Kenneth Followill, judge in Columbus ‘Stocking Strangler’ trial, dies at 87
Senior Superior Court Judge Kenneth Followill, who served on the bench since the 1970s and presided at the trial of Columbus’ infamous “Stocking Strangler” serial killer in 1986, died late Sunday night in hospice care. He was 87.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. June 2 at Trinity Episcopal Church, according to Striffler-Hamby Mortuary.
Followill’s career in law spanned half a century. He was elected the part-time solicitor or prosecutor in Columbus’ city court, now Muscogee State Court, before voters made him a full-time judge in that court in 1970. In 1978, he was appointed a Superior Court judge for the six-county Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit based in Columbus.
He took partial retirement in 2008, becoming a part-time senior Superior Court judge here the next year.
A Columbus native, he attended public schools here before he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and then got his law degree from Emory University in Atlanta.
In 1973, he served on the first Judicial Council of Georgia, the group that establishes policies and guidance for the state judiciary and recommends relevant legislation to the Georgia General Assembly. Followill was elected its secretary that first year and later chaired the council, a position now reserved for the chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court.
While serving as chief judge for the Chattahoochee Circuit, he helped manage the court system here and see to its needs. City leaders found him straightforward and proficient, they said.
“He was on the bench when I started serving on council,” said Mayor Pro-Tem Gary Allen, first elected in 1992. “He was very amenable and agreeable to talk, just about anytime, and did a wonderful job as a Superior Court judge. He served the citizens well, both from the judicial side and the government side.”
Citywide Councilor Judy Thomas said councilors learned to rely on Followill’s judgment: “Not only was he around for a long time, but he did such a good job, we wanted him to stay around,” she said.
His court decisions did not always favor the city, when its interests were involved, she added: “But that’s the way the judicial system is. He was fair and impartial. You could trust him to do the right thing.”
Superior Court Judge Gil McBride said Followill’s decades of experience made him a valuable resource, when the city began planning to replace the Government Center with a new judicial building.
“He had helped plan the current Government Center more than fifty years ago,” McBride said. “He understood what decisions were made in that planning process, why they were made and what had worked and not worked. This is the sort of knowledge that you can’t find in a book.... In his long career, there was very little that Judge Followill had not seen or addressed.”
Steve Craft, assistant director of the public defender’s office, complimented Followill’s calm and steady courtroom demeanor: “He was the consummate chief judge: He understood the process and all the players. He was always respectful to everyone in his courtroom.”
He also recalled Followill’s kindness, in 1999 when Craft’s wife became ill: “I was a young lawyer when my first wife got sick, before she passed away,” he said. “He made sure that I was free to take care of her, and made sure the other judges understood. I did not have to put her needs aside to come to court until she was taken care of.”
The Strangler trial
The year Followill was appointed a Superior Court judge was the last year of the “Stocking Stranglings,” seven rapes and stranglings of older women that terrorized Columbus from September 1977 to April 1978.
Those cases remained unsolved until 1984, when police arrested Carlton Gary, charging him specifically with three of the cases that had the most evidence, but maintaining he was the perpetrator in all seven.
Gary’s defense team had two other local judges disqualified, before Followill was assigned the case, and tried to get him removed, too, said Bill Smith, now a senior judge who was the district attorney at the time.
“He was under a lot of pressure,” Smith said, recalling that Gary’s defense attorneys needled Followill to try to make him lose his composure, to cause a mistrial or establish grounds for appeal.
“His demeanor was tested,” Smith said, later adding, “He handled it like a champ.”
Smith, who still calls the stranglings trial “the most important criminal case in the history of the circuit,” noted in the decades of appeals that followed, before Gary was executed in March 2018, Followill’s rulings consistently were upheld, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The significant thing he did was to never be reversed,” said Smith.
Columbus will miss Followill’s calm guidance, and so will the friends he made here, Smith said: “He was my friend as well as my colleague.... It’s a real loss to me and to the community.”
