by Casey Cep
Selection, though, was just the start of his seduction. Like Clarence Darrow, Radney believed that “jurymen seldom convict a person they like, or acquit one that they dislike. The main work of a trial lawyer is to make a jury like his client, or, at least, to feel sympathy for him; facts regarding the crime are relatively unimportant.” Radney knew getting the right people on the jury was only half the battle; the real trick was getting them to see the right version of the case. A Casanova of the courtroom, Big Tom managed to do it again and again. His juries might not have always liked his clients, but they sure liked him. He once had a jury slip him an envelope at the end of a trial; inside it was a birthday card, signed by all twelve of them.
For every case a lawyer wins, though, someone else loses, and for someone like Tom, who stacked up acquittals like firewood, there were plenty of opposing counsels and clients who resented not only the verdict but the lawyer who’d won it. Not everyone was charmed by Tom’s “country lawyer shtick,” as one detractor called his folksy style. In a small town, memories are long, and grudges last longer. Some people held them against Big Tom for his success, others for his self-promotion, still others for a certain profligacy in his personal life.
Because he would happily work with minority and indigent clients, Big Tom also took some flak for the people he represented, and once the Reverend Willie Maxwell came along, he took a lot more. It was one thing to defend the Reverend against a single murder charge; it was something else to help him make money and to make money off him. For his part, Radney didn’t believe in asking potential clients whether they had done what they were accused of doing, and he didn’t withhold an ounce of his talent from even the guiltiest among them. He’d challenge all the evidence he could to keep it from being admitted; if it was admitted anyway, he’d go after the person who’d collected it. When Big Tom was in charge, a jury was sure to hear about it if a toxicologist had degrees in zoology or a medical examiner had previously worked as a butcher. If a doctor’s testimony was damning, Big Tom would come up with a long list of patients who were now deceased and then in court inquire one by one if the doctor had treated each person and, upon getting a yes, ask where that patient was now.
As Tom won judgment after judgment and helped clients avoid conviction after conviction, his practice grew—in size, in reputation, in settlements. He defended young boys in destruction of property cases and old men for public drunkenness; he prevented the state from trying a fourteen-year-old charged with homicide as an adult, and got a guy off a robbery charge even though he’d been caught holding a marked bill from the store’s till. He took care of deeds, divorces, wills, and estates; defended county commissioners accused of accepting bribes; and sued doctors and hospitals for medical malpractice and wrongful death. He tried cases in traffic court and in the federal court of appeals. No task was too small, no odds were too long, and no amount of enmity people felt toward Tom mattered if they suddenly needed him on their side. Even the police officers in town, angry about the acquittals Radney sometimes won at their expense, forgave him whenever a friend or relative of theirs needed a good attorney.
All those years of representing Maxwell, in both civil and criminal trials, hadn’t endeared Big Tom to anyone around Lake Martin, but it had helped him make his name as a lawyer who could handle any case. Which is why, on the day that a man named Robert Burns shot the Reverend in front of three hundred witnesses, his brother told him not to worry and promised, “Big Tom’ll get you out of this.”
| 11 |
Peace and Goodwill
It was a hundred degrees on the day of the Reverend Willie Maxwell’s wake, a week after the one for his stepdaughter, in the middle of June 1977. Lightning flashed overhead during the fever break of a summer storm, and the wind tore a dead limb from a tree across the street from the House of Hutchinson Funeral Home, sending it crashing down through all the lower branches before hitting the ground. People arriving on foot hurried toward the funeral home doors holding on to their hats, and car after car pulled up in front of the same chapel where Maxwell had been gunned down days before. However much locals might have gone out of their way to avoid crossing paths with the Reverend during his lifetime, half of eastern Alabama showed up to his wake. “They might be coming to see if he is really dead,” one person speculated. “Some people say he isn’t, and some say that he will be back.”
