by John Berendt
At ten o’clock, while the crowd buzzed in the corridor outside the locked courtroom, Judge Oliver convened a star-chamber session in his office in an effort to deal with the situation. In the presence of Lawton, Seiler, a court stenographer, and the paramedic, the judge summoned each of the jurors individually and asked them under oath if they had called a paramedic in the middle of the night to discuss the case. Each said no, including Mrs. Tyo, although when Mrs. Tyo left the room the paramedic told the judge, “That voice is familiar to me.”
Out in the corridor, speculation centered on three possibilities: that Mrs. Tyo had made the call, that the paramedic had been duped by someone acting in league with the prosecution, and that the paramedic was in active collusion with the prosecution. Having failed to get a confession out of anybody, Judge Oliver reopened the courtroom and called the court back into session. Once again, he asked the jurors if any of them had discussed the case with a paramedic. None spoke up. Mrs. Tyo, looking distressed, held a handkerchief to her mouth. She had confided to the forewoman that she had recently suffered a heart attack and was afraid she might be on the verge of having another. Seiler moved for a mistrial. The judge rebuffed him and sent the jury, including Mrs. Tyo, back into deliberations.
In the expectation that something might happen soon, Williams went out into the corridor to wait. Minerva was sitting alone at the far end. He walked over and stood in front of her. She spoke to him as if in a trance.
“Last night I done took the old man’s teeth and buried them in that lady’s yard. Just like you said.”
“They’ve been up to mischief anyhow,” said Williams. “They’ve concocted a story, and they’re trying to throw her off the jury.”
“That would be they only hope,” said Minerva. “’Cause she ain’t switchin’ sides. That’s for sure, and I ain’t lyin’. The old man done took the case his self this time. Uh-huh. And after midnight, me and Delia worked the D.A. and the judge up one side and down the other.”
Williams smiled. “Did you play that number I gave you?”
“Didn’t have no time to play it. I been too busy.”
About noon, the judge called the jury back into the courtroom and asked if there had been any movement toward a decision. There had not. Reluctantly, he declared a mistrial and gaveled the proceedings to a close. Amid the ensuing commotion, Spencer Lawton’s voice could be heard calling out to the judge. “For the record, Your Honor, I will ask the court administrator to set this case down for a retrial as soon as possible!”
A fourth trial would set a record. Jim Williams would become the first person ever to be tried four times for murder in the state of Georgia. The courthouse flack laughed and slapped his thighs and hooted that the matador was now bloodier than the bull. Downstairs, the television crews converged on Lawton, who, though bloody, was still unbowed. “After three trials,” he said, “the score is thirty-five to one for conviction. I’m confident that if we get a jury that is willing and able to decide, we’ll get the right verdict.” As he spoke, a small crowd gathered around him. Minerva stood on the periphery, a broad smile on her face and three crisp one-hundred-dollar bills crumpled in her hand.
Later that evening, Williams sipped Madeira and played round after round of Psycho Dice. His gray tiger cat, having just eaten her first bite of food in two days, lay sleeping in his lap. Williams calculated that his third trial had cost him roughly a quarter of a million dollars.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “only three hundred dollars of it was worth a damn.”
Chapter 28
GLORY
Lillian McLeroy came out on her front steps to water her plants and get a closer look at the commotion in Monterey Square. Ladies in hoopskirts and men in frock coats were milling around in the bright morning sun, along with blue-uniformed soldiers with muskets slung over their shoulders. Clouds of dust rose up from the street in front of Jim Williams’s house as workmen raked truckloads of dirt over Bull Street to make it look like an un-paved nineteenth-century road. The panorama was startling, but the eerie sense of having seen it all before sent a shiver through Mrs. McLeroy. Monterey Square this morning looked just the way it had looked ten years before when the movie about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was being filmed. The movie crews were back again, with their lights and cameras and the big vans parked across the square. This time they were filming Glory, a movie about the first black regiment in the Union Army during the Civil War. Mrs. McLeroy looked toward Mercer House, half-expecting to see Jim Williams drape another Nazi flag over his balcony.
But Jim Williams was not inclined to do that this time. In fact, instead of opposing the filming, he had let the filmmakers use his house. He had let them bring their equipment in and hang lace curtains in the living room to give Mercer House the look of a mansion in Boston in the mid-1860s. Earlier, Williams and the producer had sat down in his study and, over cigars and Madeira, negotiated a fee. The producer offered $10,000. Williams leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Eight years ago I shot a man who was standing right about where you are now. In a few weeks I’ll be going on trial for murder, for the fourth time, and my lawyer is a man of expensive tastes. Make it twenty-five thousand and you have a deal.”
The legal wrangling over a fourth murder trial had dragged on for nearly two years. Sonny Seiler first asked the court to bar another trial on the grounds that it would put Williams in double jeopardy. The motion was denied, and so was Seiler’s appeal. Both Seiler and Lawton then demanded in separate motions that the court disqualify the other from further involvement in the case. Seiler, citing Lawton’s concealment of evidence, said Lawton had been guilty of “prosecutorial misconduct of the highest order.” Lawton countered that Seiler had defended Williams “in a negligent, incompetent and unethical manner.” (This accusation was based largely on Lawton’s contention that the young hustler friends of Hansford had been bribed by Williams and Seiler for their affidavits. There was no proof of that allegation, however, and neither of the two witnesses had ever been used in court.) Both motions were denied. The fourth trial would go forward.
