In 2016, Payne Lindsey, a twenty-eight-year-old freelance filmmaker in Georgia—now thirty, and the host of “Atlanta Monster,” the No. 1 podcast on iTunes for much of its existence, about the Atlanta child murders of 1979-81—was looking for a project. “I’ve been a storyteller my whole life,” he told me recently. Professionally, he’d been working on commercials, short films, music videos. “I wanted to make my breakout documentary piece, my first film,” he said. “I wanted to do something really big, and I was always a fan of true crime.” He liked “Serial,” “Making a Murderer,” and, especially, “The Jinx,” Andrew Jarecki’s 2015 HBO documentary about the alleged serial killer Robert Durst. “I was blown away by it,” Lindsey said. “You know—wow. These guys really did make a difference.” (A hearing for a possible murder trial for Durst is scheduled for April.) “They basically caught this guy red-handed,” Lindsey said. “It’s possible. I was, like, What if I could do that?”
Lindsey had no experience in journalism or investigation. “But I liked doing it, just like anyone else,” he said. “I think everyone has a little sleuth in them.” He searched online for Georgia cold cases and, intrigued by the one with the biggest file in the history of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, that of the 2005 disappearance of Tara Grinstead, a high-school teacher in rural Ocilla, he decided to investigate. What he found led not to a film but to his first podcast, “Up and Vanished.” “I didn’t want to raise money,” he told me. “I wanted to get the story out there first and work on building something big.” He teamed up with a producing partner, Donald Albright, a music-industry veteran. They ultimately formed a company called Tenderfoot TV—a name that’s a bit odd to keep hearing repeated on a podcast.
“Up and Vanished,” which has been downloaded more than a hundred and fifty million times, is a sprawling, fascinating, unnerving concoction—dozens of episodes and bonus episodes in which locals speculate about murder, sexual liaisons, secrets, and coverups. As it begins, Lindsey is a naïf, equipped mostly with gumption, the Internet, and his grandmother’s tips (her best friend attended the barbecue where Grinstead was last seen) and her folksy support (she bakes “cowboy cookies” for a few lucky listeners who write reviews on iTunes). Lindsey also connects with a helpful private investigator who had worked on the case, and off he goes.
Lindsey’s narrative authority feels neither rock solid nor entirely suspect. He’s figuring it out, and you’re figuring him out, too. The writing is earnest, with hints of pulp: Grinstead, who was thirty years old, white, and a former Miss Georgia contestant, is described as a “former beauty queen” and a “gorgeous brunette with a striking smile.” Lindsey discusses her relationships, reads her e-mails to us, lets clips of speculating interviewees run on and on. He calls experts to speculate further, rather loosely. The show has an improvisational, let’s-try-this quality: in the fourth episode, Lindsey gets a lead on a suspicious patch of dirt under a porch, grabs a shovel, and goes to dig. “Every second, I feared I would see something I would never be able to unsee,” he says, over the sounds of a shovel scraping through soil. Sometimes a dramatic second narrator, whom Lindsey identifies only as “my friend Rob,” appears, as if spliced in from a movie trailer. (“He’s done voice-over work and sound design with me in the past,” Lindsey told me. “He’s just someone I thought had a cool voice.”) Tape varies widely in sound quality; editing can feel tentative. But Lindsey takes his work seriously, respects his interviewees, and keeps sensitive details obscured for privacy.
How did he know what he should and shouldn’t include? He did “a bunch of research” on “the legalities of cold cases and the different rules there are for journalists,” he told me. “But, for the most part, I used my own moral compass as the guide.” On the podcast, we hear several interviewees praise him for his empathy and approach. All the speculation about who the killer was didn’t bother him, he told me. “It just so happened that she had a lot of acquaintances who didn’t have the best alibis,” he said. “So, for years, everyone speculated. I was more or less looking into the community and what they thought. I never stated, ‘Hey, this is what I think.’ I think that in order to get to the truth you have to sift through all these leads.”
Six months into Lindsey’s investigation, a woman called in a tip to the authorities and two men were arrested in connection with Grinstead’s murder. The suspects hadn’t been mentioned on the podcast; Lindsey didn’t know who they were. But he pivoted to researching their story and exploring it as thoroughly as he could. Because of a gag order and other factors, basic facts—evidence, motives, the suspects’ credibility—remain obscure. But Lindsey is undaunted. In one episode, he has a man and a woman read us messages between one of the suspects and a stranger he confides in. The messages are disturbing, graphic, and performed theatrically; it’s horrifying. In another, Lindsey talks to the ex-girlfriend of one of the suspects—her mother called in the tip—and ends up giving her a righteous earful about morality. But, despite these dubious choices and the intractability of the case, Lindsey manages to finagle an ending to the podcast that implies a plausible twist without being ethically reckless.
