Blood Echoes Read online

  “What kind of car?” Angel asked.

  “A 1973 Chevrolet Caprice.”

  “Color?”

  “Dark green with a bronze top.”

  “Where was it stolen from?”

  “From in front of a residence. Mike Wise’s residence.”

  “Is that anywhere near the Boyd Cutoff?”

  Yes, Chief Moody told him, no more than a few blocks away.

  With the discovery of the stolen-car report, Angel now felt certain he knew exactly what car the Maryland escapees were driving. He transferred that information via NCIC, and a nationwide alert was put out for the recovery of P. C. Mincus’s car.

  “At that moment, I thought it was only a matter of time before we had them,” Angel said later. “They were just a few hours ahead of us, just a few hours, and we knew who they were, what they looked like, the car they were driving. I could almost feel them in the palm of my hand.”

  Judging from their actions, neither Carl nor Wayne felt the slightest intimation of impending capture. Instead, they obliviously continued the same erratic movement that had characterized their journey since leaving Maryland. As they drove, they talked about various destinations, shifting radically from one moment to the next, dreams of California or Mexico or Canada flashing through their collective imaginations like images projected from a magic lantern.

  In the back seat, George hummed to himself or stared vacantly at the whizzing landscape, while Billy sat frozen beside him, his own mind now repeatedly playing over its own terrified scenario, as he wondered if perhaps he had already been selected as his brothers’ next victim. Certainly his own edginess had served to make them edgy, as well, and Billy had had enough recent experience with his older brothers, particularly Carl, to know just how wired for sudden violence he already was. To completely break down in front of him might result in more than a loss of face. There was something in the furtive glances and low muttering he had observed between Carl and Wayne that suggested to him that he might be just as expendable to them as the Aldays, and because of that, he labored as best he could to keep his self-control.

  Meanwhile, through the long aimless night following the murders, Carl and Wayne jabbered incessantly as the stolen green Caprice crossed and recrossed the Georgia-Alabama line, before, without any stated reason or explanation, Carl suddenly veered it westward into Mississippi.

  Nor had these ramblings been uneventful. Just on the western out-skirts of Jackson, as they had found themselves cruising along a deserted two-lane blacktop road, they’d seen a car approach, slowing as it neared them.

  As it drew closer, they could see that it was a Mississippi State Patrol car. Carl continued driving, staring straight ahead until the two cars passed. Then, from the rearview mirror, he could see the patrol car come to a sudden brake-slamming halt, then make a hard doughnut turn in the middle of the road.

  “They spotted us,” Carl said to Wayne who sat, as always, in the shotgun position of the front seat.

  Billy and George, both still drowsy with the long ride, straightened up immediately, their eyes darting toward the rear where they could see the patrol car closing in behind them, its lights flashing.

  Wayne glared at Carl. “What are you going to do?”

  Carl slammed his foot on the accelerator. “Let me know the first road you see coming up on the right side,” he said grimly.

  It came up only a few minutes later, a dirt driveway that led up to a rickety, unpainted wooden house. Just behind them, the patrol car had disappeared behind a curve in the road just long enough for Carl to make a hard, brutal turn into the drive, skidding wildly as the back tires spun to the left, lifting clouds of grit and dust as they churned up the dark driveway before coming to a stop.

  Once the car slid to a halt, Carl and Wayne leaped out and took up positions behind it, their guns already leveled at the driveway, while Billy and George hunkered down, cowering together in the back seat, both too petrified to leave the car.

  Seconds later the patrol car sped by, its siren blaring as it raced past the driveway before disappearing entirely into the night.

  Carl lowered the shotgun and laughed. “That’s one lucky bastard,” he told Wayne.

  Only a short time later, still vaguely heading west, the green Caprice pulled into yet another small Mississippi town. As it approached a four way stop, the men inside saw a police car edge its way into the intersection. Glancing to the right, they saw a second patrol car ease into the intersection, then to the left, a third.

