Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  “Atlanta stands a little taller for handling it in this manner,” announced an Atlanta University professor. Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard summed it up in a headline: “Williams Trial Verdict: The City Is Not Guilty.”

  He was more correct than he realized: it was indeed Atlanta on trial throughout the murders, and the Williams conviction allowed the city to refocus blame not on social failings but on a sick individual. When Wayne Williams’s attorney, Alvin Binder, went on ABC’s Nightline after the trial and pointed out that there had been two unsolved murders that fit the pattern since his client’s arrest, there was an immediate angry response. The mayor denounced the attorney and the Constitution ran an editorial titled “Trial Is Over, Mr. Binder.” Most people were eager to put it all behind them, letting the larger forces at work slip into the dark once more.

  The black community’s response was more ambivalent. An Atlanta Daily World editorial praised the jury, but advocated taking at least some of the other cases to trial. A poll immediately after the conviction found blacks leery of the justice system. Even the victims’ families expressed skepticism. “The whole system is unjust,” said the mother of Patrick Rogers. “They wanted to find a scapegoat and they did.” Christopher Richardson’s aunt told reporters prosecutors should try Williams for the other cases if they really believed him guilty. “If they don’t have the evidence, they should continue to look for the killer,” she said.

  “I think he got a fair trial, but I’m not sure he’s guilty,” declared Nathaniel Cater’s father. “I just hope they got the right man.” Many of the victims’ relatives expressed the same tentative hope. But Camille Bell was outraged. “With this conviction,” she declared, “Wayne Williams, at 23, became the 30th victim of the Atlanta slayings.”

  Under pressure from families and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Atlanta Metro police department kept seven of the cases open, disbanding the task force formed in 1980 but launching a new homicide task force to deal with murders citywide. The newspapers were busy declaring the ordeal over. “It is time to put the Wayne Williams case to rest and move on,” declared the Constitution’s editors on March 4. The next day, they practiced what they preached by taking Williams off the front page. He was replaced by the city’s plan to close a spate of schools in poor black neighborhoods.

  • • • • •

  “When I was in Atlanta in the fifties,” James Baldwin wrote, “though some Blacks rode buses . . . and some drove taxis and some drove cars—and many walked—we all seemed to be in hailing distance of each other, and in sight of a church or a poolroom or a bar. But now, neither Butler nor Auburn Street, for example, is what it was and, it seemed to me, the faces there, now, convey a pained and bewildered sense of having been abandoned.”

  In 1982, the year Wayne Williams was tried, three planners published a study of high-crime and low-crime neighborhoods in Atlanta. Their work built on a body of research that, beginning in the seventies, advanced a theory of urban spaces and their effects on human lives. Most famous was architect Oscar Newman’s 1972 Defensible Space, an influential indictment of public housing architecture and its propensity to increase crime. Others looked at the blight caused by urban roads. The planners’ study determined that much of the difference in crime rates in Atlanta could be attributed to physical characteristics. Low-crime neighborhoods were more residential and had fewer arterials or major streets, and their populations were less transient. High-crime neighborhoods had residents who moved a lot, were close to major roads, and included a lot of vacant lots. It seems like a glaringly obvious set of conclusions. But the implications were something that simply could not be said: Atlanta’s urban renewal and expressway construction had, at the very least, built the stage on which the tragedy in Atlanta could unfold.

  The Atlanta child murders were a strikingly potent symbol for what a quarter century of urban redesign had wrought. The hitchhiking scare of the 1970s was just that—a scare. But what happened in Atlanta showed how the remaking of our built world created an environment conducive to crime, and how it had fostered the victimization of poor children. The national response to the murders reflected this awareness, casting a dark look at community breakdown in the capital of the New South. Once Williams was convicted, however, that awareness was quickly shoved out of sight. It was easier and more pleasant to think the problem could be solved by jailing an obnoxious young man than it was to consider attacking the conditions that made the entire tragedy possible: a racist past, an impoverished—and impoverishing—environment, and a built world that enshrined them both in concrete and brick.