Yet my misgivings persisted throughout. Later in the feed, there are episodes from a months-long, seventeen-city “Up and Vanished” live tour. It feels like an unsavory victory lap. Lindsey’s friend Rob is back, now as m.c., introducing Lindsey and others in show-biz fashion, to cheering. The energy in the room is intense. During a Q. & A., Lindsey is applauded for having scolded the ex-girlfriend. “You kind of went off on her,” an audience member says, admiringly. “That was a game-changer.” Lindsey modestly frames it as just something he had to do. (That moral compass again.) The man continues, “Is there any kind of legal way that we can, like, make this woman pay for it?” Lindsey demurs, keeping the fervor in the room at a low boil. They’re all detectives now—and they want justice. The legal outcome of the Grinstead case is undetermined; a trial is forthcoming. Meanwhile, Lindsey is onto the next case.
“Atlanta Monster,” produced by Tenderfoot TV in collaboration with HowStuffWorks, began in January, and it was No. 1 on the iTunes charts for four weeks in a row. At first, “Atlanta Monster” feels almost like a different genre from “Up and Vanished”—a big leap forward in narrative authority and sophistication.
In the Atlanta child murders, as they were known, at least twenty-eight children, almost all black boys from poor neighborhoods, went missing or were found killed, many of asphyxiation, between 1979 and 1981. As the podcast begins, people who lived in Atlanta during that time set the scene—we hear substantive description and commentary from victims’ relatives, historians, detectives, and journalists, augmented by archival news audio. It’s devastating, riveting. To the podcast’s credit, Lindsey, who is young, white, and previously unfamiliar with the case, doesn’t appear until several minutes in; the focus is not on him but on the victims and the traumatized community, where it belongs. But when he does introduce himself he can’t resist a little pride. He says, about “Up and Vanished,” that “the case remained ice cold for more than a decade,” but that, six months into his podcast, arrests were made and at long last “this small-town community had some answers.” Right away, the tension between these two impulses—to create a thoughtful narrative podcast that contextualizes a story about race, crime, and justice or to create a true-crime podcast that saves the day and sometimes showcases its own heroism—dominates the experience of listening to “Atlanta Monster.” I think that Lindsey wants to do both things at once, whether he realizes it or not, and he may not fully know the difference.
The interviews in the early episodes are often excellent. Calinda Lee, of the Atlanta History Center, deftly provides both cultural and emotional context. By the late seventies and early eighties, she says, the first generation of African-Americans who had benefitted from school desegregation at the secondary and collegiate levels, who might have “attended segregated primary schools and still had those memories,” were professionals in the workforce. When the murders began, Lee says, she was a nine-year-old living in the Fourth Ward, “which was one of the areas from which children were taken. And I remember, as a child, whispers and chatter among children—if you can imagine, this real-life bogeyman is actually out there.” A child she went to summer camp with was abducted, “and there wasn’t a sense that that anything very serious was happening to protect us”; little was changing “except that we were very afraid and our parents were very angry.” Every child who disappeared was black and poor. “Many of them came from public-housing projects. And so all of that definitely conspired to make folks feel like this is something that is happening to the least of us. And nobody cares.” Lee does oral-history work, and she says that there’s a “distinct gap between white Atlantans and black Atlantans” in their memories of that time—“a profound sense of separate realities and separate societies.”
For black Atlantans affected by the killings, answers and support were not forthcoming. Mothers demanded justice at City Hall; the police force was experiencing upheaval. We hear an affable ex-F.B.I. agent who goes by the nickname Popcorn explain that the police department’s detectives were inexperienced, and he offers racial dynamics as the cause. This explanation is interesting but wobbly. Popcorn explains that the first black mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson, said that he “wanted to make the police department more brown,” so experienced white police officers left; black recruits were given answers to tests in what became a “huge cheating scandal.” Is this accurate? A generalization? We don’t know. The presentation of cultural details is on more solid footing. The mayor offered a cash reward, supplemented by a donation from Muhammad Ali, for information on the murders; the city held a benefit concert, and on the podcast we hear clips of Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly with Me” and of Sammy Davis, Jr., saying, “Such a horrendous tragedy as this . . . certainly affects all of America.” TV stations began playing “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?” P.S.A.s. The F.B.I. got involved with the investigation, and it employed profilers; the police used psychics sent by the National Enquirer.
