FURIOUS HOURS-Casey Cep

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attorney who had previously defended the reverend. Sitting in the audience during the Vigilantes trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own in Cold Blood, the true crime classic. She had helped her friend Truman Capoti research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting and many more years working on her own version

of the case. Now, Casey Sepp brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the country's most beloved writers in her struggle with fame success

in the mystery of artistic creativity. The book they were featuring this evening is Furious Hours, Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, with my special guest, journalist and author, Casey Sep. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Casey Sep.

authority he had owing to his vocation. And when Harper Lee got involved, obviously this is the kind of story within a story about another writer's attempt to research and report this case. So those are the kind of deep journalistic background and academic interests that brought me to this case. But you know, I grew up in a small town,

and I grew up loving to kill a mockingbird. So Harper Lee was one of my favorite authors, and that was how I came to know the story of the Reverend Maxwell was through her involvement.

of Alabama. So he was born to sharecroppers, spent much of his early life sharecropping, and worked some at a textile mill. So this was a part of Alabama that when hydroelectric power came in, it mechanized a lot of these textile mills and moved a lot of rural folks into town and into just a higher quality of life.

So he served in the army, and when he came back from his army service during World War Two, he actually went to work in the very textile mill that had had an army commission to make the uniforms he wore a little bit of his background. And you know, when I say that kind of political and environmental upheople, it has a lot to do with the changing economy of the South, so those textile mills really started to boom.

And you know, it didn't make everyone rich, but it made a few people really rich, and it improved the quality of life for a lot of others. And on top of that, you know, the reverend, long before he was accused of murder, he was a very entrepreneurial man. And you know he was he wasn't ordained Baptist minister, so he spent some of his time preaching and leading worship services and conducting funerals. But you know, he did a lot of other things for money too. He worked

at a rock quarry. He just did, you know, kind of anything he could for money. And I think that's one of the reasons when you know, folks who knew him close family members of his started to die, and these lucrative life insurance policies he held on all of them. It sort of added up to a kind of character, you know, someone who had big aspirations, who would do anything for money, who was entrepreneurial, who was certainly determined to rise above his station in life.

She worked with him at that textile mill. He he also did something again depending on where listeners are listening from, they might know a little bit about the timber industry, but you know he also worked with the Paulpwodding crew cutting you know, short short timbers for paper pulping mills, and so he was a busy guy, and you know, he was well known and respected for them for the ministry, but had a pretty high quality of life that she

contributed to. She took in work as a seamstress, and she came from a big family too, so she had a lot of sisters and a brother in the area, and you know, they were well known, well respected people, and that was pretty much their their way of life until nineteen seventy when she was found murdered, and the story of their marriage, as far as the public was concerned, really changed and things came out about affairs he had had, and rumors about his life, you know, without her and

outside of that marriage.

you meant. And in nineteen seventy, you know, he was still just a well regarded minister headed to preach a summer revival and he was, you know, driving far enough away he told his wife to leave the phone on the hook so he could call to let her know he was headed home. She had not gone with him, even though some of the other ministers involved had brought

their wives. And we know this because Mary Lou Maxwell, the first missus Maxwell, went next door that night and talked with the neighbor of hers and said, you know, my husband told me to leave the phone on the hook. He's preaching out a revival. She had a sister come visit her that day. You know, it was early August. She was shelling peas, just preparing the summer harvest, and

shame old, same old. So she didn't keep anything from anyone, and so both from her sister and from her neighbor, we know a little bit about what happened earlier in the day, and what the reverend told the police was that, you know, he called and she didn't answer, and when he came home, she wasn't there, and he didn't think anything of it. He went right to sleep, you know, he figured she was out with a sister or visiting her mother, and he went right to bed because he

was tired and didn't think anything of it. And you know, the book starts to track a couple of different version of events because on the one hand, the reverence were he was never involved in his wife's murder. He had no idea what happened. If anything, it was someone trying to frame him. But there's, obviously, as there often is with a domestic murder like this, there's a parallel track of what everyone else said and what the police were able to piece together about what happened that night.

So they interviewed the Reverend Maxwell, and they also went and interviewed the neighbor, and Dorcas Anderson, who lived next door to the reverend, said that she had spoken to Mary Lou Maxwell that night. Mary Lou had told her this business about the phone and about the revival, but he also came back later and she said that her husband had called and that he had been in a car accident and she needed to go pick him up.

And that was a telling detail for the police because what Dorcas told them was Mary Lou had been lured to the very place where her own body would be found and where her own car was found in what was staged to be an accident. So that was the beginning of the fraying story that the reverend provided and the kind of weakness of his alibi. And to be quite honest, that night, you know, already the police had a sense that Dorcas was going to be their star

witness that you know, she disrupted his timeline. She provided them with a narrative of events that made sense and explained how Mary Lou ended up where she did that night and why her husband was somehow involved.

becomes the second Missus Maxwell. And I bring that up on the subject of life insurance only because if the reverend had only ever been accused of murdering his first wife, this part of the story might not have been as relevant. But it turns out he would eventually accused of killing five family members, and the patterns such as it was part of it was that he held these lucrative life insurance policies on all of them. So that's the first

