Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  In the end, the only life insurance company to persist was Independent. Although the four policies it held were among the smallest the Reverend had taken out on Dorcas, the company’s lawyer, Harry Raymon, would not stop fighting payment. Tom Radney responded by bringing in help, in the form of a colleague in Tuskegee by the name of Fred Gray. Gray was not an insurance specialist; he was one of the most prominent civil rights attorneys in the nation. He had gotten his law degree from Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, before any Alabama law school would admit African American students, then returned home to use it in the fight for racial justice. Gray represented Rosa Parks after she refused to surrender her seat on a segregated bus, and then represented the Montgomery Improvement Association during the resulting boycott. He won an acquittal from an all-white jury for Martin Luther King Jr. after he was charged with tax evasion, took on Governor Wallace when he tried to block the march from Selma to Montgomery, and got a ten-million-dollar settlement from the federal government on behalf of the surviving victims of the Tuskegee experiment. In addition to his legal practice, Fred Gray served in the Alabama House of Representatives, one of the first black legislators since Reconstruction.

  It was through his legislative work that Gray had come to know Tom Radney, but taking on the Maxwell case was more than doing a favor for a friend; it was an opportunity to mount a legal challenge to another form of discrimination. Racial bias was ubiquitous in the insurance industry. African American policyholders were routinely required to pay more money for less valuable coverage, refused consolidation offers for discounts on multiple policies, forced to pay premiums exceeding the value of the payout, and denied benefits based on capricious claims of lapsed coverage. Some companies maintained dual rates for white and black clients, based on separate mortality tables that were used to justify charging nonwhites more than whites for the same policies; others maintained dual plans, using one mortality table but offering two levels of insurance, and paying agents the full commission only when minority clients bought substandard policies. Some companies simply refused to insure black lives at all.

  Black families were also disproportionately targeted for the predatory policies known as burial insurance. These small policies, enough to cover funeral expenses, were first marketed to factory workers in the United Kingdom, where they were known as industrial insurance; they became popular in the United States after 1875 and appealed to those who could not afford quarterly or annual life insurance payments but could scrape together a few pennies or nickels once a week to spare their families the financial burden of burial when they died. Such policies were sold in droves to emancipated slaves, and later to their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, by insurance agents who went door-to-door every week to collect the tiny but cumulatively lucrative premiums. One of those agents was the father of the novelist Philip Roth, who passed “the eerie evenings collecting pennies from the poorest of Newark’s poor,” as the younger Roth put it in his memoir Patrimony. Roth’s father recalled how some black families were “still paying premiums twenty, thirty years after the death of the insured.” When his son asked why they kept paying, the older Roth said, “They never said anything to the agent. Somebody died and they never mentioned it. The insurance man came round and they paid him.”

  That kind of predation and fraud was common. Insurance companies around the country profited off African American customers through exploitative sales, underwriting, and administrative techniques, and such practices were particularly prevalent in the South. Civil rights lawyers like Fred Gray knew that the discriminatory actions of insurance companies not only depleted blacks of their current wealth but deprived future generations of the financial benefits burial insurance and life insurance provided for whites: a safety net, a leg up, an inheritance. Decades later, class-action lawsuits by living clients and surviving beneficiaries would reveal the appalling extent of the abuse: half a billion dollars in restitution and legal fines were wrenched from almost one hundred companies in the redress of more than fourteen million biased policies.

  At the time that Independent Life and Accident was taking its stand against the Reverend, however, all of that was still in the future. The company, indifferent to racial injustice in the industry, tried to make the case that Dorcas Anderson Maxwell’s death had not been natural—and, failing that, had certainly not been caused by a car accident—and therefore should not be covered. Radney and Gray, meanwhile, knew that their legal case depended on proving that her death was covered by an accidental death policy, but also that their appeal to the jurors would be aided by making a broader argument about discrimination and predation in the insurance industry. “That insurance man came and knocked on the door every time and got the money and took the money home and sent it to the insurance company,” Gray said in his closing statement, “and then when the time came to pay off, they said, ‘Oh, no, we’re not going to pay it.’ That’s what these big companies do. They want your money, but any time they can weasel out of it, they weasel out of paying.”

  Never mind that their client was possibly the least likely poster boy for civil rights in the entire African American population of Alabama. Never mind that unlike the policyholders described by Philip Roth’s father, there was zero chance that Maxwell would ever pay a dime of a dead person’s premiums, or fail to collect on a policy. The strategy used by Tom Radney and Fred Gray worked—not only in Macon County, where a jury awarded the Reverend Maxwell his full five-thousand-dollar payout on April 26, 1973, but again in Montgomery, where the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals upheld that decision over a year later.

  That was the last of the half a dozen lawsuits over insurance payouts on policies in the name of Dorcas Anderson Maxwell. Of the $131,000 in insurance that the Reverend was known to have held on his second wife at the time of her death, Tom Radney managed to recover nearly $80,000 of it. For the Reverend Willie Maxwell, becoming a widower was proving to be a lucrative business.

