Catherine Leach, mother of 13-year-old victim Curtis Walker, shares Graham’s belief in Williams’ innocence but, to her, this is not about Williams.
“I don’t know if he’s innocent or not on those other crimes,” she says. “All I want is justice for mine.”
For her, the issue is her son, the boy who said he was going to Hollywood one day and make his momma rich. And she believes that her boy’s killer is, almost certainly, still at large along with the murderer of the other Atlanta child victims.
Atlanta’s Prostitute Killers
In Atlanta, Georgia, more than ten African-American prostitutes have been murdered by a serial killer who likes to display their bodies in theatrical positions at the crime scene. Law enforcement personnel believe that this “lust killer” has been at large in Atlanta for the last 15 years.
Convicted killer Jeremy Bryan Jones confessed to killing eight women in metropolitan Atlanta, including five prostitutes. He talked of picking them up on streets lined with strip joints, murdering them and dumping their bodies in wooded areas and, in one case, dropping the body off a bridge in a river. Although he passed a polygraph test, he has since retracted his confession. His court-appointed lawyer, Habib Yazdi, said that he would confess to anything if he was allowed to talk to his mother and girlfriend.
Jones is certainly guilty of other killings. On 26 October 2005, Jones was convicted of burglary, sexual assault, rape, kidnapping and the homicide of 45-year-old Lisa Nichols. During the trial he blamed Nichols’ neighbour for her death, but he had earlier confessed to killing Lisa and burning her body while high on crystal meth.
On 18 September 2004, Lisa Nichols, the divorced mother of two daughters from Mobile County, Alabama, had been found in her bathroom. She had been raped, shot in the head three times and her body set on fire. However, while the body and the room were scorched, the fire did not destroy the house as intended—and with it vital forensic evidence.
Neighbours recalled seeing a vehicle parked outside Nichols’ home and one recalled part of the licence plate number. This lead to a itinerant labourer known locally as “Oklahoma”. His employer gave the police his birth date and social security number. This identified him as John Paul Chapman, an alias used by Jeremy Bryan Jones.
Four days later, Chapman called Detective Paul Burch of the Mobile Country Police Department who was investigating the Nichols murder. The call was traced and Chapman was arrested, still on the phone, in a house not far from where Lisa Nichols lived.
Chapman was already known to the police as a small-time drug user. However, fingerprints had failed to link him to Jeremy Bryan Jones of Miami, Oklahoma, who had been in trouble with police since, at the age of 16, he had been charged assault of a boy and his mother. He was also suspected of murdering 20-year-old Jennifer Judd, the wife of a former schoolmate and next-door neighbour Justin Judd. She had been stabbed to death in the kitchen of her own home. Her body was discovered by her husband. They had been married just ten days. Justin Judd had regularly reported Jones to the police after hearing women’s screams issuing from Jones’ house.
Jones was charged with rape on 5 November 1995, and again on 10 January 1996. On the second occasion he was found in possession of methamphetamine—crystal meth. Out on bail the next day, he pointed a loaded gun at a woman’s vulva and threatened to pull the trigger.
He pleaded guilty to three charges of sexual assault on 3 March 1997 and was sentenced to five years’ probation. Two rape victims were afraid to testify. He defied court orders requiring him to provide DNA samples and was kicked off his sexual-offender counselling sessions. Then on 19 October 2000 his probation was revoked and a warrant was issued for his arrest, citing probable cause. Rather than go to jail, Jones skipped the state.
In Joplin, Missouri, he met the mother of convicted criminal John Paul Chapman who was serving time in Missouri State Penitentiary. She took pity on him and gave him her son’s birth date and social security number. Equipped with a new identity, Jones headed for Atlanta.
As Chapman, he was picked up three times for minor offences in Georgia, but each time his fingerprints were run through, the FBI database in West Virginia failed to identify him as Jeremy Bryan Jones. Each time he was released, leaving him free to kill. He has been charged with three more murders during that period and remains a suspect in a fourth.
