Boogeyman [01]
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And that time, man, was just so, just to think back, like, everybody was scared. It was always, be careful, you know, every way y'all go, go in groups. You know what I'm saying? It was like, everybody was scared. And definitely the people from where we grew up. Like, around from where we from, everybody over there was scared because that's where they was getting the kids from. It was crazy, man. That time was like the boogeyman.

Kelp Cubs, it's literally somebody going around taking kids. And they were finding them in Chattahoochee. They were finding them behind buildings. That was just our life. When you're living through something like that, it's kind of like different. It was just something we had to deal with. Watch for the boogeyman. My name is Jasper Cameron. We are in the ATL, Atlanta, Georgia. And I'm from Atlanta, Georgia. Born and bred. And I'm Eric Cameron. And I'm from Atlanta, Georgia also. Westside, to be exact. Yep. He the big brother. That's the little brother.

The area we from is where most of the kids would get missing from. So the area we from, the west side of Atlanta, so it was almost like you got to be real, real careful. Can't stay out. You always be with somebody. I was real, real little, so most times I was with him anyway, my big brother. Man, that was a real trying time because we couldn't hang out. I mean, it's a lot different now, man. Times are different. Back then, everything was about going outside.

Everything was about going outside. I mean, now everything's about being inside, playing on computers and games or whatever, but it was just a different time. They snatching kids. Somebody getting kids, so you stand a better chance of not getting snatched if it's more than one, like if you with somebody. It was just like unthinkable, like who could do this? ♪

It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? I still remember that. Like, literally remember that. Talking about keeping your kids safe and what other things you could do to keep them safe. I still remember that.

That was, you know, that was, I wasn't at Channel 2. What channel that was? Monica Kaufman. Yeah, Monica Kaufman, I think, was on Channel 2 and they would say that. You know, where are your kids? It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are? That statement became a nightly statement. I was Monica Kaufman. I'm now Monica Kaufman Pearson. I anchored the 5, the 6, the 11, and the 4 o'clock news at Channel 2, WSB-TV. It's the city's oldest television station.

People needed to know that they needed to keep an eye on their boys in particular because boys were being literally picked up off the streets. So there was this fear that unless you reminded people to ask, where's your child? Do you know where your child is at this time at 10 o'clock? Your child should be in your house somewhere.

that people needed to be reminded there was a monster on the prowl in metro Atlanta. It was scary. It was very scary. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, and a happy 1979! The year is 1979. Jimmy Carter is our president.

The Vietnam War ended just four years ago, and it's been barely over a decade since the Civil Rights Movement. My name is Payne Lindsey. I'm a documentary filmmaker. I was born in 1987, and I'm from a small town called Kennesaw, northwest of Atlanta. In 2016, I made a podcast called Up and Vanished, where I spent nearly two years investigating an unsolved disappearance of a high school teacher and beauty queen from South Georgia named Tara Grinstead.

Tara vanished from her home in 2005, and the case remained ice cold for more than a decade. But six months after I started making the podcast, something crazy happened. The police arrested two suspects in connection with Tara's murder. And for the first time in nearly 12 years, this small town community had some answers. Since then, I've been looking into other cold cases. What began as just an idea became something more like an obsession.

A few months ago, I was in my office, and my business partner, Donald, mentioned the case I'd never heard of. The case of Atlanta's missing children. I started doing some research on my own time, reading old articles and watching news clips. And what I found was captivating. A twisted tale that's haunted Atlanta for over three decades. As far as the documentary goes, I didn't really have a plan, but I just started talking to people. And I made sure I recorded everything. Okay, let's go back to 1979.

So you think about the late 70s, it's post-1960s soul and stacks and all that stuff. Now you're sliding into the disco era. This is an era where cable is a new idea. Ted Turner hasn't even really done his thing with CNN. That's what we're talking about. There was no 24-hour news network or news cycle at the beginning of this era.

This is nearly 40 years ago now. So needless to say, in many ways, things are very different. The first thing I did was try to soak in as much as possible about this time period. This is... Kalinda Lee. I'm the Vice President for Historical Interpretation and Community Partnerships at the Atlanta History Center.

