The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (3 page)

Mayor Jackson now appealed to the FBI on the grounds that Latonya Wilson and Earl Terrill – then both still missing – may have been kidnapped and transported over a state line, making the crime a Federal offence.

On 20 August, the body of 12-year-old Clifford Jones, who was visiting his aunt in Atlanta, was found in a dumpster. He had been strangled with a ligature and was wearing shorts and underwear that did not belong to him. Three boys said that they had seen a black boy disappear into the back room of a Laundromat with the manager, a white male who was later jailed in 1981 for attempted rape and sodomy. One of the boys said he seen the manager “strangle and beat” the boy. The time they had seen the manager and boy together coincided with the time of death established by medical experts. Another witness said that he had seen the manager, whom he knew, drop a large object wrapped in plastic in the dumpster the night before Clifford’s body was discovered. The manager admitted that he knew Clifford and failed two polygraph tests. However, he was not charged on the grounds that the boy who had said he had seen Clifford strangled was “retarded” and Jones’ name was added to the growing list of the victims of the unidentified serial killer.

Eleven-year-old Darren Glass was also added to that list after he vanished near his home on 14 September 1980. Shortly afterwards his foster mother received an emergency call from someone the operator said claimed to be Darren. But when she was put through the line was dead. The police initially dismissed the case as Darren had run away several times before. But when he failed to turn up he joined the list, primarily because authorities did not know what else to do with his case. He was never found. On 9 October, Charles Stephens went missing. His body was found the following day. He had been asphyxiated.

That year, the citizens of Atlanta were particularly afraid that the killer would strike again at Halloween when children were out trick-or-treating. Police patrols were stepped up, to no avail. On 2 November, the body of nine-year-old Aaron Jackson, a friend of earlier victim Aaron Wyche, was found under a bridge over the South River, near where Wyche’s body had been found. Like Charles Stephens he had been a victim of smothering.

Fifteen-year-old Patrick Rogers disappeared on 10 November. Like Darren Glass, he was thought to have run away several times before and it took some time before he was added to the list. His body was found face down in the Chattahoochee River on 21 December. His head had been crushed by heavy blows. “Pat Man” Rogers had known Aaron Jackson and had a crush on his sister. In fact, Rogers had connections to 17 other murder victims, some of which had not made the list. A week before he went missing, he had told his mother that he felt that the killer was closing in. A mother’s friend told the police that Rogers had been looking for her son to tell him that he had found someone to manage their singing career. His name, she said, was Wayne Williams. It was the first time that Williams’ name had come up in connection with the case.

On 2 January 1981 Lubie Geter, aged 14, disappeared. His body was found in a wood by a man walking his dog on 5 February. He was dressed only in his underwear and his decomposed corpse showed signs that he had been strangled manually. He was also connected to the paedophile John David Wilcoxen, who had been dismissed as a suspect in the Earl Terrill case, and another unnamed child molester – a white man whose apartment he had been seen in several times.

Lubie Geter’s friend, 15-year-old Terry Pue, disappeared on 22 January after being seen in a hamburger joint on Memorial Drive. An anonymous caller – thought to be white – told the police where they could find his body. Pue’s body was recovered the next day. He had been strangled with a rope or piece of cord. This time, the investigators used a new technique which allowed them to lift fingerprints from the boy’s corpse. But the fingerprints they found did not match anyone on file. The caller had also indicated that the body of another victim might be found in the same place. Years later, other human remains were found nearby. These were thought to be those of Darren Glass.

On 6 February, 12-year-old Patrick Baltazar vanished shortly after calling the police and telling them that he thought the killer was coming after him. The Atlanta police task force did not respond. After he went missing, one of his teachers received a phonecall from a boy who said nothing, just cried. She said she thought it was Patrick. His body was found the following week by a man clearing up an office park. It showed signs of strangulation inflicted by rope. His corpse led FBI agents to the decomposed remains of Jeffrey Mathis that were found nearby. By this time, Atlanta’s murder spree had become known across America and Jeffery Mathis’s funeral made the national news.

