Wayne Williams is now 60 years old. He sits in a state prison about three hours south of Atlanta and has steadfastly denied that he is a killer. But Erika Shields, Atlanta’s police chief, said the new investigation is not about him.

“This is about being able to look these families in the eye,” she said, “and say we did everything we could possibly do to bring closure to your case.”

‘My God. My God.’

In the summer of 1979, the remains of two teenage boys were found in the woods in southwest Atlanta. They had been missing for several days. One reportedly vanished from a skating rink. The other while returning from a movie.

“Nobody had any idea of what this was going to morph into that Saturday afternoon, that these were the first two victims of a serial killer who would murder over a span of two years,” said Danny Agan, a retired Atlanta homicide detective who investigated three of the cases on the list.

Over the next 22 months, 22 more children — including two girls — were kidnapped and strangled, shot, stabbed or bludgeoned, along with four young adults. One boy, Darron Glass, last seen in September 1980 when he was 10, is still missing.

“Every day, every night, it seemed like they were finding bodies. The city was turned upside down. There was this big dark cloud over us,” said Sheila Baltazar, 61, whose stepson, Patrick Baltazar, 12, was killed in 1981. “And we were just trying to hold on to our babies.”