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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. The church was a little United Methodist church on Eastland Road, which is right off of Moreland. It was an elderly white congregation in a neighborhood that had transitioned. It had gone on several months when the pastor said, we've got to do something to help the kids in this community.

I was 26 years old, had just finishing up my undergraduate studies, and he asked me if maybe you've got some extra time, can you come and help us reach these kids? So all I did was put up a basketball goal in the church parking lot, bought one basketball, and went out there just myself and just started bouncing the ball in the parking lot, just bouncing the ball.

Did it for a couple hours, went inside, next day, same thing, same time, just bouncing the ball. I thought maybe if I'm consistent, and sure enough, a couple of kids showed up from the neighborhood. One week, two weeks, three weeks went on, and pretty soon, before we knew it, we had 100 kids. The tragedy began to gain more and more publicity. Our program began to get more attention.

But it was sad to see the kids and as you know adolescents they don't want to show their fear. They would joke with each other, you know, "You're gonna get snatched and somebody's coming, you know, to your house." And you know, but you could tell, you know, deep down inside they were really frightened. I got the feeling that they knew they were in something together.

you know, confronting this serious danger. And they kind of came together and around the program and saw me as the leader. Made them feel good to be a community, you know, to be a group. There was safety in our group and everybody, whether they admit it or not, responds to love.

I think that we've made some progress with a long way yet to go. I can see a tremendous difference in the prejudices I grew up with being born in the mid-50s. I remember the assassination of Dr. King, and I remember the kids in my elementary school saying that they were glad that he had been killed.

What a terrible thing for a child to say, but that's what they were living. That's what they'd been taught. I remember those things and unfortunately still see some of those same prejudices that are alive, you know, even today in our beautiful city, although we've come a long way. There are still bigotries alive, not only here in the South, but I imagine throughout this country.

Honestly, I think perhaps we hide them a little better than we used to, but they're still there. I found acceptance in those kids and their families, and together we made a difference in that one little part of Atlanta. So thankful for silver linings. That was a man named Bill Burnham. As a young man in the 80s, he saw how scared these kids were. The victims in this case are the children.

And that should never be forgotten. Because this story is so complex, for years people have argued whether or not they got the right guy. From everyone I've talked to, there's been a lot of disagreement over whether Wayne Williams is the Atlanta Monster. Many people feel that he's guilty. His stories just don't really add up. He fit the FBI profile to a tee. And depending on how you looked at it, after he was arrested, the murders stopped. But some people seem to think this was a huge conspiracy against Wayne Williams. But with very little evidence to back up those claims.

But the question isn't as simple as, did he do it? The question is, what did he do? Did he kill Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne, the two adults he was convicted for? Maybe he did. But what about the kids? Did he kill the kids too? Did he kill all of them? Even though people are still very divided over Wayne Williams himself, there's one common thread that everyone seems to agree on. It was time for all this to end in the city of Atlanta, and someone had to go away for this. And Wayne Williams was that guy.

Wayne still claims his innocence, and from our very first phone call, he promised to provide strong evidence to prove that. I want this podcast to be the final debate over Wayne Williams and the Atlanta child murders. And now that my investigation is in full swing, I'm going to put everything out on the table. If Wayne Williams has anything credible to say, now's the time to hear it. I've been incarcerated since 1981 in connection with the Atlanta murders.

It was a situation that few people understood then, and today even fewer people understand the truth about what happened, and probably even more so about what didn't happen. Due to the political climate and the fear and all of the uncertainty about what happened, the police and authorities were just anxious to arrest anybody that they could, and that person just happened to be me.

Sadly, it's taken all these years for me to finally get the case brought back to the forelight so people can see the truth about what happened, the fact that not only am I an innocent man, but that the people involved in this, the families, the city, and the nation deserve an answer. One of the main objectives for us is to make people aware of what really happened during events before the trial as well as after the trial and that continue today.

I don't think few people realize I was never convicted in connection with any of the child murders. I was charged for the deaths of two adults whose murders were actually unrelated. Furthermore, we were prevented from bringing out a lot of evidence that could have helped me during the trial. We're talking about the existence of other suspects,

We're talking about physical evidence, including fiber evidence from Caucasian suspects and others who we know were involved in some of these cases, as well as false testimony about the synthetic fibers that the FBI presented during the trial. I'm referring not only to setting the factual record straight, but telling of the story behind the scenes about the hurt and the emotional pain that lingers to this day.

