Blood Echoes Read online

  Billy had obeyed without question, and while he and Wayne continued to move their supplies from the Super Sport to the Impala, Carl began to paw at Mary Alday’s breasts. For a time she resisted him, but he hit her again and again, so that by the time Billy returned to the trailer, she had given up.

  “I opened the trailer door a few inches and Mary Alday was laying on the floor,” Billy Isaacs said.

  He could see Mary Alday on her back beneath the table, her white panties already stripped from her and flung to the side. The top part of her pants suit had been pulled up around her neck, revealing the two white breasts Carl had groped for, then seized by force, and now, for a time, appeared to be finished with.

  “Carl Isaacs was standing by the kitchen table with his pants down,” Billy Isaacs said. “George Dungee was standing behind Carl Isaacs.”

  As if, perhaps, he were the next in line.

  But he was not.

  “I closed the door of the trailer and went out and told Wayne that Carl was messing around with Mary Alday and Wayne Coleman said that he was going to go in,” Billy Isaacs said.

  And so he did, disappearing into the trailer’s tiny, crowded kitchen, while Billy remained outside as the minutes crawled by one after another until he couldn’t take it anymore and returned once again to the trailer door, opened it a few inches, and peered in.

  “Wayne Coleman was on top of Mary Alday,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “What happened after that?”

  “I told Carl to come on, that everything was ready.”

  “What took place then?”

  “I closed the trailer door and went out and stood by the 396 Chevy, and a few minutes passed and the trailer door opened.”

  And out they came.

  Carl Isaacs.

  Wayne Coleman.

  George Dungee.

  And …

  “Mary Alday had a red handkerchief tied around her eyes and had her hands tied behind her back and had a handkerchief tied around her mouth,” Billy Isaacs said.

  In that condition, she was placed in the back floorboard of her own car, with Dungee there to guard her, while Carl sat alone in the front seat behind the wheel.

  At last, they were ready to go, but then, for the first time, their luck began fitfully to run out.

  The Super Sport wouldn’t crank.

  “So Carl took the front of Mary Alday’s car and pushed it out on the paved road until it finally started,” Billy Isaacs said.

  And again, as they moved northward down River Road, past Jerry Godby on his tractor and Mrs. Eddie Chance in her garden, and little Michael Jackson in his yard, their luck sputtered out briefly once again.

  “Wayne had lost his wallet and he thought it was back in the trailer,” Billy Isaacs said.

  After returning to it, they headed out again, still moving northward down River Road until they came to a break in the forest which bordered it.

  “We went across the field and zigzagged through the woods until we came to a little clearing in amongst the woods,” Billy Isaacs said.

  And there the Impala halted.

  “Carl got out of the car and told me and Wayne to take the Super Sport on down in the woods as far as we could and wipe down the fingerprints,” Billy Isaacs said.

  Which, as always, they obediently did, but also as always, poorly did, shoddily and hastily did, leaving prints everywhere for Dr. Larry Howard to find and tell the world about.

  Then they returned to the Impala.

  “What, if anything, did you see?” Geer asked.

  “Mary Alday was fully undressed,” Billy Isaacs said.

  She was nude, and leaning against the hood of the car. Carl was standing beside her until he saw the two other men approach. Then he suddenly stepped away and grabbed her by her wrist and threw her on the ground.

  “What happened then?”

  “Carl asked me and Wayne if we wanted any,” Billy Isaacs said.

  But Coleman had already had his, and Billy didn’t want “any.” Only George Dungee remained.

  “George Dungee said he wanted to have sexual intercourse with her,” Billy Isaacs said, using a pristine, clinical language that Dungee would not have known.

  But Carl, as always, was the first in line.

  “Carl said wait a minute because he wanted to have it first,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “What happened then?”

  “He had sexual intercourse with her and then got up.”

  Now, at last, George could have his.

  “And George Dungee had sexual intercourse with her,” Billy Isaacs said.

