Blood Echoes Read online

  Judging from the trailer, Jerry and Mary Alday had lived a modest, pared-down life, but a neat, orderly, decent one. Within their small cabinets and dresser drawers, Angel found no drugs, no pornography, no hateful letters, no bills that had not been paid. He found nothing locked away or covered up or in any way concealed. “With the Aldays,” he would later say, “what you saw was what you got, the salt of the earth.”

  By early afternoon, the Pennsylvania license plate had been traced and Angel was on the phone with Sergeant Larry Good of the Pennsylvania State Police.

  According to Good, three inmates had escaped from the Poplar Hill Correctional Institute in Wimpimco, Maryland, on May 5, 1973. Later they had picked up the younger brother of two of them, fifteen-year-old William Carroll Isaacs, known as Billy, in Baltimore. After that they’d added two young girls to their party, and subsequently gone on a protracted spree of petty crime, burglarizing an assortment of houses before finally abandoning the girls on a street corner.

  It was presumably at that point, Good went on, that things had gotten meaner. The four men had stolen a truck in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania. But the theft hadn’t gone smoothly. They’d been spotted and followed by a nineteen-year-old boy named Richard Wayne Miller.

  “Where’d he see them go?” Angel asked.

  That was a question Pennsylvania authorities had not yet been able to answer, Good replied, because Miller had not been seen since he’d disappeared down the road behind the stolen truck.

  “He just vanished?” Angel asked.

  Without a trace, Good told him, despite considerable local efforts to locate him. In fact, Good added, the discovery of the green Super Sport in the Georgia woods was the first lead he’d gotten in many days, since the car was the one Richard Miller had been driving as he’d followed the four escapees down U.S. 30 the day he’d disappeared.

  “And nobody’s spotted Miller since then?” Angel asked.

  “No.”

  “So it’s possible he’s still with them,” Angel said.

  “It’s possible.”

  “But that would be against his will, right?” Angel asked. “They’re not the type he’d have gone off with.”

  “Absolutely not,” Good said. “He’s a very clean-cut type of kid.”

  “All right,” Angel said, “let’s go on with the three escapees.”

  For the next few minutes, Angel took careful notes as Good gave him full physical descriptions of the Isaacs brothers, Coleman, and Dungee. To Angel, they seemed small in more ways than their size. They were stunted men with stunted lives, petty offenders, dropouts, losers, the northern urban equivalent of the rural redneck outlaws he’d been tracking all his life.

  Still, for all their shiftlessness and criminality, they had committed no acts of violence so far, a fact that Angel found surprising. It was as if something had suddenly snapped in them, shot them up to a terrible slaughter that nothing in their backgrounds could accurately have predicted.

  And yet the escape Good had described struck Angel as equally arbitrary and illogical, the same irrational quality at work, though with none of the reckless, annihilating violence that now gave a sudden, terrible urgency to his pursuit. Clearly, the Maryland escapees were precisely the kind of men who had lost all sense of proportion, the type for whom the ordinary limits of human behavior were mere spindly, insubstantial obstacles in the path of their flight. As long as they were at large, he thought as he hung up the phone after his conversation with Larry Good, not one person in the whole vast country was entirely safe.

  At approximately 10:00 P.M. Dr. Howard finished the autopsies he’d been conducting on the six members of the Alday family. He’d been working at the Evans Funeral Home in Donalsonville nearly all afternoon and evening as one body after another was wheeled into its small embalming room.

  The final results of his autopsies indicated that Ned Alday had been shot six times with two different pistols, .22 and .32 calibers. Aubrey Alday had been shot once with a .38. Shuggie Alday had been shot once with a .380-caliber pistol, Jerry Alday had been shot four times with a .22-caliber pistol, Jimmy Alday had been shot twice with a .22-caliber pistol, as had Mary Alday, who, Dr. Howard concluded, had also been raped, probably more than once.

