Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  In 1969, Federal Highway Administrator Frank Turner submitted to Congress a list of sixteen cities—including Atlanta—where popular protests were blocking interstate construction. The bland reasons he gave for freeway opposition—“displacements,” “effect on community”—ignored the racial implications. By the first Earth Day in April 1970, freeway revolts were underway in cities from Boston to New Orleans, Miami to Portland, Oregon. All of them included accusations of racial injustice. But the media tended to ignore this part of the story. Stripped of its background as part of the civil rights movement, the freeway revolt ended up sounding like a bunch of not-in-my-backyard whiners throwing a wrench in the wheel of public works. Today it’s rarely remembered that the battle against the freeway juggernaut for the soul of the American city was also a new chapter in the nation’s history of racial conflict, a chapter where Jim Crow stepped behind the curtain and emerged in a new guise: infrastructure.

  • • • • •

  Camille Bell was right at the center of that battle. Her first local employer, the Atlanta branch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was active in organizing the community to fight displacements. In 1967, she got married and began to work in an employment office. There, she saw the men coming in desperate for work because so many jobs had fled the inner city. The process didn’t slow down. Between 1970 and 1980, the population of many counties surrounding Atlanta doubled, while the city itself lost residents. By 1973, Atlanta’s technically desegregated public schools were 90 percent black, and they were some of the nation’s worst. Even a 1974 technical report commissioned by Central Atlanta Progress, the downtown development nonprofit, warned of the “extreme separation” suburbanization and urban renewal were creating.

  In 1978, Camille Bell and her husband divorced. Her youngest child, Tonia, was two. Bell quit her job at the employment agency to stay home with the kids. But then her family—like so many in the city—was displaced. In the Bells’ case, the cause was transit construction: after much public debate, the city was building a light rail system. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority was a well-intentioned attempt to counteract some of the transportation racism the interstate program had wrought. But Atlanta sprawls over four counties, and two of them, the white counties of Cobb and Gwinnett, had refused to be part of MARTA. They were afraid “urban youths” would gain access to their affluent utopias. A former commissioner in Cobb County even joked that he’d like to “stock the Chattahoochee”—the river separating the city from its suburbs—“with piranha.”

  When the transit project condemned the Bell family’s home, they moved into McDaniel-Glenn, a public housing project a few blocks south of I-20 and just west of the new stadium that had displaced the Summerhill neighborhood. Camille Bell tried to counter the ghetto’s influence by encouraging her kids to work hard in school, and by enrolling them in gifted programs. But McDaniel-Glenn was a grimy place, notorious for drug-dealing and violence. As the crow flies, it was about a mile from Atlanta’s new central business district. But even without the monster freeway interchange that stood between them, the two downtowns would still have been worlds apart.

  • • • • •

  By the time the Bells moved into McDaniel-Glenn, the transformation of Atlanta from a sleepy Southern backwater to a shining beacon of commercialism was complete. Over the course of a decade, downtown Atlanta had built a whole new skyline: in addition to the Peachtree Center and the new Hilton, there was the Omni International, a complex containing a hotel, restaurants, stores, theaters, arcade, ice rink, and indoor amusement park. Nearby was Colony Square—offices, hotel, retail, ice rink. In 1976, the city completed a huge trade show complex, the World Congress Center, obliterating the black neighborhood of Lightning. The new Atlanta was focused on offices, conventions, and upscale retail: new commerce for the “New South.” Architecture critic Ada Louis Huxtable called it “Instant City.”

  “Atlanta has become now a kind of perpetual Renaissance City,” crowed a developer in 1975, “a robust and eclectically composed great merchant city with a cosmopolitan variousness and panache, a Twentieth-Century rendition of Medician Florence with mellow magnolia-soft inflection.” The new downtown, enthused this rhapsodist of real estate, held “heroic mirror towers surging up one after another into the sky like huge shouts of expectancy—a kind of architectural New World Symphony assembling in the air before our eyes.”

