Blood Echoes Page 16

  Now, at sixteen years of age, Billy Isaacs faced an absolute minimum of twenty years of incarceration. Under even the best of conditions, he would enter prison as a boy and come out as a man already at the edge of middle age.

  It was by no means a sweetheart deal, but with six murder charges, along with kidnapping, as possible elements within a bill of indictment, Isaacs had hardly been in a strong negotiating position.

  Thus, early in September, Isaacs had agreed to testify against the other three defendants, and on the twenty-first of that same month had been interviewed by Geer in the offices of the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department in Cuthbert, Georgia, a small community approximately fifty miles from Donalsonville.

  Since that single meeting, however, they had not seen each other, and as Isaacs made his way to the stand, Geer wondered if such a boy, only a few years beyond childhood, would be able to go through what now lay before him, in the presence not only of a large contingent of the Alday family, but, perhaps more important, of his revered older brother, Carl.

  If Geer had had any doubts about either Billy Isaacs’ willingness or his ability to testify against his brother, they were quickly resolved when, in answer to one of Geer’s first questions, he coolly pointed Carl out as the man “in the orange-colored shirt” who sat little more than twenty feet away.

  “Is he your brother?” Geer asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know George Dungee?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know Wayne Carl Coleman?”

  “Yes, sir, he’s my half-brother.”

  “Where did you get in the presence of these individuals you have named?”

  “Baltimore County, Maryland.”

  “Do you know where Carl Isaacs had been before he came and picked you up?”

  “In a prison camp,” Billy said. “He told me he had escaped.”

  Billy Isaacs then related the tortuous route from Maryland to Pennsylvania back to Maryland which had directly preceded the precipitous drive southward through West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and across the state line into Florida. It was there, in a motel near Jacksonville, Isaacs said, that the four had remained for two days before making that fateful decision to head north again, finally crossing back into Georgia.

  “Did you have an occasion to visit a mobile home in Seminole County, Georgia?” Geer asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Geer then asked Isaacs to look at a photograph, State’s Exhibit Number 1.

  “Do you recognize that?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What is it a picture of?”

  “The Alday trailer home,” Isaacs answered.

  “And that’s the place you visited with whom?”

  “With Carl Isaacs, Wayne Carl Coleman, and George Dungee,” Billy answered.

  “Approximately what time did you get to this mobile home?”

  William Carroll (“Billy”) Isaacs drew in a long, apprehensive breath as he began to move inevitably toward the single most horrendous experience of his life.

  “It was in the evening,” he began, “around a quarter after four or four-thirty …”

  Only a few feet away, staring evenly into Billy Isaacs’ soft brown eyes, Nancy and Patricia sat silently and waited. “No one can ever imagine what it’s like to sit and know that you’re going to hear things that you’ll never be able to get out of your mind,” Nancy would say nearly seventeen years later.

  Still, for the next two hours, the two sisters did just that, lived through an unprecedented slaughter, an assault upon the bodies of the closest kin that had by then become a further assault upon their land and livelihood and dignity, moving through the terrible hours slowly, as if it were a motion picture playing in their heads, bearing them onward toward unimaginable cruelties one excruciating frame at a time.

  “It was in the evening,” Billy Isaacs said, “about a quarter after four or four-thirty.”

  Richard Miller’s green Super Sport was acting up, its carburetor shot, pumping gas incessantly, eating up their money. At first they’d looked for an isolated gas tank somewhere, but the only one they’d found was filled with diesel fuel.

  So they’d continued on down a small, paved back road, through wide, flat fields, looking for a mark, a quick hit good enough to buy them a little more gas, a few more beers, maybe a night in some motel that had a television and a hot shower.

  But the fields seemed to stretch out forever, featureless and vague, so that for the longest time, while the engine guzzled ceaselessly, they saw nothing but the gently undulating furrows and the small seedling plants that had just begun to sprout within them, saw nothing but a few isolated sodbusters crouched over the wheels of their tractors, saw nothing but empty land and empty sky, saw nothing until, at last, a likely mark swam into view.

  “The Alday trailer home,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “And when you got to this mobile home,” Geer asked, “did anyone go in?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who went in?”

  “Wayne Carl Coleman,” Billy Isaacs answered matter-of-factly, ticking off their full names. “Carl Junior Isaacs.”

  He’d been able to see them from his place in the back seat. Dungee had taken Carl’s place behind the wheel so that he could press his foot on the accelerator to keep the engine from shutting down. This had left Billy alone in the back seat, from which position he had been able to keep Carl and Wayne in plain sight as they moved toward the trailer’s back door, then turned its gray aluminum knob effortlessly.

  “It was unlocked,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “Did you see them go in?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He saw them disappear into the trailer’s shadowy interior. For a time he waited, still sitting silently in the back seat while Dungee continued to keep his foot on the accelerator, racing the engine slightly from time to time to make sure it didn’t gutter out.

  “Did you, yourself, later go in the trailer?” Geer asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Billy Isaacs said.

