If there were ever a real-life cold case that cried out for a brilliant, obsessed investigator, it’s the Atlanta child murders of 1979 to 1981. Some 29 killings of black children, adolescents, and young men riveted the nation and almost tore apart the booming “City Too Busy to Hate” as Atlanta’s black community celebrated the election of the city’s first black mayor. In 1981, police arrested 23-year-old Wayne Williams, a freelance news photographer and self-styled music promoter, for the murder of Nathaniel Cater, 27. He was convicted, and authorities closed the remaining 28 cases. Hardly anyone was satisfied with this resolution, as a new five-part HBO documentary series, “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children,” shows, says a review in Slate. The first two episodes are available, and the remaining three will air on consecutive Sundays.
Still, there are a half-dozen different and incompatible ways of quarreling with it, Slate says. “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered” does justice to a few of the criticisms, and it provides a more cogent picture of the city, the time, and the crimes than an “Atlanta Monster” podcast did two years ago. The HBO series “succumbs to the imperatives of a plot-twist narrative. It seems driven more by the need to entertain than a desire to get at the truth,” Slate says. The series succeeds in portraying how the city’s black community experienced that terrifying two-year period, and the role that grassroots organizers played in forcing Atlanta’s newly integrated police force to take the murders more seriously. Victims’ relatives, journalists, people who were children at the time, and others speak about the dread that settled over black neighborhoods, and to their indignation that officials couldn’t seem to stop the killing or identify its perpetrator.