  Even then, however, it was not over.

  “When Dungee got finished he got up and Carl asked me if I was sure that I didn’t want any and I said no, that I did not. So Carl said that he wanted to have some peanut butter,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “Some what?”

  “Some peanut butter.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “So he laughed at me and George and Wayne. And he turned her over on her stomach and he had sexual intercourse with her rectum.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He got up and was laughing and before he had sexual intercourse in the rectum with her he had tried to get Mary Alday to have sexual intercourse in the mouth, but she refused, so Carl hit her upside of the head with his fist and he knocked her unconscious.”

  “How long did she remain unconscious?”

  “Until Carl finished having sexual intercourse with her in the rectum. She came to when Carl had finished having sexual intercourse with her the second time and she sat up on the ground and asked if she could please get dressed and Carl said no.”

  There was no need for Mary Alday to get dressed.

  She was about to die.

  “We was getting ready to take Mary Alday down into the woods away from the car,” Billy Isaacs said.

  To kill her, of course, but murder was something George Dungee had not yet tasted … and wanted to.

  “And so before Wayne took her down into the woods, Dungee spoke up and said, ‘What about me?’” Billy Isaacs said.

  To which Coleman shrugged, then handed Dungee his .22.

  “And George took Mary Alday down into the woods a little ways away from the car, made her lay facedown on the ground and he shot her twice,” Billy Isaacs said.

  “And where did you go from there?”

  “Headed toward Alabama.”

  “And when you got to Alabama what, if anything, happened to the Mary Alday car?”

  “It was the next afternoon and we was going through a little town in Alabama and Mary Alday’s car started overheating and Carl pulled off of the main road a ways and the car just blew up in one cloud of smoke.”

  With the Alday car now irrecoverably disabled, the four men had then proceeded to take what they needed from the abandoned car and toss the rest over a barbed wire fence and into a weedy field for Ronnie Angel and Horace Waters to find and bring back to Donalsonville.

  Now on foot, they had retreated into the nearby woods, waited until nightfall, then walked into town, where they’d stolen a Chevy Caprice and headed north, finally reaching as far as West Virginia, where, for a final time, under a hail of shots from Frank Thomas’s AR-15, their luck ran out completely.

  It was over now, the first run through the story of May 14, and as Nancy and Patricia made their way out of the courtroom, they looked forward to hearing it only two more times, in the trials of Coleman and Dungee. After that, they would never have to hear it again.

  “We felt a little relieved at the end of Billy Isaacs’ testimony,” Nancy Alday remembered, “like we’d gone through the worst of it.”

  But they had not.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  In his cross-examination of Billy Isaacs, Bobby Hill, anticipating the sort of family background and mitigating circumstances that would be much more fully explored in later trials, led Billy back through his early years. In response to Hill’s questions, Billy testifie
d that he and Carl had not been raised together because when he was five, the two brothers had been placed in different foster homes because their mother could not support them.

  “Did you ever know your father?” Hill asked.

  “I don’t verily remembered him.”

  But he did know his brother Carl, and on that fateful night in Baltimore, he’d been glad to see both Carl and Wayne.

  “Did they ask you to go with them?”

  “They asked me if I wanted to go.”

  “What was your answer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you want to go?”

  “Just got the urge to be with my brothers.”

  For William Carroll (“Billy”) Isaacs, it would always remain just as simple as that.

  On January 2, the day following Billy’s testimony, the prosecution and defense made their closing arguments in the case.

  Rising to his full, imposing stature, Geer, in a deep, orotund voice, presented the situation as he saw it.

  “What you do in this case,” he told the jury, “is going to determine whether or not members of the Alday family can be shot and killed by a meandering band of killers.”

