The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice

Called a dazzlingly reported, supremely elegant work by The Observer, The Big Eddy Club is an award-winning journalist’s expose of race, injustice, and serial murder in the Deep South Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with an investigative edge. Over eight bloody months in the mid-1970s, a serial rapist and murderer terrorized Columbus, Georgia, killing seven affluent, elderly white women almost all members of the Big Eddy social club for the town’s elite. Carlton Gary, an African American man currently on death row for what came to be known as the stocking stranglings, came within four hours of being executed in December 2009.

The Big Eddy Club connects Gary’s late-twentieth-century trial with racially charged trials in Columbus of a previous era, to explore the broad topic of racial justice in the American South. This paperback edition includes an all-new afterword detailing the recent discovery of potentially exonerating evidence, which led to Gary’s last-minute stay of execution and will likely result in a new trial.