Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  When Earnhardt got back to his desk and found a note on his typewriter saying that Harper Lee had called, he thought it was a prank. But when he returned the call, there was Lee on the other end of the line, hoping to talk with him about his reporting. An avid reader of novels, histories, and just about anything else he could get his hands on, Jim was thrilled to speak with her, and the two hit it off right away. Soon enough, they met in person, and Jim, like Big Tom, ended up giving Lee everything that he had on the Reverend—in his case, a scrapbook that his mother had made for him of all the articles about the case. The red cover was unmarked except for a gold border, but inside, protected by plastic sheets, were all of the stories Jim had written about Shirley Ann Ellington, the Reverend, and Burns, plus clippings his mother had saved from other newspapers.

  Later, after Lee had come for supper with Earnhardt’s parents, she mailed them a letter to say how highly she thought of their son. She was the same age as Jim’s father and a little older than his mother, but she took a shine to the bearded, bespectacled twenty-two-year-old reporter, and it was easy to see why: Jim was just as comfortable reconstructing the rise of the Russells in Alex City as discussing Faulkner, whom Lee had never met, and Steinbeck, whom she knew because they shared a literary agency. What Jim couldn’t reciprocate in the annals of celebrity, he could match in the annals of Alabama arcana: like Alice Lee, he could rattle off all sixty-seven counties in the state, together with their seats. He had wanted to be a reporter since he was twelve and had grown into one with as strict a sense of ethics as Lee herself; with no prompting from her, he cast aspersions on “nonfiction novels” and other “pseudo-journalistic practices.”

  Perhaps most important of all, Earnhardt intuited the quality that Harper Lee valued most in her friendships: discretion. He didn’t cover her comings and goings in the Outlook, never pried into what she was or wasn’t writing, and would answer anyone’s questions about the Maxwell case, so long as they had nothing to do with her. Lee and Earnhardt struck up a correspondence that next spring that lasted for decades and included half a dozen visits in Manhattan. When Jim came to the big city, Lee worried like a mother about him getting mugged, introduced him to the man who ran her local newsstand, took him for drinks with Marcia Van Meter, and made him stay at the Algonquin the way real writers did. They ate Persian food at Teheran and Chinese food at Mayor Koch’s favorite restaurant; she even took him to Sardi’s, where she used to eat with Maurice Crain, and for burgers at Jackson Hole, after which the daughter of the Great Depression took the leftovers home for “Aunt Lily,” the older woman who lived on the same floor of her building.

  Like Lee, Earnhardt loved music, so when he came to town, she took him to the symphony. Once, during a performance of Mozart by the pianist Alicia de Larrocha, Jim saw her “politely correct a young man seated next to us who was moving his hand to the music in the wrong time signature.” They also both loved books, of course, so his visits inevitably involved sojourns to bookstores. Lee directed him to the Strand, but also to the Bryn Mawr, one of her favorite shops, where she’d once found a rare edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in the gardening section and where he found a first edition of Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding for a dollar. Their literary adventures took other forms, too, including a pilgrimage to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where they paid their respects to Herman Melville. After Jim left the Outlook for The Montgomery Advertiser, he wrote a column about their graveyard adventure in the only way that Lee wholeheartedly endorsed: so anonymously (“My friend, an Alabamian who has lived in New York for many years”) that when her sister Alice sent along the clipping, she wrote, “This is the way I like to read about you; identifiable only to the author, her sister, and the subject.”

  Earnhardt was as trustworthy with his reporting as he was with his friendships, and Lee soon found that he was the rare source who never fabricated a memory, even around the edges. He recalled for her with precision everything he knew about the Reverend and readily admitted when she needed to look elsewhere for information. That turned out to be an unusual quality. Like a lot of places in Alabama, if you asked a question around Alex City, you could expect an entire epic, with all the narrative liberties the word implies, or no answer at all. Lee had committed herself to a book built from facts, but when it came to the story of the Reverend Maxwell, those were hard to come by and harder still to verify. Many of the people she talked to never really knew the details of the case, some had already forgotten them, and others had reason to lie about them.

