Blood Echoes (14 page)

Nearly ten hours after their capture in the West Virginia hills, the men from Baltimore were finally taken aboard a twenty-seat aircraft for the flight back to Atlanta, and Angel could begin to think of how to deal with them once they were exclusively in his custody.

Sitting only a few feet away, the Isaacs brothers, Coleman, and Dungee all seemed utterly exhausted. As Angel watched them, they appeared silent rather than sullen. Throughout the early-morning flight, they remained awake, but motionless, while just a few feet beyond them, near the front of the plane, the “Uniforms” snoozed sweetly in their seats, as if resting up for the supercharged media reception that was expected to greet them at their arrival in Atlanta.

But it was a grand reception that was not to be, as Angel already knew even as he and Waters sat together, talking quietly of the long day's work. For not long before takeoff, he'd called Director Beardsley and warned him of the security problems that might arise from such an extravaganza. Beardsley had agreed, and with his permission, Angel had secretly rerouted the plane to a remote airport, little more than a runway in a cornfield, where the entire contingent could deplane in total obscurity, the Big Noise now reduced to a whistling in the corn.

The plane arrived a few hours later on a dark field surrounded by a scattering of unadorned GBI field automobiles.

While Angel watched from a few feet away, each of the four prisoners was carried to a separate car and driven, with yet another escort car behind, to one of four separate jails within the state.

Within two hours of their departure, Angel, now once again behind his desk at GBI headquarters on Confederate Avenue, had been notified that all four prisoners had been safely transported to their respective places of incarceration, and that there had been no incidents on the way.

Then, after four relentless days, Ronnie Angel went to sleep.

*     *     *

He awakened early the next morning, headed back to his office, and waited impatiently for something that had by then seemed forever in coming, his first interrogation of one of the Alday suspects.

Wayne Carl Coleman, who'd spent the night in the county jail in Gainesville, Georgia, was the first to arrive.

With the swirl of officialdom now dissipated, Angel could carry out an interview in his own quiet style. After conducting Coleman into a small room adjacent to his own office, he and Waters watched silently as Coleman made himself comfortable behind the room's single wooden conference table.

Prior to this time, Angel had assumed Coleman to be the group's indisputable leader. At twenty-six, he was seven years older than Carl, and eleven years older than Billy. In addition, he was a more seasoned convict, his yellow sheet considerably longer than any of the others. Coleman had therefore taken the central position in Angel's mind as the gang's brutal chief.

But on the morning of May 19, as he began to interview Coleman for the first time, Angel experienced his initial doubts about Coleman's capacity for the kind of forceful, even vehement, leadership that would have been required to carry out the desperate acts that had taken place in Maryland, Georgia, and West Virginia.

Rambling in his speech and, after a brief period of reticence, curiously nonchalant in his attitude, Coleman appeared almost as a clownish, bumbling figure. As he narrated the events following the Poplar Hill escape, he exhibited none of the terror which had been the hallmark of Dungee's presentation. Nor did he seem particularly concerned that he'd been caught, an attitude distinctly different from that of both Carl and Billy Isaacs as Angel had observed them on the plane ride back to Georgia.

“He acted like the whole thing, the escape, the murders, everything was just a lark,” Angel remembered. “The way he described it, it was just the boys out for a little wild time that sort of got out of hand.”

Leaning casually back in his seat, one leg slung over a chair arm, a slender grin forever sliding onto his face, Coleman told Angel that it had all started with a simple burglary. While traveling the back roads of Georgia, they'd come upon an isolated house trailer, knocked at its back door, and, when no one had answered, they'd stepped inside and begun rummaging about for any valuables they could find.

In a tone that suggested he was incapable of grasping the enormity of what had taken place in the trailer on River Road, Coleman presented Angel with a flat, narrowly anecdotal account of a burglary that had gotten out of hand, accident following accident, until, at the end of the chain, six of the Alday family lay dead.

The first accident, the one that presaged all the others, according to Coleman, was little more than an inopportune arrival.

