Furious Hours Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Casey N. Cep

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cep, Casey N., author.

  Title: Furious hours : murder, fraud, and the last trial of Harper Lee / Casey Cep.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Knopf, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018043337 | ISBN 9781101947869 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101947876 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Serial murders—Alabama. | Murder—Investigation—Alabama. | Trials (Murder)—Alabama. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | TRUE CRIME / Murder / Serial Killers. | HISTORY / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV).

  Classification: LCC HV6533.A2 C47 2019 | DDC 364.152/32092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018043337

  Ebook ISBN 9781101947876

  Cover photograph by BJ Ray / Shutterstock; (torn newspaper) by StillFx / Getty Images

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  Map by Mapping Specialist, Ltd.

  v5.4

  ep

  For my father and my mother,

  who gave me a pocket watch,

  then taught me to tell time

  and everything else

  We are bound by a common anguish.

  —Harper Lee

  | Contents |

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  PART ONE | The Reverend

  1. Divide the Waters from the Waters

  2. Minister of the Gospel

  3. Death Benefits

  4. Seventh Son of a Seventh Son

  5. Just Plain Scared

  6. No Exception to the Rule

  PART TWO | The Lawyer

  7. Who’s in the Stew?

  8. Roses Are Red

  9. The Fight for Good

  10. The Maxwell House

  11. Peace and Goodwill

  12. Tom v. Tom

  13. The Man from Eclectic

  14. What Holmes Was Talking About

  PART THREE | The Writer

  15. Disappearing Act

  16. Some Kind of Soul

  17. The Gift

  18. Deep Calling to Deep

  19. Death and Taxes

  20. Rumor, Fantasy, Dreams, Conjecture, and Outright Lies

  21. Coming Back Until Doomsday

  22. Horseshoe Bend

  23. The Long Good-Bye

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Illustrations

  | 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 air-conditioning 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.” Thi
s 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 di
pping 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.