Law: Terror on Atlanta's South Side

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Fourteen black children die or vanish, and police are baffled says Teresa Brown, 9, "I get scared and cry." Teresa is not alone. The entire south side of Atlanta, where she lives, is a community gripped by fear. Over the past 15 months, 14 black youngsters, ranging in age from seven to 15, have disappeared. Ten have later been found murdered.

Although the causes of death vary from strangulation to stabbing and bludgeoning, the series of abductions and killings may well be part of some bizarre and mysterious pattern. All but two of the victims were males who were relatively small, generally wore their hair short, and looked younger than their age. Those similarities might suggest a sexual motive, but police say there is no evidence of molestation. There is speculation that the boys were well cared for by their abductor, because some of them had apparently been washed shortly before they were murdered. Such tenuous theories are all that anybody has to go on. At the end of last week, a three-month-old police task force of 24 full-time investigators had not come up with a single solid lead.

It was not for lack of effort. In what Public Safety Commissioner Lee Brown calls "the most intensive investigation ever conducted in the history of this city," the Georgia bureau of investigation is pitching in, the FBI is providing national crime-lab facilities, and a psychiatrist at Emory University is trying to develop profiles of the killer or killers. In addition, Atlanta officials have enlisted 450 fire-and policemen in an unprecedented twelve-hour-a-day, door-to-door canvass to ask residents if they have seen anything unusual and give them pictures of the missing children. Says Fireman William Eberhardt: "This way the people see you're involved, and they have a tendency to get into the act themselves." True enough, if the neighborhood searches conducted by residents over the weekends are any indication. More than 600 people took part in the first one, on Oct. 18, which found the skeleton of a seven-year-old victim.

There have been other initiatives as well. A parents' group called the Committee to Stop Children's Murders (Stop) set up shop in June at a local mall, established a 24-hour hotline, and began undertaking some detective work on its own. It receives 20 to 50 calls a day, but not one tip has panned out. Schools are scheduling lessons on street safety taught by visiting police; television coverage has included a film re-enacting some of the crimes; and police fraternal organizations are distributing 100,000 bumper stickers reading: KIDS, DON'T GO WITH STRANGERS. A reward fund contributed by the Atlanta Business League, the local bar association, a radio station, the city council and numerous other Atlanta groups has reached a total of $150,000 and is still growing. Says Commissioner Brown, who is black and himself the worried father of ten-year-old twins: "Somewhere out there, someone has that piece of information we need to break the case."