Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  Camille Bell, like many in the black community, was angered by the ongoing suspicion of parents and the constant suggestion that “ghetto parents” failed to supervise their kids. “It takes a lot to get people concerned about a child out of the ghettos,” she told the New York Times in January. “The feeling of the middle class, who cops and bureaucrats tend to be, is ‘these people don’t care about their children, so why should I?’ But a lot of these ghetto people care deeply. Their kids are about the only things they have in the world.”

  In February 1981, twelve-year-old Patrick Baltazar asked his father for some money so he could go to the downtown Omni complex to play video games in the Galaxy 3 arcade. It was the last time anyone saw him alive.

  The Omni was popular with Atlanta’s kids, particularly the ones it was designed to exclude. Several of the victims frequented the place. Symbolic of Atlanta’s new image as economic powerhouse and capital of the New South, it was a place that evoked the good life, a life of fashionable clothing and upscale food and kid-friendly entertainment. James Baldwin, sent to Atlanta to report on the child murders for Playboy, found the Omni fascinating: “One enters through a galaxy of shopwindows selling clothes that your momma and your papa can’t buy. . . . among the establishments on the ground level, there is a ‘French’ baker and a pinball, video-game arcade . . . In the center of all this is a tremendous open ice-skating rink (since closed) and at the opposite end of the floor, facing the arcade, is the movie house.” The entire complex, he concludes, is “nothing less than a magnet for children and for those who prey on children.”

  The Atlanta kids who disappeared lived in neighborhoods transformed by freeway development. They were last seen in the vicinity of twelve main arteries. Their bodies were found in vacant lots, freeway right-of-ways, and abandoned buildings. Map drawn by Bill Nelson.

  Sometime after arriving at the Omni, Patrick Baltazar disappeared. His father, a dishwasher, spent hours driving the city streets, looking for his son. The boy was found a week later, his body discarded behind Corporate Square, an office complex between the Buford Highway and I-85.

  • • • • •

  March 1981 was a watershed. Curtis Walker, 13, a Bowen Homes resident who had vanished on February 19, was found strangled. Four more young men, ages 13 to 23, disappeared, bringing the count—depending on which murders and disappearances you counted—to more than twenty. Newspapers revealed that the police were finding trace evidence on the bodies. After that, the bodies stopped showing up in vacant lots. Instead, they began to be found in the city’s rivers, the Chattahoochee and the South. The police took to staking out bridges.

  Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. shared the stage in a benefit concert at the Civic Center to raise money for the investigation. Atlanta’s upper crust dressed up and paid a hundred dollars a head to attend the benefit auction and dinner afterward at the Peachtree Plaza Hotel. Outside the inner sanctum of the new downtown, volunteers convened every Saturday to search a different neighborhood for bodies. The residents of Techwood Homes, the nation’s oldest public housing project, organized “bat patrols,” in which groups armed with baseball bats—and the occasional gun—patrolled the project. When police turned up to arrest some of the leaders on weapons charges, they were surrounded by a jeering, hostile crowd. The day of the first patrol, a twenty-one-year-old man disappeared from Techwood Homes.

  Camille Bell went on the road, traveling from city to city and appearing on television, in churches—wherever people were willing to hear about Atlanta’s lost children. She and two other mothers traveled to Harlem and joined a candlelight vigil that drew a crowd of over ten thousand. They met with church leaders and New York City officials to discuss how to keep Atlanta’s tragedy from spreading to other cities. “This kind of thing is a sign of our times,” Bell said. “It’s not a black-white issue; it’s a people issue. If you don’t know who your neighbor is, you’re part of the problem.” In Baltimore, she told an audience at a memorial mass that anonymity in the central cities was partly to blame. “We don’t know who lives around us,” she said.

  In Washington, Mayor Marion Barry declared the killings part of a national swing toward racism. “A certain mood exists in this country, encouraged by the leadership,” he declared, “that it is all right to do anything to black people.” Barry was widely criticized for the comment, but it had some sting. The newly elected President Reagan hurried to sign a bill authorizing federal aid to Atlanta.

  The murders had become a national spectacle. And in the anguished city, residents increasingly got the uncomfortable feeling that Atlanta itself was taking the rap. “In many ways, it’s unfair,” Andrew Young, the frontrunner in the upcoming Atlanta mayoral race, told the Washington Post. “Nobody questioned the competence of the New York City police or New York City’s leaders during the Son of Sam murders. . . . Somehow Atlanta is on trial in this thing.”

  Part of what was going on was that hordes of reporters had descended upon Atlanta, and in the absence of suspects, they began to look at the city itself. Sociologists, child psychologists, and activists were trotted out to bemoan a variety of urban ills—all of which could be tied to the highway program. Kids, they said, were more at risk of victimization when they lived in “inward-looking, cold, impersonal and inhuman” public housing projects. They were more vulnerable in neighborhoods that lacked stability. Overcrowding and lack of privacy in the ever-smaller space allotted the ghetto forced kids to lead “public lives” that also made them easy prey. No one connected these things to two decades of highway construction and urban renewal. But newspapers did report that the police saw a pattern in “the placement of the bodies in secluded areas off major highways” and “the proximity of highways to sites where a number of the children were last seen.”

