Blood Echoes (11 page)

The paper went on to quote Gil Kelley, foreman of the coroner's jury, to the effect that Mary Alday had probably been followed home by “four or five hippie-type men” who'd been seen pulling into her yard late Monday afternoon.

The paper noted that Governor Jimmy Carter had dispatched officials to Donalsonville to work on the case, and went on to speculate that police were searching for several escapees from a Maryland prison camp in connection with the murders. According to the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, William Beardsley, the paper said, so much evidence linked the escapees to the murders that at the present time there was “no point in looking for anybody else.”

*     *     *

At about the time the people of Donalsonville were reading their first local reports of the murders, the Isaacs brothers and George Dungee stopped for breakfast at a small restaurant in northern Alabama. By then they had crossed and recrossed into Mississippi several times, moving randomly, their vision of a western escape decidedly dulled by the two near-captures in Mississippi. While Wayne went into the restaurant, Carl remained behind the wheel, glancing occasionally into the rearview mirror where he could see Billy and George staring vacantly ahead.

Minutes later, Wayne scrambled quickly back into the car. While in the restaurant, he told the others, he'd seen a customer reading a local newspaper. “It was all about the killings,” he said excitedly. “I couldn't see what it said, but I figured it might have our pictures in it, so I got the hell out of there.”

Carl nodded, but said nothing. Certainly he could not have been disturbed by the newspaper story, since he could feel his criminal fame building by the second.

Criminal fame had never been his younger brother's life ambition, however, and while Wayne and George seemed content with the situation as it had developed, Billy had begun to crack up.

“I want to go home,” he said at last.

Carl looked at him darkly. “What do you mean, go home?”

“I can't take this anymore,” Billy said, though already terrified of Carl's response. Still, he had no choice but to hold to what he'd already said. He'd had enough of Carl's exploits. The long night of narrow escapes, with Carl increasingly out of control, had entirely unnerved him, and even at the grave risk of his own life, he found himself unable to shore himself up, to keep the outlaw pose which alone ensured his survival. He began to cry. “I can't take this anymore,” he repeated brokenly. “I just can't.”

Carl's eyes swept over to Wayne, as if for a signal, some sign that he might join him in the murder of their younger brother.

But Wayne did not give it. Instead, he made a mundane suggestion. “We could put him on a bus.”

Carl nodded obliquely, his eyes returning once again to the wheel. “Yeah, okay,” he said with a shrug. “We'll just have to find one.”

Wayne glanced back at Billy. “That okay with you, Billy?”

“Yeah, okay,” Billy said softly, fighting to regain control of himself. “A bus, yeah.”

“That's what we'll do then,” Carl said to Wayne as he hit the ignition and guided the car back out onto the road. “We'll find a place for Billy to catch a bus.”

Billy nodded silently, though for the rest of the trip, he believed that his two brothers were not looking for an appropriate bus stop, but a place where they could kill him.

In any event, they headed north, back toward Baltimore along a random assortment of obscure state and county roads, finally crossing into Tennessee. As they traveled, they tried to keep their ears tuned to the local radio stations in order to keep abreast of whatever news was breaking about the murders. But they were moving so quickly, flying from town to town, county to county, that they could only catch small bits of their own story as it was unfolding over the airways. Hearing only snatches here and there before the story dissolved in clouds of static, they could only grasp that it was a big story, immensely big. It seemed to pervade the very air around them, reports of the murders pursuing them like angry, hissing ghosts down every country road, through every jerkwater town, over the densely forested hills and valleys, extending on and on, it seemed to them, toward the farthest edges of the world.