Missus Maxwell, that's the second Missus Maxwell. All the members of his family who die under suspicious circumstances are ensured, and he is the beneficiary on almost all of those policies. And that's why life insurance becomes a huge part of

this story. And when I first found out about it's about half a million dollars in life insurance that the reverend was able to collect in the nineteen seventies, tremendous amount, and not just one policy on each of these family members, but in some cases a dozen policies on the same individual, and the police believed executed without their consent, with out their knowledge. And for me, as a journalist, there was

this straightforward question, well, how could he do it? You know, I have a life insurance policy, my parents do, I have a pology and my spouse. In order to do that, you provide their social Security number, they get a medical exam. You know, it's all above board, And I thought, well, how could he do this? And the answer is, in nineteen seventy, the life insurance industry was the wild West.

a million dollar policy. But they've turned up and so those standards didn't exist. So when the reverend executed all these policies, you know, in some cases he would you know, pull a little tag out of a magazine and it would be like a little postcard, and all you needed was the date of birth, a correspondence addressed, and a

little bit of biographical information. And because he was insuring his family members, you know, from the company's perspective, it's not suspicious that a son would want a policy on his mother, or a husband on his wife, or a father on his children. And so one by one he was insuring through all these different companies. You know, the policies were one thousand dollars here, three thousand dollars there, maybe twenty five thousand dollars in the largest denomination, but

they added up pretty quickly. And you know, this, to me, it's just one of these interesting fraud cases. I think straightforwardly, when you get away with something, the temptation is to do it over and over again. And piecing together what the Reverend was able to do was fascinating. And there's a photo in the book. At one point, you know, I was able to get copies of a lot of these policies because of some of the civil and criminal

litigation around the Reverend's activity. And at one point I laid them out on my kitchen table, and there's a photograph in the book. You know, again, we are talking dozens and dozens of policies, and you can just see they all have the same handwriting. You know, they're all shooting his mailing address. So these people did not know for the most part that he had even taken out

the policies on them. And in a couple of instances when the companies like sever their connection, so a couple of companies caught on, you know, when wife number two died under the same circumstances, there were a couple of companies who said, you know, that's it, we're canceling. We will give you a refund on what you've paid in, but we're terminating our relationship with you. And one of those termination letters, you know, itemizes, nieces, nephews, and infant daughter.

You know, just a huge number of family members and again no reason to believe any of them had any idea that he held policies on them because he was hiding the correspondent. You know, once or twice he got tripped up, like one of the policies he tried to take out on his mother, who was older by that point. You know, the company contacted her physician to say, like is she in good health? Like is this a good policy? And you know the doctor was like, she doesn't know

anything about it. So I you know, the fraud stuff is very interesting to me, and it is a big part of his story. And I think it's an interesting part of his character because again this was, you know, a black sharecropper born in the nineteen twenties and one of the poorest counties in Alabama. And some of his story is just the resourcefulness of you know, he was an incredibly intelligent person with very limited opportunities for exercising

that intelligence. And you know, his lawyer, who was also an army that you know, when Tom Radney, his lawyer, joined the military, you know, he went into the jag Corps. He got legal experience. He came home and opened a law office, and you know, the Reverend Maxwell, who was awarded, you know, a medal for good conduct in the army,

came home to no opportunities. So I think it's it's just an interesting part of the story both how the industry worked at the time, and you know, he was not the only person who took advantage of the insurance companies this way. There were other crimes, you know, none, I don't think with quite this larger body count, but

certainly other examples of fraud. I mean, if you can believe it, there was literally another Willie Maxwell, and that one lived in Florida and he was caught up in an insurance fraud scheme where they just dumped a body and pretended it was you know, pretended it was him. And then you know, the newspaper covers of that one is like, you know, Lazarus, the sky rises again. But the guy who was supposed to be pretending to be dead kind of forgot and he got picked up on

a like a kind of lower rest carget. The area is in prison, but he's supposed to be dead and someone's collecting the policies on him. So you know, it's just it really was the wild West, you know. And if you've seen Double Indemnity or you know, any of these movies about the insurance industry, they're not documentaries, but you know, they dramatize some of the irregularities in the industry. Now, again, I always say, the book isn't a how to. You

cannot get away with this kind of stuff today. There are standards and protections and all sorts of ways that the companies try and regular people's participation in the in the industry. But it's a financial market like anything else, you know, it really is. It grew in response to economic trends, and it's susceptible to fraud the way any financial market is.

he's an upstanding reverend. He strikes the curious pose in court and lo and behold the next door neighbor who's supposed to blow a hole in his alibi instead provides him with one. And so Dorcas Anderson, she was married at the time, but her husband died of als and you know, look in the way that rumor and innuendo and gossip can grow, a lot of things were said about the reverends and how he got away with all this.

And one of the things that was said was, you know, he was a voodoo practitioner and he could get whatever he wanted, and he could, you know, hexa jury and charm anyone. And so those rumors included Dorcas's husband, who did you know, in some ways die at a convenient time, you know, just when she was planning to marry the reverend.

