A Lady Killer Stalks Atlanta

$ Atlanta is a wary town, haunted by an evil memory, touchy about anything reminiscent of that grim time. Just when lingering anxiety over the slaying of 28 black youths from 1979 to 1981 had begun to recede, a new series of murders with a different type of victim has recalled a period the city wants only to forget.

Since March 1, four poor and elderly black women, each living alone, have been raped and murdered. In the housing projects and neighborhoods where the murders have occurred, there is a mingled sense of danger and deja vu. "A lot of people are saying, 'Here we go again,' " says State Senator Arthur Langford, pastor of a church in the area. Fear among elderly black women is acute: some are nailing their doors shut each night; others are sleeping during the day in order to stay vigilant after dark; still others are using their Social Security checks to buy pistols.

The first victim, Annie Copeland, 84, was found slaughtered in her run- down apartment on March 1. Her apartment had been ransacked; she had been suffocated with a pillow and raped. Then, on March 6, Aretha Clements, 60, was discovered by her son: she had been strangled, raped and robbed. On March 11, Dena Mae Mike, 62, blind and living only a mile away from the others, became the third victim. By the time the body of Grace Hill, 68, was discovered on April 9, the police had already formed a task force to investigate the similarities in the murders. "We have to be sensitive after what we went through," says Major B.L. Neikirk, the head of the task force, who was deeply involved in the 1979-81 investigations as well. "We learned to take advantage of the computer to compare information and past crimes."

As if the new series of murders were not enough to remind the city of the disquieting past, Wayne Williams, convicted killer of two of the Atlanta youths, was again in the headlines. Last week USA Today reported that the Georgia bureau of investigation destroyed evidence that it had received from an informant about possible links between the Ku Klux Klan and the child killings. Williams' prosecutors say investigators concluded that the Klan was not connected with the murders. But Williams' lawyers are arguing that the state's "cover-up" entitles their client to a new trial.

The "senior-citizen murders" have certain characteristics that may make them easier to solve than the Atlanta child slayings. Unlike the earlier case, the murders have all taken place during a brief period of time in a circumscribed geographic area; the modus operandi has not varied. Says Langford: "This will not stretch out like the missing and murdered children." Elderly women pray that he is right.