Shortly before kickoff, Seiler took Uga down from his perch and led him around to the open end of the U-shaped stadium. He and Uga paused just outside the end zone in front of three marble tombstones set into a landscaped embankment. This was the Uga memorial plot. Bunches of flowers had been placed at the foot of each tombstone, and each bore an inscription to a late Uga:
“UGA. Undefeated, Untied. Six bowl teams. ‘Damn Good Dog’ (1956-1967).”
“UGA II. Five bowl teams. ‘Not bad for a dog’ (1968-1972).”
“UGA III. Undefeated, Untied, Undisputed, and Undenied. National Champions of College Football 1980. ‘How ’bout this dog.’”
The band was assembling in the end zone. The Georgia cheerleaders came to take Uga from Seiler and put him into his official doghouse, which was shaped like a big red fire hydrant on wheels. It was air-conditioned, the Georgia heat being less than ideal for Uga’s breed of English bulldog. The hydrant was wheeled out to midfield for the opening ceremonies. Just before kickoff, Uga jumped out and trotted to the sidelines. A roar went up from the crowd. “Damn good dog! Damn good dog! Damn good dog! Rooff! Rooff! Rooff! Rooff-rooff-rooff-rooff-rooffrooffrooffrooff!”
Later that evening, I called Williams to tell him about my conversations with Seiler.
“It sounds as if he’s come up with strong new ammunition for you,” I said.
“I would think so,” said Williams, “considering the rates he charges. What did you think of him?”
“Smart, energetic, committed to your case.”
“Mmmmm,” said Williams, “and to the money he’s making from it.” I could hear the clinking of ice cubes at Williams’s end of the line.
“Do you want me to explain what he’s got?”
“No, not especially. But tell me—not that I really care about this either—who won the game today?”
“Georgia. Nineteen to eight.”
“Good,” said Williams. “That means Sonny will be in high spirits. It’s all so childish. When Georgia loses, it absolutely destroys him. He goes into shock and can’t function for days.”
“In that case, I think you’ll get a vigorous defense out of him. It was a solid victory.”
“Not too big a victory, I hope. He might regard my trial as an anticlimax.”
“I don’t think the game was that important,” I said. “It wasn’t a Southeastern Conference game.”
“Wonderful,” said Williams. “I wouldn’t want him to be all distracted and daydreaming. I want him to be frisky. Yes. That should work.” Williams paused. The ice cubes clinked. “Yes, that should work very well.”
Chapter 21
NOTES ON A RERUN
This is not a happy jury. Six men, six women—seven black, five white. When Judge Oliver told them to go home and come back in the morning with enough clothes for a two-week stay, four of the women burst into tears. One of the men jumped up and shouted, “I refuse it! I refuse it! I’ll lose work. It will make me hostile to the case!” Another man bolted for the door and had to be restrained by the bailiffs. “You can take me to jail!” he screamed. “I’m not serving!” The judge summoned the six recalcitrant jurors to his chambers and listened to their complaints. Then he told them to go home and pack.
Spencer Lawton leads off with the police photographer, Sergeant Donna Stevens, who gives a photographic tour of Mercer House, using huge blowups on an easel. “This is an outside shot of the house,” she says. “This is the living room …. This is the hallway, and that’s a grandfather clock dumped over …. This is the doorway to the study, showing the victim laying on the floor …. This is a shot of blood on the carpet ….”
When she is finished, Seiler steps up for cross-examination.
“Do you remember photographing a pouch and a chair leg?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says.
“Did you photograph it when you first got there?”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“And did you photograph it again after the detectives and other people had been stirring around in there?”
“Yes.”
Seiler holds up the two photographs showing the pouch and the chair leg in different positions. “I’m interested in the traveling pouch,” he says, raising an eyebrow. Sergeant Stevens concedes that the chair has been moved, but she denies that the pouch has been moved. Seiler asks if by looking at the designs on the carpet she can see that indeed the pouch, too, has been moved. No, she does not see any such thing. Seiler keeps at it. “Well, let’s look at the first picture and count the dots in the carpet,” he says. “One … two … three … four … five … six! And in the second picture there are only two dots, right?”