Outside House of Hutchinson, reporters hung around with their notebooks and cameras. A story that had simmered for seven years on the back roads of Coosa County was suddenly burning up the front pages of newspapers around the country, and journalists from all over were wandering around the funeral home parking lot, looking for sources and shade. There was Vern Smith, a writer for Newsweek who grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, and Mike Keza, the white photographer who came with him to Alex City to cover the case. There was Phyllis Wesley, with The Montgomery Advertiser, whose colleague Lou Elliott had been following the Maxwell case since Shirley’s murder and was one of the few journalists to have interviewed the Reverend before he was shot. There was Harmon Perry, who had been the first black reporter for The Atlanta Journal and was now the Atlanta bureau chief for Jet. Alongside these and other out-of-towners were Jim Earnhardt and Alvin Benn, still tag-teaming coverage for The Alexander City Outlook.
Nearly everyone in the crowd outside House of Hutchinson refused to go on the record. Many of them didn’t want to talk at all, those that did rarely consented to using their name, and what most of them claimed to know about the Reverend often turned out to be something they’d been told second or third or fourth hand. No one had seen the Reverend Maxwell’s alleged voodoo room for themselves, but everyone knew someone who knew someone who’d seen it; everyone knew that Maxwell had been involved in the deaths of five of his family members and maybe some others too, but no one had any proof or knew exactly how he’d done it. That did not stop the press from writing their stories, of course, and the rumors that had been circulating around Alex City for years now found new homes between quotation marks. “Voodooist Is Slain at Ala. Funeral” read one headline; “Death of Voodoo Shaman Lets Town Breathe Easier” read another. One unnamed neighbor of the Reverend was quoted as saying that everyone was “rejoicing” because they’d been “scared to death of him”; another, also anonymous, said that after Maxwell’s death “it was like a burden was lifted off the whole town.”
But not everyone felt safer after the Reverend Willie Maxwell was killed. Some thought that he might come back from the dead to haunt or harm them, and some worried that he had left behind accomplices. “There’s no reason for any joy,” one woman said. “There might be somebody else involved and it wouldn’t be safe to say anything about what happened.” A few thought that the Reverend was innocent and that therefore the real criminal, or criminals, were still around. “Will Maxwell,” a friend of his said, “was killed by public opinion. I hope now that he’s gone, the investigators will get to work and really find out what happened to Shirley Ellington and who was responsible.”
That sentiment was echoed by the Reverend’s grieving family. When Alvin Benn interviewed Ophelia Maxwell for The Alexander City Outlook at her home on the day after her husband’s murder, she insisted on his innocence and said she felt as if she were “living in a nightmare.” In addition to his widow, the Reverend had left behind several children, a grandchild, his mother, three sisters, three brothers, and various nieces and nephews; a great many of them had been witnesses to his murder. So had some of his colleagues from the ministry, the mill, and the quarry. To those who believed he was innocent, Maxwell had gone from being the victim of vicious rumors to the victim of a vicious murder.
“I just hate all this publicity,” the Reverend’s old friend Mac Thomas said. “I don’t think this is helping anything.” One of Maxwell’s relatives, unable to avoid the scrum of journalists outside the funeral home, shouted at them instead, saying she was sick of hearing the word “v
oodoo” and warning them that the family would sue any reporter who printed anything slanderous.
It was just as hot on Thursday as it had been the day before at the wake, but there were more people at the funeral, and even more press. By noon, up at the junction where Highway 9 meets Highway 22, not far from where four of the Reverend’s relatives had been found dead, lawmen leaned against their cars, smoking and watching the traffic heading toward the Peace and Goodwill Baptist Church. Many of them had worked on one case or another of Maxwell’s relatives, and many of them were upset about his death—not because they grieved him, but because they felt they had been deprived of the chance to finally bring him to justice. Unlike all but one of the cases that preceded it, the death of Shirley Ann Ellington had been officially declared a homicide, the cause of death had been determined to be strangulation, and the Reverend had been the only suspect. The authorities were planning to charge him as soon as the coroner’s report was certified.
