Blood Echoes (2 page)

“Did he buy them?”

“Yes, he did. Then got in his car and headed down U.S. 30.”

Down U.S. 30, and into oblivion.

At 9:00
A.M.
the next day, Pennsylvania State Trooper Larry Good received an urgent telephone call from Riley Miller.

“Someone saw Richard,” Mr. Miller told him.

“Who?”

“Her name is Deborah Poole. She's with me now.”

Good drove immediately to Miller's house and listened as Poole told her story.

At around 12:30
P.M.
on May 10, Poole told him, she'd been on her way to pick up her children at her mother's house just off U.S. 30 when she'd seen Richard Miller traveling west in his green Chevy Super Sport. As their two cars approached Patterson Run Road and slowed down to make a left turn, she and Miller had glanced to the left and seen three white men and one black one as they hustled around the cab of a pickup truck. Both Miller and she had recognized the truck as belonging to a local resident, Lawrence Schooley. But Schooley had been nowhere around the truck, Poole added, and so she had become suspicious.

“Why?” Good asked.

“Because of the men around it,” Poole said. “They didn't seem like they ought to have been in Mr. Schooley's truck.”

“What did the men look like?” Good asked.

“The black one wore thick dark-rimmed glasses,” Poole answered. “And one of the white ones had long light-brown hair.”

Miller had become suspicious of the men too, Poole added, and after they'd made the left turn, they'd both stopped on Patterson Run Road to look at what was going on around Schooley's truck. Poole had remained in her car, but Richard had gotten out of his and walked up to where she had stopped.

“Did he say anything to you?” Good asked.

“Yes,” Poole answered. “He asked me if I knew any of the men we could see around Lawrence's truck. I told him that I'd never seen any of them before.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Yes,” Poole said. “He told me that he was going to hang around and watch where they went. If they pulled away, he was going to follow them.”

According to Poole, Miller had then returned to his car and backed down the road to U.S. 30, from which position he would be able to observe the men at the truck, then follow them should they pull back out onto the highway.

“And that's where you left him?” Good asked. “Sitting in his car?”

Poole nodded. “I didn't think anything else about it until I heard he was missing.”

Later that same afternoon, Good consulted a recent Maryland State Police bulletin about a breakout at the Poplar Hill Correctional Institute, a minimum-security prison outside Baltimore. Three men had simply walked off the grounds at three in the morning on May 5. Two of the men, Carl Junior Isaacs and his half-brother, Wayne Carl Coleman, were white. The third, George Elder Dungee, was black. A fourth man, the younger brother of one of the escapees, was suspected of having joined the gang.

The next day, suspecting that the men Poole had seen around Lawrence Schooley's truck might be the same as those who had escaped from Poplar Hill, Good presented her with two separate photographic lineups. One consisted of six pictures of black men, all were wearing glasses. She identified George Elder Dungee as the man she'd seen sitting placidly in the back of Schooley's truck.

Next Good presented her with a second lineup consisting of seven photographs of young white males. Poole picked William Carroll (“Billy”) Isaacs as the long-haired youth she'd seen three days before. Billy Isaacs was the fifteen-year-old brother of Carl Junior Isaacs.

Some time later, a second witness came forward. His name was Norman Strait, and he told Good that as he'd been coming down U.S. 30, he'd seen several men loading material from a blue Chevrolet into Schooley's truck. He'd stopped to observe them more closely, and taken his hunting rifle from the gun rack and drawn a bead on each of the four men. Through the powerful lens of his hunting scope, he had watched them haul things back and forth between the two vehicles. One had remained idle while the others hustled about, and Strait had been able to get a good look at him. He was short, with long dark hair that often fell over one eye.

In a photographic lineup, Strait identified Carl Isaacs as the man he had sighted through the cross-hairs of his hunting scope. “I guess I should have shot that son-of-a-bitch right there,” he would tell Good only three weeks later. “It would have saved a lot of lives.”

Chapter Three

O
ne thing was sure, and Carl Junior Isaacs must have known it as he led Wayne and George out of Poplar Hill on the morning of May 5, 1973. He was in command, a position he reveled in.

Born on August 9, 1953, Carl was the son of a father who abandoned him and a mother he despised. His father, George Archie Isaacs, had drifted up from Mountain City, Tennessee, where he'd worked as a delivery man and a service station attendant before finally coming north.

Once in Maryland, George took a variety of odd jobs, everything from working at a mushroom plant to plying his skills as a carpenter.

A woman proved his undoing, as far as remaining in the North was concerned. Her name was Betty, and when George met her she was already married to Carl Coleman, the father of her four children. Such incidental facts did not stop Archie and Betty from deepening their relationship, however, and when Coleman realized he was being cuckolded, he promptly signed a warrant against George, charging him with “breaking peace” between Betty and himself. As a result, George spent forty days in jail.

Once released, he went back to Betty. By then, Coleman had disappeared into the wilds of West Virginia, where he was later rumored to have been shot.

Though George would later describe Betty as a faithless wife who did “nothing but sit around and drink,” he fathered so many children by her during the next few years that in 1988, when interviewed by a defense team psychologist, he could remember neither the names nor the exact number of his offspring. Their separate personal identities equally eluded him. “I'm just trying to remember which one that was,” he said, when asked about the early life of Carl Junior, the son who would bring to the Isaacs name a singularly dark renown.

