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Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee
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Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Reverend”
Prologue Summary
Cep provides background on the events of the book. Seventeen years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, writer Harper Lee returned to Alexander City, Alabama, to gather material on the trial of Robert Burns, who was accused of killing Reverend Willie Maxwell at the funeral of Shirley Ellington, Burns’s niece who was presumed to be just one of several victims Maxwell murdered. Burns’s lawyer was Tom Radney, also the longtime lawyer of Willie Maxwell. The sensational circumstances of the case notwithstanding, Harper Lee never completed or published her proposed book on the trial. Cep questions why Lee never finished her book on these events despite having such good source material.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Divide the Waters from the Waters”
Willie Maxwell was born to a poor family in Alabama in 1926. He came from a family of black sharecroppers and had little education, and there is virtually no mention of him in the historical record. By 18, Willie was enlisted in the US Army and assigned to an engineering aviation battalion. Willie served until 1947, then he returned home. By then, Willie was known for his charm and politeness. He got a job at Russell Manufacturing, a textile company, and married Mary Lou Edwards in 1949. He was 21, and she was 19.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Minister of the Gospel”
Willie and Mary Lou’s marriage was not a happy one. They were crushed by debt, for one thing. Beyond their financial struggles was Willie’s womanizing. As a minister, he had many opportunities to be alone with women, and he took full advantage of this liberty. In 1970 Willie even had a child with another woman. By 1970, it was obvious to anyone who knew Mary Lou that she was unhappy.
On the afternoon of August 3, 1970, Willie left their home in Nixburg, Alabama, to preach at a revival in Auburn. Mary Lou visited with her next-door neighbor Dorcas Anderson twice on the night she died, once on a social call and a second time to tell Dorcas she was going out because Willie had called to say he had been in a car accident on Highway 22.
Later that night Mary Lou’s murderer severely beat and strangled her, leaving her body in an idling car on the side of Highway 22. When the police came around to question Dorcas, she told them about Mary Lou’s trek to find Willie. She also told them that Willie came home later that night with no sign of any damage to his car. Based on Dorcas’s statements, the police began to see Willie as a suspect in his wife’s murder. Despite the police’s suspicions, they were unable to conclusively prove that Willie was the murderer.
Willie presented the face of the grieving spouse to the world. His lawyer, Tom Radney, helped him arrange Mary Lou’s funeral, and Willie wrote to claim the payout from a life insurance policy with Old American. By then, Willie had been indicted for murder based on Dorcas’s testimony.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Death Benefits”
Cep provides historical context about Willie’s insurance policies in this chapter. Life insurance was around during the age of the Roman Empire, but it only gained wider acceptance in the Western world in the 18th century. Prior to then, people saw life insurance as an affront to the all-knowing nature of God, and beyond this religious objection was the grave difficulty potential insurers had in figuring out whether it was a good bet to insure a person.
Plagues and natural disasters eventually provided actuarial information on likely lifespans and shifted attitudes about the morality of preparing for death by buying insurance. Life insurance boomed in the United States as death loomed large during the Civil War, although the industry was still poorly regulated and policyholders were not thoroughly vetted with an underwriting process.
Willie took advantage of this poor regulation. His apparent crime was not just the murder of his wife but insurance fraud on a vast scale. Some of the policy issuers fought his claims once he was indicted in August 1971. Most were forced to pay up after Willie was acquitted in his trial for the murder of Mary Lou, however. The case against him fell apart when Dorcas got on the stand and provided an alibi for Willie instead of repeating her earlier statements that implicated Willie.
No one was brought to justice for the death of Mary Lou. Ophelia Burns, one of Willie’s girlfriends, was also indicted for Mary Lou’s death but never charged. After his acquittal, Willie had his lawyer sue the insurance companies who refused to pay out his policies on Mary Lou.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”
Willie didn’t get off scot-free, however. All four of the churches where he served as a part-time pastor fired him, although he managed to get a pulpit in nearby Pitt County. Even more shocking was his marriage to Dorcas Anderson just 15 months after Mary Lou’s murder and a mere seven months after the death of Abram, Dorcas’s first husband. Dorcas was 27 while Willie was 46, and the age difference didn’t sit right with their acquaintances. People soon claimed that Willie had used supernatural means—voodoo—to kill Abram.