So certainly what you're looking at by the late 70s, early 80s is that first generation of African-Americans who had actually benefited from school desegregation, for example, at both a secondary and collegiate level by then, right? So people who were in segregated, maybe primary schools and still had those memories, but were professionals by the early 80s. African-Americans are...

prospering to some degree, still definitely hard hit by the recession, but compared to the ways in which they had been disadvantaged before, prospering to some degree, largely as a byproduct of affirmative action. Kalinda described a time of fear and helplessness. All around her, kids were gradually going missing, one by one. To kids her age, there was this idea there was a real-life boogeyman out there, in a sense that no one was really trying to protect them.

I was a child in Atlanta during that time. I was a nine-year-old living in Atlanta in the Fourth Ward, which was one of the areas from which children were taken. And I remember as a child saying,

The whispers and chatter among children, if you can imagine, this real life boogeyman is actually out there. This is really happening. There was a child who went to summer camp with me who was one of the children who was abducted.

And there wasn't a sense that anything very serious was happening to protect us. There wasn't a sense that anything about our daily lives was really changing much except that we were very afraid and our parents were very angry. Every single one of them was not only black, they were also poor. The neighborhoods from which they were taken were the most vulnerable neighborhoods.

most impoverished within the city. Many of them came from public housing projects. And so all of that definitely conspired to make folks feel like this is something that is happening to the least of us and nobody cares. Atlanta

is ashamed of this, I think continues to be ashamed of this. It is not something that people really candidly talk about.

in the open very much. I think that it's interesting that there's a way in which I think Atlanta remains ashamed of the racial bifurcation that this really shows up. When you talk to people about their memories of this time, there's a really distinct gap. I do a lot of oral history. There's a really distinct gap between white Atlantans and black Atlantans. I think that it's about a sense, a profound sense of

of separate realities and separate societies. It's startling to me as a person who, again, as a child lived here, to talk to people who are my contemporaries, who were living in other neighborhoods, living in majority neighborhoods, who didn't have a sense of

of that urgency at all, who didn't have a sense of that vulnerability at all, who didn't even know that it was happening at all. I think it's impossible to disentangle the race and class issues. I think if the world was designed with all blacks, we might be prejudiced to the one that's too short, the one that might be too tall, the one that's bald. And I think the same difference if it was all whites would be the same thing.

I think it's just a human illness that we have, and we as a people never learned to solve it. It's crazy. Even in Vietnam, it was the same thing. This is Russell Bultazar. He's 69 years old, currently living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As a young adult in the late 70s, Russell remembers this time period all too well. When I left for the Marine Corps, I was 17 years old.

They had to fly us out secretly in the middle of the morning and fly us back in the middle of the night. Yeah, that's how we used to leave here at night so most of the protesters wouldn't see us leaving. We were so close together as a team and what we were for, we were bled red, we ate together, slept together, the whole nine yards. It didn't make a difference, but when we flew back to the stateside and landed on the tarmac, we went back our separate ways again.

I was active duty in the Marine Corps at the time, stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. My father was living in Atlanta. Patrick, Diane, and Jacqueline are my three youngest brothers and sisters. They got invited there during the summer to Atlanta. They decided to enroll in school there. Even all the way in North Carolina, Russell remembers seeing and hearing the news stories about Atlanta's missing children.

With his younger siblings having just moved to Atlanta, Russell felt concerned for their safety. So one day he called his father. I asked him, do you think that it's wise that those kids should be there? Or maybe they need to be back in Louisiana. And so he said, well, everything is going to be okay. And, you know, we're going to go ahead and put them in school and they're going to be safe. I says, well, I don't have a good feeling about it, but

you go ahead and handle it. A few months later, his father called him out of the blue one day. He called me and he asked me, "Have you seen Patrick?" What do you mean, have I seen Patrick? He's in Atlanta and I'm in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and he's 11 years old. I think he was just reaching for straws because now all of a sudden he's worried.

Well, you know, Patrick thinks a lot of you, and it is a possibility. Maybe he got a ticket, caught the bus, and went up there to see you. I said, no, Dad, I don't think that would have happened. That's kind of odd for you to say that Patrick, young as he is, would have tried to find me in North Carolina, had never been there before, to the base at all. I was trying to locate me. I just felt that that wasn't something for an 11-year-old, the way we were raised, that Patrick would just...

I said, "I got a bad feeling you're not gonna find Patrick alive." And I made him anger when I said that. I had that feeling that you're not gonna find him. A week later, the following Friday, that's when we got a phone call that they found him. - Who called you? - My dad. - What'd he say? - Said that they found him, your brother, dead. He was stabbed several times. They claimed that he got beat with a round object and strangled.

