Casey Sepp
Appearances
Criminal
The Reverend
You know, there was a tremendous amount of gossip about how the reverend had gotten away with all this and how he had made so much money. The folks around Lake Martin really start to talk about the reverend, and they no longer think that he's just, you know, a hardworking mill worker or a gifted preacher. They start to wonder if he's not a voodoo practitioner.
Criminal
The Reverend
Once again, her car was found abandoned on the side of a road in what seemed to be a staged car accident, although the external damage to the car did not at all explain the contents of the car, which was her body turned over in the front wheel well in a kind of unnatural position that the police once again felt certain had been staged.
Criminal
The Reverend
By April of 1973, when he succeeded in getting the last one of these payouts, he had managed to cobble together $1,000 here, $3,000 there, $5,000 there. So actually a large number of policies, 17 in total, to get that $80,000.
Criminal
The Reverend
You could walk into a bar and there might be a matchbook. And when you opened it, it had the five questions you had to answer. And for a quarter, they would give you a $1,000 policy. And these burial policies were very popular because for people, for working class people, all they really needed was enough money to cover their funeral and burial.
Criminal
The Reverend
And that meant they wouldn't be a burden on their loved ones, even if they weren't a kind of profitable death. And so, you know, company after company around the country offered these kind of lower denomination policies. But The expectation was you would only have one, not that you would have 17 on the same person.
Criminal
The Reverend
So if he knew your date of birth and he could somehow get a hold of your social security number, you know, he would mail away the reply card. And for a quarter, for 50 cents, for 75 cents, for a dollar, he would initiate these policies. And it was a full year before you had to pay a renewal fee.
Criminal
The Reverend
So for about a year, you know, he would hold truly these insurance policies where in the event that that person died, you know, for a quarter he had made $1,000 or for 50 cents he had made $3,000. Eventually, life insurance companies started to catch on. So when these companies, when these insurance companies started to realize what was happening, they of course tried to stop payment.
Criminal
The Reverend
And what happens then is what happens today in the event that, you know, you have a policy with... nationwide and, you know, your loved one dies and they try to stop payment, you have to take that insurance company to court. And that is what Tom Radney did on the Reverend's behalf. And, you know, again, he did it for the $1,000 policies and he did it for the $20,000 policies.
Criminal
The Reverend
And these cases went before juries. And, you know, the matter at hand was not only whether the policy was applicable or enforceable, but also to some extent whether some of these double indemnity clause applied and just how much money the reverend was going to get. Because as far as the insurance companies were concerned, he deserved zero dollars.
Criminal
The Reverend
And as far as the reverend was concerned, he was owed, you know, double the face value of any of them. And so he succeeded most of the time in getting at least half of the face value of the policies. And That happened death after death, and a lot of people around Lake Martin were not only apprehensive of the Reverend Maxwell, they were apprehensive of his lawyer.
Criminal
The Reverend
And so lucrative was the business of representing the Reverend Maxwell that when Tom Radney built a new law office, folks around Lake Martin called it the Maxwell House. And he was really one of Tom Radney's most notorious clients.
Criminal
The Reverend
And for a long time, Tom insisted on the Reverend's innocence. And as far as the legal system was concerned, he was owed all of this insurance money. And it didn't matter that there was this pattern of death that followed him or this kind of profitable side to all of these deaths. But, you know, Tom was just doing his job as a lawyer and
Criminal
The Reverend
He represented anyone, so why wouldn't he have represented the Reverend Maxwell? And, you know, while we were talking about it, he would say, you know, of course, a lot of African Americans were denied the kind of legal representation they deserved.
Criminal
The Reverend
What the police thought when they arrived at the scene was that she had maybe been changing a tire. The lug nuts were removed and the wheel was off the axle and Shirley Ann was under the weight of the car. And, you know, once again, that was very quickly disproved by their investigation. It had just been staged that way.
Criminal
The Reverend
And then actually she had been, the coroner's finding was that she had been strangled to death that day in June. And And once again, after their initial investigation, the police thought the Reverend was the most likely suspect. This was a tremendously difficult time for the folks around Lake Martin. It wasn't just that Shirley Ann Ellington was 16, which was obviously a scandal in its own right.
