Blood Echoes (23 page)

It now fell to Bobby Lee Hill to make the last plea. In an argument only slightly longer than Geer's, he accepted the jury's finding of guilty under the law and assured them that he would not reargue the facts of the case as he stood before them now.

“Carl Isaacs is guilty because you said so,” Hill told the jury. “I understand that for starters.”

But the issue of Isaacs' guilt was not the only one the case raised, Hill contended. There was another matter at stake as well, one whose profundity could hardly be overestimated. “This whole case is about human life,” Hill told the jury. “The people in that trailer who fired those guns obviously thought very little about human life. It is obvious that the guilty and the weak and the bitter think very little of human life.”

The cheapening of human life had been going on relentlessly for years, Hill continued, a process that the Vietnam War and television violence had greatly accelerated. He hoped the jury would take the opposite course, hold all life infinitely dear. “Well, would you want to participate in the continuing of cheapening life? All you have to do is just come back and say that Carl Isaacs ought to be put to death over in Reidsville in a steel chair which attaches to electricity and puts him to death. So just continue that effort, and all of us will cheapen life just a little more.”

Over the past few weeks, Hill said, he had come to have considerable admiration for the Alday family. “I regret all that occurred,” he told the jury, “but what troubles me more is that if Carl Isaacs doesn't care about life, does that mean you don't have to care anything about life? He is guilty. He is guilty of not caring anything about human life and he thinks it's cheap. Do you have to be?”

Hill disputed Geer's notion that the death penalty had any deterrent effect on capital offenses. “The criminals are out there killing right now,” he declared. “They are not out there keeping up with what Mr. Geer is saying.”

As to Carl Isaacs and the other defendants, they could now be of help to society only if kept alive and studied. “Something is wrong with Billy,” Hill declared. “Something is wrong with Wayne. Something is wrong with George. There is something wrong with Carl.” But rather than making any attempt to discover the source of their behavior, Hill said, “all the system now asks is that you just adopt some of his notions about the cheapness of life.”

In his final remarks, Hill returned to the Aldays. “They are surely one of the best, if not the best family you have here,” he said, “but you can't do anything about what happened to them except adopt the same stupid, dumb, ignorant, malicious notion that the people who did it have.”

Thirty-eight minutes after Hill's conclusion, and with virtually no discussion or deliberation, the jury was escorted back into Judge Geer's courtroom. They had decided that Carl Junior Isaacs should be put to death.

Nine days later, after an almost identical trial to that of Carl Issacs, and following a deliberation of only fifty-eight minutes, George Dungee was found guilty on all counts.

In his closing arguments in both the guilt/innocence and penalty phases of the trial, Geer presented nearly identical statements to the jury.

In the penalty phase, however, Dungee's attorney, Philip Sheffield, offered what Geer himself later called “the most eloquent argument against the death penalty” he had ever heard.

“I am against killing, period,” Sheffield said, then launched into a brief history of the death penalty, moving through the Old Testament practice of stoning, to the Roman practice of crucifixion, to the burning of witches in England, the invention of the guillotine in France, through the rise of hanging as the standard form of legal execution in England, a method, Sheffield noted, that could be applied as the penalty for no less than 135 separate offenses.

Georgia had used the same method for many years, Sheffield told the jury, before finally switching to what appeared the more expeditious method of electrocution. “I remember when I was a teenage boy I went to the Georgia Military Academy,” Sheffield said, “and I remember on too many occasions when we would sit down to the evening mess, the lights would dim and it was said that somebody was being executed in the electric chair just a few miles from us.”

It was a practice that had only ended when the United States Supreme Court had declared Georgia's practice unconstitutional because it was used only on “the poor, the indigent, the half crazy, the incompetent and the black.” Now, despite the new law that had just been passed by the general assembly to correct these abuses, Sheffield argued that it was about to happen again, the same punishment for the same victim. “You have got a little ole nigger man over here that doesn't weigh over 135 pounds,” Sheffield said. “He is poor and he is broke. He is ignorant. I will venture to say he has an I.Q. of not over 80. This is the kind of person who has been killed for the most part in the history of capital punishment in Georgia.”

Finally, Sheffield asked the jury who would be helped by Dungee's execution? Not the Aldays, he said, whose lives could never be regained, or whose grief, as expressed in the survivors, could never be assuaged.

Who would be hurt? Sheffield asked the jury, then answered for them. “I have a visceral fear that if you order the execution of this man that you may be the ones that will be hurt, that there will be a great day of judgment when you will face the authority of all the universe and when the book of life is opened to the page January 9, 1974, and your verdict which says, ‘Kill him. Kill him,' is there for all to see, and you are asked just one question, ‘Why? Why?', what will be your answer?”

After deliberating for less than two hours the jury returned with their answer to Sheffield's question. Unpersuaded by either the logic or the passion of his argument, they sentenced George Elder Dungee to death, a decision Dungee received, according to news accounts, entirely without emotion.

In contrast to Carl Isaacs, who'd appeared bored and indifferent to his trial proceedings, and who'd actually yawned lazily as Geer beseeched the jury for his death, Coleman seemed clearly concerned with his trial. Throughout the proceedings he wrung his hands nervously or twiddled edgily with a box of matches. Since his capture, he'd grown a wispy blond moustache and the beginnings of a light-colored beard. Only his two tattoos, the one of a heart with “MOM” written inside it on his left arm, and on his right, a slithering snake, remained to suggest the dissolute look he'd had at the time of his capture.