And I told him, I says, well, I'm going to talk to my company commander and see if I can come out there to be with you. And that's what I did. St. Anthony's Church was crowded with Patrick Baldazar's family, his friends and classmates. The shock at his disappearance 10 days ago had barely sunk in when they learned Friday that his body had been found. Patrick's fellow fifth graders sat quietly, attentively, wondering why their friend had been taken from them.

It was to these youngsters that Father Patrick Bishop directed his remarks. He spoke of a good fear that teaches children to avoid danger, and he spoke of a bad fear, terror, that can't be understood, and he made a plea. There are things in this life that are dangerous, things that we need to protect ourselves from. You can't let it change your way of believing about people.

After the Mass, Father John Adamski read a poem written by Patrick's classmates. It ended with these words: "There was not a word about how you died. It is no wonder that we all cried. Patrick, we miss you and wish you knew how much your schoolmates grieve for you." My mom's and dad is from the little town of Brobridge in Cecilia, Louisiana.

And this one particular grave site has my grandmother, my aunts, and brothers, and the majority of the family, my mother. In the past, all of us has always made a point whenever one of us passed, made sure we went back to that same graveyard. When I drove back to Atlanta to pick up his body, I stayed there till the wake was over, what they call is a memorial, basically.

Once they closed the coffin, I talked to arrangement with the funeral director. They flew the body here. I drove here and waited till his body showed up. I made arrangement with one of the funeral directors here in a little town of Brobridge. We did the funeral services there and buried him there. I want to tell you a little something about that. Okay.

During that era now, we're still talking about the segregation integration going on and everybody trying to get us to merge together as black and white. Well, there in that town, being in the South, there were two churches. These two churches, one of the churches is white. The other church is black. Same denomination of church. In between the two churches is a cemetery. White's superior to the front.

and blacks are buried to the back. The cemetery has always been set up like that. When the hearse showed up, it showed up in the front door of the white church. I'm standing at that particular church. To me, church is church and no problem. They met us outside of that church and told us that they couldn't do it. They couldn't do their services in that church. And I went over and talked to the minister about it.

you will have his funeral in that church. And this guy that was driving the hearse got so angry because he was a white driver. I think the rule was that you do not take blacks in that church. And he was trying to hold fast to that. Didn't want to bring him over to the white church to get buried, to do his service. And he was upset because I was demanding for it to happen that way. And he mashed on the gas and was kicking rocks, spinning in the parking lot.

the Patrick body in the back of the hurts. I wasn't trying to make any problems for anybody. You told me no, why not? Well, you couldn't tell me why. You're going to do a service here. I'm out here raising hell for Patrick to get him to be buried. They did his service in the church. He was one of the first black kids that ever went, had a funeral in that church.

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Protect your reputation with exterior products by James Hardy. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.

Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down from unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal.

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy.

And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast There and Gone.

It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident? Or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes, he's innocent.

But in my eyes, he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There and Gone.

It has proved to be the police department's most baffling problem. Eight children kidnapped or killed in the last year. There have been massive searches. Civic groups have tried to help out. Parents of the children have gotten together to see what they could do. Former police officers have donated their time to the investigation. But still, nothing. And I remember, I still remember parents organizing to stand at the bus stop with the kids.

and wait for them to safely be on the bus. So the anxiety that that produced. Remember, this is a time when we were free-range children. We would come home when the streetlights came on children. So that was a very big deal. I am so sorry that what happened to my child and what happened to these other ladies' children happened. But what I want you to do is to hang in there and try your best to see to it that it doesn't happen to yours.

The mothers of missing and murdered children sat in at City Hall to demand that a full investigation be launched. So imagine the grief, not just of losing your children, but then having to demand that there be full attention to this.

We are paying people to maintain the safety of the streets of the city of Atlanta. If the safety of the city of Atlanta is not maintained, then the people that we are hiring to do that job need to be looked at carefully. If that job is not done, then we need to look towards why we are paying people not to do a job.

Part of this crowd agreed that some of the criticism of the police was accurate. Tello explained there was no attempt to show the city as insensitive, just to show how long it took Atlanta and the city administration to become outraged. That fracture I don't think was ever fully healed within the Atlanta community. There was a sense that maybe, you know, some folks felt safe or felt safe enough based on a degree of economic privilege.