Curtis Walker, aged 13, snuck off on the afternoon of 19 February to earn money by carrying elderly folks’ bags at a local K-mart and never came home. He was strangled and his body was found later that day in Atlanta’s South River. His uncle, Stanley Murray, who lived with Curtis and his mother Catherine Leach on the Bown Homes housing project in Atlanta, was also murdered, though his slaying did not make the list.

On 2 March, 16-year-old Joseph “Jo-Jo” Bell went missing. Two days later, a fellow employee of Cap’n Peg’s seafood restaurant told the manager that Jo-Jo had called him and told him that he was “almost dead”. After that, Jo-Jo’s mother received a call from a woman who said she had Jo-Jo. She called back and spoke with Mrs Bell’s other two children. Mrs Bell called the murder task force that had been set up by the Atlanta police. When they did not respond, she called the FBI. By then it was too late. On 19 April, Jo-Jo’s body was found in the South River. Like many of the other victims, he had been asphyxiated.

Joseph Bell could be connected to a number of other victims. He had been to summer camp with Cynthia Montgomery, a murdered girl whose name did not make the list. However she had her own connections with a number of people on it. Jo-Jo’s mother had been in prison for the murder of her husband. While incarcerated, she had befriended another inmate, who was the sister of Alfred Evans.

Jo-Jo was also a friend of 13-year-old Timothy Hill, who disappeared ten days later. Together they often visited the house of 63-year-old homosexual Thomas Terrell on Gray Street, which was known as Uncle Tom’s. Terrell’s next-door neighbour had seen Timothy Hill the day before he disappeared. Hill was a troubled youth with violent tendencies. A friend told the police that Terrell paid the under-age Hill for his sexual favours. Terrell admitted having sex with Hill. The last witness to see Hill alive said that Timothy had spent the night before he vanished at Terrell’s house after missing his bus home. He also said he saw Timothy from his window, talking to a teenage girl. Timothy Hill also had connections with Alfred Evans, Anthony Carter, Jeffrey Mathis and Patrick Baltazar.

On 30 March 1981, Timothy’s body was found in the Chattahoochee River. The cause of death was recorded as drowning, though it seems likely he was asphyxiated. Strangely, Terrell was never a suspect in the murders of Jo-Jo Bell or Timothy Hill.

By April 1981, the Atlanta “child murders” had become an embarrassment for the authorities. People took things into their own hands. Prayer vigils were held. Children were given safety instructions. Neighbourhood searches were made for missing children and curfews organized. Even the noted psychic Dorothy Allison was called in. Then FBI spokesmen announced that a number of the murders had been “substantially solved” – the victims had been killed by their own parents. This outraged Atlanta’s African-American community. The civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s were still fresh in their minds and the white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan was still active in the South.

Leader of the Congress of Racial Equality Roy Innis then blamed the murders on a Satanic cult involved with pornography and drugs, and he revealed the existence of an alleged ritual site, resplendent with large inverted crosses. He also produced a female witness who passed two polygraph tests, but the police took the investigation no further.

With the police and FBI investigations getting nowhere, the residents of the Techwood Homes housing project took matters into their own hands and began “bat patrols” – residents would patrol the streets armed with baseball bats. Some of the actions the communities had already undertaken may have had an effect. Detectives had already noted that the killer’s area of activity seemed to have moved out from the centre of the city to more outlying areas and his victims were getting older. The same day Hill’s body was found, the Atlanta task force added 20-year-old Larry Rogers to their list. Although he was considerably older than the other victims, like many of them, he had been asphyxiated. He was mentally retarded and his body was found, not in a river, but in an abandoned apartment.

Although Larry Rogers was no relation of Patrick Rogers, he had a connection to Wayne Williams. Larry’s young brother had been involved in a fight and suffered a head injury. Williams overheard reports of the incident on police channels. He beat the police to the scene and took the injured man to hospital. Later he picked up the boys’ mother and took her to an apartment where the younger Rogers was holed up. This apartment, Mrs Rogers testified, was near the one where Larry’s body was later found.

