You might recognize my voice.

This is the Zodiac speaking.

I'm Scott Benjamin, the host of a new true crime podcast from the creators of Atlanta Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer.

It's called Master Presents Insomniac.

If you're tired of the same old true crime stories being told and retold time and time again, We'll break that pattern.

In every episode, I tell the story of a lesser known killer, a monster that will give you nightmares.

But it doesn't stop there.

I'll also tell you how these killers really have invaded my dreams.

It's raw, it's real, and there are plenty of episodes to binge with more on the way.

Stick around after this bonus episode of Atlanta Monster for an exclusive clip from the next installment If Master Presents Insomniac.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not necessarily represent those of I Heart Media, Stuff Media, or its employees.

So I have a friend that works in the mayor's administration.

He called me the morning of the press conference and just gave me the heads up that this was going down, that there would be families there the Mayor herself, as well as police chief and other people, and that there would be some announcement made.

When it was Donald Albright, president of Tenderfoot TV and executive producer of Atlanta Monster, that was the first time I heard about it, and I jumped up and said, look, I need to be there.

We need to capture audio on this good afternoon.

Then thank you all for being here.

In nineteen seventy nine, I was nine years old.

I was the daughter of a single mother, working two jobs and back in school in the evenings.

My story was the story of many children across this city.

In the backdrop of that story, it's something that has stayed with me my entire life.

And that was the era of Atlanta's missing and murdered children.

And for those of us who grew up in that era, in so many ways, it shaped our childhood.

It robbed us of our innocence, and it reminded us all that evil was real and Atlanta.

Another Barday was discovering today a police times Force headquarters.

There are twenty seven faces on the wall, murdered, one missing.

We do not know the person or persons that are responsible.

Therefore, we do not have the morning from Tenderfoot TV and House of Forts in Atlanta like a lot of another reason victims in Atlanta Rogers apparently was asphyxiated.

Atlanta was unlikely to catch the killer unless she keeps on killing.

This is Atlanta monster.

The mayor came out and she made a really emotional and powerful announcement.

I stand here as the sixtie of Mayor of Atlanta now the mother of four children, ages eight through sixteen.

Their ages are reflective of the children who were killed during my childhood.

A lot has changed in Atlanta since nineteen seventy nine, and a lot has changed in our world since nineteen one, when there was a conviction for two of these murders, the conviction of and Williams.

We now know that DNA technology is much more advanced.

But also last week, I've watched a national story that mentioned the arrest of a man charged with two rapes and murders based upon inputting his DNA or their DNA into a national database.

I immediately reached out two Chief Shields to ask her what if any updated testing had we done as it relates to the missing and murdered children.

For the mayor to do this, I think is a is a big statement.

I think it's it's genuine and comes from a place of someone who could have been a victim, you know, who felt that fear as a child uniform Mayor Cosine read as well as Mayor Bottoms.

There of the age range of the children who went missing at that time, they aren't the older politicians that were, you know, a little more focused on moving the city forward and passed his tragedy.

They were the kids that suffered from this tragedy.

So if anyone's going to take a look into this, it would be them, and in this case the current mayor.

Chief Shields then took the next step and spoke with our partners at the g b I, who agree with Chief Shields that it would certainly be in order for us to now look once again at evidence that the City of Atlanta has in its possession, evidence that the g v I has in its possession, to once again take a fresh look at these cases and to determine once and for all, if there is additional evidence that may be tested that may give some peace, to the extent that peace can be had in a situation like this, to the victims families to let them know that we have done all that we can do to make sure that their memories are not forgotten, and then the truest sense of the word to let the world know that black lives do matter.

You know, I think we should be reopening and re examining the cases that we feel are not attributed to Wayne and that's someone else responsible for, and also re examining the way this was handled.

I think if this was some independent investigation that was you know, fueled by a third party, then it wouldn't feel as gratifying the fact that the city is stepping up.

You know, they're skeletons in the closet of the City of Atlanta, and this is one of them.

I will turn the podium over two, Chief Erica Shields.

Thank you.

Eric.

In May of n A p D, Detective Bob Buffington was working the homicide of one of the victims, Eric middle brooks age fourteen.

Detective Buffington's spotted trace fiber evidence on middlebrook shoe and collective or further examination.

This type of evidence collection had never occurred before.

This was brand new for the Atlanta Police Department, and while some of his colleagues respected his attention to detail, there were many who made a mockery of his discovery.

So Bob took this evidence to a micro analyst at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and fortunately that he met someone there, a young fellow by the name of Larry Peterson, who took interest in it.

This piece of evidence became crucial in the trial against Wayne Williams.

So let's fast forward forty years to today and conceptualize all of the advancements that have been made in science since that first carpet five rother was found.

We have an obligation to take those advancements and see if any further analysis can be conducted on the property and evidence that was collected four years o.

The families deserved to find closure.

The Atlanta Police Department has reached out to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

What we've asked is that they look at the evidence that was handed over to them forty some years ago and they see whether any of it qualifies for further analysis, and what we are asking of them that they report back to us what they have that could potentially be tested, and they've agreed to do this.

Separately, there is evidence from the trial that the District Attorney's office has and he's very graciously offered to go through it and see was there anything that was presented a trial that potentially is eligible for testing.

And lastly, the Atlanta Police Department has numerous boxes of evidence from the trial.

Now much of it is documents and transcripts, but we already have begun the process of going through these boxes to see there's anything that was never tested that would not be a value.

We don't know what we'll find, but what we do know is we have an obligation.

I have an obligation to these families to ensure that every imaginable investigative lead was followed.

I think it was a step in the right direction because we have to start the conversation again.

Hopefully what they find will cause the d A's Office to reopen some of these cases.

But as of now, what they're doing is looking at the evidence that already has been collected.

They're going to utilize the latest technology and see if there was new testing that they could do on any of the evidence that still exists in a p d S custody.

We know, just by researching this case what's out there in that evidence locker?

Are those evidence lockers, those boxes from forty years ago, some of those boxes that we've already seen ourselves looked through.

When the series wrapped, there was obviously a lot of open questions things still hanging out there.

And the one thing that kept bothering me was the mentioned of files related to the KKKS involvement.

This is Jason Hooke, executive producer of Atlanta Monster on behalf of How Stuff Works.

I went to the FBI website, We looked at stacks and stacks and documents, and went down to most of the local government offices, the courthouses, and no one had any record of these KKK files.

I finally landed at the ap D, the Atlanta Police Department, and filed an open records request and almost immediately her back from one of the officers who was on the front lines of the press team, and she said, we have something called the a p D Annex which holds thousands and thousands of files and records.

It might just be in there.

She said, I'm just here to tell you there's about seventy thousand pages in this archive.

