Murder at the funeral

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the most beloved American novels of all time. Famously, Lee never completed another book, once declaring she’d ‘said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again’. But a journalist who went to Lee’s home in Monroeville, Alabama in 2015 learned of another book that Lee had worked on, perhaps for decades — again the story of an Alabama courtroom trial with a black defendant and white lawyer, but this one was true. Lee does not appear to have finished that book, but the journalist who discovered the story, Casey Cep, has: the result is Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.

Having helped Truman Capote research his true-crime classic In Cold Blood, Cep argues, Lee was troubled by the liberties Capote took with the facts. When she encountered her own true-crime case  more than a decade later, she determined to be meticulous about the truth. That appears to have been the problem.

The story was certainly dramatic. On 18 June 1977, at the funeral of a 16-year-old black girl named Shirley Ann Ellington in Alexander City, Alabama, a man named Robert Burns turned and shot the Reverend Willie Maxwell three times, in front of 300 people. His motive was simple: like most of the people in the church that day, he thought Maxwell had killed his adopted daughter Shirley Ann. It was widely believed that Maxwell had previously murdered his first wife, and his second wife, and his brother, and his nephew too.

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Maxwell was a handsome, charismatic and hard-working part-time Baptist preacher; he was also a full-time ladies’ man, and emerges from Cep’s tale as a complete sociopath. When he died he had multiple life insurance policies on other family members, including, Cep writes, ‘his wife, his mother, his brothers, his aunts, his nieces, his nephews and the infant daughter he had only just legitimated’.