Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South

FOUR Dragnet

The first time I met the blues mama,

They came walking through the woods

The first time I met the blues baby,

They came walking through the woods

They stopped by at my house first mama,

And done me all the harm they could.

The blues got at me

Lord they ran me from tree to tree

The blues got at me

Lord they ran me from tree to tree

You shoulda heard me beggin’,

’Mister blues, don’t murder me.’

‘The First Time I Met the Blues’,

’LITTLE BROTHER’ MONTGOMERY (1906–85)

Even the greatest detectives rarely solve their cases on their own. They need tip-offs, informants, steers from those in the know, especially when the trail they have to follow is cold. One chilly evening in April 2001, across a table in a chain hotel in Gwinnett County, on the northern edge of the metro Atlanta sprawl, the man who cracked the stocking stranglings leant towards me and lowered his voice. The former Columbus homicide investigator Michael Sellers had already told me that his work on the murders had begun with a mysterious phone call in March 1984, almost six years after the last killing. Now, after five hours’ intense conversation, he felt ready to reveal his own prize source, the starting point of the hunt for Carlton Gary. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘it was a phone call from God.’

A tall, slim, greying figure, his face dominated by a toothbrush moustache, Sellers was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. Born and raised in Columbus, the son of the city’s former Treasurer, he described himself as part of a new breed of better-educated officer who began to join the CPD in the 1970s: he even had a degree in policing from Troy State University. The pride Sellers took in the work he had done seventeen years earlier was palpable. He carried an ordered folder of photographs and documents, and I had the impression that he had made presentations of his contribution to this case many times before. But Sellers, fifty at the time we met, also seemed suffused by bitterness, much of it directed at his former boss and CPD chief, Jim Wetherington.

‘After the trial in 1986, when Carlton Gary had been convicted, Richard Smith put in an application for me to be nominated as Police Officer of the Year with the Police Chiefs’ Association,’ Sellers said. ‘But for it to go forward, Chief Wetherington had to second it. He refused. He said the case had been a team effort.’

I found it strange that this still rankled after so many years. ‘But surely,’ I asked, ‘bringing Gary to justice was reward enough?’

Sellers shook his head, colouring. ‘For two years, I’d been assigned to the District Attorney’s office in the Government Center, working up the case. I almost set up home there. I think there was a lot of jealousy from some of the lieutenants and captains. They resented the fact that because I was working on the stranglings, I wasn’t doing any of the John shot Mary cases.

‘You know what I found hardest? That no one ever said thank you. After the trial, the DA opened up the grand jury room and allowed me to talk to the media. But when I got back to the office, I got my butt chewed off. And after it was all over, all that I was ever assigned was the crap.’

In the spring of 1987, less than a year after Gary’s trial, Sellers left Columbus and detective work altogether. When we met, he was earning a higher salary. But instead of solving notorious murders, he was working nights as a Gwinnett Country Patrol Sergeant. I couldn’t help thinking it was really a job for a younger man, physically demanding and dangerous. In 2002 he suffered terrible injuries in a car crash, sustained while chasing a suspect.

After Janet Cofer’s murder in April 1978, as the strangler’s silence grew from weeks to months, the special police patrols continued, and the stranglings inquiry remained the overwhelming preoccupation of the CPD. There was more to this than the simple horror of leaving such a murderer at liberty. Always in the background was the social position of many of the victims. The venerable business elites of Columbus did not normally concern themselves with criminal justice, and if they thought about it at all, it was merely as a job that had to be done. But a serial killer who had violated and murdered women such as Kathleen Woodruff, and had done so amid the citadels of Wynnton, represented a different level of threat.

Columbus is a town for joiners, where a person’s position in society is advertised by their memberships of clubs and other organisations. In Wynnton, one of the oldest and swankiest is the Columbus Country Club; further north, on the banks of the Chattahoochee, is the Green Island Club – just as expensive, but burdened with a hint that some of its members are what might be considered a little nouveau riche. Above them all stands that riverside fine-dining establishment on its little promontory, the Big Eddy Club. Its members are generous contributors to charity, and not a month goes by without some gala dinner or reception there in aid of this or that good cause, together with Columbus’s best weddings and debutante balls. For years, such events were chronicled every Sunday in Marquette McKnight’s ‘Around Town’ column in the Ledger-Enquirer: ‘That’s where you find the bluebloods,’ she told me, ‘the families who settled Columbus, together with what they call newcomers – people who are major players, but who have been in the city for less than twenty-five years.’

