In Atlanta, another body whispers coming today at Police Task 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 MODI from Tinderfoot TV and How Stuff Works in Atlanta.

Like eleven other recent victims in Atlanta, Rogers apparently was a fixy victor.

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

This is Atlanta Monster.

Hey, guys, welcome to part two of our Q and A session.

I'm here with the Tenderfoot TV team and How Stuff Works.

I'm Jason from How Stuff Works from Tenderfoot Mrs Donald from tinder Foot TV, and we're here today to answer your questions.

Hey, my name is Joe.

Was there ever a house or location of where they thought there was like a sex at ring going on where people were taking maybe over to that house and that's gonna bring carpet there.

Just wondered if you'd ever heard anything about them actually investigating the house.

One of the hardest parts of this story, I think to to hear, and frankly, it was a story that was told in the media, so going to uncle Tom's house.

Tom Terrell, UM, there was frank and open talk about at least ten of these boys visiting his house.

We've seen some pretty graphic detail of what happened there, that these kids would come through the neighborhood and just for a couple of bucks, would participate in some you know, some pretty troubling things and even sleep over.

Um.

A couple of years after this case was closed, Tom Terrell's house and the house next door burned down.

We went back, if you remember, and it was raised.

There was nothing there.

It was it was a clean field, empty lot.

If you were looking at the old and you look directly to your left, you saw the Georgia Dome and you saw where the Omni, which is a big location in the podcast.

So you can actually imagine where kids were coming from there, going through the neighborhood, stopping and then hitting their ultimate destination at their houses at any time of the day.

UM.

It's really heartbreaking.

Uh.

And often in trials, not all the evidence they have is presented, just enough of the strongest evidence is used to convict someone.

So even though it was known it was in the media, it doesn't mean it has to show up in trial.

But what we don't know is was there a larger kind of pyramid of players here.

We've heard some of the adult victims may have been running through the same neighborhood.

So I hate speculating on this stuff, but something really really nags at me that says there's a connection here.

I just don't know what it is.

And we didn't present this on the podcast because we frankly just didn't have the evidence.

We didn't have anything that would tell us that these things were all specifically connected.

Even back then, the media theorized that some of the adult victims could actually have been co conspirators.

So there is a scenario that some of these things are connected, um, and that it's larger than one person.

So we already all believe that, you know, this wasn't all the work of one monster, but it could be the work of a few people working together.

And then some of some other things that are can be unrelated, some things that are related to those um that those houses and some of those victims that work at those houses that also weren't related to Wayne Williams or any other co conspirators with Wayne Williams.

So just you know, like I said, there's just not enough evidence to point that that is true or false.

So it's one of the things we didn't really dive deep into because it's a big question mark.

So we kind of focused on, you know, the larger issues in front of us that we had, you know, more evidence to point to.

It was called Uncle Tom's Cabin, was the nickname that it was given in the media.

Vincent Hill, the former police officer, was a huge advocate of this theory, and he had his own evidence.

He showed me he firmly believed that there was a real connection between this Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Atlantic child murders, and based on what he showed me, I think that at least a few of the victims were connected.

But the question remains, did it have to do with Wayne Williams.

Is there a bigger story here or are we looking at a bunch of different murders by different people.

Yeah, I mean, like tim Timothy Hill was at Tom Terrell's house the day before he went missing and was supposed to return, and you can't just you can't dismiss that.

But it's hard to put those connections together so many years later.

That's the problem with this Everyone says, it's so confusing.

It is confusing.

It there's no way to make it all makes sense, because I firmly believe it doesn't all make sense.

It doesn't all connect.

There's not one big puzzle here that makes sense.

And this is this explains everything, right, We're talking about different things that happened, right.

I think one thing that we make the mistake of just the general public when we look at, um a crime like this is trying to find the one after that solves everything.

And also that trying to look at every child name that appears on a list and saying that, um, all of the evidence has to fit every single victim, and when one doesn't fit, we can't throw it all out.

It makes me that that evidence are that assailant or you know, the person responsible for one is not responsive for the other.

There's definitely a world where several of these victims are murdered for several different reasons, some associated with one killer, some associated with this house, some by street violence.

