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

by Casey Cep

The same prejudice that kept civilians separated by race in schools and churches and soda shops kept soldiers segregated in camp bunks, mess halls, and on the front lines.

“There wouldn’t be anybody nicer to you, conversation-wise,” people said of him. “You’d think that man came from heaven he was so smooth.”

It was the first but not the last marriage of the future Reverend Willie Maxwell, and whatever else can be said about it, this much is true: it lasted, as he promised that day that it would, until death did them part.

it was partly thanks to the state’s vibrant revival culture that by 1970 one in four Alabamians was Baptist.

In a small town, a preacher’s wife faces more scrutiny than almost anyone. Where she goes and what she wears, how she talks and whom she talks to and what she says: everything she does is noticed, noted, weighed, and judged. Charity begins at home, but so does humility, modesty, patience, piety, and respectability, and a preacher’s wife is under pressure to embody them all—even more pressure, sometimes, than the preacher himself.

went back to the bedroom,” she said, “and told my husband there was something wrong because his car wasn’t torn up.”

He felt certain that it must have been his wife who had been in a wreck, and he urged the police to look for her car on Highway 22,

Later, people took to saying that his clothing must’ve been handmade for him by the Devil,

Men of the cloth may have more cause than most to avoid indiscretions, but they also have more opportunities to commit them.

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.

By the 1970s, the Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation was consulting on almost six thousand cases a year, offering assistance with autopsies, ballistics, fingerprinting, handwriting analysis, microscopy, and photography.

Rehling called himself the “crime doctor,” and his colleagues the “crime crew.”

The letter that the Reverend wrote to Old American to request payment was dated August 19, 1970, by which time, though he failed to mention it, his wife’s death had been declared a homicide, and he had been indicted for her murder.

If earthquakes were not divine punishments but geological inevitabilities, then perhaps insuring oneself against death was not contrary to God’s plan but a responsible and pious way to provide for one’s family.

Most early anthropologists and historians shared the biases of the culture at large, leaving them uninterested in or even antagonistic to African spirituality in general and voodoo in particular. One of the first scholars to take it seriously was a graduate student at Columbia who had been born and raised in the South and longed to return there to document its folklore: the writer Zora Neale Hurston,

With both of their spouses dead, the widower Maxwell and the widow Anderson said their vows on November 21, 1971. The day after that, the Reverend’s insurance man came by.

according to nearly the whole of Nixburg, John Columbus died of being a Maxwell.

It was there that future president Andrew Jackson and his troops slaughtered 557 Creeks, leaving hundreds more to die while trying to escape across the river, and taking the survivors prisoner; later, he forced those survivors across the Mississippi on the Trail of Tears. Sunk beneath Lake Martin are Creek burial grounds, and on the pocket of land inside Horseshoe Bend, where the weeds grow wild and the river and its bloody history are always just behind you, the sound of a turtle slipping off a rock into the water can make a grown man jump.

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

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.

telling him that while they were lucky today, they might not be tomorrow, in which case they would want people to remember their kindness.

He knew that the struggle for civil rights and political equality remained unfinished and promised to keep fighting for both as a citizen.

Vengeance is as old as violence, and many white southerners can trace their moral genealogy through family feuds and gentlemen’s duels, across rivers and oceans all the way back to medieval courts and biblical dynasties. Theirs was a society that not so long ago had written theft into legal treaties with Native Americans and bondage into legal deeds on the lives of African Americans; a society that until recently had believed the law elastic enough to bend without breaking, exempting lynching from the category of homicide. Like those killings, the murder of the Reverend Willie Maxwell had been witnessed by hundreds but still resulted in no conviction.

No matter where she was, she avoided the press, her fans, and anything that seemed too literary; she tried to live her life as if she had never published one of the most popular novels in American history.

But the chain-smoking tomboy who played football with the boys and slept in men’s pajamas was used to confusing those around her.

aesthete

Mostly, though, they kept close to each other and away from others; they were both “apart” people, as he would explain much later, when the world knew him as Truman Capote.

Lee once said, revealing not only the appetite she had for intellectual friendships but also the deep estrangement of a bright young woman from her hometown.

Both men were the size and shape of a crab apple, and both had fallen from the same sort of tree: their fathers were absent, their mothers alcoholic.

Billington was convicted and hanged, thereby earning the dubious distinction of becoming the first recorded murderer in the New World.

hagiographic

In The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm called this space between reporting and writing an “abyss.”

That was in keeping with the way black lives in the South and elsewhere had been treated—not merely criminalized but criminally neglected, including in her father’s own newspaper, which had frequent mentions of the Lee family but only the occasional “Negro News” column.

“I think Pickett left his heart at Horseshoe Bend.”

She might have struggled sometimes with the prose in her books, but in her letters she wrote with the ear of Eudora Welty, the eye of Walker Evans, the precision of John Donne, the wit of Dorothy Parker, and, often, the length of George Eliot.