBI got involved in these cases, there was an extreme
tension brewing in the city of Atlanta.
Speaker 8 (09:23):
Of course, the blacks wanted it to be somebody white
and the whites wanted it to be somebody black. And
I can't speak for the rest of the bureau, but
my partner and I are Larry Ellington. We talked about
it a lot. First off, our profilers said that serial
killers rarely cross races. They'll kill in their own race,
and all these kids were black.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Popcorn and Macomis both mentioned FBI profilers the people who
formulate an idea of who the killer is, who the
FBI should be looking for, and there was one characteristic
that stood out to me immediately.
Speaker 7 (09:54):
It had to be a black guy.
Speaker 6 (09:56):
A white man could not go into a black neighborhood,
pick up a ca we had put them in his
car and drive off without anybody seeing.
Speaker 8 (10:03):
If there's a crime scene. Then the media was just unbelievable.
And with all of the attention this case was getting,
it was almost impossible to get into a predominantly black
neighborhood and not be challenged or approached or whatever. If
you were white.
Speaker 6 (10:19):
It just doesn't happen. In fact, when we went into
black neighborhoods during the investigation, everybody on a street was
out on their front porch as soon as we appeared
in the neighborhood.
Speaker 8 (10:28):
There was one place that I think is gone now.
It was a housing project. They had what they call
the bat patrol, and these were adults that walked around
with baseball bats and looking for suspicious characters or protecting
the community whatever they call them. The bat patrol. We
were over in this housing area. We had two young
black kids that had supposedly seen something we thought, so
(10:53):
Larry and I were tasked to go over and pick
up these two children and their mother. So here we
are in the Brown Ford again. He's driving, I'm in
the passenger side, and we have the mother sitting in
the middle and the two black kids in the back
seat and near the windows, and two young boys, and
I think they were like ten or something, eight, ten, twelve,
I don't know, somewhere around that. And we didn't get
two blocks before we were boxed in by about four
(11:15):
three or four different police cars. And we weren't proned
out that it was coming to that before we finally
got them to look at our identification. Hey, we're FBI agents.
And because somebody had called in, there's two white guys
with some black kids in the car. So it was
tough getting in and out of certain areas, and so
we were kind of convinced this guy had to be black.
He had to be black. We just couldn't figure out
(11:36):
how he was getting them in a car.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Was this a skewed opinion coming from only white males.
Was it that impossible for a white person to walk
around the inner city of Atlanta in the early eighties,
I don't know. I asked Eric and Jasper Cameron, they
grew up in Atlanta during that time, if anything they
would know person.
Speaker 9 (11:53):
I felt like it had to be somebody that could
move around in the community. So therefore I felt like
to be somebody black or somebody who wouldn't draw suspicion
because you know, over there we live a white person
walking around over there, they are gonna be you know,
it's gonna draw attention because that wasn't happening then. Now
(12:13):
now you go over there, it's like.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
You know everybody.
Speaker 9 (12:16):
But back then, nah, you know, it would have drew
too much attention. So I always felt like, probably with
somebody who could move around pretty easy, you know, undetected,
without really causing a lot of suspicion.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
But not everyone agreed on that. This is Bernard Parks.
He grew up in Atlanta too, and was also a
child at the time of the murders.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
There are certain guys that you know that they were around.
I mean, you know, it's like it wasn't a lot
of white guys, right, but but.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
There were some.
Speaker 5 (12:45):
Yeah, I mean, like you grew up, you know what
I'm saying. It's like, you know, one or two white
guys that went to my school, right, But that's just
because their family didn't have no money, right, So they
were just around and so you kind of accepted them.
But you know, I always say, you know, they got cousins,
they got friends, they got people that hung around and
we accepted.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
It wouldn't have.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
Normal, though, for in that time, for a black guy
just to walk up and be accepting of a white
guy without somebody understanding what's happening, right, I mean, that
just wasn't normal. I mean you just questioned, period, because
you're in my community and it's ain't your community.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
I asked Monica Pearson, the former news anchor in Atlanta.
