America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (39 page)

Aubrey Melton, an Atlanta police detective assigned to investigate the murders, provided
Spin
magazine reporters Barry Michael Cooper and Robert Keating with new evidence related to the murders. Melton's firsthand account, and supporting documents, points to a parallel inquiry into the crime by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). With the strong encouragement of their editor, Rudy Langlais, Cooper and Keating published an exposé in a series of articles in 1986 and 1987.
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Within months of the first disappearances, both the FBI and the GBI began to receive disturbing reports from their informants. Separate lines of evidence focused attention on a family of racists as potential suspects in the murders. Members of the Sanders family often ran afoul of the law. The family patriarch, Carlton Sanders, boasted
a criminal record dating back to 1951 that included “35 arrests for everything from simple assault to wife beating”
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to child molestation. (That charge was dropped.) Sanders's five sons shared similar histories. Charles Sanders dealt and used narcotics and was active in recruiting for the KKK. Don Sanders was the national secretary for the National States Rights Party; he often dressed in military fatigues when serving as a bodyguard for J.B. Stoner. Three other brothers, Ricky, Terry, and Jerry Lee, also belonged to the NSRP.

Jerry Lee bore a strong resemblance to a police sketch of a potential suspect seen in a green car near one of the child victims. His father, Carlton, closely matched the description, originally given by witness Ruth Warren, of a scar-faced white man connected with the disappearance of fourteen-year-old Lubie Geter. (Warren later changed her identification to say that Wayne Williams was the man she saw with Geter.) The bodies of several victims, including Geter, were found with dog hairs that had come from a Siberian husky. As it turned out, the Sanders family raised Siberian huskies. (Law enforcement later claimed that the hairs could have come from a German shepherd—the kind of dog owned by Wayne Williams.)
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The most incriminating evidence against the Sanders family emerged from undercover informants. The GBI first turned its attention to the Sanders clique when a longtime and reliable source for Detective Melton, Billy Joe Whittaker, reported that Geter had once accidentally backed his go-cart into Charles Sanders's car. Whittaker relayed Sanders reaction: “I'm gonna kill that black bastard. I'm gonna strangle him with my dick.” Not long after that exchange, police found Geter's body, a victim of strangulation. Geter, in turn, personally knew several of the other child victims, leading the GBI to consider the Sanders family as key suspects in the Atlanta murders. Fearing media leaks if this information were to spread to the much larger joint task force, a small band of GBI investigators began looking into the Sanders angle using Whittaker as well as other informants.
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Charles Sanders had once attempted to recruit Whittaker into the NSRP (then directly tied to the New Order of the Ku Klux Klan). At the behest of Melton, Whittaker asked Charles Sanders about Geter. In 1991, when Whittaker testified to an appellate court considering
a new trial for Wayne Williams, he recalled Sanders saying, “Yeah I killed the little bastard. We are killing niggers, about 20 of them, and we are going to start killing young black women next.”
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Another informant insisted that “Don Sanders has direct knowledge of who was responsible” for the killings in Atlanta.
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Transcripts of wiretaps of Don Sanders's phone went a long way toward supporting that contention. After a brief, mundane conversation in which Don Sanders (identified in the transcripts as DS) asks where his brother Ricky is, Don matter-of-factly tells Terry Sanders (identified in the transcripts as TS) what Don's plans are:

DS: I'll just give a buzz back, and I might get out and ride around a little bit, and I might come by there.

TS: Go find you another little kid, another little kid?

DS: Yeah, scope out some places. We'll see you later.
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Additional tape recordings and transcripts may shed further light on the role of the Sanders family. The GBI claimed to have destroyed the remaining material after clearing the Sanders family of suspicion (and, perhaps not coincidentally, after charging Wayne Williams with the Atlanta crimes). Keating and Cooper imply that the material may be lost forever, but new documents, discovered by the author, suggest that the recordings may have been transferred to the FBI and that the FBI may have done independent electronic surveillance (ELSUR). One document says, “Body recording is being utilized to direct the course of investigation and numerous valuable lead material was obtained from this recording. Elsur cards in this matter were previously submitted to the Bureau.”
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The term
body recordings
likely refers to informants who wear wiretaps, hidden underneath their clothes, to record person-to-person live conversations. In other words, either the GBI or the FBI used wired sources to investigate leads in the Atlanta crimes.

