April 21, 2025 • 53 mins
For years, a predator preyed on gay men in Atlanta. He was known as the Handcuff Man. He attacked male sex workers, disfigured them, and then left them for dead. Journalist Hallie Lieberman wrote a fantastic piece for The Atavist Magazine called The Devil Went Down to Georgia.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You know, I think it's easy to look back on
this and go, oh, that was a weird request. He
beat himself up and saying I should have said no.
I was too smart for that.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:50):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. For years, a predator paraded
on gay men in Atlanta. He was known as the
handcuff Man. He attacked male sex workers, disfigured them horribly,
(01:15):
and then left them for dead. Journalist Hallie Lieberman wrote
a fantastic piece for the Atavist magazine called The Devil
Went down to Georgia Well let's get started, And I
know you want to start with Max, see somebody you
actually know. So what a unique interviewee for you to have,
What a great source.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, I actually like got to meet him in person
and he showed me. So. Max grew up in Atlanta
in the nineteen seventies, sixties and seventies, and he came
from like a really rough home. His dad was not
really in the picture. He was mostly raised by his mom.
(01:55):
His mom was an alcoholic and she worked at this
diner in Atlanta. And near the diner when Max became,
you know, a teenager, there are a bunch of boys
who hung out there and they were selling sex. And
when I say boys, they were like thirteen years old,
twelve years old, really insanely young, and they would sit
(02:18):
on the yellow newspaper boxes that were near this theater,
the Plaza Theater, and men would drive by and look at,
you know, the boys and decide if they wanted to
hire one for sex or you know whatever sex act.
So Max started doing this or the other boys would
(02:39):
actually walk to the back of the Plaza theater and
he showed me this, like we did this at age
fifty nine. He showed me what he did at thirteen,
because these buildings are still here. He walked to the
back that's where the man would have the car and
would pick him up and then they would do the act.
They would pay the money and then he'd be off
and Max would have some and that was his job.
(03:02):
And he was also getting into like gangs, and he
was doing all this kind of stuff because that was
he had a really rough home life. They didn't have
a lot of money. He was kind of trying to
make money, trying to live in Atlanta, and that was
how he started doing sex work.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Set the scene for that time period separately from the
view of being gay, homosexual, whatever term they would have used,
and then going into sex work, which is you know,
another part of this what was it like for Max
or an adult a male sex worker in this time period.
(03:43):
I mean, were they constantly harassed by police or did
people intervene to try to help?
Speaker 2 (03:48):
They did not intervene as much as they should have.
As Max said, like this was you know, He's like,
we would call it child mole station today and I
was like, well, when we've called it child molization then too,
but at the time, like for being a sex worker,
so it was a time in fast forward to when
he was a little older in the nineteen seventies nineteen eighties,
(04:12):
time when being gay was illegal, even in the early seventies,
and it was in the DSM as a mental disorder,
so it was a mental disorder. Sex work was illegal.
Sex were still legal except in Nevada and a few
counties in the US, and AIDS came to the four
(04:32):
starting in the nineteen eighties, and that's when Max was
really working, you know, as a young adult. AIDS was
a death sentence, and many people argue that gay men
deserved it. And the thing was, since since being gay
or having gay sex was illegal and sex work was illegal,
the police didn't really distinguish between gay mail sex worker
(04:56):
and just a gay man. If you and a lot
of gay men were having sex in the same places
that the sex workers were, so they were harassing both
of them. So like you just like and you were
harassed by the police, then you were harassed by people
in the community. Like every gay man who was alive
at this time has talked about bottles being thrown at them,
talking about all this stuff. So it was even in
the gay neighborhoods, it was just a culture of harassment.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
How long is Max doing this before he becomes a
major part of your story.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
So Max is doing sex work for about eight years
as a teenager before like teenager and young adult before
he becomes a part of his story because he started
at age thirteen. So that was a pretty crazy you know,
it's crazy that he was so young.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
So is that when he first encounters the handcuff man.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Max was twenty one. When he first encountered the handcuff man.
Max knew this job was dangerous. So someone had pulled
a gun on him. You know, when he was a teenager,
a female sex worker who was his friend had been killed.
He said they found her head in one dumpster, her
body and the other her limbs in the other, so
like in a horrific way. So he was a street
(06:10):
savvy kind of guy. I mean he had to be.
You had to be to literally survive in this time.
So it wasn't like we had this naive guy who
just got into sex work. He'd been doing it for
a long time. He had to vet his clients for
a really good reason. But what happened was so this
was April nineteen eighty five, HIV is spreading through the
(06:34):
gay community. People. There are all sorts of rumors about
how you get it, and so people don't know. So
gay men people are staying far away from them. So
there's all that stuff going on. But it was April
nineteen eighty five. Max was hustling on Ponce de Leon Avenue,
a popular street in Atlanta, and a thin man drove up,
(06:55):
rolled down his car window. He was in a Lincoln
town car, and asked him if he wanted to make
some money. This was not unusual. This was a you know,
the kind of transaction he did all the time. This
guy looked like a professional or not a professional, but
like not intimidating. He was. He wore glasses, he had
a pressed shirt. He seemed like a normal guy. The
(07:17):
man asked Max to drink some alcohol with him, and
Max said, okay, sure, you know, I'll do this for
a little cash. So he's standing there he's drinking alcohol
with the man. He starts to feel funny. Wasn't sure
what's going on. Had the man slipped him something. Max
collapses to the ground and the man pulls him into
(07:40):
the car. Max is begging, don't hurt me. As this
happens he knew something was off, but he was completely
out of it on you know, the alcohol or whatever
was mixed into the alcohol, and Max drank a lot
so he could handle his alcohol. So he gets in
the car. He is stuck with this man who's picked
(08:01):
him up. The man drives him to a wooded area.
He parks. He drags Max into this patch of kudzu,
and Max is like, what the hell is going on?
You know, this is not a normal hookup, like usually
it would just have sex and it would be over
in fifteen minutes whatever. So he's in this remote area,
(08:23):
he's in this foliage and then he sees the guy
who picked him up pour this liquid onto his groin
and then light a match, And as he lights a match,
it illuminates the man's face in this this ghoulish way.
Then Max could never forget. Then the man drops the
(08:43):
match onto Max's crotch and Max catches fire. He is
in excruciating pain, and he starts drifting in and out
of consciousness, in so much pain, on fire. He cries
for help when he has the energy, but he doesn't
have a lot of energy obviously, because he's been drugged
(09:05):
and he's on fire. Around nine point thirty PM, a
man who happened to be a nurse was driving home
with his girlfriend when he spotted a naked figure on
the side of the road. So somehow Max had managed
to move in somewhere where people could see him. The
nurse stopped, saw Max's condition, rushed home to call the police,
(09:28):
and got some blankets to wrap Max in. And Max
thought to himself, I guess God had sent him. That
was how close Max was to dying.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Where in the timeline are we, as far as you're concerned,
what you think the timeline is for the handcuff man.
Is this sort of at the beginning of when he
was targeting young men or is it the middle? Or
where are we?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
We are in the middle of the timeline. He had
been targeting young men for at least nine years because
he'd been kicked out, or ten because he'd been kicked
out of Tawanda, Pa literally by the sheriff.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
So Max is lucky to be alive because a lot
of these young men that he and boys that he
encounters don't end up alive. So are you thinking that
the handcuffed man is intending that this is going to
kill him? Absolutely? This is the way that it's going
to happen or or what do you think the mindset was.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
So it seemed like the mindset was and obviously have
no way of knowing, but the mindset was, I don't
care if this person lives or dies. I mean, if
you're lighting someone on fire, leaving them in like somewhere
in Atlanta, like in the early morning hours, I mean
the chances that this person are survived, I mean, who knows,
like fifty to fifty Like, he didn't care. He didn't
(10:51):
value the life of the men he was doing this too.
They were very low on the totem pole of society.
They were people. And this is why predators target sex workers,
because there are people they assume that society doesn't care about.
They assumed that they won't be missed. I've interviewed sex workers.
The sex worker who used to be a LAPD cop,
(11:15):
and she said they had a nickname for crimes a
murders involving sex workers and it was nhi no human involved.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
It's awful, totally awful.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
And that was in the eighties, and so that was
around this time. And so if you're a criminal, if
you're a murderer, you're someone violet. You are going to
target this person who police are going to go. Oh,
their life doesn't matter.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So an ambulance comes, I'm assuming to find Max. Thank
god for that nurse.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Max was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. His
burns were so severe that he stayed there for six weeks.
He had to wear a diaper, like because the burns
were on his genitals. He wasn't sure if his penis
would ever work again. That's how he was making money.
And just also, like, your quality of life is terribly
(12:02):
he burns on his thighs. I mean it was excruciatingly
painful during this time. The police came to see him once,
they left a business card and meanwhile, I mean Max
is suffering. He's not completely there. You know, he's recovering.
They left this business card and said to call if
he wants to talk. He misplaced the card and never
(12:25):
heard from the cops again. And that was that.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
This is specifically on the lower part of his body,
right where this liquid was poured. It wasn't on his
face orning. It was a lower part of the body. Okay,
So that says to you, what just initially, if you
were an investigator on the scene, the lower part of
the body. What do you think that would indicate to someone?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
It was? It was so like seemed targeted to gay
men's sexuality, Like pinpointed, like, I'm pouring this liquid on
men's genitals. I'm preventing them from ever expressing their sexuality
like that. To me, that's what it reminded me of.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
So did Max say that when he was first encountering
this man? I know, he was excited about the forty
or fifty bucks and the alcohol and everything. Did he
have like a gut feeling that he ignored? I read
about that a lot like that. People who survive assault.
Sometimes they're like, I had a gut feeling, but I
just ignored it. Did he talk about that to you
at all?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
He didn't say that he had a gut feeling, but
he said that the guy was a little weird. So
I guess that was his version of gut feeling. You know.