While still ransacking the trailer, Coleman told Angel, he and the others had spotted a jeep with two men in it as it pulled into the driveway of the trailer. They'd waited until the men had come to the door, then brought them inside at gunpoint, robbed them, and finally forced them to sit on the floor.

It was after that, Coleman continued, that things had begun to get out of hand. Realizing that if Jerry and Ned Alday were allowed to live, he and the others would never be able to get out of Georgia, Coleman had finally decided to kill them. After that, it was only a question of how to do it. Finally, he'd marched one man into each of the bedrooms at the opposite ends of the trailer, forced each of them to lie down on their respective beds, and shot them to death.

These murders were followed by the unfortunate arrival of Jimmy Alday, and subsequent events quickly turned into a merry-go-round of murder. “Here comes another damn tractor,” he told Angel expansively, like someone narrating a television show he'd found curiously entertaining. “And pretty soon the house is filling up on us. There wasn't no way of getting out of there.”

After the third murder, with one body in each of the bedrooms and a third, that of Jimmy Alday, now lying facedown on the small sofa in the living room, Coleman told Angel that he'd become somewhat anxious to leave the trailer. But at that point, he said, the others had resisted his advice and had chosen to linger a while longer.

“Why is that?” Angel asked.

“Because of the woman,” Coleman replied. While Jerry Alday was still alive, he added, Carl had asked him if he were married. Alday had replied that he was, and that his wife would soon be home. He'd then pleaded with Carl not to hurt her, adding that if robbery were the motive, then the men need not wait for his wife, since she never carried more money than was necessary for her to go back and forth to her job in Donalsonville. However, the men had decided to wait anyway, Coleman added, even though he had protested the decision.

“I said, ‘Shit, I'm leaving,'” Coleman told Angel. But still the others had refused to join him.

“Why?” Angel asked.

Coleman shrugged. “Those pussy-hungry motherfuckers, they said, ‘No, stay around, wait for her,'” he told Angel. And in the end, that is what they'd done.

“So they waited for Mary Alday,” Angel asked. “That's why they hung around?”

“Yeah,” Coleman said.

But it was not Mary who'd next arrived at the trailer on River Road, Coleman went on, it was two men in a pickup truck who'd suddenly driven into the now crowded Alday driveway. In response, Coleman said that he and the others had remained inside the trailer and watched as the two men approached its rear door. They had allowed them to open it, and only then pulled their guns and forced them to come inside.

“What'd you do to them?” Angel asked.

“We robbed them,” Coleman answered.

“Then what?”

After the robbery, Coleman replied idly, he had walked each man into the opposite bedrooms, just as he had done with the first two, and had murdered them.

A short time later, Coleman went on, Mary Alday had arrived just as her husband had said she would, her arms wrapped around a bag of groceries. For a time she was held captive in the kitchen while the men continued to burglarize the trailer. Later, while still in the trailer, Carl Isaacs had raped her, Coleman added.

Although rape had not occurred to Coleman before he saw Carl's assault on Mary Alday, it had been enough to convince him to “get some too,” and after waiting for Carl to finish, he'd crawled on top of Mary and raped her on the kitchen floor while the others watched from various positions in the room.

Once the rapes were completed, Coleman said, Mary Alday was told to get dressed again. After getting dressed, she'd been taken to her car, where she was forced to crouch in the floorboard of the back seat while the men, now in two separate cars, Mary Alday's Impala and Richard Miller's Super Sport, drove her to a wooded area several miles from the trailer. There, according to Coleman, the Super Sport was abandoned, and Mary was raped again, first by Carl, then by George. After that, Coleman added, the men had “pushed her around a little bit, touched her ass and everything,” while discussing whether or not to have her run about in the woods for a time while they shot at her. In the end, Coleman said, they had finally grown tired of playing with Mary, and at that point “since I had done shot everyone else,” Coleman said to Angel, he had walked Mary a few yards further into the woods, ordered her to lie down on her stomach, and had shot her twice in the head.

And that in a nutshell, Coleman told Angel, was the way it had gone down. The story over, Coleman slouched back in his chair, took a long draw on his cigarette and smiled.

