Manhunters by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

11

The Cases That Awakened America

The Atlanta child murders lasted from July 1979 until June 1981, reached a figure of twenty-one (or twenty-nine, depending on which estimate you prefer to believe), and ceased with the arrest of the chief suspect, Wayne Williams. Roy Hazelwood and John Douglas were both called to Atlanta to work on the murders, and it was a suggestion by Douglas that led to Williams being detained for the first time.

The case began, almost unobtrusively, on July 28, 1979, when a woman searching for empty bottles to recycle for cash noticed a disgusting smell near some roadside undergrowth in a slum neighborhood of southwestern Atlanta, Georgia. When she spotted a leg sticking out of the tangle, she reported her find to the police, who uncovered the body of fourteen-year-old Edward Smith. He had been shot in the head with a .22-caliber gun. The last time he had been seen was a week earlier, when he left a skating rink after meeting his girlfriend there.

The buzzing of flies led the police to another body, fifty feet away in the woods—another black youth, Alfred Evans, thirteen, who had disappeared four days earlier. Partial decomposition made it hard to determine the cause of his death, but it could have been strangulation.

The boys were friends, although they lived in different parts of town. There was no sign of sexual assault upon either boy, but Smith’s football shirt was missing; so were his socks. Evans was wearing a belt that was not his own. In each case, this could imply that the boy had been undressed.

Because both victims were black, even the double murder failed to attract widespread attention. The police hinted that the deaths were “drug-related.”

Milton Harvey, fourteen, lived in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood in northwest Atlanta, a far cry from the slums in which Evans and Smith lived. On September 4, Harvey cycled to the bank on an errand for his mother, and disappeared. His bicycle was found a week later on a deserted dirt lane.

On October 21, 1979, a neighbor asked nine-year-old Yusuf Bell to fetch her a box of snuff. Yusuf, the son of an ex–civil rights worker, Camille Bell, was an unusually gifted child whose hobby was mathematics, and who read encyclopedias for recreation. He also disappeared, and was reported to have been seen getting into a blue car. This time, the event stirred up some media excitement, since Camille Bell was a well-known figure in the Mechanicsville neighborhood where she lived, and made on-air pleas to the abductor to release her son. A week later, a decomposed corpse was found near College Park; it proved to be the missing Milton Harvey. Then Yusuf’s body was found stuffed into the crawl space of an abandoned elementary school. He had been strangled. Although he had been missing for ten days, it was clear that he had not been dead for more than half that time. His clothes had been cleaned, and the body washed. His funeral became a media event, with black leaders and politicians in attendance.

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