I think it's easy to look back on this and go, oh,
that was a weird request because that was not a
normal request for him. And you know what, he beat
himself up, Max, like in saying I should have said no,
(13:41):
I was too smart for that, and that's the whole
like victims blaming themselves thing. But I think maybe that
was his gut feeling, like he thought this was a
little too good to be true, this was a weird request,
but I need the money, you know. I mean, it's
really hard when you're doing survival sex, when you're doing
this work and you need the money so much, you
(14:02):
are going to do things that you wouldn't otherwise do
because you're motivated by your basic needs. And so I think, like,
I think that was his gut feeling, was this is
a weird request. This guy's a little weird, but I
need the money.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And yeah, okay. So Max is in the hospital recovering,
and then the police are virtually ignoring him. They're kind
of doing the bare minimum, which is, if you want
to talk about this, we'll talk to you, but we're
not going to pursue. You know, don't call us, we'll
call you kind of deal. After a while, Max, what
does he do after he's recovered and he can walk
and move around and everything. Does he get out of
(14:36):
sex work or does he return He.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, he returns to sex work. He doesn't really have
any you know, a lot of skills, and so that's
what he does. But he also went throughout the city
of Atlanta looking for the handcuff man. He was like,
I'm going to get this guy who got me. He
never found him, but he was like so mad obviously,
so that was the thing. But he does return turn
(15:00):
to hustling.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Well in the article, you say scores at all, which
is incredible.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah, but he told me and this was really sad.
You know, when I met him, he's like, every time
I shower, I see the scars, and I'm reminded of
the tack, Like he can never get away from that,
like because it's a part of him, and that is
really messed up.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Does he have a positive life moving forward after this event?
I mean, I'm assuming he eventually gets out of sex work.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
He does. He eventually gets out of sex work. And
so when I met him, he was with his boyfriend
who he'd been with for like twenty years, twenty five years.
He got in a good relationship with a guy who
loves him, and so that is actually a happy ending
in that sense. You know, this literally scarred him and
(15:54):
emotionally scarred him. But yeah, he did find love, So
that was nice.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
To transition to you know, another victim of the handcuff Man.
Let me ask, did Max say any of his friends said, oh,
I've seen that guy before, I didn't get in the
car with him. Or was this just like this ghost
that pops up and nobody else had seen him except
Max in that part of the community.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So within the gay community and within gay bars at
the time, there were all these rumors that there was
this guy called the handcuff Man because there were a
bunch of unusual attacks were happening. So at this time,
between nineteen eighty four and nineteen eighty six, which is
the period Max was attacked in eighty five, gay men
(16:42):
were being attacked and murdered in Atlanta. Incidents of gay
bashing often went unsolved if they were investigated at all,
and at least eighteen gay men died at the hand
of unidentified perpetrators. So there was this culture of fear.
It was so bad in the investigations. The police were
(17:03):
so bad at not investigating these things because they didn't
care or whatever the reason was, or homophobia, that the
Atlanta Gay Center actually set up training for police officers
and said, please, like give a shit about our community.
But during this time, there were these attacks that were
even unusual for the time. They were around Midtown, which
is where Max applied his trade. There were all these
(17:27):
rumors that there's a serial predator who approached gay men,
offered to pay them to drink, then beat or burn
them and left them for dead. And sometimes he handcuffed
them to polls, which is where the nickname handcuffed Man
came from. So there were rumors. But the rumors, you know,
people didn't know is this a boogeyman? Like is this
(17:47):
a real guy? Are these just rumors? You know, they're
always like no one knows who this guy is, so
maybe it's not real. Maybe people are exaggerating, like no
one knew what it was. This weird like nebulous like
specter like hanging over the gay community.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
And this is not limited to just male sex workers, right,
I mean, we are talking about kind of a whole
gay community feeling vulnerable, particularly the male gay community, feeling
really vulnerable during this time period and feeling like nobody
is on their side.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Right Exactly, It wasn't just sex workers and plus sex
workers and gay men were hanging out in the same clubs.
They were just like certain areas for the hustlers and
certain areas for the non hustlers. So yeah, no, it
was a whole community was feeling like if I get
beaten up or anything, the cops won't care. And a
lot of times it was the cops doing the abuse too,
or the cops saying, hey, give me a blowjob, and
(18:39):
I want to rest you for being gay.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
I mean, these are all significant cases, but let's talk
about kind of the next step for you. Is that
Michael Jordan. Yes, tell me before we talk about his
interaction or his you know, being becoming the victim of
that handcuff man, tell me about what you know about
Michael befo all this happens.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, so Michael. I know less about Michael than I
did about Max. I'd never met him, and he had
the name, you know, his name was the name of
a famous basketball player, so he's harder to track down.
So he was visiting from Florida twenty one years old,
around the same age as Max, coming on vacation, and
ended up in a neighborhood called Midtown, which is the
(19:20):
neighborhood you would be if you were a gay man
visiting from Florida. The issue with and this is nineteen
ninety one. This is six years after Max, after Max
gets attacked. By this time in the nineties, the gay
community really really knows about this handcuff man. I mean,
it's like one of the first things, especially if you're
a hustler, there's a handcuff man. You got to watch
(19:40):
out for this guy. Here's hismo. He's going to drive
up in a car, he wears glasses, he's in his forties.
He's going to ask you to drink something, you know,
And so people were like had the red flag. So
at this time, handcuff Man was trying to find a
lot of victims. But finding people were out of town
was good for him because they didn't have this knowledge.
And this is before the internet, you know, wouldn't get
(20:02):
this warning anywhere. So you get someone who doesn't know
what's going on. So the first day in the city,
the evening of May twelfth, Jordan is milling around midtown
when he's approached by a man in a white Lincoln
town car, similar to how what happened with Strader. He said,
(20:23):
do you want to make some money? And Jordan responded, well,
what do I have to do? The man said Okay,
I'm conducting a study and I'm going to pay you
fifty dollars to drink vodka. Very similar to the trader thing,
but in this case, he said, I'm going to watch
as you become more and more anebriated, and I'll take notes.
(20:45):
So Jordan said, okay, you know, good way to make
some money. I'd agreed to meet the man at the
corner of Fifth in Juniper Streets. Jordan was on the
side of the street. Man arrived, motioned for him to
get in his car. He handed him a fifth vodka
and told him to drink it fast. Jordan down's about
(21:05):
half his bottle. The man leaves the car says, okay,
I'm gonna go get a mixer. When he came back,
the man asked Jordan to get hard. Said he wanted
to see a masturbate, and Michael's like, uh, you know
it's going to be hard to do, given that, like
you gave me all this alcohol, I'm too drunk. He
drank more and blacked out. That's the last Michael remembers
(21:27):
of this encounter. Then what happens is a hotel clerk
finds someone curled up in the fetal position, on the
ground of the parking lot behind the Ponce d Lyon
hotel and this is near where Max was working. The
person on the ground was Michael. He was naked, his
(21:48):
genitals had been wrapped in a rubber band. He had
blood in his mouth and nose. The hotel clerk calls
nine one one. The clerk thought this man was like
thirty to thirty five because he was so and then
once he got cleaned up, he's like, oh my god,
this is just a kid, and a twenty one year
old Michael's Russian and ambulance to the hospital, and like Max,
(22:08):
he had to remain there for a month. But what
was crazy or similar to Max is police were slow
to respond to the scene. They didn't seem to care.
Again and this is six years later and they don't care.
And then the hotel clerk reached out to a gay
rights advocate working with George's chapter of the ACLU, and
(22:31):
her name is Kathy Willard, and she said she called
up the police and said what are you doing? And
she got nothing but run around, as she said, so,
they had deck designated the crime as a biased crime
because you know, Michael was gay. But Kathy thought that
that was also the reason they weren't taking the crime
seriously because he was labeled gay. So I mean, it
(22:52):
was a horrific, horrific crime.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
So Okay, within this six year period, there's two that
are very clearly connected that it seemed very obvious that
the same man committed both of these crimes.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Absolutely, although there are so many other attacks at this
time that are happening, but these are the ones that
actually get traction, like are reported to the police and
people know about them. But there are other attacks, including
in Florida at this time, that are similar. But this
is before police are really communicating. Well, so you could
(23:25):
have attacks. You could be a criminal doing things in
different states and you could send a teletype saying I
have an unusual crime, like they told me about this
in Florida, like that you could do this. But unless
you know you did that and thought that this was
a predator in multiple states, you could get away from
with going from state to state. I hopefully things have
(23:45):
changed now. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Well, yeah, that's interesting, and I know that jurisdictional issues
pop up, and not in this case necessarily, But what
about the media. I mean, this seems like a story
of the media would just be crazy about yellow journalism
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
You would think so, but the media, So with Michael
Jordan's attack, the media starts covering this a little more.
You have basically the media who's covering this attack in
the first like, or covering the attacks in the first
ten years, it's gay media. Gay media are saying there
(24:21):
is this predator in our community. And we had robust
gay media here at etc. Or Etc. Magazine like we
had that, and they were covering they were saying there
all these attacks. Mainstream media, Atlanta Journal, Constitution or it
was Atlanta Journal then not covering it for the most part,
except for in nineteen eighty four, the year before Max's attack,
(24:41):
Susan Fuluti, the famous like feminist writer who was working
for the Atlanta Journal at the time. She covered a
story on hustlers and she's mentioned that there was this
character called the handcuff Man. So did get that press,
but it wasn't until the Michael Jordan attack. News of
(25:02):
that reached a man called Richard Rear and he was
a beat cop working the night shift five pm to
one am at the Atlanta Journal, and he had hung
around cops and other reporters for long enough that he
was like, oh, this sounds like the handcuff man. I've
heard these rumors. And again Richard did not know if
that was a real guy or whatever, but he's like, oh, wow,
(25:23):
this actually sounds like this. So he'd heard like an
officer mentioned them. The cops as well, thought like the
handcuff Man was a myth, but Richard thought, wait, this
is actually you know, here, we have evidence that this
may not be a myth. So Richard actually and Richard's
brother was gay, and so Richard was more sympathetic to
(25:45):
the gay community. And then I think other reporters and
beat cops because he had a family member who was
and he went to the gay bars and he drove
down there and he gave his card instead of you
if you've heard anything like this, I'm looking for the
handcuff man. I'm really digging into this story. And he
was the first reporter to say I'm going to dig
(26:06):
into this. And he would get phone calls where people
would be like, I saw him, he's here, come down,
and so Richard would drive down and he'd be gone.
But Richard did not let up. Like he then was
given a name of who this guy was, and that
became a huge debate in the newsroom. So he started collecting.
(26:27):
He connected with a cop who worked at the gay
bar's JD. Kirkland, and this guy's like, yeah, I know
who is doing this. There's a guy who's been banned
from the Gallas, one of the gay bars. They have
a picture in there. You know, it seemed like everyone,
if you really dug deep, people knew that there was
a guy who was possibly doing this, but they didn't
(26:49):
have enough evidence. It was really weird.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Okay. So Kirkland, who is he's doing? Is he the
one who does security? He's the one who's doing security? Okay?
