F
For months after Catherine Leach buried the
bruised remains of her son Curtis Walker, she
would sit on the step of her south Atlanta home
and sob over his autopsy report. It was the only
real rec ord she had of the fate that befell her
13-year-old generous and smart “mama’s boy.”
Curtis, saving to buy bike tires, had walked to the
Kmart near their housing project on Feb. 19, 1981,
to earn a few bucks helping elderly shoppers tote
their groceries. He never came home. It was about
two weeks before Leach saw her son again—on the
TV news, as his lifeless body was pulled from the
South River, the 20th victim of a suspected serial
killer preying on the children of Atlanta’s black
neighborhoods from 1979 to 1981. Officials said
Curtis had likely been suffocated. When his body
was finally recovered from the river, Leach, now
70, recalls, “the medical examiner said half of Cur-
tis’s face was off.”
That is about all she’s ever known for sure. In
1982 a local man named Wayne Williams
was convicted of a pair of murders that
police said bore similarities to Curtis’s
case—along with the cases of 21 other
black boys murdered or missing around
that same time. As Williams went to pris-
on on two life sentences, law enforce-
ment closed the book on most of the
murders, satisfied the serial killer had
been put away. Leach was anything but
satisfied. “They had to hurry up and
blame [the child murders] on somebody
because the city was fixing to go haywire.
Everybody was tense. But the police told
me nothing from the day Curtis got killed to now,”
Leach says. “I needed to read the autopsy papers
over and over. I’d just sit and cry and read.”
Today Leach and other grieving families finally
have hope for answers. The Atlanta police depart-
ment, under the direction of Mayor Keisha Lance
Bottoms, has reopened not only the original cases
thought connected but also another 35 between
1970 and 1985 that have similarities to those mur-
ders. Most investigators say that even if Williams—
who has steadfastly said he killed no one—is respon-
sible for some of those deaths, they do not think he
is responsible for all of them. So investigators are
reexamining evidence with DNA technology,
forensic-science innovations and national data-
bases that did not exist in 1982. “Everybody is look-
ing at this with fresh eyes,” says Bottoms, “to make
sure nothing ’s been missed and that the person
who’s responsible is the person who’s in prison.”
The case, which over the years has been chron-
icled on film and in the hit podcast Atlanta Mon-
ster, has spawned conspiracy theories. Leach be-
Atlanta was “gripped with fear,”
Mayor Bottoms, who was 9 when
the murders started, recalls.
But residents also marched (March 1,
1981) and formed search groups.
THE KILLER?
Williams (escorted to
trial in February 1982)
eluded police for so
long because he was
“so unassuming.... We
were looking for
a monster, not an
Urkel,” says the
FBI’s Jim Procopio.
Police recovered the body of Aaron
Jackson Jr., 9, from a South River
bank on Nov. 2, 1980, one day after he
vanished from a shopping center.
Police steadied
Helen Pue on
Jan. 23, 1981,
after she learned
her son Terry, 15,
last seen getting
fast food, was
found dead.
A Time of Terror
52
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