Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (55 page)

Later that evening, Williams sipped Madeira and played round after round of Psycho Dice. His gray tiger cat, having just eaten her first bite of food in two days, lay sleeping in his lap. Williams calculated that his third trial had cost him roughly a quarter of a million dollars.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “only three hundred dollars of it was worth a damn.”

Lillian McLeroy came out on her front steps to water her plants and get a closer look at the commotion in Monterey Square. Ladies in hoopskirts and men in frock coats were milling around in the bright morning sun, along with blue-uniformed soldiers with muskets slung over their shoulders. Clouds of dust rose up from the street in front of Jim Williams’s house as workmen raked truckloads of dirt over Bull Street to make it look like an un-paved nineteenth-century road. The panorama was startling, but the eerie sense of having seen it all before sent a shiver through Mrs. McLeroy. Monterey Square this morning looked just the way it had looked ten years before when the movie about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was being filmed. The movie crews were back again, with their lights and cameras and the big vans parked across the square. This time they were filming
Glory
, a movie about the first black regiment in the Union Army during the Civil War. Mrs. McLeroy looked toward Mercer House, half-expecting to see Jim Williams drape another Nazi flag over his balcony.

But Jim Williams was not inclined to do that this time. In fact, instead of opposing the filming, he had let the filmmakers use his house. He had let them bring their equipment in and hang lace
curtains in the living room to give Mercer House the look of a mansion in Boston in the mid-1860s. Earlier, Williams and the producer had sat down in his study and, over cigars and Madeira, negotiated a fee. The producer offered $10,000. Williams leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Eight years ago I shot a man who was standing right about where you are now. In a few weeks I’ll be going on trial for murder, for the fourth time, and my lawyer is a man of expensive tastes. Make it twenty-five thousand and you have a deal.”

The legal wrangling over a fourth murder trial had dragged on for nearly two years. Sonny Seiler first asked the court to bar another trial on the grounds that it would put Williams in double jeopardy. The motion was denied, and so was Seiler’s appeal. Both Seiler and Lawton then demanded in separate motions that the court disqualify the other from further involvement in the case. Seiler, citing Lawton’s concealment of evidence, said Lawton had been guilty of “prosecutorial misconduct of the highest order.” Lawton countered that Seiler had defended Williams “in a negligent, incompetent and unethical manner.” (This accusation was based largely on Lawton’s contention that the young hustler friends of Hansford had been bribed by Williams and Seiler for their affidavits. There was no proof of that allegation, however, and neither of the two witnesses had ever been used in court.) Both motions were denied. The fourth trial would go forward.

On one issue all parties were agreed: that it would be impossible to find a single juror in Savannah who did not already have strong opinions about the case and about the taxpayers’ money being spent on it. So, on the morning the filming of
Glory
began at Mercer House, Sonny Seiler went into superior court and asked for a change of venue. He knew it would be granted this time and prayed only that the trial would not fall into the fire of some redneck outpost after the frying pan of Savannah.

In the end, the honors went to the city of Augusta. Spencer
Lawton considered it a victory, cheerfully telling friends that Augusta was a “cow town” and that Williams would be convicted for certain. Sonny Seiler was not so sure about that.

The second oldest city in Georgia, Augusta lay 130 miles up-river from Savannah on the fall line of the Appalachian piedmont. The city’s population of fifty thousand was scattered about its sloping terrain in a descending hierarchy that closely followed the lay of the land. On the Hill and the high ground to the north, rich families lived in fine houses and played golf at the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the annual Masters Tournament. At the foot of the Hill, the city’s old tree-shaded boulevards served as a commercial core and a middle-level residential zone. Farther south, the town descended into a vast, low-lying marshland of working-class houses, mobile homes, shanties, Fort Gordon army base, and a backwoods thoroughfare made famous by Erskine Caldwell as a symbol of rural squalor—Tobacco Road.

So Augusta had its sophisticates and its cruder elements. But when the selection of jurors began, it became clear that whether they lived on the Hill or in the swamp, Augustans all had one thing in common: They had never heard of Jim Williams.

