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.
All of this had convinced Kline that Carl Isaacs was, as she put it, “the kind of person that can reach out and help anyone,” since “he’s always been outgoing with us, with the whole family.”
On January 29, 1988, Ferguson and Jackson made their closing arguments in the penalty phase of the trial.
Isaacs’ crimes were “outrageously and wantonly vile, horrible, or inhuman,” Ferguson argued. Then he added a final appeal for justice. “Mary Alday won’t ever go back to work at the Department of Family and Children Services,” he said. “Mrs. Ernestine won’t ever sit down to those lunches that they had at her house with Ned and Aubrey and Jerry and Jimmy and Shuggie. Carl Isaacs told them never again. You’ve got to do that, too. Never again. Never again, Carl Isaacs.”
In his argument for Isaacs’ life, Terry Jackson described the poverty and abuse Carl had suffered as a child, and in support of which Jackson had previously called two psychologists to testify. Focusing on Isaacs’ hatred of his mother, Jackson declared that the rape of Mary Alday had not been a rape at all, but Carl’s way of assaulting his own mother. As far as any notion that Carl was some kind of evil genius, nothing could be further from the truth.
“We don’t have a mastermind,” Jackson told the jury. “We’ve got a pathetic person who’s never felt love, never been able to have any faith in anything. I hope he can have faith in you.”
He couldn’t.
After deliberating for one hour and fifty-two minutes, the jury found that Carl Junior Isaacs should be put to death.
Accordingly, Judge Lawson asked Isaacs to rise before pronouncing sentence. “All right, Mr. Isaacs,” he said then, “it is the sentence and judgment of the court that you suffer death by electrocution at such time and place as may be fixed by the order of this court, the state of Georgia, and the Department of Corrections after the required review of this case by the Supreme Court of Georgia.”
Then, as once again required by law, the judge advised Carl Isaacs of his right to appeal.
On February 4, the Donalsonville News reprinted an article from the Houston Home Journal of Perry, Georgia. It was an interview with Fleming Fuller, the guiding spirit of Murder One, conducted by Charles Postell, the author of Dead Man Coming.
In the article, Postell noted that Fuller’s film had taken only six weeks to complete, and that the filming itself had been done in and around Toronto, Canada, rather than in Georgia.
“I understand that [Seminole County] is nearly bankrupt,” Fuller told Postell, “but the city and county fathers there never expressed any interest in a production company coming there and setting up.”
This was regrettable, Fuller went on, since it signaled an unfortunate reversal of what had formerly been a vigorous pro-film policy. “I can remember when the Georgia Department of Industry and Trade’s film commission went after business,” he said, “but I suppose that is a thing of the past.”
Neither state nor county governments had offered him any incentives to filmMurder One in Georgia, Fuller added, whereas the Canadian government had offered “many incentives” to S.C. Entertainment, the film’s production company. “We had many people mention the fact that a Georgia movie was being shot in Canada,” Fuller told Postell, “but it was the cheapest and best way,” since, unlike Georgia, movie investments in Canada were one hundred percent tax deductible.
One week later, on February 11, the Donalsonville News reported that the total charges for Carl Isaacs’ second trial c
urrently amounted to $69,288.04. Expenditures which the paper meticulously itemized:
$480.00 for prisoner housing for 32 days
$359.32 for medical costs when Isaacs became ill during the trial
$26,681.22 for prisoner transportation and security
$6,470.31 for jail security
$3,645.41 for overtime for patrol staff
$890.00 for county maintenance crews opening and closing doors of courthouse
The News added that the second trial would probably end up costing around one hundred thousand dollars, and that an additional four hundred thousand could be expected before the last of the trials had been concluded.
Seminole County was doubtless spending a great deal of money on the retrials, but it was not alone. So were Ernestine, Nancy, and other members of the Alday family who had determined to attend the trials. Though Ernestine’s expenses were picked up for the time she was a prosecution witness, all other family members were required to pay their own way. As the trial had dragged on, the bills had begun to mount heavily.
