DAVID ROSE

VIOLATION
JUSTICE, RACE AND SERIAL MURDER IN THE DEEP SOUTH

DEDICATION

For my mother, Susan, who gave me a sense of historyAnd my father, Michael, who taught me the meaning of justice

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Maps

Dedication

1 The Best Place on Earth

2 We’ve Got a Maniac

3 Ghost-Hunting

4 Dragnet

5 The Hanging Judge

6 Under Colour of Law

7 The Trial

8 A Benchmark for Justice

9 To the Death House

10 Violation

11 Due Process

12 Southern Justice and the Stocking Stranglings

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Other Works

Notes on Sources

Copyright

About the Publisher

MAPS

Strangling Crime Scenes

1 Ferne Jackson (17th Street)

2 Florence Scheible (Dimon Street/Eberhart Avenue)

3 Jean Dimenstein (21st Street)

4 Martha Thurmond (Marion Street)

5 Kathleen Woodruff (Buena Vista Road)

6 Ruth Schwob (Carter Avenue)

7 Mildred Borom (Forest Avenue)

8 Janet Cofer (Steam Mill Road)

9 Callye East’s house – Henry Sanderson’s gun stolen (Eberhart Avenue)

10 Gertrude Miller – survived first attack by strangler (Hood Street)

Other Locations

11 Historic District

12 Big Eddy Club

13 Lynching of Teasy McElhaney 1912

14 Lynching of Simon Adams 1900

15 Carlton Gary’s apartment 1977–79

16 Fort Benning

17 Area of Land family holdings 1900–20

18 G.W. Ashburn murdered 1868

19 Dr Thomas H. Brewer murdered 1956

ONE The Best Place on Earth

Way down in Columbus, Georgia

Want to be back in Tennessee

Way down in Columbus Stockade

Friends have turned their backs on me.

Last night as I lay sleeping

I was dreaming you were in my arms

Then I found I was mistaken

I was peeping through the bars.

‘Columbus Stockade Blues’ (traditional)

‘We don’t take just anybody as a member,’ said Daniel Senne, the Big Eddy Club’s general manager. ‘They have to be known to the community. It’s not a question of money, but of standing, morality, personality. And they must be people who conduct themselves well in business. Integrity is important.’

We were talking in the hush of the club’s sumptuous lounge, perched on deep sofas, our feet on a Turkoman rug, surrounded by antiques. With the seasons on the turn from winter to spring, the huge stone fireplace was not in use, but there was no need yet for air-conditioning. From the oak-vaulted dining room next door came the muffled clink of staff laying tables for lunch: silver cutlery, three goblets at every setting, and crisply starched napery. The club’s broad windows provided a backdrop of uninterrupted calm. Framed by pines that filtered the sunlight, a pair of geese glided across the state line, making barely a ripple. Behind them, across a mile of open water, lay the smoky outline of the Alabama hills.

The minutes of the club’s founding meeting were framed on the wall, a single typed folio dated 17 May 1920. On that day, ten of the most prominent citizens of Columbus, Georgia, led by the textile baron Gunby Jordan II, had formed a committee ‘to perfect an organization for building a suitable club at a place to be determined … for having fish fries, ‘cues and picnics’. A postscript added: ‘Arrangements will be made at the club for entertaining ladies and children.’

The Big Eddy’s buildings had expanded since that time, but were still on the spot the founders chose, a promontory at the confluence of the Chattahoochee River and its tributary, Standing Boy Creek. In 1920, before the river was dammed, the turbulence formed where the currents came together was an excellent place to catch catfish. Anyone who ate Chattahoochee catfish now would likely suffer unpleasant consequences, thanks to the effluent swept downstream from Atlanta, but the club’s location remains idyllic. Escaping the traffic that mars so much of modern Columbus, I’d driven down a vertiginous hill to the riverside, where I followed a winding lane along the shoreline, past grand homes and jetties. Before passing through the club’s wrought-iron gates, I pulled off the road to feel the warmth of the sun. The only sounds were birds and a distant chainsaw.

Senne and his wife Elizabeth, dapper and petite, spoke with heavy French accents. They had served their apprenticeship in some of the world’s more glamorous restaurants: London’s Mirabelle and the Pavilion in New York, at a time when its regular patrons included Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis, Salvador Dalì, Cary Grant and the Kennedys.

‘If you had told me twenty years ago that this is the place to be, I would not have believed you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘But it is. They are nice people, really down-to-earth.’

Membership was strictly limited to 475 families, Elizabeth went on, and applicants must accept that their backgrounds would be carefully investigated by the board. Even in summer, the dress code was strictly observed: a jacket and tie for men, and for women, ‘no unkempt hair or wrinkled pants’.

The rules served their purpose, Daniel said. ‘It’s a good community. People take care of you.’ Just as in the 1920s, the club could count many of Columbus’s most distinguished inhabitants as members: the leaders of business, and local, state and national politicians. Former President Jimmy Carter was an honorary member for life.

In the week of my visit in March 2000, another of the city’s more venerable institutions, the Columbus Country Club, had announced the admission of its first two African-American members – both of them women who worked for the public relations departments of local corporations. I turned to Daniel and mentioned this news, then asked: ‘Do you have any black people yet in the Big Eddy Club?’

He shifted his posture awkwardly. ‘No. Not yet.’ He looked appealingly at his wife. ‘We don’t have black members, because none have applied.’

Later that day, as the light was starting to fade, I sat on the veranda of a Victorian house on Broadway, in the heart of Columbus’s downtown ‘Historic District’, with George and Vicky Williams, admiring their profligate springtime flowers. The area had once been in steep decline, but years of careful restoration had made it again a highly desirable neighbourhood. The Williamses were the first middle-class black family on their block, but Vicky said they’d encountered little overt prejudice. ‘Most of them just leave us alone.’

George, some twenty years older than his wife, was a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, and since leaving the military had built up several thriving businesses. Vicky had a university degree and worked at Columbus’s huge commercial bank, CB&T. She had lived in Columbus all her life: attended its schools; socialised widely; watched its local TV news and read its newspaper, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. How important did she think the Big Eddy Club was in the way the city was run?

Vicky looked at me blankly. ‘What’s the Big Eddy Club?’

Columbus, population a little less than 200,000, is Georgia’s second city, 110 miles south of the state’s capital, Atlanta. Running across it is a racial fissure, a rift with an exact geographical position, its line marked by the east – west thoroughfare known for most of its length as Macon Road. With exceptions unusual enough to be noticeable, white people – about 65 per cent of the total – live to the north, and black to the south. No longer legally segregated, they will mingle at work and use the same stores and restaurants, but in general they do not mix in their social lives, or at home. This de facto segregation still divides other American cities, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. But in places like Columbus it tends to be more noticeable. One of its lesser implications is the fact that a well-educated, middle-class black family has never even heard of the fine dining club where their white counterparts take their families for Sunday brunch, marry off their daughters and hold their charity balls; a place where rich and powerful people relax in each other’s company. Unbeknown to George and Vicky Williams, their near neighbours included at least one Big Eddy member, a prominent lawyer.

Columbus stands amid the rolling granite landscape of what, before the boll weevil infestation of the early twentieth century, used to be Georgia’s cotton belt. In summer, the sun irradiates the city with a lacquered intensity for months on end, bringing with it a plague of bugs. Winters are pleasantly mild, although a shift in the wind can bring plummeting temperatures and even, occasionally, tornadoes. The city takes up far more room than its inhabitants need. Its low density has allowed them to cultivate generous, handsome gardens, and there are so many trees that viewed from above, from atop one of the hills on the eastern perimeter, it barely looks like a city at all, but an expanse of forest. At ground level, the foliage turns out to hide a sprawling hinterland of strip malls and snarling expressways, built to connect mazes of suburban subdivisions which on superficial inspection could be almost anywhere in America. Beyond the Victorian downtown enclave, anyone crossing a road on foot takes their life in their hands.

To the west, across the Chattahoochee, is Alabama, here represented by Phenix City, long a centre for gambling and illicit alcohol. In the 1950s the gangs of Phenix City took to murdering elected officials who were trying to clean it up, and it remains the only town in the United States where martial law has had to be imposed in peacetime. Some of those gangsters’ descendants now occupy positions of the greatest respectability in both Georgia and Alabama.

For many Americans, Columbus has a fame and importance out of proportion to its size. It was in his Columbus drugstore during the 1870s that the chemist John Stith Pemberton first mixed the ingredients for his patent soda drink, Coca-Cola. (That original formula is said to have included a stimulating ingredient which is missing from its later versions – cocaine.) To the immediate south of the city lies Fort Benning, the world’s largest infantry base, a place familiar to millions who have served in the military. Its short-haired inhabitants can often be seen in Columbus on weekends, in the dive bars and strip lounges on Victory Drive, a venue for occasional drunken shootings, and with their girlfriends at the motels clustered round the exit ramps on the road to Atlanta, Interstate 185. On my very first night in Columbus, I found myself in the Macon Road Days Inn, where some recent recruits had decided to hold a party in the room above mine. At 3 a.m. it sounded as if they were rounding off their celebrations by repeatedly throwing a heavy refrigerator against the walls and onto the floor. A few hours later, as I blearily went in search of breakfast, there were two used condoms, pale translucent jellyfish, on the concrete stairs.

In Oxford, my English home city, which has a population about two-thirds of Columbus’s, the Yellow Pages phone book entries under the heading ‘Places of Worship’ take up less than a page. In Columbus, they require fourteen, listed under a rich array of denominations: from ‘Churches, African Methodist Episcopalian’ to ‘Churches, Word of Faith’. There are five separate headings to cover the different varieties of Baptist, and seven for Methodists. In Columbus can be found many kinds of Reverend. At the fancy places, such as the imposing neoclassical First Baptist Church of Columbus on Twelfth Street, they are solemn men in silken robes. At the other end of the market is Eddie Florence, a former cop who turned to religion after a short spell in the penitentiary. Dominating his church, deep in South Columbus, on the day of my visit was a drum-kit and electric organ; the premises doubled from Monday to Friday as the office for Florence’s real estate and loans business. A plump, intense, beaming figure, he told me: ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had much opportunity to take out a mortgage from a man of God before?’

For many of Columbus’s citizens, whose behaviour, I learnt, was not always conventionally devout, Church and community are one and the same. If one only knew a person’s choice of place of worship, one would be able to assume much about his or her race, class and social standing. But Columbusites’ faith is no veneer. They give generously to charity, and their routine enquiries after one another’s health appear to express a genuine concern. As I rapidly discovered, their habit is to welcome strangers, even those armed with a notebook and difficult questions.

Its citizens may be oriented towards the world to come, but Columbus, according to Mayor Bob Poydasheff, with ‘its wonderful people and great climate, is simply one of the best places on earth – cosmopolitan but always neighbourly’. The city, states his website, is ‘in a period of unprecedented building and development, which is bringing our quality of life to new highs’. He enumerates its blessings: ‘[The] Chattahoochee Riverwalk, River-Center for the Performing Arts, Springer Opera House, Coca-Cola Space Science Center, Columbus Civic Center, our South Commons Softball Complex including a world-class softball stadium and much, much more.’

The economy, Mayor Poydasheff adds, is buoyant. For more than a century, Columbus has been quietly dominated by a small number of wealthy families. Gunby Jordan, who founded the Big Eddy Club, came from one of them. In 1919, two of these dynasts, Ernest Woodruff and William C. Bradley, bought the Coca-Cola corporation for $25 million. (In Bradley’s case, some of this money was originally derived from his father’s former slave plantation across the river in Alabama.) Their investment was to multiply several thousand times, and spread among their descendants, it has fructified Columbus. Bradley also founded the CB&T banking conglomerate. Its offshoot, the financial computing firm TYSYS, has been quartered since 2002 in a line of large, reflective buildings just north of the former textile district, and is the world’s largest processor of credit cards.

It is only in the south of the city, on the other side of its racial frontier, that the signs of twenty-first-century prosperity are less visible. There, the surfaces of the roads are potholed and pitted. There are junkyards piled with ancient cars, and meagre stores with signs done in paint, not neon. In the poorer districts, lines of low-rise public housing projects stand amid meadows of ragged grass, competing for space with wooden three-room ‘shotgun’ houses, whose squalor would not look out of place in Gaza or Soweto.

The clubs of south Columbus are different, too. The biggest, a huge, low-ceilinged cavern just off Victory Drive, belongs to the R&B singer Jo-Jo Benson, responsible for a string of hits in the sixties and early seventies, including a national pop chart number one, ‘Lover’s Holiday’. A big, bearded bear of a man, the day we met he was dressed in a vivid striped caftan. He showed me round the club and took me into his office, taking pains to check that the large-calibre revolver he kept in the drawer of his desk was still there. ‘This town is a trip,’ he said. ‘A lot of people don’t want to see you make no money or succeed. Coming here from Atlanta is like leaving earth and going to the twilight zone, or travelling back in time.

‘But this is the biggest, the nicest club in town, and I’m a public figure. A lot of people ask me why I stay. Well, I was raised in Phenix City, and more than that, I don’t want to go in for that big-city stuff – gangs and shit. At the end of the day, Columbus is a place to sleep, lay down and rest. Most of the time I don’t get no trouble.’

Benson led me out of the club into the parking lot, and asked me to sit in the passenger seat of his impressive grey sports utility vehicle. ‘I’ve got sound equipment worth thousands of dollars in here,’ he said. He opened the glovebox and removed an unmarked CD. ‘We recorded this last week. Ain’t finished with it yet.’ It turned out to be a romantic duet of heartbreaking sweetness and purity with another local singer, Ruby Miles. Jo-Jo’s music filled the car and brought to mind decades of Georgia gospel, blues and soul: Otis Redding, Randy Crawford, Sam Cook. For a moment he looked bashful. ‘You like it? Tell your friends.’

I made my first visit to Columbus to investigate what looked like a paradox. It was 1996, and the British newspaper that employed me, the Observer, had asked me to go to Georgia to write about the death penalty. My editors were intrigued by the fact that the state’s death row held two prisoners who had exhausted every possible appeal, but whose execution had been indefinitely delayed. The reason, it seemed, was that Georgia wanted to wait until after the Olympic Games, which were shortly to be held in Atlanta. In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, capital punishment had been abolished many years earlier, and the paper wanted me to try to find out why parts of America still found it so attractive.

I began by talking to defence attorneys in Atlanta. They all said the same thing: I should go to Columbus. While its overall crime rate was relatively low, since 1976, when a case from Georgia persuaded the US Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty, Columbus had sentenced more men to die than anywhere else in the state. By the middle of 1996, four had been executed, all of them African-American, and eight were still on death row. At least another twelve had been condemned by Columbus judges and juries, but had won reprieves in appeals. If one worked out the number of death sentences per head of population, Columbus was one of the most dangerous places to commit a murder in the whole of the United States.

A few days later I found myself in Columbus’s second tallest building, a harsh monstrosity in white concrete which would not have looked out of place in Stalinist East Berlin, the eleven-floor Consolidated Government Center. In front of a view across the river sat Judge Doug Pullen of the Chattahoochee Circuit Superior Court, which covers the city and five neighbouring counties. It had been a hot and languorous weekend, and I knew Pullen’s reputation: criticised for his record a few years earlier by Time magazine, he had told the local media that Time’s problem was that it had yet to discover glasnost, the new policy of openness pioneered by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and was still a ‘lovely pink colour’. Nevertheless, his lusty enthusiasm for capital punishment took me by surprise.

‘I would guess that your experience of seeing bodies splattered and mutilated is limited,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘Unfortunately, mine is not.’ A spreading, heavy-set man with round eyes too small for his face, he moved a little stiffly. ‘In all honesty, abolishing the death penalty would have a negligible effect on crime. But the effect on the American people would be horrific. It would be symbolic, like flag-burning.

‘We like to talk tough on crime, but we’re soft. And every time you get an execution, you get people picketing, saying it’s so cruel. Phooey. The first man I prosecuted for capital murder, even if he’d been executed on his due date, it would have been nine years to the day after he committed the crime. And then he got a stay, and all the anti-death penalty people went out dancing. In my view, there should be one appeal, and one only, then that’s that: homeboy goes.’

‘What about life without parole?’ I asked.

Pullen shook his head. ‘It’s a weak sister, my friend. A horribly weak sister.’

As we talked, a big, stooped man with unusually bright blue eyes entered the room without knocking. The two of them stood, whooped, and made high fives. ‘Meet Gray Conger, my successor as District Attorney,’ Pullen said.

‘We still on for that barbecue this weekend?’ Conger asked him. Pullen replied in the affirmative. Before Pullen became a judge, the two men had worked together as prosecutors for more than twenty years: Pullen had been DA, and Conger his assistant. That was the way things had been done for decades in Columbus, they explained: an orderly progression from District Attorney to Superior Court judge meant that four of the five judges then sitting had spent most of their careers in the prosecution office.

‘They’re friends of mine, and they employed me,’ Conger said. ‘But don’t get the idea that that means I get any advantages in court. All it does is give us a smooth transition when a new DA comes in.’

‘Why do you think the city has sent so many men to death row?’ I asked.

‘I just don’t know,’ Conger shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just that we’ve had some awful horrible murders around here.’

One thing he was sure of. ‘In deciding which cases to seek the death penalty, and in the way we work in general, race is not a factor. In the South in my time, over the last thirty years, there’s been the most amazing transformation. Southerners are very conscious of race. They go out of their way not to be accused of racial bias.’

Later that afternoon, Pullen took me in his battered Volvo down to Fort Benning, where he taught a class in criminal law and capital punishment to soldiers and police patrolmen. I still had no real idea why he was wedded so strongly to capital punishment, but there was obviously nothing confected about the strength of his feeling. ‘I love people,’ he remarked happily as we sped through the gates of the vast military base. ‘You can probably tell that. So if you hurt one of my people, I’m going to come after you.’

In the past, he said, he had received dozens of letters asking him to reconsider death sentences. ‘The strange thing was, they all seemed to come from Holland and Wales. Don’t think I can’t recognise an organised letter-writing campaign when I see it. I got news for you. My education puts me in the top 3 per cent in this country, but I couldn’t name a single city in Wales. Folks round here don’t necessarily care what folks in Wales think of them. I guess those letters came from Amnesty International or something. They should be concentrating on real human rights abuses, like in the Third World.’

Pullen’s class, in an echoing room easily big enough to contain his hundred students, was a bravura performance. ‘Let me give you a little insider tip,’ he began. ‘Our fine Attorney General, Michael Bowers, is planning to run for Governor.’

‘How do you know?’ someone asked.

