Original subtitles

♪♪

Reporter: The search goes on for yet another missing child.

Bottoms: As a child, I felt fear.

They were killing children, Black children, in Atlanta.

I don't think any of us attached a face to what these killers

or this killer looked like and who it was.

It was just somebody evil.

♪♪

♪♪

Hello and welcome to "How It Really Happened."

I'm Hill Harper.

From 1979 to 1981, the city of Atlanta was gripped by fear.

Children were disappearing -- little girls, boys,

and young men, all of them Black.

They were later found murdered, most of them strangled,

their bodies left in abandoned buildings and in the woods.

Panic swept the city.

Parents kept their kids close

as police launched a desperate search

to find the killer or killers.

And in Atlanta, the nightly TV catchphrase

"Do you know where your children are?"

took on a new, ominous tone.

This is how it really happened.

♪♪

Agan: Saturday afternoon, July 28, 1979.

I was a rookie homicide detective, learning the ropes.

A call came up to respond to Niskey Lake Road.

What had happened was

someone was looking for aluminum cans alongside the road,

and they had stumbled upon the remains of a decomposing body.

♪♪

So, we arrived on the scene.

It was a typical Georgia summer day -- hot, humid.

And Niskey Lake Road was a very desolate area.

Back in those days, in the '70s and the '80s, it was woods.

Agan: To assume that the body was dumped there

would be the logical assumption.

And somebody said,

"Well, maybe we should do a search of the immediate area."

Smith: And not far from where his body was found,

the remains of another Black child was found.

Agan: This body was in much better shape,

physically, than the first body.

It was still intact.

Clearly, it was a young Black male,

more or less fully clothed, laying on the ground faceup.

We really need help from the public on this one to --

on these two cases.

It took a while to identify them.

♪♪

Edward Hope Smith, who's 14 years old --

he had been shot in the back by a small-caliber weapon.

And Alfred Evans -- he was 13.

And the cause of death was attributed to asphyxiation.

So, there's these kind of divergence

in terms of method of homicide

that caused the police department

to believe that they were unconnected.

Agan: And there were the first two murders on Niskey Lake Road.

They got very little coverage, if any, with the press.

The level of alarm did not spread too much

beyond the communities that they came out of.

Suggs: But after the finding of the two bodies,

things just started to kind of build.

I just want my little girl found safely and brought home.

I miss her, and I love her.

[ Voice breaking ] I love her.

♪♪

Suggs: There were more children missing.

More bodies were being found.

News anchor: Authorities in Atlanta today

identified the remains of a child

found by volunteer searchers.

There was a small patch of hair next to the skull.

More bodies turn up.

Reporter: 14-year-old Milton Harvey.

Smith: Yusuf Bell.

Angel Lanier.

News anchor: The body of 7-year-old Latonya Wilson

was found near a railway track

not far from where she had lived.

Suggs: Then the bodies just started piling up,

piling up, piling up, piling up.

People were very concerned.

Someone's killing our kids.

Someone's after our children.

Good evening.

Another child has been found murdered in Atlanta.

It was just a very dark and scary and sad time in our city.

We must bring an end to the killing of Black folks

in this country!

Glover: I don't know how we can look back at it now

and try to describe the horror.

I can still see those black-and- white photos

of those children.

I can still see them.

Suggs: And you think about 29 murders in two years,

that's a lot of murders of Black kids.

You had a whole city of children.

We were terrified.

People are getting children around here.

I don't like it.

Absolutely terrified.

And we had every reason to be.

♪♪

Suggs: Atlanta was always this aspirational place.

At the time, Atlanta was a growing city.

Atlanta was a changing city.

Glover: Back then, in 1979,

Atlanta had an African-American mayor, Maynard Jackson.

He was the first African-American elected

to be the mayor of any major city in the South.

Ladies and gentlemen, the future of Atlanta begins tonight.

[ Cheers and applause ]

The city's motto back then was "city too busy to hate."

The city was growing.

It was undergoing a huge economic and building boom.

Every major corporation you could think of

was relocating to Atlanta.

Ford: It was the very beginning of CNN.

We were the new kids on the block.

For the first time in television history,

there is now a 24-hour-a-day news service.

Back then, Atlanta was just super-busy.

[ Siren wailing ]

But it was the homicide capital of the United States.

There were more murders per capita in Atlanta

than anywhere else in the country.

Our crime statistics in the '70s were horrible.

