Blood Echoes Page 21

  Postell relented, even to the point of declaring that Powell was “on the level and that it would be wise” if Isaacs “latched on to her.”

  With the matter settled, but in a manner so sudden that Isaacs continued to suspect some kind of ruse on Postell’s part, he began to raise the issue of escape with Powell. By late summer she was fully engaged in the plan, and in August she mailed five silver eight-inch hacksaw blades in a box of envelopes from a small town in Alabama.

  With Powell indictably committed to his escape, Carl began to work on Postell, telling him of the aid Vinson had already given, and eliciting from him an equal commitment. According to Isaacs, Postell unhesitatingly agreed to be of any assistance he could in Isaacs’ impending escape.

  With outside assistance now in place, Carl began to work on assistance from within, approaching fellow Death Row inmate Troy Gregg in the fall of 1976.

  By then, Carl had devised the basic formula for his escape. His plan was to cut out of his cell through the catwalk bars, then go out a window at the end of the catwalk and on to the roof of the prison. Once on the roof, he intended to lie low until early the following morning, which would have to be a Saturday, leap from the room, and dash to the parking lot where Powell would be waiting in a car. “I realized that it was a grave risk,” Carl wrote, “and that my chances of pulling it off were almost nil, but I was very determined to escape.”

  But if reason would not have been sufficient to deter Isaacs from this plan, a sudden shakedown of A-block was. It was no ordinary, routine shakedown. The officers carried rubber hammers to check the bars for cuts, and as he watched the shakedown progress, Isaacs felt relieved that he had made none in his own bars as yet.

  Unnerved by such a sudden, thorough shakedown, and suspicious that the authorities had been alerted by none other than his old friend, Charles Postell, Carl began to formulate a different, and far more elaborate scheme.

  But while his plans inside the prison progressed, his outside structure began to collapse. Without explanation, Judy Powell was abruptly excluded from his visitor’s list. Bereft of this dedicated lifeline, Carl decided that his next attempt would have to be far more complicated and foolproof than his first one. Accordingly, as he later wrote, it was shortly after that “that the idea in my subconscious mind finally evolved into the greatest plan ever, later to be termed the greatest and most daring escape ever recorded in history.”

  Two and a half years later, by September 1979, Carl had “worked all the kinks out of the master plan.” Now all he needed was to find the men who would be able to pull it off. He had five in mind, only two of whom, Troy Gregg and Johnny Johnson, were actually located on his cell block. The other three, West McCorquodale, David Jarrell, and Tom Fitzgerald were housed elsewhere.

  The first task was to get the remaining three men into Isaacs’ cell block. Within five days, by having McCorquodale claim that he was having trouble in his relationships with the inmates of his home cell block, Carl had succeeded in having him transferred to Cell Block A.

  A month later, David Jarrell was also transferred to A, and not long after that, the third member, Tom Fitzgerald, was also transferred, this time in the middle of the night, to Cell Block A.

  Once the escape team was in place, Carl began assembling the tools he deemed necessary to put his plan into operation.

  He needed pajamas, black shoes, and belts for each escapee.

  With these items, Isaacs, an accomplished tailor, planned to duplicate in the most minute details the uniforms worn by the Reidsville correctional officers.

  To accomplish this, however, he needed to get swatches of the actual uniforms in order to duplicate their color. To do this, Carl relied on corruption.

  By June 1980, a young correctional officer, Bill Maddox, had for some time been selling small amounts of marijuana to prison inmates. Carl determined that if he could arrange a large marijuana sale, then Maddox would be his, a prison official disastrously compromised, perhaps even faced with imprisonment, a very perilous situation.

  But to pull off a large buy, Carl needed money, and, as always, he was broke. To get money, he drew none other than George Dungee, now in failing health and increasingly dim-witted, into a poker game and quickly won over a thousand dollars in IOUs, none of which Dungee could pay. To satisfy the debt, Carl said that he would take Dungee’s watch, and Dungee happily agreed.

