INJUSTICE BY LETHAL INJECTION
Strapped to this gurney and pumped with fatal drugs, the ‘Stocking Strangler’ was executed for raping and killing 7 women... ...to the horror of MoS man who knew he was innocent, and discovered vital DNA evidence that SHOULD have cleared him
AT ABOUT 10pm last Thursday, Carlton Gary, the prisoner condemned as the ‘Stocking Strangler’, a man who supposedly murdered seven women and raped another in Columbus, Georgia, was hustled into a white breeze block building at the state prison in Jackson – the death house.
Tim Chitwood, a reporter designated as the lead media witness, was allowed to watch. ‘Six officers bundled him in, mobbing him like a rugby scrum,’ he said. ‘They pushed him on to the gurney and tied him down with straps around his ankles, knees, waist and chest.
‘They strapped his arms to boards sticking out diagonally. A nurse found a vein inside his right elbow, and another on his left hand. The prison warden asked if he had anything to say, but Carlton said nothing. His eyes were shut. Finally the warden read the death warrant.’
Gary, who had been on death row since his trial in 1986, had known since February 23 that his execution was imminent. Despite a final appeal being rejected last year, Gary’s lawyers – Michael McIntyre and Jack Martin – fought on, filing motions for a stay of execution in state and federal courts.
At 9.30pm last Thursday their hopes died. A US Supreme Court clerk called McIntyre to say their motion had been denied – despite DNA tests showing Gary, 67, could not have been the man who raped and strangled the victims.
‘I phoned Carlton,’ McIntyre said. ‘I had to tell him we had lost, that they were about to kill him. He handled it with courage and dignity. We spoke for four minutes, then they took him away.’
As the final scenes of this drama played out and the hours ticked down, my horror was growing. I have worked on Gary’s case since 1998, writing a book and numerous articles on it for this newspaper, and I have been his lawyers’ investigator since 2000. There is no doubt in my mind that Gary was innocent.
In 2014, I testified at one of a series of hearings in Judge Frank Jordan’s court that made up Gary’s ‘extraordinary motion for a new trial’ – a last-ditch resort for prisoners with fresh evidence. To shrieks of outrage from the prosecution, who claimed I was ‘not qualified’, I stated on oath that I had borrowed a gauge from a shoe store during the court’s lunch break to measure Gary’s feet – and had found them to be unusually large, a size 14.
This was crucial, for the killer had climbed on to a dusty air-conditioning unit while breaking into a victim’s home, and left clear shoeprints behind – revealing his feet were a size 9. Police distributed photocop- ies to every officer working on the case – yet the existence of these was hidden from Gary’s 1986 trial. That was by no means all. My interest in the case began in 1997, when I received a letter from Wendy Murphy, a dental hygienist from Norfolk. Having started as Gary’s pen friend, she had visited him numerous times. She sent me some legal documents and I quickly came to the conclusion that the case stank. I arranged to meet Gary the following year.
Superficially, the evidence against him seemed strong. The stocking stranglings, perpetrated over an eight-month reign of terror between 1977 and 1978 against elderly women who lived alone, triggered a massive investigation. Gary had a record for robbery, and according to police, became a suspect because he had sold a gun stolen in a 1977 burglary in the same neighbourhood as the stranglings. (In fact, it turned out that there was no obvious link between this theft and the stranglings at all.)
Arrested for the murders, he supposedly confessed.
His fingerprints were found at three of the victims’ homes. The
‘He handled it with courage and dignity’ Powerful people were determined to kill him
first victim, Gertrude Miller, who was raped and throttled but survived, testified in the trial’s most dramatic moment that she was sure it was Gary who attacked her.
On closer scrutiny, the evidence did not stack up. Ms Miller, I discovered, had initially told officers that it had been so dark she could not say whether her attacker was black or white, much less identify him. Gary had always disputed his unsigned ‘confession’ – which was neither recorded nor noted contemporaneously, but written down from ‘memory’ by detectives.
As for the prints at the crime scenes, the former head of the Columbus fingerprint unit told me that in the 1970s police always took photos of dusted prints before lifting them on to cards with sticky tape to prove that they were genuine. There were no photos of Carlton’s prints in situ.
Meanwhile, running through Columbus, a prosperous city of 200,000 south of Atlanta, was a dark history of racism and lynchings, some perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan. The city had sent more black men to death row than anywhere else in Georgia, and when Gary went on trial, his defence was refused any public funding.