So you're trying to be this wonderful city,

a city that's too busy to hate,

but at that time, in the late '70s,

you had a city that was really full of crime.

Back up this way. Go back up.

News anchor: Atlanta police have set up a close watch on children

for the weekend amid reports

the killer of Atlanta's Black children may strike again.

♪♪

Bottoms: So many years later,

it's still incredible to think that it happened

and that it happened day in, day out for weeks,

for months, for years,

and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

♪♪

Reporter: Jefferey Mathis, age 10,

went to the store for his mother two weeks ago

and hasn't been seen since.

I'm still hoping that he's alive,

but I just don't know at this point.

Bottoms: Literally, children were disappearing.

They were walking to bus stops

or they had been out with their friends,

and they were disappearing.

Agan: What was tying them together were what you call victimology.

All Black.

I think there was one female at that time.

The rest of them were males.

They all had disappeared under strange circumstances

and then been discovered murdered.

It took a moment for people to even realize

that we had a problem on our hands.

Suggs: The mothers were the ones who kind of sounded the bell

to say, "Hey, our kids are missing.

Our kids are being taken and killed,

and the police aren't doing anything.

They're not doing anything fast enough."

The police department doesn't want to alarm the community.

They are afraid of panic.

How many children do we have to lose in our neighborhoods

before the police department says,

"Hey, we've got a problem"?

♪♪

The mothers formed the Committee to Stop Children's Murders.

And there was one mother in particular,

Yusuf Bell's mother, Camille Bell.

We needed to warn the city that something was going on.

Camille Bell is starting to raise hell,

and she's getting attention.

McComas: She started to tell the media

that we had a serial killer on our hands.

I am so sorry that what happened to my child happened,

but what I want you to do is try your best to see to it

that it doesn't happen to yours.

Buffington: Yusuf Bell was going to the grocery store for people.

And then he became missing, and they found him strangled

and pushed into an air duct in an old, abandoned school.

♪♪

Bell: He was bright. He was ambitious.

He was in the gifted program.

All of the what could have been, should have been,

and probably would have been was taken away.

And we'll never know now,

because somebody decided that it was alright

to just kill a little kid 'cause they wanted to.

♪♪

Buffington: It was in May.

We got a call in the early morning.

Agan: Somebody observed this body of a young boy

on the sidewalk in back of this lounge.

The fact that the little boy's body

was dumped behind a dumpster

was, for me, psychologically significant

in that he thought the child was trash.

Agan: The scene basically consisted of the body,

and there was a bicycle.

The pockets of the little boy were turned out

to make it appear to be a robbery,

and then pennies, nickels, dimes were strewn

just like somebody had actually thrown them.

Agan: We didn't have a lot to work with.

One, we didn't know who the boy was.

We didn't know how he got there.

Cause of death wasn't readily apparent.

Buffington: There was some discoloring to the neck,

and it also appeared that he had been bludgeoned.

Agan: When we were conducting our crime-scene investigation,

Bob saw some fibers that were stuck

to the bottom of the boy's shoes.

It was all we had.

There was no blood.

There was no semen.

There was nothing.

Danny and I hand-carried the fiber out to the GBI lab

and talked to Larry Peterson,

who we worked with a lot in our homicide investigations.

♪♪

It was fairly obvious to me that it was carpeting

that he had to have been in contact with

just before his body was laid there.

So basically, it's highly significant.

Bring me a sample of red carpet that you think it may match,

and then we'll do a comparison and see.

But there was no matching source for the longest time.

At some point during the morning,

we identified him as Eric Middlerooks.

Buffington: I had connected the bodies of the two children

at Niskey Lake and Eric Middlerooks.

So I wrote a letter saying that I thought that it was important

that we start looking at them as related cases.

And I sent the letter up to my major,

who was the head of homicide.

And the major asked me if i liked working homicide,

and i told him I did very much.

And he said, "Well, how about auto theft?

If I see another letter like this,

you're gonna be in auto theft."

I think they were afraid of a serial murderer.

It was almost as if everybody was suffering from deniability.

It didn't seem like law enforcement was jumping on it

or giving it a lot of attention.

Reporter: As late as yesterday, detectives in the homicide division at APD

were saying there was no link between the cases.

In fact, they wouldn't even acknowledge

that there have been more kidnappings and murders

involving children than in the past.

Suggs: The causes of death were random.

Some were shot. Some were strangled.

Some were asphyxiated.

