onday, June 4th, 2007
An Innocent Man on Death Row in Georgia? British Journalist David Rose
on the Case of Carlton Gary and the "Stocking Stranglings"

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In 1986 Gary was convicted and sentenced to death for three murders
despite no physical evidence that tied him to the crimes. Last week a
federal judge upheld his conviction despite new evidence that casts
doubt on his conviction. David Rose examines Gary's case in his new
book "The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern
Justice." [includes rush transcript]

A man who has been sitting on death row for over two decades was
denied a new trial last week in a highly publicized and controversial
case known as "the Stocking Stranglings."

The case dates back to the late 1970s when a serial killer in
Columbus, Georgia, raped and murdered several elderly white women by
strangling them in their beds. In 1986, eight years after the last
murder, an African American man, Carlton Gary, was convicted and
sentenced to death for three of the murders. No physical evidence was
ever produced to tie him to the crimes. Gary has been on death row
ever since.

In 2005, a new piece of evidence that had been missing for 25, a bite-
mark mold taken from the last victim, was presented. Gary's attorney
argued that the mold did not match his teeth and it was evidence that
pointed to his client's innocence. But last Wednesday, U.S. District
Court Judge Clay Land ruled that the mold doesn't cast enough doubt on
Gary's case to undermine the 1986 conviction. Carlton Gary's case now
goes to the 11th circuit court of appeals in Atlanta.

Award-winning journalist David Rose has followed this case for more
than ten years and has just published the book "The Big Eddy Club: The
Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice." David Rose is a
contributing editor at Vanity Fair and has worked for The Guardian,
The Observer, and the BBC. He is the author of five previous books,
including "Guantanamo."

David Rose joined me in the firehouse studio last week - just two days
before Judge Land's latest ruling on the bite-mark mold - to talk
about the case and the significance of this piece of evidence.

    * David Rose, British journalist and author of the "The Big Eddy
Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice."

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

 David Rose joined me in the firehouse studio last week just two days
before Judge Land's latest ruling on the bite-mark mold to talk about
the case and the significance of this piece of evidence.

      DAVID ROSE: Right now, the case is at an absolutely critical
stage. Perhaps the most important piece of evidence that I've dug up
is a bite cast made from the killer's teeth. The story behind this is
extraordinary. At the trial, the defense attorney, Bud Siemon, who had
no money, could see from the photo of one of the victims, Janet Cofer,
that she had been bitten savagely by the murderer, and there was a
very distinctive pattern of tooth marks on her breast. And so, he
asked the judge, "Can we get an expert to compare this photo with
Carlton Gary's teeth?" because it looked like, you know, these teeth
were very jumbled up. And Carlton Gary was a very good-looking guy.
Unlike most serial killers, he had a number of successful
relationships with women. He had even worked as a model. At the time
of these murders, he was appearing five times a night on television
modeling clothes. And I've always thought that makes him unique among
alleged serial killers, that he was actually, you know -- it's very
easy to identify someone if you've seen him on TV. You don't have to
give a vague description to the cops. You say, "It's that guy, the guy
who's in those commercials."

      Well, of course, nothing happened with that at the trial, but
then, later, in the '90s, the defense attorney who represented him at
his state appeal, Jeff Ertel, thought he'd revisit this issue, and he
went to Atlanta -- or he lived in Atlanta -- he found that in Atlanta
was an expert in the field of forensic odontology called Thomas David,
and he might be able to compare the photo with the bite -- with
Carlton Gary's bite. And, well, he called Dr. David, and he said, "I
know about this case. Come and see me straightaway."

      And it turned out that Ricky Boren, the former chief detective
of Columbus, now the chief of police; the District Attorney Bill
Smith, at the time, and his assistant Doug Pullen -- both men now are
superior court judges -- had come to see him before Carlton Gary's
trial with a cast that had been made by a local dentist of the
killer's teeth. And they said to him, "If this matches our suspect,
you know, is this good evidence? Can you testify that this means he's
the killer?" And he said, "Yeah. That's pretty good. If that matches,
you have the right guy." And then they said -- very strange question
-- they said, "And if it doesn't match, would you be able to testify
that this doesn't necessarily exclude him?" And he said, "No, no. If
that doesn't match him, you have the wrong man. This would exclude
him." And they said, "Just forget this meeting ever happened. Don't
tell anybody about it."