Voodoo was one of several folk religions that reflected the practices of Africans imported as slaves to North America and the Caribbean. In a society in which medical care was scarce for most people of color and the poor, these practitioners provided alternative treatments. Voodoo was practiced even by people who were Christians, and both African Americans and whites accepted its plausibility.
The idea that Willie was a secret voodoo priest had a comforting explanatory power for people who could not imagine that a man would brazenly murder his wife and his lover’s husband but get away with it. Dorcas did not seem at all deterred by these rumors. She married Willie, and Willie secured a life insurance policy on her the day after their wedding.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Just Plain Scared”
Willie also had an insurance policy on his brother, John Columbus Maxwell. John died after a car struck him as he walked near the intersection of Highways 9 and 22. His blood alcohol level was so high he should have been passed out, a fact that convinced people Willie Maxwell was somehow involved in the murder. John’s cause of death was determined to be a heart attack, however, and Willie Maxwell collected the payout on the life insurance policy he held on his brother. By 1971, Willie had collected nearly a half million in insurance in 2020 dollars.
Dorcas’s turn came on September 20, 1972. Three men found her body in her idling car in Nixburg, near Highway 9. There was no marking on the body, and the car had no damage beyond a crumpled fender. Willie’s behavior in the hours when Dorcas was missing was suspicious, but there was once again little concrete evidence indicating his guilt. Dorcas, an unremarkable and healthy woman, supposedly died of natural causes, possibly as the result of “acute respiratory distress” (55).
Undeterred by rumors that he was a murderer, Willie Maxwell began collecting on the 17 insurance policies he had on Dorcas. The companies fought him to avoid paying the policies, so Willie relied on Tom Radney to sue these companies in civil court. The last civil case went all the way to the Alabama Supreme Court, where the justices decided in Willie’s favor.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “No Exception to the Rule”
People assumed Willie Maxwell’s guilt as the bodies piled up around him. Willie, however, saw himself as a Job-like figure. The deaths had to be the work of unnamed people out to murder Willie or just plain bad luck and tragedy heaped upon one undeserving man. He lost his last pulpit. Despite the deaths, Willie married again in 1974, and his bride was Ophelia Burns, the indicted-but-never-charged girlfriend in the murder of Mary Lou.
Willie’s new life was complicated. He became the head of a large, blended family. Unable to preach because of his reputation as a murderer, Willie made his living as a crew leader for a pulpwooding outfit that included his nephew. On February 14, 1976, the nephew—James Hicks, who had by then quit working for his uncle—disappeared. His body was found two days later on Highway 9 in an abandoned car located not far from Willie’s house. Once again, the cause of death was mysterious. The coroner found nothing more than a few cuts on the young man’s body.
Investigators for the Alabama Bureau of Investigations (ABI) did find a policy written in Willie’s handwriting among Hick’s belongings. Hicks’s widow told the investigators stories about Ophelia calling around to get his Social Security number, information that would have been necessary for a policy. Even more damning evidence emerged two months later when the investigators found two witnesses who claimed Willie had solicited their help in a plan to kill two nephews who owed him money. The coroner found Hicks had apparently died of natural causes, so no charges could be brought against Willie.
In summer 1977 Shirley “Shell” Ellington, Ophelia’s adopted daughter, drove away from the Maxwell home after an argument with Ophelia. The Maxwells went to the Alexander City Police Station to report Ellington missing after she failed to return, but the police told them the girl was dead. Her body was found on the side of Highway 9 under the car, which had apparently fallen on her as she attempted to change a flat tire. Nothing at the scene matched up with this story, however.
The Maxwells held Ellington’s funeral on June 18. Robert Burns, Ellington’s uncle, pulled out a pistol at the funeral and shot Willie Maxwell to death in front of the mourners. The Burns family secured Tom Radney, Willie’s lawyer, to defend Robert.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 6 Analysis
Cep establishes the cultural and historical setting for the story she tells. Furious Hours is literary nonfiction in the true-crime genre. Aspects of its genres are evident throughout Part 1, although Cep makes some unexpected choices when it comes to representing the actual murders. In addition, Cep makes her opening moves in examining the influence of race, class, and place on the justice in America.
