Blood Echoes (10 page)

Stephens had done the right thing in not ordering his own men to process the car, and Angel was glad of it. “We're on our way,” he assured him, “we'll be there as soon as we can. Just keep the whole area secure.”

“Nobody'll get near it,” Stephens assured him.

Angel immediately dispatched Agent Jim Duff in a crop-duster biplane to Livingston to secure the Impala, while he, Waters, and several Crime Lab officials followed by car. Officers of the Alabama State Patrol met them at the Alabama state line and escorted them for nearly four hours as they moved the rest of the way across the state to Livingston.

“It was like a whirlwind from then on,” Angel remembered. “Things breaking almost every second. There was no time to get tired, no time to come up with a theory or a plan of action, no time to do anything, but just stay on top of all that was going on.”

Several hours before the discovery of Mary Alday's car, as soon as it had gotten dark enough to move out of the woods surrounding the Boyd Cutoff, Carl had finally decided to make a move, and had roused Wayne, Billy, and George from the idleness that had overtaken them for the past few hours. Far in the distance, they could see the lights of Livingston flickering brightly through the night, and it was not hard to surmise that somewhere along its streets there might be a car too carelessly surveilled. It had already been determined that strolling through a quiet southern town with an arsenal of weapons might draw a certain amount of unwelcome attention, so most of their more obtrusive weapons, particularly their assortment of rifles and shotguns, had already been jettisoned at the Boyd Cutoff, while several of the remaining ones were abandoned in the hills above Livingston.

Traveling light, now armed only with those few weapons that could be nestled beneath their jackets, Carl led his ragtag army out of the woods and down into the dark, nearly empty village. With the Impala now abandoned, his first order of business was to find another form of transportation. For even without a weaving array of black rifle barrels, they would look suspicious enough, as Carl well knew, three white men and one black, all of them hunched and unwashed, straggling along narrow village streets or winding country roads. Under such conditions, a car was their only hope.

As he walked, Carl kept his eyes on the alert for an easy mark, a car parked in an empty parking lot or sitting alone on a quiet street.

To his delight, he found one within a few minutes. Turning a corner onto one of the residential blocks directly off the downtown streets, Carl saw something glint in the silvery street lamp that illuminated the area. It was a set of keys dangling innocently from the ignition of a two-toned Chevrolet Caprice. His eyes shot over to Wayne, back to the keys, and back to Wayne again. Then the two men smiled at each other as George, dazed as usual, and Billy, now beginning to crumble, still staggered by the violence he had witnessed at the Alday trailer, straggled up behind.

It was nearly dawn on the morning of May 17 when Georgia officials began processing the scene in Livingston, Alabama. While the lab crew powdered Mary Alday's deserted Impala, trying to pick up latent fingerprints, Angel and Waters searched the surrounding area for any indication as to where the men had gone after abandoning it.

Not far from the car, on a gently sloping downgrade, they saw a piece of cloth hanging from a rickety barbed wire fence. They headed down the slope and into the woods where they found several items of clothing scattered in the brush. One of them caught their attention instantly. It was a high school jacket shaped like the varsity jackets Angel remembered from his own days in high school. On the front, it bore the insignia of the Future Farmers of America, along with the letters FFA. It was the sort of jacket worn in rural areas throughout the United States, but as he turned it around, Angel saw that this jacket had come from a particular place, its town of origin written in large block letters across the back of the jacket:

McCONNELLSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

It could hardly be doubted that this was Richard Wayne Miller's jacket, and since he had last been seen pursuing the Maryland escapees, its presence in a field near Mary Alday's abandoned car indisputably linked the Isaacs brothers and George Dungee to the Alday murders. Certainly it left no lingering doubts in Angel's mind as to the identities of the men who had stolen Mary Alday's car after wiping out nearly an entire family.

The question now was where exactly were the men from Baltimore?

This was not the only question, however. For the fate of Richard Miller had not yet been discovered either. It was unlikely that he was still alive, Angel thought, but if dead, where was his body? Pennsylvania authorities had described very thorough and extensive efforts to locate it, all of which had been unsuccessful.