On one issue all parties were agreed: that it would be impossible to find a single juror in Savannah who did not already have strong opinions about the case and about the taxpayers’ money being spent on it. So, on the morning the filming of Glory began at Mercer House, Sonny Seiler went into superior court and asked for a change of venue. He knew it would be granted this time and prayed only that the trial would not fall into the fire of some redneck outpost after the frying pan of Savannah.
In the end, the honors went to the city of Augusta. Spencer Lawton considered it a victory, cheerfully telling friends that Augusta was a “cow town” and that Williams would be convicted for certain. Sonny Seiler was not so sure about that.
The second oldest city in Georgia, Augusta lay 130 miles up-river from Savannah on the fall line of the Appalachian piedmont. The city’s population of fifty thousand was scattered about its sloping terrain in a descending hierarchy that closely followed the lay of the land. On the Hill and the high ground to the north, rich families lived in fine houses and played golf at the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the annual Masters Tournament. At the foot of the Hill, the city’s old tree-shaded boulevards served as a commercial core and a middle-level residential zone. Farther south, the town descended into a vast, low-lying marshland of working-class houses, mobile homes, shanties, Fort Gordon army base, and a backwoods thoroughfare made famous by Erskine Caldwell as a symbol of rural squalor—Tobacco Road.
So Augusta had its sophisticates and its cruder elements. But when the selection of jurors began, it became clear that whether they lived on the Hill or in the swamp, Augustans all had one thing in common: They had never heard of Jim Williams.
Reporters and television crews came up from Savannah to cover the trial, but the local media virtually ignored it. There were no big headlines in the Augusta newspapers, no news flashes interrupting television programs,
no crowds overflowing the gallery. Every weekday for two weeks, a jury of six men and six women calmly assembled in the Richmond County Courthouse to listen and watch as the trial unfolded. They were fascinated, even titillated, and yet they remained detached. They had not lived with the Jim Williams case as people in Savannah had lived with it. Mercer House, with all its grandeur and significance, was merely a house in a photograph to them; it had not figured in the landscape of their daily lives. Jim Williams had not climbed the social ladder in their very midst, arousing feelings of admiration, envy, and outrage as he had done in Savannah over the last thirty years. One prospective juror gave Sonny Seiler a reason to hope that the issue of homosexuality would not be as much a negative in Augusta as it had been in Savannah. “I have no use for gays,” the man admitted during jury selection, “but I don’t mind it so much if they live somewhere else.”
By the time the fourth trial began, Sonny Seiler had worked his presentation into an act of highly polished showmanship, focusing his energies on his strongest line of attack—the incompetence of the police. When Detective Jordan took the stand and claimed that he had put bags on Danny Hansford’s hands, Seiler gave him a brown paper bag and a roll of evidence tape, held out his right hand, and asked him to tape the bag over it. Seiler then paced up and down in front of the jury, waving his bagged hand in the air, leaving no doubt that if Jordan had bagged Hansford’s hands, no one at the hospital could possibly have failed to notice it. Seiler ridiculed the prosecution for inconsistencies in the statements of its expert witnesses—most notably Dr. Larry Howard, director of the State Crime Lab. Dr. Howard had claimed at one trial that Williams could not have fired all his shots at Hansford from behind the desk; at another, he said Williams could have done it. At different times, Howard had said that Danny Hansford’s chair had fallen backward, sideways, and forward. Seiler gleefully brandished a memo that showed how officials at the state crime lab had originally planned to conceal the results of the gunshot-residue tests if they did not help the prosecution. “If you do want to report the test results,” one official wrote to another, “just let us know. The grand jury hearing is June 12.”
“They all play footsie together,” Seiler piped, “and it’s just disgusting. They were thirsting for a conviction. They were saying to each other, ‘Let’s see if the residue tests cut our way. If they do, we’ll use them. If they don’t, we’ll forget it.’”
Seiler kept the jury well entertained, and by the middle of the first week they had nicknamed him “Matlock,” after the lawyer played by Andy Griffith in the popular television series. That was a good sign, and Seiler knew it. Several times in his closing remarks, he moved the jurors to laughter. That was another good sign. “Jurors never laugh if they’re about to send a man to prison,” he said.
Minerva made only one appearance at the trial, and when she did she told Williams she felt movement in his favor. “But listen,” she said, “just in case something go wrong, be sure you put your drawers on backwards. That way you’ll get a shorter sentence.”
The jurors reached a verdict fifteen minutes after they sat down to deliberate, but they stayed in the jury room another forty-five minutes, afraid they might seem too hasty if they sent word to the judge right away. They had found Williams not guilty.
Having been acquitted at last, Jim Williams could never again be tried for murder in the shooting of Danny Hansford. It was over—the worry, the dread, the expense. Because he had been found innocent of any crime in Danny Hansford’s death, his insurance company would step in and settle with Hansford’s mother. So that burden was lifted as well.