And what's the name of the place where he's doing secure?
You just said it. I think the Gallas The Gallas? Okay.
So from what I remember from your piece, he's told,
you know, we have this. I don't know how big
it is, but it sounds like we have this this,
you know, file of people who we aren't letting back
(27:13):
in here because they've caused problems for skipping out on
the bill or being disruptive or whatever it is. Keep
an eye out. So at some point does he encounter
the handcuff man yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
So one of the owners of the bar, the Gallas,
said Kirkland with a comb of dirty Harry and the
sheriff for gun smoke. And Kirkland was not gay, but
he's you know, sympathetic and empathetic to gay men. So
patrons were willing to talk to Kirkland. Gay men were
willing to talk to him. They told him what the
(27:47):
handcuff man looked like. So Kirkland was was scoping around
like he had you know, his radar op for someone
who looked like a man in his mid forties, brown hair, glasses,
about five ten, very skinny, like one hundred and thirty pounds.
So on November fourth, nineteen eighty three, a man comes
(28:09):
into the Gallas who looks like what they're describing to him.
So Kirkland wrote a trespass notice. He takes a polaroid
of this man and he puts it in the barred
book where they eject the patrons who, yeah, are being
rowdy like you mentioned, or have him paid their bill,
and Kirkland kicks him out, and handcuffed man is kicked
(28:33):
out for good. They say, you're you know, you're completely banned.
Unlike the other people never come back, and Kirkland says,
after taking his picture, what's your name? The man says,
his name is Robert Lee Bennett Junior. I'm an attorney,
he added, and I'm going to sue you.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
What was his mindset by doing all of that? Was
it to try to get this guy's name, or was
it to try to just get him out of this
bar so that people know he's dangerous or what was it?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I don't know because he had died so I couldn't.
I interviewed his daughter, and his daughter was a little
kid at the time, and she said, you know, it
was one of the few cases he talked about, but
she didn't hear a lot. But I think that his
mindset was a, you know, get him out of the bar.
They didn't have evidence to show this was the guy
(29:23):
committing the crimes, or even they didn't have this as
before Max's incident. I don't know if they had investigated
any incidents like this, so it was all rumor myth.
But they knew enough. Kirkland knew enough and had heard
enough from the patrons to be like, this guy shouldn't
be here. He's causing so much trouble, he's scaring people
that he shouldn't be here. They just didn't have enough
(29:45):
evidence to time. There were a lot of rumors, but
didn't know how dangerous this man could be.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
So tell me what ends up happening. Now we have
an I mean, I don't think it's going to be
a spoiler alert to say this is our guy, this
is the guy, this is handcuff guy. And you know
he makes two big statements, one that his name is
Robert Bennett Junior and the other is that he's an attorney.
What happens next? Does Kirkland go to his superiors in Atlanta,
(30:15):
the police, or what does he do that?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I don't know because there weren't records. I don't know
if he went there, but he kept working at the Gallas, so,
I mean, he knew he'd gotten handcuff man Robert Lee
Bennett Junior, who he suspected was the handcuff man out
of this bar. What seemed to happen was in action,
and I don't know how much he ended up doing.
(30:41):
At one point, Don Honeywell, the owner of the Gallas,
the police, Kirkland hired him to work for the police
to try to start looking and this did not make
it into my story, but to start looking for the
handcuff man. And around this time, a bunch of children
were being murdered in Atlanta and they were all in
the hunt for the Atlanta child murderer. And this is
(31:04):
the other thing police did. They thought this Atlanta child
murderer was a gay man. They began scoping out like
gay bars and things like that. A handcuff man, Robert
le Bennett or actually it was Robert Lee Bennett Junior
who was on their radar and he was taken in
for questioning. He was a suspect for a while, and
then they dismissed him. So this guy was on their radar.
(31:26):
That was the craziest thing. He'd been arrested for kidnapping
a police officer in the nineteen seventies. So this man
whose name they found was not like just some unknown man.
I don't know what investigation they had done, because a
year before they found this same man had been arrested
in connection with murder. So it was a lot.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Yeah, absolutely, So when are they finally making that connection
between Robert Bennett Junior and the handcuff man? And you know,
these horror mutilations that are happening to these men in Atlanta,
and it sounds like Florida too.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Yeah, so what happened was really the media pushing this.
So two weeks so, this assault on Michael happens, the
police start investigating more. Richard, the journalist starts investigating more.
He publishes an article in the Atlanta Journal saying gay
prostitutes in fear of sadists, He doesn't name the handcuffed man,
(32:28):
even though he has the name, because of Kirkland, right,
not really, Actually it wasn't because of Kirkland. It was
because they were worried. The paper was worried about being sued. Basically,
Richard knew or thought Robert was the guy. But if
they falsely published this allegation, if it wasn't true, a
(32:50):
the guy you're charging is a lawyer, so he's already
threatened a lawsuit. You know, if they got it wrong,
they could be in trouble. So didn't name it. He
wrote a few articles tying Bennett. You know, Richard did
some amazing digging found out that Robert Lee Bennett Junior
had been a suspect in the Lena child murders. He
(33:13):
published multiple articles and the paper kept saying, do not
name him, do not name him. And finally Richard was like,
I feel like there's going to be another attack coming.
We have to name him. We have to get this
man off the streets. And so there's a back and
forth in the newsroom and finally the newsroom agreed to
let him name him. Wow, and that this was May
(33:34):
thirty first. Richard's reporting said Michael had identified Robert Lee
Bennett Junior as the last person he saw before losing
consciousness during his attack. The shocking part about this story
was that Richard found out that police still hadn't spoken
to Robert Lee Bennett Junior at all. It's like, what, like,
(33:57):
you know, you have this brutal attack, this guy been
on your raidar, this guy's been a suspect in Atlanta
child murders. You're not speaking to him? Like it was infuriating.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
At what point do we move towards this being something
that's chargeable that you know the police are finally saying, okay,
well we obviously I would think it would have been
with the media, especially with a newspaper, the newspaper in Atlanta,
But I mean, does it take more time?
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Well that sped things up a bit, but it does
take more time, and it also takes the involvement of
a Florida case. So a few months before Richard names
Robert Lee Bennett Junior, there's a man in Florida who
meets Robert Lee Bennett outside the Salvation Army. This guy
(34:45):
is a downs luck guy, has children, same sort of
mo o, gets picked up, says hey, want to drink something.
He gets in the car, he drinks the thing. The
next thing he knows, who wakes up and he's on
fire in the mangroves. The police find this guy because
there's a report that there's a fire in the mangroves. Well,
(35:07):
and this is in the Tampa, Florida area. Well, they
come over, it's a human body on fire. That is
not what they were expecting. The burns were so bad
that both his legs had to be amputated. The doctors thought,
this guy's not going to live overnight. So they're trying
to figure out who did this to who did this
to you? The man, his name was Gary Klapp, is
going in and out of consciousness, doesn't know and they're like,
(35:29):
he's gonna die, he won't know. He manages to survive
and some of the prosecutors told me who I interviewed,
were like, we think the high alcohol content helped him survive.
For some reason. He had like this ridiculously high alcohol
content in his body. He had fourth degree burns on
nearly half his body. And the detectives interview him and
(35:51):
he starts recovering. He said that the man who attacked
him drove a Lincoln town car. He described all these people,
and you know, he's forty five years old. He describes
Robert Lee Bennett Junior, the investigator in Atlanta. He sees
a teletype about the handcuffed man and about these attacks
(36:14):
happening in Atlanta, and he calls in Atlanta and says,
we got the same thing in Florida. And they start
connecting dots and they the Florida police are the first
ones to issue a warrant. So we had the Michael
Jordan attack happening in May, but it wasn't there wasn't
a warrant even though it was connected with Robert Lee Medditt.
(36:36):
The first warrant was happening in June in Tampa. Finally,
at that time, Atlanta police finally bring Robert Lee Bennett
Junior in for questioning in Atlanta. He's taken into custody
for the Tampa warrant. So that's when things start happening.
You have to ask. You have someone who loses their
(36:57):
legs and another person who's severely burned, and that's when
things start to shift.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
What does Bennet say about this? So he's brought in
and does he say, I have no idea what you're
talking about.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yes, So he keeps maintaining his innocence and he is,
you know, full of himself, and he is kind of,
you know, an asshole and obviously but he is kind
of like pretentious and like it's strange. So he said,
I'm here to tell the Atlanta police and this is
on video two in the city of Atlanta. I am
(37:31):
not the handcuffed man. He maintains his innocence and he
complains about the jail because he's like, I'm a lawyer.
He's like, oh, I wasn't breakfast, you know all this stuff.
It's like, what you went to breakfast? Why do you
you know? So anyway, he yeah, he claims he has
nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
What do we know about him as a person. We
know he's an attorney. What else do we know.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
So Bennett was adopted. He came from this wealthy family
in Twanda, Pia, this small town, and his dad was
owner of a bank there. His mom was a homemaker
and social life. But if you go I went to
Twana for the story, you go to the Bennett's names
are still on the historical Society. The Bennett mansion has
(38:15):
like a little plaque like they were the Kennedys of Twanda.
Every single thing they did was put in the newspapers,
like you look at all the old records, like, oh,
you know missus Bennett, like Annabelle Bennett, like went on
a trip to Africa. Okay, we're gonna put that in
the paper. All this stuff, and he was like the
prodigal son. He was adopted at twenty two months. I
(38:38):
don't know if he ever knew his birth parents. I
don't think he did. But he was super wealthy. He
grew up in a Victorian mansion that his mom nicknamed Nirvana.
It had tiffany shirling silver, it had pianos. He lived
the life and everyone I talked to his best friend
(38:59):
at the time, woman who was also his girlfriend a
little bit, but she said everyone would come over to
his house. Most of his friends were the girls. Everyone
sort of knew he was a feminine. They didn't call
it gay. Then he didn't come out, and he was
like popular. He was in the glee club. He liked
to cross stitch. He was in the student newspaper. The
(39:20):
worst thing his best friend told me that he ever
did when they were growing up, and they were very tight,
very close. They went to prom together. All this stuff
was throw pumpkin off the bridge. So that was the
worst thing. So it wasn't like, you know, there's some
stories of people who in their life they were torturing animals.
