Blood Echoes Read Free

working at a mushroom plant to plying his skills as a carpenter.
    A woman proved his undoing, as far as remaining in the North was concerned. Her name was Betty, and when George met her she was already married to Carl Coleman, the father of her four children. Such incidental facts did not stop Archie and Betty from deepening their relationship, however, and when Coleman realized he was being cuckolded, he promptly signed a warrant against George, charging him with “breaking peace” between Betty and himself. As a result, George spent forty days in jail.
    Once released, he went back to Betty. By then, Coleman had disappeared into the wilds of West Virginia, where he was later rumored to have been shot.
    Though George would later describe Betty as a faithless wife who did “nothing but sit around and drink,” he fathered so many children by her during the next few years that in 1988, when interviewed by a defense team psychologist, he could remember neither the names nor the exact number of his offspring. Their separate personal identities equally eluded him. “I’m just trying to remember which one that was,” he said, when asked about the early life of Carl Junior, the son who would bring to the Isaacs name a singularly dark renown.
    It wasn’t very long before George had had enough of family life. Betty’s own behavior toward him was bad enough, as he saw it, but even worse was her tendency to set the children against him. Egged on by Betty, they tormented him mercilessly, finally forcing him to do the “dirty thing,” as he later described it, of abandoning them, the idea suddenly popping into his head as he sat in a diner after dropping Betty off at work. It was the kind of bizarre whimsy he’d already passed on to his eldest son, though in Carl it would take on a far grimmer character, horrendous acts committed with a shrug.
    Once his father had deserted the family, and with his mother either drunk at home or holed up with her latest romantic interest, Carl and the other children were left to fend for themselves. Roaming in what amounted to a family pack, they moved along the streets while their neighbors watched them apprehensively from behind tightly closed doors.
    What the neighbors saw was a collapsing family structure, its center gone, its sides caving in. Soon the Isaacs children were reduced to rags, though still wandering together, clinging to whatever loose strands of family life they might gather, particularly to such communal efforts as foraging for food in garbage cans.
    But as the weeks passed, their lack of supervision finally drew the attention of various Maryland authorities. At the Hartford Elementary School, teachers noticed that the Isaacs children were unkempt, their teeth rotten, that they stank from unwashed clothes and poor personal hygiene. Called in to explain this condition, Betty Isaacs declared that it was up to the public school teachers to take care of her children, an attitude educational officials greeted with helplessness and dismay.
    Over the next few weeks, the mischief and disorder of the Isaacs children grew steadily more severe, until, in April 1965, Maryland officials assumed full responsibility by declaring them wards of the state.
    By that time Carl Junior, now eleven, had been caught stealing in his elementary school, as well as in Korvette’s, a local department store. He was placed in a foster home, along with Bobby, his younger brother, and Hazel, his older sister.
    For a time, the placement appeared successful. Carl joined the Boy Scouts and began playing trumpet in school.
    By May of 1966, however, the darker angels of his experience had begun to reassert themselves. He was caught stealing again, first at his school, then at the construction site where his foster father worked. A psychologist declared the thievery, along with numerous other incidents of bad behavior and foul language, to be entirely consistent with