camille bell called the police. they came and said they would write a report. that s all. days went by. camille waited with two older children and yousef s 3-year-old sister. she is terrify ied. if he can go to the store and they can steal him then she doesn t want to leave the house. she doesn t want to do anything. camille hid her own fear from her children. you ve got to hold them together so you can t act as scared as you are. the body of yousef was found in an abandoned schoolhouse. his body would not turn up for another month. yousef bell had been strangled. all of the, what could have been, should have been and probably would have been was taken away. we ll never know now because somebody decided that it was all
yousef bell came by captain peg s one last time. about 3:30, 4:00 monday. he came by and stuck his head in the door. he said, richard, i m going to basketball. see you later. throw his hand up, went up the street. to a school yard basketball court like this. this witness, lugene laster knew jojo and saw him leave the game. he said he left in a station wagon that looked like this. laster testified he got in the car, got in wayne s car. in court, laster would identify wayne williams as the driver. lugene laster. okay. he s pretty much an eyewitness. said that you gave a ride to jojo bell in your station wagon. okay. did you? no, i did not. you fervor gave a ride to jojo bell? no, i did not. williams did not deny he was the
in the spring of 1980, police were still reluctant to listen to camille bell. children were dying on the streets of atlanta in the daytime. among them, jeffrey mathis only 10. like yousef bell, he walked down the street on an errand to this gas station to buy cigarettes for his mother. she never saw him again. what we had here was a predator. what he was looking for was somebody cut off from the herd. if you don t realize you re in trouble until you re in trouble, then you have no way of getting out. it would be another year before jeffrey mathis body was found in a woods miles from his home. his mother would join camille bell in forming a committee to confront the city s leaders. the reaction of the police
loss of her 9-year-old son who finally forced police to listen, but not until almost a year after her boy died. camille bell and her children lived in these project apartments, poor to the eye, but rich in mind and spirit. yousef bell was an honor student in the gifted program at school. on a warm october sunday in 1979, he walked away on an earned to buy snuff for an elderly lady downstairs. he went bare footed in a pair of brown shorts. he got to the store. he bought the snuff. he started back home. less than half a block from this store, yousef bell stepped off this curb and vanished. and nobody saw anybody do anything or anything, but they didn t see him come back across the street. that s the last that we saw him.
right to just kill a little kid because they wanted to. for a long time, the 3-year-old would look for yousef every time it was a foggy day. we would go out into the fog and she would go as far as she could into the fog. i d say, come back here and she would say, i ve got to go find my brother. she said the clouds came down so yousef can come down. the child, her mother said, had confused the fog with heaven. still ahead, the boy who was too brave. he was like, man, i want to find this killer and get this reward money. a drive-by threat against the fbi chief s child. some guy in a pick-up truck said, i m going to get you, nigger. in the end, the curious question of the cia.