Blood Echoes Page 22
As for his arrest, Mr. Postell told reporters that the charges were utterly unsubstantiated, and that they had been made by the GBI in retaliation against articles he had written linking some of the bureau’s officials with drug trafficking.
Two weeks later, on November 13, all charges against the Postells were dropped, a decision which District Attorney Dupont Cheney made after it was discovered that Carl Isaacs, who had agreed to testify against the Postells, had made an extortion demand of fifteen thousand dollars in exchange for altering his testimony. “Isaacs’ testimony was crucial to the prosecution of the Postells,” Cheney told reporters. Now that it was tainted, he added, the case against them could not proceed.
In the meantime, the appeals process for all three of the Alday defendants continued at its own excruciating pace, producing a maddening array of legal maneuvers and countermaneuvers.
On October 31, 1980, approximately two months after the escape from Death Row, the Georgia State Supreme Court refused to review the June 13, 1980, ruling of the Superior Court of Tattnall County denying habeas corpus relief to Wayne Coleman.
A month later, on November 25, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia transferred Isaacs’ and Dungee’s petitions to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia in Columbus.
The following year, on April 27, 1981, the United States Supreme Court denied Coleman’s certiorari petition. The petition had asked the court to review an earlier Georgia Supreme Court ruling, which had upheld an even earlier denial of state habeas corpus relief by the Superior Court in Tattnall County.
On July 8, Coleman filed a habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, prominently raising the change of venue issue once again.
On October 22, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia denied Isaacs’ and Dungee’s habeas corpus petitions on the merits.
The following month, on November 20, their petition for a rehearing of this petition was denied.
Four months later, on March 11, 1982, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia also denied Wayne Coleman’s habeas corpus petitions on the merits.
On June 21, the United States Court of Appeals temporarily remanded Isaacs’, Dungee’s, and Coleman’s appeals back to the Middle District of Georgia so that additional evidence on the prejudicial pretrial publicity could be gathered.
Part of that evidence consisted of the radio broadcasts which had been transmitted across Seminole County and those adjoining areas from which the Alday juries had been selected. The relevant broadcasts had begun on May 15, the day after the murders, and had continued up to the time of the trials in January 1974, a period of seven months.
It was discovered that tapes of these broadcasts did in fact exist, but that they had never been edited. In order to review them for evidence of community prejudice against the Alday defendants, defense attorneys and their assistants were compelled to listen to the full taped transcripts.
In the end, this was a process that would take almost two and a half years.
During that time, and particularly in 1983, media attention in the form of books and movies reached a crescendo in the Alday murder case.
It amounted to a blitz that left Ernestine and her daughters reeling with bitterness and dismay.
In 1983, Clark Howard’s Brothers in Blood was published by St. Martin’s Press in New York.
Howard had come to Donalsonville the year before and interviewed several members of the Alday family. As Nancy would later say, he had told members of the family that his work on the case would result in “a book your children and grandchildren can be proud of.”
The result, however, was far from what either Nancy, her sisters, or Ernestine imagined as a dignified treatment of the Alday case. “I wouldn’t even let my children read it,” Nancy declared seven years after its publication.
Although Howard had made it clear in an author’s note that certain scenes had been dramatically re-created, and that he had used composite characters in his retelling of the story, Nancy and Patricia, who read it first, then warned Ernestine away, found his treatment, particularly of certain members of their family, utterly fanciful.
In addition, certain of the “re-creations” appeared to the Alday sisters as an effort to sensationalize their kindred’s suffering. To Nancy and Patricia these accounts appeared purposefully crude, designed to titillate, rather than inform a wider world of their family’s suffering and victimization at the hands of Carl Isaacs and the others.
From their point of view, this was bad enough. Even worse from their perspective was the fact that Carl had been made to appear remorseful, while in reality not only had he never expressed the slightest remorse, but he had sought repeatedly, by every word and deed, to wound the Aldays again and again, to reach beyond the bars of his cell and strike at Ernestine and themselves with a cruelty that seemed only to have grown more heartless with the years.
“We wanted just one book in which Carl didn’t win,” Nancy said in 1990. “Just one book that didn’t let him blow himself up again at our expense. Just one book that remembered our Daddy, our brothers, Uncle Aubrey, and Mary.”
They did not get it.
And if Nancy and Patricia had felt nothing but distaste for Brothers in Blood, it was a mild and carefully restrained response compared to their hatred of yet another work about the murders that also appeared in 1983.
Dead Man Coming was published by the Network Press in Albany, Georgia, and its author was none other than the peripatetic Charles Postell.
Presented in a lurid, blood-spattered cover, the book declared in its hyperbolic reading line that it was the story of “Mass Murderer Carl Isaacs,” who “dreams of killing again. Will he?”
Centered exclusively on Carl, the “dead man” of its title, Dead Man Coming presented his most outrageous exaggeration of himself. Within its pages, Carl emerges as a young man raped by blacks during a prison riot in Maryland, and who, bent on revenge, then proceeds to murder several blacks in Baltimore City and rape “a couple dozen women,” all of this done at a time when he was actually cruising Hillendale with Jennifer and Lori, an interval of aimlessness, boredom, and petty crime that did not even succeed in holding the interest of two teenage girls, a fact Carl had failed to report to his biographer.