  The watch was now in hand, and valued at over a hundred and fifty dollars. Carl, to avoid compromising himself, had Troy Gregg offer it to Maddox as collateral for thirty dollars’ worth of marijuana. Maddox agreed, and the deal was consummated a few days later.

  Now fatally compromised, Maddox, over the next few days, supplied Isaacs with a belt loop from his uniform pants along with a piece of his uniform shirt which Carl cut, using a knife handed to him by Maddox.

  Bill Maddox was now deeply involved in an escape plan from Death Row. But he was not the only one. A prison trustee now working as a barber, Willie Flynn, had also become involved. A member of the motorcycle gang to which Timothy McCorquodale had belonged, he began supplying Isaacs with an assortment of necessary items.

  While the details involved in acquiring dyes to match the uniform swatches supplied by Maddox went forward, so did the least technically complicated element of the escape, the slow, tedious sawing through of the bars along the cell block’s catwalk. It was a long, painfully slow process, requiring nearly four hours per bar, top and bottom. As the days passed, two bars each were sawed through in the respective cells of Isaacs, Gregg, and Fitzgerald. Jarrell required three bars, however, while McCorquodale, biggest of them all, demanded no less than four.

  While the bars were still being sawed, two pairs of pajamas arrived for McCorquodale. Since only Carl and Jarrell could sew, the other men continued with the bars, while Isaacs and Jarrell concentrated on making exact copies of correctional officer shirts. At various times during this period, Carl would stop work to draw Maddox into long, lingering conversations at his cell, while Jarrell stood nearby, his eyes fixed on the American flag insignia, Bureau of Corrections patch, nameplate, and badge that adorned his uniform, all of which had to be duplicated as part of Isaacs’ escape plan.

  Once the two men had gotten a clear enough fix on the uniform accessories, they started to work on reproducing them. Isaacs hand-sewed several American flag insignia, secretly cutting squares from the white institutional towels used throughout the prison, then carefully painting in the flag using Magic Markers and ballpoint pens. The borders of the towels served well as the borders of the patches, and were also colored appropriately.

  It took five days to make two patches, but when they were done, along with the pajamas Carl now had a grand total of three complete shirts and two patches, all of which he stuffed inside various pillows in the cell block. Only a few days later, Flynn obviated the need to make any further patches when he supplied six authentic flag and correctional officer patches to Isaacs and his men, all of them cleverly concealed beneath the powder in a talcum powder box. Utterly delighted, Isaacs and the other men, as Isaacs later wrote, “gave Willie a big hug and voiced out deep appreciation.”

  By early June, correctional officer badges had been made from cardboard, pieces of a soda can, blue paper, white oil paint, and a blue Magic Marker. The only difficulty had been in making it look shiny, as the actual badges did, a problem Carl corrected by wrapping them very tightly in cellophane, which, as he told Ingram, “was easily obtained from a cigarette pack.”

  But other aspects of the break were going far too slowly for Carl’s own internal pace. The bars were still being sawed each night before the 11:00 P.M. count, a time during which the sound of a nearby television served to conceal the noise. For Isaacs, the whole tedious process was excruciatingly slow.

  Not one prone to patience, Isaacs acted. The solution was obvious. He needed more blades.

  To get them, he turned once again to Charles Postell, instructing him to buy the blades in Reidsville
and hand them over to Minnie and Patti Hunter, McCorquodale’s mother and sister. According to Isaacs, Postell also agreed to supply the escapees with guns, drugs (two hundred black beauties, speed) and “a few hundred dollars,” all of which were to be placed in a car Minnie Hunter would leave in the prison parking lot.

  It was at this time, according to Isaacs, that the ulterior motive he had always suspected in Postell surfaced for the first time when, during a prison visit, Postell advised him that after the escape, Carl should “lay low” until he, Postell, could get a “small cassette recorder and give it to Minnie.” There would be plenty of tapes, Postell told him, and “I want you to turn it on as soon as you get in the car.” When the tapes were full, they were to be mailed to Postell so that he could reconstruct the escape in a book he would then write.