Initially, they were showing up all over the place.

They were showing up in woods, in the back of buildings,

and abandoned places.

It seemed like there was no pattern.

You had a very loosely connected series of homicides.

It wasn't anything that you could connect evidentiary.

And just two days ago, on Monday evening,

another young boy was found dead.

The Black community --

they were pretty sure it had to be someone white.

No Black person would do such a thing.

Buffington: And so as the body count started to ramp up,

the city was on edge.

McComas: You expect something occasionally to happen

from time to time,

but when you start finding them just one right after the other,

it starts to say, "Okay, you know, this Is alarming.

There's something going on."

Then, finally, finally, the authorities were like,

"Okay, we have something here that we need to really,

really kind of look into."

And that's when they put together the task force.

Wright: He was laying straight up there,

and I just came on the side of the bridge

and then looked down there.

And there he was.

Reporter: 9-year-old Aaron Jackson was found

on this riverbank Sunday afternoon.

A passerby spotted his legs and shoes from the bridge above.

And so did Aaron's father on a local TV newscast.

Ford: When we showed up at their parents's houses,

I felt like the Grim Reaper. I really did.

Did you ever think that this could happen to you?

No.

I didn't think it would happen to me.

I don't think anybody thinks it could happen to them.

It was awful.

It was terrifying, just the day-to-day existence

of not knowing what was gonna happen.

Bottoms: I just remember one day

standing at the bus stop and a car slowing down,

everyone just taking off running.

And I think that's really symbolic of the fear

that we carried with us,

that there was a boogeyman amongst us,

and he was taking children who look like us.

You can't even walk out the door

without looking over your shoulder.

Reporter: Anita, are you aware of the children who have been murdered?

Yes.

Does it worry you? Yes.

What do you do about it?

I always have a dime with me, and anything happen, call.

During the time of the missing and murdered children,

we did teasers.

Announcer: It's 11:00 p.m.

Do you know where your children are?

That's a reminder every day

that something is happening in your city,

that kids are being snatched up every day.

Arcangeli: Children got much more closely supervised during this period.

You saw people walking their kids to the bus stop,

waiting for the bus.

Reporter: A group of residents in the Techwood housing project

have armed themselves with baseball bats and guns.

And some of the neighborhoods

had what they called "the bat patrol,"

where a group of them would walk around with baseball bats,

protecting their neighbors.

We intend to protect and defend our community

by any and all means necessary.

Reportre: The parents of some these children have complained

that police aren't doing enough.

The mothers started speaking out

and walking down the street with signs,

and it became a P.R. issue.

Reporter: Partly because of these complaints,

but mostly just to try and get to the bottom of all this,

the special task force was created.

Within the period of time we're looking at,

with the number of kids that have been killed

or still missing, it's not normal.

♪♪

Smith: For so long, the police would say that they didn't know

whether they were looking for one killer,

for multiple killers,

whether multiple people had killed multiple victims.

Was anything connected?

Maybe not, maybe so. Who knew?

Because it was not clear.

There was talk of whether or not it was the Ku Klux Klan.

Suggs: This was the South.

This was only a decade after the assassination

of Martin Luther King Jr.

So there was an obvious assumption

that if Black kids were being killed in Atlanta,

that the Klan could be involved in it.

News anchor: Are the children of Atlanta

being systematically killed by a hate group?

At one point, there was an explosion at a daycare center,

a public-housing facility.

Reporter: The explosion ripped out four sections of wall.

90 children were inside the building

when the blast occurred.

Four children and their teacher were pronounced dead on arrival.

The Black community went berserk.

Reporter: A crowd of nearly 1,000 people gathered,

and rumors soon circulated.

Pearson: The Black community thought some white racists

set off a bomb to kill more Black children,

that it was the Klan,

and they found out the boiler exploded.

Reporter: Through it all,

Commissioner Brown stood motionless,

powerless to quiet factions of the crowd,

trying to tell them that there was nothing to indicate

the furnace explosion was anything but an accident.

That's just how tense it was.

Anything could have necessarily happened at that point.

You went through all these theories --

that it was the Klan or it was the police or the authorities,

someone who the kids may have known

or someone who the kids didn't fear.

Buffington: When the word got out that it might be a policeman,

well, I'm a white police officer.

And I'd get out of the car, and I'd go around asking people,

"Did you see something?"

Well, there was nobody there to answer it.

A lot of times, people would just close the door.