And all that evidences is no way's gonna all match up.

And and one thing is true, and that's that sex rings were a real thing in Atlanta and other cities.

UM, We're gonna share a c from another another caller who actually know her father was named Wayne Williams and was in the phone book, and they got all kinds of nasty calls.

And here she shares a story of some of the sex ring activities that we're having in Cabbage Town here in Atlanta.

I lived in MND Park at the time, which is just on the other side of the tracks from where everything was happening.

I had a lot of memories of it.

I know for a fact that there was a kitty pornography ring that was going on in Cabbage Town at the time.

And I noticed for a fact because I rode the school bus with a lot of the boys who would whisper about getting paid for ppe pictures.

Have that you know, kind of burned into my brain.

This is there from Los Angeles that I know, you guys kind of touched on this before, but there's never been on any serious te quarry on whether Wayne possibly partnered with his father in these murders.

The fibers from the house being on the victims.

It seems to me the only good way to get a fiber onto a victim his direct contact with the fibers themselves and though the victims were brought home and disposed of, and even photographs.

Most serial killers have a trophy aspect to them, and Wayne dead with a photographer and doing taking pictures of the funerals afterwards.

That's a good point.

It would be merely speculation to talk about that at all.

But one thing I do find interesting is that you take all the evidence against Wayne Williams, it would also match his father, all the carpet fibers, everything would be the same.

So it is interesting.

And I don't know much about their relationship.

I asked Wayne a few times about his father, but he never really got into it, which I found also was kind of strange.

And they had a strained relationship, and we we kind of briefly touched on that they've had an argument out in a parking out around the trial time.

We stayed away from trying to present a lot of the speculation on this.

We heard a lot of stories that we actually did not put in the podcast.

Um, but I will say this, We do know that Homer Williams was the only photographer at the Frank Sinatra Sammy Davis Junior Benefit concert.

We do know that he was on stage with Frank Sinatra.

We do know that he took the iconic photo of Sammy Davis Jr.

And maer casim Read.

But there's there's lots of questions, Like one of the things we heard over and over again was Wayne and Homer are showing up at the funerals.

They're showing up at the at the case sites where the bodies were.

I can tell you personally, I looked at hours and hours and hours of video footage and never saw it.

So we're not going to make a statement on that, Like I've never seen it with my own eyes, so to present that out there just doesn't make sense.

We do know that Chet Deutlinger talked about Homer being there at Jimmy Ray Paine's funeral, and we did discuss kind of that connection.

Uh, We've heard lots of things.

Chat also talks about he actually met with Homer and Wayne a lot.

He met Wayne and jail.

He went to their residence when Wayne was in jail and Homer was at home and talked with him about the fact that they took boxes and put him in dumpsters near on nearby downtown school, and the fact that Homer had all kinds of photography that he burned, and he admitted to doing it, but he said, you know, it was just unclaimed extra copies of stuff, and and even so I'll burn him and not just throw him away.

Yeah, and this was in the kind of clean up phase.

He said, Um, they were unclaimed extra copies and photos that just didn't turn out right.

And Chet said, I've never been satisfied with any part of the explanation about the cleanup, either Wayne's or Homer's.

The best I can say is it could be true.

Mhm.

Hi, my name is Laurie.

So several years ago I read the book Mine Hunter by John Douglas.

He is one of the people that basically founded the field of criminal profiling.

That's a really fascinating book.

And he had an entire chapter on the Atlanta child murders and in that chapter he describes exactly what was in the profile before they caught Wayne Williams and it is absolutely uncanny.

Yes, I've read that.

I've read that section of his book, Mine Hunter.

Um, we did try to reach out to John Douglas early on.

Uh, the name John Douglas came up multiple times in the FBI.

Everyone we talked to really looked up to this person.

He was a brilliant man.

He's still around and we tried to reach out to him early on, but we were not able to get an interview lined up.

I think there was a sort of conflict of interest with the My Hunter show and our show.

But you know, he expressed that he would like to do it, but it didn't work out.