  In the last days of June 1980, final preparations were completed for the escape, though not without a few hitches. Hacksaw blades mailed to four of the escapees were intercepted in the prison mail room on June 25, and as a result strip searches were conducted on Isaacs and Troy Gregg at 7:00 P.M. that evening. Finding nothing, five other cells were shaken down while Isaacs and Gregg sat in their own cells, listening for the first indication that any part of the escape plan had been uncovered.

  It never came. During the entire process, despite the intercepted hacksaw blades, no guard had bothered to examine the bars.

  The following day, while the men in Cell Block D were laughing at the fact that despite the shakedown, their plans had gone undetected, Carl was told to report to the control office downstairs. Once there, he was told that he had been charged with the illegal possession of instruments of escape and a deadly weapon, the latter nothing more than a pair of scissors. In response to these charges, Carl was taken to disciplinary court on June 25, found guilty of the offenses, and given fourteen days in isolation and ninety days on restricted privileges.

  On July 11, Carl was released from the hole and was told that ten hacksaw blades were already en route to the prison, this time concealed in the handle of a portable radio.

  The radio arrived on July 18, passed through prison inspection without a blink, and within minutes of its receipt, Isaacs, Gregg, and the others were busily sawing at the bottom bars of their cells.

  Once the cell bars had been cut, Carl set about cutting the bars over the window overlooking the prison fire escape. Beginning on the morning of July 19, he worked continually through the weekend, grabbing whatever moments he could to saw, then concealing the saw marks with a concoction of bubble gum and cardboard which he had painted to match the color of the bars.

  More pajamas came on July 22, and Carl and Jarrell set to work making the last of the uniform shirts, while continuing to saw through the various cell block bars in any remaining time.

  On July 23, the bars on McCorquodale’s cell had been completely sawed through, and later that afternoon, Carl, using India ink and black Magic Markers, dyed four pairs of shoes to match the institutional black of the prison staff. That completed, Isaacs turned his talents to fashioning the required six nightstick holders, for which he used pieces of state-issued belts along with several lengths of coated electrical wire.

  The following day, the pace moving inexorably faster as the appointed hour of the escape neared, Carl began making copies of the metal nameplates that were pinned at the left breast of the uniform shirts. Using nothing more complicated than cardboard, pieces of aluminum from a soda can, cellophane, and a black writing pen, Carl constructed identical nameplates, inscribing them with the names, among others, of his own boyhood heroes, Jesse and Frank James, and Cole Younger.

  Exhilarated by his own daring, Carl took a brief respite from work to celebrate his cunning. He ordered Maddox to supply him with thirty dollars’ worth of marijuana, then spent the rest of the day, as he wrote, “just getting high.”

  On July 25, a pair of headphones arrived for George Dungee. A package of dark blue dye and a tube of Super Glue were concealed inside. They were to be used for fashioning and securing the last of the uniform insignia and nameplates.

  Over the next three days the last of the preparations were completed, down to the minutest detail of sewing stripes on the uniform pants.

  On the afternoon of July 27, the day before the planned escape, Minnie Hunter arrived to tell McCorquodale that everything was ready, with one exception. According to Issacs, it appeared that Postell had wavered at the last moment, never sending her any of the supplies he’d promised Isaacs. There were no pills or guns, not even the cassette player with which he was supposed to record this magnificent criminal exploit. To Carl, it appeared that at the last moment, Postell had grown faint of heart.

  But if Postell seemed to be withdrawing from the scheme, there was plenty of good news to lift Carl’s spirits, and McCorquodale was the bearer of it. The final critical element was now in place, McCorquodale said; the getaway car had arrived. Another of McCorquodale’s relatives had left it in the parking lot, complete with six changes of clothes in the truck and a full tank of gas. Minnie and Patti Hunter would be at the prison the next morning, McCorquodale added, and they would cause two diversions, one at 4:45 A.M. and another five minutes later. McCorquodale further informed Isaacs that he had instructed his mother to call Postell and tell him to meet the escapees in Baxley, Georgia, at 5:15 A.M., and to have the necessary supplies with him at that time.

