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Speaker 3: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 3: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about them. Geesy Bundy, Dalhmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
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Speaker 3: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 3: host journalist and author Dan.
Speaker 6: Zupanski, Good Evening. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher
Speaker 6: accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance
Speaker 6: money in the seventies. With the help of a savvy lawyer,
Speaker 6: he escaped justice for years until the relative shot him
Speaker 6: dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds
Speaker 6: of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted thanks to the same
Speaker 6: attorney who had previously defended the reverend. Sitting in the
Speaker 6: audience during the Vigilantes trial was Harper Lee, who had
Speaker 6: traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with
Speaker 6: the idea of writing her own in Cold Blood, the
Speaker 6: true crime classic. She had helped her friend Truman Capoti
Speaker 6: research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town
Speaker 6: reporting and many more years working on her own version
Speaker 6: of the case. Now, Casey Sepp brings this story to life,
Speaker 6: from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the
Speaker 6: racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time,
Speaker 6: she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the
Speaker 6: country's most beloved writers in her struggle with fame success
Speaker 6: in the mystery of artistic creativity. The book they were
Speaker 6: featuring this evening is Furious Hours, Murder, Fraud, and the
Speaker 6: Last Trial of Harper Lee, with my special guest, journalist
Speaker 6: and author, Casey Sep. Welcome to the program, and thank
Speaker 6: you very much for this interview. Casey Sep.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thanks so much, Dan. It's an honor to talk
Speaker 5: with you.
Speaker 6: It's an absolute pleasure. This is a already released last year,
Speaker 6: a big, big bestseller and rave reviews. Let's start off
Speaker 6: immediately here with just your journalism background and what brought
Speaker 6: you to this story.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sure thing, you know. I actually, I mean I
Speaker 5: studied literature and religion, and so in some ways this
Speaker 5: was a perfect book for me to get to write.
Speaker 5: My background wasn't in crime journalism, but obviously part of
Speaker 5: the Reverence story is about religious authority and the role
Speaker 5: of religious leaders in small towns. Much was made of
Speaker 5: his ability to escape justice because of the respect and
Speaker 5: authority he had owing to his vocation. And when Harper
Speaker 5: Lee got involved, obviously this is the kind of story
Speaker 5: within a story about another writer's attempt to research and
Speaker 5: report this case. So those are the kind of deep
Speaker 5: journalistic background and academic interests that brought me to this case.
Speaker 5: But you know, I grew up in a small town,
Speaker 5: and I grew up loving to kill a mockingbird. So
Speaker 5: Harper Lee was one of my favorite authors, and that
Speaker 5: was how I came to know the story of the
Speaker 5: Reverend Maxwell was through her involvement.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about as you do in the book about
Speaker 6: Reverend Willie Maxwell. His parents Ada and will and they
Speaker 6: were sharecroppers, and he was born one of nine children.
Speaker 6: And you say he was born in an age of
Speaker 6: political and environmental upheaval. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 6: where this is. He was born in Kellyton. You provide
Speaker 6: a map in the book, and this is just west
Speaker 6: of Alexander City. Tell us a little bit about Cusa
Speaker 6: County and where this story is set.
Speaker 5: Sure, yeah, some of your listeners might know it. So
Speaker 5: Lake Martin is this beautiful part of Alabama, eastern Alabama,
Speaker 5: not far from the Georgia line, and it's known now
Speaker 5: as a pretty distinctive recreational area. So folks in Montgomery
Speaker 5: and Birmingham have you know, summer houses there, or they
Speaker 5: go and they spend a week at the lake. But
Speaker 5: the Reverend Maxwell was born in Kutha County, which is
Speaker 5: one of the least populated, most rural counties in all
Speaker 5: of Alabama. So he was born to sharecroppers, spent much
Speaker 5: of his early life sharecropping, and worked some at a
Speaker 5: textile mill. So this was a part of Alabama that
Speaker 5: when hydroelectric power came in, it mechanized a lot of
Speaker 5: these textile mills and moved a lot of rural folks
Speaker 5: into town and into just a higher quality of life.
Speaker 5: So he served in the army, and when he came
Speaker 5: back from his army service during World War Two, he
Speaker 5: actually went to work in the very textile mill that
Speaker 5: had had an army commission to make the uniforms he
Speaker 5: wore a little bit of his background. And you know,
Speaker 5: when I say that kind of political and environmental upheople,
Speaker 5: it has a lot to do with the changing economy
Speaker 5: of the South, so those textile mills really started to boom.
Speaker 5: And you know, it didn't make everyone rich, but it
Speaker 5: made a few people really rich, and it improved the
Speaker 5: quality of life for a lot of others. And on
Speaker 5: top of that, you know, the reverend, long before he
Speaker 5: was accused of murder, he was a very entrepreneurial man.
Speaker 5: And you know he was he wasn't ordained Baptist minister,
Speaker 5: so he spent some of his time preaching and leading
Speaker 5: worship services and conducting funerals. But you know, he did
Speaker 5: a lot of other things for money too. He worked
Speaker 5: at a rock quarry. He just did, you know, kind
Speaker 5: of anything he could for money. And I think that's
Speaker 5: one of the reasons when you know, folks who knew
Speaker 5: him close family members of his started to die, and
Speaker 5: these lucrative life insurance policies he held on all of them.
Speaker 5: It sort of added up to a kind of character,
Speaker 5: you know, someone who had big aspirations, who would do
Speaker 5: anything for money, who was entrepreneurial, who was certainly determined
Speaker 5: to rise above his station in life.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about he meets and gives a ring and
Speaker 6: proposes to Mary lou Edwards, and he's married in April
Speaker 6: forty nine. Tell us about a little bit about their
Speaker 6: married life, what she did and what he was doing
Speaker 6: at that time within this marriage.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it's interesting the reverence of her wife quite early,
Speaker 5: and she was from the same part of Alabama he was,
Speaker 5: and by all accounts, for about two decades they you know,
Speaker 5: from the outside looking in, had a very happy marriage.
Speaker 5: And you know, she was the wife of a minister.
Speaker 5: She worked with him at that textile mill. He he
Speaker 5: also did something again depending on where listeners are listening from,
Speaker 5: they might know a little bit about the timber industry,
Speaker 5: but you know he also worked with the Paulpwodding crew
Speaker 5: cutting you know, short short timbers for paper pulping mills,
Speaker 5: and so he was a busy guy, and you know,
Speaker 5: he was well known and respected for them for the ministry,
Speaker 5: but had a pretty high quality of life that she
Speaker 5: contributed to. She took in work as a seamstress, and
Speaker 5: she came from a big family too, so she had
Speaker 5: a lot of sisters and a brother in the area,
Speaker 5: and you know, they were well known, well respected people,
Speaker 5: and that was pretty much their their way of life
Speaker 5: until nineteen seventy when she was found murdered, and the
Speaker 5: story of their marriage, as far as the public was concerned,
Speaker 5: really changed and things came out about affairs he had had,
Speaker 5: and rumors about his life, you know, without her and
Speaker 5: outside of that marriage.
Speaker 6: Now on the day did you have in nineteen seventy
Speaker 6: August third, nineteen seventy, he had left his wife and
Speaker 6: again twenty years marriage. But he had asked his wife
Speaker 6: to leave the phone line open that day so he
Speaker 6: could call her on the way home.
Speaker 5: So yeah, so he was headed to preach at a revival.
Speaker 5: So again, you know this guy, for all the other
Speaker 5: of work he did, he was most known as a preacher.
Speaker 5: And in fact, he became so infamous in this part
Speaker 5: of Alabama. If you mentioned the reverend, you didn't even
Speaker 5: have to say Maxwell. You know, most people knew who
Speaker 5: you meant. And in nineteen seventy, you know, he was
Speaker 5: still just a well regarded minister headed to preach a
Speaker 5: summer revival and he was, you know, driving far enough
Speaker 5: away he told his wife to leave the phone on
Speaker 5: the hook so he could call to let her know
Speaker 5: he was headed home. She had not gone with him,
Speaker 5: even though some of the other ministers involved had brought
Speaker 5: their wives. And we know this because Mary Lou Maxwell,
Speaker 5: the first missus Maxwell, went next door that night and
Speaker 5: talked with the neighbor of hers and said, you know,
Speaker 5: my husband told me to leave the phone on the hook.
Speaker 5: He's preaching out a revival. She had a sister come
Speaker 5: visit her that day. You know, it was early August.
Speaker 5: She was shelling peas, just preparing the summer harvest, and
Speaker 5: shame old, same old. So she didn't keep anything from anyone,
Speaker 5: and so both from her sister and from her neighbor,
Speaker 5: we know a little bit about what happened earlier in
Speaker 5: the day, and what the reverend told the police was that,
Speaker 5: you know, he called and she didn't answer, and when
Speaker 5: he came home, she wasn't there, and he didn't think
Speaker 5: anything of it. He went right to sleep, you know,
Speaker 5: he figured she was out with a sister or visiting
Speaker 5: her mother, and he went right to bed because he
Speaker 5: was tired and didn't think anything of it. And you know,
Speaker 5: the book starts to track a couple of different version
Speaker 5: of events because on the one hand, the reverence were
Speaker 5: he was never involved in his wife's murder. He had
Speaker 5: no idea what happened. If anything, it was someone trying
Speaker 5: to frame him. But there's, obviously, as there often is
Speaker 5: with a domestic murder like this, there's a parallel track
Speaker 5: of what everyone else said and what the police were
Speaker 5: able to piece together about what happened that night.
