Killer Terrorizes City

Nearly a half century ago, the people of Georgia’s second-largest city, Columbus, lived through eight months of terror.

Racial tensions skyrocketed.

People moved away.

Police officers spent nights in the homes of vulnerable women who feared falling victim to the “Stocking Strangler.”

Starting on September 16, 1977, seven women who lived alone were raped and murdered. The first victim, Ferne Jackson, was also the youngest at age 60. The oldest was Florence Scheible, a great-grandmother who was killed 10 days shy of her 90th birthday.

Most of the victims were strangled with nylon stockings wrapped two or three times around their necks. Hair found at one scene led police to suspect the killer was Black. All of the victims were white.

One man confessed, but he also claimed the assassinations of presidents McKinley and Kennedy. Police arrested a second man but dropped him as a suspect when another Stocking Strangler death occurred.

After Janet Cofer, 61, was murdered April 20, 1978, the killings stopped, and the case went cold for six years.

Then a pistol – which had never been used in any of the murders – led police to the killer.

The .22-caliber Ruger had been stolen in October 1977 from the same neighborhood where the stranglings had occurred. Detectives theorized the thief was probably the Stocking Strangler, but the gun vanished.

(Columbus Ledger photo)

In 1984, prodded by a phone call from the gun’s owner, police sent out a nationwide alert for the weapon – and got a hit.

Police in Michigan found it was registered in Kalamazoo by a man who got it from his mother, who got it from her brother. The brother lived near Columbus, Georgia, and told police he bought the weapon from a nephew – Carlton Gary.

It was the first time Gary’s name was linked to the Strangler investigation.

Detectives learned he had recently escaped from a prison in South Carolina, and they asked for his fingerprints. They were a match for a print found at one of the Strangler crime scenes.

Police tracked him to Columbus and then to Albany, Georgia, where a SWAT team broke into a motel room and arrested him.

Prosecutors put him on trial for three of the Columbus murders. He was convicted in August 1986 and sentenced to death.

It also emerged that he murdered three women in New York before the Columbus crime spree, killing the first victim when he was 19.

Appeals kept Gary alive for 32 years. When he was executed by lethal injection March 15, 2018, he was 67 years old. He made no final statement.