  Genius was hardly required for Carl and the others to suspect that more than mere coincidence was necessary to explain such a sudden convergence of law enforcement on a single, isolated intersection.

  In the complete silence that fell inside the Caprice as it continued to roll toward the intersection, Billy and George remained in the back seat, sitting motionlessly while waiting to see what Carl and Wayne would do.

  In the front seat, neither of the two men discussed the issue. Instead, they sat stiffly and silently, staring straight ahead as Carl gently pressed down on the accelerator and let the car cruise smoothly through the intersection.

  Any relief that might have swept through the shadowy interior of P. C. Mincus’s Chevy as it glided through the intersection was to be short-lived. For in a gesture fully characteristic of the reckless bravado with which Carl attempted to live out his fantasies of outlaw grandeur, he suddenly punched the accelerator, cut the wheels to the right, and careened so violently around a nearby corner that the car had gone up on two wheels for an instant before slamming back down on the hard pavement once again.

  From the back window, a thunderstruck Billy and George could see one of the patrol cars jerking forward and backward as it struggled to maneuver itself out of the narrow street and give chase. Then it suddenly came to rest, its flashing light finally blinking off, leaving nothing but the lights of the small town disappearing behind the men in the green Caprice, and only the dense rural darkness up ahead.

  Once again Carl felt the exhilaration of escape, the high rapture of thumbing his nose at the law. To Wayne and George, it was an outrageous exploit that served to demonstrate not only Carl’s daring but his invulnerability. To Billy, however, it had demonstrated something else, the terrible depth of his brother’s self-destructiveness, his Bonnie-and-Clyde urge to die in a hail of gunfire, even at the cost of taking the rest of them with him. Carl, it seemed, was on a suicide mission, and as Billy watched his brother’s dark hair slapping in the wind that rushed through the car’s unlighted interior, it struck him that in all likelihood he was destined to die with him, all of them together, to pay the debt they had incurred on River Road. There was no talking to him or reasoning with him. Carl Isaacs was now on autopilot, his mind entirely propelled by its wildest and most reckless fantasies, a death ship rushing toward the rocky bar.

  And yet, as the Caprice sailed on through the thick southern night, even Billy had to admit that Carl had done it again, spit on the sheriff and lived to tell about it.

  The mythical sheriff, however, was not finished yet.

  Chapter Eleven

  On the morning of May 17, the community’s only newspaper, the Donalsonville News, a weekly published each Thursday morning, began its coverage of the murders with the bold headline:

  COMMUNITY SHOCKED BY MURDER OF

  SIX MEMBERS OF THE ALDAY FAMILY

  The following story related the murders and the discovery of the bodies, along with police speculation that based on the condition of the interior of the trailer, the Alday victims had been killed without a struggle, probably immediately upon entering the trailer. Only Mary, the paper noted, appeared to have been “running from someone” at the time of her murder.

  The paper went on to quote Gil Kelley, foreman of the coroner’s jury, to the effect that Mary Alday had probably been followed home by “four or five hippie-type men” who’d been seen pulling into her yard late Monday afternoon.

  The paper noted that Gover
nor Jimmy Carter had dispatched officials to Donalsonville to work on the case, and went on to speculate that police were searching for several escapees from a Maryland prison camp in connection with the murders. According to the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, William Beardsley, the paper said, so much evidence linked the escapees to the murders that at the present time there was “no point in looking for anybody else.”

  * * *

  At about the time the people of Donalsonville were reading their first local reports of the murders, the Isaacs brothers and George Dungee stopped for breakfast at a small restaurant in northern Alabama. By then they had crossed and recrossed into Mississippi several times, moving randomly, their vision of a western escape decidedly dulled by the two near-captures in Mississippi. While Wayne went into the restaurant, Carl remained behind the wheel, glancing occasionally into the rearview mirror where he could see Billy and George staring vacantly ahead.

