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

by heat, and maddened by myriads of mosquitoes. The calls of nature were attended to in a bucket which was removed but once in twenty-four hours.

      In some quarters the prisoners’ allegations were vehemently denied. According to the Cincinnati Commercial, their supporters in Georgia were guilty of ‘moral terrorism’, which ‘made it a crime to entertain any opinion but the one most decided as to the[ir] innocence’. Appalled by the claims of torture and ill-treatment, General Meade issued his own public rebuttal, accusing the Georgia newspapers of making false and exaggerated statements for political purposes, and insisting that they had ‘no foundation’. He ended his remarks with some trenchant comments about the city where Ashburn died: ‘Had the civil authorities acted in good faith and with energy, and made any attempt to ferret out the guilty – or had the people of Columbus evinced or felt any horror of the crime or cooperated in any way in detecting its perpetrators, much that was seemingly harsh and arbitrary might have, and would have been, avoided.’

      There were two further layers of significance to the murder of George Ashburn. In a case of the highest importance and profile, positions had been taken not in response to evidence, but on the basis of partisan beliefs and allegiance. And at its end, resolution had not come about through a court’s dispassionate verdict, but through a political deal, itself the result of the vexed and edgy relationship between the Union and the states of the South. Not for the last time in Columbus, the rule of law had been shown to be a contingent, relative concept. Realpolitik had taken precedence over justice.

      Even in Georgia, cloudless nights in January bring frosts, and bands of mist that collect in hollows, clinging to the trees. The cold muffles sound. As I walked amid the lanes and shrubbery of Wynnton one evening at the start of 2001, I found it easy to imagine how an intruder might have crept undetected between the pools of shadow, moving in on human prey without so much as the crackle of a twig. Twenty-four years earlier, in the weeks after Kathleen Woodruff’s death, the Columbus police stepped up their patrols again, joined by their many allies. By January 1978, some of the task force officers were giving in to despair, and hinted to reporters that they were beginning to think that the stocking strangler possessed supernatural powers. Trying to catch him, they suggested, was like trying to hunt ‘a will o’the wisp, a ghost’.

      If science couldn’t stop the killer, the authorities hoped to rely on sheer numbers. Earnestine Flowers, a childhood friend of Carlton Gary, was working as a Sheriff’s Deputy. ‘There were guys from the hills of Tennessee who knew how to track people; Military Police from Fort Benning; the Ku Klux Klan; people from other Police Departments who wanted to volunteer. We had night lights, people hiding up in trees; that new night vision thing which had just come out; dogs. And yet we were getting so many calls. People were so afraid. I don’t mean only the people who lived there. I was terrified, too. I was out on patrol, shaking with fear. I remember thinking, “I can’t do this, night after night; I gotta get myself assigned as a radio operator. I gotta get myself inside the building!”’

      If there was a point when Columbus became immobilised by fear, it came with what law enforcement staff still call the ‘night of the terrors’ – the early hours of 11 February 1978. It began with an attempted burglary at the Wynnton residence of a retired industrial magnate, Abraham Illges. An imposing building, a pastiche of a medieval castle, the Illges house had a drive that opened on to Forest Avenue, in the heart of the territory haunted by the strangler. On 1 January the house had been burgled, and while Mr and Mrs Illges slept, a purse containing her car keys removed from the bed next to hers. Next morning, her Cadillac was missing. The couple then installed a sophisticated alarm system, with a pressure pad under the carpet near the front door, and at 5.15 a.m. on 11 February, someone stepped on it, automatically summoning the police. They arrived within a few minutes, and, in the belief that the burglar might be the strangler, summoned help. As officers, some with sniffer dogs, fanned out through the moonlit trees and gardens, the airwaves were alive with officers’ communications.

