The second season of “Mindhunter,” David Fincher’s Netflix series about the early days of the FBI’s criminal psychology and criminal profiling division, will center on the Atlanta Child Murders.
“You could probably do three seasons on the Atlanta Child Murders,” Fincher said on KCRW’s “The Treatment” podcast. “It’s a huge and sweeping and tragic story. We couldn’t do it justice in the background of our nine hours.”
Fincher also revealed that the second season will premiere on Aug. 16.
The Atlanta Child Murders were a series of killings between 1979 and 1981 that slain African-American children, teenagers and adults. Wayne Williams, who is currently serving a life sentence of the deaths of Atlanta men in 1981, will play a central role in the season. Police believe he’s responsible for 23 of those murders.
The second season will start with the end of the investigation as the FBI is called in to Georgia. “[The FBI] are the last guys in, they’re trying to help out something that has its own momentum and politics,” he said. “It’s a divided battlefield. They’re coming in to throw this federal umbrella over everything to make everyone feel OK about sharing information.”
Fincher also confirmed that “Assassination of Jesse James” director Andrew Dominik is involved in the second season.
The first season focused on the birth of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, which was kept under wraps and limited to a basement in the bureau’s Quantico, Virginia, headquarters. Fincher said the second season will see that conversation about serial killers — like Charles Manson and Son of Sam — enter the public consciousnesses.
“In the 70s, post-Manson, post-Son of Sam, post-Zodiac, there really was, I don’t think you can say it was an epidemic, but there was definitely the feeling that the notion of this has gotten away from us,” Fincher said. “There was this transition. I remember it happening with Son of Sam. When I left the Bay Area in the mid 1970s and our parents moved to Oregon, you go 300 miles north and nobody talked about Zodiac. It had been this festering thing that had never been brought to any kind of closure but no one cared about it [outside of the Bay Area]. Then Son of Sam came, and it was Newsweek and Time, the cover.”