ALEXANDER CITY, Ala. (AP) – Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Harper Lee politely knocked on truck driver Robert Louis Burns’ door in rural Alabama one day more than three decades ago and asked him about the preacher he killed.
The plainly dressed writer wanted to meet the man who had stood up in a crowded Alexander City funeral home in 1977 and put a bullet in the brain of a preacher who was rumored to have dabbled in voodoo and suspected in a string of deaths in this riverside county.
“She came up out of the blue. She said I’m Harper Lee. She said I’m interested in writing this book about the reverend.” Burns, now 74, recalled.
Lee, the famed author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” came to the textile town beside the Tallapoosa River, about 70 miles southeast of Birmingham, in the late 1970s to research a true-crime novel based on the bizarre tale of possible serial murder, the occult and courtroom drama. Her visits were reminiscent of her trips to Kansas in the early 1960s, when she helped her childhood friend Truman Capote research his acclaimed murder story, “In Cold Blood.”
Lee worked on the Alabama book for months, maybe even years, but it never materialized. Now even her notes are nowhere to be found, giving rise to another mystery: What became of the novel she had tentatively titled “The Reverend”?