Title: Lover's Lane Serial Murders.

Dates: 1977

Overview: While making love in their cars, several couples were rudely interrupted.

Status: Cold Case.

Atlanta, Georgia: Lovers Lane murders 1977

While detectives in New York city were stalking the elusive gun man known as Son of Sam, their counterparts in Georgia tried to identify the killer with a similar modus operandi, who preyed on couples parked on darkened streets, striking from the shadows, interrupting passion with point-blank gunshots. Manhattan officers eventually bagged their quarry by means of a parking ticket, but Atlanta's man hunters have thus far been stumped in their search.

The murders began on January sixteenth, 1977, when police were summoned to the scene of an unusual auto accident. The vehicle had veered across an intersection out of control to collide with a traffic sign. Behind the steering wheel a naked man lay slumped, covered with blood. A woman also nude and bloody, sprawled across the backseat, partly covered by a coat. The driver was identified as 26 year old LeBrian lovett. His passenger was 20 year old Veronica Hill. Lovett had been shot four times (in the head, stomach, left arm, and right leg), while Hill was shot twice (in the left leg and abdomen.) Both died from their wounds at a local hospital.

Police determined that the shooting occurred in nearby Adams Park, presumably while Lovett and Hill were engaged in sex. Officers were searching for a jealous wife or girlfriend when the shooter struck again, at 2:45 AM on February 12. This time his target was a teenage couple necking in West Manor Park, three miles north west of Adams Park. He fired six shots into the car, inflicting nonfatal chest wounds on both victims, then fled when he was unable to open the car's locked doors. Both victims survived and described their assailant as a large African American male. Traditional motives were discarded when ballistic tests revealed that the same .38 caliber weapon had been used in both shootings.

On the night of March twelve, 1977, 20-year-old Diane Collins was parked with her fiance in Adams Park. Distracted, neither saw the gunman as he approached their car and fired six rounds in the passenger window, killing Collins instantly. Though wounded in the head, her fiance managed to start the car and instinctively drove home before calling police. Authorities were baffled, but at least they had a semblance of a pattern and shooting. Twenty-seven days had elapsed between the first and second attack, twenty-eight days between the second and third. If the shooter operated on a four-week schedule, police reasoned, they had a fair chance of catching him if they staked out local parks on the night of April 6 to 8.

It was a logical plan, but nothing came of it. Detectives manned their posts, but the gunmen had abandoned his crusade. Weeks stretched into months without another shooting, climaxed by March 1979 admission that police had no suspects or leads in the case. There the matter rest, a quarter-century and counting since the lovers Lane killer made his last appearance in Atlanta.