by Casey Cep
When Hicks came back to the car, he was vague about what his uncle had wanted, but Mrs. Hicks learned afterward that Ophelia Maxwell had been calling around to various relatives trying to get James’s Social Security number. “They must have wanted it to put on his insurance policy,” Mrs. Hicks told Abbett. “ ’Cause so many people have been killed.” And not just any people: “Will Maxwell always have insurance on them.” She said that her father had even heard a woman bragging about having thirty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of insurance on James.
Mary Hicks’s certainty made Abbett want to keep investigating. Pretty sure he already knew the motive, he went looking for the means. It took him two months, but finally he turned up something damning. On April 14, Abbett interviewed a local man named Aaron Burton, who swore under oath that the Reverend had run into him at Smith’s Grocery two weeks before James Hicks was found dead and called him over to his brown Continental—where, Burton said, he “asked me how dirty I was.” When Burton replied that he was as dirty as Maxwell needed him to be, the two arranged to meet a few hours later. Only then did Maxwell make Burton agree to take to his grave what they were about to discuss.
What the Reverend wanted to know was if Aaron Burton would help him murder two of his nephews. “The reason for killing them,” Burton said, “was that the two owed him a lot of money.” The Reverend was serious enough about his plan to negotiate with Burton for a fee, and they settled on four thousand dollars each for the murder of James Hicks and his brother Jimmy Maxwell.
They talked for almost an hour and then met again later that week, when the Reverend drove Burton down Highway 9 to show him the spot where he thought the murders should take place. The Reverend parked his Continental on a hill near Elam Church and suggested to Burton that once Hicks arrived there, they could overpower him. “Will told me that all I had to do was hide in the woods, and when James Hicks came up that he would be talking and for me to come up behind him and touch James in the back and that he would do the rest. Will told me that he had two pair of gloves for us to wear to keep the fingerprints off.”
It was when Maxwell pulled a pair of white and blue work gloves out from under the seat of the Continental that Burton lost his nerve and told the Reverend that he’d changed his mind and didn’t want to be involved. That didn’t stop Maxwell from showing Burton another ridge on Highway 9, on the drive home from the church, where he thought they could nudge his nephew’s car off the road to make the murder look like an automobile accident. “He told me that he would use his car to push James’s car off into the hole. I told Will the rubber bumpers on his Continental was too low, and Will said he would get his Ford Torino.”
When Burton again refused to take any part in the murders, Maxwell offered him some money to keep quiet. Burton told him no money was necessary, but after James Hicks’s body was found the next week, the Reverend went to visit Burton’s father and brother to warn them both that Aaron better keep his mouth shut. Burton also told Agent Abbett that the ridge on Highway 9 where the Reverend had stopped was near the home of a family named Edwards and suggested that the ABI talk with Mrs. Edwards’s son about the Reverend Willie Maxwell, too.
The next day, Agent Abbett interviewed Calvin Edwards, who had once worked on Maxwell’s pulpwooding crew. If he had not just interviewed Aaron Burton, Abbett might never have believed the story that Edwards had to tell. Edwards swore that he too had been approached to help murder two of the Reverend’s nephews. “Reverend Maxwell came to my house, and asked me how dirty I was,” Calvin Edwards recalled. “I asked Maxwell what he was talking about, and Maxwell told me that he needed two knocked off.”
Edwards claimed the conversation had taken place in February 1975, almost a year before James Hicks was found dead and a month or so after Maxwell had bailed Edwards out of the Coosa County Jail in Rockford, put him to work on his pulpwooding crew, and started asking him about his willingness to break the law again. According to Edwards, Maxwell had complained about how his nephews owed him money, and promised that within four months of their murders he would have enough insurance money to pay an accomplice four thousand dollars for each of them.
As Abbett listened, Edwards described exactly how the Reverend planned to kill his nephews. “Maxwell told me he had some pill to go in some whiskey that would make them dizzy, and wanted me to get them drunk and call him and then meet him.” Once the young men were drunk, all Edwards had to do was take them to a church near Tallassee. The Reverend would be there waiting, and he promised Edwards that he would be the one to “smother them and then run their car off a cliff above Elam Church.”