So she's the second missus Maxwell. She is also found dead in what appears to be a car accident, although the police investigated, hoping to prove homicide and her you know, status as the second Missus Maxwell probably already sounds a little unbelievable to some folks listening. But she was not the last Missus Maxwell. So Ophelia Burns, who was you know, investigated and charged with, although not ever tried, as an accessory to the murderer of the first Missus Maxwell, crazily

becomes the third Missus Maxwell. So the reverend actually takes a third wife, and that's Ophelia, and Ophelia survived him, but Ophelia was implicated in some of the other crimes he was accused of. So there are three wives, two of whom are found dead, one of whom survives the reverend. And you know, if you talk to some people in this part of Alabama, they would say she survived him because she was involved. You know, that she knew exactly

what had happened, and she had been involved. It's not quite clear what the police's theory was, although because all of these murders were staged as car accidents, one theory is simply that she helped provide a getaway. So when the reverend would stage these crime scenes, she helped him get away. Although there was reason to believe in that first murder, she might have been more involved, and that's certainly some of the theories that Harperley entertained when she

investigated the case. But that was another client of Tom Radney's. And you know you've mentioned Tom is the lawyer kind of at the heart of my book. So the first third of the book is about the reverend and the crimes he was accused of, and the second third is about Tom Radney. This you know, small town lawyer, had a diverse practice. Like a lot of small town lawyers,

was you know, just lived and died for trials. He had had a political career before he settled into law and just you know, lived for a courtroom, lived for the dramatic speech. You know, loved it when people said he reminded him of Mattlock, that kind of a lawyer with a dramatic courtroom presence. And I think one of the things that did was make him crave you know, hard cases, you know, the long shots that no one

else wanted. And he and the reverend, you know, had a legal relationship for ten years and he did everything from mortgages for the reverend to as you've said, these civil cases. So the police were investigating the reverend. But at a certain point, so was basically every insurance company in the state of Alabama. You know, they were trying to policies, and that meant that quite often the reverend had to sue them in order to get what he was theoretically owed. And so there was there was a

lot of litigation. You know, every time one of his family members died after in nineteen seventy two, he had to take the companies to court or settle with them out of court. And so Tom ran They handled not only the criminal investigations. You know, he would arrange for private autopsies, and he would you know, be with the reverend when he was questioned, and if there were court proceedings, he represented him in court. But he also handled all

these these civil cases. And you know that took a lot of creativity because at a certain point, I quote this letter in the book, but you know, Tom is joking with a colleague of his in Montgomery, and he's asking this old friend of his if he'll bring some litigation in the Montgomery circuit courts, because you know, you could docket shop to a certain extent based on where the company was located or where the regional office was, and Tom was trying to get this friend in Montgomery

to bring some new civil cases because he was worried he'd run out of juries. Around Lake Martin, you know that there was no one who had not heard the reverend, you know, bring one of these cases. And you know, it was a lot of lawyering, and it was creative lawyering, and you know, it raised a lot of eyebrows in town that both of them did. You know, the reverends

had a reputation, but so did Tom. And at a certain point he built this new brick law office, you know, right right downtown in alex City, and folks called it the Maxwell House because they said it was the house the Reverend Maxwell had built from all of these insurance cases that you know, not only was the reverend making money off these cases, but obviously his lawyer was getting a cut. And I think, you know, you brought up Ophelia,

who was a very interesting client. But obviously the most interesting thing that happens is, you know, after the reverend is gunned down and murdered, Tom then takes the case of the vigilante who murdered him, and you know, I think there are some interesting ethical questions about that choice,

and certainly there were questions around town. But I think that one of the things Tom thought was taking that other case could possibly help his reputation and rehabilitate his standing, because you know, so many people had objected to the work he did for the reverend. So I think, you know, it's it's to me one of the most obvious reasons

Harperley took an interest in this case. She found out about the Reverend in nineteen seventy seven when he was gunned down by that vigilante, and she spent a lot of time getting to know the vigilante and getting to know Tom Radney and some of the other folks who had worked these cases, both as law enforcement officers and as lawyers, and you know, as life insurance investigators and

coroners and a lot of people involved. But I think that you know, the kind of morally complicated lawyer was obviously we all know from her writing about Atticus, since just something she was interested in the complexities of the law and of our understanding, and of the way that it both you know, pursues justice and and can sometimes run orthogonal to justice.

animated his practice and complicated it. So you know, it's really true, anyone accused of murder, even if they've confessed, is entitled to a good defense and to a robust defense. And I think Tom believed that. And I think that, you know, Tom was a white lawyer practicing in a part of the world where black defendants were not all afforded the same opportunities for justice and for a zealous defense. And I think that there were really admirable things animating

his work as a lawyer. But you know, it's true what he did with the Reverend. Certainly there were people who objected, and there were you know, things he said after the fact, I mean, look, in attempting to defend the vigilante. Part of the case that Tom Radney made was that the reverend was a murderer who had never been held accountable for his actions, and he made, you know, he made it seem like that was the fault of the police and of the district attorney in this circuit.

But of course plenty of people thought that was his fault too, that his defense had been a little too zealous, and that he had been a little too willing to, you know, do whatever it took to defend the reverend. So I think there are things like that, and then right, you know, when it came to Robert Burns, the vigilante, Look, three hundred people watched him commit that crime, and there were three hundred eye witnesses who plenty of prosecutors would

have called it's not quite how that trial unfolded. And we can talk about that if you want. But you know, the defense he brought for Robert Burns was an insanity defense, and that is its own can of worms. Not just in this case, but at the time, you know, certain states had already banned the insanity defense. There was an ongoing conversation in the legal community about whether it was applicable or how what standards should be applied to make sure that it was relevant to the facts at hand,

