Blood Echoes (18 page)

First, both the motive and the opportunity to commit the murders were obvious and demonstrable. Without doubt, all the murdered Aldays had been robbed and Jerry and Mary Alday's trailer burglarized. At various stages of the investigation, a large number of their possessions, such as Mary Alday's Timex watch, had been found in the possession of the defendants. Thus, the murders could be tied to the burglary of Jerry Alday's trailer, the subsequent arrival of the Aldays, and the defendants' decision to leave no witnesses to their crimes. Consequently, the motive could not only be easily established, but once proven, it would serve to demonstrate that the murders themselves had been committed during the commission of a felony, a crime for which Georgia's new, and as yet untested, capital punishment statute called for the imposition of the death penalty.

As to the question of the defendants' opportunity to commit the crimes, numerous witnesses, such as Jerry Godby, could place them in the area of the Alday trailer at the time of the murders.

In addition to demonstrating motive and opportunity, Geer could easily establish that, beyond the question of the murders being committed during the commission of a felony, they were also multiple, with no less than six victims, and had been gravely and wantonly aggravated by the rape and kidnapping of Mary Alday, two other elements that fit the state's capital punishment statute.

Once the gravity of the crimes, along with the defendants' motive in and opportunity for committing them, were established, Geer knew he could go on to present the physical evidence, of which, it seemed to him, there was an overwhelming abundance, everything from an assortment of fingerprints found in the trailer and in various automobiles and on numerous articles used by the defendants, to ballistics tests that tied their weapons to the murders, to a vast array of items associated with the Aldays and found in the possession of the defendants at the time of their arrest in West Virginia or previously dumped by them in Sumter County, Alabama.

Both in general matters such as motive and opportunity as well as in such specifics as fingerprints and ballistics—and without the slightest doubt in either case—it was clear to Geer that the preponderance of the evidence would conclusively argue for the guilt of the defendants. But he also knew that sound physical evidence and eyewitness testimony from outside the trailer still left out that element which every prosecutor ultimately required in order to make his case so utterly airtight as to put to rest the reasonable doubt of even the most wily, suspicious, merciful, and, as it were, unreasonable of jurors.

What Geer needed was another set of eyes. Not Jerry Godby's, who'd seen two cars pass from a distance of many yards as he poured insecticide into a peanut sprayer, but another set entirely, one that had been inside the trailer at the time of the murders, and had then moved out of it, following along as Mary Alday was transported six miles down River Road, taken from a car, led off into the woods, and shot two times in the back.

A casual glance at the defendants' birthdays, along with the most cursory reading of the statements Coleman and Dungee had already given various officials in Georgia and West Virginia, made it clear that the eyes Geer needed were in Billy Isaacs' head.

Not one of the defendants had sought to link Billy to the actual murder of any of the Aldays, or even to lay his body on top of an anguished Mary Alday during the final hours of her life. In addition, even if he should be tied to such actions, his age alone would keep him from the electric chair.

For Geer's purposes, the younger Isaacs was clearly the perfect candidate for the eyewitness he needed to conclude his case. Billy was probably the least culpable of the four defendants. Certainly he was the youngest, and thus well beyond the reach of death. And yet, he had seen each and every outrage that had been committed between 4:30 and 6:00
P.M.
on May 14, 1973. Thus, for Geer, the only question that remained was how much Billy Isaacs would be willing to tell of the horrible scenes he had witnessed, how steady and untrembling his finger would remain when he was called upon to point it at his brothers.

By the end of May, Judge Walter Geer—the special prosecutor's uncle, a kinship defense attorneys would raise many times in the coming years—had appointed eight lawyers to defend the four defendants in four entirely separate trials.

