True Crime Campfire - Gilded Cage: The Murder of Lita Sullivan

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Eric Maisel once said that ambition is vital, but dangerous—capable of driving people over the edge. That’s especially true when you add greed to the equation, and a relentless desire for status. For some, what other people think of them is the only thing that matters. That tiny little inner voice that never felt good enough starts to drown out all the other voices, even the ones who say “I love you.” Nothing’s more important than looking like you have more stuff than anybody else. Nothing matters more than having a seat at the table with the “right” sort of people. And if the “wrong” sort try and get in your way, well—things can get dangerous.Sources:The Palm Beach Murder by Marion Collinshttps://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna12009956https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1990-07-15-9002040058-story.htmlhttps://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1998-04-29-9804280344-story.htmlhttps://www.ajc.com/news/local/triggerman-socialite-sullivan-murder-released-from-prison/Pwc3DKaD8LzVfzYu5JiNVN/https://www.palmbeachpost.com/article/20150607/NEWS/812063065https://www.e-reading-lib.com/chapter-amp.php/147530/50/the-best-american-crime-writing-2005.htmlhttps://blackthen.com/lita-mcclinton-murdered-white-husband-attempt-reach-social-elite-status/Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Eric Maisel once said that ambition is vital but dangerous, capable of driving people over the edge. That's especially true when you add greed to the equation and a relentless desire for status. For some, what other people think of them is the only thing that matters. That tiny inner voice that never felt good enough starts to drown out all the other voices, even the ones who say, I love you, and mean it. Nothing's more important than looking like you have more stuff than anybody else.

Nothing matters more than having a seat at the table with the right sort of people. And if the wrong sort, try and get in your way, well, things can get dangerous. This is Gilded Cage, the murder of Lita Sullivan. So, campers, we're in the wealthy buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia, the morning of January 16, 1987. Lita Sullivan was in her kitchen having a cup of coffee with her friend Poppy, who'd stayed over with her the night before with her three-year-old daughter. They were all still in their nightgowns, just kind of gearing up for the day when the doorbell rang. It was 8 o'clock in the morning, kind of early for somebody to be visiting,

and Lita wasn't expecting anybody. She had a big day ahead of her. Later, she was due in court for a divorce proceeding with her soon-to-be-X, Jim. So she was a little bit puzzled as she went to the door. on the doorstep was a guy holding a long white box from a flower shop tied with a pink ribbon who doesn't love to see that maybe lita thought one of her friends was sending her good luck roses flowers ma'am the guy said are you lita sullivan lida smiled and said yes thank you she took the box and just as she was moving to close the door the man raised his hand and lita saw that he was holding a handgun instinctively she brought the flower box up to her head to try to protect herself but of course it did no good The first shot went right through the box, and the pink roses inside it into Lita's head. She hit the ground, bleeding badly. The man took a few steps into the foyer to shoot her one more time, then turned on his heel and walked away.

Lita's friend Poppy, who had been in the kitchen finishing her coffee while Lita went to answer the door, was totally bewildered at first. Was that a gunshot? And then she saw her friend fall to the ground. Her first reaction was to protect her little girl. She grabbed her and hid in the first closet she came to. She had no idea at first if the shooter had come into the house and might be prowling around looking for stuff to steal

or more people to shoot. She tried desperately to keep the three-year-old quiet as she listened to what was happening outside the door. Finally, she heard the voice of Lita's neighbor Bob, who had apparently heard the shots and rushed over to help, and she cautiously popped her head out of the closet. Bob was calling 911. Bob had actually seen the gunman walk up to the house with the flower box

a couple minutes earlier, and the guy had given him a little bit of a hinky feet, feeling. So much so that for a moment, he'd had the fleeting thought that he should question the guy about what he was doing there so early in the morning. So he'd been half paying attention to Lita's front step as he worked in his yard out front, just kind of keeping an eye out. When he heard the shots and saw the man speed walking away, he rushed over. He could see that Lita was in a bad way, still alive, but just barely. He called 911 as Poppy knelt next to her friend. The first responders came quickly, but it was no use.

Lita Sullivan had been shot in the head at practically point-blank range. She was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Why? Who was that man with the flowers? It was obvious from the way Lita addressed him at the door that she didn't know who he was. Why would he murder her so matter-of-factly in her own house at 8 o'clock in the morning? Before she was Lita Sullivan, she was Lita McClinton, and she'd grown up in a world most of us won't ever get to experience.

She was the daughter of Emory and Joanne McClinton, wealthy, Atlanta socialites and pillars of the well-to-do black community there. Lita grew up in a gorgeous home, went to Catillians as a debutante, got taught dancing and proper etiquette with other kids from wealthy families. Her folks were preparing her to take her place in the rarefied world she was born into, and they had big dreams for her. And it's not hard to see why. Lita was smart, driven, and gorgeous. She loved fashion and took her mom's advice that, quote, it's going to take a little pain to be beautiful to heart. Remember we're talking 1960s here, folks. Lita was always perfectly turned out from head to toe. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of her where

she doesn't look elegant. And she was great to be around, too. One of those people who can just swoop in and befriend you immediately. She had a sharp intelligence and an even sharper wit, and there was a genuine warmth there, too. Nothing stuck up about her, despite her wealthy background. That's pretty rare in my experience, so good for her for that. Says something about her whole family, I think, in the way they were raised, doesn't it? For sure. After high school, Lita went to Spelman College, a historically black school in Atlanta. That's where she met her friend Poppy. They bonded over fashion, wanted to go open a store together someday. After she graduated, Lita got a job at a shishi boutique, like the kind where you need an appointment shop. The kind of place where they wouldn't

let me in, probably. To ever tell you about that one time when I was living in Chicago and I was like walking home from work and it was like zero degrees, I wandered into a prodig shop just to get out of the freezing-ass cold for a second. And the women working there, looked at me like I was some kind of newly discovered species of swamp creature. I was like, sorry, Jesus. Like, I realize I obviously can't afford anything in here, but can you maybe just drop the attitude for one second? You gaggle a mean bitches.