But it was too late to charge the Reverend Willie Maxwell now, and the agents, deputies, sheriffs, and state troopers gathered that day were only there to maintain order at his funeral. Soon enough, they got back into their cars, followed the traffic to Peace and Goodwill, and split up to patrol the parking lot and the chapel. Captain Chapman, who had worked the Maxwell case for the Alabama Bureau of Investigation—he was the investigator who had been so frustrated all the way back when Dorcas Anderson changed her testimony about the night that Mary Lou Maxwell died and whose partner had taken the testimony of the two would-be accomplices—had brought along his son, and the two of them stood by the door, watching the bottom of men’s blazers to see if they flapped in the wind or stayed still, held down by the weight of a gun. At the start of the service, Chapman went inside to join the other officers, who fanned out to guard the pulpit and all three entrances to the sanctuary.
At the altar was a silvery-blue steel coffin, open for all to see the Reverend’s body, draped partly by an American flag and surrounded by wreaths of red and white carnations. From a photograph on the front page of the funeral program, the much-avoided eyes of the Reverend stared at every mourner. Inside was the service order, the list of survivors, and a bit of verse that sometimes appeared in the obituaries of country preachers: “Their trouble and sorrow into his ears had poured. The old, young, sick, healthy, poor, rich, dark, white and everyone. His mission finished, his reward ahead, in one quiet moment for the last time he bowed his head.”
Ophelia was seated in the front row. She and the Reverend Maxwell’s mother cried as a sheriff’s deputy looked on from his place beside the pulpit, and every journalist that had descended on Alex City that week watched from the back of the sanctuary. The family had asked that the press be kept out, but the presiding pastor, the Reverend Chester Mardis, had declined to bar them from the service. Instead, Mardis, who was seventy-seven and had driven the eighty miles from Birmingham that morning to officiate, had welcomed the assembled reporters, telling them “we have nothing to hide” and then spelling his own name to make sure they all got it right in print.
Between the grieving relatives, the other mourners, the curiosity seekers, the press, and the police, there was not that much peace and goodwill that day at Peace and Goodwill. At one point during the service, a folding chair slid down from where it had been propped against a wall, clanging loudly against the ground and causing all the lawmen to reach for their guns. But no one was shot at the funeral of the man who was shot at a funeral. The choir sang a few songs, some scripture and psalms were read, prayers were offered, an assisting minister sang Thomas A. Dorsey’s “The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow.” The eulogy came last, and the Reverend Mardis preached on the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, reminding the congregation that Jesus the Good Shepherd leads his flock, including the Reverend Maxwell, into eternal life. Mardis then compared Maxwell to Moses, “a murderer and a fugitive” whom God used to bring freedom to God’s people. “The Devil couldn’t take Moses from God,” Reverend Mardis said to a chorus of amens. But when he added that the Devil couldn’t take the Reverend from God either, the chorus quieted, and when he said that Maxwell would be coming back to judge those who had judged him, people all over the chapel shook their heads in disapproval or alarm, and one man said audibly, “I hope to hell not.”
By three o’clock that afternoon, it was over. The pallbearers carried out the casket, which was driven down the road to the Peace and Goodwill Cemetery. At the graveside, Mardis offered a few more words, those gathered recited the Lord’s Prayer, and the American flag was removed, folded, and presented to Ophelia before the casket was lowered into the ground. The Reverend Willie Maxwell was buried less than a mile from his home and only a few feet from the final resting places of Mary Lou Maxwell, Dorcas Maxwell, John Columbus Maxwell, and James Hicks.
* * *
—
Tom Radney didn’t go to Willie Maxwell’s funeral, but he spoke with a lot of the journalists who were covering it. He wanted everyone to know that he wouldn’t have defended the Reverend for the murder of Shirley Ann Ellington, but he also wanted to remind them that Maxwell had never been convicted and in fact had been charged only once in any of the deaths that people so persistently associated with him. The Reverend, his former lawyer was quick to tell you, had been acquitted of his first wife’s murder, John Columbus drank himself to death, Abram Anderson had a degenerative disease and died of pneumonia, Dorcas Maxwell had died of respiratory distress, and as for James Hicks, well, he seemed to have died of nothing at all. In a song that he would very soon cease to sing, Big Tom pointed out that, legally speaking, the Reverend was and always had been entirely innocent.
