Danny Lewis Hansford was born on March 1, 1960, the youngest of Charles and Emily Hansford's three sons. Danny's mother divorced his father in 1962 and married Edward Bannister that same year. When Danny was a boy, his father moved to South Carolina to marry again. In 1969, his father took his gun and committed suicide. Danny's mother, Emily, had one daughter with Edward Bannister. She then divorced him in 1970 and married Donald Olsen. The next year, she divorced Olsen as well. Afterwards, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated by Dr. Abraham H. Center in Savannah. All of these events added up to a difficult and unsettling life for Emily and her children. Danny always told people he looked like his father, and that was why Emily hated him and "throwed" him away.
All three Hansford boys-Johnny, Billy, and Danny-had, at some point in their adolescence, lived at the Bethesda Home for Boys. Danny was there for most of 1972. The Bethesda Home was founded in 1740 as an orphanage on 500 acres of farmland south of the city of Savannah by evangelist George Whitefield. By the 1970s, Bethesda was no longer just for orphans, it also took boys from struggling single-parent homes, like Emily's family. At that time, the boys normally lived on campus and attended local schools, and some went home for the weekends. Today, the home has been transformed into Bethesda Academy, a private residential and day school for boys in grades 6 through 12.
It's hard to say how Danny fared at Bethesda, as the records from that era no longer exist. By age 13, Danny had come to the attention of school authorities because he failed most of his classes and skipped school excessively. The principal held Danny back in 1973, after he missed 45 days of school. In 1974, he missed 63 days of school, and school officials held him back once more in 1975. His grades were mostly Fs and Ds, but he did receive an A in art class. With less than an eighth-grade education and no interest in learning a trade, his job prospects were very poor. Instead, he picked up his education on the streets of Savannah, experimenting with LSD, marijuana, cocaine, various uppers and downers, and selling his sexual favors for money to buy drugs and alcohol.
By 1975, Emily realized that she could not cope with her son. The situation at home became progressively worse. On August 4, she asked the Chatham County Juvenile Court to take him because he was beyond her control. Danny refused to obey her, used drugs and alcohol, associated with friends of questionable character, and even struck her on July 2.
His case worker recommended Gould Cottage, a home for poor children. On August 20, Danny was ordered to live there. But Danny couldn't deal with the Gould Cottage rules and returned home, where he stayed for a few days and then disappeared without his mother's permission.
On August 27, Danny stole a pistol from his mother's bedroom. She filed a new petition in juvenile court, stating again that he was beyond her control. A month later, police arrested him and placed him in the county's juvenile detention center.
On October 10, he was put on probation and released to his mother, but he was back in court 14 days later for beating up his younger sister, Tracy Bannister. He hit her in the face and gave her a black eye. Judge Dickey placed Danny in the county's community treatment center, hoping that he would straighten up if he received therapy for his emotional problems. This option did not work out well for his mother because she had to provide transportation to and from the center, and it interfered with her employment.
In early December 1975, Danny tore a door off its hinges in the family's home when his mother refused to let him go to a friend's house. Emily took him to the Memorial Hospital Emergency Room to bandage up his hands and to have him evaluated for personality problems. After listening to Emily's story, Dr. Lester Haddad ordered a mental status exam. The test showed that Danny was alert and not hallucinating, but his violent rages were not normal. The doctor told Emily that her son needed further assessment by a psychiatrist and persuaded her to send him to Georgia Regional Hospital, a public hospital for the mentally ill. Dr. Haddad gave Danny a preliminary diagnosis of a personality disorder.
A psychiatrist at Georgia Regional, Dr. Simon Spiriosa, diagnosed 15-year-old Danny as having "unsocialized aggressive behavior" with emotional instability. Dr. Spiriosa wanted to keep Danny at the hospital for treatment, but Danny did not want to stay, and Emily did not agree to his continued hospitalization.
Every few months during 1976 and the first part of 1977, Danny's case worker or his mother petitioned the court about him: when given a choice of going to school or gainful employment, he would do neither. Instead, he ran away from home, refused to obey his mother; took a large knife to school, and violated his probation. Police arrested Danny several times and Judge Dickey confined him to the Chatham County Juvenile Detention Center for short periods of time.
