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  While Nancy, Jake, and I skated and played, Mom drank and Christmas shopped, and Dad watched TV in the room when he wasn’t meeting with his friend on the task force.

  The Omni fit its name––all or of all things––for the mammoth structure seemed to my twelve-year-old self to contain all things. Whether shooting up several stories in seconds in the elevator or riding the enormous escalator to the fair or looking out the window of our room at the tiny figures ice skating below, the hotel held so very many larger-than-life and unexpected attractions, and yet retained an open and airy quality of hushed tones and lost sounds into which it seemed everything else in the world could easily fit.

  Outside the hotel, fear and palpable racial tensions pulsed through the city. Inside, everyone whose job it was to cater to our comfort tried to pretend there was no world outside this one, but an uneasy anxiety coiled beneath the surface betrayed them––not unlike the one I sensed just behind the strained civility displayed by my parents.

  It was during the afternoon of our second day that I saw him, the monster dressed like a man. And not just any man, a soft, slightly effeminate, light-skinned black man in a long-sleeved, large-collared silk shirt with thick wire-framed glasses and a big afro––only part of which was visible beneath a Braves baseball cap.

  Nancy was teaching Jake to ice skate in the large round rink right in the center of the hotel. I was in the video game arcade trying to beat my best score on Space Invaders.

  I had just failed to prevent the invasion when he walked in carrying a handful of flyers.

  Unhurriedly and unapologetically he scoped out the arcade.

  After identifying his marks, he began approaching black kids by themselves, handing each one a flyer, asking them if they wanted to be a star.

  The flyers read: CAN YOU?? Sing or Play an Instrument * If YOU Are Between “11-21” (male or female) And Would Like to Become A Professional Entertainer, “YOU” Can Apply for POSITIONS with Professional Recording Acts No experience is Necessary, Training is Provided. All Interviews Private & FREE!! *

  There was something off about the man, some seeming contradiction between his arrogance and neediness, something loose and lascivious in the way he moved and looked at the kids around the arcade.

  When he approached a short, scrawny kid of about ten years old in a blue turtleneck playing a KISS pinball machine, the kid shook his head without looking at him.

  “Look at me, little brother,” he said.

  Continuing to play the game with intense concentration, he shook his head again without taking his eyes off the ball.

  The creepy man then laid the flyer on the glass top of the pinball machine, blocking the boy’s view and causing him to lose the turn.

  “You heard of the Jackson Five, ain’t ya? You could be like little Michael.”

  That stood out to me because I had just seen Michael Jackson in a silver-and-black sequined suit, backlit by a shimmering green light, performing Rock with You in the room before I came down, and he wasn’t little anymore.

  The boy abandoned his game and walked away with his head down.

  When the dull-eyed, doughy young man followed, I stepped away from Space Invaders and in front of him.

  “He said he’s not interested,” I said.

  “Whoa, little man,” he said, holding the hand without the flyers up in a placating gesture. “I’m just trying to help the youth of our city reach their potential.”

  I didn’t say anything, just stood there.

  On the same day all this happened, little LaMarcus Williams was murdered less than fifteen miles away from where we were standing at that moment. It would happen just six hours later in a place that would come to hold great significance for me, but it would be a full six years before I knew anything about it––when it became the first murder investigation I ever conducted.

  “What’s your name, boy?” he asked.

  He had been leaning back considering me, eyeing me up and down, a bemused expression on his wrinkled black face.

  I didn’t respond, just held his gaze.

  “Where you from?” he asked. “Ain’t here, is it?”

  Anger flashed in his face when I still refused to respond.

  “Just ’cause I prefer chocolate don’t mean I couldn’t go for some vanilla,” he said.

  I still didn’t respond, just stood there, every muscle in my undeveloped body tense. I wanted to look around, to see if there were any adults close by who might help, but I didn’t want to break eye contact with him.

  “I can make you talk little man,” he said. “Make you do other things too.”

  My pounding heart was pumping adrenaline through me and I could feel myself beginning to shake.

  He stepped toward me.

  Just before I took a step back, there was a flash of movement behind me.

  “What’s going on here?” a security guard asked.

  He had just come up behind us, a pale, thin, older white man in a too-big hotel security uniform.

  “Nothin’. I’s just leavin’. Little man here misunderstood my intentions. That’s all. It’s cool.”

  With that he turned and slowly swaggered away, down the game aisle and out the door.

  If I had known then what I found out later––that the latest victim, Patrick “Pat Man” Rogers, had told Mary Harper that a man wanted to record his songs right before he went missing, I might have been even more suspicious, might have said something to someone about the soft man with the handful of flyers harassing kids in the arcade of the Omni hotel, and I might have actually saved the several victims still to come.

  But I didn’t know and I didn’t act and it has haunted me ever since the moment when––seven months later, on June 21, 1981––Wayne Williams was arrested, and the satan who had laid siege to South Atlanta and frightened a nation finally had an all too human face.

  2

  During the seven months leading up to the arrest, unaware I had actually met the man the manhunt was for, I feverishly followed every step of the investigation––all the media coverage, every report of a missing child, every discovery of another dead body.

