The murder of Lita LaVaughn McClinton Sullivan

The 1987 investigation produced a neighbor who saw the gunman, a florist who sold the roses, three composite sketches and a set of telephone records: calls between Sullivan's Palm Beach house and a Howard Johnson's motel room on January 13, calls from Sullivan to Lita's neighbor asking about knocking at her door that morning, and a one-minute collect call to his house from a rest stop on I-85 forty minutes after she was shot. Sullivan's bank had told him days earlier that he could not refinance his mortgage without his wife's signature; a week after her death he said he could complete it. His third wife testified in their 1990 divorce that he had admitted hiring the killing. None of it identified the men on the calls, and in November 1992 a federal judge directed his acquittal on murder-for-hire charges because the government could not show who made the calls or what was said. Lita's parents won a $4 million wrongful-death verdict in 1994; its reinstatement in 1997 put the case back on television. In January 1998 a woman in Texas told a lawyer that her former boyfriend Phillip Anthony Harwood, a mover, had told her in November 1986 that a rich man in Palm Beach wanted his wife killed, had returned from Georgia saying the job was done, and had taken her to a diner where she watched Sullivan pass him an envelope of cash in a folded newspaper. She identified Sullivan from photographs; investigators found the moving company's 1986 invoice bearing both men's signatures in an attic; a recorded call caught Harwood saying it was real; and when the Georgia Bureau of Investigation knocked on his door he named Sullivan first and confessed. Both men were indicted in 1998. Sullivan, living in Costa Rica, fled within a day of learning the state would seek the death penalty; a tip from viewers of America's Most Wanted in Thailand led to his arrest in July 2002, and after fighting extradition for nearly two years he was returned in March 2004. At trial in 2006 Harwood contradicted himself and the former girlfriend could not place the diner; jurors said they set both aside and convicted on the phone records, the neighbor's identification and the invoice. The jury rejected the death penalty. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed in 2008.