Blood Echoes: The Infamous Alday Mass Murder and Its Aftermath

by Thomas H. Cook

  Farrington’s brief cross-examination disputed none of the facts of Bud’s testimony, and succeeded only in having him state the obvious fact that although he’d seen the dead bodies in the trailer, he had not seen Carl Isaacs in the vicinity of the trailer at any time.

  Next, Geer called Sheriff White, who took the jury back to the trailer and retraced his journey through it, along with the subsequent arrival of other law enforcement officials, culminating in the discovery of Mary Alday’s body some six miles from the trailer.

  Jerry Godby took the stand after White, providing the first eyewitness testimony that could place Isaacs in the vicinity of the trailer at the time of the murders. Under Geer’s direct examination, Godby stated that he’d been working in front of Jewell Easom’s house when he’d seen a green Chevrolet Super Sport pass by. He’d been high in the air, at the time, working on a “spray outfit” that was hooked to the back of a tractor when the car had passed at a distance of between twenty-five and thirty-five feet. The tractor had not been moving, he said, and he’d been sitting on the lid of the tank, from which vantage point he’d seen the car pass at a speed he estimated at approximately forty to forty-five miles per hour.

  He’d also seen the driver of the car, he told the jury. It was a young white man in a dark shirt with long, shoulder-length hair, and he’d nodded to him as he passed. Another man had sat in the passenger seat, while other men had followed behind in a second car, a blue and white Chevrolet Impala.

  In a final, crucial detail, Godby said that the driver of the Super Sport had waved to him as he passed so that his attention had been drawn to the driver sufficiently for him to take a careful look at his face. Then he positively identified Carl Isaacs as the man behind the wheel.

  In his cross-examination, Hill labored to establish that Godby had been wearing a cap at the time, and that it might have obscured his vision, a speculation Geer laughed at in his immediate redirect.

  “Can you see pretty good when you’re hunting with that cap on?” Geer asked.

  Godby smiled. “Better than I can shoot,” he said, then leaned back and waited as laughter rippled through the crowd of spectators in the room.

  In the afternoon session, the pace continued with the same breathless rapidity Geer had established during the morning session. “There was practically no cross-examination,” Geer recalled, “because there really wasn’t anything to cross-examine about, since the evidence itself was so absolutely overwhelming.”

  Overwhelming or not, it still had to be presented, and during the afternoon session, Geer began to establish it conclusively.

  Max Trawick described the discovery of Mary Alday’s body, while later, Joyce Hinds, one of Mary’s coworkers at the Department of Family and Children Services, identified the Timex watch with the Roman numerals on its face that she’d seen Mary wearing when she’d left work on the afternoon of her death. Barbara Alday, Shuggie’s wife, followed Hinds to the stand and also identified Mary’s watch, along with her husband’s wallet, one of the many items that had been recovered in the woods of the Boyd Cutoff in Livingston, Alabama.

  Later in the afternoon, Ronnie Angel returned to Donalsonville to testify about his part in the investigation, particularly as to the various weapons he had either recovered himself or received from other investigators. The inventory was impressive: a Smith and Wesson .32-caliber revolver, a High Standard .22-caliber revolver, a .380-caliber automatic pistol, a Stevens model 8722-caliber semiautomatic rifle, a Remington mode 572 slide-action 22-caliber rifle, and a Marlin .22-caliber automatic rifle.

  He had brought most of these weapons back to Georgia after finding them in West Virginia, Angel told Geer in the final moments of his testimony.

  “Did you bring any people back to Georgia with you?” Geer asked.

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “Who did you bring back?”

  “I brought back Billy Carroll Isaacs,” Angel said, his eyes drifting over to where Nancy and Patricia Alday sat watching him from across the courtroom. “I brought back George Elder Dungee.” He could see their eyes trained on him silently and respectfully. “I brought back Wayne Carl Colemen.” More than respect, a terrible and wondrous gratitude. “I brought back Carl Junior Isaacs.”

