Grisham's New Pitch

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A decade and a half later, he's sitting on a stack of 18 best sellers. He has a 1,000-acre farm outside Charlottesville with 15 horses (Grisham moved his family from Oxford, Miss., after too many fans dropped by; he even surprised a Japanese couple getting married on his lawn) and a vast office with blond wood floors, movie memorabilia and sliding, brushed-metal screens.

Amid all this gleaming fanciness, there is one messy room. It's in the back, and it contains, along with copies of The Rainmaker in Norwegian, about 50 linear feet of transcripts, clippings and photographs, all bearing the name Ron Williamson.

Williamson was a second-round draft choice by the Oakland A's in 1971, out of a small town in Oklahoma called Ada. He was tall and handsome and hard throwing but without much discipline. He lasted six years in the minors, including a stint with the Fort Lauderdale Yankees, before a bad arm and some bad habits landed him back in Ada at 24.

It was a tough adjustment. Williamson developed emotional problems; doctors whispered about manic depression and even schizophrenia. He drank and chased women and bounced from job to job, clinging to the delusion that his career wasn't over. He had a knack for making the worst of his bad luck, and his luck was terrible.

Very early on the morning of Dec. 8, 1982, a woman named Debbie Carter was raped in her apartment in Ada and then choked to death. The police knew Williamson as an erratic individual who kept late hours. He sometimes went to the bar where Carter worked. They liked him for the murder.

His trial was a charade. His lawyer was over the hill and, literally, blind. The state's case rested on jailhouse snitches and a few hairs found at the scene that resembled his. Williamson was sent to death row, where he would scream that he was innocent. His mental problems deteriorated into full-blown insanity.

Williamson didn't have much luck in life, but he caught a break after his death when Grisham read his obituary. "I love the obituaries," he says. "Lot of times, that's the only thing I read in the New York Times if I'm in a hurry." Williamson's story hit him like a thunderbolt. Grisham writes on a strict and orderly schedule: he likes to start a book every August and finish it by Thanksgiving. Williamson died in December 2004, when Grisham had just finished The Broker, and he didn't want another book to write. But there was something about Williamson's life that he couldn't get away from. "It was a natural," he says. "He and I are about the same age and grew up at the same time, in the same part of the country. I really dreamed of playing professional baseball, but he was a second-round draft pick! And then to get devoured by your own hometown, to the point where you become mentally ill ..."

Within an hour Grisham had placed calls to his agent, to his publisher and to Annette Hudson and Renee Simmons, Williamson's sisters, who at first assumed it was a prank call. They realized he was serious when he got them a lawyer and bought the exclusive rights to their brother's story.