‘Bowers made his intentions plain to me personally. When we met up recently’. Pullen paused, then winked: ‘At an execution.’

An Alabama state trooper, so fat he seemed almost triangular, asked how lawyers got to be judges. Pullen chuckled. ‘You may rest assured that anyone successful in defence litigation need not apply. At least not on the Chattahoochee circuit.’

After the seminar, Pullen took me to dinner in a barbecue restaurant downtown. As we consumed a small pork mountain, I asked him about one of the cases that had attracted those letters from Holland and Wales, a capital murder he’d prosecuted in 1976. The defendant had been a mentally retarded man named Jerome Bowden, an African-American aged twenty-four. The body of his victim, Kay Stryker, a white woman of fifty-five, was found in her house, knifed and beaten, several days after her death. Afterwards, the police searched the home of her sixteen-year-old neighbour, Jamie Graves, and found an old pellet gun, its butt stained with her blood, together with her jewellery. Graves admitted burgling her home, but claimed she was killed by his friend Bowden. In return for his help, he was sentenced to life rather than being given the death penalty.

Bowden soon heard the police were looking for him. He walked up to a squad car he saw in the street, and asked if he could be of help. He was arrested on the spot, and less than two months after the murder, he stood trial. Pullen’s case rested on Bowden’s confession. He tried to retract it on the witness stand, saying he hadn’t been in Stryker’s house at all, and that a police detective had promised ‘to speak to the judge’ to save him from the electric chair in return for his signature. At the start of the hearing, Pullen had exercised his right to strike prospective jurors, so removing all eight African-Americans from the panel and ensuring that Bowden was tried only by whites. They did not believe him, and found him guilty on the second day of the trial.

In Georgia, as in many American states, capital trials consist of two phases. The first is the ‘guilt phase’, when the jurors have to decide guilt or innocence; in the event of a guilty verdict, they will go on to the ‘sentencing phase’, when it becomes their responsibility to decide whether a murderer should live or die. Here Bowden’s attorney, Samuel Oates, begged the jury not to impose the death penalty, arguing that his client was of low intelligence and had a ‘weak mind’.

Pullen dismissed this suggestion, arguing that it had been cooked up ‘so someone can jump up and say, “Poor old Jerome, once about ten years ago his momma told somebody he ought to see a psychiatrist.” He is not a dumb man, not an unlearned man … He certainly knows right from wrong.’ In his view, Bowden was ‘a defendant beyond rehabilitation’, for whom death was the only possible sentence, because he had been sent to prison – for burglary – before. He held up a photograph of Stryker’s body. ‘How do you take a three-time loser who would take a blunt instrument and beat a harmless fifty-five-year-old woman’s head into that? You can look through the holes and see the brains.’

In the nineteenth century, slavery’s apologists had justified human bondage by equating black people with animals. Appealing to the jury to decree the death of a mentally retarded teenager, Pullen invoked this tradition: ‘This defendant has shown himself by his actions to be no better than a wild beast – life imprisonment is not enough. Why? Because he has killed. Because he has tasted blood.’ It would take courage for the jury to vote to have Bowden put to death, Pullen averred; much more courage than giving him a life sentence. But ‘it took more courage to build this great nation, and it will take more courage to preserve it, from this man and his like’.

Almost ten years later, in June 1986, Bowden had lost his every appeal, and his last chance lay with Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole. However, evidence had now emerged that Pullen had overstated Bowden’s mental capabilities. In fact he had an IQ of fifty-nine, and was well within the clinical parameters of mental retardation.

Bowden’s pending execution became a cause célèbre. The international music stars Joan Baez, Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed and Bryan Adams signed a petition to stop the killing, and sang at a protest concert in Atlanta. A flurry of last-minute legal petitions bought a few days’ stay of execution, but on 23 June the Pardons and Parole board decided that he had indeed, in Pullen’s phrase, ‘known the difference from right and wrong’ at the time of Kay Stryker’s murder. The following morning, Bowden was led into the death chamber, his head and right leg shaved. The prison warden held out a microphone to carry his last words to an audience of lawyers, reporters and officials.

‘I am Jerome Bowden and I would like to say my execution is about to be carried out,’ he said. ‘I would like to thank the people of this institution. I hope that by my execution being carried out it will bring some light to this thing that is wrong.’ His meaning was ambiguous, but most observers thought he was referring to his own electrocution. Then he sat down in the electric chair. There was a short delay when the strap attaching a leather blind to hide his face from the audience snapped, and had to be replaced. But when the executioner threw the switch, the chair functioned smoothly. Eighteen months after Bowden’s death, the Georgia legislature passed a new statute barring state juries from sentencing the mentally retarded to death.

Pullen told me he still slept easy over Bowden’s execution. ‘I never heard Jerome Bowden was retarded until Joan Baez had a concert in Atlanta and said he was retarded. Jerome Bowden was no rocket scientist, but he knew words like “investigation” and “detective” and was kind of articulate. On death row, they said he was a deep thinker in Bible class. He was fit to execute.’

When we left the restaurant, it was already late. The cicadas were out in force, their strange chorus loud enough to overcome the noise of the distant traffic. We strolled back towards Pullen’s car, the shadows of the historic district’s houses shifting under a blurry moon. Not far from the Government Center, Pullen stopped.

‘This is the site of the old courthouse. This is where they seized a little black boy and took him up to Wynnton, right by where the library is now. He wasn’t more than twelve or thirteen and they shot him thirty times. The son of the man who led that mob grew up to become a judge. Kind of interesting, isn’t it?’

I left town next day intrigued but also bewildered, and with no real answers as to why Doug Pullen and his colleagues had such a passion for putting men to death. But notwithstanding Gray Conger’s protestations, I was beginning to suspect that if there was a place where the ‘amazing transformation’ in race relations that he claimed to have witnessed had been least effective, it was within the criminal justice system.

In police stations, prosecutors’ offices and the criminal courts, societies attempt to deal objectively with their most traumatic events. But the horrifying nature of those events sometimes makes objectivity impossible to achieve, and creates opportunities for ancient hatreds and primeval fears to reassert themselves. Stories about crimes and criminal trials, writes the British historian Victor Gatrell, permit ‘a quest for hidden truths, when obscure people have to articulate motives, interests, and buried values and assumptions … They expose fractured moments when people were in exceptional crisis, or observers were moved to exceptional passion.’ They may say more about the way societies function than any number of broader surveys.

Before I left Georgia on that first visit I drove out to DeKalb County, at the foot of Stone Mountain, the great, bald dome of granite where giant sculptures of Confederate leaders have been carved into the rock face. I was there to see Gary Parker, an African-American attorney and former state Senator who’d spent most of his career doing criminal defence work in Columbus. Parker, a tall, slim man of forty-six whose hazel eyes seemed to brim with energy, had fought some famous legal battles, both civil and criminal, against tough odds. ‘In Columbus,’ he said, ‘usually there’s only two blacks in the courtroom. Me and the defendant.’

We talked about the city and his work there long into the evening. I was about to leave when he took a pull on his menthol cigarette and paused, as if debating whether to say what was on his mind. Outside the windows of his spacious, homely den, thickets of trees cast dusky shadows. Recently, he told me, he had left Columbus for good, unable to bear an atmosphere that he had begun to find intolerably oppressive.

‘Sometimes I think something really bad happened in Columbus,’ he said quietly. ‘That there’s some terrible secret from the past. Like a massacre or something. I keep on expecting someone to go digging foundations at a construction site and find a mass grave. Raised as I was in the South, images of lynching come to mind all the time, and there have been times when I’ve sat in court there and felt as if I was witnessing a lynching in my lifetime. I don’t know what it was, but something happened there. It’s like a curse.’

I got up to go. I knew I had come nowhere near to understanding Columbus’s paradoxes and mysteries. I suspected that their solutions must lie deep in the city’s history, and in the way it had been remembered and set down, and had thus helped form contemporary outlooks and mentalities. I also knew I’d be back.

Most of the remains of antebellum Columbus are to be found in Wynnton, the neighbourhood Doug Pullen had mentioned at the end of our evening. It was once known as the ‘millionaires’ colony’, and its placid exclusivity dates back to the time when Columbus was first laid out in 1828, and its richer citizens began to construct their homes there, on the slopes of Wynn’s Hill, a safe distance from the downtown stews and factories springing up by the side of the Chattahoochee. They were joined by cotton planters from the surrounding countryside, who saw in Wynnton the ideal location for an urban retreat. Their Palladian temples and mansions decked with Louisiana-style wrought-iron tracery were once at the heart of a social whirl that is said to have rivalled more famous centres of Old South, slave-holding glamour, such as Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans. There were lavish picnics, barbecues, marching bands and orchestras, full-dress hunts and glittering balls.

As late as the 1970s, Wynnton remained a kind of Arcadia, writes the Columbus journalist and author William Winn. His nostalgic description carries more than a whiff of Gone with the Wind: ‘Nearly every house, however modest, has a lawn, and every spring Wynnton is ablaze with pink and white azaleas, the neighbourhood’s particular glory.’ Later, the district was to become synonymous not with colourful flowers, but with rape and murder. But until then ‘it had always been a calm, peaceful neighbourhood, almost entirely free of crime except for an occasional cat burglar. Generations of black nurses rolled perambulators containing generations of white children down the shady sidewalks, and every June the air became so redolent with the fragrance of magnolias and fading gardenias it almost made one dizzy.’

The economic strength of Columbus has long enabled it to wield disproportionate political influence in Georgia, and the torrid months that preceded the South’s secession from the United States were no exception. By 1859, just thirty-one years after the time when it lay on the ragged American frontier, the city is said to have contained eleven churches, four cotton factories, fourteen bars, forty-five grocery stores, four hotels, thirty-two lawyers, three daily newspapers and a magnetic telegraph office. Cotton spun in Columbus could be taken by paddle steamer down the Chattahoochee all the way to Apalachicola on the Florida Gulf Coast, a distance by river of almost five hundred miles. In May 1853, the closing of a last ten-mile gap saw the completion of the Muscogee-Southwestern railroad. ‘It was then that a great railroad jubilee was held in Columbus,’ writes the local historian Etta Blanchard Worsley. ‘Mayor J.L. Morton mingled water from the Atlantic Ocean with the waters of the Chattahoochee, typifying the union of Savannah and Columbus.’ In the whole of what was about to become the Confederate States of America, the industrial production of Columbus was second only to that of Richmond, Virginia.

In the 1860 census, the population of Muscogee County (including Columbus, its suburbs such as Wynnton and the surrounding rural districts) was made up of 9,143 whites, 165 free blacks and 7,921 slaves. It was on this human property that the city’s wealth depended, as its civic leaders recognised. As the abolitionist movement gathered strength in the North and Midwest, the lawyer Raphael J. Moses argued as early as 1849 in favour of leaving the Union in order to protect the right to own slaves. Five years later, America’s first secessionist journal, the Corner Stone, began publication in Columbus. Another early supporter of secession was the local attorney Henry Lewis Benning, later to become the Confederate General whose name is still borne by the military fort. In 1859 he warned that if Lincoln were elected President, all who resisted the end of slavery would be summarily hanged by the ‘Black Republican Party’. Immediate secession was the only way to escape the ‘horrors’ of abolition. ‘Why hesitate?’ Benning asked. ‘The question is between life and death.’

As the political temperature rose, individuals suspected of abolitionist sympathies faced violent retribution. In December 1859, William Scott, the representative of a New York textile company, was run out of Columbus by a vigilante committee, which claimed he displayed ‘more interest in the nigger question than in the real object of his visit’. Like the French aristocracy before the Revolution, Georgia’s whites had been seized by a grande peur. Their terror of a slave insurrection was fuelled by the distant memory of Nat Turner’s bloody revolt in Virginia in 1831, and the recent raid by the Christian radical John Brown on the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry in the same state, planned as a means of arming a putative slave rebellion. In the wake of the raid, which had been crushed by the future Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the 1859–60 session of the Georgia Assembly enacted harsh new measures against free blacks, who were seen as potential focuses for discord. Blacks from outside the state were forbidden to enter it on pain of being sold into slavery, and any current free black resident found ‘wandering or strolling about, or leading an immoral, profligate course of life’ could be charged with vagrancy and also sold. It was thenceforth forbidden for a master to free his slaves posthumously in his will, making slavery in Georgia somewhat less escapable than in ancient Rome.

From this febrile milieu sprang the Columbusite US Senator Alfred Iverson. ‘Slavery, it must and shall be preserved,’ he proclaimed in a speech in 1859, going on to argue that the only way to achieve this end was to form an independent confederacy. By the end of 1860, after Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election, the second Georgia Senator, Robert Toombs, who owned a plantation south of Columbus and later became the Confederacy’s Secretary of State, had also backed secession. On 23 December, the night South Carolina became the first state to leave the Union, Columbus celebrated with a torchlight procession, bonfires and fireworks. The city had already spawned several companies of a paramilitary ‘Southern Guard’, which joined the march in their freshly designed uniforms, rifles at their shoulders. J. Harris Chappell, aged eleven, a future President of Georgia College, wrote to his mother: ‘I think nearly all the people of Columbus is for secession as they are wearing the cockade. There are several small military companies one of which I belong to … the uniform is red coats and black pants. Lenard [sic] Jones is captain. I’m a private. Tommy’s first lieutenant. Sammy Fogle has got the measles.’

Georgia’s Ordinance of Secession passed the State Constitutional Convention on 21 January 1861, to be greeted in Columbus with a mass meeting of citizens, another torchlight procession, and the firing of cannon salutes. The common people shared the zeal of the small, slave-owning elite. The State Governor, Joe Brown, was warning them that if Lincoln were to free the slaves, blacks would compete for jobs with poor whites, ‘associate with them and their children as equals, be allowed to testify in court against them, sit on juries with them, march to the ballot box by their sides … and ask the hands of their children in marriage’. (Georgia’s laws against miscegenation were not struck down by the US Supreme Court until 1967.) In the first months of the war that began that April, Columbus sent eighteen companies to the front – 1,200 men, more than a fifth of its pre-war white population.

The war both blasted and, at least for a time, enriched Columbus. One family, that of the pioneering entrepreneur Colonel John Banks, whose seventh- and eighth-generation descendants were still occupying the magnificent Wynnton mansion known as The Cedars in 2006, lost three sons. As they fought what increasing numbers came to perceive as a ‘rich man’s war’, ordinary Confederate soldiers not only died in combat, but fell prey in vast numbers to malnourishment, cold and disease. N.L. Atkinson, who lived on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee, wrote in a letter to his wife, ‘this inhuman war is putting our whole country in mourning’. But while its youth fought and fell at Gettysburg, Antietam and Manassas, Columbus’s industry boomed. By 1862, the Eagle textile mill was running non-stop, and producing two thousand yards of worsted for uniforms each day, as well as cotton cloth for tents, thread, rope and rubberised fabric. The city’s ironworks rapidly expanded, to become the Confederacy’s second-largest source of swords, pistols, bayonets, artillery pieces, steam engines, boilers and ammunition. The newly established Confederate Navy Yard made a gunboat 250 feet in length.

Of the industrial quarter that was the scene of this feverish activity, not a trace remains. As the war reached its closing stages, the Union’s Major General James Harrison Wilson was ordered to sap the Confederacy’s resistance by striking at its last centres of manufacturing. Having dealt with the cities of Selma and Montgomery in Alabama, his force of thirteen thousand reached the west bank of the Chattahoochee on 16 April 1865 – a week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Neither Wilson nor the ragtag of militia units defending Columbus had received this news; they were likewise unaware that Lincoln had been murdered on 14 April. After a short battle on the Alabama shore, the Yankees swarmed across the Fourteenth Street bridge and took the city that Wilson had called ‘the door to Georgia’ in just over an hour. Next day, Wilson ordered that ‘everything within reach that could be made useful for the continuance of the rebellion’ must be destroyed. Mills, foundries, warehouses and military stockpiles were put to the torch, together with three gunboats, which drifted for miles down the river in flames. While the Union army went about its work, civilian mobs looted stores and small businesses. Even respectable, well-dressed women were said by one witness to have participated: ‘They frantically join and jostle in the chaos, and seem crazy for plunder.’ As Wilson moved on towards Macon on 18 April, leaving only a small garrison, Columbus was ‘a mass of flame and coals’.

For many years, Columbus’s business and political elites have gently looked down on their counterparts in the parvenu state capital to the north, Atlanta, which was still a featureless rural tract when Columbus was building its grid of downtown streets. Perhaps their superior attitude stems in part from their ancestors’ differing response to Yankee-inflicted devastation. While Atlanta complained about its treatment at the hands of General William Tecumseh Sherman during his notorious march to the sea, Columbus got on with building new factories. Most of the imposing red-brick buildings downtown date from the late 1860s and seventies. One of them is built on the site of its predecessor, the Eagle mill. Above its mullioned arches, a banner in brickwork picks out the legend ‘Eagle and Phenix’. Within a month of Wilson’s fire, the iron foundries were open again for business. Louis Halman, formerly the proprietor of a sword works, retooled his charred and shattered premises and began, symbolically enough, to manufacture ploughs.

Impressive as this physical rebuilding was, in the period after the South’s defeat, Columbus also engaged in a process of psychic reconstruction. In common with other communities whose long-term material suffering was much more severe, an important part of the city’s attempt to come to terms with its role in America’s bloodiest war was its adoption of a narrative myth – the legend of the Lost Cause. On the one hand, this was a way of making the past seem acceptable. At the same time, it contained the ideological seeds for the region’s defining social characteristic far into the twentieth century – white supremacy.

There is a line in William Faulkner’s play Requiem for a Nun which has become a cliché in writing about the South: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Faulkner meant it to apply to the enduring consequences of an individual’s actions, not the influence of history – and in any case, the past affects the present in regions other than the states of the former Confederacy. But ultimately the past doesn’t die because it is remembered, and memory, as historians have recently begun to understand, is a potent influence on contemporary events, an analysis that seems especially true of the American Civil War. ‘Americans have needed deflections from the deeper meanings of the Civil War. It haunts us still; we feel it, but often do not face it,’ writes the Amherst professor David Blight. Instead of a titanic struggle over principle, America preferred to remember the war through ‘pathos and the endearing mutuality of sacrifice among soldiers’, so that ‘romance triumphed over reality’. The consequence, Blight concludes, has been ‘the denigration of black dignity and the attempted erasure of emancipation from the national narrative’.

