The Sheriff [bonus]
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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. Welcome to the special summer series of Atlanta Monster. I'm your host, Jason Hoke. In this episode, we dive deeper into the story of Sidney Dorsey, a legendary figure in Atlanta law enforcement, a figure with continued connections to the Atlanta child murders, and someone responsible for shooting the sheriff.

It was around midnight, December 15th, going into December 16th, 2000. My phone rings and it's the DeKalb County Police Department. They're saying, Mr. Cardwell, are you okay? And I said, yeah, I'm okay. Would you please come to your door?

So we slowly walk to the front door. I open the door and there's a half dozen police officers standing in the miserable rainy night in front of me. The water's dripping off the brims of their hats. And it's a bevy of local law enforcement. And they said, Mr. Cardwell, the sheriff elect of DeKalb County, Derwin Brown, was shot and killed an hour ago in his front yard. He's dead. And quite frankly, we expected to find you dead too.

It's surreal, you know, but it was reality. And they said, we need you and your family to get some clothes together because we believe we're just simply moments ahead of whoever it is that wanted the sheriff dead. They want you dead. They want J. Tom Morgan dead. There are a number of people that they've had on a hit list. And you're thinking, oh, my God, that's unbelievable.

That's impossible. That could not, you can't be telling me, wake me up. 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, Rob...

Rogers apparently was asphyxiated. Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps on killing. This is Atlanta Monster. During our investigation, Wayne Williams and Dwayne Hendricks told us that Sidney Dorsey was the key to breaking open this case, that he would have invaluable information that would change everything.

You're going to get to hear from Sidney Dorsey. He was the person, one of the persons responsible for putting me in prison. Sidney Dorsey is probably going to agree to talk to you. He's willing to come clean. I mean, Sidney Dorsey is the key to all of this. Dale Cardwell was a reporter and investigator for local Atlanta television. One fateful night, he got a knock on his door from local authorities. The night they brought him into protective custody.

Cardwell had been tracking corruption happening in the local DeKalb County Police Department, a department that was led by Sheriff Sidney Dorsey. If you'll recall, Sidney Dorsey was part of an effort in the late 90s and early 2000s to reopen the case, along with Officer Lewis Graham. Both Graham and Dorsey did not believe Williams was responsible.

I frankly don't think that Wayne Williams has killed anyone. That's former Atlanta homicide detective Sid Dorsey, who was with the task force that put Williams behind bars. He's one of an unlikely group of people in the criminal justice system now coming forward to say Wayne Williams did not commit the Atlanta child murders. I have never thought that Wayne Williams was guilty of any murder that has not changed. Not one of those dozens of killings? Not one.

People ask me often, did Wayne Williams do it? And I says, no. Jones disappeared in August 1980 close to this inner city strip mall. Hours later, he was found near a dumpster behind the mall, strangled, wrapped in plastic. There was a young man.

who claims to have witnessed the murder of Clifford Jones. Dorsey says an alleged eyewitness described the strangling of Jones and identified the strangler, not Wayne Williams, but a man named Jamie Brooks.

I've always lived with the notion that Jamie Brooks murdered the child. Brooks later died after serving time in prison for rape, sodomy, and kidnapping. And despite all that evidence, the task force blamed Clifford Jones' murder not on Jamie Brooks, but on Wayne Williams. Dorsey was part of the task force that worked on the Atlanta missing and murdered cases.

We recently filed an open records request with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for details on all evidence collected for each of the victims killed during this time. In these thousands of pages of records, we found many instances of Sidney Dorsey involved as an officer on the case. We also found that Dorsey was demoted in the police ranks in 1987 when he questioned the case around Clifford Jones, one of the victims. He filed a lawsuit and later had his rank reinstated.

In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2005, Dorsey claimed that Larry Peterson of the GBI crime lab walked into a room and told Dorsey and Yvonne Fuller-Jones that "those fibers are flying everywhere" and that the fibers were also showing up on an investigator's port code. When the trial approached in 1982, Dorsey and others thought that new evidence would come out, evidence that hadn't been previously revealed to the public.

When the fiber evidence was the primary thrust of the prosecution's case, both Dorsey and Graham recalled, "Is that all there is?" Conspiracy theories or not, Dorsey continued on this path of doubt about the Wayne Williams case. Dorsey said Wayne's father, Homer, called him in 1986, claiming Wayne had been set up. And, like Williams, Dorsey also claimed he received calls from a mysterious female figure.

