Those Bones Are Not My Child (2 page)

City under siege. Armed helicopters overhead. Bullhorns bellowing to stay indoors. The curfew pushed back into the p.m. hours. Gun stores extending sales into the a.m. hours. Hardware stores scrambling to meet the demand for burglar bars, deadbolt locks, alarms, lead pipes, and under-the-counter cans of mace and boxes of pellets.
Atlanta a magnet for every bounty hunter, kook, amateur sleuth, soothsayer, do-gooder, right-wing provocateur, left-wing adventurer, porno filmmaker, crack-shot supercop, crackpot analyst, paramilitary thug, hustler, and free-lance fool. But there should be no patrols on the principal’s turf. “Unladylike,” you heard the gym teacher say when you led the PTA walkout. But how do you conduct a polite discussion about murder?

The woman is back on the line and says again that no one is in the school building. You repeat your name, say again why you called; you mention the time, remark that you’re calling from home, and you add that your neighbor across the way is wearing a candy-striped dress and is packing away summer cottons. Then you hang up and interrogate yourself—establishing an alibi in case something is wrong? It’s 3:28 and if grilled, you would plead guilty to something. It’s 3:29 and you’ve got to get a grip on yourself.

From the start, the prime suspects in the Atlanta Missing and Murdered Children’s Case were the parents. Presumed guilty because, as police logic went in the summer of ’79, seven or eight deaths did not constitute “an epidemic of murder,” as the parents, organizers of the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders, were maintaining; because, as the authorities continued to argue after STOP’s media sit-in a year later, eight or nine cases was usual in a city the size of Atlanta; and because, as officialdom repeatedly pointed out, even as the body count rose from one to twelve, the usual suspects in the deaths of minors were the parents.

Monstrous parents, street-hustling young hoodlums, and the gentle killer became the police/media version of things. In the newspapers, STOP’s campaign—to mount an independent investigation, to launch a national children’s rights movement, to establish a Black commission of inquiry into hate crimes—would be reported, invariably, on the same page as stories about parental neglect, gang warfare, and drug-related crimes committed by minors, most often drawn from the files of cities outside of Atlanta. And frequently, photos of Atlanta’s grief-stricken mothers would appear above news stories that featured “the gentle killer”—a man or woman who’d washed some of the victims, laid them out in clean clothes, and once slipped a rock under a murdered boy’s head “like a pillow,” a reporter said. Like a pillow.

Another pattern you’ve noticed, having kept a journal for nearly
two years and your hallway jammed with cartons of news clippings, bulletins, leaflets, rally flyers, and memorial programs: Whenever STOP members were invited to lecture around the country, the authorities would call the parents in for another polygraph. Then a well-timed leak to the press: “The parents are not above suspicion.” A name dropped: one of the parents most critical of the investigation, most outspoken about the lack of trained personnel on the Task Force. In ’81, as thousands were scheduled to board the buses for STOP’s May 25 rally in Washington, D.C., an FBI agent told a civic group down in Macon, Georgia, that several of the cases were already solved, that the parents had killed their children because “they were such little nuisances.”

The father of Yusuf Bell had been treated as a suspect for more than a year; his wife, Camille Bell, the murdered boy’s mother, co-founder and prime mover of STOP, was one of the more vocal critics of the authorities’ response to the killings. A friend of the family of murdered girl LaTonya Wilson had also been considered a prime suspect; it was LaTonya’s body that the civilian search team had found on its first outing, embarrassing the professionals, who’d maintained that they were not dragging their feet, were committed to an exhaustive search, were “leaving no stone unturned” in their efforts to find the missing children. The mother of Anthony Bernard Carter was arrested, released, tailed, questioned, dogged for months, and visited at all hours of the night until she was forced to move. The media kept harping on the fact that she was a poor, young Black woman who had only one child, “only one,” as though that were sufficient grounds for suspicion, if not prosecution.

