The Best American Crime Writing 2005

Debra Miller Landau
Social Disgraces

from Atlanta magazine

He wore his dead uncle's underwear so he wouldn't have to buy his own, then spent freely on tailored suits. He'd tell his wife to keep the air-conditioning off to keep the bills at bay, and would tightly budget groceries, then turn around and throw luxurious dinner parties. His former in-laws say he'd tell new acquaintances his father worked in the Hearst publishing empire, then deny it when the truth came out that his dad was a typesetter who struggled to make ends meet.

A South Boston kid who grew up playing stickball in his blue-collar neighborhood, James Sullivan made it his life's mission to become something, or someone, else.

Eager to shed his working-class roots, Sullivan, a onetime Macon liquor distributor, married an Atlanta socialite, made millions and began grasping at the rungs of whatever social ladder he could reach.

In 1998, the Fulton County District Attorney's Office indicted James Sullivan for his alleged role in the shooting death of his wife, Lita. At the time of the indictment, Sullivan simply vanished. For four years he led authorities on an international manhunt that went from Atlanta to Florida, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, and finally Thailand. At the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list, Sullivan's photo flashed around the world. His biographical sketch portrayed a man who loved the good life, who frequented fancy resorts and restaurants, most likely with an attractive woman on his arm.

The FBI also noted that Sullivan was likely to be spotted swiping condiments from restaurants he visited.

What drove a man who buried his fortune in complex offshore accounts to burrow away sugar packets and swipe saltshakers? Fear he'd lose everything? Or was his penurious personality ingrained, reflecting a hardscrabble upbringing?

The conflict between Sullivan's social aspirations and his scabrous persona will be front and center early next year when he stands trial-again-for allegedly masterminding and financing Lita's death. As the facts of Lita's death and her tumultuous relationship with James are examined once more, it is certain that her onetime husband-and the man sitting at the defense table-will be scrutinized just as hard.

Growing up in the Irish Catholic, rough-and-tumble streets of Dorchester, a South Boston neighborhood, Sullivan learned early that if he ever wanted out, he'd have to be shrewd, smart, and different. Despite his working-class roots, young Sullivan gained an impressive education. He went to high school at the academically challenging Boston Latin School and won an academic scholarship to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated with an economics degree in 1962 and later studied finance at Boston University. Three years after completing school, he married Catherine Murray and the couple had four children in short order. Sullivan worked in the comptroller's department at Jordan

Marsh, a Boston department store, and later at Peat, Marwick and Mitchell accounting firm.

Sullivan moved to Macon in 1973 when his childless uncle, Frank Bienert, asked him to help run Crown Beverages, a successful wholesale liquor distribution company Bienert founded in 1962.

In Macon, Sullivan's swagger, charm, and ambition helped him carve a niche among the city's movers and shakers. Although many Maconites found his brashness offensive to their old-boy approach to business, Sullivan gained headway in the community by working with the Chamber of Commerce and charitable organizations.

When Bienert died in 1975, Sullivan became the sole heir to the distributorship. Less than a year later, he and Catherine divorced, citing irreconcilable differences. She got custody of the kids, one thousand dollars a month in child support, and moved back to their home near Boston.

James Vincent Sullivan and Lita LaVaughn McClinton met in early 1976 when she was working as an assistant manager at T. Edward's, an upscale clothing boutique in Lenox Square. He wore polyester pants, thick horn-rimmed glasses, and a mop of curly hair, but he was charming and affable, with a thick New England accent.

To Lita's friends and family, it seemed an odd union. Jim was white, an outsider, rough around the edges. She was from a prominent, politically active African-American family in Atlanta. A former debutante, polished and trim, Lita went to private schools and cotillions, a social girl who made friends easily. She had recently graduated with a degree in political science from Spelman College. He was thirty-four and she ten years younger.

Always impeccably dressed and passionate about fashion, Lita set to work updating Sullivan's wardrobe, teaching him how to fix his hair and convincing him to ditch the glasses for contact lenses. Though Sullivan lived in Macon and Lita in her hometown Atlanta, they began dating. He brought her gifts, took her to dinner and dancing, movies and basketball games. The relationship blossomed and a few months later, Sullivan proposed.

Jo Ann and Emory McClinton, Lita's parents, had misgivings about Sullivan from the start. "Jim was not readily accepted by members of our family," says Jo Ann, who has been a member of the Georgia legislature since 1992. "But Lita wanted to marry him and, as a parent, well, you can't see into the future, you can't see what's going to happen."

Emory, a retired regional civil rights compliance director for the Federal Highway Administration and now on the board of the Georgia Department of Transportation, says he was immediately suspicious of Sullivan's arrogance and self-aggrandizing. He worried about the ten-year age difference, and the stress a mixed-race couple had to endure.

Lita had already accepted James's proposal when she found out about his ex-wife and children. "Of course we were shocked," recalls Jo Ann. "That's just the beginning of his deceit, his lies," adds Emory.

