For those
of you who haven’t heard about this story yet, here is a quick recap:
In 1978,
Harper Lee went to Alexander City, AL to research a nonfiction book along the
lines of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which, you may
remember, she also helped research. The Alexander City story
involved Willie Maxwell, a murderous preacher—with supposed ties to voodoo—,
who allegedly killed off members of his family for insurance money. He
was later assassinated at the funeral of one of his suspected victims. The
Reverend’s lawyer then represented the assassin and won a verdict of not guilty
by reason of temporary insanity.
You can
learn more by clicking the following links: The Compelling Story Harper Lee Never Wrote; Harper Lee Manuscript Found?; Harper Lee's Next Book; What Harper Lee Said About her Lost Crime Novel
Some of what we do
know about Lee’s research into the case makes for a compelling mystery.
1) The
Reverend had an accomplice. According to a 1987 letter Lee wrote to
the late author Madison Jones, she said, “I do believe that the Reverend
Maxwell murdered at least five people, that the motive was greed, that he had
an accomplice for two of the murders and an accessory to one.”
As of yet, no one has publicly named this suspected
accomplice or explained his or her part in the story.
2) Despite
widespread belief otherwise, Reverend Maxwell wasn’t a voodoo man. According
to the same letter, Lee found no evidence that the Reverend was involved in
voodoo. “I traced nearly every rumor of that sort to its source, and if you do
the same, you will have a surprise.”
During his lifetime, the Reverend was feared by
other citizens. The connection to voodoo kept people afraid of him
even after he died. So, who started the rumors? And why?
3) Why did
Lee give up on the manuscript? Different people provide different
explanations. Some of her close friends have suggested that the
success of her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, set too high a
standard, and that any other books would suffer in comparison. One
of her friends told me that she feared rumors that Capote had written Mockingbird would
“get a life” if a second book wasn’t as good as her first.
A few pieces
of evidence suggest that Lee told different stories to different people. Her
letter to Jones claimed she did not have enough factual information to complete
a book. Attorney Tom Radney, the man who alerted her to the story in
the first place and who spoke with her on a regular basis, claimed she was
working on the book into the 1990s. In an article written by a
member of the Associated Press, Robert
Burns—the man who shot Reverend Maxwell at his adopted niece’s funeral—heard a
different story. “She was telling me she didn’t know if she was
going to write the book or not because she would incriminate some people in
Alex City.”
Would
this be the Reverend’s accomplice mentioned earlier? Unless her notes or a
manuscript turns up, we may never know.
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