Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (26 page)

Soon afterward, the police announced that the lab tests would be delayed because of a backlog of work at the Georgia Crime Lab in Atlanta. A month later, the police were still awaiting results.

In the meantime, people in Savannah were coming to conclusions on their own without benefit of lab results. Facts about Danny Hansford were beginning to circulate, and they lent credence to Williams’s claim of self-defense. Hansford had been in and out of juvenile homes and mental hospitals. He had dropped out of school in the eighth grade and had a history of violence and getting into trouble with the police. Williams himself had bailed him out of jail nine times in the past ten months. Skipper Dunn, a horticulturist, who had once lived in the same rooming house as Hansford, described him as a dangerous psychotic. “He was a berserker,” Dunn said. “I saw him run amok twice, breaking things, reaching for knives. It took two people to pin him down. You could look into his eyes and see there was no person left, only rage and violence. It was easy to see that he might try to kill someone some day.” Hansford had once torn a door off its hinges in an effort to get at his sister and beat her up. His own mother had sworn out a police warrant against him, declaring that she was afraid he would do bodily harm to her and her family.

In his interview with the
Georgia Gazette
, Williams described
Hansford as severely disturbed. He said Hansford had once told him, “I’m alone in this world. No one cares about me. I don’t have anything to live for.” With a strange sort of detachment, Williams saw himself as Danny Hansford’s savior rather than his nemesis, much less his murderer: “I was determined to save him from himself,” he said. “He had given up on being alive.” Though Williams’s view was unabashedly self-serving, it was compelling in its detail. Hansford had developed a fascination with death, he said. He would frequently go to Bonaventure Cemetery with friends and point to the grave markers and say that the small ones were for poor people, and the big ones were for rich people, and that if he died in Mercer House he would get a big one. Hansford had twice tried to commit suicide at Mercer House by taking drug overdoses. The second time, he had written a note: “If this stuff does the job, at least I’ll get a decent tombstone.” Williams had rushed him to the hospital both times. All of that was a matter of record.

Beyond saying Danny Hansford was an employee, Williams never fully explained their relationship. But it soon became known that Hansford had been a part-time male hustler who loitered in the squares along Bull Street. Most people did not need to have the rest of the story spelled out for them. A few of Williams’s friends, however—society ladies for the most part—discovered they had been completely in the dark. Millicent Mooreland, an Ardsley Park hostess and a blue blood, had known Williams for thirty years. Yet when a friend called her to say, “Jim Williams has just shot and killed his lover,” she was dumbstruck for two reasons, not just one. “That statement left me absolutely gasping,” Mrs. Mooreland said. “My friendship with Jim had been based on antiques and parties and social things. I simply wasn’t aware of his other interests in life.”

Most of the social set were more worldly than Mrs. Mooreland. “Oh, we knew,” said John Myers. “Of course we knew. We weren’t aware of the details, naturally, because Jim exercised discretion, which was the right thing to do. But all along we’d congratulated ourselves about Jim’s social success because
of what it seemed to say about us. We thought it proved Savannah was cosmopolitan, that we were sophisticated enough to accept a gay man socially.”

Mrs. Mooreland remained loyal to Williams, but there were certain things that did trouble her, apart from the shooting itself. She was perplexed by a seemingly small detail in the rush of events that happened that night. “Joe Goodman,” she said. “Who is he? I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him in Jim’s house, and yet he was the first person Jim called.”

Mrs. Mooreland’s consternation about Joe Goodman arose from the fact that she had lived her entire life within the reassuring confines of what was known as Old Savannah. Old Savannah was a sharply circumscribed, self-contained world. The supporting roles for all of its dramas had been cast long ago. In times of crisis, one turned to the relevant figures in the community—the legal authority, the moral pillar, the social arbiter, the financial titan, the elder statesman. Old Savannah was well structured for dealing with crises. Having spent a lifetime in this comforting environment, Mrs. Mooreland was surprised that in his moment of need Jim Williams had reached out to someone completely unknown—rather than to Walter Hartridge, for instance, or to Dick Richardson. It was a signal to her that something was terribly off kilter.

With so much talk centering on Jim Williams—his origins, his career, his exploits, his everything—the incident of the Nazi flag came in for a good bit of rehashing. And now a shooting with a German Luger, no less.

Some people, even a few Jews like Bob Minis, dismissed the Nazi flag episode as insignificant—“It was stupid,” said Minis. “Jim acted quickly, without thinking.” But others were not inclined to let Williams off so easily. “I’m sure he doesn’t actually think of himself as a Nazi,” said Joseph Killorin, an English professor at Armstrong State College. “But come on, Nazi symbols are not totally bereft of meaning. They still carry a very clear message, even if they’re displayed under the guise of ‘historic relics.’ The message is
superiority
, and don’t think for a minute Jim
Williams isn’t aware of it. He’s too smart not to be. In the South, among extreme chauvinists, you sometimes find a strange affinity for Nazi regalia. It has to do with a sense of once having been treated for what one was worth and now being treated merely as an equal. There is a terribly social gentleman here in Savannah who sometimes wears Nazi uniforms to costume parties—anyone can tell you who I’m talking about; he’s known for it—and he says he does it for shock value, but the deeper meaning is still there. In Jim’s case, it may not be anything more than apolitical arrogance. If a man lives in the grandest house in town and gives the most extravagant parties, he could easily come to believe he was superior. He might also think the rules for ordinary people no longer applied to him. Displaying a Nazi flag would be one way of demonstrating that.”

