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

Prologue

Nobody recognized her. Harper Lee was well known, but not by sight, and if she hadn’t introduced herself, it’s unlikely that anyone in the courtroom would have figured out who she was. Hundreds of people were crowded into the gallery, filling the wooden benches that squeaked whenever someone moved or leaning against the back wall if they hadn’t arrived in time for a seat. Late September wasn’t late enough for the Alabama heat to have died down, and the airconditioning in the courthouse wasn’t working, so the women waved fans while the men’s suits grew damp under their arms and around their collars. The spectators whispered from time to time, and every so often they laughed—an uneasy laughter that evaporated whenever the judge quieted them. 

The defendant was black, but the lawyers were white, and so were the judge and the jury. The charge was murder in the first degree. Three months before, at the funeral of a sixteen-year-old girl, the man with his legs crossed patiently beside the defense table had pulled a pistol from the inside pocket of his jacket and 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—but to understand the disturbing series of deaths that had come before the one they’d witnessed. 

One by one, over a period of seven years, six people close to the Reverend had died under circumstances that nearly everyone agreed were suspicious and some deemed supernatural. Through all of the resulting investigations, the Reverend was represented by a lawyer named Tom Radney, whose presence in the courtroom that day wouldn’t have been remarkable had he not been there to defend the man who killed his former client. A Kennedy liberal in the Wallace South, Radney was used to making headlines, and this time he would make them far beyond the local Alexander City Outlook. Reporters from the Associated Press and other wire services, along with national magazines and newspapers including Newsweek and The New York Times, had flocked to Alexander City to cover what was already being called the tale of the murderous voodoo preacher and the vigilante who shot him. 

One of the reporters, though, wasn’t constrained by a daily deadline. Harper Lee lived in Manhattan but still spent some of each year in Monroeville, the town where she was born and raised, only 150 miles away from Alex City. Seventeen years had passed since she’d published To Kill a Mockingbird and twelve since she’d finished helping her friend Truman Capote report the crime story in Kansas that became In Cold Blood. Now, finally, she was ready to try again. One of the state’s best trial lawyers was arguing one of the state’s strangest cases, and the state’s most famous author was there to write about it. She would spend a year in town investigating the case, and many more turning it into prose. 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.

Part one 
The Reverend

1. Divide the Waters from the Waters

Enough water, like enough time, can make anything disappear. A hundred years ago, in the place presently occupied by the largest lake in Alabama, there was a region of hills and hollers and hardscrabble communities with a pretty little river running through it. The Tallapoosa River forms where a creek named McClendon meets a creek named Mud, after each of them has trickled down from the Appalachian foothills of Georgia. Until it was dammed into obedience, the Tallapoosa just kept on trickling from there, lazing downward until it met its older, livelier sibling, the Coosa River, near the town of Wetumpka, where together the two streams became the Alabama River, which continued westward and southward until it spilled into Mobile Bay, and from there into the Gulf of Mexico. For 265 miles and millions of years, the Tallapoosa carried on like that, serenely genuflecting its way to the sea. 

What put an end to this was power. Man’s dominion over the earth might have been given to him in Genesis, but he began acting on it in earnest in the nineteenth century. Steam engines and steel and combustion of all kinds provided the means; manifest destiny provided the motive. Within a few decades, humankind had come to understand nature as its enemy in what the philosopher William James called, approvingly, “the moral equivalent of war.” This was especially true in the American South, where an actual war had left behind physical and financial devastation and liberated the enslaved men and women who had been the region’s economic engine. No longer legally able to subjugate other people, wealthy white southerners turned their attention to nature instead. The untamed world seemed to them at worst like a mortal danger, seething with disease and constantly threatening disaster, and at best like a terrible waste. The numberless trees could be timber, the forests could be farms, the malarial swamps could be drained and turned to solid ground, wolves and bears and other fearsome predators could be throw rugs, taxidermy, and dinner. And as for the rivers, why should they get to play while people had to work? In the words of the president of the Alabama Power Company, Thomas Martin, “Every loafing stream is loafing at the public expense.” 

By the turn of the century, hydroelectric power had become the hope of the South as factories that had run off men and mules were mechanized and lightbulbs flickered on in homes that had known nothing but candlelight and kerosene. Suddenly every river below the Mason-Dixon Line was being eyed in terms of cubic feet per second and kilowatts per hour. In 1912, some scouts from Alabama Power borrowed a Winton Six automobile from a local woman and drove with her around the Tallapoosa River basin, searching for a site that could accommodate a large-scale dam. They settled on Cherokee Bluffs, a gorge lined by two-hundred-foot cliffs of gneiss and granite, with the same solid rock laid down along the riverbed. So ideal was the location that other power companies had already tried to build a dam there, twice. The first attempt, in 1896, was thwarted by an outbreak of yellow fever, which made financiers afraid to visit; the second, in 1898, by the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, which left investors unwilling to gamble their money on an infrastructure project at the back of beyond. But Alabama Power arrived at Cherokee Bluffs during the boom years of the early twentieth century, when there was finally enough financial backing to begin buying up the land around it. 

Some people in the area sold willingly. Convinced that the lake would come anyway and worried about the diseases that might fester in it, they were happy to take the twelve dollars an acre the company was offering and start new lives in nearby towns. But others fought the dam, including businesses downstream, and by 1916 they had taken their battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Mt. Vernon–Woodberry Cotton Duck Co. v. Alabama Interstate Power Co., the high court upheld the state’s right to seize land from private owners for public use through eminent domain, including by transfer to power companies. “To gather the streams from waste and to draw from them energy, labor without brains, and so to save mankind from toil that it can be spared,” wrote the celebrated justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Court’s unanimous opinion, “is to supply what, next to intellect, is the very foundation of all our achievements and all our welfare.” 

For the power company, it was a good outcome with bad timing. Shortly after the verdict, the United States entered World War I, and the Cherokee Bluffs project was once again delayed as men and money went abroad. Alabama Power would not resume work on the dam until after the armistice, and construction did not begin until 1923. That year, a hundred carpenters came to build the camp where the burners, cooks, engineers, loggers, masons, mechanics, sawyers, skidders, and superintendents would live while readying the basin and building the dam. When they were done, nearly three thousand employees moved in with their families, temporarily transforming Cherokee Bluffs into one of the largest settlements in the region. In addition to the segregated housing for black and white laborers, there was a bakery, a barbershop, a cafeteria, an ice plant, a school, a recreation hall for movies and religious services, and a hospital where dentists pulled teeth, surgeons took X-rays, and babies were born. 

The town was big for Alabama, but the dam was huge by any standard. When it was finished and the floodgates were closed, the waters that filled in behind it would cover some forty-four thousand acres—at the time, the largest man-made lake in the world. By federal regulation, every one of those acres had to be cleared of any trees that would break the high-water line, and by company policy they had to be cleared of everything else, too: every last stick and brick that got there by force of nature or act of man before the power company came along. The three thousand workers set about moving houses, breaking down barns, relocating gristmills, digging up hundreds of bodies from a dozen cemeteries and reinterring them elsewhere. Mostly, though, they cut down trees: shortleaf pines, longleaf pines, loblollies, hickories, and oaks. Whatever they couldn’t fell, they burned. 

Mule teams, steam shovels, and a railroad line followed. By December 1923, the crew had built their first coffer, and pumps started pulling water from the gorge so that masons could build the foundations of the dam. When its final cornerstone was laid almost two years later, in a ceremony attended by thousands of people, the dam stood 168 feet tall and 2,000 feet long, a concrete raptor with a wingspan as wide as Cherokee Bluffs. It was christened Martin Dam, for the man who had said that streams should stop loafing and get to work. 

The next year, on June 9, 1926, the men and women who had flocked to that earlier ceremony came back to watch as the floodgates on the dam were closed for the first time and the river began to fill the land behind them, forming the reservoir that would be known as Lake Martin. Water ran into wagon ruts and wheel tracks, sinkholes and stump holes, ditches and streams; it rose above blades of grass, tips of weeds, cornstalks, fence rails, fence posts, and finally the tops of those few trees that had been left, destined to sink so deep in the lake that no hull would ever brush against them. 

