Georgia’s most heinous crime is in Paige Seagraves’ DNA. Her grandfather, Ned Alday, was slaughtered in a South Georgia trailer in 1973, along with his brother and three sons. Alday’s daughter-in-law was raped, dragged away from the scene, raped again and then killed.
Her mother, then a high school senior, “was one of the first at the trailer,” Seagraves said. “She opened the door and saw the feet hanging off the bed.”
Thirty-two years and three months later, the family still is dealing with that discovery.
Seagraves, 30, was not even born when the murders occurred. But the echoes of the crime and the decades of legal twists and turns enveloped her early on and helped chart her direction in life: She now works with the Georgia Department of Corrections, developing programs to keep parolees from returning to prison.
“I grew up in the court system,” said Seagraves, who spoke Monday in Atlanta at the National Organization for Victim Assistance Conference. One of her most vivid memories is from 1985, when she watched her mother sob after an appeals court overturned the convictions and death sentences of the three men who killed the family.
“I found out the world’s not fair,” she recalled.
Her father, Willie Barber, penned numerous letters to judges, prosecutors, politicians and newspapers to express the family’s frustration with the slow-moving criminal justice system. “My dad and I talked about it all the time. I read everything my dad wrote,” she said.
But three years ago Willie Barber deferred to his daughter to testify before a House committee when members considered the Alday Bill --- legislation requiring the state twice a year to contact the families of victims of killers on death row. “He said, ‘It’s time for a new generation to step forward,’ " Seagraves said.
The constant attention on the case and her distaste to how her family was treated drew her toward criminal justice early on. She started as a probation officer after college and is now a program development consultant for the Corrections Department in cognitive behavior programs. She visits prisons and talks to prisoners, counselors and parolees to see which programs work.
In May 2003, Seagraves spoke for the family outside Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, when Carl Isaacs was executed by lethal injection. Isaacs may be dead, but the case is very much alive, judging by the overflow audience attending Seagraves’ presentation.
The victim assistance conference is a learning tool for professionals in the victim assistance field, and Seagraves presented her case as a horror story.
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
Not only were six members of her family killed, but also the case lived on through the courts for 30 years, dragging generations of the family along for an emotional ride as Isaacs sneered, boasted and tried to escape from prison.
The family, she said, was victimized by the justice system nearly as much as by the killers. Her mother, Faye Alday Barber, attended the conference but did not wish to speak.
Seagraves learned early in life that something was different about her family. She’d hear that “granddad got killed” and saw that family members often got together to “tell stories about granddaddy and Uncle Jimmy,” she said.
She learned small, funny details about her deceased uncles. Jimmy liked to primp in front of the mirror. Jerry was fussy and didn’t like to hear people chew. The family always seemed alive to her.
Her grandmother, Ernestine Alday, Ned’s widow, was a devout churchgoing woman who “never said a bad word about those men. She wouldn’t let anyone else say that, either. She really believed God had a purpose.”
Even so, “she always said she wanted to live long enough to see Carl executed,” Seagraves said. She died in 1998.
Two co-defendants, George Elder Dungee and Wayne Carl Coleman, are serving life sentences, but “I absolutely expect” they will be released on parole one day, she said. [Editor’s note: Dungee died in prison in 2006; Coleman was still in prison in 2024, about 77 years old.]
Carl Isaacs’ brother Billy, who was 15 during the murders, testified against the three and was paroled in 1994.
The case has a continued hold on the imagination because it was so random and horrific. The Aldays came to the trailer on the family farm in ones or twos, where they were surprised by the escaped convicts and killed.
“It’s still talked about every day there,” she said.
“Here’s a model family: They built the church there; they’re minding their own business. They were good people. People feel, ‘That could have happened to me.’ "
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