January 5, 2018 • 42 mins
It's 1979 in Atlanta - and children are going missing.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And at that time, man was just so.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Just to think back, like every that that was everybody
was scared. It was always be careful, you know, everywhere
y'all go go in groups, you know what I'm saying.
It was like everybody was scared, and definitely the people
from where we grew up, like like.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Around from where we were from. Everybody over there.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Scared because that's where they was getting the kids from.
It it was crazy, man Like at that time, it
was like the Boogerman he because it's literally somebody going
around taking kids and they will finding them and telling
who they were, following them behind buildings.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
That was just our life. When you're living through something
like that, it's kind of like different. It was just
something we had to deal with. Watch for the Boogerman.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
My name is Camera. We are in the atl Atlanta,
Georgia and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia born and Brett.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
And I'm Eric Cameron and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia, also
West Side to be exact. Yep, he's the big brother,
that's the little brother. The area we're from is while
the kids most of the kids were getting missing from
So the area we're from the West side of Atlanta, like,
so it was almost like you gotta be real, real careful,
like can stay out, you always be with somebody. I
was real, real little so most times I was with
(01:26):
him anyway, my big brother. But man, that was that
was a real trying time because we couldn't hang out,
like I mean, it's a lot different now, man, times
are different.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Like back then everything was about going outside.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Everything was about going outside, like I mean, now everything's
about being inside playing on computers and games or whatever.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
But it was just a different time.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
They snatching kids, somebody somebody getting kids, so you stand
a better chance or not getting snatched if it's more.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Than one, Like if you're with somebody, it was just
like unthinkable, like who could who? Who could do this?
Speaker 5 (02:06):
It's ten pm?
Speaker 6 (02:07):
Do you know where your children are?
Speaker 7 (02:14):
It's ten pm?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Do you know where your children are? I still remember that,
like literally remember that.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Talking about keeping your kids safe and what other things
you could do to keep them safe. And I still
remember that.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That was that, you know, that was I wasn't at
Channel two.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
What time that was Monica Copper I think it was
on Channel two, and they would say that you know
where are your kids?
Speaker 8 (02:44):
It's ten o'clock, do you know where your children are?
That statement became a nightly statement. I was Monica Kaufman.
I'm now Monica Kaufman Pierson. I anchored the five to six,
the eleven, and the four o'clock news at Channel two WSTV.
Speaker 6 (03:01):
It's the city's oldest television station.
Speaker 8 (03:04):
People needed to know that they needed to keep an
eye on their boys, in particular because boys were being
literally picked up off the streets. So there was this
fear that unless you reminded people to ask, where's your child?
Do you know where your child is at this time?
(03:26):
At ten o'clock? Your child should be in your house.
That people needed to be reminded. There was a monster
on the prial in Metro Atlanta.
Speaker 6 (03:36):
It was scary. It was very scary.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
Ten nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three two one,
and I happy in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 9 (04:01):
The year is nineteen seventy nine. Jimmy Carter is our president.
The Vietnam War ended just four years ago, and it's
been barely over a decade since the Civil Rights movement.
My name is Payne Lindsay. I'm a documentary filmmaker. I
was born in nineteen eighty seven, and I'm from a
small town called Kinnessaul, northwest of Atlanta. In twenty sixteen,
(04:26):
I made a podcast called Up and Vanished, where I
spent nearly two years investigating an unsolved disappearance of a
high school teacher and beauty queen from South Georgia named
Tara Grinstead. Tara vanished from her home in two thousand
and five, and the case remained ice cold for more
than a decade. But six months after I started making
the podcast, something crazy happened. The police arrested two suspects
(04:49):
in connection with TERA's murder, and for the first time
in nearly twelve years, this small town community had some answers.
Speaker 10 (04:57):
Since then, I've been looking into other cold cases.
Speaker 9 (05:00):
What began as just an idea became something more like
an obsession. A few months ago, I was in my
office and my business partner Donald mentioned the case.
Speaker 10 (05:09):
I'd never heard of, the case of Atlanta's missing children.
Speaker 9 (05:13):
I started doing some research on my own time, reading
old articles and watching news clips, and what I found
was captivating, a twisted tale that's haunted Atlanta.
Speaker 10 (05:25):
For over three decades.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
As far as the.
Speaker 9 (05:28):
Documentary goes, I didn't really have a plan but I
just started talking to people and I made sure I
recorded everything. Okay, let's go back to nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 11 (05:40):
So you think about the late seventies, it's post nineteen
sixties soul and stacks and all that stuff. Now you're
sliding into the disco era. This is an era where
(06:00):
cable is a new idea. Ted Turner hasn't even really
done his thing with CNN, That's what we're talking about.
There was no twenty four hour news network or news
cycle at the beginning of this.
Speaker 9 (06:12):
This is nearly forty years ago now, so needless to say,
in many ways things are very different. The first thing
I did was trying to soak in as much as
possible about this time period.
Speaker 11 (06:22):
This is Colinda Lee. I'm the vice president for Historical
Interpretation and Community Partnerships at the Atlanta History Center. So
certainly what you're looking at by the late seventies early
eighties is that first generation of African Americans who had
actually benefited from school desegregation, for example, at both a
(06:43):
secondary and collegiate level by then, right, So people who
were segregated maybe primary schools and still had those memories,
but were professionals by the early eighties, African Americans are
prospering to some degree, still definitely hard hit by the recession,
but compared to the ways in which they had been
disadvantaged before, prospering to some degree, largely as a byproduct
(07:09):
of affirmative action.
Speaker 9 (07:11):
Calinda described a time of fear and helplessness. All around
her kids were gradually going missing one by one. To
kids her age, there was this idea there was a
real life boogeyman out there, in a sense that no
one was really trying to protect them.
Speaker 11 (07:26):
I was a child in Atlanta during that time. I
was a nine year old living in Atlanta in the
Fourth Ward, which was one of the areas from which
children were taken, and I remember as a child the
whispers and chatter among children. If you can imagine this
real life boogeyman is actually out there, this is really happening.
(07:51):
There was a child who went to summer camp with
me who was one of the children who was abducted.
And there wasn't a sense that anything very serious was
happening to protect us. There wasn't a sense that anything
about our daily lives was really changing much except that
we were very afraid, and our parents were very angry.
(08:13):
Every single one of them was not only black, they
were also poor. The neighborhoods from which they were taken
were the most vulnerable, most impoverished within the city. Many
of them came from public housing projects, and so all
of that definitely conspired to make folks feel like this
(08:39):
is something that is happening to the least of us,
and nobody cares. Atlanta is ashamed of this, I think
continues to be ashamed of this.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
It is not.
Speaker 11 (08:52):
Something that people really candidly talk about in the open
very much. I think that it's interesting that there's a
way in which I think Atlanta remains ashamed of the
racial bifurcation. That this really shows up when you talk
to people about their memories of this time. There's a
really distinct gap. I do a lot of oral history.
(09:15):
There's a really distinct gap between white at Lantin's and
Black at Lantins. I think that it's about a sense,
a profound sense of separate realities and separate societies. It's
startling to me, as a person who again as a child,
lived here, to talk to people who are my contemporaries
(09:38):
who were living in other neighborhoods living in majority neighborhoods,
who didn't have a sense of that urgency at all,
who didn't have a sense of that vulnerability at all,
who didn't even know that it was happening at all.
I think it's impossible to dissi entangle the race and
(10:01):
class issues.
Speaker 12 (10:06):
I think if the world was designed with all blacks,
we might be pressud of the one that's too short,
the one that might be too tall, the one that's
ball And I think the same difference if it was
all whites would be the same thing. I think it's
just a human illness that we have, and we as
(10:29):
a people never learned to solve it. It's crazy. Even
in Vietnam it was the same thing.
