Thirty years is a long time to be dead, and Carl Junior Isaacs knew the ropes better than anybody. In 2003 when I got the collect call from him, I had lost track of how long it had been since we’d last spoken or corresponded.
My father’s contact with Isaacs had been forbidden ever since a death row escape in 1980 which had led to the arrest of my parents for “aiding and abetting” – based on the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s illegal search and seizure of several letters penned by Isaacs to my parents by an agent my father surprised during a late-night pilfering of my father’s home office files.
Half a dozen or so GBI agents had been dispatched to our home in Sparks, Georgia, when it was confirmed that four death row inmates had escaped, under the pretense of protecting our family from the potential danger killers on the lam presented. Even I, the summer before my eighth grade year, knew they weren’t coming anywhere near our country home. One of the escapees had called our house as soon as he and his 3 cohorts had cleared Georgia State Prison’s maximum security proximity. “We’re on the ground, man,” Troy Gregg told my father, who could hear the telling sound of passing vehicles in the background.
Isaacs had masterminded the escape, being the most clever and fastidious of the “dead men” my father’s weekly visits to GSP had introduced him to over the preceding decade. Using items allowed through prison mail, such as pajamas and India Ink used for tattoos, Isaacs had fashioned replicas of the guard’s uniforms. Turning the aluminum of a soda can inside out, he had tediously eye-balled the guards outside his cell to create badges.
The most difficult part of the plan’s final execution was the time-consuming, and resource-scarce, sawing of the cell bars. Over an extended period of time and multiple visits from cooperative relatives, hacksaw blades had been surreptitiously snuck past guard inspections – once by concealing them in a wheelchair, another by carefully sliding them into the metal spine of a 3-ring binder. The blades were bought, at least once, by my mother in a Baxley, Georgia hardware store – an act required as an act of good faith; once the blades were in her possession, she walked out of the store and handed the paper bag to Minnie Hunter, the relative of the giant former motorcycle outlaw, Wes McQuorcodale.
My mother enjoyed reflecting on the chain of events during this period, while my father never made peace with his arguable complicity in the escape, or the blame he harbored for Troy Gregg’s death-by-bludgeoning while the escapees were fugitives hanging out at an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang clubhouse.
Since I was 6-years-old he had been a major part of my daily life, and at the forefront of my father’s career as a reporter for The Albany Herald. His coverage of the trial of Isaacs, 19 at the time of his arrest in 1973 for the murders of 6 members of the Alday family is nearby Donalsonville, Georgia, had gained national acclaim for both the newspaper and his career – but created contempt within the local community for fraternizing with the enemy. Murder hadn’t become the entertainment industry it has today, and only the Manson murders in 1969 compared to the senselessness of what Georgia governor Jimmy Carter referred to as the state history’s most “heinous” crime.
He knew I’d accept, and I didn’t think twice; time for the two of us had different meanings, yet the familiarity we shared was the same. Since I was 6, and he was 19, we had co-existed without analyzing or questioning our relation. To others I would compare him to an older brother who was always somewhere else and yet never beyond the shortest distance of a second-thought. Family, because he was familiar; killer or not, people tend to be people when you peel them back and get to their centers.
“Well,” I said, and he said, “How bout you?” and we batted back and forth the informal platitudes two old souls are permitted in tight spaces and fixed time. Collect calls from correctional facilities are always expensive, and brief – you learn that quick and don’t waste too much on empty air. With us, awkward silences were a joke compared to the truths and consequences we had shared since I had started communicating with him as an adult.
When he called I hadn’t heard the news – that he had lost his appeal, his last appeal. His last shot at dodging the lethal needle (instead of “Old Sparky,” the affectionately termed wooden electric chair painted white and outfitted with deadly power. I remembered throughout my childhood the frequent, ongoing drama the guards at Georgia State Prison, where Isaacs had first begun serving his death sentence following his conviction for the 1973 murders of 6 members of the Alday family in Donalsonville, Georgia.
Since the day of the 1980 escape he’d masterminded from the maximum security Reidsville, Georgia lock-up, Isaacs had been an inmate at Jackson Diagnostic Center in Jackson, Georgia, just South of Atlanta on Interstate 75. Only hours before the escape was carried out, Isaacs had been loaded up – along with GSP’s electric chair – and moved to the state’s new Death Row. Had he been allowed to stick around and escape with the other four death row inmates, as planned, what would have happened?
There’s a reason why no one knows the answer. Coincidence that he happened to be the only “dead man” to be transported that particular July 28th morning? Vague though the reasoning always has been “officially,” for those who were part of the story knew enough to not bother questioning. Isaacs was moved, no doubt simmering hotly all the way to his new home on Georgia’s new death row headquarters. Troy Gregg, David Jarrel, Johnny Johnson and Wes McQuorcodale carried on with the long-awaited and methodically-strategized mutiny of the razor-wired hell where they spent every waking moment hearing the clock ticking off second by second what remained of their lives.
He had manipulated the appeals system with increasing skill through his years as a condemned man on the 4th floor of Georgia State Prison – Death Row. A maximum security facility in Reidsville, Georgia, Isaacs had remained there since being convicted of murdering 6 members of the Alday family in a house trailer parked quaintly on the edge of the farm’s corn field where Jerry and Mary Alday lived as a young married couple. Across that field sat the Alday homestead, a modest white clapboard house where Jerry’s parents lived – and where he had grown up.
The phone call came unexpectedly after years of silence. Estranged from the killer who had been a constant throughout my life, hearing the robotic prison phone-system robot operator, “This is a call from a correctional facility. You have a collect call from,” (then silence for a split second until…)…
“Carl Isaacs.” That old familiar voice, unmistakable even if I hadn’t had the correction facility clue. How many collect phone calls had my family accepted from Carl Junior Isaacs since 1973? I had been picking up the phone since I was 6, listening for the nasal-toned operator and then the killer’s voice speaking his name. Thirty years, almost, I thought.
ened the distance between communication – but not familiarity – I pressed the “1” on the keypad to accept and waited for him to say something, half-smiling, half-eye-rolling.