After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (7 page)

Danny had been transferred to Georgia Regional Hospital by Dr. Lester Haddad at Memorial Medical Center’s emergency room. Skutch wrote that Danny’s mother “told Dr. Haddad that her son had ‘beat up his sister’ and ‘torn a door off the hinges because he was very angry.’” The doctor testified that he found Danny’s “‘violent behavior—it is out of the range of normal.’”

The
Savannah Morning News
reported that in July 1979, Danny again landed in the Georgia Regional Hospital, appearing “‘to be emotionally disturbed,’” staff psychiatrist Dr. Aurel Teodorescu told the court. He said that Danny “‘was hostile and combative,… had broken furniture… and threatened to kill somebody.’” Teodorescu said that Danny was discharged against medical advice.

A little more than a year later, Danny was hospitalized again, but the violence was directed towards himself. On August 7, 1980, Danny announced that he had taken 49 tablets of Jim’s Limbitrol, a commonly prescribed tranquilizer, and promptly passed out. Jim rushed him to Memorial Medical Center’s emergency room. Skutch reported that Dr. Patrick Brooks said had it not been for Jim, who got Danny immediate medical treatment, there was a good chance Danny would have died. It’s not clear that this was a serious suicide attempt, because Danny notified Jim right after taking the overdose, correctly assuming that Jim would take him to the emergency room to have his stomach pumped. Still, whether the suicide attempt was geared to punish Jim for some undisclosed behavior or simply an act of desperation, it was still a clear indicator that Danny was struggling with serious problems. Skutch wrote that Dr. Brooks characterized Danny as a “‘charmer, who got his own way.’” Danny tried to commit suicide twice with drug overdoses, and twice Jim saved his life.

After Joe came into contact with Danny a few times, he asked, “Williams, what the hell are you doing letting this piece of shit in here [meaning Mercer House]? This kid is trouble and he’s going to make you sorry someday.”

As time went on and more of Jim’s close friends came into contact with Danny, Jim manufactured a rationale for having this rude street hustler in his life. Jim told people that Danny had artistic ability and that he was trying to help him develop something positive in his life. Many were skeptical. Joe could not comprehend the relationship. Danny had exploited and embarrassed Jim repeatedly. He was a male whore who had been passed around to all of Jim’s buddies at one time or another. Finally, Joe asked, “Williams, why are you keeping this guy around?”

Jim answered simply, “He’s good in bed.”

But there had to be more to it. Jim had access to many gay men, yet something about Danny satisfied some inner, possibly unconscious, need. In contrast, Danny’s attraction to Jim was much simpler to understand. Jim satisfied Danny’s need for money, drugs, clothes, food and a car.

Some of Jim’s friends shared their insight into the relationship with me. Miriam K. Center felt sorry for Danny. She saw him as a wild, crazy youngster who had been exposed to Jim’s luxurious style. Jim, she said, ate at nightclubs like Who’s Who, but gave Danny money to eat at McDonald’s.

Ali Fennell told me that Jim seemed to be attracted to danger and living on the edge. Danny was always high on weed and acted very cocky. From what she could see, Danny played dumb, but was very street-smart. She couldn’t really get to know him because he was always too drugged. She rarely saw Jim and Danny together in public, except occasionally, when they met up at the end of the night.

Randy Shuman, a friend of Jim’s, saw the relationship as Pygmalion-like, with Jim trying for years to help Danny make something of himself. Jim dressed Danny and tried to refine his street manners, but from what Randy could see, Danny exploited Jim and always wanted more. No matter what Jim gave Danny, he never had enough.

After a couple of years, this combative relationship seemed to be headed for the rocks. On April 3, 1981, there was an argument. According to Jim, Danny went wild and fired a gun into the floor in an upstairs bedroom. At some point during the dispute, Danny supposedly went out on the porch and fired a shot into Monterrey Square. Jim called the police, who went upstairs at the house and found a fresh bullet hole in the rug and wooden floor beneath. Danny lay fully dressed in bed, either passed out or faking sleep. When police woke Danny up and questioned him about the disturbance, Danny became angry and uncooperative. Initially, Jim said he wanted to press charges, so the police dragged the belligerent Danny off to jail. Later, Jim had a change of mind and sent Joe over to the jail to get Danny out.

Again, Joe asked, “Williams, what in the hell are you doing with this piece of shit? He’s going to get your ass in trouble.”

Danny had a girlfriend, Debbie Blevins, and Jim was jealous of her. Jim gave into Danny’s demand for a $400 gold necklace with the understanding that he would stay away from the girl, but instead, Danny gave it to his girlfriend. This action caused a major argument a couple days before Danny was shot.

Danny was very possibly aware of the frauds that Jim perpetrated on the clients whose antiques he stole and replaced with reproductions. Perhaps at some point in the fractious relationship, when Danny didn’t get what he wanted, he threatened to tell the police or one of the clients that Jim victimized. Had Danny made such a threat, it would have made him a big liability.

Around this time, Jim had told Danny that he would take him on his antiques treasure-buying trip to London and Geneva. Danny insisted on taking his drugs with him, which would have created a big problem if he had been caught going through customs with marijuana. For a while, Danny agreed to let Joe go instead so that he could stay home with his drugs. Plans and reservations were made for Jim and Joe to go to Europe. This plan was dashed in the early morning hours of May 2 when Jim and Danny argued violently and Danny Hansford was shot.

