The Devil Has Landed in Georgia: The Race-Sex-Sex Murder Scandal That Rocked Atlanta Society

A brutal, decades-struck old murderess of a popular young black-married socialite in the South—a murder shockingly committed by her cursed white millionaire husband—is given the full forensic treatment in “A Journalist Deb Miller Landau’s “Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege and the Assassination of Lita McClinton.”

Just hours before McClinton and her wealthy businessman husband, James Vincent Sullivan, were to be in an Atlanta courtroom — where a judge would determine the outcome of their multimillion-dollar divorce case — she would be fatally shot in the middle of the day, coolly. by an amateur assassin for hire.

Friday, January. 16, 1987 – the start of the weekend before America’s second Martin Luther King Day on Monday – was cold and dreary.

McClinton, who recently celebrated her 35th birthday^th birthday, was worried and nervous about the approaching court date.

As Landau writes, her ten-year marriage to her born-and-bred blue-collar South Bostonian husband had become tortuous, marked by his infidelity, along with his “lies, manipulations, and cruelty.”

Dressed in a white satin nightgown early that Friday morning, McClinton was surprised when the doorbell rang at her home in Atlanta’s affluent Buckhead neighborhood.

Opening the door, she was met by a deliveryman described as “rough and tough”, wearing green work trousers and a faded flannel shirt. His hair was curly, his beard unruly, writes Landau.

The man handed McClinton a box of a dozen long-stemmed pink roses he had bought minutes earlier for $30.

And then the bouquet bearer fired two shots from a 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistol at the startled woman.

One bullet missed, but the other entered the left side of Lita’s well-placed head and exited her right ear. She never regained consciousness.

So begins Deb Landau’s richly detailed 244-page account of one of the nation’s most controversial but long-forgotten murder cases, one with strong racial overtones that “for a decade” would have been chilling — ” scary” – as the author writes.

The shocking case became fodder for newspapers and magazines, was featured on true-crime TV shows and, the author writes, “cops took it to their graves and Lita’s family pushed and bent until it nearly broke.”

The author finds that most of the white people she interviewed to piece together the complex story said they “believed racism had little to do with the case. . . . But every person of color I asked said, ‘yes,’ of course race did matter.” .

This case had one shocker after another.

For example, just eight months after McClinton’s assassination, her widower, Jim Sullivan, married another Korean-born, “petty, sexy” socialite, Hyo-Sook “Suki” Rogers, “the ex-wife of wonderful” of an investment advisor. – and a close friend of Sullivan’s – whom he had first met at a cocktail party.

The two had a “steamy relationship” when he was still married to McClinton, but their union was also tumultuous and would end in divorce.

Lita McClinton came from a wealthy family

Her mother, JoAnn McClinton, served a dozen years as a state representative, and Lita’s father, Emery McClinton, headed the US Department of Transportation’s regional civil rights office.

The McClintons’ neighbors included baseball great Hank Aaron and civil rights icon John Lewis.

Lita was a dean’s list graduate from the prestigious Spelman College in Atlanta, initially pursuing a law degree but eventually becoming a buyer at a high-end boutique in Atlanta.

It was there that she met her future husband—and the mastermind behind her murder—handsome, handsome Jim Sullivan, a client at the boutique, whom Landau writes flirted madly with McClinton and who immediately fell under his romantic spell. .

Nicknamed “Sully”, he later divorced his high school sweetheart, with whom he had four children.

In Boston, Sullivan had been a bookkeeper in a local department store. But in Macon, Georgia, there was a rich uncle, Frank Bienert, who owned a profitable wholesale liquor distributor and was looking for someone he could trust to eventually take over the business.

Sensing an opportunity, Sullivan moved from Boston to Macon with his family to join forces with his uncle.

Mysteriously, Bienert died suddenly. The cause of death was cardiac arrest, but the authorities suspected something more – that he had been poisoned; that maybe his nephew had done it, but nothing was ever proven.

Upon Uncle Frank’s death, Sullivan became sole heir to his estate; overnight he was a millionaire.

“It’s 1976, and mixed-race couples are still an uncommon sight in the South,” Landau writes. “After all, Georgia’s anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized marriage between whites and blacks, had been repealed just a few years earlier.”

Against her parents’ wishes, and in what McClinton’s mother would “later call the worst day of her life,” according to the author, her 25-year-old daughter married Sullivan, a decade her senior. two days before New Year’s Eve, 1976. , in a small wedding on his newly inherited 12-acre Macon estate, once owned by his late uncle Frank.

The night before the ceremony, the groom handed the bride a letter and asked her to sign it – a prenuptial agreement. “Dizzy in love, naive. . . ‘OK’ she says kissing him. “I trust you,” signing without reading, Landau writes.

The author details the highs and lows of their controversial interracial marriage, including Sullivan’s decision to sell their home, inherited business, and move to Palm Beach, Fla., where he buys a mansion, directs a Rolls Royce and acts like a bachelor playboy, sleeping with other women; his wife regularly finds their underwear and blonde hair lost in the marital bed.

Furthermore, McClinton is uncomfortable living in the elite, predominantly white enclave.

As Landau points out, “People stare at her as they pass her on the street—or flash her fake smiles. . . . It was unusual for a black woman to live in a place like Palm Beach, let alone be the mistress of home.”

Disgusted with the Palm Beach scene and her husband Casanova’s lifestyle, McClinton returned to affluent Buckhead, fully intending to end her marriage.

The inquest into McClinton’s death would not bring her killer to justice until 2006 – “19 years, one month and 11 days” after her murder – when the killer’s trial began.

He was a long-distance truck driver, Phillip Anthony “Tony” Harwood, who had been hired by Sullivan to kill his wife in exchange for $25,000.

An ex-girlfriend of Harwood’s would blow the whistle on him after watching a crime segment on a tabloid TV show.

Harwood would spend 20 years behind bars, but would stick to his story that he did not kill McClinton, but would admit in a meeting with the perpetrator that he “bought the roses” that were delivered at the scene of the murder.

On March 10, 2006, the jury in Sullivan’s trial took just four hours to deliberate.

He was convicted of manslaughter, aggravated murder, two counts of aggravated assault and burglary, and that he “caused or directed another to commit the murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan.”

Sullivan was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and is behind bars at the Augusta State Medical Penitentiary.

As Landau writes, “One day, he too will die—and no one will send flowers.”