All of this happened slowly, less deluge than drip, billions of gallons of water rising over tens of thousands of acres all day and all night for weeks. Moonshiners had time to move their stills from hollows to higher ground, and families who had decided to hold on to their land kept dragging their lives above the waterline. People fished the reservoir as soon as it was deep enough to stock with bass and bream, and children swam in it, emerging slick with the red clay loosened by the rising waters. Farmers watched watermelons float away; boaters out for a day trip on the new lake could not find the landing where they had put in, so constantly did the shoreline change. Bed nets and quinine tablets were handed out to anyone within a mile of the backwater, and twenty mosquito boats cruised the new inlets and bays spraying insecticide. Months passed like this. And then one day, where there had once been cabins and dogtrots, fields and farms, churches and schoolhouses, general stores and graves, there was nothing but water.

* * *

There was wickedness in the world before this particular flood and wickedness after it, but the future Reverend Willie Maxwell was born right in the middle, in May of the year that Alabama Power laid the cornerstone for Martin Dam. His mother, Ada, was a housekeeper; his father, Will, was a sharecropper, working a patch of land on what was rapidly becoming, when Willie was born, the western shore of Lake Martin. He was the sixth of their nine children, the second of their five sons. Born in an age of political and environmental upheaval, he never saw the Tallapoosa River in its meandering days, never knew its watershed before it was transformed by hydropower or its culture before it was transformed by Jim Crow. His childhood years were bad ones for the state. The boll weevil came north from Mexico and destroyed the cotton crop; the Communist Party came south to organize sharecroppers, and horrific violence followed in its wake. The Great Depression came from Wall Street and stayed in Alabama for a long, long time, longer than the boys who traveled to the local C.C.C. camp for a spell before returning to New Jersey or New York. 

Many of those young men who came down barely knew where they were going; nearly forty years would pass before the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Governor George Wallace put Alabama on the map for most Americans. The state sits like a headstone between Mississippi and Georgia, its top flush against Tennessee, its base resting mostly on the panhandle of Florida, but dipping at its tip into the Gulf of Mexico. For its part, Lake Martin is a little too far east and a little too far south to be the dead center of Alabama, and its own center is hard to find, because its arterial edges make it look less like a reservoir than a Rorschach blot, flowing into the countless folds and gullies and valleys of three counties: Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Elmore. The largest town in the region is Alexander City, just to the north of the lake; Wetumpka, the second largest, sits to the south. Most of the other towns around Lake Martin are much smaller, barely big enough for a post office or a service station. 

Willie Maxwell and his siblings were born in Kellyton, one of those map-dot towns just west of Alex City, and raised in Crewsville, an unincorporated community too tiny to even count as a village— only a few homes, a couple of stores, and at least that many churches, since white and black believers required separate sanctuaries and the Methodists and the Baptists wouldn’t worship together, either. There was traffic, but it never did more than pass through. In those days, it consisted mostly of horses and mule teams, though a few Model Ts found their way over from the Walker Ford Company in the next county, and the horns were loud enough when they did to make some of the people and most of the livestock jump. When the trains began coming through, children learned to recognize the different locomotives by the sound of their whistles. Otherwise, it was so quiet in that part of Alabama that you could hear birdsong all morning and bullfrogs all night. There were only twelve thousand people in the whole of Coosa County at the time, and enough pine trees that a boy playing Tarzan could practically swing from one end of it to the other without touching the ground. What little crime there was ran to bigamy, bastardy, hoboing, failing to honor the Sabbath, and using vulgar language in front of women. 

Certain crimes, however, ran so deep in the veins of the South that those in power failed to register them as criminal. Many of the white residents of Coosa County and nearly all of the black ones were tenant farmers, victims of a brutal system that left those trapped within it barely able to eke out a living. Because they had to buy their seeds and fertilizers in the spring, sharecroppers were said to eat their crops before they planted them, and much of whatever they could later coax out of the ground went straight to the landowner. The terms of the loans a sharecropper could get were often unfavorable, the yields inadequate to feed and clothe a family, and the work itself backbreaking—sunrise to sundown, six days a week. Any child born into such circumstances was expected to help from the time he could walk. 

In 1936, when Walker Evans and James Agee documented the gaunt faces and careworn lives of white tenant farmers in western Alabama, in what would later become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Willie Maxwell was eleven, living on the other side of the state and the other side of the color line. Although his later years would leave documentation in courthouses around Alabama and make headlines around the nation, little is known of his early life, a silence characteristic of the historical record for African Americans in that time and place. Maxwell attended school, but around the harvest seasons, since life in Coosa County was organized chiefly by the rhythm of what went into the ground and what came out of it. Sharecroppers there grew corn, cotton, wheat, and oats in rotation, and, if they could, peanuts, peaches, or watermelons. There were baptisms and cemetery cleanings in the spring, quilting and corn shucking in the fall. Boys like Willie planted, hoed, picked fruits and vegetables, scared crows off the corn and rabbits out of the lettuce while learning to shoot, and fished for whatever they could catch in the Beau, the Hatchet, the Socapatoy, and Jacks Creek, the streams that bounded Crewsville. 

Around the edges of all that, Willie got seven years of formal education. After school, in the summer of 1943, he joined two million other African American men in registering for the draft. At eighteen, he reported for basic training at Fort Benning, a base, named for a Confederate general, that straddles the state line with Georgia. He was issued a uniform, and his hair was shaved to the tight trim he would maintain for the rest of his life. Although he went through combat training, the army assigned Maxwell to an engineer aviation battalion at Keesler Field in Mississippi, and then to Camp Kearns in Utah.

Before the war, Camp Kearns was five thousand acres of wheat fields. Stripped of its crops, the wartime version was a gritty, filthy place. Military vehicles ran their headlights during the day to see through the clouds of dust, and soldiers woke most mornings under a layer of dirt that had blown in through the plywood and tar-paper windows. The men were packed into barracks so tightly that they called their quarters chicken coops; respiratory infections spread like rumors of deployment. Maxwell lived there for two years, until November 1945, when he was discharged with $413.80 and, in common with millions of other servicemen, a Victory Medal to mark the end of World War II. Instead of returning to Alabama, however, he chose to reenlist and was sent to California to join the 811th Engineer Aviation Battalion, one of forty-eight black units that constructed and maintained airfields around the world. From there, he went to the Pacific theater and drove trucks for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

At the time, the military was almost as divided as the Deep South that Willie Maxwell had left behind, an injustice that became even more glaring after the United States joined the fight against the Nazis. “Our local Nordics have a mass psychosis, too,” wrote Langston Hughes: “As the Hitlerites treat the Jews, so they treat the Negroes, in varying degrees of viciousness.” 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. The army would finally begin to integrate in 1948, but that was too late for Sergeant Maxwell. In January 1947, after returning to America with a Good Conduct Medal, he was voluntarily discharged. By early May, he was headed home. 

Back in Coosa County, Maxwell settled in Kellyton, the town where he was born. Now twenty-one years old, he was six feet two and 180 pounds—tall enough to see over almost any man and slim enough to pass between any two. His brown eyes were always watchful, his face handsome and lean; a narrow mustache sat like an officer’s chevron above his lips. His speech was elegant, almost formal, and the charm most young men could spare only for their steadies he offered to everyone he met, leaving “sirs” and “ma’ams” like fingerprints wherever he went. “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.” 

Sometime after his return home, Maxwell traded his uniform for a job with the company that had made it: Russell Manufacturing, Alexander City’s largest textile mill. The handsome young army vet also met a quiet local girl named Mary Lou Edwards. Born and raised in Cottage Grove, another one of Coosa County’s tiny towns, Mary Lou was two years younger than Willie and still living with her parents when he gave her an engagement ring. They got their medical certificate the last week of March and were married at the probate court in the county seat of Rockford on April 2, 1949. 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.

2. Minister of the Gospel

Mary Lou Maxwell was shelling peas. It was the first week of August, after the summer storms had battered the bird nests and wildflowers, when the cicadas were loud in the trees and the ticks were wild in the grass. Once the corn grew heavy on the stalk and other vegetables sat fat and sedate on the vine, the pea pods were ready and could be plucked by their bonnets off the plants and shelled one at a time by the hundreds. Women and children pressed their thumbs against the pods, popping the creases and sending peas pinging into a colander. Over the course of slow summer hours, bushel baskets full of tangled greens were reduced to bowls of peas, ready for washing and blanching and packing away in the freezer. 