The first was that of 38-year-old Tina Mayberry in 2002. She was attending a Halloween fancy-dress party dressed as Betty Boop in Gipson’s restaurant in Douglasville, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Stepping outside for a breath of fresh of air, she staggered back into the party moments later, bleeding profusely from stab wounds. She died that night in an Atlanta hospital. She had not been robbed and there was no evidence of sexual assault. The murder appeared to be motiveless.
On 12 March 2003, 16-year-old Amanda Greenwell disappeared from a trailer park in Douglas County where Chapman also lived. She went to make a call from a local payphone and never returned home. In April, her badly decomposed body was found in a wooded area nearby. She had been stabbed and her neck had been broken “with great force”, according to the post mortem report. But again, there were no clues, no suspect and no apparent motive.
Jones has been charged with the murder of Katherine Collins, who was found stabbed to death in the Garden District of New Orleans on 14 February 2004. Police say Katherine worked as a prostitute in the city.
He is also a suspect in the murder of Patrice Endres, who had gone missing from her beauty parlour Tambers’ Trim-’n’-Tan in Chunchula, Alabama on 15 April 2004. Before leaving home that morning, she had left a billet-doux on her second husband’s car saying: “The best is yet to come.”
Although Endres’ early life had been scarred by drugs, she had turned her life around. She had gone to hairdressing school and had opened her own salon. She married Rob Endres and had a 16-year-old son from a previous relationship whom she doted on. The family planned to move to Flagler, Florida, where they intended to buy a bed-and-breakfast.
At work that morning, Patrice was seen smiling and joking with the clientele, but when a client turned up for her 12 o’clock appointment, she found the salon empty. The front door was unlocked and her keys were on the table. Patrice’s car was outside, though it was parked at an odd angle. Although the till was empty, her purse was on her desk and her lunch was in the microwave. The police were convinced she had run away. Family and friends protested that she had never been happier, but the offer of a $17,000 reward, a poster campaign and extensive search only elicited a witness who said they had seen a white utility van, that could have been Jones’, outside the salon, but no further leads.
After he was arrested, the police say that Jones confessed to killing her and dumping her body in Sweetwater Creek in Forsyth County, Georgia. But after an exhaustive search of the creek, police still have no body and no physical evidence to base a charge on.
Jones is also suspected in the murder of a young prostitute whose decomposed torso was found near Wright City, Missouri on 28 June 2004. Passers-by told investigators that they saw a white utility van at the rest stop off Interstate 70, near where the torso was found.
While in custody, Chapman made a number of phonecalls from the jail’s pay phone to a number in Miami, Oklahoma. This belonged to Jeanne Beard, Jeremy Bryan Jones’s mother. At last the police tied Chapman to the earlier outstanding warrants.
Awaiting trial, Jones confessed to numerous other murders including eight women in Atlanta. He even produced sketch maps of the places he had dumped bodies in Georgia, Oklahoma, Kansas and Alabama dating back to 1992. He confessed to murdering 19-year-old Justin Hutchings by “lethal injection” in Pitcher, Oklahoma. And police in Delaware County, Oklahoma, believe Jones was responsible for the murder of 38-year-old Daniel Oakley and 41-year-old Doris Harris in 1996. He is thought to have shot them, then set the trailer they lived in on fire to hide his crime.
However, before his trial, he recanted all his confessions. He
has now been convicted in the Lisa Nichols’ case and has been sentenced to death by lethal injection. Before that he faces trial in Georgia for the killing of Amanda Greenwell of Douglas County. No doubt other trials will follow.
The problem is that the Atlanta prostitute killings do not seem to fit into the random MO of his other slayings. Even if his jailhouse confessions were not pure bravura, he did not admit all the current roster of prostitute killings in Atlanta, which means that, in all likelihood, there is at least one other killer at large in Atlanta.
Atlanta’s Ripper
In 1911, Atlanta, Georgia, got its own Jack the Ripper. The horrific murders began on 20 May 1911. That night and on the following six Saturdays, the killer subdued his victims by throttling them before cutting their throats. The victims were all attractive black women. None had been raped, but their sexual organs had been mutilated in a way reminiscent of the fiend of Whitechapel.
