Georgia executed Carlton Gary at 10:33 on the night of March 15, 2018, three and a half hours after the time set, while the Supreme Court of the United States decided whether to stop it. He declined a final prayer and said nothing. He had been on death row for thirty-one years and had spent all of them insisting he had not killed anybody.
Seven women were strangled in their homes in Columbus, Georgia between September 1977 and April 1978. Most were elderly, most lived in the affluent Wynnton district, most were killed with their own stockings. Two more were attacked and survived. All nine lived alone.
Mary Willis Jackson, known as Ferne, was fifty-nine or sixty. She was found at her house on 17th Street on September 16, 1977, beaten, raped and strangled with a nylon stocking and the sash of a dressing gown, her half-naked body covered with a sheet.
Jean Dimenstein was seventy-one, and she was killed nine days after Jackson. Somebody lifted the hinge pins off her front door. She was beaten, raped and strangled with a stocking, and her body covered with sheets and a pillow.
Florence Scheible was eighty-nine and lived on Dimon Street. She died on October 21.
Martha Thurmond was sixty-nine, and she was killed on Marion Street four days later, at a point when there was a significant police presence in the neighborhood.
Kathleen Woodruff was seventy-four. She was raped and killed at her house on Buena Vista Road on December 28. No stocking was left behind.
Ruth Schwob lived. On the night of February 11 or 12, 1978 she set off a bedside alarm and the man fled. Police found her sitting on the edge of her bed with a stocking tied around her neck. She never identified Gary as the man who attacked her, and she died before he was charged with anything.
Hours later and two blocks away, Mildred Borom, seventy-eight, was found lying on her back in a hallway of her home on Forest Avenue with her face covered, strangled with a cord.
Janet Cofer was sixty-one, killed on Steam Mill Road on April 20, and she was the last. Then it stopped for six years.
In between, the case took a turn of its own. A letter writer calling himself the Chairman of the Forces of Evil threatened to kill Black women if the Stocking Strangler was not caught. He turned out to be William Henry Hance, a Black soldier trying to disguise three killings of his own as the work of white vigilantes. He was arrested on April 4, 1978, and police hoped for a while that they had their man, until Janet Cofer was killed.
The man Georgia eventually convicted had walked out of a New York prison twenty-five days before the first killing. On August 22, 1977, Carlton Gary sawed through the bars of his cell in a low-security facility and went home to Columbus, where he had been born on September 24, 1950.
He grew up poor in Columbus. His father, a construction worker, would have nothing to do with him, and they met once, when Gary was twelve. His mother moved often, he was underfed much of the time, and he was left for long stretches with an aunt and a great-aunt who both worked as maids for wealthy elderly women. He was knocked unconscious in a playground accident in elementary school, used drugs heavily as a teenager, and was arrested repeatedly between fourteen and eighteen for robbery, arson and assault. He married a woman named Sheila and had two children, and in 1970 he went to Albany, New York, meaning to become a singer.
In Albany in 1970 two elderly women were raped and strangled in hotel rooms: Marion Brewer, sixty-two, at the Hampton Hotel on February 12, and Nellie M. Farmer, eighty-five, at the Wellington Hotel on April 14. After an attempted assault on a third woman he was arrested, and his fingerprint matched one at the Farmer scene. He admitted taking part in a robbery but blamed the killing on an accomplice, John Lee Mitchell, and testified against him; Mitchell was charged although no physical evidence connected him to it. Gary was charged only with robbery and served his time at the Onondaga County Correctional Institution at Jamesville.
Paroled in 1975, he moved to Syracuse, where two more elderly women were attacked in their homes within four days of each other. By one account one of them died; others say both survived. Neither could identify him because it had been dark, though one was sure her attacker was a Black man with a mustache, and she had been strangled with a scarf. He was never charged with any New York killing. He went back to prison for parole violation and robbery after being caught trying to sell coins stolen from the building where one of the Syracuse survivors lived.