He was not that person torturing animals. He was a
(39:41):
popular kid. He didn't get bullied, He didn't you know,
he wasn't reclusive. He was involved in the community, in
the school community.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
He ends up getting married to a woman, right, and
then he says, well I'm impotent, and she says okay,
and you know, life goes on.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, So he moves to so after in Tuanda, he
ends up getting a law degree from Emory, moving back
to Tauana to work with his dad, and then getting
in trouble with the police when he's in an incident
with a man a sexual incident. Then he gets the
police say, hey, Robert Lee Bennett Senior, the father, get
(40:20):
your son out of here because he's there are he was. Also,
they knew he was sending letters to people that said
for a gay all time, come with me to Atlanta.
There were rumors he was molesting young boys for money,
like poor boys and the whole It is a very
tight net, small community. All this stuff was hurt. But
because he was so privileged and his family was so privileged,
(40:42):
the police, and that's a big part of the story
that's disturbing. The police instead of saying they could have
stopped it, that they could have said, oh, your molesting children,
let's put you in jail. But instead he was this
wonderful or his parents were really wonderful members of the community,
so they said, just go to Atlanta. He goes there,
works for a law firm, meets this woman and they
(41:03):
get married. She's thirty four, he's twenty nine, and like
you said, she says, He says, I'm impotent. She says
that's fine. Sandra was her name, and he parades her around.
He finally gets this heterosexual life that gives him respect,
but he ends up quitting his job. Well, he then
(41:23):
moves from the law from to working in a jewelry store,
then quits his job and hangs around in a robe
all day. Well, Sandra's like, what the hell? Like, this
isn't good. Yeah, and so the marriage does not go well.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Wow, Okay, So when do you think he makes this turn?
I mean, there are accusations of molestation that you know,
and he has other things that seem to be ramping
up towards really major things. At what point do you
think that things really changed for him and turns him
into this monster who does these terrible things to these men.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Yeah, I mean I do think it's self lowly and
I do think it's really really sad in a way.
I mean, he did horrible things, but I don't think
he felt comfortable being gay. He never fully came out.
He barely admitted it at one point. I think the
turn happened. It was starting in the seventies in Twanda.
But I think when he moved to Atlanta and got
(42:20):
out of a community where everyone knew him, where it
was oppressive, where he couldn't be himself. He moved to
this other community and started a double life. But there
was a big enough gay community in Atlanta, like he
thought he could be anonymous, but it was like the
jackal hide thing, like he had this side of him
that he wanted to get rid of that he wanted
(42:40):
to kill the gay side of him. He did everything
he could to fight against this. He got married, he
went to law school, he did everything he was supposed
to do, but he couldn't get away. So that's where
I think, Like in the early eighties in Atlanta, that's
when he turned and he did have a boyfriend. That
(43:02):
boyfriend ended up dead or it was a rumored boyfriend
and he was a suspect and that and that was
in eighty two when he was married to Sandra, and
that's when she left him. She said she saw him.
She was getting off the bus stop from work and
she saw her husband getting arrested and he said, like,
I'm didn't do it, or I'll explain or whatever. And
she found out I was for murder. And there was
(43:23):
this whole court case, like his divorce case. And you know,
she said, my husband's a violent homosexual. So she had
which is unbelievable to say in they ate or at
any time, but especially at this time. And then there
were detectives who testify and were like, oh, we were
interviewing hustlers and they said he's scary and violent and
does all this stuff, and so like the police had
(43:45):
been doing an investigation that this is when I think
he turned. But this was what was frustrating. It was like, Okay,
we know he's doing this, the police knows, and they're
doing nothing. And he continued. And so for him, I
think setting people on fire and setting gay men on fire,
it was kind of like like we had murders here
at massage parlors of sex workers at massage parlors, and
(44:09):
the man doing them was saying he was trying to
destroy temptation. I feel like there's a similarity between Robert
Lee Bennett where he was like this is in me.
I can't destroy it, so I will destroy the people
that you know represent that, and that is like so disturbing.
But that was his mo and it never I mean,
there's no evidence he had sex with these people, there's
(44:31):
no evidence of anything like that. Maybe he did, and
you know, it was this compulsion. It was like every
single day he was out there trying to contact people,
trying to assault people. It was really and I think, yeah,
it was something psychological like that.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
So what does he put on trial for. He's charged
ultimately and it's for the attack on whom.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
So he is charged for the attack on Gary Klath.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
This is Florida, right in.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
The Florida case, because Gary was able identify And if
Gary had died, I always think about if Gary had died,
which he they thought he would, would this have ever
come to light, Would of Atlanta police have really done anything? Maybe?
Maybe not. But he's put on trial for that, and
it was it was a hard case because Gary was
(45:18):
so like his alcohol level was so high, and so
to convince a jury that that was really high, that
like he was reliable was really difficult. So they did
something called the Williams Rule where the prosecutors, which was
it was you were allowed to find similar cases that
had happened to different states and use them to make
(45:41):
your case. So that's when they used Michael Jordan and
Max Schrader and they said, we will fly you down
here to make this case. But the crazy thing I
talked to the prosecutors and they were like, there were
so many other people we found out who'd been his victims,
and they did not want to come here because they
didn't want to talk about their sex life in a trial.
(46:04):
And they were sympathetic. The prosecutors were like, I get it.
But some of them they convinced when they said, look,
this is this guy's either has killed someone, we think
he's killed someone, or he's going to kill someone like
and then they convinced. But there were so many they
talked to. There were gay clubs in Tampa that had
had these things happen. I mean, there was a huge thing.
(46:24):
The amount of people that got to testify were a handful,
and they were really brave. And that's how they got
him was by the Williams rule and having they had
to show. They were able to show a pattern that
this had happened and that Max and other people had
identified him as who had attacked them, and so that
was that was how they were able to do it.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
But despite that, despite Max and Gary, he still is
offered a plea deal.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
I know, not only has he offered a plea deal,
but while he's like on trial and while this is
all going, he's allowed to roam free and visit his
mom and he keeps trying to pick up men, and
he's allowed out on bail, but he is offered a
pleadal and members of the gay community were chanting in
(47:12):
the courtroom shame, shame, shame. And you know, as the
gay advocates said, and I agree with if he'd been
attacking straight people, if he'd been attacking people who weren't
sex workers, would he have been offered this, Would he
be been given such little time? No way? And I
(47:33):
completely agree with that. And he, you know, his attorney
who I interviewed, was like this whole time. He thought
the whole thing was an inconvenience. He was so privileged
and thought, eh, you know, I'm not you know, I'm
going to get off because I've gotten off so many
times before. And he was surprised to even get put
in prison, like he thought. You know, that's how delusional
(47:56):
he was.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
There's a couple of things that are really just disturbing
to me. Number one is, of course he got he
ended up with seventeen years, right, Yes, So that must
have been very scary for the families and and you know,
the survivors. On the surface, it's a total insult for
what ended up happening and what he was doing and
(48:17):
the kind of predator he was that just seems like
an incredibly short amount of time. And then there's the
thought that, oh, my god, he's going to get out,
you know this in this certain year. But ultimately, you know,
there is some kind of a resolution. Tell me kind
of what happens before he gets out.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Yes, so he gets seventeen years. The amount of crimes
that we even have evidence for, that's a super short
period of time. And yeah, he wasn't the type where
it's like, oh, if he gets out, he'll be reformed.
Oh and one thing to back up, the prosecutors that
I interviewed said they had heard he was sick and
was only going to live ten years, and so that
(48:58):
was one of the reasons that they were like, okay,
seventeen years is okay. But he dies in prison in
nineteen ninety eight, and he'd only been in prison about
five years at this time and he dies of a stroke.
And his own lawyer, when I interviewed her, was like,
he got the life sentence that he deserved by dying
(49:20):
in prison. And I don't mean to laugh then, but
like she for your own lawyer to say that, like,
it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
And I think one thing that was interesting was sort
of his ending in his time in prison. If I'm
remembering this right, he wanted to be in isolation first, right,
so you are right.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
So he's placed a solitary confinement at his own request,
which is weird. But actually it's not weird because when
I talked to his lawyer, it's like, they'll go after
you if you've gone after if you've done heinous crimes
like this, like you are a target, and so I
think it was a protective thing. But then he was
going buggy, his lawyer said, in solitary as one does,
(50:00):
until he was put in the general prison population and
his mom died. While he was in prison, he was
very close to his mother, who was supposed to receive
a one point five million dollar inheritance from him. His
mother seemed to never admitted that her son did this stuff,
like maybe at some levels she knew, but he was
like her prize child, like only child, dressed him like
(50:24):
little Lord faunt LeRoi. One year before he was supposed
to get out, he had a stroke and died behind bars.
There were rumors that he died of HIV related stuff.
I don't know. I couldn't find out any other causes
of death.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
You know, it sounds like the bulk of his estate
went to the Historical Society and to the Boy Scouts.
He left twenty five thousand dollars to the son of
his friend, Ellie Harden Smith in fifteen thousand to the
local country club. This is the nasty part to me,
with the condition that this bequest be acknowledged and established
as a memorial to my grandfather, the honorable William Maxwell,
(51:01):
my mother, and myself Robert Lee Bennett Junior. And he
also wanted a memorial maide in honor of he and
his mother as a condition of the gift to the
County Library. And I mean that just makes me want
to say, fuck off all of that. And I hope
none of that happened.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Yeah, no, it really was infuriating, And I don't know
the Boy Scouts, I think refused his gift.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Good. Did anybody freaking learn anything from this story? I mean,
is it? What was the takeaway for these communities and
maybe even the police officers at this point?
Speaker 2 (51:36):
So did anyone learn anything from this story? I would
like to believe that police officers, Well, one of the
things that came from this was partly the training of
police officers on sensitivity training. I'm not sure if the
community learned a ton, but I do think that the
(51:59):
publicity and this did get you know, publicity in Florida
as well, was like that the victims of him, who
were sex workers and gay men, that they were real people,
they had value, their voices mattered, they mattered, and you know,
they ended up like we should listen to them because
they ended up getting this predator behind bars. Now, when
(52:20):
I talk, I'm an optimistic person. When I talked to Richard,
he was like, I'd like to believe things have changed,
But if the same thing happened in Atlanta today, what
we care if a hustler died And I put this
in my article and he this quote from him, and
he's like, no, we would care much more if someone
died in the wealthy Buckhead community in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and America Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(53:17):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked
(53:38):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked, and on Facebook
at wicked Words Pod
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You know, I think it's easy to look back on
this and go, oh, that was a weird request. He
beat himself up and saying I should have said no.
