Carlton Michael Gary was convicted in August 1986 of killing three women in Columbus, Georgia, in the autumn and winter of 1977: Florence Scheible, 89, Martha Thurmond, 69, and Kathleen Woodruff, 74. A Muscogee County jury found him guilty of three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary, and he was sentenced to death. Prosecutors told the jury that one man had attacked nine older women in Columbus between September 1977 and April 1978, seven of whom died, and that the man was Gary. He was never charged with the other four deaths.
He denied the killings from his arrest in 1984 until his death. For three decades his lawyers argued that the science of the case pointed away from him: blood-group tests on crime-scene samples, DNA tests that excluded him as the source of a stain from the state's key surviving witness, a shoeprint too small for his feet, and a dental impression that had been kept from the defense. The state answered that his fingerprints were found at four of the scenes, that he had led police around the houses, and that DNA testing ordered in 2009 matched him to one of the women killed. Every court that heard the case left the convictions in place. Georgia executed him on March 15, 2018. He was 67.
The attacks were centered on Wynnton, an established neighborhood near downtown Columbus, a city in west Georgia. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described it in 2018 as an upscale area of large antebellum estates and modest postwar houses, the latter popular with military families from nearby Fort Benning. The federal appeals court described the women who were attacked as elderly and white, and the Associated Press reported that they lived alone.
Over about seven months the neighborhood changed. Residents cut down azaleas, shrubs and flower beds so there would be nowhere near the houses for an intruder to hide, the Journal-Constitution reported. Women stopped walking in the neighborhood, and older women who lived by themselves asked relatives or friends to move in. "It was like any siege," the Columbus writer Billy Winn told the paper in 2018. Jim Wetherington, who was the city's police chief when Gary was arrested, said the case "did a lot of damage to Columbus."
The local press called the unknown attacker the "Stocking Strangler," the Georgia Attorney General's office and the federal appeals court recorded.
The Attorney General's office and the Muscogee County court that heard Gary's last motion in 2017 set out the Columbus attacks in date order. The first, on September 11, 1977, was against a woman who survived; she later identified Gary as her attacker and was the state's main living witness at his trial.
Mary "Fern" Jackson was found dead in her home on September 16, 1977. The Attorney General's office and the 2017 court order give her age as 58; the Journal-Constitution gave it as 59. The paper described her as the first Columbus woman killed in the series.
Jean Dimenstein, 71, was killed on September 24, 1977.
Florence Scheible was 89. She was killed on October 21, 1977. The 2017 court order describes her as legally blind and reliant on a walker. The Journal-Constitution reported that police concluded after her death that one person was responsible for the attacks. Gary was convicted of her murder.
Martha Thurmond was found four days later, on October 25, 1977. Most accounts give her age as 69; the Journal-Constitution gave 70. Gary was convicted of her murder.
Kathleen Woodruff, 74, was found on December 28, 1977. Gary was convicted of her murder.
On February 11, 1978, a woman survived an intruder by pressing a panic button, the Journal-Constitution reported. She never identified Gary and died before his trial.
Mildred Borom, 78, was killed on February 12, 1978.
Janet Cofer, 61, lived outside the Wynnton area, about two miles away by the state's account. The 2017 order says she had been at choir practice at a Wynnton church on the evening she died. Accounts give the date as April 19 or April 20, 1978; the order says she was found in April and gives April 20 in a footnote. After her death the attacks stopped.
Prosecutors placed the deaths of Jackson, Dimenstein, Borom and Cofer, and the two attacks on women who survived, before the jury as evidence of a common plan and identity. Gary was never indicted for them, and no one has been convicted of them.
The courts record that the women were strangled. The courts and the Attorney General's office list the other features that the state said linked the cases: the victims were older white women who lived alone; and the attacks happened at home, in the evening, by someone who forced his way in.
In March 1978, while the strangler case was still open, Columbus police received letters signed by a group calling itself "The Forces of Evil." The letters, five to Police Chief McClung and one to a local newspaper, claimed that a white organization had seized two Black women and would kill them unless the police caught the "stocking strangler," whom the letters described as then terrorizing the white women of the city, according to the federal appeals court that later reviewed the case.
