Blood Echoes Read online

  The following month, the paint arrived, and the last stage of the escape was put into effect.

  On the last weekend in October, Pitts furnished Carl with a hand-drawn map of the area of the prison. He also buried a green plastic garbage bag near a stump behind a house only a block or so from the prison. In the bag, Pitts had placed a pair of wire strippers, a T-bar for use in hot-wiring stolen cars, a coat hanger already bent in the shape necessary for opening locked cars, black adhesive tape to be used in breaking into houses, latex gloves, a bag of marijuana, and, last but certainly not least, a .38-caliber revolver.

  With everything now set, Carl told his fellow conspirators, Coleman, Hall, and Steven Dennis, a third convict who’d been brought into the plot, that the escape would be made either on Thanksgiving night or at some point during the holiday season. At the appointed time, Carl went on, he would go to the shower, leaving his cell empty. At the same time, Coleman would divert the guard’s attention long enough for Hall and Dennis to place dummies in their bunks, and disappear into Carl’s cell. A few hours later, at approximately 10:00 P.M., by Carl’s estimate, all four of them would crawl through the wall, into the chase, and out one of the exhaust fans to the roof of the prison.

  From that point on, it was all speed and derring-do, a quick drop to the ground, a rush to the prison fence, a flash of wire cutters, and away toward the cool blue haven of Canada.

  The night before the escape, however, the Jackson Diagnostic correctional officer had glanced to the right as he made his rounds, seen something a bit off-color, and sounded the alarm.

  After listening to Isaacs’ account, Ingram could hardly believe how close he, Coleman, and the others had come to carrying out their escape. The discovery of the attempt had occurred no more than two or three hours before it was to be put into operation. And unlike the earlier escape, this time Carl himself would have been with them, the brains of the outfit. With him in command, it seemed clear to Ingram that they might well have gone all the way to freedom.

  As it turned out, however, Carl Isaacs went nowhere that night.

  But he was about to.

  In early November 1984, nearly a year before the discovery of Carl Isaacs’ second escape attempt, evidentiary hearings had finally been held in the Middle District.

  Five months later, on March 18, 1985, it denied habeas corpus relief to all three Alday defendants, a ruling that was immediately appealed to the United States Court of Appeals.

  By that time, the three convictions and death sentences that had been handed down in Donalsonville over eleven years before had gone through level after level of both the state and federal appeals systems, each time remaining intact.

  Then, on December 9, 1985, only ten days after Carl’s escape had been thwarted, and nearly twelve and a half years after the murders on River Road, everything abruptly changed. On that day, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals stunned state law enforcement officials by suddenly reversing the general direction of all the appeals that had gone before it. According to the judges, and as cited in their 112-page opinion, instances of “inflammatory and prejudicial pretrial publicity” had so pervaded the local community before and during the trials of Isaacs, Coleman, and Dungee that it had made fair trials impossible.

  Because of this impossibility, the judges concluded that each of the defendants should have been granted a change of venue in 1974, when it had first been requested by the defendants’ lawyers. Not to have done so, the panel said, had been a fatal, and unconstitutional, judicial error. “If there were no constitutional right to change of venue [in this case],” their opinion declared, “then one can conceive of virtually no case in which a change of venue would be a constitutional necessity.”

  Thus, in an instant, twelve years of judicial review were overturned, and the convictions and death sentences of Carl Isaacs, Wayne Coleman and George Dungee were set aside despite what the justices called the “overwhelming evidence” of their guilt. To hold otherwise, the panel concluded “would mean an obviously guilty defendant would have no right to a fair trial before an impartial jury; a holding which would be contrary to the well established and fundamental constitutional right of every defendant to a fair trial.”

  All three defendants were thereby granted new trials.

  In Donalsonville, the Aldays sat in stunned silence as the news raced across the state that Georgia’s most notorious Death Row inmates had not only delayed their journeys toward the electric chair once again, but that they had been granted wholly new trials.

  For the Alday women who remained in Seminole County, the prospect of three new trials came as a stunning blow. Once again, they would become the community’s macabre celebrities, their family name emblazoned in the local press, linked to Isaacs, Coleman, and Dungee. At the trials themselves, they would have to confront the faces of the defendants again, sit only a few feet from them, watch silently as they joked with their attorneys. Even worse, however, was the prospect of having to relive the events of May 14 in all their graphic detail.

  Still, there was no choice but for at least some members of the family to attend the trials. It would be a much diminished number, however. Bereft of their inheritance, and with the Alday Fund used exclusively for the new sanctuary of the Spring Creek Baptist Church, most of the children simply could not afford to leave their jobs for such long periods. In addition, with the trials being held in three separate locations, all of them located a great distance from Donalsonville, the expenses for food and lodging would be prohibitive. Even Patricia found she simply could not manage it.

  Faced with these circumstances, Ernestine made a fateful decision. She would come to the trials herself, stand in for that part of her family that could not afford to do so. Silently, with great dignity and self-restraint, her voice never raised in anger, she would sit in the courtroom to remind the jurors that Ned, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, Aubrey, and Mary Alday had not been forgotten.