Oh, God. It's like the scene in Pretty Woman. I'm truly tearing up a little for you. It was fine. I'm happy in my target threads, really. Just wait until we hit the podcast Big Leagues. Then I'll take you back and you can big mistake them and everything. we buy clothes for your cats to use his bedding.

So, Lita started working in this really nice clothing store thinking would be good experience, and one afternoon in 1975, a handsome older gent stepped into the store and immediately laser locked onto Lita. He just couldn't take his eyes off this gorgeous woman, and he went up to the counter to talk to her. His name was Jim Sullivan. Lita was taken with him, as he was with her, despite the 11-year age difference. So when he asked her out to dinner, she said yes, and it didn't take long for them to become an item.

Jim wooed Lita like his life depended on it. No restaurant was too exclusive, no piece of jewelry too pricey, no date night too extravagant. He was all in, man. He was going to have this woman no matter what he had to do to win her. Yeah, can we say love bombing? Love bombing. And when you're dealing with somebody 11 years your senior with a lot more life experience, I mean, Lita had just graduated from college at this point.

It can be really hard to see that for what it is. It's hard not to fall under the spell of a man who keeps telling you how spectacular you are. And Lita was spectacular. So why shouldn't he treat her like a queen? Nothing so weird about that. Even Lita's friend Poppy liked Jim at first. He could be charming, she said. Remember, campers, charm is a verb.

Yeah, it's a skill and a powerful one at that. Exactly. Jim may have seemed a little like a bad boy to Lita. He's been described in several sources as rough around the edges. Unlike Lita, Jim had grown up in a blue-collar Irish neighborhood in Boston. His grandparents were Irish citizens. He had sort of a Boston Irish accent, and when Lita first met him, he had zero fashion sense.

Her mom told true crime writer Dominic Dunn that when she first met him, he literally had two pairs of pants, both polyester, one green, one red. My God, must look like a 70s nightmare. Who do you match with that? Nothing. Nothing matches. And of course, Lita put a stop to that right off the bat. She helped him kind of smooth out some of those rough edges, pulled a whole Eliza Doolittle thing on him. Jim hated his neighborhood in Boston. He always had big dreams, and in 1973, just two years

before he met Lita, he had a chance to go and chase them. His uncle Frank had a successful liquor distributing business in Macon, Georgia, and because he didn't have any kids of his own, he invited Jim to come and run the business. Thinking, I'm sure, that he was a good, he'd groom him to take over when he was ready to retire. But it didn't quite work out like that. Pretty much from the get, Jim acted like a massive asshole and alienated everybody at the business. His uncle Frank was just about to fire him when he died suddenly without having changed his will.

The poor guy had been healthy as a horse, and then suddenly, he just got violently sick, excruciating stomach cramps and vomiting. This literally happened. a few days before he was planning to fire Jim. Well, in Jim a lucky duckling. Uh-huh. So the official cause of death was cardiac arrest, but, and I'm sure it's going to stun y'all to hear this,

Uncle Frank's friends felt sure Jim had murdered him to keep hold of the business. And they wanted an autopsy to try and prove it, but by the time Frank's friend tried to make that happen, Frank's body had already been shipped back to Boston and cremated. And who had arranged for this super speedy transport and cremation? Jimbo, of course. So, with his uncle out of the way, the business was now his. Finally, he had his golden ticket to join the ranks of the rich and powerful.

Or at least he thought he did. But it doesn't quite work like that, does it? See, there's old money and there's new money, and new money tends to have to prove itself before old money will let it join in all the reindeer games. Didn't take long for Jim to find that out for himself. Mr. Two Pairs of Polyester Pants wasn't quite taking the gentility by storm. But then came Lita, you see.

Lita, who did come from old money, with all the refinement that went with it. I think Jim thought she could help him get his foot in the door with the richies. And Lita, bless her heart, she was young. And she thought this guy was handsome and exciting, and he was pulling out all the stops to win her over. And before long, she told her parents she wanted to marry him. And they, especially Lita's dad, were horrified. They thought he was too old for her. They told Dateline they found him brash and arrogant, and they were pretty sure he lied a lot.

For example, according to Sun Sentinel reporter Liz Dup, whose excellent article The Rise and Fall of James Sullivan was one of our sources for this episode, Jim told Lidus Folks his dad had worked in publishing with William Randolph Hearst out in California. Now, in reality, his dad had been a typesetter for a newspaper in Boston. So obviously he was insecure about his blue-collar roots. And apparently about his hands, too, this is bonkers, but I swear to God I'm not making it up. Jim had a complex about his quote short stubby fingers which looked more like the hands of a working man than a gentleman of leisure oh my god so for y'all who watch it's always

sunny in Philadelphia it's like Charlie's Uncle Jack and for those of you who don't it's just fucking hilarious he was insecure about his stubby fingers because he thought that they didn't look like a gentleman's hands wow if you have time to obsess over the sign and tax bracket of your hands. Like, just go put those poor man's hands to good use. Get a hobby. Knitting is fun. You could try racquetball, bowling.