Cep structures these early chapters by introducing the two central questions that drove her research: How did two people manage to get away with murder despite their obvious guilt, and why did Harper Lee not manage to transform this fantastic material into a book? The question about the murders and the book’s suspense-building prologue are typical of the true-crime genre. In its more popular iteration, the primary purpose of true crime is to entertain, and we see this impulse at work when Cep uses the suspense, twists, and turns in the Willie Maxwell murders to engage readers and answer the first question.
Literary nonfiction can certainly entertain, but it tends to be a genre in which writers place more emphasis on character, important ideas, and artful use of language and literary elements. Cep’s desire to unravel the mystery of Harper Lee’s failure to produce for so many decades is more of a literary whodunit focused on the major figures in the narrative. Her work thus has a split personality—it has elements of both popular and literary writing.
It is worth noting that the structure that Cep previews in the part titles—“The Reverend,” “The Lawyer,” and “The Writer”—is built on character rather than plot, a focus one expects to find in literary work. On the other hand, most chapters in this first section end with a statement that builds suspense—an approach to chapter endings one expects in true crime. At the end of Chapter 1, for example, Cep makes the ominous statement that Willie’s marriage “lasted, as he promised that day it would, until death did them part” (14). This statement leads readers to wonder just how Mary Lou died and to keep reading to find out.
Cep also does deep dives into the historical record and cultural milieus that produced each key character in her story, varying her diction depending upon the writing task at hand. In the moments when she focuses on cultural and historical context like the building of the dam that produced Lake Martin (see Chapter 1), the diction is more literary; it is descriptive and loaded with adjectives, parallel grammatical structures, and multiple clauses. She writes, for example, that the “Tallapoosa carried on like that, serenely genuflecting its way to the sea” (7), which is a poetic way of saying the river flowed for a long time before Alabama dammed it.
These literary passages are counterbalanced by descriptions of crime scenes, autopsy reports, and investigations. The diction in that writing is matter-of-fact and at times clinical, such as when Cep describes Dorcas Maxwell’s broken neck as having a “fractured hyoid”(54) and when she includes a list in that paragraph of the many chemicals and substances that were not found in Dorcas’s body during the autopsy.
Such language is typical for true crime, but Cep makes some interesting choices in presenting the actual murders. Although true crime usually includes graphic descriptions—sometimes based on facts and sometimes based on acts of imagination—of the actual murders, Cep does not include such scenes, perhaps because doing so would require speculation about Willie Maxwell’s actions when no one ultimately knows what he did. On the other hand, her decision not to present graphic murders may be a conscious choice designed to avoid exploiting the death and suffering of the African American victims.
Furious Hours is also rooted in history as an important part of the context for the murder, so there are moments when the plot pauses so Cep can fill the reader in on these important contexts. That means, for example, that the momentum in the first part of the book pauses in Chapter 3 so Cep can explain the insurance industry, the flaws of which helped create a monster like Willie Maxwell. Cep’s discussion in Chapter 4 of the history of voodoo is more anthropology than history, but it is another digression that adds cultural context, educates the reader in enough detail to understand the characters more fully, and makes this work literary as opposed to straightforward popular/genre writing.
Finally, Cep develops a discussion of the meaning of justice in America. As Cep ably argues, the idea that a person would get away with murdering multiple people seems astonishing, almost unbelievable, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Cep doggedly uses her discussions of structural racism and inequality in the United States to provide a more down-to-earth explanation for why Willie Maxwell was never legally called to account. She does this work when she describes the roots of the ABI in the Scottsboro case, when she discusses how white community members responded to the murders (by being titillated, mostly), and when she explains Fred Gray’s involvement in Willie’s civil cases against the insurance companies. The victims in this case were poor, black, and mostly women. Cep shows that Willie is the villain in this case, but so is the legal system that enabled him for so many years.
By the time the reader gets to the end of Part 1, the dominant impression is that the book is mostly a work of true crime, but Cep’s attention to language, her development of themes related to larger questions of justice, and her refusal to include sensationalistic scenes of black death signal that she is also interested in telling a more literary tale.
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