“Do you, of your own knowledge,” Lawton asked, “know anything of any relationship that Danny Hansford may have had with Jim Williams?”
“Yes, I do,” said Kerr.
“How do you know?” asked Lawton.
“I went to their home to play backgammon, and Danny stepped out of the room or something to go to the rest room. I said, ‘He’s a nice-looking young man,’ and Mr. Williams said, ‘Yes. He’s very good in bed. And also, he’s well endowed.’”
“Did Danny use drugs?” Lawton asked.
“Yes, he did,” said Kerr. “He had marijuana at the house when I was over there one time.”
“Did he ever say anything to you about where he got it?”
“Yes, he did. He said, ‘Jim buys all my drugs.’”
Bobby Lee Cook leaped to his feet. “Your Honor, this is the rankest and purest sort of hearsay!” Judge Oliver overruled the objection.
On cross-examination, John Wright Jones brought out the fact that once, in the middle of a backgammon game, Jim Williams had accused Greg Kerr of cheating and had then hit him over the head with the backgammon board. So Kerr’s testimony might have been motivated by spite. But Kerr insisted it was not. He said that upon reading a copy of the Evening Press earlier in the week, during the trial, he learned that Danny Hansford had been described in court as having a violent temper. Having read that, Greg Kerr decided it was his duty to come forward.
“Mr. Williams had assured me numerous times that he was innocent,” said Kerr, “and he bragged to everyone that he would just appeal and appeal again. So I felt that, you know, Mr. Hansford is dead, and after I read how everybody was cutting him down, I decided to come up here. I called Mr. Lawton, I would say, around ten-thirty that night.”
“Why didn’t you come forward sooner?” Jones asked.
“I’d thought about doing it many times, but I was scared, because I was still involved with the homosexual scene, and I just felt I shouldn’t.”
“And when did you say you extracted yourself from ‘the homosexual scene,’ as you put it?”
“Well, I’ve been trying for three or four years. I did have one homosexual experience, the last one was three weeks ago, which I barely remember, but up until that point it had been a month and a half. I am doing good, and I will never go back to that type of life again, ’Cause it’s wrong, it’s in the Bible that it’s wrong, and I urge all homosexuals to please get out of it while they can, because they’re going to end up just an old fuddy-duddy, and nobody’s going to want them. I’m lucky. I’m just a young man, and I’m out of it.”
“You’re out of it about three weeks at this stage.”
“I’m out of it.”
“No further questions,” said Jones.
Greg Kerr stepped down and left the courtroom.
Bobby Lee Cook stood up at the defense table. “Call in Mrs. Dowling, please,” he said.
Alice Dowling, the late ambassador’s widow, walked into the courtroom with a pleasant smile and not the slightest idea what had been going on while she and the others had been waiting in the corridor. She said she had known Jim Williams ever since he had been a consultant on the restoration of her house on Oglethorpe Avenue.
“Have you had occasion to visit with Mr. Williams at his home at parties and festivities and social occasions?” Cook asked.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Dowling politely. “For many years we have attended his Christmas parties.”
“On any of those or other occasions, have you noticed anything that would indicate the use or approval of drugs by Mr. Williams?”
“Never,” said Mrs. Dowling.
Spencer Lawton then cross-examined Mrs. Dowling.
“Mrs. Dowling, have you heard anything of a relationship that Jim Williams may have had with a young man named Danny Hansford?”
“No, sir,” Mrs. Dowling said. “I know absolutely nothing about Mr. Williams’s private life.”
“Thank you,” said Lawton. “That’s all I have.”
One by one, the highly respected friends of Jim Williams entered the courtroom and took the stand to vouch for his good character. One by one, they all said they had been at his lovely Christmas parties, never saw drugs either being used or approved of by him, and knew nothing of Danny Hansford.
The parade of witnesses over, the judge called a recess for the weekend, admonishing the jurors not to talk about the case to anyone and not to look at newspaper and television coverage of it. On Monday, the trial would resume for closing arguments and the judge’s instructions to the jury.
