Blood Echoes Read online

  Alone among the Alday children, Nancy and Patricia remained in Seminole County. But they had also changed. Young women at the time, they had moved into middle age. As for Ernestine, she had turned into an elderly woman, still active, but no longer spry, her movements slow and more ponderous, both her hearing and her eyesight fading noticeably with the passing years.

  “We weren’t the same anymore,” Nancy recalled. “We didn’t look the same or feel the same, and yet we were going through the same things again, the trials and the testimony, all of us reliving the murders.”

  She was right. Things had changed considerably since May 14, 1973. Perhaps more than anything else, the legal process itself had changed in such ways as to greatly extend the amount of time required for a trial.

  In marked contrast to the first trial, for example, the actual presentation of evidence in the second trial did not even begin until nearly nine volumes of defense motions and voir dire examination had been completed, a process which, in itself, consumed more time than had been necessary to try all three of the Alday defendants sixteen years before.

  Finally, however, on July 3, Ferguson rose to begin the prosecution’s case. It was the jury’s task, he said, to come to judgment on indictment number 87c-4416-M in the Superior Court of Houston County, Georgia.

  After briefly retracing the crimes, he moved through a list of witnesses who were more or less unchanged from those selected and questioned by Peter Zack Geer.

  Except for one.

  By that time, and with Ferguson’s steady encouragement, Ernestine had decided not only to attend Carl’s trials, but to testify for the prosecution, a circumstance that Isaacs’ attorney, Terry Jackson, found disturbing, since her presence in the courtroom served to heighten the emotional atmosphere of the rest of the Alday family.

  “Your honor,” Jackson said just as Ernestine was about to answer Ferguson’s first question, “your honor, at this time, let the record reflect that the members of the Alday family are in the courtroom and that they are crying and that you can hear it…. And we think that this certainly has prejudiced our client’s rights.”

  Jackson then made a motion for a mistrial. When it was denied, he requested that “the Court instruct the bailiff that either the spectators are going to have to be quiet,” or that they would be removed from the court.

  Outrageous as Jackson’s objection seemed to the Aldays seated in the courtroom, the judge heeded it cautiously and issued a firm warning in its behalf. First noting that some of the family members had begun to weep as Ferguson had described the events of May 14, Judge Lawson warned that such displays of emotion would not be tolerated, and that anyone who found it impossible “to remain in the courtroom in a composed and unemotional state” would be asked to leave the room “until their composure can be restored.”

  Predictably, the judge’s warning sent shock waves through the Aldays. They could not believe that their tears could have no place in a courtroom whose walls rang with the suffering of their dearest relatives.

  “The Alday family couldn’t cry, that’s what the judge said,” Nancy recalled. “But, as it turned out later, the Isaacs family could cry as much as they wanted. And they did, too. They got up on the stand and cried and cried, and the judge never said a word.”

  Once the judge had issued his warning, Ernestine, now seventy-three years old, proceeded with her testimony, moving through the late afternoon and early morning hours of May 14 and 15, 1973.

  Before leaving the stand, she was shown a series of photographs taken in Jerry Alday’s trailer the day after the murders. In one of them, she saw Ned’s pipe as it lay in an ashtray on the kitchen table. Utterly composed until then, she suddenly began to cry.

  Once Ernestine had left the stand, Ferguson resumed a witness lineup that was little more than a replay of the 1974 trial. Bud Alday testified to his discovery of the bodies, GBI Agent T. R. Bentley to the first investigative efforts the following morning.

  As the days progressed, Jerry Godby once again identified Carl Isaacs as the man he’d seen driving Mary Alday’s car, while Horace Waters and Ronnie Angel repeated their testimony as to their own roles in the GBI investigation, finally showing the pictures that had been made from the role of negatives he’d found in a small plastic container located in Mary Alday’s abandoned car.

