Thomas H. Cook's True Crime: Blood Echoes and Early Graves
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Blood Echoes: In May 1973, three men escaped from a Maryland prison—and went on to commit one of the most horrific murders in American history, slaughtering six members of the Alday family in Donalsonville, Georgia. Their depredations were followed by a trial that only continued the nightmare for those whose loved ones were murdered.
Based on court documents, police records, and interviews with the surviving family members, this is a chilling look at a kind of blind, inhuman evil rarely seen in our world.
“[A] scorching indictment of the legal and court systems.” —Publishers Weekly
Early Graves: Alvin and Judith Ann Neelley were perfect for each other; both shared twisted urges the other could appreciate. At first playing pranks and committing vandalism, their sick ambitions grew, until they targeted thirteen-year-old Lisa Ann Millican—whose brutalized corpse was found three days later. And she was only the first to die.
Drawing on police records and extensive interviews, Thomas H. Cook recounts the killing spree of Alvin and Judith, who at nineteen became the youngest woman ever sentenced to death row.
“Strong writing . . .enhances the book’s grisly appeal.” —Publishers Weekly
Thomas H. Cook
THOMAS H. COOK was born in Fort Payne, Alabama. He has been nominated for Edgar Awards seven times in five different categories. He received the Best Novel Edgar, the Barry for Best Novel, and has been nominated for numerous other awards.
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Thomas H. Cook's True Crime - Thomas H. Cook
Thomas H. Cook’s True Crime
Blood Echoes and Early Graves
Thomas H. Cook
CONTENTS
BLOOD ECHOES
FIRST BLOOD
Chapter One
Chapter Two
FREE AT LAST
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
SOMETHING WENT WRONG
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
PURSUIT
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
TRIAL AND TRIBULATION
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
WHAT ABOUT US?
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
WILL THIS NEVER END?
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
EARLY GRAVES
PART ONE: UNKNOWN VOICES
CHAPTER 1: City of Seven Hills
CHAPTER 2: Fire in the Night
CHAPTER 3: Boney and Claude
CHAPTER 4: Where Is Lisa Ann?
CHAPTER 5: Where I Left Her
CHAPTER 6: To Feel Like a Father
PART TWO: ROMAN CENTURION
CHAPTER 7: Roman Centurion
CHAPTER 8: Who Was Lisa Ann?
CHAPTER 9: 2 Good 2 Be 4 Gotten
CHAPTER 10: Unraveling Threads
CHAPTER 11: Are You Patricia?
CHAPTER 12: Bearing Witness
CHAPTER 13: Voices
CHAPTER 14: Full Court Press
CHAPTER 15: Twenty-five to One
CHAPTER 16: I’ll Take Him
PART THREE: THE DIVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN
CHAPTER 17: Judy
CHAPTER 18: Why?
CHAPTER 19: I Thought He Would Throw Up
CHAPTER 20: Advisaries
CHAPTER 21: Life and Letters
CHAPTER 22: The Little Chicago of the South
CHAPTER 23: The Ones Who Got Away
CHAPTER 24: She Did
PART FOUR: JUDGMENT
CHAPTER 25: The Main Part of a Woman
CHAPTER 26: He Was Always Smiling
CHAPTER 27: Al Did
CHAPTER 28: How Would You Draw Hers?
CHAPTER 29: Evil, Evil
CHAPTER 30: She’s Mine
CHAPTER 31: If It Had Been True
About the Author
Blood Echoes
The Infamous Alday Mass Murder and Its Aftermath
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, the author wishes to express his abiding gratitude to Ernestine, Patricia, and Nancy Alday for their invaluable assistance in the writing of this book. The reliving of these events was understandably difficult and painful, but they never relented in their determination to see the task through to its conclusion.
In addition to surviving members of the Alday family, many others gave unstintingly of themselves, devoting many hours to the completion of this book.
