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Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.

Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast There and Gone. It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. But which victim was the intended target and why?

Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

What we have is raw news footage from WSB TV. We have 17,000 hours of raw news footage. So far, I've identified 614 clips, but we have about another 150 tapes to scrub through. The whole time I've been working on this collection, I've been thinking, "Someone, someday, someone is going to come along and do this." It was you guys. Step aboard our TARDIS. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Where are we going? Down to the sub-basement. High density storage vault. It's like a roller coaster. Yes, I can make it go fast if you'd like. It's a 30,000 square foot facility which we keep at 50 degrees Fahrenheit with a relative humidity of 30%. 32 feet from floor to the ceiling. Actually, the top of our ceiling there is the floor of the second floor.

Prior to us building this building here, it was a Native American settlement of some sort here. I understand what people have told me over the years. Everything is shelved down here by size and then by barcode. How many records do you think you guys have on the Atlanta Chalmers?

In Atlanta, another body was discovered today, the 23rd. At police task force headquarters, there are 27 faces on the wall, 26 murdered, one missing. We do not know the person or persons that are responsible, therefore we do not have the motive. From Tenderfoot TV and how stuff works in Atlanta. Like 11 other recent victims in Atlanta, Rogers apparently was asphyxiated. Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps on killing.

This is Atlanta Monster. Sketching back then wasn't what it is today. I mean, some of these sketches they come out with are better than photographs. Back then, you know, you worked with what you had and it was a pretty good sketch. We had a composite of it, of who this guy would be. What did it look like, do you remember? Well, it was a black male with bushy hair. I remember the composite sketch very well.

This is a folder of paperwork I kept from my time as the Administrator Coordinator of the Atlanta Child Murder Cases. It was an animosity between the local police and the FBI. One of the main things was the mayor, Maynard Jackson, he says, "I want every living FBI agent. My police department is basically incompetent and they can't solve it. We need the FBI to solve it." So he threw his department under the bus. None of us want to get involved because it looked like just a local mess.

This is Jim Procopio, but he goes by Popcorn. He worked for the FBI alongside Mike McComas during the time of the Atlanta child murders. Mike actually introduced me to him. Probably be interested in talking to Procopio. Yeah, Popcorn's a good guy. Now, if you can get into his treasure trove, he's got boxes of stuff.

Popcorn dealt with all the records and files in the FBI. And just like Mike McComas, he stressed the importance of a composite sketch they received early on in their investigation from a kid who told police that a man had tried to abduct him. Well, it was a black male with bushy hair. I remember the composite sketch very well. After interviewing the kid, they were able to form a detailed sketch of the suspect, a black male with bushy hair.

After only a few minutes with popcorn, you get the impression that this guy doesn't forget a thing. And it goes back to another cultural, socioeconomic issue. When Maynard Jackson became mayor, first black mayor in Atlanta, the first thing he said was, I want to make the police department more brown. The police department up at that time had some black officers, several who were majors and above,

but it was mainly a white police department. Well, when the white officers heard that, they saw the handwriting on the wall. If you were white, you're not going to rise rapidly in this department. It's going to be black. A lot of the older ones, they said, we'll see you. They retired. So consequently, they lost many of their senior officers. The best homicide investigator ever

Then they had a big cheating scandal in the police department. They found out that a lot of the black recruits in the police academy were given the answers to tests. So that was another major scandal. So the police department was left in 78, 79, 80, relatively new and inexperienced.

So I guess some of the homicide detectives were not that experienced, and they missed the signs that there were commonalities in the 8 to 10 to 12. They had, by the time the Bureau got in, they were up to 14. 10 found, 4 missing. Further, the FBI does not investigate murders. Murder is not a federal crime.

If it's committed on a government reservation, it is. If it's a certain federal authority, it is. If it's killed in a commission of a civil rights violation, it is. But we don't investigate. Bureau doesn't investigate murders like you have on the street every day. So we had no jurisdiction. We went to the Atlanta Police Department and says, here, we're here to help you. You know, we were greeted by, yeah, right, we want all your files. So I went through all the cases. We assigned...

