Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  It was, Hudson said. Big Tom, never one to stop when things were going his way, asked the witness about a box of black pepper that had allegedly been in the Reverend’s pocket at the time of his death, about the blood that had supposedly been painted across the front door of the Reverend’s house, and about the chickens rumored to be hanging upside down from the pecan trees in the Reverend’s front yard. Hudson testified that he hadn’t heard about any of those things, but it didn’t matter; now the jury had. Another witness, the Reverend Burpo, who had delivered the eulogy for Shirley Ann, testified that he hadn’t heard those stories either but then conceded during cross-examination that Maxwell had lost all of his churches because of rumors that he’d killed his relatives.

  The defense was well on its way to making Maxwell into the most notorious voodoo preacher since Marie Laveau. But Tom wanted to make another point, too—that Robert Burns was a good man who’d returned from Vietnam with a troubled mind—and when a later witness for the prosecution, Patricia Burns Pogue, took the stand, she accidentally helped him do so. Pogue, who was another one of Robert Burns’s nieces, had been sitting with him in the second pew of the House of Hutchinson chapel during Shirley’s funeral and testified that he had cried the whole length of it. Burns had been so emotional that he couldn’t talk. She shouted at him after he fired the first shot, she said, but he seemed to be in some kind of trance and wouldn’t even look at her. And so it went: one by one, the witnesses for the prosecution were sworn in, took the stand, and wound up sounding like witnesses for the defense.

  But then came James Ware. A veteran of the navy, Ware was one of the first African American police officers ever hired in Tallapoosa County; he had worked for the Alexander City Police Department for twelve years and, unlike the other witnesses, had plenty of experience testifying in court. On the day of the Reverend’s murder, he had been directing traffic outside Shirley Ann Ellington’s funeral and had raced inside at the sound of the first shot. He had heard Robert Burns confess clear as day in the chapel, then heard him do so again in the squad car on the way to the police station.

  If any of that came out, Big Tom knew, Officer James Ware would definitely not sound like a witness for the defense. Any kind of confession would have been a problem for Radney, but Burns’s particular words—“You have mistreated my family long enough” and “If I had it to do over, I’d do it again”—definitely did not sound like those of someone in the grips of temporary insanity. On the defensive for the first time since the trial started, Big Tom objected at almost every syllable from Young or Ware. When the scene in the squad car was looming, he asked Judge Avary to remove the jurors from the courtroom before Ware finished his testimony so that the court could resolve the question of whether the confessions were admissible, given the peculiar circumstances under which they were obtained.

  Judge Avary assented, and once the jurors were gone, the reporters and spectators listened attentively as the lawyers promptly picked up arguing where they had left off before lunch. Big Tom contended that because Robert Burns hadn’t been read his rights until an hour after he confessed, and because the only two people who heard him do so were officers of the law, the confessions were improperly obtained and therefore inadmissible. Tom Young countered that both of them had been offered voluntarily and spontaneously to anyone within hearing distance, and thus they were perfectly proper. Furthermore, Young said, although one of the people who had heard the confession, Robert Burns’s brother William, might have worked for the sheriff’s department in the past, he was not doing so at the time of the murder, and therefore any confession to him was admissable.

  With the jury still out of the courtroom, the state put William Burns on the stand, where, to Young’s dismay, it came out that the confession hadn’t exactly been spontaneous after all. William had actually asked, “Robert, why did you do it?” Worse than that, when Young tried to establish William’s employment record, claiming the man hadn’t worked for the Sheriff in years, the court learned that, in fact, he occasionally still volunteered for the department. Tom Radney then pointed out that William had been allowed to remove his brother’s handcuffs, something no one who wasn’t an officer of the law would have been permitted to do. Judge Avary, convinced, ruled the confessions inadmissible.

  * * *

  —

  By then it was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Tom Young wanted to cut his losses and call it a day. But Big Tom, who thought of jury trials like stage plays, wanted to make sure the scene changed when he thought it should, and he didn’t want the jury spending all night wondering exactly what his client had said in the squad car on the way to the police station. So Big Tom objected to recessing so early in the afternoon, and Judge Avary agreed that they ought to keep going. The jury was brought back, Officer Ware went back to testifying, and Tom Young went back to trying six ways ’til Sunday to sneak the confessions into the courtroom, while Big Tom went back to objecting as steadily as a metronome.

  Forty-five minutes later, everyone had had enough. Before gaveling the court to a close for the day, Judge Avary reminded the jury that they would be sequestered for the night—an unusual occurrence in a circuit where charges often ended in pleas and most trials were over in a matter of hours. With Judge Avary’s apologies, the jurors weren’t even allowed to go home to get clothes. Instead, they made lists of what they needed, and deputies went to each of their homes to fetch the various items from their wives and girlfriends. Judge Avary asked them to ignore the news on the television and radio and then sent them to get some rest just up the street, where Highway 22 meets Highway 280, at the Horseshoe Bend Motel.

  | 13 |

  The Man from Eclectic

  At least the air-conditioning was working. The courtroom was cooler on Tuesday than it had been on Monday, but it was still just as packed with spectators. The rest of the Alexander City Courthouse was packed, too: the defense and the prosecution had subpoenaed each other’s witnesses to keep them away from the trial until they took the stand, so the meeting room was full of the state’s witnesses, the library was full of law enforcement, and the defense witnesses were milling about the hallway. Tom Young was convinced that some of them could hear the proceedings over the sound of the air-conditioning, and he kept his eye on one defense witness in particular, who seemed to be skulking about within earshot.

