Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking, they change laws, change society, or even

earn the label, Crime of the Century. But the stories that made headlines and decades past

aren't necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author, and in each episode of this show,

I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.

This is Crimes of the Centuries.

Thank you. This is Crimes of the Centuries. On the evening of January 14, 1990, Doug Syl knocked on the front door of Mercer House,

a grand 19th-century mansion facing Monterey Square in Savannah, Georgia.

The man who lived there hadn't been returning calls.

Searle, who knew the routines of the house well, led himself in.

Inside, nothing initially seemed out of place. The Mercer

house was always immaculate, filled with furniture, both antique and modern, painstakingly selected

by its wealthy owner. To people who asked about his process, and plenty did, he'd say it was

simple. He chose things he wanted to spend time looking at.

Syle paid those precious items no mind as he walked through the eerily quiet home.

When he reached the study, he saw the body of a man lying on the floor. It wasn't moving.

Syle called for help, but by the time emergency services arrived, it was too late.

James Arthur Williams, one of Savannah's most celebrated preservationists, its most talked-about host,

and not so long ago, its most famous criminal defendant, was dead at 59.

Williams had been at the center of a legal drama that transfixed the city for nearly a decade. He had been tried not once, not twice, but four

times for the same crime. The only person in Georgia history to face four murder trials for a single incident.

His case exposed the fault lines in Savannah's social structure and raised questions that still

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