Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (39 page)

At fifty, Sonny Seiler enjoyed a position of considerable stature within the Georgia legal community. He was past president of the State Bar of Georgia. He was listed in the book
The Best Lawyers in America
as one of the top civil litigators in the country. He was also a native Savannahian, and that was a major plus for Williams. Juries, especially Savannah juries, were instinctively suspicious of out-of-town lawyers. Bobby Lee Cook had been from Summerville, Georgia, a hundred miles north of Atlanta, far enough away to make him a foreigner in Savannah. Seiler was not only homegrown, he had earned a place in Savannah lore. Thirty years earlier, at the age of twenty-two, he had dived into the Savannah River at the foot of East Broad Street and swum eighteen miles out to Tybee in six hours against rough water and the threat of a hurricane.

“Sonny Seiler’s been busily at work on my case,” said Williams. “He calls to tell me about it, but I only half listen. He sends me letters, but I just scan them. If you think it would amuse you, go see him yourself and let him explain it to you. Then you can tell me, in a few well-chosen words, how you think my case is going. It’ll save me the trouble. His office is right around the corner in Armstrong House, that big gray mansion I used to own at Bull and Gaston. I’ll tell him to talk to you. Just make sure you see him after five o’clock. Any earlier would be during office hours, and he’d probably bill me at his hourly rate. I’ve come to know the ways of lawyers.” The corners of Williams’s mouth drew downward. “Tell him to give my best to
ugh-uh.”

“Ugh-uh?”

“U-G-A. Uga. Uga’s a big white bulldog. He’s the University of Georgia mascot. Sonny Seiler is the proud owner.” Williams said this with a disdainful look. “Sonny is very gung-ho. He’s the university’s number-one football fan. He’s owned the school’s mascot since he was in law school in the nineteen-fifties. The current Uga is the fourth in the Uga dynasty. Twenty-five years of Ugas and football. Sonny drives Uga up to Athens for all the home games in a big Georgia-red station wagon. The license plate reads ‘UGA IV.’”

The entrance hall of Armstrong House was a cavernous space with marble floors and a baronial fireplace. A full-length oil portrait of a British nobleman in a crimson cape dominated one wall. Beneath it, old Mr. Glover, the porter, sat sleeping in an armchair. A receptionist at the foot of a sweeping stairway whispered that I should go right on up.

Sonny Seiler’s office was a large, elegant room that had once served as the mansion’s master bedroom. Tall French windows looked out across Bull Street toward the Oglethorpe Club. On the walls, where one might have expected to find portraits of the firm’s founders, there were portraits of Uga I, Uga II, and Uga III. Each of the bulldogs wore a bright red football jersey over massive shoulders; a black
G
for Georgia was centered on the dog’s chest. Seiler was sitting at his desk in a white short-sleeved shirt. He was solidly built and had big shoulders. When I came in, he bounded up from his chair like a halfback breaking out of a huddle. We shook hands. He wore a ring big enough to be brass knuckles. It sparkled with two rows of diamonds that spelled out in big block letters
GEORGIA—NATIONAL CHAMPIONS
—1980. I sat down across the desk. It was quarter to six, but I got right to the point, thinking Seiler might have the clock running anyhow.

“Will your approach to this trial be any different from the first one?” I asked.

“Hell, yes,” he said. “We’re gonna have a whole new game plan. The biggest mistake the defense made in the first trial was
not facing the homosexual issue head-on. Bobby Lee Cook thought he had an agreement to keep it out of the trial altogether, so he settled for a jury of old-maid schoolteachers and it was a disaster. He was double-crossed when the judge allowed those two punk friends of Hansford’s to testify about Jim and Danny having sex. So I sat Jim down and said, ‘Look, we can’t make that mistake again. If we do, Lawton will bring those guys back and send the jury into orbit the way he did last time. You’ve got to come right out with it yourself this time,
in your own words.
Phrase it gently and get the shock of it over.’ Well, Jim was dead set against it. He flatly refused, said absolutely not. He said he’d never expose his mother to that kind of talk. So I said, ‘For God’s sake, Jim, she was sitting right there during the first trial! She’s already heard it!’ ‘Not from me, she hasn’t,’ he said. So I thought a minute and I said, ‘How about if your mother is
not
in the courtroom when you testify? Then she won’t hear it from you.’ Jim finally came around. He agreed to do it. I told him not to worry, we’ll back him up by picking a jury that’s not biased against homosexuals.”

