Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (19 page)

Blood and fat were used to make medicines. “One old colored woman insisted that she knows the white men make castor oil out of negro blood, and that in slavery times a negro would die before he could take a dose of castor oil.”
²⁴

Belief in night doctors persisted, “at least” into the 1930s, and “disadvantaged people chose to avoid certain cities altogether, certain parts of cities in the daytime (areas adjacent to hospitals), and many avoided traveling at all at night unless accompanied by small groups. Whether fact or simply fear, the night doctor had certainly captured the imagination of the folk.”
²⁵
Some doctors (like the grave robbers that supplied anatomy classes) were black; nevertheless, they follow the pattern established by patterollers and the KKK in which roving bands of grotesquely dressed, white-faced men abduct, torture, and kill black people.

Every period has its characteristic anxieties, and during the late 1970s and 1980s, many of these concerned children. Countless numbers were reportedly being abducted by pedophiles or ritually abused at daycare centers by satanic cults; moreover, the country seemed overrun by homicidal maniacs.

Between 1900 and 1959, American police recorded an
average of two serial murder cases per year nationwide. By 1969, authorities were logging six cases per year, a figure that nearly tripled in the 1970s. By 1985, new serial killers were being reported at an average rate of three per month, a rate that remained fairly constant through the 1990s.
²⁶

Americans developed a horrified fascination with the crimes, but it was a series of child murders in Georgia that produced the mixture of traditional and contemporary fears that became the basis for clowns-in-vans.

From July 1979 to June 1981, dozens of black children and adolescents were murdered in Atlanta. Almost all the victims were male, and many were strangled or suffocated, and their bodies hidden in overgrown areas. Over time the pattern changed and came to include adult men, whose bodies were sometimes dropped into local rivers to wash away physical evidence. This new behavior prompted police to stake out the bridges, and before dawn, on May 22, 1981, police heard a loud splash coming from the Chattahoochee River just as twenty-three-year-old Wayne Bertram Williams was driving slowly across the bridge; two days later, the body of a twenty-seven-year-old man was found downstream, leading to Williams's arrest. He was convicted of murdering two men in 1982 and received consecutive life sentences; police attributed most of the murders to Williams and considered them solved.

That the killer turned out to be black surprised much of the public as well as law enforcement. For two years, conventional wisdom in the black community had been that
the Klan or a similar group was responsible—a reasonable assumption at a time when black serial killers were rare and, more to the point, the city had elected its first black mayor. The killing of black children was seen as a means of spreading fear, heightening tensions, and diminishing confidence in the authorities. (There are still those, including Wayne Williams, who claim he was convicted on weak evidence to prevent rioting.) Georgia's former governor, President Jimmy Carter, considered a racial motive likely enough to order the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist the police task force, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) put alleged Klansmen under surveillance.

This line of inquiry failed to produce convincing results, but the FBI report contains a number of different scenarios describing who might be committing the murders. A section headed “Theory” proposes:

That the core killings, of children, in Atlanta, are the work of a small, fanatical, right-wing cell (possibly linked with the KKK, American Nazi party, Minutemen, or other right-wing organization).

The “killer group” was estimated to be

four to five, white males, twenty-five to fourty [
sic
] years old. These would be males in their top years of physical
condition, powerful enough to overcome the resistance of a child without help.
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It goes on to describe how the abductions could be carried out and the sorts of vehicles that might be involved:

[One] promising type would be a small van of some kind. Not one with a fancy, “Star Wars,” paint job (that would attract too much attention) or a window van, but a simple panel van (probably with one way decals on the rear windows). Such a vehicle would draw little attention to itself, and could provide a rolling murder scene (and if the vehicle is carpeted inside, it could account for some of the fibers found on a few of “the bodies”).
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Civilians were thinking along similar lines. Atlanta's current (2014) mayor, Kasim Reed, was ten years old during the murders and remembers that “[e]verybody was very mindful of vans at that time.”
²⁹
Coincidentally, the KKK was also identifying itself with vans through the recruiting slogan, “Get on the Klan Van—Join the Klan Youth Corps.”
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White racists, however, were not the only possibility. Vans had long been associated with sex and drugs and proved popular with a number of contemporary serial killers, including Ted Bundy, Gerald and Charlene Gallego, Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker, and the Chicago Ripper Crew (vehicles
with tinted windows or enclosed cargo areas are still called “murder vans”).

Other possible killers were a pedophile gang, while Roy Innis, president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), insisted they were ritual murders carried out by white Satanists.
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The most interesting and revealing suggestion, however, came from comedian-activist Dick Gregory, who thought that Atlanta might be an “experiment.”

During a televised interview with the
Detroit Black Journal
in 1981, Gregory stated that sources told him that the victims were strangely mutilated; nine of seventeen bodies had “the tip of their penises . . . missing” and “hypodermic marks on their testicles,” while the remaining eight boys were too decomposed to determine if they had been similarly maimed. Gregory, however, claimed that the bodies did not match the missing children, which led him to think that they were alive in a laboratory where scientists were gathering white blood cells from the boys' penises to produce the cancer-fighting drug interferon. Their motive might not be racist in the ordinary sense, but a result of some useful quality present in sickle cell blood. Therefore:

The “Atlanta Child Murders” were a blind with substitute corpses identified as the victims of a nonexistent serial killer to conceal the experiments. Dick Gregory did not call it a conspiracy and cover-up, but felt that the CIA,
FBI, National Institute of Health, Centers for Disease Control, and Emory Hospital should not be excluded from the investigation.
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In James Baldwin's book-length meditation on the murders, he writes that