  “It was an amazingly courageous thing for her to do,” prosecutor Charles Ferguson remembered. “It meant that she was going to have to go through it all, the testimony, the pictures, everything she had not been unable to face fifteen years before.”

  As for the other family members who would accompany her, they would have to do the same, live through it all, but for a second time. “It was like we’d been shot back twelve years,” Nancy said. “The rape, the murders; we were going to have to go through it all again.”

  Over the next few weeks, Georgia officials made numerous appeals contesting this latest ruling. All of them were denied.

  Accordingly, on August 18, 1986, Wayne Carl Coleman, George Elder Dungee, and Carl Junior Isaacs were transferred from Death Row to the Chatham County jail in Savannah to await new trials.

  A few days later, Superior Court Judge Walter C. MacMillan, Jr., of Sandersville, was appointed to preside over each of the three trials. On August 30, he appointed six new lawyers to defend Isaacs, Coleman, and Dungee.

  Within weeks, however, MacMillan was challenged when a motion for his removal as presiding judge was filed by lawyers for Coleman and Dungee. The motion charged that MacMillan was prejudiced against both poor and black defendants.

  In response, Judge MacMillan appointed a second jurist, Asa Kelly of Albany, to choose yet a third jurist to decide the issue. Kelly subsequently appointed Blend Taylor, of Brunswick, to conduct a hearing on the motion.

  At the hearing held in early September, Steven Bright, Dungee’s newly acquired attorney, argued that MacMillan had never had a black law clerk, court reporter, or public defender in his circuit, though its population was forty percent black. In addition, Bright said, MacMillan belonged to the Emanuel County Country Club, which had no black members and practiced racial discrimination.

  At the same hearing, lawyers for Coleman charged that MacMillan had called the Georgia Attorney General’s Office asking for assistance for the prosecution in the case, while in contrast, public defende
rs in the judge’s circuit had complained in the past about the volume of their caseloads as well as the scarce resources MacMillan permitted to be allocated for their work.

  For his part, and out of what he called an “abundance of caution,” Seminole County District Attorney Charles Ferguson, whose task it would be to prosecute the three Alday defendants, made no objection to the defense attorneys’ arguments, although he thought their motion groundless.

  On Monday, October 21, Judge Taylor declared that he found no grounds for removing MacMillan, and denied the motion. Defense lawyers promptly appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, asking it to overturn Taylor’s ruling.

  It would take seven months for the supreme court to come to its decision.

  But if a terrible silence had fallen over the Georgia State Supreme Court in regard to the Alday defendants, the defendants themselves, particularly Carl Isaacs, were making enough noise to keep the citizenry of Georgia forever in their hearing.

  His method was two-pronged.

  First, Carl suddenly decided to protest his poor treatment by means of a hunger strike. It began in the Chatham County jail, and authorities there officially listed it as a hunger strike when he missed his ninth consecutive meal.

  In fact, Carl was eating all during his “hunger strike,” preferring to gobble away at the full forty-three dollars’ worth of candy and other junk food he had purchased from the courthouse commissary.

  Still, Chatham County authorities decided to take no chances, and Carl was carefully monitored, given daily weigh-ins as well as medical checks of his vital signs.

  Far more irritating, however, was Carl’s increasing penchant for independent legal maneuvering. In late November, he filed suit against Chatham County for the “inhuman treatment” he alleged he had suffered while in its custody.

  A few months later, on March 12, he filed another suit, this one charging that he had been illegally transported from Chatham County, and that all subsequent movement across the state had been illegal. Arguments were heard by a fourth judge, Perry Brennan, on April 2 and dismissed by him a few days later.

  Carl was returned to Chatham County’s jurisdiction in order to avoid any further lawsuits he might file regarding his right to reside in the area of venue after a change of venue had been granted.

  In the meantime, while Carl languished in the Chatham County Jail, and the Georgia Supreme Court continued to ponder the fate of Judge MacMillan, Seminole County was spending a great deal of money to house all three defendants and to pay for their lawyers.

  While the original trials had cost approximately fifteen thousand dollars, the hearings and pretrial arguments involved in the retrials had already cost nearly ten thousand in defense fees alone. In addition, the county had spent almost fifteen thousand dollars in jail and court fees.

  Still, on the evening of August 21, the Seminole County Board of Commissioners voted a resolution declaring its willingness to assume whatever financial burden was necessary to ensure the prosecution of the defendants even though it might run to a million dollars, and necessitate, as the commission admitted, either a new ad valorem tax or an increase in the mil rate for the already beleaguered people of the county.

  Money was also being made on the case, however, the recipient of these funds being Charles Postell. On August 14 the Donalsonville News reported that the movie rights to Dead Man Coming had been sold to Phoenix Productions. According to the paper, the motion picture production company had pledged a “certain percentage” of its profits to a fund for the Alday Memorial Fund, a pledge of which Ernestine, the fund’s indisputable head, was unaware.

  Nor could Ernestine anticipate with any confidence that the film would be something of which she could be proud, since, according to the News, the script would be written by Postell and a woman named Nancy Sterling, whose previous screen credit, the paper said, was a film called Rock ’n’ Road Trip.

