Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

  Although racial inequalities were, if anything, greater in Savannah than in other southern cities, Savannah’s blacks displayed surprisingly little hostility toward whites. On the surface, at least, a remarkable civility prevailed. A black man passing a white stranger on the street would be likely to nod and say, “Good morning,” “How y’doing?” or simply “Hey.” Outwardly, little seemed to have changed since William Makepeace Thackeray visited Savannah in 1848 and described it as a tranquil old city with wide, tree-planted streets and “a few happy Negroes sauntering here and there.” Thackeray was not the only person to notice that slaves had smiles on their faces. W. H. Pierson wrote in The Water Witch in 1863: “[The slaves] are, by all odds, the happiest-looking folks in the Confederacy. They sing, while the whites curse and pray.” During slavery, it was thought by some observers that the apparent good cheer of the slaves had something to do with their expectation that the roles would be reversed in the hereafter: They would be the masters, and whites would be their slaves. In the 1960s, the civil rights struggle put a temporary strain on relations, but integration was peaceful on the whole. Since then, Savannah had been governed largely by moderate whites who made it their business to stay on good terms with the black community. As a result, racial peace was maintained, and blacks remained politically conservative, which is to say, passive. There was no discernible black activism in Savannah. But it was evident that underneath their apparent complacency, Savannah’s blacks were beset by an anguish and despair that ran so deep and expressed itself with such violence that it had made Savannah the murder capital of America.

  If Savannah’s spiritual, economic, artistic, architectural, and law-and-order concerns were not enough to keep people’s minds off Jim Williams, there were plenty of distractions on the social scene. There was talk, for instance, about a standoff at the Married Woman’s Card Club. Slots for membership had opened up, but competition to fill them had become so fierce that every candidate had been blackballed for two years running. No one had gotten into the club in all that time, and for the first time in memory, membership had slipped below the mandated sixteen. The stalemate was temporarily upstaged by a food-poisoning scare at one of the club’s get-togethers. The ladies were just heading home at six o’clock when they discovered the hostess’s cat lying dead on the front steps. Someone recalled having seen the cat nibbling a leftover portion of crab casserole only minutes before. The women thereupon trotted to their cars and drove in a swarm to Candler Hospital to have their stomachs pumped. The following morning, the next-door neighbor stopped by to say he was sorry he’d run over the cat.

  Neither the Married Woman’s membership crisis nor the food scare received any mention in the newspaper’s society column. It was, in fact, at about this time that the newspaper announced it was discontinuing its society column altogether. The column had never been much more than a bland recitation of guest lists, but its disappearance provoked a stinging rebuke from one of Savannah’s leading socialites, Mrs. Vera Dutton Strong. In her letter to the editor, which was one of the longest the newspaper had ever published, Mrs. Strong expressed “shocked disbelief” at the cancellation of the column, calling the paper’s social coverage a “genuine disgrace.” There was a certain irony in this, because the most compelling social gossip at the moment happened to be the test of wills currently being waged by Mrs. Strong and her rebellious daughter, Dutton.

  Vera Dutton Strong was an heiress to the huge Dutton pulpwood fortune. An only child, she was a member of one of Savannah’s richest society families; her mother and father had always dressed for dinner—black tie and evening gown. Throughout her childhood she had been known as “The Princess,” a nickname that seemed only natural for her. She was Debutante of the Year, and at her wedding she wore an exact replica of the gown Queen Elizabeth II had worn at her wedding. Over the years, Mrs. Strong had shown herself to be good-humored, warm-hearted, and strong-willed. She was a founder of the Savannah Ballet Company and served as its hovering benefactress. Each year just before the Cotillion ball, society mothers would send their debutante daughters to Vera Strong so that she could teach them how to curtsy properly. A cloistered Savannahian of the purest sort, Mrs. Strong had never been to Europe, and she was past fifty when she visited Charleston for the first time.