I've done several interviews over the years, but none have addressed the full context of what this story is about. 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. According to Wayne Williams, the story begins with that infamous night on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge. Wayne first described a rather convoluted story about the timing sequence of the bridge that night.

FBI's still in there, "Yeah, I got it. He's coming towards me." Stop. That's the timing sequence they testified to in court. There's the contradiction. During that sequence, there's no way any car could have been going south on the bridge, turned into the gravel park lot, and turned back north. That's an absolute impossibility.

He's saying that according to police testimony, the timing doesn't make sense. In what he described as a matter of seconds, the police recruit below the bridge heard the splash, shined his light on the water, didn't see a body and only saw ripples, then radioed to the other officers, who then saw Wayne in his car turn around in a gravel parking lot just moments later, heading the opposite way on the bridge. "- That car of mine had to have been traveling north the entire time of the sequence."

Bottom line is, there was no selection. If you take the bridge out of the equation, Wayne Williams is not in prison, right? This is Vincent Hill, a law enforcement analyst and former police officer. But more significantly, Vincent is an expert of sorts on Wayne's case. If Wayne was not on that bridge, either the case would have been solved a different way or it would still be unsolved. Take that bridge out of the equation, and what do you have?

I guess you can argue that that had put Wayne next to the body, right? I mean, he's on the bridge, they hear a splash, two days later, there's a body found. That morning, while four officers sat quietly under the South Cobb Drive bridge, one of them, an Atlanta recruit, heard a splash.

Why do you think they stopped your car that night? The police recruit, Bob Campbell, was stationed below the bridge, and he's the only one who heard the splash that night. Yeah.

He claimed that most of the FBI statements about the bridge were in fact true, except for two major points, the first being "Recruit Bob Campbell's account of the splash" and the "Recruit Jacob's accounts of the timing." The second major point was over Wayne's strange story about a girl named Cheryl Johnson.

When the FBI asked what he was doing out there, Wayne said he was looking for a woman named Cheryl Johnson, who had scheduled an in-person interview with him that morning.

He told the police he was out checking the address. That night, Wayne gave police an alleged phone number for Cheryl Johnson. But later when they tried to call the number, it didn't work. It didn't belong to anyone. But Wayne says the FBI called the wrong number. And the reason was his handwriting. The number was a 9347766. You'll see when you get my writing, I'm going to send you some samples of it. It was 434. My 4's and my 9's look alike because I closed the loop on top of them.

The FBI claims Cheryl Johnson wasn't real, but Wayne Williams agrees. So Cheryl Johnson, when did she originally call you and what did she say?

Well, she originally did not call me. She called my mother, and my mother left a note. I talked to her the day before, and I figured she was a prank call thing. We were doing public auditions of my music company, Nova Entertainment, for some of the acts that we had. The acts were running on the radio, television stations, and the newspapers for, you know, 1980. You know, the auditions were all over the radio and TV, and that's how she found out and got on them.

He said as a talent scout, he received hundreds of calls during that time, and that every so often he would get a fake caller.

And Cheryl Johnson was likely one of them. But why was Wayne out checking this address at 2:00 in the morning?

when he was scheduled to meet with her just a few hours later. That never made sense to me. I mean, me being a 45-year-old man, if I'm out at 2 in the morning, if I'm not working and I'm looking for someone's house, let's be honest, I know what I'm going to do at 2 in the morning, and it's not to talk record contracts.

So maybe Wayne was out getting ready to meet someone and got lost. I don't know.

wayne likes to embellish things i don't know why but again i think that was part of wayne's downfall regardless if he told the truth or not i don't think the outcome would have been different simply because he was on the bridge do you regret being on the bridge that night if you could go back and change it would you not go that way well hey let me put it to you like this i'm the type of person okay uh

I'm liable to change my mind at any given time. Everybody said, well, do you think it was a conspiracy? Were they out to get you ahead of time? No, that was a conspiracy only after I became a suspect in the FBI getting involved. Nobody knew I was going to take that route home, not even me that night. That was a spur-of-the-minute issue. The only thing I regret was going out, period, that night. You know, I should have just took my butt to bed and waited until in the morning.