Criminal
The Reverend
It was, of course, the fact that, you know, here again was another one of the reverend's relatives found dead under very similarly suspicious circumstances. And there was real terror and fear. And again, I think that inevitably when you look back at crimes like this,
Criminal
The Reverend
You know, there's a kind of elegance in hindsight that makes things seem obvious, but for the people who lived in this part of Alabama, you know, this started in 1970 and here by the summer of 77, it just seemed like things were accelerating and it seemed more and more like there was nothing the police could do.
Criminal
The Reverend
300 people were gathered into that funeral home and they were already on edge and they were already afraid. And they were all on top of the kind of straightforward earthly rumors about murder and methodology. There was this heightened fear around the kind of supernatural stories people told about the reverend and others.
Criminal
The Reverend
Some people said he was wearing a bulletproof vest, and some people said he had more powders and poisons on his body, and some people said you couldn't even look him in the eye. So all of this was happening in this kind of saturated space of the funeral home, and there was so much talk. And so at Shirley Ann Ellington's funeral near the end of it, one of her sisters—
Criminal
The Reverend
had been crying and had gone up to the casket to see her sister and cried out from the back of the funeral home, you killed my sister and now you're going to pay for it.
Criminal
The Reverend
You know, it was a totally chaotic scene when the shots were fired and people didn't know what was happening and they didn't know where to go. And there was a kind of stampede to get out of the funeral home. And, you know, people on that street were instantly told, you know, Will Maxwell had been shot, you know, the reverend's been gunned down and everything.
Criminal
The Reverend
So, you know, obviously there are 300 witnesses to this murder to some extent. You know, there were that many people there, and some of them were so scared they couldn't count the shots, and others of them claimed to have, you know, waited outside the funeral home to learn more about who had done it. And once word spread about who had fired the shots, it was immediately explicable to people why.
Criminal
The Reverend
And to some extent, there was a kind of instant narrative about, you know, this vigilante. It was a man named Robert Burns.
Criminal
The Reverend
So after Shirley Ann's funeral, if you can believe it, the reverend's funeral was even larger because there were so many people who came just to make sure he was really dead.
Criminal
The Reverend
Yeah. I mean, one of the, you know, the kind of there are so many oddities and idiosyncrasies about this case. And, you know, it's not just the complexity of the insurance fraud and it's not just the kind of deep weirdness of the investigations and the failure to reach a kind of straightforward cause of death determination and the.
Criminal
The Reverend
Just all of those kinds of ins and outs of what people knew and when they knew it and who was related to whom and this sort of business. Yes, one of the kind of oddest things about this case is right away when the reverend is gunned down, Tom Radney, this lawyer who spent so many years representing him, decides to take the case of the vigilante who murdered him.
Criminal
The Reverend
Obviously, a lot of people wondered what was going on. Was he going to really defend Robert Burns? Was this an effort to protect the Reverend's reputation after his murder? Was it an effort to rescue his own reputation?
Criminal
The Reverend
A lot of people thought, well, maybe Tom Radney was just trying to change the narrative about who he was and the kinds of cases he would take and that this was his way of atoning for all the years he had represented the Reverend and all the money he had made.
Criminal
The Reverend
He had arrived at this defense partly because even though it was before an official diagnosis of PTSD even existed, Robert Burns had served in Vietnam and had, like a lot of men who served in Vietnam in combat, had had a very harrowing experience and had lost another nephew during Vietnam and had seen many of his victims.
Criminal
The Reverend
many of the men in his unit die, and actually the episode in the church, in the chapel, when Robert Burns murdered the Reverend was just a PTSD episode, and that, you know, he had just been temporarily insane in that moment and not able to distinguish between right and wrong, and that was what led him to murder the Reverend, and he could not be held responsible because it was just an episode of PTSD.
Criminal
The Reverend
He was just trying to remind the jury that a very bad man had been killed and a very bad man who was menacing the community in a way the police couldn't stop was finally stopped by his client.