Speaker 10 (10:38):
This is Russell Boltazar.
Speaker 9 (10:40):
He's sixty nine years old currently living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
As a young adult in the late seventies, Russell remembers
this time period all too well.
Speaker 12 (10:51):
When I left for the Marine Corps, I was seventeen
years old. They had to flies out secretly in the
middle of the morning and flies back in the middle
of the night. Yeah, that's how we used to leave
here at night. So most of the protesters wouldn't see
us leaving. We were so close together as a team,
(11:15):
and what we were fought, we were bled red. We
ate together, slept together the whole nine yard. It did
make a difference. But when we flew back to the
state side and landed on the tarmac, we went back
all separate ways again. I was active duty in the
(11:42):
Marine Corps at the time, stationed at Campbell's Ure in
North Carolina. My father was living in Atlanta. Patrick, Diane,
and Jacqueline are my three youngest brothers and sisters. They
got invited there doing this to Atlanta. They decided to
(12:03):
enroll in school there.
Speaker 9 (12:06):
Even all the way in North Carolina, Russell remembers seeing
and hearing the news stories about Atlanta's missing children. With
his younger siblings having just moved to Atlanta, Russell fulk
concerned for their safety.
Speaker 10 (12:18):
So one day he called his father.
Speaker 12 (12:20):
I asked him, do you think that it's wise that
those kids should be there? Maybe they need to be
back in Louisiana. And so he said, well, everything is
going to be okay. And you know, they were gonna
go ahead and put him in school and they're going
to be safe. I says well, I don't have a
(12:44):
good feeling about it, but you go ahead and hamle it.
Speaker 10 (12:49):
A few months later, his father called him out of
the blue.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
One day.
Speaker 12 (12:52):
He called me and he asked me, have you seen Patrick?
What do you mean? Have I seen Patrick? He's in
Atlanta and I'm in campus. You're in North Carolina and
he's eleven years old. I think he was just reaching
for straws, because now all of a sudden he's word, well,
you know, Patrick thinks a lot of you, and it
(13:14):
is a possibility maybe got a ticket, caught the bus
and went up there to see us. Says no, Dad,
I don't think that would have happened. That's kind of
odd for you to say that Patrick, young as he is,
will to try to find me in North Carolina, had
never been there before, to the base at all. I
was trying to locate me. I just felt that that
(13:34):
was something for eleven year old. The way we were raised,
that Patrick was just I said, I got a bad
feeling you're not gonna find Patrick alive. And I made
him anger when I said that I have that feeling
(13:57):
that you're not gonna find me. A week later, the
following Friday, that's when we got a phone call that
they found him.
Speaker 10 (14:17):
Who called you, my dad?
Speaker 7 (14:20):
What do he said?
Speaker 12 (14:21):
Said that they found him your brother dead. He was
stabbed several times. They claimed that he got beat with
a round object and strangled. And I told him, I says, well,
(14:42):
I'm going to talk to my company commander and see
if I can come out there to be with you.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
And that's what I did.
Speaker 13 (15:04):
Saint Anthony's church was crowded with Patrick Baldassar's family, his friends,
and classmates. The shock of his disappearance ten days ago
had barely sunk in when they learned Friday that his
body had been found. Patrick's fellow fifth grader sat quietly, attentively,
wondering why their friend had been taken from them. It
was to these youngsters that Father Patrick Bishop directed his remarks.
He spoke of a good fear that teaches children to
(15:26):
avoid danger, and he spoke of a bad fear, terror
but can't be understood.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
And he made a plea.
Speaker 14 (15:31):
There are things in this life that are dangerous, things
that we need to protect ourselves from. You can't let
it change your way of believing about people.
Speaker 13 (15:44):
After the mass, Father John Adamski read a poem. Written
by Patrick's classmates. It ended with these words, there was.
Speaker 15 (15:50):
Not a word about how you died. It is no
wonder that we all cried, Patrick, we miss you and
wish you knew how much your schoolmates agreed for you.
Speaker 12 (16:30):
My mom's and daddy is from the little town of
Broughbridge and Cecilia, Louisiana, And this one particular gravesite has
my grandmother and my aunts and brothers, and the majority
of the family, my mother and the past, all of
us has always made a point whenever one of us
(16:54):
past made sure we went back to that same graveyard.
When I drove back to Atlanta to pick up his body,
I stayed there till the wake was over, what they
called as a memorial. Basically, once they closed the coffin,
I talked to arrangement with the funeral director and they
(17:14):
flew the body here. I drove here and waited till
this body showed help. I made arrangement one of the
funeral directors here in a little town of Broughbridge. We
did the funeral services there and buried him there. I'm
gonna tell you a little something about that. Okay, during
that era, now we're still talking about the segregation, integration
(17:37):
going on, and everybody trying to get us to merge
together as black and white. Well, there in that town,
being in the South, there were two churches. These two churches.
One of the churches it is white. The other church
it's black, same denomination of church. In between the two churches,
(18:02):
it is a cemetery, white Saberita to the front and
black Sabit to the black. The cemetery has always been
set up like that. When the hears showed up, it
showed up in the front door of the white church.
I'm standing at that particular church to me, church's church,
and no problem. They met us outside of that church
(18:23):
and told us that they couldn't do it. They couldn't
do his services in that church. And I went over
and talked to the minister about it. You will have
his funeral in that church. And this guy that was
driving the hearse got so angry because it was he
was a white driver. I think the rule was that
you do not take blacks in that church, and they
(18:45):
were and he was trying to hold faster. That didn't
want to bring him over to the white church to
get buried to do his service, and he was upset
because I was demanding for it to happen that way,
and he mashed on the gas, was kicking rocks, spinning
in a parking lot. If Patrick bought in the back
of the hurts, I was trying, I wouldn't trying to
(19:07):
make any problems for anybody. You told me no, why not, Well,
you couldn't tell me why you're gonna do a service here?
I might here raising hell for Patrick to get him
to be buried. They did his service in the church.
He's one of the first black kids that ever went
had a funeral in that church.
Speaker 16 (19:33):
It has proved to be the police department's most baffling problem.
Eight children kidnapped or killed in the last year. There
have been massive searches. Civic groups have tried to help out.
Parents of the children have gotten together to see what
they could do. Former police officers have donated their time
to the investigation. But still nothing.
Speaker 11 (19:54):
And I remember I still remember parents organizing to stand
at the bus stop with the kids and wait for
them to safely be on the bus and that kind
so the anxiety that that produced. And remember this is
a time when we were we were free ranged children.
We were come home when the street lights came on children,
so that was a very big deal.
Speaker 17 (20:19):
I am so sorry that what happened to my child
and what happened to these other ladies' children happen. But
what I want you to do is to hang in
there and try your best to see to it that
it doesn't happen to yours.
Speaker 11 (20:34):
The mothers of missing and murdered children sat in at
city Hall to demand that a full investigation be launched.
So imagine the grief not just of losing your children,
but then having to demand that there be full attention
to this.
Speaker 17 (20:48):
We are paying people to maintain the safety of the
streets of the city of Atlanta. If the safety of
the city of Atlanta is not maintained, then the people
that we are hiring to do that job need to
be looked at carefully. If that job is not done,
then we need to look towards why we are paying
people not to do a job.
Speaker 18 (21:13):
Part of this crowd agreed that some of the criticism
of the police was accurate. Tell them, explained there was
no attempt to show the city as insensitive. Just to
show how long it took Atlanta and the city administration
to become outraged.
