by Casey Cep
| 5 |
Just Plain Scared
Perhaps it was the act of a conscientious husband, tending to all the logistics of forming a new family; perhaps it was a colder calculation. Whatever the motive, the facts were this: if anything happened to Mrs. Dorcas Anderson Maxwell, starting on November 22, 1971, Independent Life and Accident would owe the Reverend Maxwell one thousand dollars on Policy No. 71-0890563D, another thousand on Policy No. 71-0890563A, another thousand on Policy No. 71-0890563C, and two thousand dollars on Policy No. 71-0890563B. Within two months, Bankers Life and Casualty would be on the hook for another twenty thousand dollars in the event of Mrs. Maxwell’s death, and the Old American Insurance Company for twenty-five thousand more.
It was a lot of insurance for what was, by all appearances, a modest life. After the marriage, the Reverend moved next door, into the house that the second Mrs. Maxwell had shared with her late husband. Despite their eighteen-year age difference, the newlyweds seemed mostly happy. He thought that she drove too fast, and she did not like how he refused to go to dances or parties; it was one thing to live next door to a preacher, she learned, and another to be married to him. But he helped look after her two boys and went through the legal process of adopting them. Together, the new Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell also created a survivorship estate so that if either died, the other would inherit their property. They filed the paperwork with the Coosa County Probate Court, paying the registration fee to Judge Mac Thomas, Maxwell’s old friend from his sharecropping days.
One week later, the Reverend found himself right back in the same courthouse in Rockford, for a very different reason: to bail out his older brother, John Columbus Maxwell, who had been arrested by the county sheriff for driving while intoxicated. J.C., as he was called, was fifty-two years old, worked in a pipe shop, and, according to his brother, was something of a lush, albeit a polite one. “He was a nice guy,” the Reverend said. “He was even nice when he was drinking.” The Reverend paid the three-hundred-dollar bond and agreed to make sure that his brother appeared in court on February 7, 1972.
He did not. The day before his court date, John Columbus was found dead on the side of the road near Nixburg. Someone who refused to identify himself had called the Alexander City Police Department to say that a pedestrian had been struck by a car where Highway 22 meets Highway 9. But when the authorities found a body at that crossroads, it did not seem to have been hit by an automobile. There were no visible injuries, but the body had been out in the cold all night, and it reeked strongly of alcohol. The county coroner, a man named Jimmy Bailey who was an electrician by training, could not tell the cause of death right away, but knowing that J. C. Maxwell was related to W. M. Maxwell and knowing the rumors about the Reverend, Bailey sent a sample of his blood to the Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation.
An analyst with the crime crew found that the deceased’s blood contained .41 percent ethyl alcohol, in the life-threatening range—high enough that it could cause even a 165-pound habitual drinker to experience loss of consciousness, alcohol poisoning, and death. The police did not notify John Columbus’s wife and children of this finding, because John Columbus did not have a wife or children. But he did have life insurance, and the beneficiary on the policies was the Reverend Willie Maxwell.
According to his death certificate, John Columbus died of a heart attack, caused by the overconsumption of alcohol; according to nearly the whole of Nixburg, John Columbus died of being a Maxwell. Whatever his previous drinking habits had been, no one believed that he had gotten all of that alcohol into his bloodstream by himself. Some thought it had been forced down his throat; others thought it was a cover for some sort of toxin in his blood. Maxwell, who had now lost one wife, one inconvenient neighbor, and one brother in less than two years, demurred. “They said someone had to have held a gun to his head to make him drink that much whiskey,” the Reverend said dismissively, “but I knew my brother, and he did it to himself.”
The residents of Nixburg, skeptical as they were, were not nearly as skeptical as the insurance companies that still counted the Reverend Willie Maxwell among their clients. In two years, Maxwell had collected almost a hundred thousand dollars in life insurance, well over half a million dollars in today’s money, and the companies who had paid him were starting to lose patience with the speed at which he was cashing in his policies. Some of them asked the law firms that had represented them in the matter of the first Mrs. Maxwell to take another look at the Reverend, and soon insurance lawyers all over the country were reviewing handwriting samples, comparing application addresses, sending investigators to interview witnesses, and requesting information from the crime lab at Auburn.