On Sunday—perhaps intentionally, perhaps not—the Savannah Morning News published a story about the grim living conditions in the Chatham County Jail. A federal judge had toured the facility and pronounced it “filthy.” He was amazed and appalled, he said, by the lack of sanitation. Inmates were “crowded, ill-fed, dirty and lacked medical attention.” The building was only three years old, a modern concrete structure with a fringe of neatly landscaped lawn. At night it was spotlit and looked as clean and tranquil as a branch bank in Palm Springs. But the inside was a different story. Chaos reigned, to hear the federal judge tell it. “There is no supervision,” he said. “Food is terribly handled.”
On Monday morning, the mood in the courtroom was tense. The revelations about the jail seemed to raise the stakes in this trial. Spencer Lawton rose to make his closing argument. “There’s a lot more wrong with Jim Williams than hypoglycemia,” he said. “Jim Williams is a man of fifty years of age. He is a man of immense wealth, of obvious sophistication. He lives in an elegant home, travels abroad twice a year. He has many powerful and attractive and influential friends. There’s some thing else about Williams too. He has a houseful of German Lugers, cocked and loaded all the time. He has a Nazi hood ornament on the desk in his study. He has a Nazi officer’s ring with the skull and crossbones on it.
“Danny Hansford was an immature, undereducated, unsophisticated, confused, temperamental young man, preoccupied with feelings of betrayal and rejection, even at the hands of his mother, says Jim Williams. I suggest to you that Danny Hansford was a young man who was a great deal more tragic than evil. Can you not imagine how easily impressed a young man like that would be, living in a house, being friends with a man of Jim Williams’s stature?
“Danny Hansford was never someone that Jim Williams really cared for. He was a pawn, nothing more or less than a pawn in a sick little game of manipulation and exploitation. Danny maybe thought of himself as a bit of a hustler. Well, he was in way over his head. He was playing for keeps with a pro, and he turned out to be the ultimate loser. I don’t think he was a hustler. I think he was being hustled. I think he was what amounts to a prisoner in a comfortable concentration camp, where the torture was not physical but emotional and psychological.
“There is abundant reason to wonder why in the world Jim Williams would keep somebody around that he knew to be an unskilled, undependable, highly emotional, depressed psychotic, to protect and serve him in his hour of greatest need, when he collapsed in fainting spells and became comatose. And there is every reason to wonder why Jim Williams would voluntarily take to Europe somebody who, he says, was felonious, violent, and psychopathic.”
Lawton was eloquent and venomous. He spoke softly, as he had throughout the six-day trial, but his righteous anger rang throughout the courtroom like a shout.
“What happened was an act of murder,” said Lawton. “The self-defense was a coverup. It did not occur. Thomas Hobbes is often quoted as having said that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and surely it must have seemed so to Danny Hansford during the last fifteen or twenty seconds of his life, while his life was oozing out onto Jim Williams’s Persian rug.”
It was during his closing argument, in the final moments of the trial, that Lawton introduced a new and diabolical element into the state’s theory of what had really happened. Lawton suggested that the earlier episode of violence at Mercer House—Danny’s rampage on the evening of April
3, when he had stormed through the house and fired a gun into the bedroom floor—was all a hoax. Williams had staged it, Lawton suggested, as a prelude for murdering Hansford a month later. “Could it be a setup?” he asked. “Could Jim Williams have known that about now he would be testifying in court that he had been forced to kill Danny Hansford in self-defense? Did Williams want to create some evidence of Danny’s violent nature, get something into the police records, set it up while Danny was asleep upstairs?”
