Atlanta’s Serial Killers: Three Different Gruesome Homicide Sprees Targeting Mostly Black Victims Over Three Distinct Eras Left Horrifying Legacies

The Atlanta Ripper. The Atlanta Child Murders. The Midtown Bar Killer. Three different killing sprees taking place in and around Atlanta in three different eras but they share a hideous, bloodthirsty common thread: No one was sentenced to the death penalty for any of the murders.

And the overwhelming majority of the victims were Black.

Atlanta Then And Now

Today’s Atlanta is known for its global influence on culture, music, and business. But a look back to the early 1900s years offers a picture of a very different Atlanta, a city where racial animus and oppression were the order of the day due to legalized segregation accompanied by socially ingrained racial oppression.

It was a time when Black victims of violent crime were rarely treated as such by authorities and law enforcement, making an already marginalized community even more marginalized, allowing crimes perpetrated against them to be downplayed or even dismissed outright.

By the time the late 1970s arrived, Atlanta had left Jim Crow behind but the racial sensitivities of that deeply unjust and lengthy part of Atlanta history were still alive. And while Atlanta was building and growing, the economic boom that would catapult many Black Atlantans into the middle and upper-middle class economic stratosphere was not realized by all, as entire swaths of the city’s Black residents continued to live in economically disaffected areas of the city.

By the early 2000s, the city’s gay community was visible, politically potent, and a culturally signifant element of the city’s melting pot. This was particularly true for many Black LGBT+ people who were succeeding in professional and creative endeavors across the city, leaving indelible marks along the way.

Three different eras. Three different killing sprees. And a city that does not instantly come to mind when the term “serial killer” is mentioned. However, a series of cold-blooded killings perpetrated by killers during a time span that stretches across more than 100 years of Atlanta history has left a scarred legacy along with memories of dozens of victims.

The Atlanta Ripper (1911-1915)

It was in the midst of the Jim Crow era in Atlanta when in the summer of 1911, a young Black woman named Mary “Belle” Walker was found murdered. Her body was discovered by her sister on May 28, twenty-five yards from her home on Garibaldi Street, a stone’s throw from today’s Belt Line. Belle’s family had grown concerned when she did not return from her overnight job.

Her throat had been cut by an unknown assailant. The local press gave the murder very little attention, running a brief report on page 7 in The Atlanta Constitution under the headline “Negro Woman Killed; No Clue to Slayer — Was Found With Her Throat Cut Near Her Home.”

However, the murder of the young Black woman would not be the last crime of its nature: The Atlanta Ripper would be the moniker given to the unidentified serial killer (or killers) who would eventually be suspected of the brutal, violent murders of up to two dozen young women of color between 1911 and 1915.

The murders almost exclusively took place on Saturday nights or in the early hours of Sunday mornings in poorly lit sections of the Fourth Ward. The victims were ambushed from behind in alleyways, unlit streets, or near railroad tracks.

The killer would utilize brutal physical trauma to overcome the women, including bludgeoning the victims on the head, and would slit the victims’ throats with deep, sometimes precise incisions—drawing immediate comparisons to London’s infamous Jack the Ripper.

The killer’s actions followed a terrifyingly precise, ritualistic pattern. The New York Times reported at the time that the weapon used was likely a razor or a surgeon’s knife. Post-mortem mutilation was common; in the case of a housekeeper named Mary Putnam, her heart was cut out and placed next to her body.

Physically, the victims were mostly young, African-American women around the age of 20. Many were poor, working-class Black women, while some were educated, well-dressed, and worked as domestic servants, cooks, or housekeepers for wealthy White families.

A precise victim count will never be known and the exact count is still debated: Some of the women’s murders were written off by a largely uninterested law enforcement apparatus to abusive husbands or male acquaintances who were said to have harmed the women but staged their killings to look like it was the work of the unknown killer.

In fact, an Atlanta judge who was hearing the case of a man accused of threatening to cut his wife’s throat infamously said: “I am satisfied that every one of the several negro women slain recently in Atlanta were murdered by a different man. There are least 1,000 negro men in Atlanta today who stand ready to cut the throats of their wives at the slightest provocation.”

