Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

by Casey Cep

shot the Reverend Willie Maxwell three times in the head. Three hundred people had seen him do it. Many of them were now at his trial, not to learn why he had killed the Reverend—everyone in three counties knew that, and some were surprised no one had done it sooner—

The mystery in the courtroom that day was what would become of the man who shot the Reverend Willie Maxwell. But for decades after the verdict, the mystery was what became of Harper Lee’s book.

Enough water, like enough time, can make anything disappear.

No longer legally able to subjugate other people, wealthy white southerners turned their attention to nature instead.

Sometimes churches came together to host a collective revival, but generally they staggered them, so that summer was one long season of spiritual improvement where salvation was always within driving distance.

Violence has a way of destroying everything but itself. A murdered person’s name always threatens to become synonymous with her murder; a murdered person’s death always threatens to eclipse her life.

Water, like violence, is difficult to contain.

Ghost bells, war cries, the clanging of slave chains: if ever a land came by its haunting honestly, it is eastern Alabama.

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.

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.

This building, erected after the Great Depression, had one wing to house the court, another for city hall, and spare rooms to accommodate other uses. A person could show up at 1 Court Square to pay his taxes, register his will, sue for his inheritance, check out a library book, renew his driver’s license, or marry his sweetheart. For locals, it was where you went for pretty much everything short of salvation and groceries.

Money does wonders for misfits.

It had become obvious to her that a writer is someone who writes, and also that sooner or later everyone disappoints their parents: better, she figured, to get started on both.

and to warn her it had better sell under three million copies: “If it sells more, you will have tax collectors hounding you!”5

I just lost any patience and respect I had for her, lol

Lee herself had no patience for this budding Harper Lee Industrial Complex.

She'd get on well with JD

But Lee was bothered less by what he told the world than by what he told himself. His “psychological processes,” she would reflect, “were of clinical fascination to me.”3 However good a lawyer he was, she understood right away that no matter whom he was representing, he was first and foremost representing himself.

History isn’t what happened but what gets written down,

(5) that there is no cassette tape long enough to measure human vanity.

“I know exactly why she did it,” she explained in 1976 of Lizzie Borden: “Anyone burdened with long petticoats and having had mutton soup for breakfast on a day like that was bound to have murdered somebody before sundown”

Virtually in the same breath, though, Lee all but doomed the project by making Claudia promise that she wouldn’t get started until all of the dust was settled—the dust, in this case, being the kind usually accompanied by ashes.