by Casey Cep
And when, at the end of what he had made seem like the longest, most rigorous examination ever undertaken of a human psyche, Radney asked his expert witness to describe the defendant’s state of mind on the day of the shooting, it was “Dr.” Woodhouse who answered: “When Robert Lewis Burns pulled the trigger on that day, he was suffering from disease of the mind, which prevented him from being able to choose from right and wrong.” Radney, wanting Woodhouse to say more, asked if “irresistible impulse” was an accurate term for what Burns had experienced at the funeral home. Woodhouse agreed that it was and added that he had diagnosed Mr. Burns with “transient situational disorder.”
Radney, having gotten what he wanted from Woodhouse, called to the stand his second expert witness, Dr. Frances Goodrich Gunnels. Gunnels was an old friend of Big Tom’s from the Alexander City junior college, where he occasionally taught politics and history, and she had chaired the social sciences division and headed the psychology department. Young was furious when she took the stand, but, strangely, not about the obvious conflict of interest. Gunnels was the witness he had become convinced was trying to eavesdrop earlier in the trial, so he asked for the jury to be dismissed and, once they were, became apoplectic. He must have been worried that the second of Big Tom’s expert witnesses was trying to make sure her testimony matched that of his first or cribbing answers for any technical questions, but instead of explaining his actual worries, he raised his fist at the judge.
“I approached the bench yesterday, and advised the Court, and the Court knows, that I was going to object to this witness, Dr. Gunnels, testifying in this case at all,” he told Judge Avary. “Not only yesterday, but today she has been standing at the air vent there at the door of the courtroom,” he claimed, “right by the witness stand, within eight feet of the witness stand, and listening to the evidence.” But when Judge Avary questioned Dr. Gunnels, she said that while yes, she had been in the hallway the whole time, she couldn’t hear anything because of the air-conditioning. Moreover, she was so hard of hearing that even if she’d pressed her ear against the vent, she wouldn’t have been able to make out what was being said inside the courtroom.
Avary, once again unpersuaded by Tom Young, brought the jury back in, and Gunnels began her testimony, both about her own qualifications—which included degrees in psychology, special education, and counseling, as well as extensive work with the Birmingham Child Guidance Clinic and the Veterans Administration—and about her interactions with Robert Burns, whom she had interviewed three times that summer, for a total of six hours. Gunnels testified that she found Burns to be of average intelligence but suffering from a passive-aggressive syndrome whereby he suppressed his anger, making him predisposed to “explode” after a tragedy like the murder of his niece. She went so far as to testify that Robert Burns was “incapable of avoiding” what had happened at House of Hutchinson.
Young began his cross-examination of Gunnels by belittling her credentials, the same way he had done, with perhaps more justification, to the Not-Quite-Doctor Woodhouse. “You have, in effect, been the same as a school counselor,” he said of her work at the Birmingham Child Guidance Clinic. “In essence, that’s all you are, is that true?” It was not. As Dr. Gunnels explained to Young, and to the jury, her decade of experience as a clinical psychologist involved evaluating and treating everything from dyslexia to schizophrenia.
Having failed to discredit the witness, Young tried to discredit psychology in general. Was it, he asked, “an art, a science, or what?” He had already attempted this move during his cross-examination of Woodhouse, by asking whether one of the tests that Burns had been administered, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, “truly reflects conditions in blacks as well as whites” and whether animal subjects like mice could reliably represent human beings. But when he returned to this latter point with the new witness, Young found himself outmatched; Gunnels ran a mouse laboratory at the community college and was more prepared to defend her research than Woodhouse.
Things got worse for Tom Young when the defense rose for re-direct. Lee Sims asked Dr. Gunnels whether she had ever given testimony before as an expert witness. She had, it turned out—including for the State of Alabama. Now this witness, favored by the DA’s own office, told the jury that “no man and no money could make me say a man is insane if I don’t believe he is,” and she believed that Robert Burns was not sane at the time that he shot the Reverend Willie Maxwell. He was not a violent person, she said, and he had not committed any acts of violence prior to this one except during his military service.