You had two agents who were one agent per victim, and we had 14 of the victims at the time. So we said, go out and redo the case. Look through it. Give it a fresh look. Come back and tell us what you find. About 10 out of 12 of them come back and said, these look like local crimes. We were pretty much convinced that they were all local homicides that the APD had bungled. We didn't see any pattern. We didn't see anything.

The FBI, along with local police, were not convinced they were dealing with a serial killer. But as the death toll of black children was growing, they began to recognize similarities in the murders. It would start with a child going missing for days, weeks, and sometimes even months. And the FBI became involved in many of the searches. Popcorn recalled the first big search he was a part of. There were a thousand searches all over the city.

One place was Redwine Road in South Fulton County. If you go there today, it's right off 285. There's a huge shopping center with a Target and a whole bunch of stores. Back then, it was Woods. About 3 o'clock, the team down on Redwine Road says, we found skeletal remains. So everybody hauled, asked, and it was like being in Vietnam again. There were the news choppers overhead. They got wind of where we were. All the news choppers were overhead. So I got there about 5 o'clock.

And I'm walking and I parked my car in Redwiden Road and I walk in the woods and something catches my eye at 11 o'clock and I walk over and it was a skull and more human remains. So we had two human remains within 100 feet of one another. And this led to one of the most bizarre episodes. About 100 feet below both bodies, we found a Playboy magazine. It was that week's Playboy magazine. It came out

that Wednesday. This was Friday. So we found the Playboy magazine and there was a sticky substance between the pages. I'll let you decide what that was. So he immediately fantasized, the investigators. The killer came back, came down here to the site of the murders, masturbated, then took off. This is key evidence. We packaged it up, raced it out to the airport, gave it to the captain of a Delta Jet

heading for Washington, D.C. An agent picked it up as soon as the plane landed, rushed to the FBI laboratory. They gave it to the lab. They developed prints and identified the sticky substance. We didn't have any of the prints on file, so they sent it to the APD to look through their files. Within an hour, they identified the print.

So we went in, we arrested the guy, we searched his house. We brought him to the bureau, we polygraphed him, he passed the polygraph. "What the hell were you doing down there?" He says, "Well, my wife just had a baby. I went down there that afternoon." Now, during that time, we were part of the vice president of George Bush's task force. Everything I wrote went to a unit chief at the bureau, went to the director, to the attorney general, to George Bush. George Bush read it. So the one thing he asked us was,

Please don't tell my wife. We said, you goddamn idiot. Do you know the Vice President of the United States knows what you did when you went into the woods and you're worried your wife's going to find out? By the way, we codenamed that. It was known as the Wood Whacker. Popcorn's first big lead went nowhere.

Popcorn had found the bodies of 11-year-old Christopher Richardson and 11-year-old Earl Terrell. Christopher had been missing for eight months, and Earl had been missing for six months. To me, on the surface, these cases seemed open and shut. A Playboy magazine with semen on it was found near the bodies, with the suspect's fingerprints on it. But after an extensive interrogation, the suspect passed a polygraph test. And despite all the bizarre circumstances, the FBI was convinced that this man was not involved in the murders. So they moved on.

Both Popcorn and Mike McComas told me that when the FBI got involved in these cases, there was an extreme tension brewing in the city of Atlanta. Of course, the blacks wanted it to be somebody white and the whites wanted it to be somebody black. And I can't speak for the rest of the Bureau, but my partner and I, Larry Ellington, we talked about it a lot. First off, our profilers said that serial killers rarely cross races. They'll kill in their own race.

and all these kids were black. - Popcorn and McComas both mentioned FBI profilers, the people who formulate an idea of who the killer is, who the FBI should be looking for. And there was one characteristic that stood out to me immediately.