  Mrs. Strong’s own daughter, Dutton, was an angel-faced beauty with long red hair and not the slightest inclination to be a princess or a ballerina, both of which Mrs. Strong had set her heart on. Dutton obediently started ballet lessons at the age of four, and soon she was dancing with her mother’s ballet company. Dutton’s debutante party was the only one ever held at the Telfair museum; Vera Strong hired Peter Duchin and his orchestra and commissioned a twelve-foot ice sculpture of the Eiffel Tower to highlight the “April in Paris” theme of the party. It was not until Dutton went away to school that a streak of independence began to assert itself. She skipped classes, stopped dancing, and finally dropped out of school. She came back home to Savannah, where she spent a year aimlessly hanging around the house and doing battle with her mother. “I never wanted to be a ballerina!” Dutton would bellow. “You’re the one who wanted to be a ballerina!” But Mrs. Strong would have none of it. “That’s nonsense! You loved dancing, or you never would have been so good at it!” After one especially energetic quarrel, Dutton stormed out of the house and moved into an apartment with an older woman who had been her mother’s poodle breeder. Dutton cut her long hair short, took to wearing jeans instead of skirts, put on weight, and stopped wearing lipstick. Then one afternoon she came to see her mother to announce that she had at long last decided on a career. She would go to the police academy and become a Savannah cop.

  Vera Strong took the news with uncharacteristic calm. “If that’s what you really want,” she said, “I pray it turns out to be everything you’re hoping for.” Mrs. Strong attended her daughter’s graduation at the police academy with a pasted-on smile. She wore the same smile at Christmas dinner when her daughter, the former ballerina-debutante, arrived wearing a navy-blue polyester pants suit with a .38 revolver on one hip and a Mace can and handcuffs on the other.

  Refusing to admit defeat, Vera Strong decided to view her daughter’s choice of profession as a selfless gesture of civic-mindedness rather than a betrayal of the family heritage. In the spring, she called the Oglethorpe Club to reserve a table for Easter dinner, making a point of telling the club manager that Dutton would be going on duty immediately afterward and would therefore be in uniform. Sensing a crisis of protocol, the manager demurred and said he would have to confer with the board. Ten minutes later he called back with profound apologies: The no-trousers rule for women had never been lifted before and the board dared not do it now. Mrs. Strong forthwith denounced the manager, the board, and the Oglethorpe Club as only she could do. She then slammed down the telephone and booked a table at the more amenable but less exclusive Chatham Club.

  The Savannah Morning News proved to be more tractable than the Oglethorpe Club. Stung by Mrs. Strong’s vituperative letter, the paper reinstated its society gossip column. Understandably, the column never made reference to the red-headed ballerina and her astonishing leap from Coppélia to cop, or to the continuing anguish that it caused her mother.

  While all this was going on, the controversy over Joe Odom and the Hamilton-Turner House continued unabated. Shortly after Joe set up the nonprofit “Hamilton-Turner Museum Foundation” to shield his illegal tour business, his neighbors countered by arguing before the Department of Inspections that, profit or nonprofit, the Hamilton-Turner House stood within one hundred yards of a school. This meant it was illegal for Joe to sell liquor at his luncheons and dinner parties. But Joe was not concerned. “The law says I can’t sell liquor,” he said. “It doesn’t say I can’t serve it.” Somewhere in the gray area between selling and serving, Joe knew how to make money giving liquor to his customers, and he went right on doing it.

  Liquor also played a part in a small drama involving Serena
Dawes. Serena and Luther Driggers had split up, and Serena had taken to cruising the docks late at night in an effort to pick up Greek sailors. One night the police spotted her driving erratically along River Street and stopped her. Serena opted for a pose of elegant femininity, which was a feat in itself since she was wearing a shortie nightgown and fluffy white rabbit-head slippers. She batted her eyelashes and exclaimed sweetly that she had gone out to move her “cah-wuh” and had gotten lost. When the policemen took her to the county jail and booked her for driving under the influence, she wanted to scream and scratch their faces, but instead she held herself in check and coyly thanked them for coming to her rescue. She mentioned that her “great-granddaddy-in-law” had been Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s just to let them know they were dealing with a woman of quality. An hour later, Luther Driggers came down to bail her out, but by that time Serena had had enough of pretense. A fat black prison matron, who had taken Serena’s handbag and searched it, now handed it back to her.

