Blood Echoes (31 page)

As events would prove, such an amount, though considered astronomical by Seminole County standards, was wildly optimistic. The cost of the retrials had just begun.

Chapter Twenty-eight

D
istrict Attorney Charles Ferguson, to whom it now fell to prosecute Isaacs, Coleman, and Dungee, needed only to glance at the previous trial testimony to see exactly how strong a case he had.

“The evidence was absolutely overwhelming,” he would say years later, “and it was all still available to us … of course with one exception.”

That exception was Billy Isaacs. Sixteen years before, Billy had agreed to testify against each of the defendants in exchange for having no murder charges filed against him in the state of Georgia.

Since that time, however, he had been transferred to Allegany County, Maryland, where he, alone among the four men who'd kidnapped Richard Wayne Miller in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, had been charged with the various criminal offenses connected to his death.

For those crimes, kidnapping and murder, he had been swiftly tried, convicted, and sentenced to a staggering sixty years in prison, along with five additional years for car theft, all of which were to be served only after he had completed his forty-year sentence in Georgia. If these sentences remained in place, Billy Isaacs would be eligible for parole in slightly more than fifty years. This was not a pleasant prospect for a sixteen-year-old boy, particularly when it seemed entirely possible given their upcoming retrials, that the other Carl and Wayne, each of whom he considered far more culpable than himself, would suffer a fate hardly worse than his own.

“I testified for the state, and then drew one hundred and five years,” Billy would say from prison in 1990, “and I didn't kill or rape or kidnap anybody.”

Now in his early thirties, no longer a child, and certainly no longer innocent of the law's dark ironies, Billy was well aware that he was not under the slightest obligation to testify against either Carl, Wayne, or George in their upcoming retrials. He had fulfilled his part of the bargain in 1974, and to his mind, the state of Georgia had gotten the better part of the deal, particularly since various Georgia officials had worked vigorously to ensure his later prosecution in Maryland, activities of which he had been unaware in 1974.

Bitter at his treatment and desperately weary of prison, Billy knew that he now had one last card to play. He could trade his testimony for the better deal he felt he deserved, and which had been denied him fifteen years before.

Charles Ferguson knew Billy's situation, too, and in reviewing the case, had even felt some sympathy for him.

“I didn't know Billy as a person,” Ferguson recalled, “but looking at what had happened to him in 1974, I was pretty sure he'd want something from us in exchange for his testimony. I was also sure that I couldn't offer him anything.”

Except a chance to do the right thing.

Which is precisely what Ferguson did.

“We met in a little room at the prison where Billy was serving his time,” Ferguson remembered, “and Billy asked if there was anything I could do for him, and I told him straight out that I couldn't make any deals.” Then, in a move whose outcome he could not have known beforehand, Ferguson took out a picture of Ernestine Alday, a woman who, despite her suffering, had never called for Billy's death or raised her voice in vengeance against him.

“Do it for her,” Ferguson said.

Billy stared at the picture for a moment, then nodded. “All right, I will,” he said.

It was now July 1988. Fifteen years had passed since the murders on River Road. Jimmy Carter, who'd occupied the Georgia governor's mansion at the time of the murders, had ascended to the White House, only to be turned out of it four years later by the Reagan juggernaut. The Watergate scandal, particularly the episode of the Saturday night massacre, which had served to crowd the murders from the national news in 1973, had almost entirely receded from the public mind, its central figure, Richard Nixon, now rising once again to an honored place as elder statesman.

As for the Alday family, much had changed for them as well. As a farming family, they had ceased to be, their 550 acres now in different hands, broken up, subdivided.

Death had claimed some of the survivors on River Road. Bud, last of Ned's farming brothers, was now buried near the rest of them at Spring Creek Baptist Church. Others had simply moved away. Elizabeth had returned to Albany, the child she'd been carrying at the time of the murders now grown into a teenager. Faye, still in high school in 1974, had since married and borne her own children. Norman had retired from the military and settled in the West, returning to Georgia only for short visits.

Alone among the Alday children, Nancy and Patricia remained in Seminole County. But they had also changed. Young women at the time, they had moved into middle age. As for Ernestine, she had turned into an elderly woman, still active, but no longer spry, her movements slow and more ponderous, both her hearing and her eyesight fading noticeably with the passing years.

“We weren't the same anymore,” Nancy recalled. “We didn't look the same or feel the same, and yet we were going through the same things again, the trials and the testimony, all of us reliving the murders.”

She was right. Things had changed considerably since May 14, 1973. Perhaps more than anything else, the legal process itself had changed in such ways as to greatly extend the amount of time required for a trial.

In marked contrast to the first trial, for example, the actual presentation of evidence in the second trial did not even begin until nearly nine volumes of defense motions and voir dire examination had been completed, a process which, in itself, consumed more time than had been necessary to try all three of the Alday defendants sixteen years before.

Finally, however, on July 3, Ferguson rose to begin the prosecution's case. It was the jury's task, he said, to come to judgment on indictment number 87c-4416-M in the Superior Court of Houston County, Georgia.

After briefly retracing the crimes, he moved through a list of witnesses who were more or less unchanged from those selected and questioned by Peter Zack Geer.

Except for one.

By that time, and with Ferguson's steady encouragement, Ernestine had decided not only to attend Carl's trials, but to testify for the prosecution, a circumstance that Isaacs' attorney, Terry Jackson, found disturbing, since her presence in the courtroom served to heighten the emotional atmosphere of the rest of the Alday family.