Mary Lou had been shelling since she got home from her shift at Russell Mills—her second job, on top of working from home as a laundress and seamstress, taking in clothes and linens from her neighbors. Shelling was a peaceful, mindless task, good for gossip if you had company and contemplation if you did not. But when one of her sisters came by the house that evening, she found Mary Lou sweating and anxious. Earlier that day, Willie Maxwell had been dismissed from his own job at the mill. It was not the first time he had been fired, and it was unwelcome news for the couple financially, but Mary Lou hadn’t been able to discuss it with her husband yet, because he had a second job, too, and he had to go straight to it that night: the Reverend Maxwell, as he was universally known by then, was scheduled to preach at a revival near Auburn. 

Back then, as today, southern revivals were all fire and brimstone, and they could go on for hours inside tents raised especially for the occasion. Even in the evening, the heat was so tremendous under the pavilions that attendees could be forgiven for thinking the setting had been designed to remind them of what awaited if they didn’t repent. But people flocked to them anyway, sometimes by the thousands, and churches kept hosting them, for the simple reason that they worked: it was partly thanks to the state’s vibrant revival culture that by 1970 one in four Alabamians was Baptist. 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. 

Maxwell had been invited to this particular revival by the Reverend and Mrs. Reese of Macedonia Baptist Church, but Mrs. Maxwell did not want to come along. 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. It is easy to see why a woman in such a position might keep to herself when she could, and that night, August 3, 1970, Maxwell agreed to go preach without his wife, but asked her to leave the phone line clear so that he could stop somewhere to call her on his way back home. 

The Reverend headed out for the revival a little before six o’clock. Mary Lou’s sister left soon afterward, and later that evening Mary Lou got in her car and went to visit a different sister, Lena Martin. When she got back home, she stopped to talk with her next-door neighbor, Dorcas Anderson. Her husband, Mary Lou mentioned, was out at a revival and had asked her to stay off the telephone so he could reach her. They talked for a few minutes, and then Mary Lou went back to her house to wait out the rest of what she assumed would be a long, lonely night; she’d had enough experience of revivals by then to know that the one over in Auburn would likely carry on until well after dark, and enough experience of her husband to be used to passing evenings alone.

* * *

To hear him tell it, hours later and for the rest of his life, that was the night the Reverend Willie Maxwell became Job. On his way back from the revival, he pulled in to a service station in the town of Camp Hill to buy a Coca-Cola and call his wife. Forever after, he would insist that she didn’t answer and that when he got home to Nixburg, just before eleven, she wasn’t there. He would swear that, worn out by a long and difficult day, he’d fallen right to sleep. It was not until he woke up around two in the morning and realized his wife still had not come home that he called his mother-in-law, who said she hadn’t seen her daughter that day; his neighbor, who had seen her but much earlier; and then one of Mary Lou’s sisters, who said she had come by the house to visit but left hours before. It was only then that Maxwell called the police. 

After the officers who were dispatched to Nixburg spoke to Maxwell, they went next door to talk with Dorcas Anderson. She had been woken earlier that night by the Reverend’s telephone call and had gone over to talk with him about his missing wife, but when the police came knocking, she told them something she hadn’t told the Reverend himself: Mrs. Maxwell had come to her house not once but twice that evening. The first time was after visiting her sister Lena, when Mary Lou mentioned something peculiar about how her husband wanted her to leave the phone on the hook; the second time was after ten, when she was excited and agitated. “The Reverend has been in a bad accident and I’m going to get him,” she had told Dorcas, explaining that Maxwell had called to say he’d wrecked his car up near New Site. 

That was the last thing that Mary Lou had ever said to Mrs. Anderson. As for Maxwell’s claim to have gotten home around eleven, Anderson told the authorities that to the best of her knowledge he had been out all night. If he had come home earlier and fallen asleep, she had neither seen nor heard him. The earliest she could be sure that the Reverend was home was when he called her, at well past two o’clock in the morning, to ask if she knew where Mary Lou was. Right after that, Mrs. Anderson said, she walked to her back door and looked across at the Reverend’s garage, where she could see his car. “I went back to the bedroom,” she said, “and told my husband there was something wrong because his car wasn’t torn up.” 

The Reverend insisted that there must have been some kind of misunderstanding. He had not been in any kind of accident, and when he called home from Camp Hill, Mary Lou hadn’t answered the telephone. 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, the route that would have taken her home from her sister Lena’s house and had also taken the Reverend home from New Site. 

A highway in name only, 22 is a sleepy, two-lane road that crosses Hillabee Creek. At night, when the air grows colder than the water, fog rises up off the creek and hangs over the pavement like breath in winter. When the police finally found Mary Lou’s 1968 Ford Fairlane along Highway 22, it was on the shoulder, twelve feet from the asphalt beside a stand of trees, but it had not actually hit any of them. There was a little damage, none of it serious; all told, it would cost only a few hundred dollars to repair. Far from looking wrecked, the car looked as if it had been parked. Its engine was running, and its headlights stared blankly out into the darkness. Mrs. Maxwell was inside, already dead.

* * *

For the first five years of their marriage, the Maxwells worked as sharecroppers for a man named Mac Allen Thomas, then a county commissioner and later a probate judge, who owned a plantation just outside of Rockford. As commissioner, Mac was the kind of gladhanding, strong-arming good old boy who knew how to get bridges built and roads improved and didn’t mind when people joked that he’d paved every pig trail in the county. As judge, he wasn’t a stickler for details, and happily obliged law enforcement officers by presigning warrants for them to keep in their cars in case they came across any bootleggers. Mac took a shine to the soft-spoken, sweettalking newlywed tilling his fields and remained friendly with the Reverend long after pretty much every other lawman in three counties had developed a different opinion. 

When Maxwell wanted to, he could be both charming and persuasive, but he did not always want to, and his self-control, such as it was, had limits. At Russell Mills, for instance, his reputation for hard work was marred by a record of absenteeism, and in 1954, two years after Hank Williams got arrested for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct and was famously photographed stumbling shirtless out of a cell in the Alexander City Jail, Maxwell was fired from the mill for failing to show up for work. Around the same time, the Maxwells stopped sharecropping for Mac Thomas, leaving them short on money. But as would later become abundantly clear, Maxwell was an entrepreneurial man, and he soon began working the series of jobs he would have in rotation for the rest of his life: powdering, pulpwooding, and preaching. 

The powdering took place at a rock quarry in Fishpond, a smidge of a town near the county line. It was a difficult, dangerous job, and Maxwell excelled at it. “He was one of the most outstanding, dependable employees I had in every way,” recalled his supervisor, Jack Bush, who would later be elected Alexander City’s first full-time mayor. The work entailed drilling holes several feet down into the rock so that blasting caps or fertilizer blasts could bust the rock into smaller bits and a crusher could break them down. Each explosion covered the quarry and everyone in it with powdered rock, so that by the end of the day the laborers looked like they had been dusted with flour from head to toe. 

Unlike his co-workers, however, Maxwell never stayed dusty for long. At the quarry as elsewhere, he excelled at erasing the evidence of what he had done. “When we cleaned up,” Bush said, “he was immaculate.” Maxwell didn’t just brush off the powder and mop off the sweat, and he did not truck any more than necessary in work clothes; instead, he fashioned himself into one of the most dapper men in eastern Alabama. His shoes were always polished, his suits were always black, and a tie almost always accentuated his crisp white shirts. Later, people took to saying that his clothing must’ve been handmade for him by the Devil, and the men who watched him deliver pulpwood to wood yards in three-piece suits still talk about it today. 

Pulpwooding was cleaner work than powdering, but not by much, and only because the Reverend Maxwell ran a crew instead of working on one. America’s pulp and paper industry had moved south in the early decades of the twentieth century, after New England’s forests were depleted and a Georgia chemist figured out how to make newsprint from southern pine despite its high resin levels. In short order, the gristmills and sawmills that had dotted rural counties around the South were overtaken by pulp mills, and many of the crews that had cut and hewed ties for the railroad industry and planed lumber for construction turned their energies to pulping wood. A war waged briefly over supply, as lumbermen fought pulpwooders over millions of acres of forests—the South’s version of the farmer-versus-rancher battles in the West. In Alabama, International Paper established its headquarters in Mobile, while the Gulf States Paper Corporation landed in Tuscaloosa; those giants and many other smaller companies depended on leases with private landowners and arrangements with private crews to supply their mills. 