Speaker 6: One of the interesting things was that the neighbor that
Speaker 6: he spoke to that night ended up giving him or
Speaker 6: keeping a little bit of information from him and then
Speaker 6: talking to police. What did the Dorcas Anderson say to
Speaker 6: police before we talk about.
Speaker 5: The trial, Yeah, sure things. So when the police came
Speaker 5: to investigate, so Mary Lou's body was found, and her
Speaker 5: car was found, and it looked like a car accident,
Speaker 5: but then it was actually quite a bloody and brutal scene,
Speaker 5: and so they concluded it was a homicide, not just
Speaker 5: a car accident. And so they did what they always do.
Speaker 5: They came to investigate. They came to talk to the spouse.
Speaker 5: So they interviewed the Reverend Maxwell, and they also went
Speaker 5: and interviewed the neighbor, and Dorcas Anderson, who lived next
Speaker 5: door to the reverend, said that she had spoken to
Speaker 5: Mary Lou Maxwell that night. Mary Lou had told her
Speaker 5: this business about the phone and about the revival, but
Speaker 5: he also came back later and she said that her
Speaker 5: husband had called and that he had been in a
Speaker 5: car accident and she needed to go pick him up.
Speaker 5: And that was a telling detail for the police because
Speaker 5: what Dorcas told them was Mary Lou had been lured
Speaker 5: to the very place where her own body would be
Speaker 5: found and where her own car was found in what
Speaker 5: was staged to be an accident. So that was the
Speaker 5: beginning of the fraying story that the reverend provided and
Speaker 5: the kind of weakness of his alibi. And to be
Speaker 5: quite honest, that night, you know, already the police had
Speaker 5: a sense that Dorcas was going to be their star
Speaker 5: witness that you know, she disrupted his timeline. She provided
Speaker 5: them with a narrative of events that made sense and
Speaker 5: explained how Mary Lou ended up where she did that
Speaker 5: night and why her husband was somehow involved.
Speaker 6: You also talk about, and was very important and very
Speaker 6: shocking and fascinating, is you talk about the American insurance
Speaker 6: industry at the time. I won't ask the specific questions.
Speaker 6: This tell us some a little bit of aspects of
Speaker 6: this insurance industry at that time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sure, thing, I mean, I don't want to get
Speaker 5: too far ahead because I think you're plotting our contrastation nicely,
Speaker 5: and this is a complicated case. But you know what
Speaker 5: ends up happening with Dorcas Anderson and the trial of
Speaker 5: the Reverend Maxwell for the murder of his first wife,
Speaker 5: is Dorcas changes her testimony and you know, it upsets
Speaker 5: the police, that confuses the prosecution. But it turns out
Speaker 5: not long after that trial she marries the reverend and
Speaker 5: becomes the second Missus Maxwell. And I bring that up
Speaker 5: on the subject of life insurance only because if the
Speaker 5: reverend had only ever been accused of murdering his first wife,
Speaker 5: this part of the story might not have been as relevant.
Speaker 5: But it turns out he would eventually accused of killing
Speaker 5: five family members, and the patterns such as it was
Speaker 5: part of it was that he held these lucrative life
Speaker 5: insurance policies on all of them. So that's the first
Speaker 5: Missus Maxwell, that's the second Missus Maxwell. All the members
Speaker 5: of his family who die under suspicious circumstances are ensured,
Speaker 5: and he is the beneficiary on almost all of those policies.
Speaker 5: And that's why life insurance becomes a huge part of
Speaker 5: this story. And when I first found out about it's
Speaker 5: about half a million dollars in life insurance that the
Speaker 5: reverend was able to collect in the nineteen seventies, tremendous amount,
Speaker 5: and not just one policy on each of these family members,
Speaker 5: but in some cases a dozen policies on the same individual,
Speaker 5: and the police believed executed without their consent, with out
Speaker 5: their knowledge. And for me, as a journalist, there was
Speaker 5: this straightforward question, well, how could he do it? You know,
Speaker 5: I have a life insurance policy, my parents do, I
Speaker 5: have a pology and my spouse. In order to do that,
Speaker 5: you provide their social Security number, they get a medical exam.
Speaker 5: You know, it's all above board, And I thought, well,
Speaker 5: how could he do this? And the answer is, in
Speaker 5: nineteen seventy, the life insurance industry was the wild West.
Speaker 6: You know, these.
Speaker 5: Standards that we all, if you've gone to get a
Speaker 5: policy today, have to meet, and that the industry you.
Speaker 6: Know, upholds.
Speaker 5: A lot of those protections were responses to fraud. So
Speaker 5: all of these, you know, the medical exam, the proof
Speaker 5: of not of consent, and you know the the networks
Speaker 5: by which these insurance companies make sure that someone is
Speaker 5: not over insured or that they don't have an insurable interest,
Speaker 5: meaning they don't have a reason to keep the person alive.
Speaker 5: You know, I can't go, you know, take a policy
Speaker 5: out on my nemesis. And then the insurance company would
Speaker 5: say like, well, you know, well, big surprise, you have
Speaker 5: a million dollar policy. But they've turned up and so
Speaker 5: those standards didn't exist. So when the reverend executed all
Speaker 5: these policies, you know, in some cases he would you know,
Speaker 5: pull a little tag out of a magazine and it
Speaker 5: would be like a little postcard, and all you needed
Speaker 5: was the date of birth, a correspondence addressed, and a
Speaker 5: little bit of biographical information. And because he was insuring
Speaker 5: his family members, you know, from the company's perspective, it's
Speaker 5: not suspicious that a son would want a policy on
Speaker 5: his mother, or a husband on his wife, or a
Speaker 5: father on his children. And so one by one he
Speaker 5: was insuring through all these different companies. You know, the
Speaker 5: policies were one thousand dollars here, three thousand dollars there,
Speaker 5: maybe twenty five thousand dollars in the largest denomination, but
Speaker 5: they added up pretty quickly. And you know, this, to me,
Speaker 5: it's just one of these interesting fraud cases. I think straightforwardly,
Speaker 5: when you get away with something, the temptation is to
Speaker 5: do it over and over again. And piecing together what
Speaker 5: the Reverend was able to do was fascinating. And there's
Speaker 5: a photo in the book. At one point, you know,
Speaker 5: I was able to get copies of a lot of
Speaker 5: these policies because of some of the civil and criminal
Speaker 5: litigation around the Reverend's activity. And at one point I
Speaker 5: laid them out on my kitchen table, and there's a
Speaker 5: photograph in the book. You know, again, we are talking
Speaker 5: dozens and dozens of policies, and you can just see
Speaker 5: they all have the same handwriting. You know, they're all
Speaker 5: shooting his mailing address. So these people did not know
Speaker 5: for the most part that he had even taken out
Speaker 5: the policies on them. And in a couple of instances
Speaker 5: when the companies like sever their connection, so a couple
Speaker 5: of companies caught on, you know, when wife number two
Speaker 5: died under the same circumstances, there were a couple of
Speaker 5: companies who said, you know, that's it, we're canceling. We
Speaker 5: will give you a refund on what you've paid in,
Speaker 5: but we're terminating our relationship with you. And one of
Speaker 5: those termination letters, you know, itemizes, nieces, nephews, and infant daughter.
Speaker 5: You know, just a huge number of family members and
Speaker 5: again no reason to believe any of them had any
Speaker 5: idea that he held policies on them because he was
Speaker 5: hiding the correspondent. You know, once or twice he got
Speaker 5: tripped up, like one of the policies he tried to
Speaker 5: take out on his mother, who was older by that point.
Speaker 5: You know, the company contacted her physician to say, like
Speaker 5: is she in good health? Like is this a good policy?
Speaker 5: And you know the doctor was like, she doesn't know
Speaker 5: anything about it. So I you know, the fraud stuff
Speaker 5: is very interesting to me, and it is a big
Speaker 5: part of his story. And I think it's an interesting
Speaker 5: part of his character because again this was, you know,
Speaker 5: a black sharecropper born in the nineteen twenties and one
Speaker 5: of the poorest counties in Alabama. And some of his
Speaker 5: story is just the resourcefulness of you know, he was
Speaker 5: an incredibly intelligent person with very limited opportunities for exercising
Speaker 5: that intelligence. And you know, his lawyer, who was also
Speaker 5: an army that you know, when Tom Radney, his lawyer,
Speaker 5: joined the military, you know, he went into the jag Corps.
Speaker 5: He got legal experience. He came home and opened a
Speaker 5: law office, and you know, the Reverend Maxwell, who was awarded,
Speaker 5: you know, a medal for good conduct in the army,
Speaker 5: came home to no opportunities. So I think it's it's
Speaker 5: just an interesting part of the story both how the
Speaker 5: industry worked at the time, and you know, he was
Speaker 5: not the only person who took advantage of the insurance
Speaker 5: companies this way. There were other crimes, you know, none,
Speaker 5: I don't think with quite this larger body count, but
Speaker 5: certainly other examples of fraud. I mean, if you can
Speaker 5: believe it, there was literally another Willie Maxwell, and that
Speaker 5: one lived in Florida and he was caught up in
Speaker 5: an insurance fraud scheme where they just dumped a body
Speaker 5: and pretended it was you know, pretended it was him.
