Carl took the spotlight at once, his eyes fixed on Lori while he told the two girls about the escape, a real blood-curdling tale, with himself as the criminal mastermind of the whole brilliant scheme.
The girls were very impressed, and their attention spurred Carl on. “We’re going south,” he said boldly. “Maybe to Mexico.” It was going to be a life of high adventure, and Carl took pains to paint a glowing picture of it, days of leisure, plenty of drugs. When he was sure his description of life on the road had captivated them, he popped the question. “You girls want to come along?”
Trapped as they were in the bleak tenements of suburban Baltimore, Jennifer and Lori were easy marks for Carl’s tall tales. Mexico, with its wide haciendas and glittering tropical lagoons, sounded like Paradise.
“Yeah, okay,” Lori said, then with Jennifer directly behind her, she slid into the car and headed toward the blue unknown.
* * *
But if Mexico lay in Jennifer and Lori’s future, it was certainly not in the immediate one. For instead of making a wild dive south, the warm wind in their hair, Carl hesitated, as if unsure of his next move. Typically, The Big Plan shriveled into an aimless wandering of the same old streets and towns Jennifer and Lori had already had enough of. Carl remained behind the wheel, sometimes blowing off about all he’d done, sometimes simply driving on silently, sullenly, his eyes locked on the road.
Thus, for the first few hours after getting into the green Chevrolet, Jennifer and Lori experienced nothing even remotely similar to the southern escape from the confines of Baltimore that Carl had so cavalierly promised. Instead, they drifted through an assortment of small towns in the Baltimore area, sleeplessly cruising through Hillendale, up and down Taylor Avenue, while Carl jabbered about his innumerable triumphs over the various authority figures who’d tried to tame his wild spirit.
For Carl, the girls were a captive audience for his breast-beating fables of criminal exploit, and he railed at them ceaselessly while the sweltering interior of the car grew increasingly disgusting with the smell of smoke, cheap beer, and unwashed bodies. Hour after hour, the cruising dragged on, until night finally fell, and Carl parked along the unromantic stretches of Notch Cliff Road.
This first, uninspired day on the road was followed by a second of pure tedium. After a cramped night, Carl was in no mood to entertain the girls with more tales. Besides, he was running out of stories, his limited imagination depleted by many hours of spinning lies and fantasies.
In addition, the girls were getting cranky. Something had to give.
For Carl, crime had always served as a quick relief from boredom, as well as a way of reasserting his authority. He decided to pump things up a bit by stealing a car.
He found one in a parking lot in Hillendale, hot-wired it, then waved the girls over. He could tell that the strategy had worked by the way the girls tumbled in delightedly, thankful for even this limited change in their surroundings. After that, the “gang” enjoyed a nutritious breakfast of cakes and coffee, all their combined finances could afford.
Once breakfast was over, the drifting began again. It lasted until around 9:00 P.M., when Carl, bored again, stole a second car, a bluish-green Buick. It was late by then, and with no other plan in mind, Carl fell into his usual pattern, drove up to Notch Hill Road, and parked again, just as he had the night before, as if his mind were trapped in its own circular ruin.
The second night was no less wretched than the first. Carl remained in his bizarre holding pattern, a cycle of aimless cruising that wore on more than the collective psychology of the people crowded in the bluish-green Buick. It was also taking its toll on the group’s dwindling finances.
The solution was predictable, of course, but it was also enough to pull Carl from his robotic, perseverating tendencies. No money meant no gasoline, which meant no cruising, which meant that something different had to be done, a break in the iron recapitulations that gave his actions their only discernible structure.
Thus, toward afternoon, Carl and Billy broke into a house while everyone else waited in the car. Approximately twenty minutes later, the Isaacs brothers returned to the car, their arms filled with shirts, watches, radios, and several rifles. For a time, there was general jubilation at the ease with which the burglary had been committed, the loot passed around and fondled lovingly, the totemic objects of their outlawry.