Criminal
The Reverend
It's pretty incredible. You know, she did exactly what she had done with Truman Capote out in Kansas when he was working on In Cold Blood.
Criminal
The Reverend
And when they were investigating the Clutter murders together, she got to know the lawyers who were involved in these cases and looked for evidence in primary source documents and, you know, went to the Department of Vital Statistics and obtained death certificates and birth certificates and, you know, paid the court reporter for a full transcript of the Burns trial and went and interviewed, you know,
Criminal
The Reverend
relatives of the Reverend and relatives of the Reverend's victims and, you know, just scooted around town busy as a bee for almost a year.
Criminal
The Reverend
when she had finished the reporting of the Reverend and tried to do the writing, it seems to have become difficult in the way that all writing projects had been difficult for her. And even worse than that, she was one of these writers who had, you know, strong feelings about how, you know, serious writing had to be difficult and you had to struggle for it.
Criminal
The Reverend
And, you know, she would go around quoting Jean Fowler saying, you know, that writing, you know, writing was what happened when you sat down to the typewriter and waited for your forehead to bleed and I just think that can be such a self-reinforcing notion about writing. So however optimistic and excited she was when she was in Alexander City, when she left, she really struggled with the book.
Criminal
The Reverend
So if you go to the New York Public Library, you can look in the Capote archive at these extraordinary reporting notes that Harper Lee made for Truman Capote in 1959 and 1960 during their first few reporting trips in Kansas. Author, Casey Sepp. And, you know, she's an incredibly scrupulous reporter. She made these very detailed notes for him.
Criminal
The Reverend
You know, it's basically a prosecutor's dream. He just admits to everything and says, you know, we're not going to dispute any of these facts, but we're going to try and contextualize them and we're going to give you a reason. And of course, you know, that is a bold strategy.
Criminal
The Reverend
So they got married in 1949 and they stayed married until 1970. And by all accounts, the kind of outward account of their marriage was one that was happy and faithful. So the beginning of their marriage isn't as notable as what happened several decades into it in 1970.
Criminal
The Reverend
And supposedly spent most of that night preaching and left his wife at home shelling peas and had told her to leave the phone on the hook because he was going to call when the revival had ended and he was on his way home so that she would know and What he says happened is he called home and she never answered.
Criminal
The Reverend
And then when he finally got home from Auburn, she wasn't there and he didn't know what had happened to her. But he figured she was visiting a sister, which she did quite often. And so he went to bed and it was only several hours later when he woke up and she still wasn't home that he began to worry.
Criminal
The Reverend
That very night, they found Mary Lou Maxwell dead several miles from her home. She was in her car, but what had looked from the outside of the car like a car accident wasn't that at all, and her body was quite beaten and quite disturbed.
Criminal
The Reverend
When they began asking questions about the Reverend, they also learned that the marriage was not as happy as it had seemed in the kind of public facade offered by the Reverend to these congregations and to these places where he was invited to preach. And quite quickly, they were told that the Reverend had... been unfaithful to his wife and that there were several women.
Criminal
The Reverend
And there was reason to believe that the marriage was not nearly as happy as the Reverend had led folks to believe.
Criminal
The Reverend
And when the police went to speak with some of Mary Lou Maxwell's siblings, in fact, one of the very sisters the Reverend said she had probably been visiting that day, that sister said almost right away that she thought the Reverend had been involved and that probably he had murdered her sister.
Criminal
The Reverend
asking for his checks. There was a kind of technical legal dispute over whether or not homicide constituted accidental death because he held all of these accidental death policies on his wife, which, again, at the start of things isn't, you know, isn't odd in any respect.
Criminal
The Reverend
Obviously, many of us insure our spouses and it's considered good family planning to make sure that, you know, if you were to die, that your family would be provided for. But in the case of the Reverend, there were actually a large number of policies and some of them had been taken out not long before his wife's murder.
Criminal
The Reverend
Between when Mary Lou Maxwell had been found murdered and the reverend's trial for her murder, Dorcas Anderson's husband had died under what some folks in the area felt were suspicious circumstances, and after his death, she then married the reverend. Dorcas Anderson's husband had ALS.