In 1987, the murder of socialite Lita McClinton Sullivan shocked the wealthy Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, Ga. The tony neighborhood, with its well-kept mansions and excellent schools, was not a place where women were murdered in cold blood all over the world. day light. But that’s exactly what happened when she opened the door to someone posing as a flower delivery man.
Now, inside The Devil Descended in Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Assassination of Lita McClinton (out Aug. 6 from Pegasus Crime) author and investigative reporter Deb Miller Landau takes readers through the life and death of McClinton Sullivan, as well as the winding road to bringing her killer to justice.
Below, in an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, relive the moment she went to meet the killer who went to prison for her murder.
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Lita McClinton Sullivan in West Palm Beach, Fla. 1990 Scott Wiseman/Palm Beach Post/ZUMAPRESS.com
January 2023: I’m sitting in a rented Pacifica minibus in a deserted parking lot at City Lake Park in Albemarle, NC, waiting to meet a man recently released from prison for orchestrating murder. For decades, newspaper headlines across the country called him “The Killer”—Hitman Found, Suspected Killer Accused of Murdering Buckhead Socialite, Hitman Freed. I chased him for months before he finally called me.
“Although it would be refreshing to have the opportunity to meet someone who wants to learn the truth and publish it,” he said. “I’m not sure if you have the resources to do the things I would ask of you.” I looked over my shoulder in a fit of senseless panic – is anyone seeing this? — but it was an opening, even though I had no idea what he was talking about.
I first wrote a retrospective on the brutal murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan in 1987. Atlanta magazine in 2004. It was a case that shook the city, the country, and later the world. A black member of a politically powerful Atlanta family, murdered in broad daylight in Buckhead, Atlanta’s most respectable, whitest neighborhood. For a decade, the case was cold, disturbingly cold. It became fodder for newspapers and magazines, featured on television shows such as Dominick Dunne Power, privilege and justice; CBS 48 hours, Extra!, FBI: Most Wanted and many others. Journalists like me covered it for years, lawyers didn’t sleep, cops took it to their graves, and Lita’s family pushed and bent until they almost broke.
So here I am, rubbing the skinny bits of sleep from the delicate crevices of my eyeballs, in a rental van in a small town in the middle of nowhere, trying to talk to a killer. He knows I’m coming, but he’s been ghosting me for the past few weeks, and now I fear I’ve traveled in vain. I drove all over town, past junkyards with wrecked cars and rusted washing machines, past the “Home of Kellie Pickler” sign in the square outside the courthouse celebrating the American Idol contestant who ran away from this town, past colonial homes, abandoned textile factories, and undisguised cemeteries on the side of the road.
And I googled a bit. This small farming town about an hour east of Charlotte grew up around cotton production and manufacturing. For decades, everyone worked in the “mill” – packing sacks of raw cotton, spinning fibers into yarn, attaching toes to socks in hosiery factories. Since the textile factories closed in the 1980s, the city has struggled to redefine itself. Many families here barely make ends meet. If North Carolina is the rough shape of a revolver pointing west, Albemarle is north of the trigger.
I check my phone again. Still no message from the killer. I feel a mixture of relief and disappointment. I’m not entirely sure what I’m hoping he’ll tell me, other than his side of the story.
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I sigh, scroll to the “Lita” album in my phone’s photo app, and look at her pensive, beautiful face. Whatever happens today, it’s a good reminder: it all begins and ends with Lita McClinton Sullivan.
I decide not to wait any longer and dial the killer’s number. To my surprise, he answers immediately.
“Where are you?” he asks in his big booming voice. No kindness, no conversation.
“In Albemarle,” I say.
“Yeah, I know,” she says like I’m stupid. “Where?”
I tell him I’m in a city park, but before I can suggest a coffee shop, somewhere warm, safe, public with people, he cuts me off and says he’s on his way.
Click.
I look panicked around the empty parking lot, the quiet lake. I briefly wonder if there are bodies in that water, what would happen if the cops found my empty van. This is not how it should go. Literally no one knows where I am. I turn on location sharing and text a friend in Atlanta: “Meeting the killer in 5!” He returns the wide-eyed emoticon and, even though it’s cold outside, I start to sweat.
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‘The Devil Has Come Down to Georgia’ by Deb Miller Landau.
Pegasus Books
January 16, 1987: Randall Benson is late for work at Botany Bay Flower Shop. The store is supposed to open at 8 a.m., but by the time he turns on the lights, unlocks the front door, and retrieves the cash register hidden in the refrigerator in the back, it’s about 8:05 a.m., and he scolds himself for being in a hurry. Given the gloomy morning, he expects a slow day, so he is surprised when the bell rings, signaling a customer.
“Hello!” sings behind the counter. As Randall watches the customer walk towards him, he hesitates, heat suddenly rising to the back of his head. He immediately gets a bad feeling. The man looks nothing like the usual Buckhead business crowd; this guy is rough and dirty, without a hint of a smile. He wears green work pants and a faded flannel shirt.
“I need a dozen roses,” says the man, not looking at him. “In the box.”