  Finally, during the first week of May, the Georgia State Supreme Court at last rendered judgment on the matter of Judge MacMillan, and in a unanimous decision disqualified him.

  Nearly two months later, after an exhaustive and time-consuming search for a judge whose ideas or abilities could not be challenged, Judge Hugh Lawson, Jr., of the Oconee Judicial Circuit was named to replace MacMillan.

  By August 13, Lawson had selected Perry, Georgia, a small town in Houston County, to be the site of the first of the defendants’ retrials. The defendant in that case would be Carl Junior Isaacs.

  For the next year and a half, the various attorneys for the defendants were granted continuances while they worked to develop adequate defenses for their clients. As a result, it was not until January 4, 1988, almost fourteen years to the day of his first trial, that jury selection began in Perry, Georgia, for the trial of Carl Isaacs.

  By that time, according to the Donalsonville News, the bill for legal fees associated with the defense had reached $135,687, a sum the county could not pay and still operate its various educational, medical, and social service functions. Thus, faced with such an unacceptable decline in county services, the Board of County Commissioners had borrowed $210,000 to offset trial expenses now expected to reach nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

  As events would prove, such an amount, though considered astronomical by Seminole County standards, was wildly optimistic. The cost of the retrials had just begun.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  District Attorney Charles Ferguson, to whom it now fell to prosecute Isaacs, Coleman, and Dungee, needed only to glance at the previous trial testimony to see exactly how strong a case he had.

  “The evidence was absolutely overwhelming,” he would say years later, “and it was all still available to us … of course with one exception.”

  That exception was Billy Isaacs. Sixteen years before, Billy had agreed to testify against each of the defendants in exchange for having no murder charges filed against him in the state of Georgia.

  Since that time, however, he had been transferred to Allegany County, Maryland, where he, alone among the four men who’d kidnapped Richard Wayne Miller in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, had been charged with the various criminal offenses connected to his death.

  For those crimes, kidnapping and murder, he had been swiftly tried, convicted, and sentenced to a staggering sixty years in prison, along with five additional years for car theft, all of which were to be served only after he had completed his forty-year sentence in Georgia. If these sentences remained in place, Billy Isaacs would be eligible for parole in slightly more than fifty years. This was not a pleasant prospect for a sixteen-year-old boy, particularly when it seemed entirely possible given their upcoming retrials, that the other Carl and Wayne, each of whom he considered far more culpable than himself, would suffer a fate hardly worse than his own.

  “I testified for the state, and then drew one hundred and five years,” Billy would say from prison in 1990, “and I didn’t kill or rape or kidnap anybody.”

  Now in his early thirties, no longer a child, and certainly no longer innocent of the law’s dark ironies, Billy was well aware that he was not under the slightest obligation to testify against either Carl, Wayne, or George in their upcoming retrials. He had fulfilled his part of the bargain in 1974, and to his mind, the state of Georgia had gotten the better part of the deal, particularly since various Georgia officials had worked vigorously to ensure his later prosecution in Maryland, activities of which he had been unaware in 1974.

  Bitter at his treatment and desperately weary of prison, Billy knew that he now had one last card to play. He could trade his testimony for the better deal he felt he deserved, and which had been denied him fifteen years before.

  Charles Ferguson knew Billy’s situation, too, and in reviewing the case, had even felt some sympathy for him.

  “I didn’t know Billy as a person,” Ferguson recalled, “but looking at what had happened to him in 1974, I was pretty sure he’d want something from us in exchange for his testimony. I was al
so sure that I couldn’t offer him anything.”

  Except a chance to do the right thing.

  Which is precisely what Ferguson did.

  “We met in a little room at the prison where Billy was serving his time,” Ferguson remembered, “and Billy asked if there was anything I could do for him, and I told him straight out that I couldn’t make any deals.” Then, in a move whose outcome he could not have known beforehand, Ferguson took out a picture of Ernestine Alday, a woman who, despite her suffering, had never called for Billy’s death or raised her voice in vengeance against him.

  “Do it for her,” Ferguson said.

  Billy stared at the picture for a moment, then nodded. “All right, I will,” he said.

  It was now July 1988. Fifteen years had passed since the murders on River Road. Jimmy Carter, who’d occupied the Georgia governor’s mansion at the time of the murders, had ascended to the White House, only to be turned out of it four years later by the Reagan juggernaut. The Watergate scandal, particularly the episode of the Saturday night massacre, which had served to crowd the murders from the national news in 1973, had almost entirely receded from the public mind, its central figure, Richard Nixon, now rising once again to an honored place as elder statesman.

  As for the Alday family, much had changed for them as well. As a farming family, they had ceased to be, their 550 acres now in different hands, broken up, subdivided.

  Death had claimed some of the survivors on River Road. Bud, last of Ned’s farming brothers, was now buried near the rest of them at Spring Creek Baptist Church. Others had simply moved away. Elizabeth had returned to Albany, the child she’d been carrying at the time of the murders now grown into a teenager. Faye, still in high school in 1974, had since married and borne her own children. Norman had retired from the military and settled in the West, returning to Georgia only for short visits.