We have no idea what's actually here.

You're going to have to go through this yourself.

Reviewing those documents.

At the time that we did this was you know, probably six months ago by now.

Had we not reviewed them then and then this press conference happened, I don't think we'd have access to those.

It was, you know, seventy thousand documents just boxed upon box of you know, a file on every single victim, crime scene photos, slideshow presentations, sheets that were filled out from every single phone tip that came in, who called in, when they called in, where they called in, and like a summary of the tip they gave.

I'm Meredith Steadman, I'm a creative producer at Tenderfoot TV.

And down below and in pages behind them it would say like how the officer followed up on that tip.

I was pretty impressed by the amount of tips they actually followed up on.

We got a sense of how many man hours, like I went into gatherting all this stuff.

So if you're thinking that this wasn't a thorough investigation, that they didn't really care what was happening, that could be said at the very very beginning, when there wasn't the attention given to those victims, you know, because they were pouring black and because those mothers didn't get the respect that they deserved and those children didn't.

But once the investigation started, and once there was a task force, once they dedicated man hours to this, they kept every single document.

After being in this podcast for so long and caring the frustration from so many people, it did seem like a lot of the officers were trying really hard to follow up on as much as they could, and the volume was big.

These were actually original forty year old Manila envelopes with every victim's name on them.

We saw the original crime scene quotas, we saw the picture of that first red fiber on that tennis shoe.

It was extremely sad because it's all real.

When you're sitting behind a computer desk and you're investigating online, you're only finding what people have access to, have scanned in and have uploaded.

So I saw some of those original pictures that I had seen online, but there are thirty or fifty more that never made it online.

So you might see one picture of a victim, but we've seen fifty and multiple angles close ups on what the trained photographer, who you know, is supposed to take pictures of what they see on the scene as potentially relevant.

The way their clothes were positioned, you know, whether they had shoes on or not, or how far away the body was from the road.

It puts you right there at the crime scene.

You know, it was hard to look at forty years later and there's nothing you can do about it, but you you feel the connection there of being being right there and when it happens.

So you just imagine like seeing it as a police officer discovering it.

We heard them talk about finding those first two bodies and then seeing the pictures of that.

It's an image that you you don't want to see, but you also don't want to forget, because this is a real story that you can't look at as just a podcast, as just an old cold case or old case that's been solved.

These are real cases with real kids that never got to grow up, and it's just it's just extremely sad.

I think the most interesting thing that I read while going through the files is this account about knowing Wayne Williams but knowing him under a different name.

The police or whoever had filed this report.

They had spoken to someone and I guess they'd shown him a photo of Wayne Williams.

They said, I know that guy, but I know him under a different name.

I don't know him as Wayne Williams, and they said he lives at this apartment with this other man.

There was another account that said, I do know that man, but I don't know him as Wayn Williams.

I know him under a different name.

He has a roommate, which is this guy.

There was an apartment that someone who least looked very identical to Wayn Williams was living in or renting with another male, and at that apartment it seemed like they had younger men over for I'm not sure what, but that's how they knew that apartment, because they had been invited there before and they knew way Williams under a different name.

A lot of people expressed, how could he be doing something like this in his home with his parents, that it doesn't seem feasible, And I thought, oh wait a second, maybe Wayne Williams had an altar life, like a life outside of his home.

It makes you really wonder who was his alleged roommate.

A lot of people thought, you know, this can't be a one man job.

Maybe it wasn't.

It was stunning to see the kind of leads.

Most of them were short, one page reports.

But it also led into some interesting areas of focus.

I found Wayne's original driver's license, a medical record from his mother, saw Homer's report card, not Wayne's, Homer's his dad.

They were going all out to find everything that they could about this family.

One of the things that really stuck with me were these letters sent by Wayne to Atlanta schools to teachers, and they were recruiting the kids in these classrooms on behalf of the teachers to try out for Wayne's talent shows.

And it happened over and over and over again.

And when you see something like that in a typed out form with letter head and the signature Wayne Williams at the bottom, it just did not feel right.

It felt calculated that something was up here.

They were addressed to the schools, they were addressed to vice principles, they were addressed to teachers.

He was recruiting, recruiting kids more than you would than just kind of that average sign that you see on a telephone pole somewhere.

I thought at about that for days and days.

It really bothered me.

We talked a lot in the podcast about Jim and I and this group that Wayne Way was putting together.

You know, he was a talent scout trying to make the next Jackson five, and we are always thinking like, who was in Gemini?

You know, who was in this four or five member group?

You know, we've seen pictures when he was young with this group in the studio.

One of the things that we found they were actively investigating what Jim and I was.

Who were the members And there's a list of about thirty names of potential Gemini group members And it was just crazy to see that because we could never figure out is this actually a group.

If it is a group, how many versions of this group are there?

You know, we talked to Jimmy Howard, who was a member of Jim and I.

He's an advocate for Wayne Williams and doesn't believe he was guilty.

He was actually with Wayne when he got arrested, him and another young boy at the time.

So it definitely appears that the group wasn't a complete farce, right, there was a group that he was constantly recruiting for makes it a much more desirable way to attract the next kid.

Oh, I want to be in that group too.

You know, my friend Jimmy Howard told me about this group and then you know, Jimmy said he went to school with the kid they went missing.

Some of the family members say that their brother auditioned for Wayne Williams, So you know, it's um, it's it's definitely a connection there.

If this is your way in to finding young kids and getting them away from their parents, you know, you don't stop it when you get your first five kids in this band, right, you still need to recruit, you still need to bring them in.

So there's this extensive list of all these kids that either they found out we're in the group, or those kids told them they were auditioning for the group.

So it's it was a recruitment tool, um is what it seems and what I gathered from from looking at that list, there was definitely a lot of men that the task force had talked to.

A lot of those men had long rap sheets.

They had a history of violence, and they had a history of being sexual predators.

And it was completely disturbing to see detailed accounts of how grown men were sexually abusing kids and being incredibly violent towards those kids.

And seeing that just hit me hit me differently.

It told me that these kids were living in a part of town in an era where they were not only not being properly cared for, but when they were interacting with adults, it was incredibly violent and inexcusable in the way that they were being touched and manipulated sexually for a few bucks.

And I can't tell you how that feels when you actually see the files in detail based on these interviews with some of the sexual predators, and they talked to everyone, but what they did to these kids and is absolutely heartbreaking.

It is heartbreaking.

There were sus backs, no shortage of names given.

We saw pictures too, There were like lineups in the files, you know, pictures that the police had taken of people that we'd never heard of and some that we had.

You can understand how unbelievable it was when Wayne Williams was actually arrested, because he was kind of in there somewhere, but there were so many people in there.

