Trials of a Dead Lawyer’s Wife: A True Story

By Maggie Redmon

In 1997, Maggie Redmon was divorcing her disbarred husband, Scott, so she wasn’t at the hospital when his girlfriend Brandi—a defrocked nurse he’d met in drug treatment—gave conflicting versions of exactly how and when he’d fallen deathly ill that morning. At the funeral home visitation, Maggie learns that Scott changed his will mere hours before he died and bequeathed half a million dollars to Brandi, the last person to see him alive. Using the medical and legal knowledge acquired in her career as a disability examiner and professional counselor, and her decade as a civil court mediator, she embarks on a quest for truth and justice. Southern noir meets memoir in this riveting true story as Maggie encounters more bodies on Brandi’s watch; blind eyes in the offices of the sheriff, the coroner, and the medical examiner; and an unlikely white knight who champions her cause.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664188549

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Copyright © 2021 by Maggie Redmon.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 08/13/2021

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Contents

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter 1 Unholy Alliances

Chapter 2 The Arrangements

Chapter 3 Unrest for the Weary

Chapter 4 Irony in the Fire

Chapter 5 Brave New Whirl

Chapter 6 Happy Days

Chapter 7 Red Flags in the Sunset

Chapter 8 Breaking News

Chapter 9 Banned from Kmart

Chapter 10 Boy Interrupted

Chapter 11 In the Valley of the Shadow

Chapter 12 The Morning After

Chapter 13 Cold Storage

Chapter 14 The Data with Disaster

Chapter 15 Blind Eye

Chapter 16 Clean and Sober—and Still Dead

Chapter 17 Divorce After Death

Chapter 18 The Concrete-Murder Man

Chapter 19 In the Crosshairs

Chapter 20 Don’t Drink the Green Smoothie

Chapter 21 A White Knight and Shades of Gray

Chapter 22 The Kidney Underground

Chapter 23 Dig This

Epilogue

For Rosemary, and in memory of Pamela.

With deepest love and gratitude to you both for showing me the way.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T HE STORY PRESENTED in this book is true. However, names, locations, and other identifying information have been altered to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. Medical records, correspondence, legal transcripts, and recovered computer documents, while sometimes abridged, are quoted directly except for such modifications necessary to protect confidentiality. There are no composite characters and few composite scenes. In writing this book, I have depended upon my own notes, journals, research, personal interviews, and memories of these events during this period of my life. Only those people and events not relevant to the essence of this story have been omitted. Finally, my apologies to Richmond County and the city of Augusta, Georgia: we all know you had nothing to do with any of this.

Every day in America, nearly seven thousand people die. And when it happens suddenly, it’s assumed there will be an investigation, like in CSI. But the reality is very different.

        Post Mortem: The Death Investigation Crisis in America

        PBS Frontline, February 1, 2011

        Written and Produced by Carl Byker and Lowell Bergman

PROLOGUE

S OME DECADES ARE worse than others. But even when one’s spouse has departed this life under a cloud of scandal and disgrace, the good Southern widow must endure the ghastly ritual of the funeral home visitation, which generally involves an open casket and lots of clucking and whispering by curious Southern Baptist busybodies. I was prepared for stares and whispers as I made my way to my widow’s post next to my husband Scott’s body. The fact I was in the middle of my third divorce—from a disbarred lawyer who had been banned from every Kmart in the state of Georgia—ratcheted up the gossip factor. I was also prepared for the distasteful likelihood I would soon come face-to-face with the woman Scott had taken up with during his recent stint in rehab. But now he was gone, and I was determined to keep my composure.

I had no idea of the trouble I was walking into. I wish now I had paid more attention when Rose Bearclaw delivered her prophecy of doom.

* * *

W E GAZE AT each other across a scratched tan dinette table in my friend Carole’s efficiency apartment at the Sandcastle Inn, a funky ’50s motel on Highway 98 in the Florida Panhandle.

I’d rather be down by the blue-green Gulf with my husband, Scott, reading a good murder mystery and debating the all-important question of where we’ll dine tonight. But over my protests, Rose Bearclaw, who lives nearby, has insisted on doing this psychic reading for me. She’s dropped by to visit her old friends, Carole and her husband, Jeff; she says that she wants to read for me because of her regard for them. So too polite to refuse, here I sit, holding hands across the table with a sixty-something fortune-teller who looks like George Washington in drag.

She closes her eyes and offers a rambling prayer to deities of every stripe, then slips into a trance. I see you with this gigantic foot over you, she says, like it’s going to come down and crush you. It’s as big as a skyscraper, and you’re running around under there like Chicken Little.