      Well, years passed, he told the defense. The defense contacted
the dentist in Columbus who had made the bite. Very strangely, he told
them that the cops had given it back to him. They hadn't kept it in an
exhibit store, this potentially critical piece of evidence. They had
given it back to him. And he said, "Well, can I come and see it?" And
the dentist, Carlos Galbreath, said, "Sure, come by next week." Well,
Jeff Ertel, the defense lawyer, and a colleague went to see the
dentist. And he said, "I'm so sorry. I can't find it. I think I
destroyed it five years ago." And that seemed to be the end of the
matter.

      But then, a number of years ago, about 2001, I went to see the
dentist. And I said, "Dr. Galbreath, what happened with that bite
cast? Why did you destroy it?" And he looked at me, and he said, "I
didn't destroy it. I know it's still in existence." And I said, "Well,
why did you say you couldn't find it back in the early '90s?" And he
said, "Well, you see, the district attorney at the time, Doug Pullen,
he's my best buddy. We go bird shooting every Sunday, we have done for
the last thirty years." And he showed me. He had blown the top of
three of his fingers off bird shooting with Doug Pullen. And that's
why he had shut down his practice. And he said, "When the defense
attorney called me, I called Doug, and I said, 'Doug, what shall I do?
This guy wants to come and see the bite cast.'" And Doug, he said,
told him, "You tell him any story you want, but don't let him see that
bite cast. Tell him" -- a very strange phrase, I don't know quite what
it means -- he said, "Tell him his reputation precedes him and he
can't see the bite cast."

      Astonishingly, he repeated this in an affidavit, and this was
filed with the federal court. And then this hunt began for the bite
cast. And all kinds of people testified that they couldn't find it.
The dentist said he had given it to the coroner, who had in fact
passed away. His family said they couldn't find it, although they said
they remembered seeing it. They said he used to take it out and show
visitors and say, "These are the Stocking Strangler's teeth." But it
was going nowhere.

      And then, finally, at the end of 2005, at a point when Carlton
Gary's case had left the district court -- it was now in the 11th
Circuit, he had lost the first stage of his federal appeal, it wasn't
looking good for him -- it was just a few days before he was due in
the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta for what would have been probably
his last appeal, suddenly the assistant attorney general of Georgia,
Susan Boleyn, who conducts death penalty appeals on behalf of the
state, called Carlton Gary's lawyers and said, "The folks in Columbus
have found that bite cast."

      All last year, it was an analyzed, and Dr. David, the same
expert, photographed it from every which way under a high-resolution
microscope. He made a cast of Carlton Gary's teeth. And finally, on
February the 14th of this year, there was an evidentiary hearing in
Columbus at which the expert testified that this bite cast excluded
him to a level of reasonable scientific certainty. And we're waiting
for the judge.

      And there is another aspect to this, which is just
extraordinary. In my book, I've not just talked about the case. I've
talked about the whole kind of history of race relations in Columbus,
Georgia. And I've gone back to even before the Civil War and shown, I
think, how that history of violence and racism and oppression has fed
into this case. But there is one incredible thread that runs through
it, which is the role of a single family, begins with a man called
Aaron Brewster Land, who was responsible for two absolutely horrendous
lynchings in the early part of the 1900s. We move to his son, John
Land. John Land covers up the death of the black civil rights leader
in Columbus, Thomas H. Brewer, in 1956, and he then makes the
decisions in Carlton Gary's case, by the time of which, of course,
he's become a judge. He had been the district attorney in '56. He
makes the decisions, which deny Carlton Gary funding for his trial.
And now it's his great-nephew who is the federal judge, who holds
Carlton Gary's fate in his hand. It's Judge Clay Land of the federal
court of Columbus who now has to decide whether to give him a new
trial. So there's this extraordinary continuity of more than a
century, and this one family kind of represents this. And it's down to
Clay Land to decide whether to do the right thing.