Since Miller's body had not been discovered since his disappearance, it was conceivable that he had still been alive during or immediately after the Alday murders. If so, then the killers might have decided to dispose of his body in Livingston just as they had disposed of so much else.

After gathering up the evidence found near the barbed wire fence, Angel and Waters headed farther out into the woods in search of Miller's body and other evidence that might have been left behind by the Maryland escapees. They had gone only a few yards when they came upon an astonishing scene. In a small clearing, still in sight of the road, they found evidence that the Maryland escapees had waited many hours in the woods near Mary Alday's car. Scattered all about were cigarette packs, soda cans, potato chip and other junk food wrappers, and an impressive assortment of weapons.

The discovery of this campsite virtually within view of Mary Alday's car was important. It clearly indicated that the wanted men had not had a second car with them at the time the Impala had been abandoned. Because of that, Angel guessed that they had remained in the woods until nightfall, at which time, in all probability, they had gone in search of another car. Following these assumptions, Angel quickly contacted police officials in Livingston in an effort to find out if anyone in the area had reported a stolen car. The answer came back very quickly in a call from Larry Moody, chief of the Livingston Police Department. Between 8:30 and 9:30
P.M.,
he told Angel, a car had been reported stolen by P. C. Mincus, Jr., a resident of Livingston.

“What kind of car?” Angel asked.

“A 1973 Chevrolet Caprice.”

“Color?”

“Dark green with a bronze top.”

“Where was it stolen from?”

“From in front of a residence. Mike Wise's residence.”

“Is that anywhere near the Boyd Cutoff?”

Yes, Chief Moody told him, no more than a few blocks away.

With the discovery of the stolen-car report, Angel now felt certain he knew exactly what car the Maryland escapees were driving. He transferred that information via NCIC, and a nationwide alert was put out for the recovery of P. C. Mincus's car.

“At that moment, I thought it was only a matter of time before we had them,” Angel said later. “They were just a few hours ahead of us, just a few hours, and we knew who they were, what they looked like, the car they were driving. I could almost feel them in the palm of my hand.”

Judging from their actions, neither Carl nor Wayne felt the slightest intimation of impending capture. Instead, they obliviously continued the same erratic movement that had characterized their journey since leaving Maryland. As they drove, they talked about various destinations, shifting radically from one moment to the next, dreams of California or Mexico or Canada flashing through their collective imaginations like images projected from a magic lantern.

In the back seat, George hummed to himself or stared vacantly at the whizzing landscape, while Billy sat frozen beside him, his own mind now repeatedly playing over its own terrified scenario, as he wondered if perhaps he had already been selected as his brothers' next victim. Certainly his own edginess had served to make them edgy, as well, and Billy had had enough recent experience with his older brothers, particularly Carl, to know just how wired for sudden violence he already was. To completely break down in front of him might result in more than a loss of face. There was something in the furtive glances and low muttering he had observed between Carl and Wayne that suggested to him that he might be just as expendable to them as the Aldays, and because of that, he labored as best he could to keep his self-control.

Meanwhile, through the long aimless night following the murders, Carl and Wayne jabbered incessantly as the stolen green Caprice crossed and recrossed the Georgia-Alabama line, before, without any stated reason or explanation, Carl suddenly veered it westward into Mississippi.

Nor had these ramblings been uneventful. Just on the western out-skirts of Jackson, as they had found themselves cruising along a deserted two-lane blacktop road, they'd seen a car approach, slowing as it neared them.

As it drew closer, they could see that it was a Mississippi State Patrol car. Carl continued driving, staring straight ahead until the two cars passed. Then, from the rearview mirror, he could see the patrol car come to a sudden brake-slamming halt, then make a hard doughnut turn in the middle of the road.

“They spotted us,” Carl said to Wayne who sat, as always, in the shotgun position of the front seat.

Billy and George, both still drowsy with the long ride, straightened up immediately, their eyes darting toward the rear where they could see the patrol car closing in behind them, its lights flashing.

