‘Stocking Strangler’ execution tops Columbus crime news for 2018
Forty years had passed by the time Carlton Gary breathed his last.
When Georgia finally carried out the execution to which a jury sentenced the “Stocking Strangler” in 1986, Columbus was marking the 40th anniversaries of the seven serial killings that terrorized the city from fall 1977 through spring 1978.
Forty years had passed for five of the murders by the time Gary died by lethal injection at the death-row prison in Jackson — those of Mary Willis “Fern” Jackson, 59, on Sept. 16, 1977; Jean Dimenstein, 71, on Sept. 24, 1977; Florence Scheible, 89, on Oct. 21, 1977; Martha Thurmond, 70, on Oct. 25, 1977; and Kathleen Woodruff, 74, on Dec. 28, 1977.
Only two were shy of the four-decade mark: Mildred Borom, 78, on Feb. 12, 1978; and Janet Cofer, 61, on April 20, 1978.
Gary was convicted in the slayings of Scheible, Thurmond and Woodruff, the cases for which police had the strongest evidence, but prosecutors maintained he committed them all, as well as other burglaries and assaults, and a litany of crimes up and down the East Coast.
The killings were particularly brutal: Gary raped and beat and tortured his victims, always choosing older women who lived alone, breaking into their homes, using a ligature to strangle them, and leaving their faces covered.
Police and prosecutors who knew the gruesome details showed no sympathy for the career criminal who so long bedeviled them.
Gary never opened his eyes, nor said a word as corrections officers strapped him to a gurney and medical staff started the IV. Witnesses watching through three windows also said nothing as he yawned and drifted into oblivion.
After doctors pronounced him dead, they covered his face with a sheet.
Gary’s execution for the murders that for decades cast a shroud over Columbus is the Ledger-Enquirer’s top crime story of 2018.
Here are the rest:
The triple-murder trial
Shameika Averett gave voice to more than her grieving family when she posed a question all of Columbus had asked:
Why?
“You destroyed everything! You’ve taken everything from us!” she yelled at Jervarceay Tapley the day he was sentenced to life in prison. “Why? Why, why, why, why?”
Tapley was the longtime family friend who led two other youths to 3057 Bentley Drive, where Averett’s mother Gloria Short, brother Caleb and 10-year-old daughter Gianna were bound with tape and beaten with a bloodied dumbbell on Jan. 4, 2016.
The case went to trial in late January, with only one suspect yet to agree to a guilty plea. A jury convicted him, and the judge set the sentencing for each defendant on April 6, when Averett stood before the court and loosed the outrage she so long had held back.
She spoke directly to Tapley, grandson of a woman her uncle had dated, before he died of a heart attack Jan . 6, 2016, upon hearing of the homicides.
The Shorts had treated Tapley like family: He had spent summers on Bentley Drive, swimming in the Shorts’ backyard pool, and accompanying them on trips to Disney World and to ball games.
After the homicides, he had pretended to grieve with Averett and other mourners, before his arrest.
All the youths gained from the crime were Nike sneakers Caleb collected and other clothes, video games and a console, some cash and assorted change, and two automobiles the teens later abandoned.
For this they at Tapley’s behest had traveled 20 miles from south Columbus to the Upatoi area, first traveling by bicycle and moped, and later taking turns on the moped after the bicycle broke down. For this they had killed three people, ages 54, 17 and 10.
“I have come to this conclusion,” Averett told Tapley. “Monsters do exist. You are a monster, a monster with many faces.”
Judge Gil McBride sentenced Tapley, 20, to life without parole. His co-defendant Rufus Burks, 18, who went to trial, was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences plus 15 years to serve.
The third defendant, Raheam Daniel Gibson, pleaded guilty to simple kidnapping and two counts of auto theft. McBride sentenced him to 10 years on each count, equaling 30 years in prison. Attorneys said Gibson, 21, may be eligible for parole in about 10 years.
At the time of the crimes, Gibson was 19 years old, Tapley was 17, and Burks only 15.
A public killing
It was around 7 p.m. on a Saturday when 18-year-old Destinee Virgin leaped from her Nissan at a red light and ran up Macon Road screaming for help, trying to get into other vehicles.
Racing up behind her was her sometimes boyfriend Markel Ervin, armed with a 9mm pistol, police said. Dozens of witnesses watched in horror as he caught up to her, gunned her down in the street, ran back to the Nissan and sped away, authorities said.
Virgin’s death became more than a stark reminder of the lethal dangers of domestic violence. It made people wonder: What would they have done, had they been stopped at that light in a car Virgin tried to get into? Would they have tried to rescue her? Would they have been shot dead, too?
Virgin was killed Sept. 23. Captured that night in Harris County, Ervin was charged with murder. Born Dec. 20, he just marked his 18th birthday awaiting trial.
