Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Author:John Berendt [Berendt, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-53837-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1994-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

CIVIC DUTY

“Hell, I’d have shot Danny Hansford too,” said Dr. James C. Metts, the coroner of Chatham County. “This guy was just a badass. He scared Williams to death. You know, hell, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and here he is having a temper fit because Williams won’t play an Atari game.” Dr. Metts, a generally soft-spoken man, had spent several hours investigating the scene at Mercer House the night of the shooting. It was he who had signed the death certificate and ordered the autopsy. A week before Jim Williams’s trial was to begin, one of Williams’s lawyers, John Wright Jones, paid a call on Dr. Metts in his office to discuss the case.

John Wright Jones was one of Savannah’s better-known criminal lawyers. A burly bear of a man, he was assisting in Williams’s defense. He had seen the autopsy report and the police photographs taken in Mercer House after the shooting. He was concerned about the bullet hole in Danny Hansford’s back and the one behind his ear. He asked Dr. Metts if it was possible to reconstruct the shooting in such a way that Danny Hansford was not lying facedown when those two shots hit him.

“Yes,” said Dr. Metts, “you could do that. The first shot hit him in the front left side of the chest. When you get shot in the chest, it’s like a punch; you rotate, you spin around. So the next shot hits you in the right side of the back, and you keep rotating, and the next one hits you behind the ear. It’s possible, if the ballistics work out, that Danny Hansford was not shot lying down. He could have been standing up.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” said Jones. “So the bottom line is that you don’t really know whether or not he was shot when he was lying on the floor, do you?”

“That’s correct.”

“All right. And if you are called to testify, that’s what you’re going to say?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Metts. “But, John, you’ve got another problem. The hand lying on top of the gun has blood all over it, and there’s no blood on the gun itself. Now, there are only two places where blood was flowing from Danny Hansford—his head and his chest. The boy, when he fell, must have fallen on his right hand. And I guess maybe for artistic license Williams might have moved his hand out and put it over the gun where, you know, it looked better.”

“You sure about that?”

“Positive. You see, the blood on Hansford’s hand is smeared, like somebody dragged it out from under the body. If I were you, I’d say Williams panicked and checked Danny Hansford’s pulse—reached in there and pulled his arm out and checked his pulse and then put it on the gun so it would look better or something.”

Dr. Metts’s suggestion was not an acceptable option. Jim Williams had already put his version of the story on record with his interview in the Georgia Gazette. In the interview, Williams had made no mention of ever touching the body.

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