  Outside Atlanta, it was easy to feel that the city—combining the South’s toxic racial history with the woes of a modern metropolis—must somehow have created this mess. Atlanta itself, wrote reporter Steve Oney in the Atlanta Weekly, entered “a period marked by both self-promotion and guilt, a period of municipal schizophrenia that made life seem surreal.” Police tried to downplay the murders by expressing doubt that they were connected, as if dozens of child homicides in a single city didn’t indicate something deeply amiss, no matter how many killers were involved. Public safety campaigns subtly tried to shift the blame to parents: “Do you know where your children are right now?” demanded an electric-lit sign in front of the Civic Center every night.

  Many of the city’s children were gripped with fear for the person they called “the Snatcher” or simply “the Man.” A curfew was instituted for kids under fifteen. Children were sent to school carrying bats, knives, and sticks to defend themselves. None of it was likely to help: the murdered children had mostly vanished in broad daylight, and only one body showed any sign of struggle. In the few cases where disappeared kids were seen going off with someone, they were witnessed willingly climbing into a car. Clearly, “the Snatcher” was someone known to the victims. Or someone who made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

  • • • • •

  Camille Bell took her three remaining children on a trip to Newark in April 1981. The official count was now twenty-two children missing or dead. Bell gave an exclusive interview to Harry Webber, a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American. Feeling obliged to prove that the missing children—including Yusef—were not uneducated “hustlers” or delinquents, she had Jonathan, 12, Marie, 9, and Tonia, 4, demonstrate their intelligence for the reporter. Jonathan quoted a lengthy section of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Marie recited a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Tonia sang a Christmas song. It’s an excruciating scene to imagine. My children are worth protecting, it seems calculated to say. Would Bell have felt that message so necessary if she hadn’t lived through two decades where poor urban blacks were considered synonymous with “blight,” something to be paved over without a thought?

  That April, three
young men disappeared, and in May, two more. And then, suddenly, it was over. Or was it? In early June, newspapers reported that the police had a suspect: twenty-two-year-old Wayne Bertram Williams, a self-described music promoter who lived with his parents in Dixie Hills, the neighborhood where the 1967 riot broke out. The Williams home was along the route identified by Chet Dettlinger and within a few miles of where many of the victims lived. Williams came to the task force’s attention when police staking out a bridge on the Chattahoochee heard a loud splash and discovered him driving slowly over the river. He was questioned, but was not arrested. Two days later, the body of the twenty-eighth victim, twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater, was pulled from the water downstream of the bridge. Police began heavy surveillance of Williams. On June 3, he was detained for twelve hours and questioned.

  Then came a slow-motion spectacle, in which the city’s attention was riveted on Wayne Williams, a man not charged with any crime. The media and the police staked out his house. Police claimed they didn’t have enough evidence to indict him. Then newspapers revealed that fibers found on some of the bodies matched fibers taken from the Williams home. They reported that the FBI wanted to arrest Williams immediately, but local police wanted more evidence.

  Throughout all of it, Williams behaved like either an innocent man or an outrageously arrogant killer. He agreed to polygraphs. He told easily traceable lies. After his questioning, he called a press conference. He and his lawyer tried to get a gag order forbidding the media from publishing his name, address, or photograph. Fed up with police tailing him everywhere, he drove to the home of public safety commissioner Lee Brown, where he sat in his car and blew the horn.

  On Sunday, June 21, Williams was finally arrested and charged with one count of homicide in the death of Nathaniel Cater. He was ultimately indicted for only two of the murders. The district attorney said he still believed as many as eight to ten killers might be involved in Atlanta’s child murders. About half the cases, he told reporters, were probably not related. Nonetheless, a few days later, the FBI began recalling agents from Atlanta, as if the entire ordeal were over. The business community was no less eager to get past the nightmare. The president of Central Atlanta Progress, the downtown business owners’ group, announced that “a blanket of calm has spread over Atlanta after a very turbulent period.” The city promptly began a PR campaign to repair its damaged reputation. “Let’s pull together, Atlanta,” the billboards chided.

  Criminologists agree that it’s highly doubtful one person committed all the murders on the task force list. Serial killers tend to be specific in the type of victim they choose, and while their modus operandi can change with circumstances, it usually doesn’t vary wildly. The murder victims on the Atlanta list ranged in age from seven to twenty-eight. Two were girls. Sexual assault had occurred in some of the cases, but not all of them. Some victims were shot; some were stabbed. Others were bludgeoned, smothered, or strangled. Stranglings were carried out by hand and by rope. One boy fell from an overpass. For a few, cause of death could not be determined. For victims found in the river, drowning could not be ruled out.

  What is clear is that many of the kids knew other murdered kids. Freelance investigator Chet Dettlinger determined that every kid on the list knew at least one other kid on the list, and many knew more than that. Patrick Rogers knew seventeen of the other murdered children. It’s not as surprising as it seems. The kids lived in the same projects, hustled in the same shopping plazas, attended the same beleaguered schools, hung out at the same arcades and fast-food joints. They all came from a very tightly defined part of town—the part spreading south from I-20, with one finger stretching north toward Perry Homes. It was the area circumscribed by I-20 in the north, I-285 (the Perimeter) in the west, and to the east, the Downtown Connector: the same exact area shaded on planners’ maps as that slated for highway development and urban renewal.