  Dad fed me what information his friend on the task force was feeding him, and I ate it like a crazed starved thing.

  All through the Christmas season, I observed and obsessed, studied and stewed, but no children disappeared and no other bodies were discovered in December.

  The holiday break ended and I returned to school.

  Then Lubie Geter went missing on January 3rd.

  He was last seen at the Stewart-Lakewood Shopping Center selling Zep Gel car deodorizers outside the Big Star Food Store. He was wearing a purple coat, a green shirt, blue jeans, and brown loafers.

  From the moment I heard he was missing until his body was discovered on February 5th, I vividly imagined the horrors he was subjected to and then pictured his lifeless brown body decaying in the woods of Decatur every time I closed my eyes.

  While Geter’s family and the nation waited for news of his fate, a friend of his, Terry Pue, disappeared on January 22nd. When I heard this I lost even the tiny broken fragment of hope I had that Lubie might still be alive.

  Terry Pue was last seen spending the night in a fast food restaurant on Memorial Drive and trading bottles for money at a nearby shopping center.

  The next day, his body was found off Sigman Road in Rockdale County. He had abrasions on his elbows and bruises on his head and died of asphyxiation by ligature strangulation.

  On February 5th, Lubie Geter’s body was found by a dog off Vandiver Road. He was wearing only his white jockey shorts. His Levi’s blue jeans and brown belt were found a short distance away inside a brown paper bag three feet deep in a creek. He died of asphyxiation by manual strangulation and his body had been mutilated by animals.

  During this time, I was living an uneventful small-town life. School. Basketball. Birthday parties. Sleepovers. Chores. TV. All the while preoccupied by Atlanta, the slaughter of the sus
ceptible, the woeful wails of the inconsolable, the citywide search for a seemingly supernatural serial killer.

  Mom and Dad argued about how much he should share with me about the case. Mom and Dad argued about everything.

  The world kept spinning and Atlanta’s children kept disappearing. And dying. Two in February. Two more in March.

  So much death. So much decay. So much despair.

  And then it stopped. Or seemed to.

  On May 22nd at three o’clock in the morning, Wayne Williams was pulled over by an Atlanta police patrol car and a second unmarked car with federal agents in it. This was after his 1970 Chevrolet station wagon was spotted turning around and driving back across the James Jackson Parkway/South Cobb Drive bridge immediately following an officer staked-out beneath the bridge hearing a loud splash in the water of the Chattahoochee River.

  Later that same day, Williams was questioned by FBI agents at his parents’ home where he lived.

  Two days later, on May 24th, the naked body of Nathaniel Cater was found floating downriver just a few miles from the bridge.

  On June 3rd, Wayne Williams was questioned again by FBI agents at their headquarters about discrepancies in his statements. He was also administered a polygraph examination that showed he was being deceptive. Later that same day, his home and vehicle were searched.

  On June 4th, Williams called a press conference, addressing what was happening and answering questions from the media.

  When I saw him on TV, I told my family about what had happened in the Omni arcade back in November.

  “Are you sure?” Mom had asked.

  Dad nodded his certainty and support. “You realize,” he said, “you may have very well saved that little boy’s life––him or another kid he could’ve picked up there that day.”

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Do I need to give a statement?” I asked Dad.

  “I don’t want him involved,” Mom said.

  “I’m already involved.”

  “I doubt it’ll be necessary,” Dad said, “but I’ll call Frank and ask him.”

  Late that night I found my dad dozing in front of the TV and gave him a handwritten statement I had worked all evening on.

  “I’ll get it to the task force,” he said.

  I nodded and turned to walk out of the room.

  “Proud of you,” he said, squinting at the sheet of notebook paper I had just given him.

  On June 21st, Wayne Williams was arrested.

  That evening I was reading in my room when Nancy’s best friend and my secret crush, Anna, had come in.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  I dropped the book onto the nightstand and sat up, making room for her on the bed beside me.

  I had fallen in love with Anna when she wasn’t looking.

  She hadn’t been looking, but I had. I had watched her closely, studied her carefully, seen what no one else had, what no one else could have.

  As her best friend’s younger brother I had been in the utterly unique position to see her soul.

  I said I had fallen in love with Anna but that’s not right.

  I hadn’t fallen in love with her at all. I had grown to love her. Or rather love had grown in me for her, while observing her during a million different unguarded moments––moments in which her kindness and goodness, her fierceness and ferocity, her wit and wisdom, had been made manifest.

  “Nancy told me what happened to you in Atlanta,” she said. “I’m so glad nothing bad happened to you.”

  “Thanks.”

  She was wearing the green ribbon I had given her. It was a sign of solidarity with the children of Atlanta. People all across the nation were wearing them––including Robert De Niro when he had won his Best Actor Oscar for Raging Bull a few months back––but we were the only two people in Pottersville wearing them and it meant more to me than she would ever know.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  I shrugged.

  The truth was I was feeling everything––excited, relieved, scared, confused, disappointed, unsatisfied.