Her memory was crystal clear.
Speaker 10 (13:22):
They weren't looking for a murderer. They were profiling. They
decided that that's what it was. And you have to
keep all options open. I think anytime you don't open
up and cast a wide net, you lose the opportunity
(13:43):
of finding someone else who might be involved. It's as
simple as that. You have to look at all the possibilities.
And if you start out by saying it has to
be a black person who did it, because these were
black children, then that's the reason why so many people
in the black community thought it was the Klan. I
(14:04):
think that's short sighted on their part, because you could
easily have a white man in that community dressed as
black people dressed and no one would notice him because
he just looks like a black person. He's in this community.
Speaker 11 (14:26):
Now.
Speaker 10 (14:26):
Most white people would not go into that community because
they would stand out like a sore thumb. But if
you assimilate from the walk, to the clothing, to the attitude,
to the speech, and don't say it can't be done,
I'm just throwing it out there. I think that's shortsighted
(14:48):
to say a white person couldn't do it.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
A white person could.
Speaker 10 (14:56):
If you know the community you had. A white graduated
a couple of years ago from Morehouse College as a valedictorian.
White folks go into the black community all the time
to buy drugs, and they don't have a problem fitting in.
If you look like the people who live there, and
(15:17):
your skin is just a little lighter than somebody else's,
it's not going to stand out.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
I think they're wrong on that. From her perspective, the
possibility of a white killer was ruled out way too quickly.
I couldn't help but think she made a great point.
Speaker 10 (15:38):
The one thing I remember most about the missing and
murdered children. I still see that visual every day is
Maynard Jackson sitting there with piles of cash, offering a
reward for any information on who was committing these crimes.
Speaker 12 (15:55):
Here's one hundred thousand dollars and it's all you.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
Most gangster picture ever him sitting with that money on
the desk.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
I think that's where they got this shot from for
uh Ransom.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
Remember when Ransom they came in and put the male
gifts and he put all that money on the table
and he was like, now I'm putting his bounty on you.
That was Maina's line.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
I read about this over and over in my research.
The reward money. It started with one hundred thousand dollars
from the city, but private donations, including one from Muhammad Ali,
brought it to over five hundred thousand. Today that would
be around one point five million. As Atlanta struggled to
find the killer, the city needed more and more money.
One solution was a benefit concert.
Speaker 13 (16:41):
Come Fly with Me, Let's Fine, Let's Fine.
Speaker 14 (16:47):
Frank Sinatra will be joining Sammy Davis Junior on stage
at the Atlanta Civic Center. The two figure to draw
a standing room only crowd for the March ten benefit
concert to help the investigation into the crimes against Atlanta's children.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
The city held a huge benefit concert to raise money
for the investigation at the Atlanta Civic Center, but the
FBI was a high alert for the killer.
Speaker 6 (17:10):
I was convinced that that night he would respond to that,
and I was convinced in my mind that he would
drop a body in the fountain right there.
Speaker 12 (17:20):
Frank Sinatra arrived here at Charlie Brown Airport just a
few minutes before six o'clock.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
He's not on his.
Speaker 12 (17:25):
Way to the Atlanta Civic centerwhere he'll join Sammy Davis
Junior for tonight's benefit concert.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
Sammy Davis Junior picked up a phone and volunteered.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
To help Atlanta today. The superstar arrived here on his
private jet.
Speaker 15 (17:36):
Such a horrendous tragedy as this effects, as I said,
it certainly affects all of America.
Speaker 6 (17:44):
I was there that night, and we had cops and helicopters.
There were cars everywhere police because there is no one
could have gotten there with the body.
Speaker 16 (17:52):
It started with police dogs sniffing the entire Civic Center
looking for explosives. The Mayor's office called this routine.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Will you guys are here to catch somebody?
Speaker 17 (18:02):
Oh?
Speaker 7 (18:02):
Hell yeah, that's why we're roll out.