“Your honor,” Jackson said just as Ernestine was about to answer Ferguson's first question, “your honor, at this time, let the record reflect that the members of the Alday family are in the courtroom and that they are crying and that you can hear it…. And we think that this certainly has prejudiced our client's rights.”

Jackson then made a motion for a mistrial. When it was denied, he requested that “the Court instruct the bailiff that either the spectators are going to have to be quiet,” or that they would be removed from the court.

Outrageous as Jackson's objection seemed to the Aldays seated in the courtroom, the judge heeded it cautiously and issued a firm warning in its behalf. First noting that some of the family members had begun to weep as Ferguson had described the events of May 14, Judge Lawson warned that such displays of emotion would not be tolerated, and that anyone who found it impossible “to remain in the courtroom in a composed and unemotional state” would be asked to leave the room “until their composure can be restored.”

Predictably, the judge's warning sent shock waves through the Aldays. They could not believe that their tears could have no place in a courtroom whose walls rang with the suffering of their dearest relatives.

“The Alday family couldn't cry, that's what the judge said,” Nancy recalled. “But, as it turned out later, the Isaacs family could cry as much as they wanted. And they did, too. They got up on the stand and cried and cried, and the judge never said a word.”

Once the judge had issued his warning, Ernestine, now seventy-three years old, proceeded with her testimony, moving through the late afternoon and early morning hours of May 14 and 15, 1973.

Before leaving the stand, she was shown a series of photographs taken in Jerry Alday's trailer the day after the murders. In one of them, she saw Ned's pipe as it lay in an ashtray on the kitchen table. Utterly composed until then, she suddenly began to cry.

Once Ernestine had left the stand, Ferguson resumed a witness lineup that was little more than a replay of the 1974 trial. Bud Alday testified to his discovery of the bodies, GBI Agent T. R. Bentley to the first investigative efforts the following morning.

As the days progressed, Jerry Godby once again identified Carl Isaacs as the man he'd seen driving Mary Alday's car, while Horace Waters and Ronnie Angel repeated their testimony as to their own roles in the GBI investigation, finally showing the pictures that had been made from the role of negatives he'd found in a small plastic container located in Mary Alday's abandoned car.

One by one, as Ernestine, Nancy, and the others listened from scarcely twenty feet away, he ticked off what the photographs portrayed: a trailer with a neatly trimmed lawn, a mailbox on which the name Alday had been prominently written, a dog in the yard, and finally, a woman working in a flower garden. “Not one thing he named still existed,” Nancy remembered. “Not even our name on the deed that held the land. Everything was gone.”

Over the next few days, Ferguson continued to call his witnesses, and one by one they gave testimony that traced the development of the investigation as it led inevitably to the final capture of the defendants in the hills of West Virginia.

Finally, at 1:20
P.M.
on the afternoon of January 23, 1988, Billy Isaacs, the state's star witness, once again took the stand to testify against his brother.

Now thirty years old, Billy had entirely lost the blush of youth which had surrounded him fifteen years before when he had first taken the stand in Donalsonville. Since that time, the gangly, long-haired teenage boy had entirely faded beneath the slightly wrinkled eyes, the subtly receding hairline, and the added pounds that gave the first suggestions of his approaching middle age.

As for his testimony, it remained the same riveting account it had been when he had first given it so many years before. Sixteen years had not altered a single substantive one of its terrible details.

From only a few feet away, Ernestine and Nancy listened to it all. “And so we went through it again,” said Nancy Alday, “everything that happened to my daddy and my brothers, and Uncle Aubrey, and Mary, and I thought to myself, ‘Will this never end?'”

Just as in the first trial, Billy had been presented as the prosecution's final witness. But where defense attorneys in Donalsonville had submitted him to a limited, if accusatory, cross-examination, Jackson was determined to use Billy's position on the stand to begin to build his client's defense.

In answer to Jackson's questions, Billy said that “to the best of his knowledge” he had six brothers and five sisters. His father's name was George, he added, and his mother's name was Betty Isaacs “unless she had remarried.”

“Now, when you were growing up, did you all live together?” Jackson asked.

“No, sir, we didn't.”

“How come?”

“We were all put in different foster homes,” Billy replied.

“How old were you when you were first placed in a foster home?”

“Five years of age.”

“And was Carl placed in a foster home?” Jackson asked pointedly.

“Yes, he was.”

“Did anything occasion you all going to a foster home?”

“I don't know the real reason why my family was broken up,” Billy answered. “I do know my mother and father got divorced and the state stepped in and took all of my brothers and sisters as well as me and placed us in foster homes.”

As he continued under Jackson's questioning, Billy testified that at one foster home where he, Carl, and Bobby Isaacs had lived, the foster mother had beaten them with shoes and belts or “whatever was handy,” and that they had been forced to eat hot peppers and keep them on their tongues.

Under such conditions, of course, running away appeared as the most obvious solution. The Isaacs boys had run away from several such homes, Billy said.

From a discussion of the deplorable conditions of his boyhood, Jackson moved on to certain discrepancies between the testimony Billy had given at the first trial and that which he had just offered in the present case, listing them one by one, even down to Billy's embellishing his current tale with a story of how Carl had been wearing Jerry Alday's cowboy hat and a western-style holster before the murders.

Still, the big question remained Billy himself, his character as a person, and thereby his credibility as a witness.