On December 29, 1976, Lita and Sullivan married in a small ceremony in Macon. Not long before, Sullivan surprised Lita, over drinks and dinner, with a prenuptial agreement. Lita's divorce lawyer Richard Schiffman Jr. would later describe the agreement as "rather one-sided." He said, "in essence, Mr. Sullivan receives everything and Mrs. Sullivan receives virtually nothing." She was in love and naive; without reading the details, she signed.

Lita worked as a buyer for Rich's in Atlanta, commuting back and forth to Macon on weekends. She later quit her job and moved permanently to Macon. The Sullivans moved into a spacious, columned mansion overlooking the Ocmulgee River at 1276 Nottingham Drive, in the mostly white, affluent neighborhood of Shirley Hills. They filled the home with Louis XVI furniture, Gorham silver, and Baccarat crystal. Although he was making a decent living as the owner of Crown Beverages, the couple lived beyond their means, spending to keep up with the society in which they both aspired to belong.

The interracial marriage provoked mixed reactions in Macon, even prompting disapprovers to throw garbage on the Sullivans' lawn. Lita knew how to persevere. No stranger to racial tension, she grew up in the thick of the civil rights movement. Born in Atlanta in 1952, she was the eldest of three children. Along with her siblings, Valencia and Emory Jr., Lita was one of the first black students to attend St. Pius X High School.

Even though he was a Northerner and she a black woman, the Sullivans attended fund-raisers and charitable events and became embedded in Macon's upper echelons. Lita worked with the American Heart Association, counseled unwed mothers, and helped in the Macon beauty pageants. Under Lita's tutelage, Georgia Court of Appeals Judge Yvette Miller was the first African-American woman to be crowned "Miss Macon" in 1979.

To outsiders, the marriage seemed happy, but inside that house on Nottingham, things were starting to fall apart. The generosity Sullivan first showed Lita began to wane.

In December 1982, six years into their marriage, Lita found a Christmas card sent to Jim from a woman signed, "missing your kisses at Christmas." Jim was away in Florida and Lita was distraught; she hadn't wanted to believe the rumors that he'd been seeing other women, but she couldn't deny this overt confirmation. Lita later testified that she drove to the return address on the envelope, and waited for the woman to come home. Her worst fears were realized when the woman confirmed she'd been having an affair with Sullivan since the summer.

Devastated, Lita went to Atlanta and met with lawyer John Taylor, an acquaintance and friend of the Sullivans. He suggested she confront Sullivan and when she did, he denied the allegations, even getting angry that she'd ever accuse him of infidelity. She wanted to trust Sullivan, wanted to make the marriage work, and Sullivan agreed that he did, too. Taylor suggested the couple sign a postnuptial agreement, one that would supersede the prenup and supposedly give Lita more financial security should the marriage dissolve. The postnup gave her $300 a week, plus $30,000 for three years if they ever divorced. Again, without examining the details, Lita signed the agreement. Its validity, and whether she was coerced into signing, would become a contested topic later.

Despite her instincts to leave, she'd come from a home where family values and loyalty meant everything. She stuck with the marriage.

In 1983, Sullivan sold Crown Beverages for $5 million. The working-class kid from Boston had hit the big time. Now free of the distributorship, James Sullivan was eager to get out of Macon, and he purchased a beachfront mansion for $2 million. Built in the 1920s by Swiss architect Maurice Fatio, the home was considered "historic" and sat, overlooking the ocean, like a beacon of wealth.

Lita never even saw the house before they moved. She later said, "I did not intend ever to make Palm Beach my home as I was not accepted in the social community there. I stated to my husband on many occasions that I did not want to live in Palm Beach. When my husband purchased the Palm Beach home, he did so over my objections and I told him I would never make it my permanent residence."

During the move from Macon to West Palm Beach, Sullivan met truck driver Tony Harwood, an event that would later change the course of both their lives. At first, they were just two guys shooting the breeze while movers packed the truck. A lady's man who wore tight jeans, cowboy boots, and a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled in his T-shirt sleeve, Harwood had been around the block. He'd done time in a North Carolina prison, first for burglary, later for escape. Something about him got Sullivan talking.

"He told me he had a problem with an ex-wife and she was going to take him through the hoop," Harwood later told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). "He said he really needed somebody to take care of her. Get her out of the way. I said, 'I'll take care of her for you for $25,000.' He kind of looked at me and said, 'You have somebody that can do it?' And I just winked at him." Sullivan later mailed Harwood a certified check for $14,000 to Harwood's home, a double-wide trailer, in Finger, North Carolina. Sullivan told him the rest would come later. Harwood waited.

In West Palm, Sullivan, then forty-two, focused intently on climbing the fickle and complex social ladder. Although his red brick and coquina mansion's address at 920 South Ocean Boulevard gave Sullivan clout, he realized acceptance in the Palm Beach social sphere would require cunning. He played tennis, took flying lessons, hobnobbed over cocktails, and hosted extravagant parties. He won a coveted appointment on the city's Landmark Preservation Commission and thought he'd secured a first-class ticket to the jet set, but what he didn't realize is that the Palm Beach elite mistrusted a man with new money, especially, it seemed, one with a black wife. Sullivan frequently went out alone or, ever more frequently, with other women.