One of the first companies to sever its ties with the Reverend was Central Security Life Insurance Company, headquartered in Texas. In addition to refusing to issue Maxwell any more policies, the company’s lawyers required him to sign a release indicating that in exchange for $2,812.55, the present value, they were canceling the ten active policies he had with their company. He also had to sign a witnessed agreement that “neither he nor any members of his family including but not limited to Jimmy Maxwell, James Hicks, Dorcas Maxwell, Herman Maxwell, Flora Hicks, Henry Maxwell, Adrian Anderson, Abram Anderson, Ada Maxwell, Mae Ella Maxwell, and Samantha Maxwell will apply for or in any way become an insured or a beneficiary.”
Around the same time, Pioneer, an insurance company out of Illinois, refused to issue a policy on the Reverend’s mother, after learning that the physician listed on the application form had no record of an Ada Maxwell. Pioneer got no reply when it sent a request for a current health assessment to the correspondence address listed on the policy: Box 273A on Route 1 of Alexander City, the same one that appeared on every policy for which the Reverend Maxwell was the beneficiary.
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Whether Dorcas Maxwell ever checked the mail at that address or read any of the many life insurance notices that arrived there is not clear. By the time the insurance companies were taking a closer look at her husband, she was busy with other things; six months after marrying Maxwell, Dorcas gave birth to a third son. That was in May 1972, the same month that Alabama governor George Wallace was shot and paralyzed from the waist down by a would-be assassin. That summer, a reporter for the Associated Press broke the news that for the past forty years the federal government had knowingly deceived hundreds of impoverished black sharecroppers participating in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, taking notes and withholding treatment as many of them sickened and died. The Vietnam War was winding down and Watergate was heating up. In the middle of September, The Waltons began its ten-year television run, and one week later Muhammad Ali hit Floyd Patterson so hard he cut open his eye and ended his career.
On that same night, September 20, 1972, almost eight months after Maxwell’s brother died, three men, Jerry Fuller, Ronnie Watts, and Stanley Ingram, went for a drive down Highway 9 in Nixburg. Sometime between ten and eleven, they came upon a car idling by the side of the road, its headlights cutting two long tunnels in the fog. When they got out of their truck to look, they saw a woman wedged awkwardly on the floor of the front seat, motionless. They turned around, raced back up the road to Dunlap’s Grocery, and called the police from the telephone there. Around twenty minutes after eleven, the emergency dispatcher in Alexander City called State Trooper L. A. Wright, who lived nearby in Goodwater. Wright got dressed, jumped in his car, and found the wreck fifteen minutes later. The car had come to a stop some thirty feet from the road and perpendicular to it, near a stand of saplings. Its right front corner was lightly crumpled and the lower half of the windshield was cracked, but the extent of the damage suggested nothing worse than a fender bender. Inside, laid out across the floor of the front seat, facedown—her head on the passenger side, her feet on the driver’s side—was Dorcas Anderson Maxwell.
As the Reverend would later tell it, what had happened
that night was this: After his wife had made supper for her family and gotten her three children to bed, she left Nixburg to see her mother in Alexander City. Her mother had gone fishing earlier, and Dorcas wanted to swing by to pick up some of the catch. “I’m going to get some fish,” the Reverend recalled his wife saying as she left home. She would be right back, she said; her mother lived only eleven miles away. Dorcas left around nine o’clock in the evening, while Maxwell stayed with their seven-year-old, six-year-old, and four-month-old sons.
When an hour passed and his wife had not returned, the Reverend called his mother-in-law, who said she had not seen her daughter all day or heard from her since that morning. Wrapping up the baby and waking up the two older boys, he set out, he said, to look for Dorcas. Instead of retracing the route she would have taken, though, he drove in the opposite direction to talk with some neighbors, Clifford and Anita Coggins. The couple did not have a telephone, and Maxwell wanted to ask if his wife had gone over to their place instead of going to see her mother. His wife was not there, but the Reverend stayed and talked with Mr. and Mrs. Coggins for a while, and then got back in the car and headed back the way he came.