As already noted, however, within days of their appointments, shifts began occurring within the shaky ranks of the defense. Most notably, Bobby Lee Hill and Fletcher Farrington of Savannah took over the defense of Carl Isaacs in a move that Isaacs heartily approved. In the first of what would become many public pronouncements, Carl declared that he was aware that “Bobby L. Hill was on the counsel that overturned Georgia's last death penalty law.” Because of that, Carl went on, “I know that these men are irrevocably, unalterably opposed to the death penalty, and that they will do everything within their talents and abilities to help me.”

He was right. Bobby Lee Hill had for many years worked tirelessly to rid the state of Georgia of what he considered the unspeakable barbarity of capital punishment. For Hill, the heinousness of the Alday murders was not in question. In a sense, that very heinousness made his defense of Carl Isaacs even more critical. For surely if any crime deserved the imposition of the death penalty, it was the series of outrages that had occurred in and around River Road on May 14. But for Hill, that was just the point. Capital punishment was never appropriate, no matter what the crime. It was itself a form of murder, and simply because it was imposed upon those who had, themselves, committed murder, made it no more justifiable than the original offense.

Thus, for Hill, Carl Isaacs was the perfect candidate to test Georgia's new death penalty statute. As a court case it could serve to topple the new law from the lofty perch upon which the state legislature had placed it only a few months before, and he fully intended to use it to do just that.

As for Ernestine and her daughters, they could do no more than watch from their self-imposed silence as Hill assumed control of the case. As a lively media figure, he would bring it almost as much public attention as their own special prosecutor.

In addition, as Nancy and Patricia were beginning to understand, he would also shift the focus of the trial away from what had happened on River Road to the diminutive, nineteen-year-old man who was now on trial for doing it. Increasingly they had begun to notice that the names of the Alday dead were no longer mentioned, that they were lumped together in a faceless mass, that their pictures were no longer displayed in articles about the case. The complexity of their lives, it seemed to the Alday sisters, had been reduced to a one-word description of their economic function: farmers.

Ironically, just as Ned, Aubrey, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, and Mary were fading into mist, the images of their murderers, particularly Carl Isaacs, were being drawn with greater and greater detail. With the arrival of each new magazine or newspaper, Nancy and Patricia saw pictures of Carl, or read his latest comments. “We could tell that our family was being killed off again,” Nancy recalled years later, “that it would be Carl who'd be remembered from now on, his whole life, every little thing that had ever happened to him, and that my father and my brothers and my uncle and Mary would be these dead people he was associated with. Dead farmers. That's all.”

To Nancy, Patricia, and others of the Alday children, the “dead farmers” remained what they had always been, the heart and soul of their once extended family, people whose sudden absences left enormous empty spaces. By then Faye had graduated from Seminole County High School, but with few relatives in the stadium to see it. With all but one of her brothers dead, her father dead, her uncle dead, it had been an affair of mournful women. From their seats in the old wooden bleachers, the surviving Alday women had watched Faye's graduation in a stony silence, their blue eyes glistening in the summer sun. “That was the first day that it really seemed like they were all missing at once,” Patricia remembered. “Normally we would have filled the stands, but no more.”

Immediately upon assuming control of Carl Isaacs' defense, Bobby Hill made a series of pretrial motions, the first of which was a motion for a closed committal hearing in which Hill declared that Carl would plead innocent to all charges. Quickly following Hill's lead, lawyers for the remaining three defendants also asked for speedy committal hearings and stated that their clients would plead innocent to all charges.

Closed hearings were subsequently granted, thus banning all prospective jurors from attendance. Hearings were held on August 9, at which time all four defendants were bound over to the grand jury.

Only a few days later, the September issue of
Front Page Detective
arrived at the newsstands of Seminole County. Inside its tawdry pages, the Alday family was treated to its first dose of blatantly exploitive media coverage of the tragedy they had suffered nearly four months before. In an article entitled “Too Evil to Be Called Animals,” the magazine related in typically lurid and perfervid language the last unspeakable hours of the “sexually assaulted and slaughtered pretty Mary Alday,” who, according to the author, “had been repeatedly raped and subjected to a hideous ordeal of sexual torture.” Even after her death, the article went on, “the killer had continued to violate the young woman's body.”

