Manhunt [2]

What we have is raw news footage from WSBTV. We have seventeen thousand hours of raw news footage. So far, I've identified six hundred and fourteen clips, but we have about another one hundred and fifty taps to scrub through. The Whole time I've been working on this collection, I've been thinking someone somedays, someone is going to come along and do this. It was you, guys.

Step aboard our tartists bigger on the inside than it is on the outside where we're going down to the sub basement high density storage vaults.

It's like a rollercoaster.

Yes, I can make it go fast if you left. It's a thirty thousand square foot facility which we keep at fifty degrees fahrenheit with a relative amidity of thirty percent. Thirty two feet from floor to the ceiling. Actually the top of our ceiling there is the floor of the second floor. Prior to us building this building here was a Native American settlement of some sort here. If I've understand what people have told me over the years, everything is shelved down here by size and then by dark.

How many records do you think you guys have on the Atlanta Chalmers in Atlanta. Another bonder wasn't discovered through day, but twenty third.

At Police Task Force headquarters, there are twenty seven faces on the wall, twenty six murdered, one missing.

We do not know the person or persons that are responsible. Therefore, we do not have the money from tenderfoot TV in house to works in Atlanta.

Like eleven other recent victrums in Atlanta, rogers are currently was as fixiator.

Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps on killing.

This is Atlanta monster.

Sketching back then wasn't what it is today. I mean, some of these sketches they come out with better than photographs. Back then, you know, you work with what you had, and it was a pretty good sketch. We had a composite of it of who this guy would be.

What it looked like to you. Remember well, it was a blackmail with bushy hair.

I remember the composite sketch very well. This is a folder of paperwork I kept from my time as deministrative coordinated the Atlanta child murder cases. It wasn't animosity between the local police and the FBI. One of the main things is the mayor maina Jackson. He says, I want every living FBI agent. My police department is basically incompetent and they can't solve it. We need the FBI to solve it. So he threw his department under the bus.

This is Jim Procopio, but he goes by Popcorn. Look, he worked for the FBI alongside Mike mccomis during the time with the Atlanta child murders. Mike actually introduced me to him.

Probably be interested in talking to Procopio. Yeah, Popcorn is a good guy. Now if you can get into his treasure trove, he's got boxes and stuff.

Popcorn dealt with all the records and files in the FBI, And just like Mike McComas, he stressed the importance of a composite sketch they received early on in their investigation from a kid who told police that a man had tried to abduct him.

Well, it was a blackmail with bushy hair. I remember the composite sketch very well.

After interviewing the kid, they were able to form a detailed sketch of the suspect. A blackmail with bushy hair. After only a few minutes with popcorn, you get the impression that this guy doesn't forget a thing.

And it goes back to another cultural socioeconomic issue. When Maynard Jackson became mayor, first black mayor in Atlanta, the first thing he said was, I want to make the police department more brown. Police department up with that time had some black officers, several were majors and above, but it was mainly a white police department. Well, when the white officers heard that, they saw they saw the handwriting on the wall. If you were white, you're not going

So we had no jurisdiction.

We went to the Atlanta Police Department and says here, we're here to help you. You know, we're greeted by yeah, right, we won all your files. So it went to roller cases. We assigned. There were two agents who are one agent per victim, and we had fourteen of the victims at the time. So we said go out.

And redo the case, look through it, give it a.

Fresh look, come back and tell us what you're fine about. Ten or twelve of them come back and said, he's looked like local crimes. We were pretty much convinced that they were all local homicides that the APD had bungled. We didn't see any pattern. We didn't see anything.

The FBI, along with local police, were not convinced they were dealing with a serial killer, but as the death toll of black children was growing, they began to recognize similarities in the murders. It would start with the child going missing for days, weeks, and sometimes even months. The FBI became involved in many of the searches. Popcorn recalled the first big search he was a part of.

There were one thousand searches all over the city. One place was red Wine Road in South Fulton County. If you go there today, it's right off two eighty five. There's a huge shopping center with a Tarja and old bunch of stores. Back then it was woods. About three o'clock, the team down on red Wine Road says we found skeletal remains. So everybody hauled ask and it was like being in Vietnam again. There were the news choppers overhead. They got window.

