A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton

PROLOGUE

I’m sitting in a rented Pacifica minivan in a desolate parking lot at City Lake Park in Albemarle, North Carolina, waiting to meet a man recently released from prison for orchestrating a murder. For decades, newspaper headlines across the country called him The Hitman—Hitman Found, Suspected Hitman Charged in Killing of Buckhead Socialite, Hitman Released. I spent months hunting him down before he finally called me—I was at the grocery store buying milk—and we’ve talked and emailed several times since.

While it would be refreshing to have the opportunity to meet with someone that is all about learning the truth and printing it, he said, I’m not sure if you have the resources to do the things that I would require of you. I had looked over my shoulder in a fit of nonsensical panic—is anyone seeing this?—but it was an opening, even though I had no idea what he was talking about.

He knows I’m coming, but he’s ghosted me for the past couple of weeks, and now I fear I’ve made the trip for nothing. I’ve taken a redeye to Charlotte from my home in Oregon, achieved only a couple of hours of neck-jerking airplane sleep, and now find myself in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere—for what?

I first wrote a retrospective about the brutal 1987 murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan for Atlanta magazine in 2004. It was a case that shook the city, later the country, and still later the world. A Black socialite from a politically powerful Atlanta family, gunned down in broad daylight in one of the most upscale, whitest neighborhoods in Georgia. For a decade, the case went cold, unnervingly frigid. It became fodder for newspapers and magazines, was featured on television shows like Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege, and Justice, CBS’s 48 Hours, Extra!, FBI: Most Wanted, and many others. Journalists like me followed it for years, lawyers didn’t sleep, cops took it to their graves, and Lita’s family pushed and bent till they almost broke.

I’d been a writer for a decade when I got the Atlanta magazine assignment, but this was the first true crime story I’d ever covered—and I fell into it, hard. I got pulled in by reading police reports, news stories, and endless court documents, but what really climbed under my skin was the humanity and depravity of it all. What makes people become who they are? What leads us to the choices we make?

The story impacted me so much, I still had the banker’s box full of files upon whose lid I’d scrawled Sullivan with a black Sharpie decades prior. The box survived several moves, a flooded basement, a storage locker, my divorce, neglect. In it were yellowing court documents, hand-scrawled notes, business cards of long-retired police detectives, and a photo of Lita given to me by her parents; it’s the same one that graces the cover of this book. I’d periodically pull out that photo and wonder what she was thinking in that moment, what she thought in so many moments before and after. I kept in loose touch with the McClinton family lawyers and their private investigator. Sometimes I’d google James Sullivan. Every time I thought about pitching the box, I’d put the lid on and shove it back on a shelf, sensing there was more story left inside it.

Then, as the world was in lockdown in May of 2020, George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, and something in me shifted. Just a few years prior, I had joined millions of women who’d taken to the streets wearing homemade pink pussyhats to fight against misogyny and protect the rights of women. Then, brave women took to the highways of social media as the #MeToo movement shone light in the faces of miscreant men and demanded a change in the power imbalance of Hollywood and beyond. Now, I joined other outraged protestors who flooded the streets shouting about how Black lives mattered only to be teargassed and harangued as angry mobs.

In the eye-stinging haze of pepper spray and the reverb that followed that summer, I began thinking about Lita and the McClinton family in this new day of reckoning. How clearly had I seen Lita the first time I wrote this story? I felt increasingly called to reexamine not only Lita’s life and death, but my own exploration of it too.

Around this time, I reached out to my old Atlanta magazine editor, and we talked for hours. Finally, around the middle of the call, he said in his slow Georgia accent, Well, sounds like maybe it’s time to write a book.

There it was, the reason I’d carried that box around all these years. The responsibility of reopening it felt both essential and monumental. As I sifted through the papers, I began to slowly realize the story I thought I knew wasn’t the whole story. I’ve spent the past few years drowning in court documents, grasping to get my hands on information that evaporated years ago, clinging to the fading memories of retired cops, investigators, reporters, family members, and attorneys. Many people are no longer alive. Others don’t return my calls. Still others can’t or don’t want to remember; it’s still too painful. My walls are decorated with sticky notes that keep falling to the floor. The more I learn, it seems, the less I know.

So here I am, rubbing crusty bits of sleep from the tender crannies of my eyeballs, in a rented minivan in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, trying to talk to a hitman.

If North Carolina is the rough shape of a revolver pointing west, Albemarle, the Stanly County seat, is just north of the trigger. I’ve driven all around, past junkyards with broken cars and rusted washing machines, past the Home of Kellie Pickler sign in the courthouse square celebrating the American Idol contestant who escaped this town, past the colonial homes, deserted textile mills, and unabashed cemeteries on the side of the road. And I’ve done some googling. This little agricultural town about an hour east of Charlotte grew up around the production and manufacturing of cotton. For decades, everyone worked at the mill—bagging sacks of raw cotton, spinning fiber into yarn, attaching toes to socks at the hosiery mills. Since the textile mills closed in the 1980s, the town has grappled to redefine itself. A lot of families here struggle to make ends meet.

