Yahoo Lifestyle A Hitman, A Dozen Roses, A Shocking Murder: New Details on Lita McClinton Sullivan Case Explored in New Book (Exclusive)
Read an exclusive excerpt from 'A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton' here
Matt H. King; Pegasus Books
Deb Miller Landau and her new book 'A Devil Went Down to Georgia'In 1987, the murder of socialite Lita McClinton Sullivan shocked the affluent Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, Ga. The tony neighborhood, with its well-kept mansions and excellent schools, was not the kind of place where women were gunned down in cold blood in broad daylight. But that's exactly what happened with she opened the door to someone posing as a flower delivery man.
Now, in A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton (out Aug. 6 from Pegasus Crime) author and investigative journalist Deb Miller Landau is taking readers through the life and death of McClinton Sullivan, as well as the winding road to bringing her killer to justice.
Below, in an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, experience the moment she went to meet up with the hitman who went to jail for her murder.
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January 2023: I’m sitting in a rented Pacifica minivan in a desolate parking lot at City Lake Park in Albemarle, N.C., waiting to meet a man recently released from prison for orchestrating a murder. For decades, newspaper headlines across the country called him “The Hitman”—Hitman Found, Suspected Hitman Charged in Killing of Buckhead Socialite, Hitman Released. I spent months hunting him down before he finally called me.
“While it would be refreshing to have the opportunity to meet with someone that is all about learning the truth and printing it,” he said. “I'm not sure if you have the resources to do the things that I would require of you.” I had looked over my shoulder in a fit of nonsensical panic — is anyone seeing this? —but it was an opening, even though I had no idea what he was talking about.
I first wrote a retrospective about the brutal 1987 murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan for Atlanta magazine in 2004. It was a case that shook the city, the country and later the world. A Black socialite from a politically powerful Atlanta family, gunned down in broad daylight in Buckhead, the most upscale, whitest neighborhood in Atlanta. For a decade, the case went cold, unnervingly frigid. It became fodder for newspapers and magazines, was featured on television shows like Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege, and Justice; CBS’s 48 Hours, Extra!, FBI: Most Wanted and many others. Journalists like me followed it for years, lawyers didn’t sleep, cops took it to their graves, and Lita’s family pushed and bent till they almost broke.
So here I am, rubbing crusty bits of sleep from the tender crannies of my eyeballs, in a rented minivan in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, trying to talk to a hitman. He knows I’m coming, but he’s ghosted me for the past couple of weeks and now I fear I’ve made the trip for nothing. I’ve driven all around town, past the junkyards with broken cars and rusted washing machines, past the “Home of Kellie Pickler” sign in the courthouse square celebrating the American Idol contestant who escaped this town, past the colonial homes, deserted textile mills and unabashed cemeteries on the side of the road.
And I’ve done some Googling. This little agricultural town about an hour east of Charlotte grew up around the production and manufacturing of cotton. For decades, everyone worked at “the mill” — bagging sacks of raw cotton, spinning fiber into yarn, attaching toes to socks at the hosiery mills. Since the textile mills closed in the 1980s, the town has grappled to redefine itself. A lot of families here struggle to make ends meet. If North Carolina is the rough shape of a revolver pointing west, Albemarle is just north of the trigger.
I check my phone again. Still no text from the hitman. I feel a mix of relief and disappointment. I’m not entirely sure what I’m hoping he’ll tell me, other than his side of the story.
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I sigh, scroll to the “Lita” album in the photos app on my phone and look at her pensive, beautiful face. Whatever happens today, it’s a good reminder: it all starts and ends with Lita McClinton Sullivan.
I decide not to wait any longer and dial the hitman’s number. To my surprise, he answers right away.
“Where you at?” he asks in his big booming voice. No pleasantries, no small talk.
“In Albemarle,” I say.
“Yeah, I know,” he says like I’m stupid. “Where?”
I tell him I’m at the city park, but before I can suggest a coffeeshop, somewhere warm, safe, public with people around he interrupts and says he’s on his way.
Click.
I panic, looking around the empty parking lot, the quiet lake. I wonder briefly if there are bodies in that water, what would happen when the cops find my empty minivan. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Literally no one knows where I am. I turn on location sharing and shoot a text to my friend in Atlanta: “Meeting hitman in 5!” She sends back a wide-eyed emoji and, even though it’s freezing out, I begin to sweat.
Pegasus Books
'A Devil Went Down to Georgia' by Deb Miller LandauJanuary 16, 1987: Randall Benson is running late for his job at the Botany Bay Florist. The shop is supposed to open at 8 a.m. but by the time he turns on the lights, unlocks the front door and retrieves the register cash hidden in the walk-in cooler in the back, it's about 8:05 a.m. He chastises himself for having to rush. Given the dreary morning, he expects a slow day, so he’s surprised when the bell jingles, signaling a customer.
“Helloo!” he sings from behind the counter. As Randall takes in the customer walking toward him, he hesitates, heat suddenly creeping up the back of his neck. He is instantly overcome with a bad feeling. The man looks nothing like the usual upscale Buckhead business crowd; this guy is rough and grubby, with no hint of a smile. He wears green work pants and a faded flannel shirt.
“I need a dozen roses,” the man says, not making eye contact. “In a box.”
