Gary Goldman

The Crime

Early in the morning on May 6, 1975, the body of Elizabeth Rosenberg was found across the street from the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Rosenberg, a graduate student at the university, had been studying at the library and was last seen crossing Hillsborough Street headed towards her car.

Rosenberg’s body, which was found near her parked car, had been beaten so severely that she was nearly unrecognizable. Rosenberg was believed to have had a purse in her possession when she left the library, but her purse was not located at the scene and was never recovered. The physical evidence indicated that Rosenberg had likely been killed during a robbery after being struck by a metal 30-40 pound iron and concrete pipe, which was found a short distance from her body.

In the immediate aftermath of the killing, Raleigh Police Department (RPD) failed to conclusively identify a suspect and even struggled to agree on a theory of Rosenberg’s murder. RPD spoke with more than 100 people in the following days to try and identify a suspect, but in the end, over five years would pass before a murder indictment was brought against a suspect. In 1981, under pressure to solve the high-profile, violent murder of Rosenberg, RPD doubled down on their investigation and found a promising suspect in Gary Goldman. At the time of the murder, when RPD was attempting to identify a suspect, Goldman had been questioned and polygraphed by RPD, but Goldman successfully passed the polygraph and was eliminated as a suspect. However, upon this new reinvigoration of the investigation, Goldman was serving time for a different murder resulting from an armed robbery in Georgia, and law enforcement believed him to be an easy solution to this unsolved case.

On December 14, 1981, over six years after the crime occurred, Gary Goldman was indicted for the murder and armed robbery of Rosenberg.

The Trial

At Goldman’s trial, the State presented no physical evidence linking Goldman to the murder, but instead relied primarily on the testimony of three key witnesses: Franklin Adams, Tracy Current, and Larry Lumsden. However, as Goldman’s Defense pointed out, each of these witnesses had notable credibility concerns.

Adams, who worked with Goldman in a Georgia prison’s leather shop, testified that Goldman had admitted to beating a girl to death with a metal pole in North Carolina and that Goldman gave him a vivid account of the killing on two separate occasions. However, as Goldman’s defense noted, Adams was an admitted alcoholic who had spent 27 years in prison and had wanted to get out so badly that he had escaped nearly a dozen times.

Tracy Current, 15 y.o at the time of the crime and a friend of Goldman’s, testified that she had been with Goldman on the night of the crime after Goldman threw pebbles at her window and the two went to smoke marijuana at a Rose Garden nearby. Current claimed that Goldman had scratches on his arms and that he made off comments such as “She got worse.” However, Current had credibility issues of her own, being an admitted drug addict who had been shooting amphetamine daily for the two years before she apparently saw Goldman on the night of the killing.

The State’s final key witness, Larry Lumsden, testified that a day or two after the murder, Goldman admitted to friends that he had hit a girl when he tried to snatch a purse and she resisted. Lumsden claimed that Goldman had wanted money for wine and that the woman fought back when Goldman tried to rob her. Once again, Lumsden’s credibility was called into question by the fact that he had convictions for stealing and claimed to be “burned out” from taking drugs.

Despite the extremely flimsy case brought by the State, on February 28, 1983, a Wake County jury convicted Gary Goldman of First-Degree Murder, under the felony murder rule, and Robbery with a Dangerous Weapon. Goldman was sentenced to life in prison.

Postconviction Center Involvement

Since the moment of his conviction, Goldman has always maintained his innocence of the robbery and murder of Rosenberg. At the time of his trial, he turned down an attractive plea offer that would have had him home decades ago. Goldman’s innocence claim has even been supported by none other than Rosenberg’s sister, Jean Parks, who has been suspect of Goldman’s conviction from the moment that the verdict was reached.

The NCCAI was requested by both Goldman and Parks to review Goldman’s case and, in doing so, the Center noticed a myriad of concerning factors, including the use of incentivized jailhouse informants, the use of “witnesses” in the community who were threatened with charges if they did not give helpful statements, poor investigative methods, and ineffective legal assistance. Most importantly, DNA testing was not available at the time of Goldman’s trial and, as a result, no physical evidence collected from the crime had ever undergone proper DNA testing.

In response to this, the Center sought an order aimed at locating any and all physical evidence collected during the investigation of Rosenberg’s murder.  A September 2012 inventory of evidence related to the case in the custody of RPD revealed many pieces of evidence that could be valuable if properly tested. The State agreed that since the evidence had not previously undergone DNA testing, a private lab should conduct DNA testing in an effort to address Goldman’s ongoing innocence claim.

In November 2013, the Court delivered a significant win for Goldman, ordering RPD to provide for the immediate transfer of physical evidence to be DNA tested by the North Carolina State Crime Lab and a private testing lab. Testing revealed that none of the physical evidence linked Goldman to the crime scene or to Rosenberg’s body in any way.

In 2019, Goldman, then sixty-years old, was eligible for parole and both the Center and Jean Parks, Rosenberg’s sister, wrote letters to the board in support of granting Goldman parole. NCCAI Executive Director Chris Mumma noted that Goldman was intelligent, hard-working, kind, humble, highly self-motivated, and well equipped to live a productive life. Parks further emphasized Goldman’s behavior during his time behind his bars, noting his impressive commitment to the “New Leash on Life” program, where inmates are trained to socialize dogs to make them more adoptable. Goldman had excelled at the program and had even begun to train other inmates himself.

Finally, on May 17, 2019, the state parole board decided to release Gary Goldman on parole and on May 21, Goldman walked free.