  As to Billy Isaacs’ testimony, Geer was willing to admit that his star witness had not come from the most upstanding of the nation’s citizens. “I can’t get a Baptist preacher to be my witness,” he declared. “Baptist preachers, Methodist preachers, Holiness preachers, rabbis, and Catholic priests are usually not at a mobile home where shootings are taking place. They are not usually in the woods where a woman is repeatedly raped and shot dead. Billy Carroll Isaacs was there.”

  In conclusion, Geer returned once again to the jury’s responsibility to its community. “This community wants to know whether or not peaceful, law-abiding citizens can be shot down and killed and its wives raped and mistreated. The state of Georgia, from the mountains to the sea, wants to know what you are going to do about it.”

  Then, ticking off the names of the Alday dead one by one in a slow, dramatic cadence, Geer made his final plea. “Ned Alday. Jerry Alday. Chester Alday. Aubrey Alday. Jimmy Alday. Mary Alday. Their lips are sealed forever. They are dead. Carl J. Isaacs saw to that. God will tend to whether or not mercy shall be on his soul. Your duty is to say whether or not he is guilty or innocent. We ask you for a verdict of guilty.”

  In a very brief statement, Fletcher Farrington admitted that Carl Isaacs had been present in the Alday trailer, but he vigorously disputed the testimony of his brother Billy. Noting that some of the victims had been murdered by weapons that had been under Billy Isaacs’ control, Farrington argued that Billy’s testimony was entirely self-serving, meant not so much to convict Carl as to exonerate himself from any criminal responsibility for what had happened on River Road. “Billy, when he gets to Georgia and decided to be good, says, ‘Carl took my gun from me.’ Why is Billy not on trial? Billy figured out a way to save his skin, put it all on everybody else.”

  Sixty-eight minutes after Farrington had concluded his argument, the jury reached its verdict. It had found Carl Junior Isaacs guilty on all counts.

  * * *

  The penalty phase in the trial of Carl Isaacs began on January 7, with Geer as the first to speak.

  “Now, what is your punishment to be?” he asked. “This is not an ordinary murder case. This is the most serious murder that ever happened in the history of Seminole County.”

  Geer then returned to the notion of the jury’s duty to protect its community against the likes of Carl Isaacs. “There is only one way for you to make sure that this sort of tragic, senseless crime will not reoccur [sic] in Seminole County,” he told the jury. “That’s for your verdict to speak out and ring around the world that we have imposed death on Carl J. Isaacs.”

  It now fell to Bobby Lee Hill to make the last plea. In an argument only slightly longer than Geer’s, he accepted the jury’s finding of guilty under the law and assured them that he would not reargue the facts of the case as he stood before them now.

  “Carl Isaacs is guilty because you said so,” Hill told the jury. “I understand that for starters.”

  But the issue of Isaacs’ guilt was not the only one the case raised, Hill contended. There was another matter at stake as well, one whose profundity could hardly be overestimated. “This whole case is about human life,” Hill told the jury. “The people in that trailer who fired those guns obviously thought very little about human life. It is obvious that the guilty and the weak and the bitter think very little of human life.”

  The cheapening of human life had been going on relentlessly for years, Hill continued, a process that the Vietnam War and television violence had greatly accelerated. He hoped the jury would take the opposite course, hold all life infinitely dear. “Well, would you want to participate in the continuing of cheapening life? All you have to do is just come back and say that Carl Isaacs ought to be put to death over in Reidsville in a steel chair which attaches to electricity and puts him to death. So just continue that effort, and all of us will cheapen life just a little more.”

  Over the past few weeks, Hill said, he had come to have considerable admiration for the Alday family. “I regret all that occurred,” he told the jury, “but what troubles me more is that if Carl Isaacs doesn’t care about life, does that mean you don’t have to care anything about life? He is guilty. He is guilty of not caring anything about human life and he thinks it’s cheap. Do you have to be?”

  Hill disputed Geer’s notion that the death penalty had any deterrent effect on capital offenses. “The criminals are out there killing right now,” he declared. “They are not out there keeping up with what Mr. Geer is saying.”