  “You can have it back,” the matron said. “It’s clean.”

  “It is not clean anymore,” Serena snapped, snatching the purse out of the woman’s hands. “And if I ever catch you putting your filthy fucking hands on anything of mine again, you’ll be wearing your poon-tang for a turtleneck!”

  These, then, were the matters of consuming interest in Savannah, the city Le Monde had called “la plus belle des villes” in North America. Beautiful it was, but still very isolated and, because of that, a bit too trusting. Police had recently circulated a warning about a pair of con men who were cashing checks drawn on a nonexistent company. The con men had given their victims a sporting chance by naming their bogus company “Fly By Night, Inc.,” but dozens of Savannah merchants had cashed the checks anyway. About the same time, it also came to light that the clerk in charge of handling the money in probate court did not know how to multiply and that one of the probate judges had taken advantage of the situation by dipping into the cash box. Life, in other words, went on. Savannah had community questions to resolve, such as: Should a second mall be built? Had Mr. Charles Hall ruined Whitfield Square by painting his gingerbread house a dozen shades of pink and purple? And, if so, did the city have the right to force him to repaint it in more acceptable colors?

  Then one day in June, all of these questions were overshadowed by the news that the Georgia Supreme Court had once again overturned Jim Williams’s conviction for murder.

  The court cited two reasons for setting aside the conviction. First, it ruled that Judge Oliver should not have allowed a Savannah police detective to testify as an “expert” for the prosecution on points of evidence that the jurors were competent to evaluate on their own—the smeared blood on Danny Hansford’s hand, the chair on his pants cuff, the fragments of paper on top of the gun. Second, the court faulted Spencer Lawton for waiting until his closing argument to demonstrate that the trigger on Hansford’s gun was easy to pull rather than difficult, as the defense had claimed. In effect, said the court, Lawton’s demonstration introduced new evidence, which should have been brought up during the trial itself, at which time the defense could have responded to it.

  Williams was lucky. The reversal had been a 4-to-3 decision. The three dissenting justices argued that the errors had been harmless ones and that, in any case, they had not influenced the verdict. But none of that mattered now. Since the state supreme court had not found Williams innocent—they had merely thrown out the verdict—murder charges still stood against him. He would be tried a third time in Judge Oliver’s court, and a third jury would deliver yet another verdict.

  Williams emerged from the Chatham County Jail a little thinner than before, a little grayer at the temples, and ghostly pale from having been indoors nearly two years. He squinted in the sun. As he and Sonny Seiler walked to a car parked at the curb, a small group of reporters and cameramen followed along, shouting questions.

  Did Williams think he would be acquitted at a third trial?

  “Yes, of course,” he said.

  What would be the deciding factor?

  “Money,” he said. “My case has been about money from the very beginning. The D.A. spends the taxpayers’ money, and I spend my own—five hundred thousand dollars of it so far. The criminal-justice system is rigged that way, in case you haven’t noticed. I’d still be in jail if I hadn’t been able to pay for lawyers and experts and their endless expenses. So far I’ve managed to stay even with the prosecution. Dollar for dollar, tit for tat.”

  As he approached the car, Williams looked across Montgomery Street and saw an old black woman standing at the bus stop. She was staring in his direction through purple glasses. Williams met her glance briefly and smiled. Then he turned back to the reporters.

  “Well … maybe I shouldn’t have said ‘tit for tat.’ As I’ve always said, there are forces working in my favor—forces the D.A. doesn’t know anything about.”

  And what might they be?

  “You can put them down under the heading of … ‘miscellaneous,’” he said.

  Within minutes Jim Williams was back in Mercer House, back in the news, and back on people’s minds again whether they liked it or not.

