The Atlanta Child Murders: Twenty-Nine Victims and Open Questions

Between nineteen seventy-nine and nineteen eighty-one, twenty-nine Black children, teenagers, and young adults were murdered in Atlanta. The killings concentrated in the city's poorest Black neighborhoods, on the south and southwest sides, in areas where children walked to school and played in parks within blocks of where their bodies were found.

The Atlanta Police Department initially treated the deaths as separate incidents. It was organizing by the mothers of the victims, particularly a group that came to call itself the Committee to Stop Children's Killings, that forced the city to acknowledge a pattern and establish a task force. The task force was eventually funded with federal money and staffed at its peak by more than a hundred investigators.

Wayne Bertram Williams was arrested in June of nineteen eighty-one after police watching a bridge saw him in a car and heard a splash. He was tried for two of the murders, both adults, and convicted in February of nineteen eighty-two. Officials later attributed roughly twenty-two to twenty-four additional child murders to him, without filing charges in those cases. He has been in prison since.

Criminologists, investigative journalists, and families of the victims have disputed the case in the decades since. Some investigators have argued that the physical evidence in some of the child cases does not match Williams. In two thousand nineteen, Atlanta authorities authorized DNA retesting in several cases, with additional testing authorized in two thousand twenty-one. The results of that testing are not established in the publicly accessible record as of mid-twenty twenty-six. The full account of who killed the twenty-nine people, and whether all of those deaths are accounted for in the Williams conviction, is not settled.

The mothers who organized to force official acknowledgment are the ones who made any investigation possible.