Photograph courtesy of the McClinton family
In the chilly morning hours of January 16, 1987, 35-year-old Lita McClinton Sullivan tightened a bathrobe around her waist and headed downstairs to answer the door of her Buckhead townhouse. It was a big day—the day of a court hearing that would be one of the final steps in securing her divorce from her husband, James Vincent Sullivan.
For nearly two years, Lita and her husband had been in a contentious battle. Sullivan, a Boston native who owned a liquor distributorship in Macon, was a philanderer with an explosive temper, and fiercely controlling and emotionally abusive to Lita. He’d tried for months to paint his wife as a drug abuser, a thief, and an adulteress to avoid having to abide by the conditions of a postnuptial agreement.
That January morning, just a few hours before a court was scheduled to rule on the distribution of the Sullivans’ substantial marital assets, a man stood on Lita’s doorstep holding a large white box tied with pink ribbon, full of pink roses, and rang the doorbell.
Just as Lita answered the door with a friendly “Good morning,” the man crossed the threshold and shoved the box of roses into her hands. Before she could even comprehend what was happening, he pulled out a 9mm Smith & Wesson and fired two shots. The first bullet missed Lita. The second didn’t, piercing the flower box before hitting her in the left side of the head. She died at the hospital barely an hour later.
Although Sullivan was the prime suspect from the very beginning, it would take nearly two decades for Lita’s parents—Emory McClinton, former head of the regional civil rights office of the U.S. Department of Transportation, and his wife, former Georgia state representative JoAnn McClinton—to see him brought to justice for paying long-haul trucker Phillip Anthony “Tony” Harwood $25,000 to murder their daughter.
Courtesy of Georgia Bureau of Investigation
Courtesy of Georgia Bureau of Investigation
Deb Miller Landau’s new book, A Devil Went Down to Georgia (Pegasus Books), explores the murder of Lita McClinton. Landau, a former Atlanta resident who now lives in Oregon, will be here for two author talks this month: August 12 at the Atlanta History Center, and August 13 at the First Baptist Church of Decatur in a program presented by the Georgia Center for the Book.
Landau first wrote about the murder through a freelance assignment for Atlanta magazine. From the moment she began to investigate, Landau found herself drawn to the story—not only by Lita, a beautiful, intelligent, accomplished woman adored by all who knew her, but also by Lita’s family, wracked with grief but relentless in their pursuit of justice.
Courtesy of the publisher
Her feature story, “Social Disgraces,” was published in 2004, 17 years after Lita’s murder and shortly after Sullivan was arrested in Thailand, where he’d gone into hiding. The following year, Harper Perennial anthologized the article in The Best American Crime Writing.
She held on to Lita’s story throughout the decades that followed. She carted her files across the country through moves to different states and life changes. Then, in 2020, amid the high fever pitch of a global pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the faltering wake of the #MeToo movement, Landau found herself thinking about Lita. Confronting those issues in her own life brought Landau back to “Social Disgraces.”
“I always had this feeling that the original story I wrote didn’t go deep enough,” she says. “I felt like there were questions that weren’t adequately answered in the past, by me or anyone else, and I wanted to ask those questions. I wanted to figure out what life was really like for Lita as part of an interracial couple living in Macon and Palm Beach, Florida. What was her experience living with James? Why did it take so long for the family to get justice?”
She began to work on a book that sought to finally and fully answer those questions. Landau knew that true crime is a problematic genre that can turn tragedy into spectacle, and often reduces victims of violent crimes and their families to thinly drawn, two-dimensional caricatures.
It’s also a genre that capitalizes on violence against women and girls, and favors the stories of White women. “Best American Crime Writing had essays or articles from 25 writers that year, and I was the only woman selected,” Landau says. “In the research for this book, every single investigator that I knew of or talked to was a man. Except in the DA’s office, most of the lawyers were men. The judges were men. So, in the same way we look at stories from a White lens, we also tend to look at stories from a male lens. And that was especially true of crime at that time.”
Photograph by Matt H. King
Deeply researched and thoughtfully told, A Devil Went Down to Georgia details with cinematic clarity the events that led up to and followed Lita’s brutal 1987 murder. It also paints a fuller, more human picture of Lita and her family.
The book has gained major national attention. People magazine is publishing an excerpt. Newsweek ran a personal essay by Landau about the murder. Publishers Weekly praised the book, saying, “Displaying a veteran’s knack for pacing, Landau peppers the narrative with cliff-hangers and vertigo-inducing twists. It adds up to a chilling and infuriating work of true crime.”
A Devil Went Down to Georgia is a kind of testament to what rigorous and intentional true crime stories can do. They can bring to the center the stories of women who were marginalized, abused, and victimized, and give them back some of their agency, their voice—even after death.
They can, in their highest form, be their own kind of justice.
This article appears in our August 2024 issue.