[p]eople found this an appalling suggestion. I did not. I wondered why they did. It was during my lifetime, after all, and in my country, somewhere in a prison in the “American” South, that Black men with syphilis were allowed to die, while being scrutinized.
³³

Though Baldwin considers the “suggestion” plausible in light of the Tuskegee syphilis study, Gregory is describing the murders in terms of night doctors. Unlike Innis's satanists, the “fiendish experiment” hypothesis is based on a widespread tradition, and similar ideas might have enjoyed greater currency than was acknowledged publicly. (Suspicions about white institutions are so deeply rooted that a 1990 poll conducted by the
New York Times
/WCBS-TV News found that “10% of Black Americans thought that the AIDS virus had been created in a laboratory in order to infect Black people. Another 20% believed that it could be true.”
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) In addition to being consistent with existing beliefs, Gregory's ideas also provide a measure of perverse reassurance. Instead
of dark, incomprehensible forces at work within the black community, the source of danger is external and has familiar motives: white society's agencies and institutions were once again exploiting black people by taking their blood and using it to make medicine to heal whites.

If rumors about Atlanta involving Klansmen/night doctors and children being abducted in vans were circulating through the black community nationwide, they could have provided the basis for the clowns. When the panics were going on, many assumed that the two were related (Pittsburgh police thought it was “some sort of hysteria perhaps related to child slayings in Atlanta . . . ,” but how close a connection existed was not then apparent.
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Perhaps the unexpected, and seemingly absurd, involvement of clowns proved distracting, and some kind of explanation, however speculative, seems warranted.

John Wayne Gacy is one possibility. A respectable Chicago contractor, Gacy was a Jaycees Man of the Year who participated in local politics and entertained at charity events dressed as clowns named “Pogo” or “Patches.” In December 1978, police discovered that Gacy had also raped, tortured, and murdered more than thirty young men and adolescent boys, burying most of the bodies in a crawl space beneath his
suburban ranch house and filling it with the smell of rotting flesh.

Gacy seems like the obvious inspiration for the panic. He was dubbed the “Killer Clown” and the murders received extensive coverage from 1979 to 1980. Gacy was a sexual sadist whose victims were often minors; he owned a black van, and widely reproduced photographs of Pogo and Patches radiate palpable depravity. Nevertheless, his role is probably a secondary, if surprising one (see the following discussion).

Another popular candidate is the shape-shifting, child-eating villain of Stephen King's horror novel
It
, “Pennywise the Dancing Clown.” While Pennywise and John Wayne Gacy certainly launched a generation of coulrophobes, King's book did not come out until 1986, and the television dramatization four years after that. Perhaps the explanation does not lie in one clown figure or another but in an accident of language.
³⁶

The words
Klan
and
clown
are similar (
clown
also sounds like KKK jargon names such as
Kludd
,
Kloran
, and
Kleagle
), and if black communities around the country were discussing the murders as the work of Klansmen driving vans, perhaps children interpreted
Klan
as
clown
. None of the 1981 panics happened in the South, where the KKK was active (few, if any, clown panics have been recorded there), which suggests that clowns-in-vans were created to fill the void somewhere that fear of the Klan existed but the Klan did not.
That kind of situation could conceivably arise when a Southern black population relocates to somewhere like Newark, New Jersey.

If a birthplace for clowns-in-vans exists, then Newark might be where it happened. The city's port and factories attracted black workers from “Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida” at the beginning of the twentieth century and, despite the opening of a Klan headquarters on Broad Street in 1921, immigrants from the South kept coming until a majority of residents were black.
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In 1978, the city also experienced mysterious disappearances.

On August 20, 1978, five adolescent boys, ages sixteen and seventeen, were playing basketball together when they were hired to move boxes. After the job was finished, the five were dropped off at Clinton Avenue, then vanished. Despite years of investigation, and the chief suspect's trial and acquittal in 2011, what happened to them remains unknown. Newark's main disappearance happened eleven months before Atlanta's, and while there is no proof that it inspired rumors about night doctors at work in New Jersey, the earliest report of clowns-in-vans discovered so far comes from Newark during Halloween, 1980.
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Earlier this week, rumors spread throughout Newark, N.J., that a trio disguised as two clowns and a witch were jumping out of a black van and attacking youngsters. The story was that children had been pricked with a needle, kidnapped and harassed. One report had it that witches were jumping out of vans and threatening to turn all the children into frogs.

Newark police said the hysteria may have been related to the mysterious slayings of the children in Atlanta.
³⁹

The reference to children being “pricked with a needle” appears in no other clown reports and recalls the night doctors' syringes (“Soon as they catch you alone, they'd stick a needle in you that numbs you”) and the “hypodermic marks” that Dick Gregory said were on the Atlanta victims' testicles. It also suggests that the story was in a transitional state, a sort of
Archaeopteryx
, displaying traits of both traditional Klan/night doctors and the emerging clowns.
⁴⁰

Untethered from their KKK/night doctor origins, clowns ceased to menace the children of a specific community and threatened children in general, making it possible for the story to spread into the larger society and then around the world.

After the nationwide flaps of 1981, reports of clowns-in-vans, or on foot, continued. A partial list of places includes Boston in 1983; Phoenix, Arizona, in 1985; Chicago, Newark,
and surrounding cities in 1991; and Sydney and St. Albans, Australia. Clowns were seen in Washington, D.C., and Capitol Heights, Maryland, in 1994, while Latin America experienced prolonged panics.

Clowns have allegedly abducted countless children from Mexico, South America, and Central America for illegal adoption, organ harvesting, or the sex trade; by 1995, it reached the point where “more than 60 clowns” at Tegucigalpa, Honduras, “burned their costumes in a downtown park to protest the kidnapping of children by armed men dressed as clowns.”
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