Speaker 5: And then you know, the newspaper covers of that one
Speaker 5: is like, you know, Lazarus, the sky rises again. But
Speaker 5: the guy who was supposed to be pretending to be
Speaker 5: dead kind of forgot and he got picked up on
Speaker 5: a like a kind of lower rest carget. The area
Speaker 5: is in prison, but he's supposed to be dead and
Speaker 5: someone's collecting the policies on him. So you know, it's
Speaker 5: just it really was the wild West, you know. And
Speaker 5: if you've seen Double Indemnity or you know, any of
Speaker 5: these movies about the insurance industry, they're not documentaries, but
Speaker 5: you know, they dramatize some of the irregularities in the industry. Now, again,
Speaker 5: I always say, the book isn't a how to. You
Speaker 5: cannot get away with this kind of stuff today. There
Speaker 5: are standards and protections and all sorts of ways that
Speaker 5: the companies try and regular people's participation in the in
Speaker 5: the industry. But it's a financial market like anything else,
Speaker 5: you know, it really is. It grew in response to
Speaker 5: economic trends, and it's susceptible to fraud the way any
Speaker 5: financial market is.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about Tom Radney. He represents Maxwell in his
Speaker 6: civil suits and his criminal charges, but he also represents
Speaker 6: someone called Ophelia Burns. Tell us who Aphelia Burns is,
Speaker 6: and that'll be important a little bit later. And talk
Speaker 6: about the marriage with Dorcas Anderson.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I tipped hand a little bit earlier. And
Speaker 5: you know Dorcas Anderson, the next door neighbor, who again
Speaker 5: the police are just convinced is going to be their
Speaker 5: star witness. When they finally bring this murder charge against
Speaker 5: the Reverend Maxwell, you know, they're between a rock and
Speaker 5: a hard place. This guy is aggrieving widower. You know,
Speaker 5: he's an upstanding reverend. He strikes the curious pose in
Speaker 5: court and lo and behold the next door neighbor who's
Speaker 5: supposed to blow a hole in his alibi instead provides
Speaker 5: him with one. And so Dorcas Anderson, she was married
Speaker 5: at the time, but her husband died of als and
Speaker 5: you know, look in the way that rumor and innuendo
Speaker 5: and gossip can grow, a lot of things were said
Speaker 5: about the reverends and how he got away with all this.
Speaker 5: And one of the things that was said was, you know,
Speaker 5: he was a voodoo practitioner and he could get whatever
Speaker 5: he wanted, and he could, you know, hexa jury and
Speaker 5: charm anyone. And so those rumors included Dorcas's husband, who
Speaker 5: did you know, in some ways die at a convenient time,
Speaker 5: you know, just when she was planning to marry the reverend.
Speaker 5: So she's the second missus Maxwell. She is also found
Speaker 5: dead in what appears to be a car accident, although
Speaker 5: the police investigated, hoping to prove homicide and her you know,
Speaker 5: status as the second Missus Maxwell probably already sounds a
Speaker 5: little unbelievable to some folks listening. But she was not
Speaker 5: the last Missus Maxwell. So Ophelia Burns, who was you know,
Speaker 5: investigated and charged with, although not ever tried, as an
Speaker 5: accessory to the murderer of the first Missus Maxwell, crazily
Speaker 5: becomes the third Missus Maxwell. So the reverend actually takes
Speaker 5: a third wife, and that's Ophelia, and Ophelia survived him,
Speaker 5: but Ophelia was implicated in some of the other crimes
Speaker 5: he was accused of. So there are three wives, two
Speaker 5: of whom are found dead, one of whom survives the reverend.
Speaker 5: And you know, if you talk to some people in
Speaker 5: this part of Alabama, they would say she survived him
Speaker 5: because she was involved. You know, that she knew exactly
Speaker 5: what had happened, and she had been involved. It's not
Speaker 5: quite clear what the police's theory was, although because all
Speaker 5: of these murders were staged as car accidents, one theory
Speaker 5: is simply that she helped provide a getaway. So when
Speaker 5: the reverend would stage these crime scenes, she helped him
Speaker 5: get away. Although there was reason to believe in that
Speaker 5: first murder, she might have been more involved, and that's
Speaker 5: certainly some of the theories that Harperley entertained when she
Speaker 5: investigated the case. But that was another client of Tom Radney's.
Speaker 5: And you know you've mentioned Tom is the lawyer kind
Speaker 5: of at the heart of my book. So the first
Speaker 5: third of the book is about the reverend and the
Speaker 5: crimes he was accused of, and the second third is
Speaker 5: about Tom Radney. This you know, small town lawyer, had
Speaker 5: a diverse practice. Like a lot of small town lawyers,
Speaker 5: was you know, just lived and died for trials. He
Speaker 5: had had a political career before he settled into law
Speaker 5: and just you know, lived for a courtroom, lived for
Speaker 5: the dramatic speech. You know, loved it when people said
Speaker 5: he reminded him of Mattlock, that kind of a lawyer
Speaker 5: with a dramatic courtroom presence. And I think one of
Speaker 5: the things that did was make him crave you know,
Speaker 5: hard cases, you know, the long shots that no one
Speaker 5: else wanted. And he and the reverend, you know, had
Speaker 5: a legal relationship for ten years and he did everything
Speaker 5: from mortgages for the reverend to as you've said, these
Speaker 5: civil cases. So the police were investigating the reverend. But
Speaker 5: at a certain point, so was basically every insurance company
Speaker 5: in the state of Alabama. You know, they were trying
Speaker 5: to policies, and that meant that quite often the reverend
Speaker 5: had to sue them in order to get what he
Speaker 5: was theoretically owed. And so there was there was a
Speaker 5: lot of litigation. You know, every time one of his
Speaker 5: family members died after in nineteen seventy two, he had
Speaker 5: to take the companies to court or settle with them
Speaker 5: out of court. And so Tom ran They handled not
Speaker 5: only the criminal investigations. You know, he would arrange for
Speaker 5: private autopsies, and he would you know, be with the
Speaker 5: reverend when he was questioned, and if there were court proceedings,
Speaker 5: he represented him in court. But he also handled all
Speaker 5: these these civil cases. And you know that took a
Speaker 5: lot of creativity because at a certain point, I quote
Speaker 5: this letter in the book, but you know, Tom is
Speaker 5: joking with a colleague of his in Montgomery, and he's
Speaker 5: asking this old friend of his if he'll bring some
Speaker 5: litigation in the Montgomery circuit courts, because you know, you
Speaker 5: could docket shop to a certain extent based on where
Speaker 5: the company was located or where the regional office was,
Speaker 5: and Tom was trying to get this friend in Montgomery
Speaker 5: to bring some new civil cases because he was worried
Speaker 5: he'd run out of juries. Around Lake Martin, you know
Speaker 5: that there was no one who had not heard the reverend,
Speaker 5: you know, bring one of these cases. And you know,
Speaker 5: it was a lot of lawyering, and it was creative lawyering,
Speaker 5: and you know, it raised a lot of eyebrows in
Speaker 5: town that both of them did. You know, the reverends
Speaker 5: had a reputation, but so did Tom. And at a
Speaker 5: certain point he built this new brick law office, you know,
Speaker 5: right right downtown in alex City, and folks called it
Speaker 5: the Maxwell House because they said it was the house
Speaker 5: the Reverend Maxwell had built from all of these insurance
Speaker 5: cases that you know, not only was the reverend making
Speaker 5: money off these cases, but obviously his lawyer was getting
Speaker 5: a cut. And I think, you know, you brought up Ophelia,
Speaker 5: who was a very interesting client. But obviously the most
Speaker 5: interesting thing that happens is, you know, after the reverend
Speaker 5: is gunned down and murdered, Tom then takes the case
Speaker 5: of the vigilante who murdered him, and you know, I
Speaker 5: think there are some interesting ethical questions about that choice,
Speaker 5: and certainly there were questions around town. But I think
Speaker 5: that one of the things Tom thought was taking that
Speaker 5: other case could possibly help his reputation and rehabilitate his standing,
Speaker 5: because you know, so many people had objected to the
Speaker 5: work he did for the reverend. So I think, you know,
Speaker 5: it's it's to me one of the most obvious reasons
Speaker 5: Harperley took an interest in this case. She found out
Speaker 5: about the Reverend in nineteen seventy seven when he was
Speaker 5: gunned down by that vigilante, and she spent a lot
Speaker 5: of time getting to know the vigilante and getting to
Speaker 5: know Tom Radney and some of the other folks who
Speaker 5: had worked these cases, both as law enforcement officers and
Speaker 5: as lawyers, and you know, as life insurance investigators and
Speaker 5: coroners and a lot of people involved. But I think
Speaker 5: that you know, the kind of morally complicated lawyer was
Speaker 5: obviously we all know from her writing about Atticus, since
Speaker 5: just something she was interested in the complexities of the
Speaker 5: law and of our understanding, and of the way that
Speaker 5: it both you know, pursues justice and and can sometimes
Speaker 5: run orthogonal to justice.
Speaker 6: Right. He had also been told by his client something
Speaker 6: that suggested his guilt. You write that in the book
Speaker 6: as well, which one Well he writes.
Speaker 5: This because I think, yeah, I mean kind of kind
Speaker 5: of all of the above. And you know, and I
Speaker 5: say that sort of jokingly, but obviously, you know, our
Speaker 5: legal system, when it comes to criminal cases, at least,
Speaker 5: is very clear everyone is entitled to a lawyer, regardless
Speaker 5: of their guilt. And I think one of the things
Speaker 5: that's interesting about Tom is the way that that belief
Speaker 5: animated his practice and complicated it. So you know, it's
Speaker 5: really true, anyone accused of murder, even if they've confessed,
Speaker 5: is entitled to a good defense and to a robust defense.
