Yusef Ali Bell, a 9-year-old Black male, disappeared on Sunday, October 21, 1979, in Atlanta, Georgia. On that day, the fifth-grader left his home in the McDaniel-Glenn housing project to run a simple errand for a neighbor, Eula Birdsong: to buy a can of Bruton snuff from the nearby Reese Grocery on McDaniel Street. It was a task he had done before. A witness reported seeing him near the intersection of McDaniel and Fulton streets getting into a blue car before he vanished.
He never returned home from the short trip to the store.
The search for Yusef ended tragically on November 8, 1979, when a janitor discovered his body in the crawlspace of the abandoned E.P. Johnson Elementary School on Capitol Avenue. The boy was found clothed only in the brown cut-off shorts he was wearing when he went missing. An autopsy revealed that he had been hit over the head twice, and the official cause of death was determined to be strangulation.
Yusef Bell's death was one of a string of killings that came to be known as the Atlanta Child Murders, which terrorized the city between 1979 and 1981 and involved the deaths of at least 28 African-American children, adolescents, and young adults. In 1981, a man named Wayne Williams was arrested and later convicted in 1982 for the murders of two of the adult victims. Following his conviction, law enforcement officials attributed a number of the child murders, including Yusef's, to Williams, and closed those cases. However, Williams was never formally charged with or tried for the murder of Yusef Bell.
Despite Williams's conviction for the two adult murders and being implicated in others, he has always maintained his innocence in all the cases. Over the years, doubts have been raised about whether Williams was responsible for all the killings attributed to him. In March 2019, the Atlanta police reopened the murder cases in the hope that advances in technology could lead to definitive answers and convictions.
