After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (10 page)

Sonny Seiler
photo by Jeanne Papy

The trial began on September 18, 1983, in Judge George E. Oliver’s court. The jury was composed equally of men and women; seven were black and five were white. This time, the issue of sexual orientation was of paramount importance to the defense team. Another concern was community knowledge of the case and Jim’s earlier conviction, because it had such a high media profile in the Savannah area. The jury was sequestered.

In Lawton’s summary of the Williams case, he explained how different the second trial was from the first. “This time … the defense pulled out all the stops: professional consultants to help evaluate and select potential jurors; a re-creation of the crime scene in the courtroom (even bringing in the actual furniture from Williams’ study); and two new ‘eyewitnesses.’”

The prosecution’s case was very similar to the first trial, which had secured a conviction. Many of the same witnesses were called with testimony very much like what was presented at the 1982 trial.

On September 29, 1983, Savannah Detective Everette Ragan, the prosecution’s main police witness, testified that Danny was shot from behind and a pistol was subsequently placed in his hand.

Jan Skutch of the
Savannah Morning News
reported, “Ragan is the crux of District Attorney Spencer Lawton’s contention that Hansford’s death was a killing set up to appear self-defense. Defense lawyers challenged whether Ragan was qualified to provide expert opinions. Judge Oliver allowed Ragan to testify as an expert criminal investigator over repeated defense objections. Ragan was permitted to draw conclusions based on what he found at the scene.”

Dr. Irving C. Stone, who had worked on the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, was the head of the Dallas, Texas, Institute for Forensic Sciences. Skutch reported that Stone told the jury that all three of the gunshots that Danny sustained were fired from more than four feet away. This testimony disputed the prosecution’s assertion that Danny was shot as he lay on the floor.

Lawton’s case summary states: “In an effort to explain how Hansford could have shot at Williams from point-blank range and missed, Dr. Stone testified that he had test-fired the same pistol in the lab. He said that a tight, or heavy, trigger pull would tend to distort aim by pulling the muzzle of the gun down. This pistol, he said, had such a heavy trigger pull that when he attempted to fire it for the first time it was so difficult that he actually checked to see if the safety was on. It was not. In fact, he said, he required two hands to hold the gun level and fire it.”

Finally, Jim understood that he was going to have to deal with the sex issue. Instead of waiting for Lawton to bring up Jim’s relationship with Danny, Seiler asked Jim to describe it. Skutch described Jim’s response for his newspaper: “This other thing (his sexual relationship with Hansford) had no mystique to it,” Williams said. “It was just something that’s a natural and normal thing. I was 52 years old, but he (Hansford) had 52 years’ mileage on him.”

One is left to wonder how the Savannah jurors imagined that relationship as a “natural and normal thing.” The comment served to show how distant Jim was from the minds and morals of the average person.

This time, a new witness was added. Barry Thomas headed up Jim’s restoration shop. He recounted an incident in which Danny charged at him, knocked him down and kicked him in the stomach for no apparent reason.

The
Savannah Morning News
reported that Seiler brought forth two surprise witnesses. One was a woman who was sitting in the square in front of Mercer House when Danny was shot. She heard four or five gunshots fired at once. The other was a woman who testified that she heard a gunshot around 3
AM
on April 3, 1981, as she came home from work. She saw a “young man” (presumably Danny) fire a gun into the square from Jim’s yard.

Lawton’s case summary addresses Dr. Stone’s testimony about the heavy trigger pull on the pistol that Danny allegedly used to shoot at Jim. “In closing,” Lawton stated, “I had Ms. Aldridge, a petite woman of perhaps 100 pounds, point the pistol at arm’s length, and fire it one-handed (empty of course) at a wall. This she did, with no perceptible movement of the muzzle whatsoever.”

It was 5:30
PM
on Saturday night, October 8. The jury had been sequestered since September 27. It took less than three hours to return with a verdict: Guilty of murder. Judge Oliver, who, like the jury, was tired and cranky, delivered a sentence of life imprisonment.

Jim was taken to the Chatham County jail and put in a special cell away from the general inmate population. His requests for bond during his appeal were denied. Early in 1984, the defense produced two new witnesses that claimed Danny had tried to lure them into a plot to harm Jim and steal his money. Lawton protested and told the court that the two men had been offered money to make these false assertions.

On June 11, 1985, the Georgia Supreme Court again overturned Jim’s murder conviction and ordered a third trial. The reason for the reversal was that the state had improperly introduced evidence—the trigger pull demonstration—during closing arguments that Jim’s attorneys had no opportunity to rebut. The court also ruled that Savannah Detective Everette Ragan was improperly allowed to testify to conclusions that took away the jury’s ultimate decision.

In “The Other Side of ‘Midnight,’” Lawton wrote about political hanky-panky in this second reversal. “According to the sworn statement of a retired banker who’d been a character witness for the defense, Jim Williams told him that ‘things were looking up’; that former Gov. Carl Sanders had taken an interest in the case; and that ‘these things are as much political as legal.’ Separately, another independent third party (an attorney) stated that a lawyer on the defense team told him that they had engaged Gov. Sanders to intercede with the Supreme Court on an informal basis. The only refutation of this in the record is an equivocal affidavit of denial from the talkative attorney on the defense team. There was no sworn statement from his co-counsel or from Gov. Sanders.

