For Black children growing up on the west side of Atlanta in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the boogie man was very real.
From 1979 to 1981, 28 children—all African-American and mostly male—were kidnapped and later found murdered in Atlanta. Terror plagued the city’s Black community for three years as police struggled to find the killer, not even sure if all the murders were related.
Despite the mass hysteria sparked by the murders—and the fact that most of them remain unsolved—it isn’t likely that young adults in 2018 have ever heard of the incident. That’s because after investigators arrested a local 23-year-old man named Wayne Williams, who was subsequently convicted of two adult murders and sentenced to two consecutive life terms, the whole ordeal was swept under the rug—despite the fact that Williams still has not been tried or convicted for a number of child murders that police have attributed to him.
That’s all about to change, however….
