I'll admit I first found out about this case from Mindhunters, and I'm only now looking into the full scope of the timeline/investigations.
I have no doubt that WW was an offender and did commit some of this crimes, but there were likely other murderers or even copycats at work. (Or even the opportunistic KKK member). I have nothing but words of disdain towards town officials and LEOs who didn't take this as seriously as they should've. These victims deserve justice, and I hope LE today is using every bit of advanced tech to find the correct perp in every case, not just a one size fits all conviction.
Im not defending Atlanta PD on how this was handled at the time, but you have to remember Atlanta has been a high crime area for a long time, and up until then had handled its own cases.
On top of this case was also dealing with a rash of other murders, rapes, robberies, drugs, assaults, missing persons, burglaries, and everything else at the time not associated with the ATKID case.
Serial crime can be extremely hard to solve as it is , but its even exponentially more so when they are hidden among some 75-100 other murder cases alone on top of everything else.
This was LONG before departments started sharing info and asking for help from each other.
In the ATKID case, you are looking at 28 + murders, that means there could in theory be at least 28 offenders but in this case, at least 3 but possibly as many as 5 serial killers could be working the same area.
Not all of them are serial killings, some of these were robberies that went wrong, some were street beefs, some were rapes , 1 could be a filicidal murder, and thats just some of the child victims.
Add into that now a possible KKK connection and then add into that the adults now you have even more of a dynamic to work with.
SO again Im not defending APD, but I understand what its like in a large metropolitan PD, and these were not the only things they were dealing with at the time.