Where we were.

All the news choppers were overhead. So I got there there about five o'clock and I'm walking and I'd park my car on red Wine Road and I walk in the woods and something catches my eye at eleven o'clock and I walk over and there was a skull and.

More human remains.

So we had two human remains within one hundred feet at one another, and this led to.

One of the most bizarre episodes.

About one hundred feet below both bodies, we found a Playboy magazine. It was that week's Playboy magazine. It came out that Wednesday.

This was Friday.

So we found the Playboy magazine and there was a sticky substance between the pages. I'll let you decide what that was. So he immediately fantasized the investigators. The killer came back, came down here to the side of the murders, masturbated, then took off.

This is key evidence.

We packaged it up, raced it out to the airport, gave it to the captain of a Delta jet heading for Washington, DC.

An agent picked it up as.

Soon as the plane landed, rushed with the FBI laboratory. They gave it to a ladder lab. They developed prints and identified the sticky substance. We didn't have any of the prints on file, so they sent it to the APD to look up through their files. Within an hour they identified the print.

So we went in. We arrested the guy, We searched us.

He brought him to the Bureau. We polygraphed him. He passed the PolyGram. What the hell were you doing down there? He says, well, my wife just had a baby. I went down there that afternoon. Now, during that time we were part of the Vice President of George Bush's task for us. Everything I wrote went to a UNI chief of the Bureau, went to the director, to the Attorney General, to George Bush. George Bush read it. So the one thing he asked us was please don't tell my wife.

We said, you goddamn idiot.

Do you know the Vice President of the United States knows what you did when you went into the woods, and you know where your wife's going to find out.

By the way, we code named that. It was known as the Woodwhacker.

Popcorn's first big lead went nowhere. Popcorn had found the bodies of eleven year old Christopher Richardson and eleven year old Earl Terrell. Christopher had been missing for eight months, an Earl had been missing for six months. To me, on the surface, these cases seemed open and shut. A Playboy magazine with semen on It was found near the

Of course, the blacks wanted it to be somebody white and the whites wanted it to be somebody black. And I can't speak for the rest of the bureau, but my partner and I are Larry Ellington. We talked about it a lot. First off, our profilers said that serial killers rarely cross races. They'll kill in their own race, and all these kids were black.

Popcorn and Macomis both mentioned FBI profilers the people who formulate an idea of who the killer is, who the FBI should be looking for, and there was one characteristic that stood out to me immediately.

It had to be a black guy.

A white man could not go into a black neighborhood, pick up a ca we had put them in his car and drive off without anybody seeing.

If there's a crime scene. Then the media was just unbelievable. And with all of the attention this case was getting, it was almost impossible to get into a predominantly black neighborhood and not be challenged or approached or whatever. If you were white.

It just doesn't happen. In fact, when we went into black neighborhoods during the investigation, everybody on a street was out on their front porch as soon as we appeared in the neighborhood.

There was one place that I think is gone now. It was a housing project. They had what they call the bat patrol, and these were adults that walked around with baseball bats and looking for suspicious characters or protecting the community whatever they call them. The bat patrol. We were over in this housing area. We had two young black kids that had supposedly seen something we thought, so Larry and I were tasked to go over and pick up these two children and their mother. So here we

Was this a skewed opinion coming from only white males. Was it that impossible for a white person to walk around the inner city of Atlanta in the early eighties, I don't know. I asked Eric and Jasper Cameron, they grew up in Atlanta during that time, if anything they would know person.

I felt like it had to be somebody that could move around in the community. So therefore I felt like to be somebody black or somebody who wouldn't draw suspicion because you know, over there we live a white person walking around over there, they are gonna be you know, it's gonna draw attention because that wasn't happening then. Now now you go over there, it's like.

You know everybody.

But back then, nah, you know, it would have drew too much attention. So I always felt like, probably with somebody who could move around pretty easy, you know, undetected, without really causing a lot of suspicion.

But not everyone agreed on that. This is Bernard Parks. He grew up in Atlanta too, and was also a child at the time of the murders.

There are certain guys that you know that they were around. I mean, you know, it's like it wasn't a lot of white guys, right, but but.

