Boogeyman [1]

And that time, man, was just so just to think back like every, that was everybody was scared. [MUSIC] It was always be careful, every way I go, go in groups. [MUSIC] You know what I'm saying? It was like everybody was scared. And definitely the people for what we grew up. Like, well, round for what we from everybody over there was scared because that's what it was getting the kids from. [MUSIC] It was crazy, man. Like, that time was like the Book of Man. [MUSIC] Kelfkowski, it's literally somebody going around taking kids. [MUSIC] And they were finding them and they were finding them behind buildings. That was just our life. [MUSIC] When you live into something like that, it's kind of like different. [MUSIC] Who's just something we had to deal with. [MUSIC] Watch for the Book of Man. [MUSIC] 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's a big brother. That's the little brother. The area we from is where all the kids, most of the kids were getting miss from. So the area we from the Westside of Atlanta, like, so it was almost like, you got to be real, real careful. Like, Kings stay out, you always be with somebody. I was real, real little, so I most times I was with him anyway, my big brother, but. >> Man, that was a real trying time because we couldn't hang out. Like, I miss a lot of different now. Man, time is different. Back then, everything was about going outside. Everything was about going outside. Like, now, everything's about being inside. Playing on computers and games or whatever, but it was just a different time. They snatch your kids, somebody getting kids. So you stand about a chance or not getting snatch if it's more than one. Like, if you with somebody, it was just like, unthinkable, like, who could, who could do this? [MUSIC] >> It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? [MUSIC] >> I still remember that, like, literally remember that. [MUSIC] Talking about keeping your kids safe and what other things you could do to keep them safe. And I still remember that. [MUSIC] >> I wasn't that talented too. What kind of that was? >> Monika. >> Monika, my thing, it was on channel two and they would say that, where are your kids? >> It's 10 o'clock, do you know where your children are? That statement became a nightly statement. I was Monika Kaufman, I'm now Monika Kaufman Pearson. I anchored the five, the six, the 11 and the four o'clock news at channel two, 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. [MUSIC] 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. That people needed to be reminded there was a monster on the prowl in Metro Atlanta. It was scary, it was very scary. >> 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and a happy 1979. [MUSIC] >> 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. [MUSIC] My name is Payne Lindsay, I'm a documentary filmmaker. I was born in 1987, nine from a small town called Kinesle, 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 Grinston. Tara of 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 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. 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. I mean, to lead 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. So people who were segregated may be 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 boogie man 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, the whispers and chatter among children, if you can imagine, this real life boogie man 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 was in a sense that anything very serious was happening to protect us. There was in 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, 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 can't talk about in the open very much. I think that it is interesting that there is a way in which Atlanta remains ashamed of the racial bifurcation that this really shows up. When you talk to people about their memories of this time, there is a really distinct gap. I do a lot of oral history. There is a really distinct gap between white Atlantins and black Atlantins. I think that it is about a sense, a profound sense of separate realities and separate societies. It is 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 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 is impossible to disincomit. and tangle the race and class issues. - I think if the world was designed with all blocks, we might be prejudiced the one that's too short, the one that might be too tall, the one that's ball, and I think the same difference if it was all white, it'd 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 a Vietnam was the same thing. - This is Russell Boltazor. 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'd 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 protestors wouldn't see us leaving. We were so close together as a team and what we were for it, we were blood red, we ate together, slept together the whole nine years. It did make a difference, but when we flew back to the states side and landed on the tarmac, we went back all separate ways again. I was active due to the Marine Corps at the time. Station at Camp Le Juin, 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. But this younger sibling is 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 is wise that those kids should be there?" Maybe they need to be back in Louisiana. And so he said, "Well, everything is gonna be okay." And you know, we're gonna go ahead and put them in school and they're gonna be safe. I said, "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?" - We do mean have I seen Patrick. He's in Atlanta and I'm in Camp Le Juin, North Carolina. And he's 11 years old. I think he was just reached in for straws because now we're sitting these worried. Well, you know, Patrick thinks a lot of it and it is a possibility that maybe got a ticket, called the bus and went up there to see if there's 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 was something for 11-year-old, the way we were raised, that Patrick would just. I got a bad feeling you're not gonna find Patrick alive. And I made him anger when I said that. I have that feeling that you're not gonna find me. Week later, the following Friday, that's when we got a phone call that they found him. Who called you? My dad. What do you say? I said that they found him, your brother did. He was stabbed several times. They claimed that he got beat with a round object and strangled. And I told him I said, "Well, I'm gonna talk to my commander and see if I can come out there to be with you." And that's what I did. "Said 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 had 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, but 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 Adamsky read a poem written by Patrick's classmates, it ended with these words. [Music] My mom's and dad is from a little town of Brobridge and Sicily, Louisiana. And there's one particular grave site. It's the Grandmother of my aunts and brothers and the majority of the family, my mother, and the past, all of us, has always made a point whenever one of us past made sure we went back to that same graveyard. [Music] When I drove back to Atlanta to pick up his body, I stayed there till the wake was ordered with the bake call as a memorial, basically. And once they closed the call and I talked to a arrangement with a funeral director. They flew the body here. I drove here and waited till his body showed up. I made a 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 something about that. Okay. Doing that error now, we still talking about segregation and 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. [Music] Same denomination of church. And between the two churches, is the cemetery, white superior to the front, and black superior to the back. Symitir has always been set up like that. When the hers 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 it services in that church. And I went over and talked to the minister about it. You will have his funeral in that church. This guy that was driving the hers 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 faster than 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, was kicking rocks, spinning in the parking lot. The patchy body in the back of the herds. I was trying to make any problems for anybody. You told me, no, why not? Well, you couldn't tell me why. You can do a service here. I'm like your reason, Hale, for patchy, 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. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that. Trust your girlfriends. I'm Anasin Field. And in this new season of the girlfriends. Oh my god, this is the same man. A group of women and discovered they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. They said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get ready to serve. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. [Music] Look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you. Which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Yeah. Listen to ThinkStat on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. [Music] In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctor this particular test twice and so, inscrack? I doctor the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. Some likes the greatest disinfectant. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian, Michael Marancheni. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. Laura, Scott's the police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at America, Papacanias, Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until Justice has served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trap's podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was the fall of 2016, and girls were disappearing from Newark, New Jersey, one after another. But there was no press conference, no scary headlines. No one suspected the truth. He looked nice. Like, have you look at him? You don't look at him and think he's a serial killer. This is Someone's Hunting Us, a podcast from ng.com and the star ledger. It's the story of a serial killer you've never heard of, and the woman who took him down. Including the one woman who escaped. They didn't even believe her. I feel like they let him get away. But these women saw what he really was. I didn't know what I was doing, but I felt as though I had to do something. Imagine your sister, or your best friend, just disappeared. And the police say they can't locate her. What wouldn't you do to try to find her? Would you catfish a serial killer? Listen to Someone's Hunting Us, wherever you get your podcasts. I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money. It's financial literacy month, and the podcast eating while broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future. This month, here from top streamer, Zo Spencer, and venture capital's Laquisha, Landrum Pierre, as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up. If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what? Today now, obviously, it's like 100%. They believe everything when I first was just like, you gotta go get a real job. There's an economic component to community striving. If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail. And what I mean by "fills," they don't have money to pay for food. They cannot feed their kids. They do not have homes. Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them. Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 and that kind. So the anxiety that that produced. Remember, this is the time when we were, you know, we were free-range children. We were come home when the street lights 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. In this point, 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. Oh, within the Atlanta community, there was a sense that maybe 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 very difficult and unstable homelies because of a parental failing or not because of poverty. Some of them went missing doing things like 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. In my mind, still very painful portrait of these kids who are incredibly vulnerable, who were then taken up in this way, angle missing and then found in these gruesome circumstances, if at all. As we finally got the kind of attention that parents were lobbying 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 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 that children go out to play. People are afraid to send that children to the store. They are afraid to let the 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, we 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 and right in the mix of the kids getting here, like it was a curfew. Like we had to be in at seven o'clock, six o'clock some crazy like that. That came along right in the midst of it. You know, we understood that it was something going on. missing and I can distinguish to remember walking as groups and we will see cause the likes of cause and we will literally just take off. You know, just like somebody coming against you, we always felt like that. There's not a sense of support. So people were wounded and then kind of rewounded. And then in the midst of all of this, there's a sense of, from some folks, a sense that part of what having a racial solidarity means because race relations were still very fraught was that you have to support the African American mayor and 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 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, the killer knows that, right? And so, 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 a 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 to 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. In the Atlanta police department, found themselves in 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 pulls 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 a Ku Klux Klan that was grabbing these black boys. Other people thought 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 mother's pleading for help. 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. 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 dumping them like trash. 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. 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 and trying to find who did this. The frustrates police here most as 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 I believe 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 will listen to them. No one, they think it's just child's nonsense. There may be a kid out here that has a complete description of everything we want for nothing. More than 400 police officers and firefighters beginning Monday will knock on doors from nine in the morning until nine at night. They will canvas 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. If you can find no one else to talk to you, call the police department. We always say that. I'm Anasin Field and in this new season of the girlfriends. A group of women discovered they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I thought how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. Trust me, babe. On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll touch you, I'll touch you. