For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man—but the police knew his real name.

By Hallie Lieberman

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 “Stay away from him.”

In May 1991, Michael Jordan visited Atlanta, Georgia, to revel in the city’s social scene. Jordan, who was 21 and lived in Florida, came on vacation and ended up in a neighborhood called Midtown. If the Deep South had a gay mecca, Midtown was it. The bars there were legendary; among the busiest were the Phoenix, a brick-walled dive, and the Gallus, a sprawling three-floor property transformed from a private home into a piano bar, restaurant, and hustler haunt. Piedmont Park, situated in Midtown’s northeast, was a popular cruising spot, thanks to the privacy offered by its dense vegetation. Cars lined up in droves there, bearing license plates from as far away as California and Michigan. Local residents complained about the traffic, and arborists put up fences to “protect” the trees. A cop once told a reporter that the park was “so busy” with gay men, “you’d think they were having a drive-in movie.”

Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

But Midtown’s freedoms and pleasures had limits. Sodomy was illegal in Georgia, and cops routinely detained gay men, sometimes by going undercover and posing as hustlers. “One of the television stations would scroll the names of all the people who had been arrested for soliciting sodomy,” recalled Cliff Bostock, a longtime journalist in Atlanta. The HIV/AIDS crisis was approaching its zenith, and testing positive was a near certain death sentence that some Americans, especially in the South, believed gay men deserved. Prominent Atlanta preacher Charles Stanley had made national headlines in 1986 when he declared that the epidemic was a way of “God indicating his displeasure” with homosexuality.

On the evening of May 12, his first day in the city, Jordan was milling around Midtown when he was approached by a man in a white Lincoln Town Car who asked if he wanted to make some money. “What do I have to do?” Jordan replied. The man said he was conducting a study and would pay Jordan $50 to drink vodka. “I’m going to watch as you become more and more inebriated, and I’ll take notes,” the man said. Jordan jumped at the chance to earn some easy cash and agreed to meet the man at the corner of Fifth and Juniper Streets.

Jordan was already there when the man arrived. The man motioned for Jordan to get into his car, handed him a fifth of vodka, and told him to drink it fast. Jordan downed about half the bottle, at which point the man left the car for a few minutes to get something to mix the alcohol with. When he came back, the man asked Jordan to get hard because he wanted to see him masturbate. Jordan said he was too drunk to get hard quickly. Then he drank more and blacked out.

Early the next morning, a man named David Atkins found someone curled up in the fetal position on the ground of the parking lot behind the Ponce de Leon Hotel, where Atkins worked as a clerk. “At first I thought he was 30 to 35 and very dirty. I nudged him with my foot, told him to wake up,” Atkins told Southern Voice, a gay newspaper in Atlanta. “Then I realized it was blisters all over his body and he was just a kid.”

The person on the ground was Jordan. He was naked, and his genitals had been wrapped in a rubber band and set on fire. Burns extended to his buttocks and legs, and his nose and mouth were filled with blood.

Atkins called 911, and Jordan was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital, where he would remain for a month. When the police were slow to respond to the scene, Atkins reached out to Cathy Woolard, a gay-rights advocate working with Georgia’s chapter of the ACLU. Woolard sprang into action and contacted the police investigator assigned to the case. In her words, she got “nothing but runaround.” Because of the victim’s profile, the police had designated the attack a bias crime. For the same reason, Woolard sensed, they weren’t taking the incident seriously.  

Woolard urged law enforcement to talk to a potential witness: Bill Adamson, a bartender at the Phoenix. Adamson said that Jordan had come into the bar before going to Fifth and Juniper and had described his conversation with the stranger in the Town Car. Adamson issued a warning: “Stay away from him. He’s dangerous.”

Adamson didn’t know the driver’s name, only that people around Midtown called him the Handcuff Man. He was a serial predator who approached gay men, offered to pay them to drink liquor, then beat or burned them and left them for dead. Sometimes he handcuffed his victims to poles—hence his sinister nickname.

There were men who said they’d narrowly escaped the Handcuff Man, and rumors that some of his victims hadn’t survived. But there were also people who thought that he was nothing more than an urban legend. Jordan’s assault would bring the truth to light: Not only did the Handcuff Man exist, but there were people in Atlanta who knew his name, including members of the police force. He hadn’t been caught because, it seemed, no one was trying in earnest to catch him.

That was about to change.

 “I’m going to sue you.”

No one could be certain when the Handcuff Man had staged his first attack. Adamson claimed that he’d been terrorizing Midtown since the late 1960s, that he drove a white Lincoln, was about five foot ten, and had black hair and glasses. A sex worker said that the Handcuff Man had picked him up in Piedmont Park in 1977, asked him to take shots of liquor, then assaulted him. The victim managed to flee with a stab wound to the shoulder, and later saw the man again at the park eyeing other male hustlers. He didn’t report the crime because he was afraid of being outed to loved ones.