Rose smiles happily, as though she finds this amusing. But I’m having a nice life—I don’t want to be crushed by a gigantic foot.

They’re telling me that all you have to do is move over, that you don’t have to be destroyed. But you’ve got to move out of the way. Nobody else is going to rescue you. You’ve got to save yourself.

Great. Move out of the way of what? And who are ‘they’? But Rose isn’t slowing down to answer my questions.

And now I see your husband—Scott, right? She winces. I see him leaving the practice of law.

I haven’t told her that Scott is a lawyer.

He’s sitting at a table with several old men, like judges or something, and they’re telling him he has to surrender his law license, something about moral turpitude.

But why? What’s he done? I can’t fathom such a disaster—Scott and I don’t have problems like moral turpitude. I look past her through the picture window, to Scott, reading and sunning in his beach chair, oblivious to Rose’s dark vision.

Eyes still shut, Rose squeezes my hands. You’re going to get through it. And Scott is going to get to higher ground.

Higher ground? What do you mean higher ground? Rose makes higher ground sound like a hard place to get to. And what is the it I’m going to get through?

Her voice is firmer now. You must promise not to discuss this reading with your husband.

Okay, right. Of course. I glance again at Scott. A giant foot? Moral turpitude? Surely not.

Back in trance mode, Rose’s voice softens. Now I see him lying facedown on a table. He’s nude, and there’s a hole in his spine.

Good God! Do you mean he’s going to die? Does somebody shoot him?

Her eyelids flutter. Maybe what they mean is that Scott has a weakness, that he’s spineless in some way. Or that he dies spiritually, and then he’s reborn. I’m not sure what this means.

Well, he’s a recovering alcoholic and addict, but he’s been sober for many years. Does it have something to do with alcohol and drugs?

Yes, but it’s more complicated than that. Scowling, Rose shakes her head like a dog after a bath, flinging disturbing possibilities in every direction. Then her grip tightens.

I’m sorry, Maggie, I can’t tell you the rest.

CHAPTER 1

Unholy Alliances

I T’S HARD TO divorce an ex-lawyer, especially one who has acquired a fat bank account and a bad attitude. In February 1997, I sat in the office of Claude Harkness, my attorney, watching his denim-blue eyes crinkle in concern as I spilled out my marital woes. I could hear my voice shake as I broached the subject of divorce.

I was really hoping you guys could work things out, Claude said. I saw Scott at an AA meeting a few weeks ago, and he told me you were about to take a Caribbean cruise. I believe he actually called it a second honeymoon. He shook his head. But I have to say, I was afraid it was too good to be true.

Well, I guess you were right. He relapsed on scotch the first night and stayed drunk the whole time. And he admitted he’s back on methadone.

As Claude winced, I took a deep breath and tightened my grip on the arms of my chair. It was pretty awful, Claude. He moved out last Saturday as soon as we got home. I’m sure he’s gone back to that girl in Augusta.

I fell silent, wiping away tears with the back of my hand. I saw Scott looming over me as I cowered in the prison of our tiny cruise-ship cabin, his evil grin and liquored breath paralyzing me with fear. It would be a while before I would find the courage to level with Claude—or myself—about Scott’s brutal abuse in the throes of his relapse.

Claude pushed a box of Kleenex toward me. He was twenty-five years sober himself, and he had witnessed a lot of casualties on the slippery slopes of abstinence.

Maggie, you knew Scott Walker was a snake when you picked him up.

I know, but he was such a pretty snake, and I thought he’d been defanged. He was sober for twelve years. I figured if he ever relapsed, he’d just go to more twelve-step meetings.

Sugar, I don’t think he’s coming back from this one. In fact, I predict he’ll be dead in two years. He’ll either get himself killed or kill himself. He’s ruined his life. What’s he got to live for?

But don’t you think divorce papers might get his attention? I asked. I just want him back in treatment. We’ve had a lot of good years together. If he could get sober again, I think we could pull this out of the ditch.

Claude looked at me like I’d just lied on the witness stand. Nah, I’m telling you, Maggie, Scott doesn’t have another recovery in him. I’d love to see him get sober again. I’ll even file the papers for free just to show you how much I care. But you need to face the facts. He’s a disbarred felon and a hopeless opioid addict. He’s driving three hours a day just so he can get zonked at the methadone clinic in Atlanta.