Tom Young, who had the FBI file on Burns full of allegations to the contrary, sat in his seat fuming. But no matter which way he pushed, the witness could not reveal to the jury anything about the defendant’s earlier episodes of violence, because Gunnels had not talked with Burns about his time in Ohio, Maryland, and Illinois and did not know anything about the crimes he had allegedly committed there. The same went for every character witness Big Tom called. They testified about what a good man Burns was; they testified about what a good family he came from; they knew nothing about any visits to Cleveland or Laurel or Chicago. As far as anyone in the jury could tell, prior to the shooting, Burns was admired and beloved everywhere he went.
To deepen that impression, Big Tom called his client’s wife to the stand. Vera Burns talked about her eight years of marriage and how her husband was helping to raise their teenage son and foster daughter, the one with special needs. She also testified that Shirley Ann Ellington had been close with that daughter and that her husband had been close to Shirley. In what was perhaps her most effective testimony, she told the jury that she had heard about what the Reverend Maxwell had asked the man from Eclectic to do and that she had told her husband about it prior to the shooting. On hearing it, she said, Burns became distraught. “He told me he just felt sick, he just got upset,” she testified. “And he said he was afraid Mr. Maxwell would kill the rest of Nathaniel’s children” and that “he was afraid that Mr. Maxwell might even try to do something to us.”
“Let me ask you, Vera,” Big Tom asked, in his gentlest tone. “Was it true that every member of the Burns family was scared to death of Reverend Maxwell?”
Vera said yes, they were, and when Radney asked if she specifically was afraid of Maxwell, she said yes, too. When he asked her about voodoo, Mrs. Burns explained that there had always been a lot of talk about that. It was awful, Mrs. Burns said, everything they’d learned about the Reverend since Shell’s death, and then to see him at the funeral was just too much. Her husband carried his pistol everywhere, so she hadn’t thought anything of it when he took it to the funeral. She hadn’t even been there when he fired it, because she’d left early with one of Shirley’s sisters, who had gotten emotional during the service.
It was effective testimony, but Big Tom, who understood perfectly well that jurors can nod sympathetically and dab at their eyes but still vote to convict a man, wanted to put one more witness on the stand. A resident of Alexander City, Dorothy Moeling had been matched years earlier with Robert Burns for a letter-writing program organized by a local community group for troops serving abroad. Although she had met Robert Burns only once, she had exchanged many letters with him while he was fighting in Vietnam. “My husband and I just thought his letters were marvelous,” she said on the stand. “He was very patriotic and very dedicated.”
Tom Young objected, claiming that Moeling’s testimony was irrelevant and asking for it to be excluded, but Big Tom appealed to a higher authority: “Every act, the Supreme Court says, from the cradle to the grave, on a plea of insanity is admissible.” Avary overruled Young, and Big Tom read much of Robert Burns’s DD 214 into the record, complete with his service summary, his honors, and his medals. Then he read aloud from a letter that Burns had written to Dorothy Moeling from Vietnam. After thanking her for taking the time to write to him and describing his upbringing near Horseshoe Bend
, he told her that he’d been in Vietnam 134 days and still had 232 more to go. “I want you to know I don’t regret one day of it,” he wrote, before extemporizing on the famous words of Nathan Hale: “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country, and people like yourself.”
He was writing by candlelight, Burns continued. Two days before, his company, Action Alpha, had been in “a big fire fight, and we killed fifty-eight men and three women, and also wounded three women.” “Mrs. Moeling,” the soldier finished, “we are going to win this war if it costs many more lives and mine, if that’s the price I have to pay.” It was a deftly chosen bit of evidence, and Big Tom was right to fight for its inclusion. Whether or not the jurors thought that Burns had been a hero that day at House of Hutchinson, they were reminded that he had been heroic in Vietnam and that his military service had shaken him the way that combat can shake any man, however peaceable he was before.
