Part 10 (2/2)
The important a.s.signment began inauspiciously when his wallet was stolen at Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport. Hazelwood had to borrow two hundred dollars from John Glover, special agent in charge of the FBI's Atlanta office.
Once he'd reviewed the cases, Roy had little trouble recognizing what Atlanta faced. ”I was absolutely convinced a serial killer was at work,” he says. A couple of the murders clearly looked like copycat killings to him. Others looked like a family member, or acquaintance, was the most likely killer. Roy deeply doubted that the serial killer had murdered either of the two young girls on the list.
But in the midst of the confusion and fear, the Child Killer certainly was out there, murdering for the sheer thrill of it, growing more confident and more skilled with each homicide. He was a cla.s.sic lone wolf, and he wasn't going to be easily stopped.
Roy also was certain from the start that the killer was black.
”I drove with three black Atlanta police detectives to the neighborhoods where the victims lived, as well as where they disappeared and where their bodies were found,” he explains.
”We were in an unmarked car, but I remember turning down one street and seeing everything just stop. People walking on the sidewalk stopped. People mowing their lawns stopped. People stopped talking to each other and stared at us. It was like one of those old E. F. Hutton ads on television.
”I asked, 'What the h.e.l.l's going on?'
”These detectives said that it was me, that everyone wondered about the white guy in the car. I knew then that there was no way a white serial killer could have moved through those neighborhoods without being noticed. I knew the guy had to be black.”
As the body count rose-two more young black males were added to the list in July-Roy felt both the pressure to make a positive contribution to the investigation, and the urgency of catching the Atlanta Child Killer before the city's strained social fabric began to tear.
”I called the BSU and I said, 'This thing's going to blow, and I'm going to need some help.' ”
There didn't seem to be much interest at the other end of the line.
”So I called back about a week later and said, 'I'm telling you, this thing is going to blow.' That's when they sent down John Douglas.”
Months had pa.s.sed since Roy's first review of the case, and six more potential victims of the Child Killer had been identified. There was no consensus among the various law enforcement agencies involved as to just what sort of person, or persons, might be committing the killings.
Hazelwood and Douglas, in consultation with their colleagues back at Quantico, went to work on a profile.
Douglas immediately agreed with Hazelwood that the killer was an African American male, and that he probably was not responsible for all the deaths on the list-which would eventually reach thirty-especially not those of the two girls. While it is wise never to say never when it comes to aberrant offenders, Hazelwood and Douglas quickly isolated and a.n.a.lyzed enough behavioral evidence to have a firm sense of the offenses the Atlanta Child Killer would, and would not, commit.
His victims, many of them poor and streetwise, were disappearing routinely, yet there were no reliable reports that any of them had been forcibly abducted, or s.n.a.t.c.hed in the night from their families' houses, except for one of the girls, LaTonya Wilson, who was taken from her bed.
The Child Killer was too cool for that. Hazelwood and Douglas knew he was using some variation on the con approach, an indication of intelligence.
They believed him to be in his mid- to late twenties.
”This type of offender has to relate to children,” Hazelwood explains. ”He can't be so old that he frightens them, or so young that they don't believe what he says. Whatever his lure, we said it had to be credible.”
The agents' experience, and BSU research, led them next to conclude the killer probably was from a middle-cla.s.s or higher background. These were not a poor man's crimes.
Self-evidently, his hobbies and pastimes would be attractive to children.
He also was single, and probably was s.e.xually inadequate. The first conclusion flowed from his demonstrated s.e.xual preference for boys. The second was an inference. Autopsies indicated minimal s.e.xual contact between the Child Killer and his victims. In fact, the murders, at least the earliest ones, may have been caused by frustration and anger precipitated by his s.e.xual dysfunction.
Finally, Hazelwood and Douglas knew that serial killers often are police buffs, and guessed that the Child Killer probably was one, too. He might even drive an old police car, or a vehicle that resembled one, and he likely had insinuated himself into the investigation.
He enjoyed the national attention, too, and would inject himself into the investigation to enhance that experience.
”We said that he not only was gratified in the commission of his crimes,” Roy recalls, ”but also in the authorities' inability to solve them.”
In the midst of fitting these pieces together, Hazelwood and Douglas also had occasion to knock down the claims of at least one white Georgian who wished to take credit for killing so many black children.