In the Lost Cause account of the Civil War, partially created and vividly expressed in Columbus, slavery, racial oppression and the struggle against them have all but disappeared. The Confederate soldiers’ courage and independence were to be celebrated, but not the realities of the ‘peculiar institution’ – slavery – they had happened to be defending. If slavery were to be mentioned at all, it was to be as something decent and necessary, grounded in mutual respect.

Histories of Columbus by authors from the city are steeped in the different aspects of this myth. For Nancy Telfair, a local journalist whose History of Columbus, Georgia was published in 1928 and recently reissued, the only principles involved in secession and the war were ‘states’ rights’ to determine whether or not to permit slavery, and the prerogative of owners ‘to assert their rights to equality and the protection of their property’. It simply did not occur to her that the fact that this property happened to consist of human beings made it different from bales of cotton or farmland. According to Telfair (her real name was Louise Jones DuBose), slavery was merely ‘a characteristically Southern industry’ destroyed by the war.

Etta Blanchard Worsley’s Columbus on the Chattahoochee was published in 1951, at an early stage of the modern civil rights era, when Georgia’s African-Americans were fighting in court for the right to vote and other basic liberties. Like Telfair’s, her book was published by the Columbus Supply Company, and taught in the city’s schools. Both works can still be found on the shelves of Columbus’s libraries. The Reverend Joseph Wilson, father of the US President Woodrow Wilson, had argued that bondage was an ‘ameliorative’ institution, which could improve the spiritual welfare of slaveholders and slaves alike. Echoing his logic, Worsley characterises slavery as ‘part of the evolutionary process of the civilisation of the African tribes’. There might, she adds, have been isolated examples of abuse by ‘low-class overseers’. In general, however, ‘there had been the kindliest feelings between the whites and the Negroes … the tie that bound the slave to the master with whom he was closely associated was one less of law than of mutual need, confidence and respect’. As for abolition, it was but a ‘fanatical demand’ orchestrated mainly by Northern Quakers, peddled by means of ‘inflaming editorials’, and ‘little did it help for the South to plead for conciliation. The agitation went on for forty years.’

If Worsley is indignant about the end of slavery, Sterling Price Gilbert, long a member of Georgia’s Supreme Court and arguably the most distinguished jurist Columbus has produced, is both egocentric and mawkishly sentimental. In his 1946 memoir A Georgia Lawyer, he writes of the liberation of his own family’s property:

The earliest recollection that I have of my home takes me back to the age of about three … Our cook and her son, Anderson, who was the yard boy and who had ‘looked after’ me were leaving. I had a strong attachment, almost love, for Anderson. He had been my bodyguard and my playmate. My heart was filled with sorrow, and I cried because he was leaving me. I went to the road with him and his mother. I can remember standing with feet apart, in the middle of the road, with tears streaming down my face, waving goodbye to my two friends. Every hundred yards or so, they would turn round and wave.

Justice Gilbert does not ask why his father’s chattels, given a choice for the first time in their lives, had elected to leave.

Telfair, Worsley and Gilbert were all writing in the twentieth century, but the Lost Cause legend had emerged much earlier, and Columbus played a direct and significant role in its formation. On 12 March 1866, less than a year after Wilson’s raiders torched the city’s factories, Miss Lizzie Rutherford, her cousin Mrs Chas. J. Williams and their friends in the Soldier’s Aid Society of Columbus began what was to become a totemic institution, Confederate Memorial Day. Mrs Williams, the daughter of a factory and railroad magnate, was married to a soldier who had, as Worsley writes, ‘served bravely in the war’. She composed ‘a beautiful letter’, which she had distributed to women, newspapers and charitable organisations throughout the South. Williams proposed

to set apart a certain day to be observed from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, and be handed down through time as a religious custom throughout the South, to wreath the graves of our martyred dead with flowers … Let every city, town and village join in the pleasant duty. Let all alike be remembered, from the heroes of Manassas to those who expired amid the death throes of our hallowed cause … They died for their country. Whether or not their country had or had not the right to demand that sacrifice is no longer a question for discussion. We leave that for nations to decide in the future. That it was demanded – that they fought nobly, and fell holy sacrifices upon their country’s altar, and are entitled to their country’s gratitude, none will deny.

Here was the core of Lost Cause mythology, what Blight describes as ‘deflections and evasions, careful remembering and necessary forgetting’, defined in a few sentences, as candid as they were succinct. If the true reason for the war was too painful to contemplate, then let it be dropped from discourse. Instead of asking whether all the devastation, loss and sacrifice had been justified, let them be venerated by the South’s revisionist history.

The seed sown in Columbus flourished and multiplied. By the end of the 1860s, there was barely a town which did not observe Mrs Williams’s ritual, with newly constructed memorial monuments, sometimes built in the greatly expanded cemeteries, as its focus. Similar observances began to be held in the North. Underlying them was a rhetoric of national reconciliation, of brotherhood renewed, in which Mrs Williams’s plea that the causes of the bloodshed be ‘no longer a question for discussion’ was accepted wholeheartedly. As the New York Herald put it in an editorial on Memorial Day 1877, ‘all the issues on which the war of the rebellion was fought seem dead’.

The only people written out of the script, in Columbus as elsewhere, were the former slaves. To them, in a Georgia stained by murder, exclusion, organised intimidation and a legal system of segregation that became more oppressive by the year, the issues for which the war had been fought did not seem dead at all. For black freedmen, reconciliation was possible only through submitting to white supremacy almost as completely as they had done before the torchlight parades and salutes that had heralded the war.

The Lost Cause legend did not die with the gradual entrenchment of civil rights, nor with the rise of a South where African-Americans have begun to serve as judges and elected politicians, and to gain access to business and social circles that were once impenetrably closed. In Columbus, hidden signs of a vision of the Confederacy as something heroic, a bulwark against the North’s alien values, lie as if woven into the streets. The local TV station, its logo reproduced on signs and billboards, is called WRBL – W-Rebel. It took a strike by black students in the 1980s to get the authorities at the local college (now Columbus State University) to see that to use ‘Johnny Rebel’ as the mascot for sports teams, black and white alike, and to ask them to parade before games to the strains of the Confederate anthem ‘Dixie’, was, at least for African-Americans, unacceptable.

On the shelves of the city’s bookstores I found the Lost Cause legend reproduced in an entire literary sub-genre of works such as The South Was Right, by James and Walter Kennedy, published in 2001. Railing against Northern historians’ ‘campaign of cultural genocide’, it maintains that the true story of the War Between the States is that ‘the free Southern nation was invaded, many of our people raped and murdered, private property plundered at will and their right of self-determination violently denied’.

Always lurking beneath Georgia’s surface, the strange and anachronistic wounded anger expressed by such discourse burst into the open in a protracted political struggle in the first years of the twenty-first century. In early 2001 I spent several weeks in Columbus, and daily studied the Ledger-Enquirer’s letters page. The State Assembly was debating a proposal to replace the Confederate battle flag as the official flag of the state, on the grounds that African-Americans saw it as a symbol of servitude and oppression; just as pertinently, transnational corporations which would otherwise have been investing in the state were expressing their reluctance unless the flag were changed. Not the least bizarre aspect of the debate was the fact that far from representing historical continuity, the Stars and Bars had only been readopted in 1956, as part of the state’s militant response to the US Supreme Court’s attempt to desegregate education. But to change the flag again, the Ledger-Enquirer’s incensed correspondents claimed, would be an intolerable act of vandalism.

‘The issue over the state flag is not altogether about heritage or hate or slavery. It is all about the blacks trying to force the white southerners to remove all symbols of the Confederacy from their sites, and they do not have the right to do that. If they choose to live in the South, they WILL have to look at it. Keep the flag flying!’ wrote Mr Danny Green. ‘The Confederate emblem should remain. There is [sic] no racial problems I know of. We gave blacks the right to ride in the front of the bus. Let’s not give them everything they want,’ added J.R. Stinson. A Mr Raymond King was more extreme: ‘Where does it end? It’s OK for a terrorist [sic], Jesse Jackson, to be revered as some kind of saint … but it’s not OK for us to honour our great Southern heritage. Bull! As far as I’m concerned, it’s the African-Americans that are full of hate because people like me will not bow down and give them a free ride in life.’

In 2001, the flag-reform measure passed. Almost two years later, a Republican candidate for State Governor named Sonny Perdue ended many decades of Democrat stewardship after making a pledge to restore the Confederate flag the central plank of his campaign.

I bought a copy of The South Was Right and took it home to England. It was only there, as I browsed one afternoon, that I noticed that someone had left a business card inside it, hidden between two pages. ‘National Alliance’, read a heading on the front, above a logo made up of a cross and oak leaves. ‘Towards a New Consciousness, a New Order; a New People’. Further details, complete with numbers for ‘Georgia hotlines’ and an address for a website, were printed on the reverse:

We believe that we have a responsibility for the racial quality of the coming generations of our people. That no multi-racial society is a healthy society. That if the White race is to survive we must unite our people on the basis of common blood, organize them within a progressive social order, and inspire them with a common set of ideals. That the time to begin is now.

I returned to Columbus in the autumn of 1998, two years after my first trip. This time, and for many subsequent visits, some of which lasted several weeks and others just a few days, my enquiries had a focus: the city’s most notorious series of crimes – the serial killings known as the ‘stocking stranglings’.

In the late 1970s, a time when Jimmy Carter’s arrival in the White House was being said to mark the emergence of a new, racially harmonious, post-civil rights ‘sunbelt’ South, the fabric of the city was rent by seven exceptionally horrible rapes and murders. The victims – the youngest fifty-nine, the oldest eighty-nine – were all white women who lived alone, and all were strangled, most with items of their own lingerie. All but one had lived in the neighbourhood of Wynnton, and some were members of the city’s highest social echelons. From an early stage, while he still rampaged without apparent hindrance, the Columbus authorities had been convinced that the perpetrator was black.

In the course of my research, I found myself keen to know more about the Big Eddy Club, the exclusive private social club on the banks of the Chattahoochee. The membership lists were confidential. But former staff told me that five of the women murdered by the strangler had been members or frequent visitors, together with many of the public officials whose job it became to capture and punish the man responsible for their deaths.

It took time, and the assiduous cultivation of local contacts, before I was able to acquire an invitation to venture beyond the big iron gates bearing the legend ‘B.E.’ that guard the entrance to the club’s driveway. My lunch, as the guest of a delightful, politically liberal couple who made me promise not to jeopardise their social standing by thanking them in print, was adequate, if not exceptional – a salmon filet with wilted greens, slightly overdone, and a chocolate torte with mixed berries for dessert. It would not have won a Michelin star, but on the other hand, I had been living amid the fast-food and chain restaurants of Columbus, and it was the tastiest meal I had eaten for weeks. The service – from a pair of young black waiters – was efficient and polite, without being over-attentive. As for the surroundings, as one gazed through the dining room’s panoramic windows at the scene of utter tranquillity, it was difficult to imagine that Columbus had a long history of violence.

After coffee in the lounge, I picked up my coat and made ready to leave. Elizabeth Senne, the maîtresse d’hôtel, saw me from the passageway and hurried over, detaining me at the door. She seemed awkward, agitated. ‘Please don’t make anything of the fact we haven’t got black members,’ she said, ‘and they do come as visitors. Really, they are very welcome.’ She touched my arm confidentially. ‘I think perhaps it’s the joining fee: it’s a lot to pay if you’re not sure you’re going to fit in.’

‘How much is it?’ I asked.

‘I can’t tell you that. But you know, most of the members are old families, and although newcomers are very welcome, there is a distinction. There is one guy who worked his way up from selling insurance. And although he’s seventy now, he’s still a newcomer. So maybe they sense that. You know what I mean?’

The joining fee, I discovered later that day, was $7,500. On her veranda that same evening, I described the club to my African-American friend Vicky Williams, and mentioned Elizabeth’s closing remarks. Vicky laughed, surprised at the way some people chose to spend their money, then came up with an alternative hypothesis. Mrs Senne, of course, was an employee: she could not be held responsible for following the club’s policies. But Vicky said, with a bitter little shrug, ‘It’s like, you’re a reporter, and you’re good at getting people to tell you their stories, and maybe you can tell when they’re lying. That’s how it is as a black person, when you encounter racism. People can seem ever so nice, but sometimes, you can smell it.’

TWO We’ve Got a Maniac

The black fiend who lays unholy and lustful hands on a white woman in the state of Georgia shall surely die!

REBECCA FELTON (1897)

Hours after nightfall, when the last lights are going out and the only sound is the rustle of the pines and sweetgums on the balmy Georgia wind, the terror that enveloped Wynnton seems closer, more palpable. I’d planned to take a slow drive, to pause and stare at these moon-shadowed dwellings as once the killer saw them, in the moments before he pounced. My guide, a local architectural historian, kept hurrying me on. ‘People here might not like it if we dawdle,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to have to explain yourself to the police. Besides, a lot of people here have guns.’

If one knew nothing of its history, Wynnton after dark might feel no different from any American neighbourhood. But knowledge cannot be undone, and despite myself I shared her unease. I had seen the crime scene photographs, and the passage of more than two decades had done nothing to diminish their horror. It wasn’t just the bodies, their swollen faces seeming to betray a heart-rending mix of fear and resignation. What conveyed the sense of violation most was the ordinariness of their surroundings.

Inside the houses we were driving past, policemen’s cameras had captured life’s final debris. In one home, the story of a death struggle was told by large-print books, some still stacked neatly on their shelves, others strewn across a patterned carpet; in another, the floor was covered with an old lady’s intimate garments, ripped from closets, then used by the killer to fashion his weapon. Most poignant of all were the family photographs, still on their tables and dressers. Amid this everyday banality lay the victims: twisted, bruised, exposed.

The horror began to surface at 10 a.m. on Friday, 16 September 1977. Dixon Olive worked in the city’s public health department and had been fretting indecisively for more than an hour. Mary ‘Ferne’ Jackson, his boss and colleague, had failed to show up for work. She was a woman of meticulous and unchanging routine, and Olive had already spoken to Ferne’s best friend, Lucy Mangham. Early the previous evening, Lucy said, she had picked up Ferne from her red-brick bungalow on Seventeenth Street in Wynnton, and they had gone together to what Lucy called ‘an enrichment school’ at St Luke’s United Methodist Church on Second Avenue, a spacious neo-Georgian edifice. Afterwards, Lucy took Ferne directly home, and waited by the kerb while she unlocked her door. She had noticed, she told Olive, that Ferne’s bronze-coloured Mercury Montego was parked in its usual space outside. Lucy was away to her own house, only a street away, by 9.45 p.m. Having spoken to her, Olive decided to phone the police.

Mrs Jackson, who was fifty-nine, had been Columbus’s Director of Public Health Education for twenty-six years. A widow, she had no children, and in her head-and-shoulders portrait she looks a little austere, as if the years of giving lectures on the dangers of smoking or the need for a healthy diet had begun to weary her. But she was much admired. She was about to be named Public Health Educator of the Year by the American Public Health Association. Her nephew, Harry Jackson, a successful businessman, was planning to run for Mayor.

When Jesse Thornton, the first police officer to respond to Dixon Olive’s call, arrived at Ferne Jackson’s house, he could see no sign that anyone had forced an entry. The doors were locked, the windows unbroken, and had he not been alerted by Mr Olive and some of Ferne’s neighbours, he would have been tempted to leave. But her car, they pointed out, was missing. Thornton spoke by radio to his patrol commander, who advised him to get inside the house and look around. He used the knife he always carried to remove the mesh insect screen from the living-room window, and to jiggle the lock until he could get it open.

Many years later, Thornton would tell a murder trial jury what he did next. The first space he came to was the hallway, and straight away, ‘I could see something that wasn’t right.’ Ferne’s approach to tidiness was as meticulous as her time-keeping. But in the hall, said Thornton, ‘There was stuff laying on the floor, papers, articles, just scattered all over the floor. There was a pillow on the floor, there was a suitcase that was opened, the drawers had been opened on the dresser, and stuff was pulled out and hanging out of it.’ He continued, very slowly, down the passage towards Ferne Jackson’s bedroom, his hand poised over his weapon. ‘Once I got to the bedroom, I looked inside,’ Thornton said. ‘That’s when I saw the body on the bed.’

Ferne’s sheets had been pulled up round her head, and her nightgown tugged upwards, in order to expose her hips, pubic area and waist. Thornton could see there was blood on the sheets.

It fell to the Columbus medical examiner, Dr Joe Webber, to conduct a post mortem. The killer, he wrote in his subsequent report, had tied a nylon stocking and a dressing-gown cord together to make a single ligature, which was wrapped around Mrs Jackson’s neck three times, leaving three ‘very deep crevasses’. There was a large area of haemorrhage and bruising on the left side of her face and head, so that the white of her left eye was ‘almost obliterated’ by bleeding; the result, he believed, of a massive blow to her head. The white of her right eye was a mass of tiny, pinpoint petechial haemorrhages where her blood, deprived of oxygen, had burst from its vessels close to the surface, a common sign of strangulation. The small hyoid bone at the front of the throat was fractured, and there was more bleeding inside her neck. Her brain was swollen, another symptom associated with an interruption to the blood supply. Her sternum, or breastbone, had been fractured, an act which would have required the application of enormous force: ‘It apparently had been flexed and pressure applied to the point that the bone snapped about midway between the upper and lower ends.’ Finally, her vagina was bloodied, torn and bruised. Although Dr Webber could not find spermatozoa, he felt it would be reasonable to conclude that Ferne Jackson had been raped. Later, traces of seminal fluid would be found on her sheet.

There was no obvious motive for Ferne’s murder. Despite ransacking her house, the killer had left her jewellery and other valuables untouched. She was still wearing two diamond rings. Nor did she have any enemies, and her popularity as a selfless public servant made her death all the harder to bear. ‘She was one of the unsung heroes who quietly, gently and persistently worked for the betterment of her community,’ Dr Mary Schley, a local paediatrician, told the Columbus Ledger. ‘Ferne Jackson fought for the underprivileged, the minority groups, and against poverty and for better mental health,’ added A.J. Kravtin, one of many readers who wrote to the paper after she died. While no one knew who was responsible, ‘if it turns out to be one of the above, they killed the wrong person. They killed a friend.’

Three days after the discovery of her body, the Ledger published an editorial in her memory. ‘It’s always tragic when an innocent person becomes the victim of a violent crime,’ it began, somewhat prosaically. ‘It’s even more tragic when the victim is someone who has devoted his or her life to helping others.’ What could be done about the kind of crime that had taken Mrs Jackson’s life, the paper asked, and how could further such acts be prevented? Increased police patrols would help. ‘Vigorous efforts to apprehend the assailant and assure him a swift trial and appropriate punishment, if found guilty, might deter others from committing similar crimes … Greater emphasis on respect for law and expanded educational and job opportunities might get at some of the underlying factors.’ It was not to be that simple.