  Worse, some of the most crucial facts of the case had never been established: of all the deaths associated with the Reverend Willie Maxwell, only two had ever been declared homicides, and neither of those had resulted in convictions. Plenty of people had theories about what the Reverend had done—including, eventually, Lee herself—but it just wasn’t possible to say for sure what had happened in the other four deaths, absent exhumations or perhaps innovations in toxicology. Nonetheless, Lee armed herself with so many autopsy reports, death certificates, and interviews with the experts who’d prepared them that she joked about being “up to my neck in funerals.”

  She was also up to her eyeballs in other paperwork. From the county courthouses at Dadeville and Rockford, she pulled marriage certificates and the Reverend’s military service record. When she found out that the Maxwells had worked for Russell Mills, she got someone to copy down the employee records for the Reverend and his first wife. She even had cocktails with Ben Russell, Benjamin Russell’s grandson, at the Willow Point Country Club, where the Radneys were members. And one day, Lee obtained a copy of the “Declaration of Legitimation” that the Reverend had filed for the daughter he had fathered in 1969.

  As a result, when Lee went to interview the first Mrs. Maxwell’s surviving relatives, she had delicate questions to ask them. On January 16, 1978, she met Mary Lou’s sister Lena Martin at her home. Martin told Lee right away how little she thought of the Reverend Maxwell and how much she and her husband had worried about Mary Lou. Maxwell was “mean to her,” Martin said, and “didn’t treat her right.” They shared the sense that he was dangerous, so much so that Essex Martin could remember for Lee exactly what he’d said after the Reverend called Lena to say that Mary Lou had been in an accident: “She ain’t had no wreck; he just killed her.”

  The Martins insisted that the Reverend Maxwell had also killed his brother. On the night J.C. died, they told Lee, he had been in a car with the Reverend, who had let him out by Cottage Grove Cemetery, not far from where his body was later found. Their certainty sent Lee back to the evidence from John Columbus Maxwell’s death, which included two insurance documents. The first was an application for a five-thousand-dollar policy on John Columbus Maxwell from the Crown Life Insurance Company of Illinois dated March 15, 1971, that named Willie J. Maxwell the beneficiary and used the Reverend’s own mailing address. The second was the “Death Claim Notice” for that same policy, indicating that John C. Maxwell had died “from sickness” on February 6, 1972, asking that the check be sent to the same address. With the two forms side by side, it was obvious that the handwriting on both was identical: the Reverend Willie Maxwell had applied for the policy on his brother and then, less than a year later, been the one to request payment. The same signature also appeared on four other policies Maxwell held on his brother alone.

  Lee’s book was never going to be a whodunit, since the murderer was never a mystery. But while the howhedunit was as puzzling as ever, the whyhedunit had taken a turn for the obvious. Reverend Maxwell was an “elusive” figure, she once wrote to Rheta Grimsley Johnson, a journalist who knew Lee’s family from her time at The Monroe Journal and was hoping to interview Lee about the book she was writing. Declining an interview from her motel room in Alex City, Lee drew a horseshoe on the back flap of the envelope as a kind of homemade return address. “He might not have believed in what he preached, he might not have believed in voodoo,” she wrot
e of the Reverend, “but he had a profound and abiding belief in insurance.”

  * * *

  —

  The extent of the Reverend’s insurance holdings raised a whole different set of questions about him, including exactly how much he had made from the policies and exactly how he had spent that money. District Attorney Tom Young had once claimed that Maxwell “always paid his debts and had excellent credit,” and suggested that his neighbors disliked him for it: “Maybe that’s why some people talked about him. That’s a poor county, you know.”

  But Young was wrong. By January 1978, the Reverend’s estate had been fully probated, and eighteen claims had already been filed against it, totaling almost sixty-five thousand dollars and ranging in size from a bill from Hardy Electric Company for thirteen dollars to some forty-five thousand dollars owed to the Bank of Dadeville. There were outstanding accounts at tire shops and country stores, and others for gas, groceries, and jewelry. The Reverend had been in serious debt at the time of his death, which meant he was also in debt at the time of the murder of Shirley Ann Ellington, much as he had been when his first wife was found dead.