“The 4-3 decision to reverse Williams’ second jury conviction was written by Justice George T. Smith, who was Speaker of the House under Gov. Sanders, his known long-time personal friend and political ally. As the
only
ground for reversal, Justice Smith took the highly unusual step of relying on a point
not even complained of by the defense as an error.
Justice Smith had recently been implicated in allegations—giving rise to an investigation by the Attorney General—that he had been improperly influenced, off the record, by a friend and ally representing one side in a high-stakes insurance case, authoring an opinion that the Court was forced to retract. Also, one of Williams’ defense counsel had admitted previous improper communications with Justice Smith in pending cases.

“After the reversal, and during the preparations for
Williams III
, new counsel entered the case for the defense: he was David Botts, the son-in-law of Gov. Sanders. Mr. Botts sat through but took no apparent substantive role in the three weeks of the third trial … Mr. Botts made no appearance in the fourth trial.”

After the reversal decision and 21 months in a jail that had been criticized as substandard, Jim was granted a $250,000 bond and left jail on July 3, 1985. During the time between his second conviction on October 8, 1983, and early July 1985, Jim conducted his antiques business from jail by routing his calls through Mercer House.

Jim’s Third Trial

On June 11, 1985, the Georgia Supreme Court called for a new trial, but legal wrangling delayed the start of the third trial until May 18, 1987. The jury was composed of three men and nine women. One woman was selected to be an alternate.

A sameness haunts the third repeat of a trial, except that much of the commentary in the testimony of prosecution witnesses was precluded by the Supreme Court’s decision. There were, however, two interesting new highlights. As reported in
The Savannah Morning News
by reporter Jan Skutch, the first was the testimony of Marilyn Case, former assistant head nurse in the emergency room at Candler General Hospital, who said that Danny’s hands were not bagged when he arrived at the hospital. “‘I personally, myself, bagged the hands bilaterally in the emergency department,’” Case said. Coroner James C. Metts Jr. had called her and instructed her to bag the hands. She used plastic garbage bags, which she then taped to keep them on Danny’s arms.

The bagging was done to preserve gunpowder on the Danny’s hands until swabbing for gunshot residue could be performed. The lack of gunshot residue on his hands was one of the strongest portions of the prosecution’s case because it gave credibility to the assertion that Danny had not fired a pistol at Jim.

During the previous two trials and at the third one, police detective Sgt. Joseph Jordan had testified that he had taped brown paper bags over Danny’s hands before the body was removed from Mercer House. Case’s testimony appeared to support the defense allegation that police treatment of the scene was sloppy. Skutch reported that when defense witness Dr. Joseph Burton, the Atlanta medical examiner, took the stand again, he testified that plastic bags were detrimental to preserving gunpowder residue.

Jan Skutch wrote that Joe Goodman, who arrived at Mercer House at the same time as police, briefly saw the scene in the study with Danny dead on the floor. “‘When I looked into Williams’ study,’” Joe testified, “‘I saw a body and a German Luger … No, I didn’t see a chair … There was no chair.’” Skutch points out in his trial coverage how important Joe’s testimony was: “It is the first time in three trials that a witness has pointedly disputed a police photograph showing a fallen Hansford with a chair over his legs, resting on his right pants cuff.”

Skutch also noted that when Jim took the stand, he came across very differently than in the previous two trials: “Williams’ appearance on the witness stand was marked by an outward calm which at times seemed to border on a daze. His demeanor held up through an afternoon of questioning by Lawton.”

In his final arguments, Lawton included a photographic presentation to the jury photos of the alleged damage that Danny had allegedly inflicted on Jim’s antiques the night of the shooting, focusing on the grandfather clock that Danny allegedly knocked over in the hall. In my recent interview with Lawton, he said that the damage to the clock was very minimal. He believed that someone as young and strong as Danny was would have inflicted much more damage on the clock. Rather, Lawton believed that Jim, in staging the scene, had lowered the clock down to an inch or two from the floor and let it drop. The clock was subsequently fixed and sold. Lawton then listed the other minor items that were damaged. He pointed out to the jury that in a house filled with exceptionally valuable antiques, Danny’s alleged rampage wasn’t all that costly.

The case went to the jury on June 5, but soon it became obvious that they would not reach a unanimous guilty verdict. One woman juror refused to vote for Jim’s guilt. She was the sole person on the jury who had experienced a life-and-death situation not unlike the one Jim described with Danny. When her boyfriend tried to strangle her, she grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him severely enough to stop his attack, but did not kill him. She wasn’t going to give in to the other 11 people who wanted her to vote against her conscience.

On Tuesday, June 9, 1987, a frustrated and angry Judge Oliver declared a mistrial. Jim was allowed to remain free until the decision in a fourth trial.

The Fourth Trial

Recently, in an interview with Spencer Lawton, I asked him why he insisted on a fourth trial. He gave me several reasons. First, of the 36 jurors in the first three trials, 35 had voted to convict Jim. Lawton believed he owed it to those 35 jurors to pursue the case. With the limited budgetary resources of the prosecutor’s office, he had done quite well. He was up against the best southern defense lawyers money could buy, as well as top-notch expert witnesses and political headwinds at the Georgia Supreme Court.

Spencer Lawton Jr.

Yet he had been on track to win three convictions, if it had not been for the one juror. In my opinion, there was also another reason: Lawton, who is very focused on victims’ rights, so passionately believed that Jim was guilty of cold-blooded murder that he wanted to see him punished for it. He wanted justice for the emotionally disturbed young man who he believed had been exploited by a wealthy manipulator.