Ronnie Angel, formerly of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, worked tirelessly in helping me reconstruct the investigation that followed the murders on River Road. Others involved in the apprehension and early questioning of the suspects were equally forthcoming in detailing events from their particular perspectives, notably, Larry Good, L. D. Townley, F. E. Thomas, and Wade Watson. In addition, Robert Ingram, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, was vital in providing information regarding the prison breaks in which Carl Isaacs was involved.
Peter Zack Geer, Charles Ferguson, and Daniel L. Ricketson helped detail the prosecution of the Alday defendants.
Bo McLeod and the staff of the Donalsonville News were most generous in providing space, as well as access to their extensive file on the murders and the trials, with particular reference to their impact upon the community.
Numerous local officials in Donalsonville gave unsparingly of their time and services, notably John Godby and Hurbey Johnson of the Seminole County Sheriff’s Department, and Sylvia James, County Clerk of Seminole County.
At the Georgia Bureau of Corrections, John Siler and Fred Steeples arranged for inmate interviews.
Susan Boylen of the Georgia Attorney General’s Office provided critical documents which pertained to the later appeals process and was always available to be of assistance in leading me through its thorny byways.
Tom West proved a devoted advocate of his client, Wayne Carl Coleman, and his willingness to assist a writer whom he knew to have a different perspective from his own will serve as a testament to his own self-confidence and certainty of purpose.
Starr Holland and others on the staff of the Albany Herald were painstaking in their efforts to provide me with articles and photographs pertaining to the long history of the case.
And finally, in New York, my editor, Michaela Hamilton, leveled a keen eye on the manuscript, providing not one suggestion that did not substantively strengthen and improve it.
To all these various individuals I offer my sincere appreciation.
Author’s Note
This is a work of nonfiction. Although much of the dialogue in it is taken directly from court and police transcripts, there are numerous instances in which it has been reconstructed on the basis of the author’s interviews with relevant individuals.
The real names of the people involved in this story have been used, except for Charlie Bowman, Steven Dennis, Tom Fitzgerald, Willie Flynn, Sarah Foster, Sam Hall, Theodore Hall, Bill Maddox, Eddie Phipps, Sylvester Pitts, and Judy Powell, whose names have been changed in the interest of privacy. Any similarity between the fictitious names used and those of living persons is, of course, entirely coincidental.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care;
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
Thomas Gray
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Contents
FIRST BLOOD
Chapter One
Chapter Two
FREE AT LAST
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
SOMETHING WENT WRONG
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
PURSUIT
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
TRIAL AND TRIBULATION
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
WHAT ABOUT US?
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
WILL THIS NEVER END?
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter One
River Road
Seminole County, Georgia
By five-thirty in the afternoon, the smell of scorched gunpowder was thick in every room. No one knew exactly how many shots had been fired, only that the old man had required more than anyone else, rising determinedly from the bed, one side of his forehead already blown open, but rising anyway, as the bullets rained down upon him until he slumped back finally, still breathing, but only for a few seconds more.
Another body lay beside his, thick and husky, the arms made strong by the rigorous farm labor he’d done all his life.
In the next room, a third body sprawled facedown across the small sofa, the legs hung over the side so that the feet touched the floor. In the opposite bedroom, two more men lay on a tiny bed, the blue smoke from the pistols still curling out the half-closed door.
With five men dead, the only question that remained was what to do with the woman.
She lay on her back beneath the kitchen table, whimpering softly, but entirely conscious, her blouse pulled over her breasts, her panties in a crumpled mass beside her.
The four men who moved about the trailer hardly glanced at her as they rifled through the drawers and cabinets and closets, looking for guns and money.
From her place on the floor, it would have been hard to keep track of the men. The tiny windows of the trailer let in very little light, and that was further constricted by the curtains which hung over them. As for the lights inside the trailer, the men had not turned them on, preferring to skulk through the rooms in a gloomy shadow, muttering to each other about their next move, their eyes averted as if they did not want to remind themselves that she was still there, still alive, that there was one to go.
In the end, it was a topic that could not be avoided, however, and they discussed their options quietly while she continued to lie beneath the kitchen table, her eyes combing its low ceiling, or crawling along the walls and windows, lighting from time to time on some little knick-knack she’d bought across the border in Florida or in one of the small shops of nearby Donalsonville.
