It was the boldest of plans and unbelievably dangerous for the public. Six Death Row inmates, convicted of Georgia’s most heinous and brutal murders and rapes, contrived a scheme to walk out of the front gate of their maximum-security prison in broad daylight. If they succeeded, some of the most dangerous men in the world would be out among the public. They had all killed brutally. There was no reason to think that, given a chance, they would hesitate to kill again. And, once they were out, that’s exactly what they did.
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The group was housed together in Block A1 of the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, GA., one floor underneath what was intended to be their final destination, the state’s electric chair.
The Georgia Department of Corrections had announced the transfer of death row inmates to a facility in Jackson. The six escape planners filed a lawsuit in Federal Court to prohibit their transfer, feeling Death Row inmates there received fewer privileges where they were currently housed, in Reidsville. The day the Reidsville escape took place, the inmates in Jackson were on the thirteenth day of a hunger strike, protesting conditions.
Carl Isaacs was generally considered the primary planner and ringleader. One of the most brutal humans in history, he had been imprisoned in Maryland when he escaped in 1973 with two other inmates. While on the run, he and the two other escapees picked up his brother, Billy. The gang kidnapped and murdered 19-year-old Richard Miller in Maryland. They stole his car and then made their way to South Georgia, where during an attempted robbery, they killed five Alday family members, then kidnapped, raped, and murdered a sixth, Mary Alday. Journalist Charles Postell, later a central figure in the escape, who wrote a book about Isaacs, attributed 13 murders to Isaacs.
In 1964, three Gwinnett County police officers were found murdered, execution style. Click here fo the story.
Timothy Wesley McCorquodale was a member of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club. He spent much of his free time hanging out on “The Strip” in an area of Atlanta today known as Midtown, known for its “hippie” element. He had an apartment with his girlfriend, Bonnie Succaw, her infant daughter, and a teenager named Linda Deering.
On the evening of January 16, 1974, McCorquodale, with an accomplice known only as Leroy, had crossed paths with Donna Dixon and her friend in a bar. After controversy about $50 and Dixon and her friend accepting drinks from black men in the bar, McCorquodale, Succaw, Leroy, and Dixon took a cab to the Moreland Avenue apartment. Once there, he smashed her in the face with his fist, tied her hands and feet, gagged her with a rag, and beat her with the buckle of his belt. Over the next several hours, McCorquodale raped and tortured Dixon, burning her with cigarettes, slicing her with razor blades, biting her flesh, and pouring salt into her wounds. She was raped by Leroy and sodomized by both Leroy and McCorquodale, who eventually strangled her to death, then broke her arms and legs to stuff her body into a trunk, then went to sleep. He dumped her body on a rural road south of Atlanta.
A prison tougher than Alcatraz? Click here for the story.
Based on a tip, police arrested McCorquodale the next day. He showed no remorse and still wore the blood-soaked clothes from the murder. His reason was that he wanted to teach Dixon a lesson about associating with black men.
David Jarrell was convicted of kidnapping, beating, and attempting to rape a minor female when he was 15. When he was 18, he kidnapped and murdered a young bank teller, Mala Still, in Lawrenceville on Christmas Eve, 1973. According to his initial confession, Mrs. Still had parked outside a grocery store and entered to shop. When she returned to her vehicle, he slid into the passenger seat, wielding a .45 caliber pistol he had stolen days before. He forced her to drive to a rural location, where he forced her to disrobe. He attempted to rape her but could not, so he had her re-dress, then shot her three times, killing her instantly. He then drove her car around, abandoned it, and sold the weapon to a friend of his friend.
Read the story of the kidnapping and murder of Mala Still here.
Gwinnett DA Bryant Huff handled the case against Jarrell. When the firearm owner reported it stolen, and the caliber matched the murder weapon, police connected Jarrell to the crime, and he was soon apprehended and confessed to the crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to death.
