Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Lee’s progress on her research moved apace as people warmed to her. Tom Radney gave her a red suitcase full of case files and legal documents on Willie Maxwell, a local reporter’s mother gave her a portfolio of all the journalist’s articles on the case, and the local courthouse yielded stacks of documents. Lee’s research revealed several important aspects of the murders.

Based on her research, Lee believed Maxwell was guilty of the murders. Nevertheless, Maxwell had to have had an accomplice to move him back and forth from several of the murder scenes. Lee assumed that accomplice was Ophelia Burns, whose story about the day Shirley Ellington died was vague and unlikely. Lee feared some harm if Ophelia Burns was indeed the accomplice. As far as Willie Maxwell’s motives went, insurance fraud and greed were obvious ones. That Maxwell spent much of his money on his numerous girlfriends seemed a likely explanation for why he died debt-ridden despite the payouts.

Beyond these facts and likely conjectures, Lee was hard-pressed to find the truth. People lied, misremembered, or imagined a great deal about the murders, with the idea that Maxwell was a voodoo practitioner being the most frequently unsubstantiated rumor. Having completed her initial research, Lee returned to New York, promising her many friends and acquaintances that this would be the first of many trips.

Despite Lee’s optimism about what she had begun calling The Reverend, she struggled mightily and unsuccessfully to write a full draft. Part of the challenge was that she could not figure out how to structure her material into the form of a book. She had a hard time identifying a heroic protagonist around which to build the narrative. Tom Radney and all the lawyers and lawmen who failed to get a conviction of Maxwell were too flawed to be the heroes.

Lee also likely worried about the unseemliness of the author of To Kill a Mockingbird creating a lurid work in which the villain was a black man in a country whose legal system was marred by racism. Lee also ran up against the reality that there just were not enough facts, especially about the black characters at the center of the book, because such people are almost never deemed significant enough to be a part of the historical record.

Beyond these writing and research challenges were personal ones. Lee was a solitary figure for her most of her life; her writing community had disappeared with the deaths of her original supporting cast, she was frequently depressed, and she was known to be an alcoholic or at least a problem drinker. Lee went to stay in Alabama with one of her older sisters. Cep contends that Lee lost her nerve for writing during this period.

The time away with her sister did not remove the blocks to Lee’s writing. Truman Capote, whose work inspired her own in this instance, died of an overdose in 1984, yet another blow to Lee. In correspondence from 1987 Lee indicated that she was unable to overcome the difficulties of the project and was finished with it.

In the book’s final full chapter Cep describes the latter years of Lee’s life, Lee’s legacy, and the fate of The Reverend. Lee’s reputation eventually solidified: She was the author of just one very famous and much-beloved novel. Sometime during the 1990s and 2000s, Lee stopped drinking and writing professionally. She seemed happy in the letters she wrote during this period. Critics, writers, and the public recognized the value of her work with honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, several unauthorized biographies, and her portrayal in films about the making of In Cold Blood and the life of Truman Capote.

Lee’s health declined as she lost her eyesight and suffered strokes, so she moved back home to Alabama, eventually settling down in an assisted living facility. In February 2015, with the permission of Lee’s agent-turned-legal-caretaker, Go Set a Watchmen—an unfinished, ungainly novel that Lee had given up on—was published. Lee was in poor health and likely suffering from dementia at that point; she died a year later on February 19, 2016. Many critics saw the novel’s publication as the exploitation of a writer who was not in control of her mental faculties; as a result, few people see it as a legitimate second novel.

The Reverend had its own slight afterlife. An Alexander City novelist published a pulp fiction crime novel based on the Willie Maxwell murders after contacting Lee in the 1980s. Tom Radney died in 2011, and his eldest granddaughter discovered a chapter of The Reverend, which Lee had sent to Radney, among his papers. The work was clearly fiction, however, and no one had any idea where the rest of the work was or if it even existed.

Cep closes the book by noting that in 2017, Lee’s estate handed the red briefcase of Tom Radney’s files over to her and one of Radney’s granddaughters. No other portion of Lee’s literary papers are available to the public, making it impossible to know if more of The Reverend exists.