Back at Mercer House, Williams poured himself a drink and considered his options. For the first time in eight years, he was a free man. Mercer House was his again, no longer held as collateral for his jail bond. He could sell the house if he wanted to. It was worth over a million dollars, more than ten times what he had paid for it. He could rid himself of the unhappy memories and buy a penthouse in New York, a townhouse in London, or a villa on the Riviera. He could live among people who did not automatically think of guns and killing and sensational murder trials every time they looked at him. Williams’s dark eyes sparkled as he thought about the possibilities. Then a smile crossed his face.
“No, I think I’ll stay right here,” he said. “My living in Mercer House pisses off all the right people.”
Chapter 29
AND THE ANGELS SING
Six months after his acquittal, Jim Williams sat down at his desk to make plans for his first Christmas party in eight years. He called Lucille Wright and asked her to prepare a low-country banquet for two hundred people. He hired a bartender, four waiters, and two musicians. Then he took out his stack of index cards and embarked on the most delicate and satisfying task of all: compiling his guest list.
Williams considered each card carefully before consigning it to the In stack or the Out stack. He put most of the regulars promptly on the In stack—the Yearleys, the Richardsons, the Bluns, the Strongs, the Crams, the Macleans, the Minises, the Hartridges, the Haineses. But he hesitated when he came to the card of his old friend Millicent Mooreland. Though she had been steadfast in her belief that Williams was innocent, she had made the grievous mistake of not attending his last party on the grounds that it had come too soon after Danny Hansford’s death. For this transgression, Williams now put her on the Out stack. She would do penance this year. She would be chastened, and then she would be restored to grace next Christmas, assuming she did nothing to displease Williams before then.
As for Lee and Emma Adler, Williams simply dropped their card into the wastebasket. Williams had no need to curry favor with the Adlers anymore. Lee Adler had been up to his old tricks, anyway. He had just returned from the White House, where he had received a National Medal of Arts award and posed for photographs with President and Mrs. Bush. This only made him more hateful to Williams and to most of the people who would be attending his party. On top of that, Adler had become embroiled in a bitter fight locally over his plan to build new Victorian-style housing for blacks in downtown Savannah. Adler’s scheme called for row upon row of identical houses covered with vinyl siding and jammed together with no lawns or green spaces in between. The Historic Savannah Foundation had risen up in angry opposition, decrying the substandard quality of Adler’s proposed dwellings. Adler had been forced to redesign the project, putting in green spaces and replacing vinyl siding with wood. Jim Williams knew that the guests at his Christmas party would be eager to exchange views about Lee Adler’s latest activities without fear of being overheard by either him or Emma. No problem; they would not be there.
Williams also dropped Serena Dawes’s card into the wastebasket—but sadly, and for a different reason. Some months earlier, Serena had decided that the 1930s and 1940s—the days of her glamorous full-page ads in Life magazine—had been the high point of her life and that it would be downhill from here on. She announced that she would die on her birthday, and she thereupon refused to leave the house or receive visitors or eat. After several weeks, she was taken to the hospital, where one night she summoned her doctor and nurses and thanked them graciously for looking after her. By morning she was dead. She had not died of starvation or committed suicide by any conventional means. She had simply willed herself to die, and being a strong-willed woman, she had succeeded. She had missed dying on her birthday by two days.
Serena’s death was not related in any way to the end of her affair with Luther Driggers, but Williams paused when he came to Driggers’s card anyway. Luther Driggers had been the focus of much attention in recent months. He had been struck by lightning. It had happened at the height of one of Savannah’s typical summer-afternoon thunderstorms. Driggers had been lying in bed with his new girlfriend, Barbara, when a wiry tongue of fire licked out from the charcoal-gray sky and enveloped his house.
Barbara’s hair suddenly stood on end. The first thought that ran through Driggers’s head was that he had never had that kind of effec
t on a woman before. But then he smelled ozone in the air and knew it meant they were surrounded by a huge electrical charge. “Get down!” he yelled. Then it struck. Luther was thrown to the floor, and Barbara was knocked unconscious for several minutes. Later, when the power was restored, they discovered that the lightning had melted the innards of the television set.
At first, Driggers did not connect the lightning with his subsequent episodes of dizziness and an increasing tendency to fall downstairs and lose his balance in the shower. He had been drunk most of his life, and those things seemed attributable to liquor. But when he stopped drinking, the dizziness continued. Doctors found and removed from his brain a semifluid mass the size of a golf ball and the consistency of motor oil.
In the months that followed, Barbara’s stomach began to swell, and that did seem to be a direct consequence of the events of that tempestuous afternoon. They decided that if the baby was a boy they would name it Thor (after the Norse god of thunder). If it was a girl they would name it Athena (after the Greek goddess who carried Zeus’ thunderbolt). But Barbara was not pregnant after all. The lightning had damaged her internal organs, much as it had done to the television set, and within months she became sick and died. Driggers, though otherwise healthy, once again took to walking out of Clary’s drugstore without eating his breakfast. The old fears about his demons resurfaced, and once again people spoke darkly about the possibility that he might dump his bottle of poison into Savannah’s water supply.