“How do you plan to do that?” I asked.

Seiler leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk. “Well, Coach, this is what we’re gonna do. When we interview prospective jurors, we’re gonna ask ’em, ‘Would you have a problem if you learned that a defendant was a homosexual?’ They’ll all say, ‘Oh, no! No problem at all.’ Then we’ll ask ’em, ‘Would you want a homosexual teaching your children at school?’ Right there, we’ll trap a lot of ’em: ‘Well … no,’ they’ll say, ‘I wouldn’t want that,’ and we’ll strike those people for cause. If they slip past that question, we’ll hit ’em with ‘Are there any homosexuals in your church?’ Then: ‘Would you mind if your minister was a homosexual?’ If there’s any bias, we’ll dig it out sooner or later.”

Seiler was not interested in seeking a change of venue. “We might be very sorry if we got it,” he said. “There’s no telling where we’d end up tryin’ this case. We’d have no control over it. We could find ourselves in Ware County.” He rolled his eyes.
“All they got there are a bunch of damn rednecks. I mean, hell, people over there think it’s a sin to have sex with the lights on. They’d lynch Jim before they ever got around to convicting him. So I think we’re better off right here in Savannah. The D.A.’s case isn’t as strong as he makes it out to be, and it’s gettin’ weaker all the time.”

“How?” I ventured to ask.

“Well, I’ll tell ya. Lawton likes to talk about the ‘overwhelming’ physical evidence against Jim. That’s bullshit. He’s got two pet theories: the gunshot-residue theory and the coup de grâce theory. He claims the absence of gunshot residue on Danny’s hands proves he didn’t fire a gun, and he says Danny was lying on the floor when Jim shot him in the back. Well, we’ve come up with brand-new evidence that knocks hell out of both those arguments. I don’t mind telling you what we’ve got, ’Cause we’ve had to share it all with the D.A.

“Last month, we got a court order that allowed us to have our own experts conduct laboratory tests on the two German Lugers—Jim’s and Danny’s—and the shirt that Danny was wearing. We lined up one of the top forensic pathologists in the country to do the tests, Dr. Irving Stone of the Institute for Forensic Sciences in Dallas. He’s the guy who analyzed the clothing worn by President Kennedy and Governor Connally for the congressional committee that reexamined the Kennedy assassination. In other words, he’s no slouch.

“Now, we were stickin’ our neck out, ’Cause we didn’t know whether Stone’s findings would help us or hurt us, and we were under court order to give the results to Lawton. In fact, the D.A. sent his man with us to Dallas—Dr. Larry Howard, the director of the Georgia Crime Lab. Ol’ Doc Howard carried the guns and the shirt down there.

“Well, when Dr. Stone stepped up to test-fire Danny’s pistol, something unexpected happened. It wouldn’t fire. At first, Stone thought the safety was on. But it turned out that the trouble was that the gun had an unusually heavy trigger pull—twenty pounds. A normal trigger pull is four to six pounds. Stone had
to squeeze hard to pull the trigger, and as he did, the gun jerked around drastically. Right there we had an unlooked-for explanation for why Danny missed Jim and shot into the desk. It was a bonus. It just fell into our lap.

“Then Dr. Stone went ahead and tested the gun to see if it was consistent in the way it threw off gunpowder. Get this: Stone found that when he held Danny’s gun in a downward angle and fired it, as Danny would have, the gunshot residue was diminished by more than half. Not only that, the gun was erratic in the amount of residue it threw off! Well, ol’ Doc Howard was breathin’ heavy right about now.

