The Murders of the Alday Family

The Second Worst Massacre in Georgia History, Leading to the Longest Serving Death Row Inmate in the United States

Lori Johnston
33 min readSep 30, 2020
Six coffins; six victims (photo source: riverroadccs.org)

May 14, 1973

Donalsonville, Georgia is a tiny hamlet in the southwestern corner of the state, 20 minutes north of Lake Seminole, 62 miles south of Albany and 36 miles east of Dothan, Alabama. Named for John Ernest Donalson, who built the first lumber mill in the area, kicking off the city’s growth, its economy was mostly agriculture, and home to 13 churches in the city’s roughly four square miles of land and the immediate surrounding area. The city has two schools (an elementary plus a middle/high school) and one public library. Two NFL players called Donalsonville home at one time and the two Anglin brothers who escaped from Alcatraz in 1962 came from a Donalsonville family. In all, it was an unlikely scene for what would become the second worst mass murder in Georgia history.

On May 5, 1973, the events which would culminate in the massacre of the Alday family began to form at the Poplar Hill Correctional Institute outside of Baltimore, Maryland.

Nineteen-year-old Carl Isaacs had been a truant and runaway that was diagnosed with depression, poor self-image and an inability to handle his angry emotions, with…

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Lori Johnston

Writer, reader, margarita drinker. Currently looking for a “dare to be great” situation.