Once the initial thrill was over, however, the incessant cruising began again. Back and forth, the bluish-green Buick lumbered heavily along the bleak suburban streets like a gray fish in a tank of murky water while Carl fought to keep up his flagging self-esteem by conjuring up increasingly outrageous tales of derring-do.
There followed a second burglary, this time with all the men disappearing into the house while Jennifer and Lori remained in the car, their eyes searching the streets for that lone police patrol car that could bring the whole fantastical enterprise to an abrupt and dreary end.
Soon Carl and the others shot back to the car, their arms filled with the latest addition to the group’s accumulating assets, a camera, binoculars, ammunition, and to everyone’s delight, a bag of mixed nuts.
After a quick meal at Gino’s Pizza, Carl and Wayne burglarized yet another house, this time netting an assortment of jewelry, shirts, cassette tapes, guns, ammunition, and, best of all, forty dollars in cash.
With a third burglary completed in a small radius of towns, Carl decided that things were probably getting too hot to remain in Maryland any longer and so crossed the border into Pennsylvania.
In Falls River, he contemplated another burglary, but the sound of a woman calling frantically for her husband forced him to reconsider.
As they drove away, Billy could see the woman standing in full view on her porch. A burst of bravado seized him, and he grabbed one of the rifles they’d stolen the day before.
“Want me to pluck her off?” he asked Carl, who alone had the power to answer questions of such profound consequence.
Carl shook his head. “No,” he said casually. It was the last time he would lift a restraining hand.
The next few days saw a few more burglaries, none of which added very much money to the collective coffers. Stolen articles like binoculars and cameras were nice enough, but they were hardly legal tender. Only cash bought the necessities of life on the run, particularly beer and cigarettes. Carl decided that the time for kidding around was over.
In more ways than one.
By then, the girls had become a nuisance. The crowding was bad enough, but the problem was deeper than that. The girls had seen a great deal, knew a great deal, and Carl began to think about the danger involved in letting them go.
Billy could see the tumblers moving in Carl’s mind, but felt powerless to do anything about it. As for Jennifer and Lori, they appeared oblivious to the dark web Billy could see descending over his older brother.
Still, it was the shortage of cash that remained foremost in Carl’s mind. The girls were tiny glitches on a big screen. The real problem was money. To travel very far, he needed a lot more money than could be had by breaking into penny-ante suburban homes.
This meant armed robbery, a crime distinctly more serious, and far more dangerous, than slipping into empty houses, grabbing shirts and peanuts.
Carl was determined to do it, and it was easy to convince the others that it was necessary.
Except for Jennifer and Lori. The lark had not been exactly thrilling so far, but at least no one had gotten hurt. And that’s the way they wanted to keep it. They told Carl they would have nothing to do with an armed robbery.
Carl made no effort to persuade them otherwise. He had run out of fairy tales with which to amuse them. More burglaries and car thefts would not impress them. His bag of manipulative tricks was empty. It was time to part company.
He let them out on a deserted street corner, telling them that the rest of the gang would carry out the robbery, then return for them, a pledge he had no intention of fulfilling.
“They said they were going to come back for us if nothing went wrong,” Jennifer told police the next day, May 10, 1973, when she and Lori were spotted loitering on a local street corner, questioned vigorously by the officers who had spotted them, then returned to their fretful mothers. “Well, they didn’t come back, so I guess something went wrong.”
Chapter Six
Traveling south through the steadily flattening expanse of the southern coastal plain, you reach it by way of roads where the tractors, agricultural combines, and dusty, late-model cars politely pull onto the shoulders to allow the faster cars to pass. On all sides, white, long-necked cattle egrets rise over broad fields of peas, beans, and cotton. In the distant woodlands, there are hints of Spanish moss. Towns called Cuthbert, Lucille, and Blakely spring up from the surrounding fields. In one courthouse square, the citizens have erected a granite monument to the peanut, the area’s most lucrative crop. Everywhere the pace is leisurely, amiable, a world where people nod to strangers in a gesture that seems almost archaic, gone with the wooden plow. In Bluffton, a hand-lettered sign hawks the town’s best barbecue, then adds, “If you don’t have time to stop, wave.” As far as the horizons stretch, the land seems curiously open, innocent … vulnerable.