  Chapter 26

  ANOTHER STORY

  With a third trial in the offing, Jim Williams’s case was approaching landmark status and attracting attention well beyond Savannah. Williams’s air of cynical detachment lent spice to the expanding media coverage. Us magazine (“The Scandal That Shook Savannah”) described Williams as having a “von Bülow-like demeanor.” The editors of the photographic documentary A Day in the Life of America sent a photographer to Savannah with instructions to take a picture of Williams as an example of southern decadence. The photographer, Gerd Ludwig, set up his lights and cameras in Mercer House.

  “He was here all day,” Williams said afterward, “trying his best to capture my ‘decadence’ on film. I suppose I could have made it easy for him. I could have offered to pose with my most recently acquired historic relic—the dagger that Prince Yussupov used when he murdered Rasputin. That would have done nicely, don’t you think? Yussupov sliced off Rasputin’s cock and balls with it.”

  Williams took little interest in the legal side of his upcoming trial. Instead, he busied himself with the “miscellaneous” end of things, which is to say he played Psycho Dice incessantly and allowed Minerva to become a lurking presence around Mercer House. She performed the appropriate rituals for removing a curse from the house, just in case there was one, and she also cast spells on people Williams suspected of wishing him ill. By chance, I happened to see her in the midst of one of these ceremonies. It was an afternoon in March, and the annual Tour of Homes was in progress. As usual, Williams had refused to open Mercer House to the tourists, but Lee and Emma Adler had happily thrown open their doors. Williams stood at his living-room window, smoking a cigarillo and making wry comments as he watched visitors trooping up the Adlers’ front steps across the street. He motioned me over to the window. Two well-dressed couples were walking single file up the Adlers’ steps. Minerva was right behind them, carrying her trademark shopping bag. At the top of the steps, she paused while the others went inside; then, after looking around in all directions, she reached into the bag and flung what appeared to be a handful of dirt into the little garden below. She threw another handful down the steps. Williams laughed.

  “Was that graveyard dirt?” I asked.

  “What else?” he said.

  “Taken from a graveyard at midnight?”

  “When else?”

  Minerva went inside the Adlers’ house. “What on earth is she doing in there?” I asked.

  “Her usual mumbo-jumbo, I suppose,” said Williams. “Twigs, leaves, feathers, exotic powders, chicken bones. I told her Lee Adler controls the D.A., and that’s all she had to hear. Minerva’s been a very busy witch lately. She’s been out at Vernonburg several times to dress down Spencer Lawton’s house, and yesterday she paid a call on Judge Oliver’s cottag
e in Tybee. She’s thrown graveyard dirt at some of the best homes in Savannah, God bless her.”

  While Williams contented himself with these mystical manipulations, Sonny Seiler mounted a vigorous legal campaign to strengthen the position of the defense. He moved to suppress most of the evidence seized at Mercer House the night of the shooting on the grounds that the police did not have a search warrant; the motion was denied by the Georgia Supreme Court. His petition for a change of venue was likewise rejected. As the date for the trial drew near, Seiler found himself with essentially the same defense strategy as in the second trial. This time he would not sequester the jury, which would improve matters slightly, but he had no new evidence and no new witnesses. He had decided against using Hansford’s two young hustler friends and their stories about Hansford’s plan to kill or injure Williams, fearing they might backfire; besides, Hansford’s penchant for violence was amply established through other witnesses. In any case, the most troublesome issue remained the total absence of gunshot residue on Danny Hansford’s hand. That piece of evidence had proved decisive against Williams in both trials, despite everything the defense had done to explain it. Seiler’s expert witness, Dr. Irving Stone, had testified that the downward angle of the gun, plus the blood from Hansford’s hand and the delay of twelve hours before the police swabbed for residue, would have diminished the residue on Hansford’s hands by 70 percent, but no more. It was unlikely that very much of the remaining 30 percent could have accidentally rubbed off on the way to the hospital, because the police had taken the routine precaution of taping paper bags over Hansford’s hands before moving his body. Seiler telephoned Dr. Stone one more time to ask if there was any way he could explain a zero reading of gunshot residue. “No,” Dr. Stone told him, “not with the information I have.”