And so yeah, I mean this book. Really the reason Tom is such a central figure is I think that you know, his decisions are interesting and up for debate, certainly just fodder for a very interesting conversation about you know, what kinds of cases lawyers take and how mixed or muddled their motives might be, and you know, how we

want the legal system to work. So yeah, I'm not quite sure which one you had in mind, but I think you know, if you sat down any number of people in Alexander City, they would say, you know, there's a lot to talk about when it comes to Tom Radney, and frankly, he would have had a lot to say. He's certainly, you know, talked a lot with Harper Lee about the Reverends and what he thought of them, and you know what he taught certainly after the fact.

the courtroom. So let's talk about what we didn't mention that a couple other murders that had strikingly similar characteristics to the other murders of his wives were his own brother, found in nineteen seventy two, and a nephew was missing in nineteen seventy six, And from that police did gain a little gained quite a bit of information from people that apparently the reverend had approached to do some of his dirty work.

these other capacities. So they'd worked on his pulp putting crew, and you know, they knew him from that kind of work, and at various points he had propositioned them to take part in the murders. And the police did learn a lot from those cases, partly because it did describe the

intent and the motive. I mean, it was very clearly he propositioned them by offering them, you know, portions of the life insurance or cash payments related to the money he would make after the life insurance was settled on those individuals. And so those statements in that testimony at the trial of the vigilante, you know, I think in ways that are really interesting for a case like this,

demystified things. You know, there had been so much fear and gossip and rumor, you know, the voodoo magic, all kinds of things people said about why the reverend could get away with us all, and you know, here were these statements that were just incredibly human and incredibly straightforward. You know, the Reverend asked me to meet him here. He said he would have a pair of gloves so

there would be no fingerprints. He planned to use you know, a small capsule pill which would incapacitate the person, and then we would stage at like an accident, and after he got the insurance, I would get you know, X amount,

And you know that meant it wasn't voodoo. There were no you know, these weren't magic potions, you know, and the lack of evidence was just from planning, you know, wearing gloves, cleaning up the scene, and you mentioned that, you know, the reverend's nephew and brother had been found under these, you know, similarly suspicious circumstances. But I think the crime that was most shocking was the last of his family members, and that is the funeral at which

the reverend was gunned down. And he had a stepdaughter, so Ophelia, that third wife of his, had been raising a little complicated to get into the specific family dynamics, but she was raising a child as her own. And that little girl, Shirley Anne Ellington, that's why she has a different surname. Shirley Anne was sixteen years old and she had been living with Ophelia and the reverend, and she was found murdered. And it's her uncle who gunned

down the reverend. And who you know, Robert Burns is alive today and he will talk about what he did. And he is just as clear today as he was in the summer of nineteen seventy seven as far as he was concerned. You know, the reverend had gotten away with murder five if five times, and that the police could do nothing, and he knew he was going to get away with Shirley Anne's murder and he had to do something about it because as far as he was concerned,

other family members were at risk. You know, it would never stop unless someone stopped it. So I think, you know, as with any true crime story, there's a way that this is, you know, just lurid and fascinating. Then there's a way that it was incredibly real and tragic for

the people who live through it. And I think one of the things that's nice about the book, by getting to tell Harperly's story is right away you start to see the ways that writers can make decisions about how to humanize victims and how to write responsibly about what happened and who was involved, and the reality and the tragedy of these kinds of cases for not just the people who knew the victims, but for the whole community

that's terrorized by something like this. And you mentioned in the intro, you know, her friendship with Truman Capodi, But I think a lot of her ethics around journalism and reporting and her sensitivity about cases like this came from her work on in Cold Blood. You know, they went to the small town in Kansas, and they saw what that family homicide did to friends and neighbors and just

how indelibly it left its mark on a community. And I think, you know, she was sensitive to that in Alexander City, and when she met with Robert Burns, she was incredibly patient and thoughtful. And when she thought about Tom Radney, I think it's very clear she knew, you know, she had to represent him accurately and critically because his

role was perceived differently by different people. And the story of the Reverend, which had been you know, kind of black comedy for some of the white folks around this part of Alabama, and just this crazy story, you know,

this front page melodrama. You know, she interviewed Mary Lou Maxwell's family members, and she interviewed Shirley Anne Ellington's friends, and she knew what this was actually like for the people who lived through it, and for other family members who were afraid, or for Robert Burns, who, you know, per his defense was driven mad by the fear and

the uncertainty of what meant, what might happen. So, you know, she only came to the story in nineteen seventy seven, but I think plotting it out as it happened from nineteen seventy you know to nineteen seventy seven is very important to do, and however it seems in hindsight, I think the first third of the book does just try to plot it and show you, you know, to be fair to the investigators. A pattern only emerges in hindsight

and as more crimes unfold. And so what they thought in nineteen seventy is different than what they thought in nineteen seventy two, and their certainty and urgency in nineteen seventy seven was different than in nineteen seventy You righte.

as opposed to Truman Capodi. So did she utilize those skills or how did she utilize those skills in terms of reaching out to the to the community. I have to find out more about Reverend Maxwell and his crimes.

it's not that Hartberly wasn't famous. You know, to Killa Mockingbird sold forty million copies, you know, Gregory Peck's Oscar winning film, and people knew the story and they knew her name, but you know, she really is shoed same or publicity and didn't do interviews after nineteen sixty four, and so the public, whatever image they had of her in nineteen sixty when t Kill a Mockingbird came out, she really was able to be quite anonymous and inconspicuous

for the rest of her life. And you know, the best demonstration of that story is I got told the story about you know, she was in her seventies and in New York City and she was at a lunch in a restaurant and the head of her publishing house was there and the person he was with said, you know, oh, that's Harper Lee. You see her. And the head of the publishing house, you know, she's one of their best selling authors, said, oh, my gosh, I've never met her.

