20
Advisaries
SMITH AND COLLINS reported the results of their interrogation of Alvin Neelley to Igou the next day.
“He admitted everything,” Smith told him. “That he raped Lisa in Scottsboro, that he knew about her murder, everything.”
“Except that he was at the canyon when Lisa was killed,” Igou said. “He didn’t admit that.”
“He denies it,” Collins said. “My guess is, he always will.”
Igou nodded. “But is he telling the truth?”
Smith shook his head. “The fact is, we don’t have any physical evidence linking him to that canyon at all.”
“And Judy backs him up one hundred percent,” Collins added. “According to her, Alvin was nowhere near the canyon.”
Igou sat back, letting his eyes roll toward the ceiling. “Why was she picking up girls? What was in it for her?”
“Sex,” Smith answered. “At least that’s the way Alvin tells it.”
Igou had his doubts. “It’s possible,” he said, “but I’m not sure we’re looking for a sexual motive in her case. Maybe it was part of it, but I think the sex was for Alvin. With Judy, it was something else.”
“But what?” Smith asked.
It was a question whose answer Igou would ponder for a long time.
Only a few hundred yards away, Robert French, Jr., Judith Neelley’s defense attorney, had questions of his own. Only a few days before, Judge Randall Cole had asked him to serve as Neelley’s court-appointed defense. Reluctantly, after voicing his protests, he’d acceded to Cole’s request. Not long after that, he’d actually met Judith Neelley in her cell in the basement of the Dekalb County Sheriff’s Office. They’d spoken for some time, and she’d given him a letter to be delivered to her husband, one that exonerated him from having any part in her crimes.
At the end of this initial interview, French could hardly remember having had a more negative reaction to a client. That evening, when his wife asked him what Judith Neelley was like, he described her as “the real thing, a cold-blooded killer.” A night’s sleep had not softened his opinion, and the next morning, when members of his staff asked him what he thought of his new client, he told them that as far as he was concerned, Halloween had come early. Still later that same day, he told his co-counsel, Steve Bussman, that he did not like Neelley, but that he would do the best he could for her, then let them cart her off to Georgia where they’d “fry her eyeballs out.”
At fifty years of age, a slender, classically handsome man, French had risen to become one of the South’s most successful attorneys. He was also one of its most politically active. A Republican in a state that voted largely Democratic at the local level, he had twice run and twice been defeated in bids for a seat in the United States Congress.
But his legal practice had flourished, and the rewards of his success surrounded him. At the beginning of the trial, as he would later say, he had been a millionaire several times over, the owner of a private plane, with which he’d actually buzzed the town, and a white Rolls-Royce, surely noticeable symbols of his position in a town as small as Fort Payne, Alabama. In addition, he owned a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house on the mountain, various residential properties, a fifty-two car rail siding, thirty-two acres of prime industrial real estate, and a half-million dollars worth of industrial machinery.
For the last few years French had lived lavishly and well, and as he freely stated, he had developed an ideology to go with his status. His politics were those of a staunch conservative Republican, and he was a strong advocate of the death penalty.
But all of this was about to change as French launched into his defense of Judith Neelley, surely one of the most passionate ever offered in an American court.
Like the local earthquake it would finally produce, it began, as it were, with a series of motions. The first was that Neelley be considered under the Youth Offenders Act. Under this statute, an offender under the age of twenty-one could make application for youthful-offender status and waive the right to a jury trial.
On December 1, Judge Cole allowed the motion and ordered that a probationary report be done to determine whether she should be granted youthful-offender status.
Within a few days the report was finished. It noted that Neelley had committed, been charged with, and convicted for numerous criminal offenses. She had lived as an adult, committed the crimes of an adult, and in the judgment of the report, she should not be regarded as a youthful offender.
On the basis of the report, Judge Cole denied Neelley status as a youthful offender on December 17, a step which, in effect, ordered that she be tried as an adult.
At that point Igou read the state of Alabama’s three-count indictment of murder, abduction with intent to harm, and abduction with intent to terrorize and sexually violate.
To this indictment, Neelley pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity, a double plea that would allow the jury the option of freeing her entirely with a not-guilty verdict or remanding her to the custody of a mental institution in the event of a finding of insanity.
The defense then asked for a ten-day continuance in order to make an additional plea. Cole granted the motion and set a trial date of March 7, 1983.
The defense also requested that a psychiatric examination be done, and Judge Cole granted the motion.
Pursuant to this motion, Neelley arrived at Bryce Psychiatric Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on January 18, 1983. For the next two days she was subjected to examinations of her mental status on the day of her admission, an evaluation of her mental condition by the three-member Lunacy Commission, psychological assessments, a social history, a physical examination, and a general extended observation.
The findings in Tuscaloosa were not encouraging to the defense. Neelley was found to be, in the technical language of the commission’s subsequent report, “oriented in good contact and cooperative.”
In addition, her general demeanor struck her observers as appropriate to her “thought content.” She told members of the staff that she had trouble sleeping, but that she had no desire to commit or tendency toward suicide. There did not appear to be any disturbance in the content of her thought processes. She was not delusional, and her memory was good for both recent and distant events. Upon examination, she was able to give a chronology of events in her life from the time she left home to get married to her arrest and incarceration.
Psychological tests administered on January 20 showed Neelley to be in the superior range of intelligence, “with no indications of organic involvement.”
There was, however, some suggestion of a personality disorder that the report classified as “either of the passive-aggressive or dependent type.” She was also said to suffer from “situational depression.”
Still, according to the report that the Lunacy Commission submitted to Judge Cole on February 9, Neelley did not suffer from any mental deficiency or disorder that would serve to “diminish her criminal responsibility.”
Judith Neelley could stand trial.
It was now four and one half months since the death of Lisa Millican.
While French filed motions and Judith Neelley sat for psychiatric evaluations, Igou continued to make those decisions that were necessary in the case. His first determination was that a charge of murder could not be made against Alvin Neelley. The problem was in the physical evidence; there was not one thing to connect him to Lisa’s murder. Time and time again Judith Neelley had exonerated her husband. Repeatedly, in statement after statement, she had declared that Alvin had had nothing to do with the killing, that, in fact, he had been miles away, barreling down Highway 59 toward Gadsden, Alabama, at the very moment when Lisa Millican had been marched to the edge of the canyon and shot in the back. On the first night of her incarceration in Fort Payne, she had written a letter that the FBI had later seized and in which she stated once again, this time in writing, that Alvin had not been involved in Millican’s death. Such statements, along with the utter lack of any physical evidence against Alvin Neelley, made it impossible to press an indictment for murder. He could be charged with rape by Scottsboro officials and with various other crimes connected with the kidnapping of John Hancock and the shooting of Janice Chatman in Georgia, but as regarded his activities in Dekalb County, Alabama, no case could be made.
“It’s just Judith Neelley now,” Igou told Smith and Collins. “She’s the one we’ve got a case against. We’ll have to leave Alvin to other jurisdictions and hope they’ve got enough to nail him.”
During the next few weeks, the prosecution began to build its case in earnest, assembling, cataloging, going over the forensic and other physical evidence, interviewing witnesses, then deciding on the order of their presentation.
As part of the process, Smith began to read the vast correspondence that Judith and Alvin had written to one another during the time of their respective incarcerations. There were hundreds of letters, all written in neat, curiously similar scripts. “I spent hours and hours reading those letters,” Smith recalled. “And at the end of it, I really felt like I knew Judy Neelley, what she was like and what her relationship with Alvin was like, and I can tell you this, it didn’t make me one bit less determined to prosecute her.”