Searching for Harper Lee’s Lost Book About a Serial Killer
Casey Cep was on assignment for The New Yorker when she decided to go to Alabama after the publication of Harper Lee’s previously unpublished novel, Go Set A Watchman, was announced. “There was a lot of scuttlebutt about who was managing [Lee’s] affairs, and in an effort to know as much as I could, I cast a wide net,” says Cep, author of the new book Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.
It was in Alabama that Cep met members of the Radney family, who were trying to retrieve some papers lent to Lee by the late Tom Radney, a prominent local lawyer. That’s when Cep learned that years after Lee had written To Kill A Mockingbird, the book that had made her internationally famous and very wealthy, she had been interested in writing a book about a notorious series of mysterious murders that took place in rural Coosa County, Alabama, in the ’70s.
Those killings involved Willie Maxwell, an African-American preacher who, over the course of seven years, allegedly killed seven people close to him, including two wives, a nephew, and an adopted daughter. “Allegedly,” because Maxwell was never convicted of any of the murders, even though he had taken out multiple life insurance policies on the deceased, naming himself as the beneficiary. This lack of convictions didn’t, however, stop the locals from their unshaken belief that not only was Maxwell a serial killer, but that he had never been convicted of a crime because he was a voodoo priest with such great powers he could sway juries and charm women.