by Casey Cep
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 asking 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 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.
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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 st
ate 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.
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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 h
ad 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-Thou-Hadst-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.