AMY GOODMAN: David Rose, investigative reporter, author of The Big
Eddy Club. We'll come back to him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with the award-winning
Vanity Fair reporter, David Rose, about his new book, The Big Eddy
Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice, about the death
row case of Carlton Gary. I asked David to go back to the '70s and lay
out the story.

      DAVID ROSE: Well, the Stocking Stranglings was a serial killing
spree in the late 1970s in eight months in Columbus, Georgia, a very
conservative city in the deep South, about a hundred miles south of
Atlanta. Seven elderly, mainly rich, white women, who lived alone,
were brutally raped and strangled, mostly with their own stockings, by
a serial killer, whom the police seemed completely unable to
apprehend. He seemed to be able to rampage through an upscale white
neighborhood known as Wynnton with complete impunity. And for many
years, the police had no really viable suspects, until finally in 1984
they arrested a guy called Carlton Gary, who was no poster boy. He, by
his own admission, had a criminal record of some length, but he had
always maintained he had never committed any violent crimes. And in
1986 he was convicted and sentenced to death, and he's on death row
now, twenty-one years later.

      AMY GOODMAN: How was he picked up?

      DAVID ROSE: Well, that is a very interesting and complicated
process. But the cop who probably can claim to have solved the crime
more than anybody else, a man called Detective Michael Sellers, looked
me in the eye in a hotel in Gwinnett County, north of Atlanta, and
said that his investigation began with a phone call from God.

      The simple answer is there is no clear reason why they picked on
him as a suspect, other than the fact that he had been involved in a
crime in Albany, New York, in Upstate New York in 1970, where an
elderly woman was raped and strangled, although he had always
maintained that he had not committed this crime, that he had only
acted as the lookout. Indeed, he wasn't charged with this murder;
another guy was.

      When he came to his trial in Columbus, Georgia, the district
attorney there, Bill Smith, said that in fact he had committed this
murder, although he couldn't produce any evidence that this was in
fact the case. I've since found evidence to show that it's quite clear
that he didn't, in the form of footprints that the killer left in the
murdered woman's apartment and forensic tests that were done on those
footprints by the scientists in New York in 1970. And what they showed
is that the killer there had size 9.5 shoes, whereas Carlton Gary has
size 13.5 or 14 shoes. He has unusually large feet. So there's good
reason to suppose that he didn't do that murder, but belief that he
had was really why Columbus Police Department made him a suspect. And
then there was, as I say, this mysterious phone call from God to the
detective, which put him on the scent.

      AMY GOODMAN: Talk more about how they picked Carlton Gary up,
what role he played in the community. And then talk about the
community and the response and how the investigation went on for eight
years.

      DAVID ROSE: Well, Carlton Gary was born in Columbus, and he
lived there 'til he was thirteen years old, and then his mother moved
to Florida, and so he left the city. He had a pretty itinerant
lifestyle in his late teens. He was a musician for a time. He was
working in a variety of jobs in Upstate New York and other places in
the sort of Northeast. And he also was committing crimes. He was, as I
say, convicted of this robbery, as being an accomplice of the killer
in Albany, and he went to prison for about five years for that. But he
made his way back to Columbus, Georgia, in the early fall of 1977 and
just before, or maybe just after, the Stocking Strangling murders
began.

      Now, he continued to live in Columbus for about a year after
they finished. There's a myth that's very widespread down there, which
says, oh, well, the murders began when he moved back to Columbus, and
they stopped when he left. In fact, that's not true. He was living in
Columbus for longer after the murders ended than the entire period of
the murders.

      But in 1979, in the spring of 1979, he was arrested in South
Carolina trying to rob a fast-food restaurant in a rather inept
fashion. He held a gun to the cashier, and she said, "I don't believe
that gun's loaded," which indeed it wasn't. Then he ran out the back
into a swamp and was arrested in rather deep water by the police. And
I think he was worried that an alligator might be about to eat him.

