No Place Safe

by Kim Reid

  It had been hard for me to keep quiet about what I knew when I played basketball down the street on Saturday, or worked the Sunday morning shift at the restaurant, but I did. On the same day of the splash, the paper ran an article about an out-of-state suspect in the death of the twenty-fourth victim, but the media didn’t have information on the splash yet. On Monday, everyone was talking about a suspect, but not the one the police caught on the bridge. I even heard some kids talking about it in chemistry in the minutes before the bell rang to start class.

  “I heard they might know who that killer is.”

  “What killer?”

  “You know, the one that’s been killing those kids in Atlanta.”

  “Thank God. Maybe they can talk about something else on TV for a change.”

  “I know. It’s on the news all the time. I’m so tired of it, already.”

  “Totally.”

  I wondered how many demerits I’d get if I slammed my chemistry book down on their heads. Between the assault and the class disruption charges, and the fact that I’d already used up ten demerits, I was certain I’d be expelled.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  For the first time since Ma joined the Task Force, she became secretive about the case, taking all work phone calls behind her closed bedroom door. If someone called about the case while we were having dinner, she’d leave the table, asking me to hang up when she got on the other line. If a call came while we were watching television on her bed, she sent us away. The media still didn’t know who the suspect was, and it was easier for the Task Force to start building evidence for his arrest without their scrutiny. Even the identity of the body found downstream from the splash was kept a mystery for a few days, although I overheard his name—Nathaniel Cater—when I walked into Ma’s bedroom while she was on the phone, and before she abruptly stopped her conversation and shooed me away.

  So I had to find out from the evening news that the suspect stopped on the bridge that night was a black man. Not a Klansman, not an angry white man, but someone with brown skin like mine. As much as I respected the police, knew that there were some good detectives on the Task Force despite what the rest of Atlanta thought, I refused to believe it. So did some of those detectives, including Ma.

  Like many patrol officers who worked in her patrol zone in the mid-seventies, Ma knew Wayne Williams long before the kids started dying. He and his father had a small-time radio station in the same building that housed her precinct when she was a street cop. Ma remembers the father being a friendly man, and she and the other cops would chat when they passed him in the hall, the way tenants do who share a building. His son always wanted more than pleasantries from Ma and the other cops, asking about the cases they were working on or whether anything big had gone down that day. Ma pegged him as a cop wannabe the first time she met him. He was always asking about police procedure, listened to calls on the police scanner, sometimes arriving at the scene at the same time as the responding officers. She said one time she pulled up to the scene of a call and Williams was already there, directing traffic to make way for the real police. Her acquaintance with him was nearly forgotten by the time he crossed the Jackson Parkway bridge in 1981, and she was caught off guard by the FBI’s insistence that Williams was a viable suspect.

  Ma just couldn’t see Williams as the killer. She questioned his size, only 5’6’’ and 160 pounds, and whether he could easily overpower streetwise teenage boys and discard their bodies so easily, hauling dead weight over bridges. From what she knew of Williams back in her uniform days, she couldn’t match his personality to that of a serial killer’s profile, though she was the first to admit he was a little strange. Specifically, he didn’t fit the original FBI profile—a white man or group of white men who belong to a racist organization like the Klan. Ma had always believed that the majority of the murders were committed by a person who matched the profile, but she also admitted she’d been in police work long enough to know that you just never know.

  She was willing to concede that some of the evidence did point to the strong possibility that Williams was involved in at least some of the latest murders. His interest in all things police related got him arrested in 1976 for impersonating an officer, driving around with a blue light affixed to the top of his car, though the charges were later dropped. This jibed well with one Task Force theory that the killer was pretending to be a cop, something that would explain why street-smart kids would get into a stranger’s car. He matched the physical description witnesses had given months ago on the driver of the car some of the kids were last seen getting into—a short, slightly heavy young black man.

  Williams had contact with some of the victims before their deaths through his business as a talent scout. He’d handed out flyers at several Atlanta public schools soliciting his services, calling for young people aged eleven to twenty-one to work with “professional recording acts, no experience necessary, training is provided.” He’d also handed out the flyers in the neighborhood of some of the victims, and through witness interviews, the Task Force had been able to conclude Williams had crossed paths with some of the victims. But so had I. So had half the population of those neighborhoods. Until the splash, Wayne Williams was no more and no less a suspect than anyone else in Atlanta, whose mayor had said that everyone was a suspect until the killer was caught.

  *

  It didn’t matter what Ma thought, or how surprised most black folks in Atlanta were when Wayne Williams was named as a person of interest. The FBI, with the full support of the mayor, named Williams the prime suspect, so Ma and Sid and the rest of the Task Force had to get to work finding enough evidence for an arrest. The district attorney had grown increasingly worried about having a prosecutable serial murder case, and he and his staff weren’t that confident in the FBI’s ability to provide the evidence needed to try it. All the fibers in the world still amounted to circumstantial evidence, even if excellent circumstantial evidence, and they wanted more to build the case on. Fibers were collected, personal items searched, but no one would ever know what Williams had gotten rid of the night of the splash when he was allowed to go home. Neighbors said they saw him burning something in his backyard.

