'I walked up and the door was ajar; it was probably opened six to eight inches, and I really didn't want to go in there but I knew I had to,' Lita's neighbor Bob Christenson later told police. 'I opened it up and Lita was lying in the foyer… I immediately went in and into the kitchen, which was just a few feet away, and called nine-one-one and then came back to see if I could-if I could make her more comfortable. But it was obvious to me that she was in pretty bad shape.'
Poppy and her daughter were still upstairs when the shooting occurred. Hysterical, Poppy called Lita's parents.
'Poppy called me and she was screaming and crying saying Lita's been shot,' says Jo Ann McClinton. 'I was getting dressed to go visit my mother in the hospital. I called Emory and he got there before I did.' Jo Ann pauses as she recounts that day. 'They were putting her in the ambulance when I drove up. Emory drove his car and I followed to Piedmont Hospital. We were there a short time when they pronounced her dead.' Jo Ann's voice trails off and she says quietly, 'And that's when Emory said, 'That son of a bitch did it.' We knew right away it had something to do with Jim.'
Forty minutes after the shooting, at 9:00 a.m., Sullivan accepted a collect call at his Palm Beach home from a pay phone at the northbound rest stop on 1-85 in Suwanee, about thirty-four miles from Lita's house. The call lasted a minute.
On January 13, 1987, three days before the shooting, three men checked into the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge at Roswell Road and I-285, at 7:24 a.m. They registered under phony names, and were driving a white Toyota. Southern Bell phone records later revealed that a call was placed at 7:44 a.m. from room 518 to Sullivan's house in West Palm Beach. Sullivan called the room back at 10:33 a.m. Minutes later, he called Lita's neighbor, Bob Christenson, and asked, 'What did you hear this morning? Did you hear any loud knocking?'
Policelater figuredthatthe murder wasplanned forthatday, January 13, and that Lita must have not answered the door. The shooter needed a way to gain entry. In Sullivan's day planner, FBI Special Agent Todd Letcher, who described Sullivan as a meticulous note-taker, later found a notation on January 14. It said: 'Get flowers.'
In a phone call to a friend a few days after the murder, Sullivan described the gun that killed Lita-a 9mm semiautomatic pistol. But information about the gun was never publicly disclosed, intentionally withheld by Atlanta Police.
On the morning of the shooting, Sullivan's lawyer called him to announce that Lita was dead. That day Sullivan lunched with a business associate. At about 8:00 p.m., he dined with his girlfriend, South Korean-born Hyo-Sook Choi 'Suki' Rogers at Jo's, a posh French restaurant.
Later, according to prosecutor Brad Moores, authorities found a note in Sullivan's diary that said, 'Suki and I celebrate with champagne and caviar at Jo's.' Another note, scrawled on December 12, 1986 (a month before the shooting), simply said, 'pistol.'
Eight months after Lita's death, Sullivan married Suki Rogers, her fourth marriage, his third. A recent divorcee, sexy Suki was reportedly as ambitious as Sullivan, and together they made progress on the Palm Beach social circuit.
It didn't take long before the life he'd so carefully crafted started to crack. In March 1990, three years after Lita's death, Sullivan got into a three-car fender bender while driving his Rolls-Royce. His driver's license had been revoked in 1989 due to more than a dozen traffic violations. Rather than dealing with the fines, he took the matter to court and said Suki had been the one driving. The traffic cop told the court that Suki wasn't even in the car.
Sullivan was convicted of two counts of perjury and sentenced to house arrest for a year, confined to his home except for 'tennis court therapy' prescribed by his doctor. During that year, still seeking clues into Lita's death, federal agents searched his house and found four guns, including a sawed-off shotgun. Convicted on felony charges for firearms possession, Sullivan was sentenced to spend the remaining nine and a half months of his house arrest in the Palm Beach County Jail.
By this point, Suki had filed for divorce. At her divorce trial, she testified that after they got arrested for perjury, Sullivan admitted his role in Lita's death. In choppy English, she explained: 'He turned the TV high. He say anybody can listen to this conversation…so he tell me he hired person to kill Lita…He said let's sell this house as soon as possible and he say, we go anywhere you want, anywhere in the world.' She later told lawyers, 'He mention in Georgia in countryside you can hire those people for nothing, you can do anything you want to have done.'
While in jail, Sullivan got into a jailhouse scuffle with convicted robber Paul O'Brien, who broke Sullivan's nose.
In January 1992, federal agents indicted Sullivan on interstate murder-conspiracy charges in Atlanta. Sullivan spared no expense in hiring Ed Garland and Don Samuel-two of the top criminal defense lawyers in the country. The duo's long list of clients include Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, acquitted of involvement in a post-Super Bowl Buckhead bar brawl that left a man dead; Larry Gleit, CFO of the now-defunct Gold Club, who walked away with a misdemeanor charge in his federal racketeering case; and Jim Williams, protagonist in the nonfiction tale Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, acquitted of murder in his fourth trial.
The federal charge of interstate murder conspiracy, by using interstate commerce to commit murder, put the onus on the federal government to prove interstate nexus. Despite the circumstantial evidence-primarily the collect call Sullivan received the day of Lita's shooting-prosecution could never prove the content of the phone conversation. Judge Marvin Shoob dismissed the case for insufficient evidence on November 23, 1992.
Though a free man back in Palm Beach, Sullivan was reduced to riding around town on his twelve-speed Peugeot bicycle. He became reclusive, now shunned by the Palm Beach social circuit. One neighbor said Sullivan had lost weight and looked visibly stressed, that his face was gaunt and he looked 'almost like a ghost.'
Sullivan sold the Palm Beach mansion for $3.2 million and moved to a more modest place in nearby Boynton Beach.