Ferne Jackson was murdered barely a month after the capture of David Berkowitz, the sexually driven ‘Son of Sam’ who killed or seriously injured a dozen women in New York. Partly in response to Berkowitz’s bloody but compulsive career, Robert Ressler, the founder of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia, had coined a new term to describe the perpetrators of such actions – they were, he suggested, ‘serial killers’. The phrase had swiftly gained widespread currency. It took just eight days after the murder of Mrs Jackson for it to become apparent that one was at large in Columbus.

Jean Dimenstein was seventy-one, a wealthy spinster from Philadelphia who owned and ran a small department store, Fred and Jean’s, with her brother. She spent the evening of 24 September with two friends at a steakhouse on Macon Road. They drove her home a little before 10 p.m., and watched from the car as she let herself into her house on Twenty-First Street, about half a mile from the residence of Mrs Jackson. As usual, she used the door at the side of the house, which led into her kitchen from her carport. Some time later that night, working in absolute silence, the killer removed the pins from the door’s hinges, laid them to one side and entered Miss Dimenstein’s house. Her sister-in-law, Francine, arrived there for coffee at ten the following morning. She noticed at once that Jean’s car was missing, saw the open doorway, and called the police.

Like Ferne Jackson, Jean Dimenstein had been beaten about the head, strangled with a ligature made from a stocking wrapped around her neck three times, and raped. She was wearing the two diamond rings and, beneath the ligature, the diamond necklace she had worn the previous night. Although her house was also ransacked, it appeared that again, nothing had been stolen. To the chagrin of the police, who were cautiously claiming that they couldn’t be sure that Jackson and Dimenstein had been killed by the same assailant, J. Donald Kilgore, Columbus’s coroner, told the Ledger of the similarities between the two murders. He was, he said, quite certain that there was only one Columbus strangler. As if the bubbling panic that began to seize the city needed further encouragement, Kilgore informed journalists of supposed details that were not borne out by later investigations: that ‘some sort of inflexible object was used to violate the women’, and that ‘a pillow was used to muffle their horrified screams while [they were] being tortured sexually before their death’. The motive for the crimes, he proclaimed, was torture.

In the autumn of 1977, Kilgore had been in his post for a year. He was not, however, a qualified forensic scientist, nor a pathologist, but the former director of a funeral home who had been embalming bodies with unusual enthusiasm since his teens. ‘By the time I was twenty-one, I had participated with embalming 1,500 bodies,’ he once told a Columbus reporter. ‘You’ve got to disassociate yourself from the body at such times, even if the body has been mutilated. You try to associate with something positive. For instance, I don’t see blood. I see ketchup.’ Kilgore said that ‘I treat every person’s body with respect. I always have.’ But as time went on, growing numbers of police officers came to disagree, accusing him of ‘aggressive investigation and handling of the remains’ at murder scenes. Some filed official complaints. In 1989, the tension between Kilgore and the Columbus Police Department (CPD) reached a new peak when he was accused of and investigated for allegedly decapitating a suicide victim. Under Georgia law, only a qualified medical examiner could cut into a body during a post mortem, and Kilgore was forced to admit that he often did so before such a person arrived. However, he insisted that he had not removed the victim’s head. He had merely ‘performed a procedure that involved the opening of the top portion of the skull’.

Told of Jean Dimenstein’s murder while he was attending Sunday worship, Columbus’s Mayor, Jack Mickle, addressed reporters on her lawn, ringed by ten police cars. ‘We’ve got a maniac,’ he said. ‘I hope we get this guy. We gotta get this guy.’

The police had not been slow to notice that the cars belonging to both of the victims were found abandoned in Carver Heights, a black district on the southern side of Macon Road. Having examined the crime scenes and bodies, Donald Kilgore supported the CPD’s growing suspicion that the strangler was black. Later, he told reporters he had looked under the microscope at pubic hairs left at the crime scenes, and in his view, being black and curly, they displayed ‘Negroid characteristics’. In the Deep South of the United States, this was not an incidental matter.

In 1941 the Southern writer Wilbur J. Cash diagnosed what he termed the ‘Southern rape complex’, a social neurosis that originated long before the Civil War, and that continued to dominate whites’ approach to race relations for many decades afterwards. In the collective mind of the South, Cash argued, white women’s status was exalted to a bizarre and extraordinary degree, while their virtue was seen as at constant risk from the marauding, violating power of black sexuality. In part, he suggested, this was the product of guilt on the part of white male slave-owners at their own numerous illicit relationships with slave women, who often gave birth to mixed-race, light-skinned children. Soiled and shamed by their own desires and their inability to restrain them, white men projected an image of pristine chastity onto their wives and daughters, while assuming that black males must inevitably share their own lust for erotic miscegenation. By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, writes Cash, ‘she was the South’s Palladium, the Southern woman – the shield-bearing Athena gleaming whitely in the clouds, the standard for its rallying, the mystic symbol of the nationality in the face of the foe … Merely to mention her was to send strong men into tears – or shouts.’

Columbus shared this dangerous fantasy. It could be found in purest form at the climax of Mrs Chas. Williams’s 1866 appeal on behalf of the city’s Soldiers’ Aid Society to newspapers and other kindred spirits that heralded the start of Confederate Memorial Day. In rousing, heartfelt language, Mrs Williams had claimed that the need to safeguard white female honour provided the noblest justification of all for the deaths of so many Southern men in pursuit of the doomed Lost Cause:

The proud banner under which they rallied in defence of the holiest and noblest cause for which heroes fought, or trusting woman prayed, has been furled forever. The country for which they suffered and died has now no name or place among the nations of the earth. Legislative enactments may not be made to do honour to their memories, but the veriest radical that ever traced his genealogy back to the Mayflower could not refuse thus the simple privilege of paying honour to those who died defending the life, honour and happiness of the Southern women.

After the South’s defeat, the slaves’ emancipation posed a new and terrible threat. Before the war, men such as Georgia’s Governor Brown had warned that if the slaves were freed, they would soon be asking for white women’s hands in marriage. Now that day had come to pass. In the summer of 1865, writes Nancy Telfair in her history of Columbus, ‘white women could not go alone on the streets’. The reason was that they were filled by black former slaves. As W.J. Cash put it, by ‘destroying the rigid fixity of the black at the bottom of the scale, in throwing open to him at least the legal opportunity to advance’, the abolition of slavery opened up a fearful vista in the mind of every Southerner. A war had been fought and lost to preserve white female honour. Though defeated, the white Southern male must fight still harder to protect it in time of peace. ‘Such,’ writes Cash, ‘is the explanation of the fact that from the beginning, they justified – and sincerely justified – violence towards the Negro as demanded in defence of women.’

Cash, of course, was white. African-Americans had noticed the effects of this rape complex long before his book was published in 1941. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the black activist writers Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. du Bois revealed how spurious rape allegations were used time and again by Southern whites to justify the wave of lynching, then at its terrible peak. Du Bois began his campaign when he investigated the torture and killing of Sam Hose in 1897 near Newnan, Georgia, a small farming town between Atlanta and Columbus. Hose, a farm labourer, had killed his employer, Alfred Crawford, in the course of a fight that started when he complained that he had not been paid his wages. When Hose disappeared, the local newspapers claimed he had also raped Crawford’s wife, Mattie, described before her marriage as ‘one of the belles of Newnan’. As vigilantes mounted a state-wide manhunt, the Newnan Herald and Advertiser warned the authorities not to interfere with the summary justice that must surely follow. Hose, it said, must be ‘made to suffer the torments of the damned in expiation of his hellish crime’, to demonstrate to all ‘that there is protection in Georgia for women and children’.

After his arrest near Marshallville, seventy-five miles to the south-east, Hose was transported to Newnan, where his death was deliberately delayed in order to magnify its spectacle. In front of a crowd of four thousand, many of whom had arrived aboard special trains from Atlanta, the mob slowly tortured him by slicing off his ears, nose, fingers and genitals, then burnt him at the stake. Already covered in blood, he was heard to cry ‘Sweet Jesus’ as the smoke entered his nose, eyes and mouth, and the flames roasted his legs; in a final, desperate struggle to break the chain which bound his chest, he burst a blood vessel in his neck.

Although an attempt had been made to get Mattie Crawford to identify Hose as her supposed rapist, she did not do so, and it seems improbable that she was raped at all. Du Bois commented: ‘Everyone that read the facts of the case knew perfectly well what had happened. The man wouldn’t pay him, so they got into a fight, and the man got killed – then, in order to rouse the neighbourhood to find this man, they brought in the charge of rape.’

The orator and writer Frederick Douglass, a former slave and arguably the greatest chronicler of the black experience of Emancipation and its aftermath, saw how the effects of bogus rape claims spread far beyond the places and people they directly involved. In the last speech of his life, delivered in Washington in January 1894, he argued that white propaganda about rape by blacks had become a device to justify their continued subjugation. ‘A white man has but to blacken his face and commit a crime, to have some negro lynched in his stead. An abandoned woman has only to start the cry that she has been insulted by a black man, to have him arrested and summarily murdered by the mob.’ Douglass quoted the recent words of Frances Willard, leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union: ‘The coloured race multiplies like locusts in Egypt. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof tree.’

The truth, Douglass pointed out, was that when most of the South’s white men had been away at the war, their women went unmolested. There was simply no substance to this ‘horrible and hell-black charge of rape as the peculiar crime of the coloured people of the South’. But its unchallenged prevalence in white society had terrible consequences, not only for the victims of lynch mobs but for black people as a whole: ‘This charge … is not merely against the individual culprit, as would be the case with an individual culprit of any other race, but it is in large measure a charge against the coloured race as such. It throws over every coloured man a mantle of odium.’ It underpinned the exclusion of blacks from politics and the right to vote, and the racial segregation of the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws then being enforced throughout the South. The fear of rape had become the ‘justification for Southern barbarism’. Douglass ended by quoting the former Senator, John T. Ingalls. There need be no ‘Negro problem’, he said. ‘Let the nation try justice, and the problem will be solved.’

Another perspective emerges from Portrait in Georgia, a short and terrifying stanza by the black writer of the 1920s, Jean Toomer, in which he casts his erotic attraction for a white woman in the light of its likely consequence should his desire be fulfilled:

Hair – braided chestnut

Coiled like a lyncher’s rope

Eyes – faggots

Lips – old scars, or the first red blisters,

Breath – the last sweet scent of cane,

And her slim body, white as the ash

Of black flesh after flame.

The Southern rape complex could manifest itself with startling power when grounded in baseless fantasy. But even before Ferne Jackson’s murder, in the Columbus of the late 1970s, it was beginning to seem as if its racist account of African-American sexuality was a simple description of fact. On 30 November 1976 Katharina Wright, the nineteen-year-old bride of a military officer, who had lived in Columbus for only a fortnight, was raped, robbed and murdered by a man who entered her house on Broadway by posing as a gas company employee. The killer stole $480 in cash, and was said to have shot her as he left. The following September, just before the first stocking strangling, a mentally retarded black man named Johnny Lee Gates was convicted and sentenced to death for these crimes. (After many legal vicissitudes, his sentence was commuted to life without parole in 2003.)

Katharina Wright was German, and although the case attracted its share of news coverage, its impact was limited. Much more shocking to white Columbus was the killing of Jeannine Galloway on 15 July 1977, two months before the death of Ferne Jackson. In Galloway’s brutal slaying, it seemed that whites’ primordial fears had achieved realisation.

Galloway, aged twenty-three, was a blonde and beautiful virgin who still lived with her parents, and who devoted much of her leisure time to directing the choir at the St Mary’s Road United Methodist Church. A talented musician, she played the piano, organ, clarinet, saxophone and guitar, and was as happy playing jazz as Christian hymns. Her fiancé, Bobby Murray, met her when they were both students at the Columbus College music school. Before enrolling, he’d been on the road with a rock band; after taking advice from one of her friends, he cut his hair and shaved his beard in order to impress Jeannine. On trips with the college jazz big band, other musicians ‘would sneak a beer or smoke marijuana’, Bobby told the Ledger. ‘Partaking of neither, Jeannine would still be in the middle of the action. Somebody would say, “Have a drink. Have fun.” She’d get real quiet and tell them right quick, “I am having fun.” She got high on life.’

For years after her murder, the Columbus newspapers continued to run long feature articles about her, on significant anniversaries of her passing, or when some development occurred in the case of her killer, a young African-American criminal named William Anthony Brooks. In these memorials, her qualities came to be described as belonging more to heaven than earth. ‘She was just an angel, a bright and shining light who was just every father’s dream,’ her church’s Reverend Eric Sizemore told reporters after one legal milestone in 1983.

There is no way to mitigate the horror of her murder. Early in the morning of her death, Jeannine was putting out the garbage, chatting to her mother, who stayed inside the house. She bent down to leave the bin, then straightened and came face to face with William Anthony Brooks, a young African-American. He was holding a loaded pistol, which he used to force her into her own car and drive to an area of marshy wasteland behind a school two miles away.

‘She was continually asking me to let her go – to take her money and the car and let her go,’ Brooks told the police after his arrest, a month later, in Atlanta. Instead, he marched her into a wood: ‘I told her to take her clothes off and she said no, and I yelled at her to take her clothes off.’ After raping her, Brooks’s statement continued, he asked if this had been the first time that she had had sex. ‘She said yes, and I said I didn’t believe it. She started screaming and wouldn’t stop and I pulled out my gun so she’d know I was serious … she kept screaming and the pistol went off. She kept trying to scream but she couldn’t get her voice.’ Jeannine died slowly, bleeding to death from a small-calibre bullet wound in her neck.

Brooks was tried in November 1977, two months after the first stocking strangling. At the start of the case, District Attorney Mullins Whisnant objected to every African-American in the jury pool, in order to ensure that the twelve men and women who would decide Brooks’s fate were white. At the end of the penalty phase he made his closing appeal, imploring the jury to send Brooks to the electric chair: ‘You have looked at William Anthony Brooks all week, he’s been here surrounded by his lawyers, and you’ve seen him.’ Having seen him, of course, the jury knew he was black.

Brooks, Whisnant said, had treated Jeannine ‘worse than you would a stray animal’. Not content with ‘raping her, with satisfying his lust’, he had let her die ‘very slowly, drip by drip, drop by drop … if you sat down and tried to think up a horrible crime, could you think anything more horrible than what you’ve heard here this week, that this defendant committed on this young lady? Could you think of anything more horrible?’

The defendant, Whisnant said, might be only twenty-two, but rehabilitation was quite impossible: he had been in trouble since he was a child. (As a teenager, Brooks had been arrested for car theft.) Fellow prisoners and guards would be at constant risk of a murderous attack if he lived. The defence was asking for mercy because Brooks had been brutally abused as a child, but for Whisnant this was just an excuse: ‘His sisters talked to you about him being beaten by his stepfather, but they never did say what his stepfather was beating him for. Maybe he needed it. There’s nothing wrong in whipping a child. Some of them you have to whip harder than others. And there’s been children who have been abused and beaten, but they don’t turn to a life of crime on account of it.’

He concluded by appealing to the jurors’ social conscience. Columbus was fighting a war, and men like Brooks were the enemy:

And you can do something about it. You can bring back the death penalty and you can tell William Brooks, and you can tell every criminal like him, that if you come to Columbus and Muscogee County, and you commit a crime … you are going to get the electric chair. You can think of it this way. You know from time to time, if you were a surgeon, and you have people coming to you and maybe they have a cancer on their arm, and you look at it, and you say, ‘Well, the only way to save your life is to take your arm off.’ Or maybe he’s got cancer of the eye, and you have to take his eye out. Sure, that’s terrible, but it’s done because you save the rest of the body. And I submit to you that William Brooks is a cancer on the body of society, and if we’re going to save society and save civilisation, then we’ve got to remove them from society.

Amid the sea of white faces inside the courtroom, that last ‘them’ might easily have been interpreted as a reference not to tumours but to African-Americans. In less than hour, the jury voted to put Brooks to death.

Six years later, in 1983, the Federal Court of Appeals for the US Eleventh Circuit stayed Brooks’s execution eighteen hours before his scheduled death, because of its concern about Whisnant’s rhetoric and the exclusion of blacks from the jury. After another six years of bitterly contested hearings, Brooks was sentenced to life without parole. Removed from death row, the man whom Whisnant had deemed beyond rehabilitation took his high school diploma, and then began to study for a university degree.

The racial connotations of the murders of 1977 were not lost on those who had to investigate them. In a cavernous, oak-panelled suite at his thirty-seventh-floor office in Manhattan, blessed with a dazzling view of Central Park, I interviewed Richard Smith, once a Columbus detective, now the chief executive of the Cendant Corporation’s property division, Coldwell Bankers – the largest real-estate business in the world. The former cop was now responsible for twenty thousand employees, and an annual turnover of $6.5 billion.

The son of a soldier based at Fort Benning, Smith said he’d been faced with a choice of flipping hamburgers or joining the police to pay his way through college. He chose law enforcement, serving from 1973 until 1979 and acquiring two degrees. By 1976 he was a detective, and soon rose to working the robbery-homicide section. Smith spoke in a soothing, understated manner which matched his well-tailored light grey suit and navy shirt. Though he had a very different life now, he stayed in touch with his friends and colleagues from Columbus, which he visited several times a year. He had worked on both the Galloway and the stocking strangler cases, and his obvious intelligence had made him the effective operational leader of the ‘task force’ established to investigate them.

‘Did the fact that it appeared to be an African-American raping and killing white women add to the impact of the crimes?’ I asked.

The easy flow of Smith’s conversation became more broken. ‘Probably. A bit. Yes: that added to the trauma.’ He cleared his throat, and his face began to colour. ‘The old South has great respect and admiration for elderly people, and to see someone treated that way was incredibly offensive. Retired women are supposed to be untouchable people. Nothing is supposed to happen to them. Most of us took it very personally.’

White women shared his sense of revulsion. At the time of the murders, Kathy Spano, who went on to work in Columbus’s courts, was living with her parents in Wynnton. ‘I knew some of the women who died,’ she told me. ‘They were typical Southern gentlewomen, used to being put on a pedestal. I remember them as very gracious women, and also my mother saying, “Oh, it’s awful what they’ve gone through. I cannot imagine laying there as a black man did those things to me.” Because it was a black man, in the eyes of the neighbourhood, it made his crimes much, much worse.’