I'm just throwing out some ideas. Cross stitch, perhaps? No, though, you have to look at your hands. You wouldn't have to look at those stubby little things. And there was also the race issue. Jim was white, Lita was black, and interracial marriage had been illegal in Georgia until like literally like three years earlier, 1972, which just, can y'all flippin' believe that?

1972. God Almighty. Just imagine for a second the kind of psychic blow that that deals to a group of people to be treated like they're not good enough to marry a white person. To have to fight for a basic human right like that just to choose who you want to love, it just boggles my mind, man, just despicable. Like, if you care so much what goes on. in someone's bedroom between two enthusiastically consenting adults, perhaps you should go to

therapy and get that sorted out. I can tell you that I put exactly zero thought on a daily basis about what goes on in somebody else's bedroom because it's literally none of my fucking business. And I'm not a complete fucking weirdo. I think about like whether people have cats in there, but that's pretty much it. You know, just how many cats? Are they cuddly cats? Do they purr a lot? That's the extent to which, and not in a creepy way, just in a like, I like cats kind of way. Right. So the race issue troubled Lita's folks a little bit.

I think they just worried about her. They worried how she might be treated by the wealthy white society people whose club Jim wanted so badly to join. But as her mom later told the Sun Sentinel, we had always told our children, you don't judge a person by his race. You judge him as an individual. So what do you say when they say that back to you? and Lita was in love and she was determined So they had one or two big rip-roaring arguments about it But ultimately Lita's parents decided they had to trust their girl

And let her marry who she chose Try to accept him despite that bad feeling in the pit of their stomachs And Lita was thrilled But then On the night before the wedding Campers let this sink in This was the night before the wedding Jim came to Lita with just a couple quick things he wanted to talk about

just a little small details he hadn't mentioned before. No big thing. First, he handed her some paperwork. The deed to the lovely new home he'd bought her as a wedding gift? A love letter, perhaps, letting her know how excited he was to marry her tomorrow? No. He handed her a prenuptial agreement. Now, campers, I'm not dogging on pre-nups, okay?

If you want a pre-nup, you go right ahead and get one. I can completely see the argument for that. But for the love of God, don't spring it on him the night before the wedding. That's about as romantic as having a boil lance, you know? I mean, she's all excited about the next morning and you hand her a pre-nup and you haven't even brought this up before. Come on. So, Lita was obviously taken aback.

But, I mean, she was the one who came for money, so she didn't really need any of his. So she said, okay, I'll sign it. And she did. I mean, she was 24 years old. And she probably didn't give it any more thought at the time than if this is what it takes to make him feel comfortable. Okay. So what was the second thing he wanted to discuss?

Oh, no big deal. He just wanted to let her know real quick that he'd been married once before. Oh, yeah. And he had four kids. That's it. That's all I wanted to talk about. Now, let's go to bed, honey. We got an early morning tomorrow. Yeah. So, he told her his first marriage had been pretty contentious and claimed that his ex had taken him right up the Roger and the divorce. Hence, the pre-nup. He didn't see his kids that much. They were back in Boston with the ex. Now, Lita had no way of knowing this, but according to the book the Palm Beach murder by Mary and Collins, one of the big reasons why Jim's first marriage ended was because he became more and more obsessed with money and things at the exclusion of everything else. And his wife couldn't care less about that stuff. The last thing she said to him when she walked out on him was money doesn't make you happy. Yeah, in fact, Jim was full of shit about his ex-wife taking him to the cleaners. In reality, he was paying her a pathetic amount of child support for their four kids. He was a millionaire at the time of their divorce, but he claimed in court that he only made $24,000 a year.

So he got off easy. But I guess for Jim, aka Scrooge McDuck, it was an outrageous amount. So on top of everything, he's a deadbeat dad. Yep. So imagine this, Camper's, your handsome groom springing this absolutely nuclear intel on you the night before your wedding. Yep. You've got family in town. Everything's booked and paid for. The venue's already decorated. The photographer has been hired. You've got a giant cake. People have bought presents.

What do you do? I'm sure thousands of you are screaming. Shut it down. And we agree. But it's easier said than done. Especially when you're 24 and you're madly in love. And when your guy is a smooth talker like Jim Sullivan. So I'm sure you're, you're not going to be surprised when I tell you that Lita went right ahead with the wedding. It wasn't that these 11th hour bombshells didn't bother her, but she just loved the guy. She believed in him. He said he just didn't know how to tell her, didn't want to lose her. He was scared.

Blah, blah, blah. Ugh. And she accepted it. Poppy was Lita's maid of honor. She told Dateline, I think you can tell in one of the wedding. pictures where she's just laughing and crying at the same time. She was really happy about being married. After the wedding, Jim and Lita bought a beautiful house in Macon. Lita found work at a department

store, and a few years later in 1983, Jim sold his liquor distributor for about $5 million. Now, he was in business. Now, he had the kind of money that might get him a place at the big boy's table. Jim wanted to move down to Palm Beach, Florida. Basically, Mecca for rich white people. Lita wasn't thrilled about the idea, but once again, she did what she thought would make Jim happy. Jim bought a beautiful oceanfront mansion he named Casa Aleda. It looked beautiful, but for Lita, it soon came to feel like a gilded cage. See, Jim was happier than a pig in mud to be amongst the blue bloods of Palm Beach. This was where his sad little ego told him he was really going to make his mark.

But for Lita, it felt alien. She'd grown up wealthy, for sure, but she'd spent her childhood among the wealthy black families of Atlanta. She was popular with everybody there. Here in Palm Beach, it was very different. Interracial couples weren't exactly the going thing in this crowd, and when she and Jim went out, they got looks. Snide comments. Worse than that, on multiple occasions, Leda would answer the doorbell at her own beautiful mansion, and the asshole at the door would ask for the lady of the house.

