Our True Crime Podcast · Our True Crime Podcast

351. Stocking Strangler: Carlton Gary

·1 hr 10 min·5 clips

Janet Cofer is presented as someone who still had plenty of life in her days. She taught first grade, stayed involved with church, and looked after her puppy Buffy. Then, on April 19, 1978, she was strangled in her bed while her adult son Mike was away. The killer had struck again. The episode follows how the violence refused to stay in one place. Around that same period, the offender appears to have moved into armed robbery. Restaurants across the region became targets. He used a bag with holes cut for his eyes and carried a gun. In one unrelated thread, Columbus resident Theda Cartwright reported that her .357 Magnum revolver had gone missing. That theft had no connection to the stranglings. Police did not know that the culprit was Cartwright's boyfriend, who was never identified as a suspect. By June 1978, the man later identified as Carlton Gary was back in Florida. He resumed robbing restaurants there. He threatened workers with a sawed-off shotgun. A bandana and oversized sunglasses helped hide his face. The robberies stretched across Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. Some included sexual assault. Some involved accomplices. The episode keeps the timeline moving so the listener can see how the crimes spread. It also keeps returning to the blunt fact that the murders and robberies seem to belong to the same violent track. Gary was eventually caught in Georgia. It was not for murder. In the early hours of June 19, 1978, authorities in Hapville, a suburb of Atlanta, arrested him, and the story moves toward that arrest as another turn in a case that kept refusing to stay small.

As heard by us

A grim, moving case history that keeps the focus on pattern, not spectacle.

Carlton Gary's trail moves from a teacher murdered in her bed to a killing pattern that spreads across Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina as the case develops.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a tight, chronological true-crime case that follows a murder spree, then tracks the suspect as the trail shifts into armed robberies across Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Our True Crime Podcast