      Half an hour after the alarm had been raised at the Illges residence, a second, home-made panic buzzer sounded two blocks away on Carter Avenue, inside the bedroom where Fred Burdette, a physician, lay sleeping. His neighbour, Ruth Schwob, a widow of seventy-four who lived alone, had asked him to install an alarm in her own bedroom, wired through to his, so that he might summon help if she were attacked. When the alarm went, Burdette tried to call Mrs Schwob, and listened as her telephone rang without answer. Then, while his wife phoned the police, Burdettte ran to his neighbour’s home. By the time he reached her door, the occupants of several squad cars were already approaching the premises. The first officer to reach Mrs Schwob, Sergeant Richard Gaines, later described what he saw:

      I climbed in through the kitchen window, over the kitchen counter, had my flashlight. I started going through the house room by room, without turning on any lights, using only my flashlight. And after about two minutes, I got to the back of the house and looked in through the bedroom door and saw Mrs Schwob, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had a stocking wrapped around her neck; it was hanging down between her legs, also laying on the floor was a screwdriver. Then I went over to where she was and when she saw me she said, ‘I thought you were him coming back.’ And then she said, ‘He’s still here, he’s still in the house.’ And I went over and I checked the necklace – I mean the strangling – the stocking that was wrapped around her neck to make sure it was not too tight, and it was loose.

      Gaines and his colleagues checked the rest of the house. But Mrs Schwob was mistaken. The stocking strangler had gone.

      The Columbus newspapers published next day, 12 February, warmly celebrated Mrs Schwob’s survival. Like Kathleen Woodruff, she was a very prominent citizen and patron of the arts. For twenty years after the death of her husband, Simon, in 1954, she had continued to run his textile firm, Schwob Manufacturing, and continued as board chairman emeritus until it was sold in 1976. In 1966 she was Columbus’s Woman of the Year, and her other accolades included the local Sertoma Service to Mankind Award. She was, reported the Ledger, ‘credited with almost single-handedly raising more than $500,000 for the $1.5 million fine arts building at Columbus College’, which was named after her husband.

      Ruth Schwob, the Ledger said, had survived the attack because she was a regular jogger and unusually fit for her age.

      I just awakened and he was there. He was on the bed and had his hand on my throat and wrapped pantyhose all the way around. Then he pulled the thing tightly round my neck. He had a mask on his face, I think he had gloves on, and it was dark in my room. There was no flesh showing, and he never uttered a sound. It was quite a struggle. I fought like a tiger. He choked me so bad, I passed out. I think the police just missed him. I don’t know how long he was in the house or whether he was gone before the police arrived.

      After her rescue, the police sealed off the surrounding streets as officers combed the earth for a scent with bloodhounds and a helicopter equipped with floodlights hovered overhead. There were shoe tracks leading from Schwob’s kitchen window, where the strangler had forced his entry with the screwdriver found by her bed. But once again, he escaped. ‘If he doesn’t have knowledge of the area,’ the task force leader Ronnie Jones told the Ledger, ‘then he’s mighty damn lucky.’

      Having found Mrs schwob, and having failed to find the strangler, Jones and his staff assumed that he had left the area. In fact, he merely fled two blocks to 1612 Forest Avenue, a house diagonally opposite the Illges castle. It was not until 11.30 in the morning of the following day, 12 February, that Judith Borom called on her way to church to check on the woman who lived there, her mother-in-law Mildred, a lone widow, aged seventy-eight. Earlier that day Judith’s husband, Perry Borom, had been discussing Mildred’s safety with his business partner, George C. Woodruff Junior, Kathleen Woodruff’s son. ‘I was telling him, “I’m really worried about your mama,”’ Woodruff told reporters later. ‘He said he’d sent a man out to put screws in the window to keep it closed.’

      Judith was with her three children. She parked her car in the back yard, and rang the back doorbell. There was no answer, but she could hear the television playing. She told her son to go round to the front while she tried to peer into Mildred’s bedroom, at the building’s side. Then she heard the boy screaming: ‘Mama, come here, Mama, come