Blood Echoes Read online

  In the driveway and around the trailer itself, the jeep, tractor, and truck remained as they had been on the afternoon of the previous day. Nothing appeared to have been moved during the ten long hours which had passed since Bud had first seen Jimmy steer his tractor into the driveway. Everything was the same. Except the eeriness of the dimly lit trailer, and the hollow silence.

  Slowly, Bud and the others got out of Bud’s truck and moved to the trailer’s back door. It was very still, the wide, recently planted fields a smooth, black slate all around them, the atmosphere utterly motionless until Jerry’s dog suddenly rushed around the corner, whimpering softly as it turned and followed them around the edge of the trailer to where they gathered at the back door.

  Roy reached for the door and turned the aluminum knob slowly. It rotated smoothly. The door had not been locked. He tugged it open partially, then drew back. Bud stepped over to it, opened it a bit further, and silently peered inside.

  What he saw, although innocent enough on its face, sent a wave of terror over him. It was a single Pabst Blue Ribbon beer can sitting upright on the kitchen counter, and the very sight of it stunned him nearly speechless. Because the Aldays did not drink and so never kept liquor in the house, he knew that people very different from them had found their way into Jerry Alday’s trailer, and he felt instantly that something terrible had happened to Mary, his father, his uncle, and his brothers. For Bud Alday, a beer can resting on Jerry’s kitchen cabinet was as alien and incongruous a sight as a severed head might have been, or a rock brought from the moon.

  “What is it?” someone asked.

  Bud did not answer. He let his eyes drift downward and saw a rumpled pair of white panties lying loosely under the kitchen table. He took a quick, shallow breath, then drew his eyes to the right, where, in the bedroom at the north end of the trailer, he could see four legs dangling motionlessly from a bed, all in farm work clothes, all dusty from the very fields that surrounded him at that moment.

  He stepped back instantly and closed the door. “We got to get some help,” he said. “Something’s happened.”

  The Aldays returned immediately to the homestead, where Bud called Seminole County Sheriff Dan White, and a neighbor, Hurbey Johnson.

  “There’s something happened up at Jerry’s trailer, Hurbey,” Bud said. “Mary’s car is missing, and there’s a light on in the trailer. Can you meet me at Ned’s?”

  “Yeah, Bud.”

  “And bring a gun with you,” Bud told him.

  Johnson hung up, dressed as quickly as he could, and made his way toward the front door. On the way out he picked up a twelve-gauge shotgun.

  Bud was waiting in Ned and Ernestine’s driveway when Johnson pulled in.

  “Something’s happened up at Jerry’s trailer,” Bud repeated. “Everybody’s missing.”

  Johnson looked at him, astonished. “Everybody? Who?”

  “Everybody,” Bud answered. “Daddy and Shuggie and Chester. Jerry. Jimmy. Mary. Everybody.”

  “Missing?”

  “Nobody’s heard from them since yesterday afternoon,” Bud went on, “and all the cars, the tractor, Jerry’s jeep. They’re just sitting in the driveway. Mary’s car. That’s the only thing that’s not at the trailer.”

  Johnson felt his hand tighten around the shotgun. “Have you been in the trailer yet?”

  Bud shook his head. “Not all the way in,” he said, unable to add anything else.

  Johnson glanced around at the large assembly that had gathered in Ned’s driveway. Ernestine, Fay, and Barbara were there, their faces ghostly white in the moonlight, along with a neighbor, Eddie Chance, the long stock of a shotgun cradled in his arm.

  “Roy and Andy are up at the trailer,” Bud said. “They’re watching the front and back doors in case anybody tried to come out.”

  Johnson nodded.

  “And I called Dan White, too,” Bud added. “He said he’d be there in a minute.”

  “Okay,” Johnson said. “Let’s go.”

  The men drove the short distance to the trailer and got out of the truck. Roy Barber and Andy Alday converged on them, their shotguns at the ready.

  It was now 2:45 on the morning of May 15, 1973, and as the men advanced on the trailer, they could feel a thick and terrible dread coagulating in the air around them. In response, they fell completely silent.