Oh my God, that makes me want to murder somebody. Yeah, they're racist pricks, and they deserve to be put through a box crusher. It didn't even occur to these people that a black woman might live in a house like Casa Alida. Fucking gross. It seems pretty, pretty clear that one of the reasons Jim married Lita in the first place was to help him fit into high society. But apparently, he hadn't accounted for the inherent racism of the Palm Beach Glitterati in the 1980s. He got invited to parties here and there, but it was clear that the in-crow wasn't folding him into their inner circle like he wanted. Soon, Jim started introducing Lita to people at parties like, this is Lita, not this is my wife, Lita. Even worse, he let some people

think she worked for him. Oh my God. I suspect that stung her worse than the people who came to the door and asked to see the lady of the house. Now, Jim wasn't exactly charming the Ralph Lauren tuxedas off these starchy assholes himself. Remember he was rough around the edges. But that didn't seem to occur to him. He started to blame Lida for his inability to fit in. In fact, soon he came to view her as his biggest obstacle to getting what he wanted. And for Jim Sullivan, if you were in the way of his ambitions, you were going to get stomped. He started treating Lita like garbage. He kept her on such a tight budget that she had to go to him to beg for money for the salon

or to buy something she needed. Despite his millions, his spectacular home, his Mercedes, and his Bentley, he was so cheap that he'd steal ketchup and sugar packets from restaurants. If he didn't bring home a handful of napkins from Burger King, they didn't have napkins that day. Yeah, digest that for a second. Meanwhile, he squirled away his money in offshore bank accounts to get out of paying his fair share of taxes. Gross. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Mr. Charming was a serial cheater. Lita would come home and find blonde hairs in the sink, strange panties in the hamper. It didn't take a psychic to figure out what was going on. But Lita had grown up in a traditional home, where she'd been taught that couples stayed together, even when one half of the equation was being a total chode. And to a fault, she loved Jim. I can't imagine why but bless her heart she did one of the hard things about getting involved with a narcissistic person is that in the beginning they love bomb the crap out of you they just make you feel so special and adored and when they take that away you can get kind of obsessed with getting it

back you keep thinking if i can just figure out what went wrong we can go back to the way we were and what you're not realizing is that the love bomber persona was 100% fake from the get go it was just a mask that they were wearing to lure you in that person you fell in love with doesn't exist. Never did exist. But that can be really hard to see when you're in the middle of the relationship. And there isn't a special combination of behaviors or a passphrase to get them to stop treating you like garbage. Their behavior is completely at their whim. That's right. Lita did achieve one small success, though. She talked Jim into buying a nice townhouse back in Atlanta in the beautiful Buckhead neighborhood. And she started spending more and more time there,

visiting family and friends. In Atlanta, Lita was the social butterfly. Everybody loved her. No wonder she was happier there. But she still wanted to heal her marriage, and Jim said he did too. But he had one condition. She'd ripped up their prenuptial agreement during one of their arguments. Good for her. And now, Jim demanded she sign a postnup. Now, it stipulated that if they divorced now, Lita would get $2,500 a month, and that was it. Now, it's not that that was such a small amount of money, in 1980 whatever, but it was a tiny fraction of what a wife would expect to get in a relationship like theirs, where there were millions in the bank. Lita signed it, though. She didn't love Jim for his money. Lita tried to make things work for a little while after that, but just weeks after he promised

to be faithful to her and work to fix their marriage, Jim cheated on her again, with a sex worker. And that was it for Lita. She was 33 years old, she was miserable, and finally, after eight and a half years of marriage, she left him. good for her. She moved back to Atlanta, into the Buckhead House, and set about building a new life for herself. She started doing charity work. She started dating a little bit. She was still young. She had plenty of time to meet someone new and have kids if she wanted. Lita felt like she was finally starting to turn the page on Jim. She filed for divorce in Georgia instead of back in Florida, which Jim fought like hell to try to prevent her from doing, by the way, and lost, because she thought

that the laws were a little more favorable to her there. She thought she might have been able to get that post-nup nixed for one thing. Georgia settled divorces in front of juries, so that meant all Jimmy's little peccadillos would be on full display. All those blonde hairs and mysterious panties, you know. And while the divorce was moving through the courts, Jim had to pay her alimony. He was running out of money and fast. On that cool morning in January of 87, Lita was ready to close the book on her life with Jim, the hearing that day would be the last page of their miserable marriage. She'd finally be free. But then the doorbell rang, and we know the rest of that story. Investigator Welcome Harris, who not only had the coolest name in all

of Atlanta, knew immediately that this was a hit. There was no sign of a robbery. The shooter had bought roses and a uniform that made him look like a flower delivery guy. This was obviously premeditated. Lita was targeted. The only evidence they found at the scene were the bullet casings, a single bullet, Lita's bloody nightgown, and a box of pink roses. The box had a hole in it where Lita had held it in front of her face. The flowers weren't obviously, so the investigators canvassed the florists in the area until they found one with an intriguing story. He said a guy had come in that morning to buy a dozen pink roses. And dude had made the florist uneasy. The guy was kind of scruffy looking, and he was acting impatient and nervous.

He didn't care what color the roses were, wasn't interested in a car to go with them, and stopped the florist from putting the standard wires into the flower's heads to keep them standing upright. He was obviously in a hurry, the florist said. At one point, the man had gone out the front door to a white car that was idling there waiting for him. He'd had a brief conversation with the driver, and while he was doing that, the florist was glancing around to figure out the best way to escape if this guy came back in waving a gun or something. Wow. He was creeped out by this dude.

