After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (9 page)

Jim testified on Thursday, January 28, 1982. He explained what happened in the April 3 incident and Danny’s increasingly tempestuous behavior in the early hours of May 2, 1981.

The
Savannah Morning News
reported Jim’s testimony: “As fast as I could pull the trigger, I shot,” Jim claimed. “I was going to stop him from killing me … I knew that if I didn’t stop him right that second … I meant to stop him.” He said Danny’s behavior that night absolutely terrified him. “I have never been as afraid in my entire life, Mr. Cook.”

Jim also told the court about growing up in Gordon, Georgia, his restoration work, and his successful business buying and selling antiques. Unfortunately for Jim, his arrogance and supercilious attitude did not help his case. Frequent and unnecessary comments about the valuable antiques in his house did nothing to endear him to the middle-class people on the jury. John Berendt was not present at the first and second trials, but had access to the trial transcripts and defense lawyers. Berendt wrote that at one point in Lawton’s questioning, Jim “looked down from the stand with an expression of loathing. He was obdurate and imperious, not even slightly defensive. For all the world, he could have been the czar in his Fabergé cufflinks, the Emperor Maximilian at his gold-encrusted desk. Williams had assumed the haughty boredom of all monarchs and aristocrats whose portraits and baubles he now owned.”

Mercer House parlor
photo by Jeanne Papy

It seemed the jury did not like Jim Williams.

Lawton eventually laid a trap and Williams walked right into it. Convinced that he did not have to be candid about his sexual relationship with Danny, Jim never brought it up, even when pressed repeatedly by Lawton on the nature of the relationship. He testified that Danny worked for him doing various jobs and that he tried to help him make something of his life. Why he took this position is hard to understand, considering that Cook knew that Lawton was prepared to call witnesses who would testify to the sexual nature of Jim and Danny’s bond.

By the end of the day on Friday, January 29, a good part of the trial had been completed. Doctors from Memorial Medical Center and the Georgia Regional Hospital testified to Danny’s mental instability, violent tendencies and attempts at suicide. The defense testimony had concluded. There was one last presentation of evidence—Lawton’s rebuttal witnesses and Jim’s character witnesses—that would take place Monday before the closing arguments would be given.

Lawton had a real bombshell in his two rebuttal witnesses. One was Danny’s best friend, George Hill, a tugboat worker, who testified that Jim and Danny had a homosexual relationship. Hill said that Jim gave Danny a nice car and clothes in exchange for going to bed with him. Then, according to Berendt, in words that would have electrified the conservative Savannah jury of the 1980s, Hill went on with his testimony: “‘Me and Danny talked about it a few times. Danny told me he liked the money and everything. He said it was fine with him if Mr. Williams wanted to pay him to suck his dick.’” There was silence in the courtroom while the audience absorbed the shockwaves. Graphic gay sex was
not
openly talked about in Savannah at that time.

Hill then described Danny’s fear that he had lost his “meal ticket” after taking his girlfriend over to Mercer House wearing the $400 gold necklace. Judge Oliver instructed the jury to consider Hill’s testimony for the limited purpose of motive. As if Hill’s comments were not enough to create a stir in the courtroom, Lawton called his second rebuttal witness. Gregory Kerr testified that Jim told him Danny was good in bed.

It was unintentionally ironic that the prominent citizens, including Jim’s good friend Carol Freeman, who then came forward to provide character witness for Jim, had not heard the testimony of Hill and Kerr. Their testimony was limited to ascertaining that Jim’s reputation was peaceable and that they never knew of any drug activity at Mercer House.

Closing Arguments

Spencer Lawton was on a roll after his controversial rebuttal witnesses. He continued his assault on the defense in his closing arguments. Deeply passionate about his beliefs, he was angry about the death of Danny Hansford at the hands of a man he considered evil, manipulative and exploitive.

“Jim Williams is a man of 50 years of age. He is a man of immense wealth, of obvious sophistication. He lives in an elegant home, travels abroad twice a year. He has many powerful attractive and influential friends…”

“Danny Hansford was an immature, undereducated, unsophisticated, confused, temperamental young man, preoccupied with feelings of betrayal and rejection, even at the hands of his mother, says Jim Williams. I suggest to you that Danny Hansford was a young man who was a great deal more tragic than evil. Can you not imagine how easily impressed a young man like that would be, living in a house, being friends with a man of Jim Williams’ stature?

“Danny Hansford was never someone that Jim Williams really cared for. He was a pawn, nothing more or less than a pawn in a sick little game of manipulation and exploitation. Danny may have thought of himself as a bit of a hustler. Well, he was in way over his head. He was playing for keeps with a pro, and he turned out to be the ultimate loser. I don’t think he was a hustler. I think he was being hustled. I think he was what amounts to a prisoner in a comfortable concentration camp, where the torture was not physical but emotional and psychological …”

“What happened was an act of murder … The self defense was a cover-up. It did not occur. Thomas Hobbes is often quoted as saying that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and surely it must have seemed so to Danny Hansford during the last fifteen or twenty seconds of his life, while his life was oozing out onto Jim Williams’ Persian rug.”