  Minutes later, Wayne scrambled quickly back into the car. While in the restaurant, he told the others, he’d seen a customer reading a local newspaper. “It was all about the killings,” he said excitedly. “I couldn’t see what it said, but I figured it might have our pictures in it, so I got the hell out of there.”

  Carl nodded, but said nothing. Certainly he could not have been disturbed by the newspaper story, since he could feel his criminal fame building by the second.

  Criminal fame had never been his younger brother’s life ambition, however, and while Wayne and George seemed content with the situation as it had developed, Billy had begun to crack up.

  “I want to go home,” he said at last.

  Carl looked at him darkly. “What do you mean, go home?”

  “I can’t take this anymore,” Billy said, though already terrified of Carl’s response. Still, he had no choice but to hold to what he’d already said. He’d had enough of Carl’s exploits. The long night of narrow escapes, with Carl increasingly out of control, had entirely unnerved him, and even at the grave risk of his own life, he found himself unable to shore himself up, to keep the outlaw pose which alone ensured his survival. He began to cry. “I can’t take this anymore,” he repeated brokenly. “I just can’t.”

  Carl’s eyes swept over to Wayne, as if for a signal, some sign that he might join him in the murder of their younger brother.

  But Wayne did not give it. Instead, he made a mundane suggestion. “We could put him on a bus.”

  Carl nodded obliquely, his eyes returning once again to the wheel. “Yeah, okay,” he said with a shrug. “We’ll just have to find one.”

  Wayne glanced back at Billy. “That okay with you, Billy?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Billy said softly, fighting to regain control of himself. “A bus, yeah.”

  “That’s what we’ll do then,” Carl said to Wayne as he hit the ignition and guided the car back out onto the road. “We’ll find a place for Billy to catch a bus.”

  Billy nodded silently, though for the rest of the trip, he believed that his two brothers were not looking for an appropriate bus stop, but a place where they could kill him.

  In any event, they headed north, back toward Baltimore along a random assortment of obscure state and county roads, finally crossing into Tennessee. As they traveled, they tried to keep their ears tuned to the local radio stations in order to keep abreast of whatever news was breaking about the murders. But they were moving so quickly, flying from town to town, county to county, that they could only catch small bits of their own story as it was unfolding over the airways. Hearing only snatches here and there before the story dissolved in clouds of static, they could only grasp that it was a big story, immensely big. It seemed to pervade the very air around them, reports of the murders pursuing them like angry, hissing ghosts down every country road, through every jerkwater town, over the densely forested hills and valleys, extending on and on, it seemed to them, toward the farthest edges of the world.

  Toward noon that same day, ten-year-old Rhonda Williamson went for a walk in the woods around her father’s home in Sumter County, Alabama. The shade kept her cool in the terrible heat that envelops the Deep South by mid-May, but that was not the main reason for her jaunt into the woods around her house. The day before, she’d seen an enormous amount of activity around a blue and white Impala that had been found on the Boyd Cutoff, and since then the neighborhood had been buzzing with tales of a murderous band of escaped convicts. There’d been talk of a body that might have been thrown into the lake or dumped off in the woods. In addition to these sizzling stories, she’d also heard tales of sinister discoveries, guns and ammunition hidden in the tall weeds that grew everywhere in the area. If the escapees had come through the woods near her house, she reasoned, then they might have dropped such dreadful wares in them as well. She decided to find out.

  For a long time, she strolled aimlessly, enjoying the cool as she rambled among the trees, her eyes following whatever attracted them, a play of light, some small movement in the leaves or along the ground. After a time, she came to an old barbed wire fence, its rusty strands just high enough for her to crouch and go under them. As she straightened again, her eyes swept the forest that spread out beyond the fence until they caught suddenly on something dreadful.

