THE last day of Diane McIver’s life began at the ranch she shared with her husband Claud “Tex” McIver near Eatonton, Georgia. It is a handsome property, with a large pond in front of the house, longhorn cattle, horses in a paddock, horse-head statuary at the gates. The McIvers, says Howard Sills, the local sheriff, were ornaments of the community: she was “the life of the party”, he “a gentleman” with “consummate manners”. On that Sunday—September 25th last year—they played golf on a pine-lined course beside Lake Oconee, a favourite playground of well-to-do Atlantans. Mrs McIver, a fine golfer, was on good form. They stopped at a steakhouse next to the highway for what would be her last meal, then headed into the city.

They were on the way to their condominium in a swanky tower in Buckhead, one of Atlanta’s fanciest neighbourhoods. Mrs McIver, who was 63 and president of a marketing firm, had come a long way from her hard-up childhood in Alabama. She married Mr McIver, now 74 and, until recently, a partner in an employment-law firm, in 2005. Originally from Texas, after 50 years in Georgia he was well-connected in local politics. Subsequent events that evening are disputed, in a case that has come to encapsulate the city’s rifts and problems, including race, elitism and guns. Appropriately, it also involves Atlanta’s main bugbear: traffic.

The McIvers’ car was being driven by their friend, Patricia Carter, known as Dani Jo. Mrs McIver was in the front passenger seat, her husband sitting behind her. They hit a jam on what Atlantans call the downtown connector, a choke-point in the heart of the city where two interstates converge. Mr McIver had been dozing; waking as they left the highway, he became alarmed and retrieved a revolver that was kept in the car’s central console. A few minutes later, near Piedmont Park, Atlantans’ favourite park, the gun went off—accidentally, Mr McIver says. The bullet struck his wife. She died in surgery a few hours later.

If the outline is clear, the details are blurry. Initially, for example, Charles Crane, then a spokesman for Mr McIver, said he took out the gun in part out of concern over recent Black Lives Matter protests nearby, an explanation that irked some black politicians. Mr Crane also said the bullet was fired when the car struck a bump in the road. Both details have been disavowed by Mr McIver and his team: there was no bump, they clarified, nor any worry about Black Lives Matter. Instead he was discomforted by the area in which the party found itself when it detoured away from the congestion. (Homeless people, another doleful feature of Atlanta life, often loiter near that exit.) In Mr McIver’s account, he fell asleep again, awoke suddenly near the park, and the gun discharged.

The authorities’ view of the case has evolved, too. In December, after murmurs about their tardiness, Atlanta police charged Mr McIver with involuntary manslaughter and reckless conduct, charges suggesting that they, too, considered the death an accident. Mr McIver was released on bond. The district attorney’s office, however, had other ideas. It launched a search for what it alleged was Diane McIver’s secret will, which it accused Mr McIver of concealing. In court documents, Paul Howard, the DA, argued that the elusive will was “likely evidence of the motive in her death”. In April a grand jury was persuaded to elevate the charges to murder, adding several counts of interfering with witnesses, namely the spokesman, Mr Crane, and Ms Carter, the driver. The indictment alleges that Mr McIver told her to say she had not been present when the shooting occurred.

By then, he was in jail. The terms of his bond forbade guns, but a search for documents in his condo turned up a pistol in his sock drawer; his lawyers insinuated that it had been planted, but the judge was unimpressed. Later efforts to secure his release, pending trial, have been thwarted in part by prosecutors’ claims that Mr McIver—who served on the state election board, among other accolades—tried to sway the case from his cell. “I believe that this defendant, he is dangerous,” Mr Howard told the judge during a recent skirmish over whether Mr McIver was receiving preferential treatment. In an earlier clash, the DA tried and failed to prevent estate auctions of the dead woman’s clothes and jewellery. Unshaven, these days, and hangdog, glasses clipped to his smock, Mr McIver has clutched a bible as he shuffles into court.

Days in court

He denies meddling and has pleaded not guilty to all charges. He says he had no motive, financial or otherwise, to kill his wife; his team is adamant that the secret will is a fiction. “It was the perfect marriage,” Mr McIver said in a jailhouse TV interview. “He seemed very doting,” corroborates Mr Sills, the rural sheriff, who is not involved in the inquiry. Defence lawyers denounce what they see as “a trophy prosecution”, accusing the DA of withholding testimony that the shooting was an accident. That is said to have come from an Atlanta detective and Ms Carter (though her lawyer has said that she did not see what happened in the back seat). Also, most explosively, from the victim herself: a doctor who treated Mrs McIver recalled that she “said it was an accident without me prompting”.

The trial is scheduled for October. For now Mr McIver is confined behind the meshed windows of a squat, redbrick jail in Alpharetta, north of Atlanta. Still, amid the fug, a central element is stark and clear: the gun that killed Mrs McIver. Her husband had a lot of firearms, prosecutors note. Around 35 were taken from the ranch for safekeeping by Mr Sills, though “Here,” he says, “that’s not a lot of guns.” The revolvers that decorate the chandelier in the couple’s barn are replicas, he says. Mr McIver’s lawyers insist two old incidents that have come to light are irrelevant. In one, he let off a shot to scare a buzzard for a Buckhead neighbour; in the other, in 1990, he was indicted after firing in the vicinity of a carload of teenagers, in self-defence, he maintained. They settled out of court.

Keeping a gun in a car, as the McIvers did, is legal in Georgia, his team observes. (Whether it is wise is debatable: by one count, Atlanta leads the nation in guns stolen from vehicles.) And Mr McIver was well-apprised of the need for caution. Last summer he was appointed to an advisory role on the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Gun Violence.