In 1984, Susan Faludi, then a twentysomething reporter a few years out from becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote a front-page story about gay hustlers for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She asked her sources about the dangers of their lifestyle and learned that “the greatest fear on the street right now is invoked by the specter of ‘The Handcuff Man,’ a man who reportedly picks up hustlers, offers them a pint of vodka spiked with sleeping pills and then handcuffs and beats them.”

The following year, in April 1985, a thin man rolled down his car window on Ponce de Leon Avenue and asked Max Shrader if he wanted to make some money. Shrader, 21, had been hustling since he was 13, turning tricks for out and closeted men alike, including a married Baptist preacher. He knew that what he did was dangerous; someone had pulled a gun on him, and a female sex worker who was his friend had been killed. “They found her head in one dumpster, her arms in another,” Shrader said. “She was a nice person.” Shrader knew about the Handcuff Man, who had attacked another of his friends. But the man in the car on Ponce, as the thoroughfare is commonly known, didn’t come off like a predator. He wore glasses and a pressed shirt; he seemed normal.

The man asked Shrader to drink some alcohol with him, and Shrader obliged. But after a little while he started to feel funny. Had the man slipped him something? Shrader collapsed to the ground. “Don’t hurt me!” he begged, as the man pulled him into his car.

The man drove to a wooded area, parked, and dragged an intoxicated Shrader into a patch of kudzu. He then poured a liquid onto Shrader’s groin and lit a match, illuminating his face in a ghoulish way Shrader would never forget. When the man dropped the match, Shrader caught fire.

Shrader lay in the woods for hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. He cried out for help when he had the energy. Around 9:30 p.m., a man who happened to be a nurse was driving home with his girlfriend when he spotted a naked figure on the side of the road. The nurse stopped, saw Shrader’s condition, and rushed home to call the police and to get some blankets to wrap Shrader in. “I guess God sent him,” Shrader said.

Shrader was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, the same place Michael Jordan would go six years later. He stayed there six weeks, during which the police came to see him once. They left a business card and said to call if he wanted to talk. He misplaced the card and never heard from the cops again.

Shrader wasn’t surprised. Atlanta cops seemed more interested in harassing and arresting gay men than in protecting them. Sometimes they wrote down the numbers on license plates in Piedmont Park and blackmailed drivers terrified of having their sexual orientation exposed—it could cost them their families, their jobs, possibly their lives. Incidents of gay bashing often went unsolved, if they were investigated at all. Etcetera, a gay and lesbian magazine in Atlanta, reported that between 1984 and 1986, at least 18 gay men died at the hands of unidentified perpetrators. The publication noted with frustration that police had “little understanding” of homophobic crimes. The Atlanta Gay Center began offering sensitivity training for cops, but feedback was mixed. “I think what you told us will be helpful in the longrun and should be expressed more often in police work,” one participant wrote in an evaluation of the training, “but I still think gays are disgusting and a disgrace to our country.” George Napper, Atlanta’s public safety commissioner, refused to make a statement condemning crimes against the gay community because it might be construed as favoritism.

After healing for two years, Shrader went back to hustling, scars and all. He’d grown up poor, and selling sex was one of the only ways he’d ever made money. At least now he knew what the Handcuff Man looked like and could steer clear of him.

J.D. Kirkland suspected that he’d seen the Handcuff Man’s face, too. Kirkland, an Atlanta cop, worked security a few nights a week at the Gallus. According to Don Hunnewell, one of the owners of the Gallus, Kirkland was a combination of Dirty Harry and the sheriff from Gunsmoke—a “kick-ass, cowboy type of tough cop.” In his free time, he trained horses on a large piece of property outside the city and worked on a novel about a time-traveling cop. Kirkland was married with kids; he wasn’t gay, but he was compassionate toward the Gallus’s clientele. “He really cared,” Hunnewell said. “I don’t think he was judgmental at all on what they were doing.” (Kirkland died in 1996.)

Patrons had told Kirkland about the Handcuff Man, including what he looked like, and on November 4, 1983, a man came into the Gallus who matched the description. Kirkland wrote a trespass notice, then snapped a polaroid of the man. The Gallus had a “barred book” filled with photos of people who weren’t allowed on the premises; bartenders were supposed to check it at the start of their shifts so they could eject any banned patrons. Kirkland put the man’s photo in the book.

Before kicking him out for good, Kirkland asked for his name. The man said he was Robert Lee Bennett Jr. “I’m an attorney,” he added, “and I’m going to sue you.”

 “What have you done?”

Robert Lee Bennett Jr. was indeed an attorney, like his father before him. He had been adopted as a baby by Annabelle Maxwell Bennett and Robert Lee Bennett Sr., of Towanda, Pennsylvania, a small town perched on the Susquehanna River. Annabelle was a socialite and the daughter of a wealthy judge; in addition to practicing law, Robert Sr. was the president of a bank.

