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. it was a green carpet fiber. and mounted the sample on the slide went over and looked under the microscope and it s the same one. you knew right then? knew right then. it became apparent it s another victim of atlanta s child killer or killers. local television carried these pictures live from the crime scene. as it was studied it became apparent it was one of the three children listed as missing. we re told the child s body sheila baltazar got a call from her mother. she say, they found another body. she say, i really feel like this
lubie never came home. i believe he had been kidnapped. police searched the woods around atlanta. they did not find lubie. instead, police found two other bodies, young boys who had disappeared ten miles and a 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?
errand and was dead by dawn. detective bob buffington saw something red stuck to eric s tennis shoe. and i noticed in the flap of the edge of this shoe this tuft of what to me appeared to be wool. and that was it. we could find no other evidence. back at homicide, buffington showed the fibers to his superiors. the lieutenant made a big joke out of it and told the rest of the squad that if i went over to the lieutenant s house and cleaned out the lint trap in his dryer we could probably clear out all the cases in the city of atlanta. still, buffington sent the fibers to the state crime laboratory. a young forensic scientist, larry peterson, took a look. so why was a fiber that was stuck in the crack of a shoe, why was that important? because it was somewhat loosely there.
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 seeing one green carpet fiber with a unique shape. this is a cross-section of the fiber magnified many times. this particular fiber had two very, very large lobes and one short lobe. the lobes are the three ends of the boomerang shape. the shape was the most distinctive part of the fiber. he showed me a slide taken from another carpet.
shorts, fibers consistent with the blanket under wayne s bed. i personally took the cutting from the yellow blanket that was under the bed. 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