Blood Echoes Read online

  Although Carl remained imprecise as to what “this hate” was, he was happy to reveal his preferred method of easing it. “When I kill,” he told Postell with the unflinching directness of a full-blown psychopath, “I feel a release.”

  While Carl bemoaned the disadvantages of incarceration, he clearly enjoyed the criminal fame that accompanied it. “You take Dillinger,” he said alarmingly. “He terrorized people all over. If they got in his way, he killed them. And they made a damn movie about him.”

  In another article, published on January 16, 1975, Carl vented his spleen once again. This time his target was not just the Aldays, but the whole state of Georgia. He’d been in Georgia so long he was “turning into a hick.” These hicks, he added, had been his downfall, and his hatred for them raged on undiminished. “That’s why I can’t feel sorry for the people I killed down here,” he said.

  These remarks returned his perseverating mind to the six people he’d murdered on River Road.

  It was their religiosity which most irritated him. “They should have died in church,” he howled. “I just wished I could have killed them there.”

  On January 15, 1975, Carl spoke again, this time claiming that his personal ambition had been to murder one thousand people. His second life’s goal, he added, was to be a practicing attorney, a notion he quickly dismissed. “No, no,” he said regretfully, his mind connecting suddenly to the real world, “the bar would never accept me.”

  Carl also took the time to do a somewhat disjointed psychological analysis of himself, first declaring that homosexuality was the root of his personality disorder, then revising the first analysis with a second one somewhat more in tune with his own hazy understanding of Freudianism. In his second swing at self-knowledge, Carl stated that it was not homosexuality, but the love-hate feelings he had for his mother that had derailed his character. “Did I tell you, we stopped by the side of the road for her to go to the bathroom right in front of us,” he told Postell, as if aghast at his mother’s lack of modesty. This immodesty had been grounds for murdering her, Carl went on, and so on that very occasion, he and his brother had tried to run her down. She’d kept dodging the car, however, her agility making it “very hard to kill her.”

  But the role of family assassin was not the only one Carl claimed to have played. Proudly, he told Postell that he’d also served as the family pimp, and had often “hit the streets to help my sister make a little money, you know what I mean?”

  Carl quickly moved from his sister to his brother Billy. “If I were free and he were free,” he said, “Billy would be the first person I’d kill. I should have killed him. Why didn’t I kill him when I had a gun in my hand?”

  For now, Carl went on, his most critical concern was not so much killing someone else as keeping someone else from killing him. Prison life, he said, was fraught with peril. At present, he told Postell, it was important for him to keep close to a knife. There were two groups in the prison who wanted him dead, he claimed. One was a group of inmates who simply didn’t care for what he’d done to the Aldays, he said, and because of that, they’d put a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.

  The other group, Carl added expansively, consisted of the Black Muslims. Of course there was little love lost between him and blacks in general. “I’d kill a nigger quicker than anybody,” he blustered, since, as he told Postell, it had been black prisoners who’d raped him during a riot at the Maryland State Penitentiary. “That turned me prejudiced,” he said.

  All the same, it was the people on River Road who still, even in their devastation, continued to inspire his hatred. “Why should I feel sorry for them?” he barked. “They should feel sorry for me. I’m the one on Death Row.”

  Death Row was again on Carl’s mind during an interview published on July 8. The people who were demanding the death penalty, he said, should instead be demanding “that prisons not make us suffer so much before we’re put to death.” This indifference to the poor quality of life on Death Row struck Carl as unspeakably cruel. “I wish the public had some compassion,” he moaned.

  It was the cramped space that was really getting to him, Carl added. “This goddamn cell gets smaller by the day,” he told Postell. “I don’t think I can take it if there are a lot of hearings and postponements before they put me in the chair.”

  But the prospect of execution appealed to him even less. “They’re going to have to beat me to death getting me there,” he warned.