The writer was William Henry Hance, a soldier at Fort Benning. The court found that he had killed Gail Jackson, also known as Brenda Gail Faison, on or about February 28, 1978, and Irene Thirkield on March 15, 1978. On April 4, 1978, he went to Army investigators' headquarters, and on April 5 he signed statements about both killings. Hance was convicted of the murder of Gail Jackson and sentenced to death; a federal court ordered a new sentencing hearing in 1983, and he was sentenced to death again.
Gary was born in Columbus, and his mother took him to Florida when he was a small child, the Journal-Constitution reported. By 16 he had been charged with setting a house fire in which a man died and with breaking into a car. In November 1969 he was charged in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with assaulting a police officer.
About five months later, on April 14, 1970, Nellie Farmer, 85, a retired teacher, was found dead in Albany, New York. A fingerprint at the scene matched Gary's. He told police he had robbed her and that another man had killed her. That man, J.L.M., was tried and acquitted. Gary was convicted only of robbery, sentenced to 10 years and served about half, the Journal-Constitution reported. The Eleventh Circuit, in 2012, described the Albany case as one in which Gary had killed the woman, and gave her age as 89; the Attorney General's office and the Muscogee County court give 85. Gary was never charged with her death.
In 1975 a woman was attacked in Syracuse, New York. The 2017 Muscogee County order says the state introduced the case at Gary's trial and that forensic evidence matched him. The Journal-Constitution reported in 2018 that DNA had linked him to the attack, which remained unsolved; he was never charged with it.
On January 2, 1977, a 55-year-old woman in Syracuse was attacked during a burglary of her home. She survived. Gary was found with her watch two days later. He said he had been only a lookout and blamed another man, D.H., who was never convicted. Gary was convicted in early 1977 of possessing stolen property. A few months later, the Journal-Constitution reported, he escaped from a county jail by jumping from a third-floor window, and he went back to Columbus. The Columbus killings began that September.
He also had criminal records in New York, Connecticut, Florida and Alabama that had not been linked to one another, the paper reported. After the Columbus attacks ended he robbed restaurants in South Carolina and became known there as the "Steakhouse Bandit," the Journal-Constitution and 11Alive reported, and he served time in a South Carolina prison. Doug Pullen, a Columbus prosecutor on the case who later became district attorney and a Superior Court judge, told the paper that what set Gary apart was the way he moved from killings to armed robberies and back.
For six years after April 1978 the Columbus police had no workable suspect, the federal courts found. The 2017 court order notes that an earlier suspect, J.L., had been questioned in October 1977 and had given a statement, and was released when the attacks went on after his arrest. He testified at Gary's trial.
The case turned on a gun. On October 8, 1977, a .22-caliber Ruger pistol was taken in a burglary of a Wynnton home, according to the 2017 order. In April 1984 police found it in Michigan. Its ownership was traced through a cousin of Gary's and the cousin's mother to her brother, Gary's uncle, in Phenix City, Alabama, who said his nephew had given it to him. A Columbus police sergeant compared Gary's fingerprints with prints lifted at the Woodruff house and reported a match.
On May 3, 1984, Sergeant Michael Sellers of the Columbus police took Gary into custody in Albany, Georgia, on the burglary charge. The Journal-Constitution reported that police found him at a motel there.
What Gary said that night became one of the most disputed parts of the case. By the officers' account in the 2017 order, he began talking about crimes on the drive back to Columbus, starting with the burglary in which the pistol was taken. At the police department, about 9:40 p.m., he was read his rights and refused to let the interview be recorded, and officers went on without recording it. He talked about a house that he believed was Mrs. Woodruff's; Sergeant Sellers said Gary was the first to use her name. He described other houses and then rode with officers through the Wynnton area, pointing out homes that included those of several of the women. The questioning ended about 1:30 a.m.
By the state's account, Gary admitted being at the burglary and being present at, or knowing of, eight of the nine Columbus attacks. He said a boyhood friend, M.C., had done the rapes and killings while he did the burglaries. The Eleventh Circuit noted in 2012 that he had blamed other men in New York and South Carolina as well, and that no evidence apart from his own statements supported any of those claims. Authorities found nothing linking M.C. to the crimes.
Gary later said he never confessed. He told 11Alive in March 2018 that the statement police relied on was unsigned and uninitialed, and his lawyers told the Associated Press that it had the marks of a false confession.