Do you think that if you didn't go out that night, that you would not be in jail right now? Absolutely. No question about that. If they had asked the same questions that you're asking me right now, I wouldn't be sitting here. Bottom line.

Living in Fort Hood, Texas, my dad was military. You know, even then that story was national news about these black kids being murdered in Atlanta. I remember my mom to this day telling me not to go outside, you know, past dark, even in Fort Hood, Texas, in Killeen, because they were killing these little kids.

Wayne Williams got arrested and got convicted and that was pretty much it. And supposedly the murder stopped and that's what I took it for, you know, as a small child. You know, it's just you trust what the police say, you trust what the courts say, and that was pretty much it. You know, but as I got older, especially when I became a police officer and a private investigator,

and I realized this keyword called evidence, then my mindset started changing about the entire case. First, we can't say that the child murders were solved because Wayne was convicted of killing Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne, which were adults. So we still have all of these child murders basically unsolved because you can't say it's solved if you only convicted him of killing two people. Wayne's a very intelligent guy. I think Wayne's downfall back then was he embellished a lot.

Wayne wanted to be the center of attention. He was calling his own press conferences, which just made him a bigger target in the media, right? You know, a lot of people that were innocent of this would have just said, I had nothing to do with it and that's it. But I'm convinced it was something totally different that happened.

Williams bluntly stated the police version of the now famous bridge incident was wrong, a lie. He claimed he wasn't driving slow, that he didn't turn around in a parking lot next to the bridge, that he did not throw anything into the river. The state contends that loud splash was the body of Nathaniel Cater hitting the water. Although prosecutors had most of the pieces that night in May, it still lacked the essential part of the puzzle. Someone actually seeing Williams' car stopped on the bridge, or better yet, the suspect throwing a body from the structure.

Why not?

If it floated down the river and you found it two days later, why wouldn't you see it as it's floating down the river right after it splashed? If you heard the splash and you thought it was a body, why didn't you send divers down there immediately? Dr. Blackwelder was there during the trial, so I asked him what he knew about the splash. The cadet that was under the bridge heard a splash.

And he had flashlights and all that. He shot them around, but they never saw anything. So they said it could have been a beaver, because there were beavers in that river. It could have been a beaver slapping its tail on the water, or it could have been a body that was thrown off the bridge into the water. But he heard a splash. I asked Popcorn with the FBI what was his take. Two cadets under the bridge, two regular officers in chase cars. They were in tents underneath the bridge, and the guy that heard the splash had been a high school swimmer.

and he knew what the sound of a body hitting the water. And he said, "That's a body hitting the water." It was a splat. As you know, if you jump off a diving board and you spread eagle and hit the water, you splat. And that's what he heard. And they looked to see what was in the water, and they never could see anything floating in the water. And then they brought a hydrologist in from the Corps of Engineers, and somebody testified there were a lot of beavers in the river. If it pops its tail in the water, it'll make a splash, so...

If it was Nathaniel Cater at his stature, wouldn't someone else have heard that? It's like going to a pool, right? You may be 20 yards away.

But you can hear people diving off the diving board. So this one guy is the only one that heard this? It's not even logical. Wasn't he like 150, 160? It's a loud splash. If they're spread out the way they say they were, there's just no way only one person heard it. That was a warning signal to say that danger was around, let's say me. Beavers take refuge here whenever they are alarmed.

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. 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.

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.

I can't help but think of Splash from A Beaver's Tale, which sounded a whole lot different from a splash from a fully grown human body. So I decided to test it out. The team at HowStuffWorks helped me put together the whole experiment. The best option we had was Rescue Randy. Randy is an adult-sized mannequin, used for simulations and training for emergency personnel. So when dropped, Randy would fall like a human body. Accurate weight distribution and everything. How do we try to recreate this sound?

