Gary was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1950 and had a record of burglary and robbery in New York and Georgia through the 1970s, including a conviction connected to the death of an elderly woman in Albany, New York.
Between September 1977 and April 1978 seven elderly white women were raped and strangled in their homes in the Wynnton district of Columbus, most of them with their own stockings. The city was in something close to panic; the case is still the defining crime in Columbus's memory.
Gary was arrested on May 3, 1984 after a gun taken in one of the burglaries was traced. He was tried in 1986 for three of the murders, convicted, and sentenced to death on August 27, 1986. He admitted being present at some of the burglaries and said another man had committed the killings.
The case then ran for thirty years on questions about what the prosecution had held back. A bite-mold cast, a shoe print larger than his foot, and a surviving victim's identification pointing elsewhere were all raised in post-conviction proceedings, along with the state's late production of material. Independent DNA testing ordered in 2009 produced results the defence argued excluded him and the state argued were inconclusive, and the courts declined to reopen the convictions.
He was executed by lethal injection at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison at Jackson on March 15, 2018, aged sixty-seven. He maintained to the end that he had not killed anyone. The count carried here is the three murders he was convicted of, set against the seven killings in the Columbus series; figures as high as eight or more are attributed to him, and the entry rests on the convictions.