Seminole County, Georgia, rests at the center of this world. Bordering Alabama to the west and Florida to the south, it is a region of marginal farms, understaffed government offices, and underfunded schools. As late as 1990, it had yet to produce a written history of itself. Some of the bank branches even maintained their offices in tiny converted house trailers. In its library, located in a small brick building behind the Piggly Wiggly supermarket, shelf after shelf was filled with scores of worn paperbacks, romance novels decidedly the winner in the quest for space.
Of the county’s population of nine thousand, almost twenty percent received food stamps. In taxable sales Seminole ranked 102nd, near the bottom, in the state, and its yearly expenditure for education amounted to a mere $2,725 per student.
An area of farmland and uncultivated woodlands, Seminole County was merely part of that “second Georgia” which has always existed south of Athens, and which has been viewed by the far more developed northern part of the state, particularly its urban center of Atlanta, as intractably lost to the forces of intellectual sophistication and economic development.
As a consequence of this perennial underdevelopment, Seminole County would not have ranked high on any tourist’s list of places to go. There were no museums, race tracks, nightclubs, zoos, or amusement parks, and even the official Georgia State Guide listed as its notable local events only Independence Day, Labor Day, and an “Old Fashioned Halloween.” In summer, there was the broad green expanse of Seminole Lake for fishing and swimming. Winter, when it came, offered nothing to relieve it, no motion picture theater, civic center, swimming pool, or even one of the small “outlet malls” which had sprung up in other, less remote, rural communities to lure the bloated tourist buses from their more established routes.
Thus, on Monday, May 14, 1973, few people in Seminole County would have argued that their region had much to recommend it to those occasional traveling strangers who sometimes found their way into its tiny county seat of Donalsonville.
But to those who had lived in the region for generations, Seminole County and its environs represented a style of life that conformed to their own vision of decency and neighborliness.
No family embodied those modest virtues more than that of Ned and Ernestine Alday. They had married in 1935, together eking out a bare living even during the darkest days of the Depression. It had not been easy. For the first years of their marriage, they’d had no fixed home at all, but had been moved about by the sawmill for which Ned worked, their tiny house jacked up and transported by truck from one milling site to the next.
After many years, Ned and Ernestine had accumulated enough money to buy a small house in Donalsonville, then worked on until there was at last enough money to buy a farm of their own, complete with a large farmhouse on River Road where, during the next few years, the family grew steadily. In the end, there were eight children, equally divided between boys and girls.
By 1969, Norman, the oldest son, had made a career in the military and was living abroad, the first of the family ever to do so. Patricia, the eldest daughter, had graduated from college, the first of the children to receive a college degree, and had taken a job in social work at the Seminole County Department of Family and Children Services. Two other daughters, Nancy and Elizabeth, had married and moved to Augusta, while their brother, Jerry, had married Mary Campbell and moved into a trailer only a few miles down River Road from the family homestead. Fay and Jimmy, the youngest of the Alday children, still lived with their parents, while Shuggie, their older brother, lived with his wife Barbara in a trailer parked only a few yards from the homestead.
Despite the fact that Norman lived in Europe and two of the Alday daughters had migrated to Augusta, the lives of the farming Aldays continued without disruption.
The work was backbreaking, of course, but rewarding nonetheless. There were no bosses or time clocks, so that the Aldays raised their animals, plowed their fields, seeded and harvested their crops according to the slow dance of the seasons as one generation passed unobtrusively to the next.
