One Drink Book Club | Furious Hours by Casey Cep

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of The One Drink Book Club. Today we are going to be discussing Furious Hours, Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. The book tells the true crime story of an Alabama serial killer accused of killing six people

[00:00:22] who were all related to him in one way or another. Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, researched this story and worked on a book about it for years but was never able to complete it. Casey Cep tells the story that Lee couldn't seem to finish

[00:00:37] and also provides us with a moving portrait of one of America's most beloved authors. Tonight I'm joined by Kathy Cookstra, a good friend that I met through a business connection but soon found out that we had another connection. Kathy, thanks for joining me. I appreciate you coming on.

[00:00:52] Oh absolutely! Thank you so much for accepting the suggestion of this book. I'm really excited to talk about it. I thought it was a great suggestion and I really enjoyed it. There was a lot to unpack

[00:01:02] with the whole book because it was really almost like three books in one. But I want to go back to, I said that we met through a business connection. Tell the story of what our other connection is because I thought it was truly small world story there.

[00:01:16] Yeah absolutely! So I am from Grand Rapids, Michigan, born there and lived there until I was 12. During that time growing up I went to Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Elementary School and lo and behold all these years later you and I meet as grownups like you said

[00:01:41] through a business- In Washington DC, yep. Washington DC. We've had the opportunity to work together off and on various projects together. Lo and behold talking to Jamie Bowers, I find out Jamie also attended Immaculate Heart

[00:01:55] of Mary Elementary School and lived in Grand Rapids or grew up in Grand Rapids for part of your childhood. And you were a grade below me. You were one grade younger than me.

[00:02:05] Yep, very funny to find that out when we were closing that circle on those, oh you were living in Grand Rapids? That's all you lived in Grand Rapids. Oh where did you go to grade school?

[00:02:15] That's really sad, and while you don't remember me by name, I don't remember you by name, but we have a lot of people in common. I remember a lot of people in your class and you remember

[00:02:25] some of the people in my class. So yeah totally small world but a very cool connection to have. Definitely. Well since it's the One Drink Book Club I have to ask what was the drink that you came up with inspired by Casey Sepp's book?

[00:02:40] After reading this book and knowing the sort of the general what's in the ether out there about Harper Lee that she had a really bad drinking problem in her adulthood and a lot

[00:02:54] of people point to that, a lot of critics over the years point to that as being the reason that she never completed a second novel per se in her life. Well we can

[00:03:06] talk about this a little bit when we get into that part of this book because it's really really revealing I think, but to sort of respect that a little bit I took a different

[00:03:17] tag and we can get to this part of the book too, the center part. My drink I'm taking it from the portion of the book called The Lawyer which we'll get into, but a big primary person involved in sort of ties the two parts of the books together,

[00:03:34] the beginning as well as Harper Lee, Big Tom Radney who is a larger than life figure in The Law in Alabama and politics and all this stuff and he features very prominently

[00:03:47] in this book which of course is a whole section dedicated to him. He was the guy in the book, he's the famous defense attorney, very progressive guy and he's kind of reminiscent of today's sort of almost like the personal injury attorneys that you see advertised on

[00:04:04] TV but when you meet in real life they're kind of these larger than life figures. They're the kind of guy that goes around a small town like Monroeville, Alabama where Harper Lee grew up or Alexander City in this case and he knew everybody in town and that was

[00:04:19] part of what he was so successful but he knew everybody by name, he knew everybody's ties to each other and the businesses that what they did for a living and who they knew

[00:04:30] and who their neighbors were, what they liked to drink so I thought you know this is a guy who would be a very interesting person to meet. You know one of these guys when you

[00:04:39] say hey the three people I'd like to invite to Thanksgiving dinner Big Tom Radney to me seems kind of like that guy right Andrew? So I figure you know what it would not

[00:04:50] take long for him to figure out what I would like to drink so it's a little bit boring but you know all of this is kind of baked into it. It is one of my favorite red