So what we want to do is drop something off the James Jackson Parkway Bridge. Something that is roughly the same size and shape of a human body. To see what kind of sound it makes, how loud it is, if we can hear it. What we're trying to do is find something that we can drop off the bridge. And we've been kind of racking our brains trying to figure out how to approximate a human body. It's not something you can just...

Go to the hardware store and find. And we've actually gone through many iterations of this. Like, originally we were thinking we might want to try to actually build a body out of wood.

wooden dowels and duct tape and like packing material. And we got kind of far down that path, but then decided, you know, it was just, it was not going to really be as flexible as a body the way we wanted it. You know, we were thinking, well, maybe, you know, like something like a emergency rescue might have some dummies and things like that. And so we did actually find a fireman's dummy and they use these in training and like competitions for firemen. It just so happens that the dummy that they make

has very similar proportions, both height and weight, to the deceased Nathaniel Cater. There he is. And that's without the legs. Wow.

He's got chunky arms. Tyler, your back, be careful. Lift with your legs, not your back. Oh, my God! I mean, again, it's doable, but it's tough. Randy's a very large gentleman. He, you know, he does weigh 145 pounds. And, you know, hearing that, it seems like that's doable, but it's dead weight. You know, the arms flail and the legs flail. And so trying to pick up that mass is actually harder than you would expect. Hey.

Pick up one of his arms or legs or something. Oh, wow. Ooh. That is, yeah, very correct, weight-wise. You know, if your adrenaline's up, you're going to be able to lift more than you normally would. Exactly. What's the return policy on this guy? Can't return it if it's wet. So this is ours. So we all kind of took turns trying to pick Randy up, and to varying degrees of success. But, yeah, it was a bit of a hassle. Yeah, it's not easy. I mean, Tyler, you could...

You were able to pick him up. I really wasn't. But yeah, it's way more difficult than you might expect.

How close is he in height and weight to Nathaniel Cater? So the coroner's report and some of the other reporting had Nathaniel Cater's height at 5'11 and weighed at 146 pounds. And the Rescue Randy dummy that we ordered has a height of six feet and weighs 145 pounds. So we're really in that range of where we want to be. It actually fits quite well.

The bridge actually straddles two county lines, Fulton County on the south side and Cobb County on the north side. So we have to close the bridge down. We have to get permits from both counties. And on top of that, we found out that we also have to coordinate with the State Department of Transportation. They have to approve it as well.

You know, closing a road down is one thing, but dropping a body into the Chattahoochee River is a whole different thing. So we've been coordinating with Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of National Resources, all these different groups to try to figure out who we need to essentially get permission from. Wayne spoke of a child sex ring that was operating out of a house on Gray Street in Atlanta.

He told me that he believed many of these child murders were related to this sex ring. We know that another six cases were involved in a homosexual ring going on in Atlanta, a black homosexual ring. Vincent Hill has spent the last several years looking into this theory too, and he believes it has some serious merit. If you look at old records and old police reports, Uncle Tom Terrell, his friend Jerry Thornton, Larry Marshall, Jerry Thornton told investigators...

10 of the victims used to hang out at that house, that they would have sex with little boys. And men would come to that house to pay for sex with these little boys. So how do you put that on Wayne?

It's been learned that investigators have now found this man, Tom Terrell, and questioned him today about his role in some type of homosexual ring operated out of this home in northwest Atlanta. That ring apparently involved the latest child victim, Timothy Hill, and through recent findings may have linked together several other children on the task force list.

Terrell knows this man, Larry Marshall, now in a Connecticut jail on armed robbery charges. Investigators also want to question Marshall, but so far he is fighting extradition back to Georgia. The next best thing is this man sitting in a detective's car this morning. How many of the murdered children have you seen around here? About ten of them. I told the man that...

Jerry Thornton, Larry Marshall's former roommate, identified 10 of the murder victims from pictures shown him by a police investigator, children he's seen in the neighborhood. Among them, 13-year-old Timothy Hill, 11-year-old Patrick Baltazar, and 15-year-old Joseph Bell.

This morning, Terrell's house on Gray Street was empty. Unlike recent weeks, when neighbors said at any given time, several boys would be hanging out here. Terrell is an admitted homosexual who says one of the victims, Timothy Hill, spent the night at his house a day before he disappeared. He was here on the 12th, but he was supposed to come back on the 13th, and that was my birthday. But he didn't come back. He didn't come back. If he did, I didn't see him, and I haven't seen him since.