Through the generations, they had lived so steadfastly according to the strictures of their religion and the customs of their region that as late as the summer of 1973, no psychological evaluation had ever been done on any member of the Alday family, nor any letter written by a concerned schoolteacher or probation officer. No police or court officer had ever entered the Alday home in an official capacity. No Alday had ever been on welfare, disturbed the peace, or violated the dignity of the community. Not one, in almost two hundred years.
“Beefeaters,” Carl smirked to the other men in the car as he headed down the narrow back country road. “Nothing but beefeaters everywhere you look.”
Since the flight from Pennsylvania, the mood in the latest of their stolen cars, a Chevy Super Sport, had darkened considerably. Billy particularly was ill at ease. He had not counted on following Carl over the dark abyss toward which he seemed driven since the events in McConnellsburg. Nor could Wayne or George be expected to stop him. Wayne appeared perfectly content to ride shotgun in the front seat, satisfied with his role as Carl’s trusty henchman. And as for George, he remained as oblivious as ever, doing what he was told, sluggish, dependent, obedient as a child.
They were in Seminole County, Georgia, now, having just crossed over the Florida state line after a short stay in Jacksonville. Though by no means a high point on their tour, Carl was convinced that it had much to recommend it. It was remote, its spacious fields crisscrossed by obscure, unpatrolled back roads, its isolated farmhouses perfect for what he had in mind. In addition, with dreams of Mexico now faded, penniless and nearly out of gas, the Super Sport already beginning to fall apart, it offered nothing more threatening than a redneck police department Carl was certain he could outsmart.
Ezell Spencer was perhaps the first to see them. It was nearly one in the afternoon, and he’d been working at his job at Jimbo’s Drive-In in downtown Donalsonville all day, taking the usual midday orders of fast food from the local farmers and workmen. He knew most of the people who came by Jimbo’s, but he did not recognize any of the four men who pulled into its gravel parking lot that afternoon in a dark green Chevy Super Sport stuffed to the gills with men and supplies. They ordered quickly in Yankee accents, then sat talking to each other while they ate their burgers and fries.
To Spencer, glancing out at them from behind Jimbo’s large picture windows, they appeared rootless and road-worn, and it crossed his mind that they might be headed toward the small hippie community that had lately sprung up near Americus, and which the people of Seminole County regarded with a xenophobic caution and distrust. Certainly the younger ones, the dark-haired youth behind the wheel and the blond boy in the back seat, possessed
that dusty, hippie look of long-haired scruffiness that Spencer associated with San Francisco and New York.
If not hippies, he concluded as he watched them pull out of Jimbo’s parking lot, they were certainly drifters of some type. It was a suspicion that seemed confirmed about two hours later when he saw the same green Super Sport cruise slowly through the back lot of Jimbo’s once again, this time without stopping, but with the same four men sitting silently inside, staring straight ahead, still looking, it seemed to him, for a place to stop.
Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Foster was the next to see them. She’d lived many years in Donalsonville, Georgia, the small county seat of Seminole County. Accustomed to its slow, rural pace, she was surprised to see the dark green car as it barreled toward her from down the road. As she neared the Oak View Church, the car suddenly swerved toward her. To avoid collision, she jerked the wheel to the right, then held on to it tightly as the car slammed into the shallow ditch just beyond the road’s narrow shoulders. The other car was far ahead by then, but she’d gotten a quick glimpse of it as it had hurtled by her, enough to notice the four men inside. They had not even looked back to see what had happened to her as their car bulleted on down the road, a green speck disappearing into an even greener landscape, leaving her shaken and slightly injured behind the wheel. Local boys would have stopped, she thought; only outsiders would have driven on heedlessly as they had done.
A little over ten miles away, Ernestine Alday had been working since just after sunrise. Large-boned and physically strong, she was a farm woman, born and bred, and she had never wanted to be anything else. The call that sometimes drew the seniors of Seminole County High School to the urban jungles of Dothan, Albany, and Atlanta had never sounded in her ears. “The family,” she would say many years later, “was always the most precious thing I ever had.”