But you know, everyone we talked to an FBI really looked up to this guy, and he was sort of the mastermind of creating these FBI profiles like this.

Some of them are even his students.

I think Popcorn said he went to John Douglas's class and things like that.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting, it is.

It's really interesting with the extra context of watching Mine Hunter and seeing some of those classes conducted to kind of it's gonna be really interesting to see how that the rumored kind of um coverage of Wayne Williams in the Atlanta child murders in season two of Mine Hunter plays out based on everything that we know.

Hi, my name was Kia.

A few episodes back, you talked to a gentleman that was abdusted in a car and kind of got out, but the plastic seats kind of grabbed the back of the pick that was in his pocket, and on his way out, the guy who kind of sort of maybe looked like Wayne Williams said goodbye and called and by his name.

Did you think any deeper into that story?

Did you revisit it?

Because it sounds like there's somebody out there that was snatching kids that looked very much like Wayne Williams.

I don't have enough information, but I was just curious.

That story stuck with me by Rodney, that's what he said.

It was extremely erie.

It's a bizarre story.

I don't know what else to say about it, to be honest, I don't.

I don't know where to look for more information on that to build a bigger story out of it.

This guy was being one sincere to me.

He had never told anyone publicly this story before.

And we've also heard after that a few other stories that make it sound like there was maybe this guy who resembled Wayne Williams who was roaming around the streets of Atlanta in abducting kids, or at least attempting to.

Is that true.

I don't know.

I cannot say for certain if it is or not.

Either when you slice it, it seems like there was someone who looked like Wayne Williams who was out in Atlanta at that time abducting kids, or at least attempting to.

Was it Wayne?

This guy says for certain it was not.

He knew what Wayne looked like and it wasn't him.

So was there someone else out there?

I don't know, Okay, So Wayne's look seems to be unique to us.

I think now in two thousand eighteen, we here, here's the guy with afro and glasses, and it seems almost like this iconic, you know, pictures that we've seen of Wayne Williams.

But at the time, it's been suggested to us many times that that was not a unique look.

Lots of people had that hairstyle, lots of people had those same types of glasses at that time, and so it's possible that there was someone who looked a lot like him.

Vincent Hill even said I looked like that, My dad looked like that, We all looked like that.

Yeah, that was a go to look, you know, late seventies, early eighties, So not surprising that you know, someone else is out there and being mistaken for Wayne Williams.

If that's what you know, what the look was I think what gives UM a little more creagence to some of the other eyewitnesses is them being able to also say that guy had, you know, abrasions or a scar on his face.

And I think that's um kind of what sets the idea apart from, you know, the people who say it definitely wasn't Wayne, and people say that it was him.

When I listened to the interview with Rodney for the first time, it was just a stunning story by itself, but I was also struck by the story of the driver giving Rodney drugs and not really knowing what was in that.

The question has come up multiple times, how do you get these scrappy kids in your car or you know, take them and kill them and without having a scratch or out having scars.

And Wayne's just five seven and a pudgy guy, and it just it's always kind of bothered me that maybe that was the trick, right, is giving these young kids some concoction that that reduced their resistance.

I don't know, there was something that's always kind of bugged me about that, and that being the almost like the candy that the strangers giving these kids to uh to make them more vulnerable.

Because I think there is a point to these kids being tough and scrappy and on the streets that would be difficult to take down.

I think the power that you're talking about when it comes to serial killers is in their manipulation.

Every serial killer manipulated their victims and gained their trust somehow.

I think that we often underestimate what that is.

I think that if you're a psychopath, your sociopath, you have all these traits and you're trying to kill somebody, you are convincing them of everything you need to to get them in your car.

Yeah.

And if you remember the kind of anonymous interview that we played in one of the episodes um of the Guy That Knew Wayne and and Jojo Bell, he talked about how Wayne had a network of spies that were kids helping him watch the neighborhood.

So again, if he is the person his ability to kind of manipulate those kids and have them act on his behalf, it's pretty powerful.

This is Jenny Kafka and Ediston, New Jersey.

How has the podcast shaken things up with the law enforcement?

Have they been responding, has they've been acting, has they've been pursuing um or reevaluating because of what you're doing.