[00:04:59] wines. It is a paradox. It's a lesser sort of popular version or lesser prominent version of the whole family of wines, the Duckhorn decoy that you see in the supermarket a lot. It's different, it's paradox. It's part of the same family

[00:05:15] but it's sort of this more of a one-off winery in Sonoma and I had the chance to go there and had one of the most pleasant experiences of my entire life and wine tasting there and this is the proprietary red blend which is one

[00:05:28] of the only ones I can find anywhere in Michigan. So that is what I have proprietary red wine it's got beautiful legs and I've just been waiting for an occasion to open this bottle so I'm really excited and like I think Big

[00:05:42] Tom would probably buy me my own bottle as we sat down and had it broke right there you go. Well that's excellent. I had to think about it a little bit. I did a little research on Truman Capote and what he liked to drink. Apparently he was

[00:05:55] a big fan of the screwdriver, his orange drink he referred to it as so but I decided to go with and I thought I was being very creative and I did Tequila Mockingbird which is really just a spicy margarita and then I found out

[00:06:10] that other people had had come up with the same joke and fairness to them I cannot say that I was the first person to come up with this idea. It's a perfect play on the Tequila Mockingbird so. Cheers to you. Interestingly the

[00:06:25] book has three parts. Well part one is about the story of Reverend Willie Maxwell who could have been a voodoo priest but he was a Reverend who basically killed a number of his relatives. He killed his first wife, his second wife, his

[00:06:42] brother, his nephew, his neighbor and finally his third wife's adopted daughter and he basically put out life insurance on every one of his victims some of them unbeknownst to them and then collected it. His first wife he had over a dozen

[00:07:00] life insurance policies on her and then big Tom Radney the lawyer his lawyer got him off on his first wife's murder and then went on to help him collect these life insurance policies for him because obviously the life

[00:07:14] insurance policy folks smelled a rat here when he would take out a life insurance policy on somebody and then weeks or months later would try to collect because the person was dead under dubious circumstances and so clearly all of these were alleged because he was never convicted of

[00:07:30] anything but at the end of the day at his at the funeral for his third wife's daughter's funeral that girl's uncle turned around he was in the pew in front of Reverend Maxwell and shot Willie Maxwell three times in the face

[00:07:44] killing him basically saying hey this is payback for all of these people you've killed it's time you went down and so it was a really interesting story really interesting true crime story and that was really part one of the book

[00:07:57] second part of the book is all about Tom Radney and then the third part is really like a biography of Harper Lee which one of those was your favorite which you know which parts do you like of each of those

[00:08:09] uh well i liked them all of course i i think i really appreciated the third book the Harper Lee part because um i don't know about you but i read to kill a mockingbird my freshman year of

[00:08:20] high school and you know we didn't have the internet we didn't have the information at hand like that so the most i knew really about Harper Lee except for when she passed away you know reading a little bit about her then

[00:08:31] was very rudimentary English one English lit 101 body of knowledge and so in my mind i had this picture of Harper Lee as sort of a a one hit wonder and just floundered around with her fame from to kill a mockingbird and just unable to

[00:08:51] to write her her next novel and you know a huge drinking problem in my head i thought oh that was being like a lot of other people that that was primary reason and sure this this author she takes everything a step further i think

[00:09:05] in each part of the book she really takes her time and to to flesh a lot of these things out and when it gets to telling us the story of Harper Lee's life i just

[00:09:17] feel like i know Harper Lee better as a result and and even more so as i'm reading about her and kind of her struggles with her struggles with writing happened long before she wrote to kill a mockingbird right she she to her

[00:09:35] it was sort of a burdensome exercise and a lot of it i can relate to i feel like oh gosh i could see me doing that i could see me being this person who collects years and years and years of research and never does anything with it writers

[00:09:48] block imposter syndrome i feel like i can relate to a lot of these things harper lee was quoted as saying i'm more of a re-writer than i am a writer and i'm like oh my god all of these things were like yeah that sounds like me i