She’d married her husband, Jerry, only a few years before in a ceremony at the Spring Creek Baptist Church, a small, wood-framed sanctuary that sat on a shady hill a few miles from the trailer. All Jerry’s relatives had crowded into the church that day, the whole Alday clan. Among them: Ned, Jerry’s father, dressed in his Sunday best; Aubrey, Ned’s brother, beaming from the front pew; Shuggie and Jimmy, the two brothers who kidded Jerry mercilessly, their faces grinning over their roughly knotted ties. All their bodies were with her now, their feet dangling from the beds or off the sofa, their shoes still encrusted with the rich topsoil of their farm.
The strangers told her to get up, and one of them stepped over and jerked her roughly from the floor. He was a short man, hardly more than a boy, with long dark hair that swept over one eye. Earlier, he’d called her a bitch and slapped her while the others looked on, waiting their turn. Then he’d forced her down, first to her knees, then on to her back, ripping at her clothes, his hands all over her, his teeth sinking into her breast, breaking the skin, leaving a jagged purple mark.
Get dressed,
he barked.
She’d worn turquoise pants and a matching sweater to work that day, and she put them back on slowly, already exhausted, standing completely still, except for the trembling, while the blindfold was pulled tightly over her eyes, then another cloth stuffed into her mouth.
A few seconds later she was outside, the last light of afternoon pouring over the undulating rows of freshly planted corn and beans and peanuts as they pushed her toward the waiting car.
Once in the car, she crouched down in the back seat floorboard, moaning softly, her knees against her chest, while the one black man among the three white ones held the gun on her, staring silently from over the barrel, his brown eyes wide and bulging behind the thick black-framed glasses.
The car moved in a zigzag pattern for a time, then turned off the road entirely and headed into the woods, its wheels bumping across the rutted ground, weeds and branches slapping noisily at its sides until it finally came to a halt.
In a moment she was outside again, first perched on the hood of the car, like an ornament for the men to gaze at, then on her knees, dragged to them by her hair, and finally on her back again, with the dark-haired man on top of her, the black man watching from above, while the other two moved quickly around and inside a second car, wiping it with brightly colored bits of cloth.
Soon the other two returned to the car, one of them sucking at a bottle of whiskey. The other one, blond and lanky, the youngest of them all, stood away, slumped against the back of the car, as if keeping his distance from the others.
She felt the dark-haired man pull himself off her, his eyes now trained on the others. He laughed and nodded toward her, his gaze still fixed upon the other men. Any of you want some more of this?
he asked casually, as if offering his companions one last sip from the nearly empty glass.
Chapter Two
Mc Connellsburg,
Pennsylvania
Several days before, on May 11, at approximately two o’clock in the afternoon, Riley Miller walked into the headquarters of the McConnellsburg Police Department and worriedly filed a Missing Persons report on his nineteen-year-old son, Richard Wayne Miller, a senior at the local high school.
Police officials asked Miller the usual questions. Had the boy acted strangely in recent days? Was he having personal problems? Had conditions deteriorated in his home life? In other words, was it possible Richard had run away?
Mr. Miller was adamant. His son was a good student, a member of the Future Farmers of America. He held down a job at the local Exxon station. He was an all-American boy.
But he had not come home the previous night, and Riley Miller wanted to know why. I thought he might have gone to stay with a friend,
he told police.
But he hadn’t, Mr. Miller went on, his voice darkening with each passing second, a gloomy apprehension now rising in the faces of the policemen who surrounded him. As they listened, Richard Miller began to take shape in their minds, no longer a name on a form, but a young man with an easy smile and helpful manner, friendly, modest, a perfect son.
I called all of Richard’s friends,
Mr. Miller insisted. But none of them have seen him.
Mr. Miller had also called the Exxon station where Richard worked, but none of his coworkers had seen him since his departure the previous afternoon.
When did he leave the station?
one of the officers asked.
Around the middle of the afternoon.
What was he driving?
