In the spring of 1980, 14-year-old Eric Middlebrooks, an African-American male, was living with his foster parents in Atlanta, Georgia. On the evening of May 18th, he answered a phone call and then hurriedly left on his bicycle, telling his foster mother he was going to fix it and had taken a hammer with him. He was never seen alive again. The following morning, his body was discovered behind a bar. His bicycle was found nearby.
An autopsy would later reveal that the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, and he also had slight stab wounds on his chest and arms. His pockets had been turned inside out.
A few weeks prior to his death, Eric had testified in a robbery case against three other juveniles, a detail that was noted in the investigation into his murder. His death became part of a string of horrifying events that gripped the city, a series of killings that would come to be known as the Atlanta Child Murders. Over a two-year period, from 1979 to 1981, at least 28 children, adolescents, and young adults, mostly African-American males, were murdered. The city was in a state of fear and panic as the number of victims grew.
The investigation into the string of murders was complex and intense. Eventually, a man named Wayne Williams was identified as a suspect in the case. While he was not directly charged with the murder of Eric Middlebrooks, prosecutors considered Eric's case to be a 'pattern case' during Williams' trial for two other adult victims. Fiber evidence found on Eric's body was among the evidence presented to link Williams to the pattern of killings. Ultimately, Wayne Williams was convicted in 1982 for the murders of two of the adult victims and sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. Following his conviction, law enforcement officials attributed a number of the other child murders, including Eric's, to Williams and officially closed the cases. However, the evidence in some of these attributed cases, including Eric Middlebrooks', was considered by some to be weak.