Reporters and television crews came up from Savannah to cover the trial, but the local media virtually ignored it. There were no big headlines in the Augusta newspapers, no news flashes interrupting television programs, no crowds overflowing the gallery. Every weekday for two weeks, a jury of six men and six women calmly assembled in the Richmond County Courthouse to listen and watch as the trial unfolded. They were fascinated, even titillated, and yet they remained detached. They had not lived with the Jim Williams case as people in Savannah had lived with it. Mercer House, with all its grandeur and significance, was merely a house in a photograph to them; it had not figured in the landscape of their daily lives. Jim Williams had not climbed the social ladder in their very midst, arousing feelings of admiration, envy, and outrage as he had done in Savannah over the last thirty years. One prospective juror gave Sonny
Seiler a reason to hope that the issue of homosexuality would not be as much a negative in Augusta as it had been in Savannah. “I have no use for gays,” the man admitted during jury selection, “but I don’t mind it so much if they live somewhere else.”

By the time the fourth trial began, Sonny Seiler had worked his presentation into an act of highly polished showmanship, focusing his energies on his strongest line of attack—the incompetence of the police. When Detective Jordan took the stand and claimed that he had put bags on Danny Hansford’s hands, Seiler gave him a brown paper bag and a roll of evidence tape, held out his right hand, and asked him to tape the bag over it. Seiler then paced up and down in front of the jury, waving his bagged hand in the air, leaving no doubt that if Jordan
had
bagged Hansford’s hands, no one at the hospital could possibly have failed to notice it. Seiler ridiculed the prosecution for inconsistencies in the statements of its expert witnesses—most notably Dr. Larry Howard, director of the State Crime Lab. Dr. Howard had claimed at one trial that Williams could not have fired all his shots at Hansford from behind the desk; at another, he said Williams
could
have done it. At different times, Howard had said that Danny Hansford’s chair had fallen backward, sideways, and forward. Seiler gleefully brandished a memo that showed how officials at the state crime lab had originally planned to conceal the results of the gunshot-residue tests if they did not help the prosecution. “If you do want to report the test results,” one official wrote to another, “just let us know. The grand jury hearing is June 12.”

“They all play footsie together,” Seiler piped, “and it’s just disgusting. They were
thirsting
for a conviction. They were saying to each other, ‘Let’s see if the residue tests cut our way. If they do, we’ll use them. If they don’t, we’ll forget it.’”

Seiler kept the jury well entertained, and by the middle of the first week they had nicknamed him “Matlock,” after the lawyer played by Andy Griffith in the popular television series. That
was a good sign, and Seiler knew it. Several times in his closing remarks, he moved the jurors to laughter. That was another good sign. “Jurors never laugh if they’re about to send a man to prison,” he said.

Minerva made only one appearance at the trial, and when she did she told Williams she felt movement in his favor. “But listen,” she said, “just in case something go wrong, be sure you put your drawers on backwards. That way you’ll get a shorter sentence.”

The jurors reached a verdict fifteen minutes after they sat down to deliberate, but they stayed in the jury room another forty-five minutes, afraid they might seem too hasty if they sent word to the judge right away. They had found Williams not guilty.

Having been acquitted at last, Jim Williams could never again be tried for murder in the shooting of Danny Hansford. It was over—the worry, the dread, the expense. Because he had been found innocent of any crime in Danny Hansford’s death, his insurance company would step in and settle with Hansford’s mother. So that burden was lifted as well.

Back at Mercer House, Williams poured himself a drink and considered his options. For the first time in eight years, he was a free man. Mercer House was his again, no longer held as collateral for his jail bond. He could sell the house if he wanted to. It was worth over a million dollars, more than ten times what he had paid for it. He could rid himself of the unhappy memories and buy a penthouse in New York, a townhouse in London, or a villa on the Riviera. He could live among people who did not automatically think of guns and killing and sensational murder trials every time they looked at him. Williams’s dark eyes sparkled as he thought about the possibilities. Then a smile crossed his face.

“No, I think I’ll stay right here,” he said. “My living in Mercer House pisses off all the right people.”