Blood Echoes (26 page)

Meanwhile, in Seminole County, Ernestine watched as work went forward on the little brick house she'd decided to build on her one remaining acre of land. When completed it was more modern than she was used to, and seemed less sturdily built than the old place she'd shared with Ned and her brood of children. Its rooms were small neat squares. There were none of those curious little touches Ned had built into the house on River Road. Outside there were no great trees, but only the weak saplings that had been planted there, which, she knew, would never give shade to anyone in her lifetime.

But by then the old homestead had come to look a good deal different too, as she noticed when she sometimes drove by it, slowing the car to catch a better look, remembering in all its fullness the life she had lived there. The new owners had painted it a brighter color, paved the drive, and installed a swimming pool and dazzling cabana where Shuggie's trailer had once rested under the broad green trees.

As for the new brick house, it was nice enough, she sometimes thought upon returning to it. Still, the dining room seemed small, the kitchen too. Everything, she had to admit finally, seemed small, reduced, with something missing. It was them, of course. All of them: Ned, Aubrey, Shuggie, Jerry, Jimmy, and Mary. And so, to bring them back a little, to fill up the space, however inadequately, that their deaths had left behind, she hung the walls with scores of pictures she'd brought from the old house. She powdered the top of the television with them, then the bookshelves after that, the mantel, the sideboard, the end tables beside the sofa, every inch of flat space covered with frames of all shapes and sizes, frames of gold, silver, plastic, her kindred frozen silently within them: Ned slouched on his workbench; Shuggie in a bright red coat; Jerry slinging feed to the chickens; Jimmy behind the wheel of his new pickup; Aubrey with his arm draped around his wife; Mary peeping out from behind the half-closed door of the Spring Creek Baptist Church. Through the months, she stared at them silently, still clinging to her faith that it had all been part of God's unfathomable plan.

Far away, now centered in metropolitan Atlanta, the appeals ground forward interminably. Only ten days after the date of execution had been set, on May 29, attorneys for Isaacs and Dungee filed habeas corpus petitions in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia in Savannah, once again stressing their clients' failure to get a fair trial in Seminole County due to the climate of extreme prejudice that had existed against them prior to trial. According to their attorneys, Judge Geer's refusal, in the light of such prejudice, to grant the change of venue that had been requested by the defendants prior to their trials constituted a reversible error on his part. They now asked for a redress of that error in the form of entirely new trials for Isaacs and Dungee.

In response, the district court stayed the executions of both men.

On August 16, attorneys for Isaacs and Dungee filed a motion for discovery. Now concentrating on the issue of pretrial community prejudice against the Alday murderers, their lawyers asked the court for the right to determine the level of community outrage that had existed in Seminole County at the time of the 1974 trial, which, they presumed, had made a fair trial impossible in that community.

After six years of unsuccessful appeal maneuvers, this motion for discovery finally fell upon sympathetic ears. Thus, on October 26, the Southern District Court granted the motion, and on December 3, attorneys for Isaacs and Dungee began three days of taking oral depositions in Albany, Georgia, Dothan, Alabama, and Tallahassee, Florida, depositions designed to show community prejudice against their clients prior to and during the January 1974 trial in Donalsonville.

A light had broken in the solid wall of denied petitions and refused appeals that had heretofore blocked the progress of defense attorneys in their efforts on behalf of the Alday murderers.

It was the first good news Carl Isaacs had received thus far in the appeals process, and it buoyed his spirits markedly. On November 8, 1979, Postell reported that in a letter to him Carl had expressed confidence that at some time in the future he would be granted a new trial and that he would return to Donalsonville for it.

Carl's spirits could not have been raised for long, however. For almost immediately Isaacs learned that not long after the motion for discovery had been granted, the
Albany Herald
had refused either to provide documents to the defendants' attorneys or to give oral depositions.

In response to this refusal, the attorneys filed a motion to compel discovery with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia in Macon.

A hearing on this motion was held on January 2, 1980, and at the end of the hearing, the motion was denied.

