'Who's Gonna Fill Those Shoes?' | Remembering Tuscaloosa Courtroom Titan Bob Prince

*This is a feature opinion column*

"Blessed are they who maintain justice, who constantly do what is right."

- Psalm 106:3

TUSCALOOSA, AL — Roughly 13 years ago I fumbled around with my notebook and audio recorder in the conference room at Prince Glover Hayes. I was unprepared and it was around the time Tuscaloosa attorney Bob Prince came in the room that I realized I hadn't outlined any questions.

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It was the first of many failed attempts on the part of your narrator to write a book and Prince was my first interview subject. Reflecting back on that fateful sit-down at the beginning of my career, I'm reminded that he was the very first attorney I ever interviewed.

The topic of conversation was one of his former clients — convicted murderer Michael Hayes, who admitted to strangling 18-year-old Regina Quarles to death in 1978, before dumping her nude body on the side of the road leading to Branscomb Apartments.

Hayes's family hired Prince following his arrest and it would be the young Tuscaloosa attorney who received a black onyx earring found by his client's mother in her son's car. The earring matched the other that Quarles was wearing the night she was murdered and Prince didn't hesitate to do the right thing once his client's guilt became apparent.

Years later, he told me of his decision to turn over the earring to homicide investigators instead of withholding the damning piece of evidence. The other attorney on the case, E.D. McDuffie, commented at trial that if they had not turned over the earring, there would have never been enough evidence to indict Hayes for the murder.

I still have the recording of that interview on a hard drive stuffed in a dusty old box somewhere.

Prince was generous with his time that day and spoke candidly about the case, but I was far too green at this kind of work to know what to do with the insight he gave me. He was patient with me, though, and could have just as easily said no instead of wasting an afternoon talking to a bookish kid who didn't have the first clue what he was doing.

What stood out even to an ignorant young man like myself that day, though, was his character and unrelenting desire for justice — justice achieved the right way, to be specific. Over a decade later, he remains the standard in this reporter's view of what a great attorney should be.

Fast-forward to just a couple months ago. With years of shoe-leather journalism under my belt, I wanted to revisit the Michael Hayes case for a long-form feature story, but with the ulterior motive of gathering as many of his stories as possible in order to preserve them for posterity.

I never got that chance, though, and I'm sure I'll regret not being more persistent for years to come. After all, great men like him simply don't come along often.

Bob Prince died early Thursday morning after a courageous battle with cancer.

He was 75.

Prince is survived by his wife, Dena Drury Prince; four children: Courtney, Mary Elizabeth, Will and Grace; and seven grandchildren.

"He was a lawyer's lawyer, one of those quiet leaders, not only of the Bar but of the community," longtime Tuscaloosa County Circuit Judge John England told Patch, before mentioning that he and Prince went to law school together. "If you ask any lawyer, they would say the same thing: Bob Prince loved the law. Unlike some lawyers, he actually liked the legal profession and he treated everybody with the kind of respect they were entitled to."

'One of a Kind'

Robert Franklin Prince was born in Franklin County and earned both his undergraduate degree and his juris doctor from the University of Alabama.

Admitted to the Alabama and Florida State Bars, Prince was also admitted to practice in the U.S. District Court for the Northern, Middle, and Southern Districts of Alabama, along with the U.S. Supreme Court.

"The evolution of his career is amazing, with Bob going from being one of the best criminal defense lawyers around to one of the best divorce lawyers and transitioning to doing what we call 'personal injury' work and reaching that same level of greatness in that area," attorney Matt Glover told Patch, before pointing out Prince's legacy with the University of Alabama School of Law's Trial Advocacy Program. "They have an entire wing named after him."

Glover should know, after all, considering he was a key player on a Trial Advocacy team that finished third in the country under his beloved mentor's guidance.

Indeed, since making the transition to personal injury and tort law, Prince Glover Hayes has secured several massive payouts for their clients, including in 2001 when a Hale County jury ordered Plantation Pipeline to pay out $43.8 million.

Bob Prince also headed up a case that saw the largest jury verdict handed down at that time in Tuscaloosa in June 1999 — to the tune of $3.5 million for the estate of an 18-year-old victim of a car accident.

In his role with UA School of Law's Trial Advocacy program, Prince influenced countless careers, including that of 24th Judicial Circuit Judge Sam Junkin.

Judge Junkin told Patch that Prince placed a high premium on training the next generation of lawyers to represent their clients the right way. In fact, it's something the judge regularly sees in his own courtroom to this day.

