Kapitel 1
The Preacher, the Lawyer, and the Unfulfilled Promise
In the sweltering heat of an Alabama courtroom in 1977, a woman with short-cropped hair sat unrecognized among the spectators. The air conditioning had failed as hundreds gathered to witness the trial of Robert Burns, who had shot Reverend Willie Maxwell three times in the head at a funeral. What made this case extraordinary wasn't just the public execution, but the victim's history-six people close to Maxwell had died mysteriously over seven years, each death netting him substantial insurance payouts. National reporters flocked to cover this tale of alleged voodoo and vigilante justice, but Harper Lee wasn't on deadline. The author of To Kill a Mockingbird had spent a year investigating the case, planning to transform it into her long-awaited second book. This true crime narrative would have been her triumphant literary return after her work on In Cold Blood with Truman Capote. Yet despite years of meticulous research and writing, Lee's manuscript about the Maxwell case vanished into literary history, becoming as mysterious as the deaths that inspired it. The book was championed by Oprah, who called it "a must-read for anyone fascinated by the shadowy intersections of justice, morality, and the written word," and remains one of publishing's greatest what-ifs.
Kapitel 2
The Reverend and His Deadly Shadow
The landscape of eastern Alabama was forever altered when Alabama Power transformed the free-flowing Tallapoosa River with the construction of Martin Dam in 1923. Named after Thomas Martin who declared that "every loafing stream is loafing at the public expense," the dam created Lake Martin-at the time the world's largest artificial lake. Workers cleared 44,000 acres of trees, relocated houses, dismantled barns, and even exhumed hundreds of bodies from a dozen cemeteries. When the floodgates closed in 1926, water slowly swallowed farms, churches, stores, and graves, creating a new geography of submerged memories.
In this transformed landscape, Reverend Willie Maxwell emerged as a figure of both respect and fear. Ordained in 1962 at Philippi Baptist Church, Maxwell became known for his biblical knowledge and powerful prayers while maintaining a trio of occupations-powdering at a rock quarry, running a pulpwood crew, and preaching at multiple churches. Despite his dusty work, he maintained an immaculate appearance, always wearing polished shoes and crisp suits.
Behind this polished facade lay a life of financial strain and personal turmoil. Maxwell's twenty-year marriage to Mary Lou was strained by his affairs and mounting debts. In August 1970, Mary Lou was found brutally beaten to death in her Ford Fairlane on Highway 22. Though the car appeared parked rather than wrecked, her body showed extensive injuries including a partially severed ear and signs of strangulation.
Despite being the prime suspect in his wife's murder, Maxwell maintained his innocence, claiming he'd been home sleeping when she disappeared. His neighbor Dorcas Anderson contradicted this story, telling authorities Maxwell had been out all night. The investigation revealed sand and leaves in Mary Lou's mouth and on her bloodstained dress, but key evidence like the strangulation rope was never found-Maxwell had recently burned his trash.
Most tellingly, while under investigation, Maxwell calmly arranged his wife's funeral, settled her estate, and filed a claim on a $15,000 life insurance policy he'd purchased for just twenty-five cents shortly before her death. His letter requesting payment was dated August 19, 1970-by which time he'd already been indicted for her murder.
This pattern would repeat with alarming frequency over the next seven years. After being acquitted of Mary Lou's murder, Maxwell married Dorcas Anderson-the very witness whose changed testimony had helped secure his freedom. Within months, he had taken out multiple insurance policies on his new wife. When Dorcas was found dead in her car near their home in 1972, Maxwell collected on seventeen separate policies despite insurance companies' legal battles to avoid payment.
The deaths continued-Maxwell's older brother J.C., his nephew James Hicks, and finally his sixteen-year-old adopted daughter Shirley Ann, supposedly crushed under a car while changing a tire. The circumstances were suspicious-the tire wasn't actually flat, her hands were clean, and lug nuts were found pinned beneath her body. At her funeral on June 18, 1977, as mourners gathered in the House of Hutchinson Funeral Home, Shirley's sister pointed at Maxwell and shouted, "You killed my sister and now you gonna pay for it!" Before anyone could react, Robert Burns pulled out a Beretta and fired three shots into Maxwell's head at point-blank range, killing him instantly.