The body that had to deal with this mayhem, the Columbus Police Department, had not been a happy organisation for many decades. In the 1960s and early seventies, a series of corruption scandals saw officers fired for accepting bribes and taking part in large-scale burglary rings. Earlier, during the 1940s, no one got a job with the CPD without a nod from Fate Leebern, a bootlegging gangster who ran Columbus’s rackets. Among African-Americans, the CPD had had a reputation for racism since the days of Jim Crow, directed both at black Columbus citizens and at the minority of black officers within its ranks, who were forbidden to arrest white suspects, and worked only ‘black beats’. In the late 1960s, just one of the city’s fifty-two black officers had been promoted to sergeant, and none above that rank. Whites received higher pay.

One freezing January night I drove to south Atlanta to meet Robert Leonard, an African-American former Columbus patrolman. A stooped, haunted figure, he told me that together with some of his black colleagues, he had joined the force after returning from service in Vietnam. There they had grown used to something like equality. It was warm inside Leonard’s house, but as he recalled his experience, he shivered.

‘We’d been out there fighting for our country. When we got to the Department, they wouldn’t let us drink from the water fountains. They were reserved for whites. We had to go down to the basement, and drink the water they used for washing patrol cars.’

In 1971, Leonard was going to night school, studying for a degree in police science.

‘There were only two blacks in the class, and it seemed to me that the captain who was taking the class was deliberately marking us down. So a white cop and me, we had a discussion, and agreed to swap papers. I knew my paper was good, and when he turned it in under his name, he got an A. His paper was pretty good too. When I turned it in under my name, I made a C.’

Leonard and the other African-American officers tried to tackle the rampant discrimination by founding a new organisation – the Afro-American Police League. They attempted to make formal representations to the CPD, but its chiefs retaliated swiftly. One black cop was arrested for contempt by his white colleagues when he failed to make a court date, despite having called in sick, said Leonard; another was fired for damaging patrol-car tyres – after risking his life chasing a suspect.

‘They started chopping us off, one by one. It got to the stage where relations between black and white cops had gotten so bad that we were pulling guns on each other. White cops I knew were calling me at home and making threats to me and my mother.’

Finally, in the spring of 1971, Leonard decided ‘it was time to get something done’. He arranged to fly to Washington DC and meet officials from the Justice Department. As he boarded his plane, he realised he was being tailed – by two CPD detectives.

‘I explained to the Justice Department that we wore the flag of the United States on our uniforms, that it stood for liberty and justice, and we weren’t getting any.’ The officials promised to look into it. But soon after Leonard’s return, he was called one night to the Columbus Medical Center, the city’s main hospital, where a doctor had got drunk and was threatening patients and nurses.

‘I told him he was under arrest. He turned to me and said, “Nigger, you can’t say that.” So I cuffed him. Then a captain came and called another white colleague. They suspended me from duty for eight days.’

On the afternoons of 29 and 30 May 1971, Leonard and some of the Afro-American League members held a small demonstration outside the police headquarters. Their protest reached its climax the following day, when ten of them, including Leonard, carefully removed the US flag from their epaulettes, stitch by stitch.

‘We had the media there, and we tried to explain that the flag represented what we’d fought for in Vietnam and couldn’t find in Columbus. There was no liberty or justice inside the CPD, and it was treating black people in the city with brutality. The chief came out of the building and faced us. He looked at us with hate in his eyes and said, “You’re fired.” He went along the line and took our shields and our weapons.’

Later that day, the CPD held a press conference, confirming that Leonard and six others had been dismissed for ‘conduct unbecoming an officer’. Columbus’s Safety Director, Joseph W. Sargis, told reporters: ‘These officers have repetitiously made baseless allegations of unlawful conduct, racism and discrimination against their fellow officers.’ The chief and his men had ‘exercised patience and forbearance concerning the conduct individually and as a group by these officers who call themselves the Afro-American Police League’. Beside him on the platform, two senior cops nodded vigorously – the CPD chief, B.F. McGuffey, and his future successor, Curtis McClung.

The black officers’ dismissal triggered a wave of protest, which was further fuelled in early June when the police shot dead a twenty-year-old African-American whom they claimed had been a robbery suspect. On Saturday, 19 June, the civil rights leader Hosea Williams of the Southern Leadership Christian Council led a demonstration by about a thousand people in support of the fired seven, demanding the reorganisation of the CPD on racially equal lines. Mayor J.R. Allen denounced his proposals as ‘an attack upon this city and its citizens’ by ‘a group of outsiders with no legitimate concern here’. The demands being made by Williams and the former patrolmen ‘could only be described as an extortion note’.

Mayhem followed. For three nights, Columbus was afflicted by rioting and arson, with grocery stores, a lumberyard and a confectionery company fire-bombed and set ablaze. Firemen and their trucks were shot at, and their hoses cut. At 1.10 a.m. on 22 June, Mayor Allen declared a state of emergency. In Columbus, Allen – who died a few months later in a plane crash – is remembered today as a reformer who believed in racial integration. On this occasion he acted like a medieval monarch, and issued an ‘ordinance’ by proclamation. Bars, liquor stores and shops selling guns and ammunition would be closed until further notice. Notwithstanding the Constitution of the United States, and its First Amendment protecting free speech, any gathering on the streets of Columbus of more than twelve people would be illegal, and its members subject to arrest. Protest marches would only be allowed if their organisers had obtained a permit from the Mayor’s office in advance. Allen was buoyed by a message of support from Georgia’s Governor, the Democratic future President Jimmy Carter. He too denounced Hosea Williams: ‘There is no evidence he wants to solve problems. He wants to create one.’

As sporadic rioting and arson continued, Columbus’s long hot summer reached its violent zenith on 24 July, with a march – banned under the Mayor’s emergency ordinance – to the CPD headquarters. Later, the police – inevitably – claimed that they were trying to disperse it peacefully, and only used force when they came under attack. Equally inevitably, accounts by surviving black participants are very different.

‘Before we started, pickaxe handles had been handed out to the cops, and they just beat us,’ Leonard said. ‘Men, women and children. Some of the kids and women got real scared, started running. I was walking with a woman who was pregnant and this cop said, “Hey Leonard, you hiding behind a pregnant woman?” He beat me on the head, knocked me to the ground, fractured my skull. Somehow I got away and ran to an old lady’s house. I was taken to hospital in Fort Benning, because I was a veteran. They arrested me in hospital, for assaulting a cop.’

By the end of the day, five police officers and five marchers had been hospitalised with serious injuries. The following week, another demonstration was broken up and eighty-one people arrested and jailed. Trouble simmered for the rest of the summer: by the time of the last conflagration, on 6 September, Columbus had seen 161 fires set by arsonists – some of them, it was widely believed, by whites, motivated not by anger at police brutality but by the prospect of making insurance claims.

As for the seven fired patrolmen, they launched a federal lawsuit that took twenty-two years to resolve. Three times Columbus’s Federal District Judge, Robert Elliott, an old-time segregationist, refused to entertain it; three times the US Supreme Court and other appeal judges insisted that he should. Finally, the case was settled out of court, and the former patrolmen were each awarded $133,000. But the emotional cost had been overwhelming.

‘I was warned by my own lawyer: leave town or face getting killed,’ said Leonard. ‘So I came here to Atlanta. All of us lost our jobs, our wives, our homes. My first wife was a schoolteacher in Columbus, and she was threatened, told she’d lose her job. One time I was unemployed and couldn’t make my child support payments. Columbus had me jailed.’

The Columbus Police Department badly needed a new broom, and with the appointment of Curtis McClung as its chief in 1976, one seemed to have arrived. Possessed of a degree in police sciences, he was skilled at handling the media, and wanted to be seen as a new model police chief, not a backwoods lawman. On first taking office, he told reporters that he was determined to expunge the stains left by the events five summers before. Nevertheless, experienced black investigators, who might have had much to contribute to the hunt for the stocking strangler, were swiftly excluded from it. Early in his service in 1967, Arthur Hardaway had been the first black patrolman assigned to the downtown Broadway beat, responsible for a business district that was then entirely white: ‘The chief called me in and told me no black officer had ever walked Broadway,’ Hardaway said. ‘He wanted to determine the reaction of the whites and he thought I had the personality to be able to do it.’ That experiment passed off successfully: ‘The business people accepted me pretty good; treated me with respect, invited me in and offered me Cokes, like I guess they did the white officers.’

The stranglings were a very different matter. Hardaway had been a detective since 1968, working mostly in robbery-homicide, and had solved several murders. ‘When the stranglings began, I did a few door-to-door interviews. But when they formed a special task force to investigate them, I wasn’t picked for it, though I was one of the top investigators, and I’d worked on that squad a long time. I didn’t know then if it was a white man or a black man who had committed those crimes. But the victims were influential people and they still had that racial concern in their heart in Columbus. The people who were making decisions still had that racist mentality.’

Hardaway spent years acquiring an impressive list of academic qualifications, only to see a long line of less experienced and less well-educated white officers promoted over his head. A methodical, unassuming man, he answered my questions in his south Columbus living room with the same precision he had once applied to murder cases, despite having become partially deaf. He left the force a disillusioned man in 1992, to scratch out a living as a small-time building contractor.

He was not the only skilled black investigator to be left out. There was no more experienced fingerprint expert on the Columbus force at the time of the stocking stranglings than Eddie Florence, the cop who later turned to real estate and religion after leaving the force. He told me that he’d always kept abreast of the latest developments in identification techniques, and ensured that the city had the most modern technology. Yet he wasn’t called to any of the strangling crime scenes. He had left the police in 1984, but his bitterness was still near the surface.

‘You had to be part of that madness to know what it was really like. The pressure, not just in the Police Department, but across the whole city was incredible, and it was being applied right in the middle of the racial divide. But the shit they put on me: not trusting me to take part in the investigation because they thought the killer was black!’ He shook his head. ‘I suppose they thought I’d try to fudge the evidence.’

After the second strangling, the murder of Miss Dimenstein, Chief McClung announced that all police leave was cancelled indefinitely. Staff who normally worked on administrative duties were moved to the streets to join new, intensive patrols, especially in Wynnton. Both the city and the state pledged money for a reward fund. Within a week it stood at $11,000, a substantial sum in 1977. And then, nine days after Dimenstein’s death, came the break Columbus had been praying for.

Jerome Livas, an African-American odd-job man aged twenty-eight, lived in south Columbus with a much older woman – Beatrice Brier, who was fifty-five. Early on Sunday, 2 October, she was found by the porch of her home, beaten and unconscious. As her partner, Livas immediately became a prime suspect. He was arrested and questioned by two detectives, Gene Hillhouse and Warren Myles. Livas, a short, muscular man who looked older than his years, was illiterate and easily confused. The detectives, he said years later, told him that if he confessed to beating Beatrice Brier, he could go home. He quickly fell for this transparent ploy, and told them that he had. Six days later she died from her injuries, and although he retracted it, his confession was enough to secure him a life sentence for murder.

Hillhouse and Myles were intrigued by the wide age gap between Livas and Brier, and wondered whether his interest in older women might mean he had strangled Ferne Jackson and Jean Dimenstein. They began to question him about their murders, and as they talked, they made notes of everything they told Livas about what had happened. They were well aware of the danger of generating a completely bogus ‘confession’ to the crimes, containing nothing but recycled information their suspect had learned from them. Unbeknown to Myles and Hillhouse, after they went home at the end of the day, three more detectives – Ronald Lynn, Robert Matthews and Robert Coddington – continued the interrogation. They were much less careful, and made no note of their questions. Their interrogation lasted for much of the night.

Around midnight, the cops bundled Livas into a police car and drove him to the scenes of the murders. Along the way, they also drove by the Wynnton home of another possible victim of the strangler, Gertrude Miller, aged sixty-four, who had been beaten and raped, but not murdered, five days before Mrs Jackson was attacked. At each house, the detectives made Livas get out, lighting the shadows with powerful torches in the hope that this would enhance his recollections, and make them more vivid.

By 2.45 a.m. on 3 October, they had a full, typed confession. In the bare police interrogation room they read it back to Livas, and he marked it with the one thing he knew how to write, his name. It was an impressive document, filled with details about the murders which had not been made public, and which, journalists were later told, ‘only the killer could have known’.

Livas’s statement began with an account of the rape of Gertrude Miller – a crime that had been given no publicity. He said he managed to enter her home by pulling the screen off her back-room window, hit her on the side of the head with a mop handle, and tied her hands and feet with stockings. Then, Livas supposedly said, ‘I took her clothes off. I fucked her for a little while and pulled my dick out and ate her pussy a little bit and then fucked her some more. When I got through fucking her, I hit her some more with the stick.’

According to Livas’s confession, he decided to attack Ferne Jackson after seeing her get out of a car being driven by someone else and go inside her house. The police, of course, knew she had been dropped at her home by her friend Lucy Mangham. The rest of Livas’s account was a close match with other known facts:

I waited down the street on the corner until I didn’t see no lights on at the house. I went to the house and went up on the porch where some glass doors were. I had a screwdriver with me. I stuck the screwdriver in the right side of the door and forced the lock. I went in the door and looked around the house and found an old woman asleep in the bed in the bedroom. She had on some type of gown. I put my hand over her mouth and she tried to move. I hit her pretty hard in the eye with my fist. I raised her gown up. I started fucking her in the pussy and then I ate her pussy. She was crying while I was fucking her. I was buck fucking her with her legs pulled up toward her head. I looked around in some drawers and found a stocking. I wrapped the stocking around her neck and pulled it tight and tied it in a knot.

Livas said he stole his victim’s car and left it on a dirt road off Lawyers Lane in south Columbus, exactly where Mrs Jackson’s vehicle had been found. His confession to murdering and raping Jean Dimenstein was equally vivid and, seemingly, accurate. Having tried to open a window, he said, he went round to the port where her car, a blue Chevrolet, was parked:

I took the hinges off the door. I threw them out in the backyard. I took the door off and set it to the side … I found an old woman in the bedroom asleep. I put my hand over her mouth and she was trying to wake up. I hit her with my fist. I don’t remember where I hit her. She had on some kind of housecoat. She had on a pair of panties. I took her panties off and threw them down. Then I pushed her legs back and buck fucked her. Then I ate her pussy a little bit. I got a stocking from a chair and wrapped it round her neck and choked her … I went out the same door I came in and got in [her] car and left. I put the radio station on WOKS because I always listen to it. I took the car pretty close to where I left the last car but left it on a paved street this time.

Dimenstein’s car radio – as the police, but not the press, knew – had indeed been tuned to WOKS when it was found on a paved road in Carver Heights.

Three days later, on 6 October, the police showed Gertrude Miller, the woman who had apparently survived the strangler’s attack, an array of photographs. She picked out Livas. His picture, she said, was the one that looked most like the man who raped her, and had ‘all the right features’. It looked as if the case was nailed. On 14 October, the Deputy Police Chief C.B. Falson, the robbery-homicide squad director Ronnie Jones, and his deputy, Herman Boone, called a press conference. Jerome Livas, they announced, was officially a suspect for the stranglings. If convicted, he could expect to be sentenced to death.

Even then, there were some members of the CPD who had their doubts. Carl Cannon, a young reporter with the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, spoke to an anonymous police source who told him Livas was a ‘twenty-four-carat idiot with the intelligence level of a five-year-old’. Another said Livas had not understood the contents of his own confession, let alone the implications of signing it without having seen a lawyer: ‘Explaining that to him is like explaining Einstein’s quantum theory of physics [sic] to a three-year-old.’ Livas’s employer, William Renfro, told Cannon he was ‘slow, illiterate and stupid’, and would ‘say anything’. But Chief McClung was confident the police had got their man. The special patrols in Wynnton were stood down.

Florence Scheible was a widow of eighty-nine, almost blind, and walked only with the aid of a Zimmer frame. Originally from Iowa, she moved to Columbus because she liked its warm weather. On the morning of 21 October, while Livas remained in custody, her neighbours saw her outside at about 11 a.m., shuffling in the garden in front of her two-storey house on Dimon Street, a few blocks from the murders. Three-and-a-half hours later, her son Paul, a colonel in the military, called the police, saying he had come to visit and found her dead.

Ed Gibson, a CPD patrolman, went inside, into the tidy living room. Antique furniture and a rug stood on a polished hardwood floor; there was a television in the corner. Mrs Scheible was lying on her bed in the bedroom next door, next to her walker. Her dress had been pulled above her waist, exposing her pubic area, which was covered in blood. She was wearing one nylon stocking. The other had been wrapped around her neck.

In the wake of Florence Scheible’s murder, Columbus was seized by dread. The special patrols reappeared, joined by soldiers from Fort Benning and volunteers from other jurisdictions. Like many women who lived alone, Martha Thurmond, a retired teacher aged sixty-nine, decided not to risk relying on these measures. The day after the discovery of Mrs Scheible’s body, she had deadbolt locks fitted to the doors, and burglar bars fixed to the windows of her house on Marion Street, a small, wood-framed dwelling just off Wynnton Road. Her son Bill, who lived in Tucker, a suburb of Atlanta, came down with his wife and son to stay for the weekend, wanting to be certain that she would be safe. They left for home at about 3.30 p.m. on Monday, 24 October.

At 12.30 p.m. next day, a neighbour noticed that Mrs Thurmond’s front door was open. The new lock had not been properly fitted, and working in silence, the killer had forced it during the night. She was inside, on her bed, wearing a pink pyjama top; taped to the wall above her was a large sheet of paper with a phone number written in large characters: 322–7711 – the number for the Columbus Police Department. Like Florence Scheible, she had been hit with enormous force, by a blow that fractured the base of her skull. The stocking ligature had been tightened so fiercely against her skin that it had caused a friction burn, a brownish red, blistered trough against her windpipe. In and around her vagina were copious quantities of seminal fluid.

Driven to desperation, Mayor Mickle tried to reduce the chances of another murder by cancelling Halloween. Parents, he told reporters, should ensure their children were home by 6 p.m. on 31 October. Trick or treating was forbidden.

With the police investigation and the reputation of his department in disarray, Chief McClung continued to claim that Jerome Livas might still have killed the first two victims. ‘The evidence against him still exists,’ he told reporters. I met the Ledger’s former crime correspondent Carl Cannon in a cellar bar in Washington DC, where his career has prospered as the White House correspondent for the National Journal. Warm and approachable, he vividly recalled the events of his reporting youth twenty-five years earlier. His father had been a big-time Washington reporter before him, and unlike most Columbus journalists, he always knew he was only passing through, and could afford to make enemies.

