Blood Echoes Page 20

  Far away, now centered in metropolitan Atlanta, the appeals ground forward interminably. Only ten days after the date of execution had been set, on May 29, attorneys for Isaacs and Dungee filed habeas corpus petitions in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia in Savannah, once again stressing their clients’ failure to get a fair trial in Seminole County due to the climate of extreme prejudice that had existed against them prior to trial. According to their attorneys, Judge Geer’s refusal, in the light of such prejudice, to grant the change of venue that had been requested by the defendants prior to their trials constituted a reversible error on his part. They now asked for a redress of that error in the form of entirely new trials for Isaacs and Dungee.

  In response, the district court stayed the executions of both men.

  On August 16, attorneys for Isaacs and Dungee filed a motion for discovery. Now concentrating on the issue of pretrial community prejudice against the Alday murderers, their lawyers asked the court for the right to determine the level of community outrage that had existed in Seminole County at the time of the 1974 trial, which, they presumed, had made a fair trial impossible in that community.

  After six years of unsuccessful appeal maneuvers, this motion for discovery finally fell upon sympathetic ears. Thus, on October 26, the Southern District Court granted the motion, and on December 3, attorneys for Isaacs and Dungee began three days of taking oral depositions in Albany, Georgia, Dothan, Alabama, and Tallahassee, Florida, depositions designed to show community prejudice against their clients prior to and during the January 1974 trial in Donalsonville.

  A light had broken in the solid wall of denied petitions and refused appeals that had heretofore blocked the progress of defense attorneys in their efforts on behalf of the Alday murderers.

  It was the first good news Carl Isaacs had received thus far in the appeals process, and it buoyed his spirits markedly. On November 8, 1979, Postell reported that in a letter to him Carl had expressed confidence that at some time in the future he would be granted a new trial and that he would return to Donalsonville for it.

  Carl’s spirits could not have been raised for long, however. For almost immediately Isaacs learned that not long after the motion for discovery had been granted, the Albany Herald had refused either to provide documents to the defendants’ attorneys or to give oral depositions.

  In response to this refusal, the attorneys filed a motion to compel discovery with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia in Macon.

  A hearing on this motion was held on January 2, 1980, and at the end of the hearing, the motion was denied.

  This denial led to another appeal to the Middle District Court on February 11. This time, Isaacs and Dungee had appealed in forma pauperis from the January 2 ruling.

  On the same day, February 11, 1980, Coleman’s habeas corpus appeal, now straggling behind the others, was finally denied by the Tattnall Superior Court.

  Approximately four months later, on July 14, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia conducted a routine hearing on the possible replacement of counsel for both Dungee and Isaacs. At this hearing, Carl Isaacs was present.

  As he sat silently before the court officials who were hearing his case, he must have had a great deal on his mind. Still, it is unlikely that the courtroom wrangling did not strike him as both amusing and ironic. Because, having finally put into place the last remaining elements of his plan to escape from Reidsville’s Death Row, he was now waiting contentedly for the already selected moment.

  Should all go according to plan, in just four days Carl expected that he would be through with courts and lawyers and petitions forever. At that point, he would be free to do what he’d already flippantly claimed he wished to do should he ever find himself outside prison walls: kill more Aldays.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  On the morning of July 28, 1980, four inmates on Reidsville State Prison’s Death Row escaped by simply walking out of the prison during its early morning shift change. The four escapees made their way to a car waiting for them in the prison parking lot, its gas tank filled, the ignition keys concealed above the sun visor on the driver’s side.

  The escape from Death Row was unprecedented in Georgia history, and it involved four singularly ruthless men.

