Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

  By the time Spencer Lawton came along, however, the grandeur of the Lawton family had all but vanished. The Shotter mansion had been destroyed by fire in the 1920s, and the grounds became an extension of Bonaventure Cemetery known as Greenwich Cemetery. The prestigious law firm of Lawton & Cunningham had been absorbed by another law firm, and the imposing Lawton Memorial Hall on Bull Street had been converted to a Greek Orthodox church.

  Spencer Lawton was a soft-spoken, mild-mannered man with gentle blue-gray eyes and dark hair combed in a pompadour. Chubby cheeks and a ribbon-bow mouth gave him a cherubic look. He had been, by his own admission, an indifferent student at the University of Georgia Law School. Afterward he returned to Savannah to practice law. He did largely pro bono work. A woman who encountered him when he was a hearing officer for the Savannah Housing Authority remembered him as being highly principled. “He was a decent man,” she said. “He more than did his job; he showed concern and compassion for the poor. But he was a little timid, as I recall.”

  For the past thirty years, the Chatham County prosecutor’s office had been the private domain of Joe Ryan. Ryan’s son, Andrew “Bubsy” Ryan, had succeeded his father and had served one term when Spencer Lawton decided to run against him.

  Bubsy Ryan was a good ol’ boy. He liked to go fishing, hunting, and drinking. He had a full head of tousled brown hair, long reddish sideburns, and bags under his eyes that made him look permanently hung over. He got along well with the police; he was good at horse-trading and had a folksy, drawling courtroom manner. Bubsy argued every major murder case himself, but it was no secret that his management of the prosecutor’s office was casual at best, just as it had been under his father. A backlog of over a thousand untried cases stretched back twenty-five years. Bubsy enjoyed being D.A., but he admitted it did have its drawbacks. “You’re limited in some ways,” he said. “You can’t go out drinkin’ with your wife, ’Cause you’ll read about it in the paper the next day.”

  The Ryans were not accustomed to having opposition at election time. But when Bubsy came up for reelection, one of his assistant D.A.s announced he would challenge him in the Democratic primary. The two began sniping at each other almost immediately, and on the last day of filing, Spencer Lawton saw an opportunity for himself and made it a three-way race. “I ran for a lark,” Lawton said later. While the other two tore into each other, Lawton took the high road and spoke about case management and other sensible-sounding things. He tiptoed through the wreckage of Bubsy and the other man.

  When Bubsy and Lawton found themselves in a runoff, Bubsy took aim at Lawton. He hooted that Lawton had been a failure as a lawyer, that he had never tried a felony case, never had appellate experience, never argued a case before the Georgia Supreme Court, and that as a direct result of his laziness and incompetence he had exposed a law firm he had worked for to a malpractice suit. Two days before the election, Bubsy went one step further. He took out a half-page ad in the Savannah Morning News and quoted from a statement made in divorce proceedings by Lawton’s former wife. Mrs. Lawton said that Spencer had told her many times that “he would be happier staying at home and keeping the house and reading than he would be working.” The underlying message in the ad was that Spencer Lawton was not man enough for the job. Bubsy’s crowd referred to Lawton as “the Pillsbury Dough Boy.” But then on the night of the primary, Bubsy Ryan watched in disbelief as the returns from the black precincts went against him and gave the nomination to Lawton. Lawton went on to defeat the Republican candidate in the general election.

  Doubts about Lawton’s ability grew after he took office. Disgruntled staff members, holdovers from Bubsy Ryan’s era, passed the word that Lawton did not know the law. “He’s asking for memos on things he should know,” one assistant D.A. complained, “like extradition. He wanted a memo on insanity defense, too, which you could write a book about.” Then came the stunning defeat in the Rangers case. As it happened, the Rangers verdict was handed down a few days after Jim Williams shot Danny Hansford. Lawton drew a bead on the Williams case. It would be a means of redeeming himself, if he won. But it would be a difficult fight.

