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Furious Hours summary

Name: Furious Hours
Rating: 4.3 (55 reviews)
Author: Casey Cep

Casey Cep

Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

4.3 (55 ratings)

21 mins

Brief summary

"Furious Hours" by Casey Cep explores the life of Harper Lee and her attempt at writing a true-crime book. It revealingly touches on race relations, southern gothic culture, and Lee's personal life.

Topics

Memoirs Autobiographies

Table of Contents

Furious Hours
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Uncover the secrets of Harper Lee’s elusive second book.

In the 1970s, a serial killer was reputedly on the loose in Alabama. Murdering his own family members and anyone who got in his way, William Maxwell was believed to have killed at least six people by 1977. By the end of that year, though, he was stopped in his tracks and a man was put on trial for his death.

Watching these events unfold was none other than Harper Lee, author of the acclaimed novel To Kill a Mockingbird. In these blinks, you’ll unravel the double mysteries of William Maxwell and Harper Lee’s involvement in his case. Explore the bizarre and shocking events that rocked a small African American community and learn how murder, greed and vigilantism collided with each other. Finally, investigate what stopped Harper Lee from telling this remarkable story herself.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

how voodoo and the law got mixed up in this case;
why Harper Lee never wrote a second book; and
what drove William Maxwell to murder.

In 1970, people close to William Maxwell began to die in suspicious ways.

On a sweltering afternoon in September 1977, onlookers fanned themselves in an Alabama courthouse and waited for the jury to reach a verdict. The defendant was Robert Burns, accused of first-degree murder. In addition to the principal charges, three other elements made this particular trial extraordinary.

Firstly, the victim whom Burns was accused of slaying, William Maxwell, was himself a suspected serial killer. Secondly, Burns’s lawyer, a man named Tom Radley, was Maxwell’s lawyer when he was still alive. And perhaps most extraordinary of all, present at the proceedings was Harper Lee, the author who had penned the best-selling novel To Kill a Mockingbird 17 years earlier.

How did these remarkable circumstances arise? Well, to understand that, we must go back 7 years before the day of the verdict.

On August 1st, 1970, William Maxwell, an African American veteran of World War II, was living in Nixburg, Alabama, with his wife of 21 years, Mary Lou. Although Maxwell was a Baptist preacher, he was rumored to be less than virtuous in his spare time, and had a reputation for regularly cheating on Mary Lou.

But on the night of August 3, 1970, tragedy struck. According to the couple’s neighbor, Dorcas Anderson, Mary Lou got a late-night telephone call from Maxwell saying that he had crashed his car and needed her to pick him up. Worried about her husband, Mary Lou went to Dorcas’s house to tell her what had happened before rushing out to find him.

By the next morning, Mary Lou was dead. Her bruised and bloody body was found inside her car on a lonely stretch of highway. She’d been viciously beaten to death. Upon hearing Dorcas’s version of events, the police immediately suspected Maxwell of Mary Lou’s murder.

Maxwell claimed that Dorcas had it wrong. According to him, Mary Lou had actually gone out that evening to visit her sister. When she drove home, she had obviously encountered trouble that resulted in her death. But the police weren’t buying Maxwell’s version of events, and on August 6th, 1971, a grand jury indicted him for Mary Lou’s murder.

William Maxwell married his second wife under disturbing circumstances.

In August 1971, Dorcas Anderson appeared as a witness in the prosecution of William Maxwell. The prosecutors believed that Anderson’s testimony would be enough to convince the jury that Maxwell was guilty. But astonishingly, when Dorcas was asked to tell the court what she had witnessed that night, her story had changed dramatically.

In front of a shocked courtroom, Dorcas swore that she’d had it all wrong before. According to Dorcas, Mary Lou had not received a phone call from Maxwell that night. Furthermore, Dorcas claimed she had seen Maxwell arrive home much earlier that evening, meaning he couldn’t have been anywhere near Mary Lou when she was murdered. With this shocking about-face of their star witness, the state’s case fell apart. The jury found the defendant not guilty, and he waltzed out of jail scot-free.

In the years after his second marriage, Maxwell’s extraordinary bad luck continued.