But the impatient man had just come back in with the cash to pay for the flowers, and then he and the other guy had driven away. The florist worked with the police sketch artist to create three sketches of the men. They also found another neighbor who had seen a white car speeding away from the scene with three men inside. The car sounded just like the one the floor is described. Of course, the investigators found out about the divorce right away. Jim Sullivan, who had already paid his first wife and kids half his wealth, was fighting tooth and nail to keep Lita from getting half of what was left. When they spoke to Lita's father, Emery, he didn't mince words.

He said, that son of a bitch killed my daughter. And of course, it seemed like an awful big coincidence that Lita just happened to be murdered on the day of the big divorce hearing, where Lita's attorneys would have gone scorched earth about Jim's emotional abuse and cheating. When the investigators pulled Jim's phone records, they found that in the days leading up to the shooting, he'd gotten an unusual number of phone calls at his house in Palm Beach, all from the same Nijim Hotel in Atlanta. Three men had checked in together, a couple days before the murder under fake names. And they'd been in a white car that matched the one neighbor had seen fleeing the scene after the murder.

Jim had also gotten a phone call, just an hour or so after Lita's murder from a pay phone not far from her house. Now, that was interesting. This was interesting, too. Jim's divorce lawyers had hired a photographer to go take pictures of Lita's townhouse to prove she didn't really need Jimbo's money. But the day before the murder, Jim canceled the appointment. The photographer was surprised, given that he knew the divorce hearing was coming

up in a day or so. But Jim didn't give a reason. Just said, cancel it. Hmm, wonder why Jim didn't think he needed those pictures anymore. Hmm, it's a thinker. I'm scratching my head over here. The police also found out that on the day of Lita's murder, Jim played tennis at the country club with his girlfriend, then treated her to a champagne dinner after that. Witnesses said they seemed to be celebrating something.

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and no matter how certain Lita's family was that Jim was behind the murder, the police couldn't arrest him on their say-so. They still needed to ID the shooter and whoever was driving his getaway car. They were hoping the sketches would help with that. In the meantime, the DA said there wasn't enough to press charges against Jimbo. Seemed like our boy was going to skate. He seemed to think so, too. He trashed Lita to the press saying she'd been heavily into drugs

and the murder probably had something to do with that. Nonsense, of course. This guy's such a scusbag. But in Palm Beach, plenty of people accepted that explanation. A bunch of racist bucket heads. It was easier for them to think of Lita as a drug addict running with the wrong crowd than it was to imagine her wealthy white husband hiring someone to kill her. You asked me, they're the wrong crowd, but whatever. I love the fact that this murder happened on the day. The divorce was set to go in front of the jury. And the Palm Beach folks were just like, huh, that's weird. Anyway, let's spend the drugs. Right? Logic streams, people. Logic streams. Also, they can shove their judgment right up their butts along with the sticks they've already got up there,

as if there wasn't enough cocaine floating around that place in the 80s to keep the population of Fort Lauderdale awake for six months. Come on. So, the DA didn't have enough evidence to charge Jim with anything yet, as we said, but they did manage to get a judge to sign off on a wiretap so they could listen to Jim's calls for a while. And it paid off. The tap caught Jim telling a friend some details of Lita's murder that only the killer should have known. That the gun was a 9mm, for example. That detail had never been published. Now, this still wasn't hard evidence, though.

Without the shooter or some more definitive evidence, the detectives knew they were going to have to let Jim go on breathe in free air. It chapped their asses like mad, but there was no way around it for the moment. And while they continued their investigation and Lita's family seethed, Jim just went right on with his life. Happy as a clamp. He got involved in local politics down in Palm Beach, making some well-placed donations and campaigning for soon-to-be Mayor Dede Merricks, who returned the favor by appointing him as chairman

of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. That was very prestigious because it meant that anybody who wanted to build something or do an alteration, they had to go through him. So it meant that he got to hobnob with all the movers and shakers. So this was just what Jim needed to propel him into the old money clique he thought was such hot shit. I don't understand it myself. I mean, I have nothing against blue-blooded folks per se, but I'm definitely not a fan of clickishness. And in my experience, these people can be pretty insufferable. For example, my brother is an attorney, and he went to law school with this dude who had grown up

with like a whole staff of servants, his dad invented freaking air or something. I don't know what it was. He was bananas rich. And I shit you not. One time he asked my brother, without a trace of irony, where do you summer where do you summer and my brother because he's my brother was like yeah I'm not really one of those people who uses summer as a verb bro so it's just not our scene but jim ate it up like strawberry pie oh my god the strawberry pie okay this makes me remember another rich person story I got to tell you this real quick and then we'll move on okay when I was in college it's worth it I promise when I was in college I got a job one summer as a nanny for this like 11 year old kid. His parents were divorced. His mom was actually great. She was a lawyer,

very cool lady. His dad was a neurosurgeon and probably one of the most repulsive human beings I've literally ever met in my life. He's always trying to grab my ass and my boobs and stuff. It was a nightmare. Yeah. Anyway, the dad would undo every little tiny bit of discipline that the mom tried to lay down. And the kid was just a flippin nightmare on wheels. The first time I met him, he'd had a friend stay over the night before. And when they got up, the friend went to the fridge to grab like an ego waffle or something for breakfast and the nightmare child freaked out on him. He was like, no, no food. You can't eat my food. And I was like, uh, what the hell is this? Your mom said that you could both have anything you wanted. And I swear to God,

this child grabbed this frozen ego waffle out of his friend's hand and threw it in the trash. Like he would rather it go in the trash than have to share his precious ego. Yikes, right? It was literally, it was Lego my ego. And then he threw it in the trash. So anyway, this child was obsessed with the country club where his dad had a membership. And if you asked him what his favorite anything was, it was always country club whatever. So his favorite drink was country club cherry Coke. Like, this child absolutely refused to consider the possibility that the fucking country club had the same cherry Coke as the rest of the world.