Toward noon that same day, ten-year-old Rhonda Williamson went for a walk in the woods around her father's home in Sumter County, Alabama. The shade kept her cool in the terrible heat that envelops the Deep South by mid-May, but that was not the main reason for her jaunt into the woods around her house. The day before, she'd seen an enormous amount of activity around a blue and white Impala that had been found on the Boyd Cutoff, and since then the neighborhood had been buzzing with tales of a murderous band of escaped convicts. There'd been talk of a body that might have been thrown into the lake or dumped off in the woods. In addition to these sizzling stories, she'd also heard tales of sinister discoveries, guns and ammunition hidden in the tall weeds that grew everywhere in the area. If the escapees had come through the woods near her house, she reasoned, then they might have dropped such dreadful wares in them as well. She decided to find out.

For a long time, she strolled aimlessly, enjoying the cool as she rambled among the trees, her eyes following whatever attracted them, a play of light, some small movement in the leaves or along the ground. After a time, she came to an old barbed wire fence, its rusty strands just high enough for her to crouch and go under them. As she straightened again, her eyes swept the forest that spread out beyond the fence until they caught suddenly on something dreadful.

Several yards ahead of her, just at the edge of a narrow culvert, she saw something so frightening and macabre that she froze for an instant before screaming loudly for her father. He heard the scream from his house down the hill, bounded over the little fence, running as fast as he could through the bramble until he reached his daughter's side. Once there, he stood motionlessly beside her, his eyes staring out in the direction toward which she pointed.

In a large tree several yards away, he saw four shirts hanging several feet above the ground. They had been methodically stuffed with leaves so that they appeared to him exactly as they had appeared to his daughter seconds before, as headless bodies dangling from the limbs.

By early afternoon, Angel had arrived once again in Donalsonville. By then he'd accumulated a massive number of case notes, and he was busily transcribing them when the phone rang. It was Chief Melvin Stephens from Livingston, Alabama, again. A little girl had found something, he told Angel, something Georgia authorities would certainly want to see.

“So I need to come back?” Angel asked unbelievingly.

“I guess so,” Stephens said.

Angel hung up, drew in a long, deep breath, and headed for his car for the long drive back to Alabama.

He arrived nearly four hours later, then accompanied Sheriff Stephens to a narrow wooded area at some distance from where the Alday car had been abandoned.

The four stuffed shirts still hung eerily in the trees as he and Stephens began gathering up the odd assortment of items that lay scattered beneath them. To one side, in a pile at the base of a large tree trunk, he found what appeared to be about $30.00 in pennies. He shook his head wonderingly. Pitching pennies, he thought, that's how they must have killed time during the afternoon, just sitting around, pitching pennies.

Not far from the pennies, he found several unopened cartons of cigarettes, which they'd obviously decided not to bother with anymore.

But of far greater interest was a single black suitcase which had not yet been opened. When he opened it, he discovered all the evidence he needed in order to determine where it had come from. Inside, he found Georgia hunting and fishing licenses made out to Shuggie Alday, along with his temporary driver's license and two dental appointment cards. He also found Barbara Alday's fishing license and a yellow Instamatic camera box with a packet of undeveloped film inside.

Not far away, but still at some distance from the original campsite, Rhonda Williamson continued to patrol the forest. She could see thirty to forty men as they inched their way among the trees and undergrowth, slipping up and down the culvert, meticulously combing every inch of the woods for anything the escapees might have left behind. They'd gathered up a great deal, she noticed, and she presumed that there was little left to find, until her eyes swept down to the ground a final time, and she saw a few bits of paper blowing idly in the summer wind. She knelt down, gathered them up, and looked at them closely. They appeared to be torn parts of a black-and-white Instamatic photograph, and she now sat down on the ground and began to piece them together. One by one she shifted the parts, fitting their jagged edges together, until the picture was finally made whole. She would never be able to forget what she saw. It was a crude black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired woman who lay on her back, nude, her body spread across the ground, her still living eyes staring up toward the camera at the man who no doubt stood above her, grinning as he took the picture. It was Mary Alday minutes before her death as she lay on the ground of the Cummings estate six miles from her trailer. She appeared dazed, almost lifeless, though unquestionably still alive, her terrible visage captured in a photograph taken by her tormentors at the moment of her deepest anguish.