There were some.

Yeah, I mean, like you grew up, you know what I'm saying. It's like, you know, one or two white guys that went to my school, right, But that's just because their family didn't have no money, right, So they were just around and so you kind of accepted them. But you know, I always say, you know, they got cousins, they got friends, they got people that hung around and we accepted.

It wouldn't have.

Normal, though, for in that time, for a black guy just to walk up and be accepting of a white guy without somebody understanding what's happening, right, I mean, that just wasn't normal. I mean you just questioned, period, because you're in my community and it's ain't your community.

I asked Monica Pearson, the former news anchor in Atlanta. Her memory was crystal clear.

They weren't looking for a murderer. They were profiling. They decided that that's what it was. And you have to keep all options open. I think anytime you don't open up and cast a wide net, you lose the opportunity of finding someone else who might be involved. It's as simple as that. You have to look at all the possibilities. And if you start out by saying it has to be a black person who did it, because these were black children, then that's the reason why so many people

Now.

Most white people would not go into that community because they would stand out like a sore thumb. But if you assimilate from the walk, to the clothing, to the attitude, to the speech, and don't say it can't be done, I'm just throwing it out there. I think that's shortsighted to say a white person couldn't do it.

A white person could.

If you know the community you had. A white graduated a couple of years ago from Morehouse College as a valedictorian. White folks go into the black community all the time to buy drugs, and they don't have a problem fitting in. If you look like the people who live there, and your skin is just a little lighter than somebody else's, it's not going to stand out.

I think they're wrong on that. From her perspective, the possibility of a white killer was ruled out way too quickly. I couldn't help but think she made a great point.

The one thing I remember most about the missing and murdered children. I still see that visual every day is Maynard Jackson sitting there with piles of cash, offering a reward for any information on who was committing these crimes.

Here's one hundred thousand dollars and it's all you.

Most gangster picture ever him sitting with that money on the desk.

I think that's where they got this shot from for uh Ransom.

Remember when Ransom they came in and put the male gifts and he put all that money on the table and he was like, now I'm putting his bounty on you. That was Maina's line.

I read about this over and over in my research. The reward money. It started with one hundred thousand dollars from the city, but private donations, including one from Muhammad Ali, brought it to over five hundred thousand. Today that would be around one point five million. As Atlanta struggled to find the killer, the city needed more and more money. One solution was a benefit concert.

Come Fly with Me, Let's Fine, Let's Fine.

Frank Sinatra will be joining Sammy Davis Junior on stage at the Atlanta Civic Center. The two figure to draw a standing room only crowd for the March ten benefit concert to help the investigation into the crimes against Atlanta's children.

The city held a huge benefit concert to raise money for the investigation at the Atlanta Civic Center, but the FBI was a high alert for the killer.

I was convinced that that night he would respond to that, and I was convinced in my mind that he would drop a body in the fountain right there.

Frank Sinatra arrived here at Charlie Brown Airport just a few minutes before six o'clock.

He's not on his.

Way to the Atlanta Civic centerwhere he'll join Sammy Davis Junior for tonight's benefit concert.

Sammy Davis Junior picked up a phone and volunteered.

To help Atlanta today. The superstar arrived here on his private jet.

Such a horrendous tragedy as this effects, as I said, it certainly affects all of America.

I was there that night, and we had cops and helicopters. There were cars everywhere police because there is no one could have gotten there with the body.

It started with police dogs sniffing the entire Civic Center looking for explosives. The Mayor's office called this routine.

Will you guys are here to catch somebody?

Oh?

Hell yeah, that's why we're roll out.

Officials have been preparing for weeks for this night. Extra security guards have been hired and extra police officers have been put on patrol here with just one objective to keep an eye on children.

It was overwhelming. The Atlanta Police Department out in full force. Who had a GBI? I know, the FBI was there, the Task Force, everybody was there. There's no way anyone could have gotten in there and done anything.

There are so many news people here, coming from all over the world, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, London, so many they had to be regulated to a room in the basement. Meanwhile, upstairs Atlanta's finance It started to arrive, but the high points of the show weren't outside. They were in here.

I've got the world of the.

