Another shot at justice for Atlanta's Missing and Murdered Children

Details: APD investigators are hand-delivering the DNA samples to a private lab in Salt Lake City that the city says specializes in “analyzing deteriorating DNA.”

• Officer Anthony Grant, an APD spokesperson, says the department won’t release the name of the lab, and declined to tell Axios why.

Context: The killings of more than two dozen black children between 1979 and 1981 left Atlanta families on edge, made national headlines and sparked a multiagency investigation to find the killer.

• Williams, an aspiring music producer and talent scout, was convicted of murdering two of the adults and sentenced to life in federal prison.
• Police considered Williams a suspect in more than 20 of the child killings but never pursued charges in those cases, leaving them unsolved and victims' families demanding closure.

Flashback: In May 2019, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms created an advisory committee to contemplate a proper memorial to the victims. Hoping new technology could yield answers in the case, APD said it would reopen the cases.