“I've never been able to forget it,” Rhonda Williamson would say nearly seventeen years later. “I've never been able to get it out of my mind.”

Over two hundred miles away, as the tide of investigation continued to sweep rapidly from Georgia to Alabama, all the varied social and commercial activities of Donalsonville and Seminole County came to a complete halt for the Alday funeral.

Heeding the mayor's call for a day of mourning and commiseration for the Alday family, the stores of the downtown area closed for the funeral. Its streets deserted, with little moving other than the steady blinking of its few traffic lights, Donalsonville looked like a town that had been swept by plague.

By 3:00
P.M.
almost all the townspeople, along with hundreds of others from the surrounding counties, had gathered to attend the funeral services for Ned, Shuggie, Aubrey, Jimmy, Jerry, and Mary Alday, which were being held at the Spring Creek Baptist Church only a short drive from the Alday family home.

For many years the spiritual center of Ernestine Alday's life, Spring Creek had also become the church of her family. Ned had helped to build it, and all of her slain sons, as well as Mary, had either been officers in the church or teachers in its Sunday school.

But if the Spring Creek Baptist Church had sustained the Alday family in life, it was physically unable to accommodate the enormity of the deaths that had suddenly swept down upon it. Over a hundred years old, and in serious disrepair, its small, modest sanctuary was incapable of handling the six full-sized Alday coffins, along with the incalculably large crowds that were expected to attend the funeral. As a result, Ernestine had already decided that the funeral would be held on the cemetery grounds so that everyone who wanted could attend the full service, rather than the burial alone.

Consequently, the coffins were brought to the cemetery and arranged side by side, then decked with the enormous number of flower arrangements that had been arriving with steadily increasing frequency at both the church and the Alday home since the murders.

‘It was probably the biggest funeral ever held in Georgia,” Nancy remembered. “I'd never seen anything like it. People everywhere, hundreds of them, and flowers stacked on flowers around the caskets and the graves.”

Over the next hour, eulogies were given by four separate ministers while a crowd, which included various state dignitaries along with both Governor Carter's special assistant and his mother, Lillian, listened quietly.

As the service progressed through the long afternoon, each of the murdered Aldays was given his or her moment of remembrance in simple eulogies that recalled their hard work, their service to their church and community, the devotion they had shown to their families. Ned was remembered for his liveliness and humor; Aubrey for his skills as a farmer; Shuggie for his strength and comic zest; Jerry for the quiet dignity with which he'd lived his life; Mary for her work in social service and devotion as a wife; Jimmy for his energy and youth; and all of them for their service to the church and their community, the long stewardship they'd maintained as husbands, brothers, sons, and wife.

These eulogies would be among the last times that Ned, Aubrey, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, and Mary would be presented as individuals with separate and distinct identities. Increasingly from this point onward, they would be fused together, their personalities melded by a single phrase used repeatedly to describe them:
the Alday victims.
It was as if a single bullet had felled them all, pulverizing their individualities by reducing them to lumps of flesh spread over beds, couchs, a forest undergrowth.

“I remember that at one of the trials,” Nancy said years later, “they were showing the jury a picture of the trailer, and in the background, you could see Mary peeping out the front door. The defense objected to the picture right away. They didn't mind the trailer, they said, but they didn't think the jury should be allowed to see Mary Alday's face.”

Hundreds of miles away from Mary Alday's trailer, a dark green Chevrolet Caprice was winding northward along the back roads of northern Virginia. Behind the wheel, Carl felt he had done very well indeed so far. Since Mississippi, he'd moved everyone forward without a hitch by keeping to the back roads as long as possible, hour after hour effectively concealing their northbound flight.

But now, once again, they were growing short of cash. Without a new influx of gas and money, even continuing along the back roads would be impossible. Because of that, Carl told the others that it would soon be necessary to strike again, even at the cost of revealing where they were.