Back in the 80s, no one was saying, oh, I'm openly gay. And you definitely didn't want to be known as a city that's trading boys for sex. But if you have 10 people that have been identified at one house where guys were coming in paying these boys for sex, they were giving them drugs, they were doing all these other types of things, you have all of these people coming to this house trading for sex, how do you put those 10 bodies on Wayne Williams? So you tie all these victims to Wayne Williams,

But you can't. 34-year-old Larry Marshall, now behind bars in Connecticut, is a known homosexual. He used to hang around this neighborhood on Gray Street. Tom Terrell, who is also a homosexual, said 13-year-old Timothy Hill also used to hang out here. And Larry and Timothy knew each other. Larry told you he had Timmy over to his house. He came there. What did they do over there? I don't know. They don't be doing nothing but drinking and talking.

But you do know for a fact that Larry knew Timmy. He knew him. Patrick Baltazar went missing after being seen at the Omni Hotel. Patrick Baltazar from the Omni to his house to Larry Marshall's house was about 1.8 miles. Baltazar would have had to pass Larry Marshall's house

on his way home. He's walking home right past Larry Marshall's house, who's associated with this pedophile who's selling these boys for sex. Marshall is believed to have known at least three of the victims: Patrick Balthazar, Timothy Hill, and Joseph Bell, who is still missing. If you're 10, 11 years old and you say, "Yeah, I'm gonna go tell my mom what you're doing." The heck you are, because I don't want to go to jail for rape of a child. So? I'll just kill you?

When Patrick Baltazar was found, one of the witnesses that morning, she said she saw a male white in a green station wagon, you know, just lurking around, like, towards the wooded area where Patrick was found.

who was the white guy in the green station wagon. Balthazar was with a 10-year-old friend playing near these railroad tracks near the Balthazar home on Foundry Street. Balthazar's friend told Jack Perry a big man in a car started following them and tried to get them to come get in the car with him. Perry taped part of the conversation with the young friend of Patrick Balthazar. He said, "Come here, you two boys." And Patrick started to the car. I grabbed him from behind. I said, "You don't know who that man is."

And then when he was going up the hill, he said, I'll be back. Then Patrick ran out and tried to get his tag number, but we couldn't get it. They called the task force from this phone near the key shop on Northside Drive, according to the young man who was with Patrick Baltazar. But after Patrick and his friend made the call to the task force, they didn't hang around waiting for police. They split up.

and Patrick was not seen again. We don't know if police sent a squad car to this area, but Jack Perry says he has learned the task force talked with Patrick Balthazar's friend just two days ago. I'm sure that the task force has the same information, so I hope it's beneficial to them. I asked Jack why it would take more than a month to follow up on talking to someone who had phoned asking for help.

particularly when one of the two children who had called turns up dead. It's surprising that they would let this thing go this long. You know, you want to follow up every lead that you have and I think it's just a breakdown of communications. Jack Perry also has learned that Patrick Baltazar may have intentionally gone back to the area where the man tried to pick him up because Patrick was a street hustler and believed he could get the license number and maybe he could collect the reward.

There's no coincidence that the FBI had Tom Terrell's house, Larry Marshall's house, under surveillance for weeks because of this alleged sex ring. If you follow the trail, you can't call the coincidence that Patrick Balthazar lives here, Larry Marshall lives here, the house where all the sexual activity was here, which also tied to 10 other victims, and you can't say, well, it had nothing to do with anything. It's impossible.

In the many years of Vincent's research, he's found a recurring story in the FBI files. A story about a vehicle that didn't belong to Wayne Williams. A Blue Nova. I know there was talk about a Blue Nova, which Wayne didn't drive a Blue Nova. Why didn't police do a motor vehicle record search to tie this Blue Nova to somebody other than Wayne? The case about the Blue Nova, the guy had an Afro with no glasses. Have you ever seen Wayne without glasses?

Other than his booking photo, have you ever seen Wayne Williams without glasses? Wayne can't see. So who is this guy with the afro with no glasses? Couldn't have been Wayne. You know, back then...

