Atlanta Child Murders Essay

Atlanta Child Murders

On June 21, 1981 Wayne Williams was arrested for the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne. Wayne Williams is the man who most people claim was the one who committed the Atlanta Child Murders, some people would disagree or say there was never enough to prove it was Wayne Williams. At first when the first few kids went missing police and the news didn’t really pay attention to any of it mainly because they were poor african american kids and at the time that really wasn’t anything important to the media and no one ever cared except for the black communities in Atlanta. After a few more kids were being kidnapped and started turning up found murdered in the woods around Atlanta people realized that this was something

Atlanta at the time was still segregated with whites being more mid-class and high-class compared to blacks who pretty much made all of the lower class percentage. All of the kids who were being kidnapped and murdered were black at the time since racism was still a big thing people suspected the killer being white or even part of the Ku Klux Klan. As the murders kept continuing the FBI started suspecting that who ever was committing these crimes had to have been fitting in with the community so they started to suspect that it was an african american. As time kept passing the news would cover more on the Atlanta Child Murders and the nation was terrified by the monster terrorizing Atlanta knowing that it could happen to anyone in the nation no matter where they lived. This case especially was scary to the black community since all of the victims were black kids, adolescents, and at the end two male adults. The black community had to have their guard up, no one could trust their kids going out in public by themselves because people were scared that their kid would be the next to be kidnapped and murdered by the Atlanta monster. Racial problems weren’t the only thing that impacted the media with this case, time was

The Atlanta Child Murders lasted two years with the death of 26 children ages from 8-14 to two young men one 23 the other 27. People all over the nation were wondering when the murders of these innocent people would stop, the murders were happening so frequent it would go to one case a month to one case a week and it was a spree of killing that people were hoping desperately it would end soon. The city eventually offers a $100,000 cash reward to anyone who could find the killer or killers, the media brought so much attention that even Muhammed Ali would help in this cause and add on to the bounty making it $500,000 after this Frank sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. would hold a concert to help raise money for the city of Atlanta to help with the investigation of this case and even President Ronald Reagan shedded light to this tragedy and ordered Vice President Bush to provide federal and local task forces to help with this case. Towards the last cases of children being kidnapped and murdered they were starting to be discovered in rivers and FBI suspected the bodies were being dumped at bridges so one FBI member recommended that they do stakeouts