Blood Echoes (19 page)

For Ernestine and her daughters, the months during which the defense and prosecution teams prepared their case in the upcoming trial of Carl Isaacs were uniquely dark and painful. The first family Thanksgiving since the murders took place at the enormous dining room table, with Ernestine serving turkey with all the trimmings to her monstrously diminished family. Nancy and Patricia were there, of course, along with Elizabeth and Faye, but the old boisterousness was gone. “It was so quiet,” Patricia remembered, “and we were never a quiet family.”

Only a few days later, a further diminishment occurred. By then, Ernestine had come to face one of the harshest and most inevitable consequences of the grave loss that had been inflicted upon them on the afternoon of May 14. Without the men, the family simply could not continue its most basic economic activity.

“As far as farming went, it was just impossible to carry on with it,” Nancy recalled. “And we just couldn't sit there and let everything go to rust. We had to get what we could out of it.”

Consequently, on the morning of December 14, approximately two weeks before Carl Isaacs' trial was to begin, an auction of the Alday farm's equipment and supplies was held on the grounds of the family homestead on River Road. By then the farm had been bereft for months of themen required to carry out its strenuous labors. As a result, Ernestine had finally acceded to the wishes of the Campbell family, who were Mary Alday's heirs, and Shuggie's wife, Barbara, to auction off the estate's heavy equipment and supplies, all of which had remained idle for the preceding six months.

“I got up and baked a bunch of cookies for the people who came to the house that morning,” Patricia remembered. “It was cold, and we served them cookies and coffee while they looked over all the stuff that was for sale.”

Then the auction began, and, wrapped in a long coat against the winter chill, Ernestine stood silently and watched as the auctioneer moved from jeep to rotary tiller to peanut planter. With each passing hour, the family saw their farm shrink as one piece of machinery after another was offered for sale, bought and then driven away from the home.

“We didn't go much,” Ernestine told Charles Postell, the
Albany Herald
reporter who covered the auction and about whom the Alday family would hear a great deal more in the coming years. “We didn't take much time off for the pleasurable things … just stayed home and worked and went to church.”

At the end of the day, the auction had netted the family nearly thirty-three thousand dollars, a sum of money that was then added to an overall family estate whose legal complications were only beginning to be guessed, and whose painful outcome neither Ernestine nor her daughters could possible imagine.

Christmas followed the auction by only eleven days, and once again the family gathered at the homestead. Ernestine and Faye had put up a tree, and brightly wrapped gifts were spread out all around it. In Christmases past, Ned had always been the last to open his presents, but on this Christmas it was Ernestine. “It didn't feel right,” she would say many years later.

For the daughters, Ned's absence was particularly painful. “He loved chocolate-covered cherries,” Nancy remembered. “And every Christmas, each of the kids would buy him a box. But that Christmas, no one bought any. No chocolate-covered cherries, that's what I remember most.”

Six days later, on the night of December 30, 1973, Ernestine was once again surrounded by her children in the house on River Road. The trial of Carl Isaacs had been set to begin the next day, and in the hours before it began, each of the sisters made her way to Ernestine's side. “I don't know why we came that night,” Patricia said years later, “but we all ended up there, every one of us. We knew that we were going to hear terrible things over the next few days, and I guess we sort of wanted to be together one more time before that started.”

Chapter Eighteen

W
hile the weeks passed slowly along bleak stretches of River Road, the green crops of summer drying to a crackling brown, Geer and Hill continued to work on their cases.

For Hill, the essential task would be to dispute as much as possible any attempt to put a specific gun in Carl Isaacs' hand at any specific moment. The forensic evidence, particularly fingerprints, indisputably placed Carl Isaacs in the Alday trailer, but none of it could be used to demonstrate that while there he had actually committed murder.

Thus, for Hill, the main thrust of the defense would be to impeach the testimony of Billy Isaacs, to impugn him as a self-serving family traitor who had sold out his brother in order to save his own skin.

