Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (30 page)

“That’s what I was hoping,” said Jones. “So the bottom line is that you don’t really know whether or not he was shot when he was lying on the floor, do you?”

“That’s correct.”

“All right. And if you are called to testify, that’s what you’re going to say?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Metts. “But, John, you’ve got another problem. The hand lying on top of the gun has blood all over it, and there’s no blood on the gun itself. Now, there are only two places where blood was flowing from Danny Hansford—his head and his chest. The boy, when he fell, must have fallen on his right hand. And I guess maybe for artistic license Williams might have moved his hand out and put it over the gun where, you know, it looked better.”

“You sure about that?”

“Positive. You see, the blood on Hansford’s hand is smeared, like somebody dragged it out from under the body. If I were you, I’d say Williams panicked and checked Danny Hansford’s pulse—reached in there and pulled his arm out and checked his pulse and then put it on the gun so it would look better or something.”

Dr. Metts’s suggestion was not an acceptable option. Jim Williams had already put his version of the story on record with his interview in the
Georgia Gazette.
In the interview, Williams had made no mention of ever touching the body.

“Damn, if you don’t brighten up my day,” said Jones.

“Then there’s one other thing,” said Dr. Metts, “something else that shows Mr. Williams rearranged the scene. He moved furniture to make things look a little bit better, I guess, but he got a little careless doing it.”

“In what way?”

“He picked up a chair and put it down on top of the guy’s britches leg.” Dr. Metts chuckled.

“Oooh, I bet y’all got pictures of that, ain’t you?”

“Color prints,” said the coroner.

“It shows the pants leg underneath the chair?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, that sure is nice.” Jones shook his head ruefully. “What else you got?”

“I tell you what,” said Dr. Metts. “I believe I know when that bastard got shot.”

“When was that?” asked Jones.

“When he stubbed out his cigarette.”

“His what?”

“I found a cigarette butt that had been stubbed out into the leather desktop. It was still sitting on its end. I think when the guy did that, Mr. Williams got pissed off and shot him.”

“Like I said, Doc, you really brighten up my day,” said Jones.

“Quite frankly, though, my sympathies lie with Mr. Williams,” said Dr. Metts. “It did occur around three in the morning. Mr. Williams presumably had to get up and work, and this kid was being an obnoxious bastard, wanting to play games and bust up the furniture.”

“Any other kind words of encouragement?” Jones asked.

“Not that I can think of, John,” he said. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, though. I would think your jury selection is going to be key. You have a problem there in that it was obviously a homosexual-type situation. You’ll have to play it so the jury is sympathetic to Mr. Williams and don’t think too bad of him for shooting this guy.”

Jones picked up his briefcase. “Well, as we all know, Doc, juries in Savannah don’t seem to mind seeing homosexuals get killed. I mean, you can stomp a homosexual to death in our community, and that doesn’t seem to make a difference.”

“No, I know,” said Dr. Metts. He walked Jones to the door of his office. “Well, John, all I can say is Mr. Williams probably did his civic duty shooting this sonofabitch.”

John Wright Jones’s remark about stomping homosexuals to death was a reference to a murder case that had come to trial only a few months earlier and deeply shocked Savannah.

The murder victim in that case had been a thirty-three-year-old man from Columbus, Georgia, who had come to Savannah to judge a beauty pageant. Married and with two children, he was stomped to death in a darkened parking garage by four U.S. Army Rangers. Rangers were reputed to be the toughest men in the army. There was a squadron of them out at Hunter Army Airfield on the southside. They were trained to endure harsh punishment and to dish it out as well. Early on the evening of the stomping, a witness saw the four Rangers strolling on Bay Street, bending parking meters to the ground with their bare hands. Later, the four went into Missy’s Adult Boutique, a pornographic bookshop off Johnson Square, where they encountered the beauty-pageant judge. The man made a sexual advance. They enticed him into a parking garage and beat and kicked him so brutally that an expert in trauma injury testified that when the victim arrived at the hospital he was “probably the most mutilated person I have ever seen still alive.” He had suffered multiple fractures of the skull, cheeks, jawbone, and eye sockets. The expert said it had taken two people to pry his eyes open. “He was almost unrecognizable as a human being.”

At the trial, the attorney for the Rangers asked the jury to “place responsibility where it lies.” The defendants, he said, were young, foolish, clean-cut, and honest. They had been the victims of a homosexual advance. The jurors were sympathetic to the Rangers and rejected the charge of murder. Still, each man had admitted kicking the victim, so the jurors felt compelled to declare them guilty of something. They chose the lightest possible count: simple battery. Simple battery is a misdemeanor; it can mean that one person merely touched another. The sentence was one year in jail with the possibility of parole in six months.

The Ranger verdict provoked a bitter public outcry. Letters to
the newspaper condemned the jury for its callousness and for sullying the name of justice in Savannah. One of the nurses who had treated the victim wrote: “If this is a misdemeanor, may I never see the victim of a felony.”

The trial had been the courtroom debut of Chatham County’s new district attorney, thirty-seven-year-old Spencer Lawton, Jr. The verdict had been a crushing defeat, and it left observers wondering whether Lawton was capable of discharging the responsibilities of his new office.

The Lawtons were a distinguished old Savannah family. Spencer Lawton’s great-great grandfather, General Alexander R. Lawton, had been in charge of defending Savannah during the early part of the Civil War and later became quartermaster general of the Confederate Army. After the war, General Lawton was one of the ten men who founded the American Bar Association; he served as its president in 1882. Later, Grover Cleveland appointed him ambassador to Austria. The Lawton family plot at Bonaventure Cemetery was one of the largest. A white marble figure of Christ stood by a towering Gothic arch on a bluff by the river.