A green Chevy Super Sport,
Mr. Miller answered. He was going into town to buy some auto parts.
Did he buy them?
Yes, he did. Then got in his car and headed down U.S. 30.
Down U.S. 30, and into oblivion.
At 9:00 A.M. the next day, Pennsylvania State Trooper Larry Good received an urgent telephone call from Riley Miller.
Someone saw Richard,
Mr. Miller told him.
Who?
Her name is Deborah Poole. She’s with me now.
Good drove immediately to Miller’s house and listened as Poole told her story.
At around 12:30 P.M. on May 10, Poole told him, she’d been on her way to pick up her children at her mother’s house just off U.S. 30 when she’d seen Richard Miller traveling west in his green Chevy Super Sport. As their two cars approached Patterson Run Road and slowed down to make a left turn, she and Miller had glanced to the left and seen three white men and one black one as they hustled around the cab of a pickup truck. Both Miller and she had recognized the truck as belonging to a local resident, Lawrence Schooley. But Schooley had been nowhere around the truck, Poole added, and so she had become suspicious.
Why?
Good asked.
Because of the men around it,
Poole said. They didn’t seem like they ought to have been in Mr. Schooley’s truck.
What did the men look like?
Good asked.
The black one wore thick dark-rimmed glasses,
Poole answered. And one of the white ones had long light-brown hair.
Miller had become suspicious of the men too, Poole added, and after they’d made the left turn, they’d both stopped on Patterson Run Road to look at what was going on around Schooley’s truck. Poole had remained in her car, but Richard had gotten out of his and walked up to where she had stopped.
Did he say anything to you?
Good asked.
Yes,
Poole answered. He asked me if I knew any of the men we could see around Lawrence’s truck. I told him that I’d never seen any of them before.
Did he say anything else?
Yes,
Poole said. He told me that he was going to hang around and watch where they went. If they pulled away, he was going to follow them.
According to Poole, Miller had then returned to his car and backed down the road to U.S. 30, from which position he would be able to observe the men at the truck, then follow them should they pull back out onto the highway.
And that’s where you left him?
Good asked. Sitting in his car?
Poole nodded. I didn’t think anything else about it until I heard he was missing.
Later that same afternoon, Good consulted a recent Maryland State Police bulletin about a breakout at the Poplar Hill Correctional Institute, a minimum-security prison outside Baltimore. Three men had simply walked off the grounds at three in the morning on May 5. Two of the men, Carl Junior Isaacs and his half-brother, Wayne Carl Coleman, were white. The third, George Elder Dungee, was black. A fourth man, the younger brother of one of the escapees, was suspected of having joined the gang.
The next day, suspecting that the men Poole had seen around Lawrence Schooley’s truck might be the same as those who had escaped from Poplar Hill, Good presented her with two separate photographic lineups. One consisted of six pictures of black men, all were wearing glasses. She identified George Elder Dungee as the man she’d seen sitting placidly in the back of Schooley’s truck.
Next Good presented her with a second lineup consisting of seven photographs of young white males. Poole picked William Carroll (Billy
) Isaacs as the long-haired youth she’d seen three days before. Billy Isaacs was the fifteen-year-old brother of Carl Junior Isaacs.
Some time later, a second witness came forward. His name was Norman Strait, and he told Good that as he’d been coming down U.S. 30, he’d seen several men loading material from a blue Chevrolet into Schooley’s truck. He’d stopped to observe them more closely, and taken his hunting rifle from the gun rack and drawn a bead on each of the four men. Through the powerful lens of his hunting scope, he had watched them haul things back and forth between the two vehicles. One had remained idle while the others hustled about, and Strait had been able to get a good look at him. He was short, with long dark hair that often fell over one eye.
In a photographic lineup, Strait identified Carl Isaacs as the man he had sighted through the cross-hairs of his hunting scope. I guess I should have shot that son-of-a-bitch right there,
he would tell Good only three weeks later. It would have saved a lot of lives.
Chapter Three
One thing was sure, and Carl Junior Isaacs must have known it as he led Wayne and George out of Poplar Hill on the morning of May 5, 1973. He was in command, a position he reveled in.