It had to be a black guy. A white man could not go into a black neighborhood, pick up a kid, put him in his car, and drive off without anybody seeing him. If there's a crime scene, then the media was just 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 or whatever if you were white. It just doesn't happen. In fact, when we went into black neighborhoods during the investigation, everybody on the street was out on their front porch as soon as we appeared in the neighborhood. There was one place that I think is gone now. It was a housing project. They had what they called the Bat Patrol. And these were adults that walked around with baseball bats and looking for suspicious characters or protecting the community, whatever. They call them the Bat Patrol.

We were over in this housing area. We had two young black kids that had supposedly seen something we thought. So Larry and I were tasked to go over and pick up these two children and their mother. So here we are in this, the brown Ford again, and Larry's driving, I'm in the passenger side.

And we have the mother sitting in the middle and the two black kids in the back seat near the windows. And two young boys, and I think they were like 10 or something, 8, 10, 12, I don't know, somewhere around there. And we didn't get two blocks before we were boxed in by about four, three or four different police cars. And we weren't proned out that it was coming to that before we finally got them to look at our identification, hey, we're FBI agents. Because somebody called in, there's two white guys with some black kids in the car.

So it was tough getting in and out of certain areas. And so we were kind of convinced this guy had to be Black. He had to be Black. We just couldn't figure out how he was getting them in the car. Was this a skewed opinion coming from only white males? Was it that impossible for a white person to walk around the inner city of Atlanta in the early '80s? I don't know. I asked Eric and Jasper Cameron. They grew up in Atlanta during that time. If anything, they would know. First, I felt like it had to be somebody that could move around in the community.

So therefore, I felt like it had to probably be somebody black or somebody who wouldn't draw suspicion. Because, you know, over there where we live, a white person walking around over there, they are going to be, you know, it's going to draw attention because that wasn't happening then. Now you go over there, it's like, you know, everybody. But back then, nah, you know, it would have drew too much attention. So I always felt like it probably was somebody who could move around

Pretty easy, you know, undetected without really causing a lot of suspicion. But not everyone agreed on that. This is Bernard Parks. He grew up in Atlanta, too, and was also a child at the time of the murders. There are certain guys that, you know, that they were around. I mean, you know, it was like there weren't a lot of white guys, right? But there were some. Yeah. I mean, like you grew up, you know what I'm saying? It's like, you know, one or two white guys that went to my school, right? That's just because their family didn't have no money.

So they were just around and so you kind of accepted them. But, you know, I always say, you know, they got cousins, they got friends, they got people that hung around and we accepted. It wouldn't have been normal, though, for in that time for a black guy just to walk up and be accepting of a white guy without somebody understanding what's happening. Right. I mean, it's just that just wasn't normal. I mean, you just question, period, because you're in my community and this ain't your community.

I asked Monica Pearson, the former news anchor in Atlanta. Her memory was crystal clear. They weren't looking for a murderer. They were profiling. They decided that that's what it was. And you have to keep all options open. I think anytime you don't open up and cast a wide net, you lose the opportunity of finding someone else who might be involved.

It's as simple as that. You have to look at all the possibilities. And if you start out by saying it has to be a black person who did it because these were black children, then that's the reason why so many people in the black community thought it was the Klan. I think that's short-sighted on their part because you could easily have a white man in that community dressed as black people dressed

And no one would notice him because he just looks like a black person. He's in this community. Now, most white people would not go into that community because they would stand out like a sore thumb. But if you assimilate from the walk to the clothing, to the attitude, to the speech, and don't say it can't be done. I'm just throwing it out there. I think that's short-sighted to say a white person couldn't do it.

From her perspective, the possibility of a white killer was ruled out way too quickly.

