Blood Echoes (3 page)

In 1970, he was arrested for breaking and entering and for car theft. Legally an adult, he was now ready for an adult institution, and after yet another arrest for car theft and breaking and entering in Maryland, he was sentenced to the Maryland State Penitentiary, arriving there on March 27, 1973.

Two days later, a riot broke out, and Carl, small, young, and to some eyes nubile, was raped by fellow inmates from 6:00
P.M.
to 2:30
A.M.,
eight and one-half excruciating hours, while the riot swirled around him, engulfing the prison in a smoking whirlwind of rage and violence.

When it was over, Carl was removed from the penitentiary and on April 2 given yet another psychological evaluation. For the nervousness, depression, and insomnia it revealed, the doctor prescribed three hundred milligrams of Noludar, one tablet a night for ten days.

Two days later Carl was transferred to the Maryland Correction Camp, a far less grim institution than the Maryland State Penitentiary. On April 25, he was again transferred, this time to the minimum-security institution at Poplar Hill, outside Baltimore, a place at which he did not intend to remain for very long.

Chapter Four

T
he nineteen-year-old boy who arrived at Poplar Hill Correctional Institute on April 25, 1973, had lived most of his life under some form of official, rather than family, supervision. He was a dark flower grown in the hothouse of institutionalized care. But to the resentment and suspiciousness common in institutionalized personalities, Carl had added a critical element of his own, a dangerously romantic notion of the outlaw archetype.

During his years of petty crime, Carl had developed a vision of the criminal ideal which, by the time he was nineteen, had entirely captured him. His heroes had become the Wild West bad guys of comic book renown: Jesse James, Cole Younger, Billy the Kid, and other such repositories of outlaw legend. Short, and often ineffectual, fighting the fears of inadequacy that tormented him, Carl had created a similarly exalted outlaw persona for himself, then grafted it onto the drifting cloud of his personality. In a sense, the outlaw persona served as the only identity he had, and he used it like a mask to confront the world, a way either to frighten others or to gain their admiration.

But in Carl's case, admiration could be gained only from people who were susceptible to his own bloated vision of himself. His own half-brother, Wayne Carl Coleman, was just such a person.

Some months before, Wayne had been transferred to Poplar Hill, and once Carl had established contact with him, he began to enlist him in his escape plans, a systematic manipulation that Wayne had few resources to resist.

Twenty-six years old, the eldest son of Betty Isaacs and Carl Coleman, Wayne had been in and out of institutions for most of his life, usually for such relatively innocuous crimes as car theft and burglary, the same type to which Carl had become addicted.

Compared to Carl, he was timid, sluggish, and without direction. Consequently, he looked to others for leadership, since he was more or less unable to formulate even the most rudimentary schemes of his own. At five feet five inches, he was only slightly shorter than Carl, but he was considerably less intelligent, and frequently appeared disoriented, his mind prone to wander from one point to another, unable to focus for very long on anything but his most primitive needs. Shy and awkward, he had lived his life in a shadowy crouch, a figure on the periphery, waiting for someone to lead him to the promised land.

Within Wayne's limited scope, Carl was just that sort of person, and he could think of no one he'd rather follow through the vicissitudes of life than the wild and cunning half-brother who'd drifted back into his life. In Wayne's eyes, Carl was bold and resourceful, a fast talker with the perfect combination of guts and brains. Better yet, Carl didn't shamble through life as Wayne did. He took things by the horns, his head full of plans.

This was precisely the grandiose view of himself that Carl so actively promoted, and so, with very little effort, he quickly drew Wayne under his own fledgling wings.

While his older brother listened as attentively as he was able, Carl explained that he'd come up with a few ideas for the immediate future. Poplar Hill was for losers. It was also a minimum-security institution that only a jerk would hang around in. And Carl Junior Isaacs was no jerk. He was going to break out of Poplar Hill, he said, and he wanted Wayne to come with him.

Wayne easily fell in with the scheme, although he added a critical precondition. He would not go with Carl, he said, unless he could bring a fellow inmate along with him.

