Jim Williams, an antiques dealer and one of Savannah's leading private restorationists, shot his 21-year-old assistant Danny Hansford at Mercer House on Monterey Square in the early hours of 2 May 1981, and called police just before 3 a.m. Williams said Hansford had fired a pistol at him first. Prosecutors said he had staged the scene. Over the next eight years he was tried for murder four times, and the case became the backbone of John Berendt's 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The National Registry of Exonerations counts it among its cases. Much of the case turned on Hansford's hands, which tests found free of gunshot residue.
Police said the hands were bagged at the house. Juries convicted Williams in February 1982 and October 1983, and the Georgia Supreme Court threw out both verdicts: the first because prosecutors had withheld part of a police report about an earlier bullet hole in a bedroom floor, the second because a detective had testified as an expert that the scene was staged.
Before the third trial, defense attorney Sonny Seiler found a nurse who testified that she had wrapped the hands in plastic garbage can liners at the hospital, which a defense expert said could wash residue away. That jury split 11 to 1 for conviction and a mistrial was declared on 9 June 1987. The fourth trial, moved to Augusta, ended in acquittal on 9 May 1989. Williams died at home in Mercer House on 14 January 1990, aged 59.
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32.0714, -81.0956
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