It’s January 13, 2023, and unseasonably cold. No one is out, save for a couple of weathered souls walking into the forest playing disc golf. I check my phone again. Still no text from the hitman. I feel a mix of relief and disappointment. I’m not entirely sure what I’m hoping he’ll tell me, other than his side of the story.

I sigh, scroll to the Lita album in the photos app on my phone, and look at her pensive, beautiful face. Whatever happens today, it’s a good reminder: it all starts and ends with Lita McClinton Sullivan.

I decide not to wait any longer and dial his number. To my surprise, he answers right away.

Where you at? he asks in his big booming voice. No pleasantries, no small talk.

In Albemarle, I say.

"Yeah, I know, he says like I’m stupid. Where?"

I tell him I’m at the park, but before I can suggest a coffee shop, somewhere warm, safe, and public with people around, he interrupts and says he’s on his way.

Click.

I panic, looking around the empty parking lot, the quiet lake. I wonder briefly if there are bodies in that water, what would happen if the cops found my empty minivan. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Literally no one knows where I am. I turn on location sharing and shoot a text to my friend in Atlanta: Meeting hitman in 5! She sends back a wide-eyed emoji and, even though it’s freezing, I begin to sweat.

I take a deep breath, look at Lita one last time, and think, OK, let’s do this.

Three days later, I’m visiting the home of Lita’s parents, Jo Ann and Emory McClinton. I first met the McClintons two decades ago when I was a writer at Atlanta magazine. Back then, they lived in a giant neoclassical colonial home that would later become a Landmark Building on Atlanta’s Registry for Historic Places. The ranch home they live in today, on a generous swath of property on the outskirts of Atlanta, is more navigable for two people approaching their nineties. It’s surrounded by pine trees, the ground splendid with the burnt orange of pine straw. There’s a wheelchair on the stoop, some garden gnomes beside the driveway, a few Christmas ornaments still decorating the yard.

It’s January 16, the federal holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth. Had he lived, the civil rights leader would be ninety-four. It’s also thirty-six years to the day since Lita McClinton Sullivan’s murder. I comment on this anniversary to Lita’s mother, Jo Ann, assuming we should acknowledge the weight of it, but Jo Ann just shrugs. Her grief isn’t particular on this day; the pain of losing her eldest daughter has long since settled into her bones. It ebbs and flows, but it’s always there.

Jo Ann, who spent more than twelve years as a representative on the Georgia General Assembly, has barely aged since I first met her. She’s a little shorter but still glamorous. She’s wearing a brown velour pantsuit, her hair curled and set, makeup flawless. Her gold jewelry clicks and jangles when she moves. She doesn’t remember meeting me back in 2004—she’s spoken to so many reporters over the years—but she’s warm and welcoming. It took some time for us to get to this place; understandably, the family had some resistance to reopening this deep wound. It took several emails and calls, plus a vote of confidence from Patrick McKenna, the investigator who worked tirelessly on behalf of the family for decades, before Jo Ann agreed to meet with me. She understood why I wanted to write the only comprehensive book about Lita’s murder, why retelling it now felt important, but she needed to know I wouldn’t be reckless with the story. She said she’d participate, but only if I wrote a nonsensational account, a balanced look at all that went down.

We settle in a formal dining room as I pull a recorder, pen, and notebook out of my backpack. I see the legs and shadow of a man sitting on a couch in another room, where the TV’s on, barely audible. Jo Ann tells me her husband, Emory McClinton, also eighty-nine, is riddled with cancer and suffering from dementia. It’s hard to reconcile this with the man I met back in 2004. I remember being struck by his height and the intensity with which he held eye contact when he shook my hand—a man who didn’t suffer fools.

Jo Ann smiles and looks down at her hands, twirls the wedding ring that’s been on her finger for more than seventy years. Jo Ann and Emory met at Catholic school when they were in the fourth grade. They married as high school seniors and have been together ever since. They had their first child, Lita, when they were just nineteen. Two more babies came quickly after that. The young family lived with Jo Ann’s mother, who helped with the bills and the babies while Emory took the bus each week from Atlanta to Tuskegee University in Alabama to study engineering. Georgia Tech would become the first white people-only university in the South to admit Black students without a court order, but not until 1961.

So, I say once Jo Ann and I settle into upholstered dining room chairs. I’ve thought about this moment for months. This time feels precious, like a thing I need to handle with utmost care. I don’t want to say anything offensive, or make assumptions, or overstay my welcome. I have so many questions, but I don’t know if I’ll have ten minutes or two hours. Will she tire and decide this conversation isn’t worth it? I take a deep breath. Tell me all about Lita.