Lawton was proposing that the shooting of Danny Hansford was neither self-defense nor a crime of passion but a carefully planned murder. He was suggesting that on April 3, while Danny Hansford lay sleeping upstairs, Williams was downstairs stomping a marble-topped table, slamming a cut-glass pitcher into the floor, smashing eighteenth-century porcelain objects, and firing a German Luger into Monterey Square—all with the intention of calling the police afterward and blaming it on Hansford. Why didn’t the shot into the bedroom floor wake Danny up? Because, according to Lawton’s theory, nobody fired a bullet into the bedroom floor that night; the bullet hole in the bedroom floor was an old bullet hole. Lawton had persuasive evidence of that. Corporal Michael Anderson, the police officer who had come to the house that night, had testified about that earlier incident. “We pulled up the carpet, and we did see a bullet hole in the floor, but we couldn’t find no bullet. I couldn’t determine if that was a fresh bullet hole or an old one.” Now, in his closing comments, Lawton told the jury, “Obviously, Corporal Anderson didn’t believe that bullet hole was created by Danny Hansford.” Bobby Lee Cook, with only his closing statement left to him, could not call witnesses or recross-examine Corporal Anderson in rebuttal to Lawton’s startling allegation.
When Lawton was finished, the judge called a recess for the day. In the morning, the benches were once again filled to overflowing. Judge Oliver read a long list of instructions and then excused the jury to consider its verdict.
Three hours later, word spread through the courthouse that the jury was returning to the courtroom. The bailiff called the court to order, and the jury filed in.
“Mr. Foreman, have you arrived at a verdict?” asked Judge Oliver.
“Yes, sir, we have,” said the foreman.
“Would you give it to the clerk that he may publish it?” The foreman handed a piece of paper to the clerk, who stood up and read from the paper:
“‘We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of murder.’”
A gasp of surprise sounded throughout the courtroom.
“The sentence is life imprisonment,” said Oliver.
Two bailiffs approached Williams and escorted him to a small door at the end of the jury box. Before going through the door, Williams paused briefly and looked back, his expression blank, his dark eyes as impenetrable as ever.
The spectators flowed out of the courtroom into the corridor and formed a crowd around Bobby Lee Cook, who stood in the glare of television lights, expressing his disappointment and saying he would file notice of an appeal within a few days. While he spoke, a solitary figure walked around the fringe of the crowd and stepped into an elevator, unnoticed by the reporters. It was Emily Bannister, Danny Hansford’s mother. She turned as the elevator door started to close. It was not really a smile that crossed her face so much as a look of quiet satisfaction.
Chapter 17
A HOLE IN THE FLOOR
Jim Williams had begun the day in the spacious grandeur of Mercer House and ended it in the cold confines of the Chatham County Jail. His glittering social life was over. Never again would the cream of Savannah society pray to be invited to his extravagant parties. He would spend the rest of his life in the company of burglars, muggers, rapists, and other murderers—the very people, as Lee Adler pointed out, who represented the “criminal element” Williams had publicly disdained.
The enormity and suddenness of Williams’s downfall shocked Savannah. It was a tribute to Williams that the public found it difficult to believe he had really been brought so low. Barely twelve hours after he had been escorted from the courtroom, rumor had it that he was rearranging life behind bars to accord with his personal tastes.
“He’s having his meals sent in,” said Prentiss Crowe. “I hear that’s already been arranged. His lunches will be catered by Mrs. Wilkes’s boarding house, and he’ll be getting supper from Johnny Harris one night and Elizabeth’s the next. He’s even written a list of the pieces of furniture that he wants moved into his cell—a firm mattress, I’m told, and a Regency writing table.”
Prison officials denied that Williams was receiving any special favors. They insisted he would be treated like any other inmate at the Chatham County Jail. And, as everyone knew, that was bad news for Williams. Even more ominous, however, was the possible fate that awaited him at the Reidsville State Penitentiary, where he was likely to be transferred to serve out his term. Reidsville was a hard-core prison seventy miles west of Savannah. At the very moment Judge Oliver was pronouncing Williams’s sentence, the inmates at Reidsville were rioting and setting the prison on fire. On his first morning in the Savannah jail, Williams was greeted by a newspaper account of the riot. He could hardly have missed it. The story appeared on page one, along with coverage of his own conviction. The following day, Reidsville was back on the front page. Three black inmates had killed a white inmate by stabbing him thirty times. After the stabbing, prison officials had conducted a shakedown inspection of the jail and confiscated a small arsenal of weapons, including a homemade bomb. Under the circumstances, the real question was not who would cater Jim Williams’s meals in the Chatham County Jail, but whether his lawyers could manage to keep him out of the Reidsville penitentiary.