Speaker 5: And I think Tom believed that. And I think that,
Speaker 5: you know, Tom was a white lawyer practicing in a
Speaker 5: part of the world where black defendants were not all
Speaker 5: afforded the same opportunities for justice and for a zealous defense.
Speaker 5: And I think that there were really admirable things animating
Speaker 5: his work as a lawyer. But you know, it's true
Speaker 5: what he did with the Reverend. Certainly there were people
Speaker 5: who objected, and there were you know, things he said
Speaker 5: after the fact, I mean, look, in attempting to defend
Speaker 5: the vigilante. Part of the case that Tom Radney made
Speaker 5: was that the reverend was a murderer who had never
Speaker 5: been held accountable for his actions, and he made, you know,
Speaker 5: he made it seem like that was the fault of
Speaker 5: the police and of the district attorney in this circuit.
Speaker 5: But of course plenty of people thought that was his
Speaker 5: fault too, that his defense had been a little too zealous,
Speaker 5: and that he had been a little too willing to,
Speaker 5: you know, do whatever it took to defend the reverend.
Speaker 5: So I think there are things like that, and then right,
Speaker 5: you know, when it came to Robert Burns, the vigilante, Look,
Speaker 5: three hundred people watched him commit that crime, and there
Speaker 5: were three hundred eye witnesses who plenty of prosecutors would
Speaker 5: have called it's not quite how that trial unfolded. And
Speaker 5: we can talk about that if you want. But you know,
Speaker 5: the defense he brought for Robert Burns was an insanity defense,
Speaker 5: and that is its own can of worms. Not just
Speaker 5: in this case, but at the time, you know, certain
Speaker 5: states had already banned the insanity defense. There was an
Speaker 5: ongoing conversation in the legal community about whether it was
Speaker 5: applicable or how what standards should be applied to make
Speaker 5: sure that it was relevant to the facts at hand,
Speaker 5: And so yeah, I mean this book. Really the reason
Speaker 5: Tom is such a central figure is I think that
Speaker 5: you know, his decisions are interesting and up for debate,
Speaker 5: certainly just fodder for a very interesting conversation about you know,
Speaker 5: what kinds of cases lawyers take and how mixed or
Speaker 5: muddled their motives might be, and you know, how we
Speaker 5: want the legal system to work. So yeah, I'm not
Speaker 5: quite sure which one you had in mind, but I
Speaker 5: think you know, if you sat down any number of
Speaker 5: people in Alexander City, they would say, you know, there's
Speaker 5: a lot to talk about when it comes to Tom Radney,
Speaker 5: and frankly, he would have had a lot to say.
Speaker 5: He's certainly, you know, talked a lot with Harper Lee
Speaker 5: about the Reverends and what he thought of them, and
Speaker 5: you know what he taught certainly after the fact.
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Speaker 6: We talked about and you already outlined it. This came
Speaker 6: down to a gentleman had assassinated Reverend Maxwell right in
Speaker 6: the courtroom. So let's talk about what we didn't mention
Speaker 6: that a couple other murders that had strikingly similar characteristics
Speaker 6: to the other murders of his wives were his own brother,
Speaker 6: found in nineteen seventy two, and a nephew was missing
Speaker 6: in nineteen seventy six, And from that police did gain
Speaker 6: a little gained quite a bit of information from people
Speaker 6: that apparently the reverend had approached to do some of
Speaker 6: his dirty work.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we were talking earlier that there was allegedly
Speaker 5: an accomplice or an accessory, and that was Ophelia, who
Speaker 5: became the reverend's third wife. But there were these other
Speaker 5: figures who had emerged, and actually one of whom testifies
Speaker 5: at the trial of the vigilante, and they were, you know,
Speaker 5: their sweorgn statements were taken by the Alabama Bureau of Investigation,
Speaker 5: and they had worked with the reverend and some of
Speaker 5: these other capacities. So they'd worked on his pulp putting crew,
Speaker 5: and you know, they knew him from that kind of work,
Speaker 5: and at various points he had propositioned them to take
Speaker 5: part in the murders. And the police did learn a
Speaker 5: lot from those cases, partly because it did describe the
Speaker 5: intent and the motive. I mean, it was very clearly
Speaker 5: he propositioned them by offering them, you know, portions of
Speaker 5: the life insurance or cash payments related to the money
Speaker 5: he would make after the life insurance was settled on
Speaker 5: those individuals. And so those statements in that testimony at
Speaker 5: the trial of the vigilante, you know, I think in
Speaker 5: ways that are really interesting for a case like this,
Speaker 5: demystified things. You know, there had been so much fear
Speaker 5: and gossip and rumor, you know, the voodoo magic, all
Speaker 5: kinds of things people said about why the reverend could
Speaker 5: get away with us all, and you know, here were
Speaker 5: these statements that were just incredibly human and incredibly straightforward.
Speaker 5: You know, the Reverend asked me to meet him here.
Speaker 5: He said he would have a pair of gloves so
Speaker 5: there would be no fingerprints. He planned to use you know,
Speaker 5: a small capsule pill which would incapacitate the person, and
Speaker 5: then we would stage at like an accident, and after
Speaker 5: he got the insurance, I would get you know, X amount,
Speaker 5: And you know that meant it wasn't voodoo. There were
Speaker 5: no you know, these weren't magic potions, you know, and
Speaker 5: the lack of evidence was just from planning, you know,
Speaker 5: wearing gloves, cleaning up the scene, and you mentioned that,
Speaker 5: you know, the reverend's nephew and brother had been found
Speaker 5: under these, you know, similarly suspicious circumstances. But I think
Speaker 5: the crime that was most shocking was the last of
Speaker 5: his family members, and that is the funeral at which
Speaker 5: the reverend was gunned down. And he had a stepdaughter,
Speaker 5: so Ophelia, that third wife of his, had been raising
Speaker 5: a little complicated to get into the specific family dynamics,
Speaker 5: but she was raising a child as her own. And
Speaker 5: that little girl, Shirley Anne Ellington, that's why she has
Speaker 5: a different surname. Shirley Anne was sixteen years old and
Speaker 5: she had been living with Ophelia and the reverend, and
Speaker 5: she was found murdered. And it's her uncle who gunned
Speaker 5: down the reverend. And who you know, Robert Burns is
Speaker 5: alive today and he will talk about what he did.
Speaker 5: And he is just as clear today as he was
Speaker 5: in the summer of nineteen seventy seven as far as
Speaker 5: he was concerned. You know, the reverend had gotten away
Speaker 5: with murder five if five times, and that the police
Speaker 5: could do nothing, and he knew he was going to
Speaker 5: get away with Shirley Anne's murder and he had to
Speaker 5: do something about it because as far as he was concerned,
Speaker 5: other family members were at risk. You know, it would
Speaker 5: never stop unless someone stopped it. So I think, you know,
Speaker 5: as with any true crime story, there's a way that
Speaker 5: this is, you know, just lurid and fascinating. Then there's
Speaker 5: a way that it was incredibly real and tragic for
Speaker 5: the people who live through it. And I think one
Speaker 5: of the things that's nice about the book, by getting
Speaker 5: to tell Harperly's story is right away you start to
Speaker 5: see the ways that writers can make decisions about how
Speaker 5: to humanize victims and how to write responsibly about what
Speaker 5: happened and who was involved, and the reality and the
Speaker 5: tragedy of these kinds of cases for not just the
Speaker 5: people who knew the victims, but for the whole community
Speaker 5: that's terrorized by something like this. And you mentioned in
Speaker 5: the intro, you know, her friendship with Truman Capodi, But
Speaker 5: I think a lot of her ethics around journalism and
Speaker 5: reporting and her sensitivity about cases like this came from
Speaker 5: her work on in Cold Blood. You know, they went
Speaker 5: to the small town in Kansas, and they saw what
Speaker 5: that family homicide did to friends and neighbors and just
Speaker 5: how indelibly it left its mark on a community. And
Speaker 5: I think, you know, she was sensitive to that in
Speaker 5: Alexander City, and when she met with Robert Burns, she
Speaker 5: was incredibly patient and thoughtful. And when she thought about
Speaker 5: Tom Radney, I think it's very clear she knew, you know,
Speaker 5: she had to represent him accurately and critically because his
Speaker 5: role was perceived differently by different people. And the story
Speaker 5: of the Reverend, which had been you know, kind of
Speaker 5: black comedy for some of the white folks around this
Speaker 5: part of Alabama, and just this crazy story, you know,
Speaker 5: this front page melodrama. You know, she interviewed Mary Lou
Speaker 5: Maxwell's family members, and she interviewed Shirley Anne Ellington's friends,
Speaker 5: and she knew what this was actually like for the
Speaker 5: people who lived through it, and for other family members
Speaker 5: who were afraid, or for Robert Burns, who, you know,
Speaker 5: per his defense was driven mad by the fear and
Speaker 5: the uncertainty of what meant, what might happen. So, you know,
Speaker 5: she only came to the story in nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 5: but I think plotting it out as it happened from
Speaker 5: nineteen seventy you know to nineteen seventy seven is very
Speaker 5: important to do, and however it seems in hindsight, I
Speaker 5: think the first third of the book does just try
Speaker 5: to plot it and show you, you know, to be
Speaker 5: fair to the investigators. A pattern only emerges in hindsight
Speaker 5: and as more crimes unfold. And so what they thought
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy is different than what they thought in
Speaker 5: nineteen seventy two, and their certainty and urgency in nineteen
Speaker 5: seventy seven was different than in nineteen seventy You righte.
