Lita McClinton Sullivan

Case background and investigation

Lita LaVaughn McClinton Sullivan was a poised, well-connected Atlanta socialite and the daughter of a prominent Black family; her father, Emory McClinton, was a Georgia civil-rights figure and transportation official. Born January 7, 1952, she married James Vincent Sullivan, a wealthy white businessman, in 1976. Sullivan had inherited a liquor-distribution fortune and moved the couple to a Palm Beach, Florida mansion, but the marriage soured amid his controlling behavior and infidelities. By the mid-1980s Lita had returned to Atlanta and filed for divorce, and the two were locked in a bitter fight over money and property as a crucial hearing approached in January 1987.

On the morning of January 16, 1987, the day a hearing in the divorce was scheduled, a man posing as a florist arrived at Lita's townhouse in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood carrying a box of long-stemmed pink roses. When the 35-year-old opened her door, the 'delivery man' drew a pistol and shot her in the head. She died at the scene. The killing bore the hallmarks of a professional hit, and suspicion immediately fell on her estranged husband, who stood to lose millions in the divorce and who was conspicuously in Florida at the time. Yet for years investigators lacked the evidence to charge him.

The case broke open a decade later. In 1997 authorities identified Phillip Anthony Harwood, a North Carolina man, as the triggerman; he admitted he had been paid roughly $25,000 to kill Lita at James Sullivan's behest. A key witness, Belinda Trahan, came forward with knowledge of the murder-for-hire plot, and in 1998 Sullivan was finally indicted. Harwood pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, received a 20-year sentence and agreed to testify. Sullivan, however, had fled the country. An international manhunt ended on July 2, 2002, when he was captured in Thailand after being profiled on television; he was extradited to the United States in 2004.

In March 2006, a Fulton County jury deliberated only a few hours before convicting James Sullivan of murder in the death of his wife. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors and family members described a case in which wealth, mobility and privilege allowed a killer to evade justice for nearly two decades while Lita's parents fought to keep her memory and her case alive. Harwood was released from prison in 2017 after serving his term. The conviction closed a case that had haunted Atlanta for a generation, though Lita McClinton's family has continued to speak publicly about the long, painful road to accountability and the class and racial dynamics that shadowed the investigation. James Sullivan remains incarcerated.