Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (34 page)

It was during his closing argument, in the final moments of the trial, that Lawton introduced a new and diabolical element into the state’s theory of what had really happened. Lawton suggested that the earlier episode of violence at Mercer House—Danny’s rampage on the evening of April 3, when he had stormed through the house and fired a gun into the bedroom floor—was all a hoax. Williams had staged it, Lawton suggested, as a prelude for murdering Hansford a month later. “Could it be a setup?” he asked. “Could Jim Williams have known that about now he would be testifying in court that he had been forced to kill Danny Hansford in self-defense? Did Williams want to create some evidence of Danny’s violent nature, get something into the police records, set it up while Danny was asleep upstairs?”

Lawton was proposing that the shooting of Danny Hansford was neither self-defense nor a crime of passion but a carefully planned murder. He was suggesting that on April 3, while Danny Hansford lay sleeping upstairs, Williams was downstairs stomping a marble-topped table, slamming a cut-glass pitcher into the floor, smashing eighteenth-century porcelain objects, and firing a German Luger into Monterey Square—all with the intention of calling the police afterward and blaming it on Hansford. Why didn’t the shot into the bedroom floor wake Danny up? Because, according to Lawton’s theory, nobody fired a bullet into the bedroom floor that night; the bullet hole in the bedroom floor was an
old
bullet hole. Lawton had persuasive evidence of that. Corporal Michael Anderson, the police officer who had come to the house that night, had testified about that earlier incident. “We pulled up the carpet, and we did see a bullet hole in the floor, but we couldn’t find no bullet. I couldn’t determine if that was a fresh bullet hole or an old one.” Now, in his closing comments, Lawton told the jury, “Obviously, Corporal Anderson didn’t believe that bullet hole was created by Danny Hansford.” Bobby Lee Cook, with only his closing statement left to him,
could not call witnesses or recross-examine Corporal Anderson in rebuttal to Lawton’s startling allegation.

When Lawton was finished, the judge called a recess for the day. In the morning, the benches were once again filled to overflowing. Judge Oliver read a long list of instructions and then excused the jury to consider its verdict.

Three hours later, word spread through the courthouse that the jury was returning to the courtroom. The bailiff called the court to order, and the jury filed in.

“Mr. Foreman, have you arrived at a verdict?” asked Judge Oliver.

“Yes, sir, we have,” said the foreman.

“Would you give it to the clerk that he may publish it?” The foreman handed a piece of paper to the clerk, who stood up and read from the paper:

“‘We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of murder.’”

A gasp of surprise sounded throughout the courtroom.

“The sentence is life imprisonment,” said Oliver.

Two bailiffs approached Williams and escorted him to a small door at the end of the jury box. Before going through the door, Williams paused briefly and looked back, his expression blank, his dark eyes as impenetrable as ever.

The spectators flowed out of the courtroom into the corridor and formed a crowd around Bobby Lee Cook, who stood in the glare of television lights, expressing his disappointment and saying he would file notice of an appeal within a few days. While he spoke, a solitary figure walked around the fringe of the crowd and stepped into an elevator, unnoticed by the reporters. It was Emily Bannister, Danny Hansford’s mother. She turned as the elevator door started to close. It was not really a smile that crossed her face so much as a look of quiet satisfaction.

Jim Williams had begun the day in the spacious grandeur of Mercer House and ended it in the cold confines of the Chatham County Jail. His glittering social life was over. Never again would the cream of Savannah society pray to be invited to his extravagant parties. He would spend the rest of his life in the company of burglars, muggers, rapists, and other murderers—the very people, as Lee Adler pointed out, who represented the “criminal element” Williams had publicly disdained.

The enormity and suddenness of Williams’s downfall shocked Savannah. It was a tribute to Williams that the public found it difficult to believe he had really been brought so low. Barely twelve hours after he had been escorted from the courtroom, rumor had it that he was rearranging life behind bars to accord with his personal tastes.

“He’s having his meals sent in,” said Prentiss Crowe. “I hear that’s already been arranged. His lunches will be catered by Mrs. Wilkes’s boarding house, and he’ll be getting supper from Johnny Harris one night and Elizabeth’s the next. He’s even written a list of the pieces of furniture that he wants moved into his cell—a firm mattress, I’m told, and a Regency writing table.”

Prison officials denied that Williams was receiving any special
favors. They insisted he would be treated like any other inmate at the Chatham County Jail. And, as everyone knew, that was bad news for Williams. Even more ominous, however, was the possible fate that awaited him at the Reidsville State Penitentiary, where he was likely to be transferred to serve out his term. Reidsville was a hard-core prison seventy miles west of Savannah. At the very moment Judge Oliver was pronouncing Williams’s sentence, the inmates at Reidsville were rioting and setting the prison on fire. On his first morning in the Savannah jail, Williams was greeted by a newspaper account of the riot. He could hardly have missed it. The story appeared on page one, along with coverage of his own conviction. The following day, Reidsville was back on the front page. Three black inmates had killed a white inmate by stabbing him thirty times. After the stabbing, prison officials had conducted a shakedown inspection of the jail and confiscated a small arsenal of weapons, including a homemade bomb. Under the circumstances, the real question was not who would cater Jim Williams’s meals in the Chatham County Jail, but whether his lawyers could manage to keep him out of the Reidsville penitentiary.

