On the morning of July 28, 1979, two children playing in a vacant wooded lot off Niskey Lake Road in southwest Atlanta found a human body. Then a second body, about ten feet away. The first was Edward Hope Smith, fourteen years old. He had been missing for three days. The second was Alfred Evans, thirteen, who had been missing for one. Both had been killed elsewhere and dumped together in the brush.

The Atlanta Police Department, when notified, opened two missing-persons-now-found cases. The deaths were not, at that point, considered connected to anything else. There was no city task force yet, no FBI involvement, no national press coverage, no mayor’s office statement. Two more Black children had been killed in Atlanta in a year that had already seen more than two hundred homicides. It was not, in the summer of 1979, considered a story.

Over the next twenty-two months, at least twenty-eight more Black children, adolescents, and young men would be killed. Twenty-three of the victims were under eighteen. Five were under ten. Most were poor. All were Black. The fear they generated, by the spring of 1981, would empty Atlanta’s playgrounds, freeze the city’s youth-recreation calendar, force three networks to relocate film crews from Iran to Georgia, and end the political career of more than one local official who had been slow to see what was happening.

One man, Wayne Bertram Williams, was eventually arrested and convicted of killing two of the victims. He was never tried for any of the others. Forty-five years later, the families of those other victims are split on whether he is guilty of any of it.

A list that grew

The first body Atlanta detectives began to think of as part of a pattern — instead of as another isolated case in a city with a high baseline homicide rate — was that of Yusuf Bell, a nine-year-old boy strangled in October 1979. Yusuf was the son of Camille Bell, a community organizer and former civil-rights worker. Camille Bell, in the weeks after her son’s killing, started keeping a list of the missing and murdered Black children in Atlanta. She circulated the list to other parents, then to local media, then to the Mayor’s office. By the spring of 1980 she had founded the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders, a small group of Black mothers who took it upon themselves to track each new disappearance.

Their list was, for some time, the only consolidated record of the pattern. The Atlanta Police Department did not formally create a task force until late summer 1980, after several more children had been killed. The FBI did not officially join the investigation until November 1980, after President Jimmy Carter — a Georgia native — was personally lobbied at the White House by Camille Bell and other parents.

By the time the task force was running at full strength in early 1981, the official Atlanta list of missing and murdered children stood at twenty-five names. By the time Wayne Williams was arrested in June 1981, it had grown to thirty.

The names

The names get less attention than they should. Among them: Yusuf Bell, nine. Aaron Wyche, ten, who fell or was thrown from a freeway overpass. Aaron Jackson, nine, found at the edge of the South River. Anthony Carter, nine, stabbed to death and left in a vacant warehouse. LaTonya Wilson, seven, abducted from her bedroom window in the middle of the night, the only female victim on the original list. Christopher Richardson, twelve. Earl Terrell, eleven. Eric Middlebrooks, fourteen, beaten to death after he left his foster home to repair a bicycle. Clifford Jones, thirteen, visiting from Cleveland and killed within a few days of arriving. Patrick Baltazar, eleven, last seen on a city bus.

The older victims tended to be young men who had been making money in the gray-market and street economies of Atlanta in the late 1970s and were, in some cases, known to the police already. The youngest victims were almost all boys who had simply been walking to a corner store, to a friend’s house, to a city pool. The Atlanta task force began, in the summer of 1980, putting up flyers in Black neighborhoods asking parents to keep their children inside after dark. By the spring of 1981 the flyers had been printed in every Atlanta public school.

A bridge over the Chattahoochee

By the spring of 1981, after the killer had begun dumping bodies in the Chattahoochee River, the FBI set up overnight stakeouts on the four major Atlanta bridges that crossed it. The stakeouts were staffed in two-man teams, with a federal agent in the brush on each bank and a unit of Atlanta Police PD in unmarked cars at each end of the bridge.

At 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1981, a recruit FBI agent named Bob Campbell, stationed on the bank below the James Jackson Parkway bridge in northwest Atlanta, heard what he later described as a “loud splash” in the river. He radioed in. Two minutes later, the Atlanta Police unit at the north end of the bridge stopped a white 1970 Chevrolet station wagon being driven by a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Wayne Williams. Williams told them he was on the bridge because he was driving to a Sandy Springs address to audition a young singer named Cheryl Johnson. There was no Cheryl Johnson at the address he gave. The phone number he provided was not a working number.

Two days later, on May 24, the body of Nathaniel Cater, twenty-seven, was pulled from the Chattahoochee River downstream from the bridge. He had died of asphyxiation. He was the same age as several of the older male victims on the Atlanta task-force list.

A trial built on carpet fibers

Wayne Williams was arrested for the killing of Nathaniel Cater on June 21, 1981, and was indicted shortly afterward for the killing of Jimmy Ray Payne, twenty-one, whose body had been recovered from the Chattahoochee a month earlier. He was not charged with any of the deaths of the children on the Atlanta task-force list.

The case against him rested almost entirely on fiber-and-hair analysis — a kind of forensic comparison that had been used in trials before but had never before carried the central evidentiary weight of a multi-victim murder prosecution. FBI laboratory technicians testified that microscopic fibers recovered from the bodies of Payne and Cater — and, controversially, also from twelve of the other Atlanta task-force victims whom Williams was not on trial for — were consistent with a yellow-green polyester carpet from Williams’s home, a bedroom blanket, and the upholstery of his family’s station wagon. The fibers were unusual enough, the FBI argued, that the probability of innocent transfer to that many separate victims was vanishingly small.