‘They were still using that hoary old line – Livas had said things that only the killer could have known – and when Mrs Scheible was killed, they added another: that there had to be a copy-cat killer. I’d already had some experience with the Columbus cops and their tendency to rush to judgement. But I had a source in the department who used to call me at home. He told me it was bullshit: the murders were the work of the same guy. He said Livas had this urge to please. He’d confess to anything.’

Cannon managed to enlist the help of a judge to get him access to Livas in jail. Left alone with Cannon, Livas signed another statement within a couple of hours. This time, he not only confessed again to the first two Columbus stranglings, but admitted that it had been he who had assassinated two Presidents, John F. Kennedy and William McKinley; that he had been with Charles Manson the night his followers murdered the actress Sharon Tate; that he had known when Charles Lindbergh’s baby was going to be kidnapped in the 1930s; and that he knew Elizabeth Short, the victim of the notorious ‘black dahlia’ murder in Cannon’s home state of California the following decade. Cannon asked him if knew what the word ‘suspect’ meant. Livas replied: ‘That means you’re trespassing on private property or something.’ The one crime he vehemently denied was the only one for which he was to be convicted – the murder of his girlfriend, Beatrice Brier.

Twenty-three years old, Cannon had the scoop of his career thus far. After staying up all night transcribing his notes and tapes, he had his story ready to run for the evening edition of 17 November 1977. Shortly before his deadline, he called on Chief McClung. Cannon recalled: ‘He got up, walked to the window, looked out. He said, “You know, Carl, I’ve got a lot of people here but no one doing public affairs to get our stories out to the public, not like the Army has.” He asked me what I earned, and suggested he might be able to double it. I told him: “I tell you what, Chief. This story’s going to come out in two hours, and everyone’s going to know that this guy didn’t do it. But I’m not, on this occasion, going to tell the readers about our conversation.”’

Meanwhile, Columbus’s maniac remained on the loose.

THREE Ghost-Hunting

And the Negro. Do not forget the Negro. So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been … The history of my people will be commensurate with the interminable history of the Jew – only bloodier and more violent.

Benedict Mady Copeland in CARSON McCULLERS,

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)*

At his hilltop home at the upscale end of south Columbus, Gene Hewell was tending his garden. Now sixty-five, he moved smoothly, wielding his hoe without apparent effort, his only concession to the heat and humidity a straw boater. I was sweating the moment I got out of my car, but his breathing was rhythmic, his skin dry. In the distance, the towers used for parachute training at Fort Benning seemed to shimmer above the trees. Gene gestured towards the west. ‘That’s where my great-grandmother worked as a slave,’ he said. ‘On a plantation at a place called Oswichee, in Russell County, Alabama. It was owned by the first W.C. Bradley’s father.’

Gene, the brother of the singer Jo-Jo Benson, owned a men’s fashion store on Broadway, the Movin’ Man – the first, and for many years the only, black-owned business on the street. Inside his house, in the welcome cool of his living room, Gene eased himself into a sofa beside an impressive collection of guitars. Like his brother, he had lived in Columbus or Phenix City for most of his life, and his family had been in the district for much longer than that.

‘My great-grandmother told my grandma about the day they freed the slaves, and she told me and Jo-Jo,’ Gene said. ‘She said that she was out in the fields, chopping cotton – chopping at the stalks to let the plants get more nutrients. Then she heard this noise. A crackling, was how she explained it. She looked up at the ridge above the field where she was working and all she could see was a blue line of white people, running by the master’s house. Some of the people there were trying to shoot at them, and they were trying to get in. She said she’d never seen so many whites killing so many whites.’

Afterwards, with the plantation secure, the Union soldiers called the slaves from the fields in order to tell them that Lincoln had set them free. Addressing a hushed semi-circle of African-Americans in the shade of a tree, an officer read the Emancipation proclamation. As he did so, Gene said, one of his men idly bounced his rifle on the toe of his boot. ‘The gun went off and clean shot off his toe. My great-grandmother pulled his boot off and dressed the wound. Then he pulled it right back on.’

When the federal army left later that afternoon, some of the former slaves followed it, because they were scared of reprisals from whites. According to the oral history handed down among the Chattahoochee Valley’s African-Americans, their fears were justified.

‘My grandma told us that the day after the Yankees left, all down through the woods near the plantations, there were black people nailed to trees,’ Gene said. ‘They were dead, like butchered animals. Instead of being set free, they were killed.’

In the National Archives in Washington DC, in the Georgia section’s records of the federal agency set up to assist the former slaves, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, I found a ledger, compiled regularly from information sent from every county to the state headquarters. Entitled Reports Relating to Murders and Outrages, its pages document what can only be described as the beginning of Georgia’s white terror.

Written in the elegant copperplate of the Victorian bureaucrat, the ledger sets out its accounts of ethnic assault and homicide under logical headings. There are columns for the ‘name of person assaulted or killed’; whether they were white or coloured; the ‘name or person killing or assaulting’, together with their race; whether anything was done to bring the perpetrators to justice; and any further ‘remarks’. In Columbus’s Muscogee County, and the five surrounding counties that today comprise the Chattahoochee judicial circuit, I counted the names of thirty-two victims attacked, most of them fatally, between March 1866 and November 1868. All but one were black. All the named perpetrators were white.

Even before the Civil War, writes W.J. Cash, the law and its institutions were weaker in the South, where slave-owners had displayed ‘an intense distrust of, and, indeed, downright aversion to, any actual authority beyond the barest minimum essential to the existence of the social organism’. In the turmoil of the Reconstruction era after the war’s end, these traditions found expression in a new wave of extralegal violence. ‘At the root of the post-war bloodshed was the refusal of most whites to accept the emancipated slaves’ quest for economic and political power,’ writes W. Fitzhugh Brundage, the historian of lynching in Georgia and Virginia. ‘Freed from the restraints of planter domination, the black man seemed to pose a new and greater threat to whites. During a period when blacks seemed to mock the social order and commonly understood rules of conduct, whites turned to violence to restore their supremacy.’

The details of these forgotten killings were not always recorded, although some bring to mind the later, more famous wave of lynching that swept the South from the 1880s on. One example took place in Harris County, just to the north of Columbus, now the site of rich dormitory suburbs, where the body of Jordan Nelson was found in June 1866, ‘in the woods, hanging by the neck’. But from the beginning, many such murders seem to have displayed a degree of organisation, a coordinated premeditation that revealed their underlying purpose. The Ku Klux Klan did not spread to Georgia from its home state of Tennessee until 1868. But the racist vigilantism that the Klan embodied was already in evidence when the Freedmen’s Bureau ledger opened its record in March 1866. On the fifteenth day of the month, an African-American named only as Samuel was ‘shot in bed by party of white men, organized’ in Talbotton, east of Columbus. His unknown killers, says the Freedmen’s Bureau ledger, called themselves ‘regulators’.

The bare accounts contained in the ledger also convey what must have been a terrifying sense of randomness, an absence of motive other than race which must, all too rationally, have led any black person to feel they were at risk. In Harris County in August 1866, an unnamed black woman ‘was beaten by a white man by the name of Spicy. She died next day, and he escaped.’ ‘There was no cause for the assault,’ the ledger states of the shooting of K. Hocut by Nathaniel Fuller in Muscogee County on 20 January 1868. Of the slaying of Samuel Clemins in Harris County by ‘unknown whites’ on 7 September 1868, it records: ‘Clemins was murdered by four white men because he had sent his son away to avoid a whipping.’ Hiram McFir died in the same county at the hands of Bud Vines five days later. ‘Vines shot McFir while holding his horse,’ says the ledger, ‘without the least cause.’ As for Tom Joiner, he was stabbed by Jesse Bennett in Troup County on 17 September ‘for refusing to let his dog fight’.

The national politics of the late 1860s were dominated by the struggle over ‘radical Reconstruction’, the attempt by the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, to persuade the former slave states to ratify new amendments to the Constitution – the Fifteenth, enshrining black citizens’ right to vote, and the Fourteenth, which promises ‘equal protection under the laws’. In and around Columbus, the absence of such protection was manifest. According to the ledger, only one of the perpetrators in the region’s thirty-two listed attacks was convicted and sentenced in court, a man named John Simpson, who killed Sammy Sapp in Muscogee County on 27 November 1867. Simpson, however, who was ‘tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang’, was ‘coloured’. Where white perpetrators were concerned, the outcomes of the cases described in the preceding paragraph typify the rest. K. Hocut’s killer, Nathaniel Fuller, was at least tried, but was acquitted. Although an inquest was held into the murder of Samuel Clemins, ‘no further action was taken by the civil authority’. Likewise, ‘the authorities have taken no action’ against Bud Vines, the man who shot Hiram McFir, and Vines ‘is supposed to be in Alabama’. The Freedmen’s Bureau officer who recorded the stabbing of Tom Joiner by Jesse Bennett knew that Bennett ‘lives near LaGrange’, but in his case too, ‘no action [was] taken by the civil authorities’.

One of the most odious aspects to the ethnic terror of the 1860s was the maiming and murder of African-Americans by the same individuals who had once owned them as property, and who seemed unable to adjust to the fact that if they still wished to put their former slaves to work, they would have to pay them. The first such case recorded in the ledger dates from July 1866, when an unnamed coloured man from Talbotton was ‘shot by his employer’. When Andrew Rawick stabbed John Brown in Troup County on 3 July 1868, ‘the difficulty originated about some work’, and when Austin and Dennis Hawley were ‘severely cut with [a] knife’ in Harris County two months later, it was because ‘the Hawleys demanded a settlement for work [they had] done’. In the same county on 20 October, Isaac Smith was killed by three unknown white men because he had ‘left a [work] place in the spring’.

Two brothers from Harris County, William and Lewis Grady, appear to have taken special pains to exact vengeance from their former human property. On 4 August 1868 they ‘whipped very severely’ a man named David Grady; the fact that he shared their last name suggests that he had been their slave. The reason, states the ledger, was that ‘David had left [their] place because he did not get enough to eat.’ In this case, warrants were issued for William and Lewis Grady to attend court, but they did not answer them. A month later they again revealed their contempt for the law when they ‘shot and very severely whipped’ another African-American who bore their name, George Grady. As usual, ‘no action [was] taken by the civil authority’. When the ledger closed at the end of 1868, the Grady brothers were still living with impunity a few miles north of Columbus in Harris County, Georgia.

A pattern that would last many decades was beginning: racial violence and inequalities were simply matters beyond the rule of law. Long after the end of the 1860s, the fact that the law did not treat the races equally was among the first lessons black parents taught their children.

‘Sassing,’ said Gene Hewell, ‘you know what that means? To be rude, disrespectful. Our parents warned us about sassing from the cradle up. That didn’t just mean being careful what you said. It meant, you don’t mess with white people; you don’t talk to them, and you don’t talk back. If they do something you don’t like, you get out of their way. You could be walking down Broadway and if three white people came towards you, you got off the kerb. And if you didn’t, they could make it real ugly for you – arrest you, beat your brains out in jail.’

In 1950, Gene said, a favourite uncle, ‘a big, muscular guy’, was murdered after getting into some kind of trouble with a white grocer – ‘They said he’d sassed him.’ After his death, his body was laid across the railroad tracks, and ‘cut up and pushed in pieces along the bridge towards Phenix City’.

This climate of fear and vulnerability allowed other kinds of oppression and exploitation to flourish.

‘We’d come out of slavery, but we had to find a place to stay, and they owned the houses. You had to buy clothes, and they owned the stores. You had just about enough chump change to feed your children and go back to work each Monday. If you didn’t like your job, you couldn’t quit at one place and find work at another. That was blue-collar slavery.’

The story of Gene’s own liberation, of how he came to buy his own downtown store and made it succeed, was a long saga of struggle against prejudice and hostility, against banks which refused to lend him money, and a Police Department that twice tried to ruin him by laying bogus charges – once for theft, and on another occasion for possessing planted drugs.

For a few months before and after the end of 1977, at the time of the stocking stranglings, he’d employed a man named Carlton Gary, first as a sales assistant, and then as a TV advertisement model. ‘It was the Superfly era when clothes were flamboyant. Big boots, tassels, silk shirts and hats,’ Hewell said. ‘I used Carlton for the simple reason that he looked good. Real good. He was a very well built, extraordinarily attractive man, and he knew how to move, you know what I’m saying? He was a charmer, and when it came to women, he had the pick of the litter.’

‘How often did you show your adverts?’ I asked.

‘At busy times, like the weeks before Christmas, Carlton would have been appearing in five TV spots a night. I guess that made him kind of easy to recognise.’ Nine years after working for Hewell, Gary would find himself standing trial for the Columbus stocking stranglings.

The rapes and murders of Florence Scheible and Martha Thurmond in October 1977, followed by Carl Cannon’s exposure of the CPD’s incompetence, plunged Columbus into a new abyss of fear. More than two decades later, in his chambers in the Government Center tower, I met Andrew Prather, a State Court judge who had lived alone in Wynnton at the time of the murders. Despite the belief that the killer was black, he said, any single man was regarded as a possible suspect: ‘There was a police car parked outside and I knew they were watching me. I thought of moving to Atlanta but then I thought, “What if I leave town and the killings stop?”’

One night he found an old lady’s dog in the street. ‘I was scared to give it back. I thought I was going to get shot. I yelled through the door, “It’s Andy Prather! I live down the street and I’ve got your puppy!”’ His fears were well founded. In one reported incident, a woman fired a pistol through her glass front door when she saw the shadow of a friend and neighbour who was calling to check her well-being.

As the police stumbled to make progress, they asked for help from the famous FBI criminal psychology profile expert, Robert K. Ressler. In his memoirs, Ressler writes of attending a social gathering during his visit: ‘A group of middle-aged and elderly women were at a party together, and the main topic of conversation was the mysterious series of killings. At one point in the evening, in a demonstration of how completely the fear of the killer had gripped the city, seven of the women guests emptied their purses, revealing seven handguns that fell out on to the carpet.’ Meanwhile, the local media advised single and widowed women to move in with male relatives, and if that were not possible, to form ‘communes’ for their own protection.

Aware that he and his colleagues had no suspect, Detective Richard Smith and his partner, Frank Simon, decided to try prevention. Before the murders began, Smith had been responsible for a programme designed to protect store-owners from robbery – the Columbus Anti-Robbery Enforcement System, or CARES. Possible targets were identified, and then equipped with panic button hotlines to the police, who were supposed to respond immediately.

‘Now,’ said Smith in his New York office, gazing into the middle distance through a mist over Central Park, ‘I had to profile the elderly women and widows who lived alone in Wynnton, then go to them and tell them, as if they didn’t already know, that they were likely victims of the strangler. The harder task was to convince them that they were going to be safe, that we were going to protect them. They didn’t have family, so we were it.’

Smith fitted dozens of these possible victims’ homes with alarms activated by panic buttons and pressure pads placed under the carpets outside their bedrooms. ‘They were very expensive units, hooked directly up to police radio bands. Unfortunately, the only result was very, very many false alarms.’ Time and again, a woman would hear something, then press her button almost reflexively. Some did it so often that the police had to take their alarms away.

‘I got to know some of those women quite intimately,’ Smith said. ‘What I do remember is that when one of them raised the alarm, what seemed like the whole world of policing would show up within seconds. One night I was on patrol with a guy from the GBI [the Georgia Bureau of Investigation]. A call went out that a guy had heard screaming from the home of his neighbour, a widow. We weren’t more than half a mile away, but by the time we got there, we had to park three blocks from the house, there were so many law-enforcement vehicles there already.’

Working with the help of official records, it took Smith hours of work to produce his list of possible victims.

‘How do you think the strangler managed to carry out his own profiling?’ I asked. ‘How did he work out where elderly women were living alone?’

Smith paused for a long time. ‘We don’t know. Until the day I left the force, I had no idea how he selected his victims.’

Anyone – especially anyone African-American – walking through Wynnton was likely to be stopped and asked to submit to a pro-forma ‘field interview’, with their personal details and movements for the past few days taken down and filed. Some were asked to give saliva and hair samples. Many of those stopped were students, on their way to the black high school in Carver Heights, and when they were questioned again and again, it aroused fierce resentment. However, flooding Wynnton with law-enforcement officers seemed to work.

‘We were not allowed in that neighbourhood – there’s no way that I could have gone through Wynnton after six or seven at night without being jumped on by every police car in the city,’ Gene Hewell said. ‘As a black man, you would have been asking for it – you could have driven through, but even now, twenty-seven years later, you couldn’t walk through without attracting attention.’

Kathy Spano, a courthouse clerk, used to lie in her Wynnton bedroom, her radio tuned to the police communications channel. ‘There were so many people on the alert, constantly moving, responding to alarms, following leads with their dogs. I do not know how they could not have seen any black man in the neighbourhood. It would have been very difficult for him to move around. One night I heard they were chasing someone. Next day I asked how he’d got away. An officer told me they’d found some ground hollowed out beneath a bush.’

Through the end of October, the whole of November and past Christmas, the strangler did not strike. As 1978 approached, Columbus began to hope that the murders had drawn to a close. In fact, the city’s serial killer was about to choose his most prominent target.

If the intermarried Bradleys and Turners are the mightiest of all Columbus’s great families, close behind has been the dynasty of Woodruffs. Founded when George Waldo Woodruff moved south from Connecticut in 1847, the clan of his numerous descendants rose to become financiers, mill-owners, bankers and philanthropists. It was a Woodruff who put together the Columbus syndicate that bought Coca-Cola in 1919, while another later became its chief executive. By the middle of the twentieth century, George C. ‘Kid’ Woodruff, a fanatical sportsman who once coached his beloved University of Georgia football team for just $1 a year, was serving as President of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, and was one of the city’s most powerful men. After his death his widow, Kathleen, divided her time between a house at the Wynnton end of Buena Vista Road and a mansion in Harris County. As a young woman she had been among the writer Carson McCullers’s closest friends, and lived for a time in Paris. Now her two remaining passions in life were her garden and her grandchildren. In the winter of 1977, she was seventy-four.

Kathleen’s home has since been torn down, but it used to lie in the open, close to the well-lit junction with Wynnton Road, the busiest in the neighbourhood. Through the autumn and early winter, it remained on the list of houses that the CPD had earmarked for regular checks by its special patrols. Shortly before Christmas, these patrols were scaled back, just as they had been after the arrest of Jerome Livas.