and she went for lunch with that court reporter. You know, they had boloney sandwiches. The woman insisted on introducing Harperlely to her husband, And when I interviewed that court reporter, you know, I said, well, what was she like, what

was that lunch like? And she said, you know, she's the most down to earth person I ever met, and you know, just good country girl, you know, wickedly funny, but just really you know, I feel like I'd known her my whole life, and I think that is an important part of you know, when reporters think about how to do their work, you always want to be professional, but I think it is important to make people comfortable and for them to feel like you're listening and that

you're there for the right reasons to understand their story, not to exploit them. And Harper Lee just had that talent through and through and it was authentic and same thing when you when you talk to people who met her when she was out in Kansas, you know, it's really true if you've ever seen Capoti or Infamous, and your listeners, if they haven't, would loved those two films about the writing of in Cold Blood and in both

Harperly it's depicted. She's played by Sandra bullickin Wan and Catherine Kenner and another and in both we see her play that role and you know, just talking to people in ways that make them feel comfortable and coming with humility and thoughtfulness and sincerity. And you know, I think that her friendship with Capodi is one of the most fascinating in American literature. You know, they knew each other from children. They moved to New York around the same time.

They're pursuing their careers, you know, almost on these parallel tracks. But you know they are really just goal models of

how to be an artist. And you know they go out to Kansas and there it's just it's it's a fine display of you know, Capodi in his finest furs, you know, speaking with an accent no one can understand, you know, demanding the caviare that he's brought in his foot locker all the way from Manhattan, you know, versus Harper Lee, who's down home and comfortable and unassuming and can talk to you about the Methodist liturgy or about the Four Age Club. And I think that was important

to him, and it was certainly important to her. And you know, it's only more and more s as her life went on, because she was one of the world's most successful authors. She did have a pulitzer, but she you know, never let it change her presentation. And I think that, you know, over and over again people in alex City, when you know, I would talk to them about what was it like when you met her, or what was it like when she interviewed you about these cases?

There's really no one who didn't say it wasn't one of the most interesting conversations in their in their whole life, And there wasn't anyone who didn't feel like she just cared about them. And I think the you know, interesting version of that for me as a journalist is, you know, the Radney family. So Tom Radney has passed away, but everyone in the Radney family thinks he was going to be the hero of Harperly's book because she took such an interest in him, and she did all these interviews

with him and she was so complimentary. But the very first time I met Robert Burns, you know, he told me he was going to be the hero of the book and that's how he felt because she had been so thoughtful and caring and appreciative of his time. And I think, you know, if you're the kind of journalist who makes everyone feel like you care about their story and that you're going to treated with respect, it's a

really admirable thing. And you know, the truth of the matter is Harperly never published her book, So you would expect at least some of these people to be bitter about that or to say, you know, I was so disappointed, and I think it's a credit to her character that none of them seemed to hold it against her. You know, they just really feel like, you know, she came with sincerity and openness and all the right motives, and it

almost didn't matter she didn't publish the book. You know, it was an honor to them that she took an interest in their life. And you know, this was the strangest thing that ever happened in this part of Alabama, and it only got more important when she got involved.

What was her intent with this and what was her opposition to what Truman Capodi and some of these authors were doing. And she did not want to do that same thing with this book.

crime documentaries and podcasts. I think a lot of thoughtful questions are being asked about how we represent uncertainty or you know, how we handle the reliability of sourcing, or you know, takes seriously different versions of events or different accounts of them. And you know, Harper Lee was at the forefront of those conversations because she had been so involved in Capote's book, and she was conservative in a lot of ways. And one of the ways she was

conservative was with was with regard to journalistic ethics. And you know, I think she you know, I quote some of these letters. She had a lifelong friendship with the fact checker who had worked on so in Cold Blood was first published as this series of articles in The New Yorker and The New Yorkers, the magazine that continues

to have very high standards around fact checking. But Harperly maintained this friendship with Truman, Capote's fact checker, and some of the letters she exchanged with him are quite revealing about her objections in Cold Blood and the decisions she thought Capoti had made, and she mentioned it in correspondence with other folks as well, and I think, you know, the cooling of their friendship, folks have often attributed to kind of professional jealousy that she wont to Pulster and

he didn't, or that to kill a mockingbird was so beloved. But I think there were kind of deeper, more foundational concerns, and a lot of them had to do within Cold Blood and the decisions he made and the narrative perspective he took so very straightforwardly when they went to Kansas.