That judge, Nash Broyles, fined the man $25.75.

The Atlanta Ripper Case remains unsolved. At least six suspects were arrested over the years, but no convictions were ever secured. Historians note that institutional racism and indifference from newspapers ran by and for White Atlantans along with the apathetic local police department allowed the murders to fade from public memory without a thorough resolution.

The Atlanta Child Murders

The horrors began in July 1979, quietly and without warning, in a city that played a pivotal geographic and historical role in the years-long fight for Black Civil Rights.

Atlanta’s leaders were busy trying to re-brand the city as the progressive, prosperous jewel of the New South, after having recently elected Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, while proudly adopting the nicknmae, “The City Too Busy to Hate.”

But in the sweltering midsummer heat, gruesome, senseless hate found work, and thus began a murderous campaign as a predator started hunting defenseless Black children in the city’s economically marginalized neighborhoods.

On July 21, 1979, 14-year-old Edward Hope Smith went missing after leaving a local skating rink.

Just four days later, on July 25, 13-year-old Alfred Evans disappeared while running an errand to the grocery store.

For several agonizing days, their families searched and hoped. That hope ended on August 7, 1979, when a passerby discovered both of their heavily decomposed bodies dumped in a secluded, wooded vacant lot off Niskey Lake Road in Southwest Atlanta.

Edward had been shot in the upper back; Alfred’s cause of death was undetermined due to decomposition, though strangulation was highly suspected.

Because the boys were teenagers from a lower-income area, local authorities initially treated the cases as isolated incidents—casting the horrific murders as the byproduct of urban street violence or labeling the boys as runaways. There was no public alarm. No major task force was formed.

The illusion of isolated crimes shattered over the next few months as more children vanished from Atlanta’s south and west sides. Each departure followed a terrifyingly mundane routine: a child went to the local store, the community swimming pool, or walked down a familiar sidewalk, and simply never came home.

September 1979: 14-year-old Milton Harvey disappeared while riding his bike. His body was found months later.

October 1979: 9-year-old Yusuf Bell went to a neighborhood store to buy snuff for a neighbor. His body was found in an abandoned school building in November. He had been strangled.

By the time Yusuf Bell’s body was recovered, the community realized that a calculated monster was operating in their backyards. The victims shared undeniable traits: they were all young, African-American, and from lower-income backgrounds.

Despite the growing body count, the Atlanta Police Department was slow to formally connect the cases. The city’s political leadership, wary of stoking racial tensions or damaging Atlanta’s booming economic reputation, resisted the narrative that a serial killer was on the loose.

Frustrated by what they saw as institutional indifference and a lack of urgency because the victims were poor and Black, grieving mothers took matters into their own hands. Led by Camille Bell—the mother of young Yusuf—a group of parents formed the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders (STOP) in April 1980.

STOP became the fierce, uncompromising voice of the victims. They organized searches, demanded police accountability, and held press conferences to force local and national media to look at the faces of Atlanta’s missing children. They boldly pointed out that if White children from affluent suburbs were disappearing at this rate, the response would have been instantaneous.

The pressure from STOP and the relentless influx of new cases finally forced a shift. In July 1980, after nine children had already been found dead, the city finally launched a dedicated police task force. By the end of that year, as the disappearances escalated into a national crisis, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officially entered the hunt.

What started with two boys in a vacant lot eventually snowballed into a twenty-two-month nightmare that claimed at least 29 young lives, forever altering the landscape of Atlanta, while traumatizing the Black Community, and rewriting the history of American criminal profiling.

A 30th victim, Darron Glass (age 10), disappeared during this window in 1980 but his body was never found. Today, his diappearance remains officially classified as a missing person case.

By May 1981, with the city in full panic mode, the FBI and local police had formed a massive task force to stop the killings. Profilers deduced that the killer was dumping bodies into local waterways to wash away physical evidence, leading police to conduct stakeouts at several bridges spanning the Chattahoochee River.

During a late-night police convergence, self-proclaimed disc jockey and record producer Wayne Williams was stopped by police but let go after brief questioning. He would later emerge as the primary suspect in the murders of the children and two adult men whose bodies were found dumped in the river.