Speaker 11 (21:26):
That fracture I don't think was ever fully healed within
the Atlanta community. There was a sense that maybe, you know,
some folks felt safe or felt safe enough based on
a degree of economic privilege, and again that these folks
who were most marginalized already anyway, just were kind of
(21:47):
left to fit for themselves. If you look at these
profiles of the children who were victimized, many of them
were in foster care situations. Many of them had, you know,
very difficult and unstable home lives, be it because of
a parental failing or not because of poverty. You know,
some of them went missing doing things like you know,
(22:09):
being ten years old and out bagging groceries to try
to get a little bit of change to help their families.
So you really get this really palpable in my mind,
still a very painful portrait of these kids who are
incredibly vulnerable, who were then taken up in this way
and go missing and then found in these gruesome circumstances.
(22:34):
If at all, as we finally got the kind of
attention that parents were lobbying for for children, it only
really escalated the fear. There wasn't a real sense of
reassurance because nobody was being captured, and the ways that
(22:57):
policies were instated to deal with them, like the fact
that one of the first official actions that was taken
was to institute a curfew, which would in many ways
and for many people, suggest that the people who are
in the communities that are most victimized by this have
somehow engaged in some wrongdoing. Right, so you have to
(23:20):
get home early or you're going to get picked up
and taken to a detention center.
Speaker 19 (23:26):
The curfew took effect at eleven o'clock last night and
will be in effect every night for the next ninety
days from eleven pm until six am.
Speaker 20 (23:33):
People are afraid to let that children go out to play.
People are afraid to send their children to the store.
They're afraid to let the children go down to the
community playgrounds and play in the afternoons and evenings.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
So I think now.
Speaker 20 (23:46):
We will get the support because there are number of
parents that need to take more time out with their
children and keep up with our children. So if parents
won't do it, we some of us have to try
to enforce some type of curfew so the children will
be off the streets by eleven pm.
Speaker 19 (24:04):
Police have been instructed to explain the conditions of the
curfew before enforcing it. However, when police get the word
to go ahead, they will first take the child home.
If the parents are home, then they will be cited.
If the parents are not home, or if the child
does not give a home address, then he or she
will be taken to a juvenile detention center.
Speaker 9 (24:24):
I asked Eric Cameron how he felt about the curfew
as a kid, Like the.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Curfew came and right in the mix, so the kids
gein't killed like it was a curfew, Like we had
to be in at seven o'clock, six o'clock, I'm crazy
like that that came along right in the midst of it.
You know, we understood that it was something going on,
kids getting missing, and I can distinctly remember walking as
groups and we will see calls the lights of cause
(24:51):
and we would literally just take off, you know, just
like somebody coming to get you.
Speaker 11 (24:54):
We always felt like that there's not a sense of support.
So people were wounded and then kind of rewounded. And
then in the midst of all of this, there's a
sense of from some folks, a sense that part of
what having racial solidarity means, because race relations were still
(25:16):
very fraught was that you have to support the African
American mayor, you have to support the African American chief
of police, and so you shouldn't be out here protesting
and saying that you know, the city is not supporting
you well enough. So it's really really fraught, difficult, contentious moment.
They're also, I think was a really significant habit during
(25:42):
that time of holding back information in investigations that looks
very different than what we have now. Right, So some
of that is probably you know, true crime investigative stuff,
like you don't want to tell all the details of
how this body is found because if you find the
right person kill and then only the killer knows that, right.
But so and you know, and we're in this moment
(26:03):
where everybody wants to know every salacious detail right this moment.
But there was definitely some significant holding back of information,
and so that only opened the door wider for people
to kind of reach into their imaginations and also for
a rumor mil to flourish. And so there were a
lot of theories, right that people developed that because they
(26:25):
were all black, because they were mostly male, this is
you know, this was a KKK conspiracy, or this was
a racially motivated. These were racially motivated attacks, and that
kind of thing, and a sense that as Atlanta was
trying to affirm its reputation and continue to get business
and tourism and all those things under the moniker of
(26:47):
the city too busy to hate, that the people who
were prospering under that just could not afford for that
thing to be true, even if it were true.
Speaker 9 (26:58):
In a time were societal in agration between blacks and
whites was really just beginning. The missing and murdered children
in Atlanta created a new tension, reopening wounds that had
never fully healed. In many ways, it was dividing the city.
From the beginning. There was a struggle to give these
children equal news coverage and even thorough police investigations. Parents
of the victims joined together pleading for answers from the city.
(27:21):
The number of missing children was growing, and eventually the
story gained national news coverage. In the Atlanta police department
found themselves in the hunt for a killer.
Speaker 13 (27:33):
Fifty seven percent of the blacks responding to the survey
said they think the killings are part of a larger
conspiracy against blacks. The same percentage of whites feel the
killings are criminal acts with no connection to racial issues.
The survey polls the question did police treat blacks as
fairly as they treat whites? The majority of the blacks
said no. Most of the white respondents said the treatment
from police's And.
Speaker 8 (27:55):
There are all kind of rumors going on back there.
I can remember some people in the black communit he
thought it was a ku Klux klan that was grabbing
these black boys.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
Other people thought, you know, it's some kind of.
Speaker 8 (28:07):
Weird sexual deviant who's grabbing these boys. And there was
all this conjecture, but no one ever really knew who
it was, what was the pattern. I can remember the
mothers pleading for help. I can remember the white community
coming together and putting up money to find the person
(28:28):
who was doing this.
Speaker 6 (28:30):
We were almost paralyzed.
Speaker 8 (28:32):
I hate to put it that way, but the freedom
of Friday night football wasn't there anymore. Going to basketball
games for kids wasn't there anymore unless you had an
adult with you all the time. You know, kids today
have their freedoms, they go here, they do anything they
want to do. But during that time period, it was
(28:55):
a matter of knowing where your child was and keeping
that child as close to you as possible, particularly if
it was a black male child. They were young black males,
and they were poor, young black males.
Speaker 6 (29:08):
It was almost as if it was like.
Speaker 8 (29:11):
A Jack the Ripper character, picking the least served in
the community and taking advantage of them by taking away
their children.
Speaker 6 (29:21):
Very vulnerable kids.
Speaker 8 (29:22):
Who would at the drop of the hat because they
are poor, you offer them something, and they trust.
Speaker 6 (29:31):
That trust was.
Speaker 8 (29:32):
Betrayed by someone who really wanted to kill them. Many
felt that the police department wasn't doing all it could
do to find who was committing these crimes, who was
picking up these children and killing them and then dumping
them like trash. You know, at first it was one child,
then it was two, and then you kind of went, okay,
(29:54):
we actually have a serial killer out there now.
Speaker 6 (29:57):
And that's when the community really did.
Speaker 8 (30:00):
They did come together in jail as a force to
try to protect the children, to push the police department
to do even more in trying to find who did this.
Speaker 21 (30:13):
What frustrates police here most is they are convinced someone
out in the community has enough information to help them
crack these cases. The problem is so far, at least
whoever does know isn't talking.
Speaker 22 (30:24):
It's I believe that there's some kids out here that
have the answers. There's a few kids who may know
a little bit, but they don't know who to tell,
or possibly no one will listen to them. What they
think it's just a child's nonsense. There may be a
kid out here that has a complete description of everything.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
We want to know.
Speaker 19 (30:46):
More than four hundred police officers and firefighters, beginning Monday,
will knock on doors from nine in the morning until
nine at night. They will canvas seven days a week
until they hit every door in the city.
Speaker 12 (30:58):
You don't have to have all the information.
Speaker 22 (31:00):
Give us what information you think you have or that
you may have. You don't have to tell nobody your name.
Just tell your teacher, she'll get the information to us.
Tell your parents, or if you can find no one
else to talk to, you call the police department.
Speaker 9 (31:19):
The police department thought the key might be a child
coming forward as a witness to an abduction or at
least an attempted one. This is Mickey Lloyd, former APD.