The Reverend's death triggered a stampede of panicked mourners through doors and windows, leaving the funeral home in shambles. The shooter immediately surrendered to police, confessing in the patrol car. Whether hero or murderer depended on whom you asked, but one thing was clear: the man who shot Reverend Maxwell would need a good lawyer. And as it happened, the best lawyer in town needed a new client.
Kapitel 3
The Liberal Lawyer in the Deep South
Tom Radney wanted his family to look like the Kennedys-a Dixie Camelot of dashing parents and darling children. For a carefully orchestrated family photoshoot at the Montgomery statehouse, his wife Madolyn had kept their daughters' dresses pristine until that very morning. The photos were important because Tom was running for lieutenant governor, already well-known in Alabama for championing an almost impossible cause: liberal politics in the Deep South.
Born in 1932 in tiny Wadley as the youngest of six children, Radney's politics were shaped by his upbringing. He was doted on by his mother Beatrice, who taught him compassion by sending him to deliver food to neighbors in need. He learned equally powerful lessons from his father Jim's cruelty-particularly when his father evicted a sharecropping family after the father lost an arm in a cotton gin accident. His Methodist faith further convinced him of racial equality and human dignity, beliefs that guided his political campaigns.
Radney's political career began with a bizarre twist in 1962 when he won a seat in the Alabama House of Representatives only to have it redistricted out of existence while he was celebrating on the Gulf Coast. Four years later, he ran for the state senate in the newly reapportioned Sixteenth District, which now included Macon County with its seven thousand newly registered African American voters.
His opponent was H.H. "Runt" O'Daniel, a veteran businessman with powerful connections including segregationist Governor George Wallace. O'Daniel launched a viciously racist campaign, distributing leaflets connecting himself to Wallace and portraying Radney as aligned with Black voters. The most offensive campaign literature featured a cartoon of a barefoot Black man stirring a cauldron with the blood-red question "WHO'S IN THE STEW..." and inside the warning "MAKE SURE IT'S NOT YOU!"
When Radney discovered the printer's mark on the offensive brochure, he brilliantly turned O'Daniel's tactics against him by ordering 1,500 copies and distributing them to Black voters in Macon County and his white country-club friends. Many of Alexander City's business leaders, though not liberals themselves, were embarrassed by such crude racism as they tried to attract outside investment to their growing town. Radney won the runoff thanks to an overwhelming margin in Macon County.
His political career was short-lived, however. After receiving threatening phone calls and notes-one reading "Roses are red, violets are blue, you're dead, Radney, and your family too"-he announced he would leave politics after his term ended. Editorial support poured in from across Alabama newspapers, which lamented the loss of political diversity in the state. The Birmingham News called for "freedom from abuse," while the Alabama Journal warned that his departure would result in "Alabama's further isolation in the political spectrum."
After a year and a half of reflection, Radney decided to run for lieutenant governor. Though he campaigned vigorously across Alabama's sixty-seven counties, spending $50,000 on billboards, brochures, and travel, he ultimately lost the race. On election night, he declared himself "not defeated, only disappointed," lamenting that Alabama wasn't ready for "the politics of reason, not race; of unity, not division."
Having given what many considered the finest speech of his career, Radney bowed out of politics permanently, though he promised to continue fighting for civil rights as a private citizen. Instead, he would become known for representing the most controversial clients in eastern Alabama-including both Reverend Willie Maxwell and the man who killed him.
Kapitel 4
The Trial That Captivated a Town
Alabama's courthouses had evolved from humble beginnings-early judges had presided from oak tree forks, large rocks, and stumps-into architectural symbols of civilization and community pride. These elaborate brick buildings with Greek Revival columns, cupolas, and clock towers served multiple functions beyond legal proceedings, hosting everything from Mardi Gras balls and shape-note concerts to Confederate reunions and campaign rallies.
It was in one such courthouse that the trial of Robert Burns for Willie Maxwell's murder would pit two contrasting attorneys against each other-Tom Radney ("silk") and District Attorney Thomas Young ("sandpaper"). Reporter Alvin Benn, himself familiar with contrasts as a Jewish Pennsylvanian covering the South, noted that unlike most trials which "resemble warmed-over grits," the Burns case promised genuine drama.