  To handle his defense, Jim Williams retained Bobby Lee Cook of Summerville, Georgia. Cook was a famous character in criminal courts throughout the South. His specialty was murder. Over a span of thirty years, Cook had defended 250 people accused of murder and got 90 percent of them off, sometimes against substantial odds. Cook would take the untouchable cases, cases nobody thought could be won, and he would win them. He was famous for his lacerating cross-examinations. “I’ve seen him take a fellow before lunch,” said a federal judge, “examine him awhile, comment at lunchtime that he was playing his witness like a bass, and then come back after lunch and finish destroying the man.” In an article extolling his technique and his daring, People magazine had once declared that “if the Devil ever needed a defense, Bobby Lee Cook would take the case.”

  Being from the mountains of north Georgia, Cook knew that a Savannah jury would perceive him as a slick, out-of-town lawyer. Therefore, he wanted a local lawyer to assist him, and in filling that position he selected the attorney most likely to unnerve Spencer Lawton—the lawyer who had just beaten him so badly in the Rangers case: John Wright Jones.

  Chapter 16

  TRIAL

  The Chatham County Courthouse was one of a half dozen modern buildings in downtown Savannah. It was made of precast concrete. Flat, blockish, and bland, it sat at the western edge of the historic district. A companion building stood next to it and was linked to it by an underground tunnel. This other building, also made of concrete, was a vaultlike cube with vertical slits for windows—the Chatham County Jail.

  The benches at the rear of Judge George Oliver’s courtroom were filled to capacity on the first day of Jim Williams’s trial. The windowless room had bright fluorescent lighting and sound-absorbing tiles that removed all tone and timbre from the human voice. Retired businessmen, housewives, and Williams’s high-society friends sat side by side with courthouse flacks, newspaper and television reporters, and a fair number of local trial lawyers who had come to watch the famous Bobby Lee Cook take on the new district attorney. Jim Williams sat at the defense table, and his mother and sister sat a few feet behind him in the first row.

  Danny Hansford’s mother, Emily Bannister, also attended the trial, but she was not permitted inside the courtroom. Bobby Lee Cook feared she might create a scene and prejudice the jury against Williams. He did not have her banned outright; instead he listed her as a defense witness, which had the same effect. Witnesses were not allowed to watch the proceedings until after they had testified. Cook, of course, had no intention of ever calling Mrs. Bannister to the stand, but his ploy would keep her out of the jury’s sight. She came to the trial anyway and sat outside in the corridor.

  “Don’t look now,” one of Williams’s socialite friends murmured to a female chum as they arrived on the first day, “but there’s Danny Hansford’s ten-million-dollar mother.”

  Emily Bannister, not yet forty, looked surprisingly youthful for a woman with a twenty-one-year-old son. She had light brown hair and angular, childlike features. Her expression, which one might have expected to reflect anger and resentment under the circumstances, was merely one of sadness. She spoke only to the woman who sat next to her, an assistant in the district attorney’s office. When reporters approached, she turned away in silence.

  It was nearly lunchtime when the bailiff called out, “Order in the court! Extinguish all cigarettes! Please rise!” Judge Oliver entered from a door behind the bench and took his seat in a highback swivel chair. An imposing man, he had a mane of snowy white hair and a handsome, craggy face. He was a steward of the Wesley Monumental Church and had been in Mercer House many times, but never as a guest of Jim Williams. He had gone there in the forties and fifties, when the house was the Shriners’ Alee Temple. Oliver brought his gavel down and in a deep drawl called the courtroom to order. “All right, gentlemen, let’s be
gin.”

  In his opening statement, Lawton spoke earnestly and in a soft voice. He told the jury that in the coming days he would prove that James A. Williams had shot Danny Lewis Hansford in cold blood and with malice aforethought and that afterward Williams had engaged in elaborate efforts not only to cover up what he had done but to make it appear that he had done it in self-defense.