I was too smart for that.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:50):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. For years, a predator paraded
on gay men in Atlanta. He was known as the
handcuff Man. He attacked male sex workers, disfigured them horribly,
(01:15):
and then left them for dead. Journalist Hallie Lieberman wrote
a fantastic piece for the Atavist magazine called The Devil
Went down to Georgia Well let's get started, And I
know you want to start with Max, see somebody you
actually know. So what a unique interviewee for you to have,
What a great source.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, I actually like got to meet him in person
and he showed me. So. Max grew up in Atlanta
in the nineteen seventies, sixties and seventies, and he came
from like a really rough home. His dad was not
really in the picture. He was mostly raised by his mom.
(01:55):
His mom was an alcoholic and she worked at this
diner in Atlanta. And near the diner when Max became,
you know, a teenager, there are a bunch of boys
who hung out there and they were selling sex. And
when I say boys, they were like thirteen years old,
twelve years old, really insanely young, and they would sit
(02:18):
on the yellow newspaper boxes that were near this theater,
the Plaza Theater, and men would drive by and look at,
you know, the boys and decide if they wanted to
hire one for sex or you know whatever sex act.
So Max started doing this or the other boys would
(02:39):
actually walk to the back of the Plaza theater and
he showed me this, like we did this at age
fifty nine. He showed me what he did at thirteen,
because these buildings are still here. He walked to the
back that's where the man would have the car and
would pick him up and then they would do the act.
They would pay the money and then he'd be off
and Max would have some and that was his job.
(03:02):
And he was also getting into like gangs, and he
was doing all this kind of stuff because that was
he had a really rough home life. They didn't have
a lot of money. He was kind of trying to
make money, trying to live in Atlanta, and that was
how he started doing sex work.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Set the scene for that time period separately from the
view of being gay, homosexual, whatever term they would have used,
and then going into sex work, which is you know,
another part of this what was it like for Max
or an adult a male sex worker in this time period.
(03:43):
I mean, were they constantly harassed by police or did
people intervene to try to help?
Speaker 2 (03:48):
They did not intervene as much as they should have.
As Max said, like this was you know, He's like,
we would call it child mole station today and I
was like, well, when we've called it child molization then too,
but at the time, like for being a sex worker,
so it was a time in fast forward to when
he was a little older in the nineteen seventies nineteen eighties,
(04:12):
time when being gay was illegal, even in the early seventies,
and it was in the DSM as a mental disorder,
so it was a mental disorder. Sex work was illegal.
Sex were still legal except in Nevada and a few
counties in the US, and AIDS came to the four
(04:32):
starting in the nineteen eighties, and that's when Max was
really working, you know, as a young adult. AIDS was
a death sentence, and many people argue that gay men
deserved it. And the thing was, since since being gay
or having gay sex was illegal and sex work was illegal,
the police didn't really distinguish between gay mail sex worker
(04:56):
and just a gay man. If you and a lot
of gay men were having sex in the same places
that the sex workers were, so they were harassing both
of them. So like you just like and you were
harassed by the police, then you were harassed by people
in the community. Like every gay man who was alive
at this time has talked about bottles being thrown at them,
talking about all this stuff. So it was even in
the gay neighborhoods, it was just a culture of harassment.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
How long is Max doing this before he becomes a
major part of your story.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
So Max is doing sex work for about eight years
as a teenager before like teenager and young adult before
he becomes a part of his story because he started
at age thirteen. So that was a pretty crazy you know,
it's crazy that he was so young.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
So is that when he first encounters the handcuff man.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Max was twenty one. When he first encountered the handcuff man.
Max knew this job was dangerous. So someone had pulled
a gun on him. You know, when he was a teenager,
a female sex worker who was his friend had been killed.
He said they found her head in one dumpster, her
body and the other her limbs in the other, so
like in a horrific way. So he was a street
(06:10):
savvy kind of guy. I mean he had to be.
You had to be to literally survive in this time.
So it wasn't like we had this naive guy who
just got into sex work. He'd been doing it for
a long time. He had to vet his clients for
a really good reason. But what happened was so this
was April nineteen eighty five, HIV is spreading through the
(06:34):
gay community. People. There are all sorts of rumors about
how you get it, and so people don't know. So
gay men people are staying far away from them. So
there's all that stuff going on. But it was April
nineteen eighty five. Max was hustling on Ponce de Leon Avenue,
a popular street in Atlanta, and a thin man drove up,
(06:55):
rolled down his car window. He was in a Lincoln
town car, and asked him if he wanted to make
some money. This was not unusual. This was a you know,
the kind of transaction he did all the time. This
guy looked like a professional or not a professional, but
like not intimidating. He was. He wore glasses, he had
a pressed shirt. He seemed like a normal guy. The
(07:17):
man asked Max to drink some alcohol with him, and
Max said, okay, sure, you know, I'll do this for
a little cash. So he's standing there he's drinking alcohol
with the man. He starts to feel funny. Wasn't sure
what's going on. Had the man slipped him something. Max
collapses to the ground and the man pulls him into
(07:40):
the car. Max is begging, don't hurt me. As this
happens he knew something was off, but he was completely
out of it on you know, the alcohol or whatever
was mixed into the alcohol, and Max drank a lot
so he could handle his alcohol. So he gets in
the car. He is stuck with this man who's picked
(08:01):
him up. The man drives him to a wooded area.
He parks. He drags Max into this patch of kudzu,
and Max is like, what the hell is going on?
You know, this is not a normal hookup, like usually
it would just have sex and it would be over
in fifteen minutes whatever. So he's in this remote area,
(08:23):
he's in this foliage and then he sees the guy
who picked him up pour this liquid onto his groin
and then light a match, And as he lights a match,
it illuminates the man's face in this this ghoulish way.
Then Max could never forget. Then the man drops the
(08:43):
match onto Max's crotch and Max catches fire. He is
in excruciating pain, and he starts drifting in and out
of consciousness, in so much pain, on fire. He cries
for help when he has the energy, but he doesn't
have a lot of energy obviously, because he's been drugged
(09:05):
and he's on fire. Around nine point thirty PM, a
man who happened to be a nurse was driving home
with his girlfriend when he spotted a naked figure on
the side of the road. So somehow Max had managed
to move in somewhere where people could see him. The
nurse stopped, saw Max's condition, rushed home to call the police,
(09:28):
and got some blankets to wrap Max in. And Max
thought to himself, I guess God had sent him. That
was how close Max was to dying.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Where in the timeline are we, as far as you're concerned,
what you think the timeline is for the handcuff man.
Is this sort of at the beginning of when he
was targeting young men or is it the middle? Or
where are we?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
We are in the middle of the timeline. He had
been targeting young men for at least nine years because
he'd been kicked out, or ten because he'd been kicked
out of Tawanda, Pa literally by the sheriff.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
So Max is lucky to be alive because a lot
of these young men that he and boys that he
encounters don't end up alive. So are you thinking that
the handcuffed man is intending that this is going to
kill him? Absolutely? This is the way that it's going
to happen or or what do you think the mindset was.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
So it seemed like the mindset was and obviously have
no way of knowing, but the mindset was, I don't
care if this person lives or dies. I mean, if
you're lighting someone on fire, leaving them in like somewhere
in Atlanta, like in the early morning hours, I mean
the chances that this person are survived, I mean, who knows,
like fifty to fifty Like, he didn't care. He didn't
(10:51):
value the life of the men he was doing this too.
They were very low on the totem pole of society.
They were people. And this is why predators target sex workers,
because there are people they assume that society doesn't care about.
They assumed that they won't be missed. I've interviewed sex workers.
The sex worker who used to be a LAPD cop,
(11:15):
and she said they had a nickname for crimes a
murders involving sex workers and it was nhi no human involved.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
It's awful, totally awful.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
And that was in the eighties, and so that was
around this time. And so if you're a criminal, if
you're a murderer, you're someone violet. You are going to
target this person who police are going to go. Oh,
their life doesn't matter.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So an ambulance comes, I'm assuming to find Max. Thank
god for that nurse.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Max was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. His
burns were so severe that he stayed there for six weeks.
He had to wear a diaper, like because the burns
were on his genitals. He wasn't sure if his penis
would ever work again. That's how he was making money.
And just also, like, your quality of life is terribly
(12:02):
he burns on his thighs. I mean it was excruciatingly
painful during this time. The police came to see him once,
they left a business card and meanwhile, I mean Max
is suffering. He's not completely there. You know, he's recovering.
They left this business card and said to call if
he wants to talk. He misplaced the card and never
(12:25):
heard from the cops again. And that was that.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
This is specifically on the lower part of his body,
right where this liquid was poured. It wasn't on his
face orning. It was a lower part of the body. Okay,
So that says to you, what just initially, if you
were an investigator on the scene, the lower part of
the body. What do you think that would indicate to someone?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
It was? It was so like seemed targeted to gay
men's sexuality, Like pinpointed, like, I'm pouring this liquid on
men's genitals. I'm preventing them from ever expressing their sexuality
like that. To me, that's what it reminded me of.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
So did Max say that when he was first encountering
this man? I know, he was excited about the forty
or fifty bucks and the alcohol and everything. Did he
have like a gut feeling that he ignored? I read
about that a lot like that. People who survive assault.
Sometimes they're like, I had a gut feeling, but I
just ignored it. Did he talk about that to you
at all?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
He didn't say that he had a gut feeling, but
he said that the guy was a little weird. So
I guess that was his version of gut feeling. You know.
