SERIAL KILLERS > SEXUAL PREDATORS

The Atlanta Child Murders

By Marilyn Bardsley and Rachael Bell

The Looming Crisis

In a four-month period, two very high profile street murders of whites by blacks would crystallize their fears:  On June 28, 1979, a young white doctor attending one of the city's conventions was murdered by two black robbers.  Then on October 17, 1979, a mentally unstable black man gunned down a white legal secretary on her birthday.  Everyone was outraged and the media demanded a crackdown on crime.

In 1978, Mayor Jackson had replaced his controversial black public safety commissioner Reginald Eaves with Dr. Lee Brown, who was an intelligent, capable manager but had very limited street experience and was perceived as socially distant from the poor black community.

Little did the city understand that these two highly publicized crimes would be dwarfed by two other crimes which, when they happened, received almost no publicity at all.  Two black boys were found murdered at the end of July 1979, officially starting one of the most highly publicized murder series in history.  A couple of years later, twenty-nine black youths would be dead and a black man, Wayne Williams, who many people believe was railroaded by the government, would be imprisoned for life.

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1. Setting the Stage
2. The Looming Crisis
3. Ominous Beginning
4. Two More Boys
5. End to the Lull
6. Jefferey
7. A Murderous Rampage
8. STOP
9. Ransom
10. Witnesses to Murder
11. The List
12. Making Sense of the Crisis
13. No End In Sight
14. Links
15. A Murderous Change of Pace
16. The Jo-Jo Connection
17. Chaos
18. A Deadly April
19. The Last to Make the List
20. Dettlinger and His Map
21. A Splash From the Bridge
22. Wayne Bertram Williams
23. Up to No Good
24. Building the Case
25. Pulling it Together
26. Gearing Up
27. The Trial
28. Patterns
29. Damaging Testimony
30. Mounting Evidence
31. On the Stand
32. Going Down!
33. Fiber Analysis
34. Under a Microscope
35. Challenging Evidence
36. Probability
37. Reasonable Doubts
38. Unfair Trial?
39. Race War?
40. More Than One
41. A New Investigation in 2005
42. New Chapter 2006 — Ku Klux Klan Connection
43. New Chapter 2006 — The Child Molester Theory
44. Bibliography