While Tom was busy publicly defending his old client, he was privately trying to figure out how to defend his new one. He had known nothing of Robert Burns before the Reverend’s murder; unlike his victim, Burns had not previously been notorious around town. In fact, he hadn’t always been around town at all. Born and raised in Alex City, Burns had left after high school and moved to Cleveland, where he drove a truck, and then to Chicago, where he drove a city bus. While there, he was drafted into the army and served in the Fourth Infantry Division during the Vietnam War.
After he was discharged, he met his wife, Vera, and the couple returned to Alex City to settle down. She got a job with Head Start, he resumed his work as a long-haul trucker, and the two of them moved into a house near Horseshoe Bend. They moved home to be near family, including one of Robert’s brothers, Nathaniel, who had married and then divorced the future Ophelia Maxwell. As a result, Ophelia’s children, including Shirley Ann Ellington, were Robert Burns’s kin, and he was close with them. On the night that Shell was killed, Burns had been hauling a load in Ohio; when the dispatchers reached him and he learned what had happened, he got into his truck and drove the eight hundred miles home.
By the time that Big Tom met him, Robert Burns was a tall, trim, handsome, self-possessed thirty-six-year-old. He and Vera had been married eight years, and together they were raising her teenage son from a previous marriage and fostering a severely disabled seven-year-old girl whose mother had rubella during pregnancy. By all appearances, Burns was an unassuming, hardworking, tenderhearted family man, right up until he pulled a gun and, from three feet away, with a whole chapel watching, shot and killed the Reverend Maxwell.
In the weeks after Maxwell’s funeral, the temperature in Alexander City barely fell below one hundred degrees. June’s hot spell turned to July’s heat wave; the hay fields that generally had two cuttings by midsummer hadn’t yet had one, cotton was a third of its usual height, the corn had dried up entirely, and most of the soybean crop hadn’t even been sown. Dust devils swirled along the sides of the highways. The sun rose up every morning into an already smoldering day, scorched everything beneath it, and set into a stifling night. Clouds occasionally formed and threatened, but the rains never came. By the third week of July, the drought was so severe that
President Carter declared both Coosa County and Tallapoosa County, not to mention the rest of Alabama and Georgia, disaster areas.
The heat that summer made the farmers crazy and made the loggers crazy and made the mill workers crazy and basically made everyone crazy except the iceman and the kids down in Lake Martin, which is how, one day, Big Tom settled on his defense of Robert Burns. In the middle of July, when Burns was indicted by a grand jury in Tallapoosa County, he did as Radney had told him and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Then Burns walked out of the courthouse in blue bib overalls and a Caterpillar baseball cap on a ten-thousand-dollar bond.
* * *
—
Insanity isn’t an easy thing to prove, and it is often the defense of last resort. The belief that madness can be exculpatory is an ancient one—so ancient that it was carved into the Code of Hammurabi seventeen hundred years before the birth of Christ, alongside the notion of proportional retaliation, lex talionis, an eye for an eye. But by the time Tom Radney invoked it, the insanity defense had been out of favor for a century. Queen Victoria tried to stifle it in the mid-nineteenth century, out of fear that it would encourage would-be assassins; a hundred years later, President Richard Nixon tried to have it outlawed. Too many defendants had turned out to be insane only until acquittal, and prosecutors and psychiatrists alike had come to worry that the defense was just a way of letting murderers get away with murder; around the country, there were examples of defendants sent to state mental hospitals after a jury decided they were insane, only to have the hospital’s superintendent and staff release them after diagnosing them as sane. In response, some states—Idaho, Kansas, Montana, and Utah—banned the insanity plea entirely. But Alabama still allowed it, and Big Tom had decided that it was his best bet. In reality, it was probably his only bet. His client had brought a pistol into a chapel, shot a man three times in front of hundreds of people, then confessed to the police not once but twice before the body of his victim had even grown cold. A first-year law student could have successfully prosecuted the case in his sleep.
