[This is an excerpt from the biography of the woman who wrote TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD – and nothing else the rest of her life. But she did start to write a book on the reverend which was never finished.]

The story revolves around W. M. "Willie Jo" Maxwell, a veteran of WWII, born and raised in east Alabama. During the mid-1970s, in addition to working in the wood pulp business, he did some preaching on the side in black churches in Alexander City and became known as the Reverend Maxwell. One night, Tom Radney, Sr., an attorney and former state senator, received a call from Maxwell. "You've got to come out here to my home," Maxwell pleaded, "the police are saying I killed my wife." Mrs. Maxwell had been found tied to a tree about a mile outside of town and murdered.

Radney agreed to take the case. Fortunately for the reverend, the woman next door proved him with an alibi, and he was found not guilty. From a portion of his late wife's insurance policy Maxwell paid Radney's fees. Later, he married the woman next door.

"A year or so passed," said Radney, "and then the new wife showed up dead."

Again, Maxwell asked Radney to defend him. During the trial, the jury was persuaded that there was no evidence linking Maxwell to the murder. He was acquitted and paid Radney from his second wife's insurance policy.

The third time Maxwell was charged with murder was in connection with his brother, who was found dead by the side of a road. The district attorney argued that Maxwell, either by himself or with someone's help, had poured liquor down his brother's throat until he died of alcohol poisoning. But the jury wasn't convinced and returned another verdict of not guilty. Maxwell was his brother's beneficiary and had another lump sum due him. The Alexander City Police Department began referring to Radney's law offices as the "Maxwell Building."

The fourth death involved Maxwell's nephew, discovered dead behind the wheel of his car. Apparently, he had run into a tree. The following day, Radney, retained again as Maxwell's attorney, inspected the crash site. "Not even the largest trees were more than two inches around," he said. "It was obvious that hitting those little trees didn't kill the reverend's nephew. However, the state could not prove the cause of death.

I remember having a pathologist on the witness stand. I asked him, 'C'mon, what did he die of?' And the reply was, 'Judge, I hate to tell you, but we don't know what he died of.'" Maxwell left the courtroom a free man and settled with Radney with proceeds from his nephew's insurance policy.

The fifth death touching the reverend appeared on the front page of the Alexander City Outlook on June 15, 1977. Police reported that Shirley Ellington, Maxwell's teenage niece, had been changing a flat tire when her car fell off the jack and killed her. After reading he news story, Radney decided, "I've had enough." When Maxwell showed up at his offices, his erstwhile attorney turned him down.

"Mr. Radney, you're not being fair to me," Maxwell protested, "I have done nothing wrong. You've got to defend me."

Radney later recalled the next few minutes clearly. "I said, 'Reverend, enough's enough. Maybe you're innocent, you never told me anything differently, and I'll never say a word against you, but I will not defend you anymore.' In the meantime, the area behind my office building was filled with cameras and reporters from Birmingham, Montgomery, and Columbus, Georgia. A newswoman was standing behind his car, and the last thing I heard the reverend say as he got into his big Chrysler was, 'Ma'am, if you don't move, I'm going to run over you.'"

The police waited to arrest Maxwell, hoping he might do or say something during his niece's funeral service that would incriminate him. Instead, a scene took place that Nelle decided was the perfect beginning to The Reverend, one that was both awful and comic in one stroke.

A week after Shirley Ellington's death from being crushed underneath a car, three hundred people gathered for her memorial service in the chapel of the House of Hutcheson funeral home. One of the teenager's uncles, Robert Burns from Chicago, took a seat in the pew behind Maxwell. As the organist was playing and the choir singing in the loft, Burns took out a .45 from his suit jacket and shot Maxwell point blank in the back. For a moment, Maxwell dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief while blood spilled from his mouth. Then he fell to the floor, dead.