In October 1976, Mrs. Penny Mitchell complained to the court that Danny threw a screwdriver and hit her son in the leg. Danny said he did it because Mitchell's son called him a "fag." Mitchell could have prosecuted Danny, but decided not to press charges if the court would convince Danny to leave her son alone.
In March 1977, Judge Dickey decided that it would be in the best interest of Danny and society to confine him in the Chatham County Jail [separate from adult offenders] until he could be transferred to a state reform school in Augusta. It's unlikely that he was ever sent to Augusta; because his mother was back in court again August 26 seeking to restrain him from causing bodily harm to her family and herself. Danny was living on West Jones Street in Savannah when police arrested him on October 10 for criminal conspiracy to burglarize Solomon's Drug Store on Bull Street.
On Dec. 16, 1977, Danny joined the US Air Force Reserves at the age of 17. It's very possible that after the October arrest, a judge persuaded Danny to enlist in the military rather than face prison or detention in Augusta. He was stationed at the Charleston, SC, airbase. Once he finished basic training, he enrolled in a training program for aircraft maintenance, but never completed it.
Sources familiar with Danny's military service said that he lasted only five or six months before he was discharged for behavior that was not tolerated in the military. He continuously showed up late for training with a dirty, wrinkled uniform, started a fistfight with another reservist, exhibited a generally poor attitude about the Air Force, and expressed a clear desire to leave the service. The counselors who tried to help him believed that he needed psychiatric help and was not suited to an Air Force career.
Once he returned to Savannah in the summer of 1978, it didn't take long for Danny to create problems for his mother. In early July, Emily signed a complaint against him for stealing a tire and the battery from of her car.
On June 30, 1979, Danny rented an apartment at The Confederate Manor. He had been drinking heavily and was angry about the noise that another tenant was making. He flew into a rage at his landlord, Howard Loper, who told Danny that he was doing everything he could to keep peace in the building. Not liking his landlord's answer, Danny picked up a chair and threw it through Loper's window. After that, Danny beat him up, damaged his car with a brick, and knocked down a post lamp. Loper, in fear of his life, picked up a wooden banister and beat Danny's head and arms. After the police arrested Danny, who was lacerated and bloody, they took him to the Memorial Hospital emergency room for stitches. After that, because emergency room physicians considered Danny a psychiatric emergency, the police took him to Georgia Regional Hospital, where he had been sent in 1975 after attacking his sister.
Nina A. Kelly, an experienced nurse at Georgia Regional Hospital, performed a preliminary assessment of Danny when he arrived on June 30. She evaluated him as homicidal and acutely psychotic. He was very angry and did not want to be admitted into the psychiatric hospital.
Dr. Aurel Teodorescu of Georgia Regional described him as hostile, aggressive, and psychotic. He said that Danny had lost contact with reality. The doctor ordered him to be secluded. The orderlies had to tie him down with leather straps to a steel cot to keep him from injuring the staff and other patients. Danny needed professional treatment, but he refused to get it. The next day, he asked to be signed out against medical advice. Danny said he did not understand why he was sent to Georgia Regional and wanted to get out as soon as he could.
Sometime in late spring or early summer, Danny rode up to Mercer House on a bike and stopped Jim Williams as he was getting out of his car with his psychologist friend, Dr. Lance Hamburger. Danny was looking for work. Jim hired him as a part-time employee to strip the finishes and upholstery from furniture and to help clean and repair two huge crystal chandeliers that had been damaged in transit from New York to Savannah. Danny worked part-time on and off throughout 1979.
One of Danny's most interesting relationships was with his very attractive girlfriend, Debbie. Because Debbie knew Danny so intimately over a period of time, investigators for both the prosecutor and the defense eagerly interviewed her about their relationship and Danny's personality.
Debbie was working behind the bar at O'Reagin's Lounge on Ogeechee Road when she met Danny around the beginning of February 1980. At the time, she was living in a trailer on Countryside Drive with another young woman who was dating Danny's best friend, George Hill.