Troy Leon Gregg was a high school dropout who spent three months in the Army but was released for medical reasons. His story was the subject of a book, “Waiting For It.” He had drifted to Florida and decided to hitchhike to his family’s home in North Carolina for the Thanksgiving holiday. Gregg, with his 16-year-old companion Sam Allen, were picked up by two men, Fred Simmons and Bob Moore, heading north. Another hitchhiker joined them and was let out near Atlanta. Drinking heavily, the group stopped at a rest stop near Lawrenceville, GA. Gregg murdered his two hosts, threw their bodies in a nearby ditch, and continued toward Asheville.
When the story made the news, the hitchhiker who had been dropped off just before the murders contacted police, and Gregg and Allen were arrested in Asheville, NC. Gregg was tried by Gwinnett DA Bryant Huff and sentenced to death. His case was one of the three that the Supreme Court heard that resulted in overturning the ban on the death penalty.
Johnny Johnson was from a broken home in South Carolina. He dropped out of school in the tenth grade and joined the Army. He was soon discharged for drug use. In 1974, he and his accomplice, Jerry Sprouse, traveled to Savannah to see a ZZ Top concert, but the event was sold out. He and his friend decided they had consumed excessive drugs and liquor, so they opted to stay in Savannah for the night. They encountered Suzanne Edenfield and another girl at a traffic light and asked them to join them and smoke a joint. Afterward, when the girls attempted to leave, Sprouse pulled a gun and forced them into his car. The women were taken to a remote area, where Sprouse tried to rape the friend but couldn’t, then shot her. She survived. Edenfield was raped and shot fatally. Sprouse and Johnson returned to South Carolina, where they burned their car and fled to Canada. They were captured days later when they returned to South Carolina. They were tried and sentenced to death.
Sprouse and Johnson escaped from prison in Savannah in 1978 while awaiting an appeal of their death sentences. There they sawed through the bars to facilitate the escape.
Three of the four inmates had sent a letter to President Carter, volunteering for a mission to rescue the American hostages being held in Tehran.
The escape plot was conceived by Isaacs several years earlier. It ended up as a perfect meeting of inmate ingenuity, wrongdoing on the part of the guards, and cooperation with several outside co-conspirators. The five were joined by convicted murderer Jack Alderman, who received a death sentence for murdering his wife for insurance money.
Given their restrictive circumstances, the execution of the plan was somewhat elaborate. The plot received a boost when in 1978, a successful lawsuit brought by inmates forced the addition of fire escapes on the building’s exterior walls. The final plan was to dress as guards and walk out the doors to freedom.
A complicit guard, James Gayheart, aided in the logistics by reportedly letting the inmates make a mold of his badge. They created fake badges from cardboard, metal, smuggled paint, and cellophane from cigarette packs. A minor child connected to Jarrell visited and hid hacksaw blades in the handle of a portable radio. The prisoners would call the guards to a particular cell, then engage them in conversation while Jarrell drew the uniforms. They each ordered pajamas from J.C. Penney in the same color as the guard’s uniforms and lined them with prison shirts. Dyes for the pants were mailed to George Dungee, a co-conspirator of Issacs and an occupant of the same cell block.
The group had been unable to replicate the shoulder patches worn by the guards, so they found an alternate plan. Former Outlaw Motorcycle Club member Richard Apgar, who had access to the location of the patches, was coerced and threatened, so he smuggled the patches, hidden in cans of talcum powder, to the potential escapees on Death Row.
Over time, the conspirators had cut through three sets of bars and fashioned ropes from bedsheets.
The last piece of the stage setting took place on Sunday afternoon when McCorquodale’s mother and aunt visited. They left a car, a blue 1971 Plymouth Fury, in the parking lot. The pair returned early in the morning of the planed escape and found the getaway car to have a flat tire. In a strange twist of fate, the pair visited a barracks for the Georgia State Patrol across the street, and an employee from there came back to the prison parking lot with them and changed the tire. The ladies told the guards it wouldn’t start, so they were leaving it until someone could return with them to repair it.. In the car were multiple changes of clothes for each inmate involved.