The last person to see her alive apart from the strangler was her servant of thirty-three years, Tommie Stevens. At 5 p.m. on 27 December, Mrs Woodruff called her over to where she was sitting at the kitchen table, chequebook at the ready. The next day was Tommie’s birthday, and Kathleen gave her a gift of $20 before Tommie left for her own home in Carver Heights. ‘Next morning, when I came back – I always kept my own key – I unlocked the door and I noticed the light was on in her room, which it always be,’ she told the trial of Carlton Gary almost nine years later. It was between 10 and 11 a.m., and Tommie noticed nothing out of the ordinary. She was surprised that Mrs Woodruff wasn’t yet up, but went into the kitchen to make her some eggs for her breakfast. Only then did it occur to her that her employer ‘was sleeping mighty late’.

‘I decided to go see whether she was asleep,’ Tommie went on, ‘because I felt like she was sleeping late. And so, when I went in the bedroom and seen she was lying on the bed with the, you know, scarf around her neck and about half dressed and blood running down her cheek, and after I saw that, then I ran my hand across to see if she would bat her eyes, and she didn’t. And after that, I ran to the phone and called Mr Woodruff’ – George Junior, Kathleen’s son.

Like the other victims, Kathleen Woodruff had bedroom closets and drawers containing numerous pieces of lingerie, yet she had been strangled with an item that had special meaning for her family – a University of Georgia football scarf. Only two years earlier, she and George Junior (another Georgia alumnus) had been photographed for the cover of the programme for a football game against Clemson University. Inside was an article about George Senior’s playing and coaching career. His uncle, Harry Ernest Woodruff, a brilliant young man who founded the real estate firm which both George Woodruffs (and the still-surviving George Woodruff III) went on to run, had also been on the University of Georgia team. (Harry died aged forty-one in a car crash in 1924, en route to the annual homecoming game between Georgia and the University of Tennessee.)

Kathleen’s body displayed the same signs of strangulation as the other victims’, including the petechial haemorrhages and the fractured hyoid bone. Unlike the earlier victims, she had not been subjected to a massive blow to her head. She had, however, been raped.

Two days after her murder, the enterprising reporter Carl Cannon heaped new humiliation on the CPD in another front-page story for the Columbus Ledger, published under the headline ‘Police Ended Special Patrol 2 Weeks Ago’:

Special Columbus police patrols which had cruised past Kathleen K. Woodruff’s 1811 Buena Vista Road house every night since 25 October were called off two weeks ago because the ‘stocking strangler’ had been silent, police confirmed.

The patrols were resumed Wednesday.

The special details were ordered in late October following the stranglings of two elderly women within four days – the third and fourth stranglings of elderly Columbus women since September.

Columbus waited in horror to see who the next victim would be, and when week after week passed without the dreaded news, many residents turned their thoughts to family, Christmas and other things …

Commander Jim Wetherington, who was in charge of the special details, confirmed they were stopped a little before Christmas. Wetherington said the patrols would resume now.

A police source said that the fruitlessness of the special patrols and the boredom felt by officers was a factor in calling off the special details.

For the first time, the city’s continuing terror was mingled with anger. At a disastrous press conference, Mayor Mickle insisted the police were doing all they could to solve the killings – just as he had already done time and again, the Ledger pointed out, since Ferne Jackson’s death the previous September. ‘We are going to solve this problem,’ Mickle said. ‘We are going to make arrests.’ Next day, the paper published a lengthy attack on Mickle, the CPD and its chief Curtis McClung, in the form of a letter from one E. Jensen:

We the people of Columbus, Georgia are sick! We have a terminal disease called fear, and soon, it will be the death of us all. But the trouble is, it’s justified. My fear stems not so much from the criminal element, but … the ineptness of local law. We are now on centre stage. The world is watching us through the networks. And what do we do? We let the world see our sloppy police work and our praying Mayor! Mickle, get up off your knees and do something!

Stung by the criticism, the CPD tried to mount its own public relations campaign, briefing reporters about the long hours its staff were working and their total commitment to finding the killer. At the behest of Georgia’s Governor, the police were forced to cede their autonomy and set up a joint ‘task force’ with the state-wide detective agency, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Twenty GBI agents and support staff moved into a special office that took up the entire basement of the Government Center, bringing with them Columbus’s first crime computer system. Ronnie Jones, the CPD’s chief homicide detective, told reporters that task force members were making huge personal sacrifices; for his own part, he said he was working up to twenty hours each day, while the strangler had invaded his dreams. For the first time in eight years, Jones revealed, he had gone so far as to disappoint his wife by cancelling their annual wedding anniversary holiday in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

If shared mentalities are partly formed by shared historical memories, among the white citizens, cops and politicians who strove to deal with the stranglings, there was none more potent than the Reconstruction period. Accounts of this era, after the end of the Civil War in 1865, in the local histories of Columbus describe it in extravagant language, suggesting that until the stranglings, Reconstruction had been the city’s deepest wound. They are, of course, written from a white perspective. On the violence and death meted out to African-Americans, the Columbus histories are silent. In their pages, post-war lawlessness and injustice in the South involved whites only as victims.

Like the Lost Cause legend, this narrative, with its wayward, marauding Negroes, ‘carpet bagger’ Northern radicals and ‘scalawag’ Southern collaborators, is not unique to Columbus. For decades, the myth of punitive vengeance by the Civil War’s victors dominated American historiography, even in the North. Its acceptance helped to legitimise the white supremacist oppression of the Jim Crow era, and was further fuelled by works such as Thomas Dixon’s bestselling 1905 novel, The Clansman. Dixon characterised Reconstruction’s aim of achieving legal equality as ‘an atrocity too monstrous for belief’, using the language of visceral racial hatred. Underlying it was the familiar Southern rape complex. In Dixon’s view, the decision to award the vote to the ‘thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour’, had rendered every Southern woman at risk of barbaric violation.

In 1914, D.W. Griffith made cinematic history with his film based on Dixon’s book, The Birth of a Nation. Screened at the White House for Woodrow Wilson and the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, Edward D White, it depicted a version of Reconstruction that bore only the most distant relationship to the truth. A contemporary scene-by-scene review in Variety provides a representative taste: ‘Soon the newfound freedom of the former slaves leads to rude insolence. Black militiamen take over the streets in a reign of terror. Flashes are shown of helpless white virgins being whisked indoors by lusty black bucks. At a carpetbaggers’ rally, wildly animated blacks carry placards proclaiming EQUAL RIGHTS, EQUAL MARRIAGE.’

Much of the film concerns the efforts of Gus, one such ‘buck’, to defile the innocence of the virginal ‘Little Sister’. Terrified, she tries to flee the pursuing Gus, while the orchestra (in the words of a later critic) ‘plays hootchy-kootchy music with driving tom-tom beats, suggesting … the image of a black penis driving into the vagina of a white virgin’. Just as he is about to catch her, she opts for the preferable fate of tumbling over the edge of a cliff. Needless to say, her death is avenged by the heroic redeemers of the Ku Klux Klan, who lynch Gus against a superimposed image of Little Sister in her coffin. At the film’s climax, a massed Klan cavalry ‘pour over the screen like an Anglo-Saxon Niagara’, to Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’.

Across the South, writes the Klan’s historian Wyn Craig Wade, The Birth of a Nation was greeted as a ‘sacred epic’, while the film ‘united white Americans in a vast national drama, convincing them of a past that had never been’. No moving picture had ever achieved a fraction of its audience and impact before. Against this backdrop, Columbus’s parochial, local version of the Reconstruction story is not particularly original, and is somewhat less vivid. But for future race relations in the city, it lacks neither relevance nor power. In paragraphs representative of prevailing white sentiment, Nancy Telfair begins the pertinent chapter of her 1928 History of Columbus, Georgia with a ringing condemnation of the South’s treatment in the immediate wake of defeat in 1865:

Half a million negroes had been given their ‘freedom’, and were drunk with the sound of the word. Thousands of Yankee soldiers had been stationed throughout the state for the purpose of seeing that the negroes received the rights so tumultuously thrust upon them.

Besides these, were the ‘carpet baggers’, who were said to carry their worldly goods in their carpet bags, and the ‘scalawags’, low-class Southerners, who were hand in glove with their Yankee confreres in stirring up racial hatred to result in their own affluence and aggrandizement … there were yet crowds of worthless, lazy darkies in the towns, who lived only by stealing from whites and acted as henchmen for the ‘carpet baggers’ and ‘scalawags’ whose power was constantly increasing.

Reconstruction, adds Etta Blanchard Worsley in her later, but equally unapologetic Columbus on the Chattahoochee, published at the dawn of the civil rights era in 1951, was a time when Northern radicals sought to impose ‘punitive measures’ on the broken South. What were these measures? According to Worsley, the worst was the idea that ‘the Negroes, though uneducated and not long out of darkest Africa, must have the vote’. The Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment ‘took from the states control of their suffrage by bestowing the ballot on the Negro’.

The burning sense of grievance implanted during Reconstruction and magnified in its later retellings had distinct implications for both the rule of law and the idea that the races should be equal under it. The Southern view that parts of the Constitution had been imposed by force, and were therefore illegitimate, had a consequence: decent people could reasonably see the law as something that need not always be obeyed, or as an instrument to be manipulated. Occasionally, even acts of terrible violence that were patently illegal might be justified.

No less a figure than Columbus’s one-time Georgia Supreme Court Justice, Sterling Price Gilbert, expresses these thoughts in his memoir A Georgia Lawyer. Echoing Telfair, he describes Reconstruction as ‘cruel and oppressive’, and continues with a eulogy to the Klan, which he compares to the French Resistance:

These [Reconstruction] measures were often administered in a vindictive manner by incompetent and dishonest adventurers. This situation brought into existence the Ku Klux Klan which operated much like the ‘underground’ in World War Two … it is credited with doing much to restore order and protection to persons and property. The Ku Klux Klan of that day resembled the Vigilantes who operated in the formative days of our Western states and territories. The methods of both were often primitive, but many of the results were good.

Those Klan methods had been described over twelve volumes of testimony to a joint select committee of the two houses of Congress in 1871–72. Established in response to a mass of reports that the Klan had brought large tracts of the South close to anarchy, the committee’s mission was to gather evidence and investigate The Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. In Georgia, a subcommittee of the parent body sat in Atlanta for several months, unearthing a pattern of rape, intimidation and murder, perpetrated not by freed slaves and Yankees but against them. By 1871, the subcommittee heard, the Klan’s secret and hierarchical terrorist brigades were committing an average of two murders in Georgia each month.

In the city of Columbus, the defining moment of Reconstruction came in March 1868, a period of intense political ferment. Since December 1867, the Georgia Constitutional Convention, the state’s first elected body to include African-Americans, had been sitting in Atlanta. While it deliberated, Georgia remained under federal military rule, a state of affairs expected to last indefinitely, unless and until the state ratified the ‘equal rights’ Fourteenth Amendment. According to the Columbus Daily Sun, the delegates to this ‘black and tan’ Convention consisted of ‘New England outlaws; Sing-Sing convicts; penitentiary felons; and cornfield negroes’.

On 21 March 1868 the Sun reported the founding of the Columbus chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. According to some of the witnesses who testified before the Congressional select committee, the Klan was fostered by the presence in the city of no less a figure than the former Confederate cavalry’s General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had become the Klan’s ‘Grand Wizard’ the previous year. As a military leader, Forrest was renowned for his tactical flair and aggression. He was also an alleged war criminal, accused of the massacre of black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, an event that prompted one survivor to describe him in a letter to a US Senator as a ‘foul fiend in human shape’, a perpetrator of ‘butchery and barbarity’.

As in other towns across the South, the Klan’s arrival in Columbus was heralded by strange placards couched in bizarre, Kabbalistic language, printed on yellow paper in clear black type, and posted on doors and walls throughout the city. Their text read:

K.K.K.

Horrible Sepulchre – Bloody Moon –

Cloudy Moon – Last Hour.

Division No. 71

The Great High Giant commands you. The dark and dismal hour will be soon. Some live today, tomorrow die. Be ye ready. The whetted sword, the bullet red, and the rights are ours. Dare not wear the holy garb of our mystic brotherhood, save in quest of blood. Let the guilty beware!! In the dark caves, in the mountain recesses, everywhere our brotherhood appears. Traitors beware!

By order of

Great Grand Cyclops, G.C.T.

Samivel, G.S.

Over the next few days the Sun named several prominent Republicans and warned: ‘The Ku Klux Klan has arrived, and woe to the degenerate … Something terrible floats on the breeze, and in the dim silences are heard solemn whispers, dire imprecations against the false ones who have proved recreant to their faith and country. Strange mocking anomalies [sic] now fill the air. Look out!’ In its editorial on 27 March, the paper warned ‘scalawags’ and ‘radicals’ to expect ‘terrible doom’.

To General Forrest, the Sun and their local followers, there was no ‘traitor’ hated more than Columbus’s most famous scalawag, George W. Ashburn. Among post-war Southern Republicans, he was as close as any to becoming a national figure. Born in Bertie County, North Carolina, in 1814, he spent part of the 1830s working as an overseer of slaves. When Georgia seceded from the Union in January 1861, Ashburn raised a company of Southerners loyal to the Union and fought with the Northern army, attaining the rank of colonel. After the war he settled in Columbus, and in 1867 ran for election to the Georgia Convention, where he played a large part in drafting the proposed new state constitution, including its bill of rights. Ashburn was also planning to stand for the US Senate, and his speeches were reported on several occasions by the New York Times. According to Worsley, he was ‘a notorious influence among the innocent and ignorant Negroes’, and even before the Convention, had been ‘most offensive to the whites of Columbus’.

Having travelled back to Columbus after the Convention broke up on 17 March, Ashburn took lodgings at the Perry House, a boarding establishment where he had stayed before, but when the owner forced him to leave he moved to a humble shotgun house on the corner of Thirteenth Street and First Avenue. Its other occupants included the Columbus head of the pro-Republican Loyal League, and the house’s owner, a black woman named Hannah Flournoy.

The most detailed contemporary account of what happened next was written up in a dispatch for the New York Tribune on 1 April by the Reverend John H. Caldwell, the presiding Elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church in LaGrange, forty miles to the north. Caldwell was a leading ‘Christian scalawag’, an early white prophet of racial tolerance who worked hard after the war to create a bi-racial church in Georgia. He had even organised special religious camps for freedmen in LaGrange, attended by up to six thousand former slaves. A frequent visitor to Columbus, he was present in the city during the events he described.

A political as well as a religious scalawag, Caldwell addressed a mass meeting of Republicans in the courthouse square on the afternoon of Saturday, 29 March. He pieced together his account of what happened after the meeting by talking with members of the Columbus coroner’s jury:

Between twelve and one o’clock last night a crowd of persons, estimated at from thirty to forty in number, went to the house where Mr Ashburn lodged, surrounded the building, broke open the rear and front doors, and murdered him in his room. He received three fatal shots, one in the head between the eyes, one just below and to the rear of the hip, and another one in the mouth, which ranged upward. His clothing had from ten to fourteen bullet holes in them [sic]. Five persons entered his room and did the murderous deed; the rest were in other parts of the house and yard. The crowd remained from ten to fifteen minutes, during which time no policeman made his appearance. As the murderous crew were dispersing, however, some policemen made their appearance on the opposite side of the street. They could give no account of the affair when examined. This deed was perpetrated on one of the principal streets, in the most public part of the city … all the assassins wore masks, and were well-dressed.

Ashburn’s body was barely cold before those who thought his murder justified began to assail his memory. The Sun’s report the following day was the beginning of a series of claims that would be made in many subsequent accounts, none of which, according to Caldwell, was true. Far from being a cold-blooded political assassination by the Klan or its supporters, the paper said, Ashburn’s murder owed its origins to his own tempestuous nature, and to his habit of waging disputes with members of his own party.

Caldwell protested in his dispatch for the Tribune that the claim that Ashburn’s friends were to blame for his murder was merely an attempt ‘to cover up and confuse the whole affair … everyone in Columbus knows for what purpose these vile insinuations are put out. See how The Sun abuses and traduces the character of poor Ashburn, even while his mangled corpse lies before the very eyes of the editor. Ye people of America, do ye not understand all this?’ In Caldwell’s view, the Sun’s pro-Klan coverage before the killing suggested that its editor ‘knew beforehand what was going to happen’. Now, he went on, Columbus’s advocates of racial equality were overcome with understandable terror. ‘The sudden, horrible, cowardly and brutal murder of Colonel Ashburn, by this infamous band, shows that their purpose is murder. They are bent on midnight assassinations of the darkest, bloodiest and most diabolical character. Union men all over the city now feel that their lives are at every moment in danger. They do not know at what hour of the night they may be massacred in their bed.’

Few other white people saw things quite that way. The Ashburn murder is a perfect example of what the contemporary historian of Southern violence W. Fitzhugh Brundage terms ‘flashpoints of contested memory’, events whose competing accounts have as much to do with ‘power, authority, cultural norms and social interaction as with the act of conserving and recalling information’. In Ashburn’s case, old Dixie, the Klan and the Democrats were soon trouncing their opponents in the propaganda battle. By the time the Congressional Committee heard testimony in the summer and autumn of 1871, Ashburn’s characterisation as an evil-doer largely responsible for his own, richly merited, demise was much more advanced. Some of the witnesses took their cue from Radical Rule, a virulently hostile pamphlet that is thought to have been written by William Chipley, one of the men accused of murdering Ashburn. Its claims and phraseology surfaced repeatedly in their evidence. According to Radical Rule, Ashburn had been remarkable as an overseer ‘only for his cruelty to the slaves’. None other than Henry Lewis Benning, the Columbus attorney and former Confederate General, told the committee that Ashburn ‘was reputed to be a very severe overseer – brutal’. Benning admitted he had never met Ashburn, but happily added further slanders. Again, the influence of Radical Rule, which claimed that Ashburn died ‘in a negro brothel of the lowest order’, is clear. Benning told the committee: ‘After the war was over he joined in with the freedmen, and made himself their especial friend – he was ahead of almost every other white man in showing devotion to their interests. He quit his wife and took up with a negro woman in Columbus, lived with her as his wife (so said reputation) and at a public house at that; I mean a house of prostitution.’

Hannah Flournoy, the black woman who owned Ashburn’s last residence, and who witnessed his murder, also testified. After the shooting, she said, ‘They run me out of Columbus.’ Too frightened to return, she ‘lost everything I had there’. Shortly before Ashburn’s death, she added, she had been given a letter addressed to Ashburn. He opened it in her presence, so that she could see it was ‘a letter by the Ku Klux, with his coffin all drawed on it’.

