Devil Went Down to Georgia: The race and sex-filled murder scandal that shook Atlanta society

A brutal decades old murder-by-hit man of a prominent young married black socialite in the South — a killing shockingly contracted by her craven white millionaire husband — is given the full 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 wealthy businessman husband, James Vincent Sullivan, were due in an Atlanta courtroom — where a judge would determine the outcome of their multimillion-dollar divorce case — she would be shot to death in broad daylight, in cold blood, by a hired amateur killer.

Friday, Jan. 16, 1987 — the beginning of the weekend before America’s second-ever Martin Luther King Day would be celebrated on Monday — was cold and dreary.

McClinton, who recently celebrated her 35th birthday, was concerned and nervous about the approaching court date.

As Landau writes, her decade-long marriage to her born-and-bred blue collar south Bostonian husband had become tortuous, marked by his infidelity, along with his “lies, manipulation, and cruelty.”

Puttering around in a white satin nightgown early that Friday morning, McClinton was surprised when the doorbell chimed in her home in Atlanta’s affluent Buckhead neighborhood.

Opening the door, she was met by a deliveryman described as “rough and grubby looking,” attired in green work pants and a faded flannel shirt. His hair was curly, his beard unruly, writes Landau.

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

And then the bearer of the bouquet fired two shots from a 9mm Smith & Wesson pistol at the startled woman.

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

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Thus begins Deb Landau’s 244 page highly-detailed account of one of the country’s most controversial, but now long-forgotten murder cases, one with high-pitched racial overtones that “for a decade” would go cold — “unnervingly frigid” — as the author writes.

The shocking case became fodder for newspapers and magazines, was featured in television true crime shows and, writes the author, “cops took it to their graves, and Lita’s family pushed and bent till 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 every black person I asked said, ‘yes,’ of course race mattered.”

This case had one shocker after another.

For instance, just eight months after McClinton’s murder, her widower, Jim Sullivan, tied the knot with another socialite, “petite, sexy” Korean-born Hyo-Sook “Suki” Rogers, the “gorgeous ex-wife” of an investment advisor — and a close friend of Sullivan’s — who he had first met at a cocktail party.

The two had a “steamy affair” while he was still a couple with McClinton, but their union, too, was turbulent, and would end in divorce.

Lita McClinton hailed from an upscale family

Her mother, JoAnn McClinton, served for a dozen years as a state representative, and Lita’s father, Emery McClinton, headed the US Department of Transportation’s regional civil rights office.

The McClintons’ neighbors included baseball great Hank Aaron and civil rights icon John Lewis.

Lita had graduated on the dean’s list from prestigious Spelman College, in Atlanta, initially pursuing a law degree, but eventually became a buyer at a high-end Atlanta boutique.

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It was there that she met her future husband — and the mastermind behind her murder — good-looking, personable Jim Sullivan, a customer in the boutique, who Landau writes flirted madly with McClinton, and who instantly fell under his romantic spell.

Nicknamed “Sully,” he was then divorced from his high school sweetheart, with whom he had fathered four children.

In Boston, Sullivan had been an accountant at a local department store. But in Macon, Georgia, there was a rich uncle, Frank Bienert, who owned a lucrative wholesale liquor distributorship, and was seeking someone he could trust to eventually take over the business.

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

Mysteriously, Bienert suddenly died. The cause of death was cardiac arrest, but authorities suspected something more — that he had been poisoned; that maybe his nephew had done it, but nothing was ever proven.

With Uncle Frank’s demise, Sullivan became the sole heir to his fortune; overnight he was a millionaire.

“It’s 1976 and mixed-race couples are still an unusual sight  in the South,” writes Landau. “After all, Georgia’s anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized marriage between  whites and blacks, had been repealed only a few years earlier.”

Against her parents’ wishes, and in what McClinton’s mother “would later call the worst day of her life,” according to the author, her 25-year-old daughter married Sullivan, a decade older, two days before New Year’s Eve, 1976, in a small wedding on his newly inherited 12-acre Macon estate, formerly owned by his late uncle Frank.

The night before the ceremony, the groom handed the bride a paper and asked her to sign it — a Prenuptial Agreement.  “Dizzy in love, naive . . . ’OK’ she says, kissing him. ‘I trust you,” signing without reading,” Landau writes.

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The author details the highs and lows of their controversial interracial marriage, including Sullivan’s decision to sell their home, the inherited business, and move to ritzy Palm Beach, Fla., where he buys a mansion, drives a Rolls Royce, and acts like a single playboy, sleeping with other women; his wife regularly finding their lingerie and stray blonde hairs in the marital bed.

Moreover, McClinton is uncomfortable living in the elite, mostly white enclave.

As Landau points out, “People openly stare as they pass her on the street — or they flash her fake smiles . . . It was unusual for a black woman to live in a place like Palm Beach, let alone be lady of the house.”

Disgusted with the Palm Beach scene and her Casanova husband’s lifestyle, McClinton moved back to affluent Buckhead, fully intending to end her marriage.

The investigation into McClinton’s death would not bring her killer to justice until  2006 — “19 years, one month, and 11 days” after her murder, when the hit man’s trial began.

He was a long-haul trucker, Phillip Anthony “Tony” Harwood who had been hired by Sullivan to kill his wife in exchange for $25,000.

An ex-girlfriend of Harwood’s would blow the whistle on him after seeing a crime segment on a tabloid TV show.

Harwood would spend 20 years behind bars, but stick to his story that he didn’t kill McClinton, but would admit in a meeting with the author that he “bought the roses,” that were delivered at the murder scene.

On March 10, 2006, the jury in Sullivan’s trial took just four hours to deliberate.

He was convicted of malice murder, felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, and burglary, and that he “caused or directed another to commit the murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan.”

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

As Landau writes, “One day, he too will die — and no one will send flowers.”

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