It just wasn't possible to him. So, of course, his favorite dessert was country club strawberry pie. And one time I tried to bribe the little bugger And to be in less of a disaster By bringing him some strawberry pie From like the bakery at the store And he, I swear I'm not making this up He literally would not touch it

He like kind of gingerly poked it with a finger And sniffed his finger And it like he wouldn't touch it Because it was not from the country club Camper's this child is in his 30s now stay frosty yeah kid my favorite pie is anywhere it's available and not rancid pie so take that it's freaking pie eat it yeah and if you're on any if you're on any dating app ask them what their favorite kind of pie is just to just to be safe country club anything run it's him it's him it's the

no food kid he's going to throw your ego in the trash run shortly after lita's murder murder, Jim began dating a beautiful, elegantly dressed Korean woman named Suki. Suki was still married at the time to one of Jim's friendly acquaintances among the Palm Beach elite, in fact, which I suspect was part of the fun. Her husband got suspicious and had her followed by a private investigator, so he found out about the affair pretty quickly and divorced her over it. But Suki was a veteran of divorce. She'd been married several times before, so it didn't seem to faze her much. And just eight months after Lita's death, Jimbo married her. And now that Jimmy was part of the political scene in Palm Beach, he finally managed to achieve

acceptance among the wealthy dickheads who'd rejected his former wife. Yay. Yay. Lucky you. Jim's political connections couldn't stop him from getting in trouble with the police, though. It turns out that our boy Jimmy is a... Bad driver is too light a term, I think. A menace to society on four wheels? Uninsurable? From 1983 to 1989, Jim had gotten 17 violations, most of them for speeding. It got so bad that the state of Florida called him a, quote, habitual traffic violator, and took away his license for five years.

We're talking about Florida here, campers. Home of Florida man and his many shenanigans. Florida called Jim Sullivan too dangerous to drive. Of course, you can't keep a terrible, no-good, pathetic excuse for a man down, and in 1990, Jim got right back up on that horse, by which I mean, Mac behind the wheel, and he promptly got himself into a three-car accident. Well, bless his heart, I was a better driver than that at 16, and I literally almost drove off a cliff one time, and that's a true story.

Oh, God. When the fuzz showed up to the accident site, Jimbo got a ticket for his part of it. Now, all this man had to do here, campers, was pay the damn ticket, apologize for driving on a suspended license, and pay his fine. It could have been as simple as that, but that is not how Jim Sullivan rolls. Oh, no, no. Instead, he talked his new wife, Suki, into going into traffic court with him and testifying under oath, that she was the one driving. Oh, Suki girl, no.

Yeah. And of course, you can't just lie to a judge's face like that, even if you do have money. Not when there's a whole clown car full of witnesses who saw the whole thing. Because it turns out, judges don't like being lied to. This judge didn't anyway. He had both Jim and Suki arrested for perjury. Womp, wamp. Remember campers? He could have just paid a small, small fine and been out of this mess. And he had his wife perjure herself instead. That is who we're dealing with here.

Jim was sentenced to a year of house arrest, and all of a sudden, he wasn't nearly as much fun to be married to anymore. Couldn't take Suki out shopping or to parties or anything. What a drag. Worse than that, the feds had been called in because of the suspicious interstate phone calls from Atlanta to Palm Beach in the days surrounding Lita's murder. And they'd just been waiting in the wings to take a bite out of gym. And the perjury charge gave them their chance. They got a warrant to search his Palm Beach house. And of course, like any given rich guy, he had a whole bunch of shit he wasn't supposed to have, including a bunch of unregistered guns. You know, a felony.

The kind of thing that turns a 12-month house arrest into a cool 30 months. It was all too much for Suki. She filed for divorce in 1990. Time to move on to a new millionaire. This one's more trouble than he's worth. Yeah, I agree, Suki. You picked her wrong in this time. So because Jim is an inveterate asshole who is apparently incapable of letting anything go,

even when it's in his best interest not to poke the best. bear, he decided to play dirty in the divorce. What he failed to realize was that Suki wasn't Lita. She was older, for one thing, and she'd been through this divorce rasmataz three times before. Remember how we told you her last husband caught her cheating with Jim and dumped her for it? Well, despite hard evidence of cheating, Suki still got money out of that guy in the divorce. She didn't fuck around.

She knew her way around a divorce court, and she wasn't easy to intimidate. So when Jim had his attorney lay the entire contents of her bedroom side, closet on the floor of the courtroom to show what a money-grubbing gold digger slash shopaholic she supposedly was, Suki didn't back down. She moved out of the house and made sure Jim didn't know where she lived and she told her lawyer she was scared of him, but she didn't back down. In fact, she dropped one hell of a bomb on the divorce court. According to Suki, the reason why Jim asked her to lie for him on the stand and traffic court, was because he didn't want the cops digging into his past. Now why a traffic cop would dig into your past in the first place,

I don't know, but apparently Jim was really squirly about any contact with the fuzz. And when she asked him why, Suki said, Jim had turned the volume way up on the radio, presumably just in case the room happened to be bugged or something, and said, I paid someone to kill Lita.