CHAPTER 1

THE DOORBELL RINGS (JANUARY 16, 1987)

It’s the Friday before the long weekend—the second-ever Martin Luther King Day is on Monday—and it’s overcast and drizzly, one of those cold midwinter days after the holidays when brittle pine needles from the Christmas tree still linger in the carpet. Usually a late sleeper, Lita has been awake since dawn, unable to sleep, puttering about in her white satin dressing gown. She’s nervous about this afternoon; what happens today will change everything.

In a few short hours, a judge will make a major decision on the division of assets in her divorce, a near-final step in the long and arduous death march of her ten-year marriage. Just a few days past her thirty-fifth birthday, Lita longs for it all to be over. Though she’s tried to put on a brave face for her family and friends, Lita is jumpy and uneasy, not her usual composed and joyful self. There’s been some strange things happening lately—an early banging on the door a few days ago, the tingling creep up her spine when she feels like she’s being followed around town. Maybe it’s all nothing, a paranoia borne of the divorce stress, but she’s a little spooked.

It’s around 8:15 A.M. when the doorbell rings. Lita wonders who it could be so early in the morning. She tightens her robe and heads downstairs to answer the door.

Half an hour earlier, less than a mile from Lita’s townhouse, Randall Benson opens the Botany Bay Florist on Peachtree Street in Buckhead, an affluent commercial and residential district of Atlanta. Randall, twenty-six, fastidious and tidy, wears a neat mint-blue linen suit and bowtie. He is running late, which is unusual for him. The shop is supposed to open at 8 A.M. but by the time he turns on the lights, unlocks the front door, and retrieves the register cash hidden in the walk-in cooler in the back, it’s about 8:05 A.M. He chastises himself for having to rush. He is a contractor for several florists around town, and reputation is everything. He’d been hired by Botany to help through the holidays and into January; he’s only been working there about a month. Given the dreary morning, he expects a slow day, so he’s surprised when the bell jingles.

Helloo! he sings from behind the counter. The flower shop was built inside an old filling station, so there is a drive-up curb and a wall of windows where the garage doors used to be. As Randall takes in the customer walking toward the counter, he hesitates, heat suddenly creeping up the back of his neck, an alert ringing in his belly. The man looks nothing like the usual upscale Buckhead business crowd that comes in to buy flowers on the way to or from work. This guy is rough and grubby, with no hint of a smile. He wears green work pants and a faded flannel shirt. Randall pegs him as in his mid-thirties, around six feet tall with curly hair and an unruly beard.

I need a dozen roses, the man says, not making eye contact. In a box.

Randall, a lifelong Georgia boy, detects an accent different from his own but can’t quite pin it. Well, that sounds lovely, Randall says, working hard to ignore the prickling in his ears. What color are we looking for?

It don’t matter. Just a dozen roses.

Randall swallows hard. Well, is there a special occasion? If it’s for your wife or your girlfriend, you’ll want red. But if it’s for an anniversary, you’ll want yellow and…

Listen, I told you it don’t matter, says the man. Just hurry.

Of course, says Randall, mentally working out what he should do. Is something happening here, or is he imagining it? Regardless, he wants the interaction to be over so he can finish opening the store and get on with the day. He glances out the store’s front windows and notes a dirty white Toyota car with a blue pinstripe parked diagonally, so that Randall is looking at the passenger side. He makes out the shadowy profile of a man waiting in the driver’s seat. Exhaust from the tailpipe tells him the engine’s still running. Randall chooses pale pink roses because they are the freshest and begins quickly wiring the buds. He’s wired five when the man tells him not to bother with the others.

Are you sure? If we don’t wire them, the heads will droop, explains Randall. Seeing the man’s confusion he adds, And then they won’t last as long. Again, the man insists it doesn’t matter.

Randall gently lays the flowers on a bed of green tissue paper in a long white box and belts it with a pink satin ribbon. He is about to affix the shop sticker when the man tells him not to and says he doesn’t need a card.

I see, says Randall, anxious to be rid of the man. That’ll be $28.15.

The guy searches his pockets and pulls out several crinkled bills, but it becomes clear he doesn’t have enough cash.

Hang on a minute, he says, leaving the box on the counter while he goes out to the car. Randall braces himself, deciding if this is a robbery, he’ll simply hand over the cash and let the man take whatever he wants. But if it’s a robbery, why order flowers? Randall watches the man open the passenger door and say something to the driver. The driver turns to rummage around in the back seat, which is full of what looks to Randall like rolled sleeping bags.

Finally, the man returns. He dumps $30 in cash on the counter, takes the flowers, and says, Keep the change.

