The Killings (6 page)

So, one night, after Mr. Jeremiah had brutalized him, he had gone to Grandma to tell her what Mr. Jeremiah was doing. And she put a stop to it. To all of it. On the night he’d finally gone to her for help, Mr. Jeremiah butchered his own family with a sickle from the woodshed. Then he used that sickle to cut his own throat. It took his mother a long time to find another job after that. They’d had no choice but to move in with Grandma Sable. Grandma hadn’t been happy. The arguments began almost immediately.

“This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t thrown your legs up in the air for that White man. I done tole you that Negroes don’t need to be messin’ ‘round with White folks. You know how many years we had to put up with them beatin’ us and rapin’ us and we couldn’t do a damn thing about it? Now you out there givin’ it to ‘em!”

Grandma’s anger was righteous. It was something dark and terrifying, a demon lurking just beyond the surface of her retinas, restrained only by Grandma Sable’s will. His mother was cowed by it. He remembered her crying, trying to make Grandma Sable understand how much she’d loved Mr. Johnson, weeping for her lost baby, the life she had working for Mr. Johnson, and the life she’d imagined as his wife. Grandma Sable replied with more venom.

“I’d rather see you dead than getting bed down by that White man. You ain’t nothin’ but a no good hussy!”

He remembered his mother’s hurt face; he remembered feeling that his grandmother was right. She was always right. If his mother hadn’t made a baby with Mr. Johnson they’d still be living there. They’d still be happy. The memories turn to violent dreams, fantasies of blood and screams and viscera. In his sleep he smiled, surrounded by oceans of blood. The screams become a chorus, singing to him. He is the master conductor bringing the shrieks of anguish to a roaring crescendo with each wave of his blade as he slashes and cuts-

The killer awakened from his dreams of the past like a man rising from the bottom of a deep well, gasping for air in a panic as he claws his way to the surface. He felt his heart pounding in his chest like a fist punching against his ribs. He felt like he was in cardiac arrest. It was a familiar feeling. The Fury was awake, and it was hungry. He felt the rage building, felt the murder lust taking over his thoughts. It was maddening and there was only one way to satisfy it.

He rose from the bed and picked up his jacket, hat, and his razor and strap. His hands shook as he sharpened the razor against the strap in frantic haphazard motions, barely paying attention to what he was doing, already seeing the sharp steel as it would look cutting through dark skin, the silver metal glistening with blood. He dropped the strap and hurried out of the house, out into the night, still hearing the chorus of screams in his head, eager to add another voice to it.

SIX

July 20, 2011, Atlanta, Georgia

Carmen left the Georgia State Prison in Hancock County and made the long, two-hour drive from Sparta back to Atlanta. Her silver Nissan Altima was on cruise control, doing seventy mph down the I-20 freeway. Carmen’s thoughts were still on her visit to the penitentiary. Wayne Williams’s carefully constructed non-confession echoed through her mind as she stared at the road. It was difficult to divide the bullshit from the truth, but Carmen was certain there were granules of truth scattered amongst the alibis and ass-covering. The convicted murderer suspected of killing more than two dozen children had continued to profess his innocence even as he recounted his bizarre experience with the impossibly ancient woman who’d died more than thirty years ago, Grandma Sable.

The digital recorder she had used to tape the conversation sat on the seat beside her. She leaned over and pressed rewind before pressing the play button.

Wayne Williams’s voice filled the interior of the vehicle. It was an eerie feeling, like the child murderer was right there, riding along with her.

“... she didn’t live in my neighborhood. She lived a few blocks away, but we all knew about her. You know ... people talk.”

“What did they say?” Carmen heard herself ask.

“They said she put a curse on all of us. The rumor was that her granddaughter had been messin’ around with this White man who got her pregnant, and Grandma Sable was pissed off about it, so she put a curse on any Black folks who stray outside their race, but the curse got out of control.”

“How? What do you mean it got out of control?” Carmen asked.