Robert Sr. was originally from the South but moved to Towanda for his bride. They lived with their son, their only child, in a Victorian mansion nicknamed Nirvana. It had five bedrooms, a white marble fireplace, and a pool house; a Steinway grand piano, Tiffany sterling silver, and plush oriental rugs. The local paper chronicled the family’s every move: vacations to Africa, charity dinners. They were the Kennedys of Towanda.

Ellie Harden Smith, who knew Bennett in high school, said that he was charming, fashionable, and quirky. Most of his friends were girls, and he liked to cross-stitch and garden. He was devoted to his mother. As far as Smith knew, he was never bullied or mocked for his feminine tendencies. Bennett sang in the glee club in high school, was active in the Boy Scouts, and worked at the student newspaper.

After graduating high school in 1965, he moved to Colorado to attend the University of Denver. Smith visited him there, and he took her out to gay bars. “I guess I sort of knew, but that was the first I realized that he was really into that stuff,” she said.

Bennett’s first run-in with the law appears to have happened in 1971, when he was arrested in Virginia for indecent exposure during a homosexual act. At the time, he was pursuing a master’s degree in political science. According to legal documents, he was arrested two years later, this time in Atlanta, for assault with an automobile. A year on, soon after graduating from law school at Emory University, he was arrested again. It happened in Midtown, when he was cruising near the Gallus. Bennett tried to pull a man into his car—a man who happened to be an undercover cop. Bennett was charged with kidnapping a police officer, but he ended up pleading no contest to simple battery and paying a $75 fine.

Once he’d finished his law degree, Bennett moved back to Towanda, where he lived a double life. By day he worked at a law firm and claimed to be looking for a wife; in his free time, he paid poor local boys to take their clothes off and drink or have sex with him. Eventually, he quit the firm and bought a plant and flower business called the Tree Stump.

On April 16, 1976, Bennett met a young man at Leonard’s, a beer garden in Towanda, and suggested that they go to a lake cottage his parents had bought him as a gift. The men had sex in Bennett’s car, then drove to the cottage. According to Francis Panuccio, a police captain quoted in a local newspaper, “something occurred that frightened” the young man, who fled the cottage in Bennett’s car and drove it into an embankment. When police arrived at the scene, they arrested the young man, but Bennett deflected scrutiny thanks to Robert Sr. “Nobody wanted to press charges against him because of the influence of his father,” a retired state police investigator later told the press. “His father was gold.”

Still, Robert Sr. feared that his son would keep getting into more trouble if he remained in Towanda. Two months after the incident at the lake, Bennett moved back to Atlanta. He was 29.

Bennett was hired by a law firm, which is where he met Sandra Powell, 34, a secretary and bookkeeper. She was small and demure, a junior-college graduate who wore her dark hair in bangs. They started dating, and Bennett told Powell that he was impotent. She said it didn’t bother her; they talked about adopting a child. In 1978, on a trip to the lake cottage in Towanda, Bennett proposed and Powell said yes. They were married at Rock Springs Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. Powell wore an ivory gown decorated with pearls and lace, and carried a bouquet of burgundy roses. Bennett wore a tuxedo with a white bow tie. They honeymooned in South America.

His hometown friends were surprised that Bennett got married. Irma Henson, who had known him since his early twenties, said that he likely did it for his parents, especially his mother, with whom he was still close. “He probably gathered from his mother that who he was wasn’t fitting her picture of who he should be,” Henson said.

Shortly after the wedding, Bennett quit the law firm. He worked for a while behind the jewelry counter at Davison’s department store, but mostly he lived off dividends from stocks his father had gifted him. “He would just hang around the house all day, and he would be in his robe when I got home,” Powell later said in court. She was unhappy, but “kept it inside.”

Then one day in the fall of 1982, Powell was getting off the bus she rode home from work when she saw police placing her husband in handcuffs. “What is it?” she asked. “What have you done?”

Over Labor Day weekend, James Lee Johnson, 24, had been found shot to death with a .25-caliber pistol in the middle of the street close to his apartment. His wallet was missing. Police learned that Johnson may have been a sex worker, and that he’d last been seen with a man who looked like Bennett. According to friends, Johnson was in a relationship with a man named Robert whom he’d met at the jewelry store where Bennett once worked. A few weeks before his death, Johnson had expressed fear of this man, telling friends, “Robert’s gonna get me.” When investigators examined the contents of Johnson’s stomach during his autopsy, they found roast beef and potatoes. They searched Bennett’s home and, discovering those items in his refrigerator, arrested him for murder.

Bennett was released on a $25,000 bond and was never tried, because the prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial. His arrest marked the end of his marriage—Powell soon filed for divorce—but not of his comfortable lifestyle. When he wasn’t in Atlanta, Bennett spent time in Clearwater, Florida, where his mother, widowed in the mid-1980s, kept a home. He vacationed in Nassau, Mexico, and China. He hosted lavish parties, and when he and his mother attended an annual lobster boil at a club in Towanda, an otherwise casual affair, he made sure their table was set with linens, porcelain plates, and a silver candelabra.