I couldn't help but think she made a great point. The one thing I remember most about the missing and murdered children, I still see that visual every day, is Maynard Jackson sitting there with piles of cash offering a reward for any information on who was committing these crimes. Here's $100,000, and it's all yours. Most gangster picture ever.

him sitting with that money on the desk. I think that's where they got the shot from for Ransom. Remember when Ransom came in with Neal Gibson, he put all that money on the table, and he was like, now I'm putting this bounty on you. That was Maynard's line.

I read about this over and over in my research. The reward money. It started with $100,000 from the city, but private donations, including one from Muhammad Ali, brought it to over $500,000. Today, that would be around $1.5 million. As Atlanta struggled to find the killer, the city needed more and more money. One solution was a benefit concert. Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away.

Frank Sinatra will be joining Sammy Davis Jr. on stage at the Atlanta Civic Center. The two figure to draw a standing room only crowd for the March 10 benefit concert to help the investigation into the crimes against Atlanta's children. The city held a huge benefit concert to raise money for the investigation at the Atlanta Civic Center. But the FBI was on high alert for the killer. I was convinced that that night he would respond to that. And I was convinced in my mind

that he would drop a body in the fountain right there. Frank Sinatra arrived here at Charlie Brown Airport just a few minutes before 6 o'clock. He's now on his way to the Atlanta Civic Center where he'll join Sammy Davis Jr. for tonight's benefit concert. Sammy Davis Jr. picked up a phone and volunteered to help Atlanta. Today, the superstar arrived here on his private jet. Such a horrendous tragedy as this affects, as I said, it certainly affects all of America.

I was there that night and we had cops and helicopters. There were cars everywhere, police cars everywhere. No one could have gotten in with a body.

It started with police dogs sniffing the entire Civic Center looking for explosives. The mayor's office called this routine. Were you guys prepared to catch somebody that night? Oh, hell yeah, that's where we roll out. Officials have been preparing for weeks for this night. Extra security guards have been hired and extra police officers have been put on patrol here with just one objective, to keep an eye on children.

It was overwhelming. The Atlanta Police Department out in full force. You had the GBI. I know the FBI was there. The task force. Everybody was there. There was no way anyone could have gotten in there and done anything. There were so many news people here coming from all over the world. Chicago, New York, Hamburg, London. So many they had to be regulated to a room in the basement. Meanwhile, upstairs, Atlanta's finest had started to arrive. But the high points of the show weren't outside. They were in here. Got the world on the street. Say no.

I've got this thing around... Didn't respond, didn't do anything. Got a lot of publicity, I thought he would respond, somehow he didn't. And while Sinatra was entertaining as he sang, he was most touching when he spoke. More of my tears are shed for the brothers and sisters and playmates of the victims to whom terror has become an unwelcome companion. And to all of the fine, decent people in Atlanta who are frightened by day and doubly frightened by night. You have my prayers, that is, and that it should pass...

without further bloodshed. The city as a whole was banding together to catch this killer. And every single law enforcement agency was working around the clock. All the murders were of black children from the inner city of Atlanta. And they were disappearing from their own neighborhoods and their own local hangouts. One popular place in the city at that time for kids to hang out was called the Omni, an arcade room with food and a movie theater.

But the Omni was also becoming a place where some kids were last seen. That's what we did. It was a game room in the Omni. And we literally would go to that game room and go to the arcades and all that. So that's what, like, video games and stuff. Like, that's what we did. We went to the Omni, hung out at the Omni.

Friday night, date night, get out of the house night, and the Omni is packed with youngsters. The Omni Complex, a mixture of fine stores, sporting events, movies, and game rooms. A popular place for the inner city kid to hang out. That's why the special task force became interested in the complex as a meeting place. Investigators first started looking for some type of connection back in February.

This sign went up today at Electronic America. The manager doesn't want anyone 17 or under in here once 7 o'clock hits. The owners realize such strict rules hurt their business, especially when their business attracts mainly teenagers.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down.

From unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal. This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me.

Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to.

Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. However, one murder of a crime boss sparked a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the mob.