She was going to take all his money, he said. He just couldn't let her do it. At that point, Suki said, she'd realized she was in over her head with this guy. Now, whether Suki perjured herself for him in traffic court because she was afraid not to or because she really wanted to help him, we have no way of knowing for sure. I find it pretty astonishing that she

delivered this red-hot intel to the divorce court instead of, you know, the police, but there it was anyway, out in the open now. And Lita's family hoped it would be the final nail in Jim's coffin. But it didn't work out like that. Because Suki had only disclosed this info in the context of a nasty divorce proceeding, the Atlanta DA didn't feel like they had enough to move forward. The feds, however, felt differently, and they brought the case before a federal grand jury. They indicted Jim in 1992. They took him to trial. Suki got up on the stand and told her story, and there was much rejoicing for about five minutes, until the judge threw out the case, mid-trial for lack of evidence. What is this guy made out of Teflon? I hate it.

This dude is more untouchable than Al Capone, I swear. Yeah, it's really annoying. So years passed, Jim got on with his life. Unfortunately for him, though, when he got back to Palm Beach after his aborted trial, he found that his fancy friends wanted nothing to do with him now that he had the stink of scandal all over him. See, this wasn't a fun scandal, like getting busted for Coke or doing a sex tape with a B-list actress or something. This was murder. Ew. And what's more, it seemed like he'd probably hired a poor person to do it for him.

Yeah, right? Yeah. Poor's. So he had to resign from his beloved position on the historical preservation board, and he moved to a less glam, more suburban neighborhood. Poor Jimbo. He'd spent a bunch of his precious money on his dream team of lawyers, and he'd gotten his freedom out of it,

but what did that matter when he wasn't getting invited to parties anymore? Lita's parents were furious, of course. Their girl's murderer was free as air, running around playing tennis and rubbing shoulders with the Palm Beach Trust Fundies while they sat home and grieved for all the life that Lita would never get to live now. She'd never find true love. She'd never have kids.

She'd never get to open the boutique she and Poppy had dreamed about. It wasn't fair. But the McClentons weren't the type to sit around feeling helpless. They decided that if they couldn't get Jim thrown in jail where he belonged, they'd get him another way. They filed a wrongful death lawsuit against him. Now, this had nothing to do with money. The McClentons were wealthy already.

They didn't need a dime from Jim. This was about dragging dark deeds into the light and about taking the bastard for everything he had, every precious penny they could take, because it would hurt him, and he needed to hurt. Jim initially hired two high-powered attorneys to defend him in the suit, but within a few days, he fired them and announced he'd be representing himself, like a lunatic, instead.

Of course, he did. This meant, of course, that Emery and Joanne McClinton now had to be cross-examined by their daughter's murderer. Can you fucking imagine? having to sit there and calmly answer questions for this monster who sent a man to shoot your daughter dead. Yeah, I can't. I don't know how they did it. The burden of proof in a civil trial isn't as rigorous as it is in a criminal trial, and the jury found that Jim had caused Lita's wrongful death.

They awarded her family $4 million. Of course, old sugar packet thief Jimbo insisted he was broke, and he never paid them a dime. In fact, he later got the decision overturned by a higher court, but the McClinton's felt sure he'd just hidden his money away. As true crime writer extraordinaire, Dominic Dunn commented, it seemed as if Jim had more lives than a cat. But as Shakespeare once wrote, murder will out y'all. Well, I added the y'all, but you get the picture. What's done in the dark tends to come to light, and in 1998, 11 years after Lita was gunned down, in the foyer of her home, the TV show Extra covered the unsolved case.

And soon after that, the Atlanta police got a phone call. It was from an anonymous tipster who said the shooter in the Lita Sullivan case was a truck driver named Philip Anthony Harwood. He and two other men had been hired to do it for 25 grand. Hired, of course, by Jim Sullivan. The tipster turned out to be Harwood's ex-girlfriend, Belinda Trahan. Yeah, you know how they say the best revenge is Living Well, I'm going to call bullshit on that and say the best revenge is turning your hitman ex-boyfriend into the cops for a murder he did 11 years ago. Living well can be number two on the list. Belinda told investigators that Philip had called and told her about the murder as soon as it was done. She later told Dateline, he told me that some white guy wanted to take out his black wife because she was going to divorce him and he didn't want to give her anything. thing. In fact, he'd called her that morning when Lita didn't come to the door when one of his

friends had gone up to the door and knocked at 6 a.m. And Belinda helpfully told him, oh, all you got to do to get a woman to come to the door is to show up with flowers. Helpful. She claimed she thought he was lying about the whole thing at first, making up a wild story to cover his ass for cheating on her. Do we believe her? Yeah, no way to know for sure. but apparently 11 years later, seeing Lita's parents on extra was too much for her. She had to turn the old boy in. It took investigators about four weeks of work to corroborate Belinda's story and make the connection between him and Jim Sullivan. Prosecutors struck a deal with Philip Harwood.

In exchange for his testimony against Jim, they charged him with voluntary manslaughter and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Okay. So now, at long last, prosecutors finally had all. their ducks in a row to put the habeas grabbis on Jimbo. But, you know, best-laid plans and all, there was a little technical difficulty in that they couldn't find him. Shit. Seems that the former Palm Beach Playboy had seen the writing on the wall

and decided to go flee for the wide-open spaces. All they could figure out initially was that he'd been able to wrangle an Irish passport because of his Irish-born grandparents. Jim Sullivan was in the wind. Yeah, and get this, his lawyer had reached out to the Irish consulate years earlier and requested a passport on the double, because Sullivan intends to travel extensively in the near future. You got to love a man who plans ahead. So, obviously, he knew all along that he'd have to run at some point, the prick.

