Those Bones Are Not My Child (4 page)

The last few pages of the journal, written in October of 1980, are hurried but lengthy. An international convention of white supremacists
had been hosted in nearby Cobb County by self-proclaimed racist and convicted bomber J. B. Stoner. Not fourteen hours after the convention adjourned, the Gate City–Bowen Homes Day Care Center blew up; four toddlers and a teacher died. That explosion, on Monday, October 13, 1980, brought the case of the Missing and Murdered Children—the tip of an iceberg that involved scores of men, women, and other children—to citywide, nationwide, and finally worldwide attention. While the Task Force called in forensic specialists to produce a victim profile, everybody else, most especially independent investigators, focused on the killers. There was widespread speculation about their identity and their motives:

Splashes of green reflecting from the pool bob across the pages in your lap. Seasick, you close your eyes. In a minute, your stomach’s less swarmy. But your mind won’t let go. It battens down on the heavy three-ring looseleaf in one of the cartons at home. That binder contains the other journals, separated by manila envelopes that bulge with scraps of letters, tear sheets from magazines and social science journals, news clippings, safety-ed comics, LEAA (Law Enforcement Assistance Administration)
circulations,
The Caped Crusader
and other Klan periodicals, and the various flyers and bulletins issued in fall ’80 and winter ’80–’81 which signaled, as early as Christmas of ’80, that you would need cartons to hold the material that came pouring in from all over the world.

Reporters everywhere were trying to make sense of what was happening in Atlanta.
Gone With the Wind
Atlanta. New International City Atlanta. Atlanta, Black Mecca of the South. Second Reconstruction City. Home of a bulk of Fortune 500 companies. Scheduled host of the World’s Fair in the year 2000. Proposed site of the World University. Slated to make the Top Ten of the world’s great financial centers. Local, out-of-town, and overseas media all relied first and foremost, however, on information supplied by the Metropolitan Atlanta Emergency Task Force. For a long time, media was unaware—or rather, made uninterested in the fact—that there were numerous other bodies of investigators conducting inquiries and coming up with findings more plausible than the explanations offered by the Task Force, which hobbled itself early on by insisting that there was nothing that linked the cases.

For all the authorities—city hall, the APD, the Task Force, the GBI, the FBI—agreed that the important thing was that the idea of a serial murder case not take root. A serial murder panics the public. Embarrasses law enforcement. Makes professionals look outsmarted. Serial murders are bad for tourism. Handling serial murders requires a coordinated effort, a spirit of cooperation on the part of the various epartments, bureaus, and agencies that careerists prefer to run as private fiefdoms, rewarding true-blue border guards, not liaison officers. Worse, tracing a race-hate-motivated conspiracy would demand a no-squabbling truce between the various branches of the law-enforcement industry. Well aware of the pecking order, locals resist “serial” lest the feds become in charge of the yard.

On complaints of civilian search team members, APD officials had approached federal agents about the blustering, arrogant behavior of the white commando types who attached themselves to the search teams and tried to bogard their way into meetings on the south and northwest sides of Atlanta. “Counterterrorist units,” muttered one fed, then exited quickly, perhaps because he had breached security. In any case, the situation was not negotiable. The APD officials backed off.
And until a Black man was collared, it was unacceptable to speak of hate.

The Task Force itself was under the command of Commissioner of Public Safety Lee Brown, a Ph.D., formerly of Seattle, Washington, a well-respected administrator and family man. Mayor Maynard Jackson had created the Public Safety post early in his first term, originally to bring Police Chief Inman under control. Later, the Public Safety Office operated mainly as a liaison between city hall and the police department. Shrewd maneuver on Maynard’s part, for as was/is an open secret in most cities, there are two police departments: a Black police force, comparatively new, having evolved as a result of the civil rights movement; and a white force, not new, and to a great extent pledged to the old order. Many a newly elected Black mayor has found him/herself embattled from day one by the reluctance, frequently bitter, ofttimes fierce, of the old-boy network to honor the voters’ choice.

No one foresaw that Atlanta’s Office of Public Safety would require a big budget, a large staff, a PR director, and a comprehensive body of policies and procedures. Its work had been, under Brown and under his predecessor, Reginald Eaves, of a community relations nature. Until the killers struck.

Eventually, the media began to ask pointed questions about the “conflicts” in the unfolding drama: bad-mouthing between the police and the community; between official investigators and community sleuths and out-of-town visitors armed with hunches; between STOP and organizations self-appointed to raise funds in the parents’ names; between the parents and city officials; between local, state, and federal authorities, who each complained that the other agencies were conducting investigations in secret and obstructing their own investigations.

Many in the targeted neighborhoods were willing to be cast as passive spectators to the tug-of-war scenarios written by reporters. But others, not distracted by theatrics, cast themselves as undercover workers who sorted out the growing roster of characters into major and minor players. From the day the case became national news, the cast of characters kept growing—psychics, suspects, tipsters, bat squads, witnesses, hypnotists, journalists, forensic experts, cult specialists, computer consultants, fund raisers, dog trainers, filmmakers, visiting
celebrities. Hundreds of people with theories, alliances, agenda clotted the arena, which began to take on the look of a fiendish perception test, challenging the most discerning eye to lift out of the dense design those players that could lead them to purposeful action. Those community workers who were not stymied by the cluttered ground design began to chart a particular part of the schemata—the crisscrossing paths of the feds.