Randall, a lifelong Georgia boy, detects an accent different from his own but can’t quite pin it. “Well, that sounds lovely,” Randall says, working hard to ignore the heat in his ears. “What color are we looking for?”
“It don’t matter. Just a dozen roses.”
Randall swallows hard. “Well, is there a special occasion? If it’s for your wife or your girlfriend, you’ll want red. But if it’s for an anniversary, you’ll want yellow and…”
“Listen, I told you it don’t matter,” says the man. “Just hurry.”
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“Of course,” says Randall, mentally working out what he should do. Is something happening here, or is he imagining it? He glances out the store’s front windows and notes a dirty white Toyota car and makes out the shadowy profile of a man waiting in the driver’s seat. Exhaust from the tailpipe tells him the engine’s still running. Randall chooses pale pink roses because they are the freshest and begins quickly wiring the buds. He’s wired five when the man tells him not to bother with the others.
“Are you sure? If we don’t wire them, they’ll droop,” explains Randall. Seeing the man’s confusion he adds, “And then they won’t last as long.” Again, the man insists it doesn’t matter.
Randall gently lays the flowers on a bed of white tissue paper in a long white box and belts it with a pink satin ribbon. He is about to affix the shop sticker when the man tells him not to and says he doesn’t need a card.
“I see,” says Randall, anxious to be rid of the man. “That’ll be $28.15.”
The man dumps $30 cash on the counter, takes the flowers and says, “Keep the change.”
Randall watches the car drive away, notes the North Carolina plates. He breathes a sigh of relief, feeling like he’s dodged some sort of bullet.
January 16, 1987: Usually a late sleeper, Lita is up early to perseverate on her day. In a few short hours, a judge will make a major decision on the division of assets in her divorce, a near-final step in the long and arduous death march of her 10-year marriage to James Vincent Sullivan. Thankfully, Jim won’t be there; he’ll be playing tennis or rattling around in his 17,000-square-foot mansion down in Florida.
Just a few days past her 35th birthday, Lita is tired of bracing for the unceasing barbs Jim slings through his lawyers. He’s called her a jewelry thief and a drug abuser — he even had the gall to claim she had multiple marital affairs — which is rich, given his own sordid history of infidelity. She knows through the grapevine that Jim is already running around with a new Palm Beach armpiece, a thrice-divorced Asian woman this time.
Lita is tired, ready to restart her life without constant calls from her lawyer detailing all the new ways Jim is trying to hurt her. In addition to the nerves about court, she’s jumpy because some strange things have been happening lately, a knock in the early morning a few days ago, the creeping suspicion she’s being followed, and that odd phone call yesterday…
It's around 8:15 a.m. when the doorbell rings. Lita tightens her robe and heads downstairs to answer the door. “Good morning,” she says to the man standing on her doorstep. In his arms, he carries a long white flower box.
Upstairs, Lita’s best friend is in the guestroom with her toddler. She hears two gunshots and instinctively pulls her daughter out of bed and hurries her into the closet, covering her with a blanket. “Be quiet,” she whispers. “Quiet as a mouse.” She waits behind the closet door, paralyzed, terrified, wondering what’s just happened.
January 2023: When the hitman gets out of the pickup in the Albemarle city park, I feel a little disappointed. In my mind, he’s a giant. But now, at 72, he’s stooped from longstanding back problems and is clearly a shrunken version of what he once was. He wears a black leather cowboy hat, an oversized black winter coat, blue jeans and black running shoes with Velcro straps. I’m relieved to see he’s brought his girlfriend, a woman suffering from emphysema and myriad other ailments. I know from our past phone calls that he’s been living with her on and off. I guess this means they’re back together.
It’s so cold, I suggest we go to a coffeeshop, but he nods toward my minivan.
“Oh, the van? OK,” I say. The girlfriend climbs into the back seat carrying her oxygen tank in a hot pink tote, the hitman takes the passenger seat and I return to the driver’s side. In his thick paddle hands, he fiddles with a plastic 7-Up bottle. A silver ring with a carved red scorpion hugs his ring finger. An old Timex Indiglo watch clings to his wrist.
We chit-chat about long-haul trucking, the meth problems in Albemarle, the recent death of Lisa Marie Presley. Finally, he’s ready to talk about the murder, the event that put him in prison for 20 years — the event that has us sitting here together in the middle of nowhere.
“Lemme tell you this, the day, January the 16th, when that man pulled that trigger, I stopped living,” he told me. “I prayed every day from that day forth that God would take this burden off my chest.” He tells me, as he has many times before, that he wasn’t the man who shot Lita. He admits to some bad stuff, and yeah, he took the money and bought the flowers, but he’s not a murderer. He’s desperate to convince me and anyone else who will listen. He isn’t, in fact, the hitman.
The only problem is nobody believes him.
After nearly three hours cooped up in the minivan, the hitman and his girlfriend finally drive away in their clunky old pickup. My head is spinning, and the post-flood of adrenaline fatigue overcomes me. I check my phone; I have several texts from my friend in Atlanta.
Are you OK?
Where are you?
Are you ALIVE?
Call me!
Excerpted from A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton by Deb Miller Landau. Published by Pegasus Books, August 6th 2024.
A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton will be released on Aug. 6, and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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