As I started to investigate, there were some extraordinary moments.
In 2002, in the most bizarre episode of my career, I visited Gary on death row and smuggled out in an envelope a tissue on which he had deposited his semen. A second envelope contained hairs he had plucked from his head in front of me.
The reason? Gary’s lawyers had just discovered documents, also hidden from his trial, detailing that lab tests on the killer’s semen using 1970s technology showed he was a ‘non-secretor’ – a genetic condition which meant he didn’t secrete his blood group marker chemical into other bodily fluids. Yet his saliva had been tested on his arrest in 1984, indicating that he was, like 80 per cent of the population but unlike the real killer, a secretor.
At that time, Gary was fighting a federal court appeal. The prosecution was claiming that even if he did secrete the chemical into his saliva, that didn’t mean he did in his semen – and so was not excluded. To our intense frustration, the court refused to order a test that would settle this.
Hence my unorthodox solution. I had a lab DNA match the smuggled semen with the hair roots, to prove it came from Carlton, and then find out whether he secreted his blood group marker in his semen.
The test proved he did, at a very high level, which meant he could not possibly have been the source of the semen from the murders.
Then there was a tooth cast – also long hidden from his trial – made from a bite wound found on one of the victims. It did not match Carlton’s teeth.
But most convincing of all was a DNA test on semen found on Ms Miller’s nightdress. Lead prosecutor William Smith told the jury it was certain that the man who had raped her had also raped and murdered the other victims; Carlton’s face was ‘burned into her memory’ and the man had attacked his victims in an identical manner. In fact, the test proved she was raped by someone else entirely.
The defence had been trying to get hold of crime-scene semen samples since 1994, when DNA testing was beginning to be used. But the prosecution claimed they had been destroyed because they were seen as a ‘biohazard’. This was untrue. In fact, as Martin and I discovered in 2009, they were sitting in a box at Columbus police headquarters.
A further DNA test, on semen on slides swabbed from the body of victim Martha Thurmond, should have ended the case. But astonishingly, it emerged in the 2014 hearings that just as the slides were about to be tested at the Georgia state crime lab, an unknown person had rendered them useless by smearing his own semen all over lab equipment, ‘swamping’ the DNA from the killer. The prosecutors claimed this was an ‘error’. To me, it looked like sabotage.
It took years for the legal wheels to turn in Judge Jordan’s court. All that time, I was hopeful. But last September, he ruled that none of the new evidence made it ‘probable’ that the jury would have reached a different verdict if they had known about it. Thus, Gary must die.
First the state appeals court, then the federal courts refused to reverse his decision. Successive judges showed themselves unwilling to look at the case with open minds – despite the Miller DNA test. Slowly, my disbelief turned to fearful outrage. Powerful people were determined to kill Carlton Gary, and no obstacle seemed strong enough to stand in their way. I felt thankful that whatever the faults of the British system, we do not have the death penalty, with its cruel, pseudo-medical rituals.
Shortly before he died, Gary was able to phone his wife, Debra. She arranged to have a local journalist present, who recorded his final words. ‘The truth. I want people to know you got me wrong,’ he said, repeating the claim his confession was fabricated and he ‘absolutely’ did not commit the crimes. As for Miller identifying him in court: ‘They did that poor woman wrong... they made that woman lie.’
Hours later, he lay trussed on the gurney as the executioner prepared to pump a fatal dose of pentobarbital into his veins. The process began at about 10.17pm.
Reporter Tim Chitwood said: ‘After a few minutes, his chest rose and fell and his lips fluttered. His mouth opened as if he was yawning. I thought that was his last breath, but another ten minutes went by. There was total silence. Finally two doctors came in, removed the chest straps and listened with stethoscopes. One of them shone a flashlight into his eye. The warden pronounced him dead at 10.33pm.’
Many officials prospered thanks to ‘solving’ the Stocking Strangler case, including Ricky Boren, who as a young detective, arrested and interrogated Gary. Now the chief of the Columbus Police Department, he watched the execution, and afterwards, addressed the TV cameras, speaking with satisfaction.
‘The only thing I wanted to see was lethal justice,’ he said in his Deep South drawl, ‘and that’s what I saw tonight.’
He was right about the lethality. As to the justice, I will go to my own grave convinced that, last Thursday, evil triumphed.
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