Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

William “Willie” Maxwell (1926-1977) is one of the central characters in Furious Hours. Widely believed guilty of murdering five of his family members to receive life insurance payouts, Willie was a mysterious character whose rumored practice of voodoo to kill his relatives overshadowed a relatively mundane life for a black man in the South of the 20th century.

According to Cep, Willie was a handsome man whose stylish clothes and formal diction made sense for a minister. Willie apparently lived above his means and was always in debt and desperate for money, likely because he had many extramarital affairs.

The central moment of transformation in Willie’s life came with the death of Mary Lou, his first wife. Willie’s neighbor, Dorcas Anderson, initially accused him of behaving suspiciously on the night of his wife’s murder; his acquittal and subsequent lawsuits to secure insurance payouts on his wife and many other relatives convinced his neighbors that he could act without getting caught because he practiced voodoo. He became a feared pariah. When Robert Burns, his adoptive daughter’s uncle, murdered him, the community saw the murder as mere justice.

Willie is a relatively static but well-developed figure whose greed and cold-bloodedness one has to assume based on the actions other people—lawyers, witnesses at trial, Cep, and family members of his apparent victims—ascribe to him. Cep also uses the scant details about his life and actions to argue that the lives of black Americans, even those as notorious as Willie Maxwell, are rarely documented in any great detail.

A Democratic state senator and lawyer, Tom Radney (1967-2011) was the lawyer who led Willie Maxwell’s civil cases against insurance companies and defended Robert Burns at Burns’s trial for Maxwell’s murder in 1977. Cep describes a character arc in which Radney started out as an idealistic booster for the New South but transformed himself into a Matlock-style country lawyer who used his considerable charisma, flashy style, and knowledge of the community to become a successful trial lawyer.

Cep describes two turning points in Radney’s life. The first was the backlash he faced in 1968 after expressing on a national news show support for Ted Kennedy as president. During a moment when Alabama’s state government was engaged in battles to stop integration, his stance was unpopular, and both he and his family faced death threats and acts of destruction. He gave up politics for a time but returned for an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor in 1970. He never ran for office again and turned his attention to making money. Cep uses this episode to show the pervasiveness of racism in Alabama and its ability to impact even whites.

The second turning point in Radney’s life was his work for Willie Maxwell, which began in 1970 when Maxwell used Radney to represent him in lawsuits to gain payouts for Maxwell’s life insurance policies on his first wife. Radney’s relationship with Maxwell was so profitable that the community began calling his law offices the Maxwell House; this relationship did not impede Radney’s decision to defend Robert Burns, who was tried for murdering Willie Maxwell. By the time Lee met Radney in 1976, he was an established figure in Alabama Democratic politics. He is a pivotal character in her story because he was the one who told her about the accusations against Willie Maxwell. Radney died in 2011, still waiting on the publication of The Reverend.

Truman Capote (1924-1984) was a childhood friend of Harper Lee’s in Alabama. Cep uses the story of Capote’s career to present a contrast with the course of Lee’s career. Cep describes Capote as an unusual child whose wild imagination, short height, and lisping speech marked him as different. He and Lee honed their early storytelling skills with each other. After high school, Capote’s career took off because he immediately began work in publishing; his travels and work allowed him to raise his public profile, while Lee trudged through college as was expected by her family. Capote was a published author by the 1940s; Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) is the most famous of those early works.

Capote is most present in Furious Hours during the late 1950s, when Cep describes the collaboration between Harper Lee and Capote as Capote worked on the article that would become the book In Cold Blood (1965). According to Cep, Capote’s liberties with the facts offended Lee’s journalistic commitment to telling the truth and inspired her to create a true-crime book that was more honest. Their relationship could not withstand Lee’s success with the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Born in Alabama to poor parents, Mary Lou Maxwell (1927-1970) was the first wife and first likely victim of Willie Maxwell. Described by Cep as a longsuffering woman who turned a blind eye to her husband’s philandering, perhaps out of a sense of duty, Mary Lou mostly appears in the book as a victim and a body. Cep uses the lack of detail about her life to point out how systemic racism impacts the representation of African Americans in history and their lack of access to justice.

Dorcas Anderson Maxwell (1944-1972) was Willie Maxwell’s second wife. She enters Cep’s narrative as the neighbor who initially raised the police’s suspicions about Willie’s possible involvement in the death of Mary Lou Maxwell. By the time Willie came to trial, however, Dorcas gave him an alibi and married him shortly after. Cep presents Dorcas as an opportunistic woman swayed by her attraction to Willie. Dorcas died in 1972 under mysterious circumstances. Her death, along with that of her brother, led community members to suspect that Willie’s ability to escape justice was the result of voodoo.

The third wife of Willie Maxwell and adoptive mother of Shirley Ellington (Willie’s last apparent victim), Ophelia Burns Maxwell (1928-1985) is a thinly sketched character who first appears as an uncharged conspirator in the murder of Mary Lou Maxwell. Her story is relatively brief: To the shock of her neighbors, Ophelia married Willie in 1974 despite rumors that he was a murderer and voodoo practitioner. She was 16 years younger than him, and her first husband died after a long illness, two facts that made neighbors even more disapproving of her choices. Ophelia last appears in the third section of the book as a close-mouthed widow who defends Willie from accusations of murder.