[00:10:01] feel like that a lot and feeling i can identify with with a lot of what she was going through getting a little further on you know we talked about you know her big reputation for drinking and the author of this book she treated it so well

[00:10:17] she thought that yeah and so i was thinking too that you know it sounds more like to me because Hemingway was no less prolific a writer um because of you know his drinking steinbeck same thing you know all these these are people

[00:10:29] and Truman Cavodie but they were prolific writers so that just doesn't jive with that keeping her from writing so to me it seems more like today's terms there might be an adhd type thing going on or you know something like that but she was in a

[00:10:43] time where you know she and a lot of people rejected what was a burgeoning field of psychiatry and psychology and mental health and things like that so that wouldn't have even been on her radar so i thought it was it was treated

[00:10:55] very sensitively and and very well i thought by the author you kind of flesh all of these things out and just kind of let us sit back and go oh there's so much more to Harper Lee from her younger informative age to

[00:11:09] you know her her career and then end of life and it was just i just feel this is so much smarter as a result you know i i also really liked the insights into Harper Lee's life and her struggles with writing i personally what

[00:11:25] i took out of it there was a couple of things that really led to the fact that she could not finish this book she could not publish a second book and i think the first thing was the success of tequila mockingbird it became so

[00:11:38] successful so quickly and she was also quite a perfectionist and so i think knowing that you'll have a very very hard time coming up with a sequel or not even a sequel but another book that even comes close to the success

[00:11:55] that tequila mockingbird had has to be very daunting because you think well even if i write a good book it's going to be compared to tequila mockingbird and there will be critics there will be people who say ah

[00:12:08] tequila mockingbird was a fluke this person isn't a good writer look at this we don't like that and so that's where i thought geez this seems like a really obvious reason that would be a barrier to coming up with something

[00:12:20] else i thought the second thing was the people who were helpful in getting to kill a mockingbird over the finish line were her editor and her publisher both who became very good friends of hers but helped her rewrite to kill

[00:12:34] a mockingbird showed her where the problems might be encouraged her to go in different directions and they were very instrumental in getting that book finished and they both got too old at a certain point to be they both retired

[00:12:49] or died and they weren't able to help her get this book the book about reverend willy maxwell out of the you know reediting editing editing phase and the other thing i think she was greatly influenced by so

[00:13:02] there were the two things i just mentioned but the third thing was her work with truman capote con in cold blood which i never realized she had such a key role in that i mean truman capote hired her to be his researcher

[00:13:16] and she went with him and was largely responsible for all the interviews he did with the family members the the murders themselves the the police officers apparently he was very off-putting to these down home kansas folks his kind of new york quirky

[00:13:34] affect just did not go over well with this crowd and so harper lee was there with her kind of southern charm that really got him access to these people and she was a little disappointed while she was publicly very supportive of the

[00:13:47] book she was a little disappointed with truman capote's treatment of the truth and so she did not really approve of the things that he either thinned about kind of twisted for his own use in the

[00:14:00] the narrative or just meet up flat out she knew the things in that that were wrong and she knew that he did them on purpose that way and so she was really put off by that and so i think she felt a lot of responsibility

[00:14:13] not to do that in this case yeah and and what's interesting if you learn about her is is that they they both had two completely different approaches to their writing right i mean truman capote his mother and and truman moved in

[00:14:26] next door to the lees when she was young and actually lived there full time for about four years when they were young kids but at the same time you and i were going to elementary

[00:14:37] already about the same age right like you know six seven eight nine years old and then his folks moved up to new york they remember reserving some sort of um they were kind of in show business type things up there are you know performance type things

[00:14:52] but he kept coming back down and would spend summers there so the two of them developed this friendship together they read together they also would go to the local courtroom and they go sit up in the in the cheap seats and and watch trials happen

