Blood Echoes: The Infamous Alday Mass Murder and Its Aftermath

by Thomas H. Cook

  “We’d stop at some place where they’d picked up a vibration,” Good remembered, “and either Beulah or Frantz would get out and start to work.”

  Frantz worked alone, with no equipment, simply stretching his two arms out in midair then letting them drift left or right until they began to quiver slightly, then more violently, then so fiercely that his whole body would shake convulsively. When the shaking reached its point of greatest violence, Frantz would suddenly grow rigid, point in a particular direction, then declare that Miller’s body lay in the exact direction his outstretched arms indicated.

  Unlike her psychic coworker, however, Beulah Johnson came to the search armed with the latest in psychic technology, two metal clothes hangers which had been bent into L-shapes. While Good and Frantz stood by, Johnson would hold each hanger at its shorter end while keeping Miller’s picture folded in one of her hands. With arms outstretched, she would then lift the hangers into the air and wait.

  What happened next astonished even the dubious Good. Within seconds, one of the hangers would begin to move, turning in a complete 360-degree circle before slowly drifting toward the other. When the two crossed, Beulah would nod confidently, as if she’d just sighted her prey between the cross-hairs of a rifle scope.

  It was a procedure Johnson tried again and again over a period of three days, until finally, exasperated, Good decided to try it himself.

  “If this thing whips around in my hand,” he told Johnson as he drew the two hangers from her hand, “I’ll jump right out of my boots.”

  Johnson stared at him solemnly. “You must believe,” she said.

  Good immediately repeated the movements he’d by then seen Johnson go through dozens of time. The response was immediate. “The end of one hanger did that same weird rotation,” Good remembered, “rotating in midair without me doing a thing to turn it. Then it drifted over and crossed the other hanger just as it had done when Beulah held it.”

  “You have the power,” Johnson cried.

  Good shook his head determinedly. “These hangers may turn in my hands,” he told her, “but they sure don’t tell me anything.” Then he returned the oddly quivering hangers to Beulah Johnson’s care, abandoning all hope for an extrasensory solution to the fate of Richard Miller, and now utterly dependent upon those more difficult and tedious efforts which, though less intriguing, it seemed to him, still had their feet planted firmly on the ground.

  That less dramatic solution first presented itself on the morning of May 18 when West Virginia State Trooper Frank Thomas released a volley of automatic rifle fire over the heads of Carl and Billy Isaacs, Wayne Coleman, and George Dungee.

  Within hours of their arrest, Good had made contact with the Georgia authorities, who had by then returned their prisoners to the state. Now convinced that Richard Miller was dead, Good’s efforts were dedicated to finding his body as the first step in the murder investigation that was sure to follow.

  After several hours of negotiation, Wayne Coleman agreed to return to Pennsylvania in an effort to recover Miller’s body.

  Cocky and nonchalant, Coleman arrived by plane in Hagarstown, Maryland, shortly after his arraignment on May 24. Already given a guarantee that nothing he said or did during his time in Pennsylvania could be used against him, Coleman made no effort to conceal his involvement in the murder, even laughingly telling officials that he’d pulled the trigger himself because he “didn’t want the others to have all the fun.”

  Coleman was cooperative and forthcoming regarding the details of Richard Miller’s death, but he was less helpful when it came to locating his body. For nearly three days, Good, along with several heavily armed officers, escorted Coleman from place to place along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. Repeatedly, Coleman claimed to recognize geographical and commercial landmarks, highways, side roads, and meandering streams in a random, discursive order that tied accompanying officials in knots, drew them back and forth in a series of zigzag patterns, and finally convinced them that Coleman had no idea where he had been either directly before or at the time of Richard Miller’s murder.

  “Wayne Coleman absolutely did not know where he was at any given time,” Good remembered. “At one point he was even recognizing little roads around Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, a little town that was completely in the opposite direction from where he’d gone after taking Richard Miller.”

  Fed up after two days of following one wild-goose chase after another, Good finally faced the disappointing fact that in all likelihood Coleman would not have been able to render any real assistance in finding Miller’s body even if he had wanted to. Consequently, he reluctantly returned Coleman to Georgia custody.

