The Atlanta Child Murders: The Night Stalker.

• Author: Badawy, Rami S.
• Position: Book review

BETWEEN JULY 1979 AND JUNE 1981, 30 boys and young men were abducted from the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, and its surrounding communities and murdered by strangulation; their bodies dumped in wooded areas or rivers. The killings sparked a massive statewide manhunt, at times numbering over 100 members of various law enforcement agencies. Georgia was a state under siege. Fearful parents viciously shielded their children from the outdoors, even during the hottest summer months. The Atlanta child killer terror ballooned throughout the United States.

As an eight-year-old living in central New York state in 1981, I was not immune to the fear created by the Atlanta child killer. My younger brothers and I spent weekends cooped up inside playing board games instead of playing a game of Frisbee, hide-and-seek or visiting the local playground. When we did venture out to the supermarkets or malls of Syracuse, we would stay close to our parents' sides, my younger brother Shareef, who was two at the time, literally clinging to my mother.

In his book The Atlanta Child Murders: The Night Stalker, Jack Mallard, the lead prosecutor on this case, takes the reader back to this event that plagued the nation. From the discovery of the first victim in a wooded area in southwest Atlanta on July 28, 1979, Mallard walks us through the investigation. We learn who these young victims were and how they died; kids like Alfred James Evans, age 13, who was last seen alive in front of a public housing project waiting to catch a bus to see a movie on Peachtree Street; and Milton Harvey, age 14, who disappeared after being sent on an errand. Mallard walks the reader through the investigation, describing how frustrated detectives turned to advice from psychics and famed astrologist Jean Dixon. Ultimately, Mallard tells us how a four-man surveillance team hears a splash in the Chattahoochee River--the break in the case that leads to the arrest of Wayne Williams. Mallard shows us how a serial killer emerges as William is questioned for over an hour and later released during the early morning hours of May 22, 1981.

What does it feel like to be the first chair in the "trial of the century?" To make decisions that the entire world will second-guess? Mallard, an experienced homicide prosecutor at the time, takes us behind the scenes as the case against Wayne Bertran Williams proceeds.

Williams, an aspiring radio disk jockey in his early twenties, lived with his parents who were...