<p>The police chief who reopened the investigation into five of the Atlanta child killings of the 1970s and '80s has resigned.</p><p>DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham submitted his resignation Wednesday just hours after a fired officer released an audio recording of a profanity-laced conversation between Graham and a top assistant. The chief's decision also came a day after the state's top lawyer appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Graham's department.</p><p>On the audio tape, which Graham appears to have accidentally recorded, he and assistant chief, R.P. Flemister, talk about firing another officer. Graham appears to coach a captain on how to question the officer to get him to admit he was wrong in trying to secretly record a conversation.</p><p>Flemister was placed on paid administrative leave while the county reviews the tape. Deputy Chief Nick Marinelli was appointed acting police chief.</p><p>At a news conference announcing Graham's resignation, Vernon Jones, DeKalb County's chief executive officer, declined to discuss the taped comments.</p><p>"The police chief is not an issue. He has resigned," Jones said. "He did not want the police department to be distracted, and we are moving forward."</p><p>Jones said he has asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to look into whether any laws were broken with regard to the recording.</p><p>To much fanfare last May, Graham reopened the investigation into the five Atlanta child killing cases that occurred in DeKalb County, just east of Atlanta, and were all blamed on convicted killer Wayne Williams. At the time, Graham, who knew Williams before the killings, said he had wrestled for years with doubts that Williams committed all of the two dozen slayings attributed to him.</p><p>However, records obtained by The Associated Press last month offered little evidence of the vigorous investigation that Graham promised a year ago, and Graham refused several interview requests to discuss the status of the investigation.</p><p>The financial records obtained by AP through an open records request show that of the $3,995 that the police department has spent on the investigation, more than half went to send detectives to training seminars. The rest was for two trips last August, including one to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to search for a suspect in a 1983 murder case _ even though the slayings Graham said he was looking into were committed in 1980 and 1981.</p><p>Graham, who had been the DeKalb County police chief since November 2004, formerly was an assistant police chief in neighboring Fulton County who had worked on the task force that investigated the string of murders.</p><p>On Tuesday, state Attorney General Thurbert Baker asked for a special investigation on allegations of misconduct. The attorney general's office provided no further details, but the probe came at the request of DeKalb County District Attorney Gwen Keyes Fleming in response to allegations of misconduct in the police department.</p><p>Last July, another incriminating audio recording of Graham was presented by Malik Douglas, an officer who claims he was fired for trying to organize a union. Douglas later filed a federal lawsuit against Graham and the county, accusing the chief of punishing officers who supported a police union.</p><p>A transcript of the tape provided by Douglas' attorney shows Graham, who is black, also referred to his white officers as "white boys," saying they were upset that he had promoted several black supervisors.</p><p>On March 8, another officer, Jimmy Faust, tried to secretly record a meeting with Graham regarding union activity. Graham seized the hidden recorder from Faust and later fired him. But after Graham took the recorder, it apparently kept running.</p><p>On the eight-minute recording, both Graham and Flemister curse and agree that Faust should be fired. At one point, Flemister uses a racial insult.</p><p>The department later returned the recorder to Faust, who discovered the taped conversation.</p>