The fingerprint evidence, as the 2017 order lists it, was a finger and palm print at the Woodruff house, a thumbprint at the Scheible house, a fingerprint at the Thurmond house and a palm print at the Jackson house. The federal courts described the blood and hair evidence as inconclusive: it neither identified nor excluded him.
On May 4, 1984, a Muscogee County grand jury indicted Gary on three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary, for the deaths of Florence Scheible, Martha Thurmond and Kathleen Woodruff. Doug Pullen told the Journal-Constitution that prosecutors charged him only where his fingerprints had been found and he had admitted being present. "The question wasn't did he do it or did he not do it," Pullen said, but whether the state could prove it.
Before trial, Gary's lawyers asked again and again for money to hire experts and an investigator, and the trial court refused, according to the Eleventh Circuit's 2009 opinion. His first lawyers were appointed by the court; he then retained August F. Siemon, who brought in other counsel. His appeal lawyers said later that Siemon worked as an unpaid volunteer, while the state called a hypnotist, a serologist, a forensic dentist, a fingerprint examiner and a hair and fiber specialist. Amnesty International called it an "inequality of arms."
In April 1986 a jury found Gary competent to stand trial. The jurors were drawn from Spalding County, but the trial was held in Columbus. It began on July 28, 1986, according to the 2017 order. The lead prosecutor was the district attorney, William Smith, later a judge. The state put on evidence from all nine Columbus attacks, the New York cases and several Columbus burglaries in which no one was hurt. The woman who survived the September 1977 attack testified and identified Gary.
On August 26, 1986, the jury found him guilty on all nine counts, according to the 2017 order and his lawyers' petition; some state releases give August 27 for both verdict and sentence. On August 27 the jury, having found two aggravating circumstances for each murder, returned death sentences on the three murder counts. The court added consecutive life sentences for the rapes and 20 years for each burglary. The defense presented no evidence in the penalty phase. Amnesty International said the jury deliberated for less than an hour.
Gary's motion for a new trial was denied on October 18, 1986. On June 26, 1987, the Supreme Court of Georgia sent the case back to the trial court to decide whether his trial lawyers had been ineffective, including because of the refusal of funds. Gary would not waive attorney-client privilege, so his trial lawyers could not testify, and in June 1989 the trial court found that he had knowingly given up the claim. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the convictions and death sentences on March 6, 1990, in Gary v. State, 260 Ga. 38, and the Supreme Court of the United States declined to review the case that year.
A state habeas corpus petition, filed in Butts County in January 1991, was denied in 1995, and the Georgia Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal in October 1996. Gary filed a federal petition in the Middle District of Georgia in November 1997.
The federal case brought the science to the fore. A state serologist, John Wegel, had told the jury that Gary "may or may not have been" a secretor, a person whose blood group can be read from other body fluids. In federal court Gary's lawyers argued from the crime lab's work papers that the samples in the Scheible and Thurmond cases came from a weak secretor or non-secretor of blood group O, and that Gary, who has type O blood, is a normal secretor. The district court paid for a defense serologist to examine Gary's saliva but refused further funds for testing. It denied relief in September 2004.
Then the Muscogee County coroner's office found a dental impression, a bite-mark exemplar, that had been made after Janet Cofer's autopsy in 1978. Prosecutors had consulted a forensic dentist before trial, who concluded that no reliable comparison could be made because Gary had had dental work since the crimes; they did not use the exemplar and did not tell the defense it existed. The case went back to the district court, which held a hearing in February 2007 and found that the exemplar would not have changed the result. On February 12, 2009, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed. It held that the funding claim had been waived under state law, called one of the claims of hidden evidence "patently frivolous," and found that the exemplar could neither identify nor exclude Gary. The Supreme Court of the United States declined review on November 30, 2009.
Georgia set Gary's execution for December 16, 2009. The Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency the day before. On December 7 his lawyer, Jack Martin, had asked the trial court to order DNA testing under a 2003 state law that allows such testing where it was not available at trial. Superior Court Judge Robert Johnston refused, saying the motion was filed for delay, the Journal-Constitution reported.
On December 16, about four hours before the execution time, the Supreme Court of Georgia voted 5 to 2 to stay it and sent the case back for a hearing on testing. Chief Justice Carol Hunstein and Justice George Carley dissented. Executing Gary without the test "would have been a sin," Martin told the paper.