Speaker 18 (18:04):
Officials have been preparing for weeks for this night. Extra
security guards have been hired and extra police officers have
been put on patrol here with just one objective to
keep an eye on children.
Speaker 6 (18:15):
It was overwhelming. The Atlanta Police Department out in full force.
Who had a GBI? I know, the FBI was there,
the Task Force, everybody was there. There's no way anyone
could have gotten in there and done anything.
Speaker 16 (18:25):
There are so many news people here, coming from all
over the world, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, London, so many
they had to be regulated to a room in the basement. Meanwhile,
upstairs Atlanta's finance It started to arrive, but the high
points of the show weren't outside. They were in here.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
I've got the world of the.
Speaker 6 (18:57):
I've got this didn't respond and to got a lot
of publicity. I thought he was response to how he didn't.
Speaker 16 (19:06):
And while Sinatra was entertaining as he sang, he was
most touching when he spoke.
Speaker 13 (19:12):
More of my tears are shed for the brothers and
sisters and playmates of the victims to whom terror has
become an unwelcome companion, and to all of the fine,
decent people in Atlanta who are frightened by day and
doubly frightened by night.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
You have my prayers that.
Speaker 13 (19:30):
Is, and that it should pass without further bloodshed.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
The city as a whole was banding together to catch
this killer, and every single law enforcement agency was working
around the clock. All the murders were of black children
from the inner city of Atlanta, and they were disappearing
from their own neighborhoods in their own local hangouts. One
popular place in the city at that time time for
kids to hang out was called the Omni, an arcade
(20:03):
room with food in a movie theater. But the Omni
was also becoming a place where some kids were last seen.
Speaker 9 (20:18):
That's what we did. It was a game room in
the Omni, and we literally would go to that game
room and go to the arcades and all that. So
that's like video games and stuff like that. That's what
we did. Went to the Omni, hung Omni.
Speaker 10 (20:37):
Friday night, date night, get out of the house night,
and the Omnie is packed with youngsters.
Speaker 12 (20:42):
The Omni Complex, a mixture of fine stores, sporting events, movies,
and game rooms, a popular place for the inner city
kid to hang out. That's why the Special Task Force
became interested in the complex as a meeting place. Investigators
first started looking for some type of connection back in February.
Speaker 11 (21:03):
This sign went up today at Electronic America. The manager
doesn't want anyone seventeen or under in here. Wont seven
o'clock hits. The owners realized such strict rules hurt their business,
especially when their business attracts mainly teenagers.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
The nineteen eighties saw the rise in arcades and video games.
But another trend, and one I didn't know about, was
the nineteen eighties fascination with psychics. In fact, psychics even
played a role in the Atlanta child murders. I heard
a lot of weird stories surrounding this case, but so
far this seemed the most bizarre, a true example of
(21:53):
law enforcement grasping its straws.
Speaker 19 (21:56):
Police are now working with more than one psychic to
solve the cases of six murdered and six missing children.
This is how the nationally known psychics spent their Friday
the thirteenth. They are visiting Atlanta courtesy of the National Inquirer. Yes,
the same National Inquirer with those sensational headlines that can
be seen at most supermarket counters. As the psychics scrambled
(22:16):
through the woods where four of the twenty murdered children
were found, psychic Mickey Dane of Miami, kicked off her shoes.
She asked reporters to feel how hot her feet were,
and then declared that two more bodies might be found nearby.
Speaker 20 (22:29):
There is something here, some child out there is trying
to tell us to go further into this.
Speaker 19 (22:34):
Jonathan Bell, whose brother Joseph is among the victims, also
served as a guide. A freelance artist was there too,
sketching psychic's descriptions of suspects.
Speaker 20 (22:44):
I do not care at this point what they think
of me. I'm here to get a killer off the street.
If it takes one person of five thousand. My big
thing is that if I have to do it alone,
I will I feel that they are afraid that if
one person does it, how will they feel? And I
can understand that. But I'm here more so for the children.