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the big money players network. It's Will Farrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day. I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the ground links. I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come. Look for up and coming talent. Yeah. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fine anymore, it's okay to quit. Right. Listen to ThinkStat on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The only court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. You doctor this particular test twice and so, right? I doctor the test ones. Like a lesbian, like a marion chainy. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is LoveTrap. Laura Scottsdale Police. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at America, Pacownia's Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. Listen to LoveTrap podcast on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It was the fall of 2016 and girls were disappearing from Newark, New Jersey one after another. But there was no press conference. No scary heads. lines. He looked nice. Like, if you look at him, you don't look at him and think he's a serial killer. I didn't know what I was doing, but I felt like I had to do something. Imagine your sister, or your best friend, just disappeared, and the police say they can't locate her. Listen to Someone's Hunting Us, wherever you get your podcast. This month, here from top streamer, Zo Spencer, and venture capitalist, Laquisha, Landrum Pierre, as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up. Today now, obviously, it's like 100% they believe everything, but at first it was just like, you gotta go get a real job. And what I mean by fellows, they don't have money to pay for food. Listen to Eating While broke from the Black Effect podcast network on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. 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 Niske Lake Road in Atlanta, Southwest Atlanta. 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. It was Alfred Evans. And he was on a hill in the woods about 20 feet off the road. And he'd 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 of Niske Lake. And he found the body of Edward Smith. And it was down in a ditch and it was to 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. And I got up and made a statement that we got a problem 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 going to spill the beans on that. And I really didn't have anything to beat based 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. 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 and try to connect these cases because to me they same 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 nine year old use of 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, use of bell, Jeffrey Mathis, Angel Lanier, Eric Middlebrooks, Christopher Richardson, Latanya Wilson, Erin Weish, Anthony Carter, Earl Terrell, Clifford Jones, Darren Glass, Charles Stevens, Aaron Jackson, Patrick Rogers, Louie Jeter, Terry Pugh, Patrick Boltzarr, Curtis Walker, Joseph Bell, Timothy Hill, Eddie Duncan, Larry Rogers, Michael Mckintosh, 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, 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 tell-in, please record your message when you finished recording you may hang up or press one for more options. Hey Mike, my name is Payne Lindsay. I'm currently doing a documentary project about the Atlanta child murders that happened in the early '80s. I'm looking for the Mike McComis 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 an chronological order, I don't think, because it was 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 of volumes. Yeah, big. There's so many files involved. This is a, see in the Bureau, they have what they call major cases and this was, this was major case, major case number seven. It was code name at kid, ATKID, AT is abbreviation of real for Atlanta and kid was the kids were missing at kid. Yeah, now every case doesn't get a name. No, just the major case. You've got a hundred different investigators. You've got GBI, you've got the FBI, you've got Atlanta City, you've got the county, you've got the cab county, the cab city, and then, you know, there was no mosque 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, you know, you just, you know, 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, socioeconomically. I think they were on the lower scale. Didn't make them bad kids, you know, they were, they were good kids. They were just street kids. They were night kids. Less than sufficiently supervised would be my opinion. The FBI got involved in this investigation. What they did was as they assigned two agents to every child that was, 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 a 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 put pushing down in the floorboard. And he had a partial tag, and he gave us a composite sketch. And Atlanta, another bonding 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 the persons that are responsible. Therefore, we do not have a motive. From Tinderfoot TV, in house to four in Atlanta. Like 11 other recent victims in Atlanta, Rogers apparently was a fixie. Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps on killing. This is Atlanta monster. Next time, on Atlanta monster. Sketching back then wasn't what it is today. Some of these sketches they come out with, but it's better than photographs. Back then, you know, you worked with what you had and it was a pretty good sketch. What it looked like, do you remember? Well, it was a black male with bushy hair. I remember the composite sketch very well. 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 and he's a partner. 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 House Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup and Vanity set. Audio archives, courtesy of WSB News Film and Video Tape Collection. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries. For the latest updates, please visit AtlantaMonster.com or follow us on social media. [Music] Describe Atlanta to me and growing up here. 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 you know, mother of the king from your source. It's like a 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. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. They take matters into their own hands. He is not going to get away with this. We always say that. Trust me, babe. On the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. 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It was the fall of 2016 and girls were disappearing from Newark, New Jersey, one after another. He looked nice. It's the story of a serial killer you've never heard of and the woman who took him down. I didn't know what I was doing but I felt like I had to do something. Imagine your sister or your best friend just disappeared and the police say they can't locate her. Hi listeners. I'm Jamal Jordan, the host of Roach Act Murder at City Hall Podcast. In July 2003, councilman James E. Davis, an ambitious rising star in Brooklyn politics, was murdered inside New York City Hall, shot to death in front of more than 200 people. The killer? His political opponent, a man named Neil Askew. The whole story of the shocking public murder and the relationship between these two men, has not yet been told. Until now. 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