♪♪

The city has an extraordinary problem.

The problem is that our children

are being abducted from the streets,

and in 11 instances, they have turned up dead.

In that case, we all have to do things that are extraordinary.

Reporter: In efforts to prevent future killings

and ease apprehension in the Black community,

city-council members approved an 11:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. curfew

for persons under the age of 15.

Jackson: I have asked the Commissioner of Public Safety

to put our police on foot,

knocking on doors and door-to-door canvassing

throughout the entire city.

Police officer: Yes, ma'am, we're handing out information

about the missing children.

Smith: You could see the impact on him

of having to deal with these cases

that this police department couldn't solve.

I think that everybody remembers the picture

of Maynard Jackson sitting there

with all of this cash in front of him.

This is the reward that will be made available under conditions

and terms to be announced in the immediate future.

Smith: It was sort of a measure of how desperate the city was

to try to bring these cases to an end.

Reporter: Police are positive that someone somewhere in this city

has information on the killer or killers,

and they believe that a $100,000 reward

will be enough to entice them to come forward with it.

I have asked the FBI several times

to make a stronger commitment to Atlanta.

Procopio: In early November, the mayor, Maynard Jackson --

he made a public call to the attorney general.

His words were -- and I'm paraphrasing --

"The Lindbergh baby was one white child.

We have 14 missing and murdered Black children here in Atlanta.

I want every living FBI agent down here."

Glover: In order for the FBI to become involved,

it must first be a federal crime.

That was not the case at all

in any of these local crimes in Atlanta.

Procopio: So, the Bureau was ordered to come in and investigate

if any Federal Laws were broken.

There's no evidence that any of these kids

have been taken out of state, except we have four missing.

We don't know where they are.

They could be out of state, and if they are,

then we got federal jurisdiction.

So that was the hook that got us in.

So, the FBI coming in was a major, major event.

Procopio: The code name of the case -- ATKID, major case number 30.

It was a big, big deal when it gets designated a major case.

It means all the resources of the Bureau

are focused on this one case.

We brought in some African-American agents,

because we understood the value of that.

We had, I believe, 30 agents from the Atlanta division,

and we got 10 agents from other divisions

to come in and help us.

We had a total of 40.

And before it was all over, it was probably about 100.

The fear was tangible.

I mean, most of Atlanta was afraid.

And there was no way to reassure them.

He was the Atlanta monster.

I had no idea how close he already was, though.

He was close enough to reach out to my brother.

Yeah.

He was that close.

Welcome back to "How It Really Happened."

By the fall of 1980,

the FBI had joined a special task force

working around the clock to solve the mysterious murders

of Atlanta's children.

Police had no real leads,

and another name was about to be added

to the list of the missing -- a beloved older brother

affectionately known as "Pat Man."

♪♪

Rogers: We were staying in Thomasville Heights apartments.

That was over in the southeast side of town.

Had a pretty extended family.

My brother Patrick was 16 at the time,

and you had me 6, going into 7.

He was the one in the family that I can honestly say

took the time to reach back to me,

to make sure, "Hey, you okay?

Is everything okay with you?

I'm here if you need me."

So he was a great big brother.

He loved Michael Jackson, Jackson 5.

He fancied himself as an R&B artist,

and he had a small group of friends,

a little doo-wop group.

And they would just go around and competing, competing,

competing in all the talent shows around the city.

I remember he'd walk me to the bus stop in the morning.

He'd always tell me, "Be careful,

be careful, be careful.

There's something going on around the city."

I don't think he wanted to frighten me,

but he wanted me to know

that I needed to be way more aware than I was.

♪♪

It was a typical day, you know?

Wake up, get dressed, go to the bus stop.

On this particular day, I returned home from school,

and I just remember my mother kept asking me,

had I seen Pat Man?

No, I hadn't seen him.

And I wasn't really worried about him.

Like, "He'll be here," you know?

But he never came home that day.

He never came home.

And the next time I saw him...

♪♪

...was when they had discovered his body.

Reporter: They say he died from head injuries

and showed signs of asphyxiation,

which could have been caused by drowning.

Rogers: I was watching the news, and he was being taken

out of the Chattahoochee.

So that was tough for a 7-year-old.

It was tough, 'cause to me,

he was, like, all I had, you know?

♪♪

When the FBI became involved in the case,

we really didn't know what we had.

Procopio: Reinvestigate the case, start from scratch.

There are several problems with that, initially.

