Carlton Michael Gary (September 24, 1950 – March 15, 2018)[1] was an American serial killer who murdered three elderly women in Columbus, Georgia, and one in Syracuse, New York, between 1975 and 1978, though he is suspected of at least four more killings.

"[3][4][5] After Gary attempted an assault on a third elderly woman, he was arrested and his fingerprints matched one left at the scene of the Farmer murder.

Gary admitted having taken part in a robbery, but he claimed that an accomplice, John Lee Mitchell, was responsible for the actual murder.

[2] Gary was charged only with robbery, a sentence he served in the Onondaga County Correctional Institution in Jamesville, New York.

The two survivors were not able to identify Gary positively, as the crimes occurred in the dark; at least one victim was sure that her attacker was a mustachioed black male, and she was strangled with a scarf.

Gary was never charged for any of these crimes, but was instead sent back to prison for parole violation and robbery after he was caught trying to sell coins stolen from the same apartment building as one of the surviving Syracuse victims.

On August 22, 1977, Gary escaped from his low-security prison by sawing through the bars of his cell and made it back to Columbus, Georgia.

[2] One month after his escape, on September 16, 1977, he raped, beat and strangled 60-year-old Ferne Jackson to death with a nylon stocking at her home in the Wynnton district of Columbus.

Things became more complicated when a man calling himself the "Chairman of the Forces of Evil" threatened to murder selected black women if the Stocking Strangler was not stopped.

This turned out to be an African-American male named William Henry Hance, who was trying to cover up three murders of his own by putting the blame onto white vigilantes.

According to a group of supporters and a book by investigative journalist David Rose, Gary's lawyer was refused state funding to carry out a defense.

[13] A key witness for the prosecution — Gertrude Miller, a woman who testified that Gary had raped her — had initially told prosecutors that she had been asleep and her bedroom had been dark at the time of the assault and she could not describe nor identify her attacker.

[14] The prosecution also withheld scientific evidence that killer was a 'non-secretor' i.e. someone who did not secrete his blood group marker in bodily fluids like semen.

[15] Rose's book also links prosecutors, judges and police who worked on the case to a whites-only organization called The Big Eddy Club and traces the history of racial injustice in Columbus, including the role of the judge's family members in lynchings and other injustices in the city.

The prosecutor for Onondaga County, New York declined to charge Gary since he was already on death row and extraditing him would present an escape risk.

[16] On December 1, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Gary's latest appeal, clearing the way for an execution date to be set.