Randall, a Georgia boy who has lived his whole life, recognizes an accent that is different from his own, but he can’t quite place it. “Well, that sounds nice,” Randall says, trying to ignore the heat in his ears. “What color are we looking for?”
“It’s not important. Just a dozen roses.”
Randall swallowed hard. “Well, is there any special occasion? If it’s for your wife or girlfriend, you’ll want red. But if it’s for an anniversary, you’ll want yellow and…”
“Listen, I told you it doesn’t matter,” the man says. “Just hurry up.”
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“Sure,” Randall says, mentally figuring out what he should do. Is something going on here or is he imagining it? He glances through the front windows of the store and notices an off-white Toyota car and makes out the shadowy profile of a man waiting in the driver’s seat. Exhaust from the tailpipe tells him the engine is still running. Randall selects the pale pink roses because they are the freshest and begins to quickly wire the buds. He was making five when the man told him not to bother with the others.
“Are you sure? If we don’t wire them, they’ll go limp,” Randall explains. Seeing the man’s confusion, he adds, “And then it won’t last that long.” Again, the man insists that it doesn’t matter.
Randall delicately places the flowers on a white tissue paper base in a long white box and ties it with a pink satin ribbon. He was about to put on the store sticker when the man told him not to and said he didn’t need the card.
“I see,” Randall says, eager to get rid of the man. “That will be $28.15.”
The man throws $30 in cash on the counter, picks up the flowers and says, “Keep the change.”
Randall watches the car drive away, noting the North Carolina plates. He breathed a sigh of relief, feeling as if he had dodged some kind of bullet.
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January 16, 1987: Lita usually sleeps late, gets up early to get through her day. In a few short hours, a judge will make a major decision on the division of assets in her divorce, nearly the final step in the long and tortuous demise of her 10-year marriage to James Vincent Sullivan. Fortunately, Jim won’t be there; he’ll be playing tennis or rattling around in his 17,000 square foot mansion down in Florida.
Just days after her 35th birthday, Lita is tired of fighting the constant attacks Jim sends through his lawyers. He called her a jewel thief and a drug addict – he even had the nerve to claim she’d had multiple affairs – which is rich, given his own sordid history of infidelity. She knows through the grapevine that Jim is already running around with a new Palm Beach bracelet, this time with a thrice-divorced Asian woman.
Lita is tired, ready to start her life over without the constant calls from her lawyer describing all the new ways Jim is trying to harm her. Apart from the nerves about the court, she is nervous because some strange things have been happening lately, the knocking in the early morning a few days ago, the creeping suspicion that someone is following her and that phone call yesterday…
Around 8:15 in the morning, the doorbell rang. Lita tightens her robe and goes downstairs to open the door. “Good morning,” she says to the man standing on her doorstep. In her hands she carries a long white box with flowers.
Upstairs, Lita’s best friend is in the guest room with her small child. She hears two shots and instinctively pulls her daughter out of bed and rushes her into the closet, covering her with a blanket. “Be quiet,” she whispered. “Quiet as a mouse.” She waits behind the closet door, paralyzed, terrified, wondering what just happened.
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January 2023: When the killer gets out of the truck in Albemarle City Park, I feel a little disappointed. In my mind, he is a giant. But now, at 72, he’s bent over from long-term back problems and is clearly a shrunken version of what he once was. He wears a black leather cowboy hat, a large black winter coat, blue jeans and black running shoes with velcro straps. I am relieved to see that he brought his girlfriend, a woman who suffers from emphysema and a myriad of other ailments. I know from our past phone calls that he lived with her all the time. I guess that means they’re back together.
It’s so cold, I suggest we go to a cafe, but he nods towards my van.
“Oh, a van? OK,” I say. The girl climbs into the back seat carrying her oxygen bottle in a hot pink bag, the killer sits in the passenger seat, and I return to the driver’s side. She fumbles with a plastic bottle of 7-Up in her fat oar hands. Silver a ring with a carved red scorpion hugs his ring finger.An old Timex Indiglo watch clings to his wrist.
We chat about long-haul trucking, the meth problems in Albemarle, the recent death of Lisa Marie Presley. Finally, he’s ready to talk about the murder, the event that put him in prison for 20 years—the event that has us sitting together in the middle of nowhere.
“Let me tell you this, the day, January 16, when that man pulled the trigger, I stopped living,” he told me. “I prayed every day from that day forward that God would take this burden off my chest.” He told me, as he had many times before, that he was not the man who killed Lita. He admits to some bad things, and yes, he took money and bought flowers, but he’s not a murderer. He is desperate to convince me and anyone else who will listen. He’s not really a killer.
The only problem is that no one believes him.
After nearly three hours in the van, the killer and his girlfriend finally drive off in their clunky old pickup truck. My head is spinning, post-flood adrenaline fatigue is taking over me. I check my phone; I have several messages from friends in Atlanta.
Are you OK?
Where are you?
Are you alive?
Call me!
Derived from The devil has come down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege and the Assassination of Lita McClinton by Deb Miller Landau. Published by Pegasus Books, August 6, 2024.
The Devil Descended in Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Assassination of Lita McClinton will be released on August 6th and is available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold.
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