Casey Sepp
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Casey Sepp’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So if you go to the New York Public Library, you can look in the Capote archive at these extraordinary reporting notes that Harper Lee made for Truman Capote in 1959 and 1960 during their first few reporting trips in Kansas. Author, Casey Sepp. And, you know, she's an incredibly scrupulous reporter. She made these very detailed notes for him.
You know, it's basically a prosecutor's dream. He just admits to everything and says, you know, we're not going to dispute any of these facts, but we're going to try and contextualize them and we're going to give you a reason. And of course, you know, that is a bold strategy.
So they got married in 1949 and they stayed married until 1970. And by all accounts, the kind of outward account of their marriage was one that was happy and faithful. So the beginning of their marriage isn't as notable as what happened several decades into it in 1970.
And supposedly spent most of that night preaching and left his wife at home shelling peas and had told her to leave the phone on the hook because he was going to call when the revival had ended and he was on his way home so that she would know and What he says happened is he called home and she never answered.
And then when he finally got home from Auburn, she wasn't there and he didn't know what had happened to her. But he figured she was visiting a sister, which she did quite often. And so he went to bed and it was only several hours later when he woke up and she still wasn't home that he began to worry.
That very night, they found Mary Lou Maxwell dead several miles from her home. She was in her car, but what had looked from the outside of the car like a car accident wasn't that at all, and her body was quite beaten and quite disturbed.
When they began asking questions about the Reverend, they also learned that the marriage was not as happy as it had seemed in the kind of public facade offered by the Reverend to these congregations and to these places where he was invited to preach. And quite quickly, they were told that the Reverend had... been unfaithful to his wife and that there were several women.
And there was reason to believe that the marriage was not nearly as happy as the Reverend had led folks to believe.
And when the police went to speak with some of Mary Lou Maxwell's siblings, in fact, one of the very sisters the Reverend said she had probably been visiting that day, that sister said almost right away that she thought the Reverend had been involved and that probably he had murdered her sister.
asking for his checks. There was a kind of technical legal dispute over whether or not homicide constituted accidental death because he held all of these accidental death policies on his wife, which, again, at the start of things isn't, you know, isn't odd in any respect.
Obviously, many of us insure our spouses and it's considered good family planning to make sure that, you know, if you were to die, that your family would be provided for. But in the case of the Reverend, there were actually a large number of policies and some of them had been taken out not long before his wife's murder.
Between when Mary Lou Maxwell had been found murdered and the reverend's trial for her murder, Dorcas Anderson's husband had died under what some folks in the area felt were suspicious circumstances, and after his death, she then married the reverend. Dorcas Anderson's husband had ALS.
You know, there was a tremendous amount of gossip about how the reverend had gotten away with all this and how he had made so much money. The folks around Lake Martin really start to talk about the reverend, and they no longer think that he's just, you know, a hardworking mill worker or a gifted preacher. They start to wonder if he's not a voodoo practitioner.
Once again, her car was found abandoned on the side of a road in what seemed to be a staged car accident, although the external damage to the car did not at all explain the contents of the car, which was her body turned over in the front wheel well in a kind of unnatural position that the police once again felt certain had been staged.
By April of 1973, when he succeeded in getting the last one of these payouts, he had managed to cobble together $1,000 here, $3,000 there, $5,000 there. So actually a large number of policies, 17 in total, to get that $80,000.
You could walk into a bar and there might be a matchbook. And when you opened it, it had the five questions you had to answer. And for a quarter, they would give you a $1,000 policy. And these burial policies were very popular because for people, for working class people, all they really needed was enough money to cover their funeral and burial.
And that meant they wouldn't be a burden on their loved ones, even if they weren't a kind of profitable death. And so, you know, company after company around the country offered these kind of lower denomination policies. But The expectation was you would only have one, not that you would have 17 on the same person.
So if he knew your date of birth and he could somehow get a hold of your social security number, you know, he would mail away the reply card. And for a quarter, for 50 cents, for 75 cents, for a dollar, he would initiate these policies. And it was a full year before you had to pay a renewal fee.
So for about a year, you know, he would hold truly these insurance policies where in the event that that person died, you know, for a quarter he had made $1,000 or for 50 cents he had made $3,000. Eventually, life insurance companies started to catch on. So when these companies, when these insurance companies started to realize what was happening, they of course tried to stop payment.
And what happens then is what happens today in the event that, you know, you have a policy with... nationwide and, you know, your loved one dies and they try to stop payment, you have to take that insurance company to court. And that is what Tom Radney did on the Reverend's behalf. And, you know, again, he did it for the $1,000 policies and he did it for the $20,000 policies.
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