In a lengthy interview with J.D. Smith, one of the prosecutor's investigators, Debbie said she dated Danny a week or so after she met him and went out with him until his death more than a year later. "It wasn't a super, super steady thing. I wasn't going out with any other guys, but still," she said. "Well, Danny was a really unstable person. He could be in a good mood one second, and then he could get real mad real easy." When Smith asked whether the sharp mood swings were his normal personality or became apparent only when he drank, she said, "Danny and his friend George drank all the time and Danny had a temper when he drank."
"He was fun at first," she told another investigator. "And he took me out to dinner at several places…And we'd go out dancing and things like that. When Danny wasn't stoned, he'd open car doors for you. He was sweet. He had like two different personalities. The real weird one and then he'd be sweet."
At the trailer that she and her girlfriend shared, Danny went out of his way to be cruel to her roommate. "He busted up her mirror that she had just bought and tore up her high school senior pictures," Debbie recalled. "And then he just stood there and laughed about it. You know, uncalled-for violence. And [her girlfriend] was crying. He got his kicks out of doing stuff like that. He told [her] she was ugly and fat and then he'd laugh. It was so much fun to him. He had a strange thing about hurting people's feelings. I'd tell him, 'Wait a minute. You can't go on doing this stuff to people.'"
Danny took Debbie to Mercer House many times during 1980 and 1981. Sometimes George Hill went along, too. Usually, they entertained themselves by playing cards, Atari games, or Psycho Dice-a game that Jim invented-and drinking.
Debbie said when they were together, nothing in Danny's behavior even hinted that he had any homosexual tendencies. Nor did Jim's behavior around her and Danny suggest that there was any sexual relationship between the two men. Danny was just too possessive for her to think that he wasn't strictly heterosexual. Debbie said that Danny didn't come on to her sexually very often except when they were at Mercer House.
Both Jim and Danny had deceived her about the reason why Danny was living at Jim's house. "The way both of them put it on to me was that Danny was one of Jim's charity cases, but that he was a super-good worker so he gave him a place to stay because Danny, him and his mother didn't get along at all."
Despite his growing obsession with Debbie, he didn't always treat her well. "Danny did a lot of drugs. He'd get mean," she said. "One time I told him to take me home, because he was too stoned and acting kind of crazy, and he slapped me in the face, and pushed me out of the car downtown. And I was walking home. Then he drove around the corner, it was on one of the squares, and he drove around and came back and wanted me to get in the car. And I didn't want to get back in the car with him. Finally he talked me into letting him take me home. But he did not take me home. He drove by Abercorn Street and I don't know where and he got pulled over for speeding. But anyhow, the police had to take me home that night."
According to Frank "Sonny" Seiler, Jim's attorney, Debbie recalled another instance when she and Danny were driving back from Tybee Island, a popular seaside vacation spot outside the metropolitan Savannah. Suddenly, he got mad at her, beat her up, and made her get out of the car. On a lonely road at night, he left her to find her own way home-alone.
Danny just couldn't stay out of trouble. On June 18, 1980, he attacked Robert Croyle, a landscape maintenance contractor. Croyle had been spraying 14 apartments for roaches for one of his clients, landlord Alvin Neeley, and knocked on the door of Danny's apartment. Neeley had given Croyle passkeys to each apartment and permission to enter the apartments and spray them if the tenant wasn't at home.
"I would start at the bottom," Croyle said, "and work up to the top floor. So Hansford's was the last apartment I got to: he lived on the top.
"And I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked again and waited. No answer, so I used the passkey. I couldn't get in the door because the chain was on inside and thought, well, he has to be here, so I hollered, 'Danny, it's Bob, spraying for roaches.'
"No response. So I called out again and there was no response. I locked the door back, sprayed the hallway, went home, had lunch, and went to sleep. About a couple hours later, there was a knock on my door (that) woke me up, and it was Danny Hansford.