      So, you know, he looked like a plausible suspect. I think what
probably happened is that the South Carolina authorities, when he left
prison in 1984, before his arrest, told the Columbus Police Department
that he might be headed their way, as indeed he was. And I think what
probably happened is that this detective thought, "Hmmm, look at his
record. Maybe he's the Stocking Strangler murderer."

      But what is very much the case, of course, is that these murders
were the most enormous blow to the community of Columbus. They were
happening in an all-white upscale neighborhood, and the police seemed
completely unable to do anything to prevent them from happening. And
there was really a reign of terror for the period of those killings.
The area was swamped with cops, with state troopers, with soldiers
from Fort Benning, the nearby military base, and, as I say, nothing
seemed to be able to stop this guy from killing.

      I think there's a real possibility that the killer was actually
white, because this is an all-white neighborhood. I think any African
American insinuating himself into that neighborhood at night and
trying to break into women's homes would have been easily apprehended,
whereas they weren't looking for a white person. Incidentally, the
reason they believed that the killer was black was because the local
coroner, who actually had no training as a mortician -- sorry, he had
training as a mortician, but not as a doctor, as a pathologist, any
kind of forensic scientist -- but he told the cops that pubic hairs
found at the crime scenes displayed what he called "Negroid
characteristics," by which he meant they were black and curly, and
perhaps he had never seen a white person with black and curly pubic
hair.

      But in any event, the police were convinced that the killer was
black. And, of course, in the deep South, especially in the 1970s, I
mean, this added an enormous charge. The fact that an African American
was violating vulnerable, elderly white women, the racial dimension to
that gave these crimes an even greater impact.

      AMY GOODMAN: Criticism of you in the Ledger-Enquirer in
Columbus, the author talks about how, for a couple hundred pages, you
didn't say you were a paralegal in this case. Talk about your access
to this case -- were you a paralegal? -- and your interviews with
Carlton Gary.

      DAVID ROSE: Well, for a long time, I got drawn into this slowly
from about 1996. And as soon as I looked at this case, I thought it
just stank. I had actually gone to Georgia initially to write an
article for a British newspaper about the death penalty. And I went to
Columbus, because Columbus had sent more people to death row than
anywhere else in Georgia and indeed, per capita, may well have sent
more people to death row than anywhere else in the United States.

      And, you know, I had begun to find out about the case, and all
kinds of things intrigued me. One of the most extraordinary things is
that the defense had absolutely no money. They had no funding at all,
by which to defend Carlton Gary. And, of course, this was a very
complex case with all kinds of scientific evidence that has turned out
to be extremely questionable. But a senior judge, the chief judge at
the circuit, a guy called John Land, who had a very interesting family
background, had made decisions which meant he had no funding.

      And so, as I started gradually to get drawn in -- I went to
visit Carlton many times; I mean, I think I've seen him ten times now
-- I began to dig up evidence that further undermined the
prosecution's case, which -- beyond what had already come out at his
state appeals. He was now in the federal court in his federal habeas
corpus appeal. And I felt that if I was coming up with evidence that
could exonerate this man, I had a simple moral duty to share it with
the defense. It would be wrong to stack up evidence over perhaps a
period of years, as indeed turned out to be the case. I was working on
this for about nine years, which were then -- if I didn't give it to
the lawyers, they might miss a filing deadline. He could literally be
executed on a technicality, in a sense. There could be evidence out
there, which might well have got him a new trial, but he wouldn't get
one, because his lawyers had not filed it in time. So I said, "Look,
I'm basically working as an investigator here. Why don't you make me
officially a paralegal investigator?" And I've been completely
transparent about this. Well, OK, I mentioned it on page 200, but
that's just where it happens in the narrative. And, you know --

      AMY GOODMAN: It also gave you access to Carlton Gary.

