A native of Columbus, Georgia, born December 15, 1952, Gary was blessed with a near-genius IQ, but that gift of nature was cruelly balanced by the rigors of childhood and adolescence. Rejected by his father at an early age, Gary was malnourished as a child, and he suffered at least one serious head trauma in elementary school, knocked cold in an accident that left him unconscious on the playground. A heavy drug abuser in his teens, he began logging arrests in 1966, his rap sheet listing charges of robbery, arson, and assault before he reached his eighteenth birthday.

Gary surfaced in Albany, New York, during the spring of 1970, in time for a series of rape-murders targeting elderly women. In May, Marion Brewer was strangled with a pillow case in her Albany hotel room, followed two months later by 85-year-old Nellie Farmer, slain in a nearby apartment. Gary was arrested as a suspect in the latter case, and he admitted being on the scene, but he fingered an accomplice -- John Lee Williams -- as the killer. Williams was convicted and sentenced to prison on the basis of Gary's testimony, his verdict subsequently overturned after Gary recanted. Escaping prosecution for the murder, Gary was convicted of burglary, receiving stolen property, and possession of drugs, drawing a term in the Onondaga County Correctional Institution at Janesville, New York. He escaped from custody on August 22, 1977, and headed home to launch a one-man reign of terror.

On September 16, 60-year-old Ferne Jackson was raped, beaten and strangled to death at her home in the Wynnton district of Columbus, Georgia, found with a, nylon stocking knotted tight around her neck. The same M.0. was demonstrated nine days later and a few blocks distant, in the slaying of 71-year-old Jean Dimenstein Florence Scheible, age 89, who was killed in identical fashion on October 21, and 69-year-old Martha Thurmond who died the same way, two days later. On October 28, 74-year-old Kathleen Woodruff was raped, beaten, and manually strangled at home, her slayer forgetting the traditional stocking in his haste to escape. Ruth Schwob survived the "Stocking Strangler's" attack on February 12, 1978, triggering a bedside alarm, but the killer was determined, traveling a mere two blocks before he raped and strangled 78-year-old Mildred Borom the same morning. By early March, police knew they were searching for a black man in the string of homicides, and since his victims had been white, a threat of mounting racial violence dogged investigators on the job. They were distracted, later in the month, by threatening communications from another killer -- self-styled "Chairman of the Forces of Evil" -- who threatened to murder selected black women if the strangler was not swiftly apprehended. Three deaths would be traced to the "chairman" before his arrest on April 4, but prosecution of the Stocking Strangler's competition brought police no closer to their man. On April 20, the killer claimed his final victim in Columbus, strangling 61-year-old Janet Cofer in her home, leaving the usual stocking knotted around her neck.

A week later, on April 27, 1978, Greenville, South Carolina experienced the first in a series of armed robberies by the "Steakhouse Bandit," a gunman who invaded restaurants near closing time. Eight months passed before Carlton Gary was arrested in nearby Gaffney, following a similar holdup, and he confessed to the entire series, drawing a sentence of 21 years in prison for armed robbery. Transferred to a minimum-security prison at Columbia, four years later, he escaped from custody on March 15, 1983. Another fourteen months would pass before Gary's ultimate arrest, on May 3, 1984, at a motel in Albany, Georgia. Held as a fugitive from South Carolina, and linked with an October 1977 burglary in Columbus, Gary was charged with the Scheible, Thurmond, and Woodruff murders on May 4. A jury convicted him of all counts in August 1986, deliberating for three hours before his penalty was fixed at death.