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  No Exception to the Rule

  Water, like violence, is difficult to contain. No sooner had the Alabama Power Company dammed the Tallapoosa than the river began seeking its revenge, in a series of floods that brimmed Lake Martin over its boundaries and droughts that drained it dry. Sometimes the towns submerged beneath it seemed to be avenging themselves, too; late at night, boaters on the lake and people along its shoreline claimed to hear the tolling of the church bells long since drowned.

  Other, more deeply buried histories haunt the waters, too. On March 27, 1814, the warriors of the Creek nation, having lost most of their land by force and the rest by treaty, took their last stand just north of Lake Martin, at a spot where the Tallapoosa River doubles back on itself in a sharp oxbow known as Horseshoe Bend. It was there that future president Andrew Jackson and his troops slaughtered 557 Creeks, leaving hundreds more to die while trying to escape across the river, and taking the survivors prisoner; later, he forced those survivors across the Mississippi on the Trail of Tears. Sunk beneath Lake Martin are Creek burial grounds, and on the pocket of land inside Horseshoe Bend, where the weeds grow wild and the river and its bloody history are always just behind you, the sound of a turtle slipping off a rock into the water can make a grown man jump.

  Ghost bells, war cries, the clanging of slave chains: if ever a land came by its haunting honestly, it is eastern Alabama. In the long empty miles between towns there, the highways rise and fall over hills that keep most things out of view and make every sight a sudden one. Where the pavement ends, the roads turn to dirt as red as rust or blood. Pines and oak trees line them, tattered moss hanging from their branches like wraiths. At night, the fog is so thick that anything can disappear into it or come walking out of it.

  The Reverend Maxwell claimed that he was afraid of what was out there, too. All his life, he insisted that he was innocent—of his first wife’s murder, of his neighbor’s death, of his brother’s death, of his
second wife’s death, of any crime whatsoever, of the practice of voodoo. All claims to the contrary, he said, amounted to vicious gossip spread at the expense of a righteous man widowed twice in only two years. The fact that he had insurance on all those who died did not suggest a motive; it showed only that he was a scrupulous spouse and sibling. While everyone in town whispered about him and hid their eyes when he passed, he maintained that the real wickedness in their midst—his enemy, whoever that was—was going unchallenged. When a reporter from The Montgomery Advertiser asked him about the strange way that death seemed to stalk his relatives, the Reverend said, “I have prayed and thought about it a lot and several thoughts have crossed my mind.”

  His first wife, he claimed, had been murdered in his stead, though he did not know by whom: “I think they were waiting for me and when they saw the car, they thought it was me but when they stopped her, they found it wasn’t me and they decided to take her instead.” Why he thought that shadowy “they” might want to kill him, he did not bother to explain. As for the other deaths, he felt he was being tested by some terrible force, perhaps human, perhaps not: “some enemy or another sticking around to hinder me, slipping around somewhere I haven’t seen him, but I’m asking the Lord to see and he will see.” The Reverend did not yet know who or what was tormenting him by taking the lives of those he loved, but he said, “If I stick close to the Lord, I’ll see.”

  Yet the Reverend could no longer stay as close to the Lord as he once had, because none of his churches wanted him preaching anymore. Against his will, he swapped the pulpit for the pew and began worshipping at Peace and Goodwill Baptist Church, in Cottage Grove, not far from where he lived in Nixburg, and where he had buried his two wives. The other parishioners might have disapproved, but Maxwell kept his head high, kept wearing his fancy suits, kept speaking in his strangely formal fashion, and not that much time passed before he found himself back at the altar again, although in a different way. Three years after the death of the first Mrs. Maxwell and two years after the death of the second Mrs. Maxwell, the Reverend took another wife.

  * * *

  —

  No one ever wondered why Mary Lou would have wanted to wed Willie Maxwell, that handsome, hardworking young man newly home from serving his country. Plenty of people wondered why Dorcas Anderson would have agreed to marry him, though given the timing of her first husband’s death, some of them had their theories. But what kind of woman would agree to become the third Mrs. Willie Maxwell?

  The answer, as it turned out, was obvious. Depending on your perspective, the woman who married Maxwell in November 1974 had either less reason to fear him than anyone else or considerably more, but in either case she certainly knew what she was getting into. The third Mrs. Maxwell was Ophelia Burns: the woman who had been indicted but never tried for the murder of the first Mrs. Maxwell.

  “He could not help it that people liked to spread rumors about him,” Ophelia Maxwell said of her new husband. Somewhat oddly, though, she herself was mostly spared such rumors. Even though there was talk of the Reverend’s having an accomplice who had ferried him like Charon to and from the scenes where his relatives had been found dead, and even though countless law enforcement officers, witnesses, and grand jury members had known at one point about the indictment brought against Ophelia in the death of Mary Lou, by 1974 her alleged involvement had somehow faded from the town’s collective memory, overshadowed by the menace of the Reverend. If she herself knew anything about Maxwell’s other crimes, she never said a word; like the Reverend, she always maintained his innocence. “Just because he was accused of one thing,” Ophelia said, “I don’t think it’s right to think he’s involved in everything.”