  Angel was standing in the room when Howard finished the last of the autopsies. By then it was awash with the results of the ones that had gone before. The heavy stench of the bodies hung in the air around him. But it was the ravaged appearance of the room that affected him the most. It looked like an army field hospital, a place where, after battle, the bodies had been brought back to lie, gutted and alone, until they could be hauled away. That they were all members of a single family struck Angel as nearly beyond belief. He could not imagine the level of grief and loss that he knew must now be sweeping down upon the Aldays who remained alive.

  Eleven miles away, in the Alday homestead on River Road, the remaining members of the Alday family were dealing with the murders as best they could. While scores of neighbors gathered inside the house or poured out onto the porch and surrounding yard, Ernestine worked to comfort her children. Elizabeth, fearing a miscarriage, had been heavily sedated, while the others fought their grief by busying themselves with the huge amounts of foods their neighbors had been showering upon them for the past few hours. No one in Seminole County could remember ever having seen anything like it. On tables throughout the house, scores of cakes and pies, along with all manner of meat and vegetables, had been brought in by a community that had decided to extend itself fully in a family’s time of unimaginable trouble. It was the one bright spot in those first dark days, and in the years that followed it would surface from time to time in the minds of Ernestine and her children. “If you can say that anything good can be taken from all this,” Nancy would say in July of 1990, nearly seventeen years after the murders, “it was how we felt about what our neighbors did for us.”

  All through that long day and deep into the night, they continued to arrive at the Alday home, bringing with them what they could, offering whatever help they might extend from their own marginal existences. Late on the evening of that first day, one of them, Eunice Braswell, drew Ernestine away from the others and solemnly pressed a five-dollar bill into her hand. “This is for you,” she said. It was a gesture Ernestine would never forget, something that seemed to rise like a flower from the richest soil on earth.

  In Colquitt, Georgia, however, things took a different turn. In the small town approximately eighteen miles from where their daughter’s body had been found, the mother and father of Mary Alday were receiving friends and neighbors much as the Aldays had been doing for the last two days in Seminole County. Mary’s death had sent shock waves through that community as well, but the agonizing details of Mary’s last hours had been concealed from Mary’s mother. Although only sixty-two years old, Mrs. Campbell had been in failing health for several years, and because of that it had been determined that the actual circumstances of Mary’s death would be too much for her to bear. Consequently, she had been told only that Mary had been shot and had died instantly from the wound.

  But at some point during the evening, a neighbor unintentionally revealed as much as was known about Mary’s last moments, including the fact that she had been the last to die, having witnessed the murders of her husband and in-laws, and that she had been found nude in the woods and had probably been raped.

  Shortly after being told the horrifying details of her daughter’s torment, Mrs. Campbell sank into a diabetic coma. Only a few hours later, she died of what her doctor later described as the combined effects of “a diabetic condition and grief over her daughter’s slaying.”

  It was a determination of cause of death with which Ronnie Angel wholeheartedly concurred. “I always thought of her as the seventh Georgia victim,” he would say years later, “because, really, it was just like those boys put a gun to her head, too.”

  Meanwhile, as the night was steadily deepening along the Mississippi-Alabama
border, Wesley Williamson decided to go into Livingston, a small town just inside the Alabama state line and almost 275 miles west of Donalsonville. As he headed toward town, he saw what appeared to be a dark-haired man and a slender, blond-haired young girl as they trudged wearily along the shoulders of the road. They looked tired, and Williamson particularly felt bad for the girl who, from a distance, seemed very thin and gangly. He slowed as he went by them, then swung over to the side of the road to pick them up. From the dusty glass of his rearview mirror, and through the scarred wooden stocks of the hunting rifles that hung in a gun rack over the back seat, he could see them rushing toward him eagerly, their lean figures faintly illuminated by the red glow of his taillights. As they neared, he noticed that the blond-haired young girl was, in fact, a boy, and something in the way he and the other man came rushing toward him, the cold, hungry look in their eyes, warned him off immediately. He turned back to the wheel, and without so much as a backward glance, plunged his foot down on the accelerator and sped away, leaving the still rapidly pursuing men in a cloud of yellow dust behind his spinning tires.