The impostor placed a call to the police in Conyers, Georgia, not far from Atlanta, claiming to be the murderer. An unmistakably unreconstructed redneck, the caller mentioned the name of the most recent known victim, and said he'd left another body at a specific spot on Sigmon Road in Rockdale County, southeast of Atlanta.
After listening to an audiotape of the call with Dr. Dietz and recognizing it for a crude ruse, Hazelwood and Douglas devised a plan for flus.h.i.+ng out the self-proclaimed serial killer. It seemed certain that the caller would monitor the Conyers police response to his information. Therefore, the agents suggested that police officers deliberately search the wrong side of Sigmon Road. The hope was that he'd surface to correct their mistake, either at the search scene or in another taunting-and traceable-telephone call.
The ploy worked.
Full of derision at the police's stupidity, the impostor ill-advisedly telephoned from his home to mock the Conyers Police Department, and stayed on the line long enough to permit a trace. He was arrested later in the day.
Hazelwood and Douglas delivered their joint profile of the Atlanta Child Killer in person to Morris Redding, Atlanta Police Department chief George Napper, Lee Brown, and a local psychiatrist who had been advising the task force investigation.
”There was a sigh of relief when we said we thought it was a black guy,” Roy recalls. ”One of them said, 'Thank G.o.d. We thought it was going to be a white guy. The last thing we needed was for these to be racial killings.' ”
The profile proved accurate. Wayne Williams, who was arrested in June of 1981, was a single black musician and freelance photographer who lived at home with his parents, both schoolteachers. Hazelwood and Douglas seemed to get everything right but Williams's age. He was twenty-three at the time of his arrest.
Wayne Williams has never admitted to the Atlanta Child Killings, and those who have questioned his guilt point out that Williams never, in fact, was charged with killing a child. The deaths for which he ultimately was convicted were those of twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater, twenty-seven, both clearly older than Williams's victims of preference, teenaged boys (his youngest suspected victim was nine).
It is unclear why Payne and Cater were killed, but it is not uncommon for a serial murderer to occasionally select seemingly anomalous victims. John Wayne Gacy's oldest victim, for example, also was twenty-seven.
The local authorities closed twenty-three of the cases upon Williams's conviction, and left the remaining seven open, officially unsolved.
At the same time they presented their profile in 1980, Hazelwood and Douglas also explained why they suspected one of the slain girls, Angel Lenair, had not been murdered by their UNSUB.
Lenair was found in early March 1980, next to a log near a stream with her hands tied behind her, not far from where she lived. An electrical cord was pulled tight around her neck. She'd been gagged with a pair of women's panties, not hers. The ME said the black child had died of ligature strangulation.
s.e.xual a.s.sault appeared unlikely. The only physical evidence of s.e.xual contact was a very small scratch, as if made by a fingernail, detected on her v.a.g.i.n.al l.a.b.i.a.
”She was not beaten or otherwise abused,” Hazelwood recalls. ”I believe the autopsy showed she'd been fed potato chips and food of that nature during the days she was missing.
”We believed she had been abducted and kept in the same neighborhood. It didn't make sense to us that you would abduct someone, take them away, and then bring them back to dispose of the body.
”We thought that she'd been taken by someone with access to a nearby place where he could keep her.
”The panties found in her mouth might have come from his panty collection, we said. And it was our opinion he had little or no contact with women. The fact that he'd taken a little girl also led us to believe he was socially inept, with no confidence in his ability to capture an adult woman.
”We didn't think he was very intelligent, based on the way in which she apparently had been kept and fed junk food. We thought he would have spent time in a mental inst.i.tution. The use of an electrical cord to strangle her was another clue. It was a weapon of opportunity.
”We suggested that the police canva.s.s her neighborhood, asking kids if they knew anyone who acted strange, and hung around with kids a lot.”
Such an individual in fact did live near Angel Lenair, in a derelict structure. As Hazelwood and Douglas had predicted, he also had been confined to a mental inst.i.tution-a VA hospital.
Investigators discovered him hiding beneath his kitchen sink. He was clad in VA pajamas. In lieu of a belt, he was wearing around his waist a length of electrical cord identical to the ligature around Angel Lenair's neck. (There was, however, no conclusive evidence that connected this man to the killing, and the Lenair case remains officially open.) ”Do you know you have just described a paranoid schizophrenic?” the task force psychiatrist said after Hazelwood and Douglas were finished.
”That's absolutely correct,” Roy answered.
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