Blood Echoes (15 page)

And last there was Carl Junior Isaacs. In almost every version, he'd seemed to be in charge of the group's activities. It was Carl who'd convinced Coleman and Dungee to escape from Poplar Hill although neither man had long to wait before release. It was Carl who'd decided to pick up Billy on Old Hartford Road. It was Carl who'd wanted to head south, Carl who'd chosen the trailer, Carl who'd waited for Mary, Carl who'd been the first to rape her. Even the incidental detail that it always seemed to be Carl who was driving the cars and making such otherwise insignificant decisions as where to eat, sleep, or buy gas argued that he was, in fact, the man in charge. At every corner, it seemed to Angel, it was Carl, Carl, Carl.

But if Carl were being talked about, he certainly wasn't talking himself, and so, as Angel prepared to make his last direct efforts in the case, he wondered if the truth would ever really be known about what had actually taken place in the modest sixty-foot trailer Jerry and Mary Alday had placed on their neatly pruned yard on River Road, or in the terrible woods six miles ways. As for Carl, he seemed determined to keep his own discussion of that day confined to a brief weather report. He remembered May 14 all right, he told Angel, but only that it was “a pretty May day.”

Chapter Fifteen

O
n May 24, clothed in prison uniforms and bound in shackles and handcuffs held together by large leather belts, Carl and Billy Isaacs, Wayne Coleman, and George Dungee arrived at the Seminole County Courthouse in Donalsonville. Under the protection of a massive security force, they had been brought in from four separate jails to be arraigned on what the
Albany Herald
had already dubbed “the most brutal mass slaying in Georgia history.”

The items in the arraignment included six counts of murder, along with an assortment of lesser charges, ranging from such very serious felonies as rape and kidnapping, through armed robbery, and finally ending in the relatively inconsequential offense of stealing Mary Alday's Chevrolet Impala.

As they were hustled into the courthouse, the Alday defendants had only the briefest instant to glance about at the scores of spectators who silently lined the streets in front of the building. Had their eyes been able to linger on them, they would have seen precisely the kind of people Carl Isaacs would later call “the type of society I don't like.”

It was a hardworking and religious society of predominantly independent farmers, and in a bygone age, it would have been held up as nothing less than the Jeffersonian ideal of a broad common people, virtuous and independent, the bedrock of American life.

But much had changed since Jefferson, along with a host of largely aristocratic literary agrarians, had rallied to the cause of the country folk. Almost none of it for the better. As a consequence, rather than being romanticized, rural Georgia had over a period of many years become an object of metropolitan scorn and ridicule.

As a result it had, to some extent, even come to view itself as a poor and underdeveloped backwater world, one that had long ago been supplanted by the more industrialized northern part of the state. Held in contempt by its own capital city of Atlanta, the butt of a thousand redneck jokes, Seminole County and its environs was a region in a state of siege, an area under ideological and economic assault by the larger, more sophisticated world beyond its borders. Its pace was the pace of the seasons, rather than the financial markets, and its old-time religion was an object of contempt and rebuke. As to its marginal, no-frills lifestyle, every television program and motion picture declared it flat and lusterless, if not entirely irrelevant.

As a people then, Seminolians were portrayed by the outside world as not so much rooted in the land as helplessly trapped by it, their customs and beliefs less quaint than anachronistic. Consequently, the ordinary respect that was generally accorded to the working world—or that had been forced upon it in the past by the pride and power of industrial trade unionism—was denied to the people of Seminole County by a combination of their limited economy, closed ideology, and undramatic geography, along with the cultural aridity that was the inevitable result of everything else. “What did they ever do?” Carl Isaacs would later ask about the Alday family. “No one would have ever paid any attention to them, if I hadn't come along and killed them.”

Isaacs' cruel question was merely the latest expression of an attitude the people of Seminole County had heard and felt before. Who are we? Nobody. Though we help to feed a world vastly larger than our own. Though we grow and cut the timber for its houses and its paper. Nobody. Though we do no harm—perhaps
because
we do no harm—we are nobody.

Under such conditions, it could be expected that the four men from Maryland would come to symbolize in the most graphic and horrendous manner the violation from outside that the county had been feeling for as long as anyone could remember. They were not only Yankees, but urban Yankees from cosmopolitan Baltimore who had invaded the region much as General Sherman had a hundred years before, destroying a helpless civilian population, killing wantonly and without regard, then moving north again, leaving everything behind in ravaged disarray.

Year after year, the people of Seminole County had been made to feel inferior, had been shunted aside and dismissed as hicks and rednecks who were little more than the farm animals the greater society used to plow its fields. Now they had within their grasp the living embodiment of that other world which had so long regarded them with disdain, so long offended and degraded them. Now, at last, there was a chance to get even, actually to see the face of the enemy, a treat few people wished to miss on the morning of May 24 when the Alday defendants arrived in Donalsonville.

Thus, dressed in their everyday work clothes, they had begun gathering early that morning, first in small knots, then spreading out along the small courthouse square until it was entirely filled. Carefully kept at a distance from the courthouse itself, they had nonetheless insisted on making their presence felt. Although they did not hoot or jeer, their stern, unsmiling faces testified to the outrage that had been sweeping the community since the murders.

For although this was their first appearance in Donalsonville since the murders, the defendants had come to occupy the minds of the local people with an intensity unprecedented in the region's history. In fact, so much outrage had already been voiced in the community that on May 24, only ten days after the killings, the
Donalsonville News
had taken pains to point out that, although profoundly offended, the people of Seminole County remained law-abiding, and thus capable of rendering the accused a scrupulously fair trial. “The four suspects cannot get a passive, indifferent trial here,” Bo McLeod, the newspaper's editor, wrote, “but they could get a fair one.”

