Georgia Plans To Execute Man Known As ‘Stocking Strangler’

Georgia plans to execute an inmate known as the “stocking strangler,” a man convicted of raping and killing older women in attacks that terrorized a small city decades ago.

Carlton Gary, 67, is scheduled to die by injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital Thursday evening at the state prison in Jackson. He would be the first inmate executed by Georgia this year.

Gary was convicted in 1986 on three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary for the 1977 deaths of 89-year-old Florence Scheible, 69-year-old Martha Thurmond and 74-year-old Kathleen Woodruff. Though charged only in those deaths, prosecutors say Gary attacked nine elderly women in the west Georgia city of Columbus from September 1977 to April 1978. Most were choked with stockings, and seven of them died.