  They were burglarizing the inside of the trailer, stumbling around in it, checking out drawers and cabinets, moving in their usual disorderly fashion from one room to the next. They had done it many times before, countless times, more than anyone could remember. Nothing had ever gone wrong before.

  “Did someone arrive?” Geer asked.

  “Two men in a jeep,” Billy Isaacs said.

  From twenty feet away, Patricia listened intently, her eyes trained on Billy Isaacs. Even without him saying it, she knew the jeep was blue, but more than that, she knew the men inside it, the “two men,” as Isaacs had described them in the most minimal of terms. Ned Alday, her father. Jerry Alday, her brother. She had worked with them, played with them, laughed and cried and argued with them. Theirs were among the first hands she had ever touched, the first voices she had ever heard. Now they were moving into a driveway, and someone was watching them from behind the lacy curtains of Mary Alday’s kitchen window, watching silently as their bodies jolted forward slightly when the jeep came to a halt in the bare, unpaved driveway of her brother’s trailer.

  * * *

  “Two men in a jeep,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “What happened?” Geer asked.

  An instantaneous decision, little more than a sudden reflex. Carl and Wayne had bolted out of the trailer and swept around the blue jeep. Carl drew his pistol and Wayne drew his pistol.

  “And I pulled mine out,” Billy Isaacs said.

  Over the barrel of his own .22 pistol, he could see Ned and Jerry Alday as they were led back into the trailer. It was still dark inside, and they peered around briefly as they were directed to the kitchen table and told to sit down. To his right, he could see Carl watching them, his hand wrapped around the gleaming pearl handle of a second .22 he’d found inside the trailer.

  For a moment, a small, barely human communication took place between Carl and the younger of the �
��two men.”

  “You live here?” Carl asked.

  Jerry answered that he did, and Carl asked nothing else within Billy Isaacs’ hearing because he and Coleman had left the kitchen by then to search the trailer again.

  “What were you looking for?” Geer asked.

  “For money,” Billy Isaacs said. “For guns or clothing or something like that.”

  But they’d had very little luck in finding anything of value, so once back in the kitchen, they’d robbed the two men, and gotten the comparatively big haul of a penknife, a cigarette lighter, a wallet, and some change.

  Then there was more talk.

  “You married?” Carl asked Jerry Alday.

  Jerry said he was, then added that his wife would be home soon. But there was no reason for him to wait for her, he told Carl, since his wife never carried any money beyond the few dollars she needed to take with her to work.

  Perhaps in that instant, Jerry Alday caught something in Carl Isaacs’ eyes that made him realize he’d made a terrible mistake. One he tried desperately to correct.

  “He told Carl please not to hurt her,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “And after this was done, what took place?” Geer asked.

  “Carl took the younger of the two men into the south bedroom,” Billy Isaacs said, “and Wayne took the older man into the bedroom on the north side.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There were shots from the south bedroom and from the north bedroom,” Billy Isaacs said.

  Listening mutely from behind the front rail of the courtroom, Nancy could hear more than Billy Isaacs’ voice. She could hear the hail of gunfire that must have rained down upon her father and brother a few seconds after they’d been led to the opposite bedrooms of the trailer. Particularly on her father as he tried again and again to rise from the bed he’d been forced to lie down on, lifting himself repeatedly as Carl Isaacs and Wayne Coleman continued to fire at him at point-blank range. She could see the blue smoke that must have wafted from the two tiny rooms after the last reverberations from the pistols had finally died away.

  Within minutes, her father and brother were dead. But even then it wasn’t over.

  In a sense, it had just begun.

  “A middle-aged man pulled up on a green John Deere tractor,” Billy Isaacs said.

  Jimmy Alday slid out of the trailer seat, walked up to the back door of the trailer, and politely knocked, fully expecting Jerry to open it and, as he always had, cordially invite him in. What he saw was another visage entirely, of course, meaner, coarser, and in its grim aspect, unimaginably different from any face he had ever seen.

  “Wayne Carl Coleman opened the door and told him to come inside,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “Did he put a gun on him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What happened then?”

  As if caught in the black grooves of a warped phonograph record, the same actions were repeated in almost the same order, first robbery, this time the limited take of a hat, a pair of sunglasses, and a nearly empty wallet, then a short, dreadfully clipped exchange.

  “Carl asked the man why he came up to the trailer,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “To see my brother,” Jimmy replied.

  “No, you didn’t,” Carl said. “You heard gunshots, didn’t you?”

  Jimmy shook his head. He had heard no gunshots, he told Carl. But in that instant, he must have realized that they had been fired outside his hearing, that someone had been shot, that it was probably his brother. He did not have time to ask.

  “Carl took the man into the living room and shot him once behind the back of the head,” Billy Isaacs said.

  Three men were now dead, a body in almost every room, the dark air inside the small trailer choked with a thick bluish smoke, the smell of gunpowder everywhere, and still they did not leave.