And I do not want the reward money that I
(23:04):
put in writing. I do not want the money. I'm
not here for the publicity. I'm just like them. I
want to kill off the street.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
One side gave police and news stations a detailed description
of who the Atlantic shold murderer was.
Speaker 21 (23:21):
He knows in the daytime what he's dealing with, but
at night, he's not really sure, so he kind of
stays to himself in his apartment. Here's a television set.
There's no guns up there, no nothing. He's very smooth
talking when he does talk, which is very seldom. Oh yes,
there's no doubt in my mind that he's walked side
(23:42):
beside probably some of the parents of these children. He's shrewd,
he's methodical. You're not dealing with a guy with the one
hundred and sixty four IQ. He's clean, he's neat, he's
above suspicion. You're dealing with a methodical, a man that's
some systematic what angry now getting more frustrated. I cannot
(24:04):
stop him. I don't have the authority or the power.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
At the University of Georgia in Athens is the Walter J.
Brown Media Archives, a huge, multi story facility that holds
hundreds of thousands of archive documents. In the early nineteen eighties,
this was arguably the biggest news story, especially in Atlanta.
I made a call to Mary Miller, one of the archivists,
to see if we can access their news archives related
(24:32):
to the case, and as it turns out, they have
thousands of hours of raw news footage from WSBTV, the
local Atlanta station. Material that hasn't been viewed by the
public since the early nineteen eighties. In that time, nothing
was digital. It was all on film or tape. But
the team at the University of Georgia worked tirelessly to
gather and digitize as much material as possible, and then
(24:53):
they gave us a personal tour of their vault.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Everything is shelved down here by size and then by
bark code, so thing that you'll notice here, each item
has a barcode on it, and each shelf has a
bar code, and the items are linked together, so it
gives us a barcode and we work by that.
Speaker 7 (25:20):
What we do with videotapes.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Is a little bit different from what we do with
train materials. The videotapes will have to go into coolers
because they need to be acclimated from the cold, dry environment.
When they move upstairs, it's a little warmer and a
lot more humid, so they have to go in the
cooler so the temperature can come up slowly they can acclimate.
(25:42):
January twenty twelve, when we opened to the public, we've
probably pulled about one hundred and fifty to one hundred
and sixty thousand items, and we've yet not been able
to find everything that's been requested. And I said, he's
going to start coming this way, so we're gonna need
to start walking back this way.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
While searching the archives, I came across several news stories
involving strange leads. This one in particular caught my attention.
According to FBI documents, on January eighth, nineteen eighty one,
an anonymous white male called the Rochdale County Sheriff's Department
claiming that he placed the body of Luby Jeter out
(26:22):
on Sigmund Road. Then he threatened to leave the body
of another child, but this time the child would be white.
Speaker 12 (26:29):
An unidentified man who has been calling the Rochdale County
Sheriff's Department for the last few weeks.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
That man has told deputies.
Speaker 12 (26:36):
They could find Atlanta's missing children on Sigmund Road, and
we've learned that recently he's also called and said he
was going to harm some of the children in this neighborhood.
When the Rockdale County Sheriff's Department arrived at the scene
this morning, all they knew was they had something already
very familiar to Atlanta investigators, the body of a black
mail around fourteen years old line just off Sigmund Road.
(26:58):
There was no apparent sign of a strug. Sheriff Vic
Davis would only say today his department and the others
involved are again very interested in tape conversations with an
unidentified male caller, the most recent call coming the day
before the body was found. The man told Rochdale deputies
victims could be found along Sigmund Road.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Someone was calling the local sheriff's department claiming to be
the killer, even declaring where the next body would be found,
but it seemed at that time the police didn't give
this much merit.
Speaker 17 (27:27):
Some detectives say, since this latest body was found so
far from Atlanta, they may be dealing with the copycat murderer,
or they say the killer or killers may have known
that the Rochdale sheriff was receiving crank calls about the
missing and murdered children and so just decided to dump
a body here to taunt police.
Speaker 22 (27:44):
We're taking a closer look at the calls at this time,
but we still feel that maybe just the publicity drew
the actual killer to this area to dump a.
