DNA profile from Gary case turns up in Atlanta shooting

Unsealed court records reveal yet another surreal twist to the continuing saga of convicted "Stocking Strangler" Carlton Gary.

This twist involves the same issue uncovered this past November when prosecutors revealed a DNA test appearing to clear Gary in the Oct. 25, 1977, rape and strangling of Martha Thurmond was the result of laboratory contamination.

The same DNA profile developed from the Thurmond evidence showed up on a BB gun found after a 2011 shooting in Atlanta's Morningside neighborhood.

The suspect in that shooting, Michael Christopher Lloyd, does not match the DNA found on his BB pistol. Now 32, he was born three years after the last of the seven serial killings that occurred here between September 1977 and April 1978.

Lloyd deepened the mystery when he told Gary's lead defense attorney he regularly kept the pistol in a 1970s-era surplus Army flak jacket he'd bought -- raising the possibility old cells in the jacket rubbed off on the gun.

Defense attorney Jack Martin's conjecture was that the jacket once belonged to a soldier stationed at Fort Benning back in the 1970s, who may have been involved in the stranglings.

But Martin said prosecutors claim the gun's DNA profile comes from the same Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime laboratory "control sample" that tainted the Thurmond evidence. The sample is a known DNA profile technicians use to test their equipment.

The defense motions mentioning the Lloyd case were filed July 6, 2012, but were sealed from public disclosure while authorities investigated the match.

Muscogee Superior Court Judge Frank Jordan Jr. ordered the documents unsealed this past December.

They tell the story of two Atlanta men who had a long-running feud that led to the shooting. William Paul Garey, now 60, a resident of Greenland Drive, east of Atlanta's Piedmont Park, had sued Lloyd and got a restraining order against him.

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DNA profile from Gary case turns up in Atlanta shooting