Nigel Cawthorne: The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey, who was the first Atlanta detective to search the Williams’ home, concurred, claiming that most people who knew about the case believed that Williams was not guilty. But the pressure to make an arrest was enormous. State Representative Tyrone Brooks remembered George Bush Snr, then Vice President, coming to Atlanta and telling the local authorities that if they could not catch someone, the Feds would happily take over. Pressure was also applied by Georgia’s Governor George Busbee.

Representative Brooks also believes that Williams is innocent. He knew Williams as a youth and sometimes helped to get leading lights of the civil rights movement to appear on the radio show that Williams broadcast from a station in his garage as a teenager. It was funded by his parents.

After dropping out of Georgia State University, Williams worked for a popular local radio station run by Benjamin Hooks, a leading light of the NAACP, and did odd jobs. He also dabbled in electronics and sold news footage to local TV stations. Using a scanner to listen in on police channels, he would often arrive at the scene with his video camera before the police themselves got there.

“I think he was too close to the scene too often with his camera,” says Brooks. “He was a convenient scapegoat.”

Despite the money he was making, Williams really fancied himself as a music promoter and was determined to discover the next Jackson Five. Unfortunately, he was a fantasist with a tin ear and spent a fortune of his parents’ money recording demos with local boys of limited talent.

The investigation of the case began on 28 July 1979. That afternoon, a woman searching for empty cans and bottles along a roadside in Atlanta stumbled on a pair of corpses dumped in the undergrowth. One victim was Alfred Evans, aged 13, who was last seen alive three days before when he left home to see a karate movie in downtown Atlanta. His death was ascribed by the coroner to asphyxiation, probably due to strangulation. The other was his friend Edward Smith, aged 14. He had been shot with a .22-caliber weapon and had gone missing the previous week after spending the evening at a skating rink with his girlfriend. Both dead boys were black. A story circulated that the two friends had fallen out with a third boy over drugs and the police investigation went little further.

On 4 September 1979, 14-year-old Milton Harvey was out riding his bicycle around the neighbourhood when he disappeared. The bike was found a week later. But Milton’s badly decomposed remains were not found until mid-November outside the city limits, miles from both his home and where the bike was found. A post mortem could not determine how he had died and, as there were no signs of violence, his death was not initially considered a homicide.

Nine-year-old Yusef Bell’s mother Camille sent him to the store on 21 October to buy tobacco for a neighbour. Witnesses saw him get into a blue car, thought to be that of Camille’s former husband. Camille made an emotional appeal to the abductor to return her child. But on 8 November Yusef’s body was found stuffed in a hole in the concrete floor of an abandoned elementary school. The coroner determined that he had been strangled manually by a powerful assailant. Yusef had been barefoot when he disappeared. Curiously, when he was found, the soles of his feet had been washed clean.

The death of Yusef Bell, by all accounts a gifted boy, seized the attention of the black community. City officials and civil rights leaders turned out for his funeral. Atlanta’s newly elected African-American mayor Maynard Jackson promised an exhaustive investigation of Yusef’s death. At that time, the four deaths were not considered connected—except by the fact that victims were all African-American youths and the murders had occurred in poor black neighbourhoods. However, Camille Bell and her supporters began to insist that the murders were racially motivated and that the Ku Klux Klan were behind them.

The spate of killings then took a grim new turn with the first female victim. Twelve-year-old Angel Lenair had gone missing on 4 March 1980. Six days later, she was found tied to a tree with her hands bound behind her. She had been sexually abused, strangled with an electrical cord, and a pair of panties, not her own, had been forced down her throat.

On 11 March, the day after Angel’s body was found, ten-year-old Jeffrey Mathis was sent to the store to buy cigarettes for his mother and disappeared. Again, a witness saw Jeffrey getting into a blue car, possibly a Buick. The driver was a white man. The witness said that he saw the man again some time later. This time the driver pulled a gun on him before speeding off. Jeffrey Mathis’s two brothers said that they had seen a blue Buick parked in the drive of a house Jeffrey visited. Schoolmates said that two black men in a blue car had tried to lure them away from school. They had noted the car’s licence plate number, but the police did little with the lead. The matter was handed over to the missing persons bureau, who assumed Jeffrey Mathis was a runaway. Eleven months later his badly decomposed body was discovered. With little more than a skeleton to go on, it was impossible to determine the cause of death.

Fourteen-year-old Eric Middlebrooks left home at 10.30 on the evening of 18 May after receiving a phone call from an unknown caller. His body was found early the following day a few blocks away. The cause of death—head wounds inflicted by a blunt instrument. Police believed that he had been a witness to a robbery.

With the police getting nowhere, Camille Bell, Willie Mae Mathis and Angel Lenair’s mother Venus Taylor, along with the Reverend Earl Carroll formed the lobby group the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders—STOP—to put pressure on the white establishment. Despite their best efforts the murder rate soared that summer. On 9 June, 12-year-old Christopher Richardson disappeared on his way to the local swimming pool. On 22 June, Latonya Wilson was snatched from her home, the night before her seventh birthday. Her body was found on 18 October, but was so badly decomposed that the cause of death could not be determined.

On 23 June, Aaron Wyche, aged ten, went missing. The next day, his body was found under a bridge where the highway passed over a railway track in DeKalb County. His neck was broken. His death was initially dismissed as an accident. It was assumed he had fallen off the bridge, even though the parapet was as high as the ten-year-old. Aaron was known to be afraid of heights and would not have climbed over the parapet unless he was fleeing from someone. Later he was added to the list of the victims of what STOP were now convinced was a serial killer.

On 6 July, nine-year-old Anthony Carter was playing hide and seek near his home when he vanished. His body was found the next day behind a warehouse less than a mile from his home. The cause of death was multiple stab wounds. Earl Terrill disappeared after being ejected from the South Bend Park swimming pool for misbehaviour on the afternoon of 30 July. Earl’s aunt got a call from a man she took to be a white southerner saying that he had got Earl. He was in Alabama and it would cost her $200 to get him back. The man said he would call back that Friday. He didn’t. Earl’s badly decomposed body was found on 9 January 1981, but again the skeletal remains rendered no clue to the cause of death. A convicted paedophile named John David Wilcoxen, who had been found in possession of thousands of pornographic photographs of children, lived across the road from the South Bend Park swimming pool. Witnesses claimed that Earl Terrill had visited Wilcoxen’s house on several occasions. The police dismissed the connection on the grounds that the pictures in Wilcoxen’s possession were of white boys.