  Bobby Lee Cook then rose. He had long white hair, a square cut goatee, and piercing eyes. He bore a striking resemblance to the image of Uncle Sam in James Montgomery Flagg’s I WANT YOU FOR THE U.S. ARMY recruiting poster. Cook’s habit of pointing his forefinger at the jury as he spoke only underscored the similarity. Cook said the defense would disprove everything Spencer Lawton had just told them. They would learn, said Cook, that Danny Hansford was “a violent and tempestuous character” and that he was the aggressor in this case.

  When the introductory remarks were over, Judge Oliver called a brief recess before beginning the parade of witnesses. In the corridor, a man in a short-sleeved shirt and slicked-down hair approached me. “I see you’ve been taking notes,” he said. “You doing legwork for the defense?”

  “No,” I said, “it’s just for myself.” The man was carrying a rolled-up newspaper. He had been sitting in the row in front of me, perched sideways in his seat with one arm slung over the back of the bench. Every so often he would laugh silently to himself, and his body would jerk in spasms of suppressed mirth. Then his head would roll back, and he’d peer through his grimy glasses at the proceedings. I took him to be a courthouse regular.

  “Spencer Lawton’s as much on trial here as Williams,” he said. “They tell me he’s been in hibernation for two months preparing his case. He’s turned his office into a bunker. Won’t take telephone calls, staff can’t get in to see him. He and Depp—Deppish Kirkland, his chief assistant—they’re trying to keep stuff away from the defense at all costs. They want to surprise ’em, turn it into a trial by ambush. They’re paranoid about things leaking out. That’s what I hear. It’s strictly bush league. The bottom line is Lawton’s scared to death.”

  “Who tells you all this?” I asked.

  “I hear things. People talk.” The man looked from one end of the hall to the other. “I’ll tell you one thing. Lawton’s overplaying his hand in this case. See, it’s not a murder case. Nobody thinks it is. The facts don’t add up to it. It’s manslaughter. Williams and Hansford argued. Somebody grabbed a gun. Maybe Williams panicked afterward and tried to rearrange things. But it wasn’t premeditated.”

  Then why was Lawton going for a murder conviction?

  “Could be politics,” he said. “Could be he wants to win big after losing the Rangers case. Could be he doesn’t want to appear to be too soft on hermaphrodites.”

  “On what?” I asked.

  “Hermaphrodites,” the man said. “That’s what this whole thing’s about, you know. Or haven’t you heard?”

  “Oh. Right,” I said. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  Lawton opened his case by calling the police dispatcher who had been on duty the night of the shooting. The dispatcher said that at 2:58 A.M., she received a call from Jim Williams reporting that he’d been involved in a shooting at his residence. That was all she had to say. Next, Lawton called Joe Goodman to the stand. Goodman said that Williams had called him between 2:20 and 2:25 A.M. to say he had shot Danny. That left a gap of more than thirty minutes between the shooting and Williams’s call to the police. The rest of Lawton’s witnesses gave testimony bearing on what might have happened up to and during those thirty minutes. Their combined testimony brought out the prosecution’s theory of what had happened:

  Williams had fired once across his desk at an unarmed Danny Hansford. Hansford clutched his chest and fell to the floor facedown. Williams then walked around the desk and fired at Hansford twice more at point-blank range, hitting him behind the ear and in the back. Then he put his gun down on the desk, picked up a second gun, and fired “at himself” from Hansford’s side of the desk to make it look as though Hansford had shot at him. One bullet passed through some papers; another bullet struck a metal belt buckle that had been lying on top of the desk. Williams wiped his fingerprints from this second gun, pulled Hansford’s right hand out from under his body, and placed it over the gun. Then he called Joe Goodman. While Goodman and his girlfriend were on their way, Williams went around his house, smashing bottles, overturning the big clock in the hall, and creating a scene of general may hem. Thirty minutes after calling Joe Goodman, Williams dialed the police.