“I mean she unleashed some kind of evil, a demon or something, and it didn’t just stick to the people she wanted dead. It would possess people and feed on their hate, you know? It would transform, and the evil would go after whoever the person it was possessing wanted to kill. That’s what I think happened to all those kids they say I killed. I think that evil that Grandma Sable unleashed? I think it got into someone who had a thing for little boys and it made that person crazy. It just kept whispering all these crazy things in that person’s head, you know? Until one day he couldn’t take it no more and started doing things he might have been dreaming about. You know, fantasizing about, but never would have done without that Fury inside of him. I think that Fury that Grandma Sable conjured up, I think it drove somebody crazy and made him do things he wouldn’t have done, you know?”

“Fury? Why do you call it a fury?”

“I don’t know. I think that’s what I heard her call it once. That’s how I think of it anyway. Just this fury that comes over people and makes them kill. That’s what was loose in Atlanta in 1979, ‘80, and ‘81 and that’s what’s loose now. It’s never stopped. It’s been killing ever since she unleashed it a hundred years ago.”

“So what happened when you spoke to her? Did she confirm those rumors?”

“I was just a little kid then. I didn’t ask her about all that directly. I was too afraid. I went to see her just before she died. I was spending the night at a friend’s house and they went to see her and took me along with them. She lived in a little shack behind one of the houses in the neighborhood a few blocks from me. Been living there for years. She used to be the servant of the original family that had the main house. I couldn’t believe how old she looked. She was like a skeleton, an old brown wrinkled bag of bones. She had white eyes, you know, cataracts? In both eyes. Her hair was completely white and all her teeth were gone. She scared the hell out of me, looked just like a witch. She gave me some candy and sat there telling us all stories about slavery days. That’s how I knew she was really old. She remembered being a slave. She said she learned magic from the other slaves to keep the massa away from her. To keep him from rapin’ her. Then she looked down and started wringing her gnarled fingers. I remember I thought her fingers looked like tree roots. That arthritis had twisted them so bad. She had this real sad expression on her face, just staring down at her hands with those blind eyes. Finally she looked up at me and I could swear she could see me, even through the cataracts. It was like she was looking right through me. She said she’d used the same magic on her grandson to keep White folks from hurtin’ him and his mother, but that she had made a mistake. She said that, and then a tear rolled down her cheek. She didn’t look so scary after that. She just looked like a sad old woman. And she looked scared then. She looked terrified. Whatever it was she’d done, it scared the hell out of her.”

“How old were you then, Wayne?”

“I was only ten or eleven. I might have even been nine.”

“So that was in the late sixties then?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Slavery ended in 1865, Wayne. If she remembers being a slave, Grandma Sable would have had to have been well older than a hundred.”

On the tape was a long silence followed by some shuffling noises and the sound of someone clearing his throat.

“Uh huh. Yeah, she was pretty old.”

The recording ended. Carmen continued to mull over Wayne’s words. She knew there was no way Grandma Sable could have been old enough to have been a slave. But she had mentioned having a granddaughter.
Could it have been possible that it wasn’t Grandma Sable Wayne had spoken to when he was a kid, but her granddaughter impersonating her? But why? Why would she want everyone to believe that she was her own grandmother?

It didn’t make sense, but neither did the other possibility, that the old woman Wayne had spoken to as a child really was well over one hundred-twenty years old.

Carmen was driving on autopilot, barely aware of the other vehicles around her, while her mind labored over the murders. Too much of what Wayne Williams had said made sense. Either Wayne was innocent, which she doubted, or there were two murderers or a long series of murderers stretching back a century in a nearly unbroken chain.

The sunset burned across the horizon. The reds, yellows, and oranges looked like blood and viscera, a deluge of gore bleeding from the sky. Carmen imagined she could hear the screams of young children and young women, countless victims murdered by whatever dark force haunted Atlanta’s African American neighborhoods. She had found evidence of serial murders in Atlanta going back as far as 1909, including the case of “the Atlanta Ripper,” who’d made headlines in 1911 and 1912 with the murders of nearly two dozen Black women.