Agent Abbett found both Edwards and Burton credible, but neither of their statements became public. Although the evidence that Abbett uncovered made the Reverend the prime suspect, neither he nor anyone else could be charged for a death by natural causes: there could be no murderer because, at least according to the coroners, James Hicks had not been murdered. Once again, what the authorities suspected was a country mile from what they could prove. For people around Lake Martin, to say nothing of those close to James Hicks, it was almost as difficult to accept that no cause of death would ever be determined as it was to realize that no charges would ever be filed: but it was not, and they never were.
As a result, there was nothing Agent Abbett or anyone else could do when claims on James Hicks were submitted to Beneficial National Life Insurance Company, Vulcan Life Insurance Company, John Hancock Insurance Company, and World Wide Insurance Company, and nothing they could do when Tom Radney accepted those claim checks on behalf of his client the Reverend Willie Maxwell. As with every one of his deceased relatives, the Reverend was not convicted of any crime, and as with every death since that of his first wife, he faced no charges. He cashed his checks and went about his business while those who believed the voodoo rumors, plus plenty of those who did not, fumed about what the object of their fear and hatred boasted about: that the law would never be able to touch the Reverend Willie Maxwell.
Meanwhile, the long, slow year carried on until America celebrated its bicentennial. Later that July, a man shot two teenage girls in the Bronx; one of them died, the other survived. It was the first of a series of attacks involving a .44-caliber revolver, and by January 1977, when another victim died, the authorities had created a task force to find the shooter. In March, a college student was murdered on her way home from class; in April, a couple was murdered in a parked car. That time, the killer left a letter and signed it Son of Sam. More letters and more murders followed. Soon, afraid of becoming the next victim, women began changing the way they wore their hair and lovers stopped parking. Police, reporters, and citizens alike puzzled over the clues in the killer’s messages, and New York was aflame with fear.
One headline at a time, the rest of the country learned of the violence there, too, including down in Alabama, where even The Alexander City Outlook covered the Son of Sam. A few years before, an FBI agent had used the term “serial homicide” in a lecture, but now the nation became gripped by the idea of a serial killer: someone who murders multiple people over an extended period of time, sometimes out of rage, sometimes for revenge, sometimes for psychological gratification, and sometimes just for money. The killings in New York caused a sensation around the United States, dredging up memories of the Manson murders and the Zodiac killer and setting the tone that would dominate the coverage of future serial killers.
* * *
—
The Summer of Sam was a trying one for the Maxwells, at first because of the teenage surliness of their adopted daughter, Shirley Ann. At sixteen, she was considerably more difficult than she had been in her single-digit years, and Ophelia, in particular, was worried about her. Shell, as her friends and siblings called her, had already run away from home a few times and just “wasn’t Shirley” anymore, Ophelia lamented. “She was just a different person. She was just looking forward to going places. She didn
’t help in the house.” Like many teenagers, Shirley was rebellious, and like many of them, Ophelia recalled, “she believed she could make it without any help. She was happy as long as she had things her own way.”
Ophelia thought a summer job might settle her daughter down, and right after the end of her sophomore year Shirley Ann found work waitressing at a fast-food restaurant in Alex City. She did not yet have a license, so she had to be driven to the Hardee’s and everywhere else. Two weeks later, on the second Saturday of June, Ophelia drove Shell to visit one of the girl’s sisters in Perryville, then stopped on the way back for ice cream. They got home around seven, but Shirley, unappeased by the day’s itinerary, complained about wanting to go back out again. Ophelia told her they were almost out of gas and tried to delay any argument by telling the girl to wait to talk with the Reverend once he got home from scouting timber sites.
