by John Berendt
Sonny Seiler’s office was a large, elegant room that had once served as the mansion’s master bedroom. Tall French windows looked out across Bull Street toward the Oglethorpe Club. On the walls, where one might have expected to find portraits of the firm’s founders, there were portraits of Uga I, Uga II, and Uga III. Each of the bulldogs wore a bright red football jersey over massive shoulders; a black G for Georgia was centered on the dog’s chest. Seiler was sitting at his desk in a white short-sleeved shirt. He was solidly built and had big shoulders. When I came in, he bounded up from his chair like a halfback breaking out of a huddle. We shook hands. He wore a ring big enough to be brass knuckles. It sparkled with two rows of diamonds that spelled out in big block letters GEORGIA—NATIONAL CHAMPIONS—1980. I sat down across the desk. It was quarter to six, but I got right to the point, thinking Seiler might have the clock running anyhow.
“Will your approach to this trial be any different from the first one?” I asked.
“Hell, yes,” he said. “We’re gonna have a whole new game plan. The biggest mistake the defense made in the first trial was not facing the homosexual issue head-on. Bobby Lee Cook thought he had an agreement to keep it out of the trial altogether, so he settled for a jury of old-maid schoolteachers and it was a disaster. He was double-crossed when the judge allowed those two punk friends of Hansford’s to testify about Jim and Danny having sex. So I sat Jim down and said, ‘Look, we can’t make that mistake again. If we do, Lawton will bring those guys back and send the jury into orbit the way he did last time. You’ve got to come right out with it yourself this time, in your own words. Phrase it gently and get the shock of it over.’ Well, Jim was dead set against it. He flatly refused, said absolutely not. He said he’d never expose his mother to that kind of talk. So I said, ‘For God’s sake, Jim, she was sitting right there during the first trial! She’s already heard it!’ ‘Not from me, she hasn’t,’ he said. So I thought a minute and I said, ‘How about if your mother is not in the courtroom when you testify? Then she won’t hear it from you.’ Jim finally came around. He agreed to do it. I told him not to worry, we’ll back him up by picking a jury that’s not biased against homosexuals.”
“How do you plan to do that?” I asked.
Seiler leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk. “Well, Coach, this is what we’re gonna do. When we interview prospective jurors, we’re gonna ask ’em, ‘Would you have a problem if you learned that a defendant was a homosexual?’ They’ll all say, ‘Oh, no! No problem at all.’ Then we’ll ask ’em, ‘Would you want a homosexual teaching your children at school?’ Right there, we’ll trap a lot of ’em: ‘Well … no,’ they’ll say, ‘I wouldn’t want that,’ and we’ll strike those people for cause. If they slip past that question, we’ll hit ’em with ‘Are there any homosexuals in your church?’ Then: ‘Would you mind if your minister was a homosexual?’ If there’s any bias, we’ll dig it out sooner or later.”
Seiler was not interested in seeking a change of venue. “We might be very sorry if we got it,” he said. “There’s no telling where we’d end up tryin’ this case. We’d have no control over it. We could find ourselves in Ware County.” He rolled his eyes. “All they got there are a bunch of damn rednecks. I mean, hell, people over there think it’s a sin to have sex with the lights on. They’d lynch Jim before they ever got around to convicting him. So I think we’re better off right here in Savannah. The D.A.’s case isn’t as strong as he makes it out to be, and it’s gettin’ weaker all the time.”
“How?” I ventured to ask.
“Well, I’ll tell ya. Lawton likes to talk about the ‘overwhelming’ physical evidence against Jim. That’s bullshit. He’s got two pet theories: the gunshot-residue theory and the coup de grâce theory. He claims the absence of gunshot residue on Danny’s hands proves he didn’t fire a gun, and he says Danny was lying on the floor when Jim shot him in the back. Well, we’ve come up with brand-new evidence that knocks hell out of both those arguments. I don’t mind telling you what we’ve got, ’Cause we’ve had to share it all with the D.A.
“Last month, we got a court order that allowed us to have our own experts conduct laboratory tests on the two German Lugers—Jim’s and Danny’s—and the shirt that Danny was wearing. We lined up one of the top forensic pathologists in the country to do the tests, Dr. Irving Stone of the Institute for Forensic Sciences in Dallas. He’s the guy who analyzed the clothing worn by President Kennedy and Governor Connally for the congressional committee that reexamined the Kennedy assassination. In other words, he’s no slouch.