  “Carl went outside to move the tractor and told George Dungee to come into the trailer and watch out for Mary Alday when she came home,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “Was Mary Alday the next person to come to the mobile home?”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “And when she arrived, tell us what happened.”

  She’d pulled into the driveway almost immediately, but Dungee, his mind forever inattentive and unfocused, had not seen her.

  “I cussed at George and told him he should have been looking out the window,” Billy Isaacs said.

  So it was Carl who’d first spotted Mary as she made the gentle curve into the now crowded driveway and brought her blue and white Chevrolet Impala to a stop.

  “She hopped out of her car,” Billy Isaacs said.

  And Carl hopped off the tractor.

  “Carl came up behind her with a pistol in his hand and brought her on into the trailer,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “What happened then?”

  “She had a grocery bag in her arms and Carl knocked it out of her hands,” Billy Isaacs said.

  Seated with her sisters in the first row of benches behind the courtroom rail, Patricia closed her eyes slowly, sensing as everyone in the community already had, that of all those who had suffered so much on the afternoon of May 14, Mary had surely suffered the most. There was even something in this first petty act of violence against her, the knocking of a bag of groceries from her defenseless hands, that had seemed to send a jolt through those who sat in the hushed but crowded courtroom. How pointlessly humiliating a thing to do, how impossible it must have been for Mary to comprehend it, and how it must have signaled to her even at this first moment that as a human being, at least in the minds of the men around her, she had already ceased to be.

  The warped record spun again, and Mary Alday, just as Ned, Jerry, and Jimmy before her, was robbed of the few personal possessions she had.

  “Carl took the pocketbook from her, opened it up and dumped it onto the table, and perfume and a wallet and car keys fell out of it,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “Any money?”

  “There was a dollar bill inside.”

  “What happened after that?”

  Nothing less than the utterly inconceivable.

  “Two men pulled up in a bluish-green pickup truck,” Billy Isaacs said.

  For a moment, the four men stared unbelievingly out the small square windows of the trailer. The only sound within it was Mary Alday’s crying.

  “Carl told her to shut up,” Billy Isaacs said.

  But she didn’t.

  So he hit her.

  Outside, however, the men, Shuggie and Aubrey Alday, were laughing, and after a moment, when they continued to sit in the bluish-green truck, making no effort to get out, Carl decided to go out and get them.

  “He told me to come along with him, so we went out the front door of the trailer,” Billy Isaacs said.

  Armed with a .22 and a .38, they silently slunk around the side of the trailer, then fanned out around the truck, one at each door.

  “Carl stuck his pistol up in the driver’s face and told them to get out and me and Carl took them inside the trailer,” Billy Isaacs said.

  The laughter had stopped by then, but Carl continued to dwell upon it. “You think it’s funny?” he demanded. “You laughing at me?”

  No, the men told him, they’d been laughing at having just missed a black flowerpot as they’d turned into the driveway.

  The laughing had stopped, but the crying had not. Mary had begun to whimper uncontrollably again. By then, she’d glimpsed Jimmy’s body as it lay facedown on the living room sofa no more than ten feet away. “He looks like he’s been hurt,” she said to Shuggie and Aubrey as they sat where Carl had put them, carefully out of sight of Jimmy’s body, crouched together on the kitchen floor.

  Then, just as before, the next cog in the disordered machinery that now controlled everything that happened within the trailer clicked into place.

  “Carl and Wayne was whispering to each other and Wayne took some towels off from the kitchen table and went into the bedroom on the north side of t
he trailer,” Billy Isaacs said.

  But this time, additional preparation was required.

  “Carl and George Dungee took Mary Alday into the bathroom,” Billy Isaacs said.

  Then he returned, leaving Mary with George, and took one of the men into the south bedroom while Coleman took the other one into the north bedroom.

  “There were several shots from the bedroom Wayne had took the man into,” Billy Isaacs said, but from the other bedroom, the one to the north, he heard only “clicks.”

  During the afternoon of killing, Carl’s .22 had emptied.

  “And so he came out of the bedroom real fast and grabbed ahold of my pistol and went back in the bedroom and there was one or two shots,” Billy Isaacs said.

  When Carl came out again, he was laughing. “That damned bastard begged for mercy,” he said.

  “That damned bastard” was Nancy’s brother, and with his death, the last of her blood relations, the last of those male Aldays who had sustained the family farm for two generations, who’d fed its hungry hogs and grown its peanuts and hunted its covey of small, brown quail across every inch of the five hundred acres of their own land, was gone.

  Now all that remained was Mary.

  “She was still in the bathroom,” Billy Isaacs said.

  But once the last of the men lay dead, she was brought back into the kitchen and made to stand by the table. She was still crying, and Carl was still screaming at her to shut up while his eyes darted about the scattered contents of her pocketbook. He was looking for her car keys, and when he found them, he snatched them up.

  “Then Carl and Wayne went outside and opened up the trunks of the cars outside, and Carl came back in and he told me to go out and help Wayne transfer the items from our car over to her car,” Billy Isaacs said.