  Early in that morning’s proceedings, the state called to the stand the only other African American officer on the Alexander City Police force: a man named Joe Ennis Berry, who, along with James Ware, had been assigned to direct traffic outside House of Hutchinson the day of the Reverend’s murder. Berry had been serving his country since he was a teenager. At sixteen, he’d passed himself off as eighteen, enlisting in the army early enough to follow paratroopers onto the beaches of Normandy and then serving in the air force before coming home to Alabama. In 1966, a time when few law enforcement outfits in the South were interested in integrating their ranks, the mayor of Alexander City called Berry up and asked him to join the police force.

  Officer Berry had been with the department ever since, so when the defense team began to cross-examine him, they asked about the police investigations of the deaths of Mary Lou Maxwell, John Columbus Maxwell, Dorcas Anderson Maxwell, James Hicks, and then finally Shirley Ann Ellington. Tom Young objected to almost every question and again called for a mistrial, but Judge Avary overruled him.

  In response, Tom Young called Officer Ware back to the stand, and hoping to figure out a way to finally get in a word about Robert Burns’s confessions, he asked once more about the day that the Reverend Maxwell was shot. Tom Radney promptly interrupted him: “Just a minute, Mr. Young, you shut your mouth for one second.”

  “Well, I think—” Young said.

  “Shut your mouth,” Radney shouted. “I mean for you to shut your mouth.”

  “You go to hell,” Young answered.

  Judge Avary, used
to playing referee for his two young daughters, Pye and Scottie, called a time-out for Tom and Tom. He sent them back to their respective tables, gave them a few minutes to cool off, and then began reprimanding the prosecutor. “Mr. Young,” he said, “we have been over this, time and time and time again, about this statement. And I have ruled it out.” Radney, playing the part of the munificent colleague, told the judge that he did not want a mistrial, just to continue so that his client’s name could be cleared. Avary decided to proceed and was admonishing the attorneys to conduct themselves appropriately when Young interrupted him: “Your Honor, how can a man conduct himself in that manner when he is talked to like a dog by the defense attorney?”

  Judge Avary had the jury removed from the courtroom, and then he gave the lawyers what for. He should have let those television cameras in after all, he told them; maybe then they wouldn’t be making such fools of themselves. The trial had turned into a “carnival” and a “circus,” and he pleaded with Radney and Young to be professional. The same went for the press and the spectators, who had already been called to order countless times by the increasingly beleaguered judge. Two hundred people had come to watch the trial of Robert Burns, and the Alexander City Courthouse was packed tight as a box of crayons. The onlookers gasped at the coroners, laughed at witnesses, and whispered among themselves during any new testimony, their benches squeaking every time they leaned over to talk with their neighbors. Again and again, the judge had asked them to quiet down. Enough was enough, he declared: from the attorneys on down, everyone had to behave.

  * * *

  —

  Having shamed his courtroom into temporary docility, Judge Avary brought the jury back into the box, and soon the last of the state’s ten witnesses took the stand. This was Jimmy Burns, one of Ophelia’s sons, who testified, as expected, that he had seen his uncle Robert shoot and kill his stepfather at Shirley Ann’s funeral. That was a fact no one disputed, including the defense, and the courtroom, only a few minutes ago nearly raucous, now threatened to grow bored. But during his cross-examination Jimmy Burns said something that made everyone bolt up in their seats. At Shirley’s wake, Jimmy said, the family had learned that a man from the nearby town of Eclectic was going around saying that the Reverend Maxwell had tried to hire him to kill her.

  Like the person from Porlock, the man from Eclectic interrupted the morning’s proceedings dramatically and irrevocably. As it turned out, that man was named Alphonso Murphy, and he actually lived closer to Wetumpka now, southwest of Lake Martin in Elmore County. He was twenty-four years old and had run a saw on the Reverend’s pulpwooding crew for a month. He’d quit when he learned about his employer’s sordid past and began to wonder who all the Reverend might hold insurance on and whether he might be the next person found dead.

  Instead, five months later, Murphy testified in court, the Reverend came by his house to say, “I’m pretty sure you done heard talk about me.” Then Maxwell told him that he would make it worth his while to murder his stepdaughter. “I can give it to you any way you want it,” the Reverend said. “Give it to you in cash, or a new car, or help buy you a place to put your house on.” The fee was negotiable, and so was the exact nature of the job: “I can let you do it all, you can either kill her or, if you don’t want to kill her, then I just want you to pretend that you wrecked the car.”