I've got this didn't respond and to got a lot of publicity. I thought he was response to how he didn't.

And while Sinatra was entertaining as he sang, he was most touching when he spoke.

More of my tears are shed for the brothers and sisters and playmates of the victims to whom terror has become an unwelcome companion, and to all of the fine, decent people in Atlanta who are frightened by day and doubly frightened by night.

You have my prayers that.

Is, and that it should pass without further bloodshed.

The city as a whole was banding together to catch this killer, and every single law enforcement agency was working around the clock. All the murders were of black children from the inner city of Atlanta, and they were disappearing from their own neighborhoods in their own local hangouts. One popular place in the city at that time time for kids to hang out was called the Omni, an arcade room with food in a movie theater. But the Omni was also becoming a place where some kids were last seen.

That's what we did. It was a game room in the Omni, and we literally would go to that game room and go to the arcades and all that. So that's like video games and stuff like that. That's what we did. Went to the Omni, hung Omni.

Friday night, date night, get out of the house night, and the Omnie is packed with youngsters.

The Omni Complex, a mixture of fine stores, sporting events, movies, and game rooms, a popular place for the inner city kid to hang out. That's why the Special Task Force became interested in the complex as a meeting place. Investigators first started looking for some type of connection back in February.

This sign went up today at Electronic America. The manager doesn't want anyone seventeen or under in here. Wont seven o'clock hits. The owners realized such strict rules hurt their business, especially when their business attracts mainly teenagers.

The nineteen eighties saw the rise in arcades and video games. But another trend, and one I didn't know about, was the nineteen eighties fascination with psychics. In fact, psychics even played a role in the Atlanta child murders. I heard a lot of weird stories surrounding this case, but so far this seemed the most bizarre, a true example of law enforcement grasping its straws.

Police are now working with more than one psychic to solve the cases of six murdered and six missing children. This is how the nationally known psychics spent their Friday the thirteenth. They are visiting Atlanta courtesy of the National Inquirer. Yes, the same National Inquirer with those sensational headlines that can

There is something here, some child out there is trying to tell us to go further into this.

Jonathan Bell, whose brother Joseph is among the victims, also served as a guide. A freelance artist was there too, sketching psychic's descriptions of suspects.

I do not care at this point what they think of me. I'm here to get a killer off the street. If it takes one person of five thousand. My big thing is that if I have to do it alone, I will I feel that they are afraid that if one person does it, how will they feel? And I can understand that. But I'm here more so for the children. And I do not want the reward money that I put in writing. I do not want the money. I'm not here for the publicity. I'm just like them. I want to kill off the street.

One side gave police and news stations a detailed description of who the Atlantic shold murderer was.

He knows in the daytime what he's dealing with, but at night, he's not really sure, so he kind of stays to himself in his apartment. Here's a television set. There's no guns up there, no nothing. He's very smooth talking when he does talk, which is very seldom. Oh yes, there's no doubt in my mind that he's walked side beside probably some of the parents of these children. He's shrewd, he's methodical. You're not dealing with a guy with the one

At the University of Georgia in Athens is the Walter J. Brown Media Archives, a huge, multi story facility that holds hundreds of thousands of archive documents. In the early nineteen eighties, this was arguably the biggest news story, especially in Atlanta. I made a call to Mary Miller, one of the archivists, to see if we can access their news archives related to the case, and as it turns out, they have thousands of hours of raw news footage from WSBTV, the

Everything is shelved down here by size and then by bark code, so thing that you'll notice here, each item has a barcode on it, and each shelf has a bar code, and the items are linked together, so it gives us a barcode and we work by that.

What we do with videotapes.

Is a little bit different from what we do with train materials. The videotapes will have to go into coolers because they need to be acclimated from the cold, dry environment. When they move upstairs, it's a little warmer and a lot more humid, so they have to go in the cooler so the temperature can come up slowly they can acclimate.

While searching the archives, I came across several news stories involving strange leads. This one in particular caught my attention. According to FBI documents, on January eighth, nineteen eighty one, an anonymous white male called the Rochdale County Sheriff's Department claiming that he placed the body of Luby Jeter out on Sigmund Road. Then he threatened to leave the body of another child, but this time the child would be white.

