One day before Georgia is scheduled to carry out its first execution of 2018, supporters of convicted serial killer Carlton Gary will ask the state Board of Pardons and Parole to spare his life.
Gary is scheduled to be put to death at 7 p.m. March 15. He was convicted in 1986 for raping and strangling three elderly women with their pantyhose.
Known as the “Stocking Strangler,” Gary has long maintained that someone else killed the women.
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The five-member board will hold two separate hearings on March 14, one will include backers of Gary and the other those who want the state to carry out the execution. Both meetings are closed to the public.
Carlton Gary, now 67, was sentenced in the brutal slayings of three Columbus, Ga. women in the 1970s —Florence Scheible, 89; Martha Thurmond, 70; and Kathleen Woodruff, 74. He also was linked to the deaths of four other older women, who were also strangled with their stockings in their homes in the same neighborhood over a seven-month period that began in September 1977.
Credit: Georgia Department of Correction
Credit: Georgia Department of Correction
Local prosecutors did not charge him with those other four homicides. Gary also was linked to the strangulations of two women in New York earlier in the 1970s but not tried for those murders either.
Gary has remained on Georgia's Death Row for decades primarily because of the extraordinary path his appeals took after newly-discovered physical evidence raised questions about his 1986 conviction.
It was the questions about that DNA evidence that saved him from execution in December 2009. The Georgia Supreme Court stopped his execution with four hours to spare and ordered the court in Muscogee County to consider DNA testing.
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Superior Court Judge Frank Jordan Jr. subsequently allowed the DNA testing and held evidentiary hearings. Last September, Jordan denied Gary's motion for new trial.
Gary’s lawyers filed an appeal, but the state Supreme Court decided not to hear it.
If his execution is carried out as scheduled, Gary will be the first person Georgia has put to death this year.
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