Blood Echoes (32 page)

“Who was holding you hostage in the trailer?” Jackson asked.

“Nobody.”

“Did you stop anybody from doing anything in that trailer?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“In fact, you were the lookout, weren't you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you think was going to happen to those people when you made that man go into the trailer [after three others had already been murdered]?”

“I wasn't doing any thinking at the time.”

“You were a zombie?”

“I was in a state of shock.”

“You had a gun?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“And, in fact, you loaned your gun to somebody to shoot somebody; is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jackson then went into any deals Billy might have been offered for his current testimony.

“What did you ask [District Attorney Charles Ferguson] to do for you?” he asked.

“If there was some way that he would make a deal with me for me to be turned loose,” Billy answered. “He stated he was not going to make any deals, promises or insinuations in any way whatsoever.”

“You hope that Mr. Ferguson does something for you when we finish this?”

“I certainly have lots of hopes that something will be done for me when this is over with,” Billy admitted frankly, then added, “that is what has helped keep my sanity for fifteen years, hope.”

“That is something to hold onto in prison, isn't it?” Jackson asked softly.

“Yes, it is,” Billy told him. “If you lose hope, you might as well go ahead and hang yourself because there is nothing left.”

When completed, it was clear that Billy Isaacs' testimony had been nearly identical to that he had given in the first trial. Since that first trial, however, a new “eyewitness” had emerged, one who'd been reluctant to speak in 1973, but who'd spoken more or less ceaselessly since that time.

The witness whose testimony was to be used against Carl Isaacs this time was Carl Isaacs himself.

Chapter Twenty-nine

I
n December 1976, Carl Isaacs had been contacted by Fleming Fuller, a writer-filmmaker who was doing a television documentary called
Murder One
, the same title he would later use for his screenplay on the Alday murder, which consisted of interviews with various Death Row inmates in Georgia and North Carolina.

While conducting interviews in Reidsville, Fuller learned about Carl Isaacs and the Alday murders, and shortly thereafter Carl agreed to tell his story for Fleming's film. The result was an amazing document, and, from the prosecution's point of view, a damning one. Here was Carl Isaacs staring directly at the camera, his voice entirely emotionless as he gave a chilling, matter-of-fact rendering of the murders on River Road.

“Okay, we pulled around to the back of the trailer,” he began. “Wayne got out and … I said, ‘Check the door,' and he turned the knob on the door.”

The unlocked door had opened with no further effort, Carl said, and he and the rest of his gang had then entered and routinely begun ransacking the trailer.

Only this time, there was a complication.

“And then a jeep pulled up,” Carl said coolly, his body slouched lazily in his chair, his eyes entirely passive, as if narrating the details of an ordinary day. “When the jeep stopped, the man looked like he was going for a gun … and I drew the pistol out of the holster and I threw down on him to freeze.”

The men, whose names Carl seemed unable to remember, were Ned and Jerry Alday, and they were immediately marched into the trailer and leaned against what Isaacs referred to as a “countertop.”

“Then me and Wayne went to talking, you know, about what we were going to do with them,” Carl went on. “So we decided, well, we'll just kill them.”

It was not a long conversation. There were no subtleties of moral thought involved. The two men were human beings who could see and tell what they saw. Because of that, they were going to die.

“So after talking with Wayne, I took the youngest one and went in the south bedroom,” Carl said. “And Wayne … took the other one into the north bedroom. All right. Now I stood there about three or four seconds, you know, waiting to see if I heard a shot. I guess it was like Wayne was waiting on me, and I was waiting on him. And I figured, well, the hell with it. I guess he's waiting on me. So I shot the dude.”

As if on a signal, Wayne had also begun firing.

“All right, I come back out,” Isaacs said. “As I was coming down the hall, I heard a shot at the other end … Wayne hollered. I run through the living room to the kitchen and George was standing by the kitchen door, and he was white as a sheet. Billy was standing in the bedroom door. I run past Billy and asked Wayne what the hell is wrong, you know? And the old man that he had shot was getting up off the bed. I could see blood, and the man had a hole in the back of his head, but the top part of his head was missing, you know, on the front of him … So I got my pistol, you know, and cocked it, and shot all the remaining shells … on the side of his head. He fell back on the bed. He started to get back up again. You know, and it just blew my mind, you know, I mean, hey, what the hell is this. The man is supposed to be dead. Wayne shot the remaining shells he had.”

