Blood Echoes (9 page)

In the north bedroom he found the bodies of Ned and Shuggie Alday as they lay facedown on the bed. A camouflage jacket had been flung over Ned's shoulder, but with the body turned slightly to the left and the side of his head exposed, Waters could see several gunshot wounds that moved in a tight pattern along the side of his face.

Shuggie Alday lay beside his father, but at an angle, so that his feet lay across Ned's legs, as if draped over them. A small towel had been wrapped around his head and was now encrusted in dried blood.

In the living room, Waters found Jimmy Alday's body, also facedown, with what appeared to be a single wound in the back of his head.

After a moment, Waters headed back into the south bedroom where Jerry and Aubrey Alday lay side by side, facedown on the bed. As his eyes lingered on them a moment, he noticed that Aubrey's fingers lay folded over Jerry's, as if, in the last moment, he'd reached out to hold his nephew's hand.

*     *     *

The bodies had been removed by the time Angel arrived at the trailer, and yet, as he moved through its small rooms, it was not difficult for him to imagine the lives of the people who had arrived there the previous afternoon, or how crowded with death the trailer must have seemed to those who had toured it while the bodies were still inside. It was very small, a miniature house, with everything scaled down in a radical compactness. The bedrooms barely provided space to walk around the beds, and Jerry and Mary Alday had crowded them even more with their few possessions. There were tiny bureaus and an old-fashioned sewing machine on top of which Mary's modest sewing kit rested, still open, its tiny interior chambers crowded with needles and multicolored threads. The bedroom closets were stuffed with work clothes, but only a few suits, the couple's “Sunday best” relegated to a single narrow section of the closet's limited space.

Judging from the trailer, Jerry and Mary Alday had lived a modest, pared-down life, but a neat, orderly, decent one. Within their small cabinets and dresser drawers, Angel found no drugs, no pornography, no hateful letters, no bills that had not been paid. He found nothing locked away or covered up or in any way concealed. “With the Aldays,” he would later say, “what you saw was what you got, the salt of the earth.”

By early afternoon, the Pennsylvania license plate had been traced and Angel was on the phone with Sergeant Larry Good of the Pennsylvania State Police.

According to Good, three inmates had escaped from the Poplar Hill Correctional Institute in Wimpimco, Maryland, on May 5, 1973. Later they had picked up the younger brother of two of them, fifteen-year-old William Carroll Isaacs, known as Billy, in Baltimore. After that they'd added two young girls to their party, and subsequently gone on a protracted spree of petty crime, burglarizing an assortment of houses before finally abandoning the girls on a street corner.

It was presumably at that point, Good went on, that things had gotten meaner. The four men had stolen a truck in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania. But the theft hadn't gone smoothly. They'd been spotted and followed by a nineteen-year-old boy named Richard Wayne Miller.

“Where'd he see them go?” Angel asked.

That was a question Pennsylvania authorities had not yet been able to answer, Good replied, because Miller had not been seen since he'd disappeared down the road behind the stolen truck.

“He just vanished?” Angel asked.

Without a trace, Good told him, despite considerable local efforts to locate him. In fact, Good added, the discovery of the green Super Sport in the Georgia woods was the first lead he'd gotten in many days, since the car was the one Richard Miller had been driving as he'd followed the four escapees down U.S. 30 the day he'd disappeared.

“And nobody's spotted Miller since then?” Angel asked.

“No.”

“So it's possible he's still with them,” Angel said.

“It's possible.”

“But that would be against his will, right?” Angel asked. “They're not the type he'd have gone off with.”

“Absolutely not,” Good said. “He's a very clean-cut type of kid.”

“All right,” Angel said, “let's go on with the three escapees.”

For the next few minutes, Angel took careful notes as Good gave him full physical descriptions of the Isaacs brothers, Coleman, and Dungee. To Angel, they seemed small in more ways than their size. They were stunted men with stunted lives, petty offenders, dropouts, losers, the northern urban equivalent of the rural redneck outlaws he'd been tracking all his life.