  A few minutes later, all six of the men who planned to make a daring escape from Death Row in only a few hours watched from a single window on the fourth floor as Minnie and Patti Hunter made their way to the employee parking lot. For the moment all looked well. Then, suddenly, the men realized that the right front tire of the Plymouth, their getaway car, was flat.

  For an instant, a cold panic swept through the men who’d gathered in triumph and camaraderie by the window. Then, just as suddenly, their terror was relieved. Clearly, the women in the parking lot had also noticed the flat tire. They were not leaving in their other car. While Patti Hunter remained by the Plymouth, Minnie strolled across the street to a barracks station of the Georgia State Patrol and disappeared inside. Seconds later she reemerged, walked back across the street and waited with Patti until, twenty minutes later, a brown and beige truck arrived. The man inside got out, changed the tire on the Plymouth, then drove out of the parking lot toward downtown Reidsville, the two women following along behind him in the Cutlass they had brought to whisk them away.

  A few hours later, just after the 3:00 A.M. count, the last bar in the window above the cell block fire escape was cut through. It was the final, slender barrier between the men and their escape, and with it now eliminated, Isaacs ordered the five others to begin drinking coffee so that they would be wide awake early the next morning when the escape would be carried out. “If someone fell asleep,” he wrote, “I made it plain that they would be left behind.”

  Thirty minutes later, as he lay in his cell excitedly awaiting the moment only two hours away when the escape would be carried out, Carl heard footsteps along the catwalk. Seconds later, a guard stopped in front of his cell. “Pack up your stuff,” he said. “You’re being transferred this morning.”

  “I sat on my bed, too stunned to reply,” Carl wrote at the end of the narrative he later turned over to Agent Ingram, “my mind racing a thousand miles a second.”

  In the end, Isaacs opted not to rush the escape, but to take the transfer obediently and let the others go without him. Quietly, he packed his things and headed down the cell block toward the waiting guard. On the way out, he shook each of his partner’s hands. “Go, brother,” he told them, “make it good.”

  Several months later, with Troy Gregg dead and the others behind the gleaming white walls of the Great White Elephant in Reidsville, Ingram was leaving Isaacs to return for follow-up interviews with the other escapees. “Got any message for them?” he asked Isaacs as he rose to leave.

  Carl nodded. “Yeah,” he said with a cold smirk. “Tell ’em I’d like to kick
their asses for being out that long and not getting a piece and wasting somebody.”

  It was a grim and unrepentant message, as cruel, it seemed to Ingram, as it was hopelessly beyond the most determined reaches of rehabilitation. “I thought right then that Carl Isaacs would never rest easy in prison,” Ingram remembered, “that this was not the last time he’d try to escape, that as long as there was breath in him, he’d be scheming to be free.”

  He was right.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  In the weeks following the Death Row escape, Georgia authorities brought a number of indictments against those individuals Carl had named in the statement he prepared for Agent Ingram. By late August, eleven had been charged, including Minnie Hunter, Timothy McCorquodale’s aunt, who had been arrested for aiding in the escape.

  By the end of that month, however, that charge had been reduced to the lesser charge of “criminal attempt” to aid an escape, a felony for which she could be sentenced to no more than two and a half years.

  Far more striking was the indictment of Charles and Judi Postell for the same crime.

  Arrested by GBI agents at their home in Sparks, Georgia, on Wednesday, August 27, Postell and his wife were taken to the Coffee County Jail in Douglas, then released on a five-thousand-dollar bond later that evening.

  According to the indictment, the Postells had visited Carl Isaacs on June 18, at which time he had requested fifteen hacksaw blades to aid in his planned escape. In response, the Postells had journeyed to Baxley, Georgia, where Mrs. Postell had purchased ten such blades, all of which she then turned over to Minnie Hunter, who’d mailed them in four separate packages to Isaacs, McCorquodale, Johnson, and Gregg.

  Postell admitted that he had received two phone calls from the escapees only a few hours after the escape, but added that he had twice called authorities in Reidsville to report the escape.