After the discovery of the nailed Bibles the ‘Cult’ Theory gained currency for a while. The kids were being killed to satisfy the rituals of some voodoo brotherhood; several of the children had been carefully washed, after all, and laid out in stylised postures. For a short time in 1980, and again in the last three months, the monthly cycle of the killings encouraged the ‘Disturbed Female’ Theory. Perhaps a failed mother or a childless woman was acting out a complicated revenge on the living world.
Are the killers white or black? To begin with, of course, this was the crucial question. Several of the kids were picked up in areas where a white man would stick out like a pink elephant. The city population splits 60-40, but the street presence is much more one-sided than that, if the murderers and the victims turned out to be the same colour, the Killings in Atlanta would accord with the mainstream of American crime. Blacks make up an eighth of the US citizenry, and a half of its prison population. Most crime is still segregated. To a wildly disproportionate extent, violence in America is black on black.
Atlanta is a scattered city, surrounded by a lot of open and unfrequented country — lakes, wide plains, woodlands. The killers use all this space and are heavily reliant on their mobility. It sometimes seems that only a black could go to work with the unobtrusive speed and freedom that he needs.
In Chesterton’s story, ‘The Invisible Man’, the detective Father Brown orders four people, two of them policemen, to keep watch on the only entrance to the flat of a potential murder victim. The murder takes place, the four men claim that ‘no one’ went through the door. Oh yes he did, says Father Brown — and he walked past you all with the body in his arms. ‘The Invisible Man?’ someone asks. Correct, in a sense. The murderer was the postman, and he carried the victim in his sack.
A uniform confers facelessness, jurisdiction, and a degree of invisibility. ‘Now that could be anyone,’ said a local crime reporter, ‘delivery man, bus driver, utility worker… or a cop.’
The switch from a white to a black administration has happened only over the last few years. A lot of people were edged out in that shift. Many white cops, in particular, got sacked or passed over for promotion (with accompanying scandals: exams were rigged to favour black candidates, and so on). Now, if the motive was to discredit and humiliate the black-run police force, then the ‘Rogue Cop* Theory has life in it.
Perhaps, though, motive is the wrong thing, the irrelevant thing, to look for. It is possible that the twenty murders will break down into four or five weird clusters. What strikes you again and again is that the Killings in Atlanta have been so easy to do. Despite the propaganda, the campaigns, the fear, kids still go with strangers. Last month black and white plainclothes-policemen drove in unmarked cars round the housing projects, the vacant lots, the shanty houses with ripped car seats on their patios. There are no adults about, there is no authority, there is not even a memory of the survival instincts of the old ghetto. ‘Hey, kid,’ the decoys would call to the children they found, ‘you want to earn ten bucks? Hop in.’ They got a rider every time.
6. The View from Peachtree Plaza
The Peachtree Plaza Hotel is the centrepiece of downtown Atlanta. It is a billion-dollar masterpiece of American efficiency, luxury and robotic good manners. ‘Mm-hm. Mm-hm,’ everyone says five times a minute as they glide across its fountained halls.
Among its other accomplishments, the Peachtree is the tallest hotel in the world. If it’s essence of vertigo you want, take the scenic elevator to the seventy-second floor and enjoy a Cloud Buster (‘a refreshing blend of coconut milk, pineapple juice and vodka served in a souvenir replica of the Hotel’ – $7.95. ‘Thank you.’ ‘Mm-hm’) in the revolving Sundial Lounge.
There you will see the scalextric of the city, with its flyovers and chicanes, the dwarfed high-rise car-parks, the windshields blazing in the malls, the elevated trains, equitable, omni, life of georgia, thruways glistening like canals… and the acres of toytown prefabs on the criss-crossed suburban streets, where a person or persons unknown is still stealing the kids off the streets.