Blood Echoes: The Infamous Alday Mass Murder and Its Aftermath Page 14

  By the end of May, Judge Walter Geer—the special prosecutor’s uncle, a kinship defense attorneys would raise many times in the coming years—had appointed eight lawyers to defend the four defendants in four entirely separate trials.

  As already noted, however, within days of their appointments, shifts began occurring within the shaky ranks of the defense. Most notably, Bobby Lee Hill and Fletcher Farrington of Savannah took over the defense of Carl Isaacs in a move that Isaacs heartily approved. In the first of what would become many public pronouncements, Carl declared that he was aware that “Bobby L. Hill was on the counsel that overturned Georgia’s last death penalty law.” Because of that, Carl went on, “I know that these men are irrevocably, unalterably opposed to the death penalty, and that they will do everything within their talents and abilities to help me.”

  He was right. Bobby Lee Hill had for many years worked tirelessly to rid the state of Georgia of what he considered the unspeakable barbarity of capital punishment. For Hill, the heinousness of the Alday murders was not in question. In a sense, that very heinousness made his defense of Carl Isaacs even more critical. For surely if any crime deserved the imposition of the death penalty, it was the series of outrages that had occurred in and around River Road on May 14. But for Hill, that was just the point. Capital punishment was never appropriate, no matter what the crime. It was itself a form of murder, and simply because it was imposed upon those who had, themselves, committed murder, made it no more justifiable than the original offense.

  Thus, for Hill, Carl Isaacs was the perfect candidate to test Georgia’s new death penalty statute. As a court case it could serve to topple the new law from the lofty perch upon which the state legislature had placed it only a few months before, and he fully intended to use it to do just that.

  As for Ernestine and her daughters, they could do no more than watch from their self-imposed silence as Hill assumed control of the case. As a lively media figure, he would bring it almost as much public attention as their own special prosecutor.

  In addition, as Nancy and Patricia were beginning to understand, he would also shift the focus of the trial away from what had happened on River Road to the diminutive, nineteen-year-old man who was now on trial for doing it. Increasingly they had begun to notice that the names of the Alday dead were no longer mentioned, that they were lumped together in a faceless mass, that their pictures were no longer displayed in articles about the case. The complexity of their lives, it seemed to the Alday sisters, had been reduced to a one-word description of their economic function: farmers.

  Ironically, just as Ned, Aubrey, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, and Mary were fading into mist, the images of their murderers, particularly Carl Isaacs, were being drawn with greater and greater detail. With the arrival of each new magazine or newspaper, Nancy and Patricia saw pictures of Carl, or read his latest comments. “We could tell that our family was being killed off again,” Nancy recalled years later, “that it would be Carl who’d be remembered from now on, his whole life, every little thing that had ever happened to him, and that my father and my brothers and my uncle and Mary would be these dead people he was associated with. Dead farmers. That’s all.”

  To Nancy, Patricia, and others of the Alday children, the “dead farmers” remained what they had always been, the heart and soul of their once extended family, people whose sudden absences left enormous empty spaces. By then Faye had graduated from Seminole County High School, but with few relatives in the stadium to see it. With all but one of her brothers dead, her father dead, her uncle dead, it had been an affair of mournful women. From their seats in the old wooden bleachers, the surviving Alday women had watched Faye’s graduation in a stony silence, their blue eyes glistening in the summer sun. “That was the first day that it really seemed like they were all missing at once,” Patricia remembered. “Normally we would have filled the stands, but no more.”

  Immediately upon assuming control of Carl Isaacs’ defense, Bobby Hill made a series of pretrial motions, the first of which was a motion for a closed committal hearing in which Hill declared that Carl would plead innocent to all charges. Quickly following Hill’s lead, lawyers for the remaining three defendants also asked for speedy committal hearings and stated that their clients would plead innocent to all charges.

  Closed hearings were subsequently granted, thus banning all prospective jurors from attendance. Hearings were held on August 9, at which time all four defendants were bound over to the grand jury.