  • • • • •

  When I went to Atlanta to trace the geography of the murders, I was surprised to see that, once again, the city is rebuilding itself. The current renaissance is being driven by the return of the middle and upper-middle class to the city. Just as it led the nation in building housing projects, Atlanta is leading the way in eliminating them, becoming the first city in the United States to demolish every single unit of its public housing. I drove from spot to spot on my map, but almost nothing was there. The Hollywood Shopping Plaza, where Clifford Jones was found in a dumpster: razed. Hollywood Courts, where Terry Pue lived: a pile of cement chunks. Hillcrest Apartments, where Latonya Wilson lived and died: boarded up and abandoned. Thomasville Heights, home to at least three victims: scheduled for demolition, a private developer’s sign already posted across the street.

  Rising up in public housing’s place are trendy, tasteful mixed-income private developments, combinations of apartments, townhomes, and single-family dwellings, all lushly landscaped and redolent with features like playgrounds, walking trails, and YMCAs. On the site of the former Perry Homes, there’s West Highlands, with apartments, townhomes, and houses grouped around an artificial pond with a fountain. East Lake Meadows—the former “Little Vietnam”—has become The Villages of East Lake, a gated community with a charter school and a golf course. Even the dire McDaniel-Glenn, where Yusef Bell vanished buying a box of snuff, has been replaced by the warehouse-loft-style Mechanicsville Crossing, which boasts security cameras at every entrance.

  The new renaissance is driven by the insight that “warehousing the poor” only cements the cycle of poverty. Instead, the city is using housing funds to help low-income families enter the private market: former public housing residents receive rent vouchers and find their own homes. Eighty percent of them will be in new neighborhoods. Advocates say this will lead to more truly mixed-income neighborhoods. Housing activists point out that the vouchers are viewed with suspicion by landlords and that the number of units available to holders is limited. Time will tell whether the approach works or not. Once again, though, transportation is being left out of the picture. Now, in a bizarre inversion of what happened in the sixties and seventies, urban life is attracting the affluent, and the poorest residents are being pushed outward, to the suburban fringe. There, even as the area fills with residents who need public transit, the cash-strapped city is canceling bus service.

  Meanwhile, on YouTube, a fascinating community has sprung up to document the vanishing projects. Inspired by the 2005 “blockumentary” Hood 2 Hood, former residents have uploaded mash-up videos juxtaposing stills and historic photos of the old projects with interviews and footage of the shuttered, demolition-ready buildings. They’re all there: Techwood, East Lake Meadows, Bankhead, Bowen Homes, Thomasville Heights, with locals acting as tour guides. The videos recount the violence and danger of the projects, but they have an odd nostalgic tone. “Bowen Homes R.I.P.” someone has spray-painted on one boarded-up low-rise. In the online comments, some Atlantans express skepticism about the new housing program. Once again, they say, the city has simply kicked the poorest people out of real estate it wants to gentrify. “All they did was tear down the old Eastlake Meadows and raised the rent,” writes one commenter. “Just like they doin all over the A now. All da folks dat stayed in da old hoods done moved to Lithonia, Clayton Co. and C
larkston.”

  Dixie Hills, however, looks much the same as it did when Wayne Williams lived there with his parents. Most of the boxlike houses are neat and well cared-for, lawns mowed, hedges trimmed. About 10 percent are vacant and boarded up, their unmowed lawns sprouting weeds and foreclosure-sale signs. The former Williams home on Penelope Drive appears to be occupied, its single picture window framed by white shutters, its doors and windows fitted with metal bars. As I stood across the street looking at it, a teenager walked by my car, headed for the bus stop. I could hear the sound of I-20, two blocks away, a steady, dull roar, the sound of people on the move.

  The Williams home in Dixie Hills, a neighborhood of neat, small homes, just blocks from the slums where two victims lived and a stone’s throw from I-20. Photo by the author.

  • • • • •

  The Atlanta child murders and the response to them reveal the legacy of bad faith that followed the interstate highway program’s massive restructuring of America’s urban spaces, a restructuring that magnified and deepened the race schism in America. Ironically, they also helped launch a new era in the nation, the era of the prime-time serial killer, even as many questions about Atlanta’s killer remained open.

