User:Afddiary/PeachGangSandbox

The Alday family murders took place on May 14, 1973, in Donalsonville, Georgia, a small town in Seminole County, Georgia, when six members of the Alday family were murdered by four men who burglarized a family home after breaking out of prison.

Earlier in May 1973, 19-year-old Carl Junior Isaacs, 26-year-old Wayne Carl Coleman, and 35-year-old George Elder Dungee escaped from a prison in Maryland. They joined with Isaacs' younger brother, 15-year-old William Carroll "Billy" Isaacs, to drive to Florida so the three escapees could avoid recapture. Prior to the drive to Florida, the four kidnapped and murdered 19-year-old Richard Miller so they could steal Miller's car.

The four passed through Georgia on their way to Florida. On May 14, 1973, they stopped at the home of Jerry and Mary Alday to steal gasoline and decided to burglarize the house to search for valuables. As several Alday family members began to return home during the burglary, starting with Jerry and Ned Alday, the four burglars held each Alday family member at gunpoint to force them inside the house, after which they shot each victim to death. In all, six Alday family members – five men and one woman – were murdered that day.

The group fled to Alabama after the murders but later moved to West Virginia, where police apprehended them. The four faced trial in early 1974, and Billy Isaacs avoided a death sentence by testifying for the state against his associates. Carl Isaacs, George Dungee, and Wayne Coleman were each sentenced to death, although Dungee and Coleman later had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment after retrials in the late 1980s. Carl Isaacs was executed by lethal injection on May 6, 2003, eight days away from the 30th anniversary of the murders. At the time of his execution, Isaacs was the longest serving death row inmate in United States history.

Background
'''THESE 2 CITATIONS ARE VERY GOOD FOR BIOGRAPHICAL INFO; THE ARTICLE CONTAINS A LOT OF BIRTH DATES. WHEN IT HAS BEEN EXHAUSTED OF ALL ITS USES, DRAG IT FROM HERE, TO THE FIRST INSTANCE IN WHICH IT SHOWS UP, AND THEN DELETE THIS TEXT.'''

AldayFamilyBackground

Perpetrators
Wayne Carl Coleman was born on December 9, 1946, in the township of East Nottingham, Pennsylvania. Coleman was a half-brother of Carl and Billy Isaacs and related to the Isaacs by their mother; Coleman was the last of five children born to Betty Jamison Isaacs and Carson Coleman, the latter of whom abandoned the family shortly after Wayne Coleman's birth. As a young adult, Wayne Coleman worked several low-paying construction jobs. When Coleman was 21 years old, he began accumulating his own criminal record with a burglary conviction. Later, he was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for a robbery and sent to prison, but after demonstrating good behavior, he was transferred to the Poplar Hill Prison Camp, a minimum-security reentry facility, where he met and befriended George Dungee.

George Elder Dungee was born on March 5, 1938, in Baltimore, Maryland. Dungee had minor intellectual disability and wore glasses for myopia. His father died when he was six months old, so he was raised largely by a single mother, Fannie Dungee. Fannie Dungee worked 16 hours a day in a vegetable canning plant and often had trouble finding babysitters for her son, who frequently went truant during his schooling years. When Dungee was in his mid-20s, he identified as a gay man, but he had a girlfriend anyway, a waitress who worked at the same restaurant where Dungee was employed as a dishwasher. They had a daughter together and lived as a family unit in Baltimore for a few years while Dungee moved between jobs, since he was fired frequently for slow work performance, until his girlfriend broke up with him and requested child support. Dungee then moved back in with his mother, but eight years later, he was arrested due to owing $1,600 in child support after not having made any of his payments of $5 USD per week, and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was sent to the minimum-security Poplar Hill Prison Camp, where he met Carl Isaacs and Wayne Coleman.

Carl Junior Isaacs was born to Betty Isaacs and her second husband, George Archie Isaacs, on August 9, 1953, in Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania; he was the third of seven children born to George Archie Isaacs. His younger brother, William Carroll Isaacs, more often went by the nickname Billy and was four years younger than Carl Isaacs. When Carl and Billy Isaacs were young, their father deserted the family, leading the Isaacs children to grow up in a home that Maryland prison officials characterized as "a nightmare of social instability." Growing up, Carl and Billy Isaacs lived in several locations near the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, frequently making extra money in farming and factory jobs and frequently switching schools. At some point, Carl and Billy Isaacs were placed in foster care because their mother was rarely home due to long work hours. Carl and Billy Isaacs developed a juvenile criminal record consisting of convictions for truancy, running away from foster homes, petty crime, and several stints in reform school. Billy Isaacs' first arrest occurred when he was five years old and a police officer caught him shoplifting, after which the police officer spanked him as corporal punishment, although their mother Betty recalled that the boys were "like any other boys" until they hit puberty, at which point they began burglarizing homes.

When Carl Isaacs was fifteen years old, he received his first adult conviction when he was found guilty of car theft and housebreaking. He was arrested several times between the ages of 16 and 19 for burglary. In February 1973, he was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for burglary and sent to the Metropolitan Transition Center in Baltimore. On March 29, 1973, Carl was assaulted and gang-raped by older inmates during a prison riot that took over his cell block, leading prison officials to transfer him to the Poplar Hill Prison Camp for his safety. There, he reunited with his half-brother Wayne Coleman, who introduced him to George Dungee. Coleman and Carl Isaacs planned an escape from Poplar Hill after deciding they would likely not be paroled from their sentences early, and Coleman convinced Carl Isaacs to allow Dungee to join them in their escape. Meanwhile, Billy Isaacs had been sent to the Victor Cullen School for Boys, a reform school located in Sabillasville, Maryland, after an arrest and juvenile conviction for burglary. In April 1973, Billy Isaacs escaped from that reform school.

