Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (51 page)

Then one day in June, all of these questions were overshadowed by the news that the Georgia Supreme Court had once again overturned Jim Williams’s conviction for murder.

The court cited two reasons for setting aside the conviction. First, it ruled that Judge Oliver should not have allowed a Savannah police detective to testify as an “expert” for the prosecution
on points of evidence that the jurors were competent to evaluate on their own—the smeared blood on Danny Hansford’s hand, the chair on his pants cuff, the fragments of paper on top of the gun. Second, the court faulted Spencer Lawton for waiting until his closing argument to demonstrate that the trigger on Hansford’s gun was easy to pull rather than difficult, as the defense had claimed. In effect, said the court, Lawton’s demonstration introduced new evidence, which should have been brought up during the trial itself, at which time the defense could have responded to it.

Williams was lucky. The reversal had been a 4-to-3 decision. The three dissenting justices argued that the errors had been harmless ones and that, in any case, they had not influenced the verdict. But none of that mattered now. Since the state supreme court had not found Williams innocent—they had merely thrown out the verdict—murder charges still stood against him. He would be tried a third time in Judge Oliver’s court, and a third jury would deliver yet another verdict.

Williams emerged from the Chatham County Jail a little thinner than before, a little grayer at the temples, and ghostly pale from having been indoors nearly two years. He squinted in the sun. As he and Sonny Seiler walked to a car parked at the curb, a small group of reporters and cameramen followed along, shouting questions.

Did Williams think he would be acquitted at a third trial?

“Yes, of course,” he said.

What would be the deciding factor?

“Money,” he said. “My case has been about money from the very beginning. The D.A. spends the taxpayers’ money, and I spend my own—five hundred thousand dollars of it so far. The criminal-justice system is rigged that way, in case you haven’t noticed. I’d still be in jail if I hadn’t been able to pay for lawyers and experts and their endless expenses. So far I’ve managed to stay even with the prosecution. Dollar for dollar, tit for tat.”

As he approached the car, Williams looked across Montgomery Street and saw an old black woman standing at the bus stop. She was staring in his direction through purple glasses. Williams met her glance briefly and smiled. Then he turned back to the reporters.

“Well … maybe I shouldn’t have said ‘tit for tat.’ As I’ve always said, there are forces working in my favor—forces the D.A. doesn’t know anything about.”

And what might they be?

“You can put them down under the heading of … ‘miscellaneous,’” he said.

Within minutes Jim Williams was back in Mercer House, back in the news, and back on people’s minds again whether they liked it or not.

With a third trial in the offing, Jim Williams’s case was approaching landmark status and attracting attention well beyond Savannah. Williams’s air of cynical detachment lent spice to the expanding media coverage.
Us
magazine (“The Scandal That Shook Savannah”) described Williams as having a “von Bülow-like demeanor.” The editors of the photographic documentary
A Day in the Life of America
sent a photographer to Savannah with instructions to take a picture of Williams as an example of southern decadence. The photographer, Gerd Ludwig, set up his lights and cameras in Mercer House.

“He was here all day,” Williams said afterward, “trying his best to capture my ‘decadence’ on film. I suppose I could have made it easy for him. I could have offered to pose with my most recently acquired historic relic—the dagger that Prince Yussupov used when he murdered Rasputin. That would have done nicely, don’t you think? Yussupov sliced off Rasputin’s cock and balls with it.”

Williams took little interest in the legal side of his upcoming trial. Instead, he busied himself with the “miscellaneous” end of things, which is to say he played Psycho Dice incessantly and allowed Minerva to become a lurking presence around Mercer
House. She performed the appropriate rituals for removing a curse from the house, just in case there was one, and she also cast spells on people Williams suspected of wishing him ill. By chance, I happened to see her in the midst of one of these ceremonies. It was an afternoon in March, and the annual Tour of Homes was in progress. As usual, Williams had refused to open Mercer House to the tourists, but Lee and Emma Adler had happily thrown open their doors. Williams stood at his living-room window, smoking a cigarillo and making wry comments as he watched visitors trooping up the Adlers’ front steps across the street. He motioned me over to the window. Two well-dressed couples were walking single file up the Adlers’ steps. Minerva was right behind them, carrying her trademark shopping bag. At the top of the steps, she paused while the others went inside; then, after looking around in all directions, she reached into the bag and flung what appeared to be a handful of dirt into the little garden below. She threw another handful down the steps. Williams laughed.

“Was that graveyard dirt?” I asked.

“What else?” he said.

“Taken from a graveyard at midnight?”

“When else?”

Minerva went inside the Adlers’ house. “What on earth is she doing in there?” I asked.