      DAVID ROSE: Well, it gave me much better access to him. It meant
that when I went in to see -- I mean, you can go into death row as a
friend, as a visitor, but you can't take any notes. So, you know, I
would go in and see him, and he would pour out this story, tumbling
out, desperate to tell me about his life. I'd just be trying to
remember it, and I'd get out into the parking lot, and I'd be
scribbling notes. Once I was going in as a paralegal, I could take in
documents, he could give me documents, and I could take notes. And I
could do other things. On one occasion, I smuggled out his semen from
death row.

      AMY GOODMAN: How did you do this?

      DAVID ROSE: Well, I gave him an envelope and a piece of paper
and some cling wrap, and I said, "I'm going out for lunch. I'll come
back this afternoon. You produce a semen sample in your cell, and I'll
collect it later." And then, when I did that, I gave him another
envelope, and I said, "Pluck some hairs from your head in front of me,
so I can then do a DNA cross match between the hairs -- the hair roots
and the semen, prove it's your semen, and then we can test the semen."

      Now, I should say, we couldn't do a DNA test. We couldn't just,
you know, send off his semen and compare it with the crime scene
samples, because the state claimed -- and indeed the former district
attorney of Columbus, now a superior court judge, Doug Pullen,
actually testified in his state appeal -- that the semen samples from
the crime scenes had been destroyed, because they were, as he put it,
a biohazard.

      But what you could do was another kind of testing. In the 1970s,
when these crimes happened, they did this thing called serology
typing. Most people are what are called secreters. That means that in
their other bodily fluids, such as semen or saliva, they excrete or
secrete the blood group chemical, the antigen that defines you as
blood group O, blood group A, and so forth. And it was quite clear
from the tests that the killer was a non-secreter. They had tested
Carlton Gary's saliva when they arrested him, and he, equally clearly,
was a blood group O secreter.

      Well, the state's expert at the trial said, "Well, maybe he just
changed over time, or maybe he was a secreter in his saliva but not
his semen." And, of course, the defense, which had no money at the
trial, couldn't challenge this. They couldn't call an expert to delve
into this deeper. And, in fact, you read the transcript, they're
begging the judge for funds, and he won't give it to them. So the
state was still sticking to this position in the federal court. And
so, I conducted this test to see if he really was a secreter in his
semen, and, of course, he was actually found to be secreting about
10,000 as much of the chemical as the killer was.

      AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to David Rose, author of The Big Eddy
Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice. David is a
contributing editor at Vanity Fair and has worked at various British
papers, The Guardian, The Observer, worked also with the BBC. Well,
the title of your book is The Big Eddy Club. Talk about the Big Eddy
Club.

      DAVID ROSE: Well, the Big Eddy Club is a venerable institution
for Columbus's elite. It stands in a beautiful location on the
Chattahoochee River, a promontory between the main river, which is
damned at that point, and a tributary, Standing Boy Creek. It was
founded by a wealthy industrialist in 1920 to provide a retreat for
Columbus's richest families. And Columbus is a very wealthy place; it
always has been. It's, you know, the place where Coca-Cola was
financed. It's the home of AFLAC, the huge insurance company, of the
CB&T Bank, of other big corporations.

      And the Big Eddy Club, until 2006, was an all-white institution.
And five of the victims of these murders were either members of the
club or very regular visitors, as were all the senior white officials
who were involved in prosecuting and trying Carlton Gary. And so,
although I'm not suggesting that the club actually has a sort of
functional role in the case, it's kind of symbolic of the way that
things have been done in Columbus for a very long time. And also the
fact that it has now admitted an African American member, I think, is
also evidence that Columbus, like many places in the South, is now
beginning to change. In fact, arguably, I think, the criminal justice
system there is one of the most resilient bastions of kind of old
South values. It's most resistant to try to, well, perhaps come into
the twenty-first century. But the club, you know, it's a place where
people mingle and network. And you have to wonder whether, you know,
the fact that these women were members of the club and the officials
who prosecuted Carlton Gary were, too, if that added yet another edge
to the way that they prosecuted the case.

AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning Vanity Fair reporter David Rose, talking
about the Carlton Gary case, his new book, The Big Eddy Club: The
Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice. And we'll continue to
follow that case.

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