Profile: William McMurry
Tenacious lawyer taking on archdiocese likes big challenges

By Andrew Wolfson

William McMurry said, "Most of the defendants I go up against are . . . evil."

April 26, 2002 - Infected with HIV and unable to pay her lawyers, the plaintiff seemed doomed to represent herself in a lawsuit claiming that Jewish Hospital had improperly disclosed her condition.

But on Jan. 30, 1997 -- the day the trial was to start -- attorney William McMurry read in the newspaper about Traci Walls' plight and showed the story to his 10-year-old son. ''Isn't this what you do?'' McMurry said the boy asked. ''Why don't you go do it?''

So with no preparation and a client he'd never met, McMurry tried the case for free and won a $125,000 verdict. ''God sent him,'' Walls exulted after the trial.

The verdict ultimately was reversed, and Walls died shortly after her case did. But the impromptu trial performance was pure McMurry, say lawyers and judges, relatives and former clients:

Fighting for the underdog against a powerful institution. Self-assured, even cocky. Steaming with righteous indignation. Living on the edge, whether it's sky diving -- he's made more than 3,000 jumps -- or jousting with witnesses in the courtroom.

''He is absolutely bulldog tenacious,'' said his brother, John McMurry, an obstetrician/gynecologist who would not want Bill McMurry suing him. ''He can be a scary guy.''

Now Bill McMurry, 46, is taking on another powerful institution -- the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville -- in what could be his biggest case.

He is the attorney in all but two of the 75 recently filed suits in which former Catholic-school students and parishioners say the archdiocese negligently hired and retained priests who, the plaintiffs claim, molested them over four decades.

''We will prove that Archbishop (Thomas C.) Kelly knew . . . and acquiesced in allowing predator priests to remain around children,'' McMurry charged one day last week as he juggled a prospective client in his conference room with others on the phone and a TV crew waiting in his office.

''To say the church has not been hiding things -- that we never knew about these cases -- is an abomination,'' McMurry added.

McMurry's staunchest supporters, as well as a few critics, say that he sees no shades of gray and views everyone on the other side -- defendants, defense lawyers, defense witnesses -- as part of the evil empire.

McMurry pleads guilty as charged.

''Most of the defendants I go up against are . . . evil,'' he said. ''Insurance companies that have acted in bad faith, doctors or lawyers who haven't followed accepted standards of care.

''I don't hold my tongue,'' he said. ''The conduct of the archdiocese in decades past is evil.''

McMurry -- previously best known for forcing the disbarment of local attorney Norman ''Nick'' Belker, who was accused of molesting clients -- says the battle with the archdiocese is deeply personal.

For one thing, he said, a close relative was sexually abused for years by a neighbor and has never recovered from it. ''This has been a strong influence on my desire to see these victims'' -- the people suing the archdiocese -- ''properly recognized, appreciated and compensated.''

McMurry said the litigation also strikes a personal chord because it pits him against his mentor, Ed Stopher, who McMurry said hired him 20 years ago and quickly promoted him to partner before they had a falling-out and Stopher forced him out of the firm. ''He hasn't had a good thing to say about me since,'' said McMurry, adding that he relishes the chance to go against his former boss, who is representing the archdiocese.

''He is an absolutely brilliant trial lawyer,'' McMurry said, but ''I know all his moves.''

Stopher declined to comment, as did the archdiocese.

But other local lawyers, including some who usually oppose McMurry in court, said he has adroitly used the news media to draw reluctant plaintiffs out of the woodwork and has wisely filed the suits a batch at a time, to keep public interest alive.

McMurry acknowledges that he has deliberately filed the suits as they come in, instead of submitting them all at once. Each time a batch is filed, he said, ''Others see the 'community of victims' is growing and know they wouldn't have to come forward alone.''

He also says he doesn't want potential plaintiffs to agonize too long over their decision. ''It's sort of like jumping out of an airplane,'' he said. ''If you think about it too long, you might not jump.''

One lawyer -- Cliff Travis, president of Kentucky Defense Counsel, a group of attorneys who represent defendants in civil cases -- said the drumbeat of interviews granted by McMurry and his clients could deny the archdiocese a fair trial. Travis also expressed concerns that the publicity may have encouraged victims to pursue litigation instead of mediation and reconciliation.

''Are people suing because it's easier to do that than to go to the archbishop and try to work through the problem?'' he asked.

McMurry scoffs at both notions. He said a trial is probably ''light-years away.'' Citing that and other reasons, ethics experts said in interviews last week that McMurry's comments don't violate a rule barring lawyers from talking about cases out of court if there is a ''substantial likelihood'' that their comments will ''materially prejudice'' a trial.

McMurry also said it is naive to expect the archdiocese to ''take care of the mess it created'' unless it is staring lawsuits in the face.

