The racist and sexist murder scandal that shook Atlanta society

The decades-old brutal murder of a prominent, young, married black Southern society woman by a contract killer – a murder shockingly ordered by her cowardly white millionaire husband – is given a comprehensive forensic treatment in journalist Deb Miller Landau's “A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton.”

Just hours before McClinton and her husband, wealthy businessman James Vincent Sullivan, were scheduled to appear in an Atlanta courtroom – where a judge would decide the outcome of their multi-million dollar divorce proceedings – she was shot in cold blood in broad daylight by a hired amateur assassin.

Friday, January 16, 1987 – the beginning of the weekend before the second Martin Luther King Day was to be celebrated in America 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 husband, a blue-collar worker from South Boston, had become a torment marked by his infidelity as well as his “lies, manipulation and cruelty.”

As McClinton dawdled early that Friday morning in a white satin nightgown, she was surprised when the doorbell of her home in Atlanta's affluent Buckhead neighborhood rang.

When she opened the door, she was greeted by a delivery man described as “rough and scruffy looking.” He wore green work pants and a faded flannel shirt. His hair was curly and his beard unruly, Landau writes.

The man handed McClinton a box containing a dozen long-stemmed pink roses that he had purchased a few minutes earlier for $30.

And then the person delivering the bouquet fired two shots from a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol at the frightened woman.

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

So begins Deb Landau's 244-page, highly detailed account of one of the country's most controversial but long-forgotten murder cases, a case with clear racist undertones that would become cold – “disturbingly frosty” – “for a decade,” as the author writes.

The shocking case made headlines in newspapers and magazines, was covered in true crime television series and, the author writes, “the police took it to the grave with them, and Lita's family pushed and pressured until they almost broke.”

The author reveals 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 all the black people I asked said, 'Yes,' of course race plays a role.”

This case had one shock after another.

For example, just eight months after McClinton's murder, her widower Jim Sullivan married another celebrity: the “petite, sexy” Korean-born Hyo-Sook “Suki” Rogers, the “stunning ex-wife” of an investment adviser – and a close friend of Sullivan's – whom he had first met at a cocktail party.

The two had a “hot affair” when he was still a couple with McClinton, but their relationship was also turbulent and ended in divorce.

Lita McClinton came from a wealthy family

Her mother, JoAnn McClinton, served as a state legislator for 12 years, and Lita's father, Emery McClinton, headed the U.S. Department of Transportation's regional civil rights office.

The McClintons' neighbors included baseball star Hank Aaron and civil rights icon John Lewis.

Lita graduated with honors from the prestigious Spelman College in Atlanta. She initially studied law, but then became a buyer in an upscale boutique in Atlanta.

There she met her future husband – and mastermind of her murder: the handsome, likeable Jim Sullivan, a customer of the boutique who, according to Landau, flirted like crazy with McClinton and immediately fell romantically in love with him.

He was nicknamed “Sully” and divorced his high school sweetheart, with whom he had fathered four children.

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

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

Bienert died suddenly and mysteriously. The cause of death was cardiac arrest, but authorities suspected something else – that he had been poisoned; that perhaps his nephew had done it, but none of this was ever proven.

After Uncle Frank's death, Sullivan became the sole heir to his fortune and became a millionaire overnight.

“It was 1976, and interracial couples were still an unusual sight in the South,” Landau writes. “After all, Georgia's anti-interracial laws, which criminalized marriage between whites and blacks, had been repealed just a few years earlier.”

Against her parents' wishes, and on a day that McClinton's mother called “the worst day of her life,” according to the author, her 25-year-old daughter married Sullivan, ten years her senior, two days before New Year's Eve 1976 in a small wedding on his newly inherited 12-acre estate in Macon, formerly owned by his late Uncle Frank.

The evening before the ceremony, the groom handed the bride a piece of paper and asked her to sign it – a marriage contract. “In love, naive… 'OK,' she says and kisses him. 'I trust you,' she signs without reading it,” writes Landau.

The author details the ups and downs of their contentious interracial marriage, including Sullivan's decision to sell their home and inherited business and move to posh Palm Beach, Florida, where he buys a mansion, drives a Rolls Royce, and behaves like a single playboy, sleeping with other women; his wife regularly finds her underwear and stray blonde hairs in the marital bed.

Moreover, McClinton feels uncomfortable in this elite, predominantly white enclave.

Landau points out, “People would blatantly stare at her as they passed her on the street – or they would give her a fake smile… It was unusual for a black woman to live in a place like Palm Beach, let alone be the lady of the house.”

Disgusted by the Palm Beach scene and her Casanova husband's lifestyle, McClinton moved back to affluent Buckhead with every intention of ending her marriage.

The investigation into McClinton's death did not bring her killer to justice until 2006 – “19 years, one month and eleven days” after her murder, when the trial against the contract killer began.

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

An ex-girlfriend of Harwood had betrayed him after she saw a crime report on a tabloid television show.

Harwood spent 20 years behind bars but stuck to his version that he did not kill McClinton. However, during a meeting with the author, he admitted that he “bought the roses” that were delivered to the crime scene.

On March 10, 2006, the jury in Sullivan's trial deliberated for only four hours.

He was found guilty of first-degree murder, first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated assault and burglary, as well as “causing or directing another person to commit the murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan.”

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

Landau writes: “One day he too will die – and no one will send him flowers.”