It was Geer's task to make sure that didn't happen, but also to arrange and present the evidence necessary to re-create the murders as vividly as possible, then the physical evidence that linked Carl Isaacs to the crimes, and finally to call Billy to the stand to give eyewitness testimony that Carl Isaacs had willfully participated in the cold-blooded murder of all six of the Alday victims.

By December 30, 1973, both he and Hill were prepared to present their cases.

Although indisputably the town's most impressive building, the Seminole County Courthouse in Donalsonville, Georgia, nonetheless suggested the pinched economic life that surrounded it. A two-story red-brick building with a short span of unpainted concrete steps, it rested at the head of what amounted to the town's central thoroughfare, Second Street, a wide, slightly curving avenue of feed stores, auto parts outlets, and a scattering of those other perennial establishments of rural America, farm finance-and-loan companies.

Set on a rectangular lot adorned only by a few short palm trees and a smattering of squat war memorials and trophy cases, the courthouse had long been the judicial and administrative center of Seminole County. As such, it housed not only the court and adjoining jury rooms but an assortment of county offices, including the sheriff's office with its tiny jail and the offices of the county clerk and tax assessors.

In a building of small, cluttered offices where every inch seemed to be used to its full potential, the courtroom stood as the most spacious and imposing, though it, too, was anything but grand. Its bare, light-green walls enclosed a spartan gathering of wooden furniture, and its large windows rattled loudly in the wintry winds that blew in from the fields. In summer it was ventilated by two overhead fans that gave the entire room a sense of being antiquated, a place where old men had once lounged in open shirts and suspenders and discussed their exploits at Antietam or Bull Run.

In its overall affect, then, Judge Walter Geer's courtroom was stereotypically small-town southern. Or so it must certainly have seemed to the four men from Baltimore who were now destined to be tried within its walls.

The first of them, according to the docket set by Judge Geer on October 9, was to be Carl Junior Isaacs, the man who by then most investigators believed to have been, despite his youth, the malignant moving spirit behind the horrors that had occurred on River Road.

The preliminary proceedings in the trial of Carl Isaacs for the murder of six members of the Alday family began at 9:30
A.M.
on December 31, 1973. Almost immediately, during the extraordinarily brief voir dire questioning of prospective jurors, it became obvious that many of the jurors were extremely familiar with the details of the case. They had read newspaper accounts published not only in the
Donalsonville News
, but in numerous other dailies from Dothan, Alabama, to Atlanta. In addition, many of the prospective jurors had also known at least one of the victims, and had even attended the Alday funeral at the Spring Creek Baptist Church five months earlier.

Nevertheless, within a single day, the voir dire had been completed, and a jury for Carl Isaacs' trial had been assembled entirely from among residents of Seminole County or its vicinity.

Thus at 9:00
A.M.
on New Year's Day, January 1, 1974, Geer began the courtroom phase of his prosecution, calling with lightning speed witness after witness in a parade of testimony that whisked the jury from the initial discovery of the murder victims through the various stages of the investigation into their deaths, and finally ending with the dramatic capture of the Maryland escapees in the hills of West Virginia.

He began with Bud Alday, who swiftly recounted a series of events by then familiar not only to the community but to the United States and even several European countries in which stories of the murders had appeared.

Farrington's brief cross-examination disputed none of the facts of Bud's testimony, and succeeded only in having him state the obvious fact that although he'd seen the dead bodies in the trailer, he had not seen Carl Isaacs in the vicinity of the trailer at any time.

Next, Geer called Sheriff White, who took the jury back to the trailer and retraced his journey through it, along with the subsequent arrival of other law enforcement officials, culminating in the discovery of Mary Alday's body some six miles from the trailer.

Jerry Godby took the stand after White, providing the first eyewitness testimony that could place Isaacs in the vicinity of the trailer at the time of the murders. Under Geer's direct examination, Godby stated that he'd been working in front of Jewell Easom's house when he'd seen a green Chevrolet Super Sport pass by. He'd been high in the air, at the time, working on a “spray outfit” that was hooked to the back of a tractor when the car had passed at a distance of between twenty-five and thirty-five feet. The tractor had not been moving, he said, and he'd been sitting on the lid of the tank, from which vantage point he'd seen the car pass at a speed he estimated at approximately forty to forty-five miles per hour.

