America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (38 page)

But experts from the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and the Atlanta Gas Light Company concluded that Jackson and Brown were right: The explosion was just an accident. Normally, cool water prevents a water-tube boiler from becoming too hot. In this instance the boiler had overheated when a safety device, designed to turn the boiler off if water levels became too low, had malfunctioned. The boiler had reached an untenably high temperature, at which point cool water rushed in, creating a sudden reaction. As the Associated Press reported, “The boiler exploded like a fragmentation grenade, tearing out massive chunks of concrete and steel from the center section of the building.”
⁵

Yet in casting their suspicions on Stoner, Atlanta's African American community may have, if by accident, identified a key player in the wave of child killings. A group of men who worked for the National States Rights Party likely perpetrated several of the Atlanta Child Murders. These men, members of a notoriously racist family, maintained ongoing contact with NSRP cofounder Ed Fields, and one enjoyed a close working relationship with J.B. Stoner. Due to what appears to be another law enforcement cover-up, this time by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), it is impossible to say with certainty that Stoner and Fields instigated or plotted the
kidnapping–murder spree in Atlanta from 1979 to 1981. And I have made the case that the NSRP is possibly the closest one can come to an outright religious terrorist organization (one that does not hide its religious agenda from its most active members); it is also impossible to say whether the family in question embraced Christian Identity theology. But a tantalizing, if speculative, case can be made that the Atlanta Child Murders fit the pattern of Christian Identity terrorism since the early 1960s—one in which Stoner and his ilk exploited racial tension in hopes of igniting a race war.

Here, Atlanta's African American community appeared to be right. However accurate Atlanta's political establishment may have been about the accidental explosion at the Gate-City Day Care Center, Atlanta's political elites desperately wanted to temper the very racial antagonisms Stoner may have wanted to inflame. The explosion in the day care center was in many ways a metaphor for a city whose reputation for being “too busy to hate” seemed in jeopardy of collapsing. The October 13 tragedy aroused national and even international attention to the ongoing crisis in Atlanta, with icons such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Muhammad Ali offering huge rewards for anyone who could help stop the killings. Now in the national spotlight, Georgia law enforcement, helped by the FBI, faced additional pressure to solve the crimes. The net result became an investigation that appears to have conflated several unrelated murders into one horrific phenomenon and to have ignored other potential killings, in hopes of finding a tidy and fast resolution to the Atlanta Child Murders. Georgia law enforcement may have identified one likely killer, Wayne Williams, but in so doing, it covered up leads that could have pointed to J.B. Stoner's last act of religious terrorism.

The murder wave had begun in the summer of 1979, but authorities were too slow to link the crimes together or to coordinate a response. Reports of missing children and teenagers found murdered became all too commonplace in the months that followed. The great writer and social critic James Baldwin, in “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” his extended essay on the murders, wrote,

It never sleeps—that terror, which is not the terror of death (which cannot be imagined) but the terror of being destroyed.

Sometimes I think,
one child in Atlanta said to me,
that I be coming home
from (baseball or football)
practice and somebody's car will come behind me and I'll be thrown into the trunk of the car and it will be dark and he'll drive the car away and I'll never be found again.