Born on August 9, 1953, Carl was the son of a father who abandoned him and a mother he despised. His father, George Archie Isaacs, had drifted up from Mountain City, Tennessee, where he’d worked as a delivery man and a service station attendant before finally coming north.
Once in Maryland, George took a variety of odd jobs, everything from working at a mushroom plant to plying his skills as a carpenter.
A woman proved his undoing, as far as remaining in the North was concerned. Her name was Betty, and when George met her she was already married to Carl Coleman, the father of her four children. Such incidental facts did not stop Archie and Betty from deepening their relationship, however, and when Coleman realized he was being cuckolded, he promptly signed a warrant against George, charging him with breaking peace
between Betty and himself. As a result, George spent forty days in jail.
Once released, he went back to Betty. By then, Coleman had disappeared into the wilds of West Virginia, where he was later rumored to have been shot.
Though George would later describe Betty as a faithless wife who did nothing but sit around and drink,
he fathered so many children by her during the next few years that in 1988, when interviewed by a defense team psychologist, he could remember neither the names nor the exact number of his offspring. Their separate personal identities equally eluded him. I’m just trying to remember which one that was,
he said, when asked about the early life of Carl Junior, the son who would bring to the Isaacs name a singularly dark renown.
It wasn’t very long before George had had enough of family life. Betty’s own behavior toward him was bad enough, as he saw it, but even worse was her tendency to set the children against him. Egged on by Betty, they tormented him mercilessly, finally forcing him to do the dirty thing,
as he later described it, of abandoning them, the idea suddenly popping into his head as he sat in a diner after dropping Betty off at work. It was the kind of bizarre whimsy he’d already passed on to his eldest son, though in Carl it would take on a far grimmer character, horrendous acts committed with a shrug.
Once his father had deserted the family, and with his mother either drunk at home or holed up with her latest romantic interest, Carl and the other children were left to fend for themselves. Roaming in what amounted to a family pack, they moved along the streets while their neighbors watched them apprehensively from behind tightly closed doors.
What the neighbors saw was a collapsing family structure, its center gone, its sides caving in. Soon the Isaacs children were reduced to rags, though still wandering together, clinging to whatever loose strands of family life they might gather, particularly to such communal efforts as foraging for food in garbage cans.
But as the weeks passed, their lack of supervision finally drew the attention of various Maryland authorities. At the Hartford Elementary School, teachers noticed that the Isaacs children were unkempt, their teeth rotten, that they stank from unwashed clothes and poor personal hygiene. Called in to explain this condition, Betty Isaacs declared that it was up to the public school teachers to take care of her children, an attitude educational officials greeted with helplessness and dismay.
Over the next few weeks, the mischief and disorder of the Isaacs children grew steadily more severe, until, in April 1965, Maryland officials assumed full responsibility by declaring them wards of the state.
By that time Carl Junior, now eleven, had been caught stealing in his elementary school, as well as in Korvette’s, a local department store. He was placed in a foster home, along with Bobby, his younger brother, and Hazel, his older sister.
For a time, the placement appeared successful. Carl joined the Boy Scouts and began playing trumpet in school.
By May of 1966, however, the darker angels of his experience had begun to reassert themselves. He was caught stealing again, first at his school, then at the construction site where his foster father worked. A psychologist declared the thievery, along with numerous other incidents of bad behavior and foul language, to be entirely consistent with Carl’s background and advised against any form of therapy.
Predictably, the stealing continued. His schoolwork slumped as well, so that by December he was failing four subjects.
By May of 1967, Carl’s behavior had darkened considerably. Now fourteen, he’d begun to resent the whole notion of school attendance. His bouts of truancy lengthened steadily, and even less taxing activities came to represent additional elements of the straight life
for which he now harbored a growing contempt. Finally the Boy Scouts dismissed him, a circumstance that led to even more heated arguments with his foster parents.
