Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

  “My dear,” said the man, “it may have been a crime of passion, but I know three people who served on that grand jury. They’ve seen the evidence, and I gather it’s going to be sticky for Jim.”

  I turned my back and looked in the other direction, but at the same time I moved closer to the couple in order to hear them better. The man lowered his voice.

  “First of all,” he said, “I’m told the Crime Laboratory came up with some troubling results. There was no gunpowder residue on Danny Hansford’s hands. That means he couldn’t have fired the gun at Jim, as Jim claims he did.”

  “Good Lord!” the woman gasped.

  “The location of the bullet wounds also appears to be at odds with Jim’s scenario of self-defense,” the man said. “One bullet entered the chest, which sounds all right, but another hit Hansford in the back. A third one hit him behind the ear. So the way it looks, Jim shot him once in the chest and then stepped around the desk and shot him twice more as he lay facedown on the floor, in a sort of coup de grâce.”

  “How dreadful,” the woman said. “You mean it wasn’t self-defense?”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t look that way. The fingerprint analysis is even more damaging. The gun found under Hansford’s hand had no fingerprints on it at all, even though it had been fired. This means somebody wiped them off. So it begins to look as though Jim shot Danny and then got a second gun and fired a few shots from where Danny had been standing, to make it look as if Hansford had fired at him. Then it seems he must have wiped his fingerprints off the gun and put it under Danny’s hand.”

  “I’m feeling faint,” the woman said. “What do you think will happen to Jim?”

  “Just what I told him when I arrived here tonight. He’ll get off.”

  “But how is that possible?” the woman asked.

  “A good lawyer can challenge the evidence, maybe even turn it around to the defendant’s advantage. And Jim has good lawyers. That’s why I think he’ll get off. That, and because of his standing in the community.”

  Having delivered his private assessment of the case, the man changed the subject, and I drifted into the hallway, where Williams and his mother were standing with a small circle of guests.

  Blanche Williams had driven in from Gordon, Georgia, where she had lived all her life. Now in her late seventies, she was a tall woman, thin as a stork. Not a hair was out of place in the arrangement of tight white curls that covered her head like a snowy cap. She stood shyly with her hands clasped in front of her. One of the other women was admiring her evening gown.

  “Why, thank you,” Mrs. Williams said politely. “James gave it to me. Whenever he has a big party, he likes to make sure I have a pretty new dress and that there’s a flower waiting for me when I get to Savannah.” She glanced at her son, as if to reassure herself that she had said the right thing.

  “Mother is always the belle of the ball!” Williams said heartily.

  Mrs. Williams took this as a sign of approval and was emboldened to continue. “James has given me so many pieces of jewelry until finally I got to where I told him one day, I said, ‘James, I don’t know how I’ll ever wear them all!’ And he said, ‘Well, Mother, I’ll just have to give more parties so you can come to Savannah more often and wear all the things you’ve got.’ James is real good about taking me places too. He’s taken me to Europe five times, and oh!, one time he called and said, ‘Mother, we’re going to leave in three days for London on the Concorde,’ and I said, ‘Now, James, don’t tell me that. We’re not going to fly anywhere on the Concorde!’ And he said, ‘Oh yes, we are. I’ve already got the tickets,’ and I thought, ‘My Lord, what did they cost!’ But then pretty quick I knew James was serious, and I had to stop fussin’ and get busy. I had to get ready in three days, and I did, and sure enough we went to London on the Concorde.”

  Mrs. Williams spoke in a quiet rush of words, as if wanting to finish quickly and not trespass on the conversational terrain any longer than necessary. Her erect posture and the alert look in her eye suggested that despite her apologetic manner, she was a lady of considerable fiber and determination. In a few moments, Williams was drawn into a conversation with new arrivals, and Mrs. Williams and I found ourselves facing each other. I uttered a pleasantry about the festive party, and Mrs. Williams nodded in agreement.

