The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice

by David Rose

Book Overview

Called a "dazzlingly reported, supremely elegant" work by The Observer, The Big Eddy Club is an award-winning journalist's expos of race, injustice, and serial murder in the Deep South--Midnight in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565849108
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: The New Press
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.4" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Mr. Rose should have left "old history" out of it

I read THE BIG EDDY CLUB in two days, without putting it down...well...hardly. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Rose in the early 90's. Having lived in Columbus,Ga. for 35 years, through an act of fate, I came across the shameful truth. The conspiracy to cover up the real facts by the Columbus police and all its "good ol' boys" ignorant and incompetent members. It was done, because they were absolutely clue-less what these murders were all about. They molded the evidence, to fit the crime...and six years later pulled out a "black Bunny" Carlton Gary, out of their hat of tricks....I hope that before I die, someone will go into it and rip up the carpet under which this has been swept and kept there all this time. I have too much evidence that someone else killed those women. There are no coincidences, not as many as I have discovered. I have moved away from Columbus years ago, but on my recent visit there, I was told by the court reporter on the Gary trial, who years later became my friend, that I am lucky to still be alive...finally, as for the book, the OLD SOUTH history, was a bit much and has absolutely nothing to do with the Columbus Strangler Case. It just angered a lot of people, which isn't helping Carlton Gary, who has been on death row for 22 years now, one bit. I pray that someone will open the Pandora's box and bring out the truth. I have tried my best, but the Columbus Police, DA's, local judges and the whole lot have just hoped I would disappear and let it die...it is long from over.

A spellbinding investigation

This is far from your typical "they got the wrong guy" story about the death penalty. Because all the biological evidence in Carleton Gary's case was destroyed (it was inexplicably deemed a "biohazard"), there is no way to prove or disprove Gary's guilt using DNA. As a result, Gary's attorneys--and Rose, as both journalist and, ultimately, paralegal on behalf of the convicted killer--have had to hunt down other evidence, from long-lost bite casts to records of tests on seminal fluids. You can't read this book without concluding that Carleton Gary got railroaded and deserves another trial. Whether he's actually innocent is a trickier question. Read the book and decide for yourself!

A Must Read!

The Big Eddy Club offers a gripping account of the systemic racism that continues to infect our criminal "justice" system. For anyone who thinks that lynching black men accused of raping white women is a thing of the past, Rose's book is a wake-up call. It demonstrates how lynching now simply takes a different form: a legal form in which black men are put on death row without a fair trial. Rose's claims are thoroughly detailed and convincingly argued, and the book is beautifully written. I recommend it unreservedly.

Is it time to abolish the death penalty?

This latest contribution by David Rose presents a troubling assessment of the relationship between race and justice in the USA. Tightly argued and well-written, it provides a gripping analysis of capital punishment. His evidence of police mismanagement of evidence and the vagaries of the trial process are, at times, breathtaking. For anyone interested in law, justice or race, this is a must-read.

A Terrifying Journey through the Deep South

Anyone who knows about the rapes and murders of the seven, elderly white women in Columbus, Georgia, which have come to be known as `stocking stranglings', will also know, upon reading this terrific analysis of the case and the criminal justice response to the murders, that David Rose understands better than most `insiders' just what happened here in Georgia. Whilst his story focuses on the man who was convicted and sentenced to death for these crimes, Carlton Gary, his investigation goes beyond the facts of the case and even the farce that was the trial, to the racist history of the town of Columbus and the apparent impunity of those responsible for delivering justice. Like Rose's other books (for example `Guantanamo'), The Big Eddy Club takes the reader on a terrifying journey through the `Deep South' to witness abuse of people and criminal process. When I got to the end of this riveting book I was convinced that Gary is innocent. My sister, who read it before me, is not so sure. But we agreed that the point is that he deserves, at the very least, a retrial for he has not to date received justice from the state of Georgia. No man should be executed without due process and yet, despite Rose's remarkable discoveries of exculpatory evidence (look out for the section where Rose describes how he smuggled Gary's semen out of death row and had it tested to prove he was not responsible for the rapes; and his painstaking investigation into the missing bite cast) Carlton Gary may yet end his tragic life in the electric chair. We all need to read this book and just hope that those in the legal system who will make the crucial decisions about a retrial read it too.