Lita began finding clues of Sullivan's ongoing affairs. When she'd confront him, he'd respond by cutting off her finances. They had vicious fights, so bad sometimes that the police were called to break it up. Sullivan became increasingly cheap with Lita, telling her to keep the air-conditioning turned off, giving her a pittance for groceries or gas.

Lita grew depressed and reclusive. She saw a psychologist to figure out ways to save her marriage, but by then it seemed hopeless. In 1984, she convinced Sullivan to buy a second home in Atlanta, so Lita could go back when she wanted to. They bought a four-bedroom townhouse on Slaton Drive in Buckhead in the mid- $400s.

On August 12, 1985, as their ten-year anniversary approached, Lita gathered her gumption. While Sullivan was out, she rented a U-Haul trailer, hitched it to the back of her 1973 Mercedes 450 SL, and packed it full of her belongings. The Sullivans' maid would later testify that Lita packed "canned goods, paper products, household items, antiques, plus more than twenty cartons of crystal, porcelain and sterling silver."

A few days later, she filed for divorce.

Once free of Palm Beach, Lita enjoyed her life in Atlanta. She cherished close friends, having her family near. She dated some men and entertained at her townhouse. She worked for different charities, and was heavily involved in arranging decorations and entertainment for the 1986 New Year's Crescendo Ball for Cystic Fibrosis, held at The Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead.

The only constantly hovering cloud was her divorce. New lawyers, new motions, new court dates, new fears. Though she had almost no contact with Sullivan, their lawyers volleyed back and forth. Sullivan had attacked her character, alleging that she was an adulteress, a thief, and a drug addict. He said he found dollar bills with cocaine residue sitting in the curve of a shoehorn in her medicine cabinet. Said she stole two diamonds that were hidden in the bottom of a shoe closet. It was one thing after another; her lawyer even had her taking monthly urine tests so they could refute the drug allegations in court. She often feared someone was spying on her, and that she'd been followed.

In March 1986, Lita's longtime friend and former Spelman classmate Poppy Marable discovered that her husband, Marvin Marable, had wiretapped Poppy's phone, listening in on her conversations, many of which were with Lita. Poppy filed for divorce from her husband, who was later indicted on invasion of privacy charges. According to the FBI, Sullivan, a friend of Marvin Marable's, later admitted that he'd received copies of the tapes, sent to him in a big box to his Palm Beach home.

On January 16, 1987, a judge was going to address a pretrial motion on division of property and determine the validity of the Sullivans' postnuptial agreement. Judged in her favor, Lita stood to get half of Sullivan's assets.

On January 15, 1987, Lita's mother and sister Valencia were visiting Lita and discussing the upcoming trial. Sullivan had scheduled to have someone take a video inventory of everything in the Atlanta home that day, but Lita got a call canceling the appointment.

That night, Lita grabbed a bite to eat with a friend at R. Thomas' Deluxe Grill. Later, Poppy and her young daughter came over to spend the night, to be with Lita before the trial. Though the women planned to stay up chatting, they fell asleep late while watching TV.

January 16, 1987, began as an unspectacular day, one of those postholiday days when the chilly wet air and steady drizzle keep one in bed a little longer than usual.

That morning, a Friday, two men drove up to the Botany Bay flower shop, then located on Peachtree at Pharr Road, about half a mile from Lita's house. They drove a white Toyota. One guy came in and said he wanted a dozen roses; he didn't care what color. The clerk, Randall Benson, felt anxious and hurried; he worried that he was going to get robbed, and so only wired five of the twelve roses. The customer told Benson to leave the shop's sticker off the box, so the clerk tied it with a pink ribbon. He let out a sigh of relief when the men left. It was just after 8:00 a.m.

Armed with the white, long flower box, a tall, white, balding man wearing a green work jacket and gray pants stood on Lita's stoop, looked around, and rang the doorbell at 3085 Slaton Drive.

Lita woke up that day in her Buckhead townhouse likely nervous about the coming afternoon. She was due in Superior Court at 2:00 p.m. to hear the important pretrial ruling. The trial was due to start in just ten days.

Maybe Lita didn't have time to think about anything that day, except perhaps that it was odd that the doorbell was ringing so early in the morning. She put on her housecoat, went downstairs, and answered the door. It was 8:20 a.m.

Lita must have seen the flower box because she opened the door wide, unsuspecting of anything more than an early-morning delivery. She took the box. She must have immediately noticed the man held a gun because she instinctively lifted the box to her face. Did she have time to think? Did she have time to taste fear?

Neighbors heard two shots. One bullet veered wildly into the family room, the other hit Lita's temple, on the right side of her head. The man fled on foot, "like a bat out of hell," said a neighbor who almost hit him with her car.

"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.

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.