I think the book that Harperly thought she was helping with was going to be a book about the Clutter family and what had happened to them and what had happened in Hulcombe to the townspeople, their fear and their experience, and obviously, you know, in Cold Blood turned out to be a very sophisticated book that shifts perspective at a certain point and allies itself quite deeply with Hickock and Smith, the two murderers, and looks at their upbringing to explain,

you know, how they got to that moment in Kansas, and it looks at their experience with the criminal justice system, and I think, in very important ways, becomes a project that critiques the criminal justice system. And you know, is really a book that's anti death penalty, that looks at some of the irregularities in their case and argues maybe that they should not have been put to death. And you know, those are all choices. No one is faulting

Coupoti for those choices. But Harper Lee certainly had her own opinions, having sat through their trial, having interviewed the same people, and I think in small bore ways, you know, she knew some of the things Capoti couldn't have known for sure, but represented as fact. And you know, we were talking about those narrative techniques. I think folks probably know about the new journalism and the ways that fictional

techniques were brought into nonfiction. But as far as Harper Lee was concerned, a nonfiction novel was a contradiction in terms, you know, you were either writing nonfiction and everything was true, or you were writing a novel and you know, anything or nothing could be true. And you know, I think she felt like those were important standards to uphold, and it was critical for readers to understand what was true and what wasn't. And I think even more importantly to her,

you know, she was not a postmodernist. There was a there was a fact of the matter, and there was the truth of the matter, and I don't think in ways that we do today, she appreciated the attempt to malign or muddy that, especially when it came to criminal proceedings. And so there's a chapter my book that really gets into that, and I'm not sure that those are you know, there are the questions we may never be able to answer, and in fact, people will answer them differently, and they

may change case to case, or they may change. You may feel a certain way if you're just a consumer of true crime, but feel differently if you you know, had a love owner, a friend who was murdered and became the subject of a book or a podcast. You know, I think our perspective can change, and you know, so

I just think I appreciate her elevating those conversations. And I think with a book like In cold Blood that has become so canonical and so admired, it is useful to see some of you know, kind of behind the curtain. You know, what choices was Capoti making? What fact did he get wrong? And I think the most striking example of that for me. You know, I'm sure people listening, if they're not familiar with these this conversation about in cold Blood, they might be thinking, well, how serious is it?

And I think a fine demonstration of that is the scene that in cold Blood, and there's a scene where Alvin Dewey, you know, the kind of heroic Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent, former FBI agent who right away, you know, his colleagues would tell you, look, Truman, Capodi needed a hero, so he invented one. Alvin Dewey was not the lead agent. He did not make all of these discoveries on his own. You know, Capoti exaggerated that fact for narrative benefit. But

you know, pause that for a minute. Just the scene at the end where Alvin Dewey is walking with a friend of the Clutter family. So the daughter who was married murdered a teenage friend of hers, and they go and they visit the family graves. That never happened. They never went together. You know, it's not just Capodi didn't see it happened. It never happened. You know, they did not visit the grave. I'm sure they both went independently to mourn the clutters at the grave site, but they

never went again. And you know, that's the kind of thing for us as readers when you read in cold Blood, it's profoundly moving, it's emotionally successful. It brings closure to the narrative. But if you're Harper Lee and you know what didn't didn't happen, and you maintained a lifelong friendship with the Dewey's, you know, she stayed in touch with folks in Kansas, that's the kind of scene that gives

you pause. And you know, if you're going to call it nonfiction, it's a scene that really makes you think, you know, well, if that's not true, what else isn't true? And so there was real tension for her in that and I think you know, to your point, seventeen years years later, what was she going to do? She really emphasized the people in town. She was only after the facts, and she only wanted to know the truth, and she

didn't want rumors, she didn't want any window. And you know, she wanted to have a realistic depiction of the characters involved in what had happened. And I think, you know, that is an admirable goal. But for folks who read Furious Hours, she could not have picked a more difficult

case to uphold that standard. To you know, again, these are these are alleged murders where no one was ever convicted, and to be frank, of the five, not all of them were even officially declared homicide, and one of them

no cause of death was ever officially determined. And the insurance cases are incredibly complex, and you know, it's really a fine demonstration of unfortunately some of what can happen, which is investigators and police officers have real certainty that they are never able to evidence in a court of law. And so I think, you know, poor Harper Lee, one part of the story about why she never published this book is she had an admirable standard that was very

hard to uphold when it came to this case. And she was not a postmodernist, So you know, she was not willing to dwell on ambiguity and uncertainty. You know, she wanted to just tell you what's happened to improve it. And you know, if she was going to cause them an accessory, she wanted to have, you know, a criminal standard of guilt, and when she got into the life insurance fraud, she was seeking out handwriting experts to try

and prove it. And you know, I just think it was a very very admirable but difficult standard to.

in life insurance. And you know, that's a pretty funny but accurate depiction of what she found. There was no evidence, despite all the things people said, that the reverend had ever been a practitioner of voodoo, and he certainly denied it his whole life. And I think that's a pretty good example of what was tricky for Harperly about this case. So, on the one hand, it is categorically true that people

said these things about the reverend. You know, they said he could turn into a black cat, they said that he could make a death potion. They said he could you know, light a court candle that would get you an acquittal, no matter what you were accused of. But there's no evidence it's true. And so for a journalist, the question is, okay, so do you not include it? You know, if it's not true, you can't prove it,

do you just strike it from the record. And for me, when I was making that decision, it's very clear you can't. It's such a part of the way people will tell you the story. One of my first days on Martin, someone said to me, you know, don't go out at night, don't go anywhere near the reverend's grave. Because he might be there. You know, that kind of supernaturalism and superstition is still a part of the way people tell the story.

And kids who grew up in this part of Alabama, you know, you talk about the hoodoo man or the Boogeyman. They were afraid of the Reverend Maxwell. They were told don't look him in the eye, you know, don't go out at night or he'll get you. And so you have to acknowledge that. But you have to acknowledge to the life lack of veracity. And I think one way you explain it is just talk about how uncertainty and ambiguity sometimes lead us to reach for these kinds of explanations.