It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Discover how law enforcement and prosecutors took on the mafia and together brought them down. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeartRadio, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. The first two episodes drop on August 22nd.

Plus, did you know that you can listen to the episodes as they come out completely ad-free? Don't miss out. Subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel today. Available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. ...ghoules and girls, and welcome to Haunting, Purgatory's premiere podcast for all things afterlife. I'm your host, Teresa. We'll be bringing you different ghost stories each week straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. ...

Some will be unsettling. When she was with her imaginary friend, she would turn and look at you and you felt like something else was looking at you too. Some unnerving. The more I looked at it, I realized that the some looked more like a claw, like a demon. Some even downright terrifying. The things that I saw, heard, felt in that house were purely demonic. But all of them will be totally true.

Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you live and get your podcasts.

The 1980s saw the rise in arcades and video games. But another trend, and one I didn't know about, was the 1980s fascination with psychics. In fact, psychics even played a role in the Atlanta child murders. I heard a lot of weird stories surrounding this case, but so far, this seemed the most bizarre. A true example of law enforcement grasping at straws. - Police are now working with more than one psychic to solve the cases of six murdered and six missing children.

This is how the nationally known psychics spent their Friday the 13th. They are visiting Atlanta courtesy of the National Enquirer. Yes, the same National Enquirer with those sensational headlines that can be seen at most supermarket counters. As the psychics scrambled through the woods where four of the 20 murdered children were found, psychic Mickey Dane of Miami kicked off her shoes. She asked reporters to feel how hot her feet were and then declared that two more bodies might be found nearby.

There is something here. Some child out there is trying to tell us to go further into this. Jonathan Bell, whose brother Yosef is among the victims, also served as a guide. A freelance artist was there too, sketching psychics' descriptions of suspects.

I do not care at this point what they think of me. I'm here to get the killer off the street if it takes one person or 5,000. My big thing is that if I have to do it alone, I will. I feel that they are afraid that if one person does it, how will they feel? And I can understand that, but I'm here more so for the children. And I do not want the reward money. That I will put in writing. I do not want the money. I'm not here for the publicity. I'm just like them. I want the killer off the street.

One psychic gave police and news stations a detailed description of who the Atlanta child murderer was. He knows in the daytime what he's dealing with, but at night he's not really sure. So he kind of stays to himself in his apartment. He has a television set. There's no guns up there, no nothing.

He's very smooth talking when he does talk, which is very seldom. And he's been seen by a lot of people. Oh, yes. There's no doubt in my mind that he's walked side by side probably some of the parents of these children. He's shrewd. He's methodical. You're not dealing with a guy with 164 IQ. He's clean. He's neat. He's above suspicion. You're dealing with a methodical, a man that's systematic but angry now.

Getting more frustrated. I cannot stop him. I don't have the authority or the power. At the University of Georgia in Athens is the Walter J. Brown Media Archives, a huge multi-story facility that holds hundreds of thousands of archived documents.

In the early 1980s, this was arguably the biggest news story, especially in Atlanta. I made a call to Mary Miller, one of the archivists, to see if we could access their news archives related to the case. And as it turns out, they have thousands of hours of raw news footage from WSB-TV, the local Atlanta station. Material that hasn't been viewed by the public since the early 1980s. In that time, nothing was digital. It was all on film or tape.

But the team at the University of Georgia worked tirelessly to gather and digitize as much material as possible. And then they gave us a personal tour of their vault. Everything is shelved down here by size and then by barcode. So each thing that you'll notice here, each item has a barcode on it and each shelf has a barcode and the items are linked together. So it gives us a barcode and we work by that.

What we do with videotapes is a little different from what we do with print materials. The videotapes will have to go into coolers because they need to be acclimated from the cold, dry environment. When they move upstairs, it's a little warmer and a lot more humid. So they have to go in the cooler so the temperature can come up slowly. They can acclimate.

While searching the archives, I came across several news stories involving strange leads. This one in particular caught my attention.