Meanwhile, in Midtown, the Handcuff Man’s reputation was mounting. Max Shrader was attacked in the spring of 1985. That August, a man named Charles Gallows was assaulted and robbed. The following June, Anthony Charles Poppilia got in the car of a man who offered to pay him $50 to drink vodka, then pushed Poppilia from the moving vehicle. The stories continued until May 1991, when Michael Jordan turned up maimed behind the Ponce de Leon Hotel. Midtown denizens would later report that, in the hours leading up to Jordan’s assault, the Handcuff Man had approached at least one other man in the area.

“A sadistic Woody Allen lookalike.”

When word of Jordan’s assault reached Richard Greer, he immediately thought of the Handcuff Man. Greer, 32, worked the 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. cop beat at the Journal-Constitution. A few months prior, he’d overheard a Midtown patrol officer casually mention the Handcuff Man to some colleagues. Greer asked around and gleaned that a lot of cops thought the attacker might be “folklore.” Jordan’s assault seemed to be confirmation that he was not.

Greer went to gay bars in Midtown to speak with employees and customers. He heard a rumor that the Handcuff Man had either removed the door handles inside his car or covered them with duct tape to trap his victims. People were upset that authorities seemed to be doing nothing to stop the violence. “The victims were people that most people either wanted to ignore or didn’t know existed,” Greer said.

Greer left his business card with patrons of the Gallus and told them to get in touch if they ever saw the person they believed to be the Handcuff Man. “I started getting calls at one in the morning saying ‘He just drove by’ or ‘He’s on the corner of X street and X street,’ ” Greer said. If he thought the information was reliable, Greer would jump in his car and drive to Midtown, but by the time he arrived, the suspect was always long gone.

Then Greer was given a name: Robert Bennett Jr. But the tip didn’t come from a hustler or a bartender—it came from a cop. Greer was surprised. In his experience, it was unusual for a cop to be so candid. More importantly, if people on the force believed that they knew who the Handcuff Man was, why hadn’t Bennett been investigated and arrested?

Greer spoke with Kirkland, the cop who moonlighted at the Gallus, and Kirkland said that he was never able to do anything about Bennett except ban him from the bar back in 1983, because it was difficult to persuade survivors and witnesses of the Handcuff Man’s attacks to come forward. But if that were true, law enforcement bore at least some responsibility for people’s reluctance: Victims of homophobic crimes in Atlanta feared that if they spoke to the police, they might be blackmailed or arrested, or simply not believed. “The police say if you don’t report the crime, we can’t do anything about it,” Bill Gripp, an activist with the Atlanta Gay Center, told Greer. “We say if we don’t have confidence in them, we won’t report it.”

On May 28, two weeks after Jordan was assaulted, Greer published a front-page story about the Handcuff Man. “Gay prostitutes in fear of sadist,” the headline read. Greer wrote that the Handcuff Man may have attacked up to 100 men during his “reign of terror,” and that gay Atlantans were “angered” that the police were “indifferent” to his crimes. Greer quoted Kirkland, who said that it was possible the Handcuff Man was responsible for several unsolved murders.

Greer characterized the Handcuff Man as “a sadistic Woody Allen lookalike … scrawny and peering with eyeglasses through his car window.” He wrote that Kirkland believed the predator was a “DeKalb County professional.” But Greer didn’t name Bennett. He couldn’t. Doing so would have risked a defamation suit against the newspaper; Bennett hadn’t been arrested or charged with a crime, and he was a wealthy lawyer with his own wealthy lawyer on call. To finger Bennett, Greer needed to keep digging.

Greer began combing through public records and police files. He read documents pertaining to Bennett’s prior arrests. He learned that Bennett had briefly been a suspect in one of Atlanta’s most high-profile crime sprees: From 1979 to 1981, a serial killer murdered 30 people in the city, most of whom were young boys. As pressure mounted to find the perpetrator, the FBI arrived to help. Based on various records, law enforcement came up with a list of 65 suspects. Bennet was among them, perhaps because of his previous arrests. He was also a known fixture in Midtown, and the FBI thought that the killer might be gay. Agents were assigned to surveil “homosexual bars and areas frequented by male prostitutes,” and to pursue the “development of informants with knowledge of child prostitution,” according to a February 1981 memo. Bennett was eliminated as a suspect after three months. (In late 1981, a man named Wayne Williams was arrested in connection with the slayings. He was convicted of two of the murders and is presumed to have committed the others.)

Greer also found the transcripts from Bennett’s contentious divorce proceedings in 1984. Astoundingly, the Handcuff Man was mentioned. Powell’s counsel called three male sex workers to the stand, all of whom testified that they believed Bennett to be the Handcuff Man. Frank Sheridan, a local gay-rights advocate who liaised with the police, testified that he had been “working with the street prostitute community … to build up information on this gentleman regarding his sexual habits and picking up of young men from the street.” Powell herself claimed that her estranged husband was “violent” and a homosexual.