  One by one, as Ernestine, Nancy, and the others listened from scarcely twenty feet away, he ticked off what the photographs portrayed: a trailer with a neatly trimmed lawn, a mailbox on which the name Alday had been prominently written, a dog in the yard, and finally, a woman working in a flower garden. “Not one thing he named still existed,” Nancy remembered. “Not even our name on the deed that held the land. Everything was gone.”

  Over the next few days, Ferguson continued to call his witnesses, and one by one they gave testimony that traced the development of the investigation as it led inevitably to the final capture of the defendants in the hills of West Virginia.

  Finally, at 1:20 P.M. on the afternoon of January 23, 1988, Billy Isaacs, the state’s star witness, once again took the stand to testify against his brother.

  Now thirty years old, Billy had entirely lost the blush of youth which had surrounded him fifteen years before when he had first taken the stand in Donalsonville. Since that time, the gangly, long-haired teenage boy had entirely faded beneath the slightly wrinkled eyes, the subtly receding hairline, and the added pounds that gave the first suggestions of his approaching middle age.

  As for his testimony, it remained the same riveting account it had been when he had first given it so many years before. Sixteen years had not altered a single substantive one of its terrible details.

  From only a few feet away, Ernestine and Nancy listened to it all. “And so we went through it again,” said Nancy Alday, “everything that happened to my daddy and my brothers, and Uncle Aubrey, and Mary, and I thought to myself, ‘Will this never end?’”

  Just as in the first trial, Billy had been presented as the prosecution’s final witness. But where defense attorneys in Donalsonville had submitted him to a limited, if accusatory, cross-examination, Jackson was determined to use Billy’s position on the stand to begin to build his client’s defense.

  In answer to Jackson’s questions, Billy said that “to the best of his knowledge” he had six brothers and five sisters. His father’s name was George, he added, and his mother’s name was Betty Isaacs “unless she had remarried.”

  “Now, when you were growing up, did you all live together?” Jackson asked.

  “No, sir, we didn’t.”

  “How come?”

  “We were all put in different foster homes,” Billy replied.

  “How old were you when you were first placed in a foster home?”

  “Five years of age.”

  “And was Carl placed in a foster home?” Jackson asked pointedly.

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Did anything occasion you all going to a foster home?”

  “I don’t know the real reason why my family was broken up,” Billy answered. “I do know my mother and father got divorced and the state stepped in and took all of my brothers and sisters as well as me and placed us in foster homes.”

  As he continued under Jackson’s questioning, Billy testified that at one foster home where he, Carl, and Bobby Isaacs had lived, the foster mother had beaten them with shoes and belts or “whatever was handy,” and that they had been forced to eat hot peppers and keep them on their tongues.

  Under such conditions, of course, running away appeared as the most obvious solution. The Isaacs boys had run away from several such homes, Billy said.

  From a discussion of the deplorable conditions of his boyhood, Jackson moved on to certain discrepancies between the testimony Billy had given at the first trial and that which he had just offered in the present case, listing them one by one, even down to Billy’s embellishing his current tale with a story of how Carl had been wearing Jerry Alday’s cowboy hat and a we
stern-style holster before the murders.

  Still, the big question remained Billy himself, his character as a person, and thereby his credibility as a witness.

  “Who was holding you hostage in the trailer?” Jackson asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “Did you stop anybody from doing anything in that trailer?”

  “No, sir, I did not.”

  “In fact, you were the lookout, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did you think was going to happen to those people when you made that man go into the trailer [after three others had already been murdered]?”

  “I wasn’t doing any thinking at the time.”

  “You were a zombie?”

  “I was in a state of shock.”

  “You had a gun?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “And, in fact, you loaned your gun to somebody to shoot somebody; is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jackson then went into any deals Billy might have been offered for his current testimony.

  “What did you ask [District Attorney Charles Ferguson] to do for you?” he asked.

  “If there was some way that he would make a deal with me for me to be turned loose,” Billy answered. “He stated he was not going to make any deals, promises or insinuations in any way whatsoever.”