  These heroic towers—many of them designed by glitzy Atlanta starchitect John Portman—were walled-off urban fortresses designed to barricade the prosperous business district from the adjacent black neighborhoods. Portman’s Peachtree Center set a new standard in enclave architecture. Its lower levels looked inward, onto a lobby that replaced both public plaza and park—it contained a half-acre indoor lake. Peachtree Center and the other downtown buildings were connected to each other with pedestrian skyways suspended above street level. Portman explained that this was to make sure “everything is within reach of the pedestrian”—the assumption being that the city’s streets and sidewalks were no place for a person to walk.

  All of these facilities were clearly marked off as private space, presenting imposing faces of concrete, steel, and tinted glass to the street. Entrances were optimized for automobiles. The Peachtree Center and the Omni complex banned anyone under eighteen without adult supervision. Guards were even stationed at the Peachtree Center’s dramatic glass elevators to prevent joyriding. The New York Times saw the point, noting when the Omni opened in 1976 that “the suburban couple can ice skate, dine, go to a movie, meditate, get chased by a witch, shop, get their hair done, and drink on a lily pad without once going out of doors where the undesirables might be.” Add to that the fact that they could zoom past the dangerous inner city neighborhoods on the freeway, park their car in an underground garage, and take an elevator directly into the lobby, and you can understand how this was a world that barely noticed when, just one mile away, young Yusef Bell was “blighted out,” his broken body stashed in an abandoned school for more than two weeks.

  • • • • •

  Camille Bell buried her son. Her ex-husband did not come to the funeral. Camille was not told that police had earlier interviewed him and his girlfriend in connection with Yusef’s death. Yusef’s father thought the boy would be found alive, but his girlfriend disagreed. She told police about a psychic vision she had experienced, in which Yusef was buried beneath concrete.

  Bell thought the police showed a surprising lack of interest in her murdered son. Heartsick in the months following Yusef’s death, she began to notice something odd in the black community. Children, primarily adolescent boys, had been vanishing with what seemed like astonishing regularity. Edward Smith, 14, had gone missing after leaving the Greenbriar Skating Rink. Alfred Evans, 13, took a bus to a movie theater downtown and was never seen alive again. Both their bodies were found a few months before Yusef’s. Milton Harvey, 14, had ridden off on his bike and been found dead in a vacant lot in September. And after Yusef’s death, child murder began to seem like a regular occurrence. Angel Lenair disappeared on the way to a friend’s house and was found dead in a vacant lot in March 1980. Jeffery Mathis, 11, went to get cigarettes for his mother that same month and never came home. Christopher Richardson, 12, disappeared on his way to a recreation center pool. Latonya Wilson, 7, went missing from her bedroom in the Hillcrest Apartments in Dixie Hills. Eric Middlebrooks, 14, left home on his bike and was found dead the next morning behind the Hope-U-Like-It Bar, just across the I-20 interchange from his home.

  Newspapers called them “ghetto kids.” They lived in the city’s housing projects, or in the low-rent homes nearby vacated by whites. Their families were often unstable and struggling to make ends meet. Most of the kids worked odd jobs, running errands, collecting cans, carrying groceries, or hawking air fresheners at shopping plazas. They played in the same blighted places where their bodies were found: in empty lots, beneath highway overpasses, in the parking
lots of low-end shopping plazas or the basements of abandoned buildings.

  Police saw nothing unusual. Violence was on the rise throughout the United States, and in Atlanta things were even worse: the city had 231 homicides in 1979, making it the murder capital of the nation. State troopers had been dispatched by the governor to help the overwhelmed Atlanta Metro Police. But Camille Bell felt in her soul that these deaths were not just inner city business as usual.

  July 1980 was a tense month nationwide. The hostage crisis in Iran dragged on. Americans distracted themselves by obsessing over who shot J.R. The GOP convention was held in Detroit: the Michigan governor’s black Lincoln was stolen as he attended it. The first major urban riots since the sixties erupted in Miami when six police officers were acquitted of bludgeoning a black insurance salesman to death because he failed to pull over while speeding. The Florida National Guard barricaded the Liberty City projects to contain the rioting. In Atlanta, temperatures reached record highs. And Anthony Bernard Carter, age 9, was found stabbed to death on a grassy bank behind a warehouse.