  It was only after Coleman’s failure to locate Miller’s body that authorities turned their attention to the remaining Alday defendants, and to their surprise found Carl Isaacs willing to come to their assistance.

  Once in Pennsylvania, Carl presented a demeanor that was less flippant than that of his half-brother, though no less devoid of any sign of remorse.

  In his knowledge of the area, Carl proved himself far superior to Coleman. Where Coleman’s sense of place had appeared as little more than a rolling fog of disconnected impressions, Carl’s gave every indication of being as thorough as it was precise. After being taken to where Lawrence Schooley’s truck had been abandoned, he directed officers unerringly westward through a tangle of small towns and a broad swath of nondescript landscape that had utterly baffled Coleman only a short time before.

  “There was not one tiny detail of that area he didn’t remember,” Good recalled years later. “And once, he told us that they’d all come to a T-shaped intersection, and that they’d been traveling so fast that they’d skidded across it into a parking lot. Well, when we got to that intersection, we drifted on across it into that parking lot, and as we were driving, we glanced over, and there they were, still on the pavement, the skid marks they’d left nearly six weeks before.”

  At that moment, Larry Good knew that finally, after so much work and so many false leads and blind alleys, he was about to find the body of Richard Wayne Miller.

  However, about forty miles southwest of McConnellsburg, at Harry’s Truck Stop in Pratt, Maryland, Carl momentarily appeared to lose his bearings. To jog his memory, Pennsylvania authorities summoned Maryland State Police Officer John McPharland, a man well known for his thorough command of the region’s many obscure roads.

  Standing six feet eight inches tall and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, McPharland practically filled the back seat of the car as he pulled himself in beside Carl Isaacs.

  “He was very calm,” McPharland remembered, “very matter-of-fact when he talked to me.”

  For a few minutes, Isaacs described in general terms the route he thought he had taken from Harry’s Truck Stop. As he listened, McPharland traced the route in his mind, moving down U.S. 40, following Isaacs’ narrative in his head, until he was sure he knew the area Isaacs had described.

  Still in the back seat with Isaacs, McPharland continued to listen as the car headed west along Route 40 toward the small town of Flintstone, Maryland. At times, Isaacs would grow silent, then suddenly indicate some local landmark that he said he’d passed along the route that had taken Richard Miller to his death.

  Once near Flintstone, Isaacs began to recognize the area in every detail. He directed McPharland to turn left onto Williams Road where, he said, he’d encountered a police car and made a quick dash up a small incline that McPharland recognized as Wallizer Hill.

  “Isaacs said they’d waited on the hill for the car to pass,” McPharland recalled, “then headed back down to Route 40 again, turned right, and driven on across Polish Mountain.”

  Once beyond the mountain, Isaacs suddenly recognized another road where, he said, he’d turned left and headed south for a distance of four or five miles.

  The road was Murley Branch Road, and not far beyond the little village of Twiggtown, Isaacs began to tense slightly as the patrol car
neared a second road, one that turned off to the left and was known locally as Brice Hollow.

  “Turn here,” Isaacs said.

  About a half mile up Brice Hollow, Isaacs recognized an old logging road and turned to McPharland. “We went up that way,” he said. For the next few minutes, Isaacs described the route he had taken up the road, pointing out various landmarks by which officers would be able to locate Miller’s body.

  “Isaacs didn’t want to go up there with us,” McPharland remembered, “but he said that up the logging road we’d come to a trash dump, and that we should go off to the left at that point, and that we would find Richard Miller’s body not far away.”

  McPharland, Good, and several other officers proceeded up the logging road. A few minutes later they spotted the unsightly, debris-strewn dumping area Isaacs had described, then turned left onto a trail that led jaggedly through the brush. They’d only gone down it for a few yards before the long search for Richard Miller came abruptly to an end.

  “He was lying facedown so I couldn’t see his face,” Good remembered, “but his father had told me he wore dingo boots, and I could see them very clearly in the grass even before I got close to the body, so I knew that it was Richard.”