Jim soon found his way onto the FBI's most wanted list. Hey, he'd always wanted to be on the A list, right? The feds got reports of gym sightings as far away as Venezuela and Panama, but they didn't pan out. They had no idea where he was. Until, in 2002, the show America's Most Wanted covered the case, and bless that show, somebody recognized him. Yeah, America's Most Wanted is an American treasure. Unsolved Mysteries, too. RIP, Robert Stack, we love you.

RIP. So turns out our boy was in Thailand, living with wife number four in a nice beachfront condo. Gross. Fortunately, the good people of Thailand wasted no time and toss in his ass into a very unpleasant Thai prison, where Jim fought extradition back to the States until 2004, when he was unceremoniously yeated back to Atlanta. His trial for soliciting Lita's murder began in February of 2006. Lita's divorce attorney testified that Lita had been murdered on the day she and Jim were due to appear in court about the division of their marital property. And she said that the court would have probably awarded Lita either $250,000 or a million bucks. Either way, Jim was set to lose significant

money. Neighbor Bob Christensen took the stand and IDed Philip Harwood as the delivery man he'd seen walking up to Lita's front door at the time of the murder. The star witness, though, was hitman Harwood. He told the court that he met Sullivan in November of 86 when he was working for a moving company Jim and hired to deliver a piano to Casa Aleda. This was months before the murder, and Jim was feeling the heat of that upcoming divorce trial. Yeah, he might not be able to afford any more pianos of the court ruled in Lita's favor. Harwood said he was in contact with Jim Sullivan for two hours tops that first day, and yet in that short amount of time, Jim was able to convince this man to drive up to Georgia

and murder his wife for him. Good gravy. I usually need longer than that to convince myself to buy a new video game, much less commit a felony. Yeah, it's kind of fast. Fascinating, really. I mean, what are the odds? On the stand, Harwood quoted Jim. You know, I've got this wife of mine up in Atlanta, and she's just trying to take everything I've got. And I don't know what to do about it. I need somebody to help me take care of my problem. Do you know anybody that can possibly take care of my problem for me? Because I need some help. Harwood claimed he thought Sullivan was kidding around. You know, like you do. But then Jim mailed him $12,500 as a down payment. And at that point, Harwood was all in. The initial plan was for him to murder Lita before Christmas as a sort of perverse gift from Jimbo to himself. But it didn't shake out that way, and Harwood ended up having to rush it so Jim could avoid that divorce hearing. So he recruited two of his friends, and they set out for Atlanta.

When the first attempt failed at 6th that morning, the Three Stooges came up with their flower delivery plan, and unfortunately, we know how that ended. When Lita was dead, Harwood called Jim in Palm Beach and said simply, Merry Christmas. That was the code to let him know the deed was done. Go fuck yourself, you fake Tony Soprana loser. Mm-hmm. Getting into the role, obviously. Ugh. Now, obviously, the prosecutors knew that it's always a fine line using a felon and admitted killer as your star witness.

So they needed somebody to help shore up his credibility. So next up was ex-girlfriend in Stulee, Belinda, who corroborated his story. And she also told this bizarre little story. She said that when she didn't believe Harwood at first, he told her he could prove it. He took her to a restaurant where he requested a table for three. A few minutes later, a man appeared, and like something out of a spy movie, passed Harwood a folded newspaper. Inside was an envelope full of cash, the rest of Harwood's payment for the murder.

When the prosecution asked Belinda if the man who passed Harwood, the paper, was present in the courtroom, She said he sure was, and she pointed her finger at Jim. Unsurprisingly, the defense tried to paint Harwood and Belinda as untrustworthy witnesses. They pointed out that Harwood had told Belinda several different stories about Lita's murder, including that the mob was involved. And where Belinda had said Jim handed him the folded newspaper at the table, Harwood said he gave it to him in the restaurant bathroom, so there were inconsistencies.

but there was also a lot of juicy circumstantial evidence to corroborate what they were saying. That wiretapped phone call where Jim somehow knew the details of the crime that had never been released. Suki's story about Jim's confession, phone records, hotel records, on and on and on. And at the end of the trial, the jury only needed five hours to convict our boy of malice murder. It was finally, finally over for Lita's murder. family who had never stopped fighting for their girl. At Jim's sentencing, Joanne finally got to confront the man who had taken her daughter from her. She said, I have looked forward to this day for many years. Should I forgive him? I cannot. Should I forgive him? I will not. Jim was sentenced to life

in prison without the possibility of parole. Lita's dad told the press, we won the battle. He's not going to make a mockery of the courts anymore. It's over, Jim. Merry Christmas. Well said. Frustratingly enough, we don't have any happy endings to give you about the other two accomplices. Harwood's two buds were never charged. There just wasn't enough evidence to connect them to the case. And, unfortunately, sometimes it's like that. You get the ones you can get, and in this case, the main one they wanted to get was Jimbo. Jim lived for status and the approval of the filthy rich people he envied. It meant so much to him that someone like Lee, who loved him despite his cheapskate habits and polyester pants meant nothing to him in the end.

It's a damn shame, and it's an even bigger shame that it took so long to bring this ass hat to justice 19 years. But at least we can rest easy in the knowledge that he's now swiping his sugar packets from the prison chow hall. And he probably gets written up for that. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we'd like to send a special shout out today to Camper Donna S. Thank you so much for the amazing box of treats from the UK.

That was so sweet of you to send us all that, and we are picking out hard on all that chocolate and loving every minute of it. If you want to send us anything, campers, our P-O box is 210-861, Nashville, Tennessee, 37221. And as always, we'd like to send a grateful shout out to a few of our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Tiffany, Susan, Ryan, Amber, and Amy. We appreciate you all to the moon and breakfast. back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus an extra episode a month. And once you

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