Speaker 23 (31:30):
I was in the homicide unit during that time period
with the Atlanta Police Department. I got the call on
the first two bodies. They were on Niskey Lake Road
in Atlanta, southwest Atlanta at that time. It was a
dirt road with woods on both sides, and the two
victims were Edward Smith and Alfred Evans. They were both
(31:56):
young black kids. Children, but we got to call first on.
It was Alfred Evans and he was off on a
hill in the woods, about twenty feet off the road,
and he had been he'd been dead a while. He
was mummified.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
If you know what mummified is.
Speaker 23 (32:16):
A term where the skin is dried and it's not decaying,
but it just mummified. That's from being in the sun
and the shade. And uh, while we were working that
crime scene, I kept smelling something like something dead, and
I got upwind of him and I still smelled it.
So I sent a patrol alture up through the woods,
(32:38):
uh Misky Lake, and he found the body of Edward
Smith and it was down in a dish and it
was a matter of fact, he was so decomposed he
was almost liquified. And then as it went on, we
started getting more young blackmails murdered in different areas of
the city. And we would meet once a month and
(33:00):
talk about crime. You know, anything that may be in
common and I think we had one of those meetings
and I think we had about six kids dead by then,
and I got up and made a statement that we
got a problem somebody killing young blackmails in Atlanta. Next
(33:21):
thing I know, I'm standing tall in the Chief's office
wanting to know what I'm basing that on because of
some media picked up on it, so I guess I'm
want to spill the.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Beans on that.
Speaker 23 (33:33):
And uh, I really didn't have anything to be based
on other than just common sense and working working cases.
They didn't want to hear it, you know, the community,
we didn't want to hear it. The police command didn't
want to hear nobody. Nobody wanted to hear I didn't
want to say it, and I don't know what made
me say it, but I just thought we need to
do something is try to connect these cases, because to me,
(33:53):
they seem related.
Speaker 9 (34:10):
The first two victims were Edward Smith and Alfred Evans.
Boths went missing in July nineteen seventy nine. In September
that year, fourteen year old Milton Harvey went missing, followed
by nine year old Yusef Bell in October. By the
end of nineteen eighty, seventeen children had gone missing in Atlanta,
(34:34):
and by May nineteen eighty one, the number was thirty.
Edward Hope Smith, Alfred Evans, Milton Harvey, Yusef Bell, Jeffrey Mathis,
Angel Lanier, Eric Middlebrooks, Christopher Richardson, Latanya Wilson, Aaron Anthony Carter,
(35:03):
Earl Terrell, Clifford Jones, Darren Glass, Charles Stevens, Aaron Jackson,
Patrick Rogers, Louby Jeter, Terry Pew, Patrick Baltazar, Curtis Walker,
(35:24):
Joseph Bell, Timothy Hill, Eddie Duncan, Larry Rodgers, Michael McIntosh,
Jimmy Ray Payne, John Porter, William Barrett, and Nathaniel Cater.
Just to be clear, these are not the only African
(35:45):
American kids that went missing or were murder between the
summers of seventy nine and eighty one.
Speaker 10 (35:51):
These are only the names that made the list.
Speaker 23 (36:11):
It got so big that I think it got kind
of convoluted. There was just too many, too many hands
in the pie. Then the FBI got involved in it.
They were leading, but we were doing what we were told.
Speaker 24 (36:37):
Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging
system is not available at the tone. Please record your message.
When you finished recording, you may hang up or press
one for more options.
Speaker 25 (36:52):
He my name is Payne Lindsay. I'm currently doing a
documentary project about the Atlanta child murders that happened in
the early eighties. I'm looking for the Mike mccombis that
was working for the FBI at the time on the case.
If you could give me a callback, I'd love to
ask you a few questions about it, if you didn't mind.
My number is three one zero seven nine.
Speaker 7 (37:23):
Telling you this two year story would be a little
not It wouldn't be in a chronological order, I don't think.
Because there was so much went.
Speaker 9 (37:32):
On, I got different bullet points I want to hit
with you, Okay.
Speaker 10 (37:40):
I guess for starters. How big was this case compared
to others in the FBI.
Speaker 7 (37:46):
We had at least one volume for every victim, and
that's a lot of volumes. Yea big. There's so many
files involved. This is seeing the bureau. They have what
they call major cases, and this was this was major
case Major case number seven. It was code named AT
KID A T K I d AT is abbreviation of
Girlfriend Atlanta and Kid was the kids were missing at kid. Now,
(38:09):
every case doesn't get a name, No, just the major case.
You've got one hundred different investigators. You've got GBI, you've
got the FBI, You've got Atlanta City, you've got the county,
you've got the Cab County to Cab City. And then
you know, there was no moss grown under our feet.
I can tell you that we were. We were humping,
and we were staying really busy, and it was taking
its toll on a lot of people too. You just,
(38:31):
you know, you just can only pick up so many
dead children off the street before it starts affecting you
a little bit. You know, these kids came from different
walks of life, you know, socioeconomically. I think they were
on the lower scale. It doesn't make them bad kids,
you know they were. They were good kids. They were
just street kids. There were night kids less than sufficiently supervised,
(38:54):
would be my opinion. FBI got involved in this investigation.
What they did was is they I signed two agents
to every child that was that was on the list.
Speaker 9 (39:06):
What would you say is your first lead that ever
amounted to anything.
Speaker 7 (39:10):
There was one kid that came in to the office
one day and he goes, hey, I was approached by
a black guy. I got in a car with him
and something went sideways with it. I'm not really sure
what happened. There was some type of scuffle. He said
that the driver tried to push him down in the
floorboard and he had a partial tag and he gave
(39:36):
us a composite sketch.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
And at another bonder was discovered from day but twenty
third at Police Task Force headquarters.
Speaker 22 (39:44):
There are twenty seven faces on the wall, twenty six murdered,
one missing.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
We do not know the person or persons that are responsible. Therefore,
we do not have the money.
Speaker 10 (39:53):
From tenderfoot TV in house to forks in Atlanta.
Speaker 20 (39:56):
Like eleven other recent victrums in Atlanta, rogers are currently wasn't.
Speaker 25 (39:59):
Fixing Atlanta was unlikely to catch the killer unless he
keeps on killing.
Speaker 10 (40:05):
This is Atlanta Monster next time on Atlanta Monster.
Speaker 26 (40:20):
Sketching back then wasn't what it is today. I mean,
some of these sketches they come out with better than photographs.
Back then, you know, you worked with what he had
and it was a pretty good sketch.
Speaker 9 (40:31):
What it looked like to you, remember, well, it.
Speaker 26 (40:33):
Was a blackmail with pushy hair. I remember the composite
sketch very well.
Speaker 27 (40:39):
He knows in the daytime what he's dealing, but at
night he's not really sure, so he kind of stays
to himself in his apartment. He has a television set.
There's no guns up there, no nothing. He's shrewd, he's methodical.
You're not dealing with a guy with one hundred and
sixty four IQ. He's clean, he's neat, he's above suspicion.
(41:00):
I cannot stop him. I don't have the authority or
the power.
Speaker 9 (41:14):
Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week,
with new episodes every Friday, A joint production between How
Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup
and Vanity Set. Audio archives courtesy of WSB News Film
and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries.
(41:36):
For the latest updates, please visit Atlantamonster dot com or
follow us on social media.
Speaker 10 (42:04):
Described Atlanta to me.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
In growing up here, man, you know what, a Atlanta
is a very special special place, and you don't even
realize how special it is until you get outside of here.
It's really a place of peace and love to be
one hundred, which you mean. You know, Martin Luther King
from here. So it's it's like a gotta it got
a spiritual thing with it, you know what I'm saying.
