In late 1976, after moving to Georgia to take over his uncle’s liquor distribution business, New England transplant James “Jim” Sullivan walked into a high-end clothing boutique in an Atlanta mall, where he met Atlanta socialite Lita McClinton, a store employee who hailed from an affluent Black background. After a whirlwind romance, the pair married the same year and the couple moved to Macon, where Jim soon inherits the company following his uncle’s unexpected death.
Lita helps her new husband assimilate into high society, helping him with his wardrobe and teaching him the fine points of Southern etiquette. But the marriage falls apart after nearly a decade of Lita putting up with Jim’s alleged infidelities and controlling behavior—like jotting down her every expense and deducting it from a weekly allowance, or constant denials that he was having extramarital affairs.
On January 18, 1987, Lita was supposed to head to divorce court in Atlanta where a judge would decide if her prenuptial agreement with her estranged husband was binding. But that morning, a man delivering a dozen roses knocked on the door of her townhouse and shot Lita in the head. She was pronounced dead when she was transported to the hospital. The killer got away.
Lita’s murder rocked the city’s Black community. Homicide investigators suspected Jim was somehow involved in his wife’s demise, even though he was living in Palm Beach, Florida, at the time. He had a simple motive: protecting his assets.
Yet, Jim eluded justice for nearly two decades.
In 1992, a judge dismissed federal charges that Jim violated interstate commerce laws by arranging his wife’s assassination. Special agents from the FBI had pinpointed long-distance calls from Georgia to Jim’s Palm Beach mansion shortly before and after the murder, but his defense attorneys successfully argued that investigators could not prove he was actually on the line.
Two years later, Lita’s parents Emory and JoAnn McClinton won a wrongful death lawsuit against Jim that was overturned and reinstated on appeal, but he never paid the $4 million in damages. Then, in 1998, the girlfriend of a North Carolina man, Phillip Anthony “Tony” Harwood, met with investigators and told them he accepted $25,000 from Jim to kill Lita. The same year, authorities arrested Harwood and charged him with murder.
Jim fled the country to Thailand, where he was apprehended in 2002. A year later, Harwood pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for his testimony against Jim. In 2006, an Atlanta jury convicted Jim for murdering Lita. He was sentenced to life without parole.
A&E True Crime spoke with journalist Deb Miller Landau, whose book, A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege and the Murder of Lita McClinton, explores the impact Lita’s death had on her family and friends, as well as how Jim remained free for nearly 20 years.
Why did you decide to write this book now so many years after Jim Sullivan’s conviction?
I first covered the story in 2004 for Atlanta Magazine. It was one of those stories that just sort of sticks with you and gets its teeth into you. I carried around all of the files and just weirdly felt like I needed to hold on to it. Fast forward to the summer of 2020. The Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements really got me thinking about this country’s history of white supremacist structures, the racial injustice inherent in the criminal justice system and the power dynamics of wealthy white men. And so, I wanted to look at the story through that lens.
While you were reporting the book, did you unravel any new threads?
[From everyone I interviewed,] Lita was just a lovely human being who made friends easily, who was curious about things and was an extrovert. She grew up in a time when Jim Crow laws were still very much running the show in Atlanta, and she learned how to navigate tough situations. For instance, Lita and her sister were among the first black children to attend an all-white Catholic high school when schools were desegregated. She also grew up in a neighborhood where “white flight” took place, but also where Black doctors, lawyers and politicians lived in houses designed by Black architects and built by Black construction companies.
Lita was also a smart, caring person who also had aspirations. She made the dean’s list when she graduated from Spelman College and got a degree in political science. Her parents would have loved for her to become a lawyer or a public figure, but she was like, “No, I am going to follow my dream and get into fashion.” Lita was very stylish and was really into fashion design, coming up with her own looks and helping friends with their outfits.
Her whole trajectory changed when she married Jim in 1976, which was not that far out from when interracial marriages were illegal in Georgia. I wanted to dig into what that would have been like for Lita. [Jim] brought her to Shirley Hills, which is an ultra-rich, ultra-white part of Macon, Georgia. And then they moved to Palm Beach, where just one percent of the population was Black at the time. She lived a lonely existence for almost a decade, putting up with years of mental abuse from Jim. He scolded her constantly about her weight and forbade her from getting a job while penny-pinching the allowance he gave her. He cheated on her too.