In 1994, the McClintons and their lawyer, Brad Moores, took Sullivan to West Palm Beach Civil Court in a 'wrongful death' suit. In civil court, judgments are based on the weight of evidence, whereas in criminal court, a defendant has to be deemed guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
A few days before that case went to trial, Sullivan fired his lawyers, opting to represent himself.
'I think it was a strategic decision,' says Moores. Lawyerless, saying that he lacked the funds to get proper representation, Sullivan hoped the jury would sympathize with him.
In his opening address to the jury, Sullivan pouted and said '… something else that is terrible and that is to be wrongly accused of murder, to have to live through that and with that is another form of death, another form of murder of the spirit.' He added, 'To be a husband and to lose your wife violently is the worst thing that can happen to a husband.'
Because Sullivan represented himself, he questioned Jo Ann and Emory on the witness stand. Emory McClinton said, 'It was horrible being questioned by the killer of your daughter.'
The jury heard testimony from Suki and Paul O'Brien, the convicted robber who had broken Sullivan's nose in jail. O'Brien told the court that Sullivan confessed to arranging Lita's murder, and that the only thing he couldn't account for was the collect call made from the interstate.
It didn't take long for the jury to reach its verdict. On February 25, 1994, Sullivan was found guilty and ordered to pay the Mc-Clintons $4 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The McClintons were elated. 'For us, it was never about the money,' says Jo Ann. 'We wanted Jim to be held accountable for what he did to our daughter.'
Sullivan, now quick to hire lawyers, appealed. Devastating to the McClintons, in 1995 the Florida Supreme Court overturned the 1994 verdict, ruling that the court case hadn't been filed soon enough. Unlike in criminal cases, where there is no statute of limitations on murder, civil court has a two-year statute for wrongful death, and those two years had long passed.
Moores counterappealed, arguing that the statue shouldn't apply when Sullivan concealed his involvement in the shooting. 'You shouldn't be able to beat the system because you're clever and fraudulent,' says Moores. 'Finally, the Florida Supreme Court agreed with us.' In 1997, the court reinstated the guilty verdict.
The decision prompted a wave of media attention. After a story about Sullivan appeared on TV's Extra, authorities got a break in early 1998. A woman in Texas, Belinda Trahan, called Atlanta police and told them she recognized Sullivan. Her ex-boyfriend, Phillip Anthony 'Tony' Harwood, was the same truck driver Sullivan had met when he first moved to West Palm Beach. She told the GBI that Harwood had met Sullivan in a Florida diner, shortly after Lita's death. She saw Sullivan slip Harwood an envelope full of money. The final payment. It was a link authorities desperately needed.
In May 1998, Sullivan and Harwood were indicted by a Fulton County Grand Jury for the murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan. With Harwood in custody, authorities called Sullivan's lawyers to get him to surrender. But by then, Sullivan had disappeared.
In September 1998, the state issued its intent to seek the death penalty against Tony Harwood. In 2003, Harwood pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter with an agreement to testify against Sullivan when he eventually got to trial. In exchange, Harwood's sentence was reduced to twenty years. He sits in the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville.
For nearly eighteen years, Sullivan has been a prime suspect in Lita's murder. At the top of the FBI's most-wanted list for four years,
Sullivan led investigators on an international manhunt throughout Central America to, eventually, Thailand.
In 2002, America's Most Wanted ran a segment on Sullivan and, incredibly, someone in Thailand recognized him. He was living in Cha-am, a luxury condo community about 150 miles south of Bangkok. He lived with Chongwattana Reynolds, a Thai divorcee he had met in West Palm Beach.
More than fifteen years after Lita's shooting, Thai police arrested Sullivan and took him to Lard Yao Prison, on the outskirts of Bangkok. There his lawyers fought extradition, hoping to use international laws to avoid the death penalty.
Thai prisons are notoriously crowded places. Amnesty International says that more than fifty inmates are held in cells built for twenty, that the prisons are plagued by rats, disease, and rotting food, and that guard brutality is rampant.
On his two visits to see Sullivan in Thailand, Samuel says the situation was better than he'd feared. 'I never had the sense that the conditions were so bad that it would shock the consciousness,' says Samuel. 'It appeared to be in all respects humane.' Reynolds visited him often during his more than eighteen months of incarceration. On one such visit, Samuel said, the couple got married, making Reynolds, Sullivan's fourth wife.
By virtue of his parentage, Sullivan has dual citizenship in both the United States and Ireland. Like other Western European countries, Ireland opposes the death penalty and the extradition of Irish citizens to any country that enforces capital punishment. When the Thai courts denied the citizenship motion, Sullivan's lawyers appealed to the Thai Supreme Court, saying that prosecuting Sullivan for Lita's death was a case of double jeopardy-Georgia's constitution states that a person cannot be tried for the same crime twice. Samuel says that because Sullivan was already prosecuted unsuccessfully in the 1992 case, which was dismissed for insufficient evidence, he should not be tried again. Again, the Thai courts denied the appeal.
In March 2004, extradition was finally granted, and a disheveled sixty-two-year-old Sullivan limped off the plane at Hartsfield before being transported to the Fulton County Jail. Sullivan wore handcuffs and shackles, a facemask and a single shoe. 'He was being difficult,' reported U.S. Marshal Richard Mecum. 'He obviously didn't want to come back.' Scott Page, one of three U.S. marshals who traveled with Sullivan from Thailand, said the fugitive read Newsweek the whole way, while grumbling profanity at the notion of returning to Atlanta.
A few days after Sullivan's arrival, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. served Sullivan notice of the state's intent to seek the death penalty against him.
