Blood Echoes (28 page)

Not one prone to patience, Isaacs acted. The solution was obvious. He needed more blades.

To get them, he turned once again to Charles Postell, instructing him to buy the blades in Reidsville and hand them over to Minnie and Patti Hunter, McCorquodale's mother and sister. According to Isaacs, Postell also agreed to supply the escapees with guns, drugs (two hundred black beauties, speed) and “a few hundred dollars,” all of which were to be placed in a car Minnie Hunter would leave in the prison parking lot.

It was at this time, according to Isaacs, that the ulterior motive he had always suspected in Postell surfaced for the first time when, during a prison visit, Postell advised him that after the escape, Carl should “lay low” until he, Postell, could get a “small cassette recorder and give it to Minnie.” There would be plenty of tapes, Postell told him, and “I want you to turn it on as soon as you get in the car.” When the tapes were full, they were to be mailed to Postell so that he could reconstruct the escape in a book he would then write.

In the last days of June 1980, final preparations were completed for the escape, though not without a few hitches. Hacksaw blades mailed to four of the escapees were intercepted in the prison mail room on June 25, and as a result strip searches were conducted on Isaacs and Troy Gregg at 7:00
P.M.
that evening. Finding nothing, five other cells were shaken down while Isaacs and Gregg sat in their own cells, listening for the first indication that any part of the escape plan had been uncovered.

It never came. During the entire process, despite the intercepted hacksaw blades, no guard had bothered to examine the bars.

The following day, while the men in Cell Block D were laughing at the fact that despite the shakedown, their plans had gone undetected, Carl was told to report to the control office downstairs. Once there, he was told that he had been charged with the illegal possession of instruments of escape and a deadly weapon, the latter nothing more than a pair of scissors. In response to these charges, Carl was taken to disciplinary court on June 25, found guilty of the offenses, and given fourteen days in isolation and ninety days on restricted privileges.

On July 11, Carl was released from the hole and was told that ten hacksaw blades were already en route to the prison, this time concealed in the handle of a portable radio.

The radio arrived on July 18, passed through prison inspection without a blink, and within minutes of its receipt, Isaacs, Gregg, and the others were busily sawing at the bottom bars of their cells.

Once the cell bars had been cut, Carl set about cutting the bars over the window overlooking the prison fire escape. Beginning on the morning of July 19, he worked continually through the weekend, grabbing whatever moments he could to saw, then concealing the saw marks with a concoction of bubble gum and cardboard which he had painted to match the color of the bars.

More pajamas came on July 22, and Carl and Jarrell set to work making the last of the uniform shirts, while continuing to saw through the various cell block bars in any remaining time.

On July 23, the bars on McCorquodale's cell had been completely sawed through, and later that afternoon, Carl, using India ink and black Magic Markers, dyed four pairs of shoes to match the institutional black of the prison staff. That completed, Isaacs turned his talents to fashioning the required six nightstick holders, for which he used pieces of state-issued belts along with several lengths of coated electrical wire.

The following day, the pace moving inexorably faster as the appointed hour of the escape neared, Carl began making copies of the metal nameplates that were pinned at the left breast of the uniform shirts. Using nothing more complicated than cardboard, pieces of aluminum from a soda can, cellophane, and a black writing pen, Carl constructed identical nameplates, inscribing them with the names, among others, of his own boyhood heroes, Jesse and Frank James, and Cole Younger.

Exhilarated by his own daring, Carl took a brief respite from work to celebrate his cunning. He ordered Maddox to supply him with thirty dollars' worth of marijuana, then spent the rest of the day, as he wrote, “just getting high.”

On July 25, a pair of headphones arrived for George Dungee. A package of dark blue dye and a tube of Super Glue were concealed inside. They were to be used for fashioning and securing the last of the uniform insignia and nameplates.

Over the next three days the last of the preparations were completed, down to the minutest detail of sewing stripes on the uniform pants.

