Retrials for Murders of Six in Family : 15 Years Later, Rural County Burdened by High Cost of Justice

Fifteen years since six members of the Alday family were murdered on their farm, shock has turned to bitter impatience as retrials of three defendants threaten to take the case into the next decade.

The retrials, ordered despite what a federal court called obvious guilt, have burdened tiny, rural Seminole County.

Tucked into Georgia’s southwest corner and with just 9,500 people, Seminole County has about $1 million a year to spend. The cost of the appeals is expected to exceed $600,000. Other counties are holding the retrials, but they send their bills to Seminole, the site of the murders.

The second retrial, of Wayne Coleman, 41, began last Monday in Decatur; jury selection is still under way.

Judicial juggling replaced questions of guilt or innocence years ago, and that rankles here, where concepts of right and wrong are stark and pure.

Ned Alday, 62; his brother Aubrey, 57, and sons Jerry, 35; Jimmy, 30, and Chester, 25, were shot to death in Jerry’s trailer as they arrived singly or in pairs May 14, 1973. Jerry’s wife, Mary, 26, was raped there, driven to a field six miles away, raped and sodomized again and shot twice in the back.

Century-Old Tree

Their graves, marked by a $20,000 black marble slab, lie near a cedar tree planted more than a century ago at Spring Hill Baptist Church by Isaac Alday.

An irrigation well stands on the site of the trailer 12 miles from Donalsonville.

But faded “Remember The Aldays” stickers remain on a few vehicles, and in the local courthouse is a cartoon depicting the appellate judges who overturned the convictions as the Three Stooges. “Remember them in May during ‘Respect for Law Week,’ ” reads the caption.

“There won’t be justice for the Alday family until (the killers) all fry,” said Eddie Gail, nursing a soft drink at the local pool hall. “The court found them guilty, they know they’re guilty, and that should be the end of it.”

Coleman, then 26 years old; his half-brother Carl Isaacs, 19, and George Dungee, 35,, all escapees from a Maryland prison farm, were arrested in West Virginia shortly after the killings.

Mary Alday’s wristwatch was in Dungee’s pocket. The men had three of the weapons used to kill the Aldays. Coleman’s confession was read in court.

The three were tried separately in Donalsonville and sentenced in 1974 to die.

Billy Isaacs, Carl’s 15-year-old brother, had been picked up in Baltimore County after the prison break. A witness to the murders, he turned state’s evidence and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Billy testified that Carl laughed after killing Aubrey Alday: “I asked him what was so funny,” Billy recalled. “He said, ‘That bastard begged for mercy.’ ”

He testified his brother shot four of the victims and that Coleman and Dungee killed one each. Some of the Aldays were shot in the head as many as seven times.

‘Overwhelming Evidence’

In 1985 the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, while citing “overwhelming evidence of guilt,” ruled there also was “overwhelming evidence that the community had prejudiced both guilt and sentence.”

A lower court had ruled that the convictions and sentences were based on “the overwhelmingly uncontroverted evidence of their willful participation in what is generally regarded as the most heinous criminal orgy in the history of the state.”

But the appellate ruling held that the trials should have been moved because of pretrial publicity and inflammatory statements by some officials. Failure to overturn the convictions, it said, “would mean an obviously guilty defendant would have no right to a fair trial.”

More than 100,000 people signed petitions calling for the impeachment of the three judges, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their decision.

“The judges and lawyers that did that are the ones who should be hung first,” said Mel Johnson, who operates a crossroads store not far from where the Aldays are buried.

He said time had not dulled emotions.

“When people around here get to talking about it, they get so mad they almost start to fight,” he said. “It’s still very much alive. And not a day goes by but what someone doesn’t stop by here and ask for directions to the cemetery, people from all walks of life, some of them from as far as New York.”

According to retrial testimony, the defendants were heading back to Maryland from Florida in a stolen car. They were burglarizing the trailer when Aldays started arriving.

In 1977, Carl Isaacs, in a television documentary interview, said the four were after money but didn’t want to go back to jail. “We figured that they couldn’t take us back to prison if they couldn’t talk.”

Isaacs was retried earlier this year in Perry, convicted and sentenced again to death. Dungee will be retried in Columbus later.

Meanwhile, the bills for everything from lawyers to false teeth keep piling up.

Since 1985, Seminole County has paid about $327,400, most of it to other counties for lodging the prisoners, holding hearings, transportation, security and lawyers’ fees.

County Clerk Bobby Nichols said costs for the Isaacs trial were about $160,000, and he wasn’t optimistic that costs for Coleman’s retrial would be lower.

“(Houston County, where Isaacs was tried) charged us $890 just for opening and closing the courtroom. They called it extra custodial service. When Isaacs needed a new suit to go to trial in, we paid for that.”

Coleman has no teeth. At a recent competency hearing, for which Seminole County also paid, his lawyers asked that he be provided dentures for the trial.

“In July of 1987, we provided him with upper and lower dentures at a cost of $350,” Nichols said with a frown. “If it were up to me, he wouldn’t get another set.”

He said Seminole County is feeling the pinch.

“We have been able to continue basic services thus far,” he said. “I don’t know how much longer we will be able to. We depend on agriculture here, and agriculture is in disarray with foreclosures and all.”

The county borrowed $210,000 so it could function while it paid retrial costs.

‘Precarious Way’

“If we don’t get a lot more help from the state it could leave us in a very precarious way,” he said. The state has paid $153,000 so far.

Nichols said the cost of the initial trials was less than $10,000, and each lasted less than a week.