A lot of people said every black person looked alike. We're talking 1979. I had an Afro in 1979, right? My dad had an Afro in 1979. Who didn't have an Afro that was black in 1979, right? That was pre the jerry curl when Michael Jackson made that famous. People were walking around with Afros. So it very well could have been someone that resembled Wayne,

Because he looked just like that. He had an afro. The description wasn't a white guy with red hair. It was a black guy with an afro. That was probably 90% of the black population of Atlanta in 1979, 1980. This whole time, I've been wondering if there were any kids that got away, that were almost abducted. And if so, were they still around? That's when I met Rodney. He's an Atlanta native, a child living here during the time of the murders.

Rodney firmly believes that when he was 16, he was almost a victim of the Atlanta child murderer. He shared with me his chilling firsthand account. I was 15, not old enough to work, but Six Flags accepted a fake ID, which you could get downtown at that time, and put me to work. So I rode the bus from my neighborhood in southeast Atlanta to downtown. There was, at the time, a Marta

direct shuttle from downtown to Six Flags and all it did was go back and forth from this stop downtown to Six Flags, no other stops in between. I would change buses, get on the Six Flags shuttle, go to work, get on that shuttle to come back to downtown to go home and get on my bus which was the 34 Crescent. That particular day,

For whatever reason, by the time I had gotten off the 34 Gresham, walked across from the end of the line and to the Six Flags shuttle, I had missed it. And as I'm standing there, this guy approaches me. He was not tall, about 5'6"-ish. He was in his mid-20s. He was clean-shaven, which was unusual for a black male in the 70s. And he had a short afro.

had a fairly soft voice. So he didn't come across very masculine. He just came off as, you know, a nice guy. He approaches me and he's just basically chatting with me, asking if I'm okay. I missed my bus, you know, I've got to get to work. And, you know, my recollection is that he almost immediately offers me a ride. I'm going that way. It's no problem. You want a ride?

Drove a Blue Nova. The Blue Nova was parked on that same street just down the block. It wasn't far. It was just walking down the sidewalk. I got in his car and off we went. To go to Six Flags from downtown, one would go directly to I-20, which is maybe a mile or so from that spot. What he did was drove on surface streets heading north away from I-20.

On that ride, as he was talking to me, he offered me a joint. I had never done drugs, and to this day, I don't know if there was anything in it or I was just new to that and just had gotten really, really high. I mean, frankly, I smoked marijuana years after that and was very familiar with it, but there was something about that high that was, it wasn't just marijuana. There was something else in it.

During the course of that ride, he started to fondle me as he was driving over my pants. And I recall just kind of staring down at what he was doing, just not knowing what was going on, not really communicating with him. You know, at 15, I had no idea what was going on. As we continued down Fulton Industrial Road,

I knew that he would get onto I-20 because we were one exit away from Six Flags. Either he'd get onto I-20, go over into Cobb County, drop me off at Six Flags, or he would continue down Fulton Industrial, which if he passed under I-20 heading south, it was no man's land. Industrial warehouses, nothing.

And as we were at a traffic light, maybe two blocks from the entrance to I-20, it was like a do or die moment. And as we were sitting at that traffic light, just out of nowhere, I decided I'm going to jump out. And I grabbed the door, unlatched the door and opened it and tried to bolt out of the car.

Now, I didn't have on a seatbelt, but he had this seat cover over his vinyl seat. It had a hole in it. And my Afro pick that was in my back pocket, which was the way we carried him then, got hung up in his seat cover. And I'm struggling at this, like, to undo myself from this seat cover as the door is open trying to escape. And he didn't try to stop me. He just said to me as I'm struggling,

And it was the most eerie, sort of calm thing by Rodney. And I got out of the car and started heading back in the opposite direction, back up the hill toward a bank that I knew was sort of the last stop for a MARTA bus line. I was really out of it, really disoriented, looking out for him to see if he had turned around to come back in that direction. He didn't. He continued on.

And I basically just laid on the grass in front of this bank waiting on a mortar bus to come. And finally one did. Got on it, went back downtown, got on another bus to go to a relative's house, to my aunt's house, and kind of slept it off during the afternoon. Just kind of slept. Never told anyone about it.

