Blood Echoes (8 page)

“My own early life was a lot like theirs,” he would say years later of the Alday killers. “Now, I'm not a saint by any means, but I didn't walk into a trailer in Donalsonville, Georgia, and kill six people who had never done me the slightest harm. The Isaacs bunch did that because they were no damn good … period.”

Nothing in the characters or backgrounds of the four men he would later arrest for the Alday murders would serve to change his mind.

Chapter Nine

W
hen Ronnie Angel arrived at the state headquarters of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in Atlanta at nine o'clock on the morning of May 15, he realized immediately that something very serious had happened, and that it was probably a good deal more than a departmental purge or administrative shake-up. The people he saw scurrying along the corridors or gathered in small groups in the adjoining offices were on full alert, as if in response to a sudden alarm. There was a dark humming in the air, along with that peculiar excitement which always signaled a sudden gearing up of the agency's staff and resources. Angel had been around long enough by then to know that it was the sort of atmosphere that could only be generated by one thing: somewhere during the night or early morning hours a very serious crime had been committed in the state of Georgia.

“It was obvious that something terrible had happened,” he remembered years later. “But even I couldn't have guessed just how bad it was, that it was the single most heinous crime that had ever been committed in the history of the state.”

He was about to find out.

Within moments of his arrival, Deputy Director Jim Stanley came into Angel's office and told him that there had been what he called a “major homicide” in Donalsonville, Georgia. Stanley went on to say that Major Beardsley, the GBI director, had decided it would be handled by the Major Case Squad, the division Angel now headed, and that Angel would be in charge of the investigation.

Angel dispatched Agent Jim Duff to Donalsonville by car, then headed for the local airport to meet Dr. Larry Howard, the forensic pathologist who'd been assigned to the case.

When he reached the small airport on the outskirts of Atlanta, Angel could hardly believe what he saw, a rickety, moth-eaten old wheezer of an airplane that Dr. Howard owned and that he fully intended to fly to Donalsonville himself. The whole structure of the plane looked alarmingly unsteady, and the windshield was so old, cracked, and stained that Howard could not even see through it. Instead, during the long, uneasy flight to Donalsonville, he leaned out over the side of the plane in order to navigate it, staring at the blue expanse before him and the steadily flattening farmland several thousand feet below.

On the way, Angel went over what was known about the case so far, amazed at just how little it was. Some people had been murdered, but no one at GBI headquarters had been sure of just how many, whether they were male or female, young or old, or even precisely when or how the murders had taken place. As to the critical issues of suspects and motivation no one had a clue, and the only thing Angel had been given to understand was that a hippie commune was situated not too far from the murder site, and that some “hippies” had been seen in the area not long before the murder. Just what he needed, Angel thought wearily as he glanced toward the ground below, some Charles Manson type on the loose in southern Georgia.

He looked at his watch. It was 10:00
A.M.
He would not sleep again for four days.

Meanwhile, in Donalsonville, Mary Alday was still missing. As he stood near the Alday trailer, watching Mary's dog as it darted back and forth from the driveway to a spot down River Road, Jerry Godby recalled the two cars he'd seen the preceding afternoon. He was reasonably sure that one of them had been Mary Alday's, and after a moment, he decided to take a drive down the road in the same direction as that strange convoy had taken not quite twenty-four hours before.

Once in his truck, he drove slowly, glancing left and right, not quite sure what he was looking for, but only looking, hoping that something would strike him as he tried to retrace the route of the cars. He passed the Alday homestead, its yard and driveway now cluttered with the cars and trucks of their neighbors, then on along their recently planted fields until he reached the peanut fields he'd been spraying when the cars had passed him the final time. This was the last time he'd seen them, but he had noted their direction, and now he decided to drive on down the road, following it as far as the cars would have had to follow it before turning left or right at the nearest crossroads.

He was drifting even more slowly now, his foot barely touching the accelerator as he glanced about, meticulously searching the bordering woods. They were thick with summer growth, the tall oaks and pines towering above the forest understory of dogwood and gallberry, sweet-leaf and greenbrier, all so dense that Godby could only see a few yards before everything disappeared behind an impenetrable wall of broad green leaves and brightly colored wildflowers.

Even so, the outer reaches of the forest were visible, and it was a sudden disarray within them that drew Godby's attention as he continued down the road. At first it was no more than a few broken branches, slender tendrils of weed and vine that looked as if they'd been snapped nearly in two and now hung perpendicular to the ground. But as he approached them, he could see a set of tire tracks that led down a narrow, rarely traveled dirt road and into the deepening woods. He pulled onto the shoulder of the road, stopped, and peered down the wooded path. It was scarcely larger than a footpath, but the tire tracks disappeared down it anyway, as if whoever had taken the route had been determined to see it to the end. All along its narrow route, he could see more broken branches, along with a scattering of weeds that looked as if they'd been pressed down into the soil as the car's tires had moved heavily over them. Beyond that, there was only the lush green of the deepening forest, a familiar, pastoral landscape that he had never feared before but that now filled him with a sense of icy dread. He decided not to venture farther into the woods alone.

Mary's dog had been shut up in a barn by the time Godby got back to the trailer, and the area around the trailer seemed curiously silent without its frantic barking. There was no shortage of people, however. They were everywhere, some huddled about the various vehicles that filled the driveway and lined both sides of the road, others in small knots in the yard or out in the surrounding fields. If he wanted to assemble a party to help him search the woods, he had plenty of people to choose from. As he approached the house, he saw Espy Gray, Max Trawick, Wayne Easom, and Ray and Rudolph Spooner. He'd known them all for quite some time, and it struck him that they were exactly the kind of men he could depend on, courageous, but not reckless.