  A month after the Wayne Williams verdict, a group of concerned black citizens collected more than 1,500 signatures on a petition asking for a retrial. In July, the parents of five victims wrote the U.S. attorney general requesting their cases be reopened. The director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Joseph Lowry, told the Atlanta Daily World, “I don’t think you will find anyone in the black community who believes Wayne Williams committed all those murders alone.” Observers debated whether the “pattern murders” had stopped. Chet Dettlinger lists seven murders that occurred after Williams’s arrest that he thinks fit the pattern. In 1985, Abby Mann’s made-for-television docudrama The Atlanta Child Murders was widely denounced by Atlanta’s mainstream for implying that Wayne Williams had been railroaded. In 1986, Spin magazine published an account of how the Georgia Bureau of Investigation pursued and then dropped an investigation of a local Klan family, one of whom had bragged to a police informant about killing black kids in Atlanta, and had pointed out Lubie Geter as an intended victim. Spin published previously undisclosed transcripts of depositions with the GBI agent in charge about his decision to close the case and destroy all the evidence. The transcripts raise many questions and resolve none.

  Camille Bell, fed up with Atlanta, moved to Tallahassee, Florida. She remains convinced that Wayne Williams did not kill her son. Today, few people familiar with the cases believe that Wayne Williams alone committed all the Atlanta child murders—though few consider him totally innocent either. DNA evidence has failed either to exonerate Williams or to prove him incontrovertibly guilty. John Douglas, an FBI profiler who worked with the Williams prosecution, believes that Williams can be considered the killer in eleven of the twenty-nine cases on the list. But he’s still convinced that parents and acquaintances were the perpetrators of some of the crimes. “Despite what some people would like to believe,” he writes in his book Mindhunter, “young black and white children continue to die mysteriously in Atlanta and other cities. We have an idea who did some of the others. It isn’t a single offender and the truth isn’t pleasant.”

  As it moved into the 1980s, however, America was not enthusiastic about facing unpleasant truths. In fact, even the phenomenon of the serial killer was about to become a lot less unpleasant. After being the stuff of nightmares, serial killers were about to go mainstream.

  To understand America, you have to understand the highways. . . . They have shrunk the nation, homogenized the landscape and strengthened common lifestyles. The freeways are not a place but a stage in our history.

  —ROBERT J. SAMUELSON, 1986

  Serial killers, like society in general, have become geographically more mobile. Unlike their counterparts in earlier years, some serial murderers now travel around the country, leaving a trail of human carnage.

  —JACK LEVIN AND JAMES

  ALAN FOX, 1985

  Sprawl followed the interstate: these orchards would soon be gone, replaced by bland edge cities like Walnut Creek along I-680. Development would then sprawl east into the Central Valley and toward I-5. Courtesy National Archives (406G-2-13-65-367).

  4

  AMERICAN ISOLATO

  Lou Ellen Burleigh, age 21, was a secretarial student in September of 1977 when she was invited to interview for a job that sounded too good to be true. A nice monthly wage, good benefits, and she’d be working for cosmetics company Helena Rubinstein. It did seem a bit odd that the interview happened in a parking lot. But the older man with graying hair who met her at the Regency Shopping Plaza explained that his office was under construction nearby. This wasn’t surprising: Walnut Creek, California, was a fast-growing “edge city” on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, one of those places where bland office buildings and franchise-packed shopping malls were springing up around a new freeway interchange. The man, who called himself John Brown, interviewed Burleigh in a multicolored van. Everything seemed to go well, and he asked her to return the following day. Though Lou Ellen agreed, the man made her a little nervous, so she asked her boyfriend to come along. He couldn’t make it, and Lou Ellen Burleigh went back to the shopping center alone. And then she vanished.

  Walnut Creek police were baffled. A nearby construction worker had seen Lou Ellen Burleigh get into a van; he gave them a description of the vehicle and its driver. Other than that, they had no leads. Then, a month later, the Walnut Creek police department got a call from police in Pittsburg, a gritty, industrial town about fifteen miles northwest. A Pittsburg resident named Roger Reece Kibbe had reportedly pulled a knife on a prostitute and threatened to kill her. The woman convinced Kibbe to let her go, and though she declined to press charges, she gave the license plate number of his van to the police. When one of the Pittsburg cops read the newspaper report on Lou Ellen Burleigh, he thought the eyewitness description of the vehicle sounded like Kibbe’s van. Walnut Creek police went to Pittsburg and questioned Kibbe, but got nowhere. Then they showed a picture of Kibbe to their eyewitness, but the worker couldn’t say if Kibbe was the right man. The guy was just too nondescript.

