Jimmy Ray Payne was 21 and recently released from a correctional institute when he was last seen on April 22, 1981, planning to meet his girlfriend and never arriving. His body was found five days later in the Chattahoochee River; the cause of death was asphyxiation. Payne’s death became one of the cases folded into the investigation that came to be known as the Atlanta Child Murders.

Investigators later focused on Wayne Williams. Fibers found on victims’ bodies were reported to match fibers from his home and car, and witnesses placed Williams with some of the victims before their deaths. Williams was arrested on June 21, 1981, and a grand jury indicted him for the murders of Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater. His trial began in early 1982; after eleven hours of deliberation, a jury found Williams guilty of both Payne’s and Cater’s murders on February 27, 1982, and he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Authorities subsequently attributed additional unsolved murders to Williams, though he was not tried for those cases.

Did anyone who knew Jimmy Ray Payne or his movements in April 1981 see anything that could still help clarify what happened that week?