  That suggested a clear pattern of motive, yet Maxwell’s finances were still baffling. Lee found that his insurance policy payouts exceeded his debts, and it wasn’t obvious what he had done with all of that money, to say nothing of why he had worked so hard at so many legitimate jobs all those years: for Russell Mills, at the quarry, in the pulpwooding business, and in the pulpit. Like the law enforcement officers before her, Lee came to focus on the “lady friends” for whom the Reverend had been known around town—costly affairs, it now seemed.

  Big Tom didn’t know all that much about Maxwell’s finances, but he was also more interested in talking about his new client than about his old one, having lately returned to the good graces of a community that only a few months before had considered him one of the Devil’s own attorneys. Just as he had been congratulated in court for the verdict in the Burns trial, Radney was now getting congratulations all around town, and on January 20, 1978, he was officially named Man of the Year by the Chamber of Commerce. An editorial in the Outlook praised the decision: “Whether he’s in the courtroom or the legislature or in politics, Mr. Radney always gives it everything he’s got. And, on the record of his accomplishments, he’s got plenty, and his efforts have paid big dividends for this community and this area.”

  Two days after that ceremony, Harper Lee went back to see Mary Ann Karr, the court reporter, and wrote her a check for one thousand dollars for the transcript of State of Alabama v. Robert Lewis Burns. She left with almost five hundred pages, double-spaced to leave room for annotations. She was also finally able to speak with Burns himself, because he was home from Bryce Hospital, already back to work, and more than willing to talk about shooting the Reverend.

  Lee quickly found that Burns was nothing at all like Hickock or Smith, and also that interviewing a murderer in his living room was nothing like interviewing one in prison. Burns was a handsome, polite man, whose wife adored him and whose foster daughter—the one with special needs, who had been close to Shirley Ann Ellington—hung around his legs during their conversations just as she had during the recesses of his trial. During his two interviews with Lee, Burns repeated a lot of what he had heard about the Reverend and his voodoo practice, adding a few details about clothespins Maxwell had supposedly worn on his ears and the bottles labeled with strange words that had allegedly been discovered when his house was cleaned out after his death. Burns told Lee that he was sure that the Reverend had murdered all five of his family members and that he had made Dorcas Anderson’s husband drink some kind of poison, too. She listened attentively, he recalled, asking a lot of questions and sharing with him some of what she had already learned. “She knew all her stuff,” Burns said, and she told him, “You’d be surprised at all the people that man’s got insurance policies on.”

  The insurance was all very real, but the voodoo rumors were hard to substantiate. Still, Lee was interested in the allegations and in the culture that had produced them, because she’d grown up with the same kinds of superstitions in Monroe County and included some of them in To Kill a Mockingbird. “Before I remembered there was no such thing as hoo-dooing,” Scout says of the soap figurines that Boo Radley carved to look like her and Jem, “I shrieked and threw them down.” What Lee didn’t already know from experience, she made a point of finding out, contacting an occult bookstore in New York to get a copy of its catalog and see what else she could learn about conjuring. The oldest shop of its kind in the country, Samuel Weiser Bookstore had opened on Book Row in 1926, but by the time Lee needed its assistance, it had moved to Broadway, established its own imprint, and racked up an inventory of over a hundred thousand books—everything from African Folklore, Country Wisdom, and The Secrets of Superstitions to Occult America, Spirits and Spirit Worlds, and Vampires, Zombies, and Monster Men.

  Reading her way through the shelf’s worth of voodoo books she ordered, Lee learned what her own life had already taught her: voodoo was an extensive and sincerely held system of belief, with practitioners all around the world. But, as far as she could tell, those practitioners did not include the Reverend Willie Maxwell. As much as Lee enjoyed the company of Tom Radney, her reporting on the rumors surrounding the Reverend made her far more inclined to agree with Tom Young, who had dismissed “all that voodoo stuff” as “based on natural superstition, surmise, conjecture, and reckless gossip.” She couldn’t find any evidence that Maxwell himself believed in voodoo, let alone that he could hex a jury or turn into a black cat. Nor was there any sign that he’d ever been to New Orleans at all, much less to study with the Seven Sisters.

  The person who denied the voodoo business most vociferously was the Reverend’s widow, who had always insisted on her husband’s innocence. After securing an interview with the third Mrs. Maxwell, Lee experienced for herself what investigators who had worked on the earlier cases had told her about the widow’s specialty, which was denying her previous statements and claiming she’d never said them. Lee herself would say, “I was disappointed by her lack of candor.”

