Carl Isaacs at 19-years-old claimed to have murdered 15 by the time he was 19 – or so he told my father during the decade’s worth of interviews conducted at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. Convicted of what President Jimmy Carter called the most “heinous crime in Georgia’s history,” he would spend 30 years manipulating his way out of the electric chair – dubbed “Old Sparky.” Appeal after appeal, year after year, Isaacs would unravel his life to the investigative journalist Charles Postell, plastering the front pages of The Albany Herald, and eventually the 1981 book, Dead Man Coming, with his image, his words and his loathsome legacy that has also become mine as Postell’s daughter.
This photo by Postell was taken as Isaacs was led to a lock up shortly after his apprehension, along with his 15-year-old younger brother Billy, their 28-year-old half-brother Wayne Coleman, and Coleman’s jailhouse right hand, George Dungee.
The Alday family in less than an hour on May 14, 1973 had been destroyed and the small rural community in which they had for generations farmed the land and feared God and nothing else was forever altered.
Though four decades have passed, the tragedy has not faded nor has the story come to an end with the deaths of the killers. Instead, it has endured and in some ways even thrived.
The now out-of-print and rare chronicle of the murder and Isaacs hapless life, Dead Man Coming, is still sought by those whose curiosity clings to the mystery that is mortality: the epic, near-mythical past and the ghosts to whom it belongs haunts the living in some ways more now than then.
The legends of humanity are most potent when cut coldly short by hands of strangers. They are the monsters of our youth and they are the reapers of our deathbeds. Peeking into the portal of horror allows a sense of survival even as it compels one to cower from a similar fate.
The doomed and the dead know better than we the living.
To them the eyes of life are riveted, humbling any who believe some divine favor protects and saves. A father, his three sons, his brother, and his young daughter-in-law paid an intimate visit by the devils they no doubt every Sunday prayed away and trusted their God to keep far from their familiar hearths.
Maybe that’s why people hold onto this story.
I’m answering the requests to reprint Dead Man Coming, with this to serve as an introduction and companion – to tell the story, and what was behind it, after and now, as a result of it.
Welcome to my ghost story.
You will find their company to be enlightening, even though sad and unbearable to fathom.