Another document says that the state of Georgia was pursuing Title III authority (that is, wiretapping authority) from the Department of Justice. The Georgians were asking the FBI to process material produced in conjunction with said authority, and the FBI director
instructs that “evidence maintained by the FBI, including logs and transcripts, should be filed as though FBI generated.”
²³
The implication here is that material collected through GBI sources, which could have included the tapes referenced by Keating and Cooper (tapes that the reporters believed were permanently destroyed), may well still exist, perhaps as duplicates, in FBI records. The author is making a Freedom of Information Act request for this material.

What we do know about the recordings comes from disclosures by Detective Melton. Besides the suspicious conversations from Don Sanders, the recordings (and informant reports) show that the Sanders family was trying to procure weapons for the National States Rights Party. The NSRP's gun-trafficking efforts became part of a national trend of white supremacist groups creating paramilitary training camps for a potential racial conflict.

Experts trace the development, in large part, to the Greensboro massacre in 1979 (referenced in the previous chapter), when, after a decade of fragmentation and intergroup rivalry, American Nazis and KKK members joined forces to fire upon a group of protesters at a rally against the Klan in North Carolina organized by the Communist Workers Party. The joint attack in Greensboro failed to yield a single conviction, galvanized white supremacists, and brought a measure of solidarity not seen since the 1960s. Paramilitary camps drew members from a variety of groups: the Aryan Nations, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, and various KKK organizations. In Hayden Lake, Idaho, Church of Jesus Christ–Christian and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler began an annual meeting of leaders of such groups, which became known as the Aryan World Congress. With the newfound esprit de corps among white supremacists came a newfound faith in the prospect of a race war. Stoner and Fields helped organize camps in the woods and mountains of Georgia, and they turned to the Sanders family for weapons.

Whittaker described a virtual arsenal of material at the Sanders residence, stolen from a National Guard armory. A February 18, 1981, report filed by Melton and provided to the GBI listed: “M 16 rifles; C 3/4 Explosives (plastic in brick form); Electric detonators; handguns; bazookas; machine guns” and “approximately 100 cases of” machetes. Ominously, the men had also obtained police
uniforms as well as “other well-known company uniforms” (such as Coca-Cola uniforms).
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The same report connected the weapons cache to the Atlanta Child Murders: “Source [Whittaker] advised that [Charles] Sanders told him that the KKK including himself was creating an uprising among the Blacks, that they were killing the children—that they are going to do one each month until things blowup.”
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To the credit of some, including the GBI, the race war angle became a factor in the investigation of the Sanders brothers' involvement in the wave of killings. According to Keating and Cooper, the GBI considered it a distinct possibility that the murders were an attempt to “ignite a race war between blacks and whites in the capital of the south.”
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The desire to polarize the races and provoke a racial conflagration had rested at the heart of the NSRP's agenda for decades. It was a manifestation of the influence of Christian Identity eschatology among the group's leaders, such as Stoner and Fields. There is no direct evidence that the Sanders family embraced Christian Identity teachings. We must admit that there is also little to suggest that members of Eastview Klavern 13, who bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, honored Identity theology either. But, as argued above, men like Stoner and Fields manipulated rank-and-file KKK members like the Sanders family (or, in the case of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, conspirators like Robert Chambliss and Tommy Blanton) into taking steps that advanced the Identity agenda. Reports that Ed Fields engaged the Sanders family directly when acquiring weapons for his camps at the very least point to an opportunity for such exploitation to happen vis-à-vis the Atlanta Child Murders.
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J.B. Stoner's rhetoric and activity during the crime wave also point to this theologically inspired manipulation. Stoner did not plant a bomb at the Gate-City Day Care Center, but the fact that he would hold an international conference for white supremacists at a time when ten children had been killed and at least four more were missing shows that he wanted to inflame Atlanta's black community. As he had in his campaigns with his late friend Connie Lynch, Stoner used rhetoric to drive apart the races, openly calling for racial violence at rallies in 1980.
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Stoner chose to do this when Atlanta was becoming a racial powder keg.

