In the early 1980s, a story emerged from Mobile that reached the national press, playing out in headlines like a murder-mystery novel. It became known as the Leverett case, and the woman at its center has now told her own account in a memoir titled Diamond in the Dark: Leaving the Shadow of Abuse, by Phyllis Hain.
A Case That Gripped the City
Paul Leverett‘s wife was found shot, her throat cut, in the couple’s home — at first glance the victim of a burglary gone wrong. Six months later, Leverett married Phyllis, and the rumors began, with the law close behind. Prosecutors first sought to convict Phyllis of perjury for her grand-jury testimony, but a judge threw the case out. The grand jury then indicted Leverett in a murder-for-hire scheme, and he was tried, convicted and sent to prison on the testimony of convicted felons.
Years later, Leverett was killed in prison, along with the warden’s wife and another inmate trusty, by a fellow prisoner. The account handed down was that Leverett died heroically defending the warden and his wife. As for the killing of his first wife, Leverett maintained his innocence to the end; in retrospect, the author writes, she is not so certain.
The Deeper Story
Beyond the sensational headlines, the book is about the long-lasting effects of childhood abuse and how those wounds shape the choices that make a person who they become. The narrative begins in the 1950s, with a young, green-eyed Phyllis growing up in what should have been wholesome farm country outside Pensacola but was instead marked by family violence.
Her father, a World War II veteran, was later diagnosed with brain damage and post-traumatic stress. For most of his postwar life, the memoir recounts, his condition was largely ignored by the Veterans Administration and the medical community, leaving the family to fend for itself. His binge drinking and violent rages, and the family’s acquiescence to them, formed the template against which Phyllis would measure relationships with men for much of her adult life.
A Story of Survival
Ultimately, the book reads as the story of a woman determined to get it right, and who eventually did, after a long education in the school of hard knocks. It is a reminder that the law and society too often fail to protect an abused spouse until after the fact — and only then if the victim survives. The memoir points readers toward resources such as Penelope House, the Mobile-area shelter where battered women and children can find refuge.
In its diary-style candor, the book recalls earlier tell-all memoirs that changed public conversation, and Hain closes by listing concrete ways readers can help. It is, in the end, a good story and a good read — one that may well get the conversation going. The memoir, published by Bancroft, is available in print for those wishing to follow Phyllis Hain’s journey from the shadow of abuse toward the light.