Podcast
RedHanded
The book, or rather the infamous lost manuscript, was discussed in the context of true crime legend Harper Lee. The hosts explained that Lee had dedicated years to researching the alleged serial killer and voodoo preacher Willie Maxwell, intending to make The Reverend her long-awaited second masterpiece. However, after Lee's death, the manuscript was tragically missing, forcing the hosts to rely on other authors who had picked up Lee's extensive research notes to detail the fascinating case.
Episode: Episode 317 - Reverend Willie Maxwell: Harper Lee...
This was Harper Lee's intended second book, about the alleged black voodoo preacher in Alabama. The book was never published because the manuscript was not found after Lee died.
And that's why she was sat there, pen and paper in hand, at a trial of a man who'd stood up in the middle of a funeral and shot a reverend, three times to be exact, in the head in front of 300 witnesses.
But when she learned about a string of killings linked to the preacher himself, she decided that she had finally found the subject of her long-awaited second book, The Reverend, the tale of an alleged black voodoo preacher in Alabama, around whom five people, including two of his wives, had died under very suspicious circumstances.
Lee spent years researching and writing what she was certain was going to be her next masterpiece. But when she died in 2016, really not that long ago, the manuscript for The Reverend was nowhere to be found.
Some people claimed that Harper Lee had finished writing the entire book, others said that she'd thrown 300 pages of it into an incinerator. What was found, however, were the countless interviews and notes Lee had made whilst researching the case.
And thanks to author Casey Koepp, who picked up where Harper Lee left off with her book, Furious Hours, Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, we bring you this episode on Alabama's alleged serial killing, voodoo preacher, Reverend Willie Maxwell.
When Radney's granddaughter wrote a letter to Harper Lee about The Reverend she got a response from Tonya Carter, Harper Lee's lawyer.
Carter heartbreakingly told her that Lee's health had deteriorated to the point that she no longer even remembered who Tom Radney was and had no recollection of the years she'd spent researching Willie Maxwell and by the time the unedited draft of Go Set a Watchman was published in 2015 Willie Maxwell had been dead for 40 years.