It wasn't very long before George had had enough of family life. Betty's own behavior toward him was bad enough, as he saw it, but even worse was her tendency to set the children against him. Egged on by Betty, they tormented him mercilessly, finally forcing him to do the “dirty thing,” as he later described it, of abandoning them, the idea suddenly popping into his head as he sat in a diner after dropping Betty off at work. It was the kind of bizarre whimsy he'd already passed on to his eldest son, though in Carl it would take on a far grimmer character, horrendous acts committed with a shrug.

Once his father had deserted the family, and with his mother either drunk at home or holed up with her latest romantic interest, Carl and the other children were left to fend for themselves. Roaming in what amounted to a family pack, they moved along the streets while their neighbors watched them apprehensively from behind tightly closed doors.

What the neighbors saw was a collapsing family structure, its center gone, its sides caving in. Soon the Isaacs children were reduced to rags, though still wandering together, clinging to whatever loose strands of family life they might gather, particularly to such communal efforts as foraging for food in garbage cans.

But as the weeks passed, their lack of supervision finally drew the attention of various Maryland authorities. At the Hartford Elementary School, teachers noticed that the Isaacs children were unkempt, their teeth rotten, that they stank from unwashed clothes and poor personal hygiene. Called in to explain this condition, Betty Isaacs declared that it was up to the public school teachers to take care of her children, an attitude educational officials greeted with helplessness and dismay.

Over the next few weeks, the mischief and disorder of the Isaacs children grew steadily more severe, until, in April 1965, Maryland officials assumed full responsibility by declaring them wards of the state.

By that time Carl Junior, now eleven, had been caught stealing in his elementary school, as well as in Korvette's, a local department store. He was placed in a foster home, along with Bobby, his younger brother, and Hazel, his older sister.

For a time, the placement appeared successful. Carl joined the Boy Scouts and began playing trumpet in school.

By May of 1966, however, the darker angels of his experience had begun to reassert themselves. He was caught stealing again, first at his school, then at the construction site where his foster father worked. A psychologist declared the thievery, along with numerous other incidents of bad behavior and foul language, to be entirely consistent with Carl's background and advised against any form of therapy.

Predictably, the stealing continued. His schoolwork slumped as well, so that by December he was failing four subjects.

By May of 1967, Carl's behavior had darkened considerably. Now fourteen, he'd begun to resent the whole notion of school attendance. His bouts of truancy lengthened steadily, and even less taxing activities came to represent additional elements of the “straight life” for which he now harbored a growing contempt. Finally the Boy Scouts dismissed him, a circumstance that led to even more heated arguments with his foster parents.

Increasingly beyond restraint, Carl grasped the solution most ready-to-hand: flight. On May 22, he ran away from his foster home, though he seems to have had little idea of where to run. He wandered the streets until, two days later, he was picked up by authorities and placed in the Maryland Training School for Boys on Old Hartford Road. Two subsequent psychological examinations found him suffering from depression, a poor self-image, and pronounced inability to handle his increasingly angry and tumultuous feelings.

After a short stay at the Maryland Training School for Boys, Carl was placed in a second foster home in October 1967. Almost immediately after placement, he began to act out. His performance in school was poor, and his new foster parents found him a disruptive and uncontrollable presence in their home.

By January the situation had become intolerable, and Carl was committed to the Lapinsky Shelter Home until April 1968, when a third foster home was found. After a recurrence of the same behavior that had made the two previous placements unworkable, Carl was transferred to the Woodbourne Boys Home. A few weeks later he ran away, only to be picked up by police and returned to the Maryland Training School for Boys.

At fifteen, Carl was now in the full throes of adolescence. Yet another psychological examination revealed that ominous feelings had begun to emerge, particularly associated with hostility toward women. A report by a staff member of the Maryland Training School for Boys stated that Carl could not respond to female authority figures or accept discipline from women, an attitude that could only have been exacerbated when, during a prearranged visit with his mother, Betty Isaacs was unable to recognize him and had to be told by a staff member that the brooding young man who stood before her was her son.

In February of 1969, Carl was readmitted to the Woodbourne Boys Home, where he remained until the following June. During that brief period, he ran away many times. On June 2, after yet another escape, Woodbourne notified Maryland officials that they would not readmit Carl to the home.

Though missing for a month, Carl was finally picked up when police found him and another boy during the course of an assault upon a third boy. Both assailants were returned to the Maryland Training Center for Boys for reconsideration of their cases.

A subsequent investigation of Carl's whereabouts during his month on the streets revealed that he'd moved in with Charlie Bowman, an employee of the Burns Detective Agency, a homosexual whose taste ran to children. Carl had been one of several boys who'd lived with Bowman, providing sex in exchange for room and board. Unlike the other boys, however, Carl, when interviewed by a social worker, had asked to be placed officially and permanently in Bowman's foster care.

Such a placement was absurd, but state officials were unable to find much of an alternative. A social worker declared Carl to be ungovernable, and recommended that he be returned to the Maryland Training School for Boys.

On August 11, 1969, Carl once again took up residence at the school, and once again began a series of escapes. As a result, the state of Maryland formally declared that it had exhausted its resources in regard to him and promptly removed him from the juvenile system. From that time forward, there would be no more training schools or foster homes.

Carl Junior Isaacs had been set loose upon the world.

He reverted instantly to crime, stealing cars and burglarizing houses, while living a seminomadic existence, bunking with friends or the families of friends, sometimes for no more than a few days, at most a few weeks, then moving on to the next temporary shelter.