[00:15:06] and then as soon as high school was done truman capote said i'm not going to he just went straight to new york and and just went off and started writing and traveling and doing all this stuff and as you said you know he was

[00:15:16] he was very flamboyant and and you know city and cosmopolitan and you know went to morocco and paris and all these places whereas harper lee went the route that you know her her folks expected to tour her dad especially

[00:15:30] i mean she she went to college first she went to a girl's school but then she said oh yes kind of like i would probably if i would have gone to a small college my first year she said you know i'm not that this is it for

[00:15:41] me so then she went to the university of alabama which i also i think is interesting and timely because when as we're recording this michigan plays alabama coming up on new year's day so anyway i feel that connection too she's role tied and then she went to

[00:15:56] she went into law school um her her dad was an attorney and then but her sister um actually became a practicing attorney and she was going to follow a suit she dropped out just shy of getting her law degree

[00:16:09] because she was starting to see truman capote having all the success in writing and she said oh a jeep you know what i've learned all this stuff oh and she also grew up her dad uh owned a newspaper so she grew up

[00:16:21] writing stuff for her dad so she she goes and she moves to new york and she's got to work she's she very you know she had to work her way and was only able to write during her spare time and she you know she's scripted pinched

[00:16:31] to make ends meet but going back to the writing style she even she admits she's she had never taken a class in creative writing she came from a journalist slash legal you know writing background whereas truman capote was writing yeah doing imaginative stories and i i totally

[00:16:48] get why she looked at the final product and said wait just a second is she spent i can't like a year or some some it was a year of research yeah um and and as you said she went around and she was largely responsible for

[00:17:02] getting these these interviews with people because can you imagine here's harper lee and then truman capote marching into a small town in kansas where he sees it's strab against a flamboyant and kind of standoff as she's big city and she comes in and instantly made people feel at

[00:17:19] home and there was a a line from the book she said um truman capote saw a story in everything that they were doing she saw families she saw people she saw and that was how she was able to make the personal connection and um one other

[00:17:38] note on that the way she helped him which was fascinating to me is that she took all these interviews everything and observations and and facts about people and little tidbits about people and she organized them she typed up all these notes and she she categorized them

[00:17:55] so truman capote was oh and all of this was being done by the way she had submitted her manuscript for tequila mockingbird and it hadn't come out yet if i'm from getting right right there's part yeah she was doing all this research after she had turned in

[00:18:10] right final final book you know that that hadn't quite come out and become what it was at the moe it was get it was just about ready to take off she's in kansas helping truman capote doing all

[00:18:20] this so basically by the time capote was ready to write she could just hand him all this everything here he had everything he needed to write this book because of her being a research assistant and i thought wow

[00:18:32] because i could see myself doing that for for a writer anyway it was stuff i had no idea the other thing i thought was kind of interesting is i think she latched on to this story of the

[00:18:44] reverend willy maxwell which was a great true crime story but it does have a lot of problems with it if you're trying to write a true novel because there is no real hero that you can a protagonist in here because you can't interview willy maxwell he's dead

[00:19:01] there are so many rumors that surrounded the guy and she had a really hard time coming up with real facts reverend willy maxwell was african-american and this is in the 50s and 60s in the south in alabama so there was very few records

[00:19:16] that were kept all the newspapers in alabama at the time were covering white lives you know here's what happened in this community and they largely ignored the african-american community so there were nothing there was nothing to kind of really glean as facts and then you had tom radney

[00:19:31] who was this very conflicted character he was very interesting but he wasn't quite a hero he got robert burns the person who shot maxwell and killed him he got him off but he wasn't exactly a true hero i

[00:19:46] think tom radney used the case where he got robert burns off as a way to resuscitate his own image in that community because i think people saw him as a guy who got rich off of this serial killer reverend who was an evil guy who

[00:20:03] offed his relatives in order to collect insurance money and tom was the guy who helped him do it and so he was kind of seen as as you said kind of an ambulance chaser and he resuscitated his image by

