Ten years ago, Sheralyn Belyeu opened an Encyclopedia Britannica that her husband had bought for their family at a local thrift store. There are countless things you might expect to find inside an encyclopedia — the population of Madagascar, the first battle of the Civil War, the physics of light — but Belyeu, to her surprise, found a letter tucked inside theirs.
Right beside the entry for Harpers Ferry was a piece of fine stationery, at the bottom of which, beneath the words “love to you both” was the signature of someone famous not only where Belyeu lived in Alabama, but all around the world: Harper Lee.
The letter was dated June 11, 1978, 18 years after Lee had published “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It was a thank-you note to someone who had hosted a cocktail party in her honor in Alexander City, the largest of a handful of towns around Lake Martin in eastern Alabama. Lee mentioned that the reason she was in town was to work on a book. Everything about the letter was a mystery — the recipient, the book, the reason it wound up in an encyclopedia, the reason the encyclopedia wound up at a thrift store.
But for Belyeu, the letter was an opportunity. Having photographed and documented around 50,000 headstones for the online cemetery data site BillionGraves, she figured she could sort out the story behind a single thank-you note.
She began by looking for the women to whom the letter was addressed — a mother and daughter, it turned out. When she couldn’t locate them, she went looking for Lee’s older sister Alice, who lived across the state in the tiny town of Monroeville. A lawyer who practiced her whole life in their father’s law firm, Alice Lee was used to handling her sister Harper’s affairs, taking care of everything from contracts and copyrights to autograph requests and fan mail.
When Alice Lee got Belyeu’s letter asking about Alexander City, she responded by saying that Harper Lee had indeed done research in town on a true-crime story that caught her interest, but no longer had plans to publish a book about the case. Alice told Belyeu to do what she wished with the letter, so Belyeu donated it to her alma mater, Brigham Young University.
But the story doesn’t end there.
I found the letter a few years later at BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library when I was just starting to research my book, “Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.” The letter that Belyeu donated was one of hundreds that I chased over the last few years: checking every postmark, tracking down every recipient, researching every name mentioned, noting every date on a calendar and marking every return address on a map.
Harper Lee was a famously private person, but she was also a prolific letter writer, so her correspondence was often the best sources of information on the nonfiction book she had tried writing in Alexander City. Lee had gotten interested in a strange, sensational case that had made headlines during the summer of 1977. A Baptist minister had been accused of murdering five of his family members for the lucrative life insurance policies he held on them, and at the funeral of the last alleged victim, a vigilante shot and killed the reverend in front of 300 people.
But the case’s peculiarity continued.
It turned out that reverend’s own lawyer went on to defend the vigilante who murdered his former client, and that when asked to explain how the reverend had gotten away with killing so many people, many people around Lake Martin said that he was a voodoo priest.
Having helped her childhood friend Truman Capote report the murder story in Kansas that became the true crime classic “In Cold Blood,” Harper Lee had a template for the research she was doing around Alexander City. She interviewed the vigilante and the lawyers involved in the case, along with relatives of the victims, law enforcement officers involved in the murders and locals around town who had lived through the original crimes.
Lee even got to know some of the local newspaper reporters who had covered the story, including one young writer whose mother had thrown a cocktail party in Lee’s honor before the novelist left town in June of 1978. That was the very party for which Lee had written the thank-you letter, saying in it how much she had enjoyed her time in town and signing off by joking, “I’ll be coming back until doomsday.”
When Lee wrote the letter, she was still wildly optimistic about her new book. She’d just spent nine months in Alexander City, interviewing countless sources and gathering a mountain of material. She had even settled on a title for this new project: “The Reverend.”
Why Lee never published that book, and why she struggled to publish anything in the years after “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is one of the many mysteries at the heart of my book. Although I was able to interview a lot of people who knew Lee well, I always felt like the best sources of information about her work on “The Reverend” and her life in general were her letters, which I found in Manhattan where she lived much of her adult life, in Monroeville where she was born and raised, and in archives and attics around the country.
That’s why I’m so thankful for all those who took the time to talk with me, or wrote down their memories, or let some loving family member make an oral history of their lives, or even just gathered up their letters and donated them to some public institution. But I don’t think there’s a single document in my book more illustrative of the fragility of history than the letter that the Belyeu family donated to BYU after finding it so unexpectedly, taking the time to rescue it from oblivion — another name for which, of course, is doomsday.