“Then Dr. Stone ran an analysis of Danny’s shirt. Hell, there wasn’t any gunpowder on it at all! According to Stone, that proves Jim had to be standing at least four feet away from Danny, because that’s how far Jim’s gun ejects debris out the front of the barrel. Stone says that means there’s no way Jim could have come around the desk to fire the last two shots, because there’d be gunpowder on Danny’s shirt if he had. So much for Lawton’s coup de grâce theory. I thought ol’ Doc Howard was gonna pass out.”

Seiler pulled a manila envelope out of his desk drawer. “Now, I’m gonna show you a little surprise we have in store for Lawton. After the police got to Jim’s house, they photographed the room where the shooting took place. Those pictures showed all sorts of supposedly incriminating details. Right? A chair leg on Danny Hansford’s trousers, particles of paper on top of the gun on the desk, smeared blood on Danny’s wrist. Bad stuff. Lawton introduced about twenty photographs in the first trial, but the police photographer testified she took
five rolls.
That means there were over a hundred pictures we hadn’t seen. A couple weeks ago we asked to have a look at the rest of them. We didn’t know what we were looking for, and frankly we didn’t think we’d find anything.

“Well, we got the full set of photographs a couple of days ago. Okay. Now, look at this one.”

Seiler handed me a photograph showing the chair behind
Williams’s desk. A leather pouch lay on the carpet against a leg of the chair.

“Now compare that photograph … with this one.” In the second shot, the leather pouch was no longer touching the chair leg; it was several inches away. “You can tell from the designs in the carpet that both the chair and the leather pouch have been moved. I don’t know who moved them or why, but nobody is supposed to touch anything at the scene of an alleged crime until photography is completed and measurements are taken. If the police do move anything, they’re required to photograph it actually being moved, and they didn’t. When we looked through the rest of the pictures, this is the sort of thing we found.”

Seiler laid out several other photographs showing objects on the top of Williams’s desk. “Notice the position of the pink box, here … and here.” The pink box, too, had been moved. So had a copy of
TV Guide
, a stack of envelopes, rolls of paper, and a telephone directory.

“When you look at all the pictures—and not just the twenty the D.A. used for the first trial—you can see that things were being shuffled around all over the place. That means the scene of the shooting was never properly secured. There’s not supposed to be anybody in the room when the police photographer is shooting pictures, but just look at these photographs: You can see feet, arms, legs, civilian shoes, uniform shoes, black shoes, felt shoes. The police were swarming all over the house that night. It was a convention. And now we discover they were moving the evidence. That’s crazy. It violates rudimentary police procedure. What’s more,
it taints all the evidence in the room!”

Seiler beamed. “I tell ya, we’re in good shape. The only thing out of our control is Jim’s arrogance on the witness stand. But hell, we ain’t never gonna get around that. We’re just gonna have to live with it.”

Seiler tilted back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Lawton’s in trouble, but it’s his own fault. He made a terrible blunder playing keep-away with the evidence in the first trial. Lawton’s articulate and smart, no question. But he doesn’t
have the experience a D.A. oughta have. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been practicing law for twenty-five years, been in court dozens and dozens of times. Spencer Lawton hasn’t handled but two court cases in his life—the Rangers case and Jim’s first trial—and he hasn’t won one yet, now that Jim’s conviction has been reversed. He’s anxious and he’s green, and we’re gonna take advantage of that. We’ve been keeping the pressure on him, swamping him with pre-trial motions, distracting him with details. There’s nothing we can do about the horrendous publicity, of course, but this time we’re gonna sequester the jury to shield them from it. I hate to do it to ’em, but we’ll try to speed things up a little by having Saturday sessions in court.” Seiler shook his head. “Right in the middle of football season too. That oughta prove I didn’t make the decision lightly. I’ve been to every Georgia home game for the last twenty-five years. I figure I’ll miss at least one game, maybe two this year because of the trial. But we’ll be at the opener against UCLA this Saturday.”

“You and Uga?”

“Yup,” said Seiler. “Ever seen Uga?”

“No, but I’ve heard about him.”

“People
love
Uga!” he said. “He’s the most famous animal in Georgia!” Seiler gestured toward a bank of file cabinets next to his desk. “That whole thing is full of nothing but Uga.” He began rolling out the drawers. They were crammed with clippings, photographs, posters, letters.