Talk:Atlanta murders of 1979–1981/Archive 1

Added content
Someone appears to be adding content to this page incrementally, so although it's obviously not complete, perhaps the rest will appear later. To the person submitting the new material: welcome to Wikipedia, and thanks for the material. However, could you please not remove the and  that I'm adding to selected phrases? These produce links to other Wikipedia articles. Also, you may want to have a look at How_to_edit_a_page for some advice on writing for Wikipedia, and Neutral_point_of_view.

Have fun!

Karl Naylor 16:54, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I say we tabulate
OK, a thought that occurs. This is looking like it's going to end up listing all the victims and eventually the name of the man imprisoned for them. Since there are so many victims it might be an idea to make a table of name, date disappeared, date found..? The extra information on where they were headed when they went missing and so on doesn't seem too relevant for an encyclopedia article -- anything specially significant (patterns established by police, racial motivation etc.) could be discussed separately.

Any objections, reactions? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Karl Naylor (talk • contribs) 14:02, 8 March 2004 (UTC)

I added a table. It includes the victims' names, ages and when they went missing. I will go back and add the dates when they were found too. Plus I was thinking of deleting all the stuff that is numbered, since it looks too much like Crime Library's article. And plus this is an encyclopedia article, and information in encyclopedia articles should be easy to find. In order to find information in this article the way it's written right now, it makes it a little difficult. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eric Ashford (talk • contribs) 22:00, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

A good source
Recent coverage in the Atlanta Journal Constitution is collected here, although this link will probably become inoperable at some point. Ellsworth 23:37, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

This article
This is a very important subject, so I am very disappointed that this article is, frankly, as bad as all this. I would write it over myself but I do not have the time right now (moving and such) to give it the care it deserves. The article basically looks like a haphazard "rewrite" and copy bit from this. Mike H. That's hot 00:25, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. I noticed that a few sentences seem to be lifted directly from the Crime Library article, which is pretty badly written to begin with. --Sklero 11:20, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

OK, I cleaned this article up a lot. Let me know what you think. And can someone include some photos in this article? Eric Ashford

It's not right to refer to the "Atlanta Child Killer." We don't know that it is any one person. The judge's name is not "Judge Clarence." It's Judge Clarence Cooper. And what's up with the article saying "last month" there toward the end? This is an encyclopedia, not the news. 74.224.126.123 03:14, 3 February 2007 (UTC) I think it's important that this criminal is never portrayed as a victim

Shouldn't the opening state that the murders occurred from 1981....? It says 1991 to 2001 which is totally wrong; Wayne Williams was long since in jail before the 1990s...... --Solarfox 19:02, 18 August 2007

Recent Conclusions
Although technicly correct, I think that the last line of the article is unfair. Although the dna testing was done, and the end result was that the courts did not change the guilty plea, the results of the dna test were actualy inconclusive, not positive as the article implies. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jjohns37 (talk • contribs) 20:49, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree. Will rephrase.Plumsforsale (talk) 10:08, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

The atlanta child murders began in july 1979 and lasted through 1981, these days were the darkest days in atlanta. Random children began missing and from weeks to months their boddies would show up. most of the victims in this case were young male african americans,the accused suspect was wyane williams. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.184.103.191 (talk) 23:40, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

The Recent Developments Section says:


 * After Wayne's conviction in 1982, over the next twelve years there was a string of unsolved child and adolescent murders in and around the Atlanta area, similar to the murders for which Wayne was convicted.

A citation is needed; Moreover, it would be helpful to know if these other cases been solved? How similar are they? Ileanadu (talk) 00:59, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

The other cases if I'm remembering right were similar to the two female victims that were added to the list of victims, but they were added by the public originally, because at the time there was an outcry that all the child murders had to be done by the same person. The police never believed the famale victims were part of the Atlanta Child Killings though, so the arguement that more murders happened after is really irrelevent, not to mention that it's been known to happen where a high crime area sometimes has more than one serial killer active at one time.--GreatAdthulhu (talk) 03:14, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

No MO?
There is nothing here about the MO of the killings or how the police came to the conclusion that it was all the same killer. The article doesn't even say how the victims were killed. I'll see what I can find, but I'm no expert on this subject. Someone who knows a lot about it might want to add this information. nut-meg (talk) 04:40, 28 June 2008 (UTC) the killings was later places on the man wayne williams

There was an MO to some extant, although most people over rate what an MO is. An MO is simply what a criminal does, and can change from crime to crime as they learn from past mistakes. For example in the Nightstalker case at one point it was thought that five different people were responsible for those crimes, but when the police began noticing the same shoe prints at crimes it changed their thinking. They began to think of the Nightstalker as a serial killer without an MO. Most of the victims were strangled or aphixyated, while one was shot and dumped next to another victm, atleat two were stabbed, some strangled with cords or ligatures, and others suffocated some how. Most of the Atlanta Child Killer victims were linked early on do to public outcry, because an alarming number of children had turned up dead, and people in the area all believed that they were killed by the same man, even though it wasn't possible to know. Then under pressure from the public to investigate them as a serial killer case the police started the investigation. The early victims were all children or preteens. The police did start to believe later on though that atleast one killer had murdered most of the victims, and found similar fibers and hair on many of the victims. Then later on as parents started becoming overly protective of their children in the area the killer began killing smaller weaker adults. Many of them were short in height. One of them was short and mentally handicapped, and was possibly mistaken for a child by the killer, and another was very short and drunk when he was murdered again possibly being mistaken for a child.--GreatAdthulhu (talk) 02:57, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Just sayin'
About writing quoted speech: it's usual in reportage etc that if a statement is unclear when quoted, square bracket inference can be inserted so that say, it's clear what the person meant. Imho, this example isn't necessary to make the person more erudite than they are: "...we will continue to pursue the [other] cold cases that are [with]in our reach." because the statement makes sense already and speech isn't necessarily syntactical. If no-one objects I could change it to stand as is, but I don't know if the quote is direct from a report that overpolished/ tweaked it already. Manytexts (talk) 08:59, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

I'll add this here, since "Just sayin'" would seem to cover it. This may not be a true story, but it continues to pop up: During the height of the Atlanta Child Murders, an Atlanta morning radio show DJ team were interrupted by a news bulletin that the body of yet another child had been found. When the news report ended, they supposedly came back on the air and played "Another One Bites the Dust." After a huge audience uproar, they were fired. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.147.118.227 (talk) 04:36, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Dog hair
Reading this article, it seems mystifying what the relevance is of the dog hair in the car. It hardly seems surprising that a man's dog might have been in his car, so it'd be nice to have some explanation of why this was considered important evidence. 24.214.230.66 (talk) 16:36, 30 October 2011 (UTC)