It does lend itself to the feeling of how can we be sure because there was no shortage of possible suspects.

It's just weird to like put yourself in the same investigative seat that a detective was in forty years ago, looking at the same evidence, trying to hunt down the same killer um and trying to bring closure and justice for those same families and victims, and to be on the same path and the same track without even knowing it.

And then you discovered their notes and their evidence forty years later and you're like, oh, I knew that.

That's I knew it, and that's where we were going, and I just couldn't put it together.

There was a lot our revelations like that.

So we're looking through all these files, box by box, page by page, file folder by file folder, and it was pretty clear that we were not going to find the k files.

Even with seventy thousand pages, it wasn't the complete report.

And then they had a series of envelopes stacked at the end of the palette and we didn't know what it was, but we had a sneaking suspicion that was probably photographs, and so we opened them up and it was crime scene photos of the kids in back alleys in fields, use of bell pain.

Meredith and I had visited one of the school sites that had been torn down right off the highway, and I that was where use of belt was was found under a floorboard in that school, and I saw the photo for myself of usef under that floorboard when they discovered him.

It took to another level that I really wasn't ready for.

I had never seen photos of a murdered child before, and the A p D officers said, you never get used to it.

In talking about this this case, presenting this show, it's been really telling the story of the Atlanta child murders.

It really brought it back home that this was something it was something deeper.

It really was about these kids and to see the terrible ways that they were murdered and abandoned and treated.

This visit to the Annex was incredibly transformative in my opinion of what had happened.

At some point, if there's something big found, it's like, oh wow, we just figured out the attent of these murders should not have been tribated to Wayne Williams.

One of the three agencies represented at that press conference is probably gonna be someone who made a mistake fourty years ago.

It's either gonna be the d a's office, the Mayor's office, or the Atlanta Police Department.

The fact that they're all on the same page trying to figure this out is a good sign because if they find something, someone's going to be left, you know, with the blame on that one.

I hope they broaden their scope of re examination of evidence to reinvestigation of theories, because there may not be physical evidence, for example, that points to Louie Jeter's killer, but we we did speak to a friend of Charles Sanders KKK member who's now deceased, who took credit for killing Louis Jeter and potentially other victims.

I'm hoping that they find some evidence that that leads them to want to look deeper and say, well, if we have this physical evidence, how do we now match that up with a theory or an eyewitness.

Let's open this thing all the way up and let's start talking to people who experienced this started talking to the officers about theories that they had.

They may have never got explored by the higher us because they were told to let it go to you know, this thing is over, stop stop talking about it.

So yeah, that's my hope is that you know, we can take this first step and that at least to a second step, that it's not just a one step process where we're only looking at new technology looking into physical evidence.

In January FBI agent John Douglas wrote the criminal Profile of the Atlanta Child Killer.

The following is a conversation between Atlanta Monster host Payne Lindsay and the legendary FBI criminal profiler John Douglas.

Hello, this is John.

Hey John, This is Paine.

Hey Paine, how are you doing?

Good?

Good?

You finally got me on here.

I know, I finally got you.

Were dug in pretty deep to the Atlanta child murders case, and just seeing the work you've done and you're profiling, how would you summarize is your experience in that case?

It was nineteen eighty one and we're just getting going, and the researched again in about nineteen seventy.

I got back in the Quantico seventy seven.

By seventy nine, we were already starting the interviews.

The FBI was not embracing me, you know, at all yet.

I think they were a little bit of standoffers who are afraid in case I screwed up on a case.

Uh, they were prepared to send me to Butte, Montana work in cattle rustling cases.

So I didn't get any bureau cases.

And while this case was going on, I was doing so many other cases the bureau, and then one day calls up and they want me down there to go to Quantico and I went with another agent, Roy Hazelwood, since passed away, and it was our job to go out to the crime scenes take a look at the cases that they had.

I can't remember the exact number, but even when we were down, their bodies were showing up.

And then I sat down and started doing an analysis.

It turned out to be extremely controversial because I said that the offender was going to be a black offender.

Uh, they didn't have the term African American back then, so it would be a black offender.

And it went through the whole all the specifics of the profile, the age grouping, the educational level.

It's just based on things that we were beginning to see in serial murder cases.

Noting that not all serial killers are textbook there are different types of serial killers.

But I just started getting involved, so involved in the case and saw so many different victims.

Why is it going to be a black offender in these cases as well?

Pretty much with serial killers, it's the same race.

It's the same race type of case.

Once in a while you'll see him stepping over the lines but um, even though we did not have many black serial killers at that time, we do today.

The studies that were done down there, we did little studies and the police to see if children would go with them, Uh, if they pulled into the inner city offered like five bucks to help them do some error in or something like that.

Uh, these kids would do anything for five dollars.

However, if it was a white person going into the area, Uh, they certainly would have been you know, observed by you know, by someone, and it was no one had observed any whites in these particular areas.

You know, went through the cases and then started trying to link some of the cases together if are they all related?

And this was before fiber evidence and hair evidence or anything like that, any of the forensics.

Just based on behavioral linkage.

We saw that there was maybe ten twelve cases that we believe we're perpetrated by.

It was pretty clear cut that we could say was perpetrated by a single offender.

We also saw some cases that we didn't believe we're related.

For example, the two females, Latania Wilson and Angela Lanier.

Uh, those two cases we felt were not in fact, Remember Angela Lanier how she was killed, and I remember a ligature around her neck, panty stuffed in her mouth that were not her panties.

I think she was asphixiated, found in a wooded area, and they had a very very good suspect.

They had an excellent suspect in that case.

In fact, this guy was holding up his pants with a rope with similar ligature that was used in the killing.

So I'm not involved in that part of the investigation.

So that case we felt should not be on the list, nor should but the case of the child being abducted out of her house, and then I remember seeing we had a case of a young person who stabbed multiple times found in the yard.

We didn't think that that case should have been on the list.

Later on when Harren Fiber evidence came in coincidentally, it was on just those cases that we had pre selected.

And then as time went on in the case, this happens typically with with some serial killers.

That happened with the bt K strangler who I interviewed, happened with David Burkewitz, his son of Sam, who I interviewed.

The motivation began to change because we went from bodies that were being secreted, we're finding skeletonized remains, and then all of a sudden, we're finding bodies out in open view.

So we have a situation where we have an offender who is getting caught up into publicity now and there was a lot of publicity.

One of the turning points and where I was a confident now that he was following the press and maybe we can do something to manipulate his behavior was when a guy calls up from Kanye's Georgia and he has a real thick, kind of redneck accident and he's calling the police saying he's killing He's using the N word.

Uh of these end kids who he's killing, and I've killed him and I'm gonna kill more.