Another of Lawton’s forebears, Spencer Shotter, amassed a fortune in the naval-stores business at the turn of the century and built one of the most grandiose estates in the South on the grounds of Greenwich Plantation, immediately adjacent to Bon-aventure Cemetery. Shotter hired the renowned architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings, designers of the New York Public Library building on Fifth Avenue, to build the house. It had forty rooms and a double colonnade of gleaming white marble columns that wrapped around all four sides. There were twelve master bedrooms, ten baths, a ballroom decorated in gold leaf, a dairy farm, a covered swimming pool, and magnificently landscaped grounds. Palm trees were imported from the Holy Land, a weeping willow from Napoleon’s tomb on Saint Helena, and statues from the ruins of Pompeii. The estate was the setting for exquisite balls and yachting parties. Movie scenes starring Mary Pickford and Francis X. Bushman were filmed there.

By the time Spencer Lawton came along, however, the grandeur of the Lawton family had all but vanished. The Shotter mansion had been destroyed by fire in the 1920s, and the grounds became an extension of Bonaventure Cemetery known as Greenwich Cemetery. The prestigious law firm of Lawton & Cunningham had been absorbed by another law firm, and the imposing Lawton Memorial Hall on Bull Street had been converted to a Greek Orthodox church.

Spencer Lawton was a soft-spoken, mild-mannered man with gentle blue-gray eyes and dark hair combed in a pompadour. Chubby cheeks and a ribbon-bow mouth gave him a cherubic look. He had been, by his own admission, an indifferent student at the University of Georgia Law School. Afterward he returned to Savannah to practice law. He did largely
pro bono
work. A woman who encountered him when he was a hearing officer for the Savannah Housing Authority remembered him as being highly principled. “He was a decent man,” she said. “He more than did his job; he showed concern and compassion for the poor. But he was a little timid, as I recall.”

For the past thirty years, the Chatham County prosecutor’s office had been the private domain of Joe Ryan. Ryan’s son, Andrew “Bubsy” Ryan, had succeeded his father and had served one term when Spencer Lawton decided to run against him.

Bubsy Ryan was a good ol’ boy. He liked to go fishing, hunting, and drinking. He had a full head of tousled brown hair, long reddish sideburns, and bags under his eyes that made him look permanently hung over. He got along well with the police; he was good at horse-trading and had a folksy, drawling courtroom manner. Bubsy argued every major murder case himself, but it was no secret that his management of the prosecutor’s office was casual at best, just as it had been under his father. A backlog of over a thousand untried cases stretched back twenty-five years. Bubsy enjoyed being D.A., but he admitted it did have its drawbacks. “You’re limited in some ways,” he said. “You can’t go out drinkin’ with your wife, ’Cause you’ll read about it in the paper the next day.”

The Ryans were not accustomed to having opposition at election time. But when Bubsy came up for reelection, one of his assistant D.A.s announced he would challenge him in the Democratic primary. The two began sniping at each other almost immediately, and on the last day of filing, Spencer Lawton saw an opportunity for himself and made it a three-way race. “I ran for a lark,” Lawton said later. While the other two tore into each other, Lawton took the high road and spoke about case management and other sensible-sounding things. He tiptoed through the wreckage of Bubsy and the other man.

When Bubsy and Lawton found themselves in a runoff, Bubsy took aim at Lawton. He hooted that Lawton had been a failure as a lawyer, that he had never tried a felony case, never had appellate experience, never argued a case before the Georgia Supreme Court, and that as a direct result of his laziness and incompetence he had exposed a law firm he had worked for to a malpractice suit. Two days before the election, Bubsy went one step further. He took out a half-page ad in the
Savannah Morning News
and quoted from a statement made in divorce proceedings by Lawton’s former wife. Mrs. Lawton said that Spencer had told her many times that “he would be happier staying at home and keeping the house and reading than he would be working.” The underlying message in the ad was that Spencer Lawton was not man enough for the job. Bubsy’s crowd referred to Lawton as “the Pillsbury Dough Boy.” But then on the night of the primary, Bubsy Ryan watched in disbelief as the returns from the black precincts went against him and gave the nomination to Lawton. Lawton went on to defeat the Republican candidate in the general election.

Doubts about Lawton’s ability grew after he took office. Disgruntled staff members, holdovers from Bubsy Ryan’s era, passed the word that Lawton did not know the law. “He’s asking for memos on things he should know,” one assistant D.A. complained, “like extradition. He wanted a memo on insanity defense, too, which you could write a book about.” Then came the stunning defeat in the Rangers case. As it happened, the
Rangers verdict was handed down a few days after Jim Williams shot Danny Hansford. Lawton drew a bead on the Williams case. It would be a means of redeeming himself, if he won. But it would be a difficult fight.

To handle his defense, Jim Williams retained Bobby Lee Cook of Summerville, Georgia. Cook was a famous character in criminal courts throughout the South. His specialty was murder. Over a span of thirty years, Cook had defended 250 people accused of murder and got 90 percent of them off, sometimes against substantial odds. Cook would take the untouchable cases, cases nobody thought could be won, and he would win them. He was famous for his lacerating cross-examinations. “I’ve seen him take a fellow before lunch,” said a federal judge, “examine him awhile, comment at lunchtime that he was playing his witness like a bass, and then come back after lunch and finish destroying the man.” In an article extolling his technique and his daring,
People
magazine had once declared that “if the Devil ever needed a defense, Bobby Lee Cook would take the case.”

Being from the mountains of north Georgia, Cook knew that a Savannah jury would perceive him as a slick, out-of-town lawyer. Therefore, he wanted a local lawyer to assist him, and in filling that position he selected the attorney most likely to unnerve Spencer Lawton—the lawyer who had just beaten him so badly in the Rangers case: John Wright Jones.