A random shooting
Some say random violence is nearly nonexistent, because the victim and the perpetrator almost always know each other. And even when they do not, the victim often has engaged in some risky conduct such as selling drugs or joining gangs.
Often is not always: Some victims have done nothing wrong. They did not know the suspect. They didn’t go anywhere or associate with anyone to place themselves in harm’s way.
Police believe that around 4 p.m. April 28, 74-year-old William Meadows was sitting in his car in his garage at his Alta Vista Drive home when a bullet came through the rear window and hit him behind his right ear.
His body was found about 10:30 a.m. the next day.
Meadows fit no profile to which police were accustomed. Nothing about his life made him a target.
Detectives eventually decided he died in what truly was a random shooting: They alleged Raphael Antwone Raymond, 26, was riding through Meadows’ neighborhood in a car with two others, one of whom was showing Raymond a Canik 9mm pistol that Raymond tested by firing out the car window.
Raymond was skeptical because of the weapon’s polymer frame, which feels like plastic, and he wanted to be sure the gun worked, officers said.
Old and young
Also random was the fatal Sept. 24 stabbing of John Dawson on Victoria Drive.
It was a sunny Monday morning when Dawson, who’d been working in the yard, came in to have some coffee while his wife did laundry in a room off their carport.
His wife came back in to find a wild-eyed man standing in their kitchen. “What are you doing in my house?” she said. “You need to go!” The intruder hit her, knocking her out.
The man went outside, trying to take the couple’s car, and attacked a neighbor who confronted him. Police called to a fight in the street arrested 27-year-old Darius Jamar Travick, a mentally ill man who had wandered away from a neighbor’s house.
Inside Dawson’s home, they found the 89-year-old wife in shock, and her husband, 92, stabbed to death on the living room floor. The couple had been married for 72 years.
Two months later, Columbus would be appalled to hear of another victim’s age, not because he was old, but too young to have threatened anyone.
On Nov. 27, police were called to 6 Stuart Drive, where a father and son were gunned down in the driveway. They identified the father as Joseph Banks, who was 41. His son, Ja’Ceiden Roberts, was only 3.
Police said the Stuart Drive house was vacant: The father lived at the Colony Inn on Victory Drive, and the boy lived with his mother on Reese Road.
The father and son were last seen at 1 a.m. that day, getting into a white 2004 Ford F-150 pickup truck that drove away from a motel on Victory Drive, investigators said: The pair were with an unidentified man described as black, over 6 feet tall and weighing 160 to 200 pounds.
High murder counts
Columbus had hoped to make it through 2018 with far fewer killings than the record number from the year before.
In 2017, police categorized 35 of the year’s 43 homicides as “murders,” meaning cases in which they filed murder charges. Those police do not call “murders” typically include justifiable homicides involving self-defense and accidental shootings that often lead to manslaughter charges.
The annual homicide count comes from the coroner, who hasn’t the option of labeling a killing justifiable or accidental. A death certificate has only five manners of death: “natural,” as from disease; “accidental,” as in a car wreck; “suicide” from a self-inflicted wound or other means; “undetermined” when a cause can’t be pinpointed; and “homicide,” for any death caused by another.
For 2018, Coroner Buddy Bryan’s homicide tally so far looks much better than last year’s: He counts 33 homicides, 10 fewer than 2017.
But the number of murders remains high, at 30, only five fewer than last year.
Here are the homicides police aren’t counting as murders:
- Tony Brown Allen, 19, died from a gunshot wound Oct. 3 on Swann Street. Police say his friend Reginald Wardlaw, 20, accidentally fired the shot that hit Allen in the chest. Wardlaw is charged with involuntary manslaughter.
- Damion “Dae-Dae” Collier, 24, died at the hospital after two officers with the police fugitive squad shot him when he pulled a gun on them on 35th Street at River Road, authorities said. Collier was a suspect in the fatal shootings of Alec Spencer, 24, on April 1 at an unlicensed nightclub at 480 Andrews Road, and of Darrell Boggans, 43, on April 28 on Winston Road, police said. Collier’s death was ruled a justifiable homicide.
- Timothy Paschal 31, died in intensive care two weeks after a May 11 fight with 34-year-old Donald Butler at Fourth Avenue and 35th Street. Butler was jailed for aggravated assault, but investigators have not decided whether the case merits a murder charge.
Gangs and guns
Columbus in 2018 had a slate of crimes connected to gangs, and witnessed the emergence of a new one here, the Ghostface Gangsters, a whites-only gang that began in the Cobb County jail two decades ago.
Columbus police arrested five suspects investigators claimed were in the gang after thefts involving a stolen U-Haul truck that twice rammed police cars in April when officers tried to chase it down.