Speaker 6: That Harper Lee when she went to observe this trial
Speaker 6: was the most famous author from Alabama ever, but she
Speaker 6: was unrecognizable. People didn't know what she looked like, what
Speaker 6: was her techn if. She learned quite a bit incredible
Speaker 6: amount from her research techniques, and also because of her
Speaker 6: legal back, she was an incredible asset to Truman Capode.
Speaker 6: But she also was very affable and friendly and empathetic
Speaker 6: as opposed to Truman Capodi. So did she utilize those
Speaker 6: skills or how did she utilize those skills in terms
Speaker 6: of reaching out to the to the community. I have
Speaker 6: to find out more about Reverend Maxwell and his crimes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Jen, I think that's an important kind of tension
Speaker 5: to point out, and I'm sure it's a little hard
Speaker 5: for people to process today. You know, when we think
Speaker 5: of JK. Rowling or John Grisham, you know, their pictures
Speaker 5: are on the back of every book they published, and
Speaker 5: we know what they look like, and they're in you know,
Speaker 5: People magazine, or we see them on you know, whatever
Speaker 5: blog we read, and so they're just incredibly famous. And
Speaker 5: it's not that Hartberly wasn't famous. You know, to Killa
Speaker 5: Mockingbird sold forty million copies, you know, Gregory Peck's Oscar
Speaker 5: winning film, and people knew the story and they knew
Speaker 5: her name, but you know, she really is shoed same
Speaker 5: or publicity and didn't do interviews after nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 5: and so the public, whatever image they had of her
Speaker 5: in nineteen sixty when t Kill a Mockingbird came out,
Speaker 5: she really was able to be quite anonymous and inconspicuous
Speaker 5: for the rest of her life. And you know, the
Speaker 5: best demonstration of that story is I got told the
Speaker 5: story about you know, she was in her seventies and
Speaker 5: in New York City and she was at a lunch
Speaker 5: in a restaurant and the head of her publishing house
Speaker 5: was there and the person he was with said, you know, oh,
Speaker 5: that's Harper Lee. You see her. And the head of
Speaker 5: the publishing house, you know, she's one of their best
Speaker 5: selling authors, said, oh, my gosh, I've never met her.
Speaker 4: Who is she?
Speaker 5: And you know, asked to be introduced to her because
Speaker 5: he didn't recognize her, he'd never met her. And so
Speaker 5: that is what she brought in nineteen seventy seven to
Speaker 5: this courthouse. You know, she attended the trial of the vigilante,
Speaker 5: but until she introduced herself, no one recognized her. And
Speaker 5: even once she had you know, I tell the story
Speaker 5: in the book of her going to lunch with the
Speaker 5: court reporters. So one of the many people she got
Speaker 5: to know was was the transcriptionists there at the try
Speaker 5: and she went for lunch with that court reporter. You know,
Speaker 5: they had boloney sandwiches. The woman insisted on introducing Harperlely
Speaker 5: to her husband, And when I interviewed that court reporter,
Speaker 5: you know, I said, well, what was she like, what
Speaker 5: was that lunch like? And she said, you know, she's
Speaker 5: the most down to earth person I ever met, and
Speaker 5: you know, just good country girl, you know, wickedly funny,
Speaker 5: but just really you know, I feel like I'd known
Speaker 5: her my whole life, and I think that is an
Speaker 5: important part of you know, when reporters think about how
Speaker 5: to do their work, you always want to be professional,
Speaker 5: but I think it is important to make people comfortable
Speaker 5: and for them to feel like you're listening and that
Speaker 5: you're there for the right reasons to understand their story,
Speaker 5: not to exploit them. And Harper Lee just had that
Speaker 5: talent through and through and it was authentic and same
Speaker 5: thing when you when you talk to people who met
Speaker 5: her when she was out in Kansas, you know, it's
Speaker 5: really true if you've ever seen Capoti or Infamous, and
Speaker 5: your listeners, if they haven't, would loved those two films
Speaker 5: about the writing of in Cold Blood and in both
Speaker 5: Harperly it's depicted. She's played by Sandra bullickin Wan and
Speaker 5: Catherine Kenner and another and in both we see her
Speaker 5: play that role and you know, just talking to people
Speaker 5: in ways that make them feel comfortable and coming with
Speaker 5: humility and thoughtfulness and sincerity. And you know, I think
Speaker 5: that her friendship with Capodi is one of the most
Speaker 5: fascinating in American literature. You know, they knew each other
Speaker 5: from children. They moved to New York around the same time.
Speaker 5: They're pursuing their careers, you know, almost on these parallel tracks.
Speaker 5: But you know they are really just goal models of
Speaker 5: how to be an artist. And you know they go
Speaker 5: out to Kansas and there it's just it's it's a
Speaker 5: fine display of you know, Capodi in his finest furs,
Speaker 5: you know, speaking with an accent no one can understand,
Speaker 5: you know, demanding the caviare that he's brought in his
Speaker 5: foot locker all the way from Manhattan, you know, versus
Speaker 5: Harper Lee, who's down home and comfortable and unassuming and
Speaker 5: can talk to you about the Methodist liturgy or about
Speaker 5: the Four Age Club. And I think that was important
Speaker 5: to him, and it was certainly important to her. And
Speaker 5: you know, it's only more and more s as her
Speaker 5: life went on, because she was one of the world's
Speaker 5: most successful authors. She did have a pulitzer, but she
Speaker 5: you know, never let it change her presentation. And I
Speaker 5: think that, you know, over and over again people in
Speaker 5: alex City, when you know, I would talk to them
Speaker 5: about what was it like when you met her, or
Speaker 5: what was it like when she interviewed you about these cases?
Speaker 5: There's really no one who didn't say it wasn't one
Speaker 5: of the most interesting conversations in their in their whole life,
Speaker 5: And there wasn't anyone who didn't feel like she just
Speaker 5: cared about them. And I think the you know, interesting
Speaker 5: version of that for me as a journalist is, you know,
Speaker 5: the Radney family. So Tom Radney has passed away, but
Speaker 5: everyone in the Radney family thinks he was going to
Speaker 5: be the hero of Harperly's book because she took such
Speaker 5: an interest in him, and she did all these interviews
Speaker 5: with him and she was so complimentary. But the very
Speaker 5: first time I met Robert Burns, you know, he told
Speaker 5: me he was going to be the hero of the
Speaker 5: book and that's how he felt because she had been
Speaker 5: so thoughtful and caring and appreciative of his time. And
Speaker 5: I think, you know, if you're the kind of journalist
Speaker 5: who makes everyone feel like you care about their story
Speaker 5: and that you're going to treated with respect, it's a
Speaker 5: really admirable thing. And you know, the truth of the
Speaker 5: matter is Harperly never published her book, So you would
Speaker 5: expect at least some of these people to be bitter
Speaker 5: about that or to say, you know, I was so disappointed,
Speaker 5: and I think it's a credit to her character that
Speaker 5: none of them seemed to hold it against her. You know,
Speaker 5: they just really feel like, you know, she came with
Speaker 5: sincerity and openness and all the right motives, and it
Speaker 5: almost didn't matter she didn't publish the book. You know,
Speaker 5: it was an honor to them that she took an
Speaker 5: interest in their life. And you know, this was the
Speaker 5: strangest thing that ever happened in this part of Alabama,
Speaker 5: and it only got more important when she got involved.
Speaker 6: Now you talk about it's interesting that Truman Capodi claimed
Speaker 6: to have reinvented the nonfiction genre by incorporating techniques used
Speaker 6: in fiction, and Harperly had assisted Truman Capode in this
Speaker 6: and knew the end was all the book and was
Speaker 6: critical of, we'll say his sense of accuracies and facts.
Speaker 6: She did not follow in his footsteps in terms of
Speaker 6: this new journalism. What was her intention seventeen years after
Speaker 6: she had this incredible best selling book to Kill a Mockingbird?
Speaker 6: What was her intent with this and what was her
Speaker 6: opposition to what Truman Capodi and some of these authors
Speaker 6: were doing. And she did not want to do that
Speaker 6: same thing with this book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure Dan, you know, you could probably,
Speaker 5: like you know, write a book on this topic. And
Speaker 5: obviously a lot of true crime writers have a lot
Speaker 5: of different opinions about how speculation and psychological projection should
Speaker 5: work in works of narrative nonfiction, and I'm sure true
Speaker 5: crime readers have even more opinions about that. I've actually
Speaker 5: appreciated some of the sophistication of those conversations around true
Speaker 5: crime documentaries and podcasts. I think a lot of thoughtful
Speaker 5: questions are being asked about how we represent uncertainty or
Speaker 5: you know, how we handle the reliability of sourcing, or
Speaker 5: you know, takes seriously different versions of events or different
Speaker 5: accounts of them. And you know, Harper Lee was at
Speaker 5: the forefront of those conversations because she had been so
Speaker 5: involved in Capote's book, and she was conservative in a
Speaker 5: lot of ways. And one of the ways she was
Speaker 5: conservative was with was with regard to journalistic ethics. And
Speaker 5: you know, I think she you know, I quote some
Speaker 5: of these letters. She had a lifelong friendship with the
Speaker 5: fact checker who had worked on so in Cold Blood
Speaker 5: was first published as this series of articles in The
Speaker 5: New Yorker and The New Yorkers, the magazine that continues
Speaker 5: to have very high standards around fact checking. But Harperly
Speaker 5: maintained this friendship with Truman, Capote's fact checker, and some
Speaker 5: of the letters she exchanged with him are quite revealing
Speaker 5: about her objections in Cold Blood and the decisions she
Speaker 5: thought Capoti had made, and she mentioned it in correspondence
Speaker 5: with other folks as well, and I think, you know,
Speaker 5: the cooling of their friendship, folks have often attributed to
Speaker 5: kind of professional jealousy that she wont to Pulster and
Speaker 5: he didn't, or that to kill a mockingbird was so beloved.