Number one, no crime scene.

We don't know where the children were killed.

We know where they were dumped.

No crime scene, no evidence, no witnesses.

Everybody had their theory in terms of what was happening.

Some people suspected the Klan.

There were some people who thought

that there was a sexual pedophilia involved

or homosexual activities.

The bodies had been thoroughly examined,

and no sign of sexual assault at all.

None.

But that didn't stop us from examining that possibility.

A number of individuals were interviewed

who had had records of crimes against children.

A number of them were given polygraph exams,

and for the most part, they passed them.

Procopio: So our agents went out, and basically,

they did not come up with anything,

except they determined initially,

at least two, maybe three of the children

may have been killed by a family member.

So it appeared, initially, that not all of the victims

were victims of the same person.

January 3, things got kind of turned up on their head.

Reporter: 14-year-old Lubie Geter was last seen

at a shopping center Saturday afternoon.

Procopio: Lubie Geter disappears without a trace.

Reporter: Volunteers searched this area for clues

to what happened to Atlanta's 16th missing child, Lubie Geter.

Geter: I believe he's been kidnapped,

because he's never been out before

and stayed away from home.

Ford: I remember Assie Geter --

she tried to be very calm about it,

and the tears rolling down her face.

And it was heart-wrenching.

Lubie Geter was just a good kid.

He was going to school.

He was trying to make extra money.

He was selling car products at a little shopping plaza.

So, we're gonna conduct a citywide search of dump sites

and see if we could find Lubie.

And by 3:00 in the afternoon, the radio crackled,

"we found skeletal remains."

So I headed out there, and as I'm going into the woods,

at about 11:00, something catches my eye.

So I walked over,

and it was a human skull and torso.

Turned out to be Earl Terrell.

So now we had two victims

located within 100 yards of one another.

And it was shocking, because they were out

looking for Lubie Geter,

and he hadn't been found yet, but two other kids turned up.

So now we've got three kids out here.

Two are found, one still missing.

Procopio: I remember we just looked at one another and said,

"We have a problem."

By no means did we anticipate what was discovered here.

And it's at that moment that we realized

that there was a serial killer out there.

Lubie was finally found a month later.

Reporter: With the discovery of the body Thursday,

there are now 15 kids dead,

and two others are officially missing.

Glover: The Lubie Geter case

spawned a detailed investigation of the Klan.

♪♪

Suggs: There's a story about Lubie Geter

having a confrontation with a Klan member

because he bumped into his car with his go-kart,

and the Klan member threatened to kill him,

and Lubie Geter ends up dead.

McMichael: The Klan members were brought in and given polygraphs.

They passed them.

This whole conspiracy of it being a white supremacist,

there was never any evidence.

♪♪

Reporter: The crowd's fragile patience was beginning to crack.

We've got children dying in Atlanta.

Suggs: Atlanta was basically a tinderbox,

and it could have exploded at any point.

♪♪

McComas: The thing that really rattled us was,

how was he getting them in the car?

How is this person getting control over these children,

with all of the media coverage and all of the "Hey.

There's a bad guy out there. Do not get in the car"?

And we're still finding bodies.

How does it happen?

♪♪

Since the string of child murders began,

the Atlanta police department has received over 25,000 tips,

and the number is growing daily.

It was very crucial that the FBI became involved

and was able to send down profilers,

people who understood criminal minds to come down

and give this stuff a fresh look.

Behavioral-science profiling was brand-new then.

Douglas, Hazelwood, Roger Depue were the first three guys,

and they took off and ran with this.

They gave us a profile that consisted of 21 points.

They said that the guy would probably be an only child.

They said he would be of higher intelligence.

They said that he would be an ambulance chaser.

Someone who was narcissistic,

someone who seeks glory and fame.

He'd be somebody who might be a police imitator,

somebody who followed the press very, very closely.

I think the consensus was that it had to be someone

who could move within the Black community unnoticed.

They'd be part of the scenery.

We drove Hazelwood into one of the neighborhoods.

The first thing he says, "The killer's got to be Black."

You could not be a white person and go into a Black neighborhood

at that time without being noticed.

Suggs: Whoever this was, he was totally invisible.

He was able to infiltrate these communities and get these kids.

McComas: According to John Douglas, who was a behavioral scientist,

serial murderers rarely cross racial lines.

Reporter: There is another missing child in Atlanta --

12-year-old Patrick Baltazar.

Baltazar: I'm like, "He didn't come home?