George E. Oliver (portrait)

Chatham Superior Court Judge George E. Oliver presided over three of Jim’s four trials. In the first trial, a jury of six men and six women were selected on January 25, 1982. Eleven were white and one woman was black. They were essentially typical middle-class people.

Leading the prosecution team was Chatham County’s new district attorney, Spencer Lawton Jr. Lawton was a soft-spoken, serious young man from a respected old Savannah family. Always a victim’s advocate, Lawton was known for his compassion for the poor. He had unseated the Ryan family, which had enjoyed a 30-year hold on the D.A.’s office. Joe Ryan had handed the office down to his son Andrew J. Ryan III, who had just completed his first term. Andrew was expected to win another term when Lawton jumped into the Democratic primary race. Lawton’s reputation as a man of principle earned him significant support from the black community, which helped him win the subsequent Democratic runoff and the race against the Republican candidate.

Spencer Lawton Jr. (recent photo)

Bobby Lee Cook, a well-known attorney from the small town of Summerville, Georgia, in the mountainous northwest part of the state, was the lead defense counsel. Former prosecutor Stan Irvin described Cook in 2009: “Bobby Lee Cook was an old school trial attorney, regarded as one of the ‘deans of criminal defense attorneys.’ He is tall, lanky, has long grey hair, a goatee and mustache, gold rimmed glasses, and continues to wear classic three piece suits when few no longer do. He arrives at court in a Rolls Royce, yet maintains the touch of a commoner. He is a southern gentleman: kind, polite and courteous … He was such a legend in the south that he became the trial attorney whom the old “Matlock” television series starring Andy Griffin was modeled after.”

Whenever a super-lawyer is brought in from another city, a talented local defense attorney is usually added to the team. In this case, the local attorney was John Wright Jones, who at that time was best known for his defense in a case against Army Rangers for killing a gay businessman.

On the surface, it could appear that this case was simply about a wealthy middle-aged man who suddenly realized that his life was in imminent danger from a dangerous young hustler and shot him to save his own life. Not so, said Chatham County District Attorney Spencer Lawton Jr.

When the trial began on Tuesday, January 26, 1982, Lawton told the jury that he would make it clear that Jim had murdered Danny in cold blood and with malice aforethought. To make the crime look like self-defense, Jim had staged the crime scene, according to Lawton. When it was Bobby Lee Cook’s turn, he promised the jury he would prove that Danny was a violent man who had initiated the attack on Jim.

In Lawton’s summary of the Williams case, he wrote about the relationship between Jim and Danny. It was “mutually exploitive, but not equally so. Hansford, in his naïve, coarse and reckless youth, no doubt thought he was taking advantage of Williams, who gave him money, clothes, car, jewelry and magnificent surroundings. But in the antique dealer he had met a pro, one who held all the cards. Williams was a sophisticated manipulator who could easily bestow money … [and] trips to Europe; but he could just as easily withhold them. And Danny Hansfords could be had at a dime a dozen.”

The prosecution focused on several key points, including the apparently staged crime scene and the absence of gunshot residue on Danny’s hands. The prosecution’s analysis is from Spencer Lawton’s
The Williams Case: The History: A Summary
, with bracketed notes inserted by Marilyn Bardsley.

The Crime Scene Appeared Staged

Detective D. Everette Ragan, Detective J.P. Jordan, and Dr. Larry Howard, the head of the state crime lab, testified regarding the bullet wounds and the position of Danny’s body. Per Lawton, “A person coming into the room would approach from behind and to the right of anyone sitting at the desk. As seen from behind the desk, Hansford’s body lay face down in front of the desk, feet-to-left and head-to-right, the head being on the same right-front spot that Williams said Hansford was standing on when firing at him. (The improbability of a person’s falling to the floor with his head coming to rest where his feet had been can best be illustrated simply by attempting to do it.)”
[Note: In other words, when Jim allegedly fired the shots attributed to Danny, he stood where Danny’s head was, when he should have stood where Danny’s feet lay.]

“He was in the classic, comic book position of the dead gunman: chest-down on the floor, head face-down on the right cheek; left forearm under left shoulder like a child sleeping; right arm out at the shoulder level and bent, with the hand resting in the shooting position on the grip of the Luger pistol at about head level; right leg extended straight out, the left leg bent with the ankle lying across the right leg just above that ankle. He had obvious bullet wounds in his back and the back of his head (the shot to the chest didn’t exit the body but lodged near the spine). Under his head and chest was a large pool of blood.

“On the back of the right hand (the one on top of the pistol grip) was a heavy deposit of blood, which had evidently been smeared—and a lighter area in the blood around the wrist, where some of it had apparently been rubbed off. There was no wound on the right hand, and no blood around it—or on the gun beneath it.”
[Note: Dr. Larry Howard testified that “it appeared from the police photos that Danny’s right hand had been had been moved from underneath the body to extend above his head.”]

“There were bullet holes in the floor directly beneath the wounds in the back and the head (according to expert testimony), the head would have bounced and turned to face left when shot on the floor.