I am convinced that had I stayed in the car, we would not have gone onto I-20. We would have continued straight south on Fulton Industrial, which, you know, would have led into that no man's land outside of southwest Atlanta. And I'm convinced that the way that that happened at that time, that this guy has some responsibility for some of these murders, if not all of them. You think that you would have been a victim? I'm sure of it. It was an odd situation.

disturbing thing that happened. But it didn't occur to me until I was an adult and had knowledge of the child murders in general.

It didn't dawn on me that, hey, that situation was more than what it seemed to be. And I started connecting the dots to other things that had happened. As the years went by, understanding what went on, you know, what that whole thing about the Atlanta child murders was about and the details of the investigation, and, you know, it became clear to me that my experience was related to it. You know, by the time I had that realization, though, the investigation was over. You know, we're talking about, you know, mid to late 80s.

And so, you know, what's the point? What's the way I thought about it? In my mind, the authorities had found their man, the person they intended to put it all on. And, you know, what's the point of me seeking out someone who cared in law enforcement to tell my story? What's the point of that? So when I came across this podcast and, you know, you guys were looking for information. Yeah. I decided to offer it. It's like, OK, I've got something to offer here.

I still don't think law enforcement is interested. In my mind, I think they consider this a closed case. I could be wrong, but that was the way I always looked at it. They were looking to close it and end it then. And I know of no one in law enforcement who would be interested in reopening or reexamining any evidence around this. So, you know, why spend time seeking out someone who would want to hear what I would have to say? Do you think the man who picked you up that day was Wayne Williams? No.

Absolutely not. Positive of that. He sounds similar in description. Yes, similar. Similar height, same hair. Clean shaven. The photos I've seen of Wayne Williams from that time, he had blemishes on his face that this guy didn't have. So just in the shape of his face was different. This guy had a slimmer build, more of an oval-shaped face. Different in more ways than he was the same. I'll put it that way.

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. 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. There and Gone.

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.

Uh, do you hear my voice?

Hey, hey, there you are. This is Tyler, over. Do you want me to stay down here or come back up? Over. Alright, so Casey and Alex are going to come down to you to follow Payne with the camera.

Okay, I'll stay down here to get him safely to the spot. Okay, that sounds good. Careful, he's gonna go deep. He's gonna sneak back here.

If you could pull your truck down where that Georgia Power sign is, and then we could at least walk him up there and get the dummy onto the back of your truck just to get it back here quicker. Does that make sense? But yeah, we're kind of approaching things as if we might not get a chance to do it again. Is that the sketch up there? It's, I mean, it wobbles a bit, but it's in the play of the joints. I don't think it's, like, the base feels stable. Go, go, go.

Okay. You guys get up there? Action. Cut. Atlanta Monster will be a 10-episode podcast, so there's four episodes left. Here's a preview of what's to come.

I don't want to tell anything because my wife right now is real nervous.

You can always come here to the office that we have at Ponce. I'd rather not.

You wouldn't think here in this little sleepy town that he was any kind of monster or he certainly didn't act like it until he drank and then he got the eyes of Charles Manson. I don't know. I don't know where it should go from here. I know that there were some wrongs that should probably be righted. His family's still suffering. Anybody out there who thinks that Wayne Williams didn't do all this by himself is correct. I only know that from the mouth of the devil.

I'm sorry that I did not come forth sooner. 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. One last thing. We've set up an Atlanta Monster tip line. Anyone with information, leads, or personal accounts pertaining to the Atlanta child murders can call us and leave a message. The number is 1-833-285-6667. Again, that's 1-833-285-6667. Thanks for listening.

Can I show you something? Yeah. Yeah? Well, now, this, uh... You got that there? That metal part. Okay. This metal part was not there. That was not there. No. Uh-uh. It wasn't there, huh? Action. No, it was just concrete up about this high, probably. Yeah, you wouldn't think it'd sound like a...

I would think that if I was out there listening that I could tell the difference between a beaver and a body, but I've never heard a beaver hit it, so I don't know what they sound like. But a beaver's tail wouldn't be near as big as the body of a man, and you would think it could probably tell. 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.