As head of one of those crews, Maxwell worked the way most pulpwooders did: with a single-axle truck, chain saws, axes, and a team of anywhere from two to six men. When he had a full crew, one or two of the men ran the saws, a limber followed along behind removing branches, a bucker cut the delimbed logs into sections, a loader moved them onto the truck, and a driver delivered them. A crew like that could expect to harvest eight cords of short wood per day. At the mills, that wood was fed into chippers, the chips were cooked into pulp, and the pulp was pressed and dried into paper. The mills reeked of ammonia and sulfides and discharged those chemicals whenever they ran, but they gave Alabama one of its few flourishing industries and gave the country countless essential and inessential goods: newspapers, notebooks, towels, lunch bags, liquor store bags, birthday cards, tissues, milk cartons, novels. 

For Maxwell, pulpwooding was a way into the lucrative logging business. It did not require a lot of overhead—just a few hundred dollars to cover saws, chains, tires for the trucks, and gas for everything with an engine. The companies that contracted men like him to bring them wood would often handle the leases and send a timber specialist in ahead of a crew to mark trees, but Maxwell did not need much help. As reliable in the woods as in the quarry, he never missed a marked tree and never cut one a client wanted standing. “I’d see after it all,” said one mill manager for the Montgomery-based company Bama Wood. “Only thing was, with Maxwell, I’d just mark a small place. He’d cut it just like I told him to. I would go out there and mark about an acre of it and I’d tell him, ‘Okay, Preacher, this is the way I want it to look, I want it all this way,’ and he would just do it.” 

For Maxwell, though, both pulpwooding and powdering were side jobs. As he would later testify under oath, he always considered his real vocation to be “minister of the gospel.” He was ordained in 1962, at Philippi Baptist Church in Keno, which had been Philippi Methodist Church until all of its white congregants died or moved away. The church was named for the Roman city in Macedonia that Saint Paul visited during his second missionary journey; years later, Paul would write the Philippians a letter from prison warning them to beware of false preachers. Maxwell surely knew that passage of the New Testament, given how much his parishioners admired his thorough grasp of scripture. “He could pray a prayer that could make this house move,” one of them said. “He could sing and he could pray, and when it came to discussing the Bible, he knew it.” 

From ordination on, the Reverend Maxwell was known by that title whether or not he was in the pulpit. Legally, he was Willie Junior Maxwell; less legally, he signed official paperwork as W. J. Maxwell and W. M. Maxwell and Will Maxwell and Willie Maxwell and William with no middle initial Maxwell, but most everyone called him Preacher or Reverend. His sartorial excess, out of place in a quarry and wood yard, suited a sanctuary, and his unmistakably strange way of speaking, too antique and elegant for everyday life, earned him renown in pulpits around Alabama—at Mount Zion West Baptist Church in Our Town, Union No. 2 Baptist Church in Eclectic, Mount Gilead Baptist in Newell, Reeltown Baptist in Notasulga, and Holly Springs Baptist Church in Springhill. 

As the demand for his preaching grew, Maxwell began taking seminary classes at a branch of Selma University. A black Bible college that opened in 1878, Selma trained thousands of ministers for the Alabama State Missionary Baptist Convention, while its extension school offered courses for those like Maxwell who were already serving in the ministry. Those classes convened fifty miles southwest of Alex City in the basement of Montgomery’s Holt Street Baptist Church—the church where, fifteen years before, inspired by Rosa Parks, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. called for a boycott of the city’s segregated bus system. 

The Reverend Willie Maxwell was awarded a certificate of theological study from Selma University in 1970, but however much it improved his sermons, it did not improve his financial situation. The Baptists became the largest denomination in Alabama partly thanks to ministers like Maxwell—bivocational men who were willing to do other work during the week when rural parishes could not support full-time clergy. Yet even in combination with his other jobs, the Reverend could not afford his lifestyle, whose excesses went further than fancy suits. The Reverend and Mary Lou Maxwell had moved into a brick house in Nixburg, a town southwest of Alex City along Highway 9, and he owed tens of thousands of dollars to the Bank of Dadeville, another few thousand to Citibanc of Alabama, and a few thousand more to Security Mutual Finance. He was heavily mortgaged, behind on his car payments, and in arrears on the many personal accounts he had opened at mom-and-pop stores all around Lake Martin.

It was to help alleviate those debts that Mary Lou had gone to work with her husband at Russell Mills. The additional money was welcome but it didn’t resolve the tensions in the Maxwell home. By then, the couple had been married for two decades, and the strain of those years was showing. Mary Lou had grown heavier, in every way; those closest to her could tell that she was unhappy, and although there was no sign of physical abuse, it was clear that her husband had found other means of hurting her. She wasn’t one to complain, but what little she confided to others was enough. “She would often talk to me about the telephone calls that he would receive from different ladies,” Dorcas Anderson said. “They would call her about the Reverend Maxwell. They would want to speak with him and she would say he’s not home, and they would think she was just trying to keep them from talking to him.” 

Men of the cloth may have more cause than most to avoid indiscretions, but they also have more opportunities to commit them. The Reverend’s parishes were far enough apart that he had reason to be away from his wife for long stretches of time, and the respect afforded the asking relationship between preacher and parishioner meant that, unlike most men, he could be alone with almost any woman in her home. Nor were telephone calls at all hours of the day and night unusual for a member of the clergy ministering to his flock. Maxwell was not the first preacher to take advantage of his position or to use it for cover, but Mary Lou wearied of it all, and whatever she knew or suspected of her husband’s affairs before 1970, incontrovertible evidence of them arrived at the beginning of that year. On January 21, the Reverend Maxwell went before the Tallapoosa County Probate Court to legitimate a six-week-old child: to “recognize the said child as my own, capable of inheriting my estate, real and personal, as if born in wedlock,” and to replace the girl’s surname with his own. 

However unhappy Mary Lou was about this development, however unhappy she was in general, she wasn’t likely to do anything about it. “When she married, she married,” one of her sisters said. Neither adultery nor insolvency could make Mary Lou reconsider her husband; if anyone was going to end the Maxwells’ marriage, it would not be her.

* * *

When the police opened the doors of the Ford Fairlane that August night, they found a horrifying scene. The red polka dots on Mary Lou Maxwell’s white cotton dress were barely visible for all the blood. Her hands, arms, head, and chest were covered in it, and more ran down the backs of her legs. She was swollen and bruised, her face covered with lacerations, her jawbone chipped, her nose dislocated; she was missing part of her left ear, which the police eventually found on the floorboards of the backseat. There was blood on the outside of the car, too—on the passenger door, the windshield, and the rear window. From what the police could determine, Mary Lou had been beaten to death, probably sometime before her car was parked on the side of Highway 22. 

The Alexander City Police were technically outside their jurisdiction, so they handed off the case to the Tallapoosa County Sheriff’s Department and the Alabama State Troopers. Some of the officers went down the road to talk with the Reverend Maxwell, while others stayed to investigate. They searched the car for any evidence of an attacker, collected fibers from the interior, and removed an empty Kleenex box and claw hammer from the backseat. Then they walked the shoulder of the road looking for footprints or signs of a struggle. At a church not too far from the car, they found drops of blood in the driveway and collected samples of those, too. Meanwhile, other officers had taken Mary Lou Maxwell’s body to the Armour Funeral Home. 

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. That was especially true of an economically marginal black woman in Alabama. Loved ones would remember Mary Lou’s talent for sewing, her devotion to her husband, her patience, her faith, and her fortitude, but apart from her birth, marriage, and death certificates, the only official record of her existence is a disturbingly thorough description of the condition of her body at the time of her death. 