“I think I may have found something,” he told them, “down a little road in the woods, not far from where I saw Mary's car go by yesterday. I think we should go down there and check it out.”

None of the men hesitated. Fully armed, the black barrels of their rifles weaving gently in the summer sunlight, Godby and the others immediately made their way back to the small dirt road where Godby had first noticed the tire tracks and broken undergrowth.

“Right there,” he said, pointing to the strange indentation in the woods. “What do you think?”

The men agreed that it was worth pursuing. Fanning out slightly so that they walked in a short flank rather than a column, they advanced through the thickening brush, their eyes carefully surveying the area, their ears attuned to the slightest sound from anywhere around them.

For a time, the men saw nothing. The woods were quiet except for the summer birds and the whir of insects. Here and there slender columns of bright sunlight fell through the dense overhanging foliage. Nothing looked out of place.

Then, at a spot about a hundred feet from the road, Godby approached a pine tree that appeared to have been recently damaged. A large section of bark had been stripped away, leaving the pale white wood fully exposed. From its height and appearance, it looked to Godby as if the tree had been raked by the bumper of a car. But where would a car have been going? And why would it have been moving so carelessly? He glanced about, his eyes searching for the car, but saw nothing further, and so he walked on.

He'd only moved fifty feet deeper into the woods when he heard Espy Gray's voice ring through the trees, calling tensely for the others.

Angel let out a long sigh of relief at approximately 11:00
A.M.
when he stepped out of Dr. Howard's tiny Cessna and let his feet touch the earth again. He walked shakily to the waiting car and pulled himself in beside the trooper who sat behind the wheel. The radio was alive with traffic about a mysterious car that several local residents had located in the woods of the Cummings estate.

“Cummings estate?” Angel asked one of the local lawmen. “Is that anywhere near the Alday place?”

“About six miles from it.”

“Let's go check on the car first then,” Angel said.

Twenty minutes later he arrived at the small dirt road identified in the radio dispatches, and headed down it. He'd only gone a short distance when he realized that the radio traffic had purposely concealed the profound nature of Espy Gray's discovery. A car had been located. That much was true. But it had not been found alone.

Sprawled across the forest bramble in an area incongruously adorned with the bright buds of summer wildflowers, Mary Alday's nude body lay facedown, her head turned slightly to the left, her hands tucked just beneath her breasts so that both elbows were nearly parallel to the upper part of her rib cage. The stark, midday sun fell so brightly on her pale skin that her body appeared to glow luminously from out of the deep shade that surrounded her, an eerie patch of blinding white that rested motionlessly on a sea of green.

As he drew nearer, Angel could see how her dark hair lay in a tangled mass on her bare shoulders, her body's only cover. All her jewelry, if she'd had any, had already been stripped from her hands and neck and ears.

Angel knelt down for a closer look. He could see no ligature marks on her hands or legs to indicate that she'd ever been forcibly restrained.

As to the cause of death, it could hardly have been more obvious. Dried blood had caked in a broad swath from a large wound in her upper back. A second gunshot wound was clearly visible near the back of her head. The rest of her body had been so ravaged by ant bites that for an instant she appeared to Angel, as he stared silently at her, as if she'd been raked repeatedly by distant shotgun fire.

Only a few yards from the body, Angel noticed a few pieces of clothing scattered across the forest floor. One by one, he examined them before dropping them into evidence bags. There was the bottom half of a turquoise pants suit that appeared damp and soiled in the crotch. A few feet away, its matching checkered blouse, grimy with dirt and forest debris, lay in a tangled mass amid a scattering of leaves. A white bra rested nearby, but as he glanced about, Angel realized that there were no panties to go with the bra, nor any other female underwear in the vicinity either of Mary Alday's body or her other discarded clothes. Their absence suggested that unlike her male relatives, Mary Alday had been subjected to even more than murder.

After his initial observation of the body and clothing, Angel paced the area carefully, concentrating on the scene as minutely as he could, pointing out and gathering up various items that appeared to have been abandoned at the murder site. Up ahead, at a distance of perhaps a hundred feet, obscured within the shadowy light of the woods, he saw a car, its dark green exterior blending almost seamlessly into the surrounding woodlands. As he neared it, he could see that it was a 1968 Chevrolet Super Sport and that it bore a temporary Pennsylvania license plate, number 2029-301. Pennsylvania was far to the north, hundreds of miles away, and as Angel began circling the car, gathering what little information he could before the lab crew arrived, he sensed that what he'd already been told about the murders was probably true, that no one from Seminole County would have wished any harm upon the Aldays, that their killers had been strangers who'd swept in from afar, the kind of wanton, shiftless drifters who emerged from time to time to carry out some appalling act on villagers who still insisted, despite all his advice to the contrary, that they need not lock their doors.

For the next hour or so Angel continued to process the green Super Sport. Nick Campbell, the chief of the Latent Fingerprints Section of the GBI, had arrived from the Alday trailer by then, and Angel assisted him in lifting various prints from the car's interior. After that, he repeated his initial search of the area around Mary Alday's body, looking for the slightest hint of something the killer or killers might have left behind.

In the meantime his associate, Agent Horace Waters, was doing the same at the Alday trailer. It was now almost noon, and the heat in the trailer was stifling, but Waters moved slowly and meticulously from room to room, his disbelief mounting with each successive step.