  As to Carl Isaacs and the other defendants, they could now be of help to society only if kept alive and studied. “Something is wrong with Billy,” Hill declared. “Something is wrong with Wayne. Something is wrong with George. There is something wrong with Carl.” But rather than making any attempt to discover the source of their behavior, Hill said, “all the system now asks is that you just adopt some of his notions about the cheapness of life.”

  In his final remarks, Hill returned to the Aldays. “They are surely one of the best, if not the best family you have here,” he said, “but you can’t do anything about what happened to them except adopt the same stupid, dumb, ignorant, malicious notion that the people who did it have.”

  Thirty-eight minutes after Hill’s conclusion, and with virtually no discussion or deliberation, the jury was escorted back into Judge Geer’s courtroom. They had decided that Carl Junior Isaacs should be put to death.

  Nine days later, after an almost identical trial to that of Carl Issacs, and following a deliberation of only fifty-eight minutes, George Dungee was found guilty on all counts.

  In his closing arguments in both the guilt/innocence and penalty phases of the trial, Geer presented nearly identical statements to the jury.

  In the penalty phase, however, Dungee’s attorney, Philip Sheffield, offered what Geer himself later called “the most eloquent argument against the death penalty” he had ever heard.

  “I am against killing, period,” Sheffield said, then launched into a brief history of the death penalty, moving through the Old Testament practice of stoning, to the Roman practice of crucifixion, to the burning of witches in England, the invention of the guillotine in France, through the rise of hanging as the standard form of legal execution in England, a method, Sheffield noted, that could be applied as the penalty for no less than 135 separate offenses.

  Georgia had used the same method for many years, Sheffield told the jury, before finally switching to what appeared the more expeditious method of electrocution. “I remember when I was a teenage boy I went to the Georgia Military Academy,” Sheffield said, “and I remember on too many occasions when we would sit down to the evening mess, the lights would dim and it was said that somebody was being executed in the electric chair just a few miles from us.”

  It was a practice that
had only ended when the United States Supreme Court had declared Georgia’s practice unconstitutional because it was used only on “the poor, the indigent, the half crazy, the incompetent and the black.” Now, despite the new law that had just been passed by the general assembly to correct these abuses, Sheffield argued that it was about to happen again, the same punishment for the same victim. “You have got a little ole nigger man over here that doesn’t weigh over 135 pounds,” Sheffield said. “He is poor and he is broke. He is ignorant. I will venture to say he has an I.Q. of not over 80. This is the kind of person who has been killed for the most part in the history of capital punishment in Georgia.”

  Finally, Sheffield asked the jury who would be helped by Dungee’s execution? Not the Aldays, he said, whose lives could never be regained, or whose grief, as expressed in the survivors, could never be assuaged.

  Who would be hurt? Sheffield asked the jury, then answered for them. “I have a visceral fear that if you order the execution of this man that you may be the ones that will be hurt, that there will be a great day of judgment when you will face the authority of all the universe and when the book of life is opened to the page January 9, 1974, and your verdict which says, ‘Kill him. Kill him,’ is there for all to see, and you are asked just one question, ‘Why? Why?’, what will be your answer?”

  After deliberating for less than two hours the jury returned with their answer to Sheffield’s question. Unpersuaded by either the logic or the passion of his argument, they sentenced George Elder Dungee to death, a decision Dungee received, according to news accounts, entirely without emotion.

  In contrast to Carl Isaacs, who’d appeared bored and indifferent to his trial proceedings, and who’d actually yawned lazily as Geer beseeched the jury for his death, Coleman seemed clearly concerned with his trial. Throughout the proceedings he wrung his hands nervously or twiddled edgily with a box of matches. Since his capture, he’d grown a wispy blond moustache and the beginnings of a light-colored beard. Only his two tattoos, the one of a heart with “MOM” written inside it on his left arm, and on his right, a slithering snake, remained to suggest the dissolute look he’d had at the time of his capture.