VIOLATION Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep south

Hardback. Over 8 terrifying months in the 1970s, 7 elderly women were raped and murdered in Columbus, Georgia, a city of 200,000 people whose history and conservative values are typical of America's Deep South. The victims, who were strangled in their beds with their own stockings, were affluent and white, while the police believed from an early stage that the killer was black. In 1986, 8yrs after the last murder, an African-American, Carlton Gary, was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death. Though many in Columbus doubted his guilt, he was, at time of publication, still on death row. The award-winning author followed this case for more than a decade, while Gary and his lawyers fought his legal appeals. He uncovered important fresh evidence that was hidden during Gary's trial and that suggests that he was innocent, including a cast of the killer's teeth, made from a savage bite wound in the last victim's breast. However, as the author's investigation proceeded, he came to realise that the dark saga of the Columbus stocking stranglings only made sense against the background of the city's bloodstained history of racism, lynching and unsolved, politically motivated murder. For example, he discovered that a black teenager was brutally lynched in 1912 after he was tried and acquitted of murdering a white boy, who had died in an accident. The judge to whom the Gary case was first assigned in 1984 was the son of the man who led that lynch mob; later, in 2002, his great-nephew took charge of Cary's appeal. Framed by its revelation of two kinds of lynching - one carried out illegally by mobs, the other perpetrated under the cover of law - this book is a tense and gripping drama, its pages filled with evocatively drawn characters, insidious institutions and the extraordinary connections that bind the past and present. Illus. + Maps, Epilogue, Notes on Sources and Index. 350pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. F. in F. dw.