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Well, let's see where this goes: DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham has reopened the investigation of the six Atlanta Child Murders that occured in his jurisdiction.

Graham investigated four of the child murders while serving as the assistant police chief in Fulton County at the time of the killings. Now, as police chief in a neighboring county, he has vowed to probe the DeKalb County cases at any price.

"This is not a matter of cost. This is the matter of the right thing to do," Graham said. He has appointed four detectives and one sergeant to review the cases and has given them no timeline to complete the task.
"They will take as long as necessary and if we come up with a conclusion, so be it. If not, so be it," said Graham.

Between July,1979 and May, 1981, 29 black youths, almost all boys, were murdered, mostly by asphyxiation, and possibly while being sexually assaulted. (Though Chet Dettlinger, a former assistant to Atlanta's Police Chief, claims 63 other "pattern" victims were left off the official list attributed to convicted Wayne Williams, 25 of whom were killed after Williams' arrest.) Judging by analysis of stomach contents, many children had spent enough time with their captors to be fed, and a number of their bodies were found dressed in a change of clothes. The sexual organs of many were missing. According to a medical examiner, around one boy's stab wound to the belly were five ceremonial cuts. A number of parents contended that when they identified their children's remains, they saw crosses carved into their foreheads and chests. (From the "Atlanta" excerpt of EIR's report on Satanism.)

Vice President George HW Bush "took an active role in the investigation," even visiting Atlanta to demand that "some action be taken." (In Programmed to Kill, David McGowan writes that Bush's visit was "ostensibly to coordinate federal and local efforts and to make sure the investigation stayed on track.") Soon after, the cases were closed when freelance photographer Williams was convicted of just two of them, on the strength of fibre evidence, found chiefly in his car. ( "My issue with the fiber evidence was and still is it is not conclusive, never has been and never will be," says Chief Graham.)

It's interesting to consider that Williams was a photographer. If the murders were the ritual sex slayings of a Satanic cult, it might be expected that a photographer would be somehow implicated, à la Rusty Nelson of the Franklin Cover-Up, for the production of child pornography. Also, the nature of the evidence against Williams, and the fact that he was a black homosexual, suggests he may have played a role in luring some of the victims to their deaths. Additionally, the EIR report claims that "information was made available to the defense team naming two police officers who were reportedly in Williams's Satanic group," though Satanism was not raised by either the defense or the prosecution.

One of the victims, Earl Terrell, disappeared after leaving a public swimming pool across from a house which was the headquarters of a child pornography ring. The owner of the house, John Wilcoxen, was later convicted for his part in the ring, though he was never considered a suspect in Terell's abduction, despite a witness having claimed to have seen Terrell at the house on several occasions. Lubie Geter, another victim, was also connected to Wilcoxen, as well as to another known paedophile who was in turn connected to later victim William Barrett. Three weeks after Geter's abduction his friend, Terry Pue, disappeared. When Pue's remains were recovered, police found what should have been a break in the case: fingerprints were found on his body. They did not belong to Williams. The prints remain unidentified.

But Clifford Jones would be the next to die after Terrell. His body was found beside a dumpster behind a laundromat. McGowan tells the story, in Programmed to Kill:

No fewer than three young witnesses reported seeing the laundromat manager, James Brooks, go into the backroom accompanied by a black male youth. One of them even saw the boy beaten, anally raped and strangled to death by Brooks and another man, Calvin Smith. Other witnesses saw Brooks, wearing a hooded ceremonial robe, carry a large object out to the trash where the body was later discovered. Brooks candidly admitted to police that the boy had been in the laundromat around the time of his death, but he steadfastly denied any involvement in the murder. Notably though, he failed two polygraph examinations. The police nevertheless cleared him as a suspect, claiming that the eyewitness to the killing was "retarded." They did not bother to explain all the other witness accounts or the failed polygraphs.

A number of independent investigations, such as those pursued by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), journalist Ira Liebowitz and author James Baldwin, uncovered many occult aspects to the crimes. A principal informant was a Miami cocktail waitress named Shirley McGill, whose story is eerily evocative of both the Matamoros Santeria drug cult and Henry Lee Lucas's tales of the Florida-based "Hand of Death".