In his father's shadow

Born in Paducah, the great-grandson of a Methodist bishop, William Fletcher McMurry attended Broadway United Methodist Church three times a week and was sent to Bible camp ''every damn summer,'' he said, laughing. He says he is still religious, but not a regular churchgoer.

His father, W. Pelham McMurry, was a prominent lawyer who served as McCracken County judge and county attorney.

After graduating from the University of Kentucky in three years and the University of Louisville's law school in 2 1/2 , McMurry tried practicing law with his father for six months, then served only a slightly longer stint as a McCracken County prosecutor.

He said he couldn't escape his father's shadow. ''Every time somebody would ask, 'Aren't you Pelham's boy?' I would wince. I got tired of wincing.''

Burned out on the law after barely more than a year in practice, he moved to Florida in 1980, just to skydive. He'd first jumped out of a plane in 1974, when a UK fraternity brother insisted he come along so their group could get a discount. Though afraid of heights, he said, he kept jumping because ''I thought there was something wrong with me that I was so scared.''

But money ran out quickly in Florida, and he returned to Kentucky later the same year to take a job in the Jefferson County commonwealth's attorney's office.

He later took a job at what is now Boehl Stopher & Graves, where, he said, he learned civil practice but soon chafed at representing insurance carriers and giant corporations. ''I wanted to represent victims,'' he said.

''Bill needs to be passionate about what he's doing, and if he's not, he changes jobs,'' said Charles M. ''Chuck'' Pritchett Jr., a Louisville lawyer and childhood friend.

McMurry returned to Florida in 1985 and represented plaintiffs, including a 6-year-old boy who was arrested for stealing a 42-cent pack of bubble gum. McMurry won the boy's family a $40,000 verdict -- enough to buy 95,238 packs of gum, The Orlando Sentinel calculated in a story about it.

He returned to Louisville again in 1987, first working at a firm headed by Ann Oldfather and Doug Morris, where he met his current wife, Teresa Talbott, also an attorney, and then at his own firm, which has two other lawyers.

There, in an office on U.S. 42, a trophy wall of news clippings and notes documents his triumphs, including the $3 million settlement he won for the widow of a man who was never scanned for cancer because a report recommending it didn't get from one doctor to another, and the $30,000 he won for each of five plaintiffs in the Belker case.

The women alleged that Belker fondled them under the guise that he needed to give them physical exams to evaluate their workers' compensation and personal-injury claims.

''We prayed that he (Belker) would be disbarred and were glad he was part of the settlement,'' said one plaintiff, Norma Tindle, who praised McMurry's handling of the case.

McMurry concedes that he's suffered some ''crushing blows'' too, including two medical-malpractice cases he lost in which he had invested more than $100,000 each.

His biggest gamble may be a $10 billion suit filed in 1999 that claims eight companies that operated or produced nuclear fuel for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant exposed workers and their families to harmful amounts of radiation. McMurry is co-counsel; the case is set for trial in 2004.

An intense competitor

William F. McMurry & Associates have two children, 4 and 6, and live in a Prospect house assessed at $330,000; they have a vacation home on a 10-acre plot in North Carolina assessed at $258,730. He has two children, 11 and 15, from his first marriage, to Mikell Grafton Skinner, also a lawyer.

He stopped sky diving four or five years ago, he said, so he could spend more time with his family. But longtime friend Bill Knopf, a Kentucky Court of Appeals judge, said McMurry pursues his new passion, white-water kayaking, as he does everything else -- with ferocious intensity.

''I am out there to have fun, and he is trying to be perfect,'' Knopf said. ''He is one of the most competitive people I know.''

He is equally intense in the courtroom, said Gerald Toner, who has litigated many cases against him. ''He knows how to work himself into a righteous indignation, and that's part of being a good plaintiffs' lawyer.''

But Pritchett and others say McMurry's passion and anger aren't faked. ''Whenever I get bored with the law, I talk to him because he pumps me up,'' Pritchett said.

McMurry also likes the limelight, said another friend, home builder Henry B. Wallace: ''He presents himself well on TV, and he knows that.''

But McMurry said he's solicited news coverage only twice -- for the first suit he filed against the archdiocese last month, and in 1996, when two women made allegations against Belker. After The Courier-Journal wrote about the claims in a front-page story, 30 women eventually gave statements alleging misconduct stretching back to the early 1980s, when the Kentucky Bar Association dismissed similar allegations as ''preposterous.''

"If not for the story." McMurry said, "we would not have been able to stop Belker."

Oldfather said McMurry deserves credit for taking on cases that other lawers wouldn't touch - such as those against a fellow attorney, or the archdiocese. "I say, 'Hooray for Bill,' she said. "He wants to right wrongs and do justice."