A fair trial was all the Alday family expected for the men who had killed their kindred so wantonly. Still numb from the catastrophe that had overwhelmed them, they stayed to themselves in the weeks following the murders, often gathering together on Sundays in the family homestead as they had done in years past. “We just wanted to be quiet,” Nancy remembered, “to be together and go through it the best way we could.”

But the unearthly quiet that pervaded the homestead on River Road during those interminable Sunday afternoons when the family sat in stricken silence, or shuffled back and forth among the home's varied, and now largely unoccupied, rooms, was in marked contrast to the boisterousness and vituperation that had steadily engulfed their surrounding community.

Sitting at the nearly empty dining room table, or in the numerous unoccupied chairs that bedecked the house's expansive front porch, Ernestine, Nancy, Patricia, and Fay, the last of the Alday women who remained in Donalsonville, could sense the rising tide in every newspaper that fell into their hands. Reading them was an agonizing experience, compounded by the fact that it would have been impossible to find a local paper that did not remind them of the murders, as well as of their community's ferocious reaction toward the four men accused of committing them.

The
Camilla Enterprise
stated what it considered to be that community's feelings in no uncertain terms. “We kill rattlesnakes,” the paper declared in a reference to what could hardly be mistaken for anything but the Isaacs brothers and Dungee. The
Bainbridge Post-Searchlight
was even more emphatic in its expression of disgust. After noting that in earlier editorial parlance American newspapers had often declared that a particular criminal “should be shot down like a dirty dog,” the paper went on to say that in the case of the Alday killers, “such a comparison would be speaking disparagingly of dogs.” The
Houston Home Journal
wrote that the Alday murders served as the best argument imaginable for the reinstatement of the death penalty. For its part, the
Baxley Banner News
dropped even the pretense of presumed innocence. Declaring that the case proved the need to extend statewide arrest powers to the Department of Investigation, the paper noted specifically that such powers were needed “to track down the escaped convicts who brutally killed six members of the Alday family,” so that they could be “brought back to Seminole County to face the life-long friends and relatives” of the people they had murdered.

Local newspapers, of course, were not alone in their call for the execution, and day after day, Patricia in her office, or Nancy and Ernestine on River Road, listened as such local officials as Sheriff Dan White declared that he would “precook” the defendants before throwing the switch on the electric chair.

Although Ernestine and her daughters might have expected a fierce community reaction toward the men accused of the murders, others found the equally negative response of the very attorneys who had been appointed to defend them genuinely alarming, suggesting the possibility that a fair trial might not be possible in Seminole County.

Within days of their appointments, most of the eight attorneys who had been selected to defend the accused had either publicly or privately discussed their unhappiness with the appointment. Some, such as Julian Webb, who'd been appointed to defend Billy Isaacs, and J. William Conger, who was one of two attorneys assigned to defend Carl Isaacs and had publicly declared that he'd “rather take a whipping” than carry out that defense, were eventually granted their requests to be removed from their respective cases.

Other defense attorneys, while willing to carry out their court appointments, were quick to point out the odiousness of the task before them. Harold Lambert declared the defense of Wayne Coleman to be “the worst thing that's ever happened to me professionally,” while Tracey Moulton, Coleman's other attorney, called his appointment to the two-man defense team a “terrible financial burden” that would also cause a “loss of friends” in the community.

According to a May 25 article in the
Albany Herald
, Lambert's, Webb's, Conger's, and Moulton's publicly expressed distaste for defending their clients was privately shared by all the other court-appointed attorneys. Although quoted as saying that they planned to provide their “best courtroom defense,” they also told reporters that they would do so with “reluctance.”

Though the tone of various public officials and officers of the court in Seminole County rose to a certain pitch, it was relatively mild compared to the response of the general public. A feeling of lost security had generated “sky-rocketing” increases in gun sales in Seminole, according to some reports. It had also darkened the mood of a region whose citizens had suddenly been made to feel terribly vulnerable to the sort of people Bo McLeod called “sorry and shiftless,” and against whom the people of Seminole County could be expected to react in a spirit of shock, grief, anger, and, just as predictably, revenge.

Within the small community, the news of the murders spread, as one local observer said, “like fire in broom sage.” During the following days it was the supreme topic of local discussion. So much so, as one Seminole County woman put it, that any local resident would “have to have had lockjaw” not to have discussed the case by the time of the arraignment. By then the discussion had shifted from the crimes themselves to the men who had been arrested for committing them and, inevitably, to the consideration of their punishment.

According to the
Atlanta Constitution
, local authorities in Seminole County believed that “lynching has crossed the mind of everybody” in that community. The specter of lynching was ever present in the public mind once the prisoners were returned to Georgia, and although publicly denied, it must have played a part in the final decision to house each of the defendants in four separate jails, all of which were outside Seminole County and at some distance from each other.

Nor was the notion of lynching merely a figment of official imaginations. Only a few years before his death, Bud Alday told reporters that he'd been approached by several men who'd told him that they were prepared to raise a lynching party. He'd forcefully resisted the idea at the time, he continued, then added that he'd later come to support it, although only after it was too late. Although several members of the Alday family privately doubted the veracity of Bud's claim, and in later months even came to resent his emergence as the family's self-appointed media spokesman, there could be little doubt that public sentiment in Seminole County was at a boil during the weeks immediately following the murders.