  Even if Wayne Williams hadn’t committed the crimes, there was no overwhelming evidence that would help clear him. There was his weak explanation for being on the bridge that night that didn’t check out—that at three in the morning, he’d been scouting out the location of a potential client’s house in preparation for a seven o’clock meeting that morning. Williams told police his client’s name was Cheryl Johnson and that she lived in the Spanish Trace Apartments, though he couldn’t remember the apartment number. He even provided a phone number, which he said he’d tried to call the morning of the splash, sometime around two o’clock. The first time, he got a busy signal; the second time someone answered but said there was no Cheryl Johnson living there. He’d stopped at the bridge only to verify that he’d dialed the right phone number. The police could never locate a Cheryl Johnson, and surmised he’d made up the client.

  There was Williams’s story that a few hours before the splash, he’d visited the Sans Souci Lounge downtown to get back a tape recorder he’d loaned the club manager. The club manager said that visit took place on a different night. There were blood stains found in Williams’s car that matched the blood type of two of the victims who’d died from stab wounds. And most damning were carpet fibers and dog hairs found on Williams’s personal belongings that could be matched with fibers found on multiple victims.

  While investigating Williams, Ma and Sid worked to eliminate other possibilities, following hunches and facts. The body found downstream from the splash was Nathaniel Cater, who coincidentally lived in the apartment above Latonya Wilson’s family at the time she was abducted from her bed. Ma had already concluded that her parents had not harmed the girl, but still wondered if they knew anything about the disappearance, if perhaps they or their children had been threatened by the killer int
o silence. The discovery that Cater lived just upstairs seemed too coincidental now that he was found in the Chattahoochee, leading Ma to speculate on a few theories.

  The first was whether Cater had killed Latonya, especially since his build matched the physical description given of the man, or the silhouette of a man, a neighbor had seen carry the girl through the bedroom window. Perhaps someone in Latonya’s family had the same theory, and sought revenge against Cater by making it appear he was the victim of the killer who was dumping bodies into the Chattahoochee. The theory was weak, but she couldn’t shake the coincidence of proximity between the two victims, nor could she build a stronger theory. Her other theory was Cater had an accomplice in the murder, the second man the neighbor had seen at the window, who had killed Cater to eliminate him as a witness.

  During a canvas of the Verbena Street neighborhood Latonya and Nathaniel had lived in, Ma and Sid found a young girl who said she’d seen a man in a neighborhood park with his dog a few times. Her description of the man and his dog matched that of Williams and his dog so closely that they had the girl polygraphed and got a positive reading. But this lead was as circumstantial as the fiber evidence.

  The FBI said as early as the second week of June that they had enough evidence to arrest Wayne Williams, basing their claim on the fiber evidence, but local authorities—the Atlanta police chief and the district attorney—didn’t agree, and they were the people who needed to make the decision. They were close, but weren’t ready to say they had enough to build a case. Ma, who’d be on the team responsible for the criminal investigation of any case the district attorney would finally elect to prosecute, still wasn’t convinced Wayne Williams was the killer, at least not in all of the murders. A political tussle ensued about whether to arrest Williams: the FBI and the mayor on one side, the district attorney and police chief on the other. Ma thought the FBI, which had been claiming victories throughout the investigation that didn’t pan out, wanted to finally have a real success, and then extricate itself. The mayor wanted to get back to running the City too Busy to Hate. The district attorney and the police chief knew that when it all hit the fan, they’d be the agencies blamed, so they were reluctant to move forward with anything less than a tight case.

  Eventually a compromise was made. To try a homicide case, a suspect need only be arrested for a single murder. On June 21, 1981, Wayne Williams was arrested in the Missing and Murdered Children case, charged with murdering Nathaniel Cater, who had been a grown man and not a child at all.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  My mother didn’t need me as much after the arrest. There were no more Missing and Murdered Children crime scenes, no nights where she came home and asked me to help her pull off mud-caked boots or fix her a little something to eat that she’d pick over while she talked to me, trying to let go of the day’s bad. Before the arrest, I’d give her the plate I’d kept warming in the oven, and watch the tines of her fork tap at the drying edges of meatloaf, stab at shriveled green peas while I tried to think up something to say. I’d struggle for the soothing and supportive words a grown-up would say, but most times all I could come up with was a question, something innocuous that didn’t demand anything of her. She didn’t seem to mind. But we didn’t have many of those nights anymore.