Still, for all their shiftlessness and criminality, they had committed no acts of violence so far, a fact that Angel found surprising. It was as if something had suddenly snapped in them, shot them up to a terrible slaughter that nothing in their backgrounds could accurately have predicted.

And yet the escape Good had described struck Angel as equally arbitrary and illogical, the same irrational quality at work, though with none of the reckless, annihilating violence that now gave a sudden, terrible urgency to his pursuit. Clearly, the Maryland escapees were precisely the kind of men who had lost all sense of proportion, the type for whom the ordinary limits of human behavior were mere spindly, insubstantial obstacles in the path of their flight. As long as they were at large, he thought as he hung up the phone after his conversation with Larry Good, not one person in the whole vast country was entirely safe.

At approximately 10:00
P.M.
Dr. Howard finished the autopsies he'd been conducting on the six members of the Alday family. He'd been working at the Evans Funeral Home in Donalsonville nearly all afternoon and evening as one body after another was wheeled into its small embalming room.

The final results of his autopsies indicated that Ned Alday had been shot six times with two different pistols, .22 and .32 calibers. Aubrey Alday had been shot once with a .38. Shuggie Alday had been shot once with a .380-caliber pistol, Jerry Alday had been shot four times with a .22-caliber pistol, Jimmy Alday had been shot twice with a .22-caliber pistol, as had Mary Alday, who, Dr. Howard concluded, had also been raped, probably more than once.

Angel was standing in the room when Howard finished the last of the autopsies. By then it was awash with the results of the ones that had gone before. The heavy stench of the bodies hung in the air around him. But it was the ravaged appearance of the room that affected him the most. It looked like an army field hospital, a place where, after battle, the bodies had been brought back to lie, gutted and alone, until they could be hauled away. That they were all members of a single family struck Angel as nearly beyond belief. He could not imagine the level of grief and loss that he knew must now be sweeping down upon the Aldays who remained alive.

Eleven miles away, in the Alday homestead on River Road, the remaining members of the Alday family were dealing with the murders as best they could. While scores of neighbors gathered inside the house or poured out onto the porch and surrounding yard, Ernestine worked to comfort her children. Elizabeth, fearing a miscarriage, had been heavily sedated, while the others fought their grief by busying themselves with the huge amounts of foods their neighbors had been showering upon them for the past few hours. No one in Seminole County could remember ever having seen anything like it. On tables throughout the house, scores of cakes and pies, along with all manner of meat and vegetables, had been brought in by a community that had decided to extend itself fully in a family's time of unimaginable trouble. It was the one bright spot in those first dark days, and in the years that followed it would surface from time to time in the minds of Ernestine and her children. “If you can say that anything good can be taken from all this,” Nancy would say in July of 1990, nearly seventeen years after the murders, “it was how we felt about what our neighbors did for us.”

All through that long day and deep into the night, they continued to arrive at the Alday home, bringing with them what they could, offering whatever help they might extend from their own marginal existences. Late on the evening of that first day, one of them, Eunice Braswell, drew Ernestine away from the others and solemnly pressed a five-dollar bill into her hand. “This is for you,” she said. It was a gesture Ernestine would never forget, something that seemed to rise like a flower from the richest soil on earth.

In Colquitt, Georgia, however, things took a different turn. In the small town approximately eighteen miles from where their daughter's body had been found, the mother and father of Mary Alday were receiving friends and neighbors much as the Aldays had been doing for the last two days in Seminole County. Mary's death had sent shock waves through that community as well, but the agonizing details of Mary's last hours had been concealed from Mary's mother. Although only sixty-two years old, Mrs. Campbell had been in failing health for several years, and because of that it had been determined that the actual circumstances of Mary's death would be too much for her to bear. Consequently, she had been told only that Mary had been shot and had died instantly from the wound.