Sergeant Stevens grudgingly admits that the pouch has also been moved.
The jury is entertained by Seiler’s self-assured courtroom manner. He strides back and forth, impeccably groomed in custom-tailored suits, French cuffs, highly polished shoes. He thunders and growls. His tone shifts from curiosity to sarcasm to outrage to surprise. Lawton is dull by comparison. He stands flat-footed in a rumpled suit. His manner is shy and unassuming. He flinches whenever Seiler shouts “Objection! Mr. Lawton is leading the witness again.” Seiler does this repeatedly to unnerve Lawton and send a message to the jury that the D.A. lacks a grasp of basic courtroom procedure.
At Clary’s drugstore, Ruth wonders out loud whether this trial will be as “juicy” as the first. Luther Driggers says he thinks Williams made a mistake after shooting Hansford. “He should have taken Danny’s body out west, pulled his teeth, dissolved them in nitric acid, peeled off his skin, and fed it to the crabs.”
“Why such a complicated cover-up?” Ruth asks.
Luther shrugs. “It beats leaving the body on the floor of Mercer House.”
“Well, whatever Jim Williams should have done with the body, he’s going about his defense the wrong way,” says Quentin Lovejoy, putting his coffee cup down gently. Mr. Lovejoy is a soft-spoken classics scholar in his mid-sixties; he lives with his maiden aunt in a high-Victorian townhouse. “All this talk about Danny Hansford being a violent, brutal criminal! Jim Williams does himself no credit blaspheming the boy that way.”
“But Quentin,” Ruth protests, “Danny Hansford beat up his sister! His mother took out a police warrant against him. He’d been arrested umpteen times. He’d been in jail. He was a common criminal!”
“Not at all,” says Mr. Lovejoy in a voice slightly louder than a whisper. “The only crime that boy ever committed was turnin’ twenty.”
Seiler objects to the repeated use of the term “crime scene” by prosecution witnesses. “It has not yet been established that any crime has been committed here,” he says.
Judge Oliver apparently does not hear Seiler. In fact, the judge appears to be dozing. His eyes are closed, his chin is resting on his chest. The judge has made it abundantly clear, by heaving deep sighs and becoming increasingly cranky, that he is bored with this retrial. His apparent catnaps are causing comment in the courthouse. At any rate, he does not respond to Seiler’s protest. Less than a minute later, a prosecution witness says “crime scene” again, and Seiler lets it pass.
In the corridor during a recess, a pair of purple glasses catches my eye. Minerva is sitting on a bench with a plastic shopping bag on her lap. I sit down next to her, and she tells me she has been asked to appear as a character witness for Williams. The defense hopes she will appeal to the seven blacks on the jury. She will identify herself as a laundress, which is her part-time profession, but from the witness stand she’ll be in a position to make direct eye contact with the D.A., the judge, and the members of the jury. This will enable her to put a curse on every one of them.
While she waits, she sits out in the hall, humming and gurgling softly to herself. Occasionally, she cracks open the door and peers into the courtroom.
Danny Hansford’s mother, Emily Bannister, also sits in the corridor. Sonny Seiler has listed her as a defense witness, just as Bobby Lee Cook did, in order to keep her o
ut of the courtroom. She is quiet and composed, and it strikes me that Seiler’s main concern is not that she will cause a disturbance in front of the jury but that her waiflike appearance will win their hearts. In any case, she still refuses to talk to the press (or to me). As the trial progresses, Mrs. Bannister sits in the corridor just outside the courtroom door reading, writing notes in a journal, and needlepointing.
The first Saturday in court, both Sonny Seiler and Judge Oliver appear to be on edge. They are worried about the Georgia–Mississippi State game, which is taking place concurrently in Athens. Seiler stations an associate in the corridor listening to the play-by-play on a portable radio. Oliver, a past president of the University of Georgia Club, asks Seiler to keep him advised of the situation. Seiler does so during whispered conferences at the bench. Georgia wins, 20 to 7.