  Ma no longer needed me to be her surrogate to Bridgette, because most nights she was home to cook dinner or help with school projects. This took some getting used to because I’d grown accustomed to running the house, and though we both missed her, Bridgette had grown used to it, too. She was happy to have more of Ma, but missed dinner in front of the TV (because Ma said she didn’t raise any savages and we had to eat dinner at the table) and staying up late watching old scary movies like Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman and The Blob. When the kids began dying, I was a girl, more responsible than most thirteen-year-olds, but still a girl. After the arrest, there were two women in the house, but I was a lightweight trying to hold steady against a heavyweight. There is room for only one woman in any house, so I deferred, waiting for the moment she would need me again.

  On the last Friday of February 1982, I thought she might need me. Jury deliberations in the Wayne Williams trial were expected to begin, and though the odds were against it, people hoped that a verdict might come quickly. Whatever the verdict would be, I thought it would leave Ma spent and that she might need me close by like she did those nights I waited for her to come home from a crime scene.

  That’s why I decided not to take the second bus once I reached downtown from school. Bridgette, who had started middle school earlier that fall, now made the bus ride from the Northside with me. Her school bus dropped her off a block from my new school, and from there we caught MARTA home. When we got off the train at Five Points and rode the escalator up into the street, our eyes adjusting to natural light, I said, “Let’s see if Ma’s car is there.”

  The courthouse lot sat between Pryor and Peachtree, taking up nearly the whole block. It looked as though someone had razed a building to expose the underground parking lot, a pit filled with cars. It was protected by a chain-link fence, put there to keep pedestrians on Peachtree Street from stumbling and falling twenty feet down onto the roofs of Fords and Chryslers. Ma always parked in the same section, and when I’d ride past on my bus in the afternoons, I’d look for her car. When I saw it, I’d be relieved that she’d made it to the end of another workday, no bad guy had wrestled her gun away, no visit to a witness’s house had gone bad.

  “I don’t see her car,” Bridgette said. “Maybe she isn’t there.”

  “Where else would she be on the last day of the trial? Maybe she had to park someplace else because of all these people coming down here to gawk.”

  Pryor Street in front of the courthouse was clogged with traffic, the far right lane of the one-way street turned into extra parking for media trucks. Across the street in the vacant lot, which had been the old entrance to Underground Atlanta, were groups with signs that let the world know on which side of the verdict they stood. Officers were stationed at every corner, making sure almost three years’ worth of anger and fear didn’t erupt in front of the building.

  I doubted whether we’d make it inside the courthouse. I knew most of the sheriff deputies who worked the front entrance, who had not long ago been reinforced by metal detectors and the right to search purses and briefcases. This meant on the days I carried my knife, I’d have to call Ma from a payphone to ask if she was going home anytime soon and if I could get a ride. Had I ever forgotten, Ma would not only have learned about the knife, but might also end her day bailing me out of jail for carrying a concealed weapon. On that day, I’d left the knife at home and the deputies, who called me Little Yvonne because they said I looked so much like her, let us in.

  “Go straight to the fifth floor, you hear?” the deputy said, referring to the floor where the crime investigators’ office was and not the floor where the trial was taking place. We did as we were told.

  “Your mother isn’t in her office right now, but you can go on back,” the secretary told us when we reached the fifth floor.

  Her office smelled of Chanel N° 5 and mildewed paper. It was tiny, with just enough room for her desk and two chairs, hers and the chair where people sat and gave her the information they hoped would clear someone they loved, or sometimes if the person they loved had done them wrong, the words that might send them away forever. But it was private, not like the car-dealership-turned-Task Force building where I sometimes felt in the way. Since it was just before five o’clock, I thought we might be waiting a while, but Ma surprised me when she stepped into the closet-sized room.

  “What are you two doing here?”

  I wanted to say that I thought she might need me today, but instead I said, “We thought maybe we could get a ride home.”

  “Today of all days? It’s crazy around here, I’m not sure when I’m going home.”

  It didn’t look crazy to me, at least not in the crime investigators’ office. The h
ead investigator, the one I couldn’t stand because Ma couldn’t stand him, the one who liked to imply Ma might not be a clean cop because she managed to buy a house and send her kids to private schools without benefit of a husband, appeared at the doorway. He asked if he could have a word with her. She left with him, and Bridgette voiced my own worry.

  “You think she’s in trouble because we’re here?”

  “Grown people don’t get in trouble. This isn’t school.”

  “Grown people can get fired, though.”

  “She won’t be fired because we’re here,” I said, my tone relaying how little Bridgette knew about grown folks’ business, though I was thinking the same thing.

  Ma returned in a minute. “Come on, it looks like my day is done after all.”

  On the walk to her car, which turned out to be in the parking lot but far from her usual space, I tried to understand what had happened. Surely Bridgette hadn’t been right, but neither of us said anything because Ma hadn’t said anything. During the drive home she was quiet, so I stared out the window as if the scenery was new to me, as if the Fulton County stadium had appeared overnight and the people pushing all they owned in rusted grocery carts down Capitol Avenue was something I’d never seen. Bridgette sat in the backseat and pulled out the leftovers of her lunch, a banana and half a peanut butter sandwich.