Atlanta Monster: How Racial Tension is Portrayed Throughout the Podcast

It’s the summer of 1979, and the city of Atlanta, Georgia was thriving.  The city was proudly rising to become the face of the South – that is, until kids started going missing. One by one, African-American kids seemed to disappear into thin air, only to be found dead days later – murdered by the serial killer who would become known as the Atlanta Monster. Two years passed, 28 more people went missing, and mothers in Atlanta lived in fear of their children becoming the next victims. Pressure overwhelmed the Atlanta police department, and as they repeatedly came up empty-handed, racial tensions began to rise. While the public thought it was obvious that a white member of the Ku Klux Klan has committed these crimes, police were convinced otherwise. With much-needed help from the FBI, the police finally seized who they believed was the Atlanta Monster – a 22-year-old African American man by the name of Wayne Williams. What’s disturbing was that he could only be positively linked to two of the 28 murders, leaving 26 of the children’s cases unresolved. The police attributed all the murders to him anyways, and closed majority of the other murder cases surreptitiously. The city of Atlanta swept the entire issue under the rug to save face, but affected families were left wondering if they caught the right man. “Atlanta Monster” takes listeners back 40 years, and puts them in the heart of the crime investigation.

              A main focus of the podcast is the effect that racial tensions had on the investigation during this time. Families were convinced that the perpetrator had to be a white male, but the police had nothing to support that claim. Or any claim, for that matter. Outraged that police wouldn’t listen to their pleas, neighborhoods across Atlanta banded together and protested investigation methodologies. This made it difficult for the police department to proceed with the investigation in any way, forcing them to contact the FBI. This wasn’t received too well by the public either, considering the FBI sent their Behavioral Science Unit – a unit that was dedicated to studying and catching serial killers, which was a relatively new and unsettling idea. But even with the authority of the FBI, investigators were struggling to get past the fear-driven fury of the public.

              The way the podcast conveys this racial tension is by purposely intertwining interviews from different sides of the story. The podcast begins with a few interviews from African-American locals who resided in Atlanta during the killings, who explain the overwhelming fear that the town faced. This is exemplified when Calinda Lee, who was a child at the time of the killings, explains the feeling of fear and helplessness the city faced. She said, “I remember as a child, the whispers and chatter among children that there was a real-life boogey man out there. This was really happening. There was a child who went to summer camp with me who was one of the abducted children. And there wasn’t a sense that anything really serious was happening to protect us. There wasn’t a sense that anything about our daily lives was changing much except that we were very afraid, and our parents were very angry. Every single one of the kids were not only black, but poor. All of that definitely conspired to make folks feel like this is something that’s happening to the least of us, and nobody really cares.” Calinda’s statements are corroborated by Monica Coffman Pierce, who was a news anchor at the time. She relates to how Calinda said nothing was being done to protect them, and felt that the police weren’t doing their jobs. She explained, “The police weren’t looking for a murderer, they were profiling. They decided that a black man was who it was, when they should’ve kept their options open. I think any time you don’t open up and cast a wide net, you lose the opportunity of finding someone else who might’ve been involved. If you start out by saying ‘It has to be a black person who did it’ then that’s the reason why so many people in the black community thought it was the Klan.”

              Soon after these statements were presented in the podcast, they interview a former FBI agent named Jim Percopio who explains the problems the public created for them. He said, “When the FBI got involved in these cases, there was extreme tension brewing in Atlanta. Of course the blacks wanted it to be somebody white and the whites wanted it to be somebody black, but our profilers said that serial killers rarely cross racial lines. They kill within their own race. And, all these kids were black. If there was a crime scene, then the media there would just be unbelievable. And with all of the attention this case was getting, it was almost impossible to get into a predominantly black neighborhood and not be challenged or approached if you were white.” Clearly, Percopio was upset by how limited the investigation was by the anger and interference of the public. And by strategically layering the interviews from the public and the police, the podcast created a sense of tension for the listener (namely racial tension in this case.) Even though these people weren’t talking to each other, the staggering of their viewpoints makes it seem as though the listener is in the middle of their argument and frustration with one another. This technique adds complexity to the podcast, and drives it further into the story. It makes the listener feel involved, and therefore intrigued about how the story will continue.

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