An unidentified man who has been calling the Rochdale County Sheriff's Department for the last few weeks.

That man has told deputies.

They could find Atlanta's missing children on Sigmund Road, and we've learned that recently he's also called and said he was going to harm some of the children in this neighborhood. When the Rockdale County Sheriff's Department arrived at the scene this morning, all they knew was they had something already very familiar to Atlanta investigators, the body of a black mail around fourteen years old line just off Sigmund Road.

Someone was calling the local sheriff's department claiming to be the killer, even declaring where the next body would be found, but it seemed at that time the police didn't give this much merit.

Some detectives say, since this latest body was found so far from Atlanta, they may be dealing with the copycat murderer, or they say the killer or killers may have known that the Rochdale sheriff was receiving crank calls about the missing and murdered children and so just decided to dump a body here to taunt police.

We're taking a closer look at the calls at this time, but we still feel that maybe just the publicity drew the actual killer to this area to dump a.

Body Sheriff Vic Davis hopes today's discovery and the calls are just coincidental.

Then I found another story. The video was of a live newscast featuring a church minister in Atlanta named Earl Polk. He voluntarily called into a local news station to present this story, and he was making some very eerie claims his alleged interaction with the Atlanta child murderer.

I have received several calls from a person identifying himself as the one responsible for these crimes.

I did notify the authorities, but I should like.

To remind you that I stand readed a minister to you, and we are protected and covered by the Constitution of the United States of America. I stand ready to be directed by you as to a place of meeting. I will minister to your needs, and you will be protected, and you will be covered.

For one thing, the voice on the phone was not the same one that has called before, so Polk says his first step was to determine how much.

The man knew many of the children are crimes are you involved in? He said, well, let's put it this way. The first three somebody helped me with them. I said, well, is he not helping any longer.

He said no.

I said why did he quit? He said, well he got afraid, I mean his wife got afraid, and he left town.

Paulk says the man told him he could prove he was the killer because he could show Paulk a piece of clothing belonging to Curtis Walker. Walker's body was found just two weeks ago in a river about a quarter mile from Paulk's church.

So I said, tell me how you got the kids to get in your car. He said, well, I've got a van, and he says, I tell him I've got paint jobs to do, and they get into in the van to go to paint.

Paulk then questioned the man about his motives.

I said, well, what makes you do this? What what caused you to do these crimes? Could you tell me that? He said, well, I'm I'm impelled or I'm controlled or forced by voices to do it. I said, well, why are you calling me now? Are the voices really to so you could call me? He says, well, I don't hear the voices right now. I said, why are you turning yourself in or why are you wanting to come see me now? He said, well, I'm tired of running, I'm out of money, and my wife is afraid.

The man told Paulk he was speaking from or near a pub on Ponsta Leon Avenue. Paulk then asked him if they could meet at his church on Flat Shoals Road, and the man agreed. About a half hour later, a van pulled into the parking lot across the street, but immediately sped off. Paulk says he thinks the man spotted some police cars at a nearby shopping center and may have thought he was walking into a trap.

My purpose of even telling the story was hopefully that he would know that there was no trap set up, and that per chance he may yet try to make contact.

After hearing the many stories from the FBI and looking back on the news archives, I started to get a sense of how the general public must have felt in nineteen eighty, completely confused an incriminating Playboy magazine, psychic involvement, bizarre phone calls, in that mysterious composite sketch of a black guy with bushy hair, but none of it was amounting to anything. The media coverage of Atlanta's hunt for

We had a body, a young young boy, on the behind a building, and we found a fiber on him, just a one fiber.

You guys.

Yes, And.

I removed it off of his shirt, and I think it was blue, maybe a quarter of inch long. It looked like a maybe a sweater or a blanket or something, just a piece of lent. Took the fiber to the crime lab. That information leaked out through high ranking people to the media and lo and behold, it wasn't me, you know, and they were putting anything they can grasp. The media were at that time, you're talking about vultures.

The Atlanta Journal came out in early February with a story the police are finding hairs and fibers on the victim.

Well guess where the next victim wound up? Stripped it in the river.

And we were getting victims every ten days.