Monday morning. Williams testifies. Standing outside the courtroom beforehand, he appears relaxed. “Sonny called me last night to tell me to act humble and remorseful,” he says. “I don’t know if I can manage that, but I am making a sincere effort to look impoverished. I’m wearing the same blue blazer I wore on Friday. It will give the jury the impression I haven’t got anything else to wear. What they won’t know is that it’s a custom-made Dunhill jacket, and that the buttons are eighteen-carat Georgia gold.”
Seiler puts his new game plan into effect. Before Williams takes the stand, his sister escorts his mother out of the courtroom. On direct examination, Seiler asks Williams to explain his relationship with Danny Hansford.
“He was a nice fellow,” Williams says. “He could be charming. He had his girlfriend, I had mine. But to me, sex is just a natural thing. We’d had sex a few times. Didn’t bother me. Didn’t bother him. I had my girlfriend, and he had his. It was just an occasional, natural thing that happened.”
The expressions on the jurors’ faces suggest they do not find this arrangement natural at all.
Lawton steps up to cross-examine Williams. Williams regards him with undisguised contempt.
“You indicated that you and Hansford had sex from time to time,” says Lawton. “Is that right?”
“Mm-hmmm.”
“And that you feel that sex is a perfectly natural thing.”
“Well, you see, it’s not only just natural. At the time, Danny was a hustler on Bull Street selling himself to anybody who wanted to pay for it.”
“Exactly,” says Lawton. “Right. So he was a street kid and had been since fourteen years of age, I think you indicated?”
“Oh, yes.”
“An eighth-grade dropout, and something on the order of twenty years old, is that right?”
“He was twenty-one. He was no child.”
“I wouldn’t, of course, dispute your right to have any relationship you wanted to. But you were fifty-two and he was twenty-one. Was that a natural and normal relationship?”
“Mm-hmmm. I was fifty-two years old, but he had fifty-two years’ worth of mileage on him.”
“I don’t have anything else,” said Lawton. “Thank you very much.”
Williams’s choice of words may not have been what Seiler had hoped for, but his frankness has made it unnecessary for Lawton to call Hansford’s two friends in rebuttal. That, Seiler believes, has spared Williams major damage.
During a recess, Seiler tells me Judge Oliver is old and tired. He is also terrified of being reversed by the state supreme court again, so he is allowing the defense to bring in a lot more evidence about Danny Hansford’s history of violence than he did in the first trial. “We wouldn’t get half that stuff past a younger, more able judge,” says Seiler.
Barry Thomas, the foreman of Williams’s shop, is one of the people permitted by Judge Oliver to tell a story about Hansford’s violence. A slightly built Scotsman, Thomas recalls how, without warning and for no apparent reason, Hansford physically attacked him at Mercer House two months before he died.
“It was the end of the workday,” Thomas says, “and I was getting ready to leave through the front door of Mercer House when I heard these footsteps behind me. I looked around and saw Mr. Hansford charging toward me. He just went at me and kicked me in the stomach. Jim grabbed him and pulled him off me and said, ‘You better get out of here. Danny’s gone crazy.’
“Well, a couple of days later, Mr. Hansford apologized for kicking me. He said he didn’t know why he did it. He wanted me to kick him in the stomach in return, but I said no. I thought he was sick. I have no idea why he attacked me, other than it was just his nature.”
Thomas steps down after testifying. As he goes out into the hall, a hand reaches up and grabs his ear. He lets out a sharp “Aiieee!” as the door closes behind him. I slip into the corridor and see that the hand clutching his ear is Minerva’s.
“Why did you say that?” she hisses.
“Say what?” says Thomas, grabbing hold of her arm.
“About the dead boy,” she says, giving his ear a sharp yank. “Why did you say that?”
“’Cause it’s true,” says Thomas. “He kicked me in the stomach for no good reason.”
