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Feb. 2nd, 2021 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
babydracoI'm watching Mindhunter all the way through again and I'm on the S2 Atlanta Child Murders arc.
1)Suspect Wayne Williams (the man currently behind bars for two of the murders) mentions that he has a part time job as a crime scene photographer. In an earlier scene of law enforcement searching a potential body dumping site in Atlanta, he can be seen hurrying past in the background, holding a camera. HUH! This is the first time I've noticed that!
I know they can't solve it on the show, because it hasn't been solved in real life. But it feels like the characters were spending too much time dancing around the obvious theory. A theory that's probably been discussed ad nauseum among people interested in the real life case. They do address the possibility but then don't really come to a conclusion. That theory being that...
It wasn't one lonely loser, but a pedophile *ring*. Probably of both black and white perps, operating out of more than one location, with members who had power in the community.
1) They find two houses where young boys, including some of the victims, were known to go, allegedly for certain types of "work". There was a lot of child prostitution going on in the area. And a lot of the victims knew each other. 15 of the 28 victims had some sort of connection to each other!
2) They find a white suspect who has a collection of images of children, but most of the boys are white. The FBI argues that victimology doesn't cross racial lines, although this contradicts something they just learned from interviewing Hance and Brudos. Namely, that race plays a big part but that there are other ways people can be grouped together that might affect a serial killer's preferences. Hance was black and killed mostly black women, but saw his white victim as also being like him, because they were both in the Army. Brudos killed college coeds, regardless of race. Some pedophiles are into all types of children, regardless of race or sex (to note, there WAS a black female victim as well!) Only having photos of white male victims doesn't mean all the victims were white or male...but it could also mean there was more than one perp. There is a reveal at the end of the season, that the Atlanta PD removed and hid photos of black children which were found in the white pedophile's collection.
3) The FBI conducts an experiment to see if poor black kids would get in a car with a white male stranger. They wouldn't, but the experiment was a little flawed. The black cop they used was cool looking, offered the kids money and approached them alone in a bad neighborhood. The white agent they used was Gregg Smith, who came off as weird and creepy and approached them outside their homes within earshot of their grandmas. It was also a bit sexist, since I guess it didn't occur to them to see if the kids would react the same to a strange woman of any race. People, especially kids, do trust a strange woman more than a strange man, white or black. Traffickers use women as bait all the time, and so have serial killing couples like Bernardo/Homolka and Brady/Hindly (the woman gets the victim to approach/get in the car/go with them to another location, the man does the bulk of the violence).
Agent Barney argues that the town where the FBI did the experiment is a lot rougher than the Atlanta neighborhoods where the kids went missing. The kids aren't from a bad area, just a poor one.
They suspected the Klan for awhile, because it looked like the victims were just being murdered, not sexually assaulted.
Some of the killers they interview in other episodes did get off merely on murder itself. David Berkowitz never sexually interacted with any of his victims, he just shot them and ran away (then masturbated at home, alone). They interviewed the guy who the movie Cruising is based on, and he would have consensual sex with other adults and *then* murder them.
But just because someone wasn't assaulted within a few hours of their death, doesn't mean they never were. Kids can't consent, period, and they knew some of these kids were being taken advantage of by adults. If you knew the victim was a child prostitute, saying "but they weren't assaulted right before their murder" tells us nothing.
It also doesn't really occur to them for the longest time that the killers/pedophiles could be using someone really really young to lure in victims. Someone young enough that kids wouldn't be remotely suspicious of anything. Another tactic traffickers use all the time. Interestingly, one episode has a subplot about a serial killer who used his teenage boyfriends to procure underage victims, Dean Coryll, the "Candyman". I wonder if the scene with Sammy Davis Jr singing the song "Candyman" at the charity benefit was meant to remind us of that story. I think the show is definitely smart enough to do a callback like that.
They do come around to the conclusion that it's definitely a young black man picking up the kids. And they're kind of right.
4)Wayne Williams (a 23 year old black man) clearly seems involved, and afaik in real life is still the only person in jail for all of this, but there's also a lot of stuff about the crimes he doesn't seem to know. To this day he insists on his innocence. The crimes he's actually imprisoned for, are for an older teen and a young man over the age of consent, after possible gay hookups. They do acknowledge that Wayne wasn't much older than the two guys he was actually convicted of murdering *contemplative emojii*
What if Wayne was a low man in the hierarchy, who knows what these guys are doing, but not all of the details. His main job is to lure in the kids via his "music promotion" and to dispose of the bodies if needed. The city of Atlanta just threw him under the bus to protect their reputation and the people involved in the ring didn't protect him. Atlanta had its first black mayor, who wanted to build the nation's largest airport, and needed to keep the wealthy white tax base in the city, but also avoid freaking out his black voter base.
I think the show wanted that to be their conclusion. The characters keep *almost* getting there, they're like inches away from figuring that out, as the show is slowly pushing them towards that as the answer (using callbacks to their other cases as clues). Maybe that's a theory of John Douglas' and David Fincher agrees. But they can't "solve" a real life crime that hasn't actually been solved (unlike the rest of their "based on RL" cases, which are crimes that *have* really been solved). They didn't get a third season and now it looks like they never will, so we can assume subplots like BTK, which are based on cases that went on for decades, are going nowwhere on the show. It leaves viewers frustrated at the season finale.
