Martin was born in 1937 and worked at a textile mill in Gaffney, South Carolina. He was married with children.
Between March 1967 and February 1968 he killed four: Annie Lucille Dedmond; Nancy Carol Parris, twenty; Nancy Christine Rhinehart, fourteen; and Opal Diane Buckson, thirteen. They were strangled, and several were raped. He picked up the girls walking to school or waiting for a bus. The South Carolina press called him the Gaffney Strangler.
He telephoned the Gaffney Ledger and told a reporter where two bodies could be found, and it was that call, and the details in it, that led to him. He was arrested on February 15, 1968.
A man named Roosevelt Dedmond, the husband of the first victim, had been charged with her murder and was awaiting trial when Martin confessed to it. He was released.
Martin was convicted and given four life sentences in 1969. He was stabbed to death by another inmate, Kenneth Rumsey, on May 31, 1972.
The wrongly charged husband is the part of this case worth carrying: a man had been arrested for his wife's murder and would probably have been convicted had the killer not carried on and then telephoned a newspaper.