By then, Fuller, Watts, and Ingram had already found the car, only a quarter of a mile from the Reverend’s home, and Trooper Wright had already found Dorcas Maxwell inside. Unlike the first Mrs. Maxwell, she had very little in the way of visible injuries, but her dead body had already begun to stiffen. Wright radioed back to dispatch and asked his supervisor, Sergeant William Gray, to come to the scene. As soon as Gray got there and saw what had happened and to whom, he turned right around and went back to Dunlap’s Grocery to call for just about all the backup he could think of: the sheriff at Rockford, the investigators from Opelika, and the medical examiner and toxicologist at Auburn.
By the time the last law enforcement officer approached the scene, he could see it from a mile away: the lights from all the cruisers made a dome of blue in the dense September fog. Everyone there knew exactly whose wife had been found and that his first wife had been murdered and left in a car at an almost identical scene. Maxwell had been acquitted in that first homicide, and this time the authorities were determined to get a conviction. An officer from the Alexander City Police Department photographed the exterior and the interior of the car, the body inside it, the stretch of highway behind it, and the shoulder around it.
Before dawn that September day, two things had happened: Dorcas Anderson Maxwell’s body had been moved to Armour Funeral Home in Alexander City for an autopsy, and the Reverend had called his lawyer, Tom Radney. The autopsy was more notable for what the coroner did not find than for what he did. There were leaves stuck in Dorcas’s brown leather sandals, and she had a few small abrasions on her shoulders and elbows, plus a larger cut above her right eye. But tests of her organs, tissues, and fluids revealed nothing. Her blood contained no alcohol, no glycols, no carbon monoxide, no cyanide, no metallic poisons, no acidic poisons, no salicylates, no phenols, and no barbiturates. Her liver contained no strychnine, no narcotics, and no amphetamines. Her stomach contained no drugs and no known poisons. She did have a fractured hyoid, the bone that supports the tongue, which is sometimes a sign of strangulation, but because that bone can also be damaged during autopsies, the authorities rejected it as a cause of death. In the end, the crime doctor, Dr. Rehling, could do nothing but declare that Dorcas Maxwell had died from natural causes. Despite no previous history of asthma, bronchitis, or pneumonia, and even though she had suffered no illnesses whatsoever for the entire year before her death aside from a minor cold, he concluded that the twenty-nine-year-old had succumbed to acute respiratory distress.
There were no witnesses to the death of Dorcas Maxwell, but if no one could say exactly what happened, no one could stop talking about it either. In just two years, the Reverend had lost his first wife, his neighbor, his older brother, and now his new wife, too. The first marriage had lasted two decades, but the second hadn’t even lasted a year. Between the increasing pace of the deaths and the loss of a second Mrs. Maxwell under similar circumstances to the first, the Reverend’s already bad reputation grew starkly worse. “People really began to fear him,” a friend of Dorcas’s said of the Reverend Maxwell after his second wife’s death. “White and black were afraid of him.”
Maxwell still peppered his speech with scripture and preached over in Pike County, but closer to home most people saw him as a man less sinned against than sinning. Rumors about him grew even more insidious, and not all of them were about voodoo. “They just didn’t know who all he had insurance on,” said a Coosa County resident. “They didn’t know who might be next.” The wife of one of the funeral home directors in Alexander City put it plainly: “Most people were just plain scared to death of that man.” While the Reverend had previously been thought handsome, now women called him “rough-looking” and whispered a warning to one another: “Don’t let Will look in your eyes.”
All around Lake Martin, neighbors played games of terrified telephone, repeating what someone had heard the Reverend say, relaying what some other someone had seen him do. It did not help to lock your doors at night, because he knew spells for opening them, and failing that, he had ways of harming you through walls. An unsolved crime often spreads hysteria, but the people of Nixburg did not think the crimes that plagued their community were unsolved. They knew who had committed them; they just did not know how, or how to stop him. They did know, though, that the only thing scarier than an unknown murderer is a known one.