  By the early summer of 1977, Carl was still blabbing to Postell, while his personal Boswell scribbled down every word. By then, goaded by his continuing need for the limelight, he had come up with the ultimate scheme for immortalizing himself. Rather than fighting the guards whose duty it was to lead him to the place of execution, he now claimed that he would cooperate with them so that his execution could be filmed “in living color.” “I want the whole damn world to see me exit,” he declared.

  At the same time, Carl had some preferences as to how the filming should be handled. “I don’t want none of those glamour boys from CBS or NBC lurking around my death watch,” he told Postell. “I want to leave something behind in this world, and I want this filming of my execution to be a documentary style thing.” The rules of taste and propriety had to be observed, Carl said, not “carried off like a goddamn sporting event like they did Gilmore.” It was a serious matter, he added, and he vowed that he “would not let this thing turn into a circus.”

  He did want to be paid for the filming of his execution, however, though he pledged a percentage of the gross for the study of psychopaths.

  Still, despite such erstwhile charitable gestures, Carl continued to maintain that he felt no remorse for the Alday murders. “I really don’t give a damn,” he said.

  On May 13, Carl lifted his voice again. By then his own psychological assessment had shifted decidedly in the direction of self-justification.

  “I am what my mother made me,” he said.

  For her part, Isaacs’ mother responded with a call for his execution. “I don’t want them around if they’re going to be killing people,” Betty said. “Just because they came from my body don’t mean I have to put up with them killing people.”

  To which Carl offered a quick rejoinder: “To the old woman I say, ‘Happy Mother’s Day.’”

  During the interview, Postell noted Isaacs’ running socks and asked about his newfound interest in physical fitness.

  When they read it, Carl’s reply sent shivers down the spines of Patricia and Nancy Alday. “I’m going to escape soon,” he declared. “And the only way you’ll know where I am is the bloody little trail I leave behind.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  While Carl reveled in the attentions of Postell, as well as those of various television and movie producers who had begun to approach him for his story, the legal process involved in the case continued at its own interminable pace.

  In June 1976, over a year and a half after sentence had been pronounced on the last of the defendants, the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences of Coleman and Carl Isaacs. Two weeks later, on July 9, it did the same in the case of George Dungee.

  Thus, within three years of the murders, the first round of appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court had been exhausted. The result had left both the original convictions and sentences intact. As far as the state of Georgia was concerned, Carl Isaacs, Wayne Coleman, and George Duncan had been justly tried and could be justly executed.

  These same three years had worn badly upon Ernestine. Following the initial period of remarkable strength and self-control, she had broken only sporadically. But as the years of loneliness continued, she grew increasingly melancholy, and at last fell into a severe and protracted depression. “Everything my mother saw reminded her of the murders,” Nancy remembered.

  By that time Nancy had decided that she and her family would not return to Albany. Instead they had moved into the house on River Road, their lives now melded even more closely
to Ernestine’s and her surroundings. It was a world of absences and dark memento mori. Outside, the farm’s various outbuildings were empty, all the tools and farm machinery sold at auction. In spring and summer, the warm breezes off Lake Seminole swept over the family’s idle boats and fishing gear. In fall and winter, colder winds tossed its brown, desolate fields, or howled in a high ghostly voice through the rafters of the empty barn.

  Inside the house, the sense of devastation was even more pronounced. There were dozens of empty chairs and beds. Monthly farm magazines still arrived with the names of the dead pasted upon them. Closets remained stuffed with clothes no one would ever wear again. Everywhere, “favorite” things—Ned’s pipe, Jimmy’s encyclopedias—went unused.

  Nowhere was the general sense of abiding loss more painful than at the noon meal, where silence and empty chairs now ringed what had once been a crowded, boisterous table.

  For a time, Ernestine had even continued to cook the same huge midday meals to which she’d become accustomed, routinely setting the table with enough food for eight or nine, where now there were only two or three plates to be filled. Serving certain dishes that she knew to have been the favorites of her husband or one of her sons proved unbearably agonizing, and at times during the now deeply abbreviated noon dinner she would suddenly begin to cry.