But if Coleman had changed his appearance, his actions on the afternoon of May 14, 1973, remained utterly unchanged in the mind of the jury. On January 24, after yet another of what the press called a “carbon copy” three-day trial of Carl Isaacs, and a jury deliberation of fifty minutes, Wayne Carl Coleman was convicted on all six counts of first-degree murder.

In the penalty phase, Geer argued along the same lines as he had successfully argued in the cases of Carl Isaacs and George Dungee, raising only one additional issue, the specter of escape, a concern that would be dramatically heightened in regard to the Aldays' killers in the years to come.

“And if he were sent off for life,” Geer asked the jury, “suppose he should escape? Would you want him back in Seminole County with a .380 automatic in his hand? Would you want him anywhere in America with any kind of gun in his hand, if you sent him off for life, and he escaped?”

In his closing argument for the defense, Harold Lambert made a few brief references to Coleman's deprived background, the foster homes he'd lived in, the lack of religious training that had been extended to him, then buttressed his arguments with a host of biblical references. “Adam and Eve had two sons whose names were Cain and Abel,” he told the jury. “And Cain took revenge out on his brother Abel, and Cain killed Abel.” This, Lambert said, was the first murder. What, then, was the first punishment? “What did the Lord do by way of punishment?” Lambert asked the jury. “Did he have Cain killed? No. He banished him from the country for the remainder of his life and that was his punishment.” This same banishment, Lambert argued, should be Coleman's punishment as well. “Justice will be done in this case if you impose six life sentences,” he said, “and maybe he can serve as a human guinea pig to find out how minds such as his work, so that society can prevent tragedies such as this from ever occurring again.”

It was not an argument to which the jury devoted much attention. Less than fifty minutes after its completion, they had rejected it entirely and sentenced Wayne Carl Coleman to death.

Standing beside his attorney, Coleman's nervousness had by then dissipated considerably. He listened in silence as Judge Geer pronounced sentence, then smiled broadly. “Thanks, Judge,'” he said.

With the three trials concluded, the entire process taking fewer than three weeks, Judge Geer could now pronounce his selection of a date of execution for the last of the Alday defendants. He'd decided that since each of the three was equally guilty the three should die as the Aldays had, together, all of them in one day, February 15, almost seven months to the day from the afternoon of the murders.

Although, as the
Donalsonville News
reported, this date was merely a formality and would certainly be changed as the mandatory and automatic appeals were made to the Georgia Supreme Court, the wheels at least had been set in motion, wheels that were expected within perhaps two years, inexorably and at a reasonable speed, to carry the Alday killers to their deaths.

“Relief, that's what we felt,” Patricia Alday said many years later from her office at the Seminole County Department of Children Services. “Relief was about all.”

If it was the relief of closure that Patricia, Nancy, Elizabeth and the other surviving children felt, of things finally brought to an end, a relief that might allow the remaining Aldays to begin to live again in an atmosphere unclouded by their tragedy, then it was certainly to be short-lived.

Chapter Twenty-two

O
n February 7, two weeks after the last trial ended, and only a few days after the execution dates had been set, the
Donalsonville News
reported that Bobby Lee Hill and Fletcher Farrington had appealed for a new trial on behalf of Carl Isaacs, one based upon the contention that the verdict had run “contrary to law.”

Attorneys for Wayne Coleman and George Dungee immediately followed suit, beginning an appeals process, the paper noted, which “experts” believed might take as long as “a couple of years or more.”

In the same issue, the paper made the first of what would in the end be dozens of mentions concerning the amounts of money the county was spending for the array of legal proceedings which had resulted from the Alday murders.

According to the
News
, the first bills had begun to come in, and by Seminole County terms they were high: $3,864 for jury pay alone, a sum considered particularly burdensome to a county whose economic condition was far from affluent, but a figure that was a mere shadow of the vast expenditures to come.

Two weeks later, on Sunday, February 26, 1974, Ernestine and her children gathered at the Spring Creek Baptist Church to break ground on the new sanctuary she had decided to help build, and which she intended to dedicate “in loving memory” to her lost family.

Over a hundred years old, the church had long been a part of her and Ned's religious life. Isaac Alday, Ned's father, had planted the first cedar on its front grounds, and over the years a host of family members had worshiped and officiated within its spare wooden sanctuary. Four of the five murdered Alday men had been deacons of the church. Mary had served as its treasurer, while still other family members had occupied various positions from training union officer to song leader.

Because of the family's long commitment to the church, Ernestine decided that those funds which had been coming to her since Mrs. Braswell's first five-dollar bill, and which now amounted to approximately eighteen thousand dollars, would not be used for her own or any member of the family's personal benefit. Instead it would be spent exclusively to help erect a new brick sanctuary to replace the rapidly deteriorating wooden one the Spring Creek Baptist Church currently used to conduct its services.

The ground breaking was attended by the entire Alday family, as well as more than a hundred people from the community. Surrounded by her children and grandchildren, Ernestine, with shovel in hand, made the first break in the red clay earth upon which the sanctuary would be built.

Apart from the six graves which were to be bordered with imported black marble, the sanctuary would be the single reminder of the Aldays' lives and deaths in Seminole County.

As to the most macabre reminder of the events of May 14, the trailer in which all but Mary Alday had died, it had already been sold and towed away. “We don't know where it is,” Bud Alday later told an inquiring reporter, “and we don't want to know.”