The police chief who last year reopened an investigation into five of the child killings that terrorized Atlanta a quarter-century ago has resigned, raising questions about the probe’s future.
DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham submitted his resignation hours after the release of a tape of a profanity-laced conversation between him and an aide, and a day after a special prosecutor was appointed to investigate claims of wrongdoing in his department.
Deputy Chief Nick Marinelli, who was appointed acting police chief, won’t be available to comment on the prospects for the child killings investigation until next week, police department spokesman Jason Gagnon said Thursday.
“I have no idea about this investigation or what’s going on with it,” Gagnon said.
The region was traumatized by the string of two dozen deaths from 1979 to 1981, including the five in DeKalb County, just east of Atlanta. All the victims were black, and most were boys. While Wayne Williams was convicted of two of the slayings, police have blamed him for the others as well.
Graham had promised a vigorous investigation of the five DeKalb cases last May with much fanfare. Records obtained by The Associated Press last month, however, offered little evidence that Graham followed through on the promised probe. He refused interview requests over the past month to discuss the investigation’s status.
The announcement of his departure Wednesday troubled one victim’s mother.
“You got me sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting to hear some justice … still looking and still listening and ain’t heard none. I don’t care if it’s been 50 years. I still want to know,” said Catherine Leach, whose son, Curtis Walker, disappeared in 1981.
Vernon Jones, DeKalb County’s chief executive officer, declined to discuss the taped comments at a news conference announcing Graham’s resignation.
“The police chief is not an issue. He has resigned,” Jones said. “He did not want the police department to be distracted, and we are moving forward.”
No details of possible wrongdoing in Graham’s department were provided by the state attorney general’s office, which named the special investigator at the county prosecutor’s request.
On the eight-minute audio tape, which Graham appears to have recorded accidentally, he and Assistant Chief R.P. Flemister talk about firing another officer. Graham appears to coach a captain on how to question the officer to get him to admit he was wrong in trying to secretly record a conversation.
Flemister, who is black, also is heard using a racial insult when referring to a white employee. He was placed on paid administrative leave while the county reviews the tape.
Graham had known Williams before the string of killings and said when announcing the new investigation that he had been plagued by doubts that Williams was responsible for all two dozen killings.
Financial records obtained by AP through an open records request show that of the $3,995 that the police department has spent on the reopened investigation, more than half went to send detectives to training seminars. The rest was for two trips last August, including one to Florida to search for a suspect in a 1983 murder case. The slayings Graham said he was looking into were committed in 1980 and 1981.
