Sullivan's lawyer, Don Samuel, said Sullivan's foot had swollen on the flight over, that the facemask was just a precaution in light of SARS. He said that Sullivan has a serious dental problem, one that the lawyers are 'struggling' to get Fulton County to address. While he was incarcerated in Thailand, Samuel admitted, Sullivan did get into a fight.
Samuel says Sullivan's defense is simple: 'He didn't do it. He is not guilty.' Samuel argues that Sullivan did not flee, that he just happened to move at the time of his indictment, that he had left the country long before there was a warrant for his arrest. Apparently, he was unaware that he was the target of an international manhunt.
Today Samuel contends that the state's case is no better than it was in 1992, when it was thrown out for insufficient evidence. His contention is that Sullivan will get off, that some day he'll walk out a free man.
That thought makes the McClintons' blood boil.
The McClintons' lawyer, Brad Moores, says that when Sullivan fled to Costa Rica in 1998, he hired a private banker in Palm Beach who worked with a Swiss bank to hide Sullivan's money in offshore accounts. Those monies were funneled through a corporate trust account established in the small country of Liechtenstein. All statements from the corporation, Nicola Resources, were sent to
Sullivan in Thailand. Moores says a lawyer in Liechtenstein managed the funds and sent Sullivan money whenever he needed it.
'He's still a pretty wealthy individual,' says Moores. Neither the McClintons, nor their lawyers, have ever seen a dime from the $4 million judgment they won in 1994 (which is now calculated at $8.8 million due to accrued interest). Moores is on a hunt to find Sullivan's well-hidden money.
While the McClintons believe in Sullivan's constitutional right to a lawyer, they think he shouldn't be able to use the money from the Florida lawsuit to pay for his high-priced criminal lawyers. Jo Ann calls it 'blood money,' while Moores calls it a lawsuit, one that's pending against Samuel and Garland for accepting funds from Sullivan that they knew were subject to the judgment.
District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. believes Sullivan should be court-ordered to pay his civil court judgment. 'It is really obscene that you could take somebody's life, profit from it and then use the proceeds from it to defend your life in a trial involving that same person,' he said.
Howard looks forward to the trial, which could start in early 2005. 'I've talked to a lot of people in our county,' he says. 'I was surprised when Sullivan was returned that so many people I've never met would just walk up to me and say, 'We want you to make sure he understands that you just can't get away with something like that in Fulton County.' ' Howard says the fact that Sullivan was living in luxury, basically vacationing, offends a lot of people and that anyone familiar with the case over the past seventeen-plus years wants to see it resolved.
'I think we've waited long enough.'
In the living room of Emory and Jo Ann McClinton's stately home on East Lake Drive, where they have lived for nearly thirty years, photographs of Lita are as prevalent as photos of Valencia, Emory, Jr., and the McClintons' two grandchildren. Portraits of ancestors line the walls. The home is furnished with antiques and heavy, brocaded furniture. In a bowl, the generous buds of their giant magnolia sit submerged in water. Talk radio murmurs in the background.
After fifty-three years of marriage, they are the kind of couple who finishes each other's sentences. They have been best friends since they met in seventh grade at their parochial high school.
Though it's nearly eighteen years ago, they remember that January day when they lost their oldest daughter. They remember her funeral, held at H. M. Patterson and Son on Spring Street at Tenth. Sullivan didn't come, nor have they ever heard from him. Catherine, Sullivan's first wife, who died last year, sent her condolences. The McClintons have kept in touch with Sullivan's four children who, they say, gave up on their father a long time ago.
They lament how they were never able to go through Lita's things. Because Sullivan was considered next of kin, he was able to get a judge to enjoin anyone from entering the townhouse. Sullivan had the locks changed on her condo before they could search for clues, or take keepsakes their daughter would have wanted them to have. Sullivan never contacted them after Lita's death, but because he was still legally Lita's husband, they had to seek his permission to have her cremated.
Their devotion to their lost daughter and the need to bring her alleged killer to justice never wavers. Their tenacity and commitment have kept Sullivan in the media. 'He should have known,' says Emory, wearing shorts and a green T-shirt, with sneakers and white athletic socks pulled halfway up his calves. He's a tall man with a gentle but determined voice. 'He should have known that we would not let him get away with this.'
For the McClintons, January 16 will always be a gray, drizzly day. Determined to shake the hand of justice when it finally arrives, they know they will never feel vindication. There is no end; the memories and dreams are nothing compared to embracing your child.
'Closure does not have a meaning to me,' says Jo Ann. 'There's no such thing as closure because our daughter is dead and that can never be erased or changed. To lose a child, there is never closure, because in the scheme of things you never think your children will predecease you-that isn't in the computer at all. We might fill in the missing pieces, but we will never have closure.'