  “There was not a sound,” Johnson recalled, “not a word spoken. We just got out and headed toward the trailer. On the way, you could hear us racking shells into our shotguns.”

  Once again, as he had done only a few minutes earlier, Bud Alday made his way to the back door of the trailer, shoved the door open, and stepped back, unable to go in.

  Johnson stepped around him and headed into the trailer. To the right, he could see a beer can on the kitchen countertop. Across the room, he noticed a few items that appeared to have been scattered across the small dining room table, and which looked like the general contents of a woman’s purse, a compact, a mirror, hair brush, tube of lipstick.

  His eyes drifted downward, lighting on the white panties beneath the kitchen table, then further to the right into the trailer’s north bedroom, where he saw four legs hanging off the side of the bed.

  “We knew something real bad had happened in there,” Johnson recalled, “and we didn’t want to mess anything up. Roy and Andy had already took up positions to guard the back and front of the trailer. We just waited, then, for the sheriff to get there.”

  Dan White pulled into the driveway five minutes later, and taking Johnson and Eddie Chance with him, moved decisively into the trailer.

  What they saw during the next five minutes as they trudged from room to room inside the trailer was unimaginable.

  In the bedroom to the right, just off the kitchen at the south end of the trailer, Ned and Shuggie lay facedown on the bed. Shuggie’s face was pressed deeply into the bed, while Ned’s was turned slightly to the side, revealing what appeared to be several wounds running in a jagged line down the right side of the face.

  Following White, Johnson and Chance headed back through the kitchen and into the living room. On a sofa by the window, they found Jimmy Alday lying facedown, one long leg slumped off the edge of the sofa so that the left foot touched the floor.

  White then proceeded back toward the far end of the trailer, while Johnson and Chance remained in the living room. They could see him standing in the doorway, staring down. “Here’s Aubrey and the other one,” he called, the only words spoken in the trailer.

  By the time Sheriff White and the others made their way out of the trailer, all the missing Alday men had been accounted for.

  Except for Mary.

  Under other circumstances, she might have become a suspect in the murders, a distraught woman who’d suddenly snapped, shot several members of her family, and fled in her own car from the scene of the slaughter.

  But then there were the panties, plain and white and lying where Mary, a very neat and very modest woman, never would have left them, crumpled and exposed beneath the kitchen table.

  Wherever the killer or killers were, the men outside the trailer reasoned, if she were still alive, she was with them.

  It was now past three in the morning, and as he stood beside the closed trailer door, Johnson could see Sheriff White talking to Bud Alday.

  Inside the trailer, Ned, his brother, Aubrey, and his three sons, Shuggie, Jerry, and Jimmy, lay motionlessly in the darkness, a family’s heart and soul. Alive they had done the heavy labor of the farm, cleared the land, plowed the fields, driven and repaired its cumbersome machinery. But they had done more than that, as Ernestine and the surviving wives and children would always remember. Ned had lit a thousand smiles with his good humor. Aubrey, with his broad red face, had never let a chance for laughter pass him by. Shuggie, stout and huggable, seemed always to have someone beneath his outstretched arm. Jerry, reticent and reserved, the least boisterous member of a boisterous family, had brought only Mary into his d
eepest confidence. And Jimmy, youngest of them all, a high school prankster renowned for his “dirty tricks,” had just begun to throw off the last vestiges of boyhood.

  Now they were all dead, and for the first time, the very traditions that had made the Alday family strong—particularly the sexual division of labor common to agrarian life—began to weaken it, while other, even more sinister, elements began to gnaw ceaselessly at its vital center, like a worm at the core. The saga of the farming Aldays had ended, and the saga of the “Alday victims” had begun.

  Chapter Eight

  During the early hours of May 15, the heartrending business begun just outside the Alday trailer as Sheriff White spoke to Bud Alday continued one phone call at a time.

  At approximately 3:00 A.M. the telephone rang in the home of Patricia Alday Miller, Ernestine’s thirty-two-year-old daughter.

