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