Increasingly beyond restraint, Carl grasped the solution most ready-to-hand: flight. On May 22, he ran away from his foster home, though he seems to have had little idea of where to run. He wandered the streets until, two days later, he was picked up by authorities and placed in the Maryland Training School for Boys on Old Hartford Road. Two subsequent psychological examinations found him suffering from depression, a poor self-image, and pronounced inability to handle his increasingly angry and tumultuous feelings.
After a short stay at the Maryland Training School for Boys, Carl was placed in a second foster home in October 1967. Almost immediately after placement, he began to act out. His performance in school was poor, and his new foster parents found him a disruptive and uncontrollable presence in their home.
By January the situation had become intolerable, and Carl was committed to the Lapinsky Shelter Home until April 1968, when a third foster home was found. After a recurrence of the same behavior that had made the two previous placements unworkable, Carl was transferred to the Woodbourne Boys Home. A few weeks later he ran away, only to be picked up by police and returned to the Maryland Training School for Boys.
At fifteen, Carl was now in the full throes of adolescence. Yet another psychological examination revealed that ominous feelings had begun to emerge, particularly associated with hostility toward women. A report by a staff member of the Maryland Training School for Boys stated that Carl could not respond to female authority figures or accept discipline from women, an attitude that could only have been exacerbated when, during a prearranged visit with his mother, Betty Isaacs was unable to recognize him and had to be told by a staff member that the brooding young man who stood before her was her son.
In February of 1969, Carl was readmitted to the Woodbourne Boys Home, where he remained until the following June. During that brief period, he ran away many times. On June 2, after yet another escape, Woodbourne notified Maryland officials that they would not readmit Carl to the home.
Though missing for a month, Carl was finally picked up when police found him and another boy during the course of an assault upon a third boy. Both assailants were returned to the Maryland Training Center for Boys for reconsideration of their cases.
A subsequent investigation of Carl’s whereabouts during his month on the streets revealed that he’d moved in with Charlie Bowman, an employee of the Burns Detective Agency, a homosexual whose taste ran to children. Carl had been one of several boys who’d lived with Bowman, providing sex in exchange for room and board. Unlike the other boys, however, Carl, when interviewed by a social worker, had asked to be placed officially and permanently in Bowman’s foster care.
Such a placement was absurd, but state officials were unable to find much of an alternative. A social worker declared Carl to be ungovernable, and recommended that he be returned to the Maryland Training School for Boys.
On August 11, 1969, Carl once again took up residence at the school, and once again began a series of escapes. As a result, the state of Maryland formally declared that it had exhausted its resources in regard to him and promptly removed him from the juvenile system. From that time forward, there would be no more training schools or foster homes.
Carl Junior Isaacs had been set loose upon the world.
He reverted instantly to crime, stealing cars and burglarizing houses, while living a seminomadic existence, bunking with friends or the families of friends, sometimes for no more than a few days, at most a few weeks, then moving on to the next temporary shelter.
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
The 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
At 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.
In addition, the girls were getting cranky. Something had to give.
For Carl, crime had always served as a quick relief from boredom, as well as a way of reasserting his authority. He decided to pump things up a bit by stealing a car.
He found one in a parking lot in Hillendale, hot-wired it, then waved the girls over. He could tell that the strategy had worked by the way the girls tumbled in delightedly, thankful for even this limited change in their surroundings. After that, the gang
enjoyed a nutritious breakfast of cakes and coffee, all their combined finances could afford.
Once breakfast was over, the drifting began again. It lasted until around 9:00 P.M., when Carl, bored again, stole a second car, a bluish-green Buick. It was late by then, and with no other plan in mind, Carl fell into his usual pattern, drove up to Notch Hill Road, and parked again, just as he had the night before, as if his mind were trapped in its own circular ruin.
The second night was no less wretched than the first. Carl remained in his bizarre holding pattern, a cycle of aimless cruising that wore on more than the collective psychology of the people crowded in the bluish-green Buick. It was also taking its toll on the group’s dwindling finances.
The solution was predictable, of course, but it was also enough to pull Carl from his robotic, perseverating tendencies. No money meant no gasoline, which meant no cruising, which meant that something different had to be done, a break in the iron recapitulations that gave his actions their only discernible structure.