For almost thirty years, beginning in 1962, the club was managed by Marcel Carles, a skilled French chef. I went to see him at his home in Wynnton, filled with memorabilia of his years of service to the city’s upper class.

‘The only other food you could get if you dined out in Columbus in those days was burgers and hot dogs,’ Carles said. ‘I had moules flown in from New York, langoustines, châteaubriand, sole bonne femme boned at the table. We were easily good enough to merit a Michelin star. We had Georgia’s first air-conditioned wine cellar, and the wines to go with it: premiers crus, a complete run of vintages of Château Mouton-Rothschild going back to 1929. There are people in Columbus who have never seen the ocean, never been outside the state. Here the people were more sophisticated. And we had a special à la carte service. If you wanted anything that wasn’t on the menu, you had only to ask, and we would cook it.’ Carles’s special talent was for ice sculptures. He showed me photographs taken at weddings and other club functions with huge models on the tables of Rodin’s The Kiss and Michelangelo’s David, which he had carved.

‘In the Big Eddy, you don’t ask regular visitors, “What’s your name?",’ Carles said, ‘even if they are not members themselves. Many of the women who were strangled had been there often enough that all the staff recognised them immediately and knew their names.’ Some of the victims had family memberships: Ferne Jackson through her nephew Harry, later Columbus’s Mayor; Mildred Borom and her son Perry; and the Woodruffs, the family of murdered Kathleen. According to Carles, Ruth Schwob, who survived the strangler’s attack, was a frequent guest, as were Jean Dimenstein and Janet Cofer. Of the seven murdered women, only two had not been seen at the Big Eddy, Martha Thurmond and Florence Scheible. ‘You can only imagine what the atmosphere was like when they began to get killed,’ Carles said. ‘Everyone was on edge, uneasy. They were frightened for their women, and they were angry.’

Leading figures in Columbus’s legal establishment were also club members. There was Judge Mullins Whisnant, District Attorney when the murders took place, and William Smith, his successor, the man in post during the hunt for Carlton Gary, and later the lead prosecution counsel at his trial. The family of Judge Kenneth Followill, who would try the case, were members, as was Robert Elliott, judge of the city’s Federal District Court, who many years later would start to hear one of Gary’s appeals. Successive police chiefs, from Curtis McClung onwards, also dined at the Big Eddy. The pressure these officials felt to find the strangler would have been intense in any case, but the connections they had through their social lives can only have increased it.

Nevertheless, in the absence of further murders, the CPD and the GBI did not have the resources to maintain its huge investigative effort indefinitely. At the end of 1978, eight months after Janet Cofer’s death, the task force was closed. By then, its case file contained more than thirty-five thousand separate documents. The contents of some eleven thousand ‘field interview’ cards, together with details of five thousand vehicles reportedly seen near the murder scenes, had been fed into an IBM computer, the first time such a device had been used by the police in Columbus. The police told reporters they could punch a geographical grid number into the machine, ‘and it will show everyone we stopped in that area’. But no amount of technology could hide the fact that they had no suspect. ‘This has been one of the biggest career disappointments to me,’ the CPD Chief, Curtis McClung, said prosaically. ‘I have this fear that somewhere in all that information we’ve overlooked something.’

The murders had stopped, but there could be no normality until the killer was captured. ‘It’s not over yet,’ wrote the Columbus Enquirer columnist Richard Hyatt on the first anniversary of the strangling of Janet Cofer. He built his article around an interview with an eighty-six-year-old widow from Wynnton, who still kept a loaded gun among her family photographs, next to her rocking-chair. ‘How can it really end until a final chapter is written, until there’s an answer to our questions?’ Hyatt asked. Those responsible for the absence of such answers were already paying with their jobs.

Ronnie Jones, the head of the task force at the time of the murders, resigned from the force in the summer of 1978, claiming that he had been hampered by ‘political interference’. Next to go was Mayor Jack Mickle, who lost a bid for re-election the following autumn to the murdered Ferne Jackson’s nephew, Harry Jackson, after a campaign in which the investigation’s lack of success figured heavily. In 1980, Curtis McClung resigned as chief of the CPD to run for election as Muscogee County Sheriff – only to lose by ten thousand votes to a man who had never held public office. By the end of that year, most of the senior detectives who had worked on the investigation under him had either resigned or been demoted. According to William Winn, in an article for Atlanta magazine, ‘A popular courthouse pastime in Columbus is to attempt to list all the individuals whose careers – lives – were adversely affected by the strangler.’

