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The Devil and Harper Lee
Murder, money, and the tale that haunted America’s most beloved author
By Mark Seal
SCRIBD ORIGINALS
Copyright © 2019 by Mark Seal
All rights reserved
Cover design and illustration by Tom Gatewood
ISBN: 9781645399728
First e-book edition: April 2019
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SOMETHING IS WRONG with this funeral.
Poor black girl, sixteen years old, dead in a tragic accident. Discovered past midnight on a deserted country road, her neck crushed beneath the left front wheel of a 1974 Ford Torino. A car tire and jack were on the ground beside her, as if she had suffered a freak accident while changing a flat. Only months later would the coroner’s report show that she had been strangled, dragged across the road, and positioned beneath the car, which crashed down on her when the jack was knocked free.
It is June 18, 1977. Alexander City, Alabama. A packed wooden chapel at a small-town funeral home, an overflow crowd outside. Scorching hot. Everyone waving fans to ward off the heat—hundreds of people, swaying to the dirge of the organist. The preacher’s sorrowful benedictions, carried aloft by shouts of Amen!
Another small country town. Another sweet, smart teenager just learning how to drive. Another girl working a summer job at a fast food restaurant. Another kid about to be buried and forgotten. Another impoverished African American community in grief. Everything sadly normal, except for this: The girl didn’t die by accident. She was most likely murdered.
And the man most everybody believes to be her murderer is sitting in the third row.
His name is Reverend Willie J. Maxwell, and he is seated among the bereaved in a red velvet pew beneath stained glass windows. He is a tall, handsome black man, fifty-two years old, charming and calculating. He sits ramrod straight, a fan in one hand, a white handkerchief in the other, his arm around his sobbing wife, Ophelia. He can bring a congregation to its knees when he preaches and make grown men cry when he sings the gospel. At this moment, he is widely believed to be Alabama’s first and most prolific black serial killer, having allegedly killed five relatives for profit.
Everybody in the chapel knows it. They’ve been through this before. This is the fifth funeral the Reverend is said to have attended as both mourner and chief suspect. To be sure that this mysterious death will be the last, police are stationed outside the chapel, with plans “to arrest Reverend Maxwell immediately after the funeral,” as Maxwell’s attorney will later write.
The Reverend is dressed in his trademark outfit: black suit, white shirt, black tie. And black patent leather shoes—perhaps the ones that kicked the jack from the car that fell on Shirley Ellington’s neck. The neck of the girl he calls his stepdaughter.
Everything about the Reverend is impressive. His height—a towering six feet four inches. His clothes—fancy and perfectly tailored, from good stores in Alex City, his shoes shined up like glass. His precise mustache. His buttery brown skin, like a movie star’s. His deep, booming voice, slow, molasses-thick, and ever consoling. “A mortician’s voice,” as someone once described it. His renditions of “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross” and “Amazing Grace” draw a flock from miles around. That voice fills the room now, accepting nervous condolences over the loss of his stepdaughter. But the Reverend remains cool and collected, shaking hands, thanking Sister So-and-So and Brother Ain’t-You-Kind.
But the most notable thing about the Reverend is the legend that precedes him.
They say he is the seventh son of a seventh son, a biblical birth order that conveys mystical powers. He lives near the crossroads of Alabama State Route 9 and Interstate 22, which gained mythical connotation, along with other crossroads in the South, after bluesman Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the junction of two Mississippi highways. Folks say that the Reverend’s home is a house of horrors with dead chickens dangling upside down in his pecan trees. Smears of blood on his driveway and doorstep ward off evil spirits and unwanted intruders. They say he has seventy pairs of shoes, each with a shine that never dims, and long rows of black suits in his many closets. They say he keeps a stack of insurance policies, filled out with the names of future victims, on file in his attic. They say he uses a spare bedroom as his voodoo room, and that it’s filled with bloody body parts and powerful potions in brightly colored jars labeled LOVE, HATE, FRIENDSHIP, and DEATH. They say he wears two bulletproof vests for protection everywhere he goes, and they say he wears seven pairs of underwear at once, for reasons nobody understands.
His most powerful armor is the magic he supposedly learned from the Seven Sisters, legendary voodoo queens from New Orleans. Or maybe Mississippi. No one seems to know for sure where they came from originally. But few doubt that, under the Sisters’ tutelage, the Reverend has mastered the use of herbs and potions and acquired what was called “a hand,” meaning he had voodoo powers, including the power to kill without detection.
Guarded by both God and Satan, his talents have been amply demonstrated, people say, by this string of odd and violent deaths, some of which not even Alabama’s best forensics experts could prove as murders. Only the death of the Reverend’s first wife resulted in a murder charge, for which a judge found him not guilty.
No wonder so few dare look the Reverend in the eye. People rush off front porches and hide in their homes at the sight of his passing car. When they drive past his house, they claim their headlights flicker. No court has been able to convict him. Lawmen can’t catch him. Some people in town are starting to ask: Are they even trying? If any of the murders had happened in a white community, would they be trying harder?
“Everyone was talking about it and worried about him, but people weren’t bothering him, because he wasn’t killing nobody from the white community,” one of Reverend Maxwell’s relatives will say years later. “He was always killing in the black community.”
In the matter of Shirley Ellington’s suspicious death, the Alexander City police have neither charged nor questioned the Reverend. Folks say he will terrorize this little Alabama town until the end of times.
Preaching on Sunday, they like to say, killing on Monday.
Young Shirley Ellington had the misfortune of colliding with Reverend Maxwell after he married her foster mother, Ophelia, his third wife. Three years into the marriage, the nightmare supposedly began. At least one relative says Shirley felt sure her stepfather was trying to kill her, which is why Ellington fled the home they shared at 10:00 p.m. that Saturday night and sped, either on foot or by car, to a relative’s house in a nearby black community. The Reverend—or somebody—not only found her, but killed her and left her body in the road. A passing motorist discovered Ellington, practically decapitated beneath the wheel of Maxwell’s 1974 Torino. Now there is only one question on the minds of the hundreds of frightened souls in the chapel: Who’s next?
Five times, they have come to bury a relative of the good Reverend, each life cut short by a freak tragedy. His first wife, Mary Lou, dead in a supposed car accident, though she had also been beaten and throttled. Then his brother John Columbus Maxwell, found dead beside the highway with so much alcohol in his bloodstream that the authorities said someone had to have forcibly poured it down his throat. Then his second wife, Dorcas, dead in another mysterious car accident. Then his nephew James Edward Hicks, found on the side of a road, dead at age twenty-two from causes the coroner was “unable to determine.” And now Shirley.
All five of the relatives had a large insurance policy taken out on their lives, most with double indemnity clauses that paid out in the case of accidental death and listed the Reverend