  Nor was it much better for her daughters, particularly for Nancy, who, along with her husband and small children, had abandoned their more prosperous and interesting lives in Albany. “We left good jobs and a good life in Albany,” Nancy recalled, “but once Daddy and my brothers were dead and my mother was left alone, we had no choice but to come back.”

  Unlike Patricia, who could find some relief at her job in Donalsonville, Nancy remained intractably bound to the old homestead on River Road. Through the long afternoons, her housework completed, she sat on the front porch, staring out over the unmoving fields, watching the clouds pass over them in broad gray shadows. At times the quiet seemed almost more than she could bear, a stillness composed not only of silenced voices, but of the whole noisy hubbub of farm life, the distant rumble of tractors in the fields, the crunch of jeeps and trucks and cars moving in and out of the gravel driveway, the sounds of labor, movement … life. No more.

  * * *

  Soon, however, even the old homestead was gone. For within three years of the murders, the Alday estate was no more. The legal questions involving its inheritance had been settled, and in its dreadful outcome not one of the surviving children of Ned Alday had received a single square inch of Alday land.

  Mary Campbell had died last, and therefore, as a matter of law, she had inherited nearly everything, save for the portion that went to Barbara Alday, Shuggie’s surviving wife.

  To put to rest the various conflicting claims on the Alday estate that had arisen since the murders, it was decided that everything, even Ned Alday’s life insurance policy along with any income derived from the sale of the Alday homestead, would be placed in one pot, then divided into sevenths.

  Although legally entitled to nothing, Ernestine Alday received three sevenths of the family’s total assets. Barbara Alday received two sevenths, and the remaining two sevenths went to the Campbell family, Mary Alday’s heirs.

  Within a few weeks of the settlement, the now divided Alday lands were sold, with the exception of a single acre on which Ernestine decided to built a small brick house, and upon which she continued to keep, almost as a memento of her lost family, Jimmy’s blue pickup.

  Nothing else was now in the hands or under the control of any member of the Alday family.

  “There was nothing left for the kids after it was all split up,” Ernestine would say from her small living room seventeen years later, “except for some hurt feelings.”

  “It was amazing what happened to our farm,” Nancy remembered. “It was there, and then it was gone. We couldn’t quite figure out why we’d come out with nothing after all we’d already lost, but, the way it was, there was nothing we could do about it.”

  Thus, the legal issues now settled, Ernestine and Nancy readied the homestead for sale, sprucing it up as much as they could to make it more attractive to a prospective buyer. Having now endured years of unimaginable events, this seemed the most unimaginable of all. “It felt very strange,” Nancy recalled, “but that was nothing new.’’

  For what was normal now? The Alday name had become inseparably linked with a tragedy of unspeakable dimension. It was their sole renown, their primary connection to the world beyond the hearth. They had become the murders.

  “We’d gotten to be the community oddities in a way,” Nancy said. “The Aldays were not just an upstanding farm family anymore, but ‘those people,’ the ones something terrible had happened to.”

  This was particularly true in regard to strangers. For as the years passed and the murders continued to be a subject of media interest, the black marble grave site at Spring Creek Baptist Church became a curious and macabre tourist attraction.

  “I’d go into a store or a service station sometimes,” Nancy said in 1990, “and somebody would come in from somewhere out of the area, and right off they’d ask the person behind the counter, ‘Where’s the Alday grave?’ And he’d tell them, and off they’d go in that direction, like they were headed for an amusement park or something.”

  Although the grisly taste of tourists still focused upon the people who had been murdered three years before, the appeals system was focused entirely upon their killers. Now in the machinery of the justice system, the appeals dragged on, and shortly after the latest actions of the Georgia judicial system, defense lawyers concentrated their attention on a higher authority, the United States Supreme Court. It was hoped that its nine justices would find constitutional reason to overturn either the convictions or the sentences and thus overturn the Georgia Supreme Court’s earlier finding.

