Terror on Atlanta's South Side

By Bennett H. Beach

Fourteen black children die or vanish, and police are baffled says Teresa Brown, 9, "I get scared and cry." Teresa is not alone. The entire south side of Atlanta, where she lives, is a community gripped by fear. Over the past 15 months, 14 black youngsters, ranging in age from seven to 15, have disappeared. Ten have later been found murdered.

Although the causes of death vary from strangulation to stabbing and bludgeoning, the series of abductions and killings may well be part of some bizarre and mysterious pattern. All but two of the victims were males who were relatively small, generally wore their hair short, and looked younger than their age. Those similarities might suggest a sexual motive, but police say there is no evidence of molestation. There is speculation that the boys were well cared for by their abductor, because some of them had apparently been washed shortly before they were murdered. Such tenuous theories are all that anybody has to go on. At the end of last week, a three-month-old police task force of 24 full-time investigators had not come up with a single solid lead.

It was not for lack of effort. In what Public Safety Commissioner Lee Brown calls "the most intensive investigation ever conducted in the history of this city," the Georgia bureau of investigation is pitching in, the FBI is providing national crime-lab facilities, and a psychiatrist at Emory University is trying to develop profiles of the killer or killers. In addition, Atlanta officials have enlisted 450 fire-and policemen in an unprecedented twelve-hour-a-day, door-to-door canvass to ask residents if they have seen anything unusual and give them pictures of the missing children. Says Fireman William Eberhardt: "This way the people see you're involved, and they have a tendency to get into the act themselves." True enough, if the neighborhood searches conducted by residents over the weekends are any indication. More than 600 people took part in the first one, on Oct. 18, which found the skeleton of a seven-year-old victim.

There have been other initiatives as well. A parents' group called the Committee to Stop Children's Murders (Stop) set up shop in June at a local mall, established a 24-hour hotline, and began undertaking some detective work on its own. It receives 20 to 50 calls a day, but not one tip has panned out. Schools are scheduling lessons on street safety taught by visiting police; television coverage has included a film re-enacting some of the crimes; and police fraternal organizations are distributing 100,000 bumper stickers reading: KIDS, DON'T GO WITH STRANGERS. A reward fund contributed by the Atlanta Business League, the local bar association, a radio station, the city council and numerous other Atlanta groups has reached a total of $150,000 and is still growing. Says Commissioner Brown, who is black and himself the worried father of ten-year-old twins: "Somewhere out there, someone has that piece of information we need to break the case."

A measure of how desperate the police are for a breakthrough of any kind is their recruiting of Psychic Dorothy Allison, 55, of Nutley, N.J., who claims to have helped solve 14 murders and locate dozens of missing persons. After Allison arrived in Atlanta last week, she announced that she had formed a mental image and knew the name of a black man who was involved in at least one of the murders: "I see where he is. I follow him." Said Police Chief George Napper: "I'm very hopeful that Mrs. Allison's presence will bring to a quick conclusion the nightmare facing this city." Southsiders were more skeptical. Said Venus Taylor, the mother of a twelve-year-old victim: "She can sleep at night. I can't."

Many of Atlanta's blacks find it understandably difficult to fight off the suspicion that the crimes may be part of a ghastly racial vendetta. Earlier this month, when a boiler exploded at a day care center and killed five blacks, Mayor Maynard Jackson had to rush to the scene to assure a crowd of angry and grieving neighborhood residents that there was no evidence of foul play. An investigation later confirmed that the blast was an accident.

The racial concerns are all the harder to dismiss because of what seems to be a nationwide wave of murders of blacks. In Buffalo, two cab drivers had their hearts cut out. Detectives there are also investigating the sniper shootings of four men and seeking a white man who tried to strangle a black hospital patient after telling him, "I hate niggers." The FBI, meanwhile, is hunting for a Southern white named James Vaughn, who is wanted for questioning in connection with similar rifle murders of blacks in five cities and who may be a suspect in the shooting of National Urban League President Vernon Jordan. At the White House, President Carter took note of all these cases in remarks to an audience of 200 black ministers last week. Calling the killers depraved, he said, "People like that and the Ku Klux Klan have got to be caught."

Until the murders are solved, life in places like Atlanta's south side will re ain tense. A 90-day curfew bars any one under 16 from the city's streets be tween 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.; even in daylight, an unaccompanied child is a rare sight.

Mayor Jackson has asked parents to keep their children from trick-or-treating on Halloween -- or to accompany them if they go -- and Stop is attempting to compensate by planning a party at its headquarters. Children are disappointed, but few question the reasoning, particularly in view of the timing of the past seven out of eight child disappearances.

They occurred regularly at intervals of 3 1/2 weeks. Since the last disappearance was reported on Oct. 10, this week will be an especially anxious one for southside parents.

Reported by Joseph N. Boyce/ Atlanta

With reporting by Joseph N. Boyce

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