In 2016, Payne Lindsey, a twenty-eight-year-old freelance filmmaker in
Georgia—now thirty, and the host of “Atlanta Monster,” the No. 1 podcast on iTunes for much of its existence, about the Atlanta child murders of 1979-81—was
looking for a project. “I’ve been a storyteller my whole life,” he told
me recently. Professionally, he’d been working on commercials, short
films, music videos. “I wanted to make my breakout documentary piece, my
first film,” he said. “I wanted to do something really big, and I was
always a fan of true crime.” He liked “Serial,” “Making a Murderer,”
and, especially, “The Jinx,” Andrew Jarecki’s 2015 HBO documentary about
the alleged serial killer Robert Durst. “I was blown away by it,”
Lindsey said. “You know—wow. These guys really did make a difference.”
(A hearing for a possible murder trial for Durst is scheduled for
April.) “They basically caught this guy red-handed,” Lindsey said. “It’s possible….