According to FBI documents, on January 8th, 1981, an anonymous white male called the Rockdale County Sheriff's Department, claiming that he placed the body of Luby Jeter out on Sigmund Road. Then he threatened to leave the body of another child, but this time, the child would be white.

An unidentified man who has been calling the Rockdale County Sheriff's Department for the last few weeks. That man has told deputies they could find Atlanta's missing children on Sigmund Road. And we've learned that recently he's also called and said he was going to harm some of the children in this neighborhood. When the Rockdale County Sheriff's Department arrived at the scene this morning, all they knew was they had something already very familiar to Atlanta investigators. The

The body of a black male around 14 years old lying just off Sigmund Road. There was no apparent sign of a struggle. Sheriff Vic Davis would only say today his department and the others involved are again very interested in tape conversations with an unidentified male caller. The most recent call coming the day before the body was found. The man told Rockdale deputies victims could be found along Sigmund Road.

Someone was calling the local sheriff's department, claiming to be the killer, even declaring where the next body would be found. But it seemed at that time, the police didn't give this much merit. Some detectives say since this latest body was found so far from Atlanta, they may be dealing with a copycat murderer. Or they say the killer or killers may have known that the Rockdale sheriff was receiving crank calls about the missing and murdered children, and so just decided to dump a body here to taunt police. We're...

taken a closer look at the cause at this time, but we still feel that maybe just the publicity drew the actual killer to this area to dump a body. Sheriff Vic Davis hopes today's discovery and the calls are just coincidental. Then I found another story. The video was of a live newscast featuring a church minister in Atlanta named Earl Polk. He voluntarily called into a local news station to present this story, and he was making some very eerie claims.

his alleged interaction with the Atlanta child murderer. I have received several calls from a person identifying himself as the one responsible for these crimes. I did notify the authorities, but I should like to remind you that I stand ready to minister to you and we are protected and covered by the Constitution of the United States of America. I stand ready to be directed by you as to a place of meeting

I will minister to your needs and you will be protected and you will be covered. For one thing, the voice on the phone was not the same one that has called before. So Polk says his first step was to determine how much the man knew. I said, how many of the children crimes are you involved in? He said, well, let's put it this way. The first three, somebody helped me with them.

I said, "Well, is he not helping you any longer?" He said, "No." I said, "Why did he quit?" He said, "Well, he got afraid. His wife got afraid and he left town." Paulk says the man told him he could prove he was the killer because he could show Paulk a piece of clothing belonging to Curtis Walker. Walker's body was found just two weeks ago in a river about a quarter mile from Paulk's church. So I said, "Tell me how you got the kids to get in your car." He said, "Well, I've got a van."

He says I tell them I've got paint jobs to do and they get into and in the van to go to to paint Paul then questioned the man about his motives. I said well what makes you do this? What what caused you to do these these crimes? Could you tell me that he said well, I'm I'm impaled or I'm controlled or forced by voices to do it I said well, why are you calling me now are the voices? Released you so you could call me. He says well, I don't hear the voices right now

I said, "Why are you turning yourself in or why are you wanting to come see me now?" He said, "Well, I'm tired of running, I'm out of money, and my wife is afraid." The man told Paulk he was speaking from or near a pub on Ponce de Leon Avenue. Paulk then asked him if they could meet at his church on Flat Shoals Road, and the man agreed. About a half hour later, a van pulled into the parking lot across the street but immediately sped off.

Palk says he thinks the man spotted some police cars at a nearby shopping center and may have thought he was walking into a trap. My purpose of even telling the story was hopefully that he would know that there was no trap set up and that perchance he may yet try to make contact. After hearing the many stories from the FBI and looking back on the news archives, I started to get a sense of how the general public must have felt in 1980.