It's a blessed place. I believe no matter how street
you are, you got a spiritual side here
And at that time, man was just so.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Just to think back, like every that that was everybody
was scared. It was always be careful, you know, everywhere
y'all go go in groups, you know what I'm saying.
It was like everybody was scared, and definitely the people
from where we grew up, like like.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Around from where we were from. Everybody over there.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Scared because that's where they was getting the kids from.
It it was crazy, man Like at that time, it
was like the Boogerman he because it's literally somebody going
around taking kids and they will finding them and telling
who they were, following them behind buildings.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
That was just our life. When you're living through something
like that, it's kind of like different. It was just
something we had to deal with. Watch for the Boogerman.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
My name is Camera. We are in the atl Atlanta,
Georgia and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia born and Brett.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
And I'm Eric Cameron and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia, also
West Side to be exact. Yep, he's the big brother,
that's the little brother. The area we're from is while
the kids most of the kids were getting missing from
So the area we're from the West side of Atlanta, like,
so it was almost like you gotta be real, real careful,
like can stay out, you always be with somebody. I
was real, real little so most times I was with
(01:26):
him anyway, my big brother. But man, that was that
was a real trying time because we couldn't hang out,
like I mean, it's a lot different now, man, times
are different.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Like back then everything was about going outside.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Everything was about going outside, like I mean, now everything's
about being inside playing on computers and games or whatever.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
But it was just a different time.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
They snatching kids, somebody somebody getting kids, so you stand
a better chance or not getting snatched if it's more.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Than one, Like if you're with somebody, it was just
like unthinkable, like who could who? Who could do this?
Speaker 5 (02:06):
It's ten pm?
Speaker 6 (02:07):
Do you know where your children are?
Speaker 7 (02:14):
It's ten pm?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Do you know where your children are? I still remember that,
like literally remember that.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Talking about keeping your kids safe and what other things
you could do to keep them safe. And I still
remember that.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That was that, you know, that was I wasn't at
Channel two.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
What time that was Monica Copper I think it was
on Channel two, and they would say that you know
where are your kids?
Speaker 8 (02:44):
It's ten o'clock, do you know where your children are?
That statement became a nightly statement. I was Monica Kaufman.
I'm now Monica Kaufman Pierson. I anchored the five to six,
the eleven, and the four o'clock news at Channel two WSTV.
Speaker 6 (03:01):
It's the city's oldest television station.
Speaker 8 (03:04):
People needed to know that they needed to keep an
eye on their boys, in particular because boys were being
literally picked up off the streets. So there was this
fear that unless you reminded people to ask, where's your child?
Do you know where your child is at this time?
(03:26):
At ten o'clock? Your child should be in your house.
That people needed to be reminded. There was a monster
on the prial in Metro Atlanta.
Speaker 6 (03:36):
It was scary. It was very scary.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
Ten nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three two one,
and I happy in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 9 (04:01):
The year is nineteen seventy nine. Jimmy Carter is our president.
The Vietnam War ended just four years ago, and it's
been barely over a decade since the Civil Rights movement.
My name is Payne Lindsay. I'm a documentary filmmaker. I
was born in nineteen eighty seven, and I'm from a
small town called Kinnessaul, northwest of Atlanta. In twenty sixteen,
(04:26):
I made a podcast called Up and Vanished, where I
spent nearly two years investigating an unsolved disappearance of a
high school teacher and beauty queen from South Georgia named
Tara Grinstead. Tara vanished from her home in two thousand
and five, and the case remained ice cold for more
than a decade. But six months after I started making
the podcast, something crazy happened. The police arrested two suspects
(04:49):
in connection with TERA's murder, and for the first time
in nearly twelve years, this small town community had some answers.
Speaker 10 (04:57):
Since then, I've been looking into other cold cases.
Speaker 9 (05:00):
What began as just an idea became something more like
an obsession. A few months ago, I was in my
office and my business partner Donald mentioned the case.
Speaker 10 (05:09):
I'd never heard of, the case of Atlanta's missing children.
Speaker 9 (05:13):
I started doing some research on my own time, reading
old articles and watching news clips, and what I found
was captivating, a twisted tale that's haunted Atlanta.
Speaker 10 (05:25):
For over three decades.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
As far as the.
Speaker 9 (05:28):
Documentary goes, I didn't really have a plan but I
just started talking to people and I made sure I
recorded everything. Okay, let's go back to nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 11 (05:40):
So you think about the late seventies, it's post nineteen
sixties soul and stacks and all that stuff. Now you're
sliding into the disco era. This is an era where
(06:00):
cable is a new idea. Ted Turner hasn't even really
done his thing with CNN, That's what we're talking about.
There was no twenty four hour news network or news
cycle at the beginning of this.
Speaker 9 (06:12):
This is nearly forty years ago now, so needless to say,
in many ways things are very different. The first thing
I did was trying to soak in as much as
possible about this time period.
Speaker 11 (06:22):
This is Colinda Lee. I'm the vice president for Historical
Interpretation and Community Partnerships at the Atlanta History Center. So
certainly what you're looking at by the late seventies early
eighties is that first generation of African Americans who had
actually benefited from school desegregation, for example, at both a
(06:43):
secondary and collegiate level by then, right, So people who
were segregated maybe primary schools and still had those memories,
but were professionals by the early eighties, African Americans are
prospering to some degree, still definitely hard hit by the recession,
but compared to the ways in which they had been
disadvantaged before, prospering to some degree, largely as a byproduct
(07:09):
of affirmative action.
Speaker 9 (07:11):
Calinda described a time of fear and helplessness. All around
her kids were gradually going missing one by one. To
kids her age, there was this idea there was a
real life boogeyman out there, in a sense that no
one was really trying to protect them.
Speaker 11 (07:26):
I was a child in Atlanta during that time. I
was a nine year old living in Atlanta in the
Fourth Ward, which was one of the areas from which
children were taken, and I remember as a child the
whispers and chatter among children. If you can imagine this
real life boogeyman is actually out there, this is really happening.
(07:51):
There was a child who went to summer camp with
me who was one of the children who was abducted.
And there wasn't a sense that anything very serious was
happening to protect us. There wasn't a sense that anything
about our daily lives was really changing much except that
we were very afraid, and our parents were very angry.
(08:13):
Every single one of them was not only black, they
were also poor. The neighborhoods from which they were taken
were the most vulnerable, most impoverished within the city. Many
of them came from public housing projects, and so all
of that definitely conspired to make folks feel like this
(08:39):
is something that is happening to the least of us,
and nobody cares. Atlanta is ashamed of this, I think
continues to be ashamed of this.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
It is not.
Speaker 11 (08:52):
Something that people really candidly talk about in the open
very much. I think that it's interesting that there's a
way in which I think Atlanta remains ashamed of the
racial bifurcation. That this really shows up when you talk
to people about their memories of this time. There's a
really distinct gap. I do a lot of oral history.
(09:15):
There's a really distinct gap between white at Lantin's and
Black at Lantins. I think that it's about a sense,
a profound sense of separate realities and separate societies. It's
startling to me, as a person who again as a child,
lived here, to talk to people who are my contemporaries
(09:38):
who were living in other neighborhoods living in majority neighborhoods,
who didn't have a sense of that urgency at all,
who didn't have a sense of that vulnerability at all,
who didn't even know that it was happening at all.
I think it's impossible to dissi entangle the race and
(10:01):
class issues.
Speaker 12 (10:06):
I think if the world was designed with all blacks,
we might be pressud of the one that's too short,
the one that might be too tall, the one that's
ball And I think the same difference if it was
all whites would be the same thing. I think it's
just a human illness that we have, and we as
(10:29):
a people never learned to solve it. It's crazy. Even
in Vietnam it was the same thing.
Speaker 10 (10:38):
This is Russell Boltazar.