But at some point during the evening, a neighbor unintentionally revealed as much as was known about Mary's last moments, including the fact that she had been the last to die, having witnessed the murders of her husband and in-laws, and that she had been found nude in the woods and had probably been raped.

Shortly after being told the horrifying details of her daughter's torment, Mrs. Campbell sank into a diabetic coma. Only a few hours later, she died of what her doctor later described as the combined effects of “a diabetic condition and grief over her daughter's slaying.”

It was a determination of cause of death with which Ronnie Angel wholeheartedly concurred. “I always thought of her as the seventh Georgia victim,” he would say years later, “because, really, it was just like those boys put a gun to her head, too.”

Meanwhile, as the night was steadily deepening along the Mississippi-Alabama border, Wesley Williamson decided to go into Livingston, a small town just inside the Alabama state line and almost 275 miles west of Donalsonville. As he headed toward town, he saw what appeared to be a dark-haired man and a slender, blond-haired young girl as they trudged wearily along the shoulders of the road. They looked tired, and Williamson particularly felt bad for the girl who, from a distance, seemed very thin and gangly. He slowed as he went by them, then swung over to the side of the road to pick them up. From the dusty glass of his rearview mirror, and through the scarred wooden stocks of the hunting rifles that hung in a gun rack over the back seat, he could see them rushing toward him eagerly, their lean figures faintly illuminated by the red glow of his taillights. As they neared, he noticed that the blond-haired young girl was, in fact, a boy, and something in the way he and the other man came rushing toward him, the cold, hungry look in their eyes, warned him off immediately. He turned back to the wheel, and without so much as a backward glance, plunged his foot down on the accelerator and sped away, leaving the still rapidly pursuing men in a cloud of yellow dust behind his spinning tires.

Several hours later a solitary police cruiser turned onto the Boyd Cutoff as it made its nightly rounds along the back roads of Sumter County. Up ahead, just off to the right near an abandoned construction site, the car's lone patrolman could see a blue and white 1968 Chevrolet Impala as it rested motionlessly along the narrow shoulders of the road. He drew his car over to the right and pulled in behind it. The car bore Alabama license plates, and before getting out, the officer recorded the number in his notebook. Then, his flashlight held loosely in his hand, the other dangling freely at the grip of his revolver, he slowly advanced on the car, shining his light into its dark interior. There was nothing inside to identify the car in any way, so he returned to his patrol car and radioed in the make, model, license, and serial numbers. There was nothing to do now but wait for the report to come back. Only five minutes later, it did. The car he'd discovered was registered to Mary C. Alday of Route 3, Donalsonville, Georgia, the report informed him, and was wanted in connection with her murder.

Chapter Ten

A
ngel and Waters were just leaving the Evans Funeral Home, on their way to their motel room to go over the day's findings and plan an investigative strategy for the next day when they were notified to call Sheriff Melvin Stephens of the Sumter County Sheriff's Department in Livingston, Alabama.

Angel returned the call immediately and listened, both surprised and exhilarated by the rapidity with which the case was breaking, as Stephens told him about the blue and white Impala which had been found during a routine neighborhood patrol only a hour or so before.

“One of our patrolmen just spotted it sitting on the side of the road,” Stephens said. “Then we ran it through NCIC, and it came up that you were looking for it, that it was connected to a homicide in Georgia.”

“Six homicides,” Angel said.

“Six?”

“Yes.”

“So, the report was right?” Stephens asked. “This is the car you're looking for, the one involved in the Alday thing, the one that's all over the news?”

“Yes, it is,” Angel said.

For a moment, he entertained the faint hope that the Maryland escapees might actually have been spotted.

“Did any of your people see anybody around the car?” he asked quickly.

“No.”

If the men were not there, Angel thought, perhaps they might not be far away. “How about the car?” he asked. “Did anybody have any idea how long it might have been there?”

“No,” Stephens said.

“Where's the car now?”

“Right where we found it,” Stephens said. “Once we knew you wanted it, I mean, for a homicide, we just posted a guard out there.”