The sun is streaming in your hallway window. It’s hot on your face. Your house smells like cooked cardboard. A flap on one of the cartons has come loose and is imprinting a corrugated design on your leg. You can’t go on standing there by the phone, watching the second hand sweep around the dial. You need to get moving. You are trying. Trying not to think about the anti-defamation suit that the STOP committee, regrettably, dropped against the police, the Bureau, and the media. Trying not to think about the rally STOP held in D.C.—all the speeches, pep talks, booths, posters, buttons, green ribbons, T-shirts, caps, profiling, and blown opportunities to organize a National Black Commission to call a halt to random, calculated, and systemic assaults on Black people all over the country. Trying not to remember how swiftly the arrest
came, the authorities collaring a man just as those back from the rally began clamoring for answers. What about the law-enforcement memo describing castrations? What about the mortician’s assistant who reported, back in the fall of ’80, the presence of hypodermic needle marks in the genitalia of several victims? And the phone tipster whose message, loaded with racial slurs, accurately predicted where the next body would be dumped? As the grapevine sizzled with charges of hate-motivated murder and official cover-up, the authorities made their arrest of a man who in no way resembled any of the descriptions in the Task Force reports, any of the sketched faces pinned to the corkboard in command headquarters. In no way resembled the descriptions in the reports of STOP’s independent investigators, or in the reports of community workers investigating well out of the limelight. A man who bore no resemblance to men fingered by witnesses to homicides kept off the Task Force’s list despite linkages of race, class, acquaintanceship, kinship, and last-seen sightings along the killer route. One man, charged with the murders of two male adults. The case against the arrested hanging by threads—carpet fibers and dog hairs, persistent enough to survive wind, rain, and rivers. Strong enough to hitch to the arrested man’s coattails as many cases as the law would allow and the public would tolerate. A seven-, eight-, some said nine-million dollar investigation brought to a close.

You’re most especially trying to keep your mind off the murders committed since the arrest in June, cases that match the six patterns devised by community investigators: Klan-type slaughter, cult-type ritual murder, child-porn thrill killing, drug-related vengeance, commando/mercenary training, and overlapping combinations. Your hallway table is tumbled down with reports you have to double-check before composing the next newsletter. You can’t afford to think about any of the chores posted on your calendar under the pile. You need all your energy to figure out who to call, what to do. Where the hell is your child?

I sent him to the store, God forgive me. I should’ve moved right away, but you know, kids lolligag. The officers kept saying, “His trail is cold.” What kind of thing is that to say about a child?

You dump your handbag on the floor, grab your key ring and purse, and lace up your tennis shoes.

I never should’ve grounded her, maybe she wouldn’t’ve run away. Not that
I believe what they say down at Missing Persons. That girl did not run away. She was snatched
.

You inspect your purse for cabfare, but reject the idea. A cab can’t jump the gully back of the fish joint and can’t take the shortcut through the Laundromat lot.

The main thing I got out of those sessions with the Task Force investigators, and none of them were from Homicide or anything like that at the time, was to keep my mouth shut. Said all this talking to the press made their work harder. Made them look bad is what they meant. And those sister detectives down at Missing Persons caught the same flack, except then it was “hysterical women.” The officers and the parents, including my husband, we were all hysterical women. Crazy is what they meant
.

You take off down the driveway, gathering speed.

The Task Force people wouldn’t talk to me because my boy wasn’t on the list, so I kept asking how to get him on the list. He’s from Atlanta, he was missing, then they found him under the trestle with his neck broken. So why can’t he be on the list? Maybe someone after the reward can do something. They had me so bulldozed, I’d actually apologize for taking them away from the “real” case to listen to me. Can you imagine?

You are running down the streets of southwest Atlanta like a crazy woman.

It’s over because they’ve locked up one man? Only thing over and done with is that list they were keeping. Over—what’s that supposed to mean?—go home and forget about it? They can forget about it. The whole city can forget about it. But I’m the boy’s father, so how in hell am I supposed to forget about it?

Maybe you
are
a crazy woman, but you’d rather embrace madness than amnesia.