In December 1978, after a robbery in Gaffney, South Carolina, he was arrested, confessed to it and was sentenced to twenty-one years. He escaped again on March 15, 1983, thirty-five years to the day before his execution, and was at large for about a year. When he was arrested over a burglary on May 3, 1984, the Columbus case came back: a gun stolen in a 1977 burglary in Wynnton was traced to him, and police said fingerprints from the murder scenes matched.
Muscogee County indicted him on May 5, 1984 over three of the nine attacks. On August 26, 1986 a jury convicted him of three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary, for Florence Scheible, Martha Thurmond and Kathleen Woodruff, and he was sentenced to death the next day. The state put the other attacks in as evidence of a common pattern, and its position never changed: one man did all nine.
Nor did his. He admitted being present at some of the burglaries and said another man had done the killing.
Then came thirty years of argument about the evidence, and most of it was serological.
Semen recovered from Ferne Jackson, Florence Scheible and Martha Thurmond indicated a non-secretor, a man whose body fluids carry only trace quantities of blood-group markers. The saliva sample police took from Gary after his arrest showed him to be an O secretor, which about two in five people are. The state has never accepted that this excludes him, and it has been fought over ever since.
The identification evidence was thin in its own way. Gertrude Miller, one of the survivors and the prosecution's most important living witness, had identified three other Black men as her attacker over the years, some of whom looked nothing like Gary, and in her first statement had said it was too dark to tell the attacker's race. She testified in 1986 about an attack in 1977.
There was a bite mark on one of the victims. There was a shoe print at one of the scenes, larger than Gary's foot. Both were raised for decades as pointing away from him. The state, for its part, said his fingerprints were found at four of the scenes.
And then there was the attic. In January 2016 a retired Muscogee County deputy sheriff, helping his mother-in-law clear out her house, found a plastic briefcase that had belonged to an investigator on the Stocking Strangler case. Inside was material the defense had never seen, including photofit evidence. A British reporter, David Rose, had by then been working the case for nineteen years. Rose and a group of supporters also said that Gary's trial lawyer had been refused state funding to prepare a defense.
There had already been one reprieve. In 2009, hours before his first execution date, the Georgia Supreme Court stayed the execution to allow DNA testing of semen from the crime scenes. The testing was done. His lawyers said the results excluded him. The state said they were inconclusive. Some of the biological evidence had been destroyed by then, and the destruction became a constitutional claim in its own right.
None of it reopened the convictions. The Georgia Supreme Court denied his appeal on December 1, 2017 and refused to reconsider. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency the day before he died.
On the last day three courts turned him down inside a few hours, and the first of them did it on paperwork. The Georgia Supreme Court dismissed his motion for a stay unanimously, not on the merits but because he had filed an original motion in that court when he should have applied for a discretionary appeal, and original jurisdiction is reserved for extremely rare cases, which it said this was not.
The Eleventh Circuit refused him permission to file a new federal petition on the state's destruction of DNA evidence and on actual innocence, holding that the destruction claim did not qualify because it was not based on an event that occurred during his prosecution. It had occurred afterward, which was precisely his point.
His petition to the Supreme Court of the United States made one narrow complaint: that through no fault of his own, the claims he was raising had never received a substantive review by any federal court. The Court denied the stay and denied certiorari without explanation.
He was the forty-eighth person put to death by lethal injection in Georgia, and the seventieth executed there since 1976.
Stated exactly, the position is this. A jury convicted Carlton Gary of three murders and no court ever disturbed that verdict. He was accused of four more and never charged with them. He denied all of it from his arrest to his death. The serology has always sat awkwardly against the state's case, the star identification witness had picked other men, evidence favorable to him sat in an attic for decades without ever reaching his lawyers, and post-conviction DNA testing produced a result the two sides describe in opposite terms, with some of the material no longer in existence to test again.
None of that is a finding of innocence, and none of it was ever weighed on its merits by a federal court.
Ferne Jackson. Jean Dimenstein. Florence Scheible. Martha Thurmond. Kathleen Woodruff. Mildred Borom. Janet Cofer. Whoever killed them, nobody has ever been convicted of four of those deaths.