The Killings Read online

  “... 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.

  Robert walked up and took a flier from one of the officers. Robert had seen the fliers appearing in his neighborhood.

  “You want to join the police force, boy?” one of the officers asked. He was a young, red-haired man with freckles who looked like he barely weighed a hundred pounds. He had a large bucktoothed smile and an unpleasant gleam in his eyes. He was twirling a police baton absentmindedly in one hand while handing out fliers with the other.

  Robert looked at the flier. They were looking for colored men to join the Atlanta Police Department, but it wasn’t exactly what Henry had told him or what the colored pastors and businessmen had been calling for. The flier said the Atlanta Police Department was hiring “undeputized security” to patrol the Negro community for clues leading to the arrest of the Ripper, for which they would pay a weekly stipend of ten dollars.

  Robert looked at the redheaded officer and asked, “Excuse me, sir. What does ‘undeputized security’ mean?”

  The officer smirked and looked down his nose at Robert. It was the type of superior expression Robert had seen on the faces of Whites all his life. He wished he had a moment alone in a dark alley with this bucktoothed bastard. He’d wipe that sanctimonious smirk off his face in a heartbeat and leave the little shit choking on his own blood. The thought put a smile on his face.

  “That means that y’all ain’t gonna be no real policemen. It means y’all have to call a real officer when you want someone arrested, but you can interview witnesses and report suspicious activity and such.” That meant they would not have guns or badges but would be placed into some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. Robert felt his stomach roll.

  “I thought y’all were hiring detectives?”

  Robert saw the fire leap into the officer’s eyes. The redhead’s lip curled back and his eyebrows furrowed. He stepped forward and poked Robert in the chest with his nightstick. “Now look here, boy! Ain’t no way we’s hiring no nigger detectives. I ain’t even a detective yet! You want to help us catch this killer? You sign up and never mind all this nonsense about being a damn detective!”

  It took all the willpower within him to resist putting his fist through the policeman’s dental work, but Robert knew what would happen to him were he to let his temper get the better of him. It was only five years ago that angry mobs were lynching colored folks right on this very street in broad daylight. Robert smiled, nodded, and began to turn away when an older White gentleman in shirt sleeves and suspenders with a gold shield pinned to his chest stepped forward with an outstretched hand.

  “My name’s Detective Douglas. Martin Douglas. What’s your name, son?”

  Robert looked at the detective’s hand like it was on fire. He tentatively reached for it as if afraid that it would burn him. Detective Douglas had large shocks of gray running through his slick black hair. It glistened with pomade. He smoked a hand-rolled cigarette and had hard eyes that focused intensely. He stared directly into Robert’s eyes without blinking until Robert finally accepted his outstretched hand.

  “My ... uh ... my name’s Robert, sir. Robert Jackson.”

  “You want to be a police detective, Robert?”

  The look in his eyes was genuine. Not mocking or challenging like the young red-haired cop.

  “Y-yes, sir.”

  “Well, Officer Lacey is right. We ain’t hiring colored cops right now. But what we have now is the next best thing. You can be an employee of the police department. You can help catch that bastard that’s killin’ all them colored women and make a pretty good wage doin’ it. Where else you gonna make ten dollars a week doin’ an honest man’s work?”

  “I own a barbershop. I do okay.”

  “Cuttin’ nigger hair?” Officer Lacey asked, laughing and sneering simultaneously. “You couldn’t pay me enough! What do you cut it with? An axe?”

  “Lacey. Why don’t you go out on patrol?” Detective Douglas said, turning to Officer Lacey. “You’re not needed here any more.” Detective Douglas’s voice remained calm and measured. It was difficult to tell if he was angry or not.

  Officer Lacey paused for a moment, staring at the detective’s face, looking for some clue to his superior’s temperament. When he found none, he scampered off with his tail tucked and his ears flat. “Yes, detective.”

  The detective was smiling again when he turned back to Robert. “Excuse the interruption. Like I was sayin’, there’s good money in upholdin’ the law. And you’d be a hero in your community if you helped us catch this maniac that’s been killin’ Negro women. So what do ya say?”

  Robert thought about it a moment. He wanted no part of it, honestly. Ten dollars a week was good money, even though he made twice that cuttin’ heads for a nickel a pop at his shop. Then there was the matter of Henry. He hadn’t said that it was mandatory, but he’d strongly suggested that Robert join, which was almost the same thing. And catching this maniac and becoming a local hero wouldn’t exactly be bad for business.

  “How many colored folks done signed up already?”

  “We’ve had about thirty or forty come through here. Mostly vagrants, criminals, and old church folks. We had a few young ‘uns try to sign up too. We’ve only accepted six Negroes so far.”

  Robert thought about that. “How many you need?”

  “We need at least a dozen. One for each neighborhood.”

  “Do we get motorcycles?”

  Robert knew the Atlanta police had just acquired motorcycles and motorized wagons. He’d always wanted to try one.

  But Detective Douglass chuckled good-naturedly and shook his head. “Uh, no, boy ... I mean ... uh ... Robert. We’ve only got a few of those. Most of our deputies are still on bicycles or on foot. You’d be on foot patrol if ya came on board.”

  Robert liked the detective. He seemed like a genuinely good guy, and he even tried not to call Robert “boy,” which, though Robert was used to hearing it from Whites, still felt demeaning.

&n
bsp; “Look ... Robert, you seem like a pretty nice fellow. You seem pretty smart too. You speak well, so you’ve obviously had an education. You been to one of them new Negro colleges?”

  Robert shook his head. “No, sir. I had to drop out of school in the tenth grade to work.”

  “Well, that’s a lot further than most of your kind get. What I’m gettin’ at is that if this thing is gonna work, we need smart Negroes like yourself out there. I know a lot of colored folks don’t trust the police and I can’t say I blame ‘em. It wasn’t but five years ago that we had those race riots down here. But there were a lot of us policemen trying to stop the killings. I know there were some of us that just stood around doin’ nothin’, but believe me, a lot of us were tryin’ to help, includin’ me. It’s hard to imagine that with guys like Officer Lacey on the force, and I can’t say there aren’t a lot of officers like him ‘round here. Lot of us don’t like the idea of being bullied by the press and the colored community into hiring Negro cops. But this here is a pretty good compromise, and you’ll have our full support if you come onboard. You’ve got my word on that.”

  Detective Douglas stuck out his hand. This time, the gesture looked far less threatening but no less ominous. Robert accepted his hand and felt the weight of the entire Negro community descend on him like a yoke.

  NINE

  July 21, 1911, Atlanta, Georgia

  Lately, he’s been remembering more. Especially about the night Ronald Jeremiah slaughtered his entire family.

  He was eleven when Grandma Sable put a stop to Ronald Jeremiah’s abuse.

  On nights the beatings got bad he would run through the fields in the middle of the night after all the other servants had fallen asleep, desperate to reach her little shack in the woods. Once there he would burst in, his emotions already racing high, and burst into tears. Grandma Sable was always awake when he came to the shack, and it didn’t matter what time during the night he happened to make his escape, she was always there to soothe his troubled spirit.