  “I still can’t believe you saw him,” she said. “Stood up to him. Looked him in the face and . . . your dad’s right. You saved someone’s life.”

  I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything, just looked at how beautiful she was.

  “I’m just so relieved,” she said. “So glad you didn’t get hurt. But I’m also so proud of you. Standing up to him like that. You’re . . . just . . . so . . . Do you mind if I hug you?”

  I didn’t. Just the opposite, in fact, but she didn’t wait to hear it from me.

  Suddenly, I was being hugged by the girl I most wanted to be hugged by in all the world.

  I could feel the heat emanating from my skin.

  She held me for a long time, her developed body pressing into mine, our cheeks touching, her hair falling onto my face.

  She smelled and felt even better than all my imagining told me she would.

  In a little while, when she had let go of me and life wasn’t as rich, as sweet, as good as it had been a few moments before, she said, “It’s hard to believe he killed nearly thirty people.”

  “He didn’t,” I said with the conviction and certainty of a child. “He didn’t even kill most of ’em.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I said. “It’ll be a while before we know. Hell, we may never know, but I’ll bet you a . . . another hug . . . that he did as few as ten and at most maybe thirteen or fourteen.”

  “You don’t have to wait that long for another hug,” she said. “And you don’t have to bet me for it. I’ll give you another anytime you like.”

  “Then how about a kiss,” I said.

  She smiled and blushed a little herself.

  “It’s a bet,” she said. “Now let’s hug on it.”

  We hugged again.

  “I’m so glad you’re in the world, John Jordan. The world needs you. So glad.”

  I hugged her harder.

  She had no idea of the effect of those words on me or how for the rest of my life they would ring in my ears as I recalled this moment over and over and over again.

  “Wait,” she said, pulling back. “Who killed all those other people?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, “but I intend to find out.”

  3

  In one of the greatest ironies in criminal history, the Atlanta Child Murderer wasn’t arrested, charged with, or tried for killing a single child.

  Wayne Williams was indicted and tried for killing Nathaniel Cater, the twenty-seven-year-old victim pulled from the river two days after Williams had been stopped near the James Jackson bridge, and Jimmy Ray Payne, a twenty-one-year-old young man who went missing on April 22nd after leaving home en route to the Omni. He was found five days later on April 27th, his body pulled from the Chattahoochee River two hundred yards south of the I-285 bridge.

  No one––not Wayne Williams, not anyone––was ever charged with the murder of any children.

  Not a single one.

  This bothered me more than anything else, except the fact that they were killed in the first place.

  My frustration and obsession and anger and confusion continued, intensified.

  So much was happening, both in my small world and in the wide world beyond it––I became a teenager, my parents split up and eventually divorced, Anna got a boyfriend and broke my heart, Mom’s drinking increased, I had a spiritual awakening, Bob Marley died, the CDC reported five cases of homosexual men with weakened immune systems, Charles and Diana had a wedding in front of the whole world––but all of it, everything happening everywhere, dimmed a bit, receded into the background, overwhelmed by the foreground light of the case against Williams and the trial intending to bring him to some sort of justice.

  Jury selection started on December 8, 1981. After six days, the twelve people––eight black and four white––selected and charged with delivering a verdict co
nsisted of nine women and three men.

  “He’s not even being tried for a single child’s death,” I said to Dad.

  I had just come in from basketball practice and found him watching the news coverage of the case.

  I was sore from the brawl-like scrimmage I had just participated in. I was raw-bone weary from not sleeping and the mental, emotional, and psychological fatigue that resulted from obsessing over Wayne Williams and what was happening in Atlanta.

  “I know, but––”

  “It’s not right.”

  I was supposed to be at home by now. Mom was expecting me for dinner, but my new routine was to have Coach drop me at Dad’s after practice to talk to him about the case before walking the mile or so to Mom’s.

  When the coverage concluded, Dad asked me to step over to the TV and turn down the sound.

  I did.

  Dad’s new bachelor pad had very little furniture, but he did have a brand new big television hooked up to cable, which had only recently arrived in Pottersville.

  “Some of them will be admitted as evidence,” he said.

  “Whatta you mean?”

  “Prosecutor will introduce them as pattern cases to show Williams had a pattern.”

  In fact, ten pattern cases were ultimately used––more than any other case before or since.

  “But if they’re part of the pattern and are going to be used, why not charge him with them too?”

  “It’s a strategy,” he said. “That’s all. Frank says the prosecutor’s trial plan is built around what happened on the James Jackson Bridge on May 22nd because he can actually place Williams at the scene. And he’s got an eyewitness who says he saw Williams holding hands with Cater earlier that night. He’s using Jimmy Ray Payne because he can tie him to the same location. If he overcharges and brings in all the others, he runs the risk of them being insufficient in law to sustain a conviction. By doing it this way he can still use some of the others to prove identity, bent of mind, knowledge, intent, course of contact—things like that. He wants to get a conviction the surest way possible. And he doesn’t want to overwhelm or confuse the jury. Williams only has one life to serve.”