  Camille Bell and some other mothers met. Fed up, they formed the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders. They held a press conference and declared there was a clear pattern to what was going on: poor black children were being killed. They demanded that police dedicate more resources to the murders and consider that they might be connected.

  Under pressure, Atlanta public safety commissioner Lee Brown announced the formation of a task force to investigate the cases full-time. Less than two weeks later, Earl Lee Terrell was kicked out of a city swimming pool for roughhousing. The ten-year-old, a round-faced boy with prominent ears and wide, expressive eyes, sat on a bench outside, waiting for his sister. Then he left. A woman later said she saw him standing on a corner near Jonesboro Road, crying. That was the last time anyone could report seeing Earl Lee Terrell alive. His name was added to the list of missing and murdered children. Still, police insisted that the deaths might not be linked. If there was a pattern, they declared, it wasn’t that the children were poor and black; it was that their bodies were all found just south of I-20.

  Then, on August 21, 1980, the body of Clifford Jones was found beside a dumpster at the Hollywood Plaza Shopping Center near the Perry Homes housing project. The thirteen-year-old had gone out to collect aluminum cans and ended up strangled and left out with the trash. For the first time, the slayings made the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. Jones was found near the ghetto, but he was not a ghetto kid. He wasn’t even from Atlanta. He had been visiting his grandmother, who lived in a house on Lookout Avenue. And he was the first child to disappear north of I-20.

  The Atlanta Constitution published a map showing where murdered children had been found. “Link Hinted in Slayings of Children,” the paper declared. A homicide commander protested that the Jones murder was not related to the others. “The finding of the body north of I-20 destroys the pattern,” he told reporters.

  Less than a month later, on September 14, 1980, eleven-year-old Darron Glass left a church bus at the corner of Glenwood and Second Avenues, near the notorious East Lake Meadows housing project, where he lived. Although fairly new—it was built in 1970—East Lake Meadows quickly developed a crime rate eighteen times the national average, becoming known as “Little Vietnam.” Alfred Evans, one of the first murdered children to be found, lived in East Lake Meadows as well. Darron Glass was last seen walking down Memorial Drive. His body has never been found.

  Around this time, Camille Bell took a ride with Chet Dettlinger and showed him the place where Yusef disappeared on his way to the grocery store. Dettlinger was plotting the kids’ addresses, their last known whereabouts, and the places where their bodies were found on a map. He had a theory about the murders. By the time Darron Glass went missing, Chet Dettlinger was convinced that “geography had become a parameter in and of itself.”

  Dettlinger, a former Atlanta cop turned private investigator, was earning Atlanta Metro’s ire by investigating the murders on his own and offering the press his conclusions. They centered on a map, which the chain-smoking, straight-talking ex-cop was frequently seen wielding on the news. Dettlinger spent a lot of time taking journalists on what he called his “tour of death,” a drive over twelve interconnected roads that he claimed composed the killer’s route. His subsequent book The List, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, excoriates the police task force for ignoring the geographic links between the cases. The route was the key, he kept saying. There was a pattern, a logic, to the killings, and if people would just look at the map, they’d be able to figure it out.

  The problem with Dettlinger’s map was that it didn’t really explain anything. It helped make the case that many of the killings were connected, but it didn’t offer any rationale for senseless child murders. It didn’t paint a picture of the killer or elucidate why kids were vulnerable to him. Dettlinger, too, was focusing on the roads rather than on the world the roads had made.

  • • • • •

  In early October, Charles Stephens vanished from the projects on Pryor Circle in southwest Atlanta. Then, on October 13, 1980, an explosion at a day-care facility in the Bowen Homes project killed four children and one adult. It was difficult not to see the explosion as related to the mounting murders, even as city officials declared it an accident. Mayor Maynard Jackson was heckled when he tried to address the Bowen Homes community. Jackson, a patrician African American from Atlanta’s established black elite, was the city’s first black mayor, and he was sensitive to accusations that he was out of touch with the urban underclass. After the Bowen Homes explosion, he raised the reward for information leading to Atlanta’s child murderer from $10,000 to $50,000, then to $100,000.