Bennett denied being gay, then admitted that he was. However, he was adamant that he wasn’t the Handcuff Man. Attorney Guy Notte, who represented Bennett, chastised the authorities for not identifying the real threat. “The Handcuff Man is still down there somewhere,” Notte said. “Could you please tell me why this man hasn’t been caught?” The court ended up ordering Bennett to pay Powell a divorce settlement of $40,000.

On May 29 and 30, 1991, Greer published two additional articles about the Handcuff Man. There were still concerns about naming Bennett, so Greer didn’t. By then Jordan had picked a photo of Bennett out of a lineup. Greer reported that Jordan had identified his attacker, but that police hadn’t issued a warrant for the suspect’s arrest. “I’m sure we will call him,” the chief of the sex-crimes unit told Greer.

Greer grew increasingly worried that Bennett might attack another man soon; naming him seemed like a matter of public safety. There was a heated debate in the newsroom about what to do. One editor told Greer that he hoped never to be an uncharged suspect in Atlanta, lest his name show up in the paper. Another editor, Pam Fine, was on Greer’s side. “Heinous crimes were involved,” Fine later said, “and we recognized that police had waited two decades to actively pursue the case.”

On May 31, Greer published an article naming Bennett as the man Jordan identified as the last person he saw before losing consciousness during his attack. The piece indicated that the police still hadn’t spoken to Bennett, much less detained him. “I would certainly love to interview him,” Bobby Ford, a sex-crimes detective, told Greer. The article went on to state: “For 20 years, police officials and members of the gay community say, a man fitting Mr. Bennett’s description has been involved in cases of brutality against young white male prostitutes. The perpetrator of these crimes has come to be known as the Handcuff Man.”

After the article was published, Greer reached Bennett on the phone at his lake cottage in Towanda, and Bennett denied being the Handcuff Man. “No attorney in his right mind is going to make a comment one way or the other on something the police are investigating,” Bennett continued. “You know as well as I do that that is not an indication of guilt or innocence.” In a separate interview, attorney Guy Notte, who was still representing Bennett, said that his client would be flying down to Atlanta the following week “to defend every allegation.”

 “I literally went nuts.”

Atlanta police didn’t immediately issue a warrant for Bennett’s arrest. “There’s just more work that needs to be done to make this thing stick,” Detective Ford told Greer. But the department did send out a dispatch to law enforcement agencies around the country describing the Handcuff Man’s crimes. When the message arrived in Tampa, Bob Holland, a local police detective, recognized similarities with a case his department had been investigating for a few months.

On February 22, 1991, 35-year-old Gary Clapp was standing outside a Salvation Army shelter, waiting for it to open. Clapp, who hung drywall for a living, was broke and struggling to feed his family; he also had a severe alcohol problem. When a white Town Car pulled up and the driver said that he was conducting a survey on how alcohol affected people’s moods, Clapp hopped into the vehicle. In between chugs of vodka from a plastic cup, Clapp asked the man his name, but he wouldn’t answer. Eventually, Clapp passed out.

Around 10:30 p.m. that night, police officer Jimmy Caplinger was driving on the frontage road along the mangrove-lined Courtney Campbell Causeway, which connects Tampa and Clearwater, when he noticed what he thought was a bonfire. He parked, got out, and saw a person engulfed in flames. It was Clapp. Caplinger grabbed an extinguisher from his car and put out the fire, then called for emergency services. When Clapp arrived at the hospital, his blood-alcohol level was “so high they could not get a reading,” according to a police report. He had fourth-degree burns on nearly half his body and was suffering from smoke inhalation.

Holland went to the hospital to conduct an interview. He wrote in his report that Clapp “was able to answer certain questions by either shaking his head or nodding his head.” Holland discerned that someone had deliberately set Clapp on fire.

Clapp’s injuries were so severe that doctors had to amputate his legs. When he regained consciousness after surgery, he began thrashing around. “I kept pulling out all my IVs,” Clapp told the Tampa Tribune. “I literally went nuts and they had to tie me down in the hospital bed.”

Holland spoke to Clapp’s ex-girlfriend, who said that she’d broken up with him because of his alcoholism. She also said that Clapp had previously been in a “homosexual relationship,” but that it “was an isolated incident.” There were only a few possible clues at the scene of the crime, including a Riva vodka bottle and a container of lighter fluid. Nearby were bags containing decapitated chickens and a headless goat. A dead body had recently turned up just 500 feet from where Clapp was found, which made police wonder if the two crimes were connected.

In early March, Holland interviewed Clapp more extensively. Clapp said that the man who’d attacked him drove a Lincoln Town Car made sometime between 1977 and 1984, with a brown leather interior. He worked with a sketch artist to produce a picture of the suspect, who Clapp said was between 40 and 45 years old, stood a little under six feet tall, and weighed 160 to 170 pounds. Clapp also described the man as having dark hair, a mustache, and glasses. The sketch was published in the Tampa Bay Times on April 9.

