The telephone rang at two-thirty in the morning. Clients often called Tom Radney’s home, so the lawyer knew right away why Reverend Willie Maxwell was on the phone at that hour. This was the first time, but it would not be the only time that the Alabama preacher called Radney after being accused of murder.
Maxwell’s wife had been found beaten to death in her car. Two years later, his brother’s dead body was found on the side of a local highway. Then his second wife was found dead in her car. Four years passed, then his twenty-three-year-old nephew was found dead in his car. Finally, on June 11, 1977, seven years after that late-night phone call, a fifth relative, Maxwell’s step-daughter, was found dead under one of the front wheels of his car. His family was prone to automobile accidents, and the reverend was partial to taking out mail-order insurance policies in their names.
One by one, Tom Radney represented the self-ordained preacher as those deaths were investigated. The young lawyer ignored what some folks around Tallapoosa County whispered about his client having a secret “voodoo room,” and he paid no mind when others started calling his law office in Alexander City the Maxwell House. But before the final case closed, as the death of Maxwell’s step-daughter was still being investigated, the girl’s uncle fatally shot Maxwell in the head. Radney would represent the uncle, too, arguing that he was insane when he killed Maxwell in front of hundreds of witnesses at the girl’s funeral.
Tom Radney knew that the six murders, the two clients, and all their trials were the caseload of a lifetime, and less than a year after Maxwell’s death he convinced one of the most famous writers in America to write about them. Harper Lee moved to Alexander City to research the book, which she tentatively titled “The Reverend.” She had read about Maxwell in the newspaper, but it appears that Radney’s eagerness is what kept her on the case: he gave Lee all his files, and she evidently spent months interviewing everyone who knew anything about Maxwell.
Many gave up on Harper Lee ever publishing again, but the Radney family never did. Though Tom Radney died in 2011, his wife, children, and grandchildren continue to believe that “The Reverend” might appear. For almost forty years, they’ve been waiting for the nonfiction novel—perhaps something like “In Cold Blood,” the book Lee helped her friend Truman Capote write about the Clutter murders in Kansas. Last month, when HarperCollins announced that Lee would finally publish another book, the Radneys thought it might well be this one. It wasn’t, but they haven’t given up.
They even have their own mustard-seed-sized reason for keeping the faith: a chapter of the book that the family says Lee sent to Radney. It’s four typed pages, each one littered with handwritten “b”s because, apparently, that key on Lee’s typewriter stuck. She numbered the pages by hand, scribbled “The Reverend” in the top margin of the first page, and wrote out a concluding paragraph on the last. The preacher appears by name, but Tom Radney is called Jonathan Larkin, one of many indications that Lee planned to stretch the facts of the case into fiction.
The Radney family shared a copy of the manuscript with me, on the condition that I not quote from it. The chapter begins dramatically with that early-morning telephone call, when the Reverend Maxwell asks the Lawyer Larkin for his help. There are only six paragraphs, just over eleven hundred words, but they form a sweeping chapter that traces the Larkin family history from the shores of Ireland to the sandy soil of Alabama. Lee only sent Radney these four pages, but she told him many times that she had written more. “I have accumulated enough rumor, fantasy, dreams, conjecture, and outright lies for a volume the length of the Old Testament,” Lee told another writer, Madison Jones, who was researching the case. In a 1987 letter now housed at Emory University, Lee wrote to Jones: “I do believe that the Reverend Maxwell murdered at least five people, that his motive was greed, that he had an accomplice for two of the murders and an accessory for one. The person I believe to have been his accomplice/accessory is alive, well, and living not 150 miles from you.” But, she wrote, “I do not have enough hard facts about the actual crimes for a book-length account.” Still, she and Radney stayed in touch for years after this, and he was convinced that she was still working on the project.
It’s easy to see why Radney wanted Lee to tell his story, and even easier to imagine why she would’ve found him so appealing a character. Born in 1932, Tom Radney studied education and history at Auburn, then got a degree from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1955. He was drafted into the Army, and after serving in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps he returned to his home state and opened a law office. He married a woman named Madolyn, and they started their family in Alexander City.
Big Tom, as friends and family knew him, became known around Alabama as Mr. Democrat: he was elected to the state senate in 1966, having gone six years earlier to the Democratic National Convention to nominate John F. Kennedy. “Tom was the quintessential yellow dog Democrat,” Madolyn Radney told me. “But unfortunately he was too progressive, too liberal.” He served only one term. Maxwell presumably hired him because Radney was one of the only white lawyers in town who would defend black clients. He was the Atticus Finch of Alexander City, in other words, and the Maxwell cases made him famous. By the time he defended Maxwell’s killer, in 1977, national newspapers and magazines had come to Alabama to cover the trial. “Lawyers like to be on the stage,” his wife reflected. “They like audiences, and they like performing, so of course Tom thought this should all be a book. He and Harper Lee would even talk about who would play him in the movie.”