I think it's easy to look back on this and go, oh,
that was a weird request because that was not a
normal request for him. And you know what, he beat
himself up, Max, like in saying I should have said no,
(13:41):
I was too smart for that, and that's the whole
like victims blaming themselves thing. But I think maybe that
was his gut feeling, like he thought this was a
little too good to be true, this was a weird request,
but I need the money, you know. I mean, it's
really hard when you're doing survival sex, when you're doing
this work and you need the money so much, you
(14:02):
are going to do things that you wouldn't otherwise do
because you're motivated by your basic needs. And so I think, like,
I think that was his gut feeling, was this is
a weird request. This guy's a little weird, but I
need the money.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And yeah, okay. So Max is in the hospital recovering,
and then the police are virtually ignoring him. They're kind
of doing the bare minimum, which is, if you want
to talk about this, we'll talk to you, but we're
not going to pursue. You know, don't call us, we'll
call you kind of deal. After a while, Max, what
does he do after he's recovered and he can walk
and move around and everything. Does he get out of
(14:36):
sex work or does he return He.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, he returns to sex work. He doesn't really have
any you know, a lot of skills, and so that's
what he does. But he also went throughout the city
of Atlanta looking for the handcuff man. He was like,
I'm going to get this guy who got me. He
never found him, but he was like so mad obviously,
so that was the thing. But he does return turn
(15:00):
to hustling.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Well in the article, you say scores at all, which
is incredible.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah, but he told me and this was really sad.
You know, when I met him, he's like, every time
I shower, I see the scars, and I'm reminded of
the tack, Like he can never get away from that,
like because it's a part of him, and that is
really messed up.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Does he have a positive life moving forward after this event?
I mean, I'm assuming he eventually gets out of sex work.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
He does. He eventually gets out of sex work. And
so when I met him, he was with his boyfriend
who he'd been with for like twenty years, twenty five years.
He got in a good relationship with a guy who
loves him, and so that is actually a happy ending
in that sense. You know, this literally scarred him and
(15:54):
emotionally scarred him. But yeah, he did find love, So
that was nice.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
To transition to you know, another victim of the handcuff Man.
Let me ask, did Max say any of his friends said, oh,
I've seen that guy before, I didn't get in the
car with him. Or was this just like this ghost
that pops up and nobody else had seen him except
Max in that part of the community.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So within the gay community and within gay bars at
the time, there were all these rumors that there was
this guy called the handcuff Man because there were a
bunch of unusual attacks were happening. So at this time,
between nineteen eighty four and nineteen eighty six, which is
the period Max was attacked in eighty five, gay men
(16:42):
were being attacked and murdered in Atlanta. Incidents of gay
bashing often went unsolved if they were investigated at all,
and at least eighteen gay men died at the hand
of unidentified perpetrators. So there was this culture of fear.
It was so bad in the investigations. The police were
(17:03):
so bad at not investigating these things because they didn't
care or whatever the reason was, or homophobia, that the
Atlanta Gay Center actually set up training for police officers
and said, please, like give a shit about our community.
But during this time, there were these attacks that were
even unusual for the time. They were around Midtown, which
is where Max applied his trade. There were all these
(17:27):
rumors that there's a serial predator who approached gay men,
offered to pay them to drink, then beat or burn
them and left them for dead. And sometimes he handcuffed
them to polls, which is where the nickname handcuffed Man
came from. So there were rumors. But the rumors, you know,
people didn't know is this a boogeyman? Like is this
(17:47):
a real guy? Are these just rumors? You know, they're
always like no one knows who this guy is, so
maybe it's not real. Maybe people are exaggerating, like no
one knew what it was. This weird like nebulous like
specter like hanging over the gay community.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
And this is not limited to just male sex workers, right,
I mean, we are talking about kind of a whole
gay community feeling vulnerable, particularly the male gay community, feeling
really vulnerable during this time period and feeling like nobody
is on their side.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Right Exactly, It wasn't just sex workers and plus sex
workers and gay men were hanging out in the same clubs.
They were just like certain areas for the hustlers and
certain areas for the non hustlers. So yeah, no, it
was a whole community was feeling like if I get
beaten up or anything, the cops won't care. And a
lot of times it was the cops doing the abuse too,
or the cops saying, hey, give me a blowjob, and
(18:39):
I want to rest you for being gay.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
I mean, these are all significant cases, but let's talk
about kind of the next step for you. Is that
Michael Jordan. Yes, tell me before we talk about his
interaction or his you know, being becoming the victim of
that handcuff man, tell me about what you know about
Michael befo all this happens.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, so Michael. I know less about Michael than I
did about Max. I'd never met him, and he had
the name, you know, his name was the name of
a famous basketball player, so he's harder to track down.
So he was visiting from Florida twenty one years old,
around the same age as Max, coming on vacation, and
ended up in a neighborhood called Midtown, which is the
(19:20):
neighborhood you would be if you were a gay man
visiting from Florida. The issue with and this is nineteen
ninety one. This is six years after Max, after Max
gets attacked. By this time in the nineties, the gay
community really really knows about this handcuff man. I mean,
it's like one of the first things, especially if you're
a hustler, there's a handcuff man. You got to watch
(19:40):
out for this guy. Here's hismo. He's going to drive
up in a car, he wears glasses, he's in his forties.
He's going to ask you to drink something, you know,
And so people were like had the red flag. So
at this time, handcuff Man was trying to find a
lot of victims. But finding people were out of town
was good for him because they didn't have this knowledge.
And this is before the internet, you know, wouldn't get
(20:02):
this warning anywhere. So you get someone who doesn't know
what's going on. So the first day in the city,
the evening of May twelfth, Jordan is milling around midtown
when he's approached by a man in a white Lincoln
town car, similar to how what happened with Strader. He said,
(20:23):
do you want to make some money? And Jordan responded, well,
what do I have to do? The man said Okay,
I'm conducting a study and I'm going to pay you
fifty dollars to drink vodka. Very similar to the trader thing,
but in this case, he said, I'm going to watch
as you become more and more anebriated, and I'll take notes.
(20:45):
So Jordan said, okay, you know, good way to make
some money. I'd agreed to meet the man at the
corner of Fifth in Juniper Streets. Jordan was on the
side of the street. Man arrived, motioned for him to
get in his car. He handed him a fifth vodka
and told him to drink it fast. Jordan down's about
(21:05):
half his bottle. The man leaves the car says, okay,
I'm gonna go get a mixer. When he came back,
the man asked Jordan to get hard. Said he wanted
to see a masturbate, and Michael's like, uh, you know
it's going to be hard to do, given that, like
you gave me all this alcohol, I'm too drunk. He
drank more and blacked out. That's the last Michael remembers
(21:27):
of this encounter. Then what happens is a hotel clerk
finds someone curled up in the fetal position, on the
ground of the parking lot behind the Ponce d Lyon
hotel and this is near where Max was working. The
person on the ground was Michael. He was naked, his
(21:48):
genitals had been wrapped in a rubber band. He had
blood in his mouth and nose. The hotel clerk calls
nine one one. The clerk thought this man was like
thirty to thirty five because he was so and then
once he got cleaned up, he's like, oh my god,
this is just a kid, and a twenty one year
old Michael's Russian and ambulance to the hospital, and like Max,
(22:08):
he had to remain there for a month. But what
was crazy or similar to Max is police were slow
to respond to the scene. They didn't seem to care.
Again and this is six years later and they don't care.
And then the hotel clerk reached out to a gay
rights advocate working with George's chapter of the ACLU, and
(22:31):
her name is Kathy Willard, and she said she called
up the police and said what are you doing? And
she got nothing but run around, as she said, so,
they had deck designated the crime as a biased crime
because you know, Michael was gay. But Kathy thought that
that was also the reason they weren't taking the crime
seriously because he was labeled gay. So I mean, it
(22:52):
was a horrific, horrific crime.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
So Okay, within this six year period, there's two that
are very clearly connected that it seemed very obvious that
the same man committed both of these crimes.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Absolutely, although there are so many other attacks at this
time that are happening, but these are the ones that
actually get traction, like are reported to the police and
people know about them. But there are other attacks, including
in Florida at this time, that are similar. But this
is before police are really communicating. Well, so you could
(23:25):
have attacks. You could be a criminal doing things in
different states and you could send a teletype saying I
have an unusual crime, like they told me about this
in Florida, like that you could do this. But unless
you know you did that and thought that this was
a predator in multiple states, you could get away from
with going from state to state. I hopefully things have
(23:45):
changed now. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Well, yeah, that's interesting, and I know that jurisdictional issues
pop up, and not in this case necessarily, But what
about the media. I mean, this seems like a story
of the media would just be crazy about yellow journalism
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
You would think so, but the media, So with Michael
Jordan's attack, the media starts covering this a little more.
You have basically the media who's covering this attack in
the first like, or covering the attacks in the first
ten years, it's gay media. Gay media are saying there
(24:21):
is this predator in our community. And we had robust
gay media here at etc. Or Etc. Magazine like we
had that, and they were covering they were saying there
all these attacks. Mainstream media, Atlanta Journal, Constitution or it
was Atlanta Journal then not covering it for the most part,
except for in nineteen eighty four, the year before Max's attack,
(24:41):
Susan Fuluti, the famous like feminist writer who was working
for the Atlanta Journal at the time. She covered a
story on hustlers and she's mentioned that there was this
character called the handcuff Man. So did get that press,
but it wasn't until the Michael Jordan attack. News of
(25:02):
that reached a man called Richard Rear and he was
a beat cop working the night shift five pm to
one am at the Atlanta Journal, and he had hung
around cops and other reporters for long enough that he
was like, oh, this sounds like the handcuff man. I've
heard these rumors. And again Richard did not know if
that was a real guy or whatever, but he's like, oh, wow,
(25:23):
this actually sounds like this. So he'd heard like an
officer mentioned them. The cops as well, thought like the
handcuff Man was a myth, but Richard thought, wait, this
is actually you know, here, we have evidence that this
may not be a myth. So Richard actually and Richard's
brother was gay, and so Richard was more sympathetic to
(25:45):
the gay community. And then I think other reporters and
beat cops because he had a family member who was
and he went to the gay bars and he drove
down there and he gave his card instead of you
if you've heard anything like this, I'm looking for the
handcuff man. I'm really digging into this story. And he
was the first reporter to say I'm going to dig
(26:06):
into this. And he would get phone calls where people
would be like, I saw him, he's here, come down,
and so Richard would drive down and he'd be gone.
But Richard did not let up. Like he then was
given a name of who this guy was, and that
became a huge debate in the newsroom. So he started collecting.
(26:27):
He connected with a cop who worked at the gay
bar's JD. Kirkland, and this guy's like, yeah, I know
who is doing this. There's a guy who's been banned
from the Gallas, one of the gay bars. They have
a picture in there. You know, it seemed like everyone,
if you really dug deep, people knew that there was
a guy who was possibly doing this, but they didn't
(26:49):
have enough evidence. It was really weird.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Okay. So Kirkland, who is he's doing? Is he the
one who does security? He's the one who's doing security? Okay?