“Now, we were stickin’ our neck out, ’Cause we didn’t know whether Stone’s findings would help us or hurt us, and we were under court order to give the results to Lawton. In fact, the D.A. sent his man with us to Dallas—Dr. Larry Howard, the director of the Georgia Crime Lab. Ol’ Doc Howard carried the guns and the shirt down there.
“Well, when Dr. Stone stepped up to test-fire Danny’s pistol, something unexpected happened. It wouldn’t fire. At first, Stone thought the safety was on. But it turned out that the trouble was that the gun had an unusually heavy trigger pull—twenty pounds. A normal trigger pull is four to six pounds. Stone had to squeeze hard to pull the trigger, and as he did, the gun jerked around drastically. Right there we had an unlooked-for explanation for why Danny missed Jim and shot into the desk. It was a bonus. It just fell into our lap.
“Then Dr. Stone went ahead and tested the gun to see if it was consistent in the way it threw off gunpowder. Get this: Stone found that when he held Danny’s gun in a downward angle and fired it, as Danny would have, the gunshot residue was diminished by more than half. Not only that, the gun was erratic in the amount of residue it threw off! Well, ol’ Doc Howard was breathin’ heavy right about now.
“Then Dr. Stone ran an analysis of Danny’s shirt. Hell, there wasn’t any gunpowder on it at all! According to Stone, that proves Jim had to be standing at least four feet away from Danny, because that’s how far Jim’s gun ejects debris out the front of the barrel. Stone says that means there’s no way Jim could have come around the desk to fire the last two shots, because there’d be gunpowder on Danny’s shirt if he had. So much for Lawton’s coup de grâce theory. I thought ol’ Doc Howard was gonna pass out.”
Seiler pulled a manila envelope out of his desk drawer. “Now, I’m gonna show you a little surprise we have in store for Lawton. After the police got to Jim’s house, they photographed the room where the shooting took place. Those pictures showed all sorts of supposedly incriminating details. Right? A chair leg on Danny Hansford’s trousers, particles of paper on top of the gun on the desk, smeared blood on Danny’s wrist. Bad stuff. Lawton introduced about twenty photographs in the first trial, but the police photographer testified she took five rolls. That means there were over a hundred pictures we hadn’t seen. A couple weeks ago we asked to have a look at the rest of them. We didn’t know what we were looking for, and frankly we didn’t think we’d find anything.
“Well, we got the full set of photographs a couple of days ago. Okay. Now, look at this one.”
Seiler handed me a photograph showing the chair behind Williams’s desk. A leather pouch lay on the carpet against a leg of the chair.
“Now compare that photograph … with this one.” In the second shot, the leather pouch was no longer touching the chair leg; it was several inches away. “You can tell from the designs in the carpet that both the chair and the leather pouch have been moved. I don’t know who moved them or why, but nobody is supposed to touch anything at the scene of an alleged crime until photography is completed and measurements are taken. If the police do move anything, they’re required to photograph it actually being moved, and they didn’t. When we looked through the rest of the pictures, this is the sort of thing we found.”
Seiler laid out several other photographs showing objects on the top of Williams’s desk. “Notice the position of the pink box, here … and here.” The pink box, too, had been moved. So had a co
py of TV Guide, a stack of envelopes, rolls of paper, and a telephone directory.
“When you look at all the pictures—and not just the twenty the D.A. used for the first trial—you can see that things were being shuffled around all over the place. That means the scene of the shooting was never properly secured. There’s not supposed to be anybody in the room when the police photographer is shooting pictures, but just look at these photographs: You can see feet, arms, legs, civilian shoes, uniform shoes, black shoes, felt shoes. The police were swarming all over the house that night. It was a convention. And now we discover they were moving the evidence. That’s crazy. It violates rudimentary police procedure. What’s more, it taints all the evidence in the room!”
Seiler beamed. “I tell ya, we’re in good shape. The only thing out of our control is Jim’s arrogance on the witness stand. But hell, we ain’t never gonna get around that. We’re just gonna have to live with it.”