[00:20:16] taking on robert burns's case and getting him off and as you said he was a he was an interesting guy because he was a progressive politician he believed in civil rights he was kind of this interesting democrat in alabama at the time because

[00:20:31] he was kind of going swimming against the tide of a lot of the folks who were segregationists who were looking at things and and tom was a defender of civil rights but he also you know made his money in this kind of shady way uh so

[00:20:46] i think harper lee had a problem with this book in that it didn't have a whole lot of facts and it didn't have a true hero that people would get behind you know you you didn't really root for tom there was not a

[00:20:58] whole lot about robert burns he just kind of showed up and got mad because his niece had gotten killed and and killed reverend max well but it wasn't like he had a big backstory either so i think she picked the wrong story to

[00:21:10] follow it was interesting the case he set did this but i think this story doesn't hold the the reverend max well story doesn't hold is a full book it is a great first part of this book and i

[00:21:22] thought case he accepted a great job of turning it into a book by adding in this biography of harper lee and all of those things but i think harper lee ended up trying to chase down this thing for years and years and years which was

[00:21:33] something that just wasn't a good choice for the for her second book yeah i that that's a really good point and i wonder if the reverend story were to be done today because i think you bring up a really good point

[00:21:45] about um they're not being a a cut and dry protagonist however i think the way a lot of our popular culture in terms of storytelling has evolved since then because that was kind of in the 70s when harper lee was

[00:22:02] looking into this stuff it was maybe 15 years after to kilmockingberg came out of the gate made her famous back then everything had a you know a clear cut protagonist right and an antagonist you had a hero you had villains and we still

[00:22:16] have that kind of thing but to me when i watch the treatment of stories these days whether it's in television miniseries whether it's in a movie whether it's even in a lot of book those lines are a lot fuzzier now it's like they're

[00:22:29] they're a lot more fluid and i've had discussions with people talking about this sort of evolution some people i know lament the fact that the protagonist aren't as clear cut the good versus evil isn't as clear but to me i

[00:22:45] think i actually kind of like that because i feel like that's more realistic that's life and there's so much gray everything isn't black and white you know there's so much gray and i like the way that that sort of thing is

[00:22:58] being explored in in modern storytelling so maybe in a different time per half but i think like you said the author kasey did a really good job of sort of picking up what harper lee had done and doing something with it in a way

[00:23:12] that invites us into that story the whole evolution of a lot of things that were explored even in the limited fact base that we had and then having that segue into into harper lee's life i really liked all that well

[00:23:28] i thought she did a good job of filling in facts that were adjacent to the story so and what i mean by that is she went into for example the history of life insurance and how it evolved in

[00:23:41] this country and and how it was treated at the time and as i mentioned you could at that point put life insurance on anybody you wanted to and so there was all these kind of crazy schemes going on

[00:23:53] and it wasn't a regulated industry so she gives a lot of that background which arf is factual it's interesting and it is likable to the story but i don't know that harper lee would have got into that

[00:24:04] she does the same thing with voodoo because many people thought that willy maxwell was a voodoo priest and so there wasn't a lot of facts over whether willy maxwell was or wasn't but kasey goes into a lot of details about the

[00:24:18] history of voodoo and how it was treated in the south and what it was and what it wasn't all of which was interesting it kind of remember i don't know if you've ever read the great train robbery by michael

[00:24:28] krait and it's a great true story and it's a true crime story but it's not quite enough because all of his history with that comes from the trial and he has the transcripts of the trial and so what michael kraiton does in that book

[00:24:42] is he fills in lots of details and facts about the victorian age when it took place what were the the habits that happened and what were the the environment that all of this happened at which would

[00:24:55] mean a very interesting story but it was his way of lengthening that into a real book and i think kasey sept did some of that same thing and maybe harper lee just never was able to figure out where she could plug her

[00:25:08] facts in yeah that's really i was going to bring that up as well and i mean even just starting right out of the gate the first portion of the book which is about the reverend kasey the author of this book goes back she