  Only a few days later, the September issue of Front Page Detective arrived at the newsstands of Seminole County. Inside its tawdry pages, the Alday family was treated to its first dose of blatantly exploitive media coverage of the tragedy they had suffered nearly four months before. In an article entitled “Too Evil to Be Called Animals,” the magazine related in typically lurid and perfervid language the last unspeakable hours of the “sexually assaulted and slaughtered pretty Mary Alday,” who, according to the author, “had been repeatedly raped and subjected to a hideous ordeal of sexual torture.” Even after her death, the article went on, “the killer had continued to violate the young woman’s body.”

  For Ernestine, this first exposure was unbearably painful. She refused to read it. But neither Nancy nor Patricia could stop themselves. The effect was jolting. “It was hard to imagine that people would write things like that, knowing that we would read them, or at least hear about them,” Nancy remembered. “But, at least, we thought that would be the end of it, just this one disgusting little article, and after that, we would be left alone.”

  Instead, as later events would demonstrate, it was just the beginning.

  At approximately 6:00 P.M. on September 4, the Seminole County grand jury indicted Carl Junior Isaacs, Wayne Carl Coleman, William Carroll Isaacs, and George Elder Dungee for a total of nineteen charges in the Alday case, including a full six counts of murder for each defendant.

  Although eight of the twenty-one members of the Seminole County grand jury were black, Hill and Farrington filed a motion declaring that the method of securing grand jury members was discriminatory in that it tended to exclude blacks from service.

  Meanwhile, on September 13, attorneys for Billy Isaacs asked that his case be remanded to juvenile court, a motion that was later denied.

  Two days later, on September 15, Hill and Farrington were once again before Judge Geer, this time filing for a change of venue for Carl Isaacs’ trial, a motion which, if granted, would have removed the trial from Seminole County.

  Attorneys for Coleman and Dungee immediately filed similar motions.

  A hearing on the motion for change of venue was conducted twelve days later, on September 27. During the hearing, Hill and other members of the defense team introduced a great deal of evidence to support their contention that the pretrial atmosphere in Seminole County had reached such a level of public outrage that Isaacs could not possibly receive a fair trial.

  To support his argument, Hill introduced scores of clippings from the Donalsonville News, along with other newspaper clippings from such neighboring communities as Bainbridge, Georgia, and Dothan, Alabama, both approximately forty miles away. In addition to these newspapers, Hill presented evidence that 300 to 450 copies of the September issue of Front Page Detective, with its title reference to the Alday defendants as “Too Evil to Be Called Animals,” had been purchased in Seminole County.

  As a result of the pervasive and inflammatory nature of such media coverage, Hill requested a change of venue, which would allow the trial to take place in a less prejudicial location, and went on to suggest certain more appropriate sites, beginning with various Georgia counties, but ranging even farther, to such places as Cook County (Chicago), Illinois; Kings County (Brooklyn), New York; and Washington, D.C.

  Geer, however, vigorously opposed the removal of the trial from Seminole County, arguing forcefully that it was the county’s right to try those who had offended it, and that to suggest its inability to do so was nothing less tha
n an insult and an affront to its citizens.

  Nearly two weeks later, on October 9, Judge Geer denied all motions for change of venue and set Carl Isaacs’ trial to begin on December 31, 1973.

  Three weeks after Judge Geer’s decision, a second sensationalistic account of the Alday murders arrived on the newsstands frequented by the surviving Aldays. It was the November issue of Detective Files, and its cover was captioned in bold letters “Sex Ghouls in Georgia, ‘Six for the Grave … One for Us.’ “ Inside, under a display of mug shots of the Alday defendants, the magazine declared in bold type that “in an effort to satisfy their depraved lust, the foursome didn’t shrink from wantonly disposing of anyone who happened to get in their way.” Thus, according to the article, “six members of a farm family were obliterated … by that breed which cares nothing for anything except its own brutal needs,” and whose “grinning, hard-faced intentness is known by instinct to all females.”