  Several hours later a solitary police cruiser turned onto the Boyd Cutoff as it made its nightly rounds along the back roads of Sumter County. Up ahead, just off to the right near an abandoned construction site, the car’s lone patrolman could see a blue and white 1968 Chevrolet Impala as it rested motionlessly along the narrow shoulders of the road. He drew his car over to the right and pulled in behind it. The car bore Alabama license plates, and before getting out, the officer recorded the number in his notebook. Then, his flashlight held loosely in his hand, the other dangling freely at the grip of his revolver, he slowly advanced on the car, shining his light into its dark interior. There was nothing inside to identify the car in any way, so he returned to his patrol car and radioed in the make, model, license, and serial numbers. There was nothing to do now but wait for the report to come back. Only five minutes later, it did. The car he’d discovered was registered to Mary C. Alday of Route 3, Donalsonville, Georgia, the report informed him, and was wanted in connection with her murder.

  Chapter Ten

  Angel and Waters were just leaving the Evans Funeral Home, on their way to their motel room to go over the day’s findings and plan an investigative strategy for the next day when they were notified to call Sheriff Melvin Stephens of the Sumter County Sheriff’s Department in Livingston, Alabama.

  Angel returned the call immediately and listened, both surprised and exhilarated by the rapidity with which the case was breaking, as Stephens told him about the blue and white Impala which had been found during a routine neighborhood patrol only a hour or so before.

  “One of our patrolmen just spotted it sitting on the side of the road,” Stephens said. “Then we ran it through NCIC, and it came up that you were looking for it, that it was connected to a homicide in Georgia.”

  “Six homicides,” Angel said.

  “Six?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, the report was right?” Stephens asked. “This is the car you’re looking for, the one involved in the Alday thing, the one that’s all over the news?”

  “Yes, it is,” Angel said.

  For a moment, he entertained the faint hope that the Maryland escapees might actually have been spotted.

  “Did any of your people see anybody around the car?” he asked quickly.

  “No.”

  If the men were not there, Angel thought, perhaps they might not be far away. “How about the car?” he asked. “Did anybody have any idea how long it might have been there?”

  “No,” Stephens said.

  “Where’s the car now?”

  “Right where we found it,” Stephens said. “Once we knew you wanted it, I mean, for a homicide, we just posted a guard out there.”

  Stephens had done the right thing in not ordering his own men to process the car, and Angel was glad of it. “We’re on our way,” he assured him, “we’ll be there as soon as we can. Just keep the whole area secure.”

  “Nobody’ll get near it,” Stephens assured him.

  Angel immediately dispatched Agent Jim Duff in a crop-duster biplane to Livingston to secure the Impala, while he, Waters, and several Crime Lab officials followed by car. Officers of the Alabama State Patrol met them at the Alabama state line and escorted them for nearly four hours as they moved the rest of the way across the state to Livingston.

  “It was like a whirlwind from then on,” Angel remembered. “Things breaking almost every second. There was no time to get tired, no time to come up with a theory or a plan of action, no time to do anything, but just stay on top of all that was going on.”

  Several hours before the discovery of Mary Alday’s car, as soon as it had gotten dark enough to move out of the woods surrounding the Boyd Cutoff, Carl had finally decided to make a move, and had roused Wayne, Billy, and George from the idleness that had overtaken them for the past few hours. Far in the distance, they could see the lights of Livingston flickering brightly through the night, and it was not hard to surmise that somewhere along its streets there might be a car too carelessly surveilled. It had already been determined that strolling through a quiet southern town with an arsenal of weapons might draw a certain amount of unwelcome attention, so most of their more obtrusive weapons, particularly their assortment of rifles and shotguns, had already been jettisoned at the Boyd Cutoff, while several of the remaining ones were abandoned in the hills above Livingston.

