by Lynn Hamilton

Murray Silver doesn¹t want to be remembered for Great Balls of Fire, a book he wrote about Jerry Lee Lewis that was made into a successful feature film.

Trouble is: Silver hates the film. And it seems it will never die. It¹s on television somewhere every night, he says.

So when Silver returned to his home town of Savannah, he hoped to capture some stories that would bring Hollywood back here to do a film‹a film that shows a more positive view of Savannah than did Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

He¹s found the perfect story, he thinks. It¹s set in 1923 when the president of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta sailed to England to dig up the remains of General Oglethorpe and bring them home to Georgia. The little church in Cranham, England, where the general is buried, was happy to surrender Oglethorpe¹s bones. But wind of the disinterment got around and the local English kicked up a protest. Before long, the queen was involved.

If it didn¹t happen to be true, it would be the kind of thing you would see on Monty Python¹s Flying Circus, Silver says. And, as it happens, former Python actors John Cleese and Michael Palin are interested in the movie rights to the story.

³Dem Bones² is one of a dozen stories in Silver¹s latest book, Behind the Moss Curtain. Key sources for these tales, all true down to the last detail, Silver asserts, are a group of elderly men who meet for snacks and chat at McDonald¹s on Derenne Avenue. Silver started meeting with this informal group, which includes retired grocer Tony Yatro and retired promoter Buster White. Silver credits the older men with giving him a number of historical leads on untold Savannah stories.

The title story, ³Behind the Moss Curtain,² is a hundred-page retrospective on Savannah¹s notorious ³butcher murderer.² In 1945, a young man named Luther Aids was brutally murdered, and Jesse McKethan was tried and executed for the crime. Silver first published the story several years ago in Connect Savannah where it was segmented into six installments.

Silver says that, when he started researching the story, he visited Bonaventure Cemetery where Aids is buried. Silver says a number of ghosts followed him home from the cemetery that day‹restless souls who wanted the story of the murder retold‹the right way. These ghosts wouldn¹t let Silver rest until he had uncovered important truths about the case that had gone neglected.

³There was unfinished business,² says Silver.

Searching through newspaper clippings from the period, Silver found subtle indications that McKethan was believed to be gay, though neither police nor reporters would come right out and say so.

But Silver came to his own conclusions about the McKethan trial, and he wasn¹t convinced. An early brain injury had left McKethan unable to perform sexually with either men or women, Silver says. The young man¹s preference for the company of men might relate to the recent death of his three brothers.

What most appalls Silver about McKethan¹s story is that the psychiatrist who examined him refused to declare him insane, preferring the word ³abnormal.² Silver thinks that evasion may have influenced the jury to find McKethan guilty. So a boy who should, by all rights, have gone to a hospital, went, instead, to the chair.

Silver¹s story about the butcher murderer has garnered a great deal of attention. Actor/director John Turturro has talked to Silver about the screen rights, but Silver says he doesn¹t want to make the story into a movie. Midnight in the Garden of Evil may have put Savannah on the map, but Silver thinks it¹s in bad taste to make a tourist attraction out of murder.