Radney's strategy involved keeping two things from the jury: Burns's criminal record and his confessions to killing Maxwell. Meanwhile, he needed to emphasize two things: Maxwell's reputation as a fearsome voodoo practitioner, and Burns's Vietnam service that had left him traumatized. Young's strategy was simpler-he just needed to prove Burns was sane when he shot Maxwell in front of hundreds of witnesses.
The trial began on September 26, 1977, in Judge James Albert Avary's sweltering courtroom. Despite the public interest, cameras were banned during proceedings, with only courtroom sketches capturing the scene. Radney successfully engineered a jury of twelve white men, believing they would be sympathetic to his argument about a "righteous murder."
From the opening statements, the attorneys clashed constantly. Young portrayed Burns as "a one-man lynch mob" while Radney repeatedly objected. When Radney began his opening, he freely admitted Burns killed Maxwell but argued he wasn't himself when doing so. As the prosecution's witnesses testified, Radney successfully shifted focus to Maxwell's alleged crimes, asking the medical examiner about the mysterious deaths of Maxwell's relatives and introducing "voodoo" into the proceedings-accomplishing his strategy of putting the victim on trial instead of his client.
The defense effectively turned prosecution witnesses into their own. When Tellis Hudson from the Auburn crime lab testified about ballistic analysis showing the shooter was three feet from the Reverend, Radney used cross-examination to bring up James Hicks's unexplained death. He also introduced rumors about black pepper in the Reverend's pocket, blood painted on his door, and chickens hanging from pecan trees-planting seeds of voodoo in jurors' minds.
The trial's most dramatic moment came when Jimmy Burns mentioned a man from Eclectic who claimed Maxwell had tried to hire him to kill Shirley Ann. This man, 24-year-old Alphonso Murphy, testified that the Reverend had offered him cash, a car, or property to either kill Shirley or stage a car accident with her already-dead body. Maxwell had even suggested Murphy could kill his own wife if he worried she might talk. The revelation transformed the proceedings from State v. Burns into The People v. Willie Maxwell-casting the murder victim as the true villain and the shooter as a vigilante hero.
The defense called expert witnesses including Julian Woodhouse from East Alabama Mental Health Center, who testified that when Burns pulled the trigger, "he was suffering from disease of the mind, which prevented him from being able to choose from right and wrong." He diagnosed Burns with "transient situational disorder" and confirmed he had acted on "irresistible impulse."
In closing arguments, Assistant DA E. Paul Jones reminded jurors that Maxwell's guilt was irrelevant: "If Willie Maxwell had confessed those crimes in open court, that would not have given Robert Burns the right to take his life." Defense attorney Lee Sims ignored this principle, cataloging accusations against Maxwell before yielding to Radney. Big Tom gave his signature performance-first pleading humility as a "simple country lawyer," then apologizing for any offense caused during trial, before asking jurors to weigh Burns against Maxwell on the scales of justice.
After five hours of deliberation, the jury returned with their verdict: "not guilty by reason of insanity." Burns was sent to Bryce Hospital but released just weeks later-less time than had passed between the murder and his acquittal. The verdict exemplified what Oliver Wendell Holmes had written about American common law-that it must correspond with "the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong."
Kapitel 5
Harper Lee's Quest for Truth
In 1978, Maryon Pittman Allen, wife of Alabama's junior senator, needed a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird to present to First Lady Rosalynn Carter. Unable to find one in Washington, she tracked down Harper Lee through mutual friend John Forney, who revealed Lee was staying at the Horseshoe Bend Motel in Alexander City. During their hour-long conversation, Lee mentioned she was working on something about a "voodoo preacher" but shared few details. What Allen didn't know was that Lee was in Alexander City to finally write her second book.
For the first thirty-four years of her life, she went by Nelle-her grandmother Ellen's name spelled backward. Born in 1926, Nelle Harper Lee was the fourth child of Frances Cunningham Finch and Amasa Coleman Lee (known as A.C. or Coley). Despite limited formal education, A.C. had worked his way up from farm life to become a lawyer, newspaper owner, and state representative.