In addition to the lacerations and swelling that the police had already noted, the coroners found a half-inch dark bruise around Mary Lou’s neck and accompanying ligature marks, as well as grains of sand and bits of leaves in her mouth. More sand and leaves were caked into the bloodstains on her dress, and there were grease spots at its midline and along the hem. The coroners concluded that Mrs. Maxwell had been beaten to death, after someone had failed to strangle her with something coiled like a rope, and that she had struggled with her attacker before falling to the ground. When the autopsy was finished, the investigators sent their findings, together with the evidence from the scene, to the Alabama Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation at Auburn University. 

For thirty-five years, the Department of Toxicology had been Alabama’s leading laboratory for forensic science. It had grown out of an incident in the state that quickly turned into one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in American history. In March 1931, nine black boys—the youngest one just thirteen years old, and none of them older than nineteen—were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train. In three rushed trials held in Scottsboro, Alabama, all nine were convicted and eight were sentenced to death, despite the absence of any credible evidence against them and the fact that one of the accusers later recanted her testimony. For the next six years, while the boys waited in prison—in most cases, on death row—the case wound its way through the justice system, via a series of hung juries, mistrials, retrials, and two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1937, charges were dropped against some of the defendants; eventually, all of the Scottsboro Boys were released, and decades later the last three were posthumously pardoned. 

It was in the middle of this debacle that the state attorney general, Thomas Knight, contacted some toxicologists at what was then Alabama Polytechnic Institute but would later become Auburn University. Knight felt that the mishandling of the Scottsboro Boys case might have been avoided had the authorities gathered and assessed the evidence scientifically. By way of a counterexample, he pointed to the scrupulous methods used in another of the era’s most notorious criminal cases: the 1935 conviction of Bruno Hauptmann for the abduction and murder of the infant son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. That latter case set a standard the state should strive for, Knight felt, and he encouraged prosecutors and law enforcement officers around Alabama to send evidence to Dr. Hubert Nixon, a professor in the agricultural laboratory, and Dr. Carl Rehling, a professor of chemistry. Within a few years, the Alabama Legislature had officially allocated funds for a special forensic laboratory. “It is not our purpose to prove guilt or innocence,” Dr. Rehling said of the lab, “but to present the facts.” 

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. Evidence from any crime committed in the state of Alabama could be sent to the department, to be studied by its team of chemists, coroners, criminologists, microbiologists, technicians, and toxicologists. Rehling called himself the “crime doctor,” and his colleagues the “crime crew.” Their reports routinely spared innocent suspects prison terms or the death penalty and brought closure to families whose loved ones had died under circumstances that only forensic analysis could clarify. 

But the crime doctor and his crew failed to do either in the case of Mary Lou Maxwell. When the scientists at Auburn began processing the evidence from her case, they concurred with the findings of the local coroner and the investigators at the scene: she had been strangled and beaten outside her car, probably in the driveway of the church, since the blood found there matched her type. But none of the police, sheriff’s deputies, or state troopers ever found the rope that the forensics team was sure had been used to strangle her, and when investigators went back to search the Reverend Maxwell’s home, they discovered that he had recently burned his trash. The technicians who analyzed the burn barrel contents could identify nothing more than a cotton cloth with a seam and the remains of something with a basket-weave pattern, such as a straw hat or handbag. They suspected it was more of Mrs. Maxwell’s clothing, or perhaps the Reverend’s own clothes from the day of her murder, but there was no way to know for sure. 

Short on physical evidence, the state investigators started asking around about the Reverend Willie Maxwell. His neighbor’s testimony made him the likeliest suspect, and her comment about women calling the Maxwell house all the time gained credence when they identified several of the Reverend’s “lady friends,” including one on the old Kellyton Road who was driving a brand-new car for which he was making the payments—or failing to make them, since the police also uncovered Maxwell’s considerable debt. Like more than a few preachers’, they learned, his private life bore little resemblance to the one his parishioners thought he was living, and no resemblance at all to those he extolled in his sermons. 

While the police were investigating him, the Reverend, newly unemployed and newly widowed, set about doing the kinds of things you do after the death of a spouse. His lawyer, Tom Radney, helped make the arrangements for his wife’s funeral, and Maxwell buried her in the cemetery at the Peace and Goodwill Baptist Church, not far from their house in Nixburg. There was not much in the way of an estate to settle, because Mary Lou had died with no will and just a hundred dollars to her name, but he went to the probate court of Tallapoosa County to petition for the right to collect her last paycheck from Russell Mills. After that, he gathered up the sewing projects she had been working on and returned them, in their various stages of unfinishedness, to the customers who had dropped them off. 

When all of that was done, Maxwell sat down and wrote a letter. “Dear Sir,” it began, “I wish to advise you that (Mary L. Maxwell) were found kill [sic] in an automobile accident on August 3 / 1970.” He included a policy number, signed the letter “Rev. W. M. Maxwell,” and sent it off to the Old American Insurance Company. The policy in question had a fifteen-thousand-dollar death benefit, and the Rev. W. M. Maxwell was its sole beneficiary. He had purchased it for twenty-five cents shortly before his wife’s death— shortly enough, in fact, that he never had to pay the twelve dollars required to renew it. 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.

3. Death Benefits

Before Lieutenant Henry Farley fired the first ten-inch mortar at Fort Sumter, there was not much of a life insurance industry in the United States. There was property insurance, of course, for ships and warehouses, and, appallingly, for slaves, but even the most entrepreneurial types in an entrepreneurial young nation had not figured out a way to make money from insuring lives. To know how much to charge people until they died, you had to know how long they were likely to live, which was impossible because companies lacked actuarial data; to maintain consumer confidence, you had to have enough money on hand to cover all death benefits, no matter how early or unexpected someone’s demise, which was difficult because capital was hard to raise. The Civil War solved both of those problems, changing not only the way Americans died but how they prepared for death. By the time that Union soldiers had taken all the souvenirs they could from the house at Appomattox where General Lee surrendered, Americans were insuring their lives at record rates. 

Although it took hold in the United States over the course of four short years, the life insurance industry was, by then, thousands of years old. Its earliest incarnation, however, looked less like companies selling policies than like clubs offering memberships. During the Roman Empire, individuals banded together in burial societies, which charged initiation and maintenance fees that they then used to cover funeral expenses when members died. Similarly, religious groups often took up collections for grieving parishioners to cover the costs of burial and to provide aid to widows and orphans. It was centuries before these fraternal organizations came to operate like financial markets, and it took one city burning and another one crumbling for them to do so. 

The city that burned was London. One Sunday morning in 1666, at the end of a long, dry summer, a bakery on Pudding Lane went up in flames. The houses around it caught fire one after another, like a row of matches in a book, and strong winds carried the blaze toward the Thames River, where it met warehouses filled with coal, gunpowder, oil, sugar, tallow, turpentine, and other combustibles. By Monday, flames and embers were falling from the sky; by Tuesday, the blaze had melted the lead roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the iron locks of the city gates. On Wednesday, the winds shifted, and the breaks made by demolishing buildings at the edges of the disaster finally held. By then, though, the Great Fire of London had destroyed more than thirteen thousand structures and left one hundred thousand people homeless. 

One of the men who made a fortune rebuilding the city after the blaze was a medical doctor turned developer with the appropriately fiery name of Nicholas If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-for-Thee-ThouHadst-Been-Damned Barebone. (The hortatory name had been given to him by his father, the millenarian preacher Praise God Barebone.) With his considerable profits, Dr. Barebone founded an “Insurance Office for Houses” that employed its own team of firefighters to protect the buildings on which it held insurance—five thousand of them, eventually. In an apt abridgment, the doctor became known around London as “Damned Barebone,” not only because of the ruthlessness with which he ignored housing regulations and local opposition to his construction projects, but also because of the soullessness with which his firefighters responded exclusively to fires in homes where a small tin plaque indicated that the owners were clients. Barebone’s “firemarks” soon proliferated in first-floor windows around the city, and the practice of paying a little money now to insure against larger risks later became more popular. Within a decade, Barebone had come up with another innovation in the field, one that paved the way from fire insurance to life insurance: he created a joint-stock company to finance his policies. The first of its kind, it allowed investors to buy and own stock in an insurance company, the way they already could in mills, mineral mines, and spice trades. 

