On April 14, 1970, Nellie M. Farmer, an 85-year-old female, was found dead in Albany, New York, in a room at the Wellington Hotel. The scene was unsettling and intimate: her body was discovered on the floor near the bed, and investigators noted a length of fabric close to her neck, as if something from the room had been pulled into service in the final moments. Accounts describing the discovery emphasized that she was partially clothed, suggesting an attack that escalated rapidly from intrusion to violence.
Authorities concluded she had been sexually assaulted and killed by strangulation. The combination of rape and suffocation by force shaped the case from the outset as a deliberate, hands-on homicide rather than an accident or a death that could be explained away by illness or misadventure. What happened in that hotel room fit a grim pattern that investigators would later recognize in other crimes associated with the same suspect: an elderly woman alone, overpowered in a private space, violated, then silenced.
The investigation soon focused on Carlton Gary. A fingerprint recovered from the Farmer scene was reported to match his, and when confronted, he did not claim he had never been there—he offered a different story. He said he had been present at the scene, but insisted that another man, John Lee Mitchell, was the one who raped and killed Mrs. Farmer. That accusation became the spine of the early courtroom drama: Mitchell was charged, and the case turned into a contest between physical evidence pointing toward Gary’s presence and Gary’s attempt to redirect the blame onto someone else. Mitchell was ultimately acquitted of the murder charges.
Gary, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to burglary connected to the Farmer case, while maintaining that he was not the killer. Reporting about the case has described him as acknowledging his involvement in the break-in but separating himself from the murder itself, a line he tried to draw even as the fingerprint evidence placed him in the orbit of the crime. In the years that followed, Gary became infamous for a series of later attacks and killings in Georgia for which he was convicted, and writers revisiting his history repeatedly returned to Albany—pointing to the Farmer homicide as an early, haunting precursor that produced accusations, an arrest, and a guilty plea for burglary, but no conviction for her rape and murder.