"He spent all of this time and dedicated so much time at the school to do exactly what he was doing at work," he said. "I can tell the lawyers that come in front of me that are little Bob Princes, trained by him. ... They know how to do their job. Without Bob, you wouldn't have all these people doing that. His legacy is going to outlive all of us. He set it up to where he will continue to live on in the people he taught."

Prince cultivated a sterling reputation in the courtroom and as a mentor in the local legal community in the years after the Michael Hayes case, sure, but it would be his work as a kind of high-stakes negotiator in 1988 that saw his name earn national acclaim.

On a rainy Tuesday morning, James "Bud" Harvey and another man whom he had initially forced to assist him entered West End Christian in ski masks with semiautomatic rifles and multiple other guns.

The standoff lasted 12 hours and was one of the first major live news stories to command a captive global audience during the earliest years of the 24-hour news cycle.

Former Tuscaloosa Police Chief Ken Swindle was the lead negotiator during the standoff and is lauded as a hero to this day for his handling of the situation. Also credited as a hero during the crisis was Bob Prince, who quickly responded to the scene when Harvey demanded the "best attorney in the city."

"I can't say enough good about Bob Prince that day," Swindle said in an interview last year when parole was denied for Harvey. "Harvey called him down to assist and he never hesitated."

Prince told Patch in August 2023 that people were under the impression that he represented Harvey and that he was disloyal to his client in the aftermath of the standoff.

This was not the case.

Rather, Prince explained that he was summoned under duress and simply answered the call, going on to reiterate that he never represented Harvey in the court proceedings after the standoff.

"I go out there and he wanted me to bring a copy of the Constitution, which I did," Prince recalled. "When I got out there, I took it to him in a book. He wanted the mayor for some reason, but I walked over there to where he was, and, I'll just tell you, he looked frightening. He was wearing sunglasses, so you couldn't see his eyes and his cap was pulled down and his face was covered and he was holding what would amount to an AR-15 repeating rifle with a clip in it. And here I am wondering what I had gotten myself into."

Prince carried himself as a "neutral" party, however, and made headway in earning Harvey's trust over the course of their first half-hour together, which saw Harvey stand in the door of an elementary classroom while Prince stood in the hall.

The classroom then became the focus, Prince explained, as Swindle and others were able to get numerous students and one pregnant teacher out of the building after they had taken shelter in adjacent classrooms.

"We can't control them in that room [with Harvey], but we actually got a lot of folks released, then the state sent their hostage negotiator there and his idea was to frustrate him, which I didn't think was very smart considering he was starting to trust us," Prince said. "He wanted food and they didn't want to bring it to him ... he also said he had been training himself to go a long time without using the bathroom."

Despite the gains made through patient negotiations, the overall atmosphere of the standoff looked as though it could take a turn for the worst.

Around 2 p.m., Prince was getting scared.

"The governor is still stalling on the pardon at this point and Harvey had me in the hall and he was in the doorway and he said 'they don't think I'm serious. I should show them I'm serious,'" Prince recalled, as worries began to mount that Harvey might be willing to gun down the young lawyer, or worse, turn the gun on the classroom to get his point across to the world outside.

Prince then remembered back to the end of the day after the sun had gone down, when he and Swindle, along with WBRC news reporter Dan Cates, convinced Harvey that they could come to terms on a book deal. It was this part of the negotiations that proved the difference and Harvey finally said he was willing to give himself up under the agreed-upon terms.

In Harvey's opinion, as both Swindle and Prince rememebered years later, he had won the day and achieved his goal. Instead, Swindle — standing 6'4" — was broadcast on national television taking Harvey to the ground when he exited the school building.

"You go back and look at West End Christian, Bob put himself in danger but he also put his law practice in danger," Swindle said. "That could have blown up on him in a heartbeat. All he was worried about was those kids and he came down there and made sure those kids were alright. He wasn't worried about his safety and his career."

When asked about the origins of an unlikely friendship of a cop and a lawyer, Swindle recalled the frustrations that consumed him while standing at the scene of fatal shooting at a Tuscaloosa gas station in 2008. He had just gone to bed when he got the call and ended up being at the scene until almost daybreak.

Swindle then remembered Prince asking him on multiple occasions to come work for the firm.

"I got mad about going to work that night," he said. "I had never been mad about going to work over 34 years and that morning, when I got home, I told [my wife] Jill I'm going to talk to Bob."

After some negotiations and a meal on the back deck of the law office, Swindle joined forces with Prince as an investigator for his firm and has even worked closely with this reporter on two major stories across as many states: A 2020 trench collapse in Starkville, Mississippi that killed two men from Fayette County and a 2021 chemical spill near two neighborhoods in Northport.

