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
And these cases went before juries. And, you know, the matter at hand was not only whether the policy was applicable or enforceable, but also to some extent whether some of these double indemnity clause applied and just how much money the reverend was going to get. Because as far as the insurance companies were concerned, he deserved zero dollars.
And as far as the reverend was concerned, he was owed, you know, double the face value of any of them. And so he succeeded most of the time in getting at least half of the face value of the policies. And That happened death after death, and a lot of people around Lake Martin were not only apprehensive of the Reverend Maxwell, they were apprehensive of his lawyer.
And so lucrative was the business of representing the Reverend Maxwell that when Tom Radney built a new law office, folks around Lake Martin called it the Maxwell House. And he was really one of Tom Radney's most notorious clients.
And for a long time, Tom insisted on the Reverend's innocence. And as far as the legal system was concerned, he was owed all of this insurance money. And it didn't matter that there was this pattern of death that followed him or this kind of profitable side to all of these deaths. But, you know, Tom was just doing his job as a lawyer and
He represented anyone, so why wouldn't he have represented the Reverend Maxwell? And, you know, while we were talking about it, he would say, you know, of course, a lot of African Americans were denied the kind of legal representation they deserved.
What the police thought when they arrived at the scene was that she had maybe been changing a tire. The lug nuts were removed and the wheel was off the axle and Shirley Ann was under the weight of the car. And, you know, once again, that was very quickly disproved by their investigation. It had just been staged that way.
And then actually she had been, the coroner's finding was that she had been strangled to death that day in June. And And once again, after their initial investigation, the police thought the Reverend was the most likely suspect. This was a tremendously difficult time for the folks around Lake Martin. It wasn't just that Shirley Ann Ellington was 16, which was obviously a scandal in its own right.
It was, of course, the fact that, you know, here again was another one of the reverend's relatives found dead under very similarly suspicious circumstances. And there was real terror and fear. And again, I think that inevitably when you look back at crimes like this,
You know, there's a kind of elegance in hindsight that makes things seem obvious, but for the people who lived in this part of Alabama, you know, this started in 1970 and here by the summer of 77, it just seemed like things were accelerating and it seemed more and more like there was nothing the police could do.
300 people were gathered into that funeral home and they were already on edge and they were already afraid. And they were all on top of the kind of straightforward earthly rumors about murder and methodology. There was this heightened fear around the kind of supernatural stories people told about the reverend and others.
Some people said he was wearing a bulletproof vest, and some people said he had more powders and poisons on his body, and some people said you couldn't even look him in the eye. So all of this was happening in this kind of saturated space of the funeral home, and there was so much talk. And so at Shirley Ann Ellington's funeral near the end of it, one of her sisters—
had been crying and had gone up to the casket to see her sister and cried out from the back of the funeral home, you killed my sister and now you're going to pay for it.
You know, it was a totally chaotic scene when the shots were fired and people didn't know what was happening and they didn't know where to go. And there was a kind of stampede to get out of the funeral home. And, you know, people on that street were instantly told, you know, Will Maxwell had been shot, you know, the reverend's been gunned down and everything.
So, you know, obviously there are 300 witnesses to this murder to some extent. You know, there were that many people there, and some of them were so scared they couldn't count the shots, and others of them claimed to have, you know, waited outside the funeral home to learn more about who had done it. And once word spread about who had fired the shots, it was immediately explicable to people why.
And to some extent, there was a kind of instant narrative about, you know, this vigilante. It was a man named Robert Burns.
So after Shirley Ann's funeral, if you can believe it, the reverend's funeral was even larger because there were so many people who came just to make sure he was really dead.
Yeah. I mean, one of the, you know, the kind of there are so many oddities and idiosyncrasies about this case. And, you know, it's not just the complexity of the insurance fraud and it's not just the kind of deep weirdness of the investigations and the failure to reach a kind of straightforward cause of death determination and the.
Just all of those kinds of ins and outs of what people knew and when they knew it and who was related to whom and this sort of business. Yes, one of the kind of oddest things about this case is right away when the reverend is gunned down, Tom Radney, this lawyer who spent so many years representing him, decides to take the case of the vigilante who murdered him.
Obviously, a lot of people wondered what was going on. Was he going to really defend Robert Burns? Was this an effort to protect the Reverend's reputation after his murder? Was it an effort to rescue his own reputation?
A lot of people thought, well, maybe Tom Radney was just trying to change the narrative about who he was and the kinds of cases he would take and that this was his way of atoning for all the years he had represented the Reverend and all the money he had made.
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