  Although quite a few local residents of Seminole County were able to acquire the September issue of Front Page Detective, the accessibility of the Detective Files November issue was less uncontrolled. Now alerted to the possibility of such painful accounts of the murders, local merchants had since September been carefully scrutinizing the various police and detective magazines which, before then, they had routinely placed on their shelves. Consequently, they were ready for Detective Files when it showed up, and deeming it, in their own words, “gross” and “misleading,” they quietly removed it from their shelves.

  For Ernestine and her daughters, the months during which the defense and prosecution teams prepared their case in the upcoming trial of Carl Isaacs were uniquely dark and painful. The first family Thanksgiving since the murders took place at the enormous dining room table, with Ernestine serving turkey with all the trimmings to her monstrously diminished family. Nancy and Patricia were there, of course, along with Elizabeth and Faye, but the old boisterousness was gone. “It was so quiet,” Patricia remembered, “and we were never a quiet family.”

  Only a few days later, a further diminishment occurred. By then, Ernestine had come to face one of the harshest and most inevitable consequences of the grave loss that had been inflicted upon them on the afternoon of May 14. Without the men, the family simply could not continue its most basic economic activity.

  “As far as farming went, it was just impossible to carry on with it,” Nancy recalled. “And we just couldn’t sit there and let everything go to rust. We had to get what we could out of it.”

  Consequently, on the morning of December 14, approximately two weeks before Carl Isaacs’ trial was to begin, an auction of the Alday farm’s equipment and supplies was held on the grounds of the family homestead on River Road. By then the farm had been bereft for months of themen required to carry out its strenuous labors. As a result, Ernestine had finally acceded to the wishes of the Campbell family, who were Mary Alday’s heirs, and Shuggie’s wife, Barbara, to auction off the estate’s heavy equipment and supplies, all of which had remained idle for the preceding six months.

  “I got up and baked a bunch of cookies for the people who came to the house that morning,” Patricia remembered. “It was cold, and we served them cookies and coffee while they looked over all the stuff that was for sale.”

  Then the auction began, and, wrapped in a long coat against the winter chill, Ernestine stood silently and watched as the auctioneer moved from jeep to rotary tiller to peanut planter. With each passing hour, the family saw their farm shrink as one piece of machinery after another was offered for sale, bought and then driven away from the home.

  “We didn’t go much,” Ernestine told Charles Postell, the Albany Herald reporter who covered the auction and about whom the Alday family would hear a great deal more in the coming years. “We didn’t take much time off for the pleasurable things … just stayed home and worked and went to church.”

  At the end of the day, the auction had netted the family nearly thirty-three thousand dollars, a sum of money that was then added to an overall family estate whose legal complications were only beginning to be guessed, and whose painful outcome neither Ernestine nor her daughters could possible imagine.

  Christmas followed the auction by only eleven days, and once again the family gathered at the homestead. Ernestine and Faye had put up a tree, and brightly wrapped gifts were spread out all around it. In Christmases past, Ned had always been the last to open his presents, but on this Christmas it was Ernestine. “It didn’t feel right,” she would say many years later.

  For the daughters, Ned’s absence was particularly painful. “He loved chocolate-covered cherries,” Nancy remembered. “And every Christmas, each of the kids would buy him a box. But that Christmas, no one bought any. No chocolate-covered cherries, that’s what I remember most.”

  Six days later, on the night of December 30, 1973, Ernestine was once again surrounded by her children in the house on River Road. The trial of Carl Isaacs had been set to begin the next day, and in the hours before it began, each of the sisters made her way to Ernestine’s side. “I don’t know why we came that night,” Patricia said years later, “but we all ended up there, every one of us. We knew that we were going to hear terrible things over the next few days, and I guess we sort of wanted to be together one more time before that started.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  While the weeks passed slowly along bleak stretches of River Road, the green crops of summer drying to a crackling brown, Geer and Hill continued to work on their cases.