  Between them, Willie and Ophelia had a large, complicated family. She, too, had been married before, but divorced her husband after getting caught running around with the Reverend. They had some children from their earlier marriages and others that were adopted by varying degrees of formality. The Reverend was raising his youngest son, the one he’d had with Dorcas, but the two older boys he’d adopted after marrying her were being raised by their grandparents over in Dadeville, and the daughter he’d legitimated was living with her mother in Alexander City. Ophelia had older children who no longer lived with her, but she was raising a child named Shirley Ann Ellington, whom she had taken in from a relative during her first marriage but never officially adopted.

  Heading up a large household but unable to preach, the Reverend threw himself into pulpwooding. He bought some more land along Highway 9 and leased some of his mother’s property to one of the timber companies, a profit-sharing outfit called Bama Wood. One of its managers, Frank Colquitt, later described the Reverend as among the best workers he’d ever had—good enough that he was worth the time it took to quash the fears of nervous customers who would have preferred having almost any other pulpwooder on their property. Colquitt soon learned that the best bet was to take the bull by the horns: he would bring the Reverend by a client’s home, introduce him, and then “tell ’em a short version of what he’d been accused of—that he was a preacher, voodoo, and all of that—and they’d say, all of them would say, ‘He seems like a nice fellow to me.’ ” That strategy would not have worked as well among African Americans, but not many African Americans in Coosa County owned enough acreage to lease their land to a timber company; the whites who did, Colquitt said, mostly found Maxwell to be a polite object of curiosity, a macabre sort of entertainment, and something to brag about to their friends. If asked how he himself could feel safe around his employee, Colquitt had a joke at the ready: “I always said I wasn’t worried because I had insurance on him.”

  Plenty of others remained scared of Maxwell, though, including members of his pulpwooding crew, who quit out of nervousness with some frequency. One of these was a nephew of the Reverend’s, a young man by the name of James Hicks, whose mother was Mae Ella Maxwell, Willie’s older sister by two years. Hicks was twenty-two years old, five feet eight inches tall, and barely more than 120 pounds, with the slender frame and wispy facial hair of a boy only barely a man. But he was grown enough to get married, and after he stopped working for his uncle, he got a job at one of the mills in Alexander City, then moved with his wife to Hissop, a town not far from Maxwell’s place in Nixburg. On February 14, 1976, Hicks went missing. Two days later, in the small hours of the morning, a woman phoned Otis Armour, one of the funeral directors in Alexander City, and told him to send a car to Highway 9. She refused to give her name, but when she called back a second time, Armour set off to see what was going on. By then, though, James Hicks had already been found dead in a car, ten miles south of Goodwater, on the shoulder of Route 9—the same highway where the second Mrs. Maxwell had been found and where the Reverend was still living, now with his new wife, Ophelia.

  The lawmen who showed up on the scene must have felt a strange and terrible déjà vu. The 1968 Pontiac Firebird in which Hicks was found looked as if it had been parked, not wrecked. A patch of pines by the car was undisturbed. Inside the vehicle, Hicks’s body was lifeless but showed no signs of injury. Jimmy Bailey, still the county coroner and by this time extremely frustrated by all the deaths accumulating around the Reverend Maxwell, immediately contacted District Attorney Harold Walden, who ordered an investigation.

  That Monday, back at the Armour Funeral Home, one of the state medical examiners came from the crime lab to autopsy the body. It was the middle of February, so in addition to his red short-sleeve shirt, James Hicks had on a denim jacket and jeans. He was still wearing his class ring from Coosa County High School. He had a few small cuts on his legs and arms, across his chest, and on the inside of his lower lip. He had some caffeine and a little alcohol in his system, but no drugs of any other kind. As the medical examiner ultimately indicated on the autopsy report, there was nothing “which would adequately account for the death of this subject.”

  As startling as that finding o
r lack of finding was, it would not have surprised Willie Maxwell. “There will be no evidence,” the Reverend assured Tom Radney when he went into his lawyer’s office to discuss the death of yet another one of his relatives. Like so much of Maxwell’s speech, that locution was a strange one: far from being a protestation of innocence, it all but suggested direct knowledge of the crime.

  However peculiar that turn of phrase might’ve been, it was correct. To the extent that anything ever turned up that could have been considered evidence in the death of James Hicks, it was found not on his body or at the scene but later, among his effects. When the Alabama Bureau of Investigation went through Hicks’s belongings, they discovered an insurance policy that had been written in the Reverend’s own handwriting. It was circumstantial, and it brought the state no closer to a conviction or even an arrest, but it did capture the attention of two ABI agents. James Abbett was new to the office but familiar with the failures of the earlier Maxwell investigations. He and his partner, Herman Chapman—“The Bear Tracker”—were eager to make sure that this one ended differently.

  When Abbett interviewed James Hicks’s widow, she told the investigator right away that she was sure the Reverend Maxwell had killed her husband. A week or so before he went missing, Mary Dean Riley Hicks said, she and James were in the car together, sometime after nine at night, when the Reverend Maxwell drove up behind them and got them to pull over. Her husband told her to wait in the car while he went to see about his uncle.