Seeing the Aldays at the trials day after day, realizing the expenses involved in their long stay in Houston County, local citizens created a fund to help ease the drain on personal finances their trial attendance had incurred. By the end of the trial, it had reached three thousand dollars.
“We’re going to give it at the Alday Memorial Service on Sunday, March 13,” Earl Cheek, the director of the drive, told a reporter. “We are going to give it to them as a love offering. They have already spent much more than that.”
And they would have to spend a great deal more.
For on the same day the Donalsonville News reported Cheek’s remarks, it also informed its readers that Wayne Carl Coleman had been indicted on six counts of murder in Dekalb County the previous Tuesday, and that his retrial had been set for the twenty-first of March.
Chapter Thirty
After three weeks of voir dire testimony, a jury was finally struck in Decatur, Georgia, a small town outside Atlanta, for the retrial of Wayne Coleman.
Sitting at the front of the room, Nancy, who had attended Coleman’s first trial, could not believe what she saw as Wayne was led into the room. At forty-one, he appeared old and haggard, his young body now bowed and emaciated, his hair nearly white, all his teeth fallen out. Far from the vigorous twenty-six-year-old man of fifteen years before, Coleman now presented the dismaying picture of a broken, middle-aged man. “He didn’t look like the same man anymore,” Nancy remembered. “He just looked plain pitiful.” Even more alarming, from her perspective, was the fact that the jury would never know the lanky, grinning youth of the first trial. Instead they would come to judgment upon someone else entirely, an emaciated old man who seemed hardly able to hold his head up. Watching him amble to his seat, then ease himself awkwardly into it, his bony arms hanging limply at his sides, she feared that someone on the jury would feel sorry for him, would think that he had suffered enough, perhaps might even work to set him free.
Opening statements were offered on April 25, Charles Ferguson for the prosecution, and court-appointed attorney Thomas West, a staunch southern liberal and active opponent of the death penalty, for the defense.
West had grown up in rural Georgia, and he still retained vivid memories of reading about executions in the local paper. They had always been of some unfortunate character with a name like Willie or Leroy, whom West knew to be either poor or black, or, in most cases, both, and who had been given no legal defense before their executions.
As for Wayne Coleman, West was determined to provide him with the full-scale defense he believed to have been lacking in the first trial, and which would concentrate on demonstrating that there was little evidence that Coleman himself had actually murdered anyone. Beyond that, West hoped to offer a vision of Coleman as a witless follower of Carl Isaacs, and to offer testimony designed to mitigate his criminal responsibility in the murders themselves.
It was a strategy that West began with his opening statement on April 25. “Carl Isaacs is one of the most manipulative persons you will ever meet,” he declared.
As for Billy, he was of a piece with his brother. ‘The state will present Billy Isaacs as a choirboy,” West told the jury, “but he’s exactly like Carl, a killer, a manipulator who cut a deal with the state.”
In contrast to his half-brothers, West told the jury, Wayne Coleman was afflicted with “a personality so passive, so easily manipulated, that he’d do anything for his brothers.” Because of that, he added, “the defense will show that every time Carl assigns Wayne to kill someone, he isn’t able to do it, and Carl has to run in and finish the job.”
After opening statements, Ferguson presented a case for the prosecution that was more or less identical to that which had been offered in 1973, again relying on physical evidence and Billy Isaacs’ eyewitness testimony, along with Coleman’s own confession of the crimes, to establish his guilt.
To these witnesses, neither West nor his cocounsel, Robert Citron-berg, offered much cross-examination, since the defense’s intention had never been to contest the fact that Coleman had been involved in the murders on River Road.
The defense became more aggressive on April 29, however, when it called William Dickenson, a clinical psychiatrist whose specialty was, as he told the jury, the science of psychologically evaluating people charged with crimes.
In this capacity Dickenson had spent approximately twelve hours with Carl Isaacs, during which time he had administered a great many psychological tests.