  Tom Young hadn’t wanted Murphy anywhere near the courtroom, but Tom Radney couldn’t wait to get him on the stand. He was the first witness the defense called, and he offered the most salacious testimony of the trial, as well as the closest thing to a theory of the crimes that had ever been made public. According to Murphy, the Reverend said that Shirley would be dead before she was placed in the car and suggested that Alphonso give himself a few cuts so that the “accident” would seem more realistic. All Murphy needed to do, the Reverend said, was stay there until the police arrived at the scene. That is, unless he had his own domestic issues or worried about being betrayed. “If you would be afraid of your wife telling it,” the Reverend advised Murphy, “I would suggest you put her in there and knock her off, too.”

  * * *

  —

  In only a few minutes of testimony, all the rumors of voodoo drained from the courtroom. There were no poisons or powders, no curses or charms or spells. Evil acts that for seven years had seemed supernatural now suddenly seemed all too human: a man had knocked on the door of another man and asked him to help commit murder. The collective gasp first elicited by the man from Eclectic turned into a communal whisper as the gallery recalled all of the other suspicious accidents and began to speculate about who might have helped with those.

  After his examination of Murphy, Tom Radney called to the stand the one person in the courthouse who would not have been surprised by the testimony of the man from Eclectic: ABI agent James Abbett, who had taken similar statements years before from two other men about the death of James Hicks. Abbett had also been the one to interview Alphonso Murphy, and the two and a half pages of notes he had taken during that conversation proved to be far more detailed than Murphy’s testimony that day in court.

  According to Abbett’s official investigative notes, Murphy reported the exact date of the Reverend’s terrible offer: it was Thursday, May 19, and “Preacher Maxwell” had come by his house in a two-door 1974 Gran Torino to offer him a house or a trailer or cash if he would help kill the man’s stepdaughter by the middle of the following month. The Reverend Maxwell claimed that Shirley had been trying to poison him with some kind of capsules and that she “had been going around asking people why he was not dead.”

  Paranoid and pressed for time, the Reverend had said that in addition to whatever payment Murphy wanted up front, he could have some of the insurance money that Maxwell would collect after Shirley’s death. He told Murphy that he had already picked out a place to stage the accident—a spot near Wind Creek State Park, a camping area on the western shore of Lake Martin. There were plenty of secluded roads into, out of, and along the park to leave a car, and it was conveniently situated between Eclectic and Alexander City. A few days later, when the Reverend returned to see what Alphonso had decided, Murphy turned him down, refusing to play any role in the murder.

  The defense couldn’t have asked for a better story, or a better witness to deliver it to the jury. Abbett, who would go on to be elected to six terms as sheriff of Tallapoosa County, was professional, thorough, and authoritative. After his testimony, Radney and Young were no longer really trying State of Alabama v. Robert Burns. They were arguing The People v. Willie Maxwell, and in that trial every term of the real one was inverted: the Reverend, who had been shot and killed, was not a victim but a cold-blooded murderer; Burns, who per three hundred witnesses plus himself actually was a cold-blooded murderer, was instead a righteous vigilante, the one man in a terrorized town brave enough to do what needed to be done.

  Not that anyone could come right out and say any of this, of course. The man from Eclectic went back to Wetumpka, Abbett came down off the stand, and the trial—whichever one it was—went on. Radney called the first of his two expert witnesses, a man named Julian Woodhouse, who worked at the East Alabama Mental Health Center in Opelika. Woodhouse was thirty-one and had studied psychology at New Mexico State University, then earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology at Florida State University. He’d completed an internship in clinical psychology at the University of Texas, worked in the forensic psychology unit of the Florida State Hospital, and completed his course work for a doctorate but hadn’t actually finished his dissertation. Like Robert Burns’s brother Deputy William Burns, who wasn’t really a sheriff’s deputy, Dr. Woodhouse was not quite a doctor.

  “I understand he is not a doctor,” Young objected, the first time that Radney tried to suggest he was one. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Radney countered; with all but the dissertation done, it was a distinction without a difference. Never mind that his witness had
not yet gotten his degree, Big Tom maintained that the man was more than qualified to have administered and read the psychological tests to which Burns had been subjected. Radney agreed to call Julian “Mr. Woodhouse” rather than “Doctor,” but within a few questions he’d forgotten the agreement and went right back to inflating his witness’s credentials. “Now, Doctor,” Big Tom said, and then, “excuse me, Julian,” before having Woodhouse recount his extensive clinical work, including a summer at the Veterans Administration Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, and additional studies in England.

  Young objected again. “If the Court please,” he said, trying the new tack of politeness, “I don’t think the gentleman is a doctor, and I know Mr. Radney wants to give all his witnesses the prestige of doctor, but Mr. Woodhouse has testified that he is not a doctor.” The objection was sustained, and Woodhouse went back to what he was trying to say about the mental health of the defendant. He had evaluated Robert Burns twice that summer, for three hours each time, administering six psychological tests during the first and second week of July. For each test, the witness explained the general methodology and then the specific findings to the jury; as often as he could, Radney asked “Dr.” Woodhouse to do the honors. Young objected and objected and objected, then finally gave up. Radney was an expert at the game of repeating something until it became true. By the end of Julian’s testimony, in a capitulation itself worthy of a psychologist’s explanation, even Tom Young was calling the witness “Dr. Woodhouse.”