Blood Echoes (22 page)

No, the men told him, they'd been laughing at having just missed a black flowerpot as they'd turned into the driveway.

The laughing had stopped, but the crying had not. Mary had begun to whimper uncontrollably again. By then, she'd glimpsed Jimmy's body as it lay facedown on the living room sofa no more than ten feet away. “He looks like he's been hurt,” she said to Shuggie and Aubrey as they sat where Carl had put them, carefully out of sight of Jimmy's body, crouched together on the kitchen floor.

Then, just as before, the next cog in the disordered machinery that now controlled everything that happened within the trailer clicked into place.

“Carl and Wayne was whispering to each other and Wayne took some towels off from the kitchen table and went into the bedroom on the north side of the trailer,” Billy Isaacs said.

But this time, additional preparation was required.

“Carl and George Dungee took Mary Alday into the bathroom,” Billy Isaacs said.

Then he returned, leaving Mary with George, and took one of the men into the south bedroom while Coleman took the other one into the north bedroom.

“There were several shots from the bedroom Wayne had took the man into,” Billy Isaacs said, but from the other bedroom, the one to the north, he heard only “clicks.”

During the afternoon of killing, Carl's .22 had emptied.

“And so he came out of the bedroom real fast and grabbed ahold of my pistol and went back in the bedroom and there was one or two shots,” Billy Isaacs said.

When Carl came out again, he was laughing. “That damned bastard begged for mercy,” he said.

“That damned bastard” was Nancy's brother, and with his death, the last of her blood relations, the last of those male Aldays who had sustained the family farm for two generations, who'd fed its hungry hogs and grown its peanuts and hunted its covey of small, brown quail across every inch of the five hundred acres of their own land, was gone.

Now all that remained was Mary.

“She was still in the bathroom,” Billy Isaacs said.

But once the last of the men lay dead, she was brought back into the kitchen and made to stand by the table. She was still crying, and Carl was still screaming at her to shut up while his eyes darted about the scattered contents of her pocketbook. He was looking for her car keys, and when he found them, he snatched them up.

“Then Carl and Wayne went outside and opened up the trunks of the cars outside, and Carl came back in and he told me to go out and help Wayne transfer the items from our car over to her car,” Billy Isaacs said.

Billy had obeyed without question, and while he and Wayne continued to move their supplies from the Super Sport to the Impala, Carl began to paw at Mary Alday's breasts. For a time she resisted him, but he hit her again and again, so that by the time Billy returned to the trailer, she had given up.

“I opened the trailer door a few inches and Mary Alday was laying on the floor,” Billy Isaacs said.

He could see Mary Alday on her back beneath the table, her white panties already stripped from her and flung to the side. The top part of her pants suit had been pulled up around her neck, revealing the two white breasts Carl had groped for, then seized by force, and now, for a time, appeared to be finished with.

“Carl Isaacs was standing by the kitchen table with his pants down,” Billy Isaacs said. “George Dungee was standing behind Carl Isaacs.”

As if, perhaps, he were the next in line.

But he was not.

“I closed the door of the trailer and went out and told Wayne that Carl was messing around with Mary Alday and Wayne Coleman said that he was going to go in,” Billy Isaacs said.

And so he did, disappearing into the trailer's tiny, crowded kitchen, while Billy remained outside as the minutes crawled by one after another until he couldn't take it anymore and returned once again to the trailer door, opened it a few inches, and peered in.

“Wayne Coleman was on top of Mary Alday,” Billy Isaacs said.

“What happened after that?”

“I told Carl to come on, that everything was ready.”

“What took place then?”

“I closed the trailer door and went out and stood by the 396 Chevy, and a few minutes passed and the trailer door opened.”

And out they came.

Carl Isaacs.

Wayne Coleman.

George Dungee.

And …

“Mary Alday had a red handkerchief tied around her eyes and had her hands tied behind her back and had a handkerchief tied around her mouth,” Billy Isaacs said.

In that condition, she was placed in the back floorboard of her own car, with Dungee there to guard her, while Carl sat alone in the front seat behind the wheel.