Newly able to attract investors, insurance companies could finally raise capital. But the value of any given life was uncertain—far more so, even, than the fluctuating prices of saffron or gold. Say a banker in Dover bought a policy and then lived another four decades; by the time he died, he would have paid premiums for forty years, and his policy would have matured enough for the insurer to provide the full benefit to his widow and still make a profit. But say the same banker went straight from buying his policy to visiting the White Cliffs and promptly drowned in the English Channel. In that case, the banker’s wife would get the full benefit at a fraction of the cost, while the insurer, far from making a profit, would take a substantial loss. The success of insurance companies depended on being able to guess which scenario was more likely, dying of old age or falling off a cliff— in the utter absence of any actual information about aging, falling, or all the other myriad ways that people die. 

Part of the reason that information didn’t exist was theological. Devout Christians were not meant to concern themselves with the details of their deaths. Like the timing of the Second Coming, as Christ proclaimed in the Gospel of Matthew: “Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven.” God, who kept watch even over the sparrow, would provide, and to doubt those provisions by making one’s own end-of-life preparations was thought to reveal a lack of faith. Thus was the life insurance industry caught between a math problem and God. 

To make matters worse, the overall reputation of the insurance industry had been tarnished by the sale of speculative policies, a practice barely distinguishable from betting. You could buy speculative policies with payouts contingent on everything from whether a given couple got divorced to when a particular person lost his virginity—or, in one infamous case, if a well-known crossdressing French diplomat was biologically a man or a woman. Such policies could be purchased in secret, and the purchaser did not need to have any connection to the “insured.” These seedy practices, along with the obvious incentive to murder someone whose life you had insurance on, had led France, Germany, and Spain to ban life insurance outright. England, meanwhile, created the insurable interest standard, which mandated that an insurance policy could be sold only to the person being insured or someone who had an “interest” in his life—that is, an interest in his remaining alive. But not even those advances cleaned up the industry. They only encouraged a new kind of speculation, in which elderly, indigent, or ill policyholders auctioned their insurance policies to investors who bid based on how long they thought the seller would live. 

Of these various obstacles to establishing a life insurance industry—spiritual, mathematical, reputational—the mathematical one was solved first. Everyone knew that death, while uncertain, was also inevitable, yet before the seventeenth century no one had even tried tracking it, let alone measuring life spans in particular populations or for specific professions. The closest thing to an actuarial table at the time was a Bill of Mortality, a grim British innovation that listed plague victims in various parishes around the country. In 1629, a quarter century after he commissioned a new translation of the Bible, King James I instructed his clergy to start issuing those bills for all deaths, not just the ones caused by plague. Later, around the time of the Great Fire, John Graunt, a London haberdasher who dabbled in demography, organized those bills, arranging twenty years’ worth of death into eighty-one causes and making it possible to see when people were most likely to die and what was most likely to kill them. 

Armed with population information for the first time, insurance companies began to get a handle on probability calculations, and soon enough a natural disaster helped ease their difficulties with religion. On the feast of All Saints in 1755, just before ten in the morning, one of the deadliest earthquakes ever recorded struck the city of Lisbon. When the shaking finally stopped—fully six minutes later, some records say—tens of thousands of people had died as homes and churches collapsed, and fissures up to sixteen feet wide gaped open in the earth. Not long after, the waters along the coast of Portugal drew back in a sharp gasp, exposing the bottom of the harbor. Throngs of amazed onlookers had flocked to see old shipwrecks newly revealed on the seabed when, nearly an hour later, the ocean exhaled and a tsunami washed over the city, killing thousands more. The scale of the tragedy was so vast that existing theodicies seemed inadequate, and all of Europe struggled to answer the existential questions raised by the Lisbon catastrophe. 

In the course of that struggle, theologians found themselves competing with Enlightenment philosophers, who seized on the earthquake to offer a rival account of the workings of the natural world. 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. By the end of the eighteenth century, that idea had gained legitimacy throughout Europe. Once it took hold, religious groups, initially opposed to the entire notion of life insurance, became some of its strongest advocates, in some cases even starting denominational funds to sell policies to their members. 

That practice eventually spread to the United States, where even today millions of Americans buy their life insurance through religiously affiliated companies like Catholic Financial Life and Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. But such developments were a long time coming. Unlike Europe, which had decades’ worth of mortality tables by the eighteenth century, colonial America had little reliable information on life expectancy, making it difficult for insurers to set prices and underwrite policies. When companies did try to offer life insurance, there were often too many beneficiaries attempting to make claims at once and rarely enough money to cover them. 

In addition, although most states required insurable interest, the American life insurance industry remained exceptionally vulnerable to fraud. Some policyholders lied from the start, fibbing about their age or forging their medical history. Others lied as they went along, violating the terms of their policies by traveling to restricted places (the malarial South, for instance) or by restricted means (by railroad, without the appropriate rider). Still others lied at the end, faking their own deaths or disguising their suicides as accidents. But calling out such lies was tricky. Contesting any claim was expensive, and litigation rarely resulted in denial of coverage, since jury members were far more likely to want to see their own policies honored than care about the profit margins of insurance companies. Moreover, whenever a company preserved its profits by denying a fraudulent claim—say, a father who had failed to disclose an illness, or a husband who had purchased arsenic a few days before he died—it risked damaging its reputation in the eyes of a skeptical public, who worried that their own heirs might be cheated, too. 

As companies attempted to grow, they exposed themselves to even more fraud through their own lapses in judgment. Some of their agents approved policies too freely in an effort to earn larger commissions, while some managers invested assets too dangerously in an effort to earn larger returns. Spreading into new territories meant recruiting new agents, not all of whom were scrupulous, and the more geographically diverse a company became, the less it knew about the background, life, and likely death of its would-be customers, making arbitrage of any kind difficult. The expansion of the postal service in the second half of the nineteenth century enabled mail-based sales but also mail-based fraud, on both ends: nonexistent companies could market nonexistent policies by mail, while unscrupulous clients could send away for policies they might never have qualified for in person. 

Individual states tried to protect consumers by setting deposit requirements for companies and restricting their investments. But those same protections slowed sales, because they required more due diligence at every stage of the process, and decreased investment returns, because they left firms with less freedom to take the kinds of risks that could make their stocks rise. Unable to sell as many policies, companies had to pool risks across a smaller population, which left them struggling to remain profitable. Eventually, however, an industry shift from stock companies, which were owned by investors, to mutual companies, which were owned by policyholders themselves, allowed insurance companies to free themselves from the capital game; instead of attracting investors, they needed only to recruit customers. That became possible due to the carnage of the Civil War, which did for the United States what earthquakes and fires had done for Europe: spread a sense of both dread and obligation around the country, creating a massive demand for life insurance. The total value of policies increased from $160 million in 1862 to an incredible $1.3 billion in 1870. Within fifty years there were almost as many life insurance policies as there were Americans.

* * *

That growth in size prompted a growth in fraud. By the time the Reverend Willie Maxwell began buying life insurance, the industry was wild the way the West had been: large, lawless, and lucrative for undertakers. Term policies were advertised in newspapers and magazines, flight policies were available for a few quarters from vending machines in airports, and local agents went door-to-door selling policies for premiums that could be paid on installments with pennies and dimes. With such low costs and so many ways to purchase life insurance without proper scrutiny, scams proliferated. Medical examinations were rarely undertaken at the start, and autopsies were not required at the end. All this left the industry open to every possible chicanery, from fudging the details of someone’s health to forging their signature on a policy to faking a death—or, worse, committing murder. Although Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and The Killers (1946) were not documentaries, they did reflect crimes that were common enough at the time: agents turned accomplice in the killing of policyholders, beneficiaries turned murderers, and insurance investigators turned detectives solving homicides alongside the authorities. 

Newspapers around the country were filled with such stories. Insurance fraud was so widespread that another Willie Maxwell, born the same year as the Reverend but living in Florida, made headlines after a man he confessed to killing was found alive a few weeks later. It turned out that three people were working a grift whereby a skeleton was left along the coast so that this other Maxwell could confess to murder; then the “dead” man’s cousin could collect on insurance policies, after which the ostensible victim could quietly be resurrected. Similarly, a funeral director right in Alexander City was convicted of first-degree murder in 1957, after an elderly man on whom he held insurance was found burned to death. Fred Hutchinson, who owned House of Hutchinson, one of the black funeral homes in town, became a suspect in the case when he hurriedly buried James Hunt’s body the same day it was recovered. Later, one of the funeral home employees confessed to getting Hunt drunk before setting fire to his house, in exchange for some of the seven thousand dollars that Hutchinson stood to gain from the policies he had taken out on Hunt three weeks earlier. 