Oh, my God.

Missing.

Murdered."

That was the first thing that popped in my head.

Patrick was very aware of what was going on.

He didn't express no fear whatsoever.

That's what feared me the most,

'cause I know he was in the streets more,

spending a lot of time at the Omni Hotel.

Well, he were last seen there.

Several of the victims were taken from the Omni.

It was a skating rink.

Kids gathered there on a Saturday, Sunday afternoon.

Glover: The Omni had a lot of these arcade games

that kids played with at the time,

and it was a hangout for young children.

Suggs: If you look at where these kids are being taken from,

the pattern becomes that the person who's taking them

is familiar with these places.

He's familiar with these type of kids.

He's familiar with what these kids want and need.

McComas: The Omni was just a target-rich environment.

If you're a shark in the park,

that's where you go looking for your victims.

♪♪

Reporter: Friday, a maintenance man found the body of Patrick Baltazar.

The medical examiner's office said he died of asphyxiation.

You could see that rope-print across his neck.

And they told me he had struggled for his life.

The head of Georgia's crime-lab unit

says fibers may have been found

which may provide a lead to the child killer or killers.

Procopio: Around the first week in February,

a story appears in the paper -- someone leaked it --

that hairs and fibers are being found on the bodies.

We were all angry that that story was leaked,

because we didn't want the killer to know

what evidence we had and how we were getting it.

There were over 500 textile samples

had been submitted to the laboratory

for comparison to the cases.

And we're finding some of the same stuff in multiple victims.

The same fiber types, we're linking them together.

The first one that really jumped out in relevance

was a green carpet fiber.

It was a very distinctive fiber.

The shape of it,

the type of inclusions were just very distinctive.

And then I started finding the violet acetate

pretty much on the heels of that.

And as more and more cases coming along,

I had more and more dog hairs.

It was easier to see similarity between the dog hairs

to dogs like akita, a husky, a German shepherd,

dogs like that.

McComas: The media started to publicize

that we were pulling evidence from the bodies.

Shortly thereafter,

the bodies started being found in the river.

Sometimes nude or seminude.

McComas: To me, that was an obvious attempt

to wash away any evidence.

So we know now he's reacting to stories in the paper.

Which didn't work, 'cause We still found evidence.

We were still finding hairs and fibers.

♪♪

Smith: The spring of 1981 was the most traumatizing period,

because the incidents began to become closer.

It's like almost every 10 days.

Bottoms: Every day, when you would turn on the news,

a kid had either been snatched

or they were finding a body or they were looking for a body.

Procopio: You could almost cut the fear, not only the Black community.

I remember driving home at night and thinking, "Holy Christmas.

There's a madman out there.

He's killing people at will,

and we're absolutely defenseless."

And nothing traditional, as far as police investigations,

seemed to work.

Procopio: At this time, we're grasping at straws.

He's calling the shots, and we're reacting to them.

Suggs: Once you got over to 1981,

one of the interesting things happening

was the patterns of deaths changed.

The victims became older.

They were in their higher teens, up into their 20s.

McComas: We had made every effort to dry up his supply.

"Watch your kids. Have your kids off the street."

Curfew was enacted, if you were such age.

You couldn't be near the Omni at that time.

They put that off-limits.

Well, I haven't seen as many kids out here in the street.

A lot of them, I guess, afraid to be out here.

But he probably had to start targeting older victims

because younger victims were no longer as readily available

as they'd been before.

Arcangeli: When he could no longer get child victims,

he switched to small-statured men,

even older men, potentially homosexual men.

News anchor: Jimmy Payne was the fourth-consecutive

adult victim of the killers,

with all the previous victims under 16 years old.

We just couldn't figure it out.

I mean, it was frustrating as hell.

We were at it for seven months,

and we hadn't generated a single thing.

We can't do anything to stop this guy.

♪♪

Reporter: 13-year-old Timothy Hill has been positively identified

as the youngster pulled out of the Chattahoochee River.

Police chief George Napper broke the news

to family members.

It was taken very hard.

Just take a little old kid like that

and just kill him, just throw him in the river.

You hear me? That ain't no good.

Take a grown person and do something to him.

Procopio: The killer became a one-eyed monster

with a horn in the middle of his forehead.

That's what we were looking at, a real monster.

Reporter: Sources have already told cable news

that the fibers and human hair

found on the victims' bodies connect these cases,

as well as some earlier ones.