My chin sank to my chest. It was all too much. Scott had practiced law in Macon, Georgia, for fifteen years since his valiant rise from the ashes of alcohol and heroin addiction. He had come calling on me a few years after he’d cleaned up, his dark good looks ironically evoking Robert Downey Jr., complete with photographic memory and genius IQ. With our mutual passion for books, music, and theater, we were soon inseparable. Scott proposed within the year.

For most of our eleven-year marriage, we were a fortunate yuppie couple, happily sucking down the oysters of money and comfort afforded us by Scott’s success as a plaintiff’s attorney and my career with the state of Georgia as a disability adjudicator and rehabilitation counselor. He tended his sobriety carefully, doing the AA shuffle at least three nights a week. After attending several Alcoholics Anonymous open meetings with Scott, I eagerly turned to Al-Anon, AA’s twelve-step group for family and friends of alcoholics. My late brother had favored scotch and pot, my bipolar father had indulged in a stunning array of prescription pills, and my elderly mother was soaking her days in wine and sherry. As the only nonaddict in my family, I was qualified for Al-Anon long before Scott came along.

Over the next decade, our biggest problem as a couple was finding a decent local mechanic for the Saab and the Porsche—that is, until Scott was busted for forging Lortab prescriptions in the aftermath of minor outpatient sinus surgery. I had slogged along with my errant husband for three years following his arrest. But now his law practice was down the toilet, he was shacked up with a defrocked nurse he had met in drug treatment, and he was decimating our million-dollar nest egg at a record clip.

Claude leaned forward, piercing my painful reverie with his intense gaze. Maggie, listen to me. That girlfriend of his, what’s her name?

Brandi Scruggs, I said glumly. Did I tell you she got kicked out of nursing for stealing drugs from a hospital pharmacy in Augusta?

Yeah, well, let me tell you, she’s just a blip on the screen. Scott’s got way bigger problems. His whole identity is wrapped up in his law practice, and the district attorney is going to make damn sure he never practices law again. Without that, Scott’s going to crash and burn. He tilted back in his chair, crossed his arms, and waited for my response.

I thought about the $16,000 in credit card advances Scott had run up in my name to get drug money. My new creditors had begun dunning me just as Scott and Brandi were bonding in their so-called recovery. Now he, or rather his evil twin, was thumbing his nose at me as I tried to get him to assume responsibility.

Okay, okay. I wiped away more tears. You’re probably right. Go ahead and file the papers. I don’t know what else to do.

Good girl. Now, the first thing we need to do is get him under a financial restraining order. We know he’s hemorrhaging money on the girlfriend. Plus, he’s already on probation, and if he’s back on methadone, he’s probably also buying it on the street. I’m betting it won’t be long before they lock his ass up.

Scott got downright hateful when he was hit with the divorce papers, even though he had agreed to accept service in care of his attorney Cash Conley, Macon’s preeminent legal cutthroat. He flouted his financial restraining order and raided our savings to foot the bill for a luxury apartment in Augusta for Brandi and himself.

While Claude lobbed threatening letters at Cash, Scott spent the next few months bobbing and weaving to avoid a court appearance. In June, he was thrown in the Macon-Bibb County jail for a dirty drug screen just as my mother, Alma, was diagnosed with inoperable metastatic lung cancer. She was given eight weeks to live and was immediately started on a brutal course of daily radiation in the hope that her massive tumor would shrink enough to make her more comfortable and give her a fighting chance with chemotherapy. Each morning before work, I drove her to the oncology clinic. Each afternoon when I left the office, I swung back by her house to fix her supper and help with the chores.

Scott detoxed from methadone for the two weeks he was behind bars awaiting a probation revocation hearing. I declined his probation officer’s invitation to attend the proceedings. I was exhausted from caring for Mother while I stumbled along at work, and I couldn’t bear the thought of being anywhere near Scott. Also, I didn’t want him to know about Mother’s condition. Since I was her only surviving child and principal heir, I was sure he would try to use her near-certain death as an excuse to give me an even smaller share of our marital assets. That was the sort of scrofulous legal strategy Scott was prone to at that point. Thank goodness, we’d had no children; they would have become only collateral damage in his guerrilla divorce.

He got off light in court. Claude reported that the judge merely transferred Scott’s probation to Augusta and ordered him to cycle back through the treatment center there so that he could get straightened out. Scott checked himself into Charter Green Hospital and right back out again as soon as the mandatory seventy-two-hour holding period expired.