Speaker 12 (27:55):
Body Sheriff Vic Davis hopes today's discovery and the calls
are just coincidental.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Then I found another story. The video was of a
live newscast featuring a church minister in Atlanta named Earl Polk.
He voluntarily called into a local news station to present
this story, and he was making some very eerie claims
his alleged interaction with the Atlanta child murderer.
Speaker 23 (28:18):
I have received several calls from a person identifying himself
as the one responsible for these crimes.
Speaker 15 (28:29):
I did notify the authorities, but I should like.
Speaker 23 (28:33):
To remind you that I stand readed a minister to you,
and we are protected and covered by the Constitution of
the United States of America. I stand ready to be
directed by you as to a place of meeting. I
will minister to your needs, and you will be protected,
and you will be covered.
Speaker 18 (28:51):
For one thing, the voice on the phone was not
the same one that has called before, so Polk says
his first step was to determine how much.
Speaker 15 (28:58):
The man knew many of the children are crimes are
you involved in? He said, well, let's put it this way.
The first three somebody helped me with them. I said, well,
is he not helping any longer.
Speaker 8 (29:13):
He said no.
Speaker 15 (29:13):
I said why did he quit? He said, well he
got afraid, I mean his wife got afraid, and he
left town.
Speaker 18 (29:19):
Paulk says the man told him he could prove he
was the killer because he could show Paulk a piece
of clothing belonging to Curtis Walker. Walker's body was found
just two weeks ago in a river about a quarter
mile from Paulk's church.
Speaker 15 (29:31):
So I said, tell me how you got the kids
to get in your car. He said, well, I've got
a van, and he says, I tell him I've got
paint jobs to do, and they get into in the
van to go to paint.
Speaker 18 (29:43):
Paulk then questioned the man about his motives.
Speaker 15 (29:46):
I said, well, what makes you do this? What what
caused you to do these crimes? Could you tell me that?
He said, well, I'm I'm impelled or I'm controlled or
forced by voices to do it. I said, well, why
are you calling me now? Are the voices really to
so you could call me? He says, well, I don't
hear the voices right now. I said, why are you
(30:06):
turning yourself in or why are you wanting to come
see me now? He said, well, I'm tired of running,
I'm out of money, and my wife is afraid.
Speaker 18 (30:14):
The man told Paulk he was speaking from or near
a pub on Ponsta Leon Avenue. Paulk then asked him
if they could meet at his church on Flat Shoals Road,
and the man agreed. About a half hour later, a
van pulled into the parking lot across the street, but
immediately sped off. Paulk says he thinks the man spotted
some police cars at a nearby shopping center and may
(30:35):
have thought he was walking into a trap.
Speaker 15 (30:37):
My purpose of even telling the story was hopefully that
he would know that there was no trap set up,
and that per chance he may yet try to make contact.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
After hearing the many stories from the FBI and looking
back on the news archives, I started to get a
sense of how the general public must have felt in
nineteen eighty, completely confused an incriminating Playboy magazine, psychic involvement,
bizarre phone calls, in that mysterious composite sketch of a
black guy with bushy hair, but none of it was
(31:07):
amounting to anything. The media coverage of Atlanta's hunt for
a serial killer was gripping the entire nation. But things
were about to change when a local Atlanta policeman found
what appeared to be the first signs of physical evidence.
Speaker 24 (31:21):
We had a body, a young young boy, on the
behind a building, and we found a fiber on him,
just a one fiber.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
You guys.
Speaker 8 (31:33):
Yes, And.
Speaker 24 (31:36):
I removed it off of his shirt, and I think
it was blue, maybe a quarter of inch long. It
looked like a maybe a sweater or a blanket or something,
just a piece of lent. Took the fiber to the
crime lab. That information leaked out through high ranking people
(32:00):
to the media and lo and behold, it wasn't me,
you know, and they were putting anything they can grasp.
The media were at that time, you're talking about vultures.
