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

by Casey Cep

And as for the rivers, why should they get to play while people had to work?

To hear him tell it, hours later and for the rest of his life, that was the night the Reverend Willie Maxwell became Job.

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.

Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.”

Supernatural explanations flourish where law and order fails, which is why, as time passed and more people died, the stories about the Reverend grew stronger, stranger, and, if possible, more sinister.

“They said someone had to have held a gun to his head to make him drink that much whiskey,” the Reverend said dismissively, “but I knew my brother, and he did it to himself.”

They did know, though, that the only thing scarier than an unknown murderer is a known one.

“That insurance man came and knocked on the door every time and got the money and took the money home and sent it to the insurance company,” Gray said in his closing statement, “and then when the time came to pay off, they said, ‘Oh, no, we’re not going to pay it.’ That’s what these big companies do. They want your money, but any time they can weasel out of it, they weasel out of paying.”

Never mind that their client was possibly the least likely poster boy for civil rights in the entire African American population of Alabama.

For the Reverend Willie Maxwell, becoming a widower was proving to be a lucrative business.

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.

In the long empty miles between towns there, the highways rise and fall over hills that keep most things out of view and make every sight a sudden one. Where the pavement ends, the roads turn to dirt as red as rust or blood. Pines and oak trees line them, tattered moss hanging from their branches like wraiths. At night, the fog is so thick that anything can disappear into it or come walking out of it.

The third Mrs. Maxwell was Ophelia Burns: the woman who had been indicted but never tried for the murder of the first Mrs. Maxwell.

As a rule, most southern towns are allergic to authority and resent any federal presence that isn’t a post office. But all of them welcome a courthouse, no matter what court it’s designed to house: city, county, district, federal, anything so long as you can put a building around it.

As with his political career, Big Tom’s legal career seemed like a way to reject his father’s cruelty and reflect his mother’s generosity, and whenever he did work for less than what it was worth, he felt that he was using his time and talents as she had taught him and as God wanted.

“In a way,” Dr. Gunnels later said, “killing Willie Maxwell was the sanest thing anybody did all summer.”

Then she added, without an ounce of irony, “Why, I probably would have killed that man myself.”

Vengeance is as old as violence,

a society that until recently had believed the law elastic enough to bend without breaking,

“The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong. If people would gratify the passion of revenge outside of the law, if the law did not help them, the law has no choice but to satisfy the craving itself, and thus avoid the greater evil of private retribution.”

This is exactly what happened! The law never could protect the people from the Reverend, or find anything to dissprove the belief that the Reverend was a murderer. The community didn't feel safe until the Reverend was dead.

The present kept sliding over the past, and the past kept slipping further down, until the truth of what had transpired in the life and death of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, elusive even as it was happening, became like the stone foundations and submerged churches and sunken graves 150 feet down in a drift of silt at the bottom of Lake Martin.

“We are bound by a common anguish.”

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.

“I am more of a rewriter than a writer,”

She claimed that while there could be “no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence,” there was also “no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed.”

“She was a writer to the depths of her soul,” Michael Brown would later say of that astonishing year. “It would have happened with or without us—all that we did was hurry it up a little.”

Capote, self-aggrandizing as ever, seemed to have forgotten that his friend was the daughter of a newspaper editor and already knew a thing or two about journalism.

“It was deep calling to deep,” she’d say later, quoting the psalmist. “The crime intrigued him, and I’m intrigued with crime—and, boy I wanted to go.”

But to the apprehensive locals, Lee was everything Capote was not: warm, empathetic, and familiar enough that they felt their stories were safe with her.

“Absolutely fantastic lady. I really liked her very much,” Harold Nye, one of the KBI agents who worked on the Clutter case, said of Lee, but of Capote he confessed, “I did not get a very good impression of that little son of a bitch.”

I'm not a big Capote fan myself my man.

“Why they never look at people they’ve sentenced to death, I’ll never know,” Lee wrote of the jurors in her notes, echoing a sentiment she loans to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.

More than most field notes, hers were a book waiting to be written.

But juries aren’t the only ones who have trouble looking directly at the damned.

That's a profound statement.

it would take Capote just as long to figure out a way to write about the Clutter case without blinking.

“Success hasn’t spoiled Harper Lee, but it has changed her life. She can’t quite convince people that the book hasn’t made her an instant millionairess. The fact of the matter is that tax laws can be great for sharp-minded movie stars and oil men but are hell on authors.”

“be remembered as the one who spoke when good men remained silent, and the one who acted when good men did nothing.”

But she herself did not speak out; she let her novel do the talking.

“He writes not to communicate with other people,” Lee said of any writer worth his salt, “but to communicate more assuredly with himself.”

“Sometimes I’m afraid that I like it too much,” she claimed, “because when I get into work I don’t want to leave it.

Writing, Lee argued, was a never-ending self-exploration for the writer, “an exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.”

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

From the time there were murders in America, there were writers trying to write about them.

“Journalism is the most underestimated, the least explored of literary mediums,” Capote declared, then set out to make himself into the Marco Polo of his profession.

The issue was that she had, as she would later say, “enough rumor, fantasy, dreams, conjecture, and outright lies for a volume the length of the Old Testament”—exactly what Harper Lee was hoping to keep out of her book.

“He might not have believed in what he preached, he might not have believed in voodoo,” she wrote of the Reverend, “but he had a profound and abiding belief in insurance.”

Nothing writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never transform into words,

Everyone told Harper Lee that the story she had found was destined to be a best seller. But no one could tell her how to write it.

However good a lawyer he was, she understood right away that no matter whom he was representing, he was first and foremost representing himself.

“If accuracy is what you are after, check out everything he says; if a hero is what you want, invent one.”