The woman was worried that her husband, a recovering drug addict, might slip off and try to buy drugs, and she contacted Dorsey to tail him. While Dorsey didn't get directly involved, the whiff of conspiratorial talk creeps into Dorsey's narrative. Despite the pleas from both Lewis Graham and Sidney Dorsey, the convictions in the Williams case were upheld in 1998, and Wim Williams remained in prison.

The judge ruled that regardless of any evidence not presented at the time of the original trial, nothing substantial had changed regarding this evidence. But why was Sidney Dorsey so important to this case now? What role did he have in the Atlanta child murders, and why is he in a Georgia prison? The story of the sheriff, Sidney Dorsey, is also one of the most bizarre murder cases in U.S. history. Dale Cardwell remembered not only the Atlanta child murders, but also Sidney Dorsey.

My name is Dale Cardwell. I spent 25 years as a conventional investigative reporter, most of that at WSB. People trusted that I would tell the story, keep them anonymous if they deserved to be kept anonymous. I remember thinking, why can't they figure this out? Who in the world could be doing this, obviously in such a public manner, and be doing it without anyone catching them?

What a lot of people in my demographic thought, okay, they got him. Let's put him on trial, put him away, and let's move on. Dorsey was intimately involved in the investigation. In fact, he was part of the team that was in Wayne's house when evidence was collected. And Dorsey had always been a big personality in Atlanta. I moved to Atlanta in 1996, and you couldn't go anywhere without hearing the name Sidney Dorsey.

covering general news and being a consumer investigator at the time, you're running into his name often. Sidney was very aggressive, very personable, had a charismatic way of presenting himself. He was considered a cowboy. And so there are stories about his activities.

He was known in the community as a guy that would rough you up. And so kids in the community were petrified of him. He would move through the neighborhoods and people were scared of him. He had two things going for him. He was charismatic, plus he had the blue. He was wearing the blue, so he was all-powerful. There's one story of a kid hiding underneath a tree.

house and Sidney Dorsey going underneath the house in the crawlspace and just simply firing his weapon indiscriminately into the darkness. Sidney Dorsey was ambitious and he had his eyes set on a bigger prize. The sky was not the limit for him. He felt driven to be something far beyond what he had already become. He had incredible self-confidence.

He started earning the respect and the support of the African-American church community in DeKalb County. Still no one dreamed that he could ever topple the system and become the first elected African-American sheriff, not only in DeKalb County, but in the state of Georgia. And he did just that, and it was stunning.

He was this prolific Atlanta homicide police detective in the 70s and 80s at a time when there were very few African-American police officers on the beat. As the white power structure transitioned to a black power structure,

Frankly, white people wanted to keep their control over that transition. So there were hand-selected African Americans that were brought into the mix. Very capable, but they knew that there were white people that wanted them in those positions. In a sense, that gave rise to the fact that they were untouchable.

They were not monitored and managed in the same way that you would normally bring in someone and move them through the police ranks. They were handled with kids' gloves, and they were able to get away with stuff that a conventional officer was not able to get away with.

Sidney Dorsey's run as sheriff was not to go unchecked. Though he handily defeated opponent Derwin Brown in 1996, Brown would challenge Dorsey again in 2000. Derwin Brown was a DeKalb County police officer. By all accounts, he was straight-laced. He treated people fairly. He was very involved in his community. He truly cared about the community.

He was a very, very pro-union police officer. And so therefore, the county management could not stand him. They were at constant odds because Derwin Brown was always trying to fight for police officers' rights. And he was not afraid to be in the lead in that fight.

They were okay to keep him in his place. As long as they could control him, keep him as a DeKalb County officer, yeah, he's rattling sabers and talking about better pay for police officers, but as long as we keep him there, we're okay. They never dreamed that he could break out of that paradigm. And the thought of him running for sheriff and actually winning the office was unthinkable.

I was at a Dairy Queen. It was late in the evening, and I'm standing in line, and a guy behind me says, hey, you're Dale Cardwell with Channel 2. I've got the story of the year, but I don't think you've got the courage to tell it. I said, okay, try me. And he said, the sheriff of DeKalb County is using on-duty sheriff's deputies to man his private security jobs all over metro Atlanta, and nobody will do anything about it.