Seiler tilted back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Lawton’s in trouble, but it’s his own fault. He made a terrible blunder playing keep-away with the evidence in the first trial. Lawton’s articulate and smart, no question. But he doesn’t have the experience a D.A. oughta have. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been practicing law for twenty-five years, been in court dozens and dozens of times. Spencer Lawton hasn’t handled but two court cases in his life—the Rangers case and Jim’s first trial—and he hasn’t won one yet, now that Jim’s conviction has been reversed. He’s anxious and he’s green, and we’re gonna take advantage of that. We’ve been keeping the pressure on him, swamping him with pre-trial motions, distracting him with details. There’s nothing we can do about the horrendous publicity, of course, but this time we’re gonna sequester the jury to shield them from it. I hate to do it to ’em, but we’ll try to speed things up a little by having Saturday sessions in court.” Seiler shook his head. “Right in the middle of football season too. That oughta prove I didn’t make the decision lightly. I’ve been to every Georgia home game for the last twenty-five years. I figure I’ll miss at least one game, maybe two this year because of the trial. But we’ll be at the opener against UCLA this Saturday.”
“You and Uga?”
“Yup,” said Seiler. “Ever seen Uga?”
“No, but I’ve heard about him.”
“People love Uga!” he said. “He’s the most famous animal in Georgia!” Seiler gestured toward a bank of file cabinets next to his desk. “That whole thing is full of nothing but Uga.” He began rolling out the drawers. They were crammed with clippings, photographs, posters, letters.
“Last year, Uga went to the Heisman Trophy award dinner in New York,” he said. “Did you hear about that? Here, look.” Seiler pulled out an AP Wirephoto of himself and Uga IV with Herschel Walker, the Georgia halfback who had won the Heisman Trophy that year. The three of them, the dog included, were wearing black tie. “Uga’s the only dog ever to be invited to a Heisman dinner,” he said brightly.
He continued wading through the files. “Uga’s correspondence is amazing. When he had an operation on his knee, he got hundreds of get-well cards from all over the country. There’s a file of them somewhere in here. He even got a card from Mike the Tiger.”
“Who’s Mike the Tiger?” I asked.
Seiler looked up from the cabinet, surprised at my ignorance. “LSU,” he said. He pressed the intercom. “Betty, you got that file with Uga’s get-well cards? I cain’t find it.”
Seiler’s secretary came into the room with a worried look. “It should be in there, Sonny,” she said. She opened another drawer and looked through it. Then she left the room. Seiler went on rummaging, thoroughly engrossed. Meanwhile, I glanced around the room. A life-size porcelain bulldog lounged on the hearth. Above it, a procession of carved bulldogs prowled across the mantelpiece in bas-relief. Scattered here and there were other objects of bulldogiana—framed snapshots, a brass paperweight, figurines, needlepoint pillows. Betty came back into the room.
“I think this is it, Sonny,” she said. She gave him a file labeled “Knee Injury.” Scores of cards and letters fell out onto the desk. Seiler began to paw through them.
“Here it is,” he said. “Mike the Tiger. And here’s one from the Boston College Eagle … the Kentucky Wildcat … Mrs. Willingham’s fourth-grade class in Macon.” Some of the letters ran to several pages. Seiler held up a handful.
“I tell ya, Uga’s a phenomenon. Uga III even made it into The Animals’ Who’s Who. He was the mascot when we won the national championship a couple years ago.”
Seiler went over to the bookshelf and took down the book. Indeed, Uga III was immortalized in it, along with Rin Tin Tin, Man o’ War, Moby Dick, Toto, and The White Rabbit. I put the book down on Seiler’s desk, which was now awash in Uga memorabilia.
“You know,” said Seiler, looking up from the pile, “you oughta try to make it up to Athens this weekend. We’re playing UCLA. Oughta see at least one game while you’re here. If you do, come on by the hotel suite around noon. We always have a little gathering before the game. That’s when Uga gets dressed.”
On Saturday morning, traffic flowed north toward Athens with the exuberance of a cavalry charge. Red-and-black pennants fluttered from aerials. Homemade signs flashed messages of common cause: GO BULLDOGS! BEAT UCLA! HOW ’BOUT THEM DAWGS!
At noon, a dozen guests were gathered in Sonny Seiler’s hotel suite. A radio on the dresser was tuned to a pregame call-in question-and-answer show. Seiler sat on the edge of the bed talking on the telephone. He wore a red sweater, black slacks, and a white baseball cap inscribed with the letter G. He was shouting into the receiver.