  Timothy McCorquodale’s crime, as the Atlanta Constitution would later say, “fit the standard definition of a heinous murder.” On January 17, 1974, when he was a twenty-three-year-old Marine Corps veteran, McCorquodale, while cruising a section of Atlanta known as the Peach-tree Strip, a notorious hangout for prostitutes, drifters, and drug dealers, had picked up a seventeen-year-old girl named Donna Marie Dixon, a runaway from Newport News, Virginia. He had taken her to an apartment on Moreland Avenue, where he had systematically, over a period of many hours, cut her to ribbons with razor blades and scissors, strangled her with a nylon cord, and finally broken her ankles and knees in a strenuous effort to force her body into a cardboard trunk.

  Although less sadistic, Troy Gregg’s crime had been no less compassionless. Drifting from state to state, Gregg and a young companion had hitched a ride with two men from Florida in November 1973. Together, they had driven north along Interstate 85 until they reached Gwinnett County, an area outside Atlanta. There an argument had developed between Gregg and the two men. It had been settled only after Gregg had cold-bloodedly shot and killed them both.

  The youngest of the escapees, David A. Jarrell, had been only eighteen on Christmas Eve 1973, when he set out on foot from Lawrence-ville, Georgia, a small town a few miles from Atlanta. Later that night, he met Mala Ann Still, a bank teller who’d left her job for the day to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. Two days later, her tortured body was found in a wooded area along the Alcovy River. She had been shot in the head.

  The last of the four, Johnny Johnson, had been with another man when the two had met two women in Savannah on July 20, 1974. According to the one woman who managed to survive what happened after that, Johnson and his associate had forced them into a car at gunpoint, tied their hands, then driven them to a remote dirt road off U.S. 17. Johnson had led his choice of the two women, Suzanne Eden-field, out into the woods, raped her, and then shot her to death.

  All four had been tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and transported to Reidsville State Prison, the “Great White Elephant” as it was called, which housed the state’s only Death Row.

  And all four had now escaped.

  Stunned and mortified by the Death Row escape by four of the most vicious men within the prison system, Georgia authorities pulled out all stops in their effort to recapture McCorquodale, Gregg, Jarrell, and Johnson. Hundreds of officers from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, the Tattnall County Sheriff’s Office, and the Georgia State Patrol went on alert, initiating a sweep search of Georgia and South Carolina, since all four of the fugitives had relatives in the two states.

  In addition to the statewide sweeps, officers began more concentrated efforts in four towns: York, South Carolina, where Gregg’s sister lived; Sumpter, South Carolina, the home of Johnson’s mother; Nicholls, Georgia, where McCorquodale’s father resided; and Lawrenceville, Georgia, the home of Jarrell’s mother.

  Within hours they were also checking the telephone exchanges of Jacksonville, Florida. By that time, the GBI had been contacted by none other than Charles Postell, the peripatetic reporter who’d long been in contact with Carl Isaacs. According to Postell, one of the Death Row escapees had telephoned him at around 10:30 on the morning following the escape. At that time, Postell said, Gregg had told him that he was calling from Jacksonville. “I thought it was a hoax,” Postell later told reporters. “I thought he was calling from the prison, just trying to fool me.”

  But it had not been a hoax, and as the hours passed, and the public outcry over the escape mounted steadily, frantic law enforcement officials continued to comb Georgia and South Carolina in search of the four escapees.


  By the early morning hours of the following day, Wednesday, July 30, it had become a nationwide manhunt, but by then, only one of the escapees, Troy Gregg, was still at large. The other three had been captured in a small, four-room brick home on the shores of Lake Wylie about ten miles southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina.

  At 1:15A.M., after a siege of nearly four hours, officers of the Mecklenburg County Police had fired teargas into the home and waited as, one by one, McCorquodale, Jarrell, and Johnson had staggered out. No shots had been fired.

  With three escapees now in custody, the fate of the fourth, Troy Gregg, was quickly discovered when his body was found floating in Mountain Island Lake, about twelve miles north of where the other three had been captured. The autopsy revealed that Gregg had been beaten to death with what the medical examiner called a “wide instrument, possibly a board, belt or shoe.”