* * *
—
At ten minutes to four in the afternoon, Tom Radney rested his case. Fifteen minutes later, the state followed suit, and both sides readied their closing arguments. The assistant district attorney spoke first, revisiting the testimony of the witnesses and walking the jury through the state’s straightforward argument: that Robert Burns shot and killed the Reverend Willie Maxwell, and that he had been sane all three times he pulled the trigger. Anticipating the defense’s closing statement, he then reminded the jurors that while they might have convicted the Reverend Willie Maxwell had they been given the chance, that was not what they were there to do. “It matters not one bit,” E. Paul Jones told them, “not one iota, if Willie J. Maxwell was guilty of all of those murders or not, in determining the guilt or innocence of this man.” At the end of his closing remarks, Jones articulated the crux of the state’s case and a cornerstone of our justice system. “If Willie Maxwell had confessed those crimes in open court, right here in front of all of you,” he said, “that would not have given Robert Burns the right to take his life.”
Lee Sims, who offered the first closing statement for the defense, proceeded to ignore everything that Jones had just said. He cataloged the accusations against the Reverend and reminded the jury of what the expert witnesses had said about the mental state of Robert Burns. Then he handed the closing over to Big Tom, who rose from behind the defense table and loosened his tie.
Trials were what Big Tom lived for, and he was most himself in that brief period of time when all of the motions and objections and testimony and evidence were over and he was standing before the jury, freed from any obligation except eloquence. The jury knew everything he did—or anyway, they knew everything that he wanted them to know—and he could finally talk with them the way he talked with his dinner table jury at home. First, he pleaded humility, saying that Jones was wrong to say he’d “wax eloquently,” because after all he, Tom Radney, was no great orator, only a simple country lawyer. Then Big Tom apologized for any offense he had caused during the heat of the trial, asking the jury to forgive him, because anything he’d done had been in the service of his client, a man whose liberty was at stake. Then he apologized to the jurors for the inconvenience of having to serve on the jury, subjecting them to a hotel stay and taking them away from their families.
Once all of that was out of the way, Big Tom reminded the jurors that Robert Burns was a good man who had served his country and whose family needed him at home and that until he’d done what he did, half of Coosa County lay awake at night wondering, “Who will the Reverend get next?” He summoned for them the images of the scales of justice and asked them to put his client, Robert Burns, on one side of that scale and the Reverend Willie Maxwell on the other. And then, finally, in what was one of Big Tom’s signature closing remarks, he asked them to take their time, pointing at the defendant, saying he knew there were at least a few jurors who “would sit there forever—forever—before you would ever give him a day.”
The final word in the case—except for the verdict—belonged to Tom Young, who used it to plead once more for law and order. “We are not living in the days of the wild and woolly west,” he said. “We are living in Alexander City, Alabama,” not “Lynch City, Alabama.” He lashed out at the press for stirring up hatred of Willie Maxwell, accused them of being complicit in his murder, then turned his attention to the defendant and implored the jury to answer one question and one question only. It was the same question that at twenty minutes to six on Tuesday, September 27, 1977, in the Fifth Judicial Circuit in Alexander City, Judge James Avary charged them with answering: “Did Robert Lewis Burns unlawfully and with malice aforethought kill Willie J. Maxwell?”
| 14 |
What Holmes Was Talking About
Eighty minutes later, the jury was back. Not because they’d reached a verdict, but because Judge Avary wanted an update from the foreman. L. D. Benton, a sixty-year-old army veteran who’d earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in World War II and then became a supervisor at Russell Mills, reported to the judge, the attorneys, and those still gathered in the courtroom that the jury was pretty close to being deadlocked. His report must have worried both the defense and the prosecution, but Judge Avary sent him back to the jury room, said maybe dinner would help them with their deliberations, and ordered the bailiff to take their orders for hamburgers and sandwiches.