I highly doubt it.

I think that this is a very old case.

Uh.

The FBI is happy with the way this ended.

It's closed in their minds.

I don't think way Williams is getting out of prison anytime soon, regardless of whether or not he's guilty or innocent.

That's just the way it is now.

It's been almost forty years.

I don't think the police feel compelled to go back through their own information in their own cases and try to find something, try to find something that was missing before.

I don't think it's in the city's best interest for that to happen either.

I think that the important part of Atlanta Monster is not just whether or not Wayne Williams killed anybody.

It's just the retelling of the story as a whole.

Just like I had never heard this story, there were plenty of other people who had never heard the story too, even my parents.

They were around in Atlanta at this time, but I've never been told this story, and they remember did it way differently.

They didn't have all the facts, they only were They were limited to what they saw on the news.

And my dad told me he didn't have a TV in his in his apartment, so he only saw the news at dunkin Donuts or something so so much it's always archived stuff we're going through.

But who all saw that?

I mean not everybody, to be honest.

It's night one.

Yeah, I mean just just look at look at your life today.

You know, if you if you're you get busy for a few days and you don't watch the six o'clock news and o'clock news, you're not up to date on everything that's happening.

And we have the internet, so you think about in in the late seventies, you know, you you missed the evening news and for a couple of days you're completely outdated.

So if you don't have a TV.

So yeah, just it's a it's a lot.

You know, the flow of information isn't uh the way the way it is now is completely different than how it was then.

And you know, people are gonna hear this story through a lens or you know, through a different I guess lens may not be the right word, but you know they're going to hear this story, um, and it's going to come with a twist on on it based off who's telling it to you.

You know, based on your community, based on your age, um.

But I think overall the you know the good question, I think that you know you answered it perfectly.

I mean, it's a case closed, like we got our guy, and we're not going to go revis anything, especially if it's going to kick us some dusted we don't want to get into.

That's that's the opinion of local and federal law enforcement.

Yeah, I think to law enforcement, this is done.

And if you remember from the last two episodes, um, every child's case that they thought was connected in a compelling way with trace evidence and circumstantial evidence, they brought those up in trial.

So though it didn't maybe make the news that way, and many people don't think that the kids were tried and they and they weren't.

Their cases were tried, um, but they still brought those up.

So I don't know why they would ever reopen these cases.

I don't think they're going to get more evidence on those cases.

That's why they were so flimsy.

But they connected in some way through you know, fibers to the two cases they had more evidence for, and that's Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Raypain, right.

And I think I think The problem that I have, and then maybe some of the listeners have as well, is that they didn't just close the cases that were brought up in court.

And there is the you know, elephant in the room.

So those parents, you know, not only was there a child never brought up in court, but you know, they were never never had there was never a trial, there was never anything.

Those cases were just closed.

And I think that's where you know, the big issue lies.

So, uh, if there was going to be an effort to look into something, I think it should be into the cases that were not brought up in court that we aren't so sure that he did.

But I think we've said it before that you know, if you close twelve cases and there are thirty, there's still an Atlanta child writer out there.

And I think that's what the city was dealing with at the time.

So I think they politically, you know, they were motivated to close you know, the majority of these cases, which they did, and I think there that's where the injustice came in.

Yeah, so I guess that's not necessarily opening up Wayne Williams case.

Again, it's like those outlying undetermined cases, right, but they would have to admit that those outlying on determined cases.

UM, we're not coming by Wayne Williams, and they've already closed and attributed over twelve that were not brought into court, and that, you know, there's the there's a difference.

Yeah.

I would love to just view all the stuff that never got presented to the public, because I mean, this went on for a couple of years, and I think that is kind of the unknown question of what happened within the task force, within ap D, within the FBI, What leads did they get and not follow, What kind of conversations did they have if they were talking to Tom Tarrell and investigating the sex ring, what was that investigation like and how come it was not presented.

Hi, my name is Kelly.

It was listening to another true crime podcasts and it was about the freeway sansom slangs that happened in the seventies.

UM there were six young DC females who disappeared and were found off the side of freeways, um strangled and dead and raped.