  “Patricia, this is Mama,” Ernestine said in a voice that remained very firm, unshaken. “Something’s happened. You need to come home.’’

  “Home” meant the family homestead on River Road, and the tone in her mother’s voice convinced Patricia that something dreadful must have happened. Quickly she roused her husband, the two of them throwing on the clothes they’d worn the day before, and headed for the door. On the way out, Patricia instinctively looked in on her sleeping children, the warmth of their room, the look of their bodies safe beneath the blankets already suggestive of a security and contentment she would never know again.

  Outside there was a chill in the air, though enough light had broken for her to see a clear sky overhead, the promise of another bright spring day. The prospect of enjoying it had already dimmed in her mind. Her mother’s voice had replaced it, cool, strained, female. Why didn’t Daddy call?

  She tried to press any further direct questions from her mind as the truck backed out of the driveway and headed toward River Road. On the way, the truck racing through the early morning mist, she kept her eyes straight ahead while her mind moved through a grim catalog of possibilities, images of death and injury in a steady stream of horrible conjectures. “It only took a few minutes to get to River Road,” she remembered later, “but it was the longest drive I ever took.”

  At last, as they neared her brother Jerry’s trailer, Patricia could see several cars lined up and down both sides of River Road. Her husband slowed down as the truck neared the trailer, then stopped dead on the road in front of it.

  From her place in the passenger seat, Patricia could see Sheriff White standing a few yards from the trailer itself. He saw her, too, and strode down to where she sat nervously in the truck.

  “They’re all dead, Patricia,” White told her solemnly. “And Mary’s missing.”

  Patricia couldn’t speak. She stared mutely at White, totally unable to imagine the “dead” he was referring to. The only name he’d mentioned was Mary’s, the fact that although the others were dead, Mary was not among them. Her first thought would later astound her with its irrational oddity: What has Mary done to my family?

  The truck eased on through the line of official vehicles toward the Alday homestead on River Road, Patricia now entering a state of near paralysis, her mind unable to arrange the disjointed information it had received during the preceding minutes.

  Once at home, she found Ernestine seated at the dining table, utterly still, her hands folded in her lap, her gray hair neatly combed, as it always was, with little to betray the unimaginable blow she had received nearly an hour before.

  For the next few minutes, as Patricia listened in disbelief, Ernestine related the evening’s events, the nightlong search for Ned and the others, then the discovery of their bodies in the trailer. Through it all, she remained entirely controlled, holding her emotions in with a monumental determination.

  “Mama was determined to be strong for the rest of us,” Patricia remembered, “and she was strong, very, very strong. I think the fact that she didn’t fall apart that night was the one thing that held us all together.”

  Still, it finally fell to Patricia to alert her two sisters, Nancy and Elizabeth, both of whom lived in Albany, and neither of whom had telephones. The only thing to do was to call the Albany Police Department and have one of its officers deliver a message to her sisters.

  But what kind of message?

  Barely able to conceive of the murders herself, and not knowing how to break such news to her sisters, Patricia penned an oblique note, one that gave no details as to what members of the family had been killed and made no reference whatever to the fact that they’d been murdered.

  Once the message had been received, the Albany Police Department dispatched two officers to the home of Nancy Alday, the older of the two sisters.

  “It was about five in the morning, and we were all sound asleep, of course,” Nancy later remembered. “There was a knock at the door, and two Albany police officers were standing there.”

  As she glimpsed the two officers through the screen door, Nancy suddenly felt that sense of dread which had earlier seized Patricia when the phone rang in her bedroom.

  “Is your husband here?” one of the officers asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can we speak to him?”

  Nancy summoned her husband Paul to the door, then eased away, wondering, against all reason, if Paul were in some kind of trouble.

  From her place a short distance away, she could hear the policemen speak to Paul for a moment, before returning to their car.

  Paul approached her slowly and handed her the note the policemen had given him.

  “It’s from Patricia,” he said.

  Nancy read the note quickly, then looked up at Paul, still puzzled. “It just says that people in the family have been killed,” she said. “Who? How?”

  Paul shrugged. “We’d better go tell Elizabeth.”