He's using on-duty deputies who are being paid by the taxpayers, and then he's dispatching them to banks, shopping centers, all kinds of commercial establishments where the sheriff has private security contracts with those establishments through his side business called S&S Security. And I said, that's crazy. There's no way that he could get away with that. He says, yeah, well, he is because everybody's afraid of this guy and nobody will bust that story.

I was naive enough to think, I'll bust that story. If I can determine that it's true, I'll tell that story. He wanted anonymity, obviously for reasons that Sidney controlled a lot of jobs in the county. And I started digging. It's what I do. And I found that he told me the truth. I saw Sidney Dorsey's name everywhere, on every sheriff's department vehicle, everywhere.

on every entrance to every building that's controlled by the DeKalb County Sheriff's Department. Sidney was a promoter par excellence. No one could touch him in self-promotion. He was on television every chance he had to be on television. He was building an incredible patronage system for himself where people owed him for the jobs they had. I think that he could envision no possibility of losing the election.

Everyone around him had to be and was a fan of Sidney Dorsey. They told him that he was great. He heard every day that he was great. I don't think anyone ever challenged him at all. Shockingly, Dorsey did not win his re-election for sheriff. After being forced into a runoff election with Brown that no one saw coming, Brown ended up winning easily in the runoff. Well, on election night, it was a stunner. Derwin Brown won 3-1.

This guy who was destined to be a street cop suddenly became the most powerful person in DeKalb County. When you manage a $300-plus million budget a year with zero governing, you're in charge of all of it. All of a sudden, you're the king.

And I don't think that that's what he was after. I think he was after the belief that he could make a difference and that suddenly he had the power to make a difference. So it was euphoria for him. It was utter defeat for Sidney Dorsey. J. Tom Morgan had been through his own campaign that year, too, becoming DeKalb County's new district attorney.

On December 15, 2000, a series of unbelievable events would change local law enforcement history and the fates of Sidney Dorsey and Derwin Brown forever.

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.

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. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?

Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions.

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. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident? Or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes, he's innocent.

But in my eyes, he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I think it was anger first, disbelief second. And I think they started looking for people to blame. And clearly, Derwin Brown was to blame for this. It's called sheriff's school. You get two weeks. Learn how to be a hotel manager with a gun. When Brown returned to his home that night, he was shot and killed in his driveway by unknown assailants. The people that perpetrated the crime for him

led by Patrick Cuffee, three of them were DeKalb County Sheriff's deputies that had no credentials. They should never have been sworn in as police officers. Criminal records, no training. Patrick Cuffee was the second highest paid law officer in the county next to Sidney Dorsey.

The assailants weren't random shooters with a grudge against their new sheriff. They were inside the sheriff's department and included on a list of employees that would not be returning to the department once Braun officially started as sheriff of DeKalb County. Braun thought he was doing these officers a favor by giving them notice that they would not be returning. But instead, it ended up providing a motive, a motive to get even.

At that time, I had a decision to make, and they gave me the opportunity to make the decision. You know, Dale, you're a valuable employee. You're a really good reporter. But no one could expect you to continue this line of investigation. Your life's in danger. It's clearly been threatened. You have the opportunity to move off this story.

I thought about it and I said, "This is what I'm supposed to do. I'm in this position for a reason. And if I quit following this, then the forces of evil are going to win." So I felt compelled that I had to keep telling the story. And just because the person who had been accused of the murder and the corruption was now in custody, it didn't change the fact that we were continuing to unravel stories of unbelievable corruption.

And all these years later, I realized, wow, that's taken a toll on me. But I didn't realize it at the time. My actions then had significant implications for my family. My daughter, to this day, has nightmares that something's happened to her dad. She'll call me up. She'll say, I had the dream again. I had the dream again.

J. Tom Morgan, DeKalb County's newly elected district attorney, was also a target. And despite his initial resistance, he also received help from police officials. Initially, I would not accept any type of bodyguard or driver or anything like that. It was only later that I got a confidential letter

disclosure from the attorney representing one of the four that my wife was in danger and that's when I started with the round-the-clock protection.

Derwin Brown was dead. Metro Atlanta was shocked by what had happened.

There was a buzz in the city. No one was in custody for his murder. But the suspects were hiding in plain sight. Thanks to Dale Cardwell's inside information and his newscast, the public and myself learned more and more about what was going on. He had literally run this past people, you know, saying, you know, if something happened to Derwin Brown, God forbid...