This denial led to another appeal to the Middle District Court on February 11. This time, Isaacs and Dungee had appealed in forma pauperis from the January 2 ruling.

On the same day, February 11, 1980, Coleman's habeas corpus appeal, now straggling behind the others, was finally denied by the Tattnall Superior Court.

Approximately four months later, on July 14, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia conducted a routine hearing on the possible replacement of counsel for both Dungee and Isaacs. At this hearing, Carl Isaacs was present.

As he sat silently before the court officials who were hearing his case, he must have had a great deal on his mind. Still, it is unlikely that the courtroom wrangling did not strike him as both amusing and ironic. Because, having finally put into place the last remaining elements of his plan to escape from Reidsville's Death Row, he was now waiting contentedly for the already selected moment.

Should all go according to plan, in just four days Carl expected that he would be through with courts and lawyers and petitions forever. At that point, he would be free to do what he'd already flippantly claimed he wished to do should he ever find himself outside prison walls: kill more Aldays.

Chapter Twenty-five

O
n the morning of July 28, 1980, four inmates on Reidsville State Prison's Death Row escaped by simply walking out of the prison during its early morning shift change. The four escapees made their way to a car waiting for them in the prison parking lot, its gas tank filled, the ignition keys concealed above the sun visor on the driver's side.

The escape from Death Row was unprecedented in Georgia history, and it involved four singularly ruthless men.

Timothy McCorquodale's crime, as the
Atlanta Constitution
would later say, “fit the standard definition of a heinous murder.” On January 17, 1974, when he was a twenty-three-year-old Marine Corps veteran, McCorquodale, while cruising a section of Atlanta known as the Peach-tree Strip, a notorious hangout for prostitutes, drifters, and drug dealers, had picked up a seventeen-year-old girl named Donna Marie Dixon, a runaway from Newport News, Virginia. He had taken her to an apartment on Moreland Avenue, where he had systematically, over a period of many hours, cut her to ribbons with razor blades and scissors, strangled her with a nylon cord, and finally broken her ankles and knees in a strenuous effort to force her body into a cardboard trunk.

Although less sadistic, Troy Gregg's crime had been no less compassionless. Drifting from state to state, Gregg and a young companion had hitched a ride with two men from Florida in November 1973. Together, they had driven north along Interstate 85 until they reached Gwinnett County, an area outside Atlanta. There an argument had developed between Gregg and the two men. It had been settled only after Gregg had cold-bloodedly shot and killed them both.

The youngest of the escapees, David A. Jarrell, had been only eighteen on Christmas Eve 1973, when he set out on foot from Lawrence-ville, Georgia, a small town a few miles from Atlanta. Later that night, he met Mala Ann Still, a bank teller who'd left her job for the day to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. Two days later, her tortured body was found in a wooded area along the Alcovy River. She had been shot in the head.

The last of the four, Johnny Johnson, had been with another man when the two had met two women in Savannah on July 20, 1974. According to the one woman who managed to survive what happened after that, Johnson and his associate had forced them into a car at gunpoint, tied their hands, then driven them to a remote dirt road off U.S. 17. Johnson had led his choice of the two women, Suzanne Eden-field, out into the woods, raped her, and then shot her to death.

All four had been tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and transported to Reidsville State Prison, the “Great White Elephant” as it was called, which housed the state's only Death Row.

And all four had now escaped.

Stunned and mortified by the Death Row escape by four of the most vicious men within the prison system, Georgia authorities pulled out all stops in their effort to recapture McCorquodale, Gregg, Jarrell, and Johnson. Hundreds of officers from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, the Tattnall County Sheriff's Office, and the Georgia State Patrol went on alert, initiating a sweep search of Georgia and South Carolina, since all four of the fugitives had relatives in the two states.

In addition to the statewide sweeps, officers began more concentrated efforts in four towns: York, South Carolina, where Gregg's sister lived; Sumpter, South Carolina, the home of Johnson's mother; Nicholls, Georgia, where McCorquodale's father resided; and Lawrenceville, Georgia, the home of Jarrell's mother.