Speaker 5: But I think there were kind of deeper, more foundational concerns,
Speaker 5: and a lot of them had to do within Cold
Speaker 5: Blood and the decisions he made and the narrative perspective
Speaker 5: he took so very straightforwardly when they went to Kansas.
Speaker 5: I think the book that Harperly thought she was helping
Speaker 5: with was going to be a book about the Clutter
Speaker 5: family and what had happened to them and what had
Speaker 5: happened in Hulcombe to the townspeople, their fear and their experience,
Speaker 5: and obviously, you know, in Cold Blood turned out to
Speaker 5: be a very sophisticated book that shifts perspective at a
Speaker 5: certain point and allies itself quite deeply with Hickock and Smith,
Speaker 5: the two murderers, and looks at their upbringing to explain,
Speaker 5: you know, how they got to that moment in Kansas,
Speaker 5: and it looks at their experience with the criminal justice system,
Speaker 5: and I think, in very important ways, becomes a project
Speaker 5: that critiques the criminal justice system. And you know, is
Speaker 5: really a book that's anti death penalty, that looks at
Speaker 5: some of the irregularities in their case and argues maybe
Speaker 5: that they should not have been put to death. And
Speaker 5: you know, those are all choices. No one is faulting
Speaker 5: Coupoti for those choices. But Harper Lee certainly had her
Speaker 5: own opinions, having sat through their trial, having interviewed the
Speaker 5: same people, and I think in small bore ways, you know,
Speaker 5: she knew some of the things Capoti couldn't have known
Speaker 5: for sure, but represented as fact. And you know, we
Speaker 5: were talking about those narrative techniques. I think folks probably
Speaker 5: know about the new journalism and the ways that fictional
Speaker 5: techniques were brought into nonfiction. But as far as Harper
Speaker 5: Lee was concerned, a nonfiction novel was a contradiction in terms,
Speaker 5: you know, you were either writing nonfiction and everything was true,
Speaker 5: or you were writing a novel and you know, anything
Speaker 5: or nothing could be true. And you know, I think
Speaker 5: she felt like those were important standards to uphold, and
Speaker 5: it was critical for readers to understand what was true
Speaker 5: and what wasn't. And I think even more importantly to her,
Speaker 5: you know, she was not a postmodernist. There was a
Speaker 5: there was a fact of the matter, and there was
Speaker 5: the truth of the matter, and I don't think in
Speaker 5: ways that we do today, she appreciated the attempt to
Speaker 5: malign or muddy that, especially when it came to criminal proceedings.
Speaker 5: And so there's a chapter my book that really gets
Speaker 5: into that, and I'm not sure that those are you know,
Speaker 5: there are the questions we may never be able to answer,
Speaker 5: and in fact, people will answer them differently, and they
Speaker 5: may change case to case, or they may change. You
Speaker 5: may feel a certain way if you're just a consumer
Speaker 5: of true crime, but feel differently if you you know,
Speaker 5: had a love owner, a friend who was murdered and
Speaker 5: became the subject of a book or a podcast. You know,
Speaker 5: I think our perspective can change, and you know, so
Speaker 5: I just think I appreciate her elevating those conversations. And
Speaker 5: I think with a book like In cold Blood that
Speaker 5: has become so canonical and so admired, it is useful
Speaker 5: to see some of you know, kind of behind the curtain.
Speaker 5: You know, what choices was Capoti making? What fact did
Speaker 5: he get wrong? And I think the most striking example
Speaker 5: of that for me. You know, I'm sure people listening,
Speaker 5: if they're not familiar with these this conversation about in
Speaker 5: cold Blood, they might be thinking, well, how serious is it?
Speaker 5: And I think a fine demonstration of that is the
Speaker 5: scene that in cold Blood, and there's a scene where
Speaker 5: Alvin Dewey, you know, the kind of heroic Kansas Bureau
Speaker 5: of Investigation agent, former FBI agent who right away, you know,
Speaker 5: his colleagues would tell you, look, Truman, Capodi needed a hero,
Speaker 5: so he invented one. Alvin Dewey was not the lead agent.
Speaker 5: He did not make all of these discoveries on his own.
Speaker 5: You know, Capoti exaggerated that fact for narrative benefit. But
Speaker 5: you know, pause that for a minute. Just the scene
Speaker 5: at the end where Alvin Dewey is walking with a
Speaker 5: friend of the Clutter family. So the daughter who was
Speaker 5: married murdered a teenage friend of hers, and they go
Speaker 5: and they visit the family graves. That never happened. They
Speaker 5: never went together. You know, it's not just Capodi didn't
Speaker 5: see it happened. It never happened. You know, they did
Speaker 5: not visit the grave. I'm sure they both went independently
Speaker 5: to mourn the clutters at the grave site, but they
Speaker 5: never went again. And you know, that's the kind of
Speaker 5: thing for us as readers when you read in cold Blood,
Speaker 5: it's profoundly moving, it's emotionally successful. It brings closure to
Speaker 5: the narrative. But if you're Harper Lee and you know
Speaker 5: what didn't didn't happen, and you maintained a lifelong friendship
Speaker 5: with the Dewey's, you know, she stayed in touch with
Speaker 5: folks in Kansas, that's the kind of scene that gives
Speaker 5: you pause. And you know, if you're going to call
Speaker 5: it nonfiction, it's a scene that really makes you think,
Speaker 5: you know, well, if that's not true, what else isn't true?
Speaker 5: And so there was real tension for her in that
Speaker 5: and I think you know, to your point, seventeen years
Speaker 5: years later, what was she going to do? She really
Speaker 5: emphasized the people in town. She was only after the facts,
Speaker 5: and she only wanted to know the truth, and she
Speaker 5: didn't want rumors, she didn't want any window. And you know,
Speaker 5: she wanted to have a realistic depiction of the characters
Speaker 5: involved in what had happened. And I think, you know,
Speaker 5: that is an admirable goal. But for folks who read
Speaker 5: Furious Hours, she could not have picked a more difficult
Speaker 5: case to uphold that standard. To you know, again, these
Speaker 5: are these are alleged murders where no one was ever convicted,
Speaker 5: and to be frank, of the five, not all of
Speaker 5: them were even officially declared homicide, and one of them
Speaker 5: no cause of death was ever officially determined. And the
Speaker 5: insurance cases are incredibly complex, and you know, it's really
Speaker 5: a fine demonstration of unfortunately some of what can happen,
Speaker 5: which is investigators and police officers have real certainty that
Speaker 5: they are never able to evidence in a court of law.
Speaker 5: And so I think, you know, poor Harper Lee, one
Speaker 5: part of the story about why she never published this
Speaker 5: book is she had an admirable standard that was very
Speaker 5: hard to uphold when it came to this case. And
Speaker 5: she was not a postmodernist, So you know, she was
Speaker 5: not willing to dwell on ambiguity and uncertainty. You know,
Speaker 5: she wanted to just tell you what's happened to improve it.
Speaker 5: And you know, if she was going to cause them
Speaker 5: an accessory, she wanted to have, you know, a criminal
Speaker 5: standard of guilt, and when she got into the life
Speaker 5: insurance fraud, she was seeking out handwriting experts to try
Speaker 5: and prove it. And you know, I just think it
Speaker 5: was a very very admirable but difficult standard to.
Speaker 6: Meet for her. You talk about also what she said
Speaker 6: about the voodoo rumors she explored those. Was there any
Speaker 6: substance or basis to those voodoo claims?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So I quote this letter in the book, and
Speaker 5: it's actually one of my favorite letters I saw. You know,
Speaker 5: a lot of friends and family of Harperley shared their
Speaker 5: correspondence with her over the years, and especially in this
Speaker 5: period of time when she was working on the Maxwell case,
Speaker 5: and there's a letter where she says, you know, I
Speaker 5: don't know if the reverend, you know, believed what he preached,
Speaker 5: and I don't think he was a practitioner of voodoo,
Speaker 5: but I believe he had a profound and abiding belief
Speaker 5: in life insurance. And you know, that's a pretty funny
Speaker 5: but accurate depiction of what she found. There was no evidence,
Speaker 5: despite all the things people said, that the reverend had
Speaker 5: ever been a practitioner of voodoo, and he certainly denied
Speaker 5: it his whole life. And I think that's a pretty
Speaker 5: good example of what was tricky for Harperly about this case. So,
Speaker 5: on the one hand, it is categorically true that people
Speaker 5: said these things about the reverend. You know, they said
Speaker 5: he could turn into a black cat, they said that
Speaker 5: he could make a death potion. They said he could
Speaker 5: you know, light a court candle that would get you
Speaker 5: an acquittal, no matter what you were accused of. But
Speaker 5: there's no evidence it's true. And so for a journalist,
Speaker 5: the question is, okay, so do you not include it?
Speaker 5: You know, if it's not true, you can't prove it,
Speaker 5: do you just strike it from the record. And for me,
Speaker 5: when I was making that decision, it's very clear you can't.
Speaker 5: It's such a part of the way people will tell
Speaker 5: you the story. One of my first days on Martin,
Speaker 5: someone said to me, you know, don't go out at night,
Speaker 5: don't go anywhere near the reverend's grave. Because he might
Speaker 5: be there. You know, that kind of supernaturalism and superstition
Speaker 5: is still a part of the way people tell the story.
