The court overturned Jim's second conviction because the state had improperly introduced evidence-the trigger-pull demonstration-during closing arguments, and Jim's attorneys had no opportunity to rebut the testimony. The court also ruled that Det. Everette Ragan was improperly allowed to testify to conclusions that the jury could have drawn on its own. The first reversal had been unanimous, but this reversal was a 4-to-3 decision. Jim's luck with the Georgia high court was running thin, and his finances were showing the strain. Lawton, however, was in good shape, having been re-elected. Seiler, the man who swam 14 miles in rough waters in 1955, was up for another fight.
After the reversal and 21 months in a substandard county jail, Jim got a $250,000 bond and returned to his beloved Mercer House on July 3, 1985. Much damage had been done to his finances He figured that it cost him over a million dollars to defend himself in the two trials. To post the bond, he had to put up Mercer House as part of the deal.
Heavy local publicity and two murder convictions made jury selection difficult. "I think that Savannah has been pretty much brainwashed against me by the media," Jim said. It became clear that despite the second trial's careful jury selection, he could not get a fair trial in Savannah. Seiler wanted the third trial moved to another city. Despite his concerns that a new venue might turn out to be an ultra-conservative city with an even greater bias against homosexuals, he petitioned the Superior Court for a change of venue. Judge Oliver refused.
The defense team came up with ways to streamline the jury selection without compromising its goals to keep people with biased opinions off the jury. The first day, 200 people filled out a lengthy questionnaire designed as a quick first screen to weed out candidates with unacceptable views. The streamlined process seemed to work, and by May 26, final jurors had been selected and opening arguments scheduled. The defense had learned its lesson about sequestering the jury and did not require it for this trial.
The jury was composed of three men and nine women. One woman was selected as an alternate.
Staleness haunts the third repeat of a trial, except that after the second reversal, prosecution witnesses were more cautious about their testimony. Essentially, they were the same witnesses with the same testimony, and the jury left wondering which experts to believe. In the first two trials, jurors believed the local detectives, supported by the state crime lab staff, over the defense's impressive expert witnesses. The prosecution had no reason to think this bias would change.
The gunshot residue was still the thorniest issue for the defense. While Seiler's experts could rail against the reliability of the gunshot residue tests and show a number of factors that reduced gunshot residue, it was tough to convince the jury to disregard the complete lack of gunshot residue on Danny's hands. The other problem the defense had to resolve was the chair over Danny's pants leg. Lawton had used the chair as proof that Jim had staged the death scene.
The prosecution began as it had in previous trials with Joe Goodman, a key witness for the timing and activities of the May 2 shooting. Because Joe was the first civilian to arrive, when Seiler cross-examined him, he asked Joe if he had seen a chair straddling Danny's body.
"No, I didn't see a chair," Joe replied. "There was no chair." His testimony about the chair was in stark contrast to the prosecution's photo of the scene with the chair on top of Danny's pants leg, giving more credence to the theory of police moving things at the scene.
As he had done twice before, Lawton called Det. Joseph P. Jordan to the stand to explain the importance of protecting gunshot residue at the death scene by attaching brown-paper evidence bags to the hands of the deceased and securing them with evidence tape.
"The hands are bagged to prevent any foreign substance from accidentally getting on the hands in being moved from the scene to the hospital or a sheet or having a funeral-home person accidentally touching and contaminating the hands or wiping any gunpowder off," Jordan authoritatively told Seiler during cross-examination.
Seiler asked Jordan what time he bagged the hands, but he didn't remember. Nor did he remember whether he had bagged the hands by himself. He also didn't remember the color of the evidence bags or the type of evidence tapes used.
Jordan told Seiler that he removed the evidence bags from Danny's hands and swabbed them before the autopsy. Seiler then asked him if they were the same evidence bags that he had placed on Danny's hands. Jordan said, "I had no reason to think that they wouldn't be."
In what was quickly becoming a dull rehash of two previous trials, Seiler injected a showstopper: He called Marilyn Case, a former assistant head nurse in the emergency room of Candler General Hospital, as a rebuttal witness. He not did have to notify the prosecution that she would be called.
When Seiler asked her about her experience, Case said she had resigned her position as assistant head nurse and took a less-demanding position as a staff nurse in the emergency department so that she had more time to work on her MBA. For four years, she had served as Chatham County Assistant Coroner. If the coroner, Dr. James Metts, was not available, she would go to the site of a death and decide whether the body should be held for autopsy.
She was on duty as the assistant head nurse in the Candler Hospital emergency room at approximately 8 a.m. on May 2, 1981, when Fox & Weeks funeral home employees delivered the body of a gunshot victim who was dead on arrival, referred by the coroner. She prepared a medical record, as she did routinely when a patient or a body came into the emergency room.
Seiler showed her the first page of that record and she testified that it was a true and correct copy of the record she created that morning at the hospital.
She explained that the body was brought in on a Fox & Weeks stretcher. Case said, "One or two employees assisted myself and the two funeral home men to pick up the body on the sheet it was laying on, on their stretcher, and transfer it to one of my stretchers. The coverings that were on top of the body, including the purple funeral-home cover, were returned to the funeral home."
Case said she observed the appearance of the body and read what she had written in her report: "White male via funeral home with multiple gunshot wounds in head and chest. White shoes, gray socks, blue jeans, black belt, and pink striped shirt was left on the body."
"Dr. Metts was at the scene at 3:45 to pronounce the patient dead. Dr. Metts stated that the patient was limber at that time. At 9:30 a.m., I charted that rigor mortis was very pronounced and complete."