* * *

M Y SISTER-IN-LAW, CORRINE, phoned me at work on a Friday afternoon, less than a month after Scott’s release from jail. Scott was comatose in an Augusta hospital, probably as the result of a drug overdose, and was not expected to live. Corrine told me that Brandi had called for an ambulance at about nine-thirty that morning when she couldn’t rouse him, and she’d told the EMTs that Scott had been suicidal. Recalling Claude’s dire prediction just five months earlier, I was not surprised. In fact, I didn’t seem to feel much of anything except a profound numbness—I’d been on emotional autopilot since the day Scott had been hauled in on felony drug charges.

Thanks to my late father, Mac, I was a past master of emotional autopilot. My bipolar dad had the first of his many psychotic breaks when I was seven. Throughout the next two decades, always heavily medicated and well-armed, he would periodically descend into chaos and barricade my mother, brother, and me in the bedroom, threatening to kill us and himself with a loaded semiautomatic handgun or a razor-sharp dagger.

I had learned early on that my best chance of surviving severe turbulence was by staying calm and riding it out, powering down and detaching to conserve energy for the whole awful episode. For the last three years, I’d quietly grieved myself sick over Scott’s relapse, disbarment, and infidelity. Now my mother was dying, and so was the husband I’d loved so deeply. But as numb and empty as I was, I was still Scott’s wife, and I needed to go to him.

I’m leaving now, Corrine—I’ll be there about six. I just need to call Aunt Marjorie to see if she can take supper over to Mother tonight, and make sure somebody can drive her to radiation on Monday morning.

But Corrine was adamant that I not make the three-hour trip from Macon to be by his side.

Maggie, please don’t come over here and subject yourself to this, she begged. He won’t know you’re here, and Brandi Scruggs is hanging around, making a scene.

Well, okay, then. I guess I’ll head out to Mother’s house and wait there. I was still torn as I recited Mother’s phone number for Corrine, but also relieved. The idea of seeing Brandi Scruggs at my dying husband’s bedside sickened me.

It was a choice I would soon regret.

As I left my office, I decided, still in shock, to swing by the beauty shop for a quick trim and a manicure. I needed somewhere to park my wagonload of grief for a while, somewhere I would be hugged and petted and taken care of before I became a widow. If I’d been a party girl, I might have hit my favorite tavern and cried on my bartender’s shoulder for an hour or so. But I needed a laying on of hands, not four fingers of whiskey. The gang at the shop had stuck with me through this whole mess; they knew how to soothe away my pain. Plus, there was nothing I could do but wait, and I did want to look as good as possible for the funeral, especially if the younger other woman was going to be there.

I brought Perry, my stylist, up to date as he draped me in lavender plastic and tucked me into his big chair. The rest of the staff and customers at the Get Ahead in Life Salon eavesdropped as I discussed Scott’s imminent death.

Honey, I’m just so sorry, but maybe it’s for the best, Perry murmured as he fiddled with my chin-length brown bob. I mean, look at yourself. You’re so thin, you’re about to blow away. Between this mess with Scott and your mother being so sick, I don’t think you can stand much more. You’re worn slap out, and your poor mother could go any day now.

I nodded, regarding my pale, gaunt face and sad blue eyes in Perry’s big mirror. I was worn out. Beneath the shimmering cape, my thin shoulders, rubber-band arms, and bony hips protruded from the baggy khakis and polo shirt I’d donned that morning for casual Friday. I looked like a hound dog with a bad case of worms.

But by the time Perry and the manicurist had worked their magic, I was back in survival mode. As I left the shop, I even had a determined spring in my step. It was too late to save Scott, but maybe it was not too late to save myself.

Scott’s mother, Hazel, called me at Mother’s a little after ten that evening to tell me Scott was dead. He had expired thirty minutes earlier after being removed from life support.

They did a CT scan, and they say his brain was just full of blood, she reported. Hazel’s bland tone befit her latest Sunday school minutes, not the details of her favorite son’s untimely death. They think he had a ruptured aneurysm. But at least he didn’t kill himself. The doctor said he really didn’t have any drugs or alcohol in his system to amount to anything.

For once, I had to agree with my mother-in-law. There was some comfort in knowing he had died sober.

The body was being sent to Melvin Ware’s Funeral Home in nearby Wheaton where Scott’s parents lived. I told Hazel I would be at her house at eight the next morning to go with her and Scott’s father, Big Jim, to make the funeral arrangements.

When I hung up, my first thought was that Scott was finally at peace. Mother, weakened from a month of radiation, cried with me when I told her he had died. She had once been his biggest fan, and his tortuous downfall had broken her heart. Ever since Scott’s arrest, her chest had ached with dread every time she opened the morning paper, fearing she would find another embarrassing headline about her son-in-law. I was convinced the relentless stress had played a part in the onset of her lung cancer.

