The outsider’s view remains hazy, cinematic, exaggerated, formed by cop-operas and a chaos of statistics. To the outsider, American murder seems as vehement and anarchic as American free enterprise, or American neurosis, or American profanity … But sometimes, and far more worryingly in a way, shapes and bearings do emerge from the turmoil, and portents are suddenly visible among all the blood.
During the week that I was in Atlanta an eighteen-year-old boy cut the throat of an elderly neighbour and stabbed her forty-two times with a butcher’s knife (over a trespass dispute); a schizophrenic former jailer and preacher raped and sodomised one woman and then shot both her and her friend in the head; a young crime reporter, having been raped the year before by an escaped convict, was found with thirty-five stab wounds in her chest (the convict was back inside on another rape charge, so it couldn’t have been him).
These are killings in Atlanta. But they are not the Killings in Atlanta.
2. The Killings in Atlanta
Piano keys don’t lock doors. Footballs don’t have toes. And, of course, cabbage heads Don’t have a mouth or a nose. And kids don’t go with strangers. They never go with strangers.
But they do. In the last twenty months, twenty black children have been murdered in Atlanta. No one has any idea who is doing this or why. District Attorney Lewis Slaton, in his creaking, leathery office, leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Oh, we got a lot of theories. But we’re not any nearer than we were when this thing started happening. We got no motive, no witnesses, no murder scenes, no hard clues at all. We ain’t got lead one.’ Only the compulsive confessors, who monotonously turn themselves in at the station houses, seem convinced of the identity of the culprit: ‘Me. I did it,’ they say. ‘I did them all.’
Kids don’t go with strangers … The jingle comes from a local rockabilly hit. Car-bumper stickers say the same thing. So do children’s colouring books. There are curfews for minors, haphazardly enforced. The Atlanta Falcons and the Westside Jaycees print trading cards of their teams, with safety tips as captions. There are teach-ins and pray-ins. There is great fear. But kids still go with strangers, one every month.
The murders began in the summer of 1979. It took a long while for any pattern to surface from the tide of Atlantan crime. Every year five or six black kids meet violent deaths (three, perhaps four, of the current cases are probably unconnected domestic killings: ‘the assailant was known to the victim’ — this is code talk for murder within the family). A year passed, and a dozen deaths, before anyone sensed the real scope of the disaster, the serial catastrophe, that was overtaking the city.
‘Pretty early on I started to get a sick feeling about it,’ said Camille Bell, who runs STOP, the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders. The walls of her improvised office are covered with maps (coloured pins denote the site of the victims’ disappearance and discovery), hand-painted uplift posters (‘We are not about Poverty. Instead, we are about Prosperity. Prosperity of the Heart and Soul… ‘) and information sheets from the Department of Public Safety.
Mrs Bell has a holding device on her telephone. She dodged from call to call. ‘Officer? There are two kids hanging around outside All Right Parking. Could you get ’em taken home?’ ‘Venus, you heard the latest? I’m getting $i,ooo a lecture. Some joke, huh?’ As Mrs Bell talked, I scanned the public safety handout. There he was, number four:
YUSEF BELL, BLACK MALE, 9 YEARS OLD
Yusef Bell was last seen on October zi, 1979, en route to a grocery store on McDaniel Street. His body was found on November 8. The cause of death was strangulation.
Camille Bell is a public figure these days. There is a lot of glare in Atlanta now, and a lot of money, federal and commercial. Mrs Bell has her critics. There is talk of cashing in, of joining die parade. I would be ashamed to question Mrs Bell’s motives; but these are poor people, and these things are inevitable in America. Camille Bell finished her call and said, ‘The fear just grew, all through last year. I just knew it. Someone is stealing the kids off the streets.’