  “James has always had a crowd around him,” she said, “even when he was little. One time, he got him a little picture machine—the kind that flashes pictures on a wall—and he’d give little picture shows, and the other children would come over and have the best time, and he’d charge them a penny apiece. Course I had to have a little something for them to eat or drink, you know, just to munch. That was when he was eleven or twelve. When he was thirteen, he used to ride around the countryside on his bicycle, buying antiques to sell. That’s how he started out. At first he went to the nigger houses, and he’d buy little oil lamps and things they didn’t want. He’d pay a quarter for them and then fix them up and sell them for fifty cents. Then he bought better things, like mirrors and furniture and whatnot, and he’d fix them in his woodworking shop. He put a little ad in the paper, ‘Antiques for Sale,’ and you’d be surprised. The ladies from Macon would come to Gordon and get him out of high school! The superintendent was so impressed. They were high-class ladies—doctors’ wives and so forth—and James would bring them to the house, and they’d buy things right out of his bedroom! He worked his way up. Bit by bit, all by himself.

  “It got to where a few years ago I thought, Isn’t life grand! My children have turned out fine. My daughter teaches at the university, and James is doing so well in Savannah. My work is done. The Lord can take me now. But He didn’t. And when James got in this awful mess, I thought this must be what God has been saving me for.”

  The din of the party surged in volume, but Mrs. Williams did not raise her voice. She kept speaking in her quiet way, looking straight into my eyes—in fact, she seemed to be looking through me.

  “James called me on a Saturday, right after lunch I believe it was, and he told me, ‘Mother, I’ve got bad news. I had to shoot Danny.’ Well, I just froze. I said, ‘Sugar, you come right straight home,’ and he did, and when he got there I didn’t question him. I just let him talk when he felt like it, because he was so keyed up and hurt and everything else, and before long people found out he was there, and I tell you people started calling. Goodness, there were so many calls I just put them on a slip.”

  Mrs. Williams paused as two guests stopped to say good-bye. “Y’all be sure and come back again next year,” she told them. Then she turned back to me.

  “I never did trust that boy. He was kind of vague, the way he looked at you. I wouldn’t tell James this, but to me that Danny Hansford was just b-a-a-ad news. James brought him to the house one time. In a little bit, James went out in the back to wash his car, and I didn’t see the boy, and I said, ‘James, I don’t see him,’ and James said, ‘Oh, that’s all right, Mother. He told me he was just going to walk around out front.’ Well, when it came time to eat, the boy was still not there, and James said, ‘Mother, I’ll tell you what: If Danny takes a notion to go somewhere, he won’t tell anybody about it, he’ll just go. He’s done it before.’ Well, right then I understood what the boy had done. Don’t ask me how I knew. Something just told me. I had an idea he was downtown huntin’ dope. Gordon’s only a small town, but I figured he saw something down at the filling station on the way to the house, and he wanted to go back there and buy some dope. James found out the next day that the boy had hitch-hiked all the way back to Savannah.”

  Mrs. Williams looked down briefly as she rearranged the wadded handkerchief she’d been clutching in her hands.

  “Now, I’ll just be frank with you,” she said. “Sometimes James is too good to people. I don’t know, maybe he got it from me. I can get feeling sorry for people too quick, and that’s not good, because a lot of people know how to play you and get your sympathy. I know some people do James that w
ay, and he’ll get to where he feels sorry for them. He’ll try to help ’em, like he tried to help that boy. There were times I felt like maybe I should talk to James, but being a mother I was afraid I might be interfering. You don’t want to overstep the line, so I never did talk to him like I wish I had.

  “James would help anybody, and that’s the reason I just hate to see him in this mess. Why, when James sold Cabbage Island and made a bunch of money, the first thing he did was he fixed up my house, and then he gave my church a check for ten thousand dollars to buy an electric organ. I just don’t know. Maybe this mess is going to be a lesson. I believe it’s going to make James realize that he’s got to think of himself sometimes ….”

  Mrs. Williams smiled as her son reappeared at her side.

  “Well, I’ll hush now,” she said.

  “What have you two been talking about?” he asked.

  “I was saying how everything is going to work out just fine, James.” Mrs. Williams’s answer was drowned out by the convivial hubbub around her.

  “I’m sorry, Mother, I didn’t hear.”