  Nevertheless, hysteria and paranoia were sweeping through the black community. Bizarre theories arose: the Ku Klux Klan was killing black kids in retaliation for two highly publicized murders of whites by blacks in Atlanta the year before. The police were involved, with or without the Klan’s help. Satanists were snatching the kids and killing them in cult rituals. The FBI was behind it. The CIA was behind it. The most bizarre theory blamed the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control: its scientists were said to be murdering young black boys to harvest interferon, a cancer-fighting chemical, from their penises.

  It didn’t help that the nation was in one of its periodic swings to the right. Many in the African American community felt alienated by the conservative rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, who would be elected president that November. Some claimed a pattern of violence against blacks was afoot in the nation. Civil rights leader Vernon Jordon had been shot and wounded in Indiana in May. Black men were being shot and killed in Buffalo, New York. A string of unsolved murders of blacks haunted Salt Lake City. The Ku Klux Klan was resurgent: in October, an episode of the television news show 20/20 recounted the Atlanta murders in the context of increased Klan activity.

  To the black community, it felt like things had been heading this way for a long time. The very real triumphs of the civil rights movement—school desegregation, the Voting Rights Act, the death of Jim Crow laws—were being undermined by programs replacing overt discrimination with covert bias: white flight, slum clearance, a transportation system centered on the car. The interstate program became a symbol for this new, insidious kind of racism, prejudice disguised as planning, something as simple as building roads instead of trains.

  Atlanta’s white community was also frightened, though for different reasons. It was less afraid of the killer than of what would happen when he was found. What if the Klan really was involved, or worse, the police? Or what if the killer simply looked like the serial killers who had been arrested in recent years: David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy? They were all white men. Newspaper columns and people on the street frequently voiced the fear that Atlanta could too easily become “another Miami,” descending into chaos and racial enmity when it had worked so hard to be a model of the New South.

  On a bright Saturday in late
October, the black community organized its first neighborhood search. About three hundred volunteers gathered in the most blighted part of Dixie Hills, the area where the 1967 riot had led Time magazine to detail the miseries of substandard housing and unemployment. The volunteers began walking the streets, sifting through vacant lots. After only two hours, they came across a small pile of bones and a clump of hair gripped in a blue barrette. It was all that was left of Latonya Wilson, who had gone missing on that very street. After four months outside, her body gave no indication of how she had died.

  • • • • •

  Nineteen eighty wound down. Aaron Jackson, 9, who lived near the Thomasville Heights Projects, disappeared from Memorial Drive’s Moreland Plaza Shopping Center on November first. Ronald Reagan was elected president three days later. The day after the election, the attorney general authorized the FBI to participate in Atlanta’s investigation. And the killings continued, one every three weeks or so. Patrick Rogers, 16, of Thomasville Heights, also last seen at Moreland Plaza, where he often bagged groceries. Lubie Geter, 14, last seen hawking car air fresheners at the Stewart-Lakeland Shopping Plaza on Route 166. Terry Pue, 15, a resident of the Hollywood Courts project: he had visited his sister in East Lake Meadows, then spent the night hanging out at a fast-food joint on Memorial Drive. He was last sighted trading in bottles at a shopping center nearby. The victims all came from the central city, but their bodies were turning up farther and farther out toward the city’s edges, as if following the city’s more affluent residents to the suburban fringe.

  From their offices in an abandoned Lincoln-Mercury showroom, the task force fielded tips from out-of-town psychics, neighbors with dubious eyesight, former mental patients with grudges, and a man who claimed to be getting messages from God through the static on his TV. FBI agents assigned to Atlanta compiled regular memos for headquarters outlining progress in each case. Some cases were stalled. In several, a parent was the key suspect. Others had possible connections to drugs or “street rivalries.” The agents expressed frustration. “In most of these cases,” a late December memo said, “investigation has been conducted solely in black ghetto areas, where the police are ‘the enemy’ and non-cooperation is the rule. In these areas, people move constantly from location to location and in some cases, it has been necessary to conduct fugitive-type investigations to locate witnesses.”