Dr. Howard: Looks like we're still talking about a single individual

who's operating on his own.

That's an unusual type of modus operandi.

Peterson: As the cases developed over time,

there was a stronger and stronger belief

that at least some of them were linked.

The crown jewel of the physical evidence,

the green carpet fiber, was like the top of the heap.

That one fiber type became so strong that that one piece,

even if it's just one fiber, was a very strong connection.

I knew I would recognize this fiber's source

if I ever found it.

Pearson: It was just a strange time.

You had people coming in from all over the country

trying to help.

Reporter: Members of New York's Guardian Angels arrived,

saying they would teach Black youths

how to protect themselves.

I remember Sammy Davis Jr.

and Frank Sinatra doing a concert here.

Muhammad Ali came.

Reporter: The champ upped the reward to a half-million dollars

with a $400,000 contribution.

You had President Reagan

give something like $1.5 million.

This nightmare has continued for more than 19 months,

and I'm determined to continue to assist the city of Atlanta

in bringing it to an end.

Procopio: The last victims, with the exception of one,

were found in a body of water.

Mike McComas and his partner came up to me one day,

and they said, "We got an idea."

And I said, "That's a first for both of you,

but anyway, go ahead.

What's your idea?"

"We want to watch the bridges."

McComas: I was raised on a river in East Tennessee.

If you want something to float downstream,

you're going to have to get it in the middle of the flow,

you know, the current.

And I said, "I'll bet you he's throwing them off bridges."

I said, "Okay.

You know how many bridges there are over the ridges

and streams and byways of Atlanta?

There were hundreds and hundreds.

How are you gonna know which is the right ones?"

"We're not.

We're just gonna pick 15 bridges or so,

and we're gonna cover them.

You have a better idea?"

And I just said, "No. At the moment, I don't really.

Go for it."

That was the birth of the bridge detail.

♪♪

Procopio: Started around the end of April

and said, "Go with it for 30 days."

It took a lot of manpower.

I think we needed about 140 people for it,

because you've got 14 bridges.

You've got an average of four to five people per bridge.

You've got to cover it seven days a week.

They decided to go to the police academy in Atlanta,

and they had several recruit classes

that were on the verge of graduating.

And so now they're told, "Time-out.

You are now going to work this special detail."

Drolet: There was an FBI agent back in the woods

north of the bridge,

an Atlanta police officer on the south end of the bridge,

and then there were two police recruits.

McComas: We called them trolls.

We put the trolls under each end of the bridge.

We'd have everybody in place just as soon as dark happened

so we would see what was going on.

They would run from 6:00 or 7:00 or 8:00 at night

till 6:00 in the morning.

♪♪

It went for about four weeks with nothing happening.

I said, "The only thing buzzing out here are the mosquitos."

We had been told,

due to us coming up with absolutely nothing,

that Friday morning was the last day of the surveillance.

And as luck would have it, last night, last bridge,

there's a splash at 3:00 in the morning.

[ Water splashes ]

Drolet: One of the recruits, Robert Campbell --

he'd been a lifeguard and thought,

"This sounds like it's big enough to be a body."

Procopio: He calls across to his partner,

"Is there a car on the bridge?"

"Yes, there's a car on the bridge.

I see the lights.

It's starting to move."

I heard something on the radio about a splash.

And the lady on the radio that night --

her name was Jeanie.

I asked Jeanie what was going on.

She said, "They're about to pull a car over."

And the rest is history.

[ Siren wailing ]

Now let us update you on the possibility of a suspect.

Who the hell is this guy?

Where'd you get him?

Some believe he is involved in the murders,

and others say he is only a scapegoat.

How could he have done all those things?

Rackleff: This is the serial killer.

We've been looking for him for two years.

They called it "the trial of the century."

His defense team's job was to create a doubt.

That doubt was clearly created.

Last week, Atlanta's mayor announced a new push

to re-examine evidence using modern forensics.

We can't go back and undo what happened 40 years ago,

but we can do better.

Pearson: I want these children to be remembered,

but more importantly, I want these cases solved.

♪♪

After nearly two years of terror,

the task force finally had a suspect

in the Atlanta murders, a man who seemed to fit

the description laid out by the FBI profilers.

But his case stirred controversy right from the start

and left many families with unanswered questions.

Could he really have killed all these victims,

or were there others involved

in part 2 of "The Atlanta Serial Killer"?

Thanks for watching.

Good night.