Never be found again
: that terror is far more vivid than the fear of death.
⁶

Many of the murder victims obviously were found again. Edward Hope Smith, a fourteen-year-old high school student, last seen leaving a skating rink, vanished on July 21, 1979. An elderly woman collecting cans for deposit money found Smith's corpse alongside another dead body in a wooded area near a dirt road in southwestern Atlanta; Smith had died from a .22-caliber gunshot wound to his upper back. The second body, dressed all in black, was decomposed to the point that authorities took nearly a year to offer a likely identification: Alfred Evans, a thirteen-year-old friend of Smith's, missing since July 25, 1979. Evans's cause of death was “probably asphyxiation by strangulation.” On September 14, 1979, fourteen-year-old Milton Harvey disappeared, last seen on his bike delivering a credit-card payment to a bank for his family. His skeletal remains were found on November 16, 1979, a few miles south of the previous two victims; authorities could not determine the cause of death. On October 21, 1979, nine-year-old fifth-grader Yusuf Bell did not return home after going on an errand for his neighbor. He was last seen getting into a blue sedan. A custodian found his body in an abandoned school in downtown Atlanta on November 8, 1979; cause of death: blunt-force trauma to the head followed by asphyxiation. The next victim, found on March 10, 1980, in a wooded area in southwestern Atlanta, was Angel Lenair, last seen watching
Sanford and Son
at her friend's house the week before. Someone had bound and gagged Lenair and strangled her to death. One day later, FBI agents, using trained dogs, found the body of eleven-year-old Jeffrey Mathis in a briar patch; authorities could not determine the cause of death for Mathis, who like Bell had last been seen getting into a blue car, at a service station earlier that month.
⁷

By the summer of 1980—what is now commonly called the Summer of Death—fear and frustration had come to a head. The number of
missing children approached record levels, but local and state police had yet to publicly link the murders together or to coordinate their approach to the crisis. Whatever person or group was responsible for the crimes, he or they appeared to be getting bolder. In one instance, a witness described seeing an individual break and enter through an apartment window and emerge with seven-year-old Latonya Wilson in his arms. An independent citizen's search found Latonya's skeletal remains weeks later. Soon a group of mothers of missing and deceased children, led by Yusuf Bell's mother, Camille, and calling themselves STOP, the Committee to Stop Children's Murders, insisted on a meeting with local law enforcement. They presented investigators with a list of nine victims of unsolved murders. That summer, law enforcement finally formed a joint task force. Meanwhile, what came to be called the List grew to include as many as twenty-eight names—“all but two of them males; all but five of them children.”
⁸

But in many ways the List served as much as an albatross as an aid to a legitimate investigation. Chet Dettlinger, an outside investigator who volunteered to analyze the crimes after hearing complaints from victims' relatives, became alarmed at the arbitrary way in which law enforcement decided which names to put on the List. Jeff Prugh, an Atlanta-based journalist who cowrote a book (fittingly called
The List
) with Dettlinger,
⁹
described the parameters:

To make The List . . . a victim had to be age 7 to 27, male, female, killed by stabbing, or manual strangulation, or suffocation, or bludgeoning, or “unknown” causes (changed later, in some cases, to “probable asphyxia,” which means nothing more than the victim probably stopped breathing). . . . The only constant thread of The List was that all of the victims were black.
¹⁰

If filtered by a different criterion—class, age, or circumstances of death—a list of murder victims who fit some pattern or profile could, in theory, be much more extensive or much more limited at any given moment. For example, a list based on race and age would exclude a twenty-eight-year-old victim who had died under similar circumstances. A list based on another criterion, such as location of bodies, could imply a relationship between two crimes that in fact
had nothing to do with each other. Dettlinger, who methodically mapped the crime scenes, including where the victims had last been seen, where they lived, and where their bodies were found, estimated that the List could have grown to include as many as sixty-three additional victims who fit a broader pattern—notably, as Dettlinger established, geographic or social proximity between victims. Police colored their investigation of the crimes with a mono-causal assumption:
one
group (the KKK or a homosexual sex ring) or
one
person (a serial killer) had murdered all the people on the List. To this day, Dettlinger, whose frustrations with the myopic focus of law enforcement became the basis for a 1985 miniseries starring Martin Sheen, questions whether or not multiple patterns of association between the crimes—multiple motives and multiple perpetrators—explain the horrible murder wave of 1979 to 1983.
¹¹

Dettlinger's investigation uncovered the fact that several of the boys not only knew each other but also appeared to be gay hustlers, who possibly turned tricks for money. The investigator connected at least ten of the victims to a house on 530 Gray Street, believed to be a hot spot for a homosexual sex ring. The house belonged to Thomas “Uncle Tom” Terrell, a sixty-three-year-old who admitted knowing Timothy Hill, a thirteen-year-old whose body was found on March 31, 1981, dressed only in underwear. More than one witness had seen Hill, who knew several of the other victims, at the Gray Street address shortly before he disappeared.
¹²