And again, that these folks who were most marginalized already anyway just were kind of left to fend for themselves. If you look at these profiles of the children who were victimized, many of them were in foster care situations. Many of them had lost

you know, very difficult and unstable home lives, be it because of a parental failing or not, because of poverty. You know, some of them went missing doing things like, you know, being 10 years old and out bagging groceries to try to get a little bit of change to help their families. So you really get this really palpable feeling

In my mind, still a very painful portrait of these kids who are incredibly vulnerable, who were then taken up in this way and go missing and then found in these gruesome circumstances, if at all. As we finally got the kind of attention that parents were lobbying for, for children, it only really escalated the fear.

there wasn't a real sense of reassurance because nobody was being captured. And the ways that policies were instated to deal with this, like the fact that one of the first official actions that was taken was to institute a curfew, which would in many ways and for many people suggest that the people who are in the communities that are most victimized by this have somehow engaged in some wrongdoing.

So you have to get home early or you're going to get picked up and taken to a detention center.

The curfew took effect at 11 o'clock last night and will be in effect every night for the next 90 days from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m. People are afraid to let their children go out to play. People are afraid to send their children to the store. They are afraid to let their children go down to the community playgrounds and play in the afternoons and evenings. So I think now we will get the support because there are a number of parents that need to take more time out with their children and keep up with their children. So

If parents won't do it, some of us have to try to enforce some type of curfew so the children will be off the streets by 11 p.m. Police have been instructed to explain the conditions of the curfew before enforcing it. However, when police get the word to go ahead, they will first take the child home. If the parents are home, then they will be cited. If the parents are not home or if the child does not give a home address, then he or she will be taken to a juvenile detention center.

I asked Eric Cameron how he felt about the curfew as a kid. Like, the curfew came in right in the mix of the kids getting killed. Like, it was a curfew. Like, we had to be in, what, 7 o'clock, 6 o'clock, something crazy like that? That came along right in the midst of it.

You know, we understood that it was something going on. Kids getting missing. And I can distinctly remember walking as groups and we would see cars, the likes of cars, and we would literally just take off, you know, just like somebody coming to get you. We always felt like that. There's not a sense of support. So people were wounded.

And then kind of re-wounded. And then in the midst of all of this, there's a sense of, from some folks, a sense that part of what having kind of racial solidarity is,

because race relations were still very fraught, was that you have to support the African-American mayor. You have to support the African-American chief of police. And so you shouldn't be out here protesting and saying that, you know, the city is not supporting you well enough. So it was a really, really fraught, difficult, contentious moment. There also, I think, was a really

significant habit during that time of holding back information in investigations that looks very different than what we have now, right? So some of that is probably, you know, true crime investigative stuff. Like, you don't want to tell all the details of how this body is found because if you find the right person, then only the killer knows that, right? But, um...

So, and you know, and we're in this moment where everybody wants to know every salacious detail right this moment. But there was definitely some significant holding back of information. And so that only opened the door wider for people to kind of reach into their imaginations and also for a rumor mill to flourish. And so there were a lot of theories, right, that people developed that because they were all black,

because they were mostly male. This was a KKK conspiracy, or this was racially motivated. These were racially motivated attacks and that kind of thing. And a sense that as Atlanta was trying to affirm its reputation and continue to get business and tourism and all those things under the moniker of the city too busy to hate, that the people who were prospering under that just could not afford

for that thing to be true, even if it were true. In a time where societal integration between blacks and whites was really just beginning, the missing and murdered children in Atlanta created a new tension, reopening wounds that had never fully healed. In many ways, it was dividing the city. From the beginning, there was a struggle to give these children equal news coverage and even thorough police investigations. Parents of the victims joined together, pleading for answers from the city.

the number of missing children was growing. And eventually, the story gained national news coverage, and the Atlanta Police Department found themselves on the hunt for a killer. 57% of the blacks responding to the survey said they think the killings are part of a larger conspiracy against blacks. The same percentage of whites feel the killings are criminal acts with no connection to racial issues.

The survey posed the question, do police treat blacks as fairly as they treat whites? The majority of the blacks said no. Most of the white respondents said the treatment from police is equal.

And there were all kind of rumors going on back there, I can remember. Some people in the black community thought it was the Ku Klux Klan that was grabbing these black boys. Other people thought, you know, it's some kind of weird sexual deviant who's grabbing these boys. And there was all this conjecture, but no one ever really knew who it was. What was the pattern?