Seiler then spoke: "All right, now, stop right there for me, please, ma'am. Tell this jury, Ms. Case, please, ma'am, whether or not this deceased's hands were bagged when you received him at the hospital."
"No, sir," Case replied, "they were not."
"Now, did you receive any instructions from the coroner concerning the management of the body?" Seiler asked.
"Yes," she said. "Prior to the body coming into the emergency department, Dr. Metts called me, asked me to bag the hands in the department. He also asked me to have the skull, chest, and abdomen x-rayed for bullet placement, and when I was completed with that, I should notify Det. Jordan of the Savannah Police Department."
Reading from her document, she said "I personally, myself, 'bagged the hands bilaterally in the emergency room, per MB Case.'" She used a plastic garbage bag on each hand and wrapped adhesive tape around each bag to secure it to the wrist. She then put a sheet over the body, which was sent to the radiology department for the x-rays Metts had ordered. Once the radiological work was completed, the body was brought back to the emergency room. It stayed there until 12:15 p.m., when it was transported to the morgue to be held for autopsy.
On her record, Case documented that Metts called her. She wrote that she received the body at 7:52 a.m., and she included his instructions about bagging the hands, ordering the x-rays and calling Jordan, which she did at 9:45 a.m. Case showed the jury her written record, including the place where she charted that she personally bagged the hands bilaterally in the emergency room and initialed it.
"Did you ever see or talk to any police officer in connection with this work?" Seiler asked.
"Other than notifying Det. Jordan at 9:45, as I was instructed, that's the only time I had anything to do with the police," she said.
"Where are these records kept at the hospital?" Seiler said.
"In the medical records department," she told him.
"And would it have been available to anyone to see if they had presented the proper authority to see it?" Seiler asked.
"Yes," she answered. She also told him it would have been kept with the autopsy records in one folder.
Case acknowledged she was contacted about this incident for the first time a few days before the trial began, when Seiler visited her along with co-counsel, Don Samuel.
Because six years had passed, she did not immediately remember the incident until she saw her handwriting all over the record, but she had no doubts whatsoever about the accuracy of the report.
Marilyn Case's testimony, which directly contradicted Jordan's testimony on the most critical aspect of the prosecution's case, must have horrified Spencer Lawton. Worse, if her testimony held up, it meant that Lawton's witness had taken the stand and perjured himself in three trials. Unprepared for this surprise, Lawton had to cross-examine her and hope that he could find something to generate doubts about her claims. According to Nancy Amons, who was covering the trial for WTOC in Savannah, Lawton looked flustered and humiliated as he cross-examined Case.
By the end of Case's testimony, the defense had established that Danny's hands had been moved around without bags to protect any gunshot residue while investigators removed his long-sleeve shirt to photograph and assess his wounds at the scene. His bloody body was then wrapped in sheets and funeral-home coverings, and he was loaded onto a stretcher by the funeral-home employees. When they reached Candler Hospital's emergency room, the stretcher was unloaded and the funeral-home employees removed the bloody sheet and wrappings. At the hospital, Danny's body was rewrapped in Candler Hospital sheets and loaded onto the hospital's stretcher-all before his hands were bagged. His hands may have moved around, rubbing against his shirt sleeves, blankets, sheets, and stretchers-potentially rubbing gunpowder off his hands and mixing it with the blood from his wounds.
When it came time for Atlanta medical examiner Dr. Joseph Burton to testify again about the unreliability of gunshot residue tests, he commented on Marilyn Case's shocking testimony. As an ER nurse, she didn't have the brown paper evidence bags used by the police to bag hands, so she used plastic garbage bags.
"I'd be surprised if there was residue on his hands," Burton said, considering how Danny's hands were handled. Plastic bags are "an absolute no-no" in preserving gunshot residue. Burton also explained that the residue begins to disappear after three hours, and Danny's hands were not swabbed until approximately six hours after they were bagged.
Another defense expert, Dr. Irving Stone, from the Dallas crime laboratory, also testified that he would be surprised if any residue remained on Danny's hands.
Lawton quickly improvised his closing to downplay the now-suspect residue test as only "one piece of evidence among many." Instead, he emphasized the 36 minutes that Jim supposedly had available to stage the destruction of antiques and rearrange the death scene. Then he pointed out that the furniture that was damaged was not very expensive compared with many of the valuable antiques that were readily available to a man on a rampage. He concluded with an emotional note: "What Jim Williams didn't do in those 36 minutes was call for an ambulance. He's been described as a compassionate man who makes contributions to the Humane Society. Well, he didn't even call the Humane Society to come check on Danny Hansford."
Lawton appealed to the jurors to be the conscience of the community. We can't have separate standards just because the defendant is wealthy, he said. Jim Williams killed Danny on a whim. He was tired of him, Lawton told the jury.
Seiler had plenty to say in closing about the quality of the prosecution's case: a grand theory unsupported by the evidence. The investigation was a circus, with cops running all over the house, making coffee, making jokes, moving things around. Too busy to bag Danny's hands and then they lied about it-for six years. Seiler told the jury that Marilyn Case's document destroyed the prosecution's credibility.
The case went to the jury on June 5, but it soon became obvious that they would not reach a unanimous verdict. One woman refused to vote for Jim's guilt. She was the sole person on the jury who had experienced a life-and-death situation not unlike the one Jim described with Danny. When her boyfriend tried to strangle her, she grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him severely enough to stop his attack, but did not kill him. She wasn't going to give in to the other 11 people who wanted her to vote against her conscience.
On Tuesday, June 9, 1987, a frustrated and angry Judge Oliver declared a mistrial. Jim was allowed to remain free until the decision after a fourth trial.
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