“That don’t matter,” she says, letting go of his ear. “You got the boy angry again. Now we gotta calm him down.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Git me some parchment. I need a pen too. One that’s got red ink in it. And let me think … scissors! Gotta have a scissors. And a candle and a Bible. I need ’em quick!”
“Parchment?” Thomas asks. “Where am I gonna fi—” Minerva grabs him by the ear again.
“I know where you can get a Bible,” I say, stepping forward. “At the motel across the street.”
Five dollars coaxes a Bible and a candle out of the desk clerk at the motel. At Friedman’s art supply shop, Thomas buys a red felt-tip pen and a package of heavy vellum tracing paper, which is the closest thing they have to parchment. When he starts to pay, Minerva puts her hand on his arm and stops him. “Lay the money down on the table first,” she says. “That way the lady can’t work with your hand. Kiss it before you lay it down, so it will come back to you.” Thomas obediently kisses the money and lays it on the counter.
Back in Thomas’s car, Minerva spreads out her paraphernalia on the backseat and says, “Take us close as we can git to water.” Thomas drives down the steep cobblestone street leading from Factors’ Walk to River Street. We move slowly along the River Street esplanade—the docks on one side, the old warehouses on the other. Minerva points to an old three-masted schooner. “Right there.”
Thomas pulls to a stop at the ship’s bow, and Minerva lights the candle and begins to chant. With the red pen, she scribbles phrases from the Bible onto the vellum. When she is done, she cuts the vellum into small squares and sets them on fire one by one. Glowing ashes float around like black snowflakes inside the car.
“Take these three pieces I ain’t burned,” she says to Thomas, “and tell Mr. Jim to put them in his shoes.”
Suddenly, I become aware that there are four of us present, not three. The fourth is a policeman who is looking in the window about a foot from my face.
“Ma’am?” he says.
Minerva holds the burning candle in front of her face and stares at the policeman through her purple glasses. She opens her mouth wide. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” she says. Then she puts the candle in her mouth and closes her lips around it. As she does, the light sets her cheeks aglow like a jack-o’-lantern. The glow goes out with a sizzle. She hands the extinguished candle to the policeman. “We ain’t burnin’ no more,” she says softly. She taps Thomas on the shoulder, and as we pull away, I can see the policeman in the side-view mirror. He is still holding the candle and looking blankly in our direction when we turn the corner.
Back in the courtroom, a psychiatrist testifies that as a child Danny Hansford was a breath holder. What he means by that, he says, is that Danny used to torment his mother by holding his breath until he turned blue and passed out.
Minerva will not testify after all. She has suddenly r
ealized that she knows one of the jurors, and he knows her.
“I done some black magic on him,” she says. “He’s still mad as hell.” She will not say what she did to him or why.
Dr. Irving Stone, the forensic pathologist from Dallas, takes the stand and makes forceful arguments for the defense about the gunshot residue and other aspects of the shooting, as Seiler said he would. His comments are supported by Joseph Burton, the medical examiner from Atlanta who testified in the first trial and has returned for this one. More compelling than their testimony, however, is the casual shoptalk they engage in while waiting in the corridor to take the stand.
“I identified 357 bodies in that Delta crash we had in Dallas the other day,” says Stone. “Got thirty a day. It took twelve days.”
“Jeez,” says Burton. “Nice going. How many did you get from fingerprints?”
“Seventy-four percent.”
“How about dental records?”
“Can’t remember. Ten percent, maybe. My favorite was the one I got from a pacemaker. Noted the serial number. Called the manufacturer. Got the name that way.”
Seiler has saved his two surprise witnesses for late in the trial.
Vanessa Blanton, a brunette in her mid-twenties, is a waitress at the 1790 restaurant and bar. She says she used to live in a townhouse on Monterey Square, and she remembers seeing a young man fire a pistol into the trees about a month before Danny Hansford was killed. She did not know that this incident had any bearing on Williams’s trial until recently, when a law associate of Sonny Seiler’s happened to overhear her mentioning the incident to another waitress at the restaurant. Seiler subpoenaed her. She takes the witness stand.