Speaker 9 (10:40):
He's sixty nine years old currently living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
As a young adult in the late seventies, Russell remembers
this time period all too well.
Speaker 12 (10:51):
When I left for the Marine Corps, I was seventeen
years old. They had to flies out secretly in the
middle of the morning and flies back in the middle
of the night. Yeah, that's how we used to leave
here at night. So most of the protesters wouldn't see
us leaving. We were so close together as a team,
(11:15):
and what we were fought, we were bled red. We
ate together, slept together the whole nine yard. It did
make a difference. But when we flew back to the
state side and landed on the tarmac, we went back
all separate ways again. I was active duty in the
(11:42):
Marine Corps at the time, stationed at Campbell's Ure in
North Carolina. My father was living in Atlanta. Patrick, Diane,
and Jacqueline are my three youngest brothers and sisters. They
got invited there doing this to Atlanta. They decided to
(12:03):
enroll in school there.
Speaker 9 (12:06):
Even all the way in North Carolina, Russell remembers seeing
and hearing the news stories about Atlanta's missing children. With
his younger siblings having just moved to Atlanta, Russell fulk
concerned for their safety.
Speaker 10 (12:18):
So one day he called his father.
Speaker 12 (12:20):
I asked him, do you think that it's wise that
those kids should be there? Maybe they need to be
back in Louisiana. And so he said, well, everything is
going to be okay. And you know, they were gonna
go ahead and put him in school and they're going
to be safe. I says well, I don't have a
(12:44):
good feeling about it, but you go ahead and hamle it.
Speaker 10 (12:49):
A few months later, his father called him out of
the blue.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
One day.
Speaker 12 (12:52):
He called me and he asked me, have you seen Patrick?
What do you mean? Have I seen Patrick? He's in
Atlanta and I'm in campus. You're in North Carolina and
he's eleven years old. I think he was just reaching
for straws, because now all of a sudden he's word, well,
you know, Patrick thinks a lot of you, and it
(13:14):
is a possibility maybe got a ticket, caught the bus
and went up there to see us. Says no, Dad,
I don't think that would have happened. That's kind of
odd for you to say that Patrick, young as he is,
will to try to find me in North Carolina, had
never been there before, to the base at all. I
was trying to locate me. I just felt that that
(13:34):
was something for eleven year old. The way we were raised,
that Patrick was just I said, I got a bad
feeling you're not gonna find Patrick alive. And I made
him anger when I said that I have that feeling
(13:57):
that you're not gonna find me. A week later, the
following Friday, that's when we got a phone call that
they found him.
Speaker 10 (14:17):
Who called you, my dad?
Speaker 7 (14:20):
What do he said?
Speaker 12 (14:21):
Said that they found him your brother dead. He was
stabbed several times. They claimed that he got beat with
a round object and strangled. And I told him, I says, well,
(14:42):
I'm going to talk to my company commander and see
if I can come out there to be with you.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
And that's what I did.
Speaker 13 (15:04):
Saint Anthony's church was crowded with Patrick Baldassar's family, his friends,
and classmates. The shock of his disappearance ten days ago
had barely sunk in when they learned Friday that his
body had been found. Patrick's fellow fifth grader sat quietly, attentively,
wondering why their friend had been taken from them. It
was to these youngsters that Father Patrick Bishop directed his remarks.
He spoke of a good fear that teaches children to
(15:26):
avoid danger, and he spoke of a bad fear, terror
but can't be understood.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
And he made a plea.
Speaker 14 (15:31):
There are things in this life that are dangerous, things
that we need to protect ourselves from. You can't let
it change your way of believing about people.
Speaker 13 (15:44):
After the mass, Father John Adamski read a poem. Written
by Patrick's classmates. It ended with these words, there was.
Speaker 15 (15:50):
Not a word about how you died. It is no
wonder that we all cried, Patrick, we miss you and
wish you knew how much your schoolmates agreed for you.
Speaker 12 (16:30):
My mom's and daddy is from the little town of
Broughbridge and Cecilia, Louisiana, And this one particular gravesite has
my grandmother and my aunts and brothers, and the majority
of the family, my mother and the past, all of
us has always made a point whenever one of us
(16:54):
past made sure we went back to that same graveyard.
When I drove back to Atlanta to pick up his body,
I stayed there till the wake was over, what they
called as a memorial. Basically, once they closed the coffin,
I talked to arrangement with the funeral director and they
(17:14):
flew the body here. I drove here and waited till
this body showed help. I made arrangement one of the
funeral directors here in a little town of Broughbridge. We
did the funeral services there and buried him there. I'm
gonna tell you a little something about that. Okay, during
that era, now we're still talking about the segregation, integration
(17:37):
going on, and everybody trying to get us to merge
together as black and white. Well, there in that town,
being in the South, there were two churches. These two churches.
One of the churches it is white. The other church
it's black, same denomination of church. In between the two churches,
(18:02):
it is a cemetery, white Saberita to the front and
black Sabit to the black. The cemetery has always been
set up like that. When the hears showed up, it
showed up in the front door of the white church.
I'm standing at that particular church to me, church's church,
and no problem. They met us outside of that church
(18:23):
and told us that they couldn't do it. They couldn't
do his services in that church. And I went over
and talked to the minister about it. You will have
his funeral in that church. And this guy that was
driving the hearse got so angry because it was he
was a white driver. I think the rule was that
you do not take blacks in that church, and they
(18:45):
were and he was trying to hold faster. That didn't
want to bring him over to the white church to
get buried to do his service, and he was upset
because I was demanding for it to happen that way,
and he mashed on the gas, was kicking rocks, spinning
in a parking lot. If Patrick bought in the back
of the hurts, I was trying, I wouldn't trying to
(19:07):
make any problems for anybody. You told me no, why not, Well,
you couldn't tell me why you're gonna do a service here?
I might here raising hell for Patrick to get him
to be buried. They did his service in the church.
He's one of the first black kids that ever went
had a funeral in that church.
Speaker 16 (19:33):
It has proved to be the police department's most baffling problem.
Eight children kidnapped or killed in the last year. There
have been massive searches. Civic groups have tried to help out.
Parents of the children have gotten together to see what
they could do. Former police officers have donated their time
to the investigation. But still nothing.
Speaker 11 (19:54):
And I remember I still remember parents organizing to stand
at the bus stop with the kids and wait for
them to safely be on the bus and that kind
so the anxiety that that produced. And remember this is
a time when we were we were free ranged children.
We were come home when the street lights came on children,
so that was a very big deal.
Speaker 17 (20:19):
I am so sorry that what happened to my child
and what happened to these other ladies' children happen. But
what I want you to do is to hang in
there and try your best to see to it that
it doesn't happen to yours.
Speaker 11 (20:34):
The mothers of missing and murdered children sat in at
city Hall to demand that a full investigation be launched.
So imagine the grief not just of losing your children,
but then having to demand that there be full attention
to this.
Speaker 17 (20:48):
We are paying people to maintain the safety of the
streets of the city of Atlanta. If the safety of
the city of Atlanta is not maintained, then the people
that we are hiring to do that job need to
be looked at carefully. If that job is not done,
then we need to look towards why we are paying
people not to do a job.
Speaker 18 (21:13):
Part of this crowd agreed that some of the criticism
of the police was accurate. Tell them, explained there was
no attempt to show the city as insensitive. Just to
show how long it took Atlanta and the city administration
to become outraged.