  According to the prosecution, the physical evidence showed that Williams had made a series of blunders. When he fired the shots “at himself,” Williams had stood in the wrong place. He had stood where Danny’s head lay; he should have stood where Danny’s feet were. Second, police photographs of the top of the desk showed tiny paper fragments lying on top of the German Luger that Williams said he had used to shoot Hansford. This could only mean that Williams had already fired his gun at Hansford and laid it down before any bullets came from Hansford’s side of the desk and hit the pile of papers, creating the paper fragments. Third, a bullet fragment was found on the seat of the chair that Williams had claimed he was sitting in when Danny shot at him. Fourth, the blood on Danny Hansford’s hand was smeared, suggesting Williams had pulled Danny’s hand out from under his body to place it on top of the gun. Strangest of all was the chair straddling Danny’s legs; one of the chair legs was resting on the cuff of his blue jeans. It could only have been placed there after Danny had died. The prosecution suggested that Williams had unintentionally put it there while rearranging the scene.

  Dr. Larry Howard, director of the state crime lab, summed up the prosecution’s case. “The scene,” he said, “appears contrived.”

  Throughout the four days of prosecution testimony, Bobby Lee Cook rose repeatedly to challenge the state’s witnesses in blistering cross-examinations. At one point, Cook seized on an apparent inconsistency in the state’s theory that Hansford was lying facedown on the floor when he was shot in the head. With a dramatic flourish, he lay down on the courtroom floor and asked Detective Joseph Jordan to position his head as Danny Hansford’s had been.

  “Am I now lying on the floor as the body of the deceased was lying when you saw it?” Cook asked, looking up at Detective Jordan.

  “Tilt your head over to your right,” said Detective Jordan. “A little bit more. That’s close. Yes, sir.”

  “Are you aware,” Cook asked, “that the point of entry of the head wound was on the right side above the ear?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the detective.

  “And is it not true that the right side of my head is lying securely upon the floor?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then the shot to the head could not have been fired as the victim lay on the floor,” said Cook. “It would have been impossible unless you got up under it to shoot.”

  “That’s basically correct,” said the detective.

  “In fact, it would be completely illogical,” Cook crowed. “It would be like telling someone that you could pour water uphill, wouldn’t it!”

  “Yes, sir,” said the detective.

  As for the absence of fingerprints on Danny’s gun, Lawton himself elicited the comment from Detective Jordan that the textured surface of the Luger handgrip was a type that rarely yielded fingerprints. “It would not be conducive to a good fingerprint,” said the detective. “It’s too rough.”

  The most damning feature of the state’s case was the negative test for gunshot residue on Danny’s hands. Detective Joseph Jordan testified that he had taken great care to preserve whatever residue had been on Hansford’s hands. He had placed paper bags on the hands and fastened them with evidence tape. Randall Riddell, the technician who performed the gunshot-residue tests at the state crime lab, testified he had found no gunshot residue at all on Danny’s hands. Cook bore into him.

  “You are familiar, of course, with antimony
and lead and barium,” said Cook. “You deal with these elements on a continuous basis in your specialty of gunshot-residue analysis, do you not?”

  “Correct, sir,” said Riddell.

  “What is the atomic weight of antimony?” Cook asked.

  “I don’t recall,” said Riddell.

  “What is the atomic weight of lead?”

  “I don’t recall exactly,” said Riddell.

  “What is the atomic weight of barium?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “What is the atomic number of lead?”

  “I’m not familiar.”

  “What is the atomic number of barium?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Of antimony?”

  “I don’t recall,” said Riddell, his face reddening.

  “What method of analysis did you utilize in examining the swabs from Mr. Hansford’s hands?” Cook asked.

  “Atomic absorption,” Riddell replied.

  “And you got negative results?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you aware,” Cook asked, “that in the Atlanta area the atomic-absorption test yields negative results sixty percent of the time when it is done on the hands of persons known to have committed suicide with a gun?”

  “I would ask to see your figures, sir,” Riddell answered.

  “You would like to see some figures on it?” said Cook. “Do you know Dr. Joseph Burton?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Riddell. “He’s the medical examiner in Atlanta, I believe.”