Under Citronberg’s questioning, Dickenson described the various psychological examinations he had given Carl Isaacs, and the general nature of their results.
They were hardly flattering.
“Carl Isaacs is a very rigid person,” Dickenson told the jury, “not very flexible in dealing with his environment.”
In addition, Dickenson said, Carl had failed to “show the normal range of emotions.” Instead, he had demonstrated a propensity toward numerous “fears, insecurities, strong feelings of inadequacy, lots of tendencies to be compulsive and obsessive.”
Even more alarming, Carl had shown “very, very strong underlying feelings of hostility,” particularly toward authority figures and women.
But Carl could be charming too, Dickenson added, and very manipulative, especially when he needed to “gain something.”
In order to gain the most from his social interactions, Dickenson said, Carl would naturally surround himself with inferiors, “passive, dependent, yielding, inadequate” people like, for example, Wayne Coleman, whose below-average IQ range of 70 to 80 was decidedly inferior to Carl’s of 95 to 110.
Now moving from a psychological evaluation of Carl Isaacs to one of Coleman himself, the defense called Dr. Howard Albrecht, a local clinical psychologist.
Albrecht had first met Coleman on November 24, 1987, then again on December 9, for a total of approximately twelve hours of psychological testing. During this time, he had administered a battery of psychological tests. Since mid-March, he had met with Coleman twice a week for a total of fifteen sessions of two hours each, meetings which he described as “very stressful” for Coleman.
As to the test results, Albrecht went on, they had revealed a decidedly deprived character in both emotional and intellectual terms. Coleman had a low-range intelligence, along with what Albrecht described as a “weak fund of common cultural information.” Coleman, it seemed, had not known who wrote Hamlet.
In addition, Dr. Albrecht said, Coleman’s powers of concentration were extremely poor, as was his social judgment. As a result, he could no more work out simple mathematical problems than he could plan his day. His reading ability was at a fourth-grade level, his mathematical ability a year lower than that.
But if Coleman was no whiz kid, neither was he much of an inspiration as a human being. “I found him to be a depressed individual,” Albrecht told the jury, “probably depressed characterologically, by which I mean, not only as a result o
f his situation of being imprisoned or facing a possible death penalty, but that he had probably always been depressed all his life, with this depression relating to a very pronounced sense of loss and deprivation.”
Wayne was “a very lonely” person, Albrecht added, who had suffered a deprived early life, one “in which there was not very much in terms of attention, affection, and nurturance from any parental figures.”
This had resulted in a personality that was “depressed, possibly suicidal, very suspicious, and paranoid.”
It was also what the doctor called a “borderline personality,” one lacking the structure that might have helped Coleman gain a cohesive sense of himself as a person. Consequently, Coleman had a poor sense of his own identity, which, in turn, made him a “passive individual … a follower,” one particularly susceptible to the suggestions of family members, particularly superior family members, particularly Carl Junior Isaacs.
Still, according to Albrecht, Wayne would not just do anything anyone told him to. For example, testify in his own defense. Coleman could not do that, Albrecht said, because he was a frightened person, terrified of getting on the stand. Forced to do so, he would have what Albrecht described as a “panic attack.”
At the conclusion of Albrecht’s testimony, the defense completed its case, then sat back to await the jury’s verdict.
It was not long in coming.
At 8:10 P.M., after a dinner of take-out hamburgers, the jury sent word that it had reached a verdict. They had found Wayne Carl Coleman guilty of six counts of murder.
The penalty phase began the day after the jury’s verdict with West’s questioning of Dr. Albrecht.
“Can you tell me what effect, if any, a history of deprivation at an early age has on the development of an individual adult personality?” he asked.
“The predominant effect it had was to make Wayne very distrustful,” Albrecht replied. “He lost his natural father before he was born, then lost George Isaacs, a father figure to him, very precipitously.”
Blood Echoes Page 25