By means of such baseless hyperbole, Carl manages to take on a weirdly heroic stature in Dead Man Coming, in part a sympathetic and abused child, in part a horrendously cruel adult, but always Carl as Carl wanted others to see him, the criminal mastermind, brilliant, deadly, and remorseless.
As the self-serving portrait of the man who had done them so much harm, Nancy and Patricia found Dead Man Coming cruel and unconscionable.
But if the Atlanta Constitution, a newspaper that had been quite sympathetic to Postell at the time of his earlier indictment, found such exchanges doubtful and “overwritten” when it reviewed the book, they were far more than a source of literary overkill to the Aldays; they were cruel, humiliating, and unspeakably offensive.
“I wouldn’t even read Postell’s book,” Patricia Alday said in 1990, “not after what people told me was in it, how terrible it was. I just didn’t want to feel what I knew I’d feel if I let myself read it, so I just never opened it up.”
Nancy, however, read every word. “I would read it, and actually see the people the names meant, Daddy, and my brothers, Mary and Uncle Aubrey, and I would ask myself, ‘Why was this written? Why is our family being used like this? Can’t we ever just be left alone?’”
Though it was Carl Isaacs who emerged as the villain-hero in written accounts of the Alday murders, it was Billy who came out shining like a knight in armor in the only motion picture made about the case.
Murder One, a film financed and shot in Canada, and released in 1983, gave Billy center stage. It is Billy’s voice, decidedly youthful and gentle, that provides the offscreen narration of the film and allow
s his character to dominate it. Erroneously portrayed as an innocent boy who had never gotten into any trouble with the law prior to the murders, he is swept along by events over which he has no control, and for which he feels nothing but revulsion.
Added to this sympathetic portrait, the film provides a denouement that is pure fiction. For rather than following the facts of the robbery at Mullins Grocery in West Virginia, the film offers a fanciful account in which Billy draws a gun on Carl in order to prevent him from taking a beautiful young girl captive, thus emerging as the heroic agent of her protection, something that, to say the least, never happened, and which struck the surviving Aldays who saw the film as a complete rewriting of events with which they were painfully familiar.
“We could never really understand why the books and the movie seemed to take the side of Carl and Billy and the rest of them,” Patricia said years later, “or why we were always made to look, particularly in the movie, like just a bunch of dumb hicks.”
It was a view shared by her sister. “I’d read this stuff and see the movie and I’d just ask, ‘What about us?’” Nancy said in 1990. “Don’t we matter? Doesn’t anybody care about what we feel?’”
* * *
As Nancy and Patricia saw it, the books and the film dealing with their tragedy were little more than further assaults upon their dignity, as well as either subtle or not-so-subtle defenses of the men who had raped and murdered their closest kin, acts which, in the end, had also robbed them of their ancestral lands. Still, even this was not as damaging as the effect the books and film had on their standing in the community. For among their fellow Seminolians, it became the general belief that members of the Alday family had received large sums of money from the publishers and movie companies who dealt with their story, that large profits had been made by them from the deaths of their relatives, and that the family had actively sought and now secretly enjoyed the fruits of the murders.
The truth was just the opposite. Neither Ernestine nor any of her daughters had ever received a single penny from publishers or motion picture companies.
Nevertheless, the notion that they had received financial rewards from the murders on River Road would linger in Seminole County through the coming years, especially as the cost of the trials and appeals continued to mount. Though utterly unjustified, it would serve to heighten the growing local resentment of trial expenditures, a resentment that, while focused on the defendants, would also wash over to Ernestine and her daughters, driving a secret, painful wedge between them and the community they’d lived in all their lives.
“In the paper, they were always called the ‘Alday trials,’” Patricia said. “The ‘Alday trials’ cost this and that, on and on, as if it was our family that was draining the treasury of Seminole County, not Carl Isaacs, Coleman, and Dungee … but us!”
That drain was about to escalate unimaginably, but not before the family would be stunned once again by the indefatigable Carl Isaacs.
Chapter Twenty-seven
On November 26, 1985, a correctional officer walking his rounds in Cell House G of the Georgia Classification and Diagnostic Center in Jackson, Georgia, glimpsed something strange in Cell 106 on the prison’s new Death Row.
From the catwalk in front of the cell, he noticed a discoloration around the edges of the ventilation screen at the rear of the cell. Using a small metal rod, he poked gently at the discolored material, then watched, thunderstruck, as the entire front portion of the steel reinforced ventilation system tumbled from the wall and crashed to the floor, lifting a wave of loose dust, soap powder, and bits of glue into his widely staring eyes.
In the hole behind the screen, the guard could see that the prisoner assigned to Cell 106 had already succeeded in cutting through layer after layer of screens, louvers, and metal backings, and that he had already penetrated into the plumbing chase behind the cell. Nothing but a single set of thin, steel bars in the skylight above the chase now remained before the escape could be carried out.
The prisoner assigned to Cell 106 was Carl Junior Isaacs.