Occasionally there were hints that the police did have a plausible suspect. In the summer of 1978 a businessman told the police that a young African-American had visited his office, and in the opinion of his female clerical staff, had ‘acted strange’. There was no reason to believe this individual had anything to do with the stranglings, but in its desperation the CPD asked the women to help its artist produce a ‘composite’ sketch of the man they had seen. The sketch depicted a black man with a pointed chin, a curved, somewhat uneven nose, a medium Afro hairstyle and pronounced, bushy eyebrows.

In June 1983, Horice Adams, an African-American aged twenty-four, was arrested and charged in the north Georgia town of Elberton with burgling and attempting to assault an elderly white woman. Having removed her bedroom window screen, he climbed in and began to choke her, but fled when she screamed and rolled off her bed. Three years earlier, Adams had been sentenced to five years in prison for robbing a couple of $15 at a motel and raping the woman, and he had recently been freed on parole. He lived with his mother in Columbus, as he had been doing throughout the months of the murders. With his thick eyebrows and pointed chin, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the composite sketch.

For a few days the city’s media explored the details of Adams’s life, while the Georgia Bureau of Investigation laboratory tested his hair and bodily fluids against the samples left by the strangler. The most telling physical evidence came from the strangler’s semen. Since the late 1980s, police involved in rape investigations have been able to use a powerful new technology, DNA profiling. If semen taken from a victim’s body is uncontaminated, forensic scientists will usually be able to state to a high mathematical probability whether its complex DNA molecules match those in a suspect’s fluids. But even though these techniques had not been invented at the time of the stranglings, investigators did possess an older method that could be very effective – secretor typing. Most people, about four-fifths of the population, are ‘secretors’, meaning that in their saliva, semen and other fluids, they secrete the chemical markers which give away their blood group. A ‘group O secretor’ would be someone from the common O blood group whose semen revealed this fact, because it contained a relatively large amount of the relevant marker.

However, the tests carried out on the stocking strangler’s semen indicated that he was a ‘non-secretor’ – that his body fluids contained only tiny traces of the group O marker. Unfortunately for those who had hoped that the police finally had their killer, Horice Adams turned out to be a regular O secretor. He might have resembled the composite sketch, but he could not be the stocking strangler.

Over the years there had been other ultimately frustrating leads. One of the earliest came even before the last murder, after the night of the terrors. Three days before Ruth Schwob survived the strangler’s attack, she had been burgled by a man she claimed to have recognised – a young white neighbour named Chris Gingell, the son of a local television news anchor. Schwob told the police that she thought it was the same man who had attacked her on the later occasion, and when the cops questioned him about the burglary he failed a polygraph test, although he was never charged. Tests on his hair and serology type – he was a blood group B secretor – appeared to exclude him definitively, but there are some in Columbus who remain convinced that Gingell was the real killer. The unjustified damage to his reputation is not hard to understand. If he, a white man who lived in Wynnton, had been guilty, it would have made two of the case’s abiding mysteries much easier to explain. Even someone like Gingell might have found it hard to evade the police patrols, but for an African-American it would have been close to impossible. Moreover, a local white man would have been more likely to have known the addresses where elderly women lived alone.

Two more possible suspects came to light during the summer of 1978. The first, Wade Hinson, had been arrested for a minor public order violation in Barbour County, Alabama, just across the Georgia state line. Once in jail, he not only confessed to committing the stranglings, he showed the Sheriff and his Deputies how he had killed his victims by ‘throttling’ a door handle with a stocking he carried in his duffle bag. He also threatened to kill the Sheriff’s wife upon his release, saying he had been ‘told by God to take care of old women’.

A few weeks later, Barbara Andrews, the estranged wife of Jesse Rawling, a black man from Columbus, informed the police of her belief that her husband was the killer. One thing she mentioned made the task force take her seriously: Rawling, she said, told her that one of the victims had had breast cancer. This was true: Jean Dimenstein had had a mastectomy, although this fact had not been made public.

Like the strangler, Hinson and Rawling had O-type blood. Initial tests indicated that Hinson’s pubic hairs were very like the strangler’s. But both men had to be ruled out, because they were O secretors.

After that, new leads in the case became rather sparse. The police tried opening what they called a ‘rumour center’, a telephone hotline for people who wanted to pass on confidential tips. Hardly anyone called. Taking office in 1982, the new CPD chief, Jim Wetherington, pledged that solving the case remained a high priority. But until the day two years later that Michael Sellers took his mysterious phone call, there was no real progress. For the moment we must leave the question of whether the Almighty really had something to do with it to one side. But if He did, He chose a human being called Henry Sanderson to be His messenger.