  “Do you see Carl Isaacs in the courtroom?”

  Angel returned his attention to Geer. “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Would you point him out for the record?”

  Angel directed his gaze to Isaacs. “He’s the man sitting there with the long brown hair and dark blue shirt,” he said, then watched as Isaacs returned a cold, hard stare.

  With his eighth witness, Geer began to introduce the first of the forensic evidence he would put forward for the prosecution, though in this first instance, dwelling on it very briefly.

  Under his direct examination, Dr. Larry Howard discussed the autopsies, going into the necessary technical detail as to the positions of the wounds as well as the calibers of the various weapons used to inflict them. Collectively, Howard said, the Aldays had been shot a total of fourteen times with no fewer than four different weapons. Of the six, Ned had been fired upon the most, six times with three different weapons, in a barrage that had nearly pulverized the contents of his skull.

  Sitting in the courtroom, it was hard for Patricia to understand why her father had been subjected to such a horrendous hail of gunfire. “Then the next day Billy Isaacs testified about how Daddy died,” she would say years later, “and I thought, ‘Yes, that was my daddy, that was what they’d had to have done to him.’”

  On the following morning, Geer opened the second day of his prosecution by calling Nick Campbell to the stand.

  Though only twenty-five years old, Campbell had been working in fingerprint identification for nearly seven years, and had worked directly under Ronnie Angel during the investigation of the murders.

  On May 15, he had arrived in Donalsonville and gone directly to the trailer on River Road.

  “Did you lift any fingerprints from the interior of that trailer?” Geer asked.

  “Yes, sir, I did,” Campbell said. “From several locations from the front bedroom to the rear bedroom.”

  In total, he told Geer, he had lifted twenty latent fingerprints from the trailer’s interior. Of the twenty prints, most had proven negative with regard to the four Alday defendants.

  Most, but not all.

  In the south bedroom, he’d found on a small cabinet drawer a print that he identified as the left thumb of Carl Isaacs. He’d also found a fingerprint on a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer can, the very one that had so horrified Bud Alday five months before as he’d glimpsed its eerie aluminum sheen in the shadowy light of Jerry Alday’s trailer. It was the left thumb of Wayne Coleman. Another beer can had borne the right thumbprint of George Dungee.

  “All right, sir,” Geer said, and with no follow-up questions, Campbell proceeded to his next fingerprint findings: the right little finger of Billy Isaacs on a Kodak camera box found in the north bedroom of the Alday trailer, the right middle finger of Carl Isaacs lifted from the inside rearview mirror of the Chevelle found in the woods near Mary Alday’s body, along with two others of Isaacs’ thumb taken from the chrome strip between the left door and vent windows.

  But that was not all.

  During his search of the floorboard of the abandoned Super Sport, Campbell testified that he had found a road map entitled “All About U.S. 15 and 17,” a reference work which, as it turned out, Carl Isaacs had fingered to the bone, in the process leaving fully identifiable impressions of his left index, left middle, and left ring fingers.

  And there was more, Campbell went on. On May 17 he had processed Mary Alday’s blue and white Chevrolet Impala and found the left thumbprint of Carl Isaacs on wood-grain paneling inside the car’s left door.

  “All right,” Geer said. “Did you recover any other items in Alabama near the Mary Alday car?”

  “Yes, sir,” Campbell answered, then listed a damning assortment found i
nside an old black suitcase the Alday defendants had discarded in their flight from Mary Alday’s car: Shuggie’s driver’s license application, fishing license, hunting license, dental appointment cards, and his wife, Barbara’s, fishing license.

  “Now where did you find these items?” Geer asked.

  “In a wooded area at the location of the Alday automobile in Alabama.”