Two months later, when Holland saw the dispatch about the Handcuff Man, he quickly picked up the phone and called the Atlanta police. They sent him a photo of Bennett, which Holland then showed to Clapp in a lineup. Clapp, who had only recently been released from a hospital burn unit, identified Bennett as his attacker. Holland pointed out that in his photo Bennett was clean-shaven, and that Clapp had said his attacker had a mustache. Clapp said he was certain that the man in the photo was the one who’d set him on fire. “It’s hard to forget someone that’s done you wrong like that,” he told a reporter.

Authorities in Tampa connected more dots. Bennett’s mother’s home in Clearwater, a seventh-floor condo, wasn’t far from the area where Clapp was found. Bennett had been visiting her in February; in fact, a few days after Clapp’s assault, Bennett and his mother embarked on a Caribbean cruise together. Bennett also owned a Town Car, which he’d recently driven up to Towanda.

It was enough to bring him in. On June 5, Tampa police issued a warrant for Bennett’s arrest. They alerted their counterparts in Atlanta, who were expecting Bennett that very afternoon for questioning about the Handcuff Man attacks in Midtown. Just after 3 p.m., he was taken into custody based on the Tampa warrant.

Speaking to reporters, a shaking Bennett proclaimed his innocence. “I am here to tell the Atlanta police and the city of Atlanta I am not the Handcuff Man,” he said. He later complained that he wasn’t served breakfast in jail, and that he had to wait five hours to get a blanket, pillow, and cigarettes.

 “It struck a bell.”

In Midtown, people were relieved that the Handcuff Man may have been caught, but they were also frustrated that Bennett had only been charged with the attack on Clapp, not the crimes in Atlanta. District Attorney Lewis Slaton assured the public that his office was developing a case against Bennett, but also noted that it would be deferring to Tampa authorities. “Since Florida has asked for him, we’re going to let them have him,” Slaton said. “That case is obviously worse.” But worse by what measure, and for whom? “My life will never be the same,” Jordan told Greer at the Journal-Constitution. Jordan was upset at the way police had handled his ordeal. “It wasn’t until it was in the news that they seemed to care,” he said.

Bennett was extradited to Florida on June 11. He pleaded not guilty and was freed on a $200,000 bond. His mother helped him get the money together by putting up her condo as collateral.

By then, other men had started coming forward to accuse Bennett of attacking them. One of the men was Max Shrader. He’d been sitting at home one day in May when his dad called and told him to turn on the news. “There’s another guy who just got burnt the same way,” his dad said. Shrader saw the report about Jordan and called the police to say that he’d suffered a similar attack six years earlier. They asked him to come to the station, where he was shown a lineup of men’s photos. “That’s him,” Shrader said, pointing at Bennett’s face.

On June 21, an Atlanta grand jury indicted Bennett on two counts of aggravated assault and two counts of aggravated battery for the attacks on Jordan and Shrader. Investigators noted that Bennett was suspected of committing similar crimes going back two decades. Bennett again pleaded not guilty and was released on bond—an additional $100,000.

For Dale Sisco and Chip Purcell, who were prosecuting Bennett in Florida, the Atlanta indictment was good news. Their case against Bennett was proving delicate. Clapp had identified his attacker, but because he’d been drunk when he was set on fire, the defense would almost certainly argue that he was an unreliable witness. The defense would also likely argue that evidence found at the scene—the lighter fluid and vodka bottle—wasn’t necessarily connected to the case. Locals called the area where Clapp was found “the redneck Riviera,” because people liked to grill, drink, and party in the mangroves. “There was no videotape of him doing the act,” Sisco said of Bennett. “We had no photographs of him. There were still many circumstantial aspects of the proof that were going to be challenging.” The prosecutors didn’t even have fingerprints connecting Bennett to Clapp’s attack.

So Sisco and Purcell decided to rely on the Williams Rule, a legal precedent in Florida that allows prosecutors to present evidence from other cases or incidents that indicate a pattern of criminal behavior. They identified a handful of recent instances in which men had endured injuries similar to Clapp’s, hoping to find other witnesses willing to testify against Bennett. For instance, there was an unsolved case from 1989 in Detective Holland’s jurisdiction involving a man who was found unconscious outside a gay bar with his genitals burned. But survivors were wary of telling their stories in court. “We talked to several guys who were not excited about coming to Tampa and testifying to what their sexual activities were,” Purcell said.

The Atlanta indictments expanded the pool of potential witnesses. If the Florida case went to trial, Jordan could testify under the Williams Rule. So could Shrader. The same went for a hustler named Shane, who asked to be identified by his first name in this story. Shane was the man in Atlanta who claimed that the Handcuff Man had tried to pick him up in the hours just before Jordan was attacked.

At the time, Shane was in his mid-thirties; he had a wife and a kid he supported with sex work. When a man in a white Lincoln pulled up one day and asked him to drink vodka for $50, Shane was suspicious. He told the driver that if he wanted to drink, they could go to a bar, but the man insisted they imbibe in the car. Shane declined and went about his night. When he heard about the attack on Jordan, “it struck a bell,” he said. Shane got in touch with the police and later identified Bennett in a photo lineup as the man who’d tried to give him vodka. The experience shook him up. “It put a kibosh on me for a while from hustling,” he said.