Lawton went on to suggest that the April 3 incident almost a month before Danny was shot was a hoax intended to get a fabricated rampage on the police record, a plot to set up a premeditated murder to look like self-defense.

Bobby Lee Cook’s closing statement focused on Jim’s right to self-defense in the face of imminent danger. He urged the jury to acquit Jim of any offense.

The jury took about four hours to convict Jim, rejecting options of voluntary manslaughter, as well as the self-defense or acquittal as charged. He was sentenced to life in prison. Lead counsel Bobby Lee Cook announced that the verdict would be appealed.

Reversal of Jim’s Conviction by the Georgia Supreme Court

After his first conviction, Jim was released from jail on $200,000 bond and went back to his antiques business. Great damage had been done to his reputation and standing in Savannah society, and Jim was very bitter about it. Not long after the trial was over, Bobby Lee Cook received an anonymous letter with a copy of the full unedited police report by Cpl. Anderson for the April 3, 1981, incident, which became part of the appeal that resulted in the Georgia Supreme Court reversing Jim’s conviction and ordering a new trial.

In “The Other Side of ‘Midnight,’” a fact sheet produced by Spencer Lawton Jr., he explains that he did provide the defense with everything it requested before the trial. Cpl. Anderson’s police report contained “portions of which had been whited out to exclude material to which the defense was not entitled under the law.”

In
The Williams Case: The History: A Summary
, Lawton addresses the whited-out portion of Cpl. Anderson’s note regarding the April incident: “Mr. Williams alleged that Hansford threatened him and discharged a gun in the house. Also damaging several expensive items in the house. Hansford denied it. We did find a fresh gunshot in the floor and the victim [sic: he was referring to Hansford] was becoming disorderly. I arrested him …” The complete unedited copy was provided to the court.

The copy received by the defense was redacted to show only the defendant’s statements to police, which is routine practice. Often police reports provided to defense counsel contain redacted information, such as commentary from officers and other witnesses whose privacy is protected.

During the trial, Cpl. Anderson testified about the April 3 bullet hole:

On direct (rebuttal) by the state:

“Q. All right, did Mr. Williams undertake to show you a bullet hole that Danny Hansford was alleged to have put into a floor of any place else in the house?

A. Yes, sir. In the bedroom on the right side, which is the south side of the bed, he pointed out that Mr. Hansford fired a weapon in the floor where the carpet’s at. We made close observation of the carpet. There appeared to be a hole in the carpet and as we looked the carpet over, it appeared the bullet did strike the floor.

I could not determine if that was a new type of gunshot or was an old one.
To my knowledge if the shot was fired, it would have been trapped into the floor and in the carpet, but we could not locate no bullet.”

[Emphasis supplied]

On cross by the defense:

“Q. And
he told you
that the suspect had discharged a pistol inside and out of the home; is that true, sir?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. And you found signs of a bullet wound or bullet hole in the rug and in the floor itself on the second floor, did you not, sir?

A. Yes, sir.”

[Emphasis supplied]

According to Lawton, during the trial, in judge’s chambers, Cook brought up the possibility of an inconsistency between the police report and Cpl. Anderson’s testimony regarding the “freshness” of a bullet hole found in an upstairs bedroom during the April 3 incident. The prosecution answered spontaneously from memory that no inconsistency had occurred and suggested at that time that Cook take a look at the unedited police report that was immediately available in Judge Oliver’s file, but Cook “declined the offer. Later, however, Cook claimed in his appeal that he had been deprived of the report he had been offered in chambers. Later, when asked under oath whether he’d in fact ever had an unedited version of the report, Mr. Cook—instead of answering directly—said, ‘I don’t know what you mean by an unedited version.’”

Despite this, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed the conviction, “citing a corruption of the truth-seeking function of the trial process.” Later, when the Georgia Supreme Court revisited the same issue, it found: “… it is clear that no intentional ‘corruption of the truth-seeking function of the trial process’ by the prosecutor has been established here.”

When Lawton proposed in his closing statements that the April 3 incident was a hoax, the testimony about the bullet hole seemed to take on increased importance. However, whether the bullet hole was fresh or old was of little consequence. Jim could have made that bullet hole to stage a scene, or Danny could have created it in an angry rampage.

The Second Trial

Jim hired new lawyers for his second trial. Bobby Lee Cook was tied up in a federal trial in Florida, so Jim hired his friend Frank “Sonny” Seiler to be lead counsel. Seiler was a senior partner at Bouhan, Williams & Levy LLP. Its offices are in the Armstrong House, which Jim had restored years earlier. Seiler was a very highly regarded and skilled litigator who was president of the State Bar of Georgia in 1973. In the movie
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
, he played the judge in the trial scenes. Seiler and his wife began the long line of bulldogs that became the famous mascot for the University of Georgia football team the Georgia Bulldogs. The bulldogs, appropriately named Uga, are traditionally present at all University of Georgia football games. Seiler was assisted by Austin E. Catts and Donald F. Samuel from Garland, Samuel & Loeb, the premier criminal defense firm in Atlanta.