Speaker 5: And kids who grew up in this part of Alabama,
Speaker 5: you know, you talk about the hoodoo man or the Boogeyman.
Speaker 5: They were afraid of the Reverend Maxwell. They were told
Speaker 5: don't look him in the eye, you know, don't go
Speaker 5: out at night or he'll get you. And so you
Speaker 5: have to acknowledge that. But you have to acknowledge to
Speaker 5: the life lack of veracity. And I think one way
Speaker 5: you explain it is just talk about how uncertainty and
Speaker 5: ambiguity sometimes lead us to reach for these kinds of explanations.
Speaker 5: So in the book, I offer it up as an
Speaker 5: example of you know, on the one hand, voodoo and
Speaker 5: root working and whodoo are totally real. You know, there
Speaker 5: are practitioners. There are people in some instances a kind
Speaker 5: of homeopathic medicine. You know, people go to get a
Speaker 5: poultice or they go to get a natural you know,
Speaker 5: herbal remedy. And that's from someone who identifies as a
Speaker 5: hoodoo worker or root worker. So it's real. You know,
Speaker 5: there's a real history of this kind of spirituality and
Speaker 5: spiritual discipline, you know, not just in New Orleans, but
Speaker 5: all around the Caribbean and around the American South. So
Speaker 5: you don't you can't say it's not real at all,
Speaker 5: because you know, voodoo isn't just voodoo dolls and zombiesm
Speaker 5: you know, it is a legitimate kind of spirituality and
Speaker 5: religious practice, but it's not one there's any evidence the
Speaker 5: Reverend practice, So I think, you know, I think Harberly
Speaker 5: was certainly did not find any proof of this, but
Speaker 5: you do if you go to this part of Alabama
Speaker 5: and you talk to folks who live through it. It's
Speaker 5: part of the story they tell, and it's part of
Speaker 5: the way they made sense of what was happening, and
Speaker 5: part of the way that they understood as character. So
Speaker 5: I didn't strike it entirely from the story, but I
Speaker 5: hope I handled it a little more responsibly than a
Speaker 5: lot of the journalists did at the time this was happening,
Speaker 5: because if you go and you look through the newspaper
Speaker 5: mords for coverage of the Reverend Maxwell, you know, the
Speaker 5: summer of seventy seven is just headline after headline, including
Speaker 5: in the New York Times of you know, voodoo is
Speaker 5: splaining voodoo priests, voodoo preacher, voodoo man gun down at funeral.
Speaker 5: It's just it's saturated the coverage of it. At the time.
Speaker 6: You talk about that, it was about three years in
Speaker 6: and then she finally conceded that there wasn't enough facts
Speaker 6: to put this book together and tell us more about
Speaker 6: what she officially or publicly said about her frustration with
Speaker 6: this book and why it couldn't be finished.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean that is a great question. Then you've
Speaker 5: offered an important distinction between what she said publicly, which
Speaker 5: was almost nothing about anything this book or anything else,
Speaker 5: and what she said privately. And you know, I think
Speaker 5: for me it was a little bit of a roller
Speaker 5: coaster reporting the book, because I'd go and interview someone
Speaker 5: one day who would insist she wrote the whole thing
Speaker 5: and it just hadn't been published. And then I would
Speaker 5: go and interview someone else who said, you know, Harper
Speaker 5: Lee's depression and her drinking problem were so severe in
Speaker 5: the seventies and eighties that she never got any traction.
Speaker 5: And you know, she was only ever exaggerating her work
Speaker 5: on the case. And there's a paragraph in the book
Speaker 5: where I kind of round up for you in a
Speaker 5: short little passage. Really the far extremes of what I
Speaker 5: was told. You know, she wrote it, but it's in
Speaker 5: a safe and it won't be published until you know,
Speaker 5: her last living family member dies or you know, she
Speaker 5: only ever wrote one chapter, which she gave to Tom Radney,
Speaker 5: and there's nothing more to be found. And you know,
Speaker 5: there's really that's that's the far ranges of what she
Speaker 5: said or what she wrote in letters. But I think
Speaker 5: you're asking about a letter I quote from from nineteen
Speaker 5: eighty seven. And there was another writer who wrote to
Speaker 5: her to say that he was interested in the story
Speaker 5: of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, and he had met one
Speaker 5: of the reverend's nephews who was going to tell him everything.
Speaker 5: And you know, he was just writing as a courtesy
Speaker 5: to Harperley to find out, you know, what had happened.
Speaker 5: You know, he had heard she was involved, and he
Speaker 5: didn't want to step on her toes and you know, frankly,
Speaker 5: he didn't want to be, you know, stomped on by
Speaker 5: Harper Lee if she was about to put out her book.
Speaker 5: And she writes back, it's a beautiful letter, and I
Speaker 5: quote quite a lot of it in the book. She says,
Speaker 5: you know, it's true, I was very interested in this,
Speaker 5: and she tells him a little bit about the case.
Speaker 5: I think, in one tantalizing way, she warns him that,
Speaker 5: you know, she did, in fact believe the reverend had
Speaker 5: an accomplice or an accessory, and that person is alive
Speaker 5: and well and living not more than you know, one
Speaker 5: hundred miles from him. So she warns him off a
Speaker 5: little bit. But then she tells him, just matter of factly,
Speaker 5: the frustration she had with this case. And one of
Speaker 5: the things she said is, you know, Tom Radney, who
Speaker 5: is a very nice person and had been so helpful
Speaker 5: to her, was also someone who's quote psychological processes were
Speaker 5: of clinical interest to her. And she says that, you know,
Speaker 5: Tom saw himself as a mix of attic extension Robert Redford,
Speaker 5: but that was not her impression. And specifically she warns
Speaker 5: this guy, you know, if a hero is what you want,
Speaker 5: you'll have to invent one. So we already hear some
Speaker 5: of her frustrations with the people who were trying to
Speaker 5: be helpful when she was working on it, and she
Speaker 5: had mentioned in other letters that, you know, one of
Speaker 5: the reasons she cooled on the Reverend Maxwell Is she
Speaker 5: was afraid of being sued, and she wrote in a
Speaker 5: letter to Gregory Peck she had promised him a role
Speaker 5: in a new movie, but then said she was, you know,
Speaker 5: afraid of losing her pants in a lawsuit. But this
Speaker 5: letter from nineteen eighty seven goes on to say, as
Speaker 5: you've gestured towards that there was a shortage of facts,
Speaker 5: and that while you know the cassette tape for the
Speaker 5: duration of Human Vanity, you know there wasn't enough tape
Speaker 5: in all the world for her. And that while she
Speaker 5: had you know, volumes the size of the Old test
Speaker 5: than full of gossip and rumor, she had not been
Speaker 5: able to get enough facts. And she was warning this
Speaker 5: writer about that. And in fact he was actually a
Speaker 5: fiction writer, so it's possible what she was really telling
Speaker 5: him was a novel would be better suited to the task.
Speaker 5: And she seems to have tried out her own fictional
Speaker 5: version as a way to deal with the lack of facts.
Speaker 5: But I think, you know, to be fair, and one
Speaker 5: of the things I do in the book is going
Speaker 5: back to this question of journalistic ethics and reporting only
Speaker 5: what we know with certainty. You know, there is no
Speaker 5: evidence beyond a few pages and a few descriptions she
Speaker 5: herself made of the work product on this case, and
Speaker 5: no manuscript has emerged. There's reason to believe she made
Speaker 5: recorded tapes of her interviews, and I found a page
Speaker 5: of her notes that's the day she's interviewing Mary Lou
Speaker 5: Maxwell's sister. So we know she did all this, and
Speaker 5: you know, I know from my own interviews she went
Speaker 5: and gathered these facts and she requested these documents. But
Speaker 5: I don't think that, you know, I don't think there's
Speaker 5: a manuscript we're going to find. I think we might
Speaker 5: find more notes. I think those tapes might emerge, But
Speaker 5: because of everything that was going on in her personal life,
Speaker 5: because of the frustrations of this case, I don't think
Speaker 5: there's a manuscript. There's a draft like ghostt a Watchman
Speaker 5: that you know is going to come out tomorrow. I
Speaker 5: think part of the story of harperly is interested in
Speaker 5: this case is what happens to a lot of people
Speaker 5: with not just true crime books, book books of any kind.
Speaker 5: It doesn't matter that it's a great story, it's hard
Speaker 5: to make it into a good book. You know, the
Speaker 5: best stories, the craziest things that happened to you. You know,
Speaker 5: it's not always easy to shape them into a narrative.
Speaker 5: And I think going back to what she helped Capoti
Speaker 5: do in Kansas is a pretty good illustration of that.
Speaker 5: You know, harperly had helped them put together more than
Speaker 5: one hundred and fifty pages of notes, and she had
Speaker 5: sat through a trial there, and she had pulled together
Speaker 5: all this material. But it's Capoti who could turn it
Speaker 5: into a book. And it's Capoti who was willing to
Speaker 5: make those decisions about, you know, how to shape the
Speaker 5: truth and how to build character. And I think in
Speaker 5: some ways her own high standard is what part of
Speaker 5: what explains what happened to her, which is, you know,
Speaker 5: she wasn't willing to invent a hero, and that made
Speaker 5: it a harder book to write. And she wasn't willing
Speaker 5: to invent fact or stretch the truth, and it made
Speaker 5: it a harder book for her to write.
Speaker 6: You write too, that Capoti abandoned her, disowned her. They
Speaker 6: had no relationship after in Cold Blood, and she suffered
Speaker 6: a stroke. And also in February nineteen, two thousand and six,
Speaker 6: that the year of she was eighty nine years old.
