Blood Echoes (24 page)

As the weeks passed, though, it became clear that more than the trailer was at stake, as issues involving the disposition of the Alday estate steadily grew more complicated. In the weeks following the murders, a great many legal complexities had begun to emerge. Utterly overshadowed during the first weeks after the murders, these thorny questions of inheritance and the division of property slowly began to entangle Ernestine in legal complexities with which she was hardly equipped to deal.

Unaccustomed to disputes of any kind, and utterly innocent of the law's inflexible position in matters of probate, Ernestine suddenly found herself faced with a legal reality whose consequences she could not possibly have anticipated: the total dissolution of the family farm.

Such a possibility equally staggered her children. Having grown up on the wide expanse of Alday land, having played in and worked its more than five hundred and fifty acres of fields and woods, neither Nancy nor Patricia nor any of the other surviving children could imagine that, technically, it might no longer belong to them. And yet suddenly their ownership was in contention. The stretch of land which had been held in the family name for as long as any of them could remember had fallen into a legal netherworld which could not have been foreseen at the time of the murders.

More than anything, the problem had its origin in the extraordinary closeness of the Alday family ties. As Ned had gotten older, his health had noticeably deteriorated. Worsening arthritis had made it impossible for him to obtain farm financing, since his physical capacity to maintain the farm appeared in doubt. To eliminate the risk that his own poor health might put the farm in jeopardy, and in order to make the Alday lands attractive to various agricultural loans, Ned had deeded the entire farm, all its acreage, structures—everything from barns and sheds to the family home—and various tools and machinery to his sons.

It had never been a transaction intended to remove the Alday estate from Alday control. But the slaughter on River Road could hardly have been anticipated. Nor could the legally defined line of succession which resulted.

In that line, Mary Alday, by birth a Campbell, had died last. For the hour or so she had survived her husband and his family members, she had inherited the entire Alday estate. Thus, at her death it had legally passed not to any member of the Alday family, but to Mary's next of kin, her mother and father, the Campbells of nearby Colquitt.

“As far as the law was concerned, everything belonged to them,” Ernestine Alday explained in 1990. “Everything. Even the house I was living in, the one Ned built and deeded to the boys.”

Ned had known his sons well enough to know that they would never have dispossessed him. He had reared them to be honest, dutiful, trustworthy, and had then demonstrated his trust by deeding them everything he had. Already frail, he could not have imagined the circumstances under which he and all his farming sons would die on the same day.

But they had. And as far as the law was concerned, the farm now belonged entirely to Mary Alday's heirs.

What the Campbells would choose to do with it, and thus with all the worldly goods the Alday family had possessed on the afternoon of May 14, 1973, would take two years to decide.

*     *     *

During the coming months, while negotiations concerning the Alday estate and the construction of its memorial sanctuary at the Spring Creek Baptist Church continued, Carl Isaacs, now housed on Death Row in Reidsville State Prison, began to erect a monument of his own, one to his own lawlessness.

Not long after Carl's conviction, Charles Postell, a staff writer for the
Albany Herald
, wrote Isaacs, requesting an interview on Death Row. Carl agreed to the interview right away, and on May 14, 1974, a year to the day of the murders, Postell published the first of several articles he would write about Isaacs in the coming weeks.

Taken as a whole, the articles, as well as Postell's later book on Carl's life, amounted to a public presentation of himself that perfectly fit Carl's criminal fantasy life, murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults piling up as fast as Carl's fervid imagination could sprout them.

Simply spinning wildly exaggerated tales of his own demonic grandeur was not enough for Carl, however. He wanted to sell himself as the living embodiment of pure, unrepentant evil by laughing at his victims, offering them nothing less than the full measure of his scorn. It was a task he set about with enormous relish.

Thus, in the first of Postell's articles, Carl claimed that on the anniversary of the Alday murders, he intended to send a note to Wayne Coleman, whose own residence was just down the Death Row catwalk in Cell 8, D-4, wishing him a happy anniversary, and telling him to “Pop the champagne.”