  But the U.S. Supreme Court found no such reason, and on November 29, it denied certiorari petitions for Dungee and Isaacs, a decision which, in effect, affirmed the constitutional correctness of the initial trial in Donalsonville as well as the later Georgia Supreme Court review.

  Thus denied their initial appeals to the Georgia and U.S. Supreme Courts, Isaacs and Dungee, followed by Coleman a few months later, moved on to the next predetermined rung of the appeals system by filing habeas corpus petitions in the Superior Court of Tattnall County on February 15, 1977.

  Two months later, on April 12, a hearing was held on the petitions in the Superior Court of Tattnall County. On August 31, the petitions of Dungee and Isaacs were denied.

  In the meantime, on May 2, the U.S. Supreme Court had denied Coleman’s certiorari petition, thus affirming Coleman’s conviction and death sentence.

  The following year, 1978, now four years after the murders, showed no decrease in the movements of the Alday murderers within the appeals process.

  On March 15, oral arguments were heard by the Georgia Supreme Court on Isaacs’ and Dungee’s appeals of the previous denials of habeas corpus by the Superior Court in Tattnall County.

  A month later, on April 18, the Court refused the habeas corpus relief requested by Isaacs and Dungee and thereby affirmed the superior court’s initial decision. Going further, the Court also refused to reconsider its 1976 decision, a ruling that had denied the defense’s contention that Judge Geer’s refusal to grant a change of venue in the 1974 trial had violated the rights of Isaacs and Dungee.

  On October 2, the United States Supreme Court denied Isaacs’ and Dungee’s certiorari petitions. The petitions had sought a review of the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision affirming the Superior Court of Tattnall County’s refusal of their original habeas corpus appeal, and in its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court for a second time saw no reason to question the legal process by which the original convictions and sentences had been gained.

  With this “final” denial of review by the United States Supreme Court, new execution dates could now be set for two of the Alday defendants
. Accordingly, on May 19, 1979, nearly six years to the day of the murders, the Superior Court of Seminole County fixed June 1 as the execution date for Carl Isaacs and George Dungee.

  Meanwhile, in Seminole County, Ernestine watched as work went forward on the little brick house she’d decided to build on her one remaining acre of land. When completed it was more modern than she was used to, and seemed less sturdily built than the old place she’d shared with Ned and her brood of children. Its rooms were small neat squares. There were none of those curious little touches Ned had built into the house on River Road. Outside there were no great trees, but only the weak saplings that had been planted there, which, she knew, would never give shade to anyone in her lifetime.

  But by then the old homestead had come to look a good deal different too, as she noticed when she sometimes drove by it, slowing the car to catch a better look, remembering in all its fullness the life she had lived there. The new owners had painted it a brighter color, paved the drive, and installed a swimming pool and dazzling cabana where Shuggie’s trailer had once rested under the broad green trees.

  As for the new brick house, it was nice enough, she sometimes thought upon returning to it. Still, the dining room seemed small, the kitchen too. Everything, she had to admit finally, seemed small, reduced, with something missing. It was them, of course. All of them: Ned, Aubrey, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, and Mary. And so, to bring them back a little, to fill up the space, however inadequately, that their deaths had left behind, she hung the walls with scores of pictures she’d brought from the old house. She powdered the top of the television with them, then the bookshelves after that, the mantel, the sideboard, the end tables beside the sofa, every inch of flat space covered with frames of all shapes and sizes, frames of gold, silver, plastic, her kindred frozen silently within them: Ned slouched on his workbench; Shuggie in a bright red coat; Jerry slinging feed to the chickens; Jimmy behind the wheel of his new pickup; Aubrey with his arm draped around his wife; Mary peeping out from behind the half-closed door of the Spring Creek Baptist Church. Through the months, she stared at them silently, still clinging to her faith that it had all been part of God’s unfathomable plan.