  Traveling light, now armed only with those few weapons that could be nestled beneath their jackets, Carl led his ragtag army out of the woods and down into the dark, nearly empty village. With the Impala now abandoned, his first order of business was to find another form of transportation. For even without a weaving array of black rifle barrels, they would look suspicious enough, as Carl well knew, three white men and one black, all of them hunched and unwashed, straggling along narrow village streets or winding country roads. Under such conditions, a car was their only hope.

  As he walked, Carl kept his eyes on the alert for an easy mark, a car parked in an empty parking lot or sitting alone on a quiet street.

  To his delight, he found one within a few minutes. Turning a corner onto one of the residential blocks directly off the downtown streets, Carl saw something glint in the silvery street lamp that illuminated the area. It was a set of keys dangling innocently from the ignition of a two-toned Chevrolet Caprice. His eyes shot over to Wayne, back to the keys, and back to Wayne again. Then the two men smiled at each other as George, dazed as usual, and Billy, now beginning to crumble, still staggered by the violence he had witnessed at the Alday trailer, straggled up behind.

  It was nearly dawn on the morning of May 17 when Georgia officials began processing the scene in Livingston, Alabama. While the lab crew powdered Mary Alday’s deserted Impala, trying to pick up latent fingerprints, Angel and Waters searched the surrounding area for any indication as to where the men had gone after abandoning it.

  Not far from the car, on a gently sloping downgrade, they saw a piece of cloth hanging from a rickety barbed wire fence. They headed down the slope and into the woods where they found several items of clothing scattered in the brush. One of them caught their attention instantly. It was a high school jacket shaped like the varsity jackets Angel remembered from his own days in high school. On the front, it bore the insignia of the Future Farmers of America, along with the letters FFA. It was the sort of jacket worn in rural areas throughout the United States, but as he turned it around, Angel saw that this jacket had come from a particular place, its town of origin written in large block letters across the back of the jacket:

  McCONNELLSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

  It could hardly be doubted that this was Richard Wayne Miller’s jacket, and since he had last been seen pursuing the Maryland escapees, its presence in a field near Mary Alday’s abandoned car indisputably linked the Isaacs brothers and George Dungee to the Alday murders. Certainly it left no lingering doubts in Angel’s
mind as to the identities of the men who had stolen Mary Alday’s car after wiping out nearly an entire family.

  The question now was where exactly were the men from Baltimore?

  This was not the only question, however. For the fate of Richard Miller had not yet been discovered either. It was unlikely that he was still alive, Angel thought, but if dead, where was his body? Pennsylvania authorities had described very thorough and extensive efforts to locate it, all of which had been unsuccessful.

  Since Miller’s body had not been discovered since his disappearance, it was conceivable that he had still been alive during or immediately after the Alday murders. If so, then the killers might have decided to dispose of his body in Livingston just as they had disposed of so much else.

  After gathering up the evidence found near the barbed wire fence, Angel and Waters headed farther out into the woods in search of Miller’s body and other evidence that might have been left behind by the Maryland escapees. They had gone only a few yards when they came upon an astonishing scene. In a small clearing, still in sight of the road, they found evidence that the Maryland escapees had waited many hours in the woods near Mary Alday’s car. Scattered all about were cigarette packs, soda cans, potato chip and other junk food wrappers, and an impressive assortment of weapons.

  The discovery of this campsite virtually within view of Mary Alday’s car was important. It clearly indicated that the wanted men had not had a second car with them at the time the Impala had been abandoned. Because of that, Angel guessed that they had remained in the woods until nightfall, at which time, in all probability, they had gone in search of another car. Following these assumptions, Angel quickly contacted police officials in Livingston in an effort to find out if anyone in the area had reported a stolen car. The answer came back very quickly in a call from Larry Moody, chief of the Livingston Police Department. Between 8:30 and 9:30 P.M., he told Angel, a car had been reported stolen by P. C. Mincus, Jr., a resident of Livingston.