  The grim details of Gregg’s death were discovered only a day or so after his body. It was not a pretty story. According to witnesses later interviewed by North Carolina authorities, Gregg had arrived in Charlotte still in the company of the three Death Row escapees. One, Timothy McCorquodale, had reestablished contact with members of the Outlaws, the motorcycle gang to which he had belonged, and particularly with William K. (“Chains”) Flamont, a member who had himself only narrowly escaped the July 4, 1979, massacre of five fellow Outlaws at their clubhouse in north Charlotte.

  Flamont, at whose lakefront home they had later been captured, had welcomed McCorquodale back into the Outlaw circle.

  By then, however, Gregg was already dead. Several hours before, at the Old Yellow Tavern on the Catawba River, Gregg had made a fatal mistake. Always arrogant, and something of a braggart, Gregg had made a thoughtless remark to a female patron currently attached to one Eddie Phipps, a thirty-year-old motorcyclist who was not known to suffer fools gracefully.

  Phipp’s reaction was swift and sure, and, cheerfully aided by Timothy McCorquodale, he promptly stomped Gregg to death behind the Old Yellow Tavern. Gregg’s body was subsequently thrown into the river, where it floated downstream into Mountain Island Lake.

  Within four days of the escape, all four of the Death Row inmates had been accounted for.

  But the escape, itself, who had planned it and how it had been carried out, had not yet been uncovered.

  After Gregg’s death and the capture of the remaining three escapees in North Carolina, Georgia law enforcement officials were determined that no such escape would ever again occur within the state prison system.

  Consequently, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Robert Ingram was assigned to head a GBI Task Force whose duty it was to uncover the escape plan in its most minute details, and inform prison officials in such a way that they could redesign their surveillance and other programs to make certain that such an escape could not be repeated.

  Only a few days after the escape, Ingram arrived at the Great White Elephant to begin his work. He went to Cell Block D-4, a row of only ten cells located on the building’s fourth floor: Death Row.

  To his astonishment, prison officials had already had the bars that had been sawed through in the initial stage of the escape plan rewelded, but it was easy for Ingram to determine that although four inmates had escaped, six had been involved in the plan. One of them, Tom Fitzgerald, had apparently gotten cold feet at the last minute. Another, however, had been transferred from Reidsville to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center in Jackson only a few hours before the escape had occurred. The sixth escapee had been assigned to Reidsville for nearly six years. He occupied Cell 10. His inmate number was D-17622. His name was Carl Junior Isaacs.

  “I knew the other escapees pretty well,” Ingram said years later, “and there was no way they could have come up with such a highly detailed and intelligent plan. The minute I saw those welding marks on Cell 10, I knew the whole thing had been thought out by Carl Isaacs. None of the others had anywhere near the brains for it.”

  Convinced that Isaacs held the key to the escape, Ingram drove to the Jackson Diagnostic and Classification Center as soon as possible to interview him. At first, Isaacs claimed to know nothing of the escape plan, but over a period of two years and twenty interviews, as Ingram patiently and meticulously stroked Isaacs’ ego, telling him that only a prisoner of his intelligence and cunning could have devised such a brilliant plan, Isaacs began to reveal the details of the plan he had developed over a period of six years, and which the four escapees had executed on the morning of November 28. In the end, Isaacs even went so far as to produce a forty-six-page narrative whose opening words could hardly have served better to demonstrate his frame of mind: “Herein lies the truthful story of one of the greatest escapes that has ever been recorded in the annuls [sic] of crime,” Isaacs wrote, “perhaps it could even be the greatest.”

  That it was an amazing plot could not be doubted. Whether Isaacs’ detailed rendering of it was truthful, however, would remain in doubt forever. His contentions would implicate a great many people, some of whom would be charged with aiding in his escape plan. Among those charged was an Albany Herald reporter named Charles Postell and his wife. The charges were later dropped after it became known that Isaacs had offered $15,000 to Postell in exchange for which Isaacs would change his testimony implicating Postell. The extent of Postell’s actual involvement, if any, remains uncertain. Still, Isaacs’ account would remain the central document of the GBI’s investigation, and although its veracity would always be questioned as a work of self-aggrandizement, it was pure Carl Junior. Never had he spoken with greater determination to carve out a monument to his own criminal genius.