So in the book, I offer it up as an example of you know, on the one hand, voodoo and root working and whodoo are totally real. You know, there are practitioners. There are people in some instances a kind of homeopathic medicine. You know, people go to get a poultice or they go to get a natural you know, herbal remedy. And that's from someone who identifies as a

hoodoo worker or root worker. So it's real. You know, there's a real history of this kind of spirituality and spiritual discipline, you know, not just in New Orleans, but

all around the Caribbean and around the American South. So you don't you can't say it's not real at all, because you know, voodoo isn't just voodoo dolls and zombiesm you know, it is a legitimate kind of spirituality and religious practice, but it's not one there's any evidence the Reverend practice, So I think, you know, I think Harberly was certainly did not find any proof of this, but you do if you go to this part of Alabama

and you talk to folks who live through it. It's part of the story they tell, and it's part of the way they made sense of what was happening, and

part of the way that they understood as character. So I didn't strike it entirely from the story, but I hope I handled it a little more responsibly than a lot of the journalists did at the time this was happening, because if you go and you look through the newspaper mords for coverage of the Reverend Maxwell, you know, the summer of seventy seven is just headline after headline, including in the New York Times of you know, voodoo is

splaining voodoo priests, voodoo preacher, voodoo man gun down at funeral. It's just it's saturated the coverage of it. At the time.

and it just hadn't been published. And then I would go and interview someone else who said, you know, Harper Lee's depression and her drinking problem were so severe in the seventies and eighties that she never got any traction. And you know, she was only ever exaggerating her work on the case. And there's a paragraph in the book where I kind of round up for you in a short little passage. Really the far extremes of what I

was told. You know, she wrote it, but it's in a safe and it won't be published until you know, her last living family member dies or you know, she only ever wrote one chapter, which she gave to Tom Radney, and there's nothing more to be found. And you know, there's really that's that's the far ranges of what she said or what she wrote in letters. But I think you're asking about a letter I quote from from nineteen

eighty seven. And there was another writer who wrote to her to say that he was interested in the story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, and he had met one of the reverend's nephews who was going to tell him everything. And you know, he was just writing as a courtesy to Harperley to find out, you know, what had happened.

You know, he had heard she was involved, and he didn't want to step on her toes and you know, frankly, he didn't want to be, you know, stomped on by Harper Lee if she was about to put out her book. And she writes back, it's a beautiful letter, and I quote quite a lot of it in the book. She says, you know, it's true, I was very interested in this, and she tells him a little bit about the case.

I think, in one tantalizing way, she warns him that, you know, she did, in fact believe the reverend had an accomplice or an accessory, and that person is alive and well and living not more than you know, one hundred miles from him. So she warns him off a little bit. But then she tells him, just matter of factly,

the frustration she had with this case. And one of the things she said is, you know, Tom Radney, who is a very nice person and had been so helpful to her, was also someone who's quote psychological processes were of clinical interest to her. And she says that, you know, Tom saw himself as a mix of attic extension Robert Redford, but that was not her impression. And specifically she warns this guy, you know, if a hero is what you want,

you'll have to invent one. So we already hear some of her frustrations with the people who were trying to be helpful when she was working on it, and she had mentioned in other letters that, you know, one of the reasons she cooled on the Reverend Maxwell Is she was afraid of being sued, and she wrote in a letter to Gregory Peck she had promised him a role in a new movie, but then said she was, you know,

afraid of losing her pants in a lawsuit. But this letter from nineteen eighty seven goes on to say, as you've gestured towards that there was a shortage of facts, and that while you know the cassette tape for the duration of Human Vanity, you know there wasn't enough tape in all the world for her. And that while she had you know, volumes the size of the Old test than full of gossip and rumor, she had not been able to get enough facts. And she was warning this

writer about that. And in fact he was actually a fiction writer, so it's possible what she was really telling him was a novel would be better suited to the task. And she seems to have tried out her own fictional version as a way to deal with the lack of facts. But I think, you know, to be fair, and one of the things I do in the book is going back to this question of journalistic ethics and reporting only

what we know with certainty. You know, there is no evidence beyond a few pages and a few descriptions she herself made of the work product on this case, and no manuscript has emerged. There's reason to believe she made recorded tapes of her interviews, and I found a page of her notes that's the day she's interviewing Mary Lou Maxwell's sister. So we know she did all this, and you know, I know from my own interviews she went

and gathered these facts and she requested these documents. But I don't think that, you know, I don't think there's a manuscript we're going to find. I think we might find more notes. I think those tapes might emerge, But because of everything that was going on in her personal life, because of the frustrations of this case, I don't think there's a manuscript. There's a draft like ghostt a Watchman

that you know is going to come out tomorrow. I think part of the story of harperly is interested in this case is what happens to a lot of people with not just true crime books, book books of any kind. It doesn't matter that it's a great story, it's hard to make it into a good book. You know, the best stories, the craziest things that happened to you. You know, it's not always easy to shape them into a narrative.