  From a few feet away, Nancy listened as Campbell described the various personal articles he’d found in the woods of Sumter County. In her mind she could see her brother’s old black suitcase as it must have appeared to Campbell, battered and discarded, empty except for the things he’d found inside, items that were meaningless to him except as evidence, but which to her were powerfully evocative of the life her father, uncle, and brothers had lived, their long days of fishing on the lake or stalking through its adjoining woods in search of quail or rabbits. “You began to see what you were going to miss,” she recalled in 1990. “Not just the people, but all the things they did and enjoyed. Not just their lives, you might say, physically, but how much they enjoyed being alive, all the things they’d liked to do, but wouldn’t be able to ever do again.”

  Chapter Nienteen

  On the third day of the trial, Geer presented the preponderance of his physical evidence in the form of Kelly Fite, the chief criminalist for the Georgia Crime Lab.

  Geer knew that Fite’s testimony would be protracted and that certain aspects would inevitably be tedious, but he hoped that its sheer volume and conclusiveness would set the stage for the far more dramatic testimony of Billy Isaacs which he’d already scheduled to follow Fite’s.

  As to Fite’s testimony, Geer proceeded through it as rapidly as possible, building cumulatively at each stage of his presentation. He began his discussion with the question of guns.

  Fite testified that he had fired and compared some three or four thousand guns, among them State’s Exhibit 33, a .32-caliber pistol with the serial number 67997 that had been given to him by GBI agents involved in the investigation of the Alday murders.

  “All right, sir,” Geer said. “Now I ask you whether or not on May 15 you were delivered any bullets that had been extracted from the bodies of the Alday family.”

  “Yes, sir, I was,” Fite said. “I was handed three .32-caliber bullets at the Evans Funeral Home, and extracted two others, myself.”

  “Did you make any test firing with the weapon you have identified with these bullets?”

  “Yes, sir. I did.”

  “What were your findings?”

  “I found the test bullet from the .32-caliber revolver to be identical with the three .32-caliber bullets taken from the head of Ned Alday.”

  Geer then showed Fite State’s Exhibit 35, a .22-caliber revolver, serial number 1967864.

  “And on the 15th of May, 1973, you received several .22-caliber bullets from Dr. Larry Howard at the Evans Funeral Home?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, did you make some test firing with this .22-caliber pistol?”

  “Yes, sir, I did test fire this gun, and compared my test bullets with the .22-caliber bullets Dr. Howard extracted from the head of Jerry Alday.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “I found that my test bullets and the evidence bullets were identical with respect to land and groove structures,” Fite answered.

  The bullets had been much too mutilated during their destructive passage through Alday’s skull for Fite to be certain that they had unquestionably been fired from the .22 that had been recovered in the hills of West Virginia.

  “Were you handed any other .22-caliber bullets by Dr. Howard on May 15?” Geer asked.

  “Yes, sir, I was,” Fite replied. “I was handed one at the Alday house trailer.”

  “Where did this bullet come from?”

  “Underneath the head of Jerry Alday.”

  “Was this bullet in a better condition than the other .22-caliber bullets you testified about?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, have you made any test comparison with that bullet and that .22-caliber pistol, State’s Exhibit 35?”

  “I found that this bullet is identical with test bullets fired from that Exhibit.”

  Geer then handed Fite yet another pistol, this time a Husqvarna .380 automatic, commonly known as a nine-millimeter short, with the serial number 53219. Fite identified the weapon, then waited for the inevitable question.

  “Now, were you handed any .380 bullets from Seminole County on May 15, 1973?”

  “Yes, sir, I was. It came from a towel which was wrapped around the head of Shuggie Alday.”

  “Have you compared that bullet with the test firing from the automatic weapon we have under consideration?”

  “Yes, sir,” Fite answered. “I found that the bullet from the towel was identical with respect to land and groove structure and gross and microscopic similarities.”

  In other words, according to Fite, the bullet that had slammed through Shuggie Alday’s skull had been fired by the same nine-millimeter short that had been recovered in West Virginia by Frank Thomas the day of Isaacs’ capture.

  From ballistic evidence, Geer then moved on to evidence that linked Mary Alday’s Impala with Richard Miller’s Chevrolet Super Sport, the car the Maryland escapees had stolen in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, before driving south to Florida.