Speaker 11 (21:26):
That fracture I don't think was ever fully healed within
the Atlanta community. There was a sense that maybe, you know,
some folks felt safe or felt safe enough based on
a degree of economic privilege, and again that these folks
who were most marginalized already anyway, just were kind of
(21:47):
left to fit for themselves. If you look at these
profiles of the children who were victimized, many of them
were in foster care situations. Many of them had, you know,
very difficult and unstable home lives, be it because of
a parental failing or not because of poverty. You know,
some of them went missing doing things like you know,
(22:09):
being ten years old and out bagging groceries to try
to get a little bit of change to help their families.
So you really get this really palpable in my mind,
still a very painful portrait of these kids who are
incredibly vulnerable, who were then taken up in this way
and go missing and then found in these gruesome circumstances.
(22:34):
If at all, as we finally got the kind of
attention that parents were lobbying for for children, it only
really escalated the fear. There wasn't a real sense of
reassurance because nobody was being captured, and the ways that
(22:57):
policies were instated to deal with them, like the fact
that one of the first official actions that was taken
was to institute a curfew, which would in many ways
and for many people, suggest that the people who are
in the communities that are most victimized by this have
somehow engaged in some wrongdoing. Right, so you have to
(23:20):
get home early or you're going to get picked up
and taken to a detention center.
Speaker 19 (23:26):
The curfew took effect at eleven o'clock last night and
will be in effect every night for the next ninety
days from eleven pm until six am.
Speaker 20 (23:33):
People are afraid to let that children go out to play.
People are afraid to send their children to the store.
They're afraid to let the children go down to the
community playgrounds and play in the afternoons and evenings.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
So I think now.
Speaker 20 (23:46):
We will get the support because there are number of
parents that need to take more time out with their
children and keep up with our children. So if parents
won't do it, we some of us have to try
to enforce some type of curfew so the children will
be off the streets by eleven pm.
Speaker 19 (24:04):
Police have been instructed to explain the conditions of the
curfew before enforcing it. However, when police get the word
to go ahead, they will first take the child home.
If the parents are home, then they will be cited.
If the parents are not home, or if the child
does not give a home address, then he or she
will be taken to a juvenile detention center.
Speaker 9 (24:24):
I asked Eric Cameron how he felt about the curfew
as a kid, Like the.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Curfew came and right in the mix, so the kids
gein't killed like it was a curfew, Like we had
to be in at seven o'clock, six o'clock, I'm crazy
like that that came along right in the midst of it.
You know, we understood that it was something going on,
kids getting missing, and I can distinctly remember walking as
groups and we will see calls the lights of cause
(24:51):
and we would literally just take off, you know, just
like somebody coming to get you.
Speaker 11 (24:54):
We always felt like that there's not a sense of support.
So people were wounded and then kind of rewounded. And
then in the midst of all of this, there's a
sense of from some folks, a sense that part of
what having racial solidarity means, because race relations were still
(25:16):
very fraught was that you have to support the African
American mayor, you have to support the African American chief
of police, and so you shouldn't be out here protesting
and saying that you know, the city is not supporting
you well enough. So it's really really fraught, difficult, contentious moment.
They're also, I think was a really significant habit during
(25:42):
that time of holding back information in investigations that looks
very different than what we have now. Right, So some
of that is probably you know, true crime investigative stuff,
like you don't want to tell all the details of
how this body is found because if you find the
right person kill and then only the killer knows that, right.
But so and you know, and we're in this moment
(26:03):
where everybody wants to know every salacious detail right this moment.
But there was definitely some significant holding back of information,
and so that only opened the door wider for people
to kind of reach into their imaginations and also for
a rumor mil to flourish. And so there were a
lot of theories, right that people developed that because they
(26:25):
were all black, because they were mostly male, this is
you know, this was a KKK conspiracy, or this was
a racially motivated. These were racially motivated attacks, and that
kind of thing, and a sense that as Atlanta was
trying to affirm its reputation and continue to get business
and tourism and all those things under the moniker of
(26:47):
the city too busy to hate, that the people who
were prospering under that just could not afford for that
thing to be true, even if it were true.
Speaker 9 (26:58):
In a time were societal in agration between blacks and
whites was really just beginning. The missing and murdered children
in Atlanta created a new tension, reopening wounds that had
never fully healed. In many ways, it was dividing the city.
From the beginning. There was a struggle to give these
children equal news coverage and even thorough police investigations. Parents
of the victims joined together pleading for answers from the city.
(27:21):
The number of missing children was growing, and eventually the
story gained national news coverage. In the Atlanta police department
found themselves in the hunt for a killer.
Speaker 13 (27:33):
Fifty seven percent of the blacks responding to the survey
said they think the killings are part of a larger
conspiracy against blacks. The same percentage of whites feel the
killings are criminal acts with no connection to racial issues.
The survey polls the question did police treat blacks as
fairly as they treat whites? The majority of the blacks
said no. Most of the white respondents said the treatment
from police's And.
Speaker 8 (27:55):
There are all kind of rumors going on back there.
I can remember some people in the black communit he
thought it was a ku Klux klan that was grabbing
these black boys.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
Other people thought, you know, it's some kind of.
Speaker 8 (28:07):
Weird sexual deviant who's grabbing these boys. And there was
all this conjecture, but no one ever really knew who
it was, what was the pattern. I can remember the
mothers pleading for help. I can remember the white community
coming together and putting up money to find the person
(28:28):
who was doing this.
Speaker 6 (28:30):
We were almost paralyzed.
Speaker 8 (28:32):
I hate to put it that way, but the freedom
of Friday night football wasn't there anymore. Going to basketball
games for kids wasn't there anymore unless you had an
adult with you all the time. You know, kids today
have their freedoms, they go here, they do anything they
want to do. But during that time period, it was
(28:55):
a matter of knowing where your child was and keeping
that child as close to you as possible, particularly if
it was a black male child. They were young black males,
and they were poor, young black males.
Speaker 6 (29:08):
It was almost as if it was like.
Speaker 8 (29:11):
A Jack the Ripper character, picking the least served in
the community and taking advantage of them by taking away
their children.
Speaker 6 (29:21):
Very vulnerable kids.
Speaker 8 (29:22):
Who would at the drop of the hat because they
are poor, you offer them something, and they trust.
Speaker 6 (29:31):
That trust was.
Speaker 8 (29:32):
Betrayed by someone who really wanted to kill them. Many
felt that the police department wasn't doing all it could
do to find who was committing these crimes, who was
picking up these children and killing them and then dumping
them like trash. You know, at first it was one child,
then it was two, and then you kind of went, okay,
(29:54):
we actually have a serial killer out there now.
Speaker 6 (29:57):
And that's when the community really did.
Speaker 8 (30:00):
They did come together in jail as a force to
try to protect the children, to push the police department
to do even more in trying to find who did this.
Speaker 21 (30:13):
What frustrates police here most is they are convinced someone
out in the community has enough information to help them
crack these cases. The problem is so far, at least
whoever does know isn't talking.
Speaker 22 (30:24):
It's I believe that there's some kids out here that
have the answers. There's a few kids who may know
a little bit, but they don't know who to tell,
or possibly no one will listen to them. What they
think it's just a child's nonsense. There may be a
kid out here that has a complete description of everything.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
We want to know.
Speaker 19 (30:46):
More than four hundred police officers and firefighters, beginning Monday,
will knock on doors from nine in the morning until
nine at night. They will canvas seven days a week
until they hit every door in the city.
Speaker 12 (30:58):
You don't have to have all the information.
Speaker 22 (31:00):
Give us what information you think you have or that
you may have. You don't have to tell nobody your name.
Just tell your teacher, she'll get the information to us.
Tell your parents, or if you can find no one
else to talk to, you call the police department.
Speaker 9 (31:19):
The police department thought the key might be a child
coming forward as a witness to an abduction or at
least an attempted one. This is Mickey Lloyd, former APD.