Then on 8 April 1981 – and the very day the bat patrols started – the body of 21-year-old Eddie “Bubba” Duncan was found. No cause of death could be established, but asphyxia was suspected and as Duncan was physically and mentally handicapped he was added to the list. Previously murder victims over 21 – and thus adults – were not included. But Eddie Duncan, it was discovered, had ties to Patrick Rogers.

On 1 April, another adult victim of asphyxiation, 23-year-old Michael McIntosh, an ex-convict, was pulled from the Chattahoochee River and ended up on the list. He had last been seen on 25 March, but a shopkeeper who said he saw McIntosh being beaten up by two black men. Again he had connection with other victims. He lived across the road from Cap’n Peg’s seafood restaurant where Jo-Jo Bell had worked and had been seen at Tom Terrell’s house along with Bell and Timothy Hill. It was thought that he was a homosexual himself.

It was plain that who made the official list was arbitrary. Critics pointed to the murder of 22-year-old Faye Yearby in January 1981. Like Angel Lenair, she had been found tied to a tree with her hands behind her back. She had also been stabbed to death, as had four of the acknowledged victims. However, the police refused to put her on the list on the grounds that she was female – though there were two girls on the list – and that she was too old – though McIntosh was a year older. Combing the police records, former assistant Atlanta police chief Chet Dettlinger came up with 63 murder victims that essentially met the same criteria as those of the list but were omitted – 25 of them occurred after the arrest of Williams that supposedly ended the killing spree. Some critics maintain that the list itself hampered the investigation as it led detectives to assume that everyone on it was been killed by the same hand when the various
modus operandi
employed suggested that more that one killer was at large.

Dettlinger also noted that, just as the victims were getting older and the murders were moving out of the centre of the city, they were also moving eastwards. However, the bodies were always found on the same 12 streets – if you extended them eastwards out of the central area. Even those dumped in the Chattahoochee and South Rivers were found in the vicinity of bridges carrying those same streets out to the eastern suburbs. Dettlinger first offered his help to the police, then to the families when the accuracy of his predictions of where the killer would strike next led him to become a suspect. After he was cleared, the FBI took him on as a consultant.

Meanwhile the death toll went on climbing. In April 1981, another ex-convict, 28-year-old John Porter, was found dead. He had been in and out of mental hospital and, shortly before he had disappeared, his grandmother had thrown him out of her house for fondling a two-year-old boy in her care. His body was found on a sidewalk in an empty lot. He had been stabbed six times. Porter did not make the list. However, at Williams’ trial he was linked to the other murders by now disputed forensic evidence involving microscopic fibres and hairs.

Twenty-one-year-old ex-convict Jimmy Payne was reported missing on 22 April. His sister said that he had left the apartment they shared with their mother the day before to sell some old coins to a coin shop. His girlfriend said that he had walked her to the bus stop the day he went missing and she became concerned when he did not pick her up when she returned as they had planned. Payne was known to suffer from bouts of depression which had been particularly severe when he served time in jail for burglary. Once he had tried to hang himself with his bed sheets, but had been cut down before he succeeded. Six days after he disappeared, his body was recovered from the Chattahoochee River. It appeared that he had been in the water for almost all that time. The cause of death could not be determined but it seemed probable that he had been suffocated and he was added to the list.

Seventeen-year-old juvenile delinquent William “Billy Star” Barrett went missing on 12 May. He was on his way to pay a bill for his mother. Found later that day not far from his home, he was another victim of asphyxiation, but he had also been stabbed after he had been strangled. At first he was not added to the list as the police had reports that he might have been the victim of a hit man. But then it transpired that he had been seen with paedophile John David Wilcoxen and had connections to the unnamed child molester in the Lubie Geter case. That man was seen at Barrett’s funeral.

As several of the victims’ bodies had been found in local rivers, the police began staking out the city’s waterways. Officer Freddie Jacobs was stationed at the south end of James Jackson Parkway Bridge over the Chattahoochee River. Before dawn on 22 May, he saw the headlights of a slow-moving car approaching. It was a 1970 Chevrolet station wagon. Then Officer Bob Campbell, who was stationed on the river bank under the north end of the bridge, heard a splash in the water, saw ripples in the water and radioed Jacobs, who kept the car under surveillance.