In 1977, claims McGill, she became involved with a Miami cab driver named Parnell Traham, a Vietnam vet who was also an occultist and drug trafficker, whose trade included hubs in Georgia and Texas. (Witnesses to one child's abduction identified Traham as the driver of the car.) He recruited McGill to keep the books, and she moved to Atlanta.

The drug operation took cellular form: members of one cell would not know the identities of those in another. McGill says that, in Atlanta, she was introduced to an inner, controlling circle of Satanists.

More from the EIR report:

In March of 1980, she was invited to a ceremonial ground in Atlanta. She was instructed to wear a long dress, with a scarf covering her head, but not to wear undergarments. An initiation ceremony took place, in which dope was smoked and there was some sexual activity. According to her account, McGill sought to keep her distance from the cult activities. When she did attend ritual ceremonies, she would volunteer to act as a guard on the perimeter of the area.

While the members of the drug network with which she was involved were black, the high priest during the occult ceremonies was a white man, and white and black would participate in the rituals. The high priest would appear naked, wearing goat horns on his head, and would seem to appear from a cloud of smoke. A ring of candles would create a kind of altar, and these were placed surrounding the statute of a short, fat, seated man. The ceremonies which she witnessed included animal and human sacrifice, which included slitting the victim's throat and then drinking his or her blood from a chalice. The sexual orgy which would follow, included having sexual relations with animals. After this, people would bathe in a body of water adjacent to the ceremonial grounds.

McGill identified several outdoor sites where rituals were held. Funeral homes were frequently used to dispose of bodies, which were placed in the closed coffins of people who were being buried from the funeral home. McGill also pointed out places from which the drug operations were run. One was a machine shop, another a barn or warehouse, and there was also a house.

McGill related three incidents which occurred apart from these ceremonies, one of them in a barn. A black man dragged what appeared to be a dead black child into the barn by a rope tied around the child's neck. Various individuals tried to get McGill to pull the rope but she refused. The child's body was then placed in the trunk of a car. On another occasion, McGill was working in the machine shop, when two men brought in a young black child who was bound. The boy knew McGill and appealed to her for help. He told her that he would be killed because he had withheld money from the sale of drugs. Later she witnessed his murder, when a plastic bag was placed over his head. On another occasion she saw on the floor of the barn a naked child, who appeared to be dead.

When CORE presented McGill's story to the press in April, 1981 it was roundly derided as absurdly sensationalist. This rush to judgement didn't change after she passed two polygraphs, repeated her story under hypnosis and was declared sane by psychiatrists. McGowan adds that McGill was also able to lead investigators to remote sites that displayed evidence they had been used for ritual ceremonies.

There was little serious interest in pursuing McGill's allegations. It was simply too much to believe. Never mind that a few months before, an anonymous call led police to an abandoned home in Atlanta's southwest.

Here's McGowan again:

Neighbors that were questioned reported strange comings and goings at odd hours. Investigators reported being sickened by an odor "like decaying flesh," though no bodies were found. Detectives did find children's clothing, along with an ax, a hatchet, and two bibles nailed to the wall - both opened to passages on human sacrifice. Professor Carl Raschke has written that, in the neighborhoods where the killings occurred, "a number of children have told police about satanic sex abuse in which, they insist, they were compelled to drink both animal and human blood." Some months after McGill came foward, searchers stumbled upon a ritual site littered with the carcasses of slaughtered animals. Prominent features of the site included a stone altar stained with blood and a twelve-foot-high charred cross.

What seemed incredible 25 years ago may not seem so today. After all, in the meantime, we've had 25 years of unbelievable truths to digest. An occult underground of paedophiles and drug traffickers, operating with the apparent protection of elements of the state, plus a special appearance by George Herbert Walker Bush? Well, knock me over with a feather.

The anti-gay rights Republican mayor of Spokane would appear to be a serial homosexual pederast. John Bolton reportedly forced group sex upon his first wife, who eventually fled him in terror. And whatever, and whoever, else he has been, "Jeff Gannon" was a male prostitute who enjoyed unrivalled White House access. And this is the mainstream news. Is it weird enough for you yet?

There's no reason anymore why our incredulity should be an arbiter of the truth. Most of us, I expect, lead what could be called normal lives. There are things outside our experience of which we cannot conceive. And yet they happen. If we can't conceive of them now, that's simply a failure of imagination.

"This is the matter of the right thing to do," says DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham. And good luck to him.

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