Speculation about Williams and his fate came to an abrupt halt after two days when Judge Oliver released him on a $200,000 bond pending appeal. A swarm of reporters and TV cameras buzzed around Williams as he walked from the door of the jail to his blue Eldorado. “Will it be business as usual, Mr. Williams?” a reporter called out.

“Business as usual. Damn right!” he said. Minutes later he was back in Mercer House.

On the surface at least, Williams’s life did return to something approaching normal. He went back to selling antiques, and with the court’s permission he traveled to New York to attend a black-tie party for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s exhibition of Queen Elizabeth’s collection of Fabergé. His manner was calm; his conversation had lost none of its sharp edge. But now he was
a convicted murderer and, despite the wit and the light humor, there was an aura of quiet desperation. His black eyes seemed darker than ever now. He still received invitations to dine, but the invitations became fewer. Old friends called, but less often.

In private, he expressed bitterness. What galled him most was not his conviction or the harm done to his reputation or even the cost of his defense; it was the indignity of having been charged with any crime at all. From the outset, he had assumed that his word as a gentleman would be accepted and that the whole affair would be settled quietly, the way Savannah had settled past incidents involving prominent suspects—the mysterious bludgeoning of a socialite at the beach not long ago, for example, or the tumble down a flight of stairs that killed a rich man who was about to divorce his wife, or the case of the spinster who embalmed her lover’s bullet-riddled body before calling the police.

“At least I did call the police,” Williams told me shortly after being released from jail. “You should have seen them that night. When word went out over the police radio about what had happened and where it had happened, they started arriving in droves. They wandered through the house like little children on a tour of Versailles. They looked at everything and whispered among themselves. They stayed for
four hours.
Now that’s unheard of. If a black man kills another black man in Savannah on a Friday night, two policemen might drop by for thirty minutes, and that would be the end of it. But the police were having a ball in my house. When the police photographer was finished taking pictures, she went into the kitchen and made tea and coffee and served it to the others with cookies. I thought, Well, this is a damned nuisance, but I guess it’s the price I have to pay. I’ll just let them have their fun, and then it will all be over. They were exquisitely polite. It was ‘Mr. Williams this’ and ‘Mr. Williams that’ and ‘Can we help you, sir?’ One particularly obsequious cop came up to me and told me that he had doused the carpet with club soda so Danny’s blood wouldn’t cause a permanent stain. I thanked him for being so thoughtful. Later, down at the police station, we went through what I thought was a routine
signing of papers. The police were so congenial I had no idea I’d been charged with murder until I read it in the newspaper the next day.”

Williams’s deepest resentment was not directed at the police, however. It was directed at Savannah’s society and the power structure that it dominated.

“Men from Savannah’s good families are born into a pecking order they can never get out of,” he said, “unless they leave town forever. They’ve got to go to a proper secondary school—Savannah Country Day or Woodberry Forest—then to a good enough college, and then come back home and join the team. They’ve got to work for a certain company or a certain man and move up gradually. They’ve got to marry a girl with the right background. They’ve got to produce a proper little family. They’ve got to be a member of Christ Church or Saint John’s. They’ve got to join the Oglethorpe Club, the yacht club, and the golf club. Finally, when they’re in their late fifties or early sixties, they’ve arrived, they’ve made it. But by then they’re burned out, unhappy, and unfulfilled. They cheat on their wives, hate their work, and lead dismal lives as respectable failures. Their wives, most of them, are little more than long-term prostitutes, the main difference being that when you factor in the houses, the cars, the clothes, and the clubs, Savannah’s respectable wives get a lot more money per piece of ass than a whore does. When people like that see somebody like me, who’s never joined their silly pecking order and who’s taken great risks and succeeded, they
loathe
that person. I have felt it many times. They don’t have any say-so over me, and they don’t like that at all.”

Despite his bitterness, Williams was confident that his appeal would be successful. If it was not, he had an idea or two how he might seek revenge on Savannah. He would use Mercer House as the instrument. “I might turn the house over to a charitable society,” he mused, “to be used as a drug-rehabilitation center. It’s big enough to handle several hundred addicts a day, wouldn’t you say? The addicts could use Monterey Square as an outdoor
waiting room. It would drive the neighbors wild, especially the socially conscious Adlers. But they could hardly object to such a public-spirited gesture.”

And what if Danny Hansford’s mother won her $10 million lawsuit against him? Would the house not fall into her hands? “Danny’s mother will never live in Mercer House,” Williams declared, “because I will destroy it first. It won’t be easy, because the house is very solid; the interior walls are made of brick. What I would do is this: I would cut a large hole in the ceiling of each of the four corner rooms on the main floor, all the way through to the second floor. Then I would put acetone in each of the cutout holes and blow the place to bits. I’ve been assured I could demolish the entire house that way. In Georgia, arson is a crime only if it’s done for the insurance. Mercer House is not insured. Danny’s mother might get a nice piece of property, but there won’t be a house on it.”