  According to Carl, his first notions of escape had been in May 1974. During the first part of that month, he’d received a short note from an Albany Herald reporter named Charles Postell. In the letter, Postell had expressed a desire to interview Isaacs with the idea of writing a book about his life.

  Isaacs agreed to the interview, and Postell arrived at the prison on May 10. After the first interview, there were many others, during which Postell sat listening as Carl, delighted to have such an attentive audience, held forth about his life and crimes.

  During the latter part of 1974, Carl even went so far as to tell Postell that he planned to escape. According to Isaacs, Postell replied by bringing up such absurd notions as him flying a helicopter to the prison’s fourth floor and snatching Isaacs from the roof, or perhaps sending him a Christmas cake with a gun inside. Despite the idiocy of such notions, Isaacs said that a tacit understanding began to develop between the two that should Isaacs ever attempt an escape, Postell would help in any way he could.

  In January 1975, Carl was moved to the fifth floor, then later to Cell Number B-4, once again on the fourth floor. It was at this point, Isaacs said, that he began to work seriously on an escape plan. At that moment, Carl, as he later wrote, “being a realist,” determined that he would need assistance in carrying out any escape from Reidsville.

  At about that time, Carl began to receive letters from Tami Postell, Charles Postell’s daughter, and as relations continued to warm between Isaacs and the entire Postell family, they began to send him the items he occasionally requested, all harmless, things such as pajamas and towels, along with others which, although he saw no immediate need for them, he deemed potentially useful at some later point: glue, tape, and Magic Markers.

  During September and October of 1975, according to Isaacs, his relationship with Postell “took on a new perspective.” He and Postell were able to speak more freely, while the family circle broadened to include Postell’s wife Judy, called Bunki, and a second Postell daughter, Robin.

  It was at this time, January 1976, that Postell began to smuggle in miniature bottles of liquor. They talked more openly, Carl about his family, and Postell about his, with “every scrap of information secretly filed away” in Isaacs’ mind, as he put it, “for future use.”

  But by then Postell and his family were not the only outsiders with
whom Isaacs was developing a relationship. In March 1976, he began a correspondence with Judy Powell. Powell had glimpsed Carl’s picture in a local newspaper, she said, and had fallen in love with him. Carl found this hard to believe, as he wrote, “but my mind was turning over the various avenues of recruiting her to help me.”

  Judy Powell was placed on Isaacs’ approved visiting list, and arrived for her first visit, the “day of reckoning” as Carl called it, during the latter part of May.

  During the meeting, Carl made a few nominal requests of Powell to “test her loyalty,” and, to his amazement and delight, she obeyed. “The lock had been set,” Isaacs later wrote. “It was time to begin.”

  But not quite.

  According to Carl, Postell reacted with outrage at his new friend. He was convinced that she had some ulterior motive for her romantic interest in Carl, he said, and asked for his permission to check her out. Carl agreed to allow Postell to conduct a “cursory probe” of her background, and promised to delay any further contact with Powell until Postell’s investigation was completed.

  This was a lie, however, and immediately after Postell’s visit, Carl penned a long, detailed letter to Powell detailing Postell’s suspicions and intentions. Now Powell was outraged, just as Carl had hoped, and he was able to calm her anxiety by assuring her that he would let her know whatever Postell discovered, and that in any event, it would not come between them.

  For the next four weeks, Carl deftly played the two competing parties against each other until finally, with Powell at her wits’ end, paranoid, convinced that she was being followed, so frightened that she had become too scared even to visit Isaacs at Reidsville, Carl finally insisted that Postell halt his investigation.