And there's one out there on on Sigmund Road, and uh so the police calls up.

And at that point in time, I'm back at Quantico and there's a room several agents.

Is even a psychiatrist in there, Dr Park Deets, who's just kind of new, just came down from Harvard to understudy us, and he's gonna go from from where we are down to University of Virginia and says he's well known.

They wanted us to listen to the tape.

So they're listening to the tape, and you know they're they're believing that this is the Atlantic child killer.

And so I said, I said, no, this redneck guy is not the atlant child killer.

But we have to develop something.

We have to identify him.

What do we do?

So I'm on the phone with the cops as a conference called type of thing, and I tell him what we should do is, uh, this this individual thinks we're real stupid.

You know, they're we're just incompetent.

And so he gave you specific instructions where to find this this body on sigmund Row where you is not going to be a body.

But he's just harassing us.

Let's just show him how stupid we really are.

What do we do?

He says, Well, all the instructions that he gave you just do the opposite.

If he tells you to search the south side of the street, you searched the north side of the street.

Distances, screw up the distances.

And then why, he said, because he's going to call up again.

I rate.

And this is before the uh you know, the cell phones.

We're gonna have traps and traces on the phone and you'll be able to, you know, identify this guy.

So they do that and guess what, Sure enough, call comes in, your dumbasses, I told you to search a specific area.

He got all screwed up, and they arrest the guy.

That story and that arrest was picked up by the local papers, and then a body would be found days later.

I can't remember exact time on Sigmund Road.

It wasn't the area where this guy who was calling in said we should find a body.

But the killer saw the article read about it, and then he kills and he brings the body and dumps it out on Sigmund Road.

And so now that's in a way it's terrible for what he did, but it's it's good in a sense that we know he is following the press, so maybe we can do things to manipulate the behavior.

And then on fortun and like the medical examer started talking about the victims and talking about getting hair and fiber evidence off of the bodies.

So we had the discussion, and we believe that because this information came out, it shouldn't have come out that bodies would start ending up in water, and the body of water running through Atlanta was the Chattahoochee River.

And then that's when the police, the FBI, the used cadets decided to stake out all the different bridges in town.

And they did it for several days.

They were about ready to break it off when that night they hear allowed splash in the water and then that's when they go up on the bridge and that's uh, Wayne B.

Williams is up there in his vehicle.

They didn't keep them there, They didn't search the vehicle.

They looked in the vehicle.

They could see ligatures in the back seat, some other items that could have been related to these crimes.

But they meaning the Bureau of the Bureau that it just led him off, you know, which turning out to be a critical mistake.

They're availing him an overt surveillance and he is back in his house where he lives with his mother and his dad, Homer, and they could see him in the backyard burning what they believe it was evidence.

Later on they found out it was photographs that he was he was burning besides papers.

When he started to get information back on the hair and fiber evidence, they had enough to to indie him.

They bring him in for the interview of the interrogation.

I was not part of that.

I wish I was part of that because I believe when he came up he was vulnerable and I saw him it looked like he wanted to say something like he would, I believe, even confess at that point.

He did not get a confession out of him.

Then did you ever sit down with WAYN Williams in person?

No, I always wanted to do it.

I'm sure he's kind of tear asked with with me because well, you know, in this case, I was censured by the FBI and then received letter accommodation by the FBI.

Typical in the bureau, they kicking the ass, then they pat you on the back.

They kicked me in the ass because I was over are doing training for the military and came back and it was teaching, of course, to correctional group a little.

I know there was media in the audience because they just made this arrest in Atlanta, and the question popped up.

They said, what about this guy in Atlanta?

And I said, well, if he's the one, he's going to be good for many of them.

And because I said that in bureau parlance, I was making myself an FBI spokesperson and uh, I shouldn't have said that, even though it's just very very h theyue.

So they kind of raked me over the coals back at Quantico and they had, you know, slapped me down and censured me.

But meanwhile, months later, here comes a trial.

Now they want me to go down there for the trial, uh and and provide assistance.

The fascinating part of it was the trial.

At times the prosecution didn't like what I was saying.

For example, one day, all the experts are testifying, and the experts we have are fantastic.

They get understand, they know their stuff, but I don't understand what you're saying.

And if I don't understand they're saying, these jurors here from local community, they don't know what they're saying.

So at the end of the day, they were back in the room conference room and they're laughing at the testimony given by the defense side on hair and fiber evidence.

So they're talking about, oh do you hear him testifying about the twist of the fibers, and and oh, yeah, he's totally totally doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

And then they get to me, what do you think, John, what do you think you're losing the case.

You're losing the case.

What do you mean?

He says.

He says, that guy that they have may not know hair and fiber evidence of the science whatever, and our guys do.

But I have no idea what our guys.

And those guys were in the room with me, I had no idea what you're saying.

You're so damn technical, You're not conveying clear enough to the jurors.

So you're, in my opinion, you're losing.

And so pretty much they want me to hell out of there.

So I'm sent back to Quantico, but I don't go back right away.

About a day later, and now we're at a point where Williams is going to be taking this stand, and uh, he initially did pretty good.

But al Binder was the defense attorney.

His nickname was Jaws, real, real good guy, and on this day he felt that he was doing pretty well and the jurors were kind of siding with with Williams.

Maybe this guy has been wrongfully accused.

I tap on the prosecutor's shoulder and it was Gordon Miller and turns around John.

Yet what I says, Well, one week from today Williams is going to get sick and said, one week from today, he's gonna be feigning some type of illness.

Why because it's gonna be a sympathy employ he may feel like he's losing.

And they look at me like, what the hell are you talking about?

So off again, go back to Quantico.

John come back.

So go back to Quantico.

And then a good call, John, come back to Atlanta.

He got sick in the courtroom.

They take him to the hospital.

They found out he wasn't sick.

He wasn't sick at all.

So then I go back and now Albino was going to bring in an expert from Arizona named Dr Michael Bayliss to testify that Wayne Williams is not the personality tight to perpetrate a crime like this.

And so I'm staying at some hotel down there all by myself, eating dinner.

And also I hear voices, and I said, oh my goodness, it is Mary Welcome.

It's the all the attorneys, Jim Kitchens, attorney al Binder.

And there's a guy over there is the African American guy.

Who is this Michael Bayliss, who's probably I'm thinking he's gonna be testifying tomorrow.

And I said, so, I'm trying to hide, and all of a sudden they spot me and they're looking over at me, and then all of a sudden, Michael Bayliss comes walking over and Dr Douglas and I didn't have my doctorate degree.

And I said, no, no, no, I don't have my doctor So I'm Dr Michael Bayless and I said, yeah, I know who you are.

I did a little research on you.

Can I sit down here?

And I really don't think it's a it's appropriate, please just for a minute.

And so he sits down and and he says, uh, you said you did some background of me.

What did you find out?

All?

I found out what your research is.

I found out you did some research with antisocial personality types and you found one of the indicators like animal cruelty in the background, just like Wayne Williams had in his background, and some other characteristics and dead wedding due to emotional psychological reasons, child could be abused.

And so did you laugh when you read it?

No, I said, I didn't laugh.

I said, but you, Dr Baylis, you'd realize that that Williams does in fact fit the profile.

So he leans over the table and he says, you're right, he's a psychopath.

And I said, well, I said, look, I gotta go, man, I gotta I gotta get back.

So I walk out.

Then Mary Welcome and the defense team calls me over, Oh John, and Mary Welcome says, you know, I wanted to join the FBI one time, and I said, I gotta go, so Bayliss.

Bayliss walks me over to the door and he said, John, I really like to come back to Quantico one day to take classes from you at the FBI.

And he strikes my hand and I'm holding his hands at Well, Michael, we'll see how you do tomorrow on the stand, whether or not you come back to the FBI academy.

Well, the next day, guess what al bind against the courtroom, screaming and yelling that the prosecution his team are scaring off my expert witnesses.

Michael Bayliss went back to Arizona.

He's not gonna be testifying.

It was a real big, big turning point.

So now he doesn't testify, and then there's another conference where they want to know if I'm gonna be testifying.

And I said, look, I said, it just depends.

But if it's not me, I'll bring in a psychiatrist.

If you don't like my credentials, there'll be some psychiatrists who worked with us.

But then when al Binder now on the examination of Williams, and he makes him stand up, and he says, look at look at him.

He holds Wayne Williams's hands.

Do these look like the hands of a serial killer?

And in the areas you know, pudgy Williams with soft, soft hands.

At the end of the day, Now, who's gonna do Now they cross examination of Williams.

That's going to be attorney Jack Mallards and Jack Malleck, Country's southern boy from down in Georgia.

And we have a meeting.

I said, Jack, if he can hold his hands, you should hold Williams's hand as well.

And when you touch his hands, talking a low voice, you know what was it like, Wayne, when you wrapped your hands, your fingers around the victim's throats?

Did you panic?

Wayne?

Did you ever panic?

And he said no, in a real low voice, no, And then he catches himself and then starts screaming and yelling you want the real Wayne Williams.

Well, here he is, and he points over to where I am.

He says, I know, you've got that FBI profile over there, and you're trying to get me to fit that profile, but I'm not going to fit your profile.

And everyone is a gas.

The jurors are looking, you know, over the fence, and they screwed up.

They probably never should let him, you know, get on the stand.

So that was really that was kind of the turning point for for the you know, the trial itself and where the defense was kind of not prepared.

In Atlanta, they convicted Williams of two cases, but they didn't charge him in the others.

But they could show linkages even though they didn't introduce the other cases, they could show linkages to ten or twelve other cases, and the attorney's finder and kitchens.

They try to argue that you've never heard of that before, but that's what they did in this In this case, here is Wayne Williams responsible for all the Atlantic child murders?

Do you think no?

And I said it then some people didn't like it.

I remember going to the scene of one of the crimes down there and walking to the crime scene and as a detective next to me and uh, he tells me, hey, Douglas, you did this profile here and yeah, I said, I think it's a bunch of ship.

And I said, well, good for you.

I didn't ask to be here.

If you don't like, I just soon go back to Quantico.

I have a lot of cases, you know, waiting for me.

A question came up to whether or not was a Ku Klux Klan type of thing, and I believe I addressed it because usually in clan type of cases, these white you hate types of groups, the crimes are very, very symbolic.

There's some symbolism involved.

You wouldn't be hiding the bodies.

You're hanging a body, it's going to be on main street, you know, not in some wooded secluded areas.

So I just never never saw, you know, other cases that we were looking at as any kind of a clan like thing.

But going back to your statement, no, I did not believe and to this day, that he was responsible for all those, uh you know, all those cases.

In your opinion, who else is?

When you analyze the case, you break it down into different groups for motivation.

Criminal enterprise as a category is there's some kind of money involved, is a drug related for example, type of thing.

No, it's not that.

Is it a group cause, meaning multiple people are involved.

I didn't see this as as a group cause type of a murder.

Look so this as an individual Is it a sexually motivated crime?

There was no evidence that there was sex UH involved in these UH in these cases, but I felt it was what I felt was a personal cause, a personal cause, you know, existed.

To get back to your question, Pain, I looked at the history.

Every year in Atlanta, there was about a dozen murders of children before this ever happened.

A lot of those cases, too, were in a personal violence cases where there they were family members involved in the UH in the deaths, you know of their of the children, and who knows, then maybe some of those cases could be attributed to Williams early on.

I don't know.

You have to go back to that date.

What was happening was was that they were entertainers coming in from all over the world.

Really, but you had Frank Sinatra, had Sammy Davis Jr.

Coming in for concerts, moneies, millions of dollars were coming in.

So families wanted to be on that list.

They were getting money, and so for you to come up and say no, all these cases are not on the list.

They're not happy.

What do you think Wayne Williams motive was.

I think it changed.

Sometimes they'll change your motivation.

I don't care how they come across an interview or interrogation, particularly interviews or research interviews I've done in prisons.

Uh, they come across maybe real confident, but really deep down there's a lot of inadequacy.

This guy here is a real failure.

He was trying all different kind of jobs d J at a little uh Ham operator radio station.

He had, his parents went bankrupt trying to support him.

He really thought he was going to be developing the next Jackson five.

But he just had failure.

You have to failure and the crimes these are crimes of power, crimes anger retaliation or maybe wrongdoing or personal animosity towards some of the people that you know he was killing.

But then what happened because of all the publicity and all the police agencies, I mean everyone, I mean the President United States was following this case and he got caught up with that, and then that's when he started with you know, the challenging and became cocky.

Now you have this insignificant nobody.

He'll never call himself that, but that's what he was.

Became a somebody.

He's got power.

He can manipulate not only the victims, but he's manipulating the entire law enforcement body.

All the bodies and law enforcement bodies are work on this case, and he's putting the fear of God, you know, in the community.

He had a classic kind of background.

He was also a police buff He got busted for impersonating a police officer.

He had the police dog, which was popular at that time.

You know, the shepherd living at home with with his elderly parents.

They were old enough to be his grandparents.

When you go interview him, but I know you've talked with him in prison.

These guys they have they have an answer for everything after so many years.

No matter what you ask, he'll give you a logical answer or uh, that's all that's on their plate.

And he just keeps talking and talking until I forget what he's talking about.

Yeah, and I'll see guys, you know, I like that, and it's just uh, and it's hard to do.

Are you doing telephonically?

It's hard to do even in prison face to face after all these years, Like if I was involved, like an interview with him, He's not.

He'd be crazy, uh to admit to anything.

But when I do do interviews, it's different than the Mine Hunter Netflix show, give an example one.

You know they'll show a tape recorder and you know, taking notes and all that did that early on, but you're dealing with people are paranoid to begin with, but not paranoid being psycholtic, just paranoid and for good reason for Williams to paranoid.

In the system where he is, you can't trust anyone, can They don't trust the guards or they won't trust anyone going into any interview.

So I found out that I had to go in when I would do an interview, after early mistakes that I made, go in with no notes, just trying to memorize every aspect of the case.

We also developed a fifty seven page question Jennaire that would be asking the offender different questions, but most of that we filled out before the interview.

Then after the interview back of the motel, we would just memorize the kind of things were interested in.

Victim selection, pre offense behavior, post offense behavior, you know those types of things, and they test you, they test you to see if you really know the case.

They'll throw a curve and they lie to you.

They'll lie, and then you got to catch him in a lie.

But you don't catch him alive by slapping him down and call him a lie.

I would just laugh.

I would just kind of laugh, and I would allow Williams, if I was gonna face to face or you face to face with him, is given the feeling or given the power of control the crimes or crimes of power and control.

So you have to you have to let him take control and then say in that interview room, a lot of the guys I've interviewed would sit up on the back of chairs to look down at me and sit on a cardenza, or if we're both in chairs, I slipped lower and you know that they're higher, that they have the semblance of you know, of control, you know, you know over me.

But so many years with him, he would not He's not going to confess to anything anything at this point because he's denied after all these years, you know, his involvement in these in these cases.

Yeah, it seems like he's never gonna admit anything.

And he seems like he holds onto the truth, like the small kernel of truth that he didn't kill all the kids.

He knows that, and so he focuses only on that, Yes, and he's right.

Then sometimes he'll throw in stuff where like he was working for the federal government, like give the impression like he was C I A or something like that, or I F B I I don't you know, like he's some intelligence kind of guy.

I mean, it's just what do you make of that?

Just desperation.

Again, he's such an inadequate loser.

I mean, he has to have power and control and he's trying to give himself some self worth.

That's the only reason they'll throw out, you know stuff, you know, stuff like that.

Again, the crimes are manipulative, manipulation, domination, and control.

He did that with the victims, He did it with the police, he did it with uh, with with society you know down there at that at that time.

There was always a situation too with Wayne Williams sexuality.

During the trial, they had different people testifying that, I mean really that there was a girl once a while, but really it was just he never really had There was no not a relationship with females.

There was always a male type of relationships.

But then even then he didn't have really a whole lot of a whole lot of friends.

And then when you start hitting that age, he's just a little younger.

Usually it surfaces, i should say it around the mid twenties, the mid twenties when the crimes begin.

He's twenty three.

Age is difficult because sometimes you deal with biological age versus emotional age, so you can miss that characteristics.

But there may have been some things, may have been cases that, like I said earlier, that happened before this grouping.

You know of cases here, and usually look again for the precipitating event or stress or in the background.

You can make crimes like this.

It's just doesn't happen all of a sudden.

There's this build up and with him, and you have to show a trend perhaps of losing and and and he's trying to develop groups, and he's getting rejected rejected, and maybe pressure is coming within the family.

You know, he's I want to be you want to be caught.

He's just seeking for positions of of power.

He's taking photographs, goes out to scenes and tries to sell the photographs to news uh, you know, outlets.

But usually there's something that finally when you talk to him, what did it?

And usually that's what you find in the background.

More times than I'll tell the person i'm talking to, Hey, this is probably what happened to you at that particular time.

When you have a bunch of cases, if you can determine which of these cases were the first crimes, the very first ones.

Uh that it's important because when he perpetrated a crime, they're looking for the comfort zone, a place where they feel they can commit a crime.

It's safe, it won't get caught, no interference.

You'll find your most clues there.

Usually it's an area where they reside, where they've been employed.

Then if something happens, maybe they go back for the disposal of a child.

In this case, someone was there or cop car came by just coincidentally.

They then go to a second or comfort zone, and they'll stay there a while, but really they're drawn back to the first generalized area.

So that's some of the things that you look for.

You know, with someone like that, you also look for which probably was some of the stuff he was burning in his backyard.

Uh.

Is that they document They not only they take pictures of their victims had almost with exception and today now today it's easy with your cell phone.

Uh.

They have may have drawings of what they want to do to the victims, but probably not so much.

He probably wouldn't go with the drawings.

He probably go more with maybe a diary and photographs.

And why because they look for victims.

You know, often some guys will look for nightly the predatory.

These are achievements, so they will whip out these photos of articles of clothing, even belonging to the children.

Uh, and fantasize and kind of relive the experience over and over again.

So when he was burning that stuff, that's a shame.

I think there was some mishaps in the investigation.

You know, why no search warrant?

Why didn't they tying him on the bridge, um than just watching him from afar as he's in the backyard waving stuff before he burns it to the people under who are surveiling him that day in the backyard, what do you think he was burning?

I think he was burning Uh, photos of the of the victims, maybe some clothing clothing of the victims.

Any documentation that he may have had, like contracts between the various victims.

That's what you know.

That's what he was burning.

Wasn't Homer with him though, wasn't wasn't his dad with him at that time with the burning.

I don't know, it's been so long, I mean when they were burning stuff.

Yeah, yeah, he may or may not have known.

I mean he may he may not have known what the heck he was specifically burning or seeing what he was burning.

Who knows what what Homer, what Homer knew, or what he may have suspected.

Did you, uh, did you find anything peculiar about Wayne's relationship to his father?

Yes, and uh, there were things there and I'm not I will tell you off the wreck were through or something, but I'm not gonna say.

I'm not gonna say on the air.

There were things.

There was something in the uh, in the backgrounds of Homer, and that came up during the d A investigation, the police investigation, and but they never brought it up during the trial.

H John, tell me about your new book coming out.

It's called The Killer Across the Table and it consists of four different types of killers.

A guy from the state of Washington, serial killer kills his friends, children, and no one knows he's the suspect.

He can participates in searches.

His name is Joseph Conjo and they got Donald Harvey from Cincinnati area.

Over about sixteen seventeen year period, he kills between seventy and a hundred patients and a couple of different hospitals.

But then you get down to South Carol Line and it's Todd Cole.

Hep he was a guy.

In two thousand sixteen, the police rescued Carla Brown in a storage container where she was kept a couple of months during the hot heat in the summers of South Carolina.

Very interesting guy, real smart.

He would kill seven people they rescued her.

But I got involved after public speaking at a university down there, and the cops came up to me.

Can I help him on a case where four people were killed in a motorcycle shop.

What I said was in all probability after looking at your case, this is a personal cause homicide.

Uh this this is a disgruntled employee or a disgruntled customer, But no probability.

Just unto customer.

His name is going to be probably in that in this file drawer.

Unfortunately, at that time the police had that information started going through the file system.

But they stopped because they began to focus on an individual who arrived at the scene that day and was the first one to find these four people having shot multiple times.

So he was a suspect for years and years.

Cole hep his name was in that file, and then he would go on and he would kill three more.

Smart guy aged fifteen, He rips a fourteen year old girl, goes to a men's prison, not a juvenile prison, gets out fifteen years later, picks up to college degrees.

Uh.

He picks up a real estate license, then a broker's license, owns a real estate company.

Then he picks up a private policy license.

Smart guy and asking me, he wants me to tell him really what makes him ticks?

So I go through that.

Another interesting cases out of Trenton, New Jersey.

Get real close to the family.

The mother of the victim sends her daughter out to collect money, uh for the sale of a box of cookies.

And here's a guy named McGowan living with his mother and grandmother.

The mother's away.

He lives in the basement of this bi level house.

Little girl comes to the door and what's what happened here was that the pearl Board asked me to go speak with him and given evaluation.

And again I'm not a psychologist, have a doctor.

He was an education but I give classes into a psychologist and psychiatrist, just my experience, and so they had me go in.

He was gonna get out and after um it was about a five hour interview or so.

It was unbelievable.

I was able to bring him back to that thirty years ago where he starts trembling, shaking.

It's free it was freezing in this, uh, this several room where we were together, and he his pecks and his chests are trembling, and but he's perspiring and he's looking off and he says, when I heard the knock on the screen door, John, I knew I was going to kill her.

And he goes through all all the gory details of of what he did and and I'm talking positive to him.

I have no notes, no nothing again, no tape recorder.

And I asked him, question, when you get out, where you going and he says in New York?

And I said, man as I was raised as a kid in New York and it's expensive.

And so he looks around to see if the guards were listening in on our conversation, and they weren't.

And he comes up and he says, John, he whispers into my ears, is I got money?

You got money from where you make a license place?

And he said no.

He said, when my when my mother died, I got the insurance money.

When my grandmother died, got insurance money.

And then sell the house.

I got insurance money.

And uh.

And I said where's the money?

And he whispers and he said, well, I put the money out of state.

Why did you do that so the victims family can't get any of the money.

How much money you got?

Six d fifty dollars?

So wow, I said, you're gonna do great when you get to New York.

I pained you with that kind of money.

Well, little does he know?

The next day and no, I guess he does know.

He just forgot who I was.

I'm gonna slam dunk his ass before the parole board one of two times.

And I go through all this.

They just told you, I told you, uh, And they're shocked.

They're shocked, and they how are we able to do it?

I said, I said, well again, I went and I had no notes.

I just studied the files that you provided to me police files, and um, and I'm not gonna rely on self reporting.

You people rely on self reporting.

You don't want to look at the crime scene fun You don't want to look at those crimes scenes of Joan Della Sandro who he sexually assaulted, and how he killed her and how he disposed of her.

You don't want to.

You don't do that.

And because you don't do it, you don't understand the criminal mind.

And then they get sometimes look at angry and they'll say, well, if we look at it, it would prejudice it would prejudice me or us.

Uh, if we saw all that, and well, what are you gonna do?

I'm gonna rely on the interview process.

They'll tell me, and I can determine, maybe not the non verbals through my experience that you know when he's lying.

And I said, well, you know, good luck, I said, because because unless you look at the material, these guys will lie to you, and they test you real real early on in the in the interview process with with them.

And uh, the the crime and the crime scene is reflection of the offender.

And I always say to to understand the artist, you must look at the artwork you could interview and artists, you've better look at the artwork before you talk to him.

To understand the criminal.

You better look at the crime before you talk to him.

So how can you you know, mr psychologist, psychiatrists and border parole corrections for example, you're gonna be You're gonna be determining whether or not a rapist, for example, should be released from from prison.

You know, unless you know the sexual assault, what the sexual assault entailed, what the verbal assault was, or the victim before, during, and after the crime, what the physical assault was, I mean physical how much force did he use before, during, even perhaps when he left the victim?

Unless you have the verbal, sexual, physical, you have no clue.

You have no idea what type of rapist dealing with.

And with some of them, yes, there maybe some rehab potential, but others you can throw the key way.

And there are five different rape typologies.

And I try to educate them, and but it's based on you have to have that information.

So so I tell them that, but then again they probably still even if they look at it, they may not know what it all means.

Had one had one, uh tell me though, how he had nightmares and he was involved in one of our early research.

We're going to use him as a psychologist, and he and he couldn't look at the at the pictures, even if the photographs of the crimes and get into the details.

And so we we deep six to him.

We got rid of that, got rid of him, you know, quick, because you have to do it work in these cases or being on Atlanta child homicides, the impact is having on families, the community.

It's terrible and one of the hardest things is really dealing with the surviving victims of these types of crimes.

It takes us toll.

It took a toll on me, I'll tell you that much.

I understand that the the Atlanta p D reached out to you, they want to know what you've got or yeah, I mean they actually um opened their doors to me and let me go with my team, uh and go through all their boxes of files.

This is actually before they made a big announcement about reopening the case.

It seems like, for whatever reason, they're open to discussing this.

They weren't a year and a half ago when I was doing the podcast.

But um, I think since then everyone's opened up a little bit and they want to, you know, bring whatever closure they can.

Your podcasts is so popular and and law enforcement is saying that that social media can be very very helpful.

You don't want people like running out conducting interrogations like your listeners are doing anything like that.

Or but for lead value, gosh, I mean, uh, you know today it's it's fantastic and uh, you can come up with some you know, very very good, you know good leads on on cases like this, even though it's so old now, that could be people out there, and I'm sure there are people out there who they have other you know, other information, uh that could help and help with these cases.

I guess they're saying that they're not saying that they don't believe he's responsible, but but I think there's they're thinking, well, let's see if did he do them all?

I mean, they closed twenty nine cases.

That's not the first time I've seen something like that too.

They've done it.

I've done it, Uh some other cases I've been involved with.

Where where are they just kind of will clear the books and wipe them all off.

You can link cases through victimology.

There's similarities and victims.

You can link cases by m O modus operandi.

But modus operandi will change because it's learned behavior and if subjects make mistakes, something doesn't go right, they will modify them m O.

And the other way is it's signature, is it's something unique.