UM.

This was prior to the Atlanta Monsters appearance.

But the link that was most intriguing to me is that in both cases, these were young children from enfranchise communities who also had green carpet fibers found on them and on their clothing and possessions.

So I just thought that that was a really interesting link.

I'm not sure if anyone has investigated the links between these two serial murders, but UM, I thought that I would call in in the off chance that it could be a helpful trip.

Firstly, I think it's important to reiterate that there are many, many types of green fibers, and I think it's a misconception that green is the thing that made these fibers stand out.

In the Williams case.

It wasn't that they were UM green, it was that the green carpet fibers they did find had this unusual structure that was trilobal and it was called the Wellman one A one B and it was among fibers, extremely rare.

So it's not inconceivable that other cases, UM They're victims would be tied together through fibers, even green fibers, even green carpet fibers, but it was the lynch pen in this case because the fibers were so rare.

UM, I'm not familiar with the fibers in the case that UM you're bringing up, but I think that it would be very unlikely that there's any tie at all, because we when we narrowed it down with Larry Peterson, the fiber analyst, it was like, maybe eighty two rooms in Georgia might have that carpet.

Maybe, Hi, I have a question for you in the team.

Out of this listening to episodes, and I was wondering, were given a story actually like got in contact with the police or the family member was going to contact with the police.

So out of the three stories that I was told, um, only one person did go to the cops, and that was the man who ended up in prison with way Williams.

Ironically, years later, he said he did tell the police about what happened to him, and they came to his house and they uh asked some questions about what happened, and they seemed interested, but it's just kind of ended there, and uh they never followed up after that.

But he did make an attempt to tell law enforcement.

They did come to his house and they asked a bunch of questions, but it pretty much just ended there.

Hey, Kane and Team.

My name is Jason.

I'm a big fan of your work and i'm your podcast.

I loved I'thing vanished, and I just got finishing with the Atlanta Monster.

With I've been Vanished, I felt that there was a very clear win, if you want to call it that with the evidence that was uncovered, kind of turned a new leaf in the investigation went to Atlanta Monster, or I didn't feel it was kind of the same way.

So really, I was just curious pain on a personal level.

If you were convinced that Wayne Williams is innocent or are you convinced that Wayne Williams was in fact the Atlanta Monster.

Oh man, that's the tough one to answer right there.

I'm not convinced of his innocence or his guilt, to be honest.

But what I'll tell you is that Wayne Williams lied to me.

He lied to me about the bridge incident and the club on multiple occasions, and I called him out on it.

Why was he lying to me?

Is it because he killed Nathaniel Cater that night?

Or is it because he was doing something suspicious and it just makes him look bad.

If that's the case, then why not, almost forty years later, come out and say, hey, I'm sorry, I lied about this.

This is why it doesn't make any sense.

But I still didn't kill anybody.

He's not saying that.

He's still lying for some reason.

Why is that?

You know?

And I also can't argue with the fiber of it.

It's you know, it's funny because you know, on the way up to Larry Peterson's house, I was with Meredith and we were both talking about how man, we really think that Wayne maybe didn't do this.

Maybe he's innocent.

It just sounds two perfect things don't add up all the way.

What's the deal here?

Maybe he's innocent.

When we left after about a four hour conversation with Larry Peterson, we both looked at each other and said, I think he did it.

So I don't know.

I've gone back and forth a lot, but I don't want to be the guy who says you should believe this, or you should believe that what I wanted to do was present the whole story, and have you decide and have you understand why this has been so puzzling for so long?

And also the focus should not be Wayam Williams.

It should be the kids.

It should be what happened almost forty years ago that was wrong.

There were things that were done the wrong way in this case, and there's things to learn from.

It's also an important part of our culture to know how things were and how they are to a So those are the more important factors that I would like to focus on.

Did he do it?

I don't know, but he lied to me and he's very suspicious.

Thanks for listening to part two of our Q and A session.

If you have any questions of your own, please call us at one eight three three to eight five six six six seven.

Again that's one three, three five six six six seven, and be on the lookout for more specials of Atlanta Monster this summer.