He'd also seen the driver of the car, he told the jury. It was a young white man in a dark shirt with long, shoulder-length hair, and he'd nodded to him as he passed. Another man had sat in the passenger seat, while other men had followed behind in a second car, a blue and white Chevrolet Impala.

In a final, crucial detail, Godby said that the driver of the Super Sport had waved to him as he passed so that his attention had been drawn to the driver sufficiently for him to take a careful look at his face. Then he positively identified Carl Isaacs as the man behind the wheel.

In his cross-examination, Hill labored to establish that Godby had been wearing a cap at the time, and that it might have obscured his vision, a speculation Geer laughed at in his immediate redirect.

“Can you see pretty good when you're hunting with that cap on?” Geer asked.

Godby smiled. “Better than I can shoot,” he said, then leaned back and waited as laughter rippled through the crowd of spectators in the room.

In the afternoon session, the pace continued with the same breathless rapidity Geer had established during the morning session. “There was practically no cross-examination,” Geer recalled, “because there really wasn't anything to cross-examine about, since the evidence itself was so absolutely overwhelming.”

Overwhelming or not, it still had to be presented, and during the afternoon session, Geer began to establish it conclusively.

Max Trawick described the discovery of Mary Alday's body, while later, Joyce Hinds, one of Mary's coworkers at the Department of Family and Children Services, identified the Timex watch with the Roman numerals on its face that she'd seen Mary wearing when she'd left work on the afternoon of her death. Barbara Alday, Shuggie's wife, followed Hinds to the stand and also identified Mary's watch, along with her husband's wallet, one of the many items that had been recovered in the woods of the Boyd Cutoff in Livingston, Alabama.

Later in the afternoon, Ronnie Angel returned to Donalsonville to testify about his part in the investigation, particularly as to the various weapons he had either recovered himself or received from other investigators. The inventory was impressive: a Smith and Wesson .32-caliber revolver, a High Standard .22-caliber revolver, a .380-caliber automatic pistol, a Stevens model 8722-caliber semiautomatic rifle, a Remington mode 572 slide-action 22-caliber rifle, and a Marlin .22-caliber automatic rifle.

He had brought most of these weapons back to Georgia after finding them in West Virginia, Angel told Geer in the final moments of his testimony.

“Did you bring any people back to Georgia with you?” Geer asked.

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“Who did you bring back?”

“I brought back Billy Carroll Isaacs,” Angel said, his eyes drifting over to where Nancy and Patricia Alday sat watching him from across the courtroom. “I brought back George Elder Dungee.” He could see their eyes trained on him silently and respectfully. “I brought back Wayne Carl Colemen.” More than respect, a terrible and wondrous gratitude. “I brought back Carl Junior Isaacs.”

“Do you see Carl Isaacs in the courtroom?”

Angel returned his attention to Geer. “Yes, sir, I do.”

“Would you point him out for the record?”

Angel directed his gaze to Isaacs. “He's the man sitting there with the long brown hair and dark blue shirt,” he said, then watched as Isaacs returned a cold, hard stare.

With his eighth witness, Geer began to introduce the first of the forensic evidence he would put forward for the prosecution, though in this first instance, dwelling on it very briefly.

Under his direct examination, Dr. Larry Howard discussed the autopsies, going into the necessary technical detail as to the positions of the wounds as well as the calibers of the various weapons used to inflict them. Collectively, Howard said, the Aldays had been shot a total of fourteen times with no fewer than four different weapons. Of the six, Ned had been fired upon the most, six times with three different weapons, in a barrage that had nearly pulverized the contents of his skull.

Sitting in the courtroom, it was hard for Patricia to understand why her father had been subjected to such a horrendous hail of gunfire. “Then the next day Billy Isaacs testified about how Daddy died,” she would say years later, “and I thought, ‘Yes, that was my daddy, that was what they'd had to have done to him.'”