Randall watches the car drive away, noting the North Carolina plates. He breathes a sigh of relief, feeling like he’s dodged some sort of bullet.

CHAPTER 2

LITA: BACK TO THE BEGINNING (1952–1976)

Lita McClinton is born on January 7, 1952, at a time when Atlanta is on the brink of the civil rights cultural revolution. In her lifetime, she’ll see the birth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), formed in 1957 to coordinate nonviolent civil disobedience and organize voter registration drives. She’ll watch Morehouse College students orchestrate sit-ins to oppose segregation (1960); she’ll experience the aftershock of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that led to the desegregation of schools. Thurgood Marshall, the lead attorney behind the case, who will later become the first Black justice on the Supreme Court, is a McClinton acquaintance. Family friends include Maynard Jackson, who will become the first Black mayor of Atlanta, and Andrew Young, who will follow Jackson as mayor and later become the US ambassador to the United Nations. While Lita’s a tween, she’ll witness the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She’ll see the dismantling of laws that criminalized marriage and sexual relations between white people and Black people, and she’ll ride into adulthood during the Black is Beautiful movement—a cultural turning point in the outward celebration of Afrocentric pride, heritage, and aesthetic. She’ll grow up with a stellar education, part of an affluent, politically powerful Black family.

But at the time of her birth, Atlanta’s not there yet. Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation in all public facilities mean restaurants carry signs saying Whites Only, bus stations have Colored waiting rooms, markets have separate doors for White and Colored, bars proclaim No Beer for Indians, and Black passengers must ride in the back of the bus. But the city is changing, thanks in part to the highly educated lawyers, doctors, and preachers coming out of the Atlanta University Center, the world’s oldest and largest consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Clark Atlanta University (formerly Clark College), and Spelman College. These HBCUs, concentrated in the heart of the city, give young Black students education, opportunity, and an incredible sense of community.

Lita and her siblings grow up in a brick split-level rancher in Cascade Heights, a westside neighborhood that had morphed from white to Black in the white flight of the 1950s and ’60s, when segregationists fled for the suburbs in protest of racial integration. It and nearby Collier Heights are some of the first neighborhoods in a major metropolitan city where Black doctors, lawyers, and politicians have built their own homes, designed by Black architects and built by Black-owned construction companies. Baseball legend Hank Aaron lives down the road from the McClintons, as does civil rights leader John Lewis and many doctors, administrators, and educators. The affluent community bustles with picnics, parties, PTA meetings, and stimulating conversation. Lita’s parents sip sweet tea at the dining room tables of other prosperous families, discussing such heady topics as desegregation, the economy, and what exactly it means to have civil rights anyway. Emory becomes head of the regional civil rights office for the U.S. Department of Transportation, and Jo Ann is a community organizer, active in Democratic politics and the NAACP.

The McClintons are mannered practitioners of Southern etiquette, staunch believers in decorum, and very protective of their children. Lita, Valencia, and Emory Jr. always dress impeccably, the girls in hats and gloves, little Emory in suspenders. Any time they go shopping, their mother forces them to use the toilet and hydrate before they leave home so they won’t have to suffer the humiliation of using inferior restrooms or drinking from colored water fountains.

With her middle name a nod to her father’s favorite jazz singer, Sarah Vaughan, Lita LaVaughn McClinton is herself like an upbeat jazz tune—lively, fun, and magnetic, easily attracting friends who want to swing in her groove. She loves to get dressed up, dance around the house, and pick wildflowers on her way to and from school.

The McClintons are Catholic and send their kids to Catholic schools because they believe deeply in the value of a good education, despite a lifelong struggle to square racial inequities with Catholic convictions. If God is above everything and all living beings are equal, they wonder, why would the archaic rules of segregation exist? While the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision declared segregated schools inherently unequal, desegregation is slow to take hold in Atlanta, especially in private schools. Lita goes to Drexel High, the all-Black Catholic school near their neighborhood. In 1967, when she is sixteen, the archdiocese closes the school in the name of desegregation. Most kids have no choice but to bus downtown to St. Joseph’s, but Jo Ann doesn’t want her children going to what she deems an inferior school, so she lobbies to send them to all-white St. Pius X Catholic High School. She eventually succeeds, and Lita and Valencia are among the first Black students to integrate at St. Pius. But it isn’t easy. When Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in 1968, some of the white kids at school laugh and joke about it. Lita and her sister grip each other’s hands and hold their heads high. Their parents have taught them ignorance is borne of fear. Those kids came from families threatened by King’s power. The McClinton kids have learned that hate never serves. The only choice is to love others, even when the others don’t love you back. Jo Ann and Emory buckle down and help plan Dr. King’s funeral.

While the battle for civil rights wages in the background of Lita’s childhood, PR people rebrand Atlanta The City Too Busy to Hate because of the way residents mix across a checkerboