In a month authorities here may know whether crime-scene evidence collected 32 years ago matches convicted Stocking Strangler Carlton Gary’s DNA profile.

District Attorney Julia Slater said she expected to send the evidence today to a Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab in Atlanta, and to have the results within a month. GBI lab technicians will expedite the testing, she said.

If the GBI is unable to draw a DNA profile from the four items the prosecution and defense have agreed to test, then a second laboratory will take a shot at it, said Jack Martin, Gary’s lead defense attorney. That lab belongs to The Bode Technology Group in Lorton, Va. “Since 1998, Bode has delivered over 1 million convicted offender DNA profiles to 26 U.S. states and a number of federal agencies and has completed over 50,000 forensic cases,” says the lab’s Web site.

When the results are in, another court hearing likely will be set to decide the next step in Gary’s case, which as been in appeals since 1986, when he was convicted in three of Columbus’ seven stranglings of 1977 and ’78.

During a Tuesday hearing before Muscogee Superior Court Judge Frank Jordan, Slater twice asked that Gary himself say whether he wanted the DNA testing to proceed. Whether Gary had acquiesced to a Feb. 19 consent agreement specifying which evidence would be tested became an issue later, when his wife, Debra Gary, told reporters her husband had not agreed to the testing and wanted a court hearing on how the tests would be conducted.

Slater asked that Jordan hear directly from Gary after a two-hour delay in Tuesday’s proceedings, during which Gary, speaking privately with his attorneys and with Jordan, reportedly expressed worries about whether the evidence had been tampered with and whether the GBI could be trusted with the testing.

At Slater’s behest, Jordan asked Gary whether he agreed to the testing as outlined in the Feb. 19 consent agreement.

“Other than the concerns I voiced in chambers, yes,” Gary said.

Later Slater again asked Jordan to make sure the court had Gary’s consent.

“Mr. Gary, do you consent to have four items in the order tested?” Jordan asked.

“Yes sir,” Gary answered.

The hearing had been scheduled for 11 a.m., and about 40 people gathered in Jordan’s courtroom on the Columbus Government Center’s 10th floor to watch. Fewer than 30 remained when the hearing finally began at 1:11 p.m. and ended six minutes later.

Among those in the audience was Debra Gary, who said afterward that the family still has concerns about how the DNA testing will be done. She said her husband had no choice but to agree to proceed, because he was told that Jordan had a “death warrant” ready to sign if Gary did not agree.

A death warrant issued by a local Superior Court judge sets the stage for a death-row inmate’s execution. Gary last faced death by lethal injection on Dec. 16 at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, but the state Supreme Court issued a stay that day and ordered the Superior Court here to hold a hearing on DNA testing.

Also at issue in Gary’s case now is a handwritten motion filed in federal court Monday asking for new attorneys. He also asked that a judge other than U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land rule on that motion, claiming Land “has exhibited bias and prejudice.”

Debra Gary said Tuesday that her husband was getting a new attorney, Brian Kammer with Atlanta’s nonprofit Georgia Resource Center, which represents indigent death-row inmates for free. Kammer and Gary Parker, a former Columbus lawyer already aiding Gary’s defense, would take over the case, she said.

But Martin said he and co-counsel Michael McIntyre would continue to represent Gary, with Kammer joining them.

Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker immediately filed a response Tuesday to Gary’s motion for new counsel, arguing Gary’s motion should be denied because the defendant “has no pending action” in federal court, so a federal judge has no jurisdiction over the case currently pending.

The response filed by Baker, Deputy Attorney General Mary Beth Westmoreland and Senior Assistant Attorney General Beth Burton further noted that Gary “is only before the trial court to consent or not consent to the state’s agreement to test the DNA evidence he previously requested to be tested and thus, there are no complex issues or discovery in the trial court, much less before this court.”

Gary did get one thing he wanted Tuesday: His motion for new counsel went not to Land but to Magistrate Judge G. Mallon Faircloth.

The items of evidence specified for DNA testing all were thought to contain sperm, which is durable enough to retain DNA for decades before yielding a profile. Such evidence has exonerated men wrongly convicted of crimes, and confirmed the guilt of others.

The evidence to be DNA-tested is on glass slides, upon which apparent semen samples were smeared as police investigated the slayings of Jean Dimenstein, 71, on Sept. 25, 1977; Florence Scheible, 89, on Oct. 21, 1977; Thurmond, 69, on Oct. 25, 1977; and Kathleen Woodruff, 74, on Dec. 28, 1977.

Gary was convicted of murdering Scheible, Thurmond and Woodruff. Though he was not convicted in the Dimenstein case, investigators believe a single serial killer committed all seven stranglings, and during Gary’s trial, prosecutors used other slayings to show a pattern in the killer’s conduct.