Less than five months ago, you would not have been running alone. Before Wayne Williams drove down the Jackson Parkway Bridge and became a suspect, your whole neighborhood would have mobilized the second you hit the sidewalk. But Williams did drive across the bridge. And a stakeout officer thought he heard a splash in the Chattahoochee, he would say days later, a splash he assumed was a dead body being dumped in the river. Though trained in lifesaving techniques, the officer did not dive in and attempt a rescue. Though equipped with a walkie-talkie, he did not request equipment to dredge the river. The police did nothing more that early morning than to stop Williams’s car and ask a few questions. Days later, after a local fisherman did spot a
body in the river, the authorities visited the Williams family’s home, ransacked it, and hauled young Williams off for questioning. Before the media began calling Williams “weird” and “cocky,” the whole of Simpson Road would have responded to your distress.

The tailor, hearing the pound of your feet on the pavement, would have picked up the phone for the block-to-block relay. Mother Enid, Reader & Advisor, would have taken one peek at you from under her neon and dropped her cards to flag down a car. The on-the-corner hardheads, heroes for a time when they formed convoys to get the children to and from school, would have sprung into action the minute you rounded the corner. Brother Chad, who turned his karate studio over to the self-defense squads, would have turned the bar next door out the moment you raced past his window. Everyone would have dropped everything to find a missing child, for when mumps have been replaced by murder, alarm is no longer a private affair.

But it’s November, not spring. The Emergency Hot Line posters are gone from the phone booth at the corner of Ashby, removed too from city buses, school buses, MARTA (Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) stations, and schools. The Williams trial has not yet begun, but the reward signs have been taken down, extra police detail withdrawn from the neighborhoods, state patrol personnel returned to highway duty, the Task Force staff reduced from a hundred and seventy to six, out-of-town reporters told to go home. There is no sign of the Community Watch network along the avenue. Decals have been scraped off the windows. “Let the Community Mend Again,” says the sign under the glass in the churchyard where you turn.

It’s 3:40 by the clock in the taxi shed. You wave your arms as you run past the first window. An old-timer brushes the brim of his hat and keeps talking. His cronies, lounging in chairs of busted green vinyl and aluminum tubing, salute you with their bottles of C’Cola. You keep moving, hoping they’ll figure it out and come on. But they’re cabbies, and cabbies have good reason to turn a glass eye on any gestures that seem to spell “crisis.” Cab drivers, who like so many others under the veil, now support the official drive toward closure.

Last spring, through Roy Innis, a witness had offered self-incriminating testimony that featured a cab-driving boyfriend. A member of a cult engaged in drug-induced sex and ritual murder, he’d boasted to the woman about his role in the child murder case. The witness,
Shirley McGill, had been involved in the drug-traffic end of the cult’s operations; she’d witnessed the torture of youths and adults, bound-and-gagged couriers who had tried to defect or had tried to shortchange. When a co-worker was killed, she’d fled to Florida. Her former boyfriend, the hack, had phoned her in the winter of ’80–’81, bragged that the kidnap-murder ring would be changing its procedures in the spring. When the Task Force in spring began placing adults on the list of Missing and Murdered Children and reported that the pattern of killings was changing, she’d read that as confirmation of the cabbie’s boast and sought the protection of Roy Innis’s group. Cabbies joined the roster of suspicious characters—Vietnam vets, karate experts, dog owners, owners of vans with carpeting, anyone capable of lulling a child into carelessness or ordering a child into obedience—and remained there, even after the Task Force issued an all-clear bulletin: witness not credible, information unrelated to the case, cabbie not a suspect.

A number of community investigators, struck by McGill’s drug-sex-murder-cult descriptions, and by the self-incriminating nature of her story, were not so quick to dismiss her as a showboating hysteric. She was willing, she said, to be questioned under hypnosis. She claimed that she could locate sites used by the cult responsible for a number of abductions and murders of both children and adults, some of whom made the Task Force list, others who were only on the victim list assembled by independents. Further discussions with McGill had produced another reason to credit her story. Her account of threats and tortures shed light on the mysterious entries in various coroners’ reports: “death by asphyxiation, precise method unknown.” The method, disclosed in McGill’s version, was a plastic bag shoved down the victim’s throat, then withdrawn after.