The defense, led by attorney Mary Welcome, argued that the fiber evidence was statistical sleight-of-hand. The exact carpet style had been sold in roughly eighty Atlanta homes. Several of the other Atlanta victims’ bodies had been left near roadsides and storm drains for days, with plenty of opportunity for environmental fiber contamination. The defense also argued that the introduction at trial of the other twelve uncharged victims — a Georgia state evidence rule allowed pattern-similarity testimony even on uncharged crimes — effectively turned a two-victim case into a thirty-victim case in the minds of the jury without ever requiring the prosecution to prove the additional thirteen killings beyond a reasonable doubt.

The jury, on February 27, 1982, after eleven hours of deliberation, found Wayne Williams guilty of both counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. He has been in the custody of the Georgia Department of Corrections ever since. He is now sixty-seven years old, currently held at Macon State Prison, and has consistently maintained his innocence in every interview, parole hearing, and habeas filing for the last four decades.

Twenty-three cases, closed without trial

Within weeks of Williams’s conviction, the Atlanta Police Department announced that it was administratively closing twenty-three of the thirty cases on the task-force list, attributing them to Williams on the basis of the same fiber-and-hair pattern. The closures were not the result of any new prosecutions or charges. They were administrative. The remaining cases were left open, mostly because they did not fit the pattern cleanly enough for police to be confident in assigning them.

That decision — to close so many killings on a pattern theory without ever putting them in front of a jury — has been controversial inside and outside Atlanta from the day it was announced. Several of the families of the closed-case victims, including Camille Bell, publicly objected at the time and have continued to object. Some said they did not believe Williams alone could have committed all of the killings. Others said they believed at least some of the killings had been committed by white supremacists — the original working theory of the Atlanta PD before Williams became a suspect — and that the rapid administrative closures had allowed real killers to go free.

The white-supremacist theory was not idle. Documents that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, including a 1986 deposition by a former Klan informant and FBI files reluctantly released under FOIA litigation, established that members of a Klan-affiliated family named Sanders had been the subjects of an early FBI surveillance operation in 1980 and 1981. The FBI had been told by an informant that one of the Sanders brothers had specifically discussed killing Black children to provoke a race war in Atlanta. The Sanders family was investigated, polygraphed, and ultimately not charged. Whether the surveillance had been adequately pursued, or had been quietly dropped because the Williams arrest provided a politically simpler resolution, has been debated for forty years.

DNA, very late

In March 2019, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields announced that the Atlanta PD would reopen the entire group of Atlanta Child Murders cases and submit preserved physical evidence for modern DNA testing. The decision came in part as a response to the renewed national conversation prompted by the HBO documentary Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children, which had begun production at the time and would air in 2020.

The testing has produced, so far, mixed and ambiguous results. Some samples have been too degraded to yield workable DNA profiles. Some have produced partial profiles that have not been matched to anyone in the CODIS database. A few have produced partial profiles that the Atlanta PD has characterized as “consistent with” Williams’s known profile, though not at the statistical threshold typically required for a contemporary conviction. The Fulton County District Attorney’s office has not, as of early 2026, reopened a prosecution against Williams or against any other person.

The Atlanta task-force case files remain partly classified at the federal level, with portions of the FBI’s white-supremacist investigation still redacted under national-security exemptions. Several Atlanta-based historians and journalists, including Pulitzer-winner Tony Pollard and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Yolande Gyimah, have continued to file FOIA requests for additional releases.

What the city kept, and what it forgot

The Atlanta Child Murders are remembered, when they are remembered nationally, mostly through one of two reductive frames. The first is the Wayne Williams frame: a single Black man caught by a single splash on a single bridge, neatly closing twenty-three other cases. The second is the activism frame: Camille Bell with her list, the green ribbons that Black parents tied on their car antennas in 1980 and 1981, the songs Stevie Wonder recorded as fundraisers for the families.

Both frames flatten what was, by any honest accounting, a more complicated catastrophe. A Southern city with a Black mayor (Maynard Jackson) and a Black public safety commissioner (Lee Brown) found itself unable, for almost two years, to protect its poorest Black children from a killer or killers it could not catch. A federal investigative apparatus that had spent the 1960s harassing the civil-rights movement found itself, in 1980, asked to do its real job in defense of the same community. A city that prided itself on being too busy to hate — the famous Atlanta civic motto coined in the 1960s by Mayor William Hartsfield — discovered that it had no useful infrastructure for protecting its own children when they began disappearing one by one from sidewalks where they should have been safe.

The thirty names on the Atlanta task-force list are, in the city’s official records, attributed to Wayne Williams in twenty-three cases and listed as open in seven. The families of those thirty victims, four and a half decades later, have lived with two different kinds of grief: the grief of losing a child, and the grief of never being entirely sure whether the man in a Macon prison cell is the right answer to the question of who took that child away.

Sources: Fulton County District Attorney’s Office trial transcript, Georgia v. Wayne Bertram Williams (1982); Atlanta Police Department Missing and Murdered Children Task Force files; FBI Atlanta Child Murders case file (FOIA-released portions); Bernard Headley, The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race (1998); James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985); HBO, Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children (2020); Atlanta Journal-Constitution archival reporting, 1979–2024.