As Sisco and Purcell built their case, a shocking news story seized headlines: In July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in Milwaukee and confessed to murdering more than a dozen gay men over the course of 13 years. Some journalists made the connection to the Handcuff Man’s crimes. “As in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer,” Mary T. Schmich wrote in the Chicago Tribune on August 3, “Bennett’s arrest has raised questions about the speed and sensitivity with which police handle crimes involving homosexual activity.” Schmich quoted Cathy Woolard, the activist who months before had asked the Atlanta police to take the threat of the Handcuff Man seriously. “A lot of people don’t care that much if gay people get killed,” Woolard said. “It doesn’t seem to matter that much that someone is savagely burning male hustlers, because they’re not the cream of the crop.”

The article ended with an update on Bennett’s whereabouts. “Bennett, who was released on bond, is spending the summer with his 85-year-old mother in Towanda,” Schmich wrote, “where he reportedly indulges a passion for gardening.”

 “You don’t count.”

To work alongside Guy Notte in the Tampa case, Bennett hired a defense attorney based in Florida. Rochelle Reback had spent the previous decade representing all sorts of clients, but none quite like Bennett. “Usually people involved in crimes of violence don’t have a lot of money,” Reback said in an interview for this story. Bennett was different. “We had an investigator. We had a jury-selection expert. We had a lot of resources that a lot of clients can’t afford,” Reback said.

When Reback visited Bennett’s mother in Clearwater, there were photos of Bennett everywhere. Many of them were from his childhood, when his mother had dressed him to the nines. “One was like Little Lord Fauntleroy looking, with his long, curly hair,” Reback said. Between how his mother viewed him and his wealth, it was clear to Reback that Bennett had led a cosseted life. And now he seemed sure that his privilege would protect him. “He really just felt like this was just one more case that was going to go by the wayside and he would suffer no ongoing consequences,” Reback said.

Bennett’s arrogance grated on her. “He was the most unpleasant client I ever had,” Reback said. When they clashed about strategy, Notte stepped in to smooth things over. He had a long history of appeasing Bennett. “Notte wanted to keep Bob happy because Bob was a wealthy client,” Reback said. Together, Notte and Reback tried to find character witnesses willing to testify on Bennett’s behalf, but according to Reback they found none. (Notte did not respond to a request for comment.)

In October 1991, Clapp was interviewed for a front-page story in the St. Petersburg Times. The picture accompanying the article showed him in his government-funded concrete-block apartment, seated in a wheelchair and cradling a black kitten. “There’s times I forget I don’t have legs and I want to get up and go take a walk, you know?” Clapp said. He told the reporter that he couldn’t stop thinking about Bennett. “Truthfully, I’d like to see the same thing happen to him that happened to me,” Clapp said.

When they spoke to the press, Bennett’s legal team tried to use what Reback called the SODDI defense (“some other dude did it”). Notte told a reporter that Clapp’s assault “smacks of the cult [of] Santeria,” because decapitated animals were found near the crime scene. As for the accusations against Bennett in Atlanta, Notte called them “stupid lies.”

Behind the scenes, however, it was becoming clear that Bennett was likely to lose in court. Sisco and Purcell had obtained a five-minute video, shot by the Tampa fire department, that showed Clapp burning in the mangroves; his cries of pain were audible. The prosecution upgraded the attempted murder charge to include use of a deadly weapon, which meant that, if convicted, Bennett could get a life sentence. This wasn’t an outside possibility: The judge assigned to the case was known for tough rulings.

Bennett’s lawyers persuaded him to take a deal. On February 13, 1992, he appeared in court in Florida to plead guilty; he planned to do the same in Atlanta several days later. At least three of his victims—Clapp, Jordan, and Shrader—were in the courtroom. Shrader wanted to lunge at Bennett as soon as he laid eyes on him. “But I knew if I hit him right there,” Shrader said, “I’d get hell.”

Bennett, who stood with his arms crossed, was sentenced to 17 years in prison followed by 13 years of probation. Under Florida law, he would be eligible for parole in five years. Clapp considered the sentence too light. “I don’t think he’ll ever feel sorry for anything he’s done,” he told the court. “He’s a sick puppy.”

Bennett’s attorneys requested that he be allowed some time to make arrangements for his aging mother’s care. He was told to turn himself in on March 9. “I trust you as a man and as a lawyer,” the judge told Bennett. The prosecution was stunned by the three-week reprieve. “This is clearly one of the most heinous crimes I’ve ever prosecuted,” Purcell told the St. Petersburg Times.

Frustration mounted further when it was announced that Bennett might get a deal that would allow him to serve his sentences in the Florida and Georgia cases concurrently rather than back-to-back. The Journal-Constitution argued in an editorial that this would effectively mean “no prison time” for the crimes he’d committed in Atlanta. “The full force of the legal system should be used to show that such acts will not be tolerated and to prevent them from happening again,” the editorial said. Had Bennett’s victims “been women or straight men … it is hard to believe the Florida sentence and the Fulton plea bargain would even be discussed.” (Atlanta is the seat of Fulton County.)