And what's the name of the place where he's doing secure?
You just said it. I think the Gallas The Gallas? Okay.
So from what I remember from your piece, he's told,
you know, we have this. I don't know how big
it is, but it sounds like we have this this,
you know, file of people who we aren't letting back
(27:13):
in here because they've caused problems for skipping out on
the bill or being disruptive or whatever it is. Keep
an eye out. So at some point does he encounter
the handcuff man yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
So one of the owners of the bar, the Gallas,
said Kirkland with a comb of dirty Harry and the
sheriff for gun smoke. And Kirkland was not gay, but
he's you know, sympathetic and empathetic to gay men. So
patrons were willing to talk to Kirkland. Gay men were
willing to talk to him. They told him what the
(27:47):
handcuff man looked like. So Kirkland was was scoping around
like he had you know, his radar op for someone
who looked like a man in his mid forties, brown hair, glasses,
about five ten, very skinny, like one hundred and thirty pounds.
So on November fourth, nineteen eighty three, a man comes
(28:09):
into the Gallas who looks like what they're describing to him.
So Kirkland wrote a trespass notice. He takes a polaroid
of this man and he puts it in the barred
book where they eject the patrons who, yeah, are being
rowdy like you mentioned, or have him paid their bill,
and Kirkland kicks him out, and handcuffed man is kicked
(28:33):
out for good. They say, you're you know, you're completely banned.
Unlike the other people never come back, and Kirkland says,
after taking his picture, what's your name? The man says,
his name is Robert Lee Bennett Junior. I'm an attorney,
he added, and I'm going to sue you.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
What was his mindset by doing all of that? Was
it to try to get this guy's name, or was
it to try to just get him out of this
bar so that people know he's dangerous or what was it?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I don't know because he had died so I couldn't.
I interviewed his daughter, and his daughter was a little
kid at the time, and she said, you know, it
was one of the few cases he talked about, but
she didn't hear a lot. But I think that his
mindset was a, you know, get him out of the bar.
They didn't have evidence to show this was the guy
(29:23):
committing the crimes, or even they didn't have this as
before Max's incident. I don't know if they had investigated
any incidents like this, so it was all rumor myth.
But they knew enough. Kirkland knew enough and had heard
enough from the patrons to be like, this guy shouldn't
be here. He's causing so much trouble, he's scaring people
that he shouldn't be here. They just didn't have enough
(29:45):
evidence to time. There were a lot of rumors, but
didn't know how dangerous this man could be.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
So tell me what ends up happening. Now we have
an I mean, I don't think it's going to be
a spoiler alert to say this is our guy, this
is the guy, this is handcuff guy. And you know
he makes two big statements, one that his name is
Robert Bennett Junior and the other is that he's an attorney.
What happens next? Does Kirkland go to his superiors in Atlanta,
(30:15):
the police, or what does he do that?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I don't know because there weren't records. I don't know
if he went there, but he kept working at the Gallas, so,
I mean, he knew he'd gotten handcuff man Robert Lee
Bennett Junior, who he suspected was the handcuff man out
of this bar. What seemed to happen was in action,
and I don't know how much he ended up doing.
(30:41):
At one point, Don Honeywell, the owner of the Gallas,
the police, Kirkland hired him to work for the police
to try to start looking and this did not make
it into my story, but to start looking for the
handcuff man. And around this time, a bunch of children
were being murdered in Atlanta and they were all in
the hunt for the Atlanta child murderer. And this is
(31:04):
the other thing police did. They thought this Atlanta child
murderer was a gay man. They began scoping out like
gay bars and things like that. A handcuff man, Robert
le Bennett or actually it was Robert Lee Bennett Junior
who was on their radar and he was taken in
for questioning. He was a suspect for a while, and
then they dismissed him. So this guy was on their radar.
(31:26):
That was the craziest thing. He'd been arrested for kidnapping
a police officer in the nineteen seventies. So this man
whose name they found was not like just some unknown man.
I don't know what investigation they had done, because a
year before they found this same man had been arrested
in connection with murder. So it was a lot.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Yeah, absolutely, So when are they finally making that connection
between Robert Bennett Junior and the handcuff man? And you know,
these horror mutilations that are happening to these men in Atlanta,
and it sounds like Florida too.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Yeah, so what happened was really the media pushing this.
So two weeks so, this assault on Michael happens, the
police start investigating more. Richard, the journalist starts investigating more.
He publishes an article in the Atlanta Journal saying gay
prostitutes in fear of sadists, He doesn't name the handcuffed man,
(32:28):
even though he has the name, because of Kirkland, right,
not really, Actually it wasn't because of Kirkland. It was
because they were worried. The paper was worried about being sued. Basically,
Richard knew or thought Robert was the guy. But if
they falsely published this allegation, if it wasn't true, a
(32:50):
the guy you're charging is a lawyer, so he's already
threatened a lawsuit. You know, if they got it wrong,
they could be in trouble. So didn't name it. He
wrote a few articles tying Bennett. You know, Richard did
some amazing digging found out that Robert Lee Bennett Junior
had been a suspect in the Lena child murders. He
(33:13):
published multiple articles and the paper kept saying, do not
name him, do not name him. And finally Richard was like,
I feel like there's going to be another attack coming.
We have to name him. We have to get this
man off the streets. And so there's a back and
forth in the newsroom and finally the newsroom agreed to
let him name him. Wow, and that this was May
(33:34):
thirty first. Richard's reporting said Michael had identified Robert Lee
Bennett Junior as the last person he saw before losing
consciousness during his attack. The shocking part about this story
was that Richard found out that police still hadn't spoken
to Robert Lee Bennett Junior at all. It's like, what, like,
(33:57):
you know, you have this brutal attack, this guy been
on your raidar, this guy's been a suspect in Atlanta
child murders. You're not speaking to him? Like it was infuriating.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
At what point do we move towards this being something
that's chargeable that you know the police are finally saying, okay,
well we obviously I would think it would have been
with the media, especially with a newspaper, the newspaper in Atlanta,
But I mean, does it take more time?
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Well that sped things up a bit, but it does
take more time, and it also takes the involvement of
a Florida case. So a few months before Richard names
Robert Lee Bennett Junior, there's a man in Florida who
meets Robert Lee Bennett outside the Salvation Army. This guy
(34:45):
is a downs luck guy, has children, same sort of
mo o, gets picked up, says hey, want to drink something.
He gets in the car, he drinks the thing. The
next thing he knows, who wakes up and he's on
fire in the mangroves. The police find this guy because
there's a report that there's a fire in the mangroves. Well,
(35:07):
and this is in the Tampa, Florida area. Well, they
come over, it's a human body on fire. That is
not what they were expecting. The burns were so bad
that both his legs had to be amputated. The doctors thought,
this guy's not going to live overnight. So they're trying
to figure out who did this to who did this
to you? The man, his name was Gary Klapp, is
going in and out of consciousness, doesn't know and they're like,
(35:29):
he's gonna die, he won't know. He manages to survive
and some of the prosecutors told me who I interviewed,
were like, we think the high alcohol content helped him survive.
For some reason. He had like this ridiculously high alcohol
content in his body. He had fourth degree burns on
nearly half his body. And the detectives interview him and
(35:51):
he starts recovering. He said that the man who attacked
him drove a Lincoln town car. He described all these people,
and you know, he's forty five years old. He describes
Robert Lee Bennett Junior, the investigator in Atlanta. He sees
a teletype about the handcuffed man and about these attacks
(36:14):
happening in Atlanta, and he calls in Atlanta and says,
we got the same thing in Florida. And they start
connecting dots and they the Florida police are the first
ones to issue a warrant. So we had the Michael
Jordan attack happening in May, but it wasn't there wasn't
a warrant even though it was connected with Robert Lee Medditt.
(36:36):
The first warrant was happening in June in Tampa. Finally,
at that time, Atlanta police finally bring Robert Lee Bennett
Junior in for questioning in Atlanta. He's taken into custody
for the Tampa warrant. So that's when things start happening.
You have to ask. You have someone who loses their
(36:57):
legs and another person who's severely burned, and that's when
things start to shift.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
What does Bennet say about this? So he's brought in
and does he say, I have no idea what you're
talking about.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yes, So he keeps maintaining his innocence and he is,
you know, full of himself, and he is kind of,
you know, an asshole and obviously but he is kind
of like pretentious and like it's strange. So he said,
I'm here to tell the Atlanta police and this is
on video two in the city of Atlanta. I am
(37:31):
not the handcuffed man. He maintains his innocence and he
complains about the jail because he's like, I'm a lawyer.
He's like, oh, I wasn't breakfast, you know all this stuff.
It's like, what you went to breakfast? Why do you
you know? So anyway, he yeah, he claims he has
nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
What do we know about him as a person. We
know he's an attorney. What else do we know.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
So Bennett was adopted. He came from this wealthy family
in Twanda, Pia, this small town, and his dad was
owner of a bank there. His mom was a homemaker
and social life. But if you go I went to
Twana for the story, you go to the Bennett's names
are still on the historical Society. The Bennett mansion has
(38:15):
like a little plaque like they were the Kennedys of Twanda.
Every single thing they did was put in the newspapers,
like you look at all the old records, like, oh,
you know missus Bennett, like Annabelle Bennett, like went on
a trip to Africa. Okay, we're gonna put that in
the paper. All this stuff, and he was like the
prodigal son. He was adopted at twenty two months. I
(38:38):
don't know if he ever knew his birth parents. I
don't think he did. But he was super wealthy. He
grew up in a Victorian mansion that his mom nicknamed Nirvana.
It had tiffany shirling silver, it had pianos. He lived
the life and everyone I talked to his best friend
(38:59):
at the time, woman who was also his girlfriend a
little bit, but she said everyone would come over to
his house. Most of his friends were the girls. Everyone
sort of knew he was a feminine. They didn't call
it gay. Then he didn't come out, and he was
like popular. He was in the glee club. He liked
to cross stitch. He was in the student newspaper. The
(39:20):
worst thing his best friend told me that he ever
did when they were growing up, and they were very tight,
very close. They went to prom together. All this stuff
was throw pumpkin off the bridge. So that was the
worst thing. So it wasn't like, you know, there's some
stories of people who in their life they were torturing animals.