Speculation about Williams and his fate came to an abrupt halt after two days when Judge Oliver released him on a $200,000 bond pending appeal. A swarm of reporters and TV cameras buzzed around Williams as he walked from the door of the jail to his blue Eldorado. “Will it be business as usual, Mr. Williams?” a reporter called out.
“Business as usual. Damn right!” he said. Minutes later he was back in Mercer House.
On the surface at least, Williams’s life did return to something approaching normal. He went back to selling antiques, and with the court’s permission he traveled to New York to attend a black-tie party for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s exhibition of Queen Elizabeth’s collection of Fabergé. His manner was calm; his conversation had lost none of its sharp edge. But now he was a convicted murderer and, despite the wit and the light humor, there was an aura of quiet desperation. His black eyes seemed darker than ever now. He still received invitations to dine, but the invitations became fewer. Old friends called, but less often.
In private, he expressed bitterness. What galled him most was not his conviction or the harm done to his reputation or even the cost of his defense; it was the indignity of having been charged with any crime at all. From the outset, he had assumed that his word as a gentleman would be accepted and that the whole affair would be settled quietly, the way Savannah had settled past incidents involving prominent suspects—the mysterious bludgeoning of a socialite at the beach not long ago, for example, or the tumble down a flight of stairs that killed a rich man who was about to divorce his wife, or the case of the spinster who embalmed her lover’s bullet-riddled body before calling the police.
“At least I did call the police,” Williams told me shortly after being released from jail. “You should have seen them that night. When word went out over the police radio about what had happened and where it had happened, they started arriving in droves. They wandered through the house like little children on a tour of Versailles. They looked at everything and whispered among themselves. They stayed for four hours. Now that’s unheard of. If a black man kills another black man in Savannah on a Friday night, two policemen might drop by for thirty minutes, and that would be the end of it. But the police were having a ball in my house. When the police photographer was finished taking pictures, she went into the kitchen and made t
ea and coffee and served it to the others with cookies. I thought, Well, this is a damned nuisance, but I guess it’s the price I have to pay. I’ll just let them have their fun, and then it will all be over. They were exquisitely polite. It was ‘Mr. Williams this’ and ‘Mr. Williams that’ and ‘Can we help you, sir?’ One particularly obsequious cop came up to me and told me that he had doused the carpet with club soda so Danny’s blood wouldn’t cause a permanent stain. I thanked him for being so thoughtful. Later, down at the police station, we went through what I thought was a routine signing of papers. The police were so congenial I had no idea I’d been charged with murder until I read it in the newspaper the next day.”
Williams’s deepest resentment was not directed at the police, however. It was directed at Savannah’s society and the power structure that it dominated.
“Men from Savannah’s good families are born into a pecking order they can never get out of,” he said, “unless they leave town forever. They’ve got to go to a proper secondary school—Savannah Country Day or Woodberry Forest—then to a good enough college, and then come back home and join the team. They’ve got to work for a certain company or a certain man and move up gradually. They’ve got to marry a girl with the right background. They’ve got to produce a proper little family. They’ve got to be a member of Christ Church or Saint John’s. They’ve got to join the Oglethorpe Club, the yacht club, and the golf club. Finally, when they’re in their late fifties or early sixties, they’ve arrived, they’ve made it. But by then they’re burned out, unhappy, and unfulfilled. They cheat on their wives, hate their work, and lead dismal lives as respectable failures. Their wives, most of them, are little more than long-term prostitutes, the main difference being that when you factor in the houses, the cars, the clothes, and the clubs, Savannah’s respectable wives get a lot more money per piece of ass than a whore does. When people like that see somebody like me, who’s never joined their silly pecking order and who’s taken great risks and succeeded, they loathe that person. I have felt it many times. They don’t have any say-so over me, and they don’t like that at all.”