  “You hope that Mr. Ferguson does something for you when we finish this?”

  “I certainly have lots of hopes that something will be done for me when this is over with,” Billy admitted frankly, then added, “that is what has helped keep my sanity for fifteen years, hope.”

  “That is something to hold onto in prison, isn’t it?” Jackson asked softly.

  “Yes, it is,” Billy told him. “If you lose hope, you might as well go ahead and hang yourself because there is nothing left.”

  When completed, it was clear that Billy Isaacs’ testimony had been nearly identical to that he had given in the first trial. Since that first trial, however, a new “eyewitness” had emerged, one who’d been reluctant to speak in 1973, but who’d spoken more or less ceaselessly since that time.

  The witness whose testimony was to be used against Carl Isaacs this time was Carl Isaacs himself.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  In December 1976, Carl Isaacs had been contacted by Fleming Fuller, a writer-filmmaker who was doing a television documentary called Murder One, the same title he would later use for his screenplay on the Alday murder, which consisted of interviews with various Death Row inmates in Georgia and North Carolina.

  While conducting interviews in Reidsville, Fuller learned about Carl Isaacs and the Alday murders, and shortly thereafter Carl agreed to tell his story for Fleming’s film. The result was an amazing document, and, from the prosecution’s point of view, a damning one. Here was Carl Isaacs staring directly at the camera, his voice entirely emotionless as he gave a chilling, matter-of-fact rendering of the murders on River Road.

  “Okay, we pulled around to the back of the trailer,” he began. “Wayne got out and … I said, ‘Check the door,’ and he turned the knob on the door.”

  The unlocked door had opened with no further effort, Carl said, and he and the rest of his gang had then entered and routinely begun ransacking the trailer.

  Only this time, there was a complication.

  “And then a jeep pulled up,” Carl said coolly, his body slouched lazily in his chair, his eyes entirely passive, as if narrating the details of an ordinary day. “When the jeep stopped, the man looked like he was going for a gun … and I drew the pistol out of the holster and I threw down on him to freeze.”

  The men, whose names Carl seemed unable to remember, were Ned and Jerry Alday, and they were immediately marched into the trailer and leaned against what Isaacs referred to as a “countertop.”

  “Then me and Wayne went to talking, you know, about what we were going to do with them,” Carl went on. “So we decided, well, we’ll just kill them.”

  It was not a long conversation. There were no subtleties of moral thought involved. The two men were human beings who could see and tell what they saw. Because of that, they were going to die.

  “So after talking with Wayne, I took the youngest one and went in the south bedroom,” Carl said. “And Wayne … took the other one into the north bedroom. All right. Now I stood there about three or four seconds, you know, waiting to see if I heard a shot. I guess it was like Wayne was waiting on me, and I was waiting on him. And I figured, well, the hell with it. I guess he’s waiting on me. So I shot the dude.”

  As if on a signal, Wayne had also begun firing.

  “All right, I come back out,” Isaacs said. “As I was coming down the hall, I heard a shot at the other end … Wayne hollered. I run through the living room to the kitchen and George was standing by the kitchen door, and he was white as a sheet. Billy was standing in the bedroom door. I run past Billy and asked Wayne what the hell is wrong, you know? And the old man that he had shot was getting up off the bed. I could see blood, and the man had a hole in the back of his head, but the top part of his head was missing, you know, on the front of him … So I got my pistol, you know, and cocked it, and shot all the remaining shells … on the side of his head. He fell back on the bed. He started to get back up again. You know, and it just blew my mind, you know, I mean, hey, what the hell is this. The man is supposed to be dead. Wayne shot the remaining shells he had.”

  Carl paused an instant, as if to draw a quick breath, then resumed his grim narrative, his eyes as dull and lusterless as when he’d begun his tale: “All right. I’m trying to load the .22. I can’t get it loaded fast enough, because the man is getting up on the bed, and I’m scared shitless. I mean this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this, you know. And I look at George, ‘Give me a gun,’ you know. He hands me a .32. So I shoot him three times with it, and Wayne shoots him three or four times with the .380. So, you know, he falls back on the bed and he stays there.”