Wayne glared at Carl. “What are you going to do?”

Carl slammed his foot on the accelerator. “Let me know the first road you see coming up on the right side,” he said grimly.

It came up only a few minutes later, a dirt driveway that led up to a rickety, unpainted wooden house. Just behind them, the patrol car had disappeared behind a curve in the road just long enough for Carl to make a hard, brutal turn into the drive, skidding wildly as the back tires spun to the left, lifting clouds of grit and dust as they churned up the dark driveway before coming to a stop.

Once the car slid to a halt, Carl and Wayne leaped out and took up positions behind it, their guns already leveled at the driveway, while Billy and George hunkered down, cowering together in the back seat, both too petrified to leave the car.

Seconds later the patrol car sped by, its siren blaring as it raced past the driveway before disappearing entirely into the night.

Carl lowered the shotgun and laughed. “That's one lucky bastard,” he told Wayne.

Only a short time later, still vaguely heading west, the green Caprice pulled into yet another small Mississippi town. As it approached a four way stop, the men inside saw a police car edge its way into the intersection. Glancing to the right, they saw a second patrol car ease into the intersection, then to the left, a third.

Genius was hardly required for Carl and the others to suspect that more than mere coincidence was necessary to explain such a sudden convergence of law enforcement on a single, isolated intersection.

In the complete silence that fell inside the Caprice as it continued to roll toward the intersection, Billy and George remained in the back seat, sitting motionlessly while waiting to see what Carl and Wayne would do.

In the front seat, neither of the two men discussed the issue. Instead, they sat stiffly and silently, staring straight ahead as Carl gently pressed down on the accelerator and let the car cruise smoothly through the intersection.

Any relief that might have swept through the shadowy interior of P. C. Mincus's Chevy as it glided through the intersection was to be short-lived. For in a gesture fully characteristic of the reckless bravado with which Carl attempted to live out his fantasies of outlaw grandeur, he suddenly punched the accelerator, cut the wheels to the right, and careened so violently around a nearby corner that the car had gone up on two wheels for an instant before slamming back down on the hard pavement once again.

From the back window, a thunderstruck Billy and George could see one of the patrol cars jerking forward and backward as it struggled to maneuver itself out of the narrow street and give chase. Then it suddenly came to rest, its flashing light finally blinking off, leaving nothing but the lights of the small town disappearing behind the men in the green Caprice, and only the dense rural darkness up ahead.

Once again Carl felt the exhilaration of escape, the high rapture of thumbing his nose at the law. To Wayne and George, it was an outrageous exploit that served to demonstrate not only Carl's daring but his invulnerability. To Billy, however, it had demonstrated something else, the terrible depth of his brother's self-destructiveness, his Bonnie-and-Clyde urge to die in a hail of gunfire, even at the cost of taking the rest of them with him. Carl, it seemed, was on a suicide mission, and as Billy watched his brother's dark hair slapping in the wind that rushed through the car's unlighted interior, it struck him that in all likelihood he was destined to die with him, all of them together, to pay the debt they had incurred on River Road. There was no talking to him or reasoning with him. Carl Isaacs was now on autopilot, his mind entirely propelled by its wildest and most reckless fantasies, a death ship rushing toward the rocky bar.

And yet, as the Caprice sailed on through the thick southern night, even Billy had to admit that Carl had done it again, spit on the sheriff and lived to tell about it.

The mythical sheriff, however, was not finished yet.

Chapter Eleven

O
n the morning of May 17, the community's only newspaper, the
Donalsonville News
, a weekly published each Thursday morning, began its coverage of the murders with the bold headline:

COMMUNITY SHOCKED BY MURDER OF
SIX MEMBERS OF THE ALDAY FAMILY

The following story related the murders and the discovery of the bodies, along with police speculation that based on the condition of the interior of the trailer, the Alday victims had been killed without a struggle, probably immediately upon entering the trailer. Only Mary, the paper noted, appeared to have been “running from someone” at the time of her murder.