I was still somewhat apprehensive about going to Atlanta, however. Several months before, Lee Brown had assembled a group of highly touted “supercops” as consultants. They were investigators who had handled some of the most notorious high-profile murder cases in the nation. As was expected, their image was overhyped by the media, who represented them as the “seven samurai” aiming to solve the case for the Atlanta police. It was hard to imagine what more we could add. Weren’t the Atlanta police satisfied with the supercops’ advice or were they consulting them about something entirely different? That’s the first question I would ask when I got to Atlanta.
We arrived at the Atlanta Hilton on May 20, 1981. It was a magnificent hotel by my standards, giving every appearance of a place far beyond my means. Our rooms and meals were direct bills and required no money out of pocket. As we checked in we were given a packet containing a welcoming memorandum, a list of conference attendees, a meeting agenda, and a background summary of the investigation and murder prevention efforts. The registration clerk treated us differently from the other people in the lobby who had registered before us. It wasn’t just that we were treated like VIPs, it was as if we were there on a secret mission. I felt caution in the voice of the employee who greeted us at the desk, and his hush-hush attitude hinted that he would not divulge our presence and identities. Obviously, no one was to know we were there. The previous media display over the “supercops” left the Atlanta administrators with a bad taste in their mouths. Secretly, I wondered how long this honeymoon from the media would last.
My eyes quickly scanned Commissioner Brown’s memorandum and landed squarely on the list of attending detectives. At the time, the list carried no special impact. The names of detectives and the cities where they were from were listed without any mention of each person’s importance to the consultation. I was in for a shock the following day when this information was disclosed.
Our consultation took place in the secure surroundings of the Milan Room, guarded by Atlanta police officers in civilian clothes who were there to keep out the press and other curious onlookers. The entire atmosphere was very formal and shrouded in secrecy. Lee Brown presided over the gathering. Brown sat at the head of the table, surrounded by Morris Redding, commander of the Atlanta task force and future city police chief; Inspector Robbie Hamrick, Georgia Bureau of Investigation; and Major Fred Taylor of the Atlanta police. Members of the consultation group sat at a U-shaped set of three tables. The strain of keeping the press away could be seen everywhere. It almost appeared as though most of the Atlanta officials were more consumed with what the press was doing than with catching the killer. There were the minority, however, who were concerned only with the case. Most of the players were concerned about their image.
Goose pimples came across my body as Lee Brown introduced each of us as if we were medieval sorcerers with just the right remedies to break the spell of evil over Atlanta. Now, for the first time in my career, I saw others who had endured the same hardships of multiple-murder investigations that I had struggled with. I could tell this was going to be a privilege as well as a challenge.
The group of consultants who were called to Atlanta with me had handled two basic kinds of cases: those in which investigators had not known that a series of murders had taken place before the offender was caught and those who were already pursuing serial cases but who did not know who the killer was. In the first contingent were Captain Sidney Smith and Detective David Millican, the investigators who had handled the brutal and sexually sadistic murders committed by Dean Coryll and Elmer Wayne Henley, who buried 17 bodies in a boat storage building in Pasadena, Texas. With them was Lieutenant Frank Braun, one of the investigators in the notorious John Wayne Gacy murders. Gacy buried 27 males in the crawl space underneath his home in Des Plaines near Chicago.
The second group consisted of Inspector Joseph Borelli from the New York Police Department task force that investigated the famous Son of Sam—David Berkowitz—who kept the city at bay while he assassinated couples parked in their cars; as well as Lieutenant Ed Henderson and Detective Philip Sartuche of the Los Angeles Police Department, who investigated the Hillside Strangler cases in Los Angeles and in Bellingham, Washington. Also in this latter group was Inspector Jeff Brosch, who investigated the Zebra killings in San Francisco, which were committed by black religious extremists and were viewed by most of the consultants in attendance as those most similar to the Atlanta child murders cases. Lieutenant Frank Chase and I, from the Ted investigations, rounded out this group.
I felt honored to be included in this group of detectives. We had never been gathered together before, but we’d followed one another’s investigations closely over the years. A group such as this with many years of accumulated serial murder investigative experience shared basic assumptions about the cases we pursued. We knew what questions to ask and understood certain axioms about the behavior of a serial murderer. Because of the cases we had solved, we knew how to cut through the administrative protocols between agencies that often got in the way of crime solving. That didn’t make any of us popular—quite the contrary. We knew we were going to butt heads with the establishment of the Atlanta Police Department, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI. We also knew that even if we found the killer, we’d wind up on the wrong side of the political fence. But we weren’t there to win friends—we were there to help solve a series of brutal murders.
According to Lee Brown, our consultation had two objectives. The first was to provide a profile of the killer by identifying characteristics of his behavior and the way they related to the signature of his crimes. After profiling the offender, we were asked to develop strategies for catching him. Inasmuch as the FBI had been running around the bushes for years before we were called in, our profile wasn’t likely to fit their profile. Moreover, because they hadn’t caught the guy, our strategies for apprehending him, we thought, might be likely to raise a few official eyebrows.