Thus, toward afternoon, Carl and Billy broke into a house while everyone else waited in the car. Approximately twenty minutes later, the Isaacs brothers returned to the car, their arms filled with shirts, watches, radios, and several rifles. For a time, there was general jubilation at the ease with which the burglary had been committed, the loot passed around and fondled lovingly, the totemic objects of their outlawry.
Once the initial thrill was over, however, the incessant cruising began again. Back and forth, the bluish-green Buick lumbered heavily along the bleak suburban streets like a gray fish in a tank of murky water while Carl fought to keep up his flagging self-esteem by conjuring up increasingly outrageous tales of derring-do.
There followed a second burglary, this time with all the men disappearing into the house while Jennifer and Lori remained in the car, their eyes searching the streets for that lone police patrol car that could bring the whole fantastical enterprise to an abrupt and dreary end.
Soon Carl and the others shot back to the car, their arms filled with the latest addition to the group’s accumulating assets, a camera, binoculars, ammunition, and to everyone’s delight, a bag of mixed nuts.
After a quick meal at Gino’s Pizza, Carl and Wayne burglarized yet another house, this time netting an assortment of jewelry, shirts, cassette tapes, guns, ammunition, and, best of all, forty dollars in cash.
With a third burglary completed in a small radius of towns, Carl decided that things were probably getting too hot to remain in Maryland any longer and so crossed the border into Pennsylvania.
In Falls River, he contemplated another burglary, but the sound of a woman calling frantically for her husband forced him to reconsider.
As they drove away, Billy could see the woman standing in full view on her porch. A burst of bravado seized him, and he grabbed one of the rifles they’d stolen the day before.
Want me to pluck her off?
he asked Carl, who alone had the power to answer questions of such profound consequence.
Carl shook his head. No,
he said casually. It was the last time he would lift a restraining hand.
The next few days saw a few more burglaries, none of which added very much money to the collective coffers. Stolen articles like binoculars and cameras were nice enough, but they were hardly legal tender. Only cash bought the necessities of life on the run, particularly beer and cigarettes. Carl decided that the time for kidding around was over.
In more ways than one.
By then, the girls had become a nuisance. The crowding was bad enough, but the problem was deeper than that. The girls had seen a great deal, knew a great deal, and Carl began to think about the danger involved in letting them go.
Billy could see the tumblers moving in Carl’s mind, but felt powerless to do anything about it. As for Jennifer and Lori, they appeared oblivious to the dark web Billy could see descending over his older brother.
Still, it was the shortage of cash that remained foremost in Carl’s mind. The girls were tiny glitches on a big screen. The real problem was money. To travel very far, he needed a lot more money than could be had by breaking into penny-ante suburban homes.
This meant armed robbery, a crime distinctly more serious, and far more dangerous, than slipping into empty houses, grabbing shirts and peanuts.
Carl was determined to do it, and it was easy to convince the others that it was necessary.
Except for Jennifer and Lori. The lark had not been exactly thrilling so far, but at least no one had gotten hurt. And that’s the way they wanted to keep it. They told Carl they would have nothing to do with an armed robbery.
Carl made no effort to persuade them otherwise. He had run out of fairy tales with which to amuse them. More burglaries and car thefts would not impress them. His bag of manipulative tricks was empty. It was time to part company.
He let them out on a deserted street corner, telling them that the rest of the gang would carry out the robbery, then return for them, a pledge he had no intention of fulfilling.
They said they were going to come back for us if nothing went wrong,
Jennifer told police the next day, May 10, 1973, when she and Lori were spotted loitering on a local street corner, questioned vigorously by the officers who had spotted them, then returned to their fretful mothers. Well, they didn’t come back, so I guess something went wrong.