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If the community was frightened and the police were frustrated, the insurance companies were furious. Here again was the preacher from Coosa County, come to collect tens of thousands of dollars in life insurance on a family member. Two companies, Southern Farm Bureau and Booker T. Washington Insurance, had no choice but to pay up without protest, because their three policies—for ten thousand, one thousand, and five hundred dollars—had been taken out by Dorcas and her first husband, Abram. Maxwell was simply the current beneficiary. The Andersons had also taken out mortgage insurance, which covered the thirteen thousand dollars still owed on their house, which now passed to the Reverend through the survivorship estate.
The other companies, however, were not going to make good on their policies without a fight. It is impossible to know exactly how many of those policies Maxwell held on Dorcas at the time of her death—or, for that matter, how many in total he ever held on anyone—because those that were not litigated left no trace. But of the policies that eventually became the subject of court battles, four had become effective the day after Maxwell married Dorcas in November 1971, a fifth had kicked in two days after that, a sixth in January 1972, a seventh that March, and the remainder by late spring of that year. All told, the Reverend had at least seventeen separate insurance policies on Dorcas, for which he had paid ten dollars a week in premiums. Now he was owed a small fortune in return.
Imperial responded by hiring the Birmingham law firm of Lange, Simpson, Robinson & Somerville. Bankers Life hired a firm out of Opelika, as did Beneficial Standard and Old American. Independent went with a firm in Tuskegee. Allstate found one in Montgomery. Pretty soon, Tom Radney was fighting what must have felt like every law firm in the state, and if he had worried about running out of juries after the death of Mary Lou Maxwell, he was draining the pool dry now. A year after Dorcas’s death, it seemed there was hardly a man or woman of voting age in the tri-county area who had not heard the Reverend plead his case against one insurance company or another. Radney brought multiple suits in the circuit courts of Tallapoosa, Clay, and Macon Counties, and in the district court for the Middle District of Alabama, and he followed one lawsuit all the way through the appellate process to the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals.
These cases turned on a series of complicated technicalities around cause of death—namely whether the second Mrs. Maxwell had died from the car accident alone,
from a preexisting condition alone, or from a preexisting condition aggravated by the car accident. As soon as the Reverend had called him on the night that Dorcas died, Radney knew that he would be handling another spate of criminal cases or civil suits or both, and he had immediately taken an unusual precaution: by the following morning, he had paid a thousand dollars for a private coroner to follow up the state’s autopsy with one conducted on behalf of his client.
The two coroners wound up agreeing on the basics—that Dorcas had died of acute respiratory failure—but quibbled on the finer details, in ways that mattered once litigation began. In depositions and examinations that went on for hours, the dueling coroners were grilled on the minutiae of bronchial walls, interstitial pneumonitis, and mucus plugs. The insurance companies seized on some of these findings to argue that Dorcas would not have died without her underlying respiratory problems, which had not been disclosed at the time the insurance was purchased, and therefore invalidated the policies. Radney seized on other findings to argue that if it had not been for the accident, the underlying respiratory condition would never have killed Dorcas; thus her death was accidental, and the policy was valid.
To everyone involved, it must have felt like they were fighting over the relative size of the lice that lived on the elephant in the room. None of the witnesses were allowed to mention it and the lawyers were forbidden from litigating it, but countless people from the county coroner on down felt certain that Dorcas Anderson had been murdered. Perhaps the hyoid bone had been a clue after all, and she had been strangled, like the first Mrs. Maxwell, or perhaps she had been poisoned, by the same undetectable method that many thought the Reverend had used on Abram Anderson and John Columbus Maxwell. Decades later, one of the coroners involved could still rattle off poisons for which they had no tests back then—some of them easily obtained, like life insurance, through the mail. But none of those suspicions could be entered into evidence.