Johnny Madison Williams - 19 August 1994

In the long ago, the late great Elwyn Brooks White, EB White, the writer who set the original urbane ironic tone of the New Yorker magazine who wrote a piece, a poem as a sort of treatment for a bad case of news bulletin overload. He tuned in the evening news on several stations, it was all radio in those days, found each of them jittery with some scandal or other and finally settled on one station, one favourite commentator who piled so many horrors and disasters into his snappy 10-minute broadcast that he acted like a kind of vaccine, a quick shot of the disease itself which would give you immunity to it. The man's name was Boake Carter famous from Alaska to Florida in the 1930s who, however, suffered the usual fate of even the most distinguished journalists – oblivion. EB White's poem was almost tender in its recall of the hideous pleasure that Boake Carter had given him at end of day when he delivered his usual lullaby of world decay.

Here's part of EB White's tribute to him. "I like to hear him summon us With all things ominous: Munitions makers, plotting gain, Asylums bulging with insane, Cancers that give no hint of pain, Insurgency in northern Spain, And rivers swollen with the rain. For Boake, Has spoke, And it's no joke."

Nobody today, no commentator on television or radio can match Boake Carter as a master of disaster, but if EB White were alive today, he could by a mere flip of the wrist collect as many scary headlines as Carter packed into his 10 minutes. Black Congressman Reject Clinton Crime Bill If Death Penalty Stands, Nuclear Leaks From Russia, Florida May Mobilise National Guard To Stem Cuban Invasion, Pope Seeks Islam's Help Against United Nations Population Control, Endeavour's Shuttle Flight Aborted At Last Minute, Israel Warns Self Rule Hangs On Halting Islamic Violence, Tornado Watch In 15 States, Simpson Lawyers Bitter Dispute Over Blood Sample.

Well, looking around for something not exactly more soothing, but something more exclusively American that might have escaped your attention. I came on a photocopy of a personal bank book, a ledger of extraordinary neatness and order. The torn page of this bank book is really, was a log of savings, ran to five columns and 13 lines mathematically parallel, each meticulous line detailing apparently the deposits, here's a typical line or two. 4-3-86, which in America means the 3rd of April. Day, Thursday. The third column is entitled "State County City" and the first notation "Texas" Colin, that's the county, city Plano. Next column, first Texas savings net $8,500. You get the picture, five columns beautifully ruled line after line 11, 5, 87 California, Santiago, Fort Something Beach, Santiago Trust and Savings, net $155,127. Some deposits.

Well, they weren't deposits; they were what you might call withdrawals and what used to be called the haul or the loot. This beautifully inscribed log was the work of one Johnny Madison Williams Jr and what it kept note of was a record of robberies in 56 banks in Texas, California and the State of Washington over eight years often with the diligent help of his wife. He was arrested on Saturday the 9 July up in Washington State in the city of Seattle by an agent of the FBI.

The agency was not reluctant to announce that Johnny Madison Williams had achieved the longest string of unsolved robberies in the history of the bureau; he'd been a data processor among other things. The first hold-up came in 1986 in Texas and the last one at a bank near Seattle on 1 July this year. In all, he collected over $879,000. He had a personal tactic that one agent said made him difficult to locate, he always entered a bank and immediately fired shots in the ceiling then jumped the counter, confronted the teller and took the swag.

The agent said that this trick, the shooting of the ceiling scared everybody to death and made them afraid to look up or as the agent put it they probably attempted not to make eye contact with him. Well, whichever you prefer, it meant that nobody in over eight years could positively identify him or describe the looks of this desperado. He has not yet come to court and I don't know if he's a man of any humour, but if the judge came to ask him why he always robbed banks, he could properly quote the famous, the infamous Willie Sutton: because, your honour, that's where the money is.

In any case, I believe Johnny Madison William's Jr will become a name to conjure with along with Bonnie and Clyde and the Newton brothers, you may recall the Newton brothers who performed a $3 million train robbery in 1924, served a short jail sentence since they turned over all the money and were alive and hale enough in the 1970s to appear on the Johnny Carson television talk show. I believe they've both gone, but their example is enough to alert us to the likelihood that from now on any robber who is sufficiently bold or handsome or otherwise attractive can expect to go on television once his time is served.

Now the crook as national hero is as everybody knows an American tradition as old as the first Western newspapers that chronicled for an eager country the wicked life of Dodge City and Tombstone and Deadwood.

The central problem of the OJ Simpson case, which is meant to come to trial in the middle of September is unique, well not quite, but it's very rare that the man charged with a hideous murder is already a figure of national fame and until his arrest a national hero for half the male population as possibly the best footballer who ever lived. He's a television star and as handsome a man as ever played Othello, moreover a black hero. This combination of qualities endowments whatever is unique and the insistent presence of television converting a dreadful murder and its circumstances into a frankly riveting daily drama, television compounds the social and legal problems that now riddle this case.

May I say at once that I am not deploring television, which seems to me as useless as deploring the nuclear bomb, they're not going back in the bottle. There are many fine people in many countries are labouring day and night to try and squeeze the bomb back there. The first problem about the OJ Simpson case is one everybody's talking about, it's already become the topic of a current joke, Knock knock, who's there?" "OJ." "OJ who?" "You're on the jury." How to find a neutral open-minded jury of 12 citizens in a nation in which 90 millions watched what appeared at the time to be a super highway flight from justice, the first question leads to the second. How can any judge be sure that among the chosen 12 aren't one or two or more who knew how they'd vote at the start and successfully went through the motions of jury discussion and debate.

I've talked, for instance, to friends, white people who say frankly I'm open-minded, but if I were on that jury I'd be terrified of bringing in a guilty verdict, I'd be afraid that the black population of Los Angeles and other cities would explode overnight.

The third factor, which both the prosecuting and defence counsel will have in mind, a national poll shows that close to 70% of all whites now think that Simpson is guilty, only 34% of blacks think so. The jury selection could take for ever. Usually several hundred people appear for duty, for this case a 1,000 will be called will be required to fill out or fill in a questionnaire longer than the interminable American income tax form, they will then be questioned by both counsels, challenged and given the judge's nod or rejection.

A new element is the profession of jury consultant, both sides in the Simpson case have hired a jury consultant. These are people who say that they have developed an expertise in identifying potential jurors who would lean this way or that, people who can infer from the forms of reply from body language from that now fashionable eye contact whether they will wind up voting innocent or guilty. I heard a posse of these new experts the other evening on a panel and to my dismay I'm old fashioned and I believe that a jury should be picked of people who are content to stay neutral until they've heard the evidence.

To my dismay, both of these jury consultants agreed that their job was to pick out jury men and women who would be sure to vote on their side. The woman actually hired by the lengthening team of Simpson lawyers said she was not looking for open-minded jurors; she wanted to identify at the beginning and get chosen people who would vote to acquit OJ. The Simpson team by the way costs in all about $35,000 a day, whatever is to be his legal fate he's pretty sure to wind up bankrupt.

Talking of eye contact, I was taken with one professional on the panel, a professional jury consultant who said the most effective tool in his examining kit was looking at people and seeing if they looked you back in the eye. He said that as with a child, you know at once if their telling you the truth, he went on and on about this tactic or gift and he seemed to impress the panel, he didn't impress me. Why, because I know my Mark Twain and have paid attention to his warning advice after he'd spent some months out West. Never played poker with a man called Doc, never trust a man who looks you square down in the eye.

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