After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (6 page)

Joe and Nancy Goodman (recent photo)

I interviewed Joe Goodman, the man closest to Jim. Joe’s wife, Nancy, also knew Jim well. While they knew each other for decades, Joe worked for Jim for eight or nine years doing odd jobs. Jim was best man at Joe’s first wedding. Jim trusted Joe completely and told him all the places where he hid his cash in Mercer House. For various reasons, Jim kept a very large sums of cash in the house, and Joe knew where all or most of it was stashed. Jim was like a father to Joe, and Joe never forgot it.

When I first start interviewing friends and associates of Jim Williams several years ago, it never occurred to me that he might be involved in unscrupulous dealings. A number of his friends volunteered that Jim came across as trustworthy and credible. “His word was his bond,” his friend Miriam K. Center told me. Then, when I interviewed the late Mike Hawk, who managed the Catherine Ward House Inn in Savannah’s Victorian District, I heard something very specific about unethical and illegal activities going on with Jim’s antiques restoration business. The more people I interviewed, the more individuals brought up frauds that Jim had perpetrated.

Mike Hawk was good friends with Douglas Seyle, who worked for Jim in his restoration shop for a number of years. Doug worshipped Jim. He died in 1994 at the age of 34. Doug spoke at great length to Mike about some of the restoration activities that Jim had initiated. Jim had some exceptionally talented craftsmen, like Barry Thomas, who could produce excellent reproductions of antique furniture. Unfortunately, Jim employed the skills of these craftsmen to defraud some of his clients. These clients were typically clueless about the value of the antiques in their homes and were very impressed with Jim’s expertise when it came to antiques. Here is how the fraud evolved with a hypothetical client.

“Amanda,” Jim told the wealthy matron who had a home full of valuable antique furniture that had been in her family for generations. “This table is a shame. Look how scratched the top is and how stained the marble inlays are. I just hate to see this wonderful table in such poor shape. My boys could have this fine table restored to its original beauty in no time.”

Amanda had never paid much attention to the old table and was embarrassed to hear Jim criticize its condition, so she let Jim restore it. When the table reached Jim’s workshop, it was restored with great care and a perfect reproduction was made. The original antique table was shipped to another city and possibly overseas for sale, and the attractive reproduction was given to Amanda. Amanda was pleased with the table that looked exactly like the original, minus the scratches and stains. The risk to Jim was low. Amanda was selected for this fraud because she knew nothing about antiques and had enough money that she would not in her lifetime need to sell her antiques to make ends meet. The fraud may never have been discovered. Her heirs, if they paid any attention whatsoever, probably assumed that the handsome table was not one of her antiques.

Independently, I happened to interview another friend of Jim’s who told me he had offered a trip to Europe in exchange for bringing in an expensive painting for him. The friend knew the arrangement was not on the up-and-up and refused to take him up on his offer.

In the midst of my delightful talks with Joe Goodman and his wife, he said, unprompted, “You know, Williams was involved in a few shady deals.” Back in the 1968-69 timeframe, Joe and Jim took Jim’s old pickup truck and drove up U.S. Route 321 to a big old house around Garnett in Hampton County, South Carolina, where Jim had visited a couple times before to impress the owners and win their trust.

The house belonged to two sweet old wealthy spinsters who offered them milk and cocoa. Jim laid on the charm very heavily. “Made them feel like queen bees,” Joe recalled.

Evidently, on an earlier trip, Jim had set up the kind of fraud that was later perpetrated on “Amanda.” The old ladies had an enormous antique mahogany table and 14 valuable Chippendale chairs with round-ball claw feet, made for some English duke. The chairs were badly scratched up and the finish darkened and damaged. Jim had offered to buy the chairs, but the ladies had refused, so he offered to restore them because Jim told them “he hated to see them in such bad shape.”

Joe and Jim loaded the chairs into the pickup truck and drove back to Savannah, where Jim was going to have them crated and sent to a cabinetmaker in Philadelphia to have them reproduced. The unsuspecting old ladies would get back 14 chairs that were actually replicas of their original Chippendales, which Jim would then sell. When the 28 Chippendale chairs were returned from the Philadelphia craftsman, I was told by an eyewitness that only an expert could tell the originals from the replicas.

Jim engaged in this particular brand of fraud, theft and illegal trading of stolen goods over a period of time, and the fraud appeared to be independent of his cash-flow needs. The “Amanda” type incidents, according to Mike Hawk, occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. It is not clear how much, if anything, Jim’s craftsmen, knew about the fraud. It’s entirely possible that the only employee in the shop that knew was Doug Seyle, who was not one of the restorers. Most of Jim’s former restorers have died and the only one that I was able to locate refused to speak with me.

One night, when Joe Goodman was at Mercer House with Jim, a stranger came to the back door very late with a Tiffany lamp. After examining the lamp, Jim paid him $15,000 cash at the door. The man left without a bill of sale. Jim explained to Joe that frequent back-door transactions like that one were one of the reasons that he kept so much cash in the house. One can surmise that the Tiffany lamp was probably stolen, although it was possible that some Savannah “blueblood” was down on his luck and was selling the family heirlooms this way to avoid embarrassment.

