New book examines the role of race, power, and privilege in the murder of Lita McClinton

Caption

A sculpture honoring Lita McClinton at her family's plot at Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery.

Credit: Peter Biello

In January 1987, Lita McClinton answered the door of her Buckhead home to find a man on her doorstep holding a box of flowers. Behind that box was a gun, and the man shot and killed McClinton before fleeing. At the time, McClinton, a Black woman from a prominent Atlanta family, was finalizing her divorce from her husband, James Sullivan, who was white and stood to lose millions of dollars in the settlement. And though he was a prime suspect, Sullivan, who was in Palm Beach, Florida at the time of the murder, managed to avoid conviction for the crime for 19 years. A new book looks at why it took so long to bring justice to McClinton and her family. It's called A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege and the Murder of Lita McClinton. Author Deb Miller Landau spoke with GPB’s Peter Biello.

TRANSCRIPT

Peter Biello: So you first encountered this case more than two decades ago when you were writing for Atlanta magazine.

Deb Miller Landau: That's right. When I got my hands on the story, it was already 17 years after the murder. And I kind of fell into it really hard and did a lot of research and just thought, "Why hasn't anyone been convicted of her murder yet? What's going on here?" And so that was my first foray into the story.

Peter Biello: But certainly not your last. What was it about this story that made you want to pick it up years later? What stuck with you?

Deb Miller Landau: Well, I carried this box of files that I'd scrawled "Sullivan" on the top of years and years before. I carried it on a move across the country through several house moves and just couldn't sort of get rid of it. There was something about the story that I felt like it had more to teach me. And fast forward to summer of 2020, the world's going through the pandemic. The Black Lives Matter movement has come to pass. George Floyd has been murdered, and we're in a place where we're really starting to have conversations about race in a way that we haven't before. So I started really digging in on my own experience, as a white woman in this culture and a kind of white dominant culture and what that meant. And it really had me thinking about Lita and Jim, who were an interracial couple at a time when Georgia's miscegenation laws forbidding interracial marriage had only been repealed a few years prior. What would their experience have been like? And I really start to think more about it. And I opened the lid.

Peter Biello: Well, tell us a little more about Lita McClinton. Who was she?

Deb Miller Landau: Lita was born in 1952 in Atlanta, and her family were very prominent members of the community. Her father would go on to be an executive at the Department of Transportation Civil Rights Division. Her mother was on the Georgia State General Assembly for 12 years. And they were just sort of very formidable people [who] had grown up, born and raised in Atlanta. But Lita grew up in a time where whites had an entrance and Blacks had a separate entrance. She would live through the Civil Rights Act, the desegregation of schools, the Voting Rights Act. And so several civil rights activities were happening in the background. And her parents were very involved and influential in asking the kind of questions like, "What are civil rights, anyway? And what do we want about desegregation? What would it look like?" And she was very in the mix of a kind of elevated, academically fueled, affluent Black community.

Peter Biello: And she meets Jim Sullivan, a man who moved to Georgia from Massachusetts. That's where the title comes from: A Devil Went Down to Georgia. And he romances her and they marry. And it turns into something that seems to me like a textbook case of domestic abuse. Right? She he controls her through money. He isolates her when they move to Palm Beach, Florida. And this will sound like skipping over a lot. There's a lot of details in this book, but the marriage falls apart and she decides to divorce him. Moves away from the Palm Beach location where she felt very much like an outsider and goes to stay in Buckhead. What happens from there?

Deb Miller Landau: Back in the day, we weren't talking about domestic violence. I mean, what happened behind closed doors was very much a private matter. And so I think that it's important to bring that up. But she's back in Buckhead. She's filed for divorce from Jim. Buckhead is arguably one of the whitest, most affluent neighborhoods in Atlanta. And she's a Black woman living in the middle of Buckhead. And so that was sort of an unusual sight at the time, too, but very much home, really looking forward to the next chapter of her life. She's 35, just turned 35 when she gets a knock at her door.

Peter Biello: The knock comes from the man I referenced in the intro holding the box of flowers with the gun behind it.

Deb Miller Landau: Right. So she opens the door to her condo. And that afternoon, a judge was to decide on the sort of validity of a much-contested post-nuptial. And so it was a big day. It was going to be a big day in court. And she was nervous and she was up early and she gets a knock on her door. And witnesses later hear that report that they heard her say, "Good morning" to the person at the door. And he shoves a long white box with a pink bow into her arms and takes a gun out of his jacket and shoots once, misses. She sort of holds up—investigators later determined that she held up the box of flowers to try to protect herself and from the second bullet, but it went straight through the box and hit her in the skull. And she died at Piedmont Hospital half an hour later.

Peter Biello: Jim Sullivan was the prime suspect at the time. How do you think he managed to really avoid really facing the consequences of his actions for so long?

Deb Miller Landau: We have a long history in this country of giving wealthy white men the benefit of the doubt. It's a truism that if you have wealth, you can buy a better defense. And I think that he had that capability. And the reason why his family went after him in civil court where the penalty is financial as opposed to jail time—they wanted to take away that one thing from him that kept enabling him to kind of keep getting off and getting off and getting off.

Peter Biello: When he finally does get convicted, how does that register with Lita’s parents, who had to wait so long and really did pursue it the whole time, pursue justice?

Deb Miller Landau: Yeah. Lita's parents were most definitely kind of the heroes of the story. If not for them, Jim Sullivan would be still sipping Mai Tais in Thailand at the moment.

Peter Biello: Which is where he was found. He was found finally in Thailand.

Deb Miller Landau: Was found in Thailand, living with yet another woman with his name on the door.

Peter Biello: As of the printing of this book, he was in prison in Augusta. Is he still there?

Deb Miller Landau: He's at the Augusta State Medical Prison in Augusta, Georgia. Yeah.

Peter Biello: And you reached out to him?

Deb Miller Landau: I wrote to him several times in Georgia. You know, you can't just go visit an inmate. They need to put you on their visitation list. And he never replied to me. I offered to sort of let him tell his side of the story. He never replied. And it's hard to know because of health, privacy laws what state he's in. But he's still alive and he's now 83.

Peter Biello: If you did get a chance to ask him a question, what would you ask?

Deb Miller Landau: I guess I would ask him, you know, after all of this, was it worth it? And what do you—I'd like to know what he would say to Lita’s family. Yeah, I think I just want to hear what he had to say.