What do you think would happen? And all the sycophants said, well, you would immediately be voted back in. They would appoint you as the interim sheriff, and then there would be a special election, and obviously you're the logical candidate. And he truly believed that that's what would happen. When you have a case like this, you draw a small circle around someone who's been murdered. Going from the inside out, the only person that would seem to have a motive is Mr. Dorsey.

Dorsey had this crazy idea that once Geraldine was murdered, that he could run in a special election and get his job back. We also sent in Fred Mays, the GBI director. Fred headed the GBI investigation, not only of the corruption, but of the murder. But Fred went into Mr. Dorsey's office and was secretly wired and questioned him.

One of Dorsey's methods of communication was legendary: eating the evidence.

Miss Dorsey had this habit that if he wanted something destroyed, he would eat it. There was a check written by a bondsman for a bribe. And when she paid the bribe with a check, Dorsey ate the check. He said to only pay him cash. There was another instance with the same bondsman, Shirley McMichael.

when they were in a restaurant and we had this McMichael Wired and Dorsey became suspicious and he wrote on a napkin, are you wired? Handed it to this McMichael and grabbed the napkin back and ate it. And then Cuffey told us that when he went to see Dorsey, he'd gotten a phone call to go see Dorsey

Dorsey answered the front door with nothing but his bat up throat, handed a copy of note. It said, "Kill Dylan Brown." The copy read the note. Dorsey took it back, put it in his mouth, and ate it. Mr. Dorsey was arrested at his first appearance hearing. I recall vividly walking my son to school, and we had to pass a courthouse, and there would be protesters out there protesting against me and for Dorsey, saying that I was prosecuting an innocent man.

It is the most dramatic moment of my career. Every judge does it differently. Judge Becker and I had tried cases before her before, and I knew she was going to make the prosecutor read the verdict. I knew that was going to be very difficult, but I was amazingly calm. Read the jury by the defendant as to count one guilty.

That's to count two, guilty. That's to count three, guilty. That's to count four, not guilty. That's to count five, not guilty. That's to count six, guilty. That's to count seven, guilty. That's to count eight, guilty. That's to count nine, guilty. That's to count 10, guilty. That's to count 11, guilty. That's to count 12, guilty.

That's the count 13, guilty. That's the count 14, guilty. That's the count 15, not guilty. Sign of measure. What I remember is that Phyllis Brown just collapsed. We all knew the first count was murder, and so when I read guilty, Phyllis fell out, and so it was hard getting through the rest of the indictment. Cindy Dorsey had no physical evidence

to the verdict. You saw nothing, no change in his demeanor at all. He was very stoic. He had no reaction, never said a word during the sentencing. He put his hands up and he said, Your Honor, I know you're going to sentence me severely, but I do not have the blood of Durham Brown on my hands. Sidney Dorsey has enough activity in the gray that it may not be in his best interest to speak.

tell everything he knows because it might make him look worse than he does. You have to think if I'm in prison for the murder of my rival, what could look worse than that? So I tend to think that Sidney Dorsey ought to talk.

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.

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. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?

Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions.

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. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident? Or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes, he's innocent.

But in my eyes, he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Rumblings on the innocence of Wayne Williams continued from Lewis Graham and Sidney Dorsey, even after Dorsey had been convicted of the murder of Brown.

In May 2005, Graham announced he was reopening the cases around the Atlanta child murders. Dorsey told Bill Torpy at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that month that, quote, "Wayne Williams was the perfect suspect, the perfect fall guy. If they arrested a white guy, there would have been riots across the U.S." When Dorsey heard the news from his old friend Graham, he was confident that he must have had something. Graham continued to press on.

My responsibility as chief of police in DeKalb County is to look at all cases and it was my decision to look at these five cases along with other unsolved cases. We are simply opening these cases.

And we're simply going to follow the evidence where it leads us. You have been quoted as saying, "I have never believed that he did anything." Is that a correct quote? That is a very, very correct quote. That's correct.

The day the paper had the headline that Lewis Graham was reopening that case, there was another major political controversy that was coming out the same day. The GBI had been conducting an investigation of a very powerful local political leader, and the results of that investigation was going to be embarrassing to that leader. And Lewis Graham worked for that leader.