At last, they were ready to go, but then, for the first time, their luck began fitfully to run out.

The Super Sport wouldn't crank.

“So Carl took the front of Mary Alday's car and pushed it out on the paved road until it finally started,” Billy Isaacs said.

And again, as they moved northward down River Road, past Jerry Godby on his tractor and Mrs. Eddie Chance in her garden, and little Michael Jackson in his yard, their luck sputtered out briefly once again.

“Wayne had lost his wallet and he thought it was back in the trailer,” Billy Isaacs said.

After returning to it, they headed out again, still moving northward down River Road until they came to a break in the forest which bordered it.

“We went across the field and zigzagged through the woods until we came to a little clearing in amongst the woods,” Billy Isaacs said.

And there the Impala halted.

“Carl got out of the car and told me and Wayne to take the Super Sport on down in the woods as far as we could and wipe down the fingerprints,” Billy Isaacs said.

Which, as always, they obediently did, but also as always, poorly did, shoddily and hastily did, leaving prints everywhere for Dr. Larry Howard to find and tell the world about.

Then they returned to the Impala.

“What, if anything, did you see?” Geer asked.

“Mary Alday was fully undressed,” Billy Isaacs said.

She was nude, and leaning against the hood of the car. Carl was standing beside her until he saw the two other men approach. Then he suddenly stepped away and grabbed her by her wrist and threw her on the ground.

“What happened then?”

“Carl asked me and Wayne if we wanted any,” Billy Isaacs said.

But Coleman had already had his, and Billy didn't want “any.” Only George Dungee remained.

“George Dungee said he wanted to have sexual intercourse with her,” Billy Isaacs said, using a pristine, clinical language that Dungee would not have known.

But Carl, as always, was the first in line.

“Carl said wait a minute because he wanted to have it first,” Billy Isaacs said.

“What happened then?”

“He had sexual intercourse with her and then got up.”

Now, at last, George could have his.

“And George Dungee had sexual intercourse with her,” Billy Isaacs said.

Even then, however, it was not over.

“When Dungee got finished he got up and Carl asked me if I was sure that I didn't want any and I said no, that I did not. So Carl said that he wanted to have some peanut butter,” Billy Isaacs said.

“Some what?”

“Some peanut butter.”

“Go ahead.”

“So he laughed at me and George and Wayne. And he turned her over on her stomach and he had sexual intercourse with her rectum.”

“What happened then?”

“He got up and was laughing and before he had sexual intercourse in the rectum with her he had tried to get Mary Alday to have sexual intercourse in the mouth, but she refused, so Carl hit her upside of the head with his fist and he knocked her unconscious.”

“How long did she remain unconscious?”

“Until Carl finished having sexual intercourse with her in the rectum. She came to when Carl had finished having sexual intercourse with her the second time and she sat up on the ground and asked if she could please get dressed and Carl said no.”

There was no need for Mary Alday to get dressed.

She was about to die.

“We was getting ready to take Mary Alday down into the woods away from the car,” Billy Isaacs said.

To kill her, of course, but murder was something George Dungee had not yet tasted … and wanted to.

“And so before Wayne took her down into the woods, Dungee spoke up and said, ‘What about me?'” Billy Isaacs said.

To which Coleman shrugged, then handed Dungee his .22.

“And George took Mary Alday down into the woods a little ways away from the car, made her lay facedown on the ground and he shot her twice,” Billy Isaacs said.

“And where did you go from there?”

“Headed toward Alabama.”

“And when you got to Alabama what, if anything, happened to the Mary Alday car?”

“It was the next afternoon and we was going through a little town in Alabama and Mary Alday's car started overheating and Carl pulled off of the main road a ways and the car just blew up in one cloud of smoke.”

With the Alday car now irrecoverably disabled, the four men had then proceeded to take what they needed from the abandoned car and toss the rest over a barbed wire fence and into a weedy field for Ronnie Angel and Horace Waters to find and bring back to Donalsonville.

