The Atlanta Lovers Lane Murders

     Three couples shot. Six people altogether. Three died. All parked on lover’s lanes. And nobody has been talking about it. What happened in that period of time in 1977 after the Zodiac Killer, during the Son of Sam but before the Colonial Parkway murders that caused this case to go unnoticed? Let’s start by discussing the details….

     On the night of January 16th, 1977 a car swerved off the road and crashed into a street sign before coming to a stop. Bystanders who witnessed the accident stood by waiting for the driver to exit the car but it sat silent. Someone's curiosity finally got the best of them and they approached the driver's side window. What they saw that night would begin a mystery that would go unsolved for forty eight years.

     LaBrian Lovett, 26 and Veronica Hill, 20 were found inside the car. Both had been shot and, oddly, both were nude. LaBrian, with the last bit of life left in his body, had struggled into the driver's seat and floored it in an attempt to escape a gunman. Police and ambulances were summoned but it was too late, both would die before reaching the hospital but with her dying breath Veronica told someone who shot her and LaBrian ^ It was someone she knew. But who? Before she could say, she succumbed to her injuries.   

     The deathbed statement made by this critically injured woman would mislead investigators. Prior to running off the road the couple had been parked in an area of Adam’s Park, located in southwest Atlanta, known locally as a lover’s lane. They were nude, the police surmised, because they had been…loving each other. The shooting must have been due to jealousy or a personal vendetta. With both dead, there was no reason to believe this would happen again. Nothing to be concerned about here folks, move along.

     Police had barely had a chance to investigate the first crime before they were dealing with another incident. Three weeks later, on February 12, a second couple was attacked in an area park. This time it would be Manor Park. As in the first attack, this couple was parked in a lover’s lane and both were shot.

     Dennis Langston, 18 and Deitra Tatum, 17 were sitting in the front seat of the car when they were both shot but Deitria was either the primary target or Dennis was lucky enough to speed away before he was shot multiple times as well. Just as LaBrian had, Dennis floored it. As he clutched a chest wound and Deitria struggled to stay alive with three gunshot wounds to an arm, her chest and stomach, Dennis raced towards his home for help. They were both taken to the hospital and both would make a full recovery. Neither saw the shooter.

     Should police have realized these two cases were connected?

     Before that question could be answered a third attack would occur. It was March 12th and Gordon Whitfield, 21 and Diane Collins, 19 were enjoying the solitude of the night in Adams Park, the location of the first attack, when out of the darkness a man approached the car from the side, knelt in a police like crouch and fired six times. Gordon was shot in the neck and jaw but would survive. Diane would be the final fatality. Diane and Gordon had just gotten engaged.

     The community was outraged. Why hadn’t the police warned them there was a madman on the loose shooting kids in lover’s lanes? 

     After all, there was an obvious pattern to these attacks. All surviving victims agreed: the gunman approached the vehicle without a word, he crouched down as he took aim, he always fired six shots, he never molested the females, and the bullets were all the same caliber even if they didn’t know, at that time, they matched ballistically too. And there was one more thing they all agreed on, the gunman was a black man. And did I mention that all the victims were black. Oh, and the attacks took place in neighborhoods with a mostly black population.  

      Some people certainly felt that this could have been a case of the police not serving all the communities in Atlanta with the same care and respect. This was in spite of the Atlanta PD claiming that this was the biggest case they had ever seen in the city. In my opinion, they felt the gravity of the situation but I wasn’t there so I don’t know.

     But let’s break this down and think about what happened with each crime. After the first couple was shot, the police were going on the assumption that the victims knew the killer and this was a targeted attack. So, even if Veronica hadn’t said she knew her attacker, why would the police have one case and think this was about to become a series? Why would they think this was anything more than a personal crime? 

     The police claimed they kept quiet to protect their undercover sting operations. They had noticed that after each incident, there was a 28-29 day cooling off period in between attacks. Apparently, they were using decoys in the parks believing there would be a predictability of when he would strike again. So when you think about it, they may have had decoys in the parks but they were also using unsuspecting kids as decoys. After all, not warning the neighborhood it wasn’t safe to be in the park was like using them as bait. Was it not?

     They had one of two choices: warn the public and risk scaring him away or provide increased security in the parks and hope they could catch him. I’m sure the family of Diane Collins and all those who were injured feel they made the wrong choice. 

     So after the third attack, the news was out, and every paper in town made it a front page story. And guess what. There weren't any more attacks. At least not in Atlanta. So, had the right choice been to scare him away and make him someone else's problem? Was the right choice to risk someone else losing their life as long as they weren’t a citizen of Atlanta?

     Regardless, Atlanta PD did continue to try to catch the killer. To do this, they staged a several pronged attack. 

     The decoy idea had failed. 

     All the friends and acquaintances of Veronica from the first attack had alibis and had been ruled out as suspects. 

     They even explored the idea that the gunman may have been a police officer. This was based on the reports from victims that he took aim like a police officer before he fired his weapon. I have to ask the question though. How did the victims know how a police officer stood before they fired their weapon? Had they seen it on television? Maybe the perpetrator of the crimes did too. It’s just a thought. 

     They did take this idea one step further though. They acknowledged that the type of ammunition used in the killings was commonly used for police target practice. That certainly adds an extra layer of suspicion. 

     They also consulted professors of psychology to try to get inside the head of someone who would choose these circumstances to commit this type of crime. The suggestion was made that he may have had a wife, girlfriend of daughter that cheated on him in those specific parks. Or he may have felt the parks were his and these kids were trespassers. 

     But in what may have been the most out there strategy of all, they held a special screening of “The Town That Dreaded Sundown”.  Have you ever seen that movie? It’s about the Phantom Killer in Texarkana in the 1940’s. It’s a dumb movie. It’s very disrespectful to the victims. I hated it. It had very little to do with the crimes themselves. 

     But on that note, I did notice several similarities. Such as both sets of crimes were committed in the winter months, both targeted couples parked in cars on lovers lanes, a gun was used. Both ended abruptly. And the biggest coincidence of all if there is no relation: both sets of crimes followed a pattern of time. The Phantom’s pattern was approximately every three weeks. In Atlanta, it was about a month between crimes.

     There were differences too though. The Phantom molested his female victims, at least two of them. The Phantom wore a hood to disguise himself. The Phantom was white…probably. The first victims and the best witnesses to what happened said he wore a hood but claimed they could see the color of his skin. The man said he was a dark skinned white man. The woman said he was a light skinned black man. Decipher that.

     Oh, and the Phantom case was solved…probably. The Atlanta lover’s lane murders were not. Efforts to solve the case continued but eventually the case went cold. Every clue they had had been exhausted by 1979 when, perhaps in the biggest blow to the case, a call was made for all hands on deck. This was the year the Atlanta Child Killer started and suddenly the Atlanta lovers lane murder was no longer the biggest case the city had ever seen.

So what did you think?

Did the police make a mistake not telling the public?

Did the police work hard enough to solve the case?

Do you think a failure to solve the case was race related?

And finally with all those similarities do you think the Texarkana phantom and the Atlanta lovers lane murderer were one in the same?