Standing only a few feet away, Angel felt his skin like a tightly drawn cord. “There are times when you really have to control yourself,” he recalled, “and watching that grin on Coleman's face, the way he bragged about all he'd done … well, that was one of those times.”

As a narrative of the murders, Angel had to admit to himself that Coleman's story had been plausible enough. At the same time, however, there were a few problems with it.

Coleman had told his tale in the tone of boastfulness, as if he were proud of his cruelty and brutality, and almost eager to make himself appear even more irredeemably evil than the events themselves suggested. Thus, as he watched Coleman saunter out of his office after finishing his story, Angel wondered if the narrative he'd just heard would be supported by the other Alday suspects, if Coleman would still emerge as the chief evil agent of all their deeds once the others had been led into the same room, slouched down in the same chair and told their separate versions, while he stood nearby, rigidly controlling himself again.

Although Angel might be wondering who the leader of the gang actually was, Frank Thomas was not. He'd already received some unsolicited information that left him with little doubt. Even before their capture, on the night of May 17, a phone call had come into the offices of the West Virginia State Police from a woman who claimed to be Betty Isaacs, the mother of three of the four Maryland escapees. Her tone was emphatic. “Carl is the one in charge,” she told Thomas. “And he's a killer. He's the only one who's like that, but Wayne and Billy will go along to impress him.”

“She was very impressive,” Thomas remembered years later. “She knew it was her sons we were looking for, and she didn't want any police officers to be hurt.”

And the one they should be wary of, she told Thomas, was Carl.

*     *     *

Within three days of the capture, Angel had plenty of confirmation for the assessment Betty Isaacs had given Frank Thomas over the phone that night, and which argued determinedly that Wayne Coleman was neither the evil chief he'd claimed to be in his initial statement, nor the agent of all six of the murders.

By that time he'd interviewed each of the four men who'd entered the trailer on that fateful afternoon. Although similar in many substantive details, the four accounts had all varied in other, equally significant aspects.

Whereas Coleman had confessed to killing all six of the Aldays, Dungee had admitted to shooting Mary Alday himself, although pointedly adding that he'd only done so because he'd feared his own murder at the hands of the others had he refused to do so.

In addition to this profound difference, there were other notable discrepancies between the two men's stories. Not only had Dungee claimed that he had killed Mary Alday, but he said that Carl had actually murdered some of the men in the trailer, and Coleman had murdered others. According to Dungee, only Billy Isaacs had murdered no one.

Added to the contradictions regarding the actual murders, Dungee and Coleman had also told widely differing accounts of the sequence of the murders. Coleman had insisted that Mary was the last to arrive, whereas Dungee claimed that the two men in the jeep, whom Angel now knew were Aubrey and Shuggie Alday, had been the last to arrive at the Alday trailer. Mary had arrived before them, Dungee said, although, in the end, she had been the last to die.

Finally, there was Coleman himself. Although Coleman had made every effort to make himself the malignant center of the group, the man in charge, he had delivered his narrative in a rambling, disorganized manner, in the process exhibiting a level of ignorance and incompetence that remained highly at variance with any capacity whatsoever to lead anyone, except possibly George Dungee. Several times Coleman had appeared utterly baffled by, and out of touch with, the group's frantic movements. His knowledge of derails involving such issues as the number and caliber of the guns used and the positioning of the bodies in the Alday trailer was at times equally hazy. Worst of all, Coleman gave the overall impression of a man totally at sea even in regard to the most rudimentary knowledge of American geography. Once, he'd actually stopped to ask Angel if Georgia were a part of Alabama, while on another occasion he had seemed to think Louisiana a county within Mississippi.

As for Billy Isaacs, his story had followed Dungee's general description much more closely than it had followed Coleman's. Still, in essence, it struck Angel as a self-serving version of events, one that worked utterly to exonerate Billy from having directly killed anyone, despite the fact that ballistics tests had already demonstrated that the murders had been committed using four, rather than three guns, and that one of them had belonged to Billy.