month apart, yet both left here at the same dumping ground. the number of known dead now 15. the unsolved murders of so many children had become front page news around the nation and the world. this is the reward. the city announced a $100,000 reward, soon to grow to $500,000. the task force was swamped with sketches of suspects, none of them alike, many suggested by psychics. at the state crime lab, larry peterson was sifting through thousands of fibers, nylon, rayon, acrylic, acetate. is it like looking for a needle in a haystack? like looking for multiple needles in multiple haystacks. then, in january of 1981, a breakthrough. peterson realized they were
this missing child. one day seemed like it was a week. that was the longest search in the world. it was almost 2:00 p.m. when maintenance man ishmael strickland found the lifeless figure of a young black boy. on the seventh day, a maintenance man spotted a body tossed down into the woods behind a parking lot at a suburban office complex. the bank was fairly steep. medical examiner joseph burton had to hold onto a rope to get down to the scene. he had a ligature mark on his neck like if somebody had a ligature and they were behind you or off to the side behind you and they closed their hands or fists together and pulled the ligature basically. in other words, killed from behind. most likely, yes. all right. let me place another sample on this side. state crime lab scientist larry peterson attended the autopsy. i can recall at one autopsy pulling a fiber off of one of the victims.
we literally would walk through wooded areas chaperoned and we would walk for a period of time until about an hour before nightfall. but now a new twist in the murders. patrick baltazar, the 20th victim, would be the last child to turn up in a wooded area. a day or two later an official would tell reporters fibers and dog hairs were being collected from the victim s clothing. the next child to die would be found in a river wearing nothing but underpants. fewer clues now for larry peterson. we re talking maybe a dozen or dozens of fibers as opposed to hundreds or potentially a thousand fibers. the 13-year-old victim was found beneath this bridge over the south river in atlanta s suburbs. a driver crossing that bridge earlier in the week saw a man leaning over the railing.
this evidence slide contains the yellow blanket fibers that dedman clipped that night, magnified by our own video camera. but when larry peterson had returned that june for a second search a couple weeks later there was no yellow blanket to be found that i could find. there are a lot of things in your case that disappeared. a lot of disappearances. yellow blanket. yes. disappeared. in the first place, there was never a yellow blanket. there were fibers of a yellow blanket. there were fibers alleged to have come from a yellow blanket. nobody has been able to produce the yellow blanket because quite simply and i m just being very blunt with you there was no yellow blanket. or maybe you got rid of it between the first time they searched and they came back. seems like to me if i was a police officer i would have confiscated the blanket. it doesn t make sense. the prosecution was allowed to bring in ten other deaths
as a young child, reed would help the volunteers searching atlanta s woods every saturday. we literally would walk through wooded areas chaperoned and we would walk for a period of time until about an hour before nightfall. but now a new twist in the murders. patrick baltazar, the 20th victim, would be the last child to turn up in a wooded area. a day or two later an official would tell reporters fibers and dog hairs were being collected from the victim s clothing. the next child to die would be found in a river wearing nothing but underpants. fewer clues now for larry peterson. we re talking maybe a dozen or dozens of fibers as opposed to hundreds or potentially a thousand fibers. the 13-year-old victim was found beneath this bridge over the south river in atlanta s suburbs.