My Life Among the Serial Killers by Dr. Helen Morrison

Author:Dr. Helen Morrison [Helen Morrison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061809590
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

By the time Sutcliffe was convicted in 1981, a series of murders deep in the South began to receive a massive amount of attention here in the United States. Just as the murders in London caused an unmistakable national fear, furor, and confusion, the killing of black children in Atlanta, Georgia, spawned an unrelenting chaos that was covered almost daily on national television.

Atlanta has boomed magnificently since the late 1950s. People from all over the South flocked there, and those with artistic aspirations no longer moved north to make their way, since the city had become so cosmopolitan. By 1970, Atlanta became the big shot city of the South. In fact, visitors from up north came to Atlanta as tourists—and many stayed. From its place in history—it was, for example, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. on “Sweet Auburn” Avenue and home to nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church—to Ted Turner’s CNN, the region had proven itself to be truly diverse, a mighty force for economics and politics in the United States. Yet even today deeply ingrained racism rears its camouflaged head like a copperhead snake, especially when you look and listen closely in a local bar or in a restaurant. Tom Wolfe writes extensively about it in his fiction in A Man in Full. But when you see it in real life, it’s so much more.

In the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Atlanta bore the burden of one of the highest crime rates in the country. The crime problem was complicated by extreme poverty in the black community, which was devastating to its residents. In early 1979, a well-known white doctor and a legal secretary were murdered by black people. Then in July 1979, the lives of two black teen boys, Edward Hope Smith and Alfred Evans, were taken, marking the commencement of a troubling crime pattern that would dwarf the murders of the doctor and the legal secretary. Edward and Alfred loved playing sports and were fans of the Atlanta Falcons; these kids loved life. I looked at photos of the faces of the teens, fresh and round and full of hope despite their poverty. They were kids with smiling faces who in no way should have suffered injury, let alone murder (Edward, by gunshot; Alfred, probably by strangulation); they had so much more of life left to live. But twenty-seven more lives would be extinguished inexplicably over the course of the next two years in an almost surreal series of murders that would parallel the apprehension, mistrust, and near hysteria of the good people across the water who feared the Yorkshire Ripper.

Kids just kept dying. Fourteen-year-old Milton Harvey disappeared while riding a bike to the bank. Nine-year-old Yusef Bell, a smart, well-liked child, never returned from an errand to buy a neighbor a tin of snuff. Twelve-year-old Angel Lenair was found tied to a tree with electrical cord, panties that were not her own forced into her mouth. A day later, ten-year-old Jeffrey Mathis never returned from a trip to the store to purchase cigarettes for his mother.

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