  Mrs. Williams took a deep breath, and for the first time all evening she raised her voice a little. “I said, ‘Everything is going to work out … just … fine!’”

  “Of course it is, Mother,” he said. “It always has, and it always will.”

  Chapter 15

  CIVIC DUTY

  “Hell, I’d have shot Danny Hansford too,” said Dr. James C. Metts, the coroner of Chatham County. “This guy was just a badass. He scared Williams to death. You know, hell, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and here he is having a temper fit because Williams won’t play an Atari game.” Dr. Metts, a generally soft-spoken man, had spent several hours investigating the scene at Mercer House the night of the shooting. It was he who had signed the death certificate and ordered the autopsy. A week before Jim Williams’s trial was to begin, one of Williams’s lawyers, John Wright Jones, paid a call on Dr. Metts in his office to discuss the case.

  John Wright Jones was one of Savannah’s better-known criminal lawyers. A burly bear of a man, he was assisting in Williams’s defense. He had seen the autopsy report and the police photographs taken in Mercer House after the shooting. He was concerned about the bullet hole in Danny Hansford’s back and the one behind his ear. He asked Dr. Metts if it was possible to reconstruct the shooting in such a way that Danny Hansford was not lying facedown when those two shots hit him.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Metts, “you could do that. The first shot hit him in the front left side of the chest. When you get shot in the chest, it’s like a punch; you rotate, you spin around. So the next shot hits you in the right side of the back, and you keep rotating, and the next one hits you behind the ear. It’s possible, if the ballistics work out, that Danny Hansford was not shot lying down. He could have been standing up.”

  “That’s what I was hoping,” said Jones. “So the bottom line is that you don’t really know whether or not he was shot when he was lying on the floor, do you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “All right. And if you are called to testify, that’s what you’re going to say?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Metts. “But, John, you’ve got another problem. The hand lying on top of the gun has blood all over it, and there’s no blood on the gun itself. Now, there are only two places where blood was flowing from Danny Hansford—his head and his chest. The boy, when he fell, must have fallen on his right hand. And I guess maybe for artistic license Williams might have moved his hand out and put it over the gun where, you know, it looked better.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Positive. You see, the blood on Hansford’s hand is smeared, like somebody dragged it out from under the body. If I were you, I’d say Williams panicked and checked Danny Hansford’s pulse—reached in there and pulled his arm out and checked his pulse and then put it on the gun so it would look better or something.”

  Dr. Metts’s suggestion was not an acceptable option. Jim Williams had already put his version of the story on record with his interview in the Georgia Gazette. In the interview, Williams had made no mention of ever touching the body.

  “Damn, if you don’t brighten up my day,” said Jones.

  “Then there’s one other thing,” said Dr. Metts, “something else that shows Mr. Williams rearranged the scene. He moved furniture to make things look a little bit better, I guess, but he got a little careless doing it.”

  “In what way?”

  “He picked up a chair and put it down on top of the guy’s britches leg.” Dr. Metts chuckled.

  “Oooh, I bet y’all got pictures of that, ain’t you?”

  “Color prints,” said the coroner.

  “It shows the pants leg underneath the chair?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, that sure is nice.” Jones shook his head ruefully. “What else you got?”

  “I tell you what,” said Dr. Metts. “I believe I know when that bastard got shot.”

  “When was that?” asked Jones.

  “When he stubbed out his cigarette.”

  “His what?”

  “I found a cigarette butt that had been stubbed out into the leather desktop. It was still sitting on its end. I think when the guy did that, Mr. Williams got pissed off and shot him.”

  “Like I said, Doc, you really brighten up my day,” said Jones.

  “Quite frankly, though, my sympathies lie with Mr. Williams,” said Dr. Metts. “It did occur around three in the morning. Mr. Williams presumably had to get up and work, and this kid was being an obnoxious bastard, wanting to play games and bust up the furniture.”

  “Any other kind words of encouragement?” Jones asked.

  “Not that I can think of, John,” he said. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, though. I would think your jury selection is going to be key. You have a problem there in that it was obviously a homosexual-type situation. You’ll have to play it so the jury is sympathetic to Mr. Williams and don’t think too bad of him for shooting this guy.”