Right before the Atlanta Child Murders made national news, another string of murders beginning in 1978 went virtually unnoticed. The bodies of thirty-eight African American women were found shot, strangled, or stabbed, and authorities believed the true death toll to have been at least double that. As Carmen dug deeper, she’d found that not five years had gone by without some evidence of serial homicide in Atlanta’s African American community. The murders were scattered all over Atlanta, not concentrated in any one neighborhood, but they were all African Americans.

The shocking thing was, no one else seemed to notice. Every so often, someone was arrested and convicted of the murders, but they never stopped. Occasionally, the MO changed. The victims changed from women to young boys to young girls to transvestites to prostitutes and back. The cause of death in each series of killings sometimes changed from a severed jugular to strangulation to shootings to stabbings. But the killing never stopped. Now there were fourteen women dead courtesy of an unidentified subject the police were quietly referring to as “the Atlanta Lust Murderer.” It made no sense ... unless what Wayne Williams told her was true and there was a curse alive in Atlanta’s Black community, a curse that began with an old former slave named Grandma Sable who may have been close to one hundred-twenty years old when she died in the late 1960s, making her the oldest woman in recorded history. But the curse had not died with her; it was still alive and well and working its murderous evil.

A shudder went through Carmen. Goosebumps rose on her skin. She tried to imagine treating this case like a normal news story - spending weeks investigating it only to have it amount to a twenty minute story forgotten with the next big headline. Even if they made some kind of weeklong special out of it, then what? The police may be galvanized into action. Someone might get arrested. Maybe even a few of the old crimes would finally get solved. But Carmen had little doubt that the murders would continue. After the last guilty verdicts were handed down, the books closed, the evidence stored away, the last sensational headlines, tabloid TV news stories, and pulp crime novels written, there would be more dead African Americans. Of that she was certain. There had to be a way to finally stop the killings forever.

There had to be a way, but Carmen had no idea how.

Carmen heard the
bumpity bumpity bump
of her car veering across the line of highway reflectors into opposing traffic. She jerked the steering wheel, overcorrecting and nearly sideswiping a Hummer traveling in the lane beside her. The driver leaned on his horn and shot Carmen his middle finger as he passed her.

“Fuck!” Carmen cried out. She swallowed hard and tried to catch her breath, which had sped up so that she was almost hyperventilating. She considered pulling to the side of the road to compose herself but thought better of it. She was almost back in Atlanta, and besides ... there was an unsolved series of murders on the I-20 too.

SEVEN

July 20, 2011, Atlanta, Georgia 

The neighborhood watch was led by a large Black woman named Glenda Carter. Its ranks had swelled since the murders began. She had called for an evening vigil and more than half the neighborhood - nearly three hundred men, women, and children - had turned out in support, marching through the historically Black neighborhood of Old Fourth Ward with lighted candles and flashlights. They were not just patrolling. It was a protest against police inaction and media apathy regarding the murder spree currently threatening the women in their community. Tonight they were out to make a statement. There would be no killings this evening.

It had worked. The street was full of police officers, following the marchers to make sure everything remained civil. News cameras followed their every move, and reporters interviewed whoever they could.

The protestors called out for the chief of police and the mayor to do something about the murders.

Mrs. Carter led the chant. “No more killings! No more killings! No more killings!”

Beside her, her son, Michael, smiled. Later he would slip away to Dekalb County while the police were busy in the Old Fourth Ward watching the protestors and keeping the peace. There was a young lady he knew over there, a beautiful young woman named Alicia Meyers whose father worked for a law office downtown and whose mother worked for an advertising firm. Her father was White and the mother was Black, and if he didn’t do anything, Michael was certain Alicia would follow in her mother’s footsteps. But Michael was going to do something. He was going to do a lot.

EIGHT

July 21, 1911, Downtown, Atlanta, GA

The police headquarters on Decatur Street was an imposing stone structure with Romanesque columns and a large stone archway at its entrance. Several White officers were lined up outside the police station, handing out fliers to every colored man who passed.