"He yelled, 'You sprayed my cat with roach spray!' and he punched me in the eye and then turned around like he was walking off and I said, 'Wait a minute!' and he turned back around with a ring and hit me on the chin. It had a little thing sticking out to slice with. I had to have six stitches." (Danny had a piece of jewelry that he called his "fighting ring." On one side, it looked like a wedding band. On the other side, it had something that looked like a flattened nail with a triangular point at the end. He used to brag that he could tear a man's face to pieces with it.)
"And then he hit me in the knee and banged my head against the pavement," Croyle continued. "At this point, I grabbed ahold of him and got him on the ground and held him down. My hands are longer-arms are longer than his and he couldn't touch me. I said, 'Now, just stop it!'
"Finally, he quit flailing at me at arm's length. I told him, 'I'm going to let you up, but I'm going to go in the house and call the police and let them handle this,' which I did."
Well aware of Danny's reputation for violence, Croyle swore out a warrant. Danny asked Neeley to fire him, but instead Neeley told Danny to find somewhere else to live. Within a month, Danny had still not been served with the warrant because they weren't able to find him. However, Danny found Croyle and was ready to attack him again.
"I was coming back from the library down at City Hall with some books," Croyle said. "When I got up to Madison Square, Hansford was circling the square, hollering out his window, 'I'm going to get you! I'm going to get you!'
"He stopped his car and got out with the baseball bat and came after me. Of course, I didn't let him get close enough, hollering over to this lady that ran the restaurant over there, 'This fellow's attacking me with a baseball bat. Call the police.'
"She saw it and she yelled back, 'I'm going to do it right now.' And he heard that, and so he got back in his car and took off. I made a police report on that."
Shortly after he attacked Robert Croyle, Danny was hospitalized, but this time, the violence was inwardly directed. On August 7, 1980, Danny announced to Jim that he had taken 49 tablets of Jim's Limbitrol, a commonly prescribed combination of Librium, a mild tranquilizer, and Elavil, an antidepressant. Jim didn't believe him. When Danny passed out, Jim realized he wasn't faking, called his physician and, upon his advice, called an ambulance. By the time Danny reached the Memorial Hospital emergency room, he was unconscious-not in a deep coma, but unable to answer any questions or cooperate with any tests. Doctors at the emergency room pumped his stomach, admitted him to the intensive care unit, and kept him there for three days. Dr. Patrick Brooks, the internal medicine physician on call the night Danny was brought in, said that 49 tablets of Limbitrol can be a very lethal dose.
Danny's mother and Jim both told the doctor about Danny's violent, aggressive, and antisocial behavior. Jim said Danny had attempted suicide once before at Mercer House, although it was not documented in medical records at Memorial Hospital. His mother said he had homosexual tendencies, was a "charmer, who was often able to get his way," and had abused a number of different drugs. "As a child," Emily said, he was a breath-holder. He would turn blue and sometimes lose consciousness." The day after Danny was brought in, Brooks said, he became violent and verbally abusive in the ICU when he awoke, saying things that the doctor wouldn't dare to repeat. Brooks asked for a psychiatric evaluation, which is routine when a patient comes in with a drug overdose and a history of emotional problems. Danny was then transferred to Clark Pavilion, the secure psychiatric unit at Memorial Hospital.
After the suicide attempt, Danny left Savannah for several months, staying with his brother in Florida and working in a gas station. He had returned to Savannah and was living at 515 Lincoln Street when he was arrested for drunk driving on October 22. On October 30, Danny pleaded guilty to the two attacks on Robert Croyle. He listed Mercer House as his address. Jim's attorney, Robert Duffy, handled the matter.
Most of the people I interviewed who knew Danny had unfavorable views of him. Jim's close friends could not understand why such an attractive, intelligent, and cultured man like Jim would have anything to do with him. Not surprisingly, Jim did not introduce Danny to the socialites and luminaries that came to the famous Christmas parties nor to his wealthy clients. Still, a number of Jim's friends met Danny and they assessed his appearance and personality in considerably different ways.
As an adult, Danny was 5 feet, 10 inches tall, weighed about 155 pounds, had blue eyes, straight brown hair, and a brown mustache. He had tattoos on both arms: a Confederate flag and a marijuana leaf on the right arm, and a winged dragon-like figure and star-like figure on the left arm.