  Lieutenant Ray Biondi, commander of Sacramento County’s Homicide Bureau, read the long-forgotten report over a decade later. A lanky man with dark hair, a woolly mustache, and an infectious smile, Biondi had a hunch the Walnut Creek police had in fact questioned the right man. He knew some things the earlier cops didn’t. He knew, for instance, that Roger Reece Kibbe had been in trouble with the law for much of his life. Born in 1939, Kibbe had grown up in the southern California city of Chula Vista, a town that went from a sleepy community among citrus groves to a fast-growing wartime boomtown after Rohr Aircraft opened a plant there. The nondescript Kibbe grew up in a nondescript house a few blocks east of the Montgomery Freeway—what would later be known as I-5. It wasn’t an idyllic childhood. Like Ed Kemper, Kibbe claimed to have been abused by his mother when his father went off to the Second World War.

  As a juvenile, Kibbe had a few run-ins with the Chula Vista police. He was caught stealing women’s underwear from neighborhood clotheslines. He staged his own abduction, tying himself up with women’s clothing and claiming he had been kidnapped and molested. He had a record by the time he reached adulthood, and he continued to add to it. He was fired from a welding job at National Steel for theft, did time in county jail for burglary, and later did another two years in state prison for stealing parachutes from an airport jump center where he liked to skydive. He was hardly a criminal mastermind, and his demeanor was not aggressive. He just seemed driven by some deep, simmering anger to steal. And not just to steal: to collect things. When a Chula Vista officer questioned him about the missing clothing, Kibbe produced a box from his closet. It was full of pilfered women’s clothing, cut and slashed with scissors.

  But in the mid-seventies, Roger Kibbe s
eemed to straighten out. In 1975 he married, and his wife Harriet seemed to be just what he needed—someone tough and no-nonsense to take charge of his life. They moved into a tract house in Pittsburg, and Harriet worked in an accounting office. They seemed like a deeply normal couple. They had three cats. Harriet bossed Roger around, but Roger didn’t seem to mind. He was physically timid, a soft-spoken man with a mild stutter. He didn’t drink. He was good with small kids and revered his younger brother, Steve, a homicide detective in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Roger Kibbe was not someone you would think likely to commit a murder, let alone do it again and again. But Lieutenant Biondi, in 1985, had some other information that the police in Walnut Creek didn’t have in 1977. In the years since Lou Ellen Burleigh disappeared, the American serial killer had come of age. And Ray Biondi had seen more than his share of this newly discovered monster.

  • • • • •

  A month before Lou Ellen Burleigh went on her fateful interview, New York City police captured a man the media were calling “Son of Sam.” David Berkowitz had begun shooting random strangers a year earlier. By the summer of 1977, the city was in a panic. Police had admitted the murders were connected, and newspapers had published rambling missives alleged to be from the killer. But no one called the Son of Sam a “serial killer.”

  Although there have been multiple murderers throughout history—Jack the Ripper, Countess Bathory of Transylvania, Lizzie Borden—the terms “serial killer” and “serial murder” were not actually used until after World War II. British author Grierson Dickson profiled something he called “series murder,” or “multicide,” in his book Murder by Numbers in 1958. In 1967, John Brophy used the term “serial murder” in his book The Meaning of Murder. Brophy separated serial murder—in which the killings are separated by space and time—from mass murder, where multiple killings happened all at once. But even then, the term was not widely used. The New York Times first used the construction “serial murder” in May of 1981, in a story about the Atlanta killings. The man most often credited with inventing the term “serial killer” is FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler, who helped shape the bureau’s increasing involvement in the topic during the early eighties. Ressler did not invent the term, but it’s easy to see why people would think he had. The FBI mounted a campaign in the early eighties that turned serial killers from a rare criminal type noticed mostly by law enforcement into a national obsession—a transformation that served the FBI’s purposes. In the process, it cemented America’s association of its highways with murder.