Under a consent order of February 19, 2010, the state and the defense agreed to test four slides from the crime lab's original work, from the Dimenstein, Woodruff and Thurmond cases. The Woodruff slide and one Thurmond slide produced nothing of value.
The Dimenstein sample produced a male profile that matched Gary through the national DNA database, and a fresh sample from Gary confirmed it, according to the state; Gary's own expert accepted the match at a 2014 hearing. Gary had never been charged with Jean Dimenstein's death.
The second Thurmond slide first gave a profile that did not match Gary. The crime lab then found that the profile came from a quality-control sample handled by another scientist in the same work area, and the slide could not be tested again. Gary's lawyers said the state had destroyed the one sample that could have cleared him; their DNA expert, Greg Hampikian, called the lab's handling "egregious." The trial court found that the contamination was not done in bad faith and that the Thurmond results neither implicated nor cleared Gary.
A private laboratory tested clothing from the woman who survived the September 1977 attack and identified Gary at trial. It found male DNA that did not match him. The state did not dispute the result; it disputed whether she had been wearing that gown during the attack. Gary's lawyers pointed out that the prosecutor had told the jury Gary's face was "burned into her memory." CBS News reported that a police report the defense received late recorded her saying she had been asleep in a dark room and could not identify her attacker; the 2017 order records the prosecutor's testimony that she identified Gary after seeing him on television and again in court.
Other evidence surfaced. A former deputy found a briefcase of case documents in his mother-in-law's attic, and it was placed in evidence; Gary's trial lawyer testified that he had asked the state for the composite sketch made from the surviving witness's description and never received it. A former state investigator disclosed a size 10 shoeprint found at the point of entry in the February 1978 attack; a podiatrist testified that Gary wore about a size 13 and could not have fitted that shoe. The forensic dentist who had looked at the Cofer exemplar before trial testified for the defense that Gary was "probably not the biter." A former FBI fingerprint supervisor said in an affidavit that the fingerprint identifications were borderline at best; the state said the affidavit contained factual errors.
Gary filed an extraordinary motion for a new trial on July 9, 2012. Judge Frank J. Jordan Jr. of the Muscogee County Superior Court held hearings in February 2014, February 2015 and January 2017 (his lawyers' petition gives 2016 for the middle hearing). On September 1, 2017, he denied the motion. Applying the Georgia test for new evidence, he found that the serology papers, the dental impression and the shoeprint had been unknown at trial but were not so material that they would probably have produced a different verdict. He held that the fingerprint challenge and the sketch had been known at trial, and that the sketch would only have been used to question a witness who held to her identification.
The Supreme Court of Georgia denied an appeal on December 1, 2017, and denied reconsideration on January 16, 2018. In federal court, the Eleventh Circuit held in July 2012 that federal money for Gary's lawyers did not extend to the state DNA proceedings; Judge Wilson dissented in part.
On February 23, 2018, the Muscogee County Superior Court set an execution window from March 15 to March 22, and the Department of Corrections chose 7 p.m. on March 15. On March 7 Jack Martin applied for clemency. Amnesty International asked the board to commute the sentence, citing the contaminated sample and the DNA result on the survivor's clothing, while saying it did not seek to minimize the crimes.
Gary filed a handwritten motion in federal court asking for a delay and a new lawyer. He wrote that he had met his lawyer only once since the September ruling and should have had "knowledge of and input into" all motions in his case, the Associated Press reported.
The retired detective Mike Sellers told WTVM that Gary was long overdue for execution. Jim Wetherington, the former chief, told the Journal-Constitution it was "a good day for law enforcement." Gary's wife, whom he met by letter in 1991 and married in prison in 1996, told 11Alive she believed he was innocent.
The Board of Pardons and Paroles met on March 14, 2018, heard arguments for and against clemency, and denied it.
Gary spoke to 11Alive on the day before his execution. "I'm an innocent person," he said. He said he trusted God and thanked his supporters for their prayers.
At about 5:30 p.m. the Supreme Court of Georgia refused to halt the execution. It said his arguments resembled those it had already rejected and that he had not shown why it should use its original jurisdiction, which it reserves for "extremely rare" cases, when the trial court's ruling could be challenged through a discretionary appeal.