The inmate was George Elder Dungee. Thirty-six years old, innocuous and dim-witted, with thick black-rimmed glasses and a mind given to hilarious non sequiturs, Dungee had been incarcerated at Poplar Hill on a contempt of court citation for not paying child support, and while there, he had developed a homosexual relationship with Wayne. Gullible and trusting, Dungee had little ability to filter the varied data that came into his mind. Despite the fact that he was soon to be released from Poplar Hill, he was willing to go along with the escape for no reason other than that Wayne wanted him to.

Beyond its sexual component, the nature of Wayne's relationship with George Dungee would remain obscure, though it seems to have been composed of an odd combination of ignorance and amusement. Although of low-average intelligence, Wayne was clearly superior to Dungee, and their interactions often suggested a low-watt version of George and Lenny in Steinbeck's
Of Mice and Men.
Unable to conceive of Dungee's witlessness as the simple and regrettable product of an innately inferior intelligence, Wayne found his friend's bumbling manner, limited vocabulary, and disordered conversation funny and ingratiating. For Wayne, George was not only a source of occasional sexual release but a comic entertainment, a squat, bug-eyed clown whom he often treated like a small child, and for whom he seems to have felt less a deeply human than an oddly canine affection.

All of these vagaries were acceptable to Carl. He had not, after all, lived his life in a community of rational spirits. But there was one thing about Wayne's new companion he found intolerable. George Dungee was black, a circumstance Carl found highly distressing, since only a few days before, he'd spent eight and a half hours being raped by black prisoners during the riot at the Maryland State Penitentiary. That, as he would say later, had “turned him racist,” and he was in no mood to have a black face staring, perhaps a bit lustfully, at his behind.

At first Carl had refused to include George in his plans for escape, firmly insisting that it be an affair of brothers, like the James boys and the Youngers, the first exploit of the Isaacs-Coleman Gang. But Wayne remained adamant, his own needs for once triumphing over his general lack of will in the face of such a commanding presence as his daring younger brother. He would not go without George, he told Carl bluntly; it would be the three of them, or it would be Carl alone.

In the end, the prospect of a solitary escape did not appeal to Carl, and so, after some thought, he grudgingly accepted Dungee, though he continued to hold him in the utmost contempt.

The escape was carried out at three o'clock on the morning of May 5. It had not been a very complicated matter, the three of them merely crawling out an open bathroom window, then disappearing into the sparsely populated area surrounding Poplar Hill.

For the next few hours, they skulked among the trees and shrubs, virtually in sight of the prison lights, and reveled in their freedom while the custodians of Poplar Hill maintained their loose vigilance through the night, unaware that an escape had taken place at all.

After a period of somewhat compulsive and erratic movement, however, the three escapees finally settled on a destination, drifted down into the neighboring community, and from there made their way toward Baltimore.

Not far from the Bay Bridge, they spotted a blue Ford Thunderbird in a motel parking lot, stole it with the same ease with which they'd walked out of Poplar Hill only a few hours before, and headed, as if following the mesmerizing drone of a homing device, into their native city of Baltimore.

By then the morning shape-up had been called at Poplar Hill, and the authorities had at last become aware of the escape. A review of the escapees' yellow-sheets, however, could hardly have been expected to cause them any serious alarm. Though embarrassed by the escape, there was nothing in the criminal histories of the three men that could have alerted Maryland authorities to the grave public danger now at large in nearby Baltimore. If anything, they appeared relatively mild-mannered, their prison breakout as uncharacteristic of their general behavior as a sudden act of violence would later prove to be. With few or no violent offenses in their backgrounds, their escape emerged as the most surprising thing any of them had ever done, an impulsive act which could be dismissed as little more than one of those sudden bursts of the unfathomable which periodically rocked the otherwise routine workings of the Maryland Department of Corrections.

The first taste of freedom was exhilarating, and for a time Carl, Wayne, and even George, in his own hazy fashion, rode it like a high, white wave. For nearly two days following the escape, they aimlessly bummed around Baltimore, roaming its dilapidated neighborhoods until Carl decided that the city was probably getting a bit hot for them to remain any longer.