Williams was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Despite only being convicted of the two adult murders, investigators held a press conference immediately following the verdict to announce that 22 of the child murder cases were “administratively closed” and attributed to Williams. Because the strangulation murders abruptly stopped after Williams was taken into custody, authorities viewed further trials as a waste of public resources–a decision that infuriated many in the community.

Wayne Williams has maintained his absolute innocence for over forty years, a stance echoed by some independent investigative journalists and even a few families of the young victims who believe the real killer(s) escaped justice. To some, Williams is the scapegoat.

But to many others, the right man is in custody. They point to witness testimony, available evidence, and the fact the murders appeared to end after Williams was jailed.

However, much like the Atlanta Ripper, no one–including Williams–was ever charged with or prosecuted for the killings of dozens of Atlanta’s Black children.

Howard Belcher–The Midtown Bar Killer

In October 2002, a wave of fear rippled through the Midtown Atlanta community. Over the course of a single month, several men vanished or were found brutally murdered, leaving investigators scrambling to find a pattern. The common thread: A popular local gay bar called Bulldogs and the area around the Peachtree Street bar–an area where Belcher cruised for potential victims.

On October 5, 27-year-old Leroy Tyler, who had recently relocated from Florida, was found dead inside his apartment in Clarkston in DeKalb County. His body had been left under a blanket in his bedroom, his hands tied and he had been killed by strangulation, according to detectives. The stove in his apartment had been left on and his car was gone.

On that same October day, Mark Schaller, a 40-year-old Atlanta businessman, was found beaten, hog-tied, and strangled to death in his condo on Dutch Valley Road in Midtown. He was found partially nude; his hands were bound with a necktie. The cause of death was determined to be severe blunt force injury to his neck.

The gas oven in Schaller’s home was left turned on, and his phone and wallet were missing.

On October 10, 2002: Matthew Abney, 43, an assistant manager at a Paulding County Wal-Mart, was discovered tied up and strangled to death. He was found partially unclothed with his hands bound by a necktie, and once again, the gas oven was left on.

His car and jewelry were missing.

Then, around October 28, 35-year-old Artilles McKinney, who lived in Duluth, was found murdered. His body was discovered by his roommate in their Mulberry Way home and McKinney’s car was missing.

Finally, on October 30, 2002, police stopped a man who was driving Artilles’ gold 1994 Lexus, which had been listed as stolen.

Behind the wheel was 24 year old Howard Milton Belcher, who had grow up in the Atlanta area. Belcher had recently been released from state prison on unrelated felony shoplifting charges when he began frequenting the Midtown neighborhood and the bar.

According to Atlanta police homicide detectives, Belcher used the lively atmosphere in and around the bar to scout and meet his victims, using his looks and charm to lull his victims into a sense of comfort.

Once he gained their trust, he would accompany them back to their homes or secluded locations. Then he would murder them in an horrific display of violence.

Homicide detectives noted that Belcher may have been “struggling with something internally”. Following his arrest, Belcher told investigators that he had contracted HIV, leading authorities to believe his diagnosis may have helped contribute to a destructive, resentful psychological downward spiral.

However, financial gain was the most immediate, tangible motive. Following the murders, Belcher systematically stole high-value belongings from his victims, including their vehicles.

But not every Belcher victim was killed: When he was finally arrested, police connected him to a separate, active metro-area kidnapping case. That specific victim reportedly helped authorities piece together Belcher’s movements before his arrest.

Following that arrest, Belcher was quickly convicted of the murder of Matthew Abney in Paulding County, receiving a life sentence plus 20 years. He subsequently faced multi-jurisdictional capital murder charges across Fulton and DeKalb counties for the multi-county crime spree.

However, when Fulton County brought additional murder charges for the death of Mark Schaller, a physically deteriorating Belcher stunned the courtroom. During his 2005 arraignment, he openly rejected his court-appointed attorneys and requested execution. “I want the death penalty,” Belcher told Fulton Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore.

Belcher would eventually be sentenced to life without parole and today is serving his sentence at Georgia’s Augusta State Medical State Prison.