  Then, while the blue smoke from the revolvers was still floating in the air, the inconceivable began to happen.

  “So this green and white pickup truck pulls up in back of the trailer,” Carl said.

  From the arrival of the pickup, Carl’s account unwound almost identically to Billy’s earlier testimony, confirming in every detail his younger brother’s rendering of the capture and murder of Shuggie and Aubrey Alday.

  “I looked at Wayne, I said, ‘Well, same way?’” Carl told the unblinking black eye of Fleming Fuller’s camera. “And he said, ‘Yes, might as well.’ So it didn’t dawn on me then, but at the time, you know, my pistol was empty. And I took one of them, I can’t remember which, into the south bedroom again. And when I walked in, you know, the other dude is sprawled out on the bed. I mean there is blood all over the trailer, all over the floor … Anyway, when I got him in the bedroom, you know, he seen the other dude laying there with all this blood. And he turned around and looked at me. And it dawned on me, you know, well, he’s going to try to jump me, you know. So I told him, ‘Get up on the bed.’ … And when he laid down, I stepped back and pulled the trigger. And all I could hear was a click, you know. And I turned out of the bedroom and I come walking down the hall … So I seen Billy … And I grabbed his gun, the .38. I went back to the bedroom, and no sooner than I walked in the door, I looked, you know, where the dude was laying, and his hand was just reaching around a shotgun, a twelve-gauge pump, sitting up in the corner … It sort of chilled me, you know. Here I am dumb enough to walk out of that room after leaving him in there, not knowing what’s in that room … But instead of saying anything to him, I shot him three times. And I come back into the kitchen … and George hollered from the living room, ‘Here comes somebody.’”

  Again, following Billy’s earlier testimony in nearly every detail, save for the actual sequence of the murders, Carl described the capture, robbery, and murder of Jimmy Alday, and after that, the arrival in a blue and white Impala of the last
of his victims, Mary Campbell Alday.

  “She got out of the car before I could stop the tractor and walked over to our car and looked in,” Carl said. “I shut the tractor off and run up behind her and grabbed her and told her to just keep walking and there wouldn’t be no trouble.”

  Once in the trailer, Isaacs said, he told Wayne and Billy to begin loading their supplies from Richard Miller’s Chevelle to Mary Alday’s Impala. Now alone with Mary Alday, save for the gawking presence of George Dungee, Carl’s mind began to turn to his own grim satisfactions. “And then it dawned on me, hey, you know, she’s a woman … So I started feeling her up, and she started to cry about it, talked about please, don’t, and all this, you know. And I slapped her, and I told her to shut up. And I took off her clothes, and I was having sex with her when Billy walked in … And then Wayne come in … and had sex with her. George wanted to have sex with her, and I told him I said, ‘Look, we’ve done took enough damn time, let’s go.’”

  Continuing in the monotone with which he’d told the preceding events, Carl then went on to describe the last terrible moments of Mary Alday’s life, an agony for which, Carl hinted obliquely, she was herself to blame: “Well, when we come out of the trailer, I told her, I said, ‘Now, look, don’t give us no hassle. It might save your life. Other than that, you’re dead.’ And I went on to tell her that if you cooperate and do what you’re told, we might keep you alive. But it didn’t work.”

  After Fuller’s testimony and his reading of Isaacs’ interview, Carl’s defense attorneys advised the court that they had no witnesses to call on their client’s behalf. The court then advised the jury that the defense had the right either to open or to close the arguments in the case, and that it had chosen to close them.

  Ferguson rose to make his final arguments. He went over the physical evidence once again, pointedly adding that even without it, they could find the defendant guilty because they could “rely on the words of Carl Isaacs himself.”