ENDURING
GRIEF
Anthony Terrell
visited the grave
of his brother Earl,
11 (inset), in April,
38 years after Earl
went missing from a
community pool and
turned up dead—still
wearing the swim
trunks Anthony had
lent him.
NOT
FORGOTTEN
Mayor Bottoms
(center, on
March 21) says
reopening the
cases and building
a memorial will
“let the world
know that black
lives do matter.”
One of those projects, Thomasville Heights, was
home to Patrick Rogers. On Nov. 10, 1980, the 16-
year-old aspiring R&B singer disappeared after
telling a friend’s mom he had met “a guy” who
wanted to record his songs. Patrick’s brother Isaac
says he has no doubt that “guy” was Williams—
because the same man chased Isaac, then 7, through
Thomasville Heights after he had been identified
in a magazine article about his brother’s murder. “I
was screaming, beating on [a neighbor’s] door, but
the thing I remember vividly was how calm he was.
Like he was on a mission, which told me he’s done
this before.” Isaac says the next time he saw Wil-
liams, it was in a news report on his arrest: “I told
my mother, ‘That’s the guy!’ ”
Williams didn’t draw the attention of police until
May 22, 1981. By then it had been in the news that
police were finding fiber evidence on various vic-
tims. “Then bodies started showing up in rivers,
without any clothes, in an obvious attempt to wash
off the fibers,” explains Joseph Drolet, one of the
prosecutors of the original case. Investigators be-
gan staking out bridges and, after hearing a splash
around 3 a.m. that May morning, spotted Wil-
liams’s car speeding away. When police pulled Wil-
liams over, “some of the first words out of his mouth
were, ‘I’ll bet this is about those boys,’ ” says Drolet.
The body of Nathaniel Cater, 28, was found down-
stream two days later. Cater had last been seen,
according to later witness testimony, holding hands
with Williams at Atlanta’s Rialto theater. Williams,
then 23, was arrested on June 21, 1981. A police
search of his home and vehicle turned up dog hairs
and carpet and bedspread fibers matching evidence
found on at least 20 of the murdered children and
on 21-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne,
whose body was pulled from the riv-
er 28 days before Cater’s. Prosecu-
tors charged Wil liams only with the
murders of Payne and Cater. “You
can convict him [Williams] 25
times, the outcome is going to be the
same—life in prison,” says retired
Atlanta police detective Danny
Agan. “So you take the two strongest
cases and get the conviction.”
That isn’t enough for the families
who still grieve the children taken from them.
“There’s a big void to this day. I want the truth to
come out,” says Isaac Rogers. As for Catherine
Leach, she says her three surviving children have
since burned the autopsy report that cost her so
many tears. Still, she’s hopeful for answers a long
time coming. “My son’s case sat dusty on a shelf for
some 40 years,” says Leach. “We are finally going to
find out what is what, and who did what.” •
lieves it was the Ku Klux Klan who killed Curtis,
just as fellow Atlantan Wanda Mathis is convinced
the Klan was behind her 11-year-old brother Jef-
frey’s disappearance in 1980. Before Jeffrey’s body
turned up in the woods a year later,
Wanda remembered a white man
trying to get her in his car. “I think
the trophy for them was to get more
than one child from one family,” she
says. “I know that these killers are
still out there.”
But retired FBI agent Jim Pro co-
pio, who worked seven months
on a special task force investigating
the child murders, calls that theory
“ridiculous.” Most of the boys dis-
appeared from their own communities in broad
daylight, suggesting the killer “blended in” and was
able to lure boys into his car, says Procopio. Wil-
liams fit that profile—a slightly built regular in the
community who, according to witnesses, was once
arrested for impersonating a police officer and lat-
er presented himself as a music producer, adver-
tising talent shows in the housing projects where
several victims lived.
PEOPLE August 5, 2019 53
FROM TOP: LYNSEY W
EATHERSPOO/THE NEW
YORK TIMES/REDUX; BOB
ANDRES/THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION/AP