Trying to rescue Ashburn’s reputation for posterity, Caldwell told the committee that he had known Ashburn for years before the war, ‘and I never heard anything against him’. Far from having been a cruel slave overseer, ‘He was a very clever, kind man, and I never heard anything against him personally.’ In Caldwell’s view, Ashburn fell ‘a martyr to liberty’, having been ‘among the very few men in Georgia who openly resisted the secession mania all through the war’. The experience of serving in the Georgia Convention had tempered his radical views, and he had done his utmost to negotiate political compromise ‘in a subdued and conciliatory spirit to the moment of his death’. Other independent witnesses supported his account.

Caldwell’s efforts were to no avail. In the Columbus histories by Telfair and Worsley, it is the Ashburn depicted in Radical Rule, the divisive, adulterous, former ‘brutal overseer’, whose death is memorialised, not the principled would-be statesman. As late as 1975, in an article on the case for the Georgia Historical Quarterly, Elizabeth Otto Daniell cites the pamphlet produced by Ashburn’s enemies as her source for the statement that he had once been a ‘cruel overseer of slaves’.

Historical events do not become flashpoints of contested memory without good reasons. One of the explanations for the posthumous vilification of G.W. Ashburn is the political struggle of which his murder formed a significant part: the largely successful terrorist campaign to limit or remove the rights of Georgia’s African-Americans. This ‘required’ their most important white Columbus advocate to be demonised, and at the same time to be seen as having acted over many years against their real interests. In Telfair’s phrase, the purpose of Ashburn’s assassination was ‘merely to remove a public menace’. Generations after his death, the guardians of white Southern memory found that the bleakest assessments of his life and character still fitted with their overall view of Reconstruction as a time of Northern cruelty and injustice.

Behind Ashburn’s death was also another agenda, which concerned the matter of his killers. His murder was a scandal of national significance, and the ensuing investigation and eventual trial were widely reported. General William Meade, the former federal commander at Gettysburg who was now in charge of Georgia’s military occupation, appointed two famous detectives to bring the assassins to justice – H.C. Whitley, who had investigated the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, and William Reed, a veteran of the failed impeachment of Lincoln’s far from radical successor, President Andrew Johnson. During the spring of 1868 they arrested at least twenty-two persons, most of them whites from Columbus, who were said to be men of the utmost respectability. Twelve were eventually charged with the murder, and their trial began at the McPherson barracks in Atlanta on 29 June – not by an ordinary civilian court, but by a military commission, a panel of federal military officers, because Georgia had not yet been readmitted to the Union.

According to contemporary reports in Northern newspapers, the prosecution presented a formidable case. The Cincinnati paper the Commercial claimed, ‘The testimony of the prosecution was crushing – overwhelming, and the cross examination, in the hands of eight illustrations of the Georgia bar … did not in the least damage it.’ The only evidence presented by the defence had been alibis which did not stand scrutiny.

However, by the time this assessment was published at the beginning of August, it was too late. The defendants’ guilt or innocence was no longer at issue. That spring, elections had been held for a new Georgia Assembly, which until now had resisted the Fourteenth ‘equal rights’ Amendment, so prolonging the military occupation. On 21 July, its Democrat diehards abruptly changed their minds and ratified the amendment. The fate of Ashburn’s alleged killers had been settled by an extraordinary deal between Southern white leaders and the federal government, in which the prisoners’ freedom, as Worsley puts it, was ‘Georgia’s reward’. On 24 July, General Meade issued orders to dissolve the military commission. Next morning, the prisoners returned to Columbus, to be met at the railroad station by a large, exultant crowd. In theory they had been released on bail, pending future prosecution by the restored civilian authorities. In practice, there would be no further effort to put them or anyone else on trial.

For the former defendants’ many Southern supporters, it was not enough that they were free: they had to be seen as utterly innocent, as almost-martyred victims of their enemies’ radical zeal. Hence, at one level, the need for the claim that Ashburn might have been killed by African-Americans or white members of his own party: if the Columbus prisoners were innocent, there had to be alternative suspects. Meanwhile, there was another battle for future historical memory to be fought. Upon their release, nine of the prisoners issued a statement, printed next day by the Columbus Sun. It said that the prosecution witnesses had been suborned by ‘torture, bribery and threats’, including the use of the ‘sweatbox’. Meanwhile, the defendants had been held at Fort Pulaski in conditions of inhuman cruelty:

The cells were dark, dangerous, without ventilation, and but four feet by seven. No bed or blankets were furnished. The rations consisted of a slice of pork fat [original italics] three times each week. A piece of bread for each meal, soup for dinner and coffee for breakfast, finished the bill of fare. An old oyster can was given each prisoner, and in this vessel both coffee and soup were served … Refused all communication with their friends, relatives or counsel, they were forced to live in these horrid cells night and day, prostrated by heat, and maddened by myriads of mosquitoes. The calls of nature were attended to in a bucket which was removed but once in twenty-four hours.

In some quarters the prisoners’ allegations were vehemently denied. According to the Cincinnati Commercial, their supporters in Georgia were guilty of ‘moral terrorism’, which ‘made it a crime to entertain any opinion but the one most decided as to the[ir] innocence’. Appalled by the claims of torture and ill-treatment, General Meade issued his own public rebuttal, accusing the Georgia newspapers of making false and exaggerated statements for political purposes, and insisting that they had ‘no foundation’. He ended his remarks with some trenchant comments about the city where Ashburn died: ‘Had the civil authorities acted in good faith and with energy, and made any attempt to ferret out the guilty – or had the people of Columbus evinced or felt any horror of the crime or cooperated in any way in detecting its perpetrators, much that was seemingly harsh and arbitrary might have, and would have been, avoided.’

There were two further layers of significance to the murder of George Ashburn. In a case of the highest importance and profile, positions had been taken not in response to evidence, but on the basis of partisan beliefs and allegiance. And at its end, resolution had not come about through a court’s dispassionate verdict, but through a political deal, itself the result of the vexed and edgy relationship between the Union and the states of the South. Not for the last time in Columbus, the rule of law had been shown to be a contingent, relative concept. Realpolitik had taken precedence over justice.

Even in Georgia, cloudless nights in January bring frosts, and bands of mist that collect in hollows, clinging to the trees. The cold muffles sound. As I walked amid the lanes and shrubbery of Wynnton one evening at the start of 2001, I found it easy to imagine how an intruder might have crept undetected between the pools of shadow, moving in on human prey without so much as the crackle of a twig. Twenty-four years earlier, in the weeks after Kathleen Woodruff’s death, the Columbus police stepped up their patrols again, joined by their many allies. By January 1978, some of the task force officers were giving in to despair, and hinted to reporters that they were beginning to think that the stocking strangler possessed supernatural powers. Trying to catch him, they suggested, was like trying to hunt ‘a will o’the wisp, a ghost’.

If science couldn’t stop the killer, the authorities hoped to rely on sheer numbers. Earnestine Flowers, a childhood friend of Carlton Gary, was working as a Sheriff’s Deputy. ‘There were guys from the hills of Tennessee who knew how to track people; Military Police from Fort Benning; the Ku Klux Klan; people from other Police Departments who wanted to volunteer. We had night lights, people hiding up in trees; that new night vision thing which had just come out; dogs. And yet we were getting so many calls. People were so afraid. I don’t mean only the people who lived there. I was terrified, too. I was out on patrol, shaking with fear. I remember thinking, “I can’t do this, night after night; I gotta get myself assigned as a radio operator. I gotta get myself inside the building!”’

If there was a point when Columbus became immobilised by fear, it came with what law enforcement staff still call the ‘night of the terrors’ – the early hours of 11 February 1978. It began with an attempted burglary at the Wynnton residence of a retired industrial magnate, Abraham Illges. An imposing building, a pastiche of a medieval castle, the Illges house had a drive that opened on to Forest Avenue, in the heart of the territory haunted by the strangler. On 1 January the house had been burgled, and while Mr and Mrs Illges slept, a purse containing her car keys removed from the bed next to hers. Next morning, her Cadillac was missing. The couple then installed a sophisticated alarm system, with a pressure pad under the carpet near the front door, and at 5.15 a.m. on 11 February, someone stepped on it, automatically summoning the police. They arrived within a few minutes, and, in the belief that the burglar might be the strangler, summoned help. As officers, some with sniffer dogs, fanned out through the moonlit trees and gardens, the airwaves were alive with officers’ communications.

Half an hour after the alarm had been raised at the Illges residence, a second, home-made panic buzzer sounded two blocks away on Carter Avenue, inside the bedroom where Fred Burdette, a physician, lay sleeping. His neighbour, Ruth Schwob, a widow of seventy-four who lived alone, had asked him to install an alarm in her own bedroom, wired through to his, so that he might summon help if she were attacked. When the alarm went, Burdette tried to call Mrs Schwob, and listened as her telephone rang without answer. Then, while his wife phoned the police, Burdettte ran to his neighbour’s home. By the time he reached her door, the occupants of several squad cars were already approaching the premises. The first officer to reach Mrs Schwob, Sergeant Richard Gaines, later described what he saw:

I climbed in through the kitchen window, over the kitchen counter, had my flashlight. I started going through the house room by room, without turning on any lights, using only my flashlight. And after about two minutes, I got to the back of the house and looked in through the bedroom door and saw Mrs Schwob, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had a stocking wrapped around her neck; it was hanging down between her legs, also laying on the floor was a screwdriver. Then I went over to where she was and when she saw me she said, ‘I thought you were him coming back.’ And then she said, ‘He’s still here, he’s still in the house.’ And I went over and I checked the necklace – I mean the strangling – the stocking that was wrapped around her neck to make sure it was not too tight, and it was loose.

Gaines and his colleagues checked the rest of the house. But Mrs Schwob was mistaken. The stocking strangler had gone.

The Columbus newspapers published next day, 12 February, warmly celebrated Mrs Schwob’s survival. Like Kathleen Woodruff, she was a very prominent citizen and patron of the arts. For twenty years after the death of her husband, Simon, in 1954, she had continued to run his textile firm, Schwob Manufacturing, and continued as board chairman emeritus until it was sold in 1976. In 1966 she was Columbus’s Woman of the Year, and her other accolades included the local Sertoma Service to Mankind Award. She was, reported the Ledger, ‘credited with almost single-handedly raising more than $500,000 for the $1.5 million fine arts building at Columbus College’, which was named after her husband.

Ruth Schwob, the Ledger said, had survived the attack because she was a regular jogger and unusually fit for her age.

I just awakened and he was there. He was on the bed and had his hand on my throat and wrapped pantyhose all the way around. Then he pulled the thing tightly round my neck. He had a mask on his face, I think he had gloves on, and it was dark in my room. There was no flesh showing, and he never uttered a sound. It was quite a struggle. I fought like a tiger. He choked me so bad, I passed out. I think the police just missed him. I don’t know how long he was in the house or whether he was gone before the police arrived.

After her rescue, the police sealed off the surrounding streets as officers combed the earth for a scent with bloodhounds and a helicopter equipped with floodlights hovered overhead. There were shoe tracks leading from Schwob’s kitchen window, where the strangler had forced his entry with the screwdriver found by her bed. But once again, he escaped. ‘If he doesn’t have knowledge of the area,’ the task force leader Ronnie Jones told the Ledger, ‘then he’s mighty damn lucky.’

Having found Mrs schwob, and having failed to find the strangler, Jones and his staff assumed that he had left the area. In fact, he merely fled two blocks to 1612 Forest Avenue, a house diagonally opposite the Illges castle. It was not until 11.30 in the morning of the following day, 12 February, that Judith Borom called on her way to church to check on the woman who lived there, her mother-in-law Mildred, a lone widow, aged seventy-eight. Earlier that day Judith’s husband, Perry Borom, had been discussing Mildred’s safety with his business partner, George C. Woodruff Junior, Kathleen Woodruff’s son. ‘I was telling him, “I’m really worried about your mama,”’ Woodruff told reporters later. ‘He said he’d sent a man out to put screws in the window to keep it closed.’

Judith was with her three children. She parked her car in the back yard, and rang the back doorbell. There was no answer, but she could hear the television playing. She told her son to go round to the front while she tried to peer into Mildred’s bedroom, at the building’s side. Then she heard the boy screaming: ‘Mama, come here, Mama, come here.’ At the front of the house a plate-glass window had been broken, and the front door was ajar, wedged open with a piece of carpet. Judith called the police. Mildred’s body, raped and strangled with cord from a Venetian blind, was lying on the hall floor. The autopsy reports suggested that she was being murdered at the very time that dozens of police were keeping busy at Ruth Schwob’s house two blocks away, and the bloodhounds and helicopter were conducting their futile search of the neighbourhood.

As usual, the task-force leader Ronnie Jones was among the first on the scene. At the sight of the killer’s sixth victim, he collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably. ‘Ronald had begun to take it personally,’ Detective Luther Miller, who now took over his responsibilities, later recalled. ‘He felt like it was his responsibility to stop the strangler. He had – we had all been working day and night to protect these women. He started thinking it was his fault each time one was found dead. It was just an emotional breakdown. Chief McClung decided he needed a break.’

The CPD’s relationship with Columbus’s eccentric coroner, Donald Kilgore, remained somewhat strained. On the day after Mildred Borom’s killing, it took another turn for the worse. Fibres found on her body, Kilgore told reporters, were ‘black, Negroid, pubic hairs’. Kilgore, it will be recalled, was a mortician, without scientific training. At the time he made this controversial pronouncement, proper forensic examination of the corpse and the crime scene had barely begun. Presumably, Kilgore had noticed that the hairs were dark and curly.

Four days after the discovery of Mildred Borom’s body, the Columbus police turned for help to the realm of the spirits. At the behest of Detective Commander Herman Boone, two officers took John G. Argeris, a well-known psychic who was said to have helped police solve crimes in New England, on a drive through Wynnton. Argeris, the officers’ report stated, ‘determined that the suspect lives in the area … The suspect was also determined, without a doubt, to be a white male, with large eyes, having a full beard. Suspect either has money or his family is considered well-to-do. Argeris determined that the suspect has the initial “J” … Argeris further stated that “J” should stand for John.’

The pressure on the cops was already almost intolerable, but on 1 March it grew still more severe. Police Chief McClung received a letter, signed ‘Chairman, Forces of Evil’, purportedly a white vigilante group, saying that if the strangler were not caught before the beginning of June, a black woman named Gail Jackson, whom the group had already kidnapped, would be murdered. If the strangler were still at large in September, the letter went on, ‘the victims will double … Don’t think we are bluffing.’ Gail Jackson, it rapidly became apparent, was indeed missing.

With commendable sang froid, McClung separated the ‘Forces of Evil’ investigation from the stranglings case. Eventually, after the receipt of further letters that demanded a $10,000 ransom, the FBI’s psychological profilers suggested that the author of the letters was black, and that Gail Jackson was probably already dead. They were right on both counts. The ‘chairman’ of ‘Forces of Evil’ was an African-American soldier from Fort Benning named William Henry Hance, and he had killed Jackson and two other women. Towards the end of 1978 he was convicted and sentenced to death. Twelve years later he died in Georgia’s electric chair.

Perhaps the night of the terrors scared even the strangler. For his last murder, he moved out of Wynnton, to Steam Mill Road, a mile and a half away. There, on 20 April 1978, eight months after his first attack, he killed Janet Cofer, aged sixty-one, a teacher at an elementary school. Her son, who normally lodged with her, had been away for the evening. And then, without apparent explanation, the stocking stranglings stopped.

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.

In 1977, the autumn of the stranglings, Sanderson was living near Dadeville, Alabama, where he owned and ran a store. On 7 October he and his wife came to Columbus for a family party, and spent the night at the house shared by Sanderson’s octogenarian mother, Nellie Sanderson, and her elder sister, Callye J. East. It lay on Eberhart Avenue, in the heart of Wynnton, a short walk from the homes where Ferne Jackson and Jean Dimenstein had recently been murdered. Late that night, the house was burgled.

The intruder first tried and failed to get in through Nellie Sanderson’s bedroom window, and then succeeded via the kitchen. But the room he entered next contained not a vulnerable old woman, but the sleeping figures of Mr Sanderson and his wife. Before departing, the burglar removed Sanderson’s trousers from the chair by his bed. Next morning, Sanderson said later, ‘I got up and started to put my pants on and couldn’t find them.’ His wallet, which contained his banking cards and $60 in cash, had been in a pocket, together with the keys to his Toyota car, which was missing from the place he’d parked it outside. A few days later the police found the car, abandoned. The thief had gone through the glove compartment, removing some gasoline credit cards and Henry Sanderson’s weapon – a blue-steel .22 Ruger automatic.

Nine months later, in July 1978, the then-CPD chief Curtis McClung addressed a press conference about the Ruger. There was, he admitted, ‘absolutely no evidence that the strangler committed this particular burglary’. He had never used a gun against any of his victims, and the Eberhart Avenue intruder left no fingerprints or other physical clues. But the burglary had been in Wynnton, and just possibly, McClung said, it had been the strangler’s work: ‘We are asking for the public’s help in this matter because the gun could not be recovered through the normal investigative process.’

Back then, Detective Sellers had been assigned to the pawnshop detail – a long way down the police hierarchy from investigating serial murder. By 1984 he had been promoted to sergeant, and had made the robbery-homicide division, the CPD’s elite.

‘I’d made a promise,’ Sellers told me portentously. ‘I was in the mall one day, at J.C. Penney, and I ran into Cindy Scheible. I knew her from school, and [the strangler’s third victim] Florence Scheible was her grandma. It must have been four or five years after her death. I said to her, “Cindy, someone killed your grandmother, and I am going to find him.” After I’d cleared it [solved the case] I saw her again and she reminded me: “You said you’d find him, and you did.”’

Meanwhile, Henry Sanderson had moved to Allen, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. But on the morning of 15 March 1984, Sellers told me, Sanderson dialled the CPD number and spoke to him. ‘He calls and he says, “I’ve been looking for a .22 Ruger,”’ Sellers said. ‘He said the reason he was calling us was someone had phoned him from the Police Department and left a message that said we had the gun.’

Sellers took down the serial number and told Sanderson he’d look into it. Under normal circumstances, he might not have been interested, but Ruger automatics were big news in Columbus that week in 1984. Four days earlier, a police officer, Charles Bowen, had been shot twice in the face and killed by a robber armed with a Ruger after a car chase. Sellers discussed the phone call with Charlie Rowe, a detective colleague who’d been on the stranglings task force. When he mentioned the weapon, Rowe said later, ‘something clicked’. He told Sellers: ‘That’s the gun stolen at Callye East’s house.’ Sellers quickly discovered two things. The first was that no one at the CPD seemed to know anything about the gun’s current whereabouts. The second was that none of his colleagues had called and left a message for Henry Sanderson.

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