Carl paused an instant, as if to draw a quick breath, then resumed his grim narrative, his eyes as dull and lusterless as when he'd begun his tale: “All right. I'm trying to load the .22. I can't get it loaded fast enough, because the man is getting up on the bed, and I'm scared shitless. I mean this is the first time I've ever seen anything like this, you know. And I look at George, ‘Give me a gun,' you know. He hands me a .32. So I shoot him three times with it, and Wayne shoots him three or four times with the .380. So, you know, he falls back on the bed and he stays there.”

Then, while the blue smoke from the revolvers was still floating in the air, the inconceivable began to happen.

“So this green and white pickup truck pulls up in back of the trailer,” Carl said.

From the arrival of the pickup, Carl's account unwound almost identically to Billy's earlier testimony, confirming in every detail his younger brother's rendering of the capture and murder of Shuggie and Aubrey Alday.

“I looked at Wayne, I said, ‘Well, same way?'” Carl told the unblinking black eye of Fleming Fuller's camera. “And he said, ‘Yes, might as well.' So it didn't dawn on me then, but at the time, you know, my pistol was empty. And I took one of them, I can't remember which, into the south bedroom again. And when I walked in, you know, the other dude is sprawled out on the bed. I mean there is blood all over the trailer, all over the floor … Anyway, when I got him in the bedroom, you know, he seen the other dude laying there with all this blood. And he turned around and looked at me. And it dawned on me, you know, well, he's going to try to jump me, you know. So I told him, ‘Get up on the bed.' … And when he laid down, I stepped back and pulled the trigger. And all I could hear was a click, you know. And I turned out of the bedroom and I come walking down the hall … So I seen Billy … And I grabbed his gun, the .38. I went back to the bedroom, and no sooner than I walked in the door, I looked, you know, where the dude was laying, and his hand was just reaching around a shotgun, a twelve-gauge pump, sitting up in the corner … It sort of chilled me, you know. Here I am dumb enough to walk out of that room after leaving him in there, not knowing what's in that room … But instead of saying anything to him, I shot him three times. And I come back into the kitchen … and George hollered from the living room, ‘Here comes somebody.'”

Again, following Billy's earlier testimony in nearly every detail, save for the actual sequence of the murders, Carl described the capture, robbery, and murder of Jimmy Alday, and after that, the arrival in a blue and white Impala of the last of his victims, Mary Campbell Alday.

“She got out of the car before I could stop the tractor and walked over to our car and looked in,” Carl said. “I shut the tractor off and run up behind her and grabbed her and told her to just keep walking and there wouldn't be no trouble.”

Once in the trailer, Isaacs said, he told Wayne and Billy to begin loading their supplies from Richard Miller's Chevelle to Mary Alday's Impala. Now alone with Mary Alday, save for the gawking presence of George Dungee, Carl's mind began to turn to his own grim satisfactions. “And then it dawned on me, hey, you know, she's a woman … So I started feeling her up, and she started to cry about it, talked about please, don't, and all this, you know. And I slapped her, and I told her to shut up. And I took off her clothes, and I was having sex with her when Billy walked in … And then Wayne come in … and had sex with her. George wanted to have sex with her, and I told him I said, ‘Look, we've done took enough damn time, let's go.'”

Continuing in the monotone with which he'd told the preceding events, Carl then went on to describe the last terrible moments of Mary Alday's life, an agony for which, Carl hinted obliquely, she was herself to blame: “Well, when we come out of the trailer, I told her, I said, ‘Now, look, don't give us no hassle. It might save your life. Other than that, you're dead.' And I went on to tell her that if you cooperate and do what you're told, we might keep you alive. But it didn't work.”

After Fuller's testimony and his reading of Isaacs' interview, Carl's defense attorneys advised the court that they had no witnesses to call on their client's behalf. The court then advised the jury that the defense had the right either to open or to close the arguments in the case, and that it had chosen to close them.

