The judge who presided over the 1986 trial of a serial killer known as the Stocking Strangler in a Georgia city more than 40 years ago has died.
Funeral services for Senior Superior Court Judge Kenneth Followill will be held June 2 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Columbus, Striffler-Hamby Mortuary confirmed. Followill died late Sunday in hospice care, the Ledger-Enquirer reported. He was 87.
Followill was appointed to the Superior Court for the six-county Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit in the final year of the Stocking Stranglings, seven rapes and stranglings of older women that terrorized the west Georgia city of Columbus from September 1977 to April 1978. Those cases remained unsolved until 1984, when police arrested Carlton Gary on three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary for the 1977 deaths of 89-year-old Florence Scheible, 69-year-old Martha Thurmond and 74-year-old Kathleen Woodruff.
Prosecutors, however, maintained Gary attacked nine elderly women in Columbus. Most were choked with stockings, and seven of them died. Gary, at 67, was executed in 2018.
Followill took partial retirement from the bench in 2008, becoming a part-time senior judge the next year. 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.
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In 1973, he served on the first Judicial Council of Georgia, the group that establishes policies and guidance for the state judiciary and makes recommendations to the Georgia General Assembly. While serving as chief judge for the Chattahoochee Circuit, he helped manage the court system.
"He was on the bench when I started serving on council," Mayor Pro-Tem Gary Allen, first elected in 1992, told the newspaper. "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 relied 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. "He was fair and impartial. You could trust him to do the right thing."
Bill Smith, now a senior judge who was district attorney at the time of the Stocking Strangler trial, said Columbus will miss Followill's calm guidance. He described his friend's death as "a real loss to me and to the community."