After we’d both cried ourselves out, I told Mother I needed to be alone, and I drove to my own house twenty miles away to prepare for the difficult days ahead. My beloved Scott was gone for good, and my mother would probably be not far behind. And soon, I suspected, my grief would be further complicated by having my nosy mother-in-law, Hazel, breathing down my neck as I sorted through the detritus of Scott’s recent bad behavior.

Walking through my front door, I felt a rush of gratitude for my comfortable old house in the tiny village of Rocky Falls, a rural remnant of a once-bustling river town. Mother had deeded it to me several years earlier. The rambling gray Victorian cottage, with its ancient oak trees, big bay windows, and green skirt of a porch, was a family heirloom. My grandfather had proposed to my grandmother in the living room on their first date, my parents had moved there as newlyweds, and it had been my home for most of my forty-seven years, a family matriarch who had lived my history with me.

I had begun renovating the place just as Scott’s troubles were starting. He and I had fled to Rocky Falls from suburban Macon for the peace of village life among my mother’s tolerant relatives. I had already buried my only brother, my father, and my grandparents. But despite the vicissitudes of my star-crossed Irish clan, the Rocky Falls house always welcomed me unconditionally, solace I sorely needed that night.

I went straight to my room and fell onto the bed, sobbing for over an hour until my old mantel clock chimed midnight. Forcing myself up, I dried my tears and tried to think what to do next. Like a robot with a dying battery, I plowed through my personal papers and fished out Scott’s will. It all seemed straightforward. I was the sole beneficiary and executor of his million-dollar estate.

Throughout our marriage, I had worked as a master’s-level counselor for people with disabilities, and I had contributed my fair share to our savings. But given the fact we were divorcing, I was prepared to relinquish some of the estate to Scott’s parents. This inclination did not spring from any great generosity, but rather from the fact that I knew my miserly mother-in-law was going to be a problem. Early in our separation, I had found a letter that Hazel had sent Scott, offering to help him hide assets from me during the divorce.

Sign everything over to me, and I’ll make sure that Maggie doesn’t get it, she had written.

Hazel had given Scott a lot of financial help when he had first started his law practice, and even though that was long before he and I were together, I was certain she would make my life even more miserable until she’d commandeered a chunk of our assets. In countless whiny phone calls, she had feigned love and concern for me during our separation, but I knew from my sister-in-law Corrine that Hazel had already started playing up to Brandi Scruggs in an effort to please her spoiled middle son.

* * *

H AZEL CALLED ME at seven the next morning.

Have you found Scott’s will? Before I could answer, she added, Who are the beneficiaries?

Even knowing Hazel as I did, I was put off by her lack of grief and her rabid interest in my husband’s money. I gave her the rundown and told her I intended to see that she and Big Jim got a share once things were settled. Then I called Claude to tell him about Scott.

Oh, sugar, I’m so sorry. You know I was afraid of this. Claude sounded battle weary, a soldier for sobriety who had lost a comrade in arms. I filled him in on the details, and he said he would be glad to shift out of divorce-lawyer mode and handle the estate for me.

We agreed to meet the following week, and I began to feel that, with Claude’s help, maybe this whole tragic saga could at last draw to a dignified close.

When I headed out the door to meet my in-laws, I ran into my seventy-year-old bachelor cousin and next-door neighbor, Sidney. As we stood talking in the front yard, my fragile sense of peace quickly shattered. A trusted confidant, Sidney had been privy to all my frustrations about Scott’s relapse. When I told him that Scott had died, Sidney’s smooth, plump face tightened into a knot as he unleashed a dire caveat.

You’d better watch it! You get in there, and you take your rightful place as his widow. If you don’t, I’m telling you, his family and that girlfriend of his are going to push you aside. Sidney then launched into a sad tale of a friend who had been upstaged at her estranged husband’s funeral, and he insisted that I not let Scott’s service likewise turn into a tacky circus.

In Sidney’s previous life, he must have been a Washington hostess. He innately knew how such things worked, and tackiness was a peril to be avoided at all costs. Wearily, I realized he was right—Hazel and Brandi, in their unholy alliance, would do their best to squeeze me out. Dreading the role I knew I must play, I girded my loins for my rendezvous with my in-laws.

As soon as I arrived at Hazel and Big Jim’s house, I saw that Sidney had hit the mark. Prominently displayed on the mantel in their living room was a framed headshot of an evening-gowned