Instead, according to Ophelia, Shell took off in the car. Ophelia did not see where she went but figured it was back to Perryville. She was furious, but rather than chase after her, she decided to wait for the girl’s sister to call; when she did not, and Shirley failed to come home, Ophelia called the police, and when the Reverend returned, they set off together to look for her. As night settled in and they still had not seen or heard any sign of their daughter, they stopped by the Alexander City Police Station, where they were informed that the girl was no longer missing.
The Maxwells were directed to a patch of Highway 9 a mile or so from their house, beside an old cemetery with sagging fences and moss-covered headstones, where, a little while earlier, a man had found the Reverend’s 1974 Ford Torino. When the Maxwells got to the scene, only Ophelia was allowed near it. “They wouldn’t let me get out of my car,” the Reverend said. “They said it didn’t concern me. That stirred me up.” From a distance, it looked as if the front tire on the driver’s side had gone flat, so Shirley had jacked up the Ford, loosened the lug nuts with a tire iron, and wrestled the wheel from its axle, only to have the rim slip from under the jack, and drop the full weight of the car on her slender frame.
It looked that way because it was meant to look that way. But the tire that Shirley Ann was supposed to have been changing was not actually flat. Her hands were clean, not covered with grease and dirt. The lug nuts from the Torino were not beside her body but pinned underneath it. By Sunday morning, when no telephones were needed because people could whisper to each other across the pews, people in Coosa County were breathing more gossip than air. Who ever heard of a sixteen-year-old girl changing a tire when she could have walked the mile home to avoid doing it? What was the Reverend doing cruising timber so late in the day and on a weekend? How come Maxwell’s relatives were always found dead by the sides of these roads? Why were there never any witnesses to say what had happened to them? Why had the police not done something sooner? Who could kill a child at all, much less a child of his own? When would someone put a stop to all this? All of that long week between Shirley Ann’s death and her funeral, the rumors and anger grew, and so did the Reverend Willie Maxwell’s paranoia. “I know they’re talking about me,” the Reverend said. “I feel they’re at me, and it’s not true.”
* * *
—
On Saturday, June 18, 1977, the day before Father’s Day, the Reverend and his wife walked into a funeral home in Alexander City and took a seat near the front of the chapel. It already felt like full summer, and the oak trees on the front lawn did not provide much shade. With only one story in the House of Hutchinson Funeral Home, there was nowhere for the heat to rise. Ceiling fans shuffled air around the room, but it was so hot that many of the three hundred mourners took a paper fan from an usher as they made their way to the pews. Up in front of them all, past the first row, Shirley Ann Ellington’s body rested in an open casket. Once everyone had settled into their seats and the audible grief in the room had hushed, a pastor from the nearby Great Bethel Baptist Church, the Reverend E. B. Burpo Jr., led the memorial service. The eulogy he offered for Shirley Ann lifted high her warmth and energy while reminding everyone in the room that neither those qualities nor any others could protect anyone from death. Young or old, attended or alone, innocent or otherwise: sooner or later, everyone would meet the same fate. “All of us must go the way of all men,” the Reverend Burpo lamented. “There is no exception to the rule.”
A collective “amen” ended the liturgy, and after the service all of the mourners came forward to say their good-byes to Shirley. Ophelia Maxwell was so overwhelmed after looking in the casket that she had to sit down again, so her husband led her back to the third pew, where she rested her head against his shoulder while he held a white handkerchief. People lingered together at the front of the chapel while the last few rows of mourners filed up from their seats, including one of the teenager’s sisters, Louvinia Lee. “She didn’t look the same, and that’s when I started crying,” Lee recalled about what it was like to see her younger sister’s body. “I was looking at Mr. Maxwell, and it seemed like he didn’t have nothing to worry about. There were no tears or nothing in his eyes, and that’s when I said what I said.” What she said, pointing her finger at the Reverend and raising her voice so high that everyone gathered that day could hear it, was this: “You killed my sister and now you gonna pay for it!”