Gay-rights advocates agreed with the paper. Larry Pellegrini of the ACLU called the deal “horrendous.” Jeff Graham of Atlanta’s chapter of ACT UP told a reporter, “I think that clearly you’ve got a prejudiced judicial system in Atlanta.”

On February 24, Bennett appeared in an Atlanta courtroom for sentencing. It was packed, with cameras everywhere. Shrader was nervous, and when he got nervous he smiled; a lawyer told him to stop smiling.

The plaintiffs’ counsel argued against the plea deal. Jordan’s attorney said that her client “wants this man to serve life.” Shrader’s lawyer said that “this child of affluence has developed into a sadistic sociopath” for whom “the concurrent sentence is not adequate.”

When the judge asked if Bennett wished to say anything, he said no.

“Did you, in fact, pick up those two fellows?” the judge then inquired, referring to Jordan and Shrader.

“I’m pleading guilty to the charge, your honor, on the advice of my counsel,” Bennett said.

“I asked you, did you pick up those two fellows?”

Notte interjected. “Your honor, he would rather not answer that question.”

“I want to hear from him. You don’t want to say so, say you don’t want to say so,” the judge said.

“Yes,” Bennett responded.

Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of the plea deal. In addition to the concurrent prison sentences, Bennett was banned from Fulton County for life, instructed to see a psychiatrist, and ordered to pay restitution of more than $100,000 to his victims. When asked where the money would come from, Notte said that Bennett would use his mother’s trust fund.

Gay activists who had come to see the sentencing shouted “shame” repeatedly at the judge. In an article for Southern Voice, reporter K.C. Wildmoon wrote that the court sent “a message to the lesbian and gay community, to the hustler community, that these things will happen. It says ‘you don’t count.’ ”

“A danger to society.”

There are lingering questions in the story of the Handcuff Man. Chief among them is how many victims there actually were, and whether any of them died from the attacks. But no further indictments were ever brought against Bennett. “What upsets me the most is how many Max Shraders there are that maybe nobody even knows about,” said Don Hunnewell, the Gallus’s owner. “Maybe nobody even knows they died.” (The Gallus closed in 1993.)

Greer, who now lives in Virginia, wonders what lessons were learned from the whole affair—by the police, the media, and the wider Atlanta community. “The Handcuff Man was the perpetrator, but in a sense we’re all accomplices. I’m certain a dead hustler on the south side today would be all but ignored, while a crime against a wealthy family in Buckhead would get a lot of ink and cameras,” he said, referring to one of Atlanta’s poshest neighborhoods.

Then there’s the question of why Bennett committed his crimes, what motive he had. Was it a combination of rage and self-loathing? Shrader thinks so. “He was gay and he hated that,” Shrader said. “Then he decided that he’d get rid of [who he considered] the lowest of the gays, the slime on the totem pole, which were gay hustlers, and unfortunately I just happened to be in his path.” For her part, Reback said that she gleaned from her conversations with Notte that Bennett was “deeply repressed” and couldn’t “function sexually in any way.” (After his convictions, Bennett filed a court motion claiming that Reback had provided ineffective counsel; it was dismissed.)

An old friend of Bennett’s in Towanda, quoted in the local paper, placed some of the blame for Bennett’s crimes on the people who’d helped him evade the consequences of his actions as a young man. “He should have had some help earlier in his life when he got into some of the minor scraps in Pennsylvania,” the friend said. “If some of that was not covered up, he might have gotten some sort of help.”

The Handcuff Man himself never offered any insight. Two days after the contentious Atlanta hearing, the judge in Florida revoked the bond he’d released Bennett on so that he could sort out his mother’s care. After his sentencing, Bennett had been seen cruising a red convertible through an area of Tampa known to be popular with gay hustlers. The judge called him “a danger to society.”

Once in prison, Bennett was placed in solitary confinement at his own request. Eventually, he was moved to the general population because, as Notte told a reporter, he was “going buggy” in isolation. His mother died in 1993. Bennett would receive a $1.5 million inheritance upon his release from prison.

But that never happened: On April 1, 1998, just one year before he was supposed to get out, Bennett had a stroke and died behind bars. “He got the life sentence that he probably deserved,” Reback said.

The bulk of Bennett’s estate went to Towanda’s historical society and to the Boy Scouts. He left $25,000 to the son of his friend Ellie Harden Smith and $15,000 to the local country club, with the condition “that this bequest be acknowledged and established as a memorial to my grandfather, the Honorable William Maxwell, my mother, Annabelle Maxwell Bennett, and myself, Robert Lee Bennett, Jr.” He also requested the erection of a memorial to himself and his mother as a condition of a gift to the county library. There was no mention of honoring his father.

As for his personal effects, namely his clothing and photographs, he issued an unusual directive: Bennett said he wanted them burned.

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