‘Mindhunter’ 2 Delves Into Atlanta Child Murders

FBI Agents Holden Ford, Bill Tench and Dr Wendy Carr return in ‘Mindhunter”s second season. Steering the conversation somewhat away from season one’s parade of infamous serial killers chillingly reliving their most heinous deeds to zoom in on ‘The Atlanta Child Murders’, the series uses the methodology and serial killer profiles generated in previous episodes to hunt a man murdering black children in Atlanta in the late 70s.

Initially sent to Atlanta on another case, Holden is approached by a black hotel worker who introduces him to a group of mothers whose children have gone missing. The meeting is a tense one and the mothers distrust Holden the way they are wary of the racist system that has barely bothered to look for their children.

Their anger and caution is valid. It’s Atlanta in the late 70s. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is vitriolic, the mostly white police force counts members of the KKK in their number and the city’s black mayor is trying to revamp Atlanta’s negative image as he vies for re-election.

As far as politics goes, it’s not a good time for children to be murdered. Less so for the FBI’s behavioural science unit to waltz in from out of town and posit that the serial killer is a black man. This racial profiling by Holden, who sticks to the science despite pressure from the mothers and the mayor, is inflammatory but his conclusion seems to hold up.

With the black community’s distrust of the police force and perhaps white people in general, a lone white man soliciting children in mostly black neighbourhoods would have stood out. He would be remembered. So the serial killer must have blended in. He must have been the kind of unassuming man who knew that black children as young as nine were getting into strangers’ cars to swap sexual favours for cash in poorer black neighbourhoods.

The reality is devastating and the situation dire but bigger than the lives and deaths of these black children are the politics and the optics which require a quick resolution and one criminal to explain the murders, which, all told, between 1979 and 1981 number 28 children, teens and adults.

Expertly directed by David Fincher (‘Zodiac’, 2007), season two builds on the freshman one with purpose. Agent Tench gets more backstory and screentime in which his personal life and the possibility that he may have adopted a future serial killer makes him largely ineffectual at both work and home. Holden leaves his big first season mental breakdown largely in the past, for a moment relishing his newfound support and free rein while Carr gets a girlfriend and is relegated to a desk job in a move that doesn’t loop her as smoothly into the larger story as one would like.

A solid second season that ends with an arrest but the eerie feeling that the prolific child killer is still out there, ‘Mindhunter’ gives us plenty of white saviour scenes but routinely undercuts these moments with black distrust, incredulity and anger as if to say: Can you believe this guy?

Excellently cast and incredibly bingeworthy, the creators of ‘Mindhunter’ gift viewers the best of true crime. Complex stories that may have been largely forgotten or unknown and whose villain maintains his
innocence to this day.

‘Mindhunter’ (2019) is now streaming on Netflix.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook,

marthamukaiwa.com

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