Before anyone in the chapel could react, a man in a green suit pulled a pistol from inside his pocket and fired three rounds into the Reverend Maxwell’s head. The shots came from closer than close range. The man with the gun was in the pew in front of his target; had he been any nearer, he would have brushed Maxwell’s mustache with the dovetailed sight of his Beretta. The Reverend tried raising his handkerchief to wipe the blood from his face but died before the white cotton touched his skin.
The sound of the pistol sent the hundreds of mourners in the funeral home stampeding through doors and diving out windows. “They tore my chapel up,” recalled its owner, Fred Hutchinson—the same Fred Hutchinson who, twenty years earlier, had himself been convicted of murder and insurance fraud in the arson death of an elderly man he buried with suspicious rapidity. Released early from prison, he had resumed his old career, but the shooting left his funeral home in shambles. “There was pictures busted, and ladies pocket books, and glasses, and umbrellas scattered all over the floor.”
Surveying the chaos was a cub reporter from the local newspaper, Jim Earnhardt. Only a few years out of high school, Earnhardt had drawn the short straw and lost his Saturday to the assignment of covering Shirley’s funeral. He had left when everyone began paying their respects and was just outside the chapel, starting to draft the story in his head, when he heard the first shot. When everyone else was racing out of the chapel, he turned and raced back in. “There’s been a shooting,” he heard someone say. “Will’s been shot!” someone else exclaimed.
Earnhardt left House of Hutchinson long enough to call his editor from a telephone next door, then returned to the scene to interview witnesses. “I thought someone was flashing their camera, because it was to the side of me,” Millie Sistrunk, the organist, told him. Johnnie Ruth Minniefield, one of the mourners, said she heard two shots, but another woman, Myrtrice Sutton, had not even been able to count them: “I was so scared. I just tried to get out.”
Not long after, before the medical examiner had removed the body from the pew, Earnhardt’s editor, Alvin Benn, arrived with a camera. He took photographs of everything, including one they knew they would never be able to run: the Reverend Willie Maxwell, still looking startlingly young and handsome, his head rolled back, his dark eyes open, staring blankly up toward the ceiling of the funeral home. In the coming weeks, Benn and Earnhardt would fill the front page of The Alexander City Outlook with articles and interviews about the life and death of the Reverend Maxwell: the three marriages, the five family members who had succumbed to strange deaths, the zero convictions, and the one man who had finally put an end to it that day in the chapel.
/> The police arrived at House of Hutchinson almost immediately after the murder, from a station only a few blocks away. But by the time they pushed through the confused crowds of witnesses and bystanders, the shooter had already surrendered himself to the two black officers who had been assigned to traffic duty for the funeral. He confessed in the police car on the way to the station. Whether he was a hero or a cold-blooded murderer depended on whom you asked, but one thing was clear: the man who shot the Reverend was going to need a good lawyer. And, as it turned out, the best lawyer in town needed a new client.
PART TWO
The Lawyer
| 7 |
Who’s in the Stew?
Tom Radney wanted them to look like the Kennedys. Dashing parents, darling children: a Dixie Camelot. His wife, Madolyn, had bought the dresses weeks before, but once she got them home, she wouldn’t let the girls so much as try them on until that morning. She didn’t want their outfits stretched or stained, and not even the best-behaved six-year-old, four-year-old, and two-year-old could promise that. The photographer Tom had hired was meeting them in Montgomery in front of the statehouse, a block away from the First White House of the Confederacy and at the same intersection where, four years before, Martin Luther King Jr. had reassured the twenty-five thousand civil rights protesters who had just arrived on foot from Selma that they weren’t going to turn back now.
Whatever the photographer wanted, the Radney family did. Wherever he beckoned with his waving fingers, they walked; whenever he held up his hand like a stop sign, they stood and smiled. Little Hollis got tired and had to be carried, but Ellen and Fran were excited. They understood that the photographs were important, and as best as such young children could, they understood why: their daddy was running for lieutenant governor. Before he became famous, or infamous, as the Reverend Willie Maxwell’s lawyer, Tom Radney was already well known in Alabama for taking on another nearly impossible cause: liberal politics in the Deep South.