  Several yards ahead of her, just at the edge of a narrow culvert, she saw something so frightening and macabre that she froze for an instant before screaming loudly for her father. He heard the scream from his house down the hill, bounded over the little fence, running as fast as he could through the bramble until he reached his daughter’s side. Once there, he stood motionlessly beside her, his eyes staring out in the direction toward which she pointed.

  In a large tree several yards away, he saw four shirts hanging several feet above the ground. They had been methodically stuffed with leaves so that they appeared to him exactly as they had appeared to his daughter seconds before, as headless bodies dangling from the limbs.

  By early afternoon, Angel had arrived once again in Donalsonville. By then he’d accumulated a massive number of case notes, and he was busily transcribing them when the phone rang. It was Chief Melvin Stephens from Livingston, Alabama, again. A little girl had found something, he told Angel, something Georgia authorities would certainly want to see.

  “So I need to come back?” Angel asked unbelievingly.

  “I guess so,” Stephens said.

  Angel hung up, drew in a long, deep breath, and headed for his car for the long drive back to Alabama.

  He arrived nearly four hours later, then accompanied Sheriff Stephens to a narrow wooded area at some distance from where the Alday car had been abandoned.

  The four stuffed shirts still hung eerily in the trees as he and Stephens began gathering up the odd assortment of items that lay scattered beneath them. To one side, in a pile at the base of a large tree trunk, he found what appeared to be about $30.00 in pennies. He shook his head wonderingly. Pitching pennies, he thought, that’s how they must have killed time during the afternoon, just sitting around, pitching pennies.

  Not far from the pennies, he found several unopened cartons of cigarettes, which they’d obviously decided not to bother with anymore.

  But of far greater interest was a single black suitcase which had not yet been opened. When he opened it, he discovered all the evidence he needed in order to determine where it had come from. Inside, he found Georgia hunting and fishing licenses made out to Shuggie Alday, along with his temporary driver’s license and two dental appointment cards. He also found Barbara Alday’s fishing license and a yellow Instamatic camera box with a packet of undeveloped film inside.

  Not far away, but still at some distance from the original campsite, Rhonda Williamson continued to patrol the forest. She could see thirty to forty men as they inched their way among the trees and undergrowth, slipping up and down the culvert, meticulously combing every inch of the woods for anything the escapees might have left behind. They’d gathered up a great deal, she noticed, and she presumed that
there was little left to find, until her eyes swept down to the ground a final time, and she saw a few bits of paper blowing idly in the summer wind. She knelt down, gathered them up, and looked at them closely. They appeared to be torn parts of a black-and-white Instamatic photograph, and she now sat down on the ground and began to piece them together. One by one she shifted the parts, fitting their jagged edges together, until the picture was finally made whole. She would never be able to forget what she saw. It was a crude black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired woman who lay on her back, nude, her body spread across the ground, her still living eyes staring up toward the camera at the man who no doubt stood above her, grinning as he took the picture. It was Mary Alday minutes before her death as she lay on the ground of the Cummings estate six miles from her trailer. She appeared dazed, almost lifeless, though unquestionably still alive, her terrible visage captured in a photograph taken by her tormentors at the moment of her deepest anguish.

  “I’ve never been able to forget it,” Rhonda Williamson would say nearly seventeen years later. “I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind.”

  Over two hundred miles away, as the tide of investigation continued to sweep rapidly from Georgia to Alabama, all the varied social and commercial activities of Donalsonville and Seminole County came to a complete halt for the Alday funeral.

  Heeding the mayor’s call for a day of mourning and commiseration for the Alday family, the stores of the downtown area closed for the funeral. Its streets deserted, with little moving other than the steady blinking of its few traffic lights, Donalsonville looked like a town that had been swept by plague.

  By 3:00 P.M. almost all the townspeople, along with hundreds of others from the surrounding counties, had gathered to attend the funeral services for Ned, Shuggie, Aubrey, Jimmy, Jerry, and Mary Alday, which were being held at the Spring Creek Baptist Church only a short drive from the Alday family home.