Completely confused. An incriminating Playboy magazine, psychic involvement, bizarre phone calls, and that mysterious composite sketch of a black guy with bushy hair. But none of it was amounting to anything. The media coverage of Atlanta's hunt for a serial killer was gripping the entire nation. But things were about to change when a local Atlanta policeman found what appeared to be the first signs of physical evidence. We had a body, a young boy behind a building,

and we found a fiber on him, just one fiber. You guys found that? Yes, and I removed it off of his shirt, and I think it was blue, maybe a quarter of an inch long. It looked like maybe a sweater or a blanket or something, just a piece of lint. Took the fiber to the crime lab. That information leaked out through high-ranking people,

to the media and lo and behold it wasn't me you know and uh they were putting anything they could grasp they were the media were at that time you're talking about vultures i mean everybody wanted to be the one to know the the little tidbit that nobody else knew the atlanta journal came out in early february with a story the police are finding hairs and fibers on the victim well guess where the next victim wound up striptein in the river

and we were getting victims every 10 days. We're starting to see bodies in several different counties. We probably need to come up with a method or come up with an idea or a thought to where we can at least direct this guy, you know, keep him from spreading bodies everywhere in hopes, of course, of catching him.

What I thought was the dumbest idea I ever heard, when Mike McComas and his partner Larry Ellington came to me and says, we got an idea. And I said, okay, what's your idea? And they said, we want to cover the bridges because it's obvious he's throwing a body off a bridge. And I said, why is that obvious? I didn't know at the time McComas grew up in a small town in Tennessee on a river. And I grew up in New York City. We didn't know what rivers were.

The reason is I don't think he would drive down to the river because the chances of getting caught. And besides that, I was raised on a river in East Tennessee, and I know that to get something to float down the river, you've got to get it out in the middle of the water or you stand a good chance it's going to come right back to the bank. He knew that if you threw something from the shore, it eventually floats back to land. But if you throw something off of a bridge in the middle of the river, it'll float down the river.

And I says, "How do you know which bridge?" He said, "Well, we're gonna pick 14." I said, "How do you know you're gonna pick the right one?" And he looked at me and said, "You got a better idea, dumb shit?" And I said, "Not at the moment."

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down.

From unbelievable romantic betrayals... The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family... When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal...

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy.

And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Some will be unsettling. When she was with her imaginary friend, she would turn and look at you and you felt like something else was looking at you too. Some unnerving. The more I looked at it, I realized that the some looked more like a claw, like a demon. Some even downright terrifying. The things that I saw, heard, felt in that house were purely demonic. But all of them will be totally true.

Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you live and get your podcasts. There was two rivers then. There was the South River and the Chattahoochee River. And I recommended that we stake those out, the bridges, because I felt that that was how he was getting the bodies into the water, was throwing them off river bridges, because it would be quick, it'd be fast. He would get them in the water, and there's a good chance they'd float downstream quite a ways.

For my idea, I got rewarded of kind of supervising the detail. It was started every night around 6 p.m., and we quit every morning at about 6. It started toward the end of April, 1st of May, and we gave them 30 days. And we actually had about 140 people total because we had to cover...

all night and we had a couple weekends. So we had 140 people assigned. And we were burning 140 bodies a night too because we had so many bridges on the South River and so many bridges on the Chattahoochee River. And what we did was we had two people on the ground under one side of the bridge, two people on the other, and then we had two chase cars per bridge.

So if anybody dropped something in, the people underneath would notify the chase cars, and that's the way it happened. It was quite taxing. I mean, you're going seven days a week, 12 hours a day. It's tough. I was single. The married guys, I don't know how with families, I don't know how they did it, but I was single at the time, so it didn't really have that much of an effect on my home life, of course.

Social life, yeah, but not the home life. But like I said, we were using 140 bodies a night. As a matter of fact, there were so many bodies that we had to go to the police academy, and they gave us several recruit classes that hadn't graduated yet. So the only thing they were allowed to carry was batons and flashlights because they weren't qualified on firearms. So, I mean, that's how many bodies we were burning, and that's why they decided that it was going to have to come to an end because we were just really wearing out man hours. And nothing came of it.