Community sleuths clocked federal agents in and out of Atlanta as early as summer 1980. There were feds investigating alleged kidnappings even as the official word to the public and the parents was “runaways.” But other feds, using the Missing and Murdered cases as a cover, were engaged in COINTELPRO-like operations, particularly against the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Central American Support Committee. President Carter, who made no secret of his suspicions and alarm over the dangerously clandestine nature of the intelligence operations, was the one hope clung to by citizens subjected to FBI breakins routinely blamed on burglars. The election of President Reagan, though, changed the picture. Both the intelligence community and right-wing insurgents stepped up their covert activities, overseas and on home ground. And community-based detectives moved further away from the media spotlight in order to keep an eye on the feds.

Agents from the Treasury Department, from the Internal Revenue Service, and from the Securities and Exchange Commission were unusually active in and around Atlanta. Their subject of surveillance was a ring of counterfeiters, credit-card defrauders, junk-bond hucksters, bank robbers, and states’ rights tax protesters that was bankrolling the ultra-right network through criminal activity. Agents from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms crossed their path. The ATF was on the trail of ultra-right gangs that were knocking over armories in the Southeast and stockpiling weapons in and around Atlanta in preparation for race war. ATF agents, in turn, were covering the same ground as narcs, staking out private airports in the area. Both the ATF and narcs crossed the paths of INS agents. Immigration and Customs came into the picture in the fall of 1980. Violations of the Arms Export Control Act had been reported in Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Those in Atlanta were keeping watch on the comings and goings of international right-wing terrorists who’d been issued visas by the State Department to attend Stoner’s convention the weekend before the Black day-care center exploded.

“Faulty boiler,” city hall said. Black vets, other community workers, as well as a number of tenants who’d spotted white men on the roof of the day care, said otherwise. “Not related,” said the six o’clock news, quoting the mayor and Commissioner Brown. But enough people felt a connection between the observation “white men on the roof” and the old question “Who would kill Black children?” to give the media a lead.

“Clean bill of health,” came the announcement from the governor’s mansion in spring after a three-week look at Georgia Klans. “Hothead,” said the reporters, quoting no one in particular, in response to Julian Bond’s outrage over the “whitewash” report. “War,” screamed the
Thunderbolt
and other fascist rags of the region when the National Anti-Klan Network was formed in Atlanta. “No connection,” said FBI director William Webster later that spring as Black citizen groups all over the country were documenting incidents of bigoted violence. “No evidence of conspiracy,” as various fight-back groups demanded that the Justice Department check into and stop the escalation of attacks throughout the country based on race, class, gender/sex, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation.

“Opportunists,” say the media when STOP persists in its efforts to ally with children’s rights lobbyists around the country. “Mercenary motives” and “limelight greedy,” the media says of the Atlanta parents. No one seems to remember anymore that prior to the arrest, a member of the Atlanta City Council, not totally persuaded by the Task Force version of the case(s), requested Lee Brown to submit by June 30 a list of all unsolved homicides in Atlanta. Suspect Wayne Williams was formally charged on June 22, making the report moot, as they say—that is, forgettable. Meanwhile, the slaughter continues.

Your daughter calls you from the pool. You close the notebook, rise, and look. Arms spread, legs wide, she’s facedown in the water, in a dead man’s float. Can you applaud?

A woman hands you the notebook you’ve dropped and you sit back down on the bench. Your daughter jackknifes under the water and kicks off. She swims under the rope like an arrow, surfaces, and turns to grin at you. Your joints settle back into position and you grimace a smile. Will you find your voice before she climbs out of the pool?

M
arzala Rawls Spencer prowled the living room. With each step, the shag carpet bristled. The upholstery crackled when she brushed against the furniture. Each time she rounded the room, the pinned choir robe slung over the chair reached out, electric, clinging to the shivering hairs on her arm. At the door, she thought she might go out again to look up and down Thurmond Street. A smear of Brasso on the knob warned her hand away from the metal. The shock came when she turned and faced herself in the full-length mirror propped against the sewing machine.

She leaned in, close to the mirror furry with grime. She had worried the fuzz escaping from her braids into corkscrews. Smudged mascara from the day before ringed her eyes like a raccoon’s. She looked feverish, her lips cracked and peeling, salt streaked across her breastbone. She looked about to boil over. He would stroll in, take one look, and know she had no good side to get on.

She set the mirror behind the sewing table in case he burst in. The sweat-crusty piping of her tank top chafed her underarms. She stepped back, the mirror out of danger. Her wraparound skirt hung uneven, limp. She had walked all the starch out of it and felt clammy. But she was not going to shower and change. Let him see she’d been up all night waiting, up all night and still wearing her shoes. Her arches ached and her soles burned, but she was keeping the sandals on for the height of the heels. Any minute now it would be eyeball to eyeball. And he was not going to get over on her, not this time.