July 28, 1980, was the go day. Early that morning, Issacs began to work his way through the cut bars toward the escape route. He heard an elevator coming to his floor, so he quickly returned to his cell. Guards were there to transfer him to the Jackson facility. After all of his planning, he would not be joining in the escape.
Later that morning, four inmates put on their homemade uniforms and badges and made their way to the fire escape and eventually the front gate. The fifth inmate, Alderman, did not join the escape.
Jarrell got to the car first, then Gregg, then Johnny Johnson. A guard detained McCorquodale. Jarrell pulled the car out of the parking lot, then circled back in to pick up McCorquodale, whose answers had satisfied the guard. It was around 8:30 AM. They got on the highway headed toward Reidsville, then Interstate 16 to eventually pass-through Atlanta.
They made their first stop in Claxton to change into the clothes left for them. While they were there, Gregg called writer Charles Postell, bragging that they had indeed escaped. Gregg told Postell that they were headed to Jacksonville, Florida, as a possible diversionary tactic.
Postell called the Department of Offender Rehabilitation in Atlanta to check if there had been an escape. When told there had not, he hung up. A few minutes later, he called the prison directly. The warden’s office assured him they had checked, and there was no escape. After receiving a second call from the inmates, Postell’s suspicions were confirmed because the call was not collect, which is the usual mode for calls from prison. Postell again called the warden’s office. The warden sent another guard to check again, and this time the escape was confirmed. This was approximately four hours since the four had walked out of the prison gates. They had quite a head start.
Once the escape was realized, word spread quickly across the region. The Atlanta, GA newspaper headlines screamed, “Four Murderers Flee from Reidsville.” The escaped inmates were called “A Violent Clique of Racists.” The public was on the highest of alerts, but authorities were at a loss as to where to search for the escapees.
Authorities focused on the Southeast, primarily Georgia and South Carolina. Newspapers shared the danger to the public that the escapees presented. With their head start, the area where they could be was vast.
Jarrell recalls, “I’m glad Carl Issacs didn’t leave with us. People would have been hurt somewhere down the road. “I just thank God he was on that list of the first to go to Jackson that morning. I hate to think of what may have happened that day if he’d left with us. I wasn’t ready to take a hostage to get to where I was going to go.”
The four stopped at a bar on Peachtree Street in Atlanta that McCorquodale knew, looking for fellow Outlaw members, but it was closed. They had beers in another bar, then decided to head to Charlotte in search of William “Chains” Flamont, a fellow Outlaw and a former sniper in Vietnam. He was reportedly the leader of the Outlaws chapter there and was the person who discovered five murdered bodies in the Charlotte Outlaw clubhouse the year prior. McCorquodale thought he would assist he and his accomplices.
As they were headed up I-85, a vibration from the right front wheel caused them to stop. They discovered that a single lug nut held on the wheel. They removed a lug nut from the other three wheels for the right front and continued toward Charlotte. Ironically, the stop was near where Gregg killed two men and was only a few miles from Jarrell’s parent’s home. Jarrell says he did not contact his family. He intended to travel to Canada to connect with an older woman that had been writing to him.
The group arrived in Charlotte around 6 PM. The Olde Yellow Tavern, near Charlotte, was in an area known as Sin City. It seemed like a haven for prison escapees. Frequented by Charlotte’s biker crowd, it was an ideal spot for the escapees to connect with their contacts, relax over beers and shoot some pool while they pondered their next moves. Little did they know that one of their own would cause a quick end to their freedom.
The evening soon turned ugly. Jarrell said in our 2022 interview, “Troy died because he didn’t do what was asked of him. He was told more than once to stay away from the bikers’ women. The woman who was tending the bar had Troy’s attention, and he was trying to talk her into stepping outside with him.”
