The telephone rang at two-thirty in the morning. Clients often called Tom Radney’s home, so the lawyer knew right away why Reverend Willie Maxwell was on the phone at that hour. This was the first time, but it would not be the only time that the Alabama preacher called Radney after being accused of murder.

Maxwell’s wife had been found beaten to death in her car. Two years later, his brother’s dead body was found on the side of a local highway. Then his second wife was found dead in her car. Four years passed, then his twenty-three-year-old nephew was found dead in his car. Finally, on June 11, 1977, seven years after that late-night phone call, a fifth relative, Maxwell’s step-daughter, was found dead under one of the front wheels of his car. His family was prone to automobile accidents, and the reverend was partial to taking out mail-order insurance policies in their names.

One by one, Tom Radney represented the self-ordained preacher as those deaths were investigated. The young lawyer ignored what some folks around Tallapoosa County whispered about his client having a secret “voodoo room,” and he paid no mind when others started calling his law office in Alexander City the Maxwell House. But before the final case closed, as the death of Maxwell’s step-daughter was still being investigated, the girl’s uncle fatally shot Maxwell in the head. Radney would represent the uncle, too, arguing that he was insane when he killed Maxwell in front of hundreds of witnesses at the girl’s funeral.

Tom Radney knew that the six murders, the two clients, and all their trials were the caseload of a lifetime, and less than a year after Maxwell’s death he convinced one of the most famous writers in America to write about them. Harper Lee moved to Alexander City to research the book, which she tentatively titled “The Reverend.” She had read about Maxwell in the newspaper, but it appears that Radney’s eagerness is what kept her on the case: he gave Lee all his files, and she evidently spent months interviewing everyone who knew anything about Maxwell.

Many gave up on Harper Lee ever publishing again, but the Radney family never did. Though Tom Radney died in 2011, his wife, children, and grandchildren continue to believe that “The Reverend” might appear. For almost forty years, they’ve been waiting for the nonfiction novel—perhaps something like “In Cold Blood,” the book Lee helped her friend Truman Capote write about the Clutter murders in Kansas. Last month, when HarperCollins announced that Lee would finally publish another book, the Radneys thought it might well be this one. It wasn’t, but they haven’t given up.

They even have their own mustard-seed-sized reason for keeping the faith: a chapter of the book that the family says Lee sent to Radney. It’s four typed pages, each one littered with handwritten “b”s because, apparently, that key on Lee’s typewriter stuck. She numbered the pages by hand, scribbled “The Reverend” in the top margin of the first page, and wrote out a concluding paragraph on the last. The preacher appears by name, but Tom Radney is called Jonathan Larkin, one of many indications that Lee planned to stretch the facts of the case into fiction.

The Radney family shared a copy of the manuscript with me, on the condition that I not quote from it. The chapter begins dramatically with that early-morning telephone call, when the Reverend Maxwell asks the Lawyer Larkin for his help. There are only six paragraphs, just over eleven hundred words, but they form a sweeping chapter that traces the Larkin family history from the shores of Ireland to the sandy soil of Alabama. Lee only sent Radney these four pages, but she told him many times that she had written more. “I have accumulated enough rumor, fantasy, dreams, conjecture, and outright lies for a volume the length of the Old Testament,” Lee told another writer, Madison Jones, who was researching the case. In a 1987 letter now housed at Emory University, Lee wrote to Jones: “I do believe that the Reverend Maxwell murdered at least five people, that his motive was greed, that he had an accomplice for two of the murders and an accessory for one. The person I believe to have been his accomplice/accessory is alive, well, and living not 150 miles from you.” But, she wrote, “I do not have enough hard facts about the actual crimes for a book-length account.” Still, she and Radney stayed in touch for years after this, and he was convinced that she was still working on the project.

It’s easy to see why Radney wanted Lee to tell his story, and even easier to imagine why she would’ve found him so appealing a character. Born in 1932, Tom Radney studied education and history at Auburn, then got a degree from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1955. He was drafted into the Army, and after serving in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps he returned to his home state and opened a law office. He married a woman named Madolyn, and they started their family in Alexander City.

Tom Radney in 1968.

Big Tom, as friends and family knew him, became known around Alabama as Mr. Democrat: he was elected to the state senate in 1966, having gone six years earlier to the Democratic National Convention to nominate John F. Kennedy. “Tom was the quintessential yellow dog Democrat,” Madolyn Radney told me. “But unfortunately he was too progressive, too liberal.” He served only one term. Maxwell presumably hired him because Radney was one of the only white lawyers in town who would defend black clients. He was the Atticus Finch of Alexander City, in other words, and the Maxwell cases made him famous. By the time he defended Maxwell’s killer, in 1977, national newspapers and magazines had come to Alabama to cover the trial. “Lawyers like to be on the stage,” his wife reflected. “They like audiences, and they like performing, so of course Tom thought this should all be a book. He and Harper Lee would even talk about who would play him in the movie.”

The book, as Lee seems to have planned it, would follow Radney through all the legal maneuvering that kept Maxwell out of jail and flush with over a hundred thousand dollars in insurance payments. It was August of 1970 when Maxwell’s first wife, Mary Lou Maxwell, was found beaten and perhaps even strangled; some newspapers reported that a rope had been discovered near her in the car. But the star witness for the state, one of Maxwell’s neighbors, Dorcus Anderson, changed her testimony after she became the second Mrs. Maxwell, providing her new husband with an alibi for the time of the murder. With Radney’s help, Maxwell was found not guilty and collected ninety thousand dollars from the insurance policy he owned in his first wife’s name.

When, in February of 1972, Maxwell’s brother John was found dead near the town of Nixburg, the cause of death was alcohol poisoning and exposure. But officials suspected that John might have been forced to drink all that alcohol and then left by the side of the road to die. They found no viable evidence, however, and Maxwell never faced trial. Maxwell’s second wife, Dorcus, was found dead in September of that same year, at the age of twenty-nine. Like the first Mrs. Maxwell, she was found in her car. Officially, she died of acute asthmatic bronchitis, but the autopsy noted a long, deep laceration on her forehead. Again, Reverend Maxwell faced rumors but no trial, though Tom Radney had to fight harder this time for the insurance settlement. Almost two years later, the Court of Civil Appeals of Alabama finally found in Maxwell’s favor.