  Once Miller’s body had been located, investigators turned to the questions of how and why he had been murdered. Here, once again, Carl Isaacs was more than willing to oblige them. It was a question of getting away, he told investigators matter-of-factly, of making sure that there would be no witnesses. From the moment Richard Miller had approached them, Isaacs said, he was a dead man.

  The only question had been where the murder should be carried out and which of the four would be the one to do it. The obscure logging road had provided the answer as to location, Isaacs said, but not as to who would do the killing. Thus, with Richard Miller on his knees before them, they had openly discussed who would kill him, arguing back and forth for several agonizing minutes while Miller pleaded for his life. “That was the worst part of it for me,” Maryland District Attorney Investigator Bill Baker recalled, “just thinking about Richard’s last few minutes. No one should have to die like that.”

  Indeed not, according to Ronnie Angel, who’d accompanied both Coleman and Isaacs to Pennsylvania, and had been at Good and McPharland’s side when the body was discovered. “It was really bad, the way he looked,” he said years later, “and the way they’d just laid him down and shot him, a young boy, only nineteen years old. I was determined that somebody was going to pay for killing him, no matter what happened to the Isaacs brothers and Coleman and Dungee in Georgia.”

  By then the fate of the Alday defendants was in the hands of the courts, and Angel knew that those who would eventually prosecute them would want the strongest imaginable case. The problem was that although the physical evidence was steadily accumulating, there was, as yet, no entirely credible witness to the murders other than the four men who had committed them, men whose statements, to the extent that they had given them, were full of conflicts and contradictions. Because of that, Angel suspected that a deal of some kind would have to be struck with one of the four defendants if the truth were ever going to be known about what happened inside the trailer on River Road or in the isolated woods six miles away.

  The question was, which one?

  Chapter Seventeen

  The ultimate decision as to “which one” fell to Peter Zack Geer, the fifty-three-year-old former state attorney general who was widely reported to have been hired by the Aldays as their special prosecutor in the case. In fact Geer had never been hired, but had telephoned Ernestine and volunteered his services in the case shortly after the capture in West Virginia.

  At the time of the murders, Geer had known Ned, Bud, and other of the Alday men for several years. He had fished with them on Lake Seminole, and occasionally been a guest in their homes. He had found Ned a happy, joyful man, and had enjoyed spending time with him. As to the murdered sons, they’d struck Geer as perfect representatives of the family life they’d enjoyed, modest, upright, and good-humored. Prosecuting the men who’d murdered them was something he could hardly have been more eager to carry out.

  Ernestine accepted Geer’s services with the same deference with which she’d accepted the aid of other, less notable, family friends. More important, however, was her need to avoid the agony of remembrance. Often breaking down in tears, her long self-control at times crumbling without warning, she wanted to distance herself from the trials. She knew what the testimony would be like, how graphic it would have to be, and she did not want to hear it. She had already decided that she could not bear to attend the trials. Turning the case over to Geer provided another way of pulling back from the trailer on River Road, of managing not to cross its tragic threshold.

  With Geer’s appointment, the prosecutorial process shifted into the fast lane of statewide notoriety. At six feet six inches and 280 pounds, Geer would have been an imposing figure almost anywhere, but within the spare reaches of Donalsonville and its environs, his was a starry presence indeed. Long one of Georgia’s best-known and most colorful political personalities, Geer was a media bonanza, a natural for its incessantly shifting spotlight.

  Nor was Geer unaware of the extreme public interest in the case. Without doubt, these trials would be the most famous in the history of the state. They would be accompanied by a media blitz.

  But if the Alday case was ripe for publicity, it was also fraught with dangers. Having taken on the prosecution of the Alday defendants, the pressure to bring those prosecutions to an acceptable conclusion—one the public had already defined as including convictions and death sentences—was enormous. To fail in either case was unacceptable.

  What Geer wanted, of course, was an airtight case, one in which every element necessary for an entirely successful prosecution was in place. Highly intelligent and fully experienced, Geer knew exactly what those elements were. He also knew that from the very beginning of his prosecutorial efforts, he had all of them but one.

  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.