For Ernestine, this first exposure was unbearably painful. She refused to read it. But neither Nancy nor Patricia could stop themselves. The effect was jolting. “It was hard to imagine that people would write things like that, knowing that we would read them, or at least hear about them,” Nancy remembered. “But, at least, we thought that would be the end of it, just this one disgusting little article, and after that, we would be left alone.”

Instead, as later events would demonstrate, it was just the beginning.

At approximately 6:00
P.M.
on September 4, the Seminole County grand jury indicted Carl Junior Isaacs, Wayne Carl Coleman, William Carroll Isaacs, and George Elder Dungee for a total of nineteen charges in the Alday case, including a full six counts of murder for each defendant.

Although eight of the twenty-one members of the Seminole County grand jury were black, Hill and Farrington filed a motion declaring that the method of securing grand jury members was discriminatory in that it tended to exclude blacks from service.

Meanwhile, on September 13, attorneys for Billy Isaacs asked that his case be remanded to juvenile court, a motion that was later denied.

Two days later, on September 15, Hill and Farrington were once again before Judge Geer, this time filing for a change of venue for Carl Isaacs' trial, a motion which, if granted, would have removed the trial from Seminole County.

Attorneys for Coleman and Dungee immediately filed similar motions.

A hearing on the motion for change of venue was conducted twelve days later, on September 27. During the hearing, Hill and other members of the defense team introduced a great deal of evidence to support their contention that the pretrial atmosphere in Seminole County had reached such a level of public outrage that Isaacs could not possibly receive a fair trial.

To support his argument, Hill introduced scores of clippings from the
Donalsonville News
, along with other newspaper clippings from such neighboring communities as Bainbridge, Georgia, and Dothan, Alabama, both approximately forty miles away. In addition to these newspapers, Hill presented evidence that 300 to 450 copies of the September issue of
Front Page Detective
, with its title reference to the Alday defendants as “Too Evil to Be Called Animals,” had been purchased in Seminole County.

As a result of the pervasive and inflammatory nature of such media coverage, Hill requested a change of venue, which would allow the trial to take place in a less prejudicial location, and went on to suggest certain more appropriate sites, beginning with various Georgia counties, but ranging even farther, to such places as Cook County (Chicago), Illinois; Kings County (Brooklyn), New York; and Washington, D.C.

Geer, however, vigorously opposed the removal of the trial from Seminole County, arguing forcefully that it was the county's right to try those who had offended it, and that to suggest its inability to do so was nothing less than an insult and an affront to its citizens.

Nearly two weeks later, on October 9, Judge Geer denied all motions for change of venue and set Carl Isaacs' trial to begin on December 31, 1973.

Three weeks after Judge Geer's decision, a second sensationalistic account of the Alday murders arrived on the newsstands frequented by the surviving Aldays. It was the November issue of
Detective Files
, and its cover was captioned in bold letters “Sex Ghouls in Georgia, ‘Six for the Grave … One for Us.' “ Inside, under a display of mug shots of the Alday defendants, the magazine declared in bold type that “in an effort to satisfy their depraved lust, the foursome didn't shrink from wantonly disposing of anyone who happened to get in their way.” Thus, according to the article, “six members of a farm family were obliterated … by that breed which cares nothing for anything except its own brutal needs,” and whose “grinning, hard-faced intentness is known by instinct to all females.”

Although quite a few local residents of Seminole County were able to acquire the September issue of
Front Page Detective
, the accessibility of the
Detective Files
November issue was less uncontrolled. Now alerted to the possibility of such painful accounts of the murders, local merchants had since September been carefully scrutinizing the various police and detective magazines which, before then, they had routinely placed on their shelves. Consequently, they were ready for
Detective Files
when it showed up, and deeming it, in their own words, “gross” and “misleading,” they quietly removed it from their shelves.