He was not that person torturing animals. He was a
(39:41):
popular kid. He didn't get bullied, He didn't you know,
he wasn't reclusive. He was involved in the community, in
the school community.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
He ends up getting married to a woman, right, and
then he says, well I'm impotent, and she says okay,
and you know, life goes on.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, So he moves to so after in Tuanda, he
ends up getting a law degree from Emory, moving back
to Tauana to work with his dad, and then getting
in trouble with the police when he's in an incident
with a man a sexual incident. Then he gets the
police say, hey, Robert Lee Bennett Senior, the father, get
(40:20):
your son out of here because he's there are he was. Also,
they knew he was sending letters to people that said
for a gay all time, come with me to Atlanta.
There were rumors he was molesting young boys for money,
like poor boys and the whole It is a very
tight net, small community. All this stuff was hurt. But
because he was so privileged and his family was so privileged,
(40:42):
the police, and that's a big part of the story
that's disturbing. The police instead of saying they could have
stopped it, that they could have said, oh, your molesting children,
let's put you in jail. But instead he was this
wonderful or his parents were really wonderful members of the community,
so they said, just go to Atlanta. He goes there,
works for a law firm, meets this woman and they
(41:03):
get married. She's thirty four, he's twenty nine, and like
you said, she says, He says, I'm impotent. She says
that's fine. Sandra was her name, and he parades her around.
He finally gets this heterosexual life that gives him respect,
but he ends up quitting his job. Well, he then
(41:23):
moves from the law from to working in a jewelry store,
then quits his job and hangs around in a robe
all day. Well, Sandra's like, what the hell? Like, this
isn't good. Yeah, and so the marriage does not go well.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Wow, Okay, So when do you think he makes this turn?
I mean, there are accusations of molestation that you know,
and he has other things that seem to be ramping
up towards really major things. At what point do you
think that things really changed for him and turns him
into this monster who does these terrible things to these men.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Yeah, I mean I do think it's self lowly and
I do think it's really really sad in a way.
I mean, he did horrible things, but I don't think
he felt comfortable being gay. He never fully came out.
He barely admitted it at one point. I think the
turn happened. It was starting in the seventies in Twanda.
But I think when he moved to Atlanta and got
(42:20):
out of a community where everyone knew him, where it
was oppressive, where he couldn't be himself. He moved to
this other community and started a double life. But there
was a big enough gay community in Atlanta, like he
thought he could be anonymous, but it was like the
jackal hide thing, like he had this side of him
that he wanted to get rid of that he wanted
(42:40):
to kill the gay side of him. He did everything
he could to fight against this. He got married, he
went to law school, he did everything he was supposed
to do, but he couldn't get away. So that's where
I think, Like in the early eighties in Atlanta, that's
when he turned and he did have a boyfriend. That
(43:02):
boyfriend ended up dead or it was a rumored boyfriend
and he was a suspect and that and that was
in eighty two when he was married to Sandra, and
that's when she left him. She said she saw him.
She was getting off the bus stop from work and
she saw her husband getting arrested and he said, like,
I'm didn't do it, or I'll explain or whatever. And
she found out I was for murder. And there was
(43:23):
this whole court case, like his divorce case. And you know,
she said, my husband's a violent homosexual. So she had
which is unbelievable to say in they ate or at
any time, but especially at this time. And then there
were detectives who testify and were like, oh, we were
interviewing hustlers and they said he's scary and violent and
does all this stuff, and so like the police had
(43:45):
been doing an investigation that this is when I think
he turned. But this was what was frustrating. It was like, Okay,
we know he's doing this, the police knows, and they're
doing nothing. And he continued. And so for him, I
think setting people on fire and setting gay men on fire,
it was kind of like like we had murders here
at massage parlors of sex workers at massage parlors, and
(44:09):
the man doing them was saying he was trying to
destroy temptation. I feel like there's a similarity between Robert
Lee Bennett where he was like this is in me.
I can't destroy it, so I will destroy the people
that you know represent that, and that is like so disturbing.
But that was his mo and it never I mean,
there's no evidence he had sex with these people, there's
(44:31):
no evidence of anything like that. Maybe he did, and
you know, it was this compulsion. It was like every
single day he was out there trying to contact people,
trying to assault people. It was really and I think, yeah,
it was something psychological like that.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
So what does he put on trial for. He's charged
ultimately and it's for the attack on whom.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
So he is charged for the attack on Gary Klath.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
This is Florida, right in.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
The Florida case, because Gary was able identify And if
Gary had died, I always think about if Gary had died,
which he they thought he would, would this have ever
come to light, Would of Atlanta police have really done anything? Maybe?
Maybe not. But he's put on trial for that, and
it was it was a hard case because Gary was
(45:18):
so like his alcohol level was so high, and so
to convince a jury that that was really high, that
like he was reliable was really difficult. So they did
something called the Williams Rule where the prosecutors, which was
it was you were allowed to find similar cases that
had happened to different states and use them to make
(45:41):
your case. So that's when they used Michael Jordan and
Max Schrader and they said, we will fly you down
here to make this case. But the crazy thing I
talked to the prosecutors and they were like, there were
so many other people we found out who'd been his victims,
and they did not want to come here because they
didn't want to talk about their sex life in a trial.
(46:04):
And they were sympathetic. The prosecutors were like, I get it.
But some of them they convinced when they said, look,
this is this guy's either has killed someone, we think
he's killed someone, or he's going to kill someone like
and then they convinced. But there were so many they
talked to. There were gay clubs in Tampa that had
had these things happen. I mean, there was a huge thing.
(46:24):
The amount of people that got to testify were a handful,
and they were really brave. And that's how they got
him was by the Williams rule and having they had
to show. They were able to show a pattern that
this had happened and that Max and other people had
identified him as who had attacked them, and so that
was that was how they were able to do it.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
But despite that, despite Max and Gary, he still is
offered a plea deal.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
I know, not only has he offered a plea deal,
but while he's like on trial and while this is
all going, he's allowed to roam free and visit his
mom and he keeps trying to pick up men, and
he's allowed out on bail, but he is offered a
pleadal and members of the gay community were chanting in
(47:12):
the courtroom shame, shame, shame. And you know, as the
gay advocates said, and I agree with if he'd been
attacking straight people, if he'd been attacking people who weren't
sex workers, would he have been offered this, Would he
be been given such little time? No way? And I
(47:33):
completely agree with that. And he, you know, his attorney
who I interviewed, was like this whole time. He thought
the whole thing was an inconvenience. He was so privileged
and thought, eh, you know, I'm not you know, I'm
going to get off because I've gotten off so many
times before. And he was surprised to even get put
in prison, like he thought. You know, that's how delusional
(47:56):
he was.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
There's a couple of things that are really just disturbing
to me. Number one is, of course he got he
ended up with seventeen years, right, Yes, So that must
have been very scary for the families and and you know,
the survivors. On the surface, it's a total insult for
what ended up happening and what he was doing and
(48:17):
the kind of predator he was that just seems like
an incredibly short amount of time. And then there's the
thought that, oh, my god, he's going to get out,
you know this in this certain year. But ultimately, you know,
there is some kind of a resolution. Tell me kind
of what happens before he gets out.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Yes, so he gets seventeen years. The amount of crimes
that we even have evidence for, that's a super short
period of time. And yeah, he wasn't the type where
it's like, oh, if he gets out, he'll be reformed.
Oh and one thing to back up, the prosecutors that
I interviewed said they had heard he was sick and
was only going to live ten years, and so that
(48:58):
was one of the reasons that they were like, okay,
seventeen years is okay. But he dies in prison in
nineteen ninety eight, and he'd only been in prison about
five years at this time and he dies of a stroke.
And his own lawyer, when I interviewed her, was like,
he got the life sentence that he deserved by dying
(49:20):
in prison. And I don't mean to laugh then, but
like she for your own lawyer to say that, like,
it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
And I think one thing that was interesting was sort
of his ending in his time in prison. If I'm
remembering this right, he wanted to be in isolation first, right,
so you are right.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
So he's placed a solitary confinement at his own request,
which is weird. But actually it's not weird because when
I talked to his lawyer, it's like, they'll go after
you if you've gone after if you've done heinous crimes
like this, like you are a target, and so I
think it was a protective thing. But then he was
going buggy, his lawyer said, in solitary as one does,
(50:00):
until he was put in the general prison population and
his mom died. While he was in prison, he was
very close to his mother, who was supposed to receive
a one point five million dollar inheritance from him. His
mother seemed to never admitted that her son did this stuff,
like maybe at some levels she knew, but he was
like her prize child, like only child, dressed him like
(50:24):
little Lord faunt LeRoi. One year before he was supposed
to get out, he had a stroke and died behind bars.
There were rumors that he died of HIV related stuff.
I don't know. I couldn't find out any other causes
of death.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
You know, it sounds like the bulk of his estate
went to the Historical Society and to the Boy Scouts.
He left twenty five thousand dollars to the son of
his friend, Ellie Harden Smith in fifteen thousand to the
local country club. This is the nasty part to me,
with the condition that this bequest be acknowledged and established
as a memorial to my grandfather, the honorable William Maxwell,
(51:01):
my mother, and myself Robert Lee Bennett Junior. And he
also wanted a memorial maide in honor of he and
his mother as a condition of the gift to the
County Library. And I mean that just makes me want
to say, fuck off all of that. And I hope
none of that happened.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Yeah, no, it really was infuriating, And I don't know
the Boy Scouts, I think refused his gift.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Good. Did anybody freaking learn anything from this story? I mean,
is it? What was the takeaway for these communities and
maybe even the police officers at this point?
Speaker 2 (51:36):
So did anyone learn anything from this story? I would
like to believe that police officers, Well, one of the
things that came from this was partly the training of
police officers on sensitivity training. I'm not sure if the
community learned a ton, but I do think that the
(51:59):
publicity and this did get you know, publicity in Florida
as well, was like that the victims of him, who
were sex workers and gay men, that they were real people,
they had value, their voices mattered, they mattered, and you know,
they ended up like we should listen to them because
they ended up getting this predator behind bars. Now, when
(52:20):
I talk, I'm an optimistic person. When I talked to Richard,
he was like, I'd like to believe things have changed,
But if the same thing happened in Atlanta today, what
we care if a hustler died And I put this
in my article and he this quote from him, and
he's like, no, we would care much more if someone
died in the wealthy Buckhead community in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and America Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(53:17):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked
(53:38):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked, and on Facebook
at wicked Words Pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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