Ferguson rose to make his final arguments. He went over the physical evidence once again, pointedly adding that even without it, they could find the defendant guilty because they could “rely on the words of Carl Isaacs himself.”

Once Ferguson had completed his argument, defense attorney Schiavone spoke for the defense. He noted that the jury was required to base its decision on whether or not Carl Isaacs was guilty of each of the six counts of murder, each and every one, and that therefore they had to consider if there was reasonable doubt in the case. He noted that in his interview with Fleming Fuller, Isaacs had told outrageous lies, that there was no blood all over the room, no shotgun for one of the Aldays to reach for, and that Ned Alday had not died beneath a fifteen-shot barrage of gunfire in the bedroom of the Alday trailer. All of that was just Carl's blustering, Schiavone told the court, “material that movie makers take license with … so that they can make the most money they possibly can, because they have to draw fans to the theater.” Carl's confession, Schiavone declared, was merely “theatrical.”

As to Billy Isaacs' testimony, Schiavone deemed it was all a self-serving lie. “But the bottom line and the fundamental truth is that Billy Isaacs was not convicted, nor did he plead guilty, nor did he receive the death sentence, or even life imprisonment for six counts of murder,” he said. “That certainly is every reason in the world for him to lie.”

“The responsibility is yours,” Schiavone concluded. “And remember that each of you have [sic] to make the decision yourself on each count, and you have to determine if it's fact that the State has proved each one beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Only a short time later, at 6:45
P.M.
on January 25, 1988, fifteen and one half years after the original crime, the jury reached a verdict on case number 87C144461-M, the state of Georgia versus Carl Isaacs.

After deliberation for little more than two hours, they had found him guilty on all six counts of murder.

The penalty phase of Carl Isaacs' second trial began the following day. Ferguson opened his argument for the death penalty by detailing Isaacs' two nearly successful escape attempts, and even had witnesses read Carl's own boastful account of them to the jury.

But it was not only that Isaacs might escape which argued for the imposition of the death penalty, Ferguson said, but the nature of the man himself, one whose unregenerate evil he attempted to demonstrate by calling several witnesses.

The first was Mark Picard, a reporter for WSB-TV in Atlanta. Picard had interviewed Isaacs only a few years after the murders, and during the interview he had discussed the crimes.

“Do you recall any specific reference or conversation with reference to the Alday family?” Ferguson asked.

“I do.”

“What do you recall?”

“I recall a question that I asked and his response,” Picard answered. “I asked if he had to do it all over again, the Alday killings, would he do it again. He responded that he would. It's been eleven or twelve years,” Picard added, “but I recall that clearly because it was one of those moments that sort of sticks in your mind.”

To counter the diabolical image of Carl Isaacs that Ferguson had hoped to establish in the minds of the jury, the defense called Shirley Kline to the stand.

A resident of Smithsburg, Maryland, Kline told the court that she had begun corresponding with Carl in 1974. Her son had just been killed in a hit-and-run accident, she said, and at the time she was “confused and messed up.” While visiting her mother at a local nursing home, she had read an article in which Betty Isaacs had stated that she did not care for Carl or any of her sons, and that she had “written them off.”

In the end, Kline said, she had felt sorry for Carl and had started writing him, beginning a correspondence that had stretched into the years. In addition, she had visited Carl in prison, bringing her husband and daughter along with her. These visits had continued, Kline said, first at Reidsville then at Jackson Diagnostic, and over time Carl had begun to call her “Mom.”

Kline went on to say that she and Carl had talked and corresponded about the Bible and other “outside” things. As a result Carl had started doing Bible study courses with her. Later Carl and other inmates had started their own Bible course in prison. In 1979, she said, Carl had written that he had been baptized in her church. Later, he had graduated from the Baptist Christian College in Louisiana, where he'd taken a correspondence course. Continuing his studies, he had finally received a Certificate of Honor, Master of Bible Theology from the International Bible Institute. Since then, Carl had indicated a desire to go even deeper into theology, Kline told the court, an interest which surprised her, she said, since she had always been under the impression he intended to study law.