I mean, everybody wanted to be the one to know
the little tidbit that nobody else knew.
Speaker 6 (32:17):
The Atlanta Journal came out in early February with a
story the police are finding hairs and fibers on the victim.
Speaker 7 (32:25):
Well guess where the next victim wound up? Stripped it
in the river.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
And we were getting victims every ten days.
Speaker 8 (32:33):
We're starting to see bodies in several different counties. We
probably need to come up with a method, or come
up with an idea or a thought to where we
can at least direct this guy, you know, keep him
from spreading bodies everywhere in hopes of course he's catching him.
Speaker 6 (32:53):
What I thought was the dumbest idea I ever heard
when Mike Mcombs and his partner Larry Ellington came to
me and says, we got an idea. And I said, Okay,
what's your idea? And they said, we want to cover
the bridge. Its because it's obvious he's throwing a body
off bridge. And I said, why is that obvious? I
didn't know at the time. Macomas grew up in a
small town in Tennessee on a river, and I grew
up in New York City.
Speaker 7 (33:13):
We didn't know what rivers were.
Speaker 8 (33:15):
The reason is I don't think he would drive down
to the river because the chances are getting caught. And
besides that, I was raised on a river in East Tennessee,
and I know that gets something to float down the river,
you've got to get it out in the middle of
the water or you stand a good chance it say
it's going to come right back to this, to the bank.
Speaker 6 (33:34):
He knew that if you threw something from the shore,
it eventually floats back to land. But if you throw
something off of a bridge in the middle of the river,
it'll float down the river. And I says, how do
you know which bridge? He said, well, we're going.
Speaker 7 (33:47):
To pick fourteen. I said, hey, you know you're going
to pick the right, right one.
Speaker 6 (33:50):
And he looked at me and said, you got a
better idea, dumb shit, And I said not. At the moment, there.
Speaker 8 (34:01):
Was two rivers, and there was the South River and
the Chattahoochee River, and I recommended that we stake those
out the bridges because I felt that that was how
he was getting the bodies into the water, was throwing
them off river bridges, because it would be quick, it'd
be fast, he would get them in the water, and
there was a good chance they would float down stream
(34:22):
quite aways from my idea. I got rewarded of kind
of supervising the detail. It was started every night around
six pm, and we quit every morning at about six.
Speaker 6 (34:33):
It started toward the end of April, first of May,
and we gave them thirty days, and we actually about
one hundred and forty people totally because we had a
cover all night, and we had a cover of weekends,
so we had one hundred and forty people assigned.
Speaker 8 (34:48):
And we were burning one hundred and forty bodies a
night too, because we had so many bridges on the
South River and so many bridges on the Chattahoochee River.
And what we did was is we had to people
on the ground under one side of the bridge, two
people on the other, and then we had two chase
cars per bridge, so if anybody dropped something in the
(35:10):
people underneath would notify the chase cars. And that's the
way it happened. It was quite taxing. I mean, I mean,
you're going seven days a week, twelve hours a day.
It's tough. I was single. The married guys, I don't
know how with families, I don't know how they did it.
But I was single at the time, so it didn't
really have that much of an effect on my home life.
(35:33):
Of course, social life, yeah, but not the home life.
But like I said, we were using one hundred and
forty bodies a night. As a matter of fact, there
were so many bodies that we had to go to
the police Academy and they gave us several recruit classes
that hadn't graduated yet, so the only thing they were
allowed to carry was batons and flashlights because they weren't
qualified on firearms. So, I mean, that's how many bodies
(35:55):
we were burning, and that's why they decided that it
was going to have to come to an end, because
we were just really wearing out man hours and nothing
came of it.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
As an officer with the APD at that time, Mike
Tovey remembers this bridge steakout, and.
Speaker 25 (36:10):
We had just about every bridge, I think every bridge
in Atlanta area covered. They canceled our off days and
we worked ungodly hours like five to five in the morning,
no off days, and we had people under the bridge,
we had people on the water posed as fishermen, and
(36:31):
just about every bridge in Atlanta and even Fulton County
we patrolled it in rafts. We had our guns in
the boat with us, and really we were just grasping
that straws. But it was apparent these bodies were coming
over the bridge.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
On the very last night of the bridge steakout, something
happened that would change the course of their investigation forever.