Tombee plantation house

During my interviews, another fascinating story came up repeatedly, although I was not able to confirm the details. In the mid-1970s, Jim undertook the restoration of two homes in Beaufort County, South Carolina. One was Barnwell House and the other was Tombee, an old plantation house on St. Helena’s Island, nicknamed after its original owner, Thomas B. Chaplin. The restorations were much more costly than Jim had anticipated, and he was short of cash for other projects he wanted to pursue. At least one of the restored homes and possibly both sold at a loss in 1976 and 1977.

This story persists decades later. One of Jim’s friends, Albert “Bert” Adams, was an art teacher with a master’s degree at who taught at Savannah’s Country Day School, a prep school. Bert had the nickname “The Viking” because he was tall and stocky. Allegedly, Jim and Bert worked out a staged theft of some very valuable silver pieces from the Tombee plantation house. Bert broke into the house when Jim was in Savannah and then helped Jim hide the silver somewhere in Mercer House. Insurance paid Jim for the valuable silver and Bert looked for places out of town to sell the silver. It was important to Jim that the distinct silver pieces did not show up in antique shops in Savannah or Beaufort County because if they did, the insurance fraud could be traced back to Bert and Jim. However, the plan allegedly hit some snags and some of the silver did eventually show up in the shops. This snag created a liability for Jim and Bert. Unfortunately, I was not able to interview Bert Adams because he died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1979.

Among the insiders who shared the silver theft story, Bert’s death caused alarm. They could not understand how Bert, who worked on cars and motorcycles all his life, would have had his garage door down on a hot, humid mid-September day while he was working on his car with the engine running. Perhaps if police in Savannah had heard the silver theft story, there might have been at least a cursory investigation or autopsy. There was none, and Bert was buried the next day.

Danny Hansford had been Jim’s lover for a couple of years by the time he was killed. Most of the people I interviewed that knew Danny said he was “street trash.” Most of those people could not understand why such an attractive, intelligent and cultured man like Jim would have anything to do with him. While someone must have photos of Danny, I could not find any. The photo that is on the Internet and was published in the
Savannah Morning News
at the time of the first trial shows a cadet-like young man in some type of military uniform next to an American flag. Whoever it is, it’s not Danny Hansford, according to those who knew him.

Some of the people that I spoke to disagreed about Danny’s looks. Joe Goodman described him as having dyed blond duck-tailed hair and said he always wore tight jeans. Joe didn’t think he was good-looking at all. Another man who worked for Jim said Danny was a “squirmy little punk who would shrink away from people.” A man who lived in Danny’s neighborhood described him as “thin, not muscular, about 5’8”, not bad-looking but certainly not handsome.” He said that Danny and his brothers were the neighborhood bullies. A salon owner who knew Danny called him “an unfixable car and a scumbag hottie. A wild child blessed with a large penis.” Mike Hawk had seen Danny several times in bars and disliked him. To Hawk, Danny came across as an untrustworthy, dangerous redneck who was in no way physically attractive. Nobody I interviewed thought Danny looked anywhere near as good as Jude Law, who played him in the Clint Eastwood movie.

Jude Law during filming
photo by Jeanne Papy

Some of the women I interviewed saw him somewhat differently. Jim’s friend Diane Silver Berryhill told me that even though Danny “wasn’t pretty, he had sex appeal. I could see why men and women were attracted to him.” Ali Fennell, a bartender at Club One, saw Danny as a “rough diamond. Attractive to look at, but rough around the edges. He was very good-looking, young and full of life.”

One thing everyone seemed to agree on was that Danny was high on marijuana and booze most of the time. Was this addiction the cause of his erratic and violent behavior, or was it his way of dealing with some very serious emotional problems? Probably both. Danny had a long history in his comparatively short life of unprovoked violence, incarceration in mental hospitals, and several suicide attempts, so there was no question about his emotional instability.

During Jim’s four trials, a number of people testified about Danny’s behavior. Veteran reporter Jan Skutch of
The Savannah Morning News
and the now-defunct
Savannah Evening Press
captured all this testimony for the newspapers’ readers.

During Jim’s first trial for murder in January of 1982, several people, including Savannah police detective J.P. Jordan, testified to Danny’s reputation in the community. They all seemed to agree that Danny had a reputation as a violent person, Skutch reported.

The
Savannah Morning News
also printed the testimony of Danny’s ex-girlfriend, Debbie Blevins, who stated her opinion succinctly on the witness stand: “‘He had a hostile attitude towards Jim and others … He couldn’t keep a job. He didn’t want to work. He drank and did a lot of drugs.’”

Skutch also reported on the testimony from doctors at the Georgia Regional Hospital and Memorial Medical Center in Savannah that had some revealing records on what kind of young man Danny was:

“Officials at Georgia Regional Hospital attempted to treat Danny Hansford on Dec. 8, 1975 for violent behavior, but neither he nor his mother would cooperate … Dr. Simon Spiriosa testified that Danny was diagnosed as suffering from a condition characterized by destruction of property and aggressive behavior. He did not want to stay. His mother was not ‘agreeable’ to further hospitalization.”