  They dressed quickly and drove the short distance to the small house where Elizabeth lived with her husband, Wayne. While the two sisters sat in the living room, their husbands walked to a nearby store and called the Alday homestead in Donalsonville. Patricia answered the call, and told Paul and Wayne all she knew about the murders. Stunned, the two men walked dazedly back to Elizabeth’s house. On the way, they agreed that they could not tell their wives what Patricia had told them. At the time, Elizabeth was seven months pregnant with her first child, and because of that, they were afraid that such a shock might bring on a miscarriage.

  “Patricia had told our husbands everything,” Nancy remembered, “but when they got back from the store, they just told us that some people in the family were dead, and after that they wouldn’t say anything.”

  As a result, for the next hour and a half as Nancy and Elizabeth rode through the early morning light toward Donalsonville, they assumed that some of their first cousins, younger, teenage Aldays, had perhaps been killed in a terrible traffic accident. It was not until they reached Jerry’s trailer that a considerably grimmer possibility entered their minds.

  “There were police cars all over the place by the time we got to Jerry’s,” Nancy recalled, “but we kept going until we got to Mama’s house.”

  Fay Alday met them in the driveway, standing grimly in the morning light, her face streaked with tears, as she ticked off the names. “Daddy’s dead,” she said. “And Shuggie. And Jerry. And Jimmy. And Uncle Aubrey.” Then the final, unbelievable detail: “Somebody killed them.”

  At that moment, Nancy and Elizabeth felt as if the world had suddenly turned upside down, all the rules by which they’d lived, the little certainties of life, spilling into the void.

  “I didn’t know what to do or say,” Nancy later remembered. “And it was like that for a long time. It was like you just couldn’t absorb it, couldn’t believe that it was really true.”

  By approximately 7.30 A.M., the focus had turned from identifying the dead and informing their relatives to a desperate search for their murderers, and for Mary Alday, who was still missing.

  After talking to Bud Alday, Sheriff White had
secured the crime scene from any intrusion. He’d summoned help from the Donalsonville police, from the sheriff’s department in neighboring Decatur County, and had informed the Thomasville office of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that a multiple homicide had occurred in Seminole County. GBI Agents T. R. Bentley and B. A. Turner then made the inevitable call to the GBI’s Major Crime Squad in Atlanta, a newly created special division headed by a thirty-two-year-old agent with the unlikely name of Angel.

  Of moderate height by law enforcement standards, his body compactly built, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Lieutenant Ronald Eugene Angel hardly looked angelic. He kept his hair in a close-cropped military style, dressed neatly but without ostentation, and let his smile do what it could to relieve the bulldog look of his face.

  Born in Evansville, Indiana, on February 2, 1940, he had not lived an idyllic life. His family had come south after the small building his father had once maintained as a woodworking shop had been occupied by United States Government war industries during World War II.

  Financially at sea, Angel’s father spent the next twelve years wandering from town to town before settling in Chattanooga, Tennessee. As a result, Ronnie Angel had attended seven different schools before finally graduating from Rossville High near Chattanooga.

  Added to this rootlessness was another problem, his mother’s alcoholism. In later life, as he looked back upon his childhood, Angel could not remember a time when his mother had not needed a bottle. Thus, with his mother drunk most of the time, his father helpless to do anything about it, Angel grew up as “poor white trash,” living in what amounted to shacks, one with an asphalt floor, others without indoor plumbing, all of them growing filthier by the hour as Angel’s mother focused her attention on the bottle. “Even some of the moves were just because the house would get so dirty,” he recalled years later. “I mean, it got so bad, my father would just say to hell with it, and we’d just pack up and move.”

  Within the turmoil of his early life, Angel found aid and comfort almost exclusively from people in uniform. In the fourth grade it was a traffic officer who would let him sit in his car and listen to the police radio. Later it was the men in the local fire station who always put him up when things at home disintegrated into unendurable chaos. “They always had a bunk for me when things were really bad at home, or when my parents split up, as they often did,” Angel recalled. “I don’t remember a time when the firemen ever turned me away.”