[00:25:20] starts out by talking about the um the history of lake martin and how it was the the power company and and even going back further into the evolution of energy companies and uh you know damning up lakes for hydroelectric

[00:25:36] power and all of that and that was how this lake martin forem did not that you know displace these people or whatever but you know it was just to me fascinating he got into property rights and eminent domain

[00:25:47] you know buying up properties and who you like yeah for for my you know professional life at a pacific legal foundation right and so that instantly like my radar went up going oh wait a minute there are all kinds of

[00:26:00] angles to this to this that i learned things i didn't think i would when i picked up the book yeah i think that was a great device to add real detail add real perspective to the story and especially when they're just

[00:26:13] there's a limited of number of facts that you can draw on i mean these people died like i said it was allegedly willy maxwell if i had a hundred dollars to bet or a thousand dollars to bet i'd say he was responsible

[00:26:24] for all of them but one of the things jay b travel believe for it for people who are listening who might be a little bit confused the fact pattern and again that it's not really being a spoiler because

[00:26:33] it's it's all baked in there and and you can read it is that each person that the reverend uh is alleged to or suspected to have killed he had bought unbeknownst to them a ton of life insurance policies on each person

[00:26:49] sometimes within a very short manner of time before their their death even days i think his first wife um who was the first alleged victim was just a week or two before and he had i can't remember how many something like 10 15 life insurance policies through

[00:27:05] all these different companies and he spent like you said big tom radney spent most of that time fighting with the insurance companies to get the life insurance uh paid out because he would get half of it so

[00:27:17] there's a lot baked in there oh yeah it was literally you would not be able to get away with this today because you could not go out and buy life insurance on on strangers essentially or people that without their knowledge

[00:27:28] and then you couldn't do things like buy 15 different policies from 15 different companies then try to collect weeks after you've purchased them i mean in some cases he may not have even made his first payment and he was he had the ability to collect and that's where he

[00:27:43] needed top randy's help because there were several of these insurance companies who said no clearly this is there's foul play here this was this looks like a murder but radney showed that he was a good lawyer and was

[00:27:55] able to collect on almost all of these and really willy maxwell was a pretty good criminal there was not a lot of criticism of the local police in this alabama town because they really did try to convict him

[00:28:09] they weren't they weren't negligent in it it's just that they didn't have DNA at the time he was pretty good at not leaving a lot of evidence in these cases but they all were similar

[00:28:20] they all you know oftentimes it was a car found by the side of the road person is beaten to death or killed inside and he has some sort of flimsy alibi in the case of his first wife his big alibi ended up being the

[00:28:34] person who turned out to be a second one right um yeah and i would be remiss not to mention that her name was dorkis which was a surprising name to me i guess that is a southern name but what

[00:28:47] a aside from being murdered she also had to live her life with the name dorkis you got to choose that sad that was in you know when you read you you say say names and words in your head and and yeah you're just kind of like that's

[00:29:01] odd but knows i i haven't looked at the genealogy records of your alexander city alabamas to know if that was common or family name or what exactly well i want to thank you uh kathy again i thought this was a great

[00:29:15] suggestion i would highly recommend it to anybody who is interested in in harper lee and enjoyed to kill a mockingbird and also likes true crime because the story here about the reverend willy maxwell is interesting and it is uh one of

[00:29:30] those cases where you can't believe somebody got away with it for as long as they did yeah it brings you back to the movie what was that primal fear with richard here at uh you know he's doing his job as an attorney i mean what

[00:29:42] yeah he was hired to do and big tom redney exactly so it was a pleasure to talk about it and a pleasure to read so thank you again thank you so much dave this has been a blast i really appreciate it for those of you who

[00:29:56] just listen please uh subscribe on apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast or visit one drink book club dot com to get the recipe for the tequila mockingbird and other drinks that we've done on previous shows thanks so much bye