Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (33 page)

“He used to move furniture for me in my pickup truck.”

“But in no other capacity and for no other work or anything did you pay him?”

“How do you mean?” Williams asked coldly. “What other work would there be?”

“I’m just asking you. I just want to be sure that I’ve got it right.”

At this point, it was Spencer Lawton who was playing his witness like a bass. The more stubbornly evasive Williams became, the more Lawton seemed to encourage him. His intention was not to hook Williams at all but to tease him along and draw out
the play. One more time, he asked Williams if he had anything to add about himself and Danny.

“Does the situation we’ve just been outlining
fully
describe your relationship with Danny?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Indicating ‘yes’?”

“Yes.”

Williams appeared to be holding back a smile. He felt he was winning this test of wills. He had not broken under Lawton’s insistent probing. He had made it through to the end of his testimony with his good name still intact. From here on, it would be all in his favor. He was to be followed on the stand by seven unimpeachable character witnesses, seven of Savannah’s most upstanding citizens. They were waiting in the corridor, out of hearing of the proceedings. There was Alice Dowling, the widow of the late Ambassador Dowling; the silver-haired George Patterson, a retired bank president; Hal Hoerner, another retired banker; Carol Fulton, the pretty blond wife of Dr. Tod Fulton; Lucille Wright, the cateress. They and others were waiting to tell the jury about Jim Williams’s peaceable nature and his good character. Williams stepped down from the stand to await the endorsement of his friends and the conclusion of the trial.

But those endorsements would have to wait. Spencer Lawton announced that he had two witnesses to call in rebuttal to Williams’s testimony. “If it please the court,” he said. “I’ll call as the state’s next witness: George Hill.”

George Hill was twenty-two years old. He had curly dark hair and a hefty build. He took the stand and identified himself as a deckhand on a tugboat in Thunderbolt. He had been Danny Hansford’s best friend. He also knew Jim Williams. Lawton asked him if he could identify Williams anywhere in the courtroom. Hill pointed to him at the defense table.

“Do you know whether or not Danny Hansford had any sort of relationship at all with Jim Williams?” Lawton asked.

“Yes, I do,” said Hill.

“What, if anything, do you know about that relationship?”

“Well, Mr. Williams was giving Danny money when he needed it. He bought him a nice car and give him fine clothes, in exchange for going to bed with him.”

“In exchange for who to—I’m sorry?”

“For Danny to sleep with him.”

“How do you know that?”

“Me and Danny talked about it a few times. Danny told me he liked the money and everything. He said it was fine with him if Mr. Williams wanted to pay him to suck his dick.”

George Hill’s words were framed in silence. Lawton paused so as not to crowd them or diminish their effect. Members of the jury stole glances at one another. Blanche Williams looked down at her lap. The courtroom flack sitting in front of me laughed his silent laugh.

Bobby Lee Cook sat in stony silence. Earlier in the day, in a session in the judge’s chambers, he had lodged formal objections to Lawton’s stated intention of bringing George Hill to the stand to say what he had just said. Cook had told the judge that any testimony based on statements made to Hill by Danny Hansford would constitute inadmissible hearsay. He urged Judge Oliver to be wary. If George Hill were allowed to cross the line, it would be impossible to tell the jury to ignore what it had heard. “You can’t unring the bell,” he said. “You can’t throw a skunk in the jury box and then tell them they didn’t smell it.” But Lawton argued that George Hill’s testimony would introduce a motive for the killing, and Judge Oliver ruled that he could testify.

“Did Danny ever tell you of any disagreements that he had with Mr. Williams?” Lawton continued.

“Well, a few times when I was over there,” said Hill, “they had a few small ones, whenever Mr. Williams wouldn’t give Danny the money he wanted. One time—I wasn’t there when the argument took place—Danny started dating a girl named Bonnie Waters, and Mr. Williams wasn’t too happy about it. He bought Danny a four-hundred-dollar gold necklace, with the agreement Danny would quit seeing this girl. Danny gave the necklace to Bonnie and then took her over to the house with it on. Williams
got pretty mad and told him he’d have to pack his stuff and leave. Danny was real worried that he’d just lost his meal ticket.”

“When was this?”

“About two nights before he died.”

For his cross-examination, Bobby Lee Cook took a kindly-uncle tone. He asked Hill to tell the jury about his fondness for guns—Hill had two pistols and four rifles—and about the time he had assaulted another boy and the boy’s father and knocked their door down. Cook asked Hill to tell how he and a friend had once been arrested for shooting out fifteen streetlights.

Cook also wanted to know why George Hill had not told the authorities about the necklace and Danny Hansford and Jim Williams for more than six months, until just before the trial. “When you finally told someone,” Cook asked, “who did you talk to?”

“Well,” said Hill, “Danny’s mother got in touch with me and asked me to please talk to her attorney or one of the district attorneys.”

“Oh, Danny’s mother got in touch with you?” Cook assumed a look of surprise.

“Yes, sir.”

“She got in touch with you, because she told you she had a lawsuit against Jim Williams, didn’t she! And she wanted to collect ten million dollars and would give you part of it,
didn’t she!”

“That’s a lie,” said Hill, “and I don’t think it’s very polite of you saying things like that.”

It was Bobby Lee Cook’s turn to pause and let the silence in the courtroom emphasize the point he had just made.

Spencer Lawton’s second rebuttal witness was another young friend of Danny Hansford’s, Greg Kerr. Kerr was twenty-one and blond and worked in the pressroom of the
Savannah Evening Press.
He wore wire-rimmed glasses and was visibly nervous. Knowing that he would probably be confronted with it anyway, he blurted out every bad thing about himself he could think
of. He had been arrested for possession of drugs and obstruction of justice; he had been involved in “the homosexual scene” ever since he was seduced by a high school teacher. But his last homosexual encounter had been three weeks ago, he said, and he was out of it for good now.

“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.”