The Eleventh Circuit refused him permission to file a second federal petition. In an unsigned order, a panel of Judges Tjoflat, Wilson and William Pryor held that the contamination claim was "not based on an event that occurred during Petitioner's prosecution for the murders," since the testing took place decades after trial, and that a claim of innocence based on new evidence is not a ground for federal habeas relief without a separate constitutional violation at trial. The Supreme Court of the United States denied his petition and his request for a stay without comment.
The execution, set for 7 p.m., was carried out at 10:33 p.m. at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. Gary declined a final prayer and did not make a final statement. He also declined to choose a last meal. He was the 48th person Georgia had executed by lethal injection, and the first that year. By the Department of Corrections' count, 69 men and one woman had been executed in Georgia since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
No one has ever been convicted of the deaths of Fern Jackson, Jean Dimenstein, Mildred Borom or Janet Cofer. The state's position was that all of the Columbus attacks were the work of one man and that he was Gary. The DNA match in the Dimenstein case is the only post-conviction scientific result that the state said tied him to one of those deaths.
In 2022 the author William Rawlings published a book on the case, The Columbus Stocking Strangler, which also covers the "Forces of Evil" killings, and gave a book signing in Columbus that September, WTVM reported. William Smith, the former prosecutor, told the station that fingerprints had been found at the scene in each charged case.
The convictions. Three convictions were final and upheld at every stage. The courts did not find Gary innocent of anything, and no court reviewing the case found that the new evidence would probably have changed the verdict.
The uncharged deaths. The deaths of Jackson, Dimenstein, Borom and Cofer, and the two Columbus attacks the women survived, were attributed to Gary by prosecutors and used at trial, but he was never charged or tried for them. The state said DNA matched him in the Dimenstein case.
The statements. Police said Gary admitted being at the scenes and blamed another man; the interview was not recorded or signed, and Gary later denied confessing.
The serology. The state's serologist said at trial that Gary might or might not be a secretor; defense experts later said the samples in two of the charged cases came from a non-secretor and so excluded him. The trial court did not find this decisive.
The surviving witness. DNA on clothing of the woman who identified Gary at trial did not match him; the state disputed whether she wore that garment during the attack.
The Thurmond sample. Contaminated in the lab during court-ordered testing; the courts found no bad faith.
The New York cases. Gary was convicted of robbery in the 1970 Albany case, not of the death; the man he blamed was acquitted. The 1975 Syracuse attack was linked to him by forensic evidence, according to the state and the Journal-Constitution, but never charged.
The name. "Stocking Strangler" was the press name for the unknown attacker of 1977 and 1978, used by the courts and the state for the whole series.
April 14, 1970: Nellie Farmer, 85, found dead in Albany, New York; Gary later convicted of robbery only.
Early 1977: Gary convicted in New York of possessing stolen property; escapes from a county jail a few months later.
September 11, 1977: first Columbus attack; the woman survives.
September 16, 1977: Mary "Fern" Jackson found dead.
September 24, 1977: Jean Dimenstein killed.
October 8, 1977: .22 Ruger pistol stolen in a Wynnton burglary.
October 21, 1977: Florence Scheible killed (conviction).
October 25, 1977: Martha Thurmond found (conviction).
December 28, 1977: Kathleen Woodruff found (conviction).
February 11, 1978: second Columbus survivor.
February 12, 1978: Mildred Borom killed.
March to April 1978: "Forces of Evil" letters; William Henry Hance gives statements April 5, 1978.
April 19 or 20, 1978: Janet Cofer killed; the attacks end.
April 1984: pistol found in Michigan and traced to Gary.
May 3, 1984: Gary taken into custody in Albany, Georgia.
May 4, 1984: indicted in Muscogee County.
July 28, 1986: trial begins in Columbus.
August 26, 1986: guilty on all nine counts.
August 27, 1986: sentenced to death.
March 6, 1990: Supreme Court of Georgia affirms.
October 7, 1996: state habeas appeal refused.
September 28, 2004: federal habeas denied.
February 12, 2009: Eleventh Circuit affirms.
December 16, 2009: execution stayed hours before; DNA testing ordered.
February 19, 2010: consent order for DNA testing.
July 9, 2012: extraordinary motion for new trial filed.
September 1, 2017: motion denied.
December 1, 2017: Supreme Court of Georgia denies appeal.
January 16, 2018: reconsideration denied.
March 14, 2018: clemency denied.
March 15, 2018: executed at 10:33 p.m., Jackson, Georgia.