  • • • • •

  In early 1982, Wayne Williams was tried for two murders. The evidence against him was circumstantial. The trial was allowed to proceed in a way that seemed obviously stacked against him. Three weeks in, the judge ruled that prosecutors could use evidence from ten other murders—murders with which Williams was never charged—to establish a “pattern” of killings to strengthen their case.

  The black community continually expressed reservations about the trial—even though the judge and most of the jury were black. Chet Dettlinger and Camille Bell actually provided help to the defense. But Wayne Williams was an excellent suspect. The spoiled only child of older parents—they called him “the miracle child”—he had been convinced he was a prodigy without ever being asked to exert himself. He had dreams of being a broadcast journalist, and his parents had gone bankrupt trying to underwrite his low-power radio station. Then he began promoting himself as a hotshot talent scout—though he never actually scouted a single talent. He had talked a lot about how he was forming a band to be called Gemini. And he had distributed flyers announcing his search for musical talent at the Omni and in several of the housing projects and shopping centers where victims lived or hung out. In many people’s eyes, this added the missing piece of the puzzle. It now made sense that the murdered kids would have gone with him. He had offered them the very thing they wanted most: a way out of the slums.

  Wayne Williams leaving the Fulton County Jail en route to his trial. A spoiled child with inflated self-esteem, he made a good suspect. But many in the community, including some of the victims’ families, doubted he could have committed all the murders. Associated Press photo / Gary Gardiner.

  After being questioned by police, Williams had called a press conference and distributed copies of his “résumé,” a fantasy-fueled list of accomplishments. He claimed that he had attended Georgia State (he had dropped out), that he had flown F-4 fighter planes (he later explained that he meant he had been given a ride in one), and that he was “heavily involved with various media” (he was a photographic stringer for a couple local television news outlets). Clearly, he suffered from delusions of grandeur, and the number of lies he told to both police and the press suggested there was something pathological in his addiction to untruth.

  Williams fit the serial killer mold in a number of other ways too. Like many serial killers, he was a law enforcement buff, with a police scanner and lights in his car. He had even once been fined for impersonating a police officer. Killers frequently insert themselves into the case at several points, and Williams had done this: witnesses testified to seeing him at one of the funerals, and he had shown up at one of the crime scenes to offer his photographic services. He was known to travel the city extensively in his freelance photography work. His sexuality was complicated: a witness testified that he had seen the defendant holding hands with Nathaniel Cater shortly before Cater’s death, but Williams vociferously denied being homosexual. And like many serial killers, he had a complex relationship with his parents. Witnesses claimed he had once tried to choke his father, though both parents, who stood by him throughout the ordeal, denied this on the stand. Clearly, Wayne Williams had secrets.

  The most compelling evidence, however, was that like so many serial killers, Williams seemed deeply insecure about his own class status. Witnesses testified to his disdain for the poor kids who were being killed, calling them “street grunchins” and “drop shots.” A white ambulance driver who knew Williams claimed that he “seemed like he was ashamed of lower-middle-class blacks and lower-class blacks.” If so, that shame likely stemmed from his own tenuous middle-class status. His parents, retired schoolteachers, were struggling financially, largely as a result of their investments in Wayne’s pipe dreams. They lived on the east side of Dixie Hills, in a leafy neighborhood of modest brick and clapboard bungalows a stone’s throw from I-20. A quarter mile west of the Williams home, at the end of Penelope Road, was Verbena Street, and a few blocks west on Verbena sat the wretched Hillcrest Apartments, where two of the victims—Nathaniel Cater and Latonya Wilson—lived. T
he tiny homes of Dixie Hills, with their neatly kept lawns and single picture windows, were just down the road from real slums. The Williams family lived literally and figuratively on the edge.

  The trial lasted two months, during which it dominated the front page of every Atlanta paper. Spectators lined up as early as four a.m. to get one of the eighty-five coveted seats. Reporters from all over the country filed daily updates. Atlantans avidly followed the trial through large sections of the testimony printed in newspapers. On Friday, February 26, the case went to the jury. The jurors deliberated for two hours on Friday and most of Saturday before coming to the judge with a verdict of guilty on both counts. On Sunday, the Atlanta Constitution announced that police were planning to disband the task force and close the books on almost all its cases—even the ones not linked to Williams and the ones that still had other active suspects. The only cases left open would be the two girls, whom most people thought had been wrongly added to the list, and—for procedural reasons—Darron Glass. He was, after all, not dead yet. Technically he was only missing.

  The Atlanta mainstream immediately began declaring the city exonerated. The trial, they said, was proof that the system was race-blind: it was presided over by a black judge, decided by a predominantly black jury, and overseen by a black mayor and a black public safety commissioner. “This city has always been way out in front of the country as far as race relations is concerned,” crowed the former head of the Chamber of Commerce. “Other cities can profit by this example of whites and blacks working and living together.”