In early 1972, less than three months after marrying Dorcas, Maxwell received a call from the county sheriff’s office. Maxwell’s older brother, John, had been arrested for drunk driving, and he needed Maxwell to bail him out of jail. Maxwell paid the bail money and promised that John would attend his court hearing in February.

But John Maxwell never saw his day in court.

Throughout the 1970s, more people who came into contact with Maxwell died suddenly.

Maxwell next married a woman named Ophelia Burns. After the wedding, he moved in with Ophelia and her adopted 16-year-old daughter, Shirley Ann Ellington. And in February 1976, someone else turned up dead in a car – Maxwell’s cousin James Hicks.

In June 1977, Shirley Ann was found dead by the side of the highway, this time underneath her car, apparently crushed to death as she tried to change a flat tire. As the body count increased, something else did, too – William Maxwell’s bank balance. Reverend Maxwell just so happened to hold several life insurance policies on each one of the people who died.

William Maxwell was finally felled in front of hundreds of witnesses.

On the day of Shirley Ann’s funeral, the community packed into the local church to pay their respects to the teenager. Among the mourners was Robert Burns, Shirley Ann’s adopted uncle. He carried a gun in the pocket of his mourning suit.

Toward the end of the funeral, as the mourners filed past the open casket, someone had a message for Maxwell. After seeing Shirley’s lifeless body, her sister Louvinia screamed across the church that she knew that Maxwell had killed her sister and that he would pay for what he had done. Her words had an electrifying effect on Robert Burns, who was seated in the pew in front of Maxwell and his wife, Ophelia.

After her first dazzling success, Harper Lee struggled to write a second novel.

Seventeen years before the judge was to pass a verdict on Burns, Harper Lee had published one of the most beloved books of the twentieth century – To Kill a Mockingbird. But despite selling upward of a million copies of the book a year, and topping the best-seller charts around the world, when Lee sat in the public gallery at Burns’s trial that day not a single reporter recognized her.

Why? Well, the awkward truth was that, since publishing her masterpiece, the world had barely heard from Harper Lee again.

After assisting Truman Capote, Harper Lee decided to make her own foray into true-crime writing.

In 1977, inspiration finally struck Harper Lee. But unlike Mockingbird, this would be a non-fiction project. It was the true-crime story of William Maxwell, his alleged victims and the man who killed him.

In the summer of 1977, Harper Lee decamped from New York to Alabama and set about researching the mysterious case of William Maxwell, the murderous voodoo preacher who was killed at his victim’s funeral. Interestingly, though, this was not Lee’s first foray into the world of true-crime writing. Indeed, she had been instrumental in the publication of author Truman Capote’s 1966 classic, In Cold Blood, the shocking story of the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas.

Robert Burns eluded the law, and Lee’s second novel eluded the world.

On that hot September afternoon in 1977, Harper Lee saw the jury return their verdict in the murder trial of Robert Burns. The defendant, the jury declared, was innocent due to temporary insanity. This was a stunning defeat for the state, who had been sure that a man 300 people had witnessed kill someone was sure to be found guilty. Burns walked free, to the delight of the local community, who considered him a hero.

The verdict also represented a triumph for Tom Radney, the lawyer who had shamelessly profited from Maxwell’s supposed crimes and resulting insurance payouts, and finally his murder. And what of Harper Lee’s long-coming second project, the true-crime project she planned to write about the killings? Sadly, and after five long years of research on her part, Lee never wrote her account of the case. Why?

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What is Furious Hours about?

Furious Hours (2019) shines a light on the twin mysteries of a 1970s serial killer and the career of the celebrated author Harper Lee. By exploring the shocking case of the alleged serial killer William Maxwell and his victims, these blinks retrace Harper Lee’s steps and finally tell the true crime story that Lee always wanted to write.

Who should read Furious Hours?

True crime addicts looking for their next scare
Bookworms who want to learn more about the life of a celebrated author
Law enthusiasts interested in courtroom dramas

About the Author

Casey Cep is a writer with a degree in English Literature from Harvard University and an MPhil in Theology from Oxford University. Cep was a Rhodes Scholar, and her writing is featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times and the New Republic.

Categories with Furious Hours

Biography & Memoir

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