In March, the Ghostface Gangsters made headlines statewide when federal and state agents arrested 23 gang leaders, members and associates named in a 21-count indictment alleging crimes such as conspiracy to commit racketeering, conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, carjacking, attempted murder, kidnapping, maiming and distributing methamphetamine.
Meanwhile police dealt with more familiar gangs such as the Gangster Disciples, reportedly the most numerous one here.
On Dec. 19, a week after he refused to testify in a local murder trial, Robert Furr was in Columbus Recorder’s Court facing four counts of violating Georgia’s Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act. Detective Michael O’Keefe testified Furr is among four “founding fathers” of the local Zohannon Gang, a subset of the Gangster Disciples.
Founded in 2014, the Zohannon gang now has about 200 members, one as young as age 10, O’Keefe said. It has been implicated in several murders, including the Sept. 3, 2017, death of 19-year-old Takelia Johnson, killed in a drive-by shooting in the 900 block of Ewart Avenue, the detective said.
Furr, 20, has been jailed since his arrest Sept. 15, 2017, in the fatal shooting of 35-year-old Travis Porter, at Hannah Heights Apartments, 909 Farr Road. On Dec. 11 he was summoned to Muscogee Superior Court to testify in the murder case against Clayton Perry, who was on trial in the Aug. 15, 2017, fatal shooting of James Francesconi.
After Furr refused to testify, the jury acquitted Perry, 18, of all charges in Francesconi’s death, but he remains a suspect in other offenses. Police said Perry also is associated with the gang.
The helicopter crash
Local law enforcement mourned the Nov. 16 death of David Hall, a reserve pilot for the Columbus’ Metro Narcotics Task Force who was one of two people killed when the task force helicopter he was flying hit a power line over the Coosa River in central Alabama and crashed into Lake Mitchell.
Also in the aircraft was Austin Jay Griswold, 22, who had been one of Hall’s flight school students, though he was not taking lessons that day. The passenger was not supposed to be aboard the aircraft Hall was flying to Canton, Ala., for maintenance. Hall had picked Griswold up in Auburn, Ala., to ride along.
Born Aug. 2, 1965, Hall was an Air Force veteran who had just retired from the police department in July. He also worked as a police recruiter who drew many into his field.
“We had hired several officers that he had recruited from the area for the department,” said Police Chief Ricky Boren. “He was known to everybody on the metro board. He had done flight services for everybody on the metro board, and he’s going to be a loss to our department.”
Born July 20, 1996, Griswold was a graduate of Northside High School and Columbus Technical College, and worked at Integrated Supply Company in Columbus. He was working toward a private pilot’s license.
The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the crash.
Opioid crisis hits home
Like most American cities, Columbus had cases connected to the nation’s opioid crisis.
One was the case of Jennifer Croy, an alleged addict whose brother had overdosed in 2012. She was accused of stealing more than $100,000 from her elderly and ailing parents while holding them captive.
Police said the 40-year-old was using the only bed in the home and making her parents sleep on a sofa, in a house with no running water and no food. The stove wasn’t working; the kitchen sink was filled to the level of the counter with what looked like “black tar”; and the rooms were filthy, detectives said. The 68-year-old father and 69-year-old mother told police they’d not had a full bath in weeks.
Croy had been extorting money from them by claiming drug dealers to whom her late brother owed debts were threatening the family. She took around $110,000 in about two years, monthly driving them to the bank to make withdrawals ranging from $5,000 to $8,000, police said. She also took her parents’ medications, such as Oxycodone and Xanax, either to sell or to use herself, a detective said.
Burned, raped, shot
Last summer the city witnessed a trial that will not soon blur into memories of other violence.
In August, three men were convicted of kidnapping a woman from a New Year’s Eve party and taking her to a field off Farr Road, where they forced her to strip, raped and sodomized her, set her afire, shot her and left her for dead.
Found crying for help the morning of Jan. 1, 2014, she survived to testify against them, never losing her composure as she told the jury all that they did to her, including sodomizing her with guns.
In addition to a chest wound that penetrated a lung, she had been left with second-degree burns, an open fracture at the knee where she was shot, another fracture where she was shot in the hand, a gunshot wound to the abdomen that required removing part of her lower intestine, other gunshot wounds and rips in her anus and vagina. She said she still had three bullets lodged in her body.
Each defendant was sentenced to life without parole. They were Ketorie Dtriston Glover, 27; Robert Carl Johnson, also 27; and Joey Bertrail Garron, 32.
“It was just a long time coming,” the victim said at their sentencing.
Also addressing the court that day was police Lt. Lance Deaton, who had spent 16 years in law enforcement, 10 assigned to violent crimes: “This has got to be one of the most, if not the most, brutal crimes that I have ever investigated,” he said, calling the trio’s actions “just a complete disregard for human life.”
This story was originally published December 26, 2018 at 12:00 AM.