Monroeville, originally called Centerville until it was renamed after President James Monroe, had just over thirteen hundred people in the 1930s. With minimal supervision from her often-absent mother, Nelle spent her childhood creating adventures from nothing, turning cornfields into battlefields and cattails into jungles. Unlike her peers, however, Nelle was a misfit who wore overalls, wrestled with boys, and was years ahead academically, having learned to read remarkably early.
Her best friend was Truman Streckfus Persons (later Capote), who appeared "like a changeling" at the house next door. The two children became inseparable-flying kites, staging baptisms in his family's fishpond, and spending hours in the tree house A.C. built. When Nelle's father gave her a typewriter, they began writing stories together, finding characters in their neighbors.
In high school, Nelle found another friend in her English teacher, Gladys Watson Burkett, who lived across the street and whom Lee later called "my closest friend in Monroeville." After attending Huntingdon College and the University of Alabama, where she wrote for campus publications, Lee applied for early admission to law school, partly to please her father who dreamed of "A.C. Lee and Daughters, Lawyers." By summer 1948, however, she abandoned law school six weeks before graduation, deciding that "a writer is someone who writes" and that "sooner or later everyone disappoints their parents."
At twenty-three, Lee moved to Manhattan where she befriended Michael Brown, a fellow southerner who Truman Capote had asked to look after her. After her mother Frances died suddenly of cancer and her beloved brother Edwin suffered a fatal brain aneurysm just six weeks later, Nelle returned to New York with renewed urgency to memorialize her childhood.
For five years, she struggled with writing, working practical jobs while living frugally in a third-floor walk-up without hot water or a proper desk. Christmas 1956 brought a life-changing gift from the Browns: an envelope containing a check and note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please." This extraordinary gift transformed her career. Within two months, she completed "Go Set a Watchman" featuring Atticus Finch and his daughter Scout. Though initially rejected, Nelle soon wrote another manuscript incorporating her short stories into what she called "The Long Good-Bye," focusing on Scout's childhood.
Editor Tay Hohoff at Lippincott saw potential despite structural flaws, offering Nelle $1,000 for the manuscript then called "Atticus." For the next two years, Lee worked tirelessly on rewrites, sometimes producing only a page or two daily in her meticulous process. The most crucial changes involved shifting from Jean Louise's adult perspective to young Scout's childhood viewpoint, narrowing the timeframe from decades to just three years, and transforming Atticus from the complicated segregationist of "Watchman" into the moral exemplar readers would come to revere.
Just days after submitting her final manuscript, Harper Lee found herself at a crossroads. With months to wait before her book would be published, she accepted Truman Capote's invitation to be his "assistant researchist" on a New Yorker assignment in Kansas. The Clutter family had been brutally murdered in their Holcomb home, and Capote wanted to profile the town's response.
For Lee, who had grown up reading detective stories and studying criminal law, the opportunity was irresistible. "It was deep calling to deep," she explained. "The crime intrigued him, and I'm intrigued with crime-and, boy I wanted to go." While Capote, with his flamboyant manner and distinctive voice, struggled to gain locals' trust, Lee proved invaluable. She meticulously documented scenes, drew diagrams, tracked chronologies, and most importantly, connected with the wary townspeople who found her warm and familiar.
Kapitel 6
The Unfinished Masterpiece
Even before To Kill a Mockingbird reached bookstores, Harper Lee had developed an unusual complaint about her success: taxation. Speaking with Dolores Hope, a newspaper columnist she'd met in Kansas, Lee jokingly lamented that her book's selection by both the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest meant she "can't afford to make any more money." The irony wasn't lost on anyone-the formerly impoverished Lee who had lived without hot water, written at a makeshift desk, and survived on peanut butter was suddenly wealthy enough to complain about taxes.
Once published in July 1960, Mockingbird immediately became a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize, sold half a million copies in its first year, and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. The more successful it became, the more its author seemed to struggle with fame. Despite profiles in major magazines, Lee increasingly withdrew from public life, overwhelmed by endless signing requests and the growing "Harper Lee Industrial Complex."