When Lita was murdered, her parents were in their early 50s. Her mom, Joanna, is now 91 and her father, Emory, passed away in December at 90. So for a good half of their lives, [Lita’s parents] have been dealing with the heartache of their murdered daughter. Lita’s nephew, who was in utero when she was murdered, has always noticed that her warmth is missing in their lives. Her death impacted generations.
In the book, readers quickly find out that Jim Sullivan is a bad guy. For instance, two years into their marriage, he gets angry with Lita because she’s buying lingerie and setting up lavish dinners in an attempt to rekindle their love. He also conceals his plan to sell the liquor distribution business, buy a mansion in West Palm Beach and have them move to Florida without discussing it with Lita. And after they moved, Jim regularly flew down his mistress from Macon when Lita visited her family in Atlanta. Did he have any redeeming qualities?
I tried many times to get him to offer up his side of the story. And he never took me up on it. So, he sort of remains this mysterious figure, because he had this totally normal life up until the point he moved to Georgia. He was a practicing Catholic who married his high school sweetheart and had four children in rapid succession. Then he moved to Georgia and everything changed. [Jim divorced his first wife, who moved back to Boston with their kids.]
I think greed does a lot of things— it really changed Jim. He was charming, he was friendly and people liked him. And then there was this other side of him that just felt like he had a need to get beyond where his life was.
Jim was very controlling [of Lita], gaslighting her about his affairs and that she couldn’t survive without him.
You explore the dynamics of Lita’s and Jim’s backgrounds converging. He was an ambitious outsider from the northeast U.S. who wanted to get rich quick and move in Georgia’s upper echelons of society. She was a scion of a Black power couple in Atlanta who was taught the finer points of Southern etiquette, but who still endured racism. Why was that important?
It’s like a science experiment. You want to see what happens when you put two very different ingredients together.
Lita was Black from a very powerful, very southern family. Atlanta has its own very distinct story of Black wealth and Black power. Jim was nobody until he took over his uncle’s business. I think the only thing [Lita and Jim] had in common was they were both Catholics.
How much of an impact did Lita’s murder have in Atlanta, particularly in the Black community?
It was massive. It was huge news in Atlanta. The McClinton family is a huge name in Atlanta. Her father was a senior official in the U.S. Department of Transportation, and her mother was in the Georgia State Legislature. And you had a Black woman murdered in broad daylight in Buckhead, probably the whitest, most wealthy neighborhood in Atlanta. And then of course, she was being delivered a dozen roses. That was a big part of all the headlines. It was such an extreme story.
How did Jim’s status as a rich white man help him stay out of prison for almost 20 years?
First, his ability to pay for high priced lawyers worked for him. And after Lita was murdered, he threw out all sorts of accusations: that she was cheating on him; that she was into drugs; that she was up to nefarious things; that she was a gold digger.
Even Black detectives who were first on the scene wondered why this Black woman was living in such luxury in the middle of this white, upscale neighborhood. If even the Black [investigators] are feeling that way, imagine how that subliminally or otherwise impacts juries.
Most of the lawyers [in Jim’s trials] were white men. Other than the initial detectives, most of the investigators from [Georgia Bureau of Investigations] and the FBI were white. And if you can pay for really good defense attorneys, you have a better shot at getting out of whatever mess you’re in. And we saw that over and over again.
As part of your reporting, you actually met face-to-face with the hitman, Tony Harwood. What was your impression of him?
He still contends to this day that he took the money to do the hit, but he wasn’t the guy who pulled the trigger. It’s so interesting to me that after spending 20 years in prison, he’s still so determined to proclaim his innocence. I said to him, ‘even if you weren’t the guy, it still happened because of you.’ And he just couldn’t see that made him guilty.
One of the things that struck me so much is that he really wanted to be liked. At the time of the murder, he made some really terrible decisions and yet he still was not able to own that.