And I think going back to what she helped Capoti do in Kansas is a pretty good illustration of that. You know, harperly had helped them put together more than one hundred and fifty pages of notes, and she had sat through a trial there, and she had pulled together all this material. But it's Capoti who could turn it into a book. And it's Capoti who was willing to make those decisions about, you know, how to shape the

truth and how to build character. And I think in some ways her own high standard is what part of what explains what happened to her, which is, you know, she wasn't willing to invent a hero, and that made it a harder book to write. And she wasn't willing to invent fact or stretch the truth, and it made it a harder book for her to write.

stone read Nell harper Lee. But a year after something very interesting, her estate contacted the family of Tom Radney, and a few weeks later his oldest daughter Alan drove from alex City to Monroeville and you met her there at the Monroe County Courthouse. Tell us about this meeting and what this was all about.

to different archives and courthouses. But this is probably the only day that really did feel like James Bond territory. So right, So one of Tom Radney's kids, He's got four children, called me in Maryland and said, you know, do you want to come with us? There had always been this question Tom, in his eagerness to have Harperley, you know, make him into a hero. You know, when she says he saw himself as a cross between Atticustvension

Robert Redford. He had tried to be so helpful because he thought this was going to be so incredible, you know, he would be the hero of Harperly's book and everyone would know his name in the case of a lifetime, would make him famous all around the country. In an effort to be helpful, he had given Harperly all of his legal files on the Reverend Maxwell. So for ten years, through all those civil cases, all those criminal cases, every scrap of paper he had saved, you know, the intake forms,

the court transcripts, copies of the life insurance policies. He gave all of that to harper Lee while she was in town. And you know, he thought whatever she needed he would try and provide. And there had always been this question about, you know, when whatever happened to Tom Radney's files, and had Harperly thrown them out, had she

given them to someone else? Whatever happened? And when she died in her New York apartment, they found a briefcase, a giant you know, a giant briefcase, you know, almost like a suitcase sized briefcase, huge, huge filats. They found it they opened it and lo and behold, here were

materials from the Maxwell case. And so her estate contacts Tom's daughter, we go, we pick it up, and right away, you know, it was interesting to me because everybody had sworn to me Tom Radney never had a briefcase, and so when they said they'd found this briefcase, I thought, well, is this even his? Right away his daughter said, you know, oh, my gosh, I remember my mom got that for him. He never used it. So that's one of the things we knew right away he had given to her because

he never used it. He just tossed all the Maxwell stuff into it, and you know, it was fascinating. It was a time capsule. You know, here was all of the material Harperly had been given by him. And you know, unfortunately for me as a reporter, some of it I had already tracked down on my own, like copies of the death certificates and copies of the autopsies. But you know, there were a lot of proprietary materials, things that only

he had, you know, those intakes forms. We know he represented Ophelia, not because he ever told anyone or that survived. I know it because one of the things he gave her in the briefcase was the intake form, so his initial interview with Ophelia about when she was accused of helping the reverend murder his first wife. And so, you know, total treasure trove and was able to confirm a lot of what I knew Harperly had done in terms of her own investigative work, and you know a lot of

times that we wouldn't have had access to otherwise. So some of the insurance cases, you know, I was able to get copies of things that moved through the courts, but there were you know, copies of filings and letters and you know, prepared docket forms that he hadn't filed because they'd been able to settle. So really just a gift that she had shaved it all. And you know, I think in a really heartbreaking way, there was always this question of, you know, well, did Herperly ever give

up on this case? You know, just because you don't publish a book doesn't mean you don't think about it, doesn't mean you don't work on it. And you know, there she was up in New York City, you know, surrounded by her Maxwell materials, and so it was a real gift to me. I'm grateful to the family. You know, we went through it all together that night, and you know,

they let me make copies of it all. And just a dream as a writer, you know, you just think, you know, maybe maybe I'll get lucky someday and there'll be a treasure trove. And it was an actual treasure trove.

and how obligated did she feel to these sources. I quote a letter from very very late in her life where she had run into Tom Radney, if you can believe it, has a son named Thomas Radney, and he practices law in the same law office and Thomas West the University of Alabama, same as Harper Lee. And he had run into Harper Lee not long before her stroke

at an event in Tuscalusa. And you know, it's just this letter Harperley and Tom Radney four years after it all happened, back in touch, and you know, she says nothing of the Maxwell case, but you know there's the suitcase in the closet, you know, just hiding out full of the books she never finished. So yeah, I make

that that's the epilogue of the book. And of course I try to be fair again to the people who know Harper Lee, who said she wrote the book, or she talked to them about it, or you know, I quote someone who said her sister had read the whole thing, and you know, those are the people who swear that the estate found more than the briefcase, and that you know, there's going to be more material from not just from

this book, but from some others. You know, I mentioned in the book some novels she tried to write in the nineteen sixties. So I think it's possible see more work from her. But I don't think it's going to be a book between two covers. I think it'll be you know, scraps of material and you know, fits and starts and the interview notes and that kind of stuff. But no, I love to tell that story because it really is what I think a lot of us dream of when we're young what it will be like to be,

you know, an investigative journalist. Someone will call and there'll be a briefcase and you'll go pick it up and go through. So yeah, it was a lot of fun and really just just a gift for the book.

I love it. Every so often someone will write and they've got, you know, a letter Harperly wrote their grandfather, or you know, a copy of her book they bought that had an inscription, and I really do love to hear from folks and people who knew the Reverend have reached out, people who knew Tom, and you know, I just think with a non fiction story, when it really happened, there's kind of no end, and so people who have a role, you know, I always love to hear more

or to hear just some you know, some story you heard from someone else about Harper Lee or Tom Radney or the Reverend Maxwell. I'll never not be interested in these characters.