I can remember the mothers pleading for help. I can remember the white community coming together and putting up money to find the person who was doing this. We were almost paralyzed. I hate to put it that way. But the freedom of Friday night football wasn't there anymore. Going to basketball games for kids wasn't there anymore unless you had an adult with you all the time.

You know, kids today have their freedoms. They go here, they do anything they want to do. But during that time period, it was a matter of knowing where your child was and keeping that child as close to you as possible, particularly if it was a black male child.

They were young black males and they were poor young black males. It was almost as if it was like a Jack the Ripper character picking the least served in the community and taking advantage of them by taking away their children. Very vulnerable kids who would at the drop of the hat because they are poor you offer them something and they trust.

That trust was betrayed by someone who really wanted to kill them. Many felt that the police department wasn't doing all it could do to find who was committing these crimes, who was picking up these children and killing them and then dumping them like trash.

You know, at first it was one child, then it was two. And then you kind of went, okay, we actually have a serial killer out there now. And that's when the community really did come together and gel as a force to try to protect the children, to push the police department to do even more in trying to find who did this.

What frustrates police here most is they are convinced someone out in the community has enough information to help them crack these cases. The problem is, so far at least, whoever does know isn't talking. It's our belief that there are some kids out here that have the answers. There's a few kids who may know a little bit, but they don't know who to tell or possibly no one to listen to them. They think it's just child's nonsense. There may be a kid out here that has a complete description of everything we want to know.

More than 400 police officers and firefighters beginning Monday will knock on doors from 9:00 in the morning until 9:00 at night. They will canvass seven days a week until they hit every door in the city. You don't have to have all the information. Give us what information you think you have or that you may have. You don't have to tell nobody your name. Just tell your teacher. She'll get the information to us. Tell your parents. Or if you can

Find no one else to talk to you, call the police department. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.

Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal.

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,

They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. However, one murder of a crime boss sparked a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the mob.

It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Discover how law enforcement and prosecutors took on the mafia and together brought them down. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeartRadio, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. The first two episodes drop on August 22nd.

Plus, did you know that you can listen to the episodes as they come out completely ad-free? Don't miss out. Subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel today. Available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. ...ghoules and girls, and welcome to Haunting, Purgatory's premiere podcast for all things afterlife. I'm your host, Teresa. We'll be bringing you different ghost stories each week straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. ...

Some will be unsettling. When she was with her imaginary friend, she would turn and look at you and you felt like something else was looking at you too. Some unnerving. The more I looked at it, I realized that the some looked more like a claw, like a demon. Some even downright terrifying. The things that I saw, heard, felt in that house were purely demonic. But all of them will be totally true.

Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you live and get your podcasts. The police department thought the key might be a child coming forward as a witness to an abduction, or at least an attempted one. This is Mickey Lloyd, former APD. I was in the homicide unit during that time period with Atlanta Police Department. I got the call on the first two bodies. They were on Nisky Lake Road in Atlanta, southwest Atlanta,

At that time, it was a dirt road with woods on both sides. And the two victims were Edward Smith and Alfred Evans. They were both young black kids, children. We got the call first on, it was Alfred Evans. And he was off on a hill in the woods about 20 feet off the road. And he had been dead a while. He was mummified. If you know what mummified is, a term where the skin is...

dried and it's not decaying but it just mummified, that's from being in the sun and the shade. And while we were working that crime scene, I kept smelling something, like something dead. And I got upwind of him and I still smelled it so I sent a patrol officer up through the woods, Niski Lake, and he found the body of Edward Smith.

and it was down in a ditch, and it was... As a matter of fact, he was so decomposed, he was almost liquefied. And then as it went on, we started getting more young black males murdered in different areas of the city, and we would meet once a month and talk about crime, anything that may be in common. And I think we had one of those meetings, and I think we had about six kids dead by then. I got up and made a statement that...

We got a problem with somebody killing young black males in Atlanta. Next thing I know, I'm standing tall in the chief's office, wanting to know what I'm basing that on because some media picked up on it. So I guess I'm the one that spilled the beans on that. And I really didn't have anything to base it on other than just common sense and working cases.

They didn't want to hear it. You know, the community didn't want to hear it. The police command didn't want to hear it. Nobody wanted to hear it. I didn't want to say it. And I don't know what made me say it, but I just thought we need to do something to try to connect these cases because to me they seem related. The first two victims were Edward Smith and Alfred Evans. Both went missing in July 1979. In September that year, 14-year-old Milton Harvey went missing, followed by 9-year-old Yusuf Bell in October.