As that suggests, it was stunningly easy to take out insurance on other people without their knowledge, and somewhere along the line the Reverend Willie Maxwell started making a habit of it. By 1970, he had policies on, among others, his wife, his mother, his brothers, his aunts, his nieces, his nephews, and the infant daughter he had only just legitimated. Although the names on the policies differed, the address was always the same, as was the beneficiary: the Reverend Willie Maxwell. One of the local insurance agents in Alex City was a regular visitor to Maxwell’s house, but the Reverend also ordered policies by mail, completing the forms that arrived tucked into the pages of magazines and newspapers, then sending them away to Kansas, California, Florida, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and cities all around Alabama, with checks made out for the initial payment— typically less than a dollar. The policies ranged in size from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands and were held by, among others, Imperial Casualty & Indemnity Company, Bankers Life and Casualty Company, Old American Insurance Company, Fidelity Interstate Life Insurance Company, Allstate Life Insurance Company, Pennsylvania Life Insurance, Beneficial Standard, Booker T. Washington, Minnesota Mutual Life, United of Omaha, and Independent Life and Accident Insurance Company. 

Many of these companies had policies on the Reverend’s wife, and when he began contacting them after she died, he was met with more than the usual bureaucratic resistance. Mary Lou Maxwell’s death had been declared a homicide, and insurance companies, like law enforcement, treat spouses as suspects—especially a husband who takes out sizable policies on his wife a few weeks before her murder. But if Maxwell was in a difficult position, the insurance companies soon found themselves in a worse one: not long after the Reverend was arrested for his wife’s murder, the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. 

As was so often the case, Maxwell had perfect timing. He had been arrested on Monday, August 10, and five days later a grand jury returned an indictment of first-degree murder. As it happened, though, the district attorney who brought the charges had been battling alcoholism for years, was about to be charged for illegal spending of state funds, and had already been defeated in his reelection campaign earlier that year. All in all, it might have been the best time in history to come before the Fifth Judicial Circuit in Alabama, because DA Thomas F. Young had no incentive to do more than a perfunctory job. To make matters worse, the Maxwell case was particularly easy to dismiss, in both senses, because the judicial system at the time was not especially interested in domestic violence or black-on-black crime. 

Some of the lawmen, though, remained interested, especially Herman Chapman, the Alabama Bureau of Investigation agent whose doggedness had earned him the nickname “Bear Tracker.” Chapman, the son of a one-armed police chief from Clay County, already had twenty years of experience in law enforcement, first as a military policeman during World War II and then as a trooper with the Alabama Highway Patrol, and he didn’t like to leave a case unsolved. While the court dithered, Chapman and another ABI agent, Byron Prescott, who would go on to lead the state’s Department of Public Safety, kept investigating, gathering more material from the scene and more testimony from those who knew the Reverend. Based on the additional evidence they supplied, the crime lab at Auburn filed another report at the beginning of October. 

When Charles Aaron took over as district attorney in January 1971, he tried right away to bring new charges against Maxwell, but the grand jury of Tallapoosa County failed to return an indictment. Although that was welcome news for Maxwell and Tom Radney, they had better things to do than celebrate. They knew that it was only a matter of time before State of Alabama v. Willie J. Maxwell would be back on the docket, and in the meantime they had a lot of death benefits to collect. 

While the authorities continued to build their case, the Reverend and Radney set about filing civil suits against those companies that were refusing payment, hoping to force a reckoning before another grand jury could hear evidence against Maxwell. Grieving widowers, they both knew, made for better plaintiffs than indicted murderers. Radney filed complaints against Fidelity, Beneficial Standard, and Independent Life and Accident. The lawyer for Independent demurred in May, insisting that Mary Lou Maxwell’s death had not been accidental and that therefore the accidental death provision of her insurance policy was not applicable. The lawyer for Fidelity filed a motion of continuance in July, claiming that the new district attorney had intimated to him that a grand jury would be impaneled during the first week of August to try once again to indict the Reverend for murder. In front of a circuit court judge, the Fidelity lawyer argued that the policy would soon be invalidated because its beneficiary was about to be convicted of murder. Unconvinced, the judge denied Fidelity’s motion, and a jury then sided with the Reverend, awarding him the full accidental death benefit. 

Fidelity might have lost in July, but its lawyer was proven partly right three weeks later: on August 6, 1971, almost a year to the day after his wife was found dead on the side of Highway 22, a grand jury indicted the Reverend Willie Maxwell on charges of first-degree murder. Tom Radney handled the arraignment and plea hearing, and one other matter as well: he agreed to represent one of Maxwell’s “lady friends” who was also being charged in conjunction with the murder, a woman by the name of Ophelia Burns. She was alleged to have helped ambush the Reverend’s wife at the church, or at least to have helped him move his or his wife’s car that night. In the end, though both were indicted, only the Reverend Maxwell faced a jury, and his trial began just over a week later, in the sweltering heat of August in Alabama. Twelve jurors were selected from the hundred or so residents who had received summonses. The state subpoenaed twenty-two witnesses, and the defense subpoenaed seventeen. But the trial did not last a day. 

If the prosecution had ever stood a chance, it vanished entirely when the Reverend’s neighbor Dorcas Anderson took the stand. In her earlier testimony, Anderson had sworn to two things. The first was that on the night of the murder Mary Lou Maxwell had received a telephone call from the Reverend saying that he had been in an accident and had left home to pick him up. The second was that the Reverend had returned home alone very late that night without any damage to his car. But as Captain Chapman later lamented, Anderson “told an altogether different story in court.” 

Under oath at the trial, Dorcas Anderson claimed not to recall any of her out-of-court statements. Instead of testifying that she’d seen a frightened wife rush out of her home after a frantic telephone call from her husband, or describing the Reverend’s absence that night and the pristine condition of his car when he finally returned, Anderson provided an alibi for her neighbor. To the bafflement and fury of those law enforcement agents who had taken her original testimony, Anderson now swore that the Reverend couldn’t have been the one who met his wife on that dark highway because he had not been anywhere near the scene of her brutal murder. Armed with her revised—or, as the police said, perjured—testimony, and absent any physical evidence against him, Maxwell listened as one of his neighbors read aloud the jury’s verdict of not guilty, and once again District Attorney Aaron watched as the Reverend walked away a free man.

* * *

After the acquittal, Tom Radney got back to work on the civil cases. The Reverend had agreed to pay him half of any judgment he recovered, so the lawyer went after every one of the companies that had insured the life of Mary Lou Maxwell. He secured payment on policy after policy, partly because of his talents as a lawyer but also because the facts, at least as far as the courts were concerned, were on his side. Lacking a conviction, the insurance companies got nowhere with insinuations that Maxwell had killed his wife, and their argument that murder was not a form of accidental death found even less favor with juries. 

By October 1971, Radney was left with only three unpaid policies, all held by Independent Life and Accident, which was still refusing to pay, because the Reverend had purchased the policies only a few days before his wife had been murdered. Radney wanted to take Independent to court, too, but his customary strategy had hit a snag. Facing an unusual limiting factor in the life of a lawyer, he wrote to a friend and fellow attorney to ask for help. That friend practiced in the state capital, and Radney wondered whether he might not sue the insurance company for him in Montgomery County, because, Radney confided, “I have just about worn out the Tallapoosa County juries with the Reverend Mr. Maxwell.”