The combination of the murders of Atlanta's black children and a major spike in Atlanta's general crime rate had created serious racial tensions in the city by the late 1970s. The separate killings of a white doctor and a white legal secretary in 1979 only worsened this dynamic at a time when the entire nation suffered through ravages brought on by the unusual combination of high prices and high joblessness (stagflation). The city that was supposedly “too busy to hate” may have experienced an easier time of integration than other southern metropolises, such as Birmingham, but Atlanta was still an epicenter for the white supremacist movement, the headquarters for James Venable's National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and for the NSRP. In a development that must have brought a smile to J.B. Stoner's face, by 1981 radical black nationalist groups had begun to agitate in Atlanta. Armed patrols manned housing projects, and some in the black community spoke about moving in weapons by the truckload. Two leftist groups (the Liberation League and the Movement Against Racism) argued,

The murders in Atlanta will stop when its residents organize to defend themselves, as the Black veterans and the Techwood [housing project] residents have begun to do. They must seek to shut down white supremacist military camps. They must make Stoner and the NSRP afraid to show their faces in Georgia. . . . The working and oppressed people of Atlanta, when they are organized and prepared to resist the fascists, are the one force that can put a stop to the murders, and to all fascist attacks.
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Mayor Maynard Jackson became alarmed at the growing frustration and militancy of the black community, but he also worried about paramilitary groups practicing for a race war in the remote parts of Georgia—and with good reason. Atlanta's first black mayor found himself in much the same situation as America's first black president, Barack Obama: having to walk the fine line between addressing the needs of his base, minority constituency without appearing as too racially partisan to white moderates. In “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” James Baldwin observed:

At the very beginning of . . . The Terror . . . it was, instinctively, assumed that this was but yet another convolution of the Ku Klux Klan. . . . But the fact, globally resounding, of a Black Administration rendered this assumption not only untenable, but craven. In the eyes of the world—to say nothing of the eyes of America—Americans behaved with honor, and altered, upward, the status of the darker brother. America had, in fact, and with unspeakable vengeance, done exactly the opposite, but the world had no way of knowing this and Americans had no reason to face it.
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Maynard Jackson kept his deep concerns about possible widespread racial tumult to himself and out of the public view. This reluctance to stoke racial tensions filtered down to the GBI. In the midst of its investigation of the Sanders family, the GBI noted in an internal memorandum that “the city of Atlanta is faced with an extremely explosive racial problem.” GBI director Phil Peters noted “how sensitive the investigation would be and how necessary it would be that the intelligence not be disseminated outside the circle of investigators who were directly involved.” Peters pointed out that if the intelligence, which the investigation was based on, leaked out, it would possibly cause “a race riot.”
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Three months after this warning, the investigation into the Sanders family closed with the arrest of Wayne Williams.

Those who exposed the possibility of criminal involvement by the Sanders family in the Atlanta murders, like Keating and Cooper, believe that with the arrest of Williams, the GBI actively buried the white supremacist angle for fear of the very race war that someone like Stoner may have been trying to stoke. Law enforcement cleared the Sanders family with surprising alacrity and then literally burned any supporting evidence that could shed light on their guilt. But even the excellent work done for
Spin
magazine tends to treat the Sanders family as the sole driving force behind the killings rather than consider the possibility that the family was taking orders from NSRP higher-ups. Perhaps the Sanders family did originate a murder conspiracy, and perhaps they were motivated by their own independent Identity convictions. Unfortunately, those with the greatest access to what sources still existed in the mid-1980s (including informants) all
but ignored the potential influence of Christian Identity on the Atlanta murders, just as historians have failed to recognize its influence in the previous crimes detailed in this book.