  According to Fite, GBI agents had delivered a mysteriously battered portion of the hood of the Impala on June 5, and asked if its injuries could be matched with an equally mysterious injury that had been suffered by the taillight assembly of the Super Sport, a portion of which they had delivered to him two weeks earlier.

  “The agents requested that I examine these scratch marks,” Fite told the jury, “and, if possible, determine if the taillight of the Super Sport had been in contact with the hood of the Impala.”

  “Did you make such an examination?” Geer asked.

  Yes, Fite answered, he had. Over the next several days, as he explained to the jury, he had gone through several stages of his own scientific investigation, first cutting the tool marks out of the hood of Mary Alday’s car, a procedure that reduced the cumbersome assembly to a small rectangle of only a few square inches. Under a comparison microscope, Fite was able to see numerous microscopic striations within the dented area. Along these striations, Fite could see flecks of green paint. The same process applied to the taillight assembly of the Super Sport revealed the presence of blue paint. A comparison of this paint, Fite said, with samples taken from Mary Alday’s car revealed that they were identical with respect to color, texture, and other less obvious properties. Repeating the process on the green paint taken from the Alday car and the Super Sport, Fite found a similar identity. In addition, the striations on the two cars were identical.

  The obvious conclusion was that the two cars had been in close and violent contact, a circumstance, as Geer well knew, that Billy Isaacs would soon be able to explain.

  On the afternoon of January 4, the normally peaceful streets around the courthouse square in Donalsonville bustled with excitement and anticipation. Within a few minutes, the somewhat formal and tedious testimony in the trial of Carl Isaacs would be over. From then on, there would be no more talk of ballistics, test firings, and microscopic comparisons. The pistols before the community’s consideration would no longer be fired into tanks of water, but into the heads and backs of six of their own. There would be no more discussion of postmortems. Now the talk would deal with the murder of living human beings rather than the minute examination of their lifeless flesh, and for the first time, the full story of what had happened along River Road between 4:00 and 6:00 P.M. on May 14, 1973, would be known. Finally, after many months of speculation, the community would be allowed to hear in all its dreadful detail precisely how, why, and with what level of cruelty Ned, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, Aubrey, and Mary Alday had lost their lives. Up until then, they had heard only bits and pieces of the story; now th
ey would receive a firsthand, eyewitness account of the six murders with which they had been preoccupied for nearly seven months.

  “You could really feel the tension in the air the day Billy Isaacs took the stand,” Bo McLeod would later say of that fateful afternoon. “Everybody knew that he was the one person in that courtroom, besides Carl, of course, who’d actually seen everything that happened in the trailer, and then in the woods a few miles down the road.”

  Nor was the drama centered around him lost on Billy Isaacs. “I knew they were all waiting to hear what I would say about Carl and the Aldays,” he remembered in July of 1990, “but the only thing I can think of now is what a scared little kid I must have been the day I took the stand in front of all those people.”

  Some of those people were seated only a few short yards from the witness stand, their eyes leveled silently upon him as he took his seat in the witness stand. Nancy and Patricia were there, along with Norman, their only surviving brother, and Fay, their youngest sister, all of them even more apprehensive on this third day of testimony than they had been at the first day of the trial. For the testimony of Billy Isaacs would necessarily be the most difficult to bear, and all the Alday children found themselves drawing together to receive it, dreading every word, but absolutely determined to hear it.

  From the beginning, Ernestine had absented herself from the proceedings. But for her children, attendance at the trial had been thought of as a solemn duty, a final act of love and devotion to their slaughtered kin, and as a way of making it clear that the men and woman who had been shot to death on May 14 had been real human beings. “They weren’t just bodies bullets had gone through,” Nancy later said. “They were not just little outlines on a chart, and we wanted everybody to remember, especially the murderers, that other people had loved the people they killed and would never let them be forgotten.”