All in all, if a straw poll had been taken in Savannah in the first few weeks after the shooting, it would most likely have shown that the public expected the case to be dropped. By all appearances, the shooting had been self-defense or, at worst, a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion. Matters like these were traditionally settled quietly, especially when the accused was a highly respected, affluent individual with no criminal record. Sa-vannahians were well aware of past killings in which well-connected suspects were never charged, no matter how obvious their guilt. One of the more colorful stories involved a society spinster who claimed that her gentleman lover had shot himself with a rifle while sitting in a wing chair in her living room. The woman “found” her lover’s body, cleaned the rifle, put it back in the rifle case, and then had the body embalmed. Only after having done all that did she call the police.

“Oh, Jim Williams will probably get off,” said Prentiss Crowe, a Savannah aristocrat, “but he’ll still face a few problems. There is bound to be a certain
resentment
about his having killed that boy—that boy in particular, I mean. Danny Hansford was a very accomplished hustler, from all accounts, very good at his trade, and very much appreciated by both men and women. The trouble is he hadn’t quite finished making the rounds. A fair number
of men and women were looking forward to having their turn with him. Of course, now that Jim’s shot him they never will. Naturally, they’ll hold this against Jim, and that’s what I mean when I say ‘resentment.’ Danny Hansford was known to be a good time … but a good time not yet had by all.”

At the bar in the Oglethorpe Club, Sonny Clarke put it more bluntly: “You know what they’re saying about Jim Williams, don’t you? They’re saying he shot the best piece of ass in Savannah!”

The entire city was captivated by the sensational shooting, and for weeks afterward curious Savannahians drove their cars into Monterey Square and circled around and around. Dog-eared copies of the September/October 1976 issue of
Architectural Digest
, the one with the feature on Mercer House, were passed from hand to hand. People who had never been inside the house came to know it as if they lived there. They could tell you that Danny Hansford had died midway between an oil painting attributed to the nephew of Thomas Gainsborough and a gold-encrusted desk that had been owned by Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. They could recite, with malicious glee, the now-ironic concluding sentence of the article: “The charm of the city and its way of life have found expression in [Williams’s] careful and loving restoration of Mercer House—a house once ravaged by war and neglect but now a center of harmony and quiet living.”

There was one major imponderable in the case against Jim Williams: Spencer Lawton, the new district attorney. Lawton was too new at the job to be predictable. Also, he owed a debt of gratitude to Lee Adler, whose support and beneficence had helped put him in office—and whose long-running feud with Jim Williams was well known. Lee Adler was uniquely positioned to influence the course of events, if he chose to do so. He could, in private conversation, encourage Lawton to prosecute Williams. Or, as seemed less likely, he could urge lenience. To people who were bold enough to ask if he was pressuring Lawton in any way, Adler stoutly replied, “Spencer Lawton is his own man.”

For more than a month after the shooting, Lawton kept a remarkably
low profile. His name was never mentioned in press coverage of the case. All public statements from his office were made by his chief assistant. A preliminary hearing was set for June 17, at which time Lawton would decide whether or not to seek an indictment.

Five days before the hearing was to take place, Lawton went before the Chatham County grand jury and presented his evidence in secret session. The grand jury acted quickly. It indicted Williams for first-degree murder—premeditated and with malice aforethought. The severity of the charge raised a few eyebrows. If there was to be an indictment at all, involuntary manslaughter had seemed a more likely charge than murder, given what was known of the case. Lawton would not discuss the evidence publicly except to say that the lab tests had been only partially completed. Jim Williams would have to stand trial.

A few days after the indictment, Danny Hansford’s mother sued Williams for $10,003,500. She charged that he had killed Danny in an “execution style” shooting. The $3,500 was for funeral expenses.

Even now, Williams maintained an air of unruffled calm. His trial was not scheduled to begin until January, more than six months away. He asked the court for permission to go back to Europe on another buying trip, and permission was granted. When he returned, he kept to his old routines. He had his hair cut by Jimmy Taglioli on Abercorn Street, he shopped at Smith’s market, he ate dinner at Elizabeth on 37th. He was not even slightly remorseful. He had no reason to be, he thought. As he had told the
Gazette
, “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Sometimes I think you Yankees only come down here to stir up trouble,” said Joe Odom. “I mean, look at Jim Williams. A model citizen. Minds his own business. One success after another. Then you come along, and the next thing we know he’s killed somebody. I mean, really!”

It was three in the morning. Joe was moving out of the house on Liberty Street exactly six months after having moved in. The unsuspecting real estate agent, Simon Stokes, was due back from England the next day, and Joe intended to restore the house to the condition in which Mr. Stokes had left it: locked and empty. Joe had found another house to move into on Lafayette Square. And now, in the dead of night, he dumped a last armload of clothes into the van parked out front.

“All right,” he said. “So now we have a murder in a big mansion. Goddamn! Well, let’s see where that puts us. We’ve got a weirdo bug specialist slinking around town with a bottle of deadly poison. We’ve got a nigger drag queen, an old man who walks an imaginary dog, and now a faggot murder case. My friend, you are getting me and Mandy into one hell of a movie.”

Joe went back inside to search for telltale signs that he had been living there for six months. In the past half year, the supposedly
unoccupied house had played host to a maelstrom of humanity. Over a thousand tourists had traipsed through, peering into every nook and cranny and pausing to have a buffet lunch before leaving. At the same time, the never-ending parade of Joe’s friends flowed in and out, with Jerry the hairdresser operating an all-but-full-time beauty salon in the kitchen. These diverse activities merged and mingled, sometimes with comical results. More than a few elderly ladies who came to the house for lunch got back on the tour bus with their hair completely restyled, and nearly everyone emerged clutching handbills advertising Sweet Georgia Brown’s.