We're starting to see bodies in several different counties. We probably need to come up with a method, or come up with an idea or a thought to where we can at least direct this guy, you know, keep him from spreading bodies everywhere in hopes of course he's catching him.

What I thought was the dumbest idea I ever heard when Mike Mcombs and his partner Larry Ellington came to me and says, we got an idea. And I said, Okay, what's your idea? And they said, we want to cover the bridge. Its because it's obvious he's throwing a body off bridge. And I said, why is that obvious? I didn't know at the time. Macomas grew up in a small town in Tennessee on a river, and I grew up in New York City.

We didn't know what rivers were.

The reason is I don't think he would drive down to the river because the chances are getting caught. And besides that, I was raised on a river in East Tennessee, and I know that gets something to float down the river, you've got to get it out in the middle of the water or you stand a good chance it say it's going to come right back to this, to the bank.

He knew that if you threw something from the shore, it eventually floats back to land. But if you throw something off of a bridge in the middle of the river, it'll float down the river. And I says, how do you know which bridge? He said, well, we're going.

To pick fourteen. I said, hey, you know you're going to pick the right, right one.

And he looked at me and said, you got a better idea, dumb shit, And I said not. At the moment, there.

Was two rivers, and there was the South River and the Chattahoochee River, and I recommended that we stake those out the bridges because I felt that that was how he was getting the bodies into the water, was throwing them off river bridges, because it would be quick, it'd be fast, he would get them in the water, and there was a good chance they would float down stream quite aways from my idea. I got rewarded of kind

It started toward the end of April, first of May, and we gave them thirty days, and we actually about one hundred and forty people totally because we had a cover all night, and we had a cover of weekends, so we had one hundred and forty people assigned.

And we were burning one hundred and forty bodies a night too, because we had so many bridges on the South River and so many bridges on the Chattahoochee River. And what we did was is we had to people on the ground under one side of the bridge, two people on the other, and then we had two chase cars per bridge, so if anybody dropped something in the people underneath would notify the chase cars. And that's the

As an officer with the APD at that time, Mike Tovey remembers this bridge steakout, and.

We had just about every bridge, I think every bridge in Atlanta area covered. They canceled our off days and we worked ungodly hours like five to five in the morning, no off days, and we had people under the bridge, we had people on the water posed as fishermen, and just about every bridge in Atlanta and even Fulton County we patrolled it in rafts. We had our guns in the boat with us, and really we were just grasping that straws. But it was apparent these bodies were coming over the bridge.

On the very last night of the bridge steakout, something happened that would change the course of their investigation forever.

Last night, last bridge.

That night we set up knowing this this would be the last day, I had about six or eight bridges. I can't remember that. I kind of kept an eye on and if anybody had any problems, or if somebody didn't show up, or you know, logistical problems, whatever happened, and I was to be notified regardless. I was at a small bridge south and I heard some radio traffic, and at the time, our radios weren't as good as they are today. And I remember getting on the radio

Next time on Atlanta Monster, it was the pre dawn hours of May twenty second.

The Atlanta Police Bureau and the FBI had been staking up bridges along the Chattahoochee River for the last two months and Atlanta recruit heard a splash. Several radio messages and a flurry of activities soon had a car stopped and it was twenty three year old Wayne Williams. People who know Williams say he is a highly intelligent young man, a good student when he was in school.

I went up to him and identified myself as special Agent the FBI, and I asked him immediately if he knew why he was being pulled over, and he said, yes, it's probably because about those kids that are missing. Kind of surprised me. That was an unusual answer.

I thought, it's like, idep, you want to go to this you rabbit hole is very, very very deep.

Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week with new episodes every Friday, a joint production between How Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. Audio archives courtesy of WSB News Film and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries. For the latest updates, please visit Atlantamonster dot com or follow us on social media. Why do they call you popcorn?

Ah?

When I was in Memphis a first office agent, brand new out of the FBI Academy, Andy was my training agent. Andy was about seven or eight years older than me, a little more experience than the bureau. And Andy had a three year old daughter, Karen, who's.

Now in the fifties. And she couldn't say the last name Procopio. What came out was popcorn. She called me popcorn, mister popcorn, and it stuck.

Do you like popcorn?

Sure,