Though she wrote few published pieces after Mockingbird, Lee struggled desperately with her second novel. Between caring for her ailing father, fielding constant interruptions, and managing newfound fame, writing proved nearly impossible. When A.C. Lee died in 1962, Harper lost not only her father but the real-life model for Atticus Finch.
In 1964, when Mockingbird was four years old and Lee was thirty-seven, she embarked on what would become a fifty-year silence. Her final substantial interview was with Roy Newquist, where she revealed, "I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words," but admitted being utterly unprepared for her novel's success-it was like "being hit over the head" and left her in "sheer numbness." Writing, she explained, required monastic dedication: "He writes not to communicate with other people, but to communicate more assuredly with himself."
By then, Lee had turned inward. Though she was "always pounding away at her typewriter," she had nothing to show for it. Her literary agent Maurice Crain and her sister Alice had begun coordinating behind the scenes, worried about her well-being. When Lee burned her right hand while frying chicken in 1965, requiring surgery, some friends wondered if her inability to write hadn't made itself literal in the injury.
Her drinking worsened. Neighbors recalled her banging on their door late at night, drunk and despairing. Once she begged for vodka, explaining, "I just threw three hundred pages of a manuscript down the incinerator." Even Capote, battling his own demons, observed that when drinking, "she would tell somebody off-that's what it amounted to. She was really a somebody. People were really quite frightened of her."
By May 1977, everyone who had helped bring Mockingbird into the world was gone-her editor, agent, and Annie Laurie Williams had all died. Yet Lee wasn't finished. At a Democratic National Convention party hosted by her Alabama friend Ned McDavid, she encountered Big Tom Radney. The following year, as violence erupted during New York's worst blackout, Radney wrote her about the strange life and shocking death of Reverend Willie Maxwell. Lee recognized in this story the kernel of a true-crime book and headed back to Alabama to write it.
Kapitel 7
Truth, Fiction, and the Pursuit of Justice
While Truman Capote had made the true crime genre respectable with In Cold Blood, Harper Lee knew better than anyone how he had fabricated details. Despite Capote's public insistence on absolute truth, he privately admitted to inventing scenes, writing to Marie Dewey about creating a scene between her and Alvin and noting "not that I mind inventing details, as you will see!"
Lee deeply disapproved of these fabrications, which included Smith crying in his jail cell and a completely invented cemetery scene between Agent Dewey and Susan Kidwell that concluded the book. Though she never publicly criticized Capote, she privately lamented to friends that "Truman's having long ago put fact out of business had made me despair of 'factual' accounts of anything."
What Capote had done with In Cold Blood presented Lee with a challenge: whether she could write the kind of straitlaced journalism she admired, and whether it could succeed like the fact-bending accounts of her contemporaries. While Capote chose an exceptional crime with wealthy white victims killed by strangers, Lee found a case where only the lawyers and law enforcement were white. She would be writing about black lives and deaths, black families and communities-unusual for the genre even today.
Harper Lee found an ally in Tom Radney, who often visited her at the Horseshoe Bend Motel to discuss the case. Despite being slightly younger, Radney reminded Lee of her father-both were country lawyers who served in the state legislature, Methodist Church lay leaders, Masons, and Chamber of Commerce members. Thrilled to have Alabama's most famous author interested in his case, Big Tom handed over his enormous leather briefcase containing hundreds of pages of Maxwell-related documents-insurance paperwork, applications, policy sheets, legal briefs, and court records dating back to the first murder trial.
Lee was skeptical of Radney's claim that he had refused to represent Maxwell for Shirley Ann Ellington's murder. She knew how lucrative a client the Reverend had been over their decade-long relationship. When Radney seemed to envision himself "as a cross between Atticus Finch and Robert Redford," Lee fueled these fantasies by calling Gregory Peck in front of him, joking about casting for her future book.
During her investigation, Lee tracked down Jim Earnhardt, the only reporter present when Maxwell was shot. Their friendship blossomed into a decades-long correspondence with Earnhardt visiting Lee in Manhattan multiple times. Earnhardt proved an invaluable source who "never fabricated a memory, even around the edges"-a rare quality in Alex City, where questions typically elicited either elaborate, embellished epics or complete silence.