Within hours they were also checking the telephone exchanges of Jacksonville, Florida. By that time, the GBI had been contacted by none other than Charles Postell, the peripatetic reporter who'd long been in contact with Carl Isaacs. According to Postell, one of the Death Row escapees had telephoned him at around 10:30 on the morning following the escape. At that time, Postell said, Gregg had told him that he was calling from Jacksonville. “I thought it was a hoax,” Postell later told reporters. “I thought he was calling from the prison, just trying to fool me.”

But it had not been a hoax, and as the hours passed, and the public outcry over the escape mounted steadily, frantic law enforcement officials continued to comb Georgia and South Carolina in search of the four escapees.

By the early morning hours of the following day, Wednesday, July 30, it had become a nationwide manhunt, but by then, only one of the escapees, Troy Gregg, was still at large. The other three had been captured in a small, four-room brick home on the shores of Lake Wylie about ten miles southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina.

At 1:15
A.M.,
after a siege of nearly four hours, officers of the Mecklenburg County Police had fired teargas into the home and waited as, one by one, McCorquodale, Jarrell, and Johnson had staggered out. No shots had been fired.

With three escapees now in custody, the fate of the fourth, Troy Gregg, was quickly discovered when his body was found floating in Mountain Island Lake, about twelve miles north of where the other three had been captured. The autopsy revealed that Gregg had been beaten to death with what the medical examiner called a “wide instrument, possibly a board, belt or shoe.”

The grim details of Gregg's death were discovered only a day or so after his body. It was not a pretty story. According to witnesses later interviewed by North Carolina authorities, Gregg had arrived in Charlotte still in the company of the three Death Row escapees. One, Timothy McCorquodale, had reestablished contact with members of the Outlaws, the motorcycle gang to which he had belonged, and particularly with William K. (“Chains”) Flamont, a member who had himself only narrowly escaped the July 4, 1979, massacre of five fellow Outlaws at their clubhouse in north Charlotte.

Flamont, at whose lakefront home they had later been captured, had welcomed McCorquodale back into the Outlaw circle.

By then, however, Gregg was already dead. Several hours before, at the Old Yellow Tavern on the Catawba River, Gregg had made a fatal mistake. Always arrogant, and something of a braggart, Gregg had made a thoughtless remark to a female patron currently attached to one Eddie Phipps, a thirty-year-old motorcyclist who was not known to suffer fools gracefully.

Phipp's reaction was swift and sure, and, cheerfully aided by Timothy McCorquodale, he promptly stomped Gregg to death behind the Old Yellow Tavern. Gregg's body was subsequently thrown into the river, where it floated downstream into Mountain Island Lake.

Within four days of the escape, all four of the Death Row inmates had been accounted for.

But the escape, itself, who had planned it and how it had been carried out, had not yet been uncovered.

After Gregg's death and the capture of the remaining three escapees in North Carolina, Georgia law enforcement officials were determined that no such escape would ever again occur within the state prison system.

Consequently, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Robert Ingram was assigned to head a GBI Task Force whose duty it was to uncover the escape plan in its most minute details, and inform prison officials in such a way that they could redesign their surveillance and other programs to make certain that such an escape could not be repeated.

Only a few days after the escape, Ingram arrived at the Great White Elephant to begin his work. He went to Cell Block D-4, a row of only ten cells located on the building's fourth floor: Death Row.

To his astonishment, prison officials had already had the bars that had been sawed through in the initial stage of the escape plan rewelded, but it was easy for Ingram to determine that although four inmates had escaped, six had been involved in the plan. One of them, Tom Fitzgerald, had apparently gotten cold feet at the last minute. Another, however, had been transferred from Reidsville to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center in Jackson only a few hours before the escape had occurred. The sixth escapee had been assigned to Reidsville for nearly six years. He occupied Cell 10. His inmate number was D-17622. His name was Carl Junior Isaacs.