4. Seventh Son of a Seventh Son

A man accused of killing his wife is not likely to find another. The lofty reputation Willie Maxwell enjoyed around Lake Martin before Mary Lou’s death collapsed after he was charged with her murder, and the well-spoken, uncommonly elegant man of God came to seem suspect and sordid. He was dismissed from all four of the churches where he had been pastoring, and when he was invited to preach again all the way over in Pike County at Holly Springs Baptist, people closer to home assumed that the parishioners there hadn’t heard about what happened. It was just as possible, though, that a man who could persuade a jury of his innocence could also persuade a parish and that, absent a conviction, the congregation preferred to believe that a man of the cloth could not be a murderer. What was certain, though, was that the Reverend had persuaded at least one person of his innocence. In November of 1971, barely fifteen months after Mary Lou’s body was found and only four months after he was acquitted of her murder, the Reverend Maxwell took another wife: his neighbor, and the state’s would-be star witness, Dorcas Anderson. 

Born Dorcas Duncan in Tallapoosa County in 1944, the second Mrs. Maxwell had known her new husband, or known of him, for quite a while. By the time she was a teenager, the Reverend’s preaching was already renowned around Lake Martin, so she’d heard of him long before she and her first husband moved in next door to the Maxwells in Nixburg. Like the Reverend, Abram Anderson had been born and raised in Coosa County, served in the army, and then returned home to Alabama to take a job in a textile mill. The money he earned there was meant to support his wife and two young children, but his life, as well as theirs, was tragically derailed when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Still in her early twenties, with two small boys at home, Dorcas became Abram’s full-time caregiver. 

That experience brought its own kind of grief, and after Mary Lou Maxwell was murdered, Dorcas and the Reverend began talking more and more. Although she was eighteen years his junior, they had a lot in common. She had two young sons; he had a little daughter, albeit not by Mary Lou. He had lost his wife, while she was watching ALS ravage her husband’s body; the disease had already forced him into a wheelchair, and it would keep wasting his muscles until he died. The doctors thought Abram would live at least a few more years, but he went into the Veterans Administration hospital in Tuskegee on the last day of February 1971, not long after the grand jury convened to hear the charges against the Reverend, and died there three months later, at the age of thirty-five. Abram’s death certificate listed the cause as pneumonia, but no autopsy was performed, and when the Reverend married Dorcas later that same year, people began to talk. 

Some of it was the age difference (Dorcas was twenty-seven and the Reverend was forty-six), and some of it was the alacrity with which both widower and widow got over their grief (Maxwell had barely been widowed a year, Dorcas only a few months). Mostly, though, it was the convenient timing of Abram’s death that made people suspicious. Some claimed that Maxwell had poisoned the man with antifreeze or embalming fluid, but most people had a different theory. It was after the death of Abram Anderson that the voodoo rumors started to spread.

* * *

The word “voodoo,” like the practice, got to the South the long way, over land from port cities like Mobile and New Orleans and before that over sea from Togo and Benin, where, in the Fon language of the kingdom of Dahomey, it means “spirit” or “deity.” It traveled to Europe chiefly in the newspaper dispatches and travelogues of early explorers—mangled variously as “veaudeau,” “vaudoux,” “vudu,” “voudoo,” “voudon,” and “vodoun”—but it came to America via its practitioners: men and women from the African continent brought to the United States in chains, sometimes after a generation or two of slavery in the Caribbean. No one knows when exactly it arrived, because its early history in America was effectively erased by a dominant culture that forbade enslaved people from practicing their indigenous religions, subjected them to forced conversions, and punished them for any spiritual activity deemed aberrant. 

As early as 1782, voodoo was so feared that Louisiana’s governor, Bernardo de Gálvez, banned the purchase of slaves from Martinique, on the grounds that they “are too much given to voodooism and make the lives of the citizens unsafe.” By then, voodoo was already well on its way to becoming a pejorative, and its beliefs and practices —also known as, although somewhat distinct from, hoodoo, obeah, conjure, folk doctoring, and root working—were being steadily delegitimized and criminalized. By the nineteenth century, voodoo had become a cultural bogeyman, shorthand for everything from orgies to human sacrifice; by the twentieth, it had become a cinematic grotesque, reduced to torture dolls and zombies. Many of its rites remained illegal long after emancipation, and the hostility of law enforcement officers to its believers and practices persists even today. 

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, best known for the novels she would publish years later, including Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the winter of 1927, Hurston boarded a train in New York City and headed for Mobile, where she began a tour of black towns and villages throughout the South. 

Driving a Nash that she called Sassy Susie and carrying a chrome-plated pistol in her suitcase, Hurston followed what she called “the map of Dixie on my tongue” and recorded in the vernacular of her sources their best stories, recipes, sayings, songs, and customs. Hurston was frank about the obstacles to studying her chosen subject. “Nobody knows for sure how many thousands in America are warmed by the fire of hoodoo,” she wrote, “because the worship is bound in secrecy. It is not the accepted theology of the Nation and so believers conceal their faith. Brother from sister, husband from wife. Nobody can say where it begins or ends. Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.” 

One sign of the silences surrounding voodoo was the extremes to which even Hurston had to go before her subjects were willing to talk to her. Before he agreed to share any of his secrets with her, one practitioner required her to undergo a series of tests, including bringing a gift of three snake skins, draining the blood of one of her fingers into a cup with the blood of five other novitiates, and helping to slaughter a black sheep. Father George Simms, whose clients knew him as the Frizzly Rooster, sold Hurston his powders and potions but would tell her how to use them only after she underwent a candlelit initiation. As Hurston quickly learned, outsiders had viewed voodoo with fear and suspicion for so long that insiders now returned the favor. 

The resulting secrecy deterred most scholars, but a few years after Zora Neale Hurston headed south, a white Episcopal priest named Harry Middleton Hyatt took a similar tour, gathering material for what would become his five-volume Hoodoo— Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork. Hyatt spent years driving around Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia recording more than a thousand subjects on Edison and Telediphone cylinder cutters. When transcribed, those interviews ran to five thousand pages and covered everything from the spiritual talents of children born with cauls to the poisonous possibilities of graveyard dirt. 

Between them, Hyatt and Hurston produced some of the earliest records of voodoo in America and documented three of the least appreciated aspects of the belief system. First, voodoo in this country was always syncretic, incorporating saints and feast days and enlisting pastors and priests of countless Christian denominations; a Baptist minister might overlay his Christian theology with voodoo practices, preaching the gospel in public worship but conjuring in private settings for a parishioner who lost his job or wanted to find a wife. Second, voodoo was in part a flourishing alternative medical system that served much of the South, including through drugstore clerks and pharmacists who sold essential ingredients like dragon’s blood, goofer dust, eagle eyes, and John de Conqueror root, which were marketed as cures for everything from indigestion to infertility. The healing aspects of voodoo were essential for a population routinely unable to access health care because of their race, socioeconomic standing, or distance from doctors and hospitals; the incorporation of elements of other religions was, as with many syncretic faiths, a product of forced migration, social coercion, and cultural appropriation. Finally, voodoo had tremendous interracial appeal. Almost from the time that voodoo arrived with enslaved Africans, it had white clients, practitioners, and suppliers. 

The role of voodoo in Alabama, in particular, was recorded by one of the state’s most notorious chroniclers, Carl Carmer, a New Yorker who came to Tuscaloosa to teach at the University of Alabama but ended up writing a kind of Deep South tell-all-and-invent-some. Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama offered an unconventional but romantic explanation for why Alabamians were drawn to voodoo and susceptible to other superstitions. According to him, the entire state had fallen under the spell of sorcery during an unusually heavy meteor shower that dazzled the southeastern United States in 1833, and some counties remained more prone to it than others—in particular an area he called “Conjure Country.” “I got troubles,” Carmer told a black woman who lived there, Ida Carter, “and the white folks up around Birmingham say you can help me.” She did, apparently: for a dollar and a quarter, Carter told him how to ward off the woman who was causing him problems; for another dollar and a half, she taught him how to cure his back pain. 

Among Carmer’s more astute observations was that even those who claimed not to believe in voodoo at all were not immune to being scared of it or above resorting to it. Think of Mark Twain and the dozens of cures, tricks, and old wives’ tales earnestly invoked by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Like their literary equivalents, southerners were steeped in a culture that gave them something to do when the world was alarming or incomprehensible. In that, of course, they were not alone; like banshees in Ireland or fairy glens in Scotland or the ghosts and goblins of the Tohoku region of Japan, the influence of voodoo culture in the South pervaded its landscapes and enchanted its people, regardless of race, from cradle to grave.

Източник:
Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Knopf, 2019.