Speaker 6: Lee Harper died, and you say that the private the
Speaker 6: stone read Nell harper Lee. But a year after something
Speaker 6: very interesting, her estate contacted the family of Tom Radney,
Speaker 6: and a few weeks later his oldest daughter Alan drove
Speaker 6: from alex City to Monroeville and you met her there
Speaker 6: at the Monroe County Courthouse. Tell us about this meeting
Speaker 6: and what this was all about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, I mean I love this story because I
Speaker 5: think that you know, if you're if you're being truthful
Speaker 5: about what life as a writer is like, a lot
Speaker 5: of it is, you know, sitting alone at your desk
Speaker 5: reading things or writing things, or you know, getting out
Speaker 5: a red pen to edit a draft. But I think
Speaker 5: this book was fun because I got to interview a
Speaker 5: lot of people, and I got to go, you know,
Speaker 5: to different archives and courthouses. But this is probably the
Speaker 5: only day that really did feel like James Bond territory.
Speaker 5: So right, So one of Tom Radney's kids, He's got
Speaker 5: four children, called me in Maryland and said, you know,
Speaker 5: do you want to come with us? There had always
Speaker 5: been this question Tom, in his eagerness to have Harperley,
Speaker 5: you know, make him into a hero. You know, when
Speaker 5: she says he saw himself as a cross between Atticustvension
Speaker 5: Robert Redford. He had tried to be so helpful because
Speaker 5: he thought this was going to be so incredible, you know,
Speaker 5: he would be the hero of Harperly's book and everyone
Speaker 5: would know his name in the case of a lifetime,
Speaker 5: would make him famous all around the country. In an
Speaker 5: effort to be helpful, he had given Harperly all of
Speaker 5: his legal files on the Reverend Maxwell. So for ten years,
Speaker 5: through all those civil cases, all those criminal cases, every
Speaker 5: scrap of paper he had saved, you know, the intake forms,
Speaker 5: the court transcripts, copies of the life insurance policies. He
Speaker 5: gave all of that to harper Lee while she was
Speaker 5: in town. And you know, he thought whatever she needed
Speaker 5: he would try and provide. And there had always been
Speaker 5: this question about, you know, when whatever happened to Tom
Speaker 5: Radney's files, and had Harperly thrown them out, had she
Speaker 5: given them to someone else? Whatever happened? And when she
Speaker 5: died in her New York apartment, they found a briefcase,
Speaker 5: a giant you know, a giant briefcase, you know, almost
Speaker 5: like a suitcase sized briefcase, huge, huge filats. They found
Speaker 5: it they opened it and lo and behold, here were
Speaker 5: materials from the Maxwell case. And so her estate contacts
Speaker 5: Tom's daughter, we go, we pick it up, and right away,
Speaker 5: you know, it was interesting to me because everybody had
Speaker 5: sworn to me Tom Radney never had a briefcase, and
Speaker 5: so when they said they'd found this briefcase, I thought, well,
Speaker 5: is this even his? Right away his daughter said, you know, oh,
Speaker 5: my gosh, I remember my mom got that for him.
Speaker 5: He never used it. So that's one of the things
Speaker 5: we knew right away he had given to her because
Speaker 5: he never used it. He just tossed all the Maxwell
Speaker 5: stuff into it, and you know, it was fascinating. It
Speaker 5: was a time capsule. You know, here was all of
Speaker 5: the material Harperly had been given by him. And you know,
Speaker 5: unfortunately for me as a reporter, some of it I
Speaker 5: had already tracked down on my own, like copies of
Speaker 5: the death certificates and copies of the autopsies. But you know,
Speaker 5: there were a lot of proprietary materials, things that only
Speaker 5: he had, you know, those intakes forms. We know he
Speaker 5: represented Ophelia, not because he ever told anyone or that survived.
Speaker 5: I know it because one of the things he gave
Speaker 5: her in the briefcase was the intake form, so his
Speaker 5: initial interview with Ophelia about when she was accused of
Speaker 5: helping the reverend murder his first wife. And so, you know,
Speaker 5: total treasure trove and was able to confirm a lot
Speaker 5: of what I knew Harperly had done in terms of
Speaker 5: her own investigative work, and you know a lot of
Speaker 5: times that we wouldn't have had access to otherwise. So
Speaker 5: some of the insurance cases, you know, I was able
Speaker 5: to get copies of things that moved through the courts,
Speaker 5: but there were you know, copies of filings and letters
Speaker 5: and you know, prepared docket forms that he hadn't filed
Speaker 5: because they'd been able to settle. So really just a
Speaker 5: gift that she had shaved it all. And you know,
Speaker 5: I think in a really heartbreaking way, there was always
Speaker 5: this question of, you know, well, did Herperly ever give
Speaker 5: up on this case? You know, just because you don't
Speaker 5: publish a book doesn't mean you don't think about it,
Speaker 5: doesn't mean you don't work on it. And you know,
Speaker 5: there she was up in New York City, you know,
Speaker 5: surrounded by her Maxwell materials, and so it was a
Speaker 5: real gift to me. I'm grateful to the family. You know,
Speaker 5: we went through it all together that night, and you know,
Speaker 5: they let me make copies of it all. And just
Speaker 5: a dream as a writer, you know, you just think,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe maybe I'll get lucky someday and there'll
Speaker 5: be a treasure trove. And it was an actual treasure trove.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: It's just just tremendously interesting. And I think if there
Speaker 5: were ever any doubt about, you know, the relationship between
Speaker 5: subject and source, it was also just fascinating to me.
Speaker 5: She could never get rid of it, you know, even
Speaker 5: if she did give up on the book, the kind
Speaker 5: of emotional trauma of what was in it for her
Speaker 5: and how obligated did she feel to these sources. I
Speaker 5: quote a letter from very very late in her life
Speaker 5: where she had run into Tom Radney, if you can
Speaker 5: believe it, has a son named Thomas Radney, and he
Speaker 5: practices law in the same law office and Thomas West
Speaker 5: the University of Alabama, same as Harper Lee. And he
Speaker 5: had run into Harper Lee not long before her stroke
Speaker 5: at an event in Tuscalusa. And you know, it's just
Speaker 5: this letter Harperley and Tom Radney four years after it
Speaker 5: all happened, back in touch, and you know, she says
Speaker 5: nothing of the Maxwell case, but you know there's the
Speaker 5: suitcase in the closet, you know, just hiding out full
Speaker 5: of the books she never finished. So yeah, I make
Speaker 5: that that's the epilogue of the book. And of course
Speaker 5: I try to be fair again to the people who
Speaker 5: know Harper Lee, who said she wrote the book, or
Speaker 5: she talked to them about it, or you know, I
Speaker 5: quote someone who said her sister had read the whole thing,
Speaker 5: and you know, those are the people who swear that
Speaker 5: the estate found more than the briefcase, and that you know,
Speaker 5: there's going to be more material from not just from
Speaker 5: this book, but from some others. You know, I mentioned
Speaker 5: in the book some novels she tried to write in
Speaker 5: the nineteen sixties. So I think it's possible see more
Speaker 5: work from her. But I don't think it's going to
Speaker 5: be a book between two covers. I think it'll be
Speaker 5: you know, scraps of material and you know, fits and
Speaker 5: starts and the interview notes and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: But no, I love to tell that story because it
Speaker 5: really is what I think a lot of us dream
Speaker 5: of when we're young what it will be like to be,
Speaker 5: you know, an investigative journalist. Someone will call and there'll
Speaker 5: be a briefcase and you'll go pick it up and
Speaker 5: go through. So yeah, it was a lot of fun
Speaker 5: and really just just a gift for the book.
Speaker 6: Yeah, incredible, And as you write, the book was tentatively
Speaker 6: called The Reverend and it remains unpublished at the very least,
Speaker 6: and as you say, unknown, I want to thank you
Speaker 6: very mu Yeah that was for working title.
Speaker 5: Sure, thanks for having me to talk about it.
Speaker 6: I want to thank you very much for coming on
Speaker 6: and talking about Furious Hours, murder, fraud, and the last
Speaker 6: trial of Harper Lee Casey Sep. For those that might
Speaker 6: want to contact you or find out more about your work,
Speaker 6: you have a Twitter, Instagram, on website tell us about that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I have all of the above, and there's actually
Speaker 5: a form on my website folks who are welcome to
Speaker 5: get in touch. It comes right to me and you know,
Speaker 5: the book's been out for about a year now and
Speaker 5: I love it. Every so often someone will write and
Speaker 5: they've got, you know, a letter Harperly wrote their grandfather,
Speaker 5: or you know, a copy of her book they bought
Speaker 5: that had an inscription, and I really do love to
Speaker 5: hear from folks and people who knew the Reverend have
Speaker 5: reached out, people who knew Tom, and you know, I
Speaker 5: just think with a non fiction story, when it really happened,
Speaker 5: there's kind of no end, and so people who have
Speaker 5: a role, you know, I always love to hear more
Speaker 5: or to hear just some you know, some story you
Speaker 5: heard from someone else about Harper Lee or Tom Radney
Speaker 5: or the Reverend Maxwell. I'll never not be interested in
Speaker 5: these characters.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Absolutely, Well, it's a fantastic book, and thank you
Speaker 6: so much for sharing it with us. Furious Hours, Murder, Fraud,
Speaker 6: and the Last Trial of Harperley. Thank you very much,
Speaker 6: Casey step You have a great evening.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much, Take care, good night,