And it's my opinion that those two people conspired to figure out a bigger story to break on the day that the embarrassing story was going to come out to that other figure. And that's exactly what happened. Missing and murdered children, front page of the AJC. The embarrassing story to the political leader buried in the metro section. Did the case of the Atlanta child murders get reopened due to a competing political scandal? Or was this conspiracy theory?

Dorsey himself did not confess to the murder of Derwin Brown until years later. He told District Attorney Gwen Keys Fleming on July 13, 2007, that he did indeed order the hit on Brown. The Associated Press reported that Dorsey told Fleming that after losing the election in 2000, he was angry, and that he was also having problems with his marriage after cheating allegations surfaced. He gave Patrick Cuffee the order to put out the hit, but later cooled on this thinking.

Louis Graham resigned in May of 2006 after internal police recordings of profanity-laced conversations between Graham and his assistant became public. Despite the drama and excitement that initially surrounded the reopening of the investigation of Atlanta child murder victims from DeKalb County, the investigation was eventually shuttered once Graham resigned. Recently, we heard from Sydney Dorsey again.

While we continued to ask him more questions about the Atlanta child murders, Dorsey was still light on details in his follow-up letter sent from prison. I will read our questions and Meredith, our producer, will read the responses from Sidney Dorsey's letter. Dear Ms. Stedman, I received your letter dated January 18th, 2018, and I must honestly tell you that I remain challenged to seek the truth. Although locked up behind these prison walls,

I want justice for our poor kids and their families. Unfortunately, time and memory is a factor, and its weight must be considered as I address each of your questions. Therefore, please bear with me for a moment as we reopen a cold case. I heard that you fought to keep the Clifford Jones case in the trial as one of the victims. Is this true? If so, could you shed light on your reasoning?

I remember the name Clifford Jones, but I do not remember any of the details regarding his case. Please write me back with more details, then perhaps that will help me to remember. Was there another name besides Wayne Williams that came up repeatedly in the investigation? I do not recall any name or names that came up repeatedly during our investigation. However, I advise you to contact former team leaders and get their input.

Did it ever seem to you that someone or some group was not looked into enough? Four brothers, reportedly members of the KKK, were not thoroughly investigated, in my opinion. And if they were, I have no information. Who would you talk to if you were us, hopefully to close the door on this tragedy? I honestly do not know anyone, in or out of law enforcement, that can help you close the door on this tragedy.

Perhaps you should consider contacting Welcome Harris, a former team leader who headed a team of investigators, Rosalind Richardson, whose team handled all of the incoming tips, and a GPI agent who also led a team of investigators. I was also a team leader in charge of all crime scene investigation. Finally, Morris Redding was the chief of police and in charge of the Homicide Task Force.

Did you ever personally speak to Wayne Williams? If so, when was the last time? I have never seen in person, nor have I spoken with Wayne Williams at any time. Welcome Harris, former major with the Atlanta Police Department, died in 2016. We will reach out to both Richardson and Redding, though neither has made any public comments on the innocence of Williams since his conviction in 1982. Redding was Atlanta deputy police chief at the time and a key figure on the task force.

When the guilty verdict was handed down to Wayne Williams, District Attorney Louis Slayton offered thanks to Redding and others for their work on the case. Despite our multiple efforts to uncover more information from Dorsey, what we received was vague and full of dead ends. I think the man that craved the limelight 20 years ago does not exist anymore. Intimidation, corruption, murder.

Sidney Dorsey has been attached to all these things over as many years as an officer of the law. As we all know now, Mr. Dorsey was involved in the killing of a lot of people. He was not indicted in an altercation he had at a gas station. The teenager at a gas station over allegedly spilling gas on Mr. Dorsey's vehicle. And the man winds up getting shot to death. And this is during the Missing and Murdered Children case.

In a strange twist of fate, Dorsey's son was murdered earlier this year in a shootout.

Well, the son of a former DeKalb County sheriff who is now in prison for the assassination of his rival has been murdered. Clayton County police found the body of Sidney Dorsey Jr. on North Ridge Trail in Ellenwood January 29th. He was facedown in the middle of the road, shot several times. Right now, police do not have any witnesses or suspects. Dorsey's father is currently serving life in prison for arranging the murder of Derwin Brown after Brown beat him in 2008.

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Atlanta Monster. Stay tuned for more news about upcoming episodes and new seasons. 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 Collections.

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