Welcome back to Unsolved, everyone. This week we will be looking at a particularly large case, involving over 28 deaths in less than two years.

Between the summers of 1979 and 1981, about thirty children and young adults were discovered to have been murdered in Atlanta, Georgia. This case was closed for quite some time, but was reopened in 2019 with hopes that modern technology can help solve some of the unanswered questions from the initial investigation. As of right now, no significant new leads have been found.

Twenty-eight victims are far too many to go into detail about in this post, so instead, I will highlight similarities or important details in the circumstances of specific ones. One of the most important trends is that the killer sought older victims as time went one. For example, the first victims were barely older than ten years old while the last victim who was deemed to be connected with the case was 27 years old. With this, there was an increase in the level of violence used to kill the individuals as the victims grew older. The child and teenage victims were almost all strangled to death or killed in a similar manner, while victims in their late teens and twenties were more often killed by either blunt force trauma or stabbing. The main exception to this is the very first victim, who was a young boy killed by a gunshot wound to the back. A possible explanation for this is that the killer learned that they needed to be more discreet and that they could overpower smaller victims, but over time they migrated to more “challenging” victims who would require more violence to overpower. As a disclaimer, there is very little evidence in all but two of the murders, so this scenario cannot be proven at this stage.

These two murders are the ones that a man named Wayne Williams was convicted of in court. The police first caught onto the suspect during a stakeout near a bridge that was hypothesized to be a possible dumping ground for the killer. Police heard a splash from the river and were able to note the car that drove from the area just above where they heard the splash. This car and the driver were investigated, and for good reason, because later on they found a body downriver of that very spot. Dog hair and fibers found inside the vehicle where linked to hair found on victims’ clothing after being analyzed in a lab, and eyewitnesses also connected the man to several of the children based on ads he posted asking for them to audition for a music group he was running. Despite the connections, there was only convincing enough evidence to convict Williams for the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne for which he was sentenced with two life sentences.

Given this information, the case seemed rather straightforward, but of course this was not the case. Several sources and investigators suspect a link to the KKK in these killings based on links between known members and some of the children who were killed. Around that time, the KKK was attempting to start a race war, so killing children in a largely African American community could have been one of their methods to do so. Williams could only be closely linked to two cases enough for the court to rule him guilty, so that leaves a lot of possibilities open for investigation. Perhaps in the near future, there will be updates on this series of killings, but for now, a majority of the story is still a mystery.