Speaker 23 (31:30):
I was in the homicide unit during that time period
with the Atlanta Police Department. I got the call on
the first two bodies. They were on Niskey Lake Road
in Atlanta, southwest Atlanta at that time. It was a
dirt road with woods on both sides, and the two
victims were Edward Smith and Alfred Evans. They were both
(31:56):
young black kids. Children, but we got to call first on.
It was Alfred Evans and he was off on a
hill in the woods, about twenty feet off the road,
and he had been he'd been dead a while. He
was mummified.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
If you know what mummified is.
Speaker 23 (32:16):
A term where the skin is dried and it's not decaying,
but it just mummified. That's from being in the sun
and the shade. And uh, while we were working that
crime scene, I kept smelling something like something dead, and
I got upwind of him and I still smelled it.
So I sent a patrol alture up through the woods,
(32:38):
uh Misky Lake, and he found the body of Edward
Smith and it was down in a dish and it
was a matter of fact, he was so decomposed he
was almost liquified. And then as it went on, we
started getting more young blackmails murdered in different areas of
the city. And we would meet once a month and
(33:00):
talk about crime. You know, anything that may be in
common and I think we had one of those meetings
and I think we had about six kids dead by then,
and I got up and made a statement that we
got a problem somebody killing young blackmails in Atlanta. Next
(33:21):
thing I know, I'm standing tall in the Chief's office
wanting to know what I'm basing that on because of
some media picked up on it, so I guess I'm
want to spill the.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Beans on that.
Speaker 23 (33:33):
And uh, I really didn't have anything to be based
on other than just common sense and working working cases.
They didn't want to hear it, you know, the community,
we didn't want to hear it. The police command didn't
want to hear nobody. Nobody wanted to hear I didn't
want to say it, and I don't know what made
me say it, but I just thought we need to
do something is try to connect these cases, because to me,
(33:53):
they seem related.
Speaker 9 (34:10):
The first two victims were Edward Smith and Alfred Evans.
Boths went missing in July nineteen seventy nine. In September
that year, fourteen year old Milton Harvey went missing, followed
by nine year old Yusef Bell in October. By the
end of nineteen eighty, seventeen children had gone missing in Atlanta,
(34:34):
and by May nineteen eighty one, the number was thirty.
Edward Hope Smith, Alfred Evans, Milton Harvey, Yusef Bell, Jeffrey Mathis,
Angel Lanier, Eric Middlebrooks, Christopher Richardson, Latanya Wilson, Aaron Anthony Carter,
(35:03):
Earl Terrell, Clifford Jones, Darren Glass, Charles Stevens, Aaron Jackson,
Patrick Rogers, Louby Jeter, Terry Pew, Patrick Baltazar, Curtis Walker,
(35:24):
Joseph Bell, Timothy Hill, Eddie Duncan, Larry Rodgers, Michael McIntosh,
Jimmy Ray Payne, John Porter, William Barrett, and Nathaniel Cater.
Just to be clear, these are not the only African
(35:45):
American kids that went missing or were murder between the
summers of seventy nine and eighty one.
Speaker 10 (35:51):
These are only the names that made the list.
Speaker 23 (36:11):
It got so big that I think it got kind
of convoluted. There was just too many, too many hands
in the pie. Then the FBI got involved in it.
They were leading, but we were doing what we were told.
Speaker 24 (36:37):
Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging
system is not available at the tone. Please record your message.
When you finished recording, you may hang up or press
one for more options.
Speaker 25 (36:52):
He my name is Payne Lindsay. I'm currently doing a
documentary project about the Atlanta child murders that happened in
the early eighties. I'm looking for the Mike mccombis that
was working for the FBI at the time on the case.
If you could give me a callback, I'd love to
ask you a few questions about it, if you didn't mind.
My number is three one zero seven nine.
Speaker 7 (37:23):
Telling you this two year story would be a little
not It wouldn't be in a chronological order, I don't think.
Because there was so much went.
Speaker 9 (37:32):
On, I got different bullet points I want to hit
with you, Okay.
Speaker 10 (37:40):
I guess for starters. How big was this case compared
to others in the FBI.
Speaker 7 (37:46):
We had at least one volume for every victim, and
that's a lot of volumes. Yea big. There's so many
files involved. This is seeing the bureau. They have what
they call major cases, and this was this was major
case Major case number seven. It was code named AT
KID A T K I d AT is abbreviation of
Girlfriend Atlanta and Kid was the kids were missing at kid. Now,
(38:09):
every case doesn't get a name, No, just the major case.
You've got one hundred different investigators. You've got GBI, you've
got the FBI, You've got Atlanta City, you've got the county,
you've got the Cab County to Cab City. And then
you know, there was no moss grown under our feet.
I can tell you that we were. We were humping,
and we were staying really busy, and it was taking
its toll on a lot of people too. You just,
(38:31):
you know, you just can only pick up so many
dead children off the street before it starts affecting you
a little bit. You know, these kids came from different
walks of life, you know, socioeconomically. I think they were
on the lower scale. It doesn't make them bad kids,
you know they were. They were good kids. They were
just street kids. There were night kids less than sufficiently supervised,
(38:54):
would be my opinion. FBI got involved in this investigation.
What they did was is they I signed two agents
to every child that was that was on the list.
Speaker 9 (39:06):
What would you say is your first lead that ever
amounted to anything.
Speaker 7 (39:10):
There was one kid that came in to the office
one day and he goes, hey, I was approached by
a black guy. I got in a car with him
and something went sideways with it. I'm not really sure
what happened. There was some type of scuffle. He said
that the driver tried to push him down in the
floorboard and he had a partial tag and he gave
(39:36):
us a composite sketch.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
And at another bonder was discovered from day but twenty
third at Police Task Force headquarters.
Speaker 22 (39:44):
There are twenty seven faces on the wall, twenty six murdered,
one missing.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
We do not know the person or persons that are responsible. Therefore,
we do not have the money.
Speaker 10 (39:53):
From tenderfoot TV in house to forks in Atlanta.
Speaker 20 (39:56):
Like eleven other recent victrums in Atlanta, rogers are currently wasn't.
Speaker 25 (39:59):
Fixing Atlanta was unlikely to catch the killer unless he
keeps on killing.
Speaker 10 (40:05):
This is Atlanta Monster next time on Atlanta Monster.
Speaker 26 (40:20):
Sketching back then wasn't what it is today. I mean,
some of these sketches they come out with better than photographs.
Back then, you know, you worked with what he had
and it was a pretty good sketch.
Speaker 9 (40:31):
What it looked like to you, remember, well, it.
Speaker 26 (40:33):
Was a blackmail with pushy hair. I remember the composite
sketch very well.
Speaker 27 (40:39):
He knows in the daytime what he's dealing, but at
night he's not really sure, so he kind of stays
to himself in his apartment. He has a television set.
There's no guns up there, no nothing. He's shrewd, he's methodical.
You're not dealing with a guy with one hundred and
sixty four IQ. He's clean, he's neat, he's above suspicion.
(41:00):
I cannot stop him. I don't have the authority or
the power.
Speaker 9 (41:14):
Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week,
with new episodes every Friday, A joint production between How
Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup
and Vanity Set. Audio archives courtesy of WSB News Film
and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries.
(41:36):
For the latest updates, please visit Atlantamonster dot com or
follow us on social media.
Speaker 10 (42:04):
Described Atlanta to me.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
In growing up here, man, you know what, a Atlanta
is a very special special place, and you don't even
realize how special it is until you get outside of here.
It's really a place of peace and love to be
one hundred, which you mean. You know, Martin Luther King
from here. So it's it's like a gotta it got
a spiritual thing with it, you know what I'm saying.
It's a blessed place. I believe no matter how street
you are, you got a spiritual side here
Atlanta Monster News
Host
Payne Lindsey
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.