On a brisk January day in 1987, Lita McClinton woke up and prepared to finally hear the results of her tumultuous divorce.
Her doorbell rang. She opened the front door of her Atlanta townhome. A man handed her a white box filled with roses — and then shot and killed the 35-year-old McClinton.
A new book takes a deep dive into the shocking murder-for-hire, ordered from an iconic Palm Beach mansion to take place hundreds of miles away in Georgia, and the effects of McClinton’s death across the decades as her family pushed for justice.
Journalist and author Deb Miller Landau in “A Devil Went Down to Georgia” presents a gripping look at the slaying of the Atlanta socialite ordered by James Sullivan, a man who longed to be part of Palm Beach society — so badly that investigators said he ordered the killing of his soon-to-be ex-wife to stop an acrimonious divorce that promised to award McClinton a healthy portion of his fortune.
The brutal murder shook Atlanta, where Lita McClinton grew up the daughter of two prominent public officials: Georgia state Rep. JoAnn McClinton and Emory McClinton, a former official with the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
It also sent shockwaves through Palm Beach, where the former Landmarks Preservation Commission Chairman James Sullivan built a life on lies — a life that was lived in the landmarked 1928 Maurice Fatio-designed oceanfront mansion known locally as “the ham-and-cheese house.”
When Landau first heard about Lita McClinton, it was 2004, and Landau was a freelance reporter for “Atlanta Magazine.”
She was relatively new to Atlanta: Landau is Canadian, grew up on the West Coast and moved to the Peach State in the early 2000s with her then-husband.
“I didn’t know anything about the South. I didn’t really know anything about the city,” she said. She harnessed that feeling of being an outsider to dig deeper into her coverage.
When the editor of “Atlanta Magazine” asked Landau to write a retrospective through fresh eyes to look at McClinton’s murder, Landau “fell into it really hard.”
“It was my first big true crime story,” she said. “I had no idea how to do it. This is back in the days before the internet was a real thing. So I jumped into the story and was just completely taken by a lot of elements about it.”
Those elements had made the killing the subject of international attention: An interracial marriage. Accusations of fraud, infidelity and abuse. A divorce that was just hours from being finalized by a judge, possibly in McClinton’s favor. A man on the run. And money.
Lots of money.
Much of that money was spent in Palm Beach, where Sullivan in 1985 famously purchased the estate originally known as Casa Eleda without McClinton’s input.
Yes, a surprise mansion. Very Palm Beach.
But McClinton would not be very Palm Beach, as the couple soon found.
They moved to the island after nearly a decade of marriage — they wed in 1976 — and as Sullivan sought to make entry to some clubs with unwritten, historically racist membership rules, he became frustrated. Instead of the warm welcome he hoped to find in Palm Beach, Sullivan was allowed cool entry into some spaces — but McClinton, with her brown skin, was spurned by most.
Not to be discouraged, McClinton did her best to navigate the majority-white world in which she found herself, something in which she had great experience after growing up with two politically powerful parents who challenged racial barriers, Landau noted.
“I can only imagine how much she would have stood out, would have felt other-than,” Landau said of McClinton in Palm Beach. “And then of course she’s married to somebody who is coming to the realization that having a Black wife is a serious albatross around his neck and his aspirations for wealth and prosperity, and to be kind of a known person in Palm Beach.”
After months of alienation, increasing loneliness for her home state and poor treatment from Sullivan, McClinton returned to a townhome in Atlanta’s tony Buckhead neighborhood.
In Palm Beach, Landau said she herself also felt like a bit of an outsider, even with her white skin and blonde hair. To learn more about the island, James Sullivan and the local connections to McClinton’s murder, Landau reached out to several people in Palm Beach County who were involved with the case, including Palm Beach Post columnist Frank Cerabino, who thoroughly covered the case as a reporter in the 1980s; and Patrick McKenna, a high-profile private detective who helped McClinton’s family.
Past examinations of the case have focused on Sullivan, the short-in-stature but larger-than-life character who began as a scrappy kid in South Boston, Massachusetts, and finagled his way to take over a family-owned liquor distribution company.
Landau turns her magnifying glass instead to McClinton, putting her at the center of the story.
“It’s interesting, because when you write a book like this, the one person who you can’t talk to, you’re trying to keep at the center,” Landau said.
“I realized that I wasn’t in it for the crime, so much as I’m in it for the justice,” she added. “And that felt very much about Lita, and her formidable family.”
More:Palm Beach is the main character in these notable books
If not for the McClinton family, Landau said she believes that Sullivan would have gotten away with his plan to pay $25,000 to a passing acquaintance to kill Lita. He was captured in Thailand in 2022 after first running to Costa Rica, then Panama and Venezuela. He was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to life in prison.
“I think we live in a place and time where we give wealthy white men the benefit of the doubt in a way that we never give to, certainly, Black women, and even women in general,” Landau said, noting that the McClintons’ skin color brought undue scrutiny from officials as the family sought justice for Lita’s murder.
That included the belief among even some Black detectives at the scene of her violent death that there was “something nefarious” about Lita McClinton’s richly decorated home in a wealthy, mostly white area of Atlanta, Landau said.
“Then you extend that to all of the white judges, and the white lawyers, and the white jurors, and the white reporters, and you can’t help but see that Black women have to be, in our society, extraordinary to be seen,” Landau said. “And now you’ve got somebody who’s dead and has to be extraordinary to be seen in the examination of the crime.”
Landau didn’t set out to write a story about race, she said. But as she continued her reporting — scouring court records, reading past reports and conducting new interviews — she felt it “simmering in the background” as she wrote.
The book’s title is a nod to the famous Charlie Daniels song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” with lyrics about greed and sin — “wanting something you don’t have,” Landau said.
Palm Beach is beautiful — but also a magnet for people who aspire for more — whether or not they have the means to get there, she said.
“I think people are lured by the beauty and grandeur and then also seeming-everydayness of it,” she said. “Maybe that’s what Jim thought: ‘I could have this life, this thing that I’ve dreamed about.’”
While he thought it was right there for the taking, with his mansion and expensive cars, he didn’t find the acceptance he sought, she said.
Landau took the step of telling the story through her own eyes, bringing a perspective that includes her first impressions of Palm Beach and her thoughts about conversations with people close to the case.
While at first she hesitated to add her point of view, she knew after writing about a third of the book that she had to make two decisions: The story had to be told in the present tense. And Landau needed to bring herself into it.
“What I realized is, I am learning a lot about myself as I re-examine this whole story, and that’s a big piece of this,” she said. “I don’t fancy myself a true crime reporter per se, but I really like to understand human nature, and I like to understand why people do the things that they do.”
That choice didn’t just bring her closer to the story, Landau said. She also felt it brought her closer to McClinton.
“She wasn’t this three-adjective, paper cut-out that she had been thus far in the media,” Landau said. “Suddenly I felt like I was starting to understand what her experience was.”
The act is now older than McClinton was when slain: She was 35. It’s been 37 years since her death.
Still, the story remains relevant because so many of its elements continue to be timely, including prejudice and the uneven application of justice based on skin color or financial standing, Landau said.
“I think that this story has a lot to teach all of us,” she said. “It certainly had a lot to teach me.”
“A Devil Went Down to Georgia” is available now from major retailers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. For more information about the book and Landau’s work, go to debword.com.
Kristina Webb is a reporter for Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at [email protected]. Subscribe today to support our journalism.
This post was originally published on here
