No fingerprints and a dodgy confession in a Ku Klux Klan stronghold: The shocking Death Row injustice of 'The Stocking Strangler'

THE MAN WHO FIRST SAVED CARLTON GARY FROM EXECUTION IN 2009



In the many years that I’ve written about the case of Carlton Gary, an American Death Row prisoner, I’ve grown used to the fact that the prosecutors who seek to have him executed will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure this happens.

But the latest twist in this labyrinthine legal saga has left me reeling: they argue that even DNA tests that completely undermine his conviction can safely be disregarded.

According to a prosecution legal document filed last week with the judge handling Gary’s last chance to appeal, it simply doesn’t matter that these tests exclude him as the killer. They are nothing but a vexatious attempt to ‘delay his punishment’, which should now swiftly proceed.

Condemned man: Carlton Gary after being found guilty of the murder and rape of seven elderly women



Gary, 61, who happens to be black, was sentenced to death back in 1986 as the ‘Stocking Strangler’, who over an eight-month period between 1977 and 1978 raped eight elderly white women in the Deep South city of Columbus, Georgia, murdering seven of them.

Most of the victims were prominent citizens, and all but one lived alone in Wynnton, a wealthy all-white neighbourhood. Long before the strangler’s reign of terror came to an end, the area was crawling with patrols, not only by police but off-duty soldiers from a nearby base, vigilante groups and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan has been a power in Columbus for decades. It perpetrated numerous killings, and as late as the Nineties, when the schools chief tried to end segregation, it tried to get him fired and burnt a cross on his lawn.

The footprints were five sizes smaller than Gary's

The Stocking Strangler seemed able to strike with impunity, and in a city with a long, violent history of racial oppression and lynching, the belief that he was African-American – founded on the local coroner’s claim that pubic hair left at one of the crime scenes had ‘negroid characteristics’ – had an electrifying effect.

As an investigative journalist, I became involved in 1997, when Wendy Murphy, a Norfolk dental hygienist who had befriended Gary, wrote to me, outlining some of his conviction’s apparent flaws. I soon established she was right, and after visiting Gary myself more than a dozen times, I not only embarked on a book about the case, I also became his lawyers’ official investigator.

Long before the new DNA tests there were already good reasons to question Gary’s guilt. For example, he was interviewed by detectives about the murders in 1979, and gave them a set of fingerprints. Years later, the police claimed Gary’s prints were lifted from four of the crime scenes, but then they could find no match.

I unearthed a cast of the killer’s teeth, made from a wound on one of the victims and deliberately concealed from his trial: one of the world’s leading forensic odontologists said it excluded Gary. His semen, it transpired from lab notes which had also been hidden, was of a completely different biochemical type to the killer’s.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan hold a cross-lighting ceremony. The Klan has been a power in Columbus for decades

As for his supposed ‘confession’, it was unsigned, composed from the pooled recollections of the three detectives who had interrogated him two months earlier, without taking a single note or using a tape recorder.

The footprints of the killer, left when he entered one of the victim’s homes, and also hidden from the trial, were five shoe sizes smaller than Gary’s size 14 feet.

Since 1992, when DNA testing first became available and began to lead to Death Row inmates being exonerated – there have been close to 200 US cases to date – Gary’s lawyers had been trying unsuccessfully to obtain bodily fluid samples taken from the crime scenes and victims, but were told they had been destroyed. According to one prosecution lawyer’s sworn testimony, they were considered a ‘bio-hazard’.

Three years ago, it turned out the samples had not been destroyed, but had been kept by the Columbus police. Unfortunately, having lost every appeal including a petition to the US Supreme Court, Gary was about to be executed.

Semen on the nightdress of the strangler’s first victim, the only one to survive, could not have come from Gary

For weeks, his lawyers vainly tried to get a stay while the samples were tested. Finally, on December 16, 2009, after I filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief enclosing copies of my book as exhibits, the Georgia state supreme court halted the execution three hours before Gary was due to die.

When the news came through, he told me later, he had said goodbye to his wife and daughter, and was being ‘prepped for execution’: stripped naked and given a body cavity search. ‘I guess the idea was to strap me to that gurney feeling degraded and humiliated.’

Even after the stay was granted, Columbus’s chief prosecutor, District Attorney Julia Slater, fought a long legal battle to try to prevent the DNA tests from being done. Now, however, the results are in.

They show that semen on the nightdress of the strangler’s first victim, Gertrude Miller, the only woman who survived his attacks, cannot have come from Gary, although she identified him in court.



This was the trial’s most dramatic and racially charged moment: a white woman pointing out her supposed attacker in the dock, the prosecution claiming his face was ‘burned into her memory’.

Years later, her original police statement emerged, in which she said it had been so dark she could not say whether the man who raped her was white or black. The US appeal courts paid it no attention.

The Klan perpetrated numerous killings and, as late as the Nineties, when the schools chief tried to end segregation, it tried to get him fired and burnt a cross on his lawn (file photo)

Body fluid found in murder victim Martha Thurmond was ‘absolutely’ not from Gary. In one of the other cases, there was not enough material for a genetic profile and in a fourth, that of Jean Dimenstein, there was a possible – though not conclusive – match with Gary.

However, the police and prosecution have always argued that all the attacks were perpetrated by one man acting alone, and Gary was not even charged with killing Ms Dimenstein.

At this late stage, Gary’s only legal recourse is a motion for a new trial in Columbus. But according to Ms Slater’s brief filed last week, this must never happen, and his sentence must not be commuted to life.

In her view, the inconvenient fact that his DNA doesn’t match that recovered from the Miller and Thurmond crimes means nothing – not even that he didn’t attack them. After all, she states, ‘ejaculation is not an essential element of rape’, implying that these elderly women must have had consensual sex with someone else before Gary turned up.

All the other items in the defence motion, including the bite cast and the footprint, have already been rejected by other courts, she adds, so are ‘procedurally barred’. But the possible match in the Dimenstein case is, she argues, conclusive. Gary might not have been convicted of killing her, but since all the stranglings were committed by the same man, if he raped her, he must have raped and killed all the victims.

Ms Slater faces re-election on November 6. The main plank of her opponent, her assistant, Mark Post, is the remarkable claim that she has been ‘too soft’ in death penalty cases, especially Carlton Gary’s.

Frank Jordan, the judge who will rule on the new trial motion, is also an elected official, well aware that most of those associated with Gary’s conviction have become powerful.

Meanwhile, Gary’s lawyer, Jack Martin, points out: ‘Ms Slater says that just because it wasn’t Carlton’s semen, it doesn’t mean anything. But it does mean something. It means it came from someone else – someone who’s still out there.’

In the next few weeks, Gary will learn whether Jordan has the courage to keep that in mind.