“That you, Remer? Can you hear me? We all up here listenin’ to the damn talk show, but you ain’t called in yet! … They got a bunch a crackers callin’ in. Huh? Oh, hell, they just askin’ dumb questions like, ‘When do we wear white pants and when do we wear red?’ and ‘How many conference games has Georgia lost in red trousers?’ You gonna call in? … It’s that 800 number I gave you. You got it? … Okay, Coach, we’ll be listenin’ for ya.”
Sonny got up from the bed. “That was Remer Lane. He’s back in Savannah. Gonna call that radio show with a question about Uga.” At this moment, Uga himself was reclining on a blanket in the shower stall, an enormous heap of furry white wrinkles surrounded by a cluster of admirers including Seiler’s daughter, Swann. “Hey, baby, hey, sweetie,” a woman cooed. “You gonna pull us through today, Sugar?”
Sonny went to a makeshift bar on the dresser and poured several drinks. “I tell ya,” he said, “I got every bit of faith in this team. We gonna have another winning season, but I sure do miss Herschel.”
“Amen,” said a man in a red blazer. Herschel Walker had played his last season the previous year and was now a rookie with the New Jersey Generals.
“We’ll do okay,” another man said, “but I’m already beginning to sweat the Florida game. Not the outcome of the game, mind you. The tickets. Everybody wants tickets. I’m usually pretty good at finding ’em, and everybody and his brother seems to know that. But I mean, Jesus, it’s only September and it’s already started.”
“September!” said a tall man in a red-and-black windbreaker. “My phone usually starts ringing around the middle of July, and that’s no exaggeration. Then come August, it really heats up. I get phone calls, I get interoffice memos, I get telegrams, I get letters. I’m the most popular man in Georgia when it comes to the Georgia-Florida game.”
Most of the men in the room were well-connected football fans, and now they traded stories about getting tickets for friends. “Hey, Sonny!” one of them called out. “What about that Williams murder case? You figure you’re gonna win it?”
Seiler looked at the man. “Is Georgia gonna beat UCLA?” Georgia was heavily favored. “I tell ya, Coach,” said Seiler, “don’t go placing any bets against us yet. We got a couple of surprises up our sleeve. New evidence, a couple of new witnesses. It’s gonna be a
… Oh, wait! There it is!” Seiler reached over and turned up the volume on the radio.
“…of course, Uga has a big appetite,” the announcer was saying, “and our caller from Savannah wants to know: ‘What brand of dog food does Uga eat?’”
“Attaboy, Remer!” said Seiler. Everyone in the room knew the answer: Jim Dandy dog ration. Uga not only ate Jim Dandy dog ration, but he officially endorsed it too. Plastic cups were raised in a toast to Uga IV and Jim Dandy. Swann Seiler poked her head in the door. “Daddy, it’s time to dress Uga.”
“Ah, the Dressing of the Dog!” intoned a portly man standing by the window.
Seiler held up a red jersey and called out, “Heeeeee-yuuhhhhh!” Uga came trotting into the room, wriggling and wagging his sixty-five-pound body. Seiler slipped the jersey over his head and fastened a spiked collar around his neck. “If we have a defeat,” said Swann, “then we don’t ever wear that jersey again. Sometimes, if things aren’t going well, we change jerseys in the middle of a game.”
“We’ve got five or six with us today,” said Sonny. “We can change if we have to. I hope we don’t.”
“Mom used to make them,” said Swann. “We’ve got some historical jerseys that Uga wears when we’ve won bowl games. Uga’s got a bigger wardrobe than I do.”
The guests started putting on their coats as Seiler brushed the dog and sprinkled talcum powder on the top of his head to cover a grayish spot. “That’s for the cameras,” he said. “He’s supposed to be a picture-perfect, all-white dog. Well, let’s go.” He opened the door, and Uga surged down the hall, straining on his leash and leading the procession to the elevator and out through the lobby.
In the parking lot outside Sanford Stadium, Seiler lifted Uga onto the roof of his red station wagon, the one with the “UGA IV” license plates. Thus enthroned, Uga accepted the adoration of his fans. Thousands of spectators waved, called his name, patted him on the head, and took snapshots on their way into the stadium. Uga wiggled and panted and licked as many hands as he could reach.