However, things went wrong for the killer on the night of 1 July, when a young woman was stabbed while out looking for her mother, who had just become the culprit’s seventh victim. The daughter survived and told the police that her assailant had been a well-dressed black man.
The killer then became more wary. He slowed his rate of killing, but did not stop. Over the next ten months, he would claim six more victims. After that he disappeared.
Atlanta’s Son of Sam
Then in 1977, Atlanta got its own “Son of Sam”—the killer who was blithely killing youngsters at random in New York at the time. The Atlanta shootings began on 16 January 1977, when the “Lovers’ Lane Killer” shot 26-year-old LaBrian Lovett and 20-year-old Veronica Hill.
The police were alerted when they were called accident. A vehicle had veered across an intersection, coming to a halt when it collided with a traffic sign. Inside, a naked man lay slumped behind the steering wheel, his face and body streaked with blood. He had been shot four times in the head, stomach, left arm and right leg. On the back seat was a naked woman covered by a coat. She had been shot twice in the abdomen and the left leg. Both died of their wounds in the hospital, but detectives determined they were shot while making love in nearby Adams Park. Somehow Lovett had survived long enough to drive from the scene.
The killer struck again this time on 12 February. At 2.45 a.m., he approached a teenage couple who were necking in their car in West Manor Park, three miles north-west of Adams Park. He fired six shots into the car before trying to open the doors. Finding them locked, he fled on foot, leaving both victims seriously injured with chest wounds. They survived to describe the attacker as a large black man. Ballistics tests showed that the same .38-caliber pistol had been used in the murder of LaBrian Lovett and Veronica Hill. As with the Son of Sam killings, there was a bewildering lack of motive. The gunman seemed to have no interest in robbing or raping his victims, who appeared to be unknown to him.
The third attack occurred on 12 March when 20-year-old Diane Collins was canoodling with her fiancé in Adams Park. They had announced their engagement just a few days before. That evening they had been to the movies before stopping for a little intimacy in the park. Intent on what they were doing, neither noticed the lethal stalker as he approached their car and unloaded his .38 through the passenger window. Diane died instantly, but her fiancé, though wounded badly in the head, survived. With blood nearly blinding him, he managed to drive home and then telephone an ambulance.
With only the vaguest of descriptions, the police had little to go on. However, they did notice that there had been 27 days between the first two attacks and 28 between the second and third. The gunman seemed to be working on a four-week cycle.
The following month, they staked out the local parks, but the phantom gunman did not appear. He did not strike again. On 10 August 1977, David Berkowitz was arrested for the Son of Sam killings. He had been terrorizing New York for two years. Two years after the Atlanta Lovers’ Lane killings the police admitted that they had no suspects and no leads in the case. Like the Atlanta Ripper of 1911, he remained at large.
Austin’s Servant Girl Annihilator
Over three years before headlines presented Jack the Ripper as the “world’s first serial killer”, another mad slayer was stalking the streets of Austin, Texas. Known as the “Texas Servant Girl Annihilator”, like his counterpart in London, he was never caught or identified with any certainty. It is plain that he was overshadowed in the historical record because most of his victims were poor and black.
The first killing took place on New Year’s Eve 1884, when the remains of 25-year-old servant girl Mollie Smith were found outside the two-storey home of her employer William Hall in West Pecan Street. She cooked and kept house for the Halls, and lived in a room in the back with her common-law husband Walter Spencer, who had also been attacked. He awoke in agony with a deep gash across his face to find Mollie had gone. The bedroom was covered with blood and there were bloody handprints on the threshold. He went for help and aroused Mr Hall, who followed the trail of blood and found Mollie lying in the snow by the outhouse. The wounds to her face and head indicated that she had been killed with an axe. Her nightdress was torn to shreds and, from the way she had been left, it was clear that she had been raped. The local marshal Grooms Lee brought in bloodhounds to track the killer, but the trail soon went cold. Later a bloody axe was found inside, which the killer had apparently brought with him.
