Yusef Ali Bell was 9 when he left his home in the McDaniel-Glenn housing project in Atlanta on Sunday, October 21, 1979, to buy a can of Bruton snuff for a neighbor, Eula Birdsong. A witness reported seeing him near McDaniel and Fulton streets getting into a blue car; he never returned from the short errand.

On November 8, 1979, a janitor found Yusef’s body in the crawlspace of the abandoned E.P. Johnson Elementary School on Capitol Avenue. He was clothed only in the brown cut-off shorts he had been wearing; an autopsy found he had been struck over the head twice and that the official cause of death was strangulation.

Yusef’s killing was later counted among the Atlanta Child Murders. Wayne Williams was arrested in 1981 and convicted in 1982 for two adult victims; authorities thereafter attributed a number of the child cases, including Yusef’s, to Williams, though he was never charged in Yusef’s death. The Atlanta police reopened the murder cases in March 2019 to pursue advances in technology.

Did anyone in the McDaniel-Glenn neighborhood in 1979 see Yusef that day or remember the blue car near McDaniel and Fulton?