The book, as Lee seems to have planned it, would follow Radney through all the legal maneuvering that kept Maxwell out of jail and flush with over a hundred thousand dollars in insurance payments. It was August of 1970 when Maxwell’s first wife, Mary Lou Maxwell, was found beaten and perhaps even strangled; some newspapers reported that a rope had been discovered near her in the car. But the star witness for the state, one of Maxwell’s neighbors, Dorcus Anderson, changed her testimony after she became the second Mrs. Maxwell, providing her new husband with an alibi for the time of the murder. With Radney’s help, Maxwell was found not guilty and collected ninety thousand dollars from the insurance policy he owned in his first wife’s name.
When, in February of 1972, Maxwell’s brother John was found dead near the town of Nixburg, the cause of death was alcohol poisoning and exposure. But officials suspected that John might have been forced to drink all that alcohol and then left by the side of the road to die. They found no viable evidence, however, and Maxwell never faced trial. Maxwell’s second wife, Dorcus, was found dead in September of that same year, at the age of twenty-nine. Like the first Mrs. Maxwell, she was found in her car. Officially, she died of acute asthmatic bronchitis, but the autopsy noted a long, deep laceration on her forehead. Again, Reverend Maxwell faced rumors but no trial, though Tom Radney had to fight harder this time for the insurance settlement. Almost two years later, the Court of Civil Appeals of Alabama finally found in Maxwell’s favor.
Not two years after that settlement, one of Maxwell’s nephews, James Hicks, went missing. His car was found by the side of the road in February of 1976, but neither the car nor the body showed any signs of damage or distress. The exact cause of death was never determined, and the reverend again escaped without charges. The next summer, though, Maxwell’s sixteen-year-old step-daughter, Shirley Ann Ellington, was found dead under the front wheel of Maxwell’s car. Technically the niece of Maxwell’s third wife, Ophelia, the teen-ager had lived with them in Coosa County. Authorities suspected that the crime scene had been staged, especially after they found lug nuts under the girl’s body and noticed that her hands were clean even though a tire had been removed from the car.
On the third Saturday in June, hundreds gathered for Ellington’s funeral in a red brick funeral-home chapel in Alexander City. In the middle of the service a woman shouted, “You killed my sister and now you gonna pay for it!” Seconds later, the girl’s uncle, Robert Lewis Burns, fired his pistol three times at Reverend Maxwell, who was sitting in the pew in front of him. Maxwell died in the chapel.
The district attorney, Tom Young, argued that Burns had acted as “a one-man lynch mob” and charged him with first-degree murder. Burns, a thirty-six-year-old truck driver, hired Radney to defend him. After first getting approval from the state bar to represent the man accused of killing his former client, Radney argued that Burns was not guilty by reason of insanity. “We admit he shot him,” Radney conceded in his opening statement. “We admit he killed him. We admit he shot him three times where Mr. Young says he shot him.”
Those gathered in the courtroom applauded when the jury announced their not-guilty verdict. Burns was sent to a state mental facility in Tuscaloosa for assessment, but was released a few weeks later. He left Bryce Hospital and went right back to his trucking business. For his part, Radney was named Alexander City’s man of the year in 1977. The next year, Harper Lee came to town.
Alexander City was a thousand miles from Lee’s friends in Manhattan, but only a hundred and sixty miles from her family in Monroeville. She even had a niece whose husband owned a place in town: the Horseshoe Bend Motel, named for a stretch of the nearby Tallapoosa River where the last battle of the Creek War was fought, a battle Lee herself mentioned in one of her only public lectures, a talk on Alabama’s first, largely forgotten historian, Albert James Pickett.
Tom Radney’s widow, Madolyn, remembers the months when Lee lived in Alexander City. “I didn’t spend nearly as much time with her as the men did,” she told me. “Harper Lee smoked and drank, and she had several four-letter words she’d contribute to any conversation.” Still, Madolyn found her charming. “She had this really cute wit about her,” she said. “She was smart, and I enjoyed just listening to her—just sitting back and listening to the conversation.”