  Jones picked up his briefcase. “Well, as we all know, Doc, juries in Savannah don’t seem to mind seeing homosexuals get killed. I mean, you can stomp a homosexual to death in our community, and that doesn’t seem to make a difference.”

  “No, I know,” said Dr. Metts. He walked Jones to the door of his office. “Well, John, all I can say is Mr. Williams probably did his civic duty shooting this sonofabitch.”

  John Wright Jones’s remark about stomping homosexuals to death was a reference to a murder case that had come to trial only a few months earlier and deeply shocked Savannah.

  The murder victim in that case had been a thirty-three-year-old man from Columbus, Georgia, who had come to Savannah to judge a beauty pageant. Married and with two children, he was stomped to death in a darkened parking garage by four U.S. Army Rangers. Rangers were reputed to be the toughest men in the army. There was a squadron of them out at Hunter Army Airfield on the southside. They were trained to endure harsh punishment and to dish it out as well. Early on the evening of the stomping, a witness saw the four Rangers strolling on Bay Street, bending parking meters to the ground with their bare hands. Later, the four went into Missy’s Adult Boutique, a pornographic bookshop off Johnson Square, where they encountered the beauty-pageant judge. The man made a sexual advance. They enticed him into a parking garage and beat and kicked him so brutally that an expert in trauma injury testified that when the victim arrived at the hospital he was “probably the most mutilated person I have ever seen still alive.” He had suffered multiple fractures of the skull, cheeks, jawbone, and eye sockets. The expert said it had taken two people to pry his eyes open. “He was almost unrecognizable as a human being.”

  At the trial, the attorney for the Rangers asked the jury to “place responsibility where it lies.” The defendants, he said, were young, foolish, clean-cut, and honest. They had been the victims of a homosexual advance. The jurors were sympathetic to the Rangers an
d rejected the charge of murder. Still, each man had admitted kicking the victim, so the jurors felt compelled to declare them guilty of something. They chose the lightest possible count: simple battery. Simple battery is a misdemeanor; it can mean that one person merely touched another. The sentence was one year in jail with the possibility of parole in six months.

  The Ranger verdict provoked a bitter public outcry. Letters to the newspaper condemned the jury for its callousness and for sullying the name of justice in Savannah. One of the nurses who had treated the victim wrote: “If this is a misdemeanor, may I never see the victim of a felony.”

  The trial had been the courtroom debut of Chatham County’s new district attorney, thirty-seven-year-old Spencer Lawton, Jr. The verdict had been a crushing defeat, and it left observers wondering whether Lawton was capable of discharging the responsibilities of his new office.

  The Lawtons were a distinguished old Savannah family. Spencer Lawton’s great-great grandfather, General Alexander R. Lawton, had been in charge of defending Savannah during the early part of the Civil War and later became quartermaster general of the Confederate Army. After the war, General Lawton was one of the ten men who founded the American Bar Association; he served as its president in 1882. Later, Grover Cleveland appointed him ambassador to Austria. The Lawton family plot at Bonaventure Cemetery was one of the largest. A white marble figure of Christ stood by a towering Gothic arch on a bluff by the river.

  Another of Lawton’s forebears, Spencer Shotter, amassed a fortune in the naval-stores business at the turn of the century and built one of the most grandiose estates in the South on the grounds of Greenwich Plantation, immediately adjacent to Bon-aventure Cemetery. Shotter hired the renowned architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings, designers of the New York Public Library building on Fifth Avenue, to build the house. It had forty rooms and a double colonnade of gleaming white marble columns that wrapped around all four sides. There were twelve master bedrooms, ten baths, a ballroom decorated in gold leaf, a dairy farm, a covered swimming pool, and magnificently landscaped grounds. Palm trees were imported from the Holy Land, a weeping willow from Napoleon’s tomb on Saint Helena, and statues from the ruins of Pompeii. The estate was the setting for exquisite balls and yachting parties. Movie scenes starring Mary Pickford and Francis X. Bushman were filmed there.