Free The Killings by J.F. Gonzalez, Wrath James White Page A

taken during her voluminous talks with Wayne Williams and had filled more than thirty pages in a Microsoft Word document on her laptop. Now, as she sat in the special collections department of the library with her Apple MacBook Pro open, she was ready to begin the next phase of her research.
    Court records hadn’t revealed much on the various deeds to the property. The records she’d found online through the county court system only went back to 1943. She focused on the years between 1950 and 1970. A man named Herman Wellington owned the home between September 1950 and June 1973. Wayne claimed the old woman had lived in the house in the late sixties. Carmen combed through the death records that were available online at the Atlanta hospitals and found no death certificate for a woman with the last name of Sable. Wayne wasn’t sure if Sable was even her last name. “That’s just what she was called,” he’d told her. “So I just assumed her last name was Sable.”
    Carmen’s research online and at the county hall of records searching through property deeds and death records proved frustrating. Carmen had been able to visually inspect hardcopy documents going all the way back to 1895, when the home on 765 Willow Street was initially built and deeded. Its first owner had been one Millhouse Rooker, and there was scant information on him. She went forward through the records, locating deeds of sale in 1904, 1925, 1945, and 1950. None of the buyers or rightful owners to the property was named Sable, and judging by the last names, all of the property owners had been White. In fact, no Black family had owned the house until 1985, when it was purchased by Mark Washington for the sum of $85,000 dollars.
    The death records were even more elusive. Carmen had been unable to find a death record for anybody with the last name Sable in the late 1960s. Going on the assumption the woman had lived to be one hundred and twenty, she’d gone back to city and state birth records and, once again, was disappointed to find no birth records for a female child with the last name Sable. Of course, African American births were hardly recorded back then, so Carmen wasn’t completely surprised by this. But she should’ve found a death record for the woman. If Wayne’s claim that she was born into slavery was true, she had to have been at least a hundred and ten, maybe a hundred and twenty when she died. Her death would have made news, but Carmen didn’t find any mention of a centenarian from the Atlanta, Georgia, area dying in the late 1960s who matched Grandma Sable’s description.
    Her research at the library until then had produced zero results. She’d pored through local history books published by local historical societies, concentrating her search on those volumes devoted to local African American history. None of the books she perused contained any mention of the rumored voodoo queen.
    It wasn’t until she decided to broaden her search into local folklore that she struck pay dirt.
    The volume she found was in the library’s special collections department, housed behind locked plate-glass doors. She’d already gone through every volume on local folklore in the library and casually asked if there were any other such volumes in the special collections department, figuring the answer would be no. Usually the only volumes kept in the special collections department were rare books of classic literature and collectible modern first editions. However, the librarian nodded once and said, “Actually, there is a pretty cool old book back there. It’s about voodoo and its practitioners in the general Atlanta area during and after the Civil War. Hold on, let me see what the restrictions are.” The librarian typed a command on the keyboard. He was a young man in his mid-twenties, long blond hair and a goatee, bespectacled, studious. “Yep, we still have it. Publication date on it is 1885 and it’s marked fragile. I can’t let you take it out