On the afternoon of July 27, the day before the planned escape, Minnie Hunter arrived to tell McCorquodale that everything was ready, with one exception. According to Issacs, it appeared that Postell had wavered at the last moment, never sending her any of the supplies he'd promised Isaacs. There were no pills or guns, not even the cassette player with which he was supposed to record this magnificent criminal exploit. To Carl, it appeared that at the last moment, Postell had grown faint of heart.

But if Postell seemed to be withdrawing from the scheme, there was plenty of good news to lift Carl's spirits, and McCorquodale was the bearer of it. The final critical element was now in place, McCorquodale said; the getaway car had arrived. Another of McCorquodale's relatives had left it in the parking lot, complete with six changes of clothes in the truck and a full tank of gas. Minnie and Patti Hunter would be at the prison the next morning, McCorquodale added, and they would cause two diversions, one at 4:45
A.M.
and another five minutes later. McCorquodale further informed Isaacs that he had instructed his mother to call Postell and tell him to meet the escapees in Baxley, Georgia, at 5:15
A.M.,
and to have the necessary supplies with him at that time.

A few minutes later, all six of the men who planned to make a daring escape from Death Row in only a few hours watched from a single window on the fourth floor as Minnie and Patti Hunter made their way to the employee parking lot. For the moment all looked well. Then, suddenly, the men realized that the right front tire of the Plymouth, their getaway car, was flat.

For an instant, a cold panic swept through the men who'd gathered in triumph and camaraderie by the window. Then, just as suddenly, their terror was relieved. Clearly, the women in the parking lot had also noticed the flat tire. They were not leaving in their other car. While Patti Hunter remained by the Plymouth, Minnie strolled across the street to a barracks station of the Georgia State Patrol and disappeared inside. Seconds later she reemerged, walked back across the street and waited with Patti until, twenty minutes later, a brown and beige truck arrived. The man inside got out, changed the tire on the Plymouth, then drove out of the parking lot toward downtown Reidsville, the two women following along behind him in the Cutlass they had brought to whisk them away.

A few hours later, just after the 3:00
A.M.
count, the last bar in the window above the cell block fire escape was cut through. It was the final, slender barrier between the men and their escape, and with it now eliminated, Isaacs ordered the five others to begin drinking coffee so that they would be wide awake early the next morning when the escape would be carried out. “If someone fell asleep,” he wrote, “I made it plain that they would be left behind.”

Thirty minutes later, as he lay in his cell excitedly awaiting the moment only two hours away when the escape would be carried out, Carl heard footsteps along the catwalk. Seconds later, a guard stopped in front of his cell. “Pack up your stuff,” he said. “You're being transferred this morning.”

“I sat on my bed, too stunned to reply,” Carl wrote at the end of the narrative he later turned over to Agent Ingram, “my mind racing a thousand miles a second.”

In the end, Isaacs opted not to rush the escape, but to take the transfer obediently and let the others go without him. Quietly, he packed his things and headed down the cell block toward the waiting guard. On the way out, he shook each of his partner's hands. “Go, brother,” he told them, “make it good.”

Several months later, with Troy Gregg dead and the others behind the gleaming white walls of the Great White Elephant in Reidsville, Ingram was leaving Isaacs to return for follow-up interviews with the other escapees. “Got any message for them?” he asked Isaacs as he rose to leave.

Carl nodded. “Yeah,” he said with a cold smirk. “Tell 'em I'd like to kick their asses for being out that long and not getting a piece and wasting somebody.”

It was a grim and unrepentant message, as cruel, it seemed to Ingram, as it was hopelessly beyond the most determined reaches of rehabilitation. “I thought right then that Carl Isaacs would never rest easy in prison,” Ingram remembered, “that this was not the last time he'd try to escape, that as long as there was breath in him, he'd be scheming to be free.”

He was right.

Chapter Twenty-six

I
n the weeks following the Death Row escape, Georgia authorities brought a number of indictments against those individuals Carl had named in the statement he prepared for Agent Ingram. By late August, eleven had been charged, including Minnie Hunter, Timothy McCorquodale's aunt, who had been arrested for aiding in the escape.

