Between 1979 and 1981, children disappeared from Atlanta’s streets, including boys who never made it home from the store or to the bus stop, and their bodies began to turn up in woods and waterways. The killings of at least 29 young people stunned the city and horrified families, who kept their children indoors for years.
According to the FBI’s publicly available case files, about 29 children, teens, and young adults, predominantly boys, were killed during that time period; in 1980, the bureau formed a multi-agency task team and logged the investigation under the code name “ATKID.”
Parents organized patrols as police investigated homes and woodland corridors where victims were eventually discovered, a pattern described in the FBI’s online case files as dump locations around the Chattahoochee River and in forested areas on Atlanta’s southwest side…