On June 18, 1977, in the chapel of the House of Hutchinson Funeral Home in Alexander City, Ala., Rev. Willie Maxwell attended his 16-year-old stepdaughter's funeral.
Shirley "Shell" Ellington had been found dead beneath a car about a mile from home a week or so before. It initially appeared the vehicle had fallen on her as she changed a tire, but authorities suspected the scene was staged. At the time of the funeral, they were still waiting on the autopsy report.
Some accounts of the funeral--including a contemporary New York Times story--say Maxwell delivered the girl's eulogy. But the duty actually fell to Rev. E. B. Burpo Jr. of nearby Great Bethel Baptist Church.
In fact, Maxwell kept such a low profile at the service that Robert Burns didn't realize he was there until mourners began to file out of their pews and approach the open casket to say their final goodbyes. When Maxwell's wife Ophelia--who had adopted Shell--looked into the casket she seemed to swoon, prompting her husband to go to her side and lead her to a seat directly behind Burns. Then, as other mourners lined up to view the body, Shell's older sister, Louvinia Lee, stopped and pointed a finger at Maxwell.
"You killed my sister and now you're going to pay for it!" she screamed.
As if on cue, Burns stood up, wheeled around and stepped up on the church pew. He jerked a silver-blue .25 caliber Beretta--a pistol he carried everywhere--from deep in the pocket of his green suit and shot Maxwell three times in the head.
"I don't know," Burns told David Granger of The Alexander City Outlook in 2015. "I guess I just lost it. I know I did. I lost it and I just started shooting him. I remember that much."
As many as 300 people could have been in and just outside the funeral home when Maxwell was executed. By the time the police arrived from the station a few blocks away, Burns had already surrendered to two officers who were working traffic at the funeral--one of whom was his brother William, a former Tallapoosa County deputy who occasionally did volunteer work for the department.
Burns didn't see any point in denying his actions.
"I hadn't been back long from Vietnam," Burns told Granger. "I was suffering from PTSD, which I didn't know what it was then ... I was real angry when I got dressed to go to the funeral that Saturday morning. I shouldn't have gone to that funeral, but, anyway, I was real angry."
And so were the police. They felt they've been cheated. While waiting for the results of Shell Ellington's autopsy to confirm their suspicions, they'd already prepared paperwork charging Maxwell with Shell's murder.
. . .
Some people believe hard in things like voodoo.
In the early '70s, lots of people in Alabama thought Maxwell was a voodoo man, allegedly connected to the Seven Sisters of Algiers, daughters of Marie Laveau who supposedly possessed (or possess) supernatural powers and hadn't (haven't) aged since the 1920s. (They might or might not be the shadowy powers behind a Internet brand that sells oils and mystic potions.)
"Yeah, he had a voodoo room [in his house]," Burns told Granger. "After I killed him, my oldest brother's daughters went down to clean the house out ... I couldn't hardly believe what they were telling me that they found in that house. All that kind of voodoo stuff. Had blood in jars. Had wrote on the jars 'love,' 'hate,' 'friendship' and 'death.' Yeah, that was a weird guy. He had pecan trees around his house. He used to take chickens and tie 'em in the pecan trees and he said that would keep evil spirits away. And he would take the chicken blood and paint it on his doorsteps and he said that would keep people away.
"The people over there in the projects on the north side--my mom lived there--they would be out on their porches, enjoying the afternoon, and Will would ride through the projects and they'd get inside the house real quick and lock the doors and close the windows," Burns said. "That's the truth."
Even if you didn't put any stock in the dark arts, Maxwell was a troubling presence. Shell was his fifth family member to die in unusual circumstances on back roads. Maxwell held mail-order insurance policies on all of them. His first wife had been found behind the wheel of a car, beaten and strangled to death in 1969; he'd been indicted for her murder but the state's case fell apart when their principal witness, Dorcas Anderson, changed her testimony. After Maxwell was acquitted, Dorcas married him.
In 1971, Maxwell's brother Columbus was found dead in a parked car, his death originally attributed to exposure and alcohol poisoning, with some suspecting he'd been force-fed the alcohol. In 1976, Maxwell's 26-year-old nephew James Hicks, who'd worked alongside him on a pulpwood crew (by then no church would have Maxwell as a preacher), was found dead after his car inexplicably ran off the road. They put it down to "natural causes."
Two years later Dorcas was found dead on the floorboard of her car. The medical examiner ruled "acute asthmatic bronchitis" as the cause of death. Basically she suffocated.
Insurance companies paid, some more reluctantly than others. When they balked, Maxwell enlisted the talents of the lawyer who had successfully defended him in his murder trial, a liberal Democrat known as Big Tom Radney who idolized and styled himself after JFK. Radney helped Maxwell collect more than $500,000 in today's dollars from those low-ball policies, and took a chunk for himself. Folks in that part of Alabama took to calling Radney's lavish offices "The Maxwell House."
Ophelia married Maxwell. And Shell had her "accident." Even Big Tom had had enough. He told the reverend that he couldn't defend him this time.
William Burns suggested his brother hire Big Tom as his lawyer.
He did and was acquitted--one of the few times an insanity defense actually worked. It essentially allowed the jury to ignore the facts and the law and do what conscience commanded. Burns got sent off to the state hospital for a few weeks. They examined him, found him sane and turned him loose.
One of the spectators in that courtroom was Harper Lee, who tried for years to make a novel from the case. Maybe she did--her estate has sealed her papers--but only a few pages have ever surfaced.
Last week Furious Hours, Casey Cep's deeply reported dive into the case and Lee's fascination with it, was published. It plumbs a strange territory, a past so odd and strange it feels dreamed.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Enterprise on 05/19/2019