  For Hill, the essential task would be to dispute as much as possible any attempt to put a specific gun in Carl Isaacs’ hand at any specific moment. The forensic evidence, particularly fingerprints, indisputably placed Carl Isaacs in the Alday trailer, but none of it could be used to demonstrate that while there he had actually committed murder.

  Thus, for Hill, the main thrust of the defense would be to impeach the testimony of Billy Isaacs, to impugn him as a self-serving family traitor who had sold out his brother in order to save his own skin.

  It was Geer’s task to make sure that didn’t happen, but also to arrange and present the evidence necessary to re-create the murders as vividly as possible, then the physical evidence that linked Carl Isaacs to the crimes, and finally to call Billy to the stand to give eyewitness testimony that Carl Isaacs had willfully participated in the cold-blooded murder of all six of the Alday victims.

  By December 30, 1973, both he and Hill were prepared to present their cases.

  Although indisputably the town’s most impressive building, the Seminole County Courthouse in Donalsonville, Georgia, nonetheless suggested the pinched economic life that surrounded it. A two-story red-brick building with a short span of unpainted concrete steps, it rested at the head of what amounted to the town’s central thoroughfare, Second Street, a wide, slightly curving avenue of feed stores, auto parts outlets, and a scattering of those other perennial establishments of rural America, farm finance-and-loan companies.

  Set on a rectangular lot adorned only by a few short palm trees and a smattering of squat war memorials and trophy cases, the courthouse had long been the judicial and administrative center of Seminole County. As such, it housed not only the court and adjoining jury rooms but an assortment of county offices, including the sheriff’s office with its tiny jail and the offices of the county clerk and tax assessors.

  In a building of small, cluttered offices where every inch seemed to be used to its full potential, the courtroom stood as the most spacious and imposing, though it, too, was anything but grand. Its bare, light-green walls enclosed a spartan gathering of wooden furniture, and its large windows rattled loudly in the wintry winds that blew in from the fields. In summer it was ventilated by two overhead fans that gave the entire room a sense of being antiquated, a place where old men had once lounged in open shirts and suspenders and discussed their exploits at Antietam or Bull Run.

  In its overall affect, then, Judge Walter Geer’s courtroom was stereotypicall
y small-town southern. Or so it must certainly have seemed to the four men from Baltimore who were now destined to be tried within its walls.

  The first of them, according to the docket set by Judge Geer on October 9, was to be Carl Junior Isaacs, the man who by then most investigators believed to have been, despite his youth, the malignant moving spirit behind the horrors that had occurred on River Road.

  The preliminary proceedings in the trial of Carl Isaacs for the murder of six members of the Alday family began at 9:30 A.M. on December 31, 1973. Almost immediately, during the extraordinarily brief voir dire questioning of prospective jurors, it became obvious that many of the jurors were extremely familiar with the details of the case. They had read newspaper accounts published not only in the Donalsonville News, but in numerous other dailies from Dothan, Alabama, to Atlanta. In addition, many of the prospective jurors had also known at least one of the victims, and had even attended the Alday funeral at the Spring Creek Baptist Church five months earlier.

  Nevertheless, within a single day, the voir dire had been completed, and a jury for Carl Isaacs’ trial had been assembled entirely from among residents of Seminole County or its vicinity.

  Thus at 9:00 A.M. on New Year’s Day, January 1, 1974, Geer began the courtroom phase of his prosecution, calling with lightning speed witness after witness in a parade of testimony that whisked the jury from the initial discovery of the murder victims through the various stages of the investigation into their deaths, and finally ending with the dramatic capture of the Maryland escapees in the hills of West Virginia.

  He began with Bud Alday, who swiftly recounted a series of events by then familiar not only to the community but to the United States and even several European countries in which stories of the murders had appeared.