Police later confirmed that Gregg had been inappropriate with a server there, who was the wife of Outlaw James “Butch” Horne. McCorquodale advised Gregg to stop, fearing any trouble would reveal their whereabouts. Gregg persisted. Another biker, Ronald “Spider” Burr, later told police that he witnessed McCorquodale beat Gregg after the confrontation about his conduct with the woman in the bar. Horne was also seen hitting Gregg, but most injuries came from McCorquodale.
A decision was made to leave the bar, so the group took Gregg, still alive but barely at this point, put him in the car, and left. Gregg soon died from the beating. Two of the escapees dropped him in the river. On Tuesday, swimmers found the body, submerged in the waters of South Carolina’s Catawba River. Initially, the two circumstances did not seem connected, as authorities did not realize the body was one of the fugitives.
Hours later, authorities received a tip, likely from one of the bikers from the night before, that the other three escapees had holed up inside a house rented by Flamont.
Police surveilled the house and flew over it with a helicopter. They saw the suspected escape car underneath covers at the back of the house and then surrounded it. When Flamont left to get food for the escapees, he was stopped and arrested. Police then addressed the three escapees, demanding that they come out. They delayed entry as they weren’t sure if the fugitives were armed. The three knew they had no real option for a successful exit from the house but held on to their freedom as long as possible. After a standoff lasting a few hours, the decision was made to fire tear gas into the structure.
When the canisters hit and discharged, the three inmates ran out and were captured. No weapons were found, but police did find explosives stashed in a freezer. The missing inmate was soon connected to the body found in the river as Gregg
Over the next several days, the three captured inmates refused extradition back to Georgia, but a court eventually ordered it. James “Butch” Horne was charged with the murder of Gregg. Charges were later dropped due to a lack of evidence.
The three escapees were never tried for the escape as they already had maximum sentences.
Carl Isaacs died by lethal injection on May 6, 2003. He spent 30 years on death row before his execution. The GBI said Isaacs “Had his hand in every aspect of that escape.” He was indicted for the escape but never prosecuted. The 1988 film, Murder One, was based on the Alday murders.
John Alderman, the inmate who, at the last minute, chose not to join his fellow escapees, was executed in 2008 after serving 33 years on Georgia’s Death Row.
McCorquodale was executed in 1987. His aunt, Minnie Hunter, and mother, Toni Jo Hopper, were indicted for abetting the escape.
Johnson is currently in a prison in Augusta, GA, that mainly houses inmates with chronic medical issues. Johnson declined to speak of his escapes or other crimes, hoping that someday, despite serving a life sentence without parole, he may get a chance to plead for his freedom. He feels the details of the crimes could hamper those efforts were they ever to happen.
David Jarrell is in Washington State prison in Davisboro. He was a vital component of the content of this story and openly expressed remorse for his past crimes. Since his escape, he has become certified in HVAC repair, acquired his G.E.D., and has voluntarily undergone therapy to address his issues.
Months later, in an interview with a reporter who asked Isaacs if he had a message for his almost fellow escapees. He responded, “Yeah. Tell them I’d like to kick their asses for being out that long and not getting a piece and wasting somebody.”
Postell received an extortion attempt from Raymond Franklin, father of a death row inmate, claiming he had evidence of Postell’s complicity. He was charged with abetting the escape but cleared in late 1980.
Southern trivia-
David Jarrell’s attorney in the Mala Still murder trial was James Venable. Venable had represented numerous high-profile clients, like Gary Krist in the Barbara Jane Mackle kidnapping, Douglas Pinion, one of five men charged with the car bombing murder of Solicitor Floyd Hoard, one of the defendants in the 1966 Atlanta synagogue bombing, and Horace Blalock, the defendant in Atlanta’s high profile Henry Heinz murder. More notably, and terribly, Venable was also the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
In the 1988 film about Carl and Billy Isaacs and the Alday murders, Murder One, Billy is played by Henry Thomas, famous for his role as Elliott in E.T. Carl was played by James Wilder, who later appeared on Melrose Place.
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Atlanta Journal
Gwinnett Daily News