By the end of that month, however, that charge had been reduced to the lesser charge of “criminal attempt” to aid an escape, a felony for which she could be sentenced to no more than two and a half years.

Far more striking was the indictment of Charles and Judi Postell for the same crime.

Arrested by GBI agents at their home in Sparks, Georgia, on Wednesday, August 27, Postell and his wife were taken to the Coffee County Jail in Douglas, then released on a five-thousand-dollar bond later that evening.

According to the indictment, the Postells had visited Carl Isaacs on June 18, at which time he had requested fifteen hacksaw blades to aid in his planned escape. In response, the Postells had journeyed to Baxley, Georgia, where Mrs. Postell had purchased ten such blades, all of which she then turned over to Minnie Hunter, who'd mailed them in four separate packages to Isaacs, McCorquodale, Johnson, and Gregg.

Postell admitted that he had received two phone calls from the escapees only a few hours after the escape, but added that he had twice called authorities in Reidsville to report the escape.

As for his arrest, Mr. Postell told reporters that the charges were utterly unsubstantiated, and that they had been made by the GBI in retaliation against articles he had written linking some of the bureau's officials with drug trafficking.

Two weeks later, on November 13, all charges against the Postells were dropped, a decision which District Attorney Dupont Cheney made after it was discovered that Carl Isaacs, who had agreed to testify against the Postells, had made an extortion demand of fifteen thousand dollars in exchange for altering his testimony. “Isaacs' testimony was crucial to the prosecution of the Postells,” Cheney told reporters. Now that it was tainted, he added, the case against them could not proceed.

In the meantime, the appeals process for all three of the Alday defendants continued at its own excruciating pace, producing a maddening array of legal maneuvers and countermaneuvers.

On October 31, 1980, approximately two months after the escape from Death Row, the Georgia State Supreme Court refused to review the June 13, 1980, ruling of the Superior Court of Tattnall County denying habeas corpus relief to Wayne Coleman.

A month later, on November 25, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia transferred Isaacs' and Dungee's petitions to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia in Columbus.

The following year, on April 27, 1981, the United States Supreme Court denied Coleman's certiorari petition. The petition had asked the court to review an earlier Georgia Supreme Court ruling, which had upheld an even earlier denial of state habeas corpus relief by the Superior Court in Tattnall County.

On July 8, Coleman filed a habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, prominently raising the change of venue issue once again.

On October 22, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia denied Isaacs' and Dungee's habeas corpus petitions on the merits.

The following month, on November 20, their petition for a rehearing of this petition was denied.

Four months later, on March 11, 1982, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia also denied Wayne Coleman's habeas corpus petitions on the merits.

On June 21, the United States Court of Appeals temporarily remanded Isaacs', Dungee's, and Coleman's appeals back to the Middle District of Georgia so that additional evidence on the prejudicial pretrial publicity could be gathered.

Part of that evidence consisted of the radio broadcasts which had been transmitted across Seminole County and those adjoining areas from which the Alday juries had been selected. The relevant broadcasts had begun on May 15, the day after the murders, and had continued up to the time of the trials in January 1974, a period of seven months.

It was discovered that tapes of these broadcasts did in fact exist, but that they had never been edited. In order to review them for evidence of community prejudice against the Alday defendants, defense attorneys and their assistants were compelled to listen to the full taped transcripts.

In the end, this was a process that would take almost two and a half years.

During that time, and particularly in 1983, media attention in the form of books and movies reached a crescendo in the Alday murder case.

It amounted to a blitz that left Ernestine and her daughters reeling with bitterness and dismay.

In 1983, Clark Howard's
Brothers in Blood
was published by St. Martin's Press in New York.

Howard had come to Donalsonville the year before and interviewed several members of the Alday family. As Nancy would later say, he had told members of the family that his work on the case would result in “a book your children and grandchildren can be proud of.”