But Dettlinger also noticed that, as the murder spree stretched further into the spring of 1981, the pattern of the crimes began to change: “The victims were getting older and the murders were moving out of the center of the city, they were also moving eastwards.”
¹³
Soon he began to predict where the “the killer would strike next” with such uncanny accuracy that Dettlinger himself became a suspect. Consistent with a pattern identified by Dettlinger, one of the oldest victims, twenty-one-year-old ex-convict Jimmy Ray Payne, was found by fishermen in the Chattahoochee River on April 27, 1981—almost twenty miles northeast of Niskey Lake Cove, where the first two victims (Smith and Evans) had been found in 1979. Law enforcement began to stake out nearby bridges, hoping a killer would once again dump his victims into the waterway.

Soon the strategy bore fruit. In the early morning of May 22, 1981, two police officers staking out the James Jackson Parkway Bridge over the Chattahoochee heard a splash. The same officers heard and then spotted a white 1970 station wagon, which was already being followed by another officer. Officers radioed the FBI, who detained the driver, a twenty-three-year-old African American part-time photographer, part-time radio disc jockey named Wayne Williams.

Williams's explanations for why he was on the bridge at the time did not jibe with investigators, and within several days police found the body of twenty-seven-year-old ex-convict Nathaniel Cater in the Chattahoochee. Circumstantial evidence then began to pile up against Williams, mostly in the form of pattern evidence—fibers and hairs that appeared to connect Williams to multiple crimes. In the end, Atlanta prosecutors charged Williams with only the murders of Cater and Payne, but during the course of the trial they implied that he was responsible for at least ten other crimes. Defense attorneys raised legitimate questions about the validity of the pattern evidence, but Williams ultimately was his own worst enemy. On the witness stand, the seemingly mild-mannered Williams exploded in a fit of temper at prosecuting attorneys, changing from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde in the eyes of the jurors. Jurors convicted Williams on February 27, 1982, and a judge sentenced him to two life terms for the two murders.

The joint task force ultimately closed its investigation of all twenty-eight murders on the List, on the assumption of a lone murderer and of Williams's sole guilt. Doubts persist over this decision, but prosecutors have always pointed to one trump card: the killings stopped when Williams went to jail.

But whether or not the killings actually stopped depends on how one defines future murders—that is, it depends on the arbitrary nature of the List. In contrast to the prosecutors' opinion, Dettlinger insists that the killings continued after Williams went to prison, citing, among other crimes, the 1984 murder of seventeen-year-old Darrell Davis, a witness whose testimony helped send Wayne Williams to prison. Famed FBI criminal profiler John Douglas, who is certain of Williams's guilt in eleven of the murders, concurred with Dettlinger:

I believe there is no strong evidence linking [Wayne Wiliams] to all or even most of the deaths and disappearances of children in [Atlanta] between 1979 and 1981. Despite what some people would like to believe, young black and white children continue to die mysteriously in Atlanta and other cities. We have an idea who did some of the others. It isn't a single offender and the truth isn't pleasant. So far, though, there's been neither the evidence nor the public will to seek indictments.
¹⁴

Like Douglas and Dettlinger, some victims' families, and even leaders of the original investigation, still wonder whether the increased public and political pressure that followed the day care center explosion led to a rush to judgment once police had arrested Wayne Williams. Even if, as it seems increasingly clear, Williams killed some of the Atlanta victims, the investigation never officially tied him to a large number of the killings on the List, much less to the other victims identified by Dettlinger. Law enforcement agents—both the FBI and the special task force in Atlanta—simply assumed that Williams was a serial killer who had murdered the other victims. Suspicions of a racist conspiracy in the killings, cast on individuals such as Stoner, seemed to subside with the arrest and conviction of Williams—at least among most of those investigating the homicides. But within two years of Williams's conviction, data that pointed to other killers and a cover-up began to leak to reporters.