Sonny Seiler: Lawyer took a lead role in oddball true-crime drama

A 1981 killing in Savannah made Sonny Seiler famous and gave birth to the book and film Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil.

Frank ‘Sonny’ Seiler, the patriarch of the long line of Georgia Bulldog mascots all named ‘Uga’.

Jim Williams was a self-made man who, when young, moved to the genteel Georgia coastal city of Savannah, the wide streets of which were overlooked by imperious mansions with fussy gardens dating back to the American Civil War.

By the time the antiques collector and dealer arrived, many of these grand houses needed help.

Across 35 years, starting in the late 1950s, he bought and restored perhaps 50 of them. In 1969 he bought and rehabilitated the 1860 Italianate Mercer House, built for Confederate general Hugh Mercer, whose great-grandson, songwriter Johnny Mercer, wrote Moon River about a local waterway.

As the arrogant Williams rose in southern society, he hosted extravagant parties in these houses, invitations to which were prized. But it was the last of them, on May 1, 1981, that made his name.

After the Mercer House guests went home Williams and his young gay lover of two years, Danny Hansford, 21, had one of their regular tiffs that escalated into violence. We have only Williams’s version of what happened in the first hour or so of the following day.

Jim Williams outside Mercer House in 1981. Picture: Savannah News Press

Certainly, Hansford pushed over a 200-year-old English grandfather clock, then entered the study where Williams sat. The young man pointed an antique Luger pistol at his lover. He misfired or the safety catch was on and the gun did not fire. Williams pulled a loaded antique Luger he presumably kept in his desk for such an occasion and killed Hansford with three shots.

This killing, the four trials that followed and the eccentric locals involved at its periphery have led, so far, to a bestselling book – Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – a Clint Eastwood film of the same name and an enduring tourism bonanza for Savannah.

Williams was charged with murder on the morning of the killing and released on a surety of $40,000 hand delivered in cash in paper bags before the sun came up. He was defended by Shakespeare-quoting lawyer Bobby Lee Cook but, despite the costly legal team, was convicted and sentenced to life, though set free on a $300,000 bond. This is when another legal luminary, Sonny Seiler, stepped in.

Down south, Seiler was also known for owning and breeding the bulldogs that are the mascots of the University of Georgia sports teams. It started in 1956 with his bulldog named Uga. They have all been called Uga. Today’s is Uga XI. Seiler took them along to the events each weekend, and America’s most famous sports mascot once even starred on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

The Seiler team had an early break when police reports of the event were leaked to them and showed they had not followed proper procedures. At the retrial, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned Williams’s conviction.

Then new evidence emerged: the police had not “bagged” and tested Hansford’s hands for gunshot residue. Seiler oversaw the defence at a third trial, after which a female juror stuck out for a not-guilty verdict. After a long deliberation the jury returned an 11-1 verdict of guilty. A hung jury. Another trial.

Kevin Spacey (left) as Jim Williams and Jack Thompson as Sonny Seiler in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

This was held in Augusta so as not to draw on Savannah residents who, by then, had fixed opinions about Seiler’s client. Williams had sought the guidance of a voodoo priestess, who advised him to “ask the boy for forgiveness”. He declined. Williams was acquitted at the Augusta trial – his fourth – in May 1989. On January 14 the following year he fell dead at home next to the desk where, had Hansford shot accurately – or at all – he might have been killed nine years earlier. He was 59. Voodoo diva Minerva said: “The boy did it.”

In the early 1990s, New York journalist John Berendt travelled to Savannah to capture the trials and characters (which included some cross-dressers and an invisible dog) for his famous book that took up residence on The New York Times bestseller list for a record 216 weeks.

In 1997, Eastwood made his mystery thriller of the story that starred Kevin Spacey as Williams, Jude Law as Hansford and Jack Thompson as Seiler. In an unusual twist, Eastwood asked Seiler to act as Judge Samuel L. White because he figured Seiler looked magisterial and would not have to learn the lines. He’d already know them. Seiler then moved into acting and was given roles in the films The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Gingerbread Man.

He will be buried in Savannah’s Greenwich Cemetery next Tuesday alongside his wife and not so far from Hansford.

Frank “Sonny” Seiler. Lawyer. Born Savannah, Georgia, February 20, 1933; died Savannah, August 28, aged 90.