Speaker 7 (36:54):
Last night, last bridge.
Speaker 8 (36:56):
That night we set up knowing this this would be
the last day, I had about six or eight bridges.
I can't remember that. I kind of kept an eye
on and if anybody had any problems, or if somebody
didn't show up, or you know, logistical problems, whatever happened,
and I was to be notified regardless. I was at
a small bridge south and I heard some radio traffic,
(37:20):
and at the time, our radios weren't as good as
they are today. And I remember getting on the radio
and asking, you know, what's what's going on? And all
I heard was something about is splash. I had a
seventy seven Forward LTD with a four hundred big block
(37:42):
in it, and I can tell you I scorched tires
getting up there because I said something's happening and I
just felt it. We went racing to the James Jackson
Bridge and as I was heading that way, the traffic
started coming in a little clear because I was getting closer.
(38:02):
The gist of the story was is that the splash
was heard by the police cadets, the guys that had
to leave the academy early to work with us. We
had two people under both sides of the bridge, and
of course we kept them hidden out so that they
brought everything they needed for the night because they weren't
going anywhere. And then in close proximity, we had a
(38:25):
chase car on each side of the bridge, and they
too blended in so that they couldn't be seen. When
they looked up on the bridge from under it to
see what caused the splash. The car appeared to be
just starting up again like it had been stopped, and
it was going two or three miles an hour. Then
crossed the bridge, circled around I think a convenience store.
(38:50):
Then as he came back and that's when our cars
tagged him. We went up the Excerpt ramp, went across
the bridge and then went down, saw the cars sitting
on the other side. They were on the south bound
side and we were heading north and I saw that
there was several blue lights over there with a white
(39:11):
station wagon that was pulled over. Since I was supervising
it and I had the ranking Atlanta police officer on
scene with me, when we got there, we were immediately briefed.
I asked, did to get his ID? And they said yes.
He was still sitting in his car and I still
(39:33):
had my composite sketch and I pulled it out had
these little glasses on, and I drew the glasses and
I held it up and I said, anybody recognized this guy?
And that was Wayne Williams to the tea. I mean
it just it was just Wayne.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Next time on Atlanta Monster, it was the pre dawn
hours of May twenty second.
Speaker 12 (40:10):
The Atlanta Police Bureau and the FBI had been staking
up bridges along the Chattahoochee River for the last two
months and Atlanta recruit heard a splash. Several radio messages
and a flurry of activities soon had a car stopped
and it was twenty three year old Wayne Williams. People
who know Williams say he is a highly intelligent young man,
a good student when he was in school.
Speaker 8 (40:33):
I went up to him and identified myself as special
Agent the FBI, and I asked him immediately if he
knew why he was being pulled over, and he said, yes,
it's probably because about those kids that are missing. Kind
of surprised me. That was an unusual answer.
Speaker 26 (40:53):
I thought, it's like, idep, you want to go to
this you rabbit hole is very, very very deep.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week
with new episodes every Friday, a joint production between How
Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup
and Vanity Set. Audio archives courtesy of WSB News Film
and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries.
(41:34):
For the latest updates, please visit Atlantamonster dot com or
follow us on social media. Why do they call you popcorn?
Speaker 7 (42:02):
Ah?
Speaker 6 (42:04):
When I was in Memphis a first office agent, brand
new out of the FBI Academy, Andy was my training agent.
Andy was about seven or eight years older than me,
a little more experience than the bureau. And Andy had
a three year old daughter, Karen, who's.
Speaker 7 (42:19):
Now in the fifties. And she couldn't say the last
name Procopio. What came out was popcorn. She called me popcorn,
mister popcorn, and it stuck.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Do you like popcorn?
Speaker 7 (42:30):
Sure,
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