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

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       FOUR Dragnet

      The first time I met the blues mama,

      They came walking through the woods

      The first time I met the blues baby,

      They came walking through the woods

      They stopped by at my house first mama,

      And done me all the harm they could.

      The blues got at me

      Lord they ran me from tree to tree

      The blues got at me

      Lord they ran me from tree to tree

      You shoulda heard me beggin’,

      ’Mister blues, don’t murder me.’

      ‘The First Time I Met the Blues’,

      ’LITTLE BROTHER’ MONTGOMERY (1906–85)

      Even the greatest detectives rarely solve their cases on their own. They need tip-offs, informants, steers from those in the know, especially when the trail they have to follow is cold. One chilly evening in April 2001, across a table in a chain hotel in Gwinnett County, on the northern edge of the metro Atlanta sprawl, the man who cracked the stocking stranglings leant towards me and lowered his voice. The former Columbus homicide investigator Michael Sellers had already told me that his work on the murders had begun with a mysterious phone call in March 1984, almost six years after the last killing. Now, after five hours’ intense conversation, he felt ready to reveal his own prize source, the starting point of the hunt for Carlton Gary. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘it was a phone call from God.’

      A tall, slim, greying figure, his face dominated by a toothbrush moustache, Sellers was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. Born and raised in Columbus, the son of the city’s former Treasurer, he described himself as part of a new breed of better-educated officer who began to join the CPD in the 1970s: he even had a degree in policing from Troy State University. The pride Sellers took in the work he had done seventeen years earlier was palpable. He carried an ordered folder of photographs and documents, and I had the impression that he had made presentations of his contribution to this case many times before. But Sellers, fifty at the time we met, also seemed suffused by bitterness, much of it directed at his former boss and CPD chief, Jim Wetherington.

      ‘After the trial in 1986, when Carlton Gary had been convicted, Richard Smith put in an application for me to be nominated as Police Officer of the Year with the Police Chiefs’ Association,’ Sellers said. ‘But for it to go forward, Chief Wetherington had to second it. He refused. He said the case had been a team effort.’

      I found it strange that this still rankled after so many years. ‘But surely,’ I asked, ‘bringing Gary to justice was reward enough?’

      Sellers shook his head, colouring. ‘For two years, I’d been assigned to the District Attorney’s office in the Government Center, working up the case. I almost set up home there. I think there was a lot of jealousy from some of the lieutenants and captains. They resented the fact that because I was working on the stranglings, I wasn’t doing any of the John shot Mary cases.

      ‘You know what I found hardest? That no one ever said thank you. After the trial, the DA opened up the grand jury room and allowed me to talk to the media. But when I got back to the office, I got my butt chewed off. And after it was all over, all that I was ever assigned was the crap.’

      In the spring of 1987, less than a year after Gary’s trial, Sellers left Columbus and detective work altogether. When we met, he was earning a higher salary. But instead of solving notorious murders, he was working nights as a Gwinnett Country Patrol Sergeant. I couldn’t help thinking it was really a job for a younger man, physically demanding and dangerous. In 2002 he suffered terrible injuries in a car crash, sustained while chasing a suspect.

      After Janet Cofer’s murder in April 1978, as the strangler’s silence grew from weeks to months, the special police patrols continued, and the stranglings inquiry remained the overwhelming preoccupation of the CPD. There was more to this than the simple horror of leaving such a murderer at liberty. Always in the background was the social position of many of the victims. The venerable business elites of Columbus did not normally concern themselves with criminal justice, and if they thought about it at all, it was merely as a job that had to be done. But a serial killer who had violated and murdered women such as Kathleen Woodruff, and had done so amid the citadels of Wynnton, represented a different level of threat.

      Columbus is a town for joiners, where a person’s position in society is advertised by their memberships of clubs and other organisations. In Wynnton, one of the oldest and swankiest is the Columbus Country Club; further north, on the banks of the Chattahoochee, is the Green Island Club – just as expensive, but burdened СКАЧАТЬ