Kapitel 8
The Silence That Echoed for Decades
Nothing writes itself. The vast chasm between reporting and writing is what Janet Malcolm called an "abyss"-a terrible place where many writers get stuck. Despite everyone telling Harper Lee her Maxwell story would be a bestseller, no one could tell her how to actually write it. Finding a protagonist proved difficult-Maxwell himself was underdocumented, Burns played only one dramatic role, and no single lawman solved the cases. Tom Radney seemed promising as a defense attorney who spanned the entire story, but Lee found him "not an entirely reliable narrator" despite his generosity with time and information.
Lee struggled with her writing while staying with her sister Louise in Eufaula. Though Louise "guarded her privacy like Cerberus" and imposed much-needed structure, keeping Lee "shut up in one end of the house" until her daily writing was done, progress remained difficult. In letters to Gregory Peck, Lee confessed her struggles with "The Reverend," quoting journalist Gene Fowler that writing was like "staring at blank paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." She felt trapped between competing demands-her agent wanted "pure gore & autopsies," her publisher wanted another bestseller, and Lee herself wanted "a clear conscience" that she hadn't defrauded readers.
For the first time in three decades, Lee had come tantalizingly close to completing another book-not just an idea but actual "meat and bones" with research, reporting, plot, characters, and prose. Yet she struggled to transform this "Watchman" into a "Mockingbird," lacking the editorial guidance that Maurice Crain or Tay Hohoff had once provided.
Her efforts suffered another blow when Truman Capote died on August 25, 1984, from an overdose of barbiturates, codeine, and Valium. When informed, Lee could only manage a sad "My old friend..." At his memorial service at the Shubert Theatre, she listened as his voice filled the hall reading "A Christmas Memory"-a story about their shared childhood in Monroeville.
By 1987, Lee finally abandoned her Maxwell project. In a letter to Auburn University writer Madison Jones, she listed five conclusions from her decade of work: she knew more about Maxwell than anyone; had collected enough "rumor, fantasy, dreams, conjecture, and outright lies" for a biblical-length volume; lacked sufficient hard facts for a book; had received countless requests for payment in exchange for information; and discovered "there is no cassette tape long enough to measure human vanity." After ten years pursuing the story, she was done.
Lee's reputation as a "one-hit wonder" developed gradually. Unlike Napoleon or Mussolini with early forgotten novels, Salinger with his additional stories, or Bronte who died young, Lee belonged with Margaret Mitchell and Ralph Ellison-authors of wildly successful first novels who never published again. While Ellison left behind thousands of unfinished pages and Mitchell offered various excuses, Lee rarely explained her literary silence.
By the 1990s, Lee had stopped two destructive behaviors: drinking and writing. Her letters became more buoyant, no longer anguished. She began accepting some public recognition, attending ceremonies at the University of Alabama and accepting honorary degrees. She even assisted filmmaker Charles Kiselyak with a documentary about her novel, though refusing to appear on camera.
After Harper Lee's stroke in 2007, she returned to Alabama permanently, settling into the Meadows of Monroeville assisted living facility. Despite her frail health, nearly blind and partially paralyzed, she continued receiving fan mail-including inquiries about the Maxwell case. In 2009, she responded to writer David Brasfield that her reporting had produced "a mountain of rumors and a molehill of facts."
Harper Lee died on February 19, 2016, at age eighty-nine, buried in Hillcrest Cemetery with a simple marker reading only "Nelle Harper Lee." A year after her death, her estate contacted Tom Radney's family. His daughter Ellen traveled to Monroeville, where she recovered her father's oversize leather briefcase that had been in Lee's possession since 1977. Inside were newspaper clippings, case records, depositions, maps, and court transcripts-the research materials for "The Reverend." Among these documents was a single page of Lee's typed reporting notes, similar to those she had made for Truman Capote in Kansas. The Radney family added these materials to the chapter fragment they already possessed, still wondering what became of the rest of the book. Lee's estate remains sealed, with the entirety of her literary assets-including whatever might exist of "The Reverend"-unpublished and unknown.