In 1981, a reporter based out of Albany, Georgia, would later claim that Carl Isaacs had participated in a total of 13 murders in his life before his imprisonment on death row, including the six Alday murders and the death of Richard Miller.

At the time of the Alday family murders, Carl Isaacs was 19 years old, and his brother Billy was 15 years old. Wayne Coleman was 26, and George Dungee was 35 years old.

Prison escape and murder of Richard Miller
In the early morning hours of May 5, 1973, Carl Isaacs, Coleman, and Dungee escaped the Poplar Hill facility by crawling out of a dormitory bathroom window. Somehow, Wayne Coleman also obtained a .38-caliber pistol. The trio stole a car and drove it to Baltimore, where they picked up Billy Isaacs from his girlfriend's house and decided to head towards Florida because Wayne Coleman wanted to see "the ocean." First, they drove west into Pennsylvania, where, on May 10, they kidnapped 19-year-old Richard Wayne Miller in McConnellsburg so they could steal his Chevrolet Chevelle. They drove into Allegany County, Maryland, where Coleman dragged Miller out of the car and murdered Miller by shooting him in the head. Miller's body was discovered on June 3, 1973, almost a month later.

Alday family murders
Text

Escape
Text

Arrest
Text

Legal proceedings and trial
Investigators characterized Carl Isaacs as the ringleader of the group, since officials considered him the smartest and best at organizing out of them all. They characterized Dungee as a follower, which Billy Isaacs corroborated, later testifying during Dungee's trial, "[Dungee] never said much. Whenever Wayne or Carl told him to do something, he did it."

Death row, appeals, and resentencing
(I guess this is where I would write about Carl Isaacs' participation in the Georgia State Prison escape, but I don't want to write a lot about that because it isn't wholly relevant to the Alday family murders, which are the focus + namesake of this article. I might dedicate 2-3 sentences to it here.)

''Then I can also talk in this section about the progression of appeals for all 3 death-sentenced inmates, also describing their retrials/resentencing hearings. That is far more relevant to the Alday case.''

Resentencing
Coleman's retrial took place in DeKalb County, Georgia, which is located hundreds of miles away from Seminole County. Judge Hugh Lawson was the presiding judge. On May 2, Coleman's jury again convicted him of six counts of murder. When it came to sentencing, jurors later reported that their votes were split on each of the six murder charges. Most favoring death for Ned Alday's murder, while there was an even split in their votes for the murders of Jimmy, Mary, and Aubrey Alday. After over 34 hours of deliberation, Judge Lawson determined that there was a hung jury on all six murder charges in Coleman's sentencing and enforced six consecutive life sentences, as a life sentence was automatic in the event that a jury could not unanimously agree on the death penalty. Coleman would be eligible for parole in 15 years.

Dungee was the last of the three death-sentenced men to receive a retrial, which concluded in mid-July 1988 when Dungee pleaded guilty to all charges against him. Two days prior, prosecutors had announced they were prohibited from seeking another death sentence against Dungee due to his intellectual disabilities, as Georgia had passed a law earlier in 1988 to protect inmates with "significantly sub-average general intellectual functioning" from being sentenced to death. After Dungee pleaded guilty, his trial judge gave him six life sentences, three running consecutively, with the understanding between both Dungee's lawyers and the prosecution being that he would likely never be paroled.

Aftermath
CarlIsaacsExecution

George Dungee died in 2006, at the age of 68, while still serving his sentence in Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. Although his body was not autopsied, his official cause of death was determined to be acute congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Dungee had no relatives available to be notified of his death or to claim his body, so he was buried in the prison cemetery, with corrections officials serving as his pallbearers. His headstone within the cemetery is a cross made of concrete that bears his inmate identification number and date of death, but not his name.

BillyIsaacsFate

WayneColemanFate

In popular culture
InformationOn1977DocumentaryGoesHere

In September 1988, the independent film Murder One was released in Canada and the United States. The film was a biographical crime drama based on the Alday family murders, directed by Graeme Campbell and starring Henry Thomas as Billy Isaacs, who narrated the film's events; James Wilder as Carl Isaacs; Stephen Shellen as Wayne Coleman; and Erroll Slue as George Dungee. The screenplay was written by Fleming "Tex" Fuller, who based his writing off of his 1977 documentary. The film generated controversy for containing several factual errors – one being that Billy Isaacs received a sentence of 100 years' imprisonment, when his sentence was actually 40 years – and for painting the perpetrators, especially Billy Isaacs, in a sympathetic light. One review printed in the Orlando Sentinel recommended In Cold Blood as a superior crime film and suggested Murder One is akin to a "cheap exploitation flick". Theaters in southwest Georgia did not show Murder One, both because representatives from the film's distributor, Miramax, felt the film's subject would be "too close to home" for the locals, and because Miramax was afraid the film would offend moviegoers.