  But what the widow wouldn’t tell her, Lee would find out for herself. After the Reverend was murdered, she learned, Ophelia Maxwell had filed a lawsuit against the Gerber Life Insurance Company in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars. It was not for a policy in her late husband’s name but for one on Shirley Ann Ellington. Gerber refused to pay on the grounds that the policy wasn’t valid—partly because it was less than two years old and the girl hadn’t died of natural causes, but also because Shirley’s signature on the application had been forged.

  After Gerber’s reply, Ophelia Maxwell dropped the suit, but the act of filing it came straight from her husband’s playbook, and it raised questions about what other policies the Maxwells might have held on Shirley. More disturbingly, it raised questions about whether Ophelia might have been the one to fulfill the role the Reverend had initially offered to the man from Eclectic. Ophelia’s account of the day that her stepdaughter died had always been strangely vague; she had never been able to explain to anyone’s satisfaction why her husband had been out scouting timber so late, or why the two of them had waited so long to look for the teenager after she supposedly set off, without a license, in their car.

  That in itself might have been enough to raise Lee’s eyebrows, but by then she also knew what most people around Lake Martin had forgotten: that Ophelia Maxwell had been a suspect in the death of the Reverend’s first wife. When Lee reconstructed the crimes, as she had done many times with Capote, it became obvious that the Reverend needed transportation to or from at least some of the scenes where the bodies had been found. The testimony of the man from Eclectic had given credence to the widespread belief that someone had helped Maxwell; the question had always been who. Some had thought it was Fred Hutchinson, since he had already been convicted of homicide in an insurance sche
me and it seemed unlikely that two such like-minded criminals would be operating independently in the same small town. But it is more likely that Lee suspected Ophelia Maxwell.

  “I do believe that the Reverend Maxwell murdered at least five people,” she wrote once in a summary of the case, “that his motive was greed, that he had an accomplice for two of the murders and an accessory for one.” Well versed in criminal law and careful with her choice of words whether in a letter or a lede, she took care to distinguish between an accessory, someone present during a murder, and an accomplice, someone who assists before or after. To a writer living in Auburn who was interested in the case, she teased that the accomplice was not only alive, but living within a 150-mile radius.

  On top of everything else that made researching the Reverend difficult, Lee now had to contend with a living accomplice. It wasn’t so unlike those early weeks in Kansas before the Clutter murders were solved, when Jack Dunphy made Capote so worried for his own life that he asked Lee if she would carry a gun. She didn’t then, and she wasn’t now, but she did tell more than a few of her sources that she was concerned about threats to herself, her family in Alex City, and her older sister over in Eufaula. Whether she meant that the Reverend’s accomplice might want to harm them or that someone else connected to the case might want to scare her off the project, she didn’t say.

  * * *

  —

  But if Lee was now afraid of the subjects of her work, for the first time in a long time she was not afraid of the work itself. She had always loved mysteries, and this one, dark as it was, was combating her own darkness. Word had spread that she was digging into the Maxwell case, and her days were starting to fill with appointments and invitations. She accepted any that seemed likely to turn up new information on the Reverend, and in the early summer of 1978 she agreed to attend a cocktail party with the staff of the Outlook. By then, Al Benn had left to become the publisher of a newspaper in LaFayette, and Bill Hatcher, a hungry young editor from Cleveland, Tennessee, had been named his successor. Hatch, as everyone called him, had graduated from a small Wesleyan college, then gone to work for a newspaper in his home state before moving to Alabama to run The Auburn Bulletin. A gay man, he was not entirely at home in Alex City, but he was at home in any newsroom, and although he was only half Harper Lee’s age, he nearly matched her wit. The new editor in chief made some other hires, including Patty Cribb, who was named editor of the “Outlook on Living” section of the paper. Unlike Hatch, Cribb was a local; she had graduated from Benjamin Russell High School and returned to Alex City after college and graduate school in Florida. It was her mother who organized the cocktail party and invited Judge C. J. Coley, a local eminence who was equal parts Pliny the Elder and Thucydides.