Later, we hear about a bridge stakeout and the arrest of Wayne Williams, a young local talent scout who does indeed seem suspect—smart, odd, into recruiting boys for professional projects, driving around for unlikely reasons in the middle of the night with suspicious items in his car. Williams was eventually convicted of the murders of two adults, on reasonable but not completely damning evidence, and the child murders were effectively ascribed to him, too; the investigations of their cases were suspended. Many families of the child victims don’t believe that Williams is responsible or that justice has been served. Later murders and disappearances of Atlanta children were not framed as being part of the Atlanta child murders, and the media moved on. The city was eager to move on, too—the situation was bad for tourism, and people didn’t want to live in fear.
Lindsey and Albright are doing a deeply worthy thing by reëxamining this case and its effects and, so far, by asking many of the right questions. To do justice to the project, though, they will have to investigate the crime thoroughly enough to get more answers than we had before, investigate the original detective work and legal process, and contextualize them so that we understand. These are extremely ambitious goals. I have high hopes, but I’m wary.
In the fifth episode, “Wayne’s World”—grim joke, that title—Lindsey reveals that he has been talking to Wayne Williams for two months: a dramatic development, podcast-wise, that is played for further drama. We hear a recording of seemingly the entire dial-in procedure with the prison—not a scene-setting snippet, as in “Serial,” but two full minutes of prompts and beeps and boops, as if we are listening to elaborate automated banking transactions set to suspenseful music. Williams is riled up and hard to parse psychologically; Lindsey doesn’t edit him much or have a robust give-and-take. I suspect that Lindsey is a bit in thrall of his Wayne Williams connection, and I’m not sure that it bodes well.
Lindsey and Albright are still learning the craft of audio journalism, and of investigation. Many elements of the podcast establish trust; some impede it. In Episode 5, leads about sex trafficking and pedophilia emerge, and, though the podcast includes clips of people talking about the ethical injustice of linking gayness with pedophilia, Lindsey earnestly uses the term “homosexual ring,” before playing clips of Williams and an old news announcer saying it. He should have used a different phrase or clarified that he was quoting it; we shouldn’t be wondering, even briefly, if he thinks “homosexual ring” is a reasonable way to describe criminals. Other elements unnerve, too. The show’s music, an often corny synth-noir plink-plink, can be distracting, especially in an instance when it’s played under a recitation of the victims’ names. What should be a sober confrontation with the scope of the tragedy merges with a distasteful wielding of drama. We don’t always have a clear sense of Lindsey as our guide; he can seem reluctant to edit interviewees or to weigh in; sometimes speakers aren’t identified. Jarring ads pop in after all kinds of grim scenarios: suddenly Lindsey will be talking about home-security systems, tuxedo rentals, or life-changing underwear in the same earnest tones that he uses for his narration. “It’s actually impossible to get a wedgie,” he tells us about the underwear, after singing the praises of its time-saving horizontal quick-draw fly.
I hope that the “Atlanta Monster” project can effect more justice—legal, emotional, or otherwise—for the tragedies’ many victims than the arrest of Wayne Williams alone did. By bringing the right kind of attention to the story it could do some good. But is this team making smart, responsible choices? Is Wayne Williams a trustworthy collaborator? On the one hand, Williams mentions a conspiracy in his case involving the F.B.I., Iran-Contra-induced paranoia in Washington, and George Bush; here, Lindsey expresses surprise, and he later emphasizes the need for “hard evidence.” But Williams, in fact, does seem to have some good leads about the crimes. The sixth episode, which came out on Friday, explored the ever more plausible theory about a sex-trafficking ring. It seems increasingly likely that homophobia and our cultural inability to confront sexual abuse, let alone talk about it, played a significant a role in this tragedy, too, and I hope that Lindsey and his peers are up to the challenge of elucidating that.
“Atlanta Monster” and “Up and Vanished” will likely inspire countless more Payne Lindseys; whether or not these cases are ever effectively resolved, Lindsey—with hit podcasts and a forthcoming “Up and Vanished” TV series, for Oxygen—has accomplished his goal of doing something big. During one of their prison phone calls, Williams seems on board with that goal. “You’re going to find out all of what happened behind the scenes on this,” he tells Lindsey. “It will be one of the biggest stories you’ve ever done—I promise you that.”