These cases highlight Prince's commitment to fighting for the side of right and showed me at numerous turns that you could set your watch by his firm's integrity.

"Bob was a legend who never lost the common touch," Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox told Patch on Thursday. "His legacy was built on being a superb attorney who never failed to show his humanity. To say that he will be missed is an understatement. The City of Tuscaloosa joins so many in offering our deepest condolences to Dena and Bob’s entire family."

'Who's Gonna Fill Those Shoes?'

Tuscaloosa attorney Ward Pearson was one of Prince's closest friends and choked up as he told Patch he was able to talk privately with Prince for a few minutes in the hospital before he died.

"It's just been a hard morning," he said. "Bob and I had been friends since I got out of law school in 1982. He and I had offices in the Searcy Building for a pretty good while and we got to be friends then. Bob introduced me to wine. He was a big wine aficionado and very knowledgeable about it. We've had cases really since then and Bob was involved in some of the biggest cases I've had in all my years practicing."

Pearson went on to describe his friend as a "consummate trial lawyer" who helped his Alabama Law National Trial Advocacy teams at UA compete at the highest level.

"Bob was just old-school tough," Pearson said. "He was like that generation of lawyers we have enjoyed in Tuscaloosa for a long time and he always comported himself with the highest level of integrity. There are a thousand stories, a thousand moments in our history where Bob really stepped up when it counted, especially in terms of his skill and his performance. I have so many stories it would take days to tell them all."

The stories are just as numerous for former Tuscaloosa Police Chief Ken Swindle, who laughed when he remembered Prince trying to get him to come to work for his firm in the early 1990s.

"I told Bob, 'I can't work for a bunch of lawyers. I fight with y'all every day,'" Swindle said, before mentioning a meeting where they ate lunch on the back deck of the firm's office and sat around in rocking chairs negotiating a potential deal that ultimately culminated in Swindle going to work for Prince Glover Hayes.

"God had his hands in it, that's the bottom line," he said. "Bob was a good Christian man and I thank God every day for him. He did everything he told me he would do and he was doing it for the right reasons. It makes me think of the song "Who's Gonna Fill Their Shoes?" because he was just such a great man and you have to wonder who will take his place. ... But 16 years later, I have not eaten on that back deck or sat in those rocking chairs since that day because we've just been so busy."

Swindle raised an interesting question when pondering who would fill Bob Prince's shoes and, as most lawyers are sure to tell you, the most logical answer is typically the right one.

Grace Prince is cut from the same cloth as her illustrious father, whether she will publicly admit to measuring up to such greatness or not. But even she will be the first to acknowledge that so many view her as the real legal legacy left by Bob Prince.

"Obviously, I'm his daughter and his only child that became an attorney, so we shared a bond that I can't describe," she told me. "As I was looking through his office yesterday, I found the original copy of my acceptance letter to Alabama Law, my Dad’s alma mater. During my time at Alabama Law, I was blessed to be a part of my Dad’s Trial Advocacy team. It was the most challenging reward of my life and the most rewarding challenge of my life."

Like so many of his pupils, Bob Prince's professional heir-apparent said he advised her to start out in the district attorney’s office or as a public defender right out of law school so she could gain the invaluable experience one can only obtain in a courtroom at trial.

As chance would have it, Tuscaloosa County District Attorney Hays Webb offered her a job and gave her the latitude and trust on some of the office's cases with the highest stakes.

"My Dad not only came to every single one of my jury trials but he also helped me strategize them and word my arguments better than I ever could have on my own," she said. "I still remember all of the arguments and phrases he gave me. I would not have secured those convictions without him."

Grace Prince quickly made a name for herself, especially as one of the defense attorneys for former Alabama basketball player Darius Miles in one of the most high-profile capital murder cases in the city's history after a fatal shooting near The Strip in January 2023.

But when her Dad's cancer spread the following December, priorities and professional obligations justifiably fell by the wayside and she ceased being a career-driven legal mind and once again became that same little girl looking up to her hero of a father.

"At that point, his cancer was incurable," she said. "Moving my practice to Prince Glover Hayes was the best and most rewarding professional decision I have ever made. Continuing my Dad’s legacy will be the greatest honor of my life. While I would give anything for more time to learn from him one-on-one, he has prepared me to succeed in every single way. I know exactly what I have to do to succeed, which is also exactly what he expects of me: to fight, relentlessly, always. I will do just that."

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