1)Suspect Wayne Williams (the man currently behind bars for two of the murders) mentions that he has a part time job as a crime scene photographer. In an earlier scene of law enforcement searching a potential body dumping site in Atlanta, he can be seen hurrying past in the background, holding a camera. HUH! This is the first time I've noticed that!
I know they can't solve it on the show, because it hasn't been solved in real life. But it feels like the characters were spending too much time dancing around the obvious theory. A theory that's probably been discussed ad nauseum among people interested in the real life case. They do address the possibility but then don't really come to a conclusion. That theory being that...
It wasn't one lonely loser, but a pedophile *ring*. Probably of both black and white perps, operating out of more than one location, with members who had power in the community.
1) They find two houses where young boys, including some of the victims, were known to go, allegedly for certain types of "work". There was a lot of child prostitution going on in the area. And a lot of the victims knew each other. 15 of the 28 victims had some sort of connection to each other!
2) They find a white suspect who has a collection of images of children, but most of the boys are white. The FBI argues that victimology doesn't cross racial lines, although this contradicts something they just learned from interviewing Hance and Brudos. Namely, that race plays a big part but that there are other ways people can be grouped together that might affect a serial killer's preferences. Hance was black and killed mostly black women, but saw his white victim as also being like him, because they were both in the Army. Brudos killed college coeds, regardless of race. Some pedophiles are into all types of children, regardless of race or sex (to note, there WAS a black female victim as well!) Only having photos of white male victims doesn't mean all the victims were white or male...but it could also mean there was more than one perp. There is a reveal at the end of the season, that the Atlanta PD removed and hid photos of black children which were found in the white pedophile's collection.
3) The FBI conducts an experiment to see if poor black kids would get in a car with a white male stranger. They wouldn't, but the experiment was a little flawed. The black cop they used was cool looking, offered the kids money and approached them alone in a bad neighborhood. The white agent they used was Gregg Smith, who came off as weird and creepy and approached them outside their homes within earshot of their grandmas. It was also a bit sexist, since I guess it didn't occur to them to see if the kids would react the same to a strange woman of any race. People, especially kids, do trust a strange woman more than a strange man, white or black. Traffickers use women as bait all the time, and so have serial killing couples like Bernardo/Homolka and Brady/Hindly (the woman gets the victim to approach/get in the car/go with them to another location, the man does the bulk of the violence).
Agent Barney argues that the town where the FBI did the experiment is a lot rougher than the Atlanta neighborhoods where the kids went missing. The kids aren't from a bad area, just a poor one.
They suspected the Klan for awhile, because it looked like the victims were just being murdered, not sexually assaulted.
Some of the killers they interview in other episodes did get off merely on murder itself. David Berkowitz never sexually interacted with any of his victims, he just shot them and ran away (then masturbated at home, alone). They interviewed the guy who the movie Cruising is based on, and he would have consensual sex with other adults and *then* murder them.
But just because someone wasn't assaulted within a few hours of their death, doesn't mean they never were. Kids can't consent, period, and they knew some of these kids were being taken advantage of by adults. If you knew the victim was a child prostitute, saying "but they weren't assaulted right before their murder" tells us nothing.
It also doesn't really occur to them for the longest time that the killers/pedophiles could be using someone really really young to lure in victims. Someone young enough that kids wouldn't be remotely suspicious of anything. Another tactic traffickers use all the time. Interestingly, one episode has a subplot about a serial killer who used his teenage boyfriends to procure underage victims, Dean Coryll, the "Candyman". I wonder if the scene with Sammy Davis Jr singing the song "Candyman" at the charity benefit was meant to remind us of that story. I think the show is definitely smart enough to do a callback like that.
They do come around to the conclusion that it's definitely a young black man picking up the kids. And they're kind of right.
4)Wayne Williams (a 23 year old black man) clearly seems involved, and afaik in real life is still the only person in jail for all of this, but there's also a lot of stuff about the crimes he doesn't seem to know. To this day he insists on his innocence. The crimes he's actually imprisoned for, are for an older teen and a young man over the age of consent, after possible gay hookups. They do acknowledge that Wayne wasn't much older than the two guys he was actually convicted of murdering *contemplative emojii*
What if Wayne was a low man in the hierarchy, who knows what these guys are doing, but not all of the details. His main job is to lure in the kids via his "music promotion" and to dispose of the bodies if needed. The city of Atlanta just threw him under the bus to protect their reputation and the people involved in the ring didn't protect him. Atlanta had its first black mayor, who wanted to build the nation's largest airport, and needed to keep the wealthy white tax base in the city, but also avoid freaking out his black voter base.
I think the show wanted that to be their conclusion. The characters keep *almost* getting there, they're like inches away from figuring that out, as the show is slowly pushing them towards that as the answer (using callbacks to their other cases as clues). Maybe that's a theory of John Douglas' and David Fincher agrees. But they can't "solve" a real life crime that hasn't actually been solved (unlike the rest of their "based on RL" cases, which are crimes that *have* really been solved). They didn't get a third season and now it looks like they never will, so we can assume subplots like BTK, which are based on cases that went on for decades, are going nowwhere on the show. It leaves viewers frustrated at the season finale.