William Sydney Porter, better known as the short-story writer O. Henry, was living in Austin at the time and coined the sobriquet “Servant Girl Annihilator” for his friends working at the Austin Daily Statesman—now the Austin American-Statesman. Porter, who was later jailed for bank fraud, was depicted as the perpetrator in the book A Twist at the End by Stephen Saylor, a fictionalized account of the murders, but it is clear that he had nothing to do with the killings.
Marshal Lee had a more obvious suspect, William “Lem” Brooks, whom Mollie had previously been involved with. The rape and murder had been motivated by jealousy, Lee reasoned. Brooks was arrested, but he protested his innocence and produced an alibi that would have made it hard, though not impossible, for him to have committed the murder. Nevertheless, a coroner’s jury comprising six white male citizens, sitting on New Year’s Day, concluded that Brooks had both the means and motive—and had, consequently, done it. He was later freed for lack of solid evidence.
On 6 May 1885, another African-American servant girl, Eliza Shelley, was murdered in the same blood-thirty fashion. The newspapers immediately connected her murder with the slaughter of Mollie Smith. The Statesman’s headline ran: “The Foul Fiends Keep Up Their Wicked Work.”
Lem Brooks had no connection to 30-year-old Shelley and was not a suspect. In those pre-Ripper times, this was a new kind of crime. A predatory killer was on the loose—a maniac who attacked at random without any discernible motive.
Eliza Shelley had been attacked on the property of Dr L. B. Johnson, a former state congressman who lived at the corner of Cypress and Jacinto Streets near the railroad track with his wife and niece. Hired as a cook the previous month, Shelley lived in a cabin behind the house with her three children. On the night of the attack, Mrs Johnson had heard screams emanating from Eliza’s cabin, and sent her niece to find out what was happening. Seeing something was terribly wrong, she summoned Dr Johnson, who went to investigate.
He found Eliza Shelley lying on the floor, dead. She had sustained numerous grievous head wounds. One gash that appeared to have been made by an axe nearly cleaved her head in two and there were puncture wounds made by a sharp, pointed instrument. This time the killer had taken the murder weapons with him.
The pillows were covered in blood, indicating that she had been asleep in bed when she was attacked. Then she had been dragged to the floor and her nightdress pulled up. Her naked midriff was raised on a pile of blankets and her genitals exposed, so it was thought that she had been raped by her attacker.
Her eight-year-old son said that a man had come into the cabin in the m
iddle of the night. The boy had woken up, but the man pushed him into a corner and told him to be quiet. He had placed a blanket over him and the child had passed out, possibly as the result of chloroform that had recently been stolen from a dentist’s home in Austin. The boy had no recollection of what had happened to his mother. His younger brothers, who slept in the same bed as their mother, knew nothing.
Marshal Lee’s bloodhounds failed once again. A set of shoeless footprints led to the cabin. At the time, Eliza’s husband was in prison and it was not thought she had any other boyfriends, so it seemed clear that the shoeless person was to blame. Marshal Lee quickly arrested a 19-year-old, slightly backward black youth who walked around barefoot. But when the tracks were compared against his, it was clear that he had not made them. Another African-American male who had once lived with Eliza was arrested. He had no alibi and had recently quarrelled with her. But he, too, was released when there was a third murder just over two weeks later.
On 23 May, another black servant girl was attacked in the middle of the night in her cabin, across the road from a beer garden. Her name was Irene Cross. This time the attacker had used a knife. But the attack was just as ferocious. Her arm had been practically severed from her body and the perpetrator had stabbed her so viciously in the head that she appeared to have been scalped. This time there was no suspect at all and no arrest was made.
The newspapers blamed the influx of migrant workers. Austin was then a city of just 23,000 people. But Texas was just recovering from the Civil War and the Reconstruction era and the attacker could have been any one of the thousands of strangers who had come to town, attracted by the prospect of work. There were even gangs of convicts employed in public building works. The newspapers were also unanimous that a black man was to blame—again, perhaps, a hangover from the Civil War.
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