In the interview, Carl continued to claim that he'd had nothing to do with the actual murders, but that he knew who was involved. “When I die in the electric chair,” he told Postell, “my brother Billy will come forward and tell the truth.”

In the same interview, Carl threatened Billy in no uncertain terms. “Billy's address is unknown to me,” he said, “but he'll never live to hit the streets again. This is a big family, and he shouldn't have done what he did.”

As to the killings, Isaacs declared that he “didn't think” about them, although he did give a certain grudging respect to Mary Alday. “Mary was the only one that put up a fight,” he told Postell, before adding disdainfully, “the rest just lay down and got shot.”

His own execution was more on his mind, however, and he expected it to come relatively soon. Even so, it was not an eventuality he dreaded, since prison life was not to his liking. “You don't know the hell they've put me through,” he said.

As to what he intended to do while Ernestine was conducting an anniversary commemorative service for the people he had murdered, Carl told Postell that at about that time, he would probably be watching
Gomer Pyle
, his favorite television program.

On the evening of May 14, 1974, Ernestine Alday was not watching
Gomer Pyle.
Instead, she was standing under the large trees whose branches swayed over the graves of her kindred, her mind not locked in criminal fantasies, but on the love she had felt for Ned, Aubrey, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, and Mary Alday.

By then, the black marble headstone had been laid in the small cemetery of the Spring Creek Baptist Church. Impressive in its modesty and muted reverence, it read only “ALDAY FAMILY.” Within the large rectangle of black stone that swept out from the central monument, the six slain Aldays lay buried beneath plain marble slabs.

Standing very still, her white hair rocked by the warm summer wind, Ernestine spoke to the few people who had gathered on the day the stones were laid. “They lived together and joined the church together and died together,” she said as her eyes drifted over the six names that had been inscribed in the individual foot stones. “I don't know why this happened. I just have to say it was God's will.” She heaved her shoulders gently, unable to say more, her eyes now trained on the simple inscription she had selected several months before to adorn their graves: “They steer'd the course to the same quiet shore, not parted long, and now to part no more.”

At the conclusion of the ceremony, a few hymns were sung in the old Spring Creek sanctuary, and a prayer was offered for the souls of the dead and the grace of the living.

“It was very quiet and dignified,” Nancy remembered. “I think my Daddy would have liked it.”

Three weeks later, at 8:00
P.M.
on June 7, a gospel singing program was held at the local high school to benefit the Alday memorial fund in its effort to complete the sanctuary. Tickets were sold at two dollars each, and those who came were treated to a lively program of gospel singing from such groups as the Hymn Masters of Donalsonville, the Tone Masters of Bainbridge, and the Sunny South Singers of Atlanta.

But that was not all. Later in the evening a group of young men also gave an exhibition. The group, known as Karate for Christ, performed karate exhibitions and gave religious testimony.

During the next few weeks, donations of additional monies for the sanctuary continued, primarily from residents of Seminole County, a sacrifice that served as a tribute to the standing of the Aldays in that community since, as the
Donalsonville News
reported in June 1974, under present conditions, the average young man in Seminole County could expect to earn close to $336,000 in the next forty-five years or so, an earning capacity of less than $7,500 per year.

Still, despite the marginal life that surrounded it, the new sanctuary was completed on November 4,1974. Dedicated to “The Glory of God in Memory of the Alday Family,” its initial construction costs had been borne entirely by the Alday Fund.