Even so, they did not leave the city in a rush of sudden flight. Despite the steadily increasing official heat, the call of blood was just too strong. Thus, instead of leaving Baltimore immediately, Carl and Wayne, with Dungee mindlessly in tow, headed out into Baltimore County. Carl had decided that he wanted to drop in on Billy, his younger brother.

They found him in the Towson area of Baltimore County, where he'd been living with a female friend.

In Billy, Carl had once again located a near perfect boost for his continually flagging ego. Even more than Wayne, Billy idolized Carl as a creature of heroic dimensions, one who occupied the revered role not only of older, but of outlaw, brother. He saw him as bold and resourceful, a pint-sized Jesse James, a criminal so agile and elusive that he could slip through the tightest net, outsmart the wiliest lawmen. Carl, like no one else, injected excitement into the air around him, a seductive, tingling aura. It was a feeling Billy, a bit of a self-styled outlaw himself, openly relished and did not want to live without. Besides, when compared to the flat plain upon which he now lived, its dreary landscape of rusty cars and dilapidated houses, its suffocating sense of hopelessness and entrapment, Carl's vision of life on the run presented itself as the ultimate escape hatch, a point of light beneath the concrete wall.

Chapter Five

A
t around three o'clock on the afternoon of May 6, sixteen-year-old Lori Levine and twelve-year-old Jennifer Lyons were lounging on a rundown street outside Baltimore when a car suddenly pulled up to them and stopped.

Inside, Jennifer glimpsed her boyfriend, Billy Isaacs.

Billy nodded to the dark-haired boy behind the wheel. “This is my brother, Carl,” he said proudly. “He's just broke out of prison.”

Jennifer's eyes drifted over to Carl, then on to the two other men, one lanky and unkempt, the other a black man with thick glasses. “Hi,” she said.

Carl took the spotlight at once, his eyes fixed on Lori while he told the two girls about the escape, a real blood-curdling tale, with himself as the criminal mastermind of the whole brilliant scheme.

The girls were very impressed, and their attention spurred Carl on. “We're going south,” he said boldly. “Maybe to Mexico.” It was going to be a life of high adventure, and Carl took pains to paint a glowing picture of it, days of leisure, plenty of drugs. When he was sure his description of life on the road had captivated them, he popped the question. “You girls want to come along?”

Trapped as they were in the bleak tenements of suburban Baltimore, Jennifer and Lori were easy marks for Carl's tall tales. Mexico, with its wide haciendas and glittering tropical lagoons, sounded like Paradise.

“Yeah, okay,” Lori said, then with Jennifer directly behind her, she slid into the car and headed toward the blue unknown.

*     *     *

But if Mexico lay in Jennifer and Lori's future, it was certainly not in the immediate one. For instead of making a wild dive south, the warm wind in their hair, Carl hesitated, as if unsure of his next move. Typically, The Big Plan shriveled into an aimless wandering of the same old streets and towns Jennifer and Lori had already had enough of. Carl remained behind the wheel, sometimes blowing off about all he'd done, sometimes simply driving on silently, sullenly, his eyes locked on the road.

Thus, for the first few hours after getting into the green Chevrolet, Jennifer and Lori experienced nothing even remotely similar to the southern escape from the confines of Baltimore that Carl had so cavalierly promised. Instead, they drifted through an assortment of small towns in the Baltimore area, sleeplessly cruising through Hillendale, up and down Taylor Avenue, while Carl jabbered about his innumerable triumphs over the various authority figures who'd tried to tame his wild spirit.

For Carl, the girls were a captive audience for his breast-beating fables of criminal exploit, and he railed at them ceaselessly while the sweltering interior of the car grew increasingly disgusting with the smell of smoke, cheap beer, and unwashed bodies. Hour after hour, the cruising dragged on, until night finally fell, and Carl parked along the unromantic stretches of Notch Cliff Road.

This first, uninspired day on the road was followed by a second of pure tedium. After a cramped night, Carl was in no mood to entertain the girls with more tales. Besides, he was running out of stories, his limited imagination depleted by many hours of spinning lies and fantasies.