Joe Goodman, Jim's longtime friend, didn't think he was good-looking at all. Another man who worked for Jim said Danny was a "squirmy punk who would shrink away from people." A man who lived in Danny's neighborhood described him as "thin, not muscular, not bad-looking, but certainly not handsome." He added that Danny and his brothers were the neighborhood bullies. A salon owner who knew Danny called him "an unfixable car and a scumbag hottie. A wild child blessed with a large penis." Mike Hawk, who managed the Catherine Ward House Inn, had seen Danny several times in bars and disliked him intensely. To Mike Hawk, Danny came across as an untrustworthy, dangerous redneck, who was in no way physically attractive.
Some of the women I interviewed saw him somewhat differently. Jim's friend Diane Silver Berryhill told me that even though Danny "wasn't pretty, he had sex appeal. I could see why men and women were attracted to him." Ali Fennell, a bartender, likened Danny to a "rough diamond: attractive to look at, but rough around the edges. He was very good-looking, young and full of life."
Everyone seemed to agree that Danny was either high on marijuana or drunk most of the time. Nobody I interviewed thought Danny was nearly as attractive as Jude Law, who played him in the Clint Eastwood movie.
After Joe came into contact with Danny a few times, he asked, "Williams, what the hell are you doing letting this piece of shit live here? This kid is trouble and he's going to make you sorry someday."
As time went on and more of Jim's close friends came into contact with Danny, Jim manufactured a rationale for having this rude street hustler in his life. Jim told people that Danny was artistic and that he was trying to help him develop something positive in his life. Many were skeptical. Joe could not comprehend the relationship. Danny had repeatedly exploited and embarrassed Jim. Many of Jim's friends were aware of Danny's reputation as a male prostitute.
Finally, Joe asked, "Williams, why are you keeping this guy around?"
Jim answered simply, "He's good in bed."
There had to be more to it. Jim had access to many gay men. Perhaps something about Danny satisfied some inner, possibly unconscious, need. There may have been another more practical reason for Jim for putting up with Danny's continual demands for money, clothes, and drugs. Danny seemed to have the upper hand in private conversations with Jim, which Debbie had witnessed. Danny, who started his part-time employment in Jim's workshop, may have been aware that some of Jim's clients were being given perfect replicas of the antiques that they believed were being restored. Danny may have threatened to expose him.
Some of Jim's friends have shared their insight into the relationship with me. Miriam K. Center, a writer who knew both Jim and Danny, felt sorry for Danny. She saw him as a wild, crazy youngster who had been allowed to enjoy Jim's wealth, but not as an equal. Jim, she said, ate at good restaurants like the Chatham Club, but gave Danny money to eat at McDonald's.
Ali Fennell told me that Jim seemed to be attracted to danger and living on the edge. Danny was always high on weed and acted very cocky, she said. From what she could see, Danny played dumb, but was very street-smart. She couldn't really get to know him because he was always too drugged. She rarely saw Jim and Danny together in public, except occasionally, when they met up at the end of the night.
Randy Shuman, a friend of Jim's, saw the relationship as Pygmalion-like. Jim tried to help Danny make something of himself. He dressed Danny and tried to refine his street manners. However, from what Randy could see, it was pure exploitation: Jim kept giving and Danny kept taking, and always wanting more. No matter what Jim gave Danny, he never had enough.
Danny closed out 1980 with another arrest on December 30 in Dania, Florida, for reckless driving, DUI, possession of marijuana, and driving with a suspended license. The license suspension was probably a result of the October arrest in Savannah for drunk driving.
Debbie, Danny's girlfriend, believed he had a death wish: "We'd drive by a cemetery and he would say, 'When I die I'm gonna have a headstone that's gigantic.' He'd always talk about death…I thought it was awfully strange for some his age to be talking about grave stones. He said Jim would pay for his gravestone. I don't know why he said that. I told him, 'You don't need to be talking about dying, as young as you are.'"
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