On December 5, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Robert Ingram journeyed to the Jackson Diagnostic and Classification Center in a déjà vu assignment to determine how Isaacs had managed once again to get within hours of an escape from Georgia’s Death Row.
Ingram arrived at 3:20 P.M., and began his interview with Isaacs. Once again, Carl appeared immensely full of himself, reveling in his favorite role of incorrigible outlaw. Thus, after far less prodding than had been required to extract a description of his escape attempt in the 1980 interviews, Carl happily detailed the plan and execution of his second, nearly successful escape attempt.
As he had several years before, Carl had begun his plot by ingratiating himself with various prisoners on his Cell Block, his mind continually tuned to how they might be of assistance.
This time, the mark was Theodore Hall, an inmate housed in the H-4 Cell Block, whom Carl had met in the late spring of 1985.
Hall was a good talker, and so Carl assumed the role of good listener, lounging in his bed for hours while Hall droned on about his family and friends. Suddenly, out of this welter of tedious family detail, Carl’s calculating mind latched with a fierce intensity upon a single, minuscule detail. Sam Hall, one of Byron’s brothers, was a paraplegic. Paralyzed from the waist down, he went everywhere in a wheelchair.
“Everywhere?” Carl asked.
“Yeah.”
“Even here, when he visits you?”
“Yeah.”
“He must set that metal detector ringing like hell when he wheels through,” Carl said.
“Oh, yeah,” Theodore told him, “but nobody notices it, because it’s just the chair, you know.”
From that moment on, Carl made it his business to get closer and closer to Theodore Hall, finally convincing him not only of his deep friendship but of his willingness to include him in his own brilliant escape plan, one whose details he’d already thought through, and which required only a few small items for its execution, items, which, as it turned out, Sam Hall would be able to supply.
Over the next few weeks, Carl managed to get Sam Hall added to his own visiting list, along with another outside contact, Sylvester Pitts.
On July 20, Pitts and Hall arrived for a visit with Carl and Byron. As a divergence, Theodore, a bit cowardly in his own participation and unwilling to transport contraband into the prison on his person, merely asked to be escorted to the bathroom by the visiting room’s only correctional officer, a move that allowed Pitts to retrieve twelve hacksaw blades from one of the hollow bottom bars of Sam Hall’s wheelchair.
Once in possession of the saws, Isaacs quickly inserted them into a specially made pocket of his boxer shorts. Later, during the required strip search that was conducted on prisoners after each visit, Carl casually slid his shorts to the floor and let the guard concentrate on his body rather than his clothes.
Back on his cell block, Isaacs hid ten of the blades in a hole underneath the toilet in Hall’s cell, 107, while inserting the other two in the shower slide of his own cell, 104.
For the next few months, at times concealing his various hacksaw blades in holes hollowed out in the soles of his shoes, Carl began the difficult and time-consuming process of cutting his way through the vent and into the plumbing chase behind his cell, carefully concealing the cuts beneath a solution of soap, paint, and glue in such a way that it would blend so perfectly with the slats that only the most determined scrutiny would uncover his work.
As the weeks passed, Sam Hall continued to be a regular visitor to Carl and Theodore. Still using his wheelchair as the perfect smuggling machine, he supplied them with additional hacksaw blades, numerous plastic bottles and containers, wire cutters, paint, and finally the escapees’ ultimate weapon, Super Glue.
Between visits, the continually interrupted and therefore protracted night work of cutting through to the plumbing chase stretched through July.
On August 17, a fe
w new members of the Hall family arrived at the visiting room, this time with a cake in celebration of Theodore’s birthday. During a boisterous round of “Happy Birthday,” Sylvester Pitts slipped Carl the second required set of wire cutters.
That night, with the slats now cut completely through, Carl fashioned a false paper vent from the state-furnished writing paper he’d cut to the size of the vent. He attached a second sheet of paper behind it, this one with lines drawn to simulate the screen behind the vent itself, and attached with Band-Aids and chewing gum. With this apparatus in place, Carl no longer had to replace the vent and screen each time the guards approached.
Once the screen had been cut through, Carl filled in its severed parts with a paste he’d made from soap, shaving cream, and toothpaste, then wired it back into position with pipe cleaners he’d purchased from the prison commissary. He then painted the entire ventilation system, the final work so perfect in its execution that in a cell shakedown the following September, no part of it was discovered.
With the failure of the shakedown to reveal his escape effort, Carl felt he had a green light to go forward as quickly and boldly as possible.
As the days passed, he cut through the ventilation system to the metal plate behind it, dug painstakingly around a sewage pipe in the wall, finally penetrated the wall itself, and emerged into the beckoning freedom of the plumbing chase.
At this point, the overall plan was for Theodore Hall and Wayne Coleman to cut through the bars of their cells, then, on the night of the escape, place homemade dummies in their beds, slip down the catwalk to Carl’s cell, and from there escape by crawling through the ventilation system and out into the plumbing chase.
Carl knew that sawing through the bars of Coleman and Hall’s cells would take many days. To conceal the various stages, he chipped a piece of gray paint from his own bars and, during yet another friendly visit from Sylvester Pitts, handed him the paint and told him to match its color and return with a small amount he could use in the escape.