From 1979 to 1981, 29 African-American males, mostly children, were either missing or found murdered in metro Atlanta. The cases plagued the city until 1982, when Wayne Wiiliams was convicted of the murders of two adult men. Authorities then considered the other cases closed. Some of the parents of the slain children were critical of the way the cases were handled and believed there was some sort of cover up. Nearly four years after the conviction of Wayne Williams, "Spin" magazine editor Ron Larson and reporter Pat Laughlin come to Atlanta in search of the truth.
Laughlin and Larson are introduced to a contingent of desperate mothers of the missing or murdered children by Assemblywoman Mildren Glover, who gives the reporters a collection of data and suspicious facts. They secretly meet with an active-duty Atlanta police officer. He informs the pair that the investigation into the murders was riddled with incompetence despite the involvement of 14 different law enforcement agencies, including the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI. In the end, as political pressure, fear and armed hysteria mounted, the massive manhunt produced Wayne Williams as "The Atlanta Child Murderer," though at the trial he was convicted of killing two men in their '20s. What the parents of the missing and murdered children were left with was the knowledge that all of the children had been killed in different ways in five different counties, and the only connecting link was that they were all black and poor.