Other than the Radney family’s memories, little about the author’s time in Alexander City has been recorded. But a few years ago a woman named Sheralyn Belyeu found a letter that Harper Lee had written not long after her first stay in town. Belyeu’s husband had bought her an Encyclopedia Britannica at a thrift store in Alexander City; the letter, she told me, was “right there, by the entry for Harper’s Ferry.” Dated June 11, 1978, it was a thank-you note that Lee had written to a family who had hosted her. “You simply can’t beat the people in Alex City for their warmth, kindness, and hospitality,” she wrote. “If I fall flat on my face with this book, I won’t be terribly disappointed because of knowing that the time I spent with you was not time lost, but friends gained.” Lee ends the letter by saying, “This is not remotely goodbye, because I’ll be coming back until doomsday.”
Belyeu tried to track down the addressees, but having no luck she contacted Lee’s sister Alice. In response, Alice Lee explained in a letter that her sister “had collected quite a mass of material” but had “never actually prepared anything for publication.” Alice also told Belyeu that she could do as she wished with the letter, so the family donated it to their alma mater, Brigham Young University. Writing in June, 2009, Alice said that her sister wouldn’t return to the project because “she is in frail health, nearly blind and paralyzed on the left side by a stroke.”
Though Alice said that her sister had never written the book, for years Harper told Tom Radney that it was near completion. In 1997, Radney told a newspaper reporter, “I still talk to Nelle twice a year, and every time we talk, she says she’s still working on it.” Madolyn Radney told me that while Lee procrastinated Tom persisted. “He’d call her and she’d say I’m just about finished with the draft, or it’s just going to be perfect, or I’ll send it to the publishers tomorrow,” she said. “He even went up to New York to get his files, and she told him it was headed to the publishers.”
“He was so trusting,” Radney said of her husband. “He gave Harper Lee everything he had: notes, transcripts, court documents. And she took it all with her.” None of it, the family says, was ever returned, and Tom Radney’s generosity has bothered the family since his death. Beyond hoping that Lee might still publish “The Reverend,” the family has tried to get Radney’s files back.
In her 2009 letter to Sheralyn Belyeu, Alice Lee said that Harper had given away all of her materials from the Maxwell case to another writer. One of Tom Radney’s granddaughters, Madolyn Price, has her doubts. It’s possible that Alice Lee thought Harper had given everything to Madison Jones. But in her 1987 letter to Jones, Lee mentioned Radney but not his files. The lawyer’s family insists that Lee never returned them, and they suspect that the author still has them. Most insistent is Madolyn Price. Price inherited her grandfather’s enthusiasm for the Maxwell story, and she is as certain as he was that the trials could become a best-selling book or a blockbuster movie. Hoping to assemble all the materials that someone might need for such a project, Price sorted through Radney’s papers after his death, tracked down a reporter who had covered the case, and even interviewed Maxwell’s murderer, Robert Burns. “We realized we were missing a huge part of his case files, and that’s when we tried to get in touch with Ms. Lee about it all,” Price told me.
This was in the fall of 2013, and the family thought they’d first try going through the Lee family law firm, Barnett, Bugg, Lee, & Carter, LLC. Ellen Price, Madolyn’s mother and Tom’s daughter, reached Tonja Carter, Harper Lee’s lawyer, and encouraged her to verify their family’s story by calling Radney’s old firm in Alexander City. When Carter called Ellen back, she said that Harper Lee had no recollection of the Maxwell case or Tom Radney.
The Prices were incredulous: Lee would have worked on the book for years, and known Tom Radney for more than three decades. As recently as February, 2006, Radney had written to Lee, after his son saw her at the University of Alabama. “The years are getting by,” Radney wrote, “and I would very much like to see you again before the grim reaper comes for either of us.”
“We just couldn’t believe Harper Lee didn’t remember,” Madolyn Price told me. “So I thought we should pursue it more.” They contacted a family friend, who offered to speak with Carter on their behalf. Shortly afterward, Price received a letter from Carter. “Miss Nelle Lee has asked that I respond to your request for the return of your grandfather’s files on the Rev. Maxwell case,” it read. “Unfortunately, Miss Lee does not have your grandfather’s files. I am sorry we were not able to help.”
“Maybe granddad’s files were lost when Harper Lee moved to or from New York,” Price said, though she suspects the author had kept them safe somewhere in Alabama. (Tonja Carter did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
Last month, when the Radney family learned that Carter had discovered the manuscript of “Go Set a Watchman” in a “secure location,” they wondered if that same location might not also hold a manuscript of “The Reverend” or, at least, Tom Radney’s materials from the case. “We’re hoping she might still find my granddad’s files,” Price told me. Radney’s widow said the same thing, adding, “We don’t want anything that belongs to Harper Lee. We just want what belongs to us: the estate of Tom Radney.”
The Radney family remains sanguine that someone will write the book that Harper Lee never did, or that if there are more manuscript chapters of “The Reverend” they, like “Go Set a Watchman,” might see the light of day and the ink of a printing press.