At nine in the evening, Judge Avary called the jurors back again. He was impatient and wanted to know whether they’d be able to decide the case that night, or at all. Benton reported that they still hadn’t reached a verdict, but they had taken votes. Avary asked him to report their split, without saying whether they leaned toward conviction or toward acquittal. There was no reason to think that where they were then was where they would end up, but it was still a heart-stopping moment for the defendant and his counsel. An acquittal was a loss for the state, but the state had lost before, whereas a conviction of murder in the first degree would likely mean life in prison for Burns. Benton announced that they were nine and three, and Judge Avary sent the jury back, reminding them they could ask any questions that might help with their deliberations.
A few minutes later, the bailiff returned to the courtroom with a written question. “What action would be taken,” the jury wanted to know, “if a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity was reached?” Judge Avary wanted to answer the jury and suggested telling them, “I would send him to Bryce Hospital where he would be evaluated; in the event they determined he was, at this time, sane, he would be released.”
For once, the attorneys were in agreement. Big Tom, worried about reviving talk of a revolving door, argued that any answer beyond the sentencing options that the jury had already been given would be prejudicial; the state, worried about a mistrial if inappropriate instructions were given, concurred. Judge Avary was convinced and sent the jurors back a note that read “It is not proper for the jury to consider this in reaching their verdict.”
At ten o’clock, with fifty people still milling about waiting on a verdict, including Robert and Vera Burns, Judge Avary called the jury back to the courtroom for a fourth time. When Benton said that they were still deadlocked and that they’d already asked the only question they had, Judge Avary informed them that the court had secured rooms for another night at the Horseshoe Bend Motel. A fair and just trial, he warned them, could take days, but for now he’d give them another half an hour to deliberate before dispatching them to the motel for the night. Big Tom objected to what he considered this “dynamite charge,” claiming that Judge Avary had basically threatened the jurors with confinement. For the first time since the opening gavel, Big Tom asked for a mistrial. “That was just a firecracker,” Avary snapped back, denying Radney’s motion. “I am holding the dynamite until later.”
* * *
—
He wouldn’t need it. At the end of their thirty minutes, almost exactly five hours after they started their deliberations, the jury sent word through
the bailiff that they had reached a verdict. Tom Young had already gone home for the night, and so had the Reverend’s widow, but there were still dozens of people around—including Big Tom, who had an appeal bond filled out and ready to hand to the judge. First, though, the foreman had his own piece of paper to give Judge Avary. The judge took it and read it aloud: “We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty by reason of insanity.”
Robert Burns let his head fall into his hands. His wife started to cry. Cheers and applause filled the courtroom, and once the jury had left and the judge had called Burns forward to read the judgment again, friends and family raced to hug him and to shake Big Tom’s hand. Judge Avary wanted to send Burns to Bryce Hospital right away, but Radney asked that he be allowed to go home with his family for the night, and Avary assented.
By the next morning, when everyone reunited in court, almost the whole town knew what Judge Avary had wanted to tell the jury in answer to their question: a defendant found not guilty by reason of insanity is sent for evaluation at a state mental hospital and is released as soon as the superintendent of that facility sees fit; there is no minimum stay, even for a killer. Tom Young, who had wanted the jury told as much but didn’t want to risk a mistrial, came to court that morning with a statement for the press. “Now, a cold-blooded murderer is a hero,” it read. “The plea of insanity was never proven. In fact, it was completely disproven. Any commitment of Burns to Bryce would be a complete farce and a waste of taxpayers’ money. If he is sent over there, he won’t need a change of clothes, but he might need to pack a lunch.”
Young was wrong, but not by much. When the staff at Bryce evaluated Robert Burns, they did not agree with the diagnosis offered by the experts who had testified at his trial. That wasn’t very surprising, because, by then, it had come out that those experts didn’t even agree with themselves. “In a way,” Dr. Gunnels later said, “killing Willie Maxwell was the sanest thing anybody did all summer.” There wasn’t a jury in Tallapoosa County, she continued, that would have convicted Burns, who “was just doing what the law ought to have done sooner.” Then she added, without an ounce of irony, “Why, I probably would have killed that man myself.”
