Martha Bradford Thurmond, 69, was murdered on October 25, 1977, in Columbus, Georgia. Her killing was one of a series of attacks on elderly women living alone in the Columbus area between 1977 and 1978, in which the assailant broke into homes, raped victims and strangled them, often using stockings or other fabric.

Investigators later linked the pattern of assaults to Carlton Michael Gary, known as the Stocking Strangler. Gary was arrested in 1984 on unrelated armed-robbery charges; fingerprint evidence from multiple crime scenes, including Thurmond’s, was used to connect him to the murders. He was tried and convicted in 1986 for the deaths of Thurmond, Florence Scheible and Kathleen Woodruff and received a death sentence.

The case exposed the risks faced by elderly people living alone and became one of Georgia’s most notorious serial murder investigations.