As an officer with the APD at that time, Mike Tovey remembers this bridge stakeout. And we had just about every bridge, I think every bridge in the Atlanta area covered. They canceled our off days and we worked ungodly hours like 5 to 5 in the morning, no off days. And we had people under the bridge. We had people on the water, posed as fishermen, in just about every bridge in Atlanta and even Fulton County.

We patrolled it in rafts. We had our guns in the boat with us, and really we were just grasping at straws, but it was apparent these bodies were coming over the bridge. On the very last night of the bridge stakeout, something happened that would change the course of their investigation forever. Last night, last bridge.

That night we set up knowing this would be the last day. I had about six or eight bridges, I can't remember, that I kind of kept an eye on and if anybody had any problems or somebody didn't show up or, you know, logistical problems, whatever happened, and I was to be notified regardless. I was at a small bridge south and I heard some radio traffic and at the time our radios weren't as good as they are today.

And I remember getting on the radio and asking, you know, what's going on? And all I heard was something about a splash. I had a '77 Ford LTD with a 400 big block in it. And I can tell you, I scorched tires getting up there because I said something's happening. I just felt it. We went racing to the James Jackson Bridge.

And as I was heading that way, the traffic started coming in a little clearer because I was getting closer. The gist of the story was that the splash was heard by the police cadets, the guys that had to leave the academy early to work with us.

We had two people under both sides of the bridge and of course we kept them hidden out so that they were, they brought everything they needed for the night because they weren't going anywhere. And then in close proximity we had a chase car on each side of the bridge and they too blended in so that they couldn't be seen. When they looked up on the bridge from under it to see what caused the splash, the car appeared to be just starting up again like it had been stopped and it was going two or three miles an hour then crossed the bridge

circled around, I think, a convenience store. Then as he came back, and that's when our cars tagged him. We went up the exit ramp, went across the bridge, and then went down, saw the cars sitting on the other side. They were on the southbound side, and we were heading north. And I saw that there was several blue lights over there with a white station wagon that was pulled over.

Since I was supervising it and I had the ranking Atlanta police officer on scene with me, when we got there, we were immediately briefed. I asked if they'd get his ID and they said yes. He was still sitting in his car and I still had my composite sketch. And I pulled it out. He had these little glasses on and I drew the glasses and I held it up and I said, anybody recognize this guy? And it was Wayne Williams to the T. I mean, it just, it was just Wayne.

Next time on Atlanta Monster. It was the pre-dawn hours of May 22nd. The Atlanta Police Bureau and the FBI had been staking out bridges along the Chattahoochee River for the last two months. An Atlanta recruit heard a splash. Several radio messages and a flurry of activity soon had a car stopped. In it was 23-year-old Wayne Williams. People who know Williams say he is a highly intelligent young man, a good student when he was in school.

I went up to him and identified myself as a special agent with the FBI, and I asked him immediately if he knew why he was being pulled over. And he said, "Yes, it's probably because about those kids that are missing." Kind of surprised me. That was an unusual answer, I thought. It's like, "Aziz, you want to go?" Because this rabbit hole is very, very, very deep.

Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week, with new episodes every Friday. A joint production between HowStuffWorks and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. Audio archives, courtesy of WSB News, Film, and Videotape Collection. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries. For the latest updates, please visit atlantamonster.com or follow us on social media.

Why do they call you Popcorn? When I was in Memphis, a first office agent, brand new out of the FBI Academy. Andy was my training agent. Andy was about seven or eight years older than me, a little more experienced in the Bureau. And Andy had a three-year-old daughter, Karen, who's now in her 50s. And she couldn't say the last name Procopio. What came out was Popcorn. She called me Popcorn, Mr. Popcorn. And it stuck.

Do you like popcorn? Sure. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.

Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast There and Gone. It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. But which victim was the intended target and why? ♪

Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.