Investigators in Alabama are reportedly examining a claim of possible elder abuse related to the upcoming publication of the second novel by Harper Lee, the 88-year-old author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

An old friend and neighbor of the reclusive novelist told the Guardian on Thursday that he had been contacted by an investigator from the Alabama human resources department asking about Lee’s welfare.

Controversy has raged since it emerged last month that Lee’s lawyer, local attorney Tonja Carter, declared that she had stumbled upon an unpublished manuscript of the novelist’s that was a forerunner to Mockingbird and, with the author’s agreement, it will be published as a book this summer by HarperCollins.

The announcement of Lee’s new book earlier this year immediately sparked questions about whether she had given fully informed consent to the publication and was capable of making an independent decision about it, given her failing health in advanced years, following a stroke in 2007.



Carter later issued a statement saying Lee was “hurt and humiliated” by claims that she was being duped by people who want to publish the newly revealed work, Go Set a Watchman, and the author was happy with the plan.



On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that at least one inquiry, by the state’s securities commission into whether the book’s publication involved financial fraud, had been closed after investigators spoke with Lee.



“We closed the file. Let’s just say that she was able to answer questions we asked to our satisfaction from our point of view,” state securities commissioner director Joseph Borg told AP. He said his agency’s investigation was opened at the request of the human resources department, which declined to comment to the AP.

Lee herself has not been seen in public in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where she lives in an assisted-living facility, or heard from directly since the news broke.



Reverend Thomas Butts, the retired pastor of First United Methodist Church in Monroeville, said he was visited by a state investigator earlier this week and had also spoken on the phone with the same individual, who also had a supervisor on the line.

“She asked me did I have any reason to believe that the lawyer is mistreating her,” Butts told the Guardian.

He said he told the investigator that he did not know “one way or the other”. He has just emerged from a lengthy stay in hospital after breaking his knee and leg in a fall and he had not seen Harper Lee since the funeral of the author’s sister last November and had not had a conversation with her for about a year, although he has known her since the early 60s, he said.

The Guardian has verified that the state investigator works at the Alabama human resources department, and has contacted her for comment. It is withholding her identity until she responds to the request for comment.

The department earlier on Thursday stated through its spokesman Barry Spear that it could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, owing to strict confidentiality laws.

The investigation has been under way since last month, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

Citing a source with knowledge of the investigation, the paper said officials interviewed Lee in February as well as employees of her assisted living facility, called the Meadows, and some of her friends following an unspecified complaint tied to the publication of Go Set a Watchman.

Since the news of Watchman broke, wildly contrasting portraits of Lee’s mental functioning have been reported from many claiming to know her very well and frequently be in contact – ranging from descriptions of her being lucid and independent in her thinking to those portraying her as forgetful, confused and depressed, with accounts that cover the spectrum by saying her degree of cogency depends on the day.

Butts advocated for the authorities to make their own expert assessment.

“The only way that anyone can know is to get an independent psychiatrist to come to give her an exam,” he told the Guardian.

Asked for his theory on the contrasting reports of her mental faculties, Butts said: “Those who know do not tell, those who tell do not know.”

Indeed, Butts’s own opinion of Lee has its contradictions. He said she had problems with memory and the best description of her in recent times had come from an account by author Marja Mills in an interview with the novelist’s late, elder sister Alice Lee, in which the sister said Harper Lee had serious memory lapses and “doesn’t know from one minute to the other what she’s told anybody”.

However, Butts said that despite some memory problems, and the fact that Lee is in a wheelchair and can barely hear or see: “There is nothing wrong with Miss Lee’s mental faculties as far as the book is concerned.”

“What is surprising is that after 55 years there is some kind of book, complete with all the punctuation and everything ready for publication. I’m very eager to see a copy,” he added.

Butts said that when he asked the state investigator for more details about the investigation being conducted by the state, the official declined to expand on her limited questions to Butts, saying confidentiality prevented her from discussing the nature of the investigation more widely.

Tonja Carter has not responded to a request for comment.

Monroeville inspired Lee’s legendary work, To Kill a Mockingbird, about social justice in the south.

As the decades slipped by since the 1960 publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, which brought her worldwide renown, Lee became almost as famous for her decision not to publish anything else and an increasing reclusiveness as for her Pulitzer prize-winning book.

Carter has been looking after Lee’s affairs since the author’s sister Alice, a lawyer and her longtime gatekeeper, died last November.

The state’s human resources department has reportedly sent adult welfare specialists to interview Lee within the last month, after receiving an anonymous call to an adult protective services hotline from a doctor who has not treated Lee but has known her for many years, the newspaper reported.

He told the paper that he asked the state to investigate whether Lee was too infirm to have fully consented to the publication plans of Go Set a Watchman.

Certain friends and caretakers of Lee have also reportedly been interviewed by state investigators.

Lee was capable of understanding investigators’ questions and giving cogent answers, the New York Times reported, citing an unnamed source who had been informed of the substance of the state’s interview with Harper Lee.