The discussions began with Inspector Hamrick and Major Taylor sharing the podium and giving a chronological description of the murders, the most significant events in the investigation, and the preventive efforts. Their presentation was mainly a slide show of body discovery sites, missing-person locations, maps reflecting the distances between the disappearance and burial sites, and the death-scene photos of one murdered child after another, many of them left in sexually degrading positions. We all squirmed in our chairs at the gruesome sights. There was nothing more stressful than knowing that a sex-crazed killer of children was still on the loose.
Atlanta Victims
Hamrick and Taylor’s brief history of the homicide cases started with the murder of Edward Hope Smith, a fourteen-year-old black male, last seen July 20, 1979, leaving a skating rink, and found eight days later in the 1700 block of Niskey Lake Drive. Smith’s death was caused by a firearm. Remarkably, on that same day, at the Niskey Lake Drive location, police investigators found the remains of Alfred James Evans, a 13-year-old black male who had been missing since July 25. He was last seen headed for a theater on Peachtree Drive, a major street running through Atlanta. The cause of Evans’s death was listed as undetermined. Unfortunately, for purposes of an appropriate follow-up in the case, Evans’s body was not identified until October 13, 1980, almost 14 months after his body was discovered. Atlanta investigators realized that the appreciable delay in the identification of that homicide victim left the trail of the killer very cold.
Through March 1980, four more children disappeared. Those four victims further complicated the Atlanta investigation. The first was Milton Harvey, 14, found November 5, 1979, in a wooded area of the neighboring city of East Point. Harvey had been dead approximately one month. The decomposition made it difficult to determine his cause of death. Like Alfred Evans, Harvey’s death was classified undetermined, a classification that was frequently used when the medical examiner or pathologist could not assign the exact cause of death. Detectives had not immediately connected the Har
vey case to the first two cases because his body was found outside of the area where the first two bodies were found.
Second was Yusef Bell, age 9, whose strangulation murder was dissimilar in certain characteristics traditionally used to link one case to another in the growing number of child murders. He was last seen October 21, 1979, on his way to a grocery store and was found November 8, 1979, in the basement crawl space of an elementary school near his home. Because his body was found in a building close to his home and not outdoors in a remote part of the woods like the others, investigators had a difficult time relating his case to those of the other victims. He was, in spite of these issues, included on the list.
Third was Angel Lanier, a 12-year-old black female, the first girl to be added to the list. Lanier had disappeared on March 4, 1980, and was found stabbed to death on March 10, 1980, in a wooded area off Campbellton Road and Willowbrook Road Southwest. Campbellton Road was an important location to the case because the body of Jeffrey Lemar Mathis, a 10-year-old black male, would be found on February 13, 1981. Mathis’s body was found near where Angel Lanier was discovered almost one year after he disappeared on March 11, 1980, which was seven days after the disappearance of Lanier.
Mathis’s body had deteriorated badly and his cause of death was also listed as undetermined. The length of time between the Lanier and Mathis disappearances was important to the investigation because it showed a pattern killer using the same dump site for victims abducted within a week of each other.
The presentations of the cases were interrupted occasionally by the two speakers including significant events in the investigation. For instance, in March 1980, after the discovery of the first five victims, police authorities reviewed the records of missing and murdered children over the previous five years in an effort to determine any patterns, trends, or similarities related to the cases. They proclaimed the result of their analysis: “no common denominator was determined.”
With that announcement, I saw the other investigators moving in their chairs and trying not to let their rolling eyes be seen by the speaker at the podium. No questions had been asked up to that point, and no one seemed ready to throw any out just yet. But I couldn’t resist. Weren’t the Edward Smith and Alfred Evans murders evidence enough that they were causally connected because they were found at the same location at the same time? Just because the causes of death were different in both cases, they ruled out the possibility the victims were killed by the same person. Smith was shot and the cause of Evans’s death was undetermined. Even a novice investigator would have concluded that, at the very least, the cases might be somewhat connected, so I wanted to know more about the details of the police analysis. Did they really review all murders in depth? Did they read the entire case files or merely scan lists of victims that contained limited data? Was the proliferation of unsolved child murders from July 1979 through March 1980 markedly different from those in the previous years? In other words, were those first five murders indicative of the normal murder rate in other years for the same time period? As presented to us, their analysis suffered from a defective premise, namely that the characteristics between murders had to be exact in nature before similar methods of operation were determined between two or more cases. The police were being exclusive rather than inclusive in their grouping of the individual cases. As a result, they were excluding cases that might have contained valuable clues that would help solve the other cases. This is still a typical problem in serial murder investigations, but nowhere have I seen it more pronounced than in the Atlanta child murders case.
Furthermore, what was the depth of the investigations into the deaths of Yusef Bell and Angel Lanier? Was there any evidence of previous injury to Yusef Bell that was indicative of child abuse? Had the family or friends of either been positively eliminated as suspects? I asked all of these questions, but no one in the room had the answers.