With this final act of commemoration, the people of Seminole County paid their last formal respects to Ned, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, Aubrey, and Mary Alday. From that point on, they would steadily recede from the mind even of their own community. That Ned had whiled away the long winter days by telling tall tales at Johnson's Grocery Store; that Jerry had been so fastidious in his dress he'd often taken apart his store-bought clothes and resewed them to perfection; that Jimmy had rushed to his prized
World Book
to get the facts in any family dispute; that Aubrey had delighted in the presence of his brother's children, paying them pennies for their kisses; that Shuggie had drawn his mother beneath his arm on the last day of his life to propose a long-awaited fishing trip; that Mary had delighted in the brightly colored phlox that sprang up in such profusion the last month of her life; all of this would be lost as their individual faces melded together during the following years, becoming featureless and void, as if themselves pressed flat beneath the steadily accumulating weight of those court transcripts and appeals in which they now existed only as words upon a page, their lives remembered solely in the protracted legal consequences that clung so tenaciously to their deaths.

Chapter Twenty-three

A
t the same time that the faces of Ned, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, Aubrey, and Mary Alday were dissolving, Carl Isaacs' profile was emerging with increasing force and fullness.

As starved for attention as ever, and increasingly intoxicated by his own infamy, Carl began a concerted campaign to keep himself prominently in the public eye.

The medium through which he spoke continued to be Charles Postell. Spurred on by Carl's performance at their first interview, Postell suggested others, and Carl, flattered by such attention, was more than willing to comply.

Thus, over a period of many weeks, Postell periodically visited Carl in Reidsville, smuggling him miniature bottles of alcohol, a tactic that was wildly successful in loosening his tongue.

Fueled by drink, Carl quickly shed the repentant, born-again Christian pose he was simultaneously using on other outside contacts, and unleashed an unprecedented attack upon the Alday family.

In an article published in the
Albany Herald
on January 16, Carl told Postell that he'd like “to get out and kill more of” the Aldays, since they represented “the type of society I don't like.” The Aldays “loved the church so damn much,” Carl blustered, that “they should have been killed and buried right in the church.” His reason for hating the Aldays played havoc with the Protestant ethic. “Working people don't do a damn thing for me,” he said.

When it came to himself, however, Carl's heart overflowed with sympathy. He declared prison an affront to his humanity, voicing what was surely one of the most unusual and alarming complaints ever made about incarceration. The problem with being locked up, he said, was that it prevented him from being out in the world “so I can do something to ease this hate.”

Although Carl remained imprecise as to what “this hate” was, he was happy to reveal his preferred method of easing it. “When I kill,” he told Postell with the unflinching directness of a full-blown psychopath, “I feel a release.”

While Carl bemoaned the disadvantages of incarceration, he clearly enjoyed the criminal fame that accompanied it. “You take Dillinger,” he said alarmingly. “He terrorized people all over. If they got in his way, he killed them. And they made a damn movie about him.”

In another article, published on January 16, 1975, Carl vented his spleen once again. This time his target was not just the Aldays, but the whole state of Georgia. He'd been in Georgia so long he was “turning into a hick.” These hicks, he added, had been his downfall, and his hatred for them raged on undiminished. “That's why I can't feel sorry for the people I killed down here,” he said.

These remarks returned his perseverating mind to the six people he'd murdered on River Road.

It was their religiosity which most irritated him. “They should have died in church,” he howled. “I just wished I could have killed them there.”

On January 15, 1975, Carl spoke again, this time claiming that his personal ambition had been to murder one thousand people. His second life's goal, he added, was to be a practicing attorney, a notion he quickly dismissed. “No, no,” he said regretfully, his mind connecting suddenly to the real world, “the bar would never accept me.”

Carl also took the time to do a somewhat disjointed psychological analysis of himself, first declaring that homosexuality was the root of his personality disorder, then revising the first analysis with a second one somewhat more in tune with his own hazy understanding of Freudianism. In his second swing at self-knowledge, Carl stated that it was not homosexuality, but the love-hate feelings he had for his mother that had derailed his character. “Did I tell you, we stopped by the side of the road for her to go to the bathroom right in front of us,” he told Postell, as if aghast at his mother's lack of modesty. This immodesty had been grounds for murdering her, Carl went on, and so on that very occasion, he and his brother had tried to run her down. She'd kept dodging the car, however, her agility making it “very hard to kill her.”