Chapter Six
Traveling south through the steadily flattening expanse of the southern coastal plain, you reach it by way of roads where the tractors, agricultural combines, and dusty, late-model cars politely pull onto the shoulders to allow the faster cars to pass. On all sides, white, long-necked cattle egrets rise over broad fields of peas, beans, and cotton. In the distant woodlands, there are hints of Spanish moss. Towns called Cuthbert, Lucille, and Blakely spring up from the surrounding fields. In one courthouse square, the citizens have erected a granite monument to the peanut, the area’s most lucrative crop. Everywhere the pace is leisurely, amiable, a world where people nod to strangers in a gesture that seems almost archaic, gone with the wooden plow. In Bluffton, a hand-lettered sign hawks the town’s best barbecue, then adds, If you don’t have time to stop, wave.
As far as the horizons stretch, the land seems curiously open, innocent … vulnerable.
Seminole County, Georgia, rests at the center of this world. Bordering Alabama to the west and Florida to the south, it is a region of marginal farms, understaffed government offices, and underfunded schools. As late as 1990, it had yet to produce a written history of itself. Some of the bank branches even maintained their offices in tiny converted house trailers. In its library, located in a small brick building behind the Piggly Wiggly supermarket, shelf after shelf was filled with scores of worn paperbacks, romance novels decidedly the winner in the quest for space.
Of the county’s population of nine thousand, almost twenty percent received food stamps. In taxable sales Seminole ranked 102nd, near the bottom, in the state, and its yearly expenditure for education amounted to a mere $2,725 per student.
An area of farmland and uncultivated woodlands, Seminole County was merely part of that second Georgia
which has always existed south of Athens, and which has been viewed by the far more developed northern part of the state, particularly its urban center of Atlanta, as intractably lost to the forces of intellectual sophistication and economic development.
As a consequence of this perennial underdevelopment, Seminole County would not have ranked high on any tourist’s list of places to go. There were no museums, race tracks, nightclubs, zoos, or amusement parks, and even the official Georgia State Guide listed as its notable local events only Independence Day, Labor Day, and an Old Fashioned Halloween.
In summer, there was the broad green expanse of Seminole Lake for fishing and swimming. Winter, when it came, offered nothing to relieve it, no motion picture theater, civic center, swimming pool, or even one of the small outlet malls
which had sprung up in other, less remote, rural communities to lure the bloated tourist buses from their more established routes.
Thus, on Monday, May 14, 1973, few people in Seminole County would have argued that their region had much to recommend it to those occasional traveling strangers who sometimes found their way into its tiny county seat of Donalsonville.
But to those who had lived in the region for generations, Seminole County and its environs represented a style of life that conformed to their own vision of decency and neighborliness.
No family embodied those modest virtues more than that of Ned and Ernestine Alday. They had married in 1935, together eking out a bare living even during the darkest days of the Depression. It had not been easy. For the first years of their marriage, they’d had no fixed home at all, but had been moved about by the sawmill for which Ned worked, their tiny house jacked up and transported by truck from one milling site to the next.
After many years, Ned and Ernestine had accumulated enough money to buy a small house in Donalsonville, then worked on until there was at last enough money to buy a farm of their own, complete with a large farmhouse on River Road where, during the next few years, the family grew steadily. In the end, there were eight children, equally divided between boys and girls.
By 1969, Norman, the oldest son, had made a career in the military and was living abroad, the first of the family ever to do so. Patricia, the eldest daughter, had graduated from college, the first of the children to receive a college degree, and had taken a job in social work at the Seminole County Department of Family and Children Services. Two other daughters, Nancy and Elizabeth, had married and moved to Augusta, while their brother, Jerry, had married Mary Campbell and moved into a trailer only a few miles down River Road from the family homestead. Fay and Jimmy, the youngest of the Alday children, still lived with their parents, while Shuggie, their older brother, lived with his wife Barbara in a trailer parked only a few yards from the homestead.
Despite the fact that Norman lived in Europe and two of the Alday daughters had migrated to Augusta, the lives of the farming Aldays continued without disruption.
The work was backbreaking, of course, but rewarding nonetheless. There were no bosses or time clocks, so that the Aldays raised their animals, plowed their fields, seeded and harvested their crops according to the slow dance of the seasons as one generation passed unobtrusively to the next.
Through the generations, they had