“Her usual mumbo-jumbo, I suppose,” said Williams. “Twigs, leaves, feathers, exotic powders, chicken bones. I told her Lee Adler controls the D.A., and that’s all she had to hear. Minerva’s been a very busy witch lately. She’s been out at Vernonburg several times to dress down Spencer Lawton’s house, and yesterday she paid a call on Judge Oliver’s cottage in Tybee. She’s thrown graveyard dirt at some of the best homes in Savannah, God bless her.”

While Williams contented himself with these mystical manipulations, Sonny Seiler mounted a vigorous legal campaign to
strengthen the position of the defense. He moved to suppress most of the evidence seized at Mercer House the night of the shooting on the grounds that the police did not have a search warrant; the motion was denied by the Georgia Supreme Court. His petition for a change of venue was likewise rejected. As the date for the trial drew near, Seiler found himself with essentially the same defense strategy as in the second trial. This time he would not sequester the jury, which would improve matters slightly, but he had no new evidence and no new witnesses. He had decided against using Hansford’s two young hustler friends and their stories about Hansford’s plan to kill or injure Williams, fearing they might backfire; besides, Hansford’s penchant for violence was amply established through other witnesses. In any case, the most troublesome issue remained the total absence of gunshot residue on Danny Hansford’s hand. That piece of evidence had proved decisive against Williams in both trials, despite everything the defense had done to explain it. Seiler’s expert witness, Dr. Irving Stone, had testified that the downward angle of the gun, plus the blood from Hansford’s hand and the delay of twelve hours before the police swabbed for residue, would have diminished the residue on Hansford’s hands by 70 percent, but no more. It was unlikely that very much of the remaining 30 percent could have accidentally rubbed off on the way to the hospital, because the police had taken the routine precaution of taping paper bags over Hansford’s hands before moving his body. Seiler telephoned Dr. Stone one more time to ask if there was any way he could explain a zero reading of gunshot residue. “No,” Dr. Stone told him, “not with the information I have.”

In addition to the gunshot-residue problem, Seiler was becoming concerned about Williams’s testimony. It had been nearly four years since he had last testified, and Seiler worried that he might become confused about minor details and contradict what he had said before. Two weeks before the trial was to begin, he insisted that Williams sit down and review his prior testimony. Any deviation in his story, even the slightest detail, would give
Lawton a chance to pounce on his credibility. Seiler told Williams he would bring the transcripts to Mercer House on Saturday afternoon, and they would go over them together. Saturday morning, Williams called and invited me to sit in on the review.

“Come half an hour early,” Williams said. “I have something I want to tell you.”

The moment he opened the door, I could tell Williams knew the odds were against him. He had shaved his mustache. Seiler had tried to make him shave it for the second trial, saying it would make him look less forbidding, but Williams had refused. Now Williams was apparently willing to do anything to ingratiate himself with the jury.

He came right to the point. “Sonny doesn’t know this yet, but I’m going to change my story. I’m going to tell what really happened that night. It’s my only chance to win this case.”

I made no comment. Williams drew a deep breath and then began:

“The evening started out just as I’ve always said it did. Danny and I went to a drive-in movie. He was drinking bourbon and smoking grass. We came back to the house. He started an argument, kicked in the Atari set, grabbed me by the neck, pushed me up against the doorjamb. All that’s true. Then he followed me into the study, just as I’ve always said. We called Joe Goodman. Right after that, Danny took the tankard in his hand and said, ‘This tankard has about made up its mind to go through that painting over there.’ I told him to get out. He went into the hall, I heard crashing sounds, he came back with the Luger in his hand and said, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, but you’re leaving tonight.’ Then he raised his arm and pulled the trigger. All that’s true. It’s what I’ve been saying all along. But here’s the difference:
The gun was on safety!
When Danny pulled the trigger, nothing happened! No bullets came out. No bullets whizzed by my arm. Danny lowered the gun, took the safety off, and ejected a live round. That gave me time to reach into the drawer and get my own gun and shoot him. I fired three times. Bam, bam, bam. He fell dead. But he hadn’t fired a shot. Then I
thought: Goddamn, what have I done! I went around the desk, picked up his gun, fired two shots back across the desk, and dropped the gun on the floor. In the panic of the moment I didn’t know what else to do.”

Having said all that, Williams seemed strangely elated. “You see, it explains why there was no gunpowder on Danny’s hand!” He studied me carefully, looking to see my reaction to his new story.

I wondered if my expression betrayed my astonishment.

“The police and my lawyer, Bob Duffy, arrived at the house at the same time,” he went on. “I took them into the study and told them Danny had fired at me and missed, and that I’d shot him. I had a feeling I was making a bad situation worse by sticking to that story, but I didn’t see that I had any choice. Well, I’ve been convicted twice now, so I’ve finally decided to tell it the way it really happened. And when I do, Spencer Lawton’s case will crumble. I’ll be acquitted.”

“I’m not sure how you figure that,” I said.

“Because it explains everything! The lack of gunpowder on Danny’s hand. The live round on the floor. The pieces of paper on the gun. It all ties together!”