I mean posing a body alongside of a road, posing another case.

Uh, there was torture involved in a series of cases.

So I was able to testify and link the cases.

Not you can't say that that this guy here in the courtroom did it.

And all you're saying is whoever did it?

Did these cases?

In my opinion, you know did them all?

Uh?

And profiles just you know too, and the listeners.

It's it's an investigative tool and it's not a substitute for thorough and well planned investigation.

Sometimes law enforcement comes a little bit too early and want this like some magical profile.

Uh.

In the eighties it wasn't so much.

They came for the profile because they were getting so much heat.

But it wasn't a hundred percent accepted.

Probably not a hundred percent accepted today.

But again too, it depends who's doing the analysis.

The analysis.

I think my original group that I had up to the point where I retired, we're really good because they all had uh around sixteen seventeen, eighteen years in in that unit, and and we're really top notch.

Had about forty two people and a dozen a dozen profile uh profiling, and it wasn't more we call them profiles, but they were us so much more than that.

They because we a lot of the times you just can't do a profile, and maybe the case is not suitable to do a profile, so you may may you have to tell a police that.

But maybe here's a proactive you know, you know technique we can employ it.

Uh give an example.

Just then I let you go, or you'll let me go.

It's it's uh the when Frank Sinatra's coming to Sammy Davis Jr.

They're going to come down and the concert.

I've I've I believe what greatest thrill it would be for the killer two attend the conference, be in the audience.

But you could have like fifty thousand people there.

But what can I do?

What?

And I suggested it would have been great, but it was analysis paralysis and it never went through.

And this is what it was.

It's that I believe the guy, the killer would be a police buff Uh have a vehicle, has and so we would advertise that we need security and may get a nominal amount of money or it could be voluntary type of but I must have a have perhaps have a definitely have a vehicle because we knew the killer had a vehicle, and then to have some kind of maybe uh background and and uh law enforced more tangentially and connected to that.

And what we could do is when people applied for the job, will use the analysis I developed to eliminate or put others on the front burner.

And that's what uh if.

It was a great idea, but it went around analysis paralysis.

You know.

The bureau at the time is is this is this is too much of a high risk, you know.

And I thought it was fantastic, so it never was employed, uh you know, And and that is and that's some of the things I liked really developing for law enforcement is if you can't do an analysis, maybe I can come up with some kind of proactive technique to try to try to get the guy.

And uh, you know, sometimes it's better just to just to do it.

And and if you know, rather than ask for permission, ask for for forgiveness.

They say, if you screw up, just go ahead and do it rather than ask, because sometimes they just they just analyze and analyze and and I heard that would that would be a question if you ever get to interview him again, uh Pain, ask him that question.

Did you have did he have a go to those concerts?

I heard that he did.

I heard that he did or was planning to, you know, ask him that if you ever have talked to him in the future.

I'm pretty sure his dad was there because he was taking pictures.

Oh really, so I would think that Wayne would also be there.

Yes, interesting, Sae.

This has been extremely helpful and enlightening.

Oh thank you.

You probably got more than you you ventured for Pain.

All right, I have a good one too.

Atlanta Monster is a joint production between iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works in Tenderfoot TV special thanks to Atlanta Mayor Keisha lance Bottom's Atlanta Police Department Chief of Police Erica Shields, and author and founder of the FBI Investigative Support Unit John Douglas.

Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set.

For the latest updates, visit Atlanta Monster dot com or follow us on social media.

For more podcasts.

For my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Yea, as promised, here's an exclusive clip from the next episode of Monster Presents Insomniac.

Following the November murder of his niece and her friend, Gaskin's next serious murder was a twenty year old named Martha Dix.

Pee Wee had discovered she was the one who had sold his niece the drugs.

Dix was attracted to pee Wee and often hung around him at his part time job at a car repair shop, but apparently pee Wee didn't feel the same attraction.

He killed her with a strong dose of acid he had stolen from a photographer.

He poured it into a Coca cola and she unknowingly ingested the fatal dose.

The acid worked fast, and she died a relatively quick but painful death right in front of him in Another young woman who considered Gaskins a friend was twenty three year old Doreen Dempsey.

Doreen was a mother of a two year old baby girl named Robin Michelle, and she was pregnant with a second child at the time.

She felt comfortable enough around Peewee to accept a ride to the bus station, after all, Peewee was an old friend.

Instead, Gascons drover to a secluded wooded area, raped and killed her in the back seat of his hearse, and then raped and sodomized two year old Robin Michelle before killing her too.

Peewee provided a graphic description of this pair of rapes and murders in his book Final Truth, and the details are just as horrific as you might imagine.

At the time, no one suspected Peewee Gaskins was capable of such sadistic killings, but word was getting around about Peewee, and there were a few people in town who knew that he would do it if the price was right.

H In a year that pee Wee would later call his killingist year, Gaskins got a little careless and murdered three people whose van had broken down on the side of the highway.

Gaskins suddenly found himself in need of a favor.

He needed help getting rid of the trio's van, and he enlisted the help of an ex con walter neely Neeli and Gaskins went about their own criminal business, but would occasionally help out each other if they were in need of some sort of assistance disposing of stolen cars, stolen goods, and occasionally bodies.

Also in nineteen a woman named Suzanne Kipper Owens hired Peewee to killer ex boyfriend, a man by the name of Silas Barnwell Gates.

Yates was a wealthy farmer in Florence County, South Carolina.

Gaskins and a pair of accomplices were successful in kidnapping and murdering Yates, and he collected the one thousand, five hundred dollars Susan Owens had promised him, But things went wrong soon after, and Pee Wee realized that he had to kill two additional people to cover up the Yates murder.

His accomplices were twenty nine year old Diane Neely and thirty five year old Avery Howard.

Diane Neely was the wife of Walter Neely, and she and Howard an ex con we're having an affair.

The pair attempted to blackmail Gaskins for five thousand dollars in hush money after assisting in the abduction and murder of Silas Yates.

The two were quickly killed by Gaskins after they agreed to meet Peewee at the payoff location.

In the meantime, Gaskins was busy killing and torturing more coastal kills, as well as other people he knew, including a thirteen year old named Kim Gilkins who sexually rejected him.

All leads in the investigation of the disappearance of Kim Gelkins pointed to Gascons, but there was nobody yet, so there was no arrest.

The authorities eventually did find evidence implicating Peewee, so he was indicted for contributing to the delinquency of a miner and kept in jail until his trial.

Walter Neely was also being held, but during that time he began to speak with a local preacher and they began to pray together.

They prayed for forgiveness, and when Walter Neely was ready to confess his sins to God, he was also ready to speak to the authorities.

Listen to Monster Presents Insomniac on Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio, or wherever you listen to podcasts.