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

Leading figures in Columbus’s legal establishment were also club members. There was Judge Mullins Whisnant, District Attorney when the murders took place, and William Smith, his successor, the man in post during the hunt for Carlton Gary, and later the lead prosecution counsel at his trial. The family of Judge Kenneth Followill, who would try the case, were members, as was Robert Elliott, judge of the city’s Federal District Court, who many years later would start to hear one of Gary’s appeals. Successive police chiefs, from Curtis McClung onwards, also dined at the Big Eddy. The pressure these officials felt to find the strangler would have been intense in any case, but the connections they had through their social lives can only have increased it.

Nevertheless, in the absence of further murders, the CPD and the GBI did not have the resources to maintain its huge investigative effort indefinitely. At the end of 1978, eight months after Janet Cofer’s death, the task force was closed. By then, its case file contained more than thirty-five thousand separate documents. The contents of some eleven thousand ‘field interview’ cards, together with details of five thousand vehicles reportedly seen near the murder scenes, had been fed into an IBM computer, the first time such a device had been used by the police in Columbus. The police told reporters they could punch a geographical grid number into the machine, ‘and it will show everyone we stopped in that area’. But no amount of technology could hide the fact that they had no suspect. ‘This has been one of the biggest career disappointments to me,’ the CPD Chief, Curtis McClung, said prosaically. ‘I have this fear that somewhere in all that information we’ve overlooked something.’

The murders had stopped, but there could be no normality until the killer was captured. ‘It’s not over yet,’ wrote the Columbus Enquirer columnist Richard Hyatt on the first anniversary of the strangling of Janet Cofer. He built his article around an interview with an eighty-six-year-old widow from Wynnton, who still kept a loaded gun among her family photographs, next to her rocking-chair. ‘How can it really end until a final chapter is written, until there’s an answer to our questions?’ Hyatt asked. Those responsible for the absence of such answers were already paying with their jobs.

Ronnie Jones, the head of the task force at the time of the murders, resigned from the force in the summer of 1978, claiming that he had been hampered by ‘political interference’. Next to go was Mayor Jack Mickle, who lost a bid for re-election the following autumn to the murdered Ferne Jackson’s nephew, Harry Jackson, after a campaign in which the investigation’s lack of success figured heavily. In 1980, Curtis McClung resigned as chief of the CPD to run for election as Muscogee County Sheriff – only to lose by ten thousand votes to a man who had never held public office. By the end of that year, most of the senior detectives who had worked on the investigation under him had either resigned or been demoted. According to William Winn, in an article for Atlanta magazine, ‘A popular courthouse pastime in Columbus is to attempt to list all the individuals whose careers – lives – were adversely affected by the strangler.’

Occasionally there were hints that the police did have a plausible suspect. In the summer of 1978 a businessman told the police that a young African-American had visited his office, and in the opinion of his female clerical staff, had ‘acted strange’. There was no reason to believe this individual had anything to do with the stranglings, but in its desperation the CPD asked the women to help its artist produce a ‘composite’ sketch of the man they had seen. The sketch depicted a black man with a pointed chin, a curved, somewhat uneven nose, a medium Afro hairstyle and pronounced, bushy eyebrows.

In June 1983, Horice Adams, an African-American aged twenty-four, was arrested and charged in the north Georgia town of Elberton with burgling and attempting to assault an elderly white woman. Having removed her bedroom window screen, he climbed in and began to choke her, but fled when she screamed and rolled off her bed. Three years earlier, Adams had been sentenced to five years in prison for robbing a couple of $15 at a motel and raping the woman, and he had recently been freed on parole. He lived with his mother in Columbus, as he had been doing throughout the months of the murders. With his thick eyebrows and pointed chin, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the composite sketch.

For a few days the city’s media explored the details of Adams’s life, while the Georgia Bureau of Investigation laboratory tested his hair and bodily fluids against the samples left by the strangler. The most telling physical evidence came from the strangler’s semen. Since the late 1980s, police involved in rape investigations have been able to use a powerful new technology, DNA profiling. If semen taken from a victim’s body is uncontaminated, forensic scientists will usually be able to state to a high mathematical probability whether its complex DNA molecules match those in a suspect’s fluids. But even though these techniques had not been invented at the time of the stranglings, investigators did possess an older method that could be very effective – secretor typing. Most people, about four-fifths of the population, are ‘secretors’, meaning that in their saliva, semen and other fluids, they secrete the chemical markers which give away their blood group. A ‘group O secretor’ would be someone from the common O blood group whose semen revealed this fact, because it contained a relatively large amount of the relevant marker.

However, the tests carried out on the stocking strangler’s semen indicated that he was a ‘non-secretor’ – that his body fluids contained only tiny traces of the group O marker. Unfortunately for those who had hoped that the police finally had their killer, Horice Adams turned out to be a regular O secretor. He might have resembled the composite sketch, but he could not be the stocking strangler.

Over the years there had been other ultimately frustrating leads. One of the earliest came even before the last murder, after the night of the terrors. Three days before Ruth Schwob survived the strangler’s attack, she had been burgled by a man she claimed to have recognised – a young white neighbour named Chris Gingell, the son of a local television news anchor. Schwob told the police that she thought it was the same man who had attacked her on the later occasion, and when the cops questioned him about the burglary he failed a polygraph test, although he was never charged. Tests on his hair and serology type – he was a blood group B secretor – appeared to exclude him definitively, but there are some in Columbus who remain convinced that Gingell was the real killer. The unjustified damage to his reputation is not hard to understand. If he, a white man who lived in Wynnton, had been guilty, it would have made two of the case’s abiding mysteries much easier to explain. Even someone like Gingell might have found it hard to evade the police patrols, but for an African-American it would have been close to impossible. Moreover, a local white man would have been more likely to have known the addresses where elderly women lived alone.

Two more possible suspects came to light during the summer of 1978. The first, Wade Hinson, had been arrested for a minor public order violation in Barbour County, Alabama, just across the Georgia state line. Once in jail, he not only confessed to committing the stranglings, he showed the Sheriff and his Deputies how he had killed his victims by ‘throttling’ a door handle with a stocking he carried in his duffle bag. He also threatened to kill the Sheriff’s wife upon his release, saying he had been ‘told by God to take care of old women’.