He attained riches, mansions, and fancy cars. He had wives and mistresses, friends and social status. He had charm, and he had dreams. Now, Sullivan sits in a prison cell, his tousled hair a dull gray, his body bent and strained from the burden of age. He has a family he no longer knows, a fortune he cannot spend. His shadow on the prison walls is only the dimmest reminder of that determined boy who played stickball in the street.
Debra Miller Landau is an award-winning travel writer who's penned eight books for Lonely Planet Publications. Born in Canada, she started writing about crime when she researched the lives of Canada's most infamous serial killers. She is a contributing editor at Atlanta magazine.
I get a strange sensation when I think that James Sullivan sits in a jail cell just a few miles from my house. Even with Atlanta traffic, I could get in my car and be there in ten minutes. I'd like to look in his eyes, to see if there's fire, to see if he's still running away from himself, that working-class kid he despised so much it made him lead a life stranger than fiction.
What it would be like to talk to him? Would he be a crushed, aging man? Would he still be charming? Would he feign dignity, and plead innocence? Does he sit alone in the jailhouse yard, or does he have pals, buddies with whom he commiserates?
For a man who fought his whole life for control, how does he stand it, waiting for his lawyers to pass motion after motion, exploring the tiny cracks in the law, those little openings that give him a window of hope?
As the months tick by, with legal acrobatics and new extensions delaying the trial, details of Sullivan's segmented life come slapping him in the face. Just a few months after this article appeared in Atlanta magazine, district attorneys in both Atlanta and Macon announced their intent to exhume the remains of Sullivan's uncle, Frank Bienert, whose death by 'heart failure' left Sullivan the liquor distributorship that eventually made him a millionaire. Did Sullivan have a hand in his uncle's death? If so, was it the trigger- the justification for everything that followed?
While combing through old court archives in Florida, reading about Sullivan's life of riches, I wondered how a guy like this could allegedly hire a trucker to kill his wife. It's a desperate story, not about one man's fall from grace, but one man's desperate attempt to get there.
It's past lights-out at the Fulton County Jail as I sit at my desk writing this. In the prison darkness, does Sullivan think about those heady days in the liquor distributorship, does he long to be sipping martinis at the Palm Beach parties? Does he, almost twenty years after her death, remember Lita's face? I wonder, as his death penalty trial approaches, if he fears death, or if his tightly woven cloak of invincibility continues to help him sleep at night.
Neil Swidey
The Self-Destruction of an M.D.
from the Boston Globe Magazine
The kid was born into medicine. He was on track to becoming one of Boston's next great spine surgeons, taking his place alongside his father among the city's medical elite. But on this day in January, the forty-three-year-old sits on the dark bench in the dimly lit gallery of Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge, watching the parade of career criminals take their familiar positions, wearing expressions of defiance or boredom. Look in his eyes, however, behind the boxy glasses, and you can see flashes of bewilderment. How did I get here? He watches as a paunchy guy charged with conspiring to kill a cop asks the court officer if he can give the large, weeping woman in the front row 'a kiss and my lottery tickets' before being led away. And then the clerk calls out his number: 'Case number thirty-eight-David Arndt.'
As the prosecutor and the defense lawyer take their positions before the judge, Arndt advances to his designated spot in front of a tattered computer printout that reads defendant, stooping his six-foot-two frame a little so his right hand can reach the railing. He is wearing a brown pin-striped suit. A taupe trench coat hangs over his left arm.
His appearance has rebounded from the unshaven, sunken-eyed mess that was on display in his mug shot last summer, though his physique is still a ways from the chiseled, rippled showpiece it was before everything fell apart. The pretrial hearing is over in just a few minutes, and he pulls his trench coat close to his chest and exits the courtroom.
You follow him into the hallway and call to him, 'Dr. Arndt.'
The words stop him in his tracks. Dr. Arndt. For the better part of a decade, that wasn't just his name, it was his identity. The domineering surgeon cutting his path-loved by some, loathed by others. But respected. That identity has been confiscated along with everything else he valued so much-standing, status, power. Now he's just another David standing in a criminal courtroom wondering what his future holds. He turns to look when he hears the words. But he recognizes you, throws up his hands to block his ears, shakes his head, and walks away. You suspect he'll come back. When you'd met a week earlier, in another court, in another county, he'd walked away then as well, at his lawyer's instruction, only to return and demand that you hold off on writing about him. 'To do otherwise,' he told you in his sonorous voice, 'would be to engage in Murdoch-style journalism.' You found it surprising that this man, given what he so infamously did in his operating room, not to mention what he's accused of doing in the weeks and months that followed, would choose to deliver a lecture about professional standards.
On this day in Cambridge he returns again, and the lecture is more expansive and comes with a reading list. 'Are you familiar with Janet Malcolm's piece in The NewYorker entitled 'The Journalist and the Murderer'?' he asks. 'It was published in two parts. Do you know her work?'
You shake your head no.
'You should,' he says.