Now the mood in the room had changed as the other Atlanta investigators braced themselves for a barrage of what would turn out to be hostile questioning from the consultants. Also in March 1980, according to the official chronology of the case provided by our hosts, “the Bureau of Police Services personnel requested and received the assistance of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) in Quantico, Virginia, in the analysis of all pertinent data related to the cases.” We couldn’t wait to hear what gems of wisdom would come from the BSU’s agents, most of whom were only self-proclaimed experts in murder investigations and had never investigated one lead in an actual murder case. The FBI were the kings of follow-up but couldn’t solve a crime in progress. Most local homicide detectives knew this. It was no surprise, therefore, that there were few friends of the FBI in this room. The profile of the probable killer provided by the BSU mirrored the wishes of the community, that is, the killer was white. Almost to a person, the frowns came across our faces. Had they told the BSU something that they hadn’t told us yet?
We were even more incredulous when the Atlanta staff admitted to us that there was a task force of over 150 FBI agents working the case in a separate facility and not one of them had been invited to this consultation. The FBI didn’t even know we were in town because no one had told them. Each one of us was aware of the problems created when the necessary personnel are not informed of what was important in the cases. But an FBI task force with separate headquarters in the same city investigating the same case was unprecedented. This fact caused us to believe that little or no sharing of investigative information was taking place.
The Eric Middlebrooks murder, the seventh case on their list, was an example of the difficulty the command staff had answering many of consultants’ questions about the facts of the investigations. Middlebrooks, a 14-year-old black male, was last seen at midnight on May 19, 1980, at his home. He was not officially reported as missing. His fully clothed body was found on May 20, 1980, off Flat Shoals Road Southeast. He died of a head injury.
Again, the consultants inquired about any previous indications of a history of child abuse. The Atlanta police officials did not know the details of the autopsy report or family history of the victim. I noticed that Middlebrooks was lying at the base of a tree. I asked whether he had suffered a coup-contracoup injury, an indicator that the victim’s head was in motion at the time the blow was struck. If Middlebrooks had fallen out of a tree, his head would have been in motion, causing a blow to the exterior of one side of his head and subdural hematoma on the opposite side on the interior of the skull from where the blow was struck. Unbelievably, the presenters couldn’t answer. Their lack of knowledge about information that was crucial to forming the characteristics of a profile would prevent intelligent decision making. It would be months later before I learned that Middlebrooks also sustained two stab wounds, confirming that his death was no accident.
While the Atlanta area had seen the disappearances of five black males, ages 9 through 13, and one 7-year-old black female during the four months from May through September 1980, the Atlanta authorities increased the resources dedicated to the investigative effort. Several innovative investigative strategies were tried. The combined assistance of Dr. Lloyd Baccus, a psychiatrist from Emory University, and Dr. Nicholas Groth of Connecticut State Prison was enlisted to develop offender profiles.
Several experts in the area of homicide investigation were individually consulted. Captain Robbie Robertson, commander of the Michigan Child Murders Investigative Task Force, whose opinions I would grow to respect, advised the task force on follow-up techniques. Investigators interviewed all previous runaway children in the same age group as those who were missing or slain. Someone may have escaped from or developed a friendship with the killer. Quite possibly, one of these children could have been recruited to lure in victims for the killer. FBI Special Agent Roy Hazelwood, an expert in developing sex offender profiles, provided analysis of taped and printed evidence. Other experts gave assistance to police management personnel on how to conduct investigations of this sort and to develop compute
r programs for sorting data. By the end of September, the task force was expanded to 25 full-time investigators, who included detectives from areas where the Atlanta Child Killer had dumped bodies—Atlanta, Fulton County, East Point, and Dekalb—and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Only three bodies of the six missing children were found before the discovery of the remains of Charles Stephens on October 10, 1980, the day after he disappeared. He was a 12-year-old black male whose cause of death was listed as probable asphyxiation. Stephens’s body, missing its T-shirt, belt, and socks, was dumped off Normandary Drive in East Point, five miles from his home. Unlike the other bodies dumped by the killer to this point, Stephens’s body was openly displayed and laid out next to the road. It was intentionally placed to ensure discovery.
There were only two more victims found before January 1981, according to the task force list of victims. It seemed like there should have been more, based on the frequency of previous discoveries. Had the investigators’ search of missing and runaway children, focusing as it had on exact matches to the killer’s modus operandi, been too quick to dismiss other possible victims? Those missing and runaway children complaints filed with the Atlanta area police jurisdictions should have been aggressively pursued in light of the ongoing murder cases. Checking on the circumstances leading to the disappearances of any children may have developed suspect information in the form of someone who was last seen with a child.
The Murders Continue
By mid-February 1981, three more young black males had been found murdered. Lubie Geter, 14 years old, had last been seen in the vicinity of Stewart Lakewood Shopping Center in southwest Atlanta on January 3, 1981. His remains were found on February 5 in a wooded area 70 feet off Vandiver Road in Fulton County. That road runs off Campbellton Road, where the bodies of Angel Lanier and Jeffrey Mathis had previously been recovered. The cause of Geter’s death was asphyxiation, probably by a chokehold.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 14