Behavioral Science instructors Howard Teten and Dick Ault, then gradually with more formality after the program of prison interviews with serial offenders began. I was still the only full-time profiler, and we were taken with varying degrees of seri-ousness, not only by the country’s law enforcement agencies but within the Bureau as well. There’s no question that something considered such touchy-feely voodoo could not have surfaced under the ironfisted reign of J. Edgar Hoover. We had no real operational side, so as the requests for assistance kept coming in and the caseload began to pile up, I was backed up by some of the instructors from the Behavioral Science Unit. As expert as any in the subject of rape and interpersonal violence—not just in the Bureau but the entire world of law enforcement—is Robert “Roy” Hazelwood. Now retired after a distinguished career, Roy is active nationally as a consultant.
He and I went down to Atlanta to try to figure out if the cases were actually related and what type of person or persons was responsible for the murders. To do this, we studied the victimology by going through each file and talking to as many family members and people who knew each victim as we could, visiting each neighborhood. Was there a common trait among the dead children? Then we had the Atlanta police take us to each of the body dump sites so we could start seeing things from the killer’s point of view.
The predominant view in Atlanta was that some sort of Ku Klux Klan—type conspiracy was responsible for the deaths of the children, that this was an attempt at genocide against the black race. As compelling asthis argument was on its face—after all, the victims were all black, and at that time, serial killers were almost exclusively white—when Roy and I really got into it, neither one of us could buy it.
First of all, the areas in which the children disappeared were overwhelmingly black. A white individual or group really would have stood out and could not have avoided notice. Yet there were no witness accounts involving white subjects. More to the point, a white supremacist group would not have operated anonymously, as this killer was doing. If a hate group such as the Klan commits a violent offense such as a lynching or other racial murder, it is supposed to be a highly symbolic act, intended to make a public statement and create an atmosphere of fear and hysteria among its intended targets. At the very least, we would expect some communication from such a group to come in to the local media taking credit for the act, just as you see after most terrorist bombings and the like, and just as we saw from the Search and Destroyer. As I said, you have to determine the nature of the obsession to determine the personality of the offender. And absent this kind of communication, Roy and I had to conclude that whoever was killing these young children, mostly boys, was doing so for other reasons.
So once we compiled our profile, we felt we were looking for a black male in his twenties who was sexually attracted to these young victims and would use some kind of ruse or come-on involving money to get them to go with him. The next question was, how would he tell us what his reasons were?
The break came on something of a fluke, a red herring, if you will. But there’s a lesson in that, too, which is that no detail of a case can either be excluded out-right or taken at face value. Everything must be evaluated in the larger context of the investigation.
A case generating as much media attention as the Atlanta Child Murders is bound to get more than its share of false leads and information. This, of course, is one of the reasons it’s necessary to withhold certain details of the crimes and crime scenes. At one point, police in the small town of Conyers, Georgia, about twenty miles from Atlanta, got a call from a man, obviously white and a real redneck type, purporting to be the killer and promising to “kill
He and I went down to Atlanta to try to figure out if the cases were actually related and what type of person or persons was responsible for the murders. To do this, we studied the victimology by going through each file and talking to as many family members and people who knew each victim as we could, visiting each neighborhood. Was there a common trait among the dead children? Then we had the Atlanta police take us to each of the body dump sites so we could start seeing things from the killer’s point of view.
The predominant view in Atlanta was that some sort of Ku Klux Klan—type conspiracy was responsible for the deaths of the children, that this was an attempt at genocide against the black race. As compelling asthis argument was on its face—after all, the victims were all black, and at that time, serial killers were almost exclusively white—when Roy and I really got into it, neither one of us could buy it.
First of all, the areas in which the children disappeared were overwhelmingly black. A white individual or group really would have stood out and could not have avoided notice. Yet there were no witness accounts involving white subjects. More to the point, a white supremacist group would not have operated anonymously, as this killer was doing. If a hate group such as the Klan commits a violent offense such as a lynching or other racial murder, it is supposed to be a highly symbolic act, intended to make a public statement and create an atmosphere of fear and hysteria among its intended targets. At the very least, we would expect some communication from such a group to come in to the local media taking credit for the act, just as you see after most terrorist bombings and the like, and just as we saw from the Search and Destroyer. As I said, you have to determine the nature of the obsession to determine the personality of the offender. And absent this kind of communication, Roy and I had to conclude that whoever was killing these young children, mostly boys, was doing so for other reasons.
So once we compiled our profile, we felt we were looking for a black male in his twenties who was sexually attracted to these young victims and would use some kind of ruse or come-on involving money to get them to go with him. The next question was, how would he tell us what his reasons were?
The break came on something of a fluke, a red herring, if you will. But there’s a lesson in that, too, which is that no detail of a case can either be excluded out-right or taken at face value. Everything must be evaluated in the larger context of the investigation.
A case generating as much media attention as the Atlanta Child Murders is bound to get more than its share of false leads and information. This, of course, is one of the reasons it’s necessary to withhold certain details of the crimes and crime scenes. At one point, police in the small town of Conyers, Georgia, about twenty miles from Atlanta, got a call from a man, obviously white and a real redneck type, purporting to be the killer and promising to “kill
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