Now on foot, they had retreated into the nearby woods, waited until nightfall, then walked into town, where they'd stolen a Chevy Caprice and headed north, finally reaching as far as West Virginia, where, for a final time, under a hail of shots from Frank Thomas's AR-15, their luck ran out completely.

It was over now, the first run through the story of May 14, and as Nancy and Patricia made their way out of the courtroom, they looked forward to hearing it only two more times, in the trials of Coleman and Dungee. After that, they would never have to hear it again.

“We felt a little relieved at the end of Billy Isaacs' testimony,” Nancy Alday remembered, “like we'd gone through the worst of it.”

But they had not.

Chapter Twenty-one

I
n his cross-examination of Billy Isaacs, Bobby Hill, anticipating the sort of family background and mitigating circumstances that would be much more fully explored in later trials, led Billy back through his early years. In response to Hill's questions, Billy testified that he and Carl had not been raised together because when he was five, the two brothers had been placed in different foster homes because their mother could not support them.

“Did you ever know your father?” Hill asked.

“I don't verily remembered him.”

But he did know his brother Carl, and on that fateful night in Baltimore, he'd been glad to see both Carl and Wayne.

“Did they ask you to go with them?”

“They asked me if I wanted to go.”

“What was your answer?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you want to go?”

“Just got the urge to be with my brothers.”

For William Carroll (“Billy”) Isaacs, it would always remain just as simple as that.

On January 2, the day following Billy's testimony, the prosecution and defense made their closing arguments in the case.

Rising to his full, imposing stature, Geer, in a deep, orotund voice, presented the situation as he saw it.

“What you do in this case,” he told the jury, “is going to determine whether or not members of the Alday family can be shot and killed by a meandering band of killers.”

As to Billy Isaacs' testimony, Geer was willing to admit that his star witness had not come from the most upstanding of the nation's citizens. “I can't get a Baptist preacher to be my witness,” he declared. “Baptist preachers, Methodist preachers, Holiness preachers, rabbis, and Catholic priests are usually not at a mobile home where shootings are taking place. They are not usually in the woods where a woman is repeatedly raped and shot dead. Billy Carroll Isaacs was there.”

In conclusion, Geer returned once again to the jury's responsibility to its community. “This community wants to know whether or not peaceful, law-abiding citizens can be shot down and killed and its wives raped and mistreated. The state of Georgia, from the mountains to the sea, wants to know what you are going to do about it.”

Then, ticking off the names of the Alday dead one by one in a slow, dramatic cadence, Geer made his final plea. “Ned Alday. Jerry Alday. Chester Alday. Aubrey Alday. Jimmy Alday. Mary Alday. Their lips are sealed forever. They are dead. Carl J. Isaacs saw to that. God will tend to whether or not mercy shall be on his soul. Your duty is to say whether or not he is guilty or innocent. We ask you for a verdict of guilty.”

In a very brief statement, Fletcher Farrington admitted that Carl Isaacs had been present in the Alday trailer, but he vigorously disputed the testimony of his brother Billy. Noting that some of the victims had been murdered by weapons that had been under Billy Isaacs' control, Farrington argued that Billy's testimony was entirely self-serving, meant not so much to convict Carl as to exonerate himself from any criminal responsibility for what had happened on River Road. “Billy, when he gets to Georgia and decided to be good, says, ‘Carl took my gun from me.' Why is Billy not on trial? Billy figured out a way to save his skin, put it all on everybody else.”

Sixty-eight minutes after Farrington had concluded his argument, the jury reached its verdict. It had found Carl Junior Isaacs guilty on all counts.

*     *     *

The penalty phase in the trial of Carl Isaacs began on January 7, with Geer as the first to speak.

“Now, what is your punishment to be?” he asked. “This is not an ordinary murder case. This is the most serious murder that ever happened in the history of Seminole County.”

Geer then returned to the notion of the jury's duty to protect its community against the likes of Carl Isaacs. “There is only one way for you to make sure that this sort of tragic, senseless crime will not reoccur [sic] in Seminole County,” he told the jury. “That's for your verdict to speak out and ring around the world that we have imposed death on Carl J. Isaacs.”