By the end of 1980, 17 children had gone missing in Atlanta. And by May 1981, the number was 30. Edward Hope Smith, Alfred Evans, Milton Harvey, Yusuf Bell, Jeffrey Mathis, Angel Lanier, Eric Middlebrooks, Christopher Richardson, Latonya Wilson, Aaron Weish, Anthony Carter, Earl Terrell, Clifford Jones, Darren Glass, Charles Stevens, Aaron Jackson,

Patrick Rogers, Luby Jeter, Terry Pugh, Patrick Balthazar, Curtis Walker, Joseph Bell, Timothy Hill, Eddie Duncan, Larry Rogers, Michael McIntosh, Jimmy Ray Payne, John Porter, William Barrett, and Nathaniel Cater. Just to be clear, these are not the only African American kids that went missing or were murdered between the summers of '79 and '81. These are only the names that made the list. - It got so big,

that I think it got kind of convoluted. There was just too many hands in the pie. Then the FBI got involved in it. They were leading, but we were doing what we were told. Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Is not available. At the tone, please record your message. When you've finished recording, you may hang up or press 1 for more options.

Hey, Mike. My name is Payne Lindsey. I'm currently doing a documentary project about the Atlanta child murders that happened in the early 80s. I'm looking for the Mike McComas that was working for the FBI at the time on the case. If you could give me a call back, I'd love to ask you a few questions about it if you didn't mind. My number is 310-729... Telling you this two-year story would be a little not...

It wouldn't be in a chronological order, I don't think, because so much went on. I got different bullet points I want to hit with you. Okay. I guess for starters, how big was this case compared to others in the FBI? We had at least one volume for every victim, and that's a lot. A volume's yay big.

There's so many files involved. See, in the Bureau, they have what they call major cases. And this was major case number seven. It was codenamed ATKID, A-T-K-I-D. A-T is the abbreviation of Bureau for Atlanta. And KID was the kids were missing, ATKID.

Yeah, now every case doesn't get a name. No, just the major case. You've got 100 different investigators. You've got GBI. You've got the FBI. You've got Atlanta City. You've got the county. You've got DeKalb County, DeKalb City. And then, you know, there was no moss growing under our feet. I can tell you that. We were we were humping it. We were staying really busy.

And it was taking its toll on a lot of people too. You just, you know, you just can only pick up so many dead children off the street before it starts affecting you a little bit, you know. These kids came from different walks of life, you know, socio-economically I think they were on the lower scale. Doesn't make them bad kids, you know, they were good kids, they were just street kids, they were night kids, less than sufficiently supervised.

would be my opinion. FBI got involved in this investigation. What they did was is they assigned two agents to every child that was on the list. What would you say is your first lead that ever amounted to anything? There was one kid that came in to the office one day and he goes, hey, I was approached by a black guy. I got in the car with him

and something went sideways with it. I'm not real sure what happened. There was some type of scuffle. He said that the driver tried to push him down in the floorboard, and he had a partial tag, and he gave us a composite sketch.

In Atlanta, another body was discovered today, the 23rd. At police task force headquarters, there are 27 faces on the wall, 26 murdered, one missing. We do not know the person or persons that are responsible, therefore we do not have the motive. From Tenderfoot TV and How Stuff Works in Atlanta. Like 11 other recent victims in Atlanta, Rogers apparently was asphyxiated. Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps on killing. This is Atlanta Monster.

Next time on Atlanta Monster.

So he kind of stays to himself in his apartment. He has a television set. There's no guns up there, no nothing. He's shrewd. He's methodical. You're not dealing with a guy with 164 IQ. He's clean. He's neat. He's above suspicion. I cannot stop him. I don't have the authority or the power. Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week with new episodes every Friday, a joint production between HowStuffWorks 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.com or follow us on social media.

Describe Atlanta to me in growing up here. Man, you know what? Atlanta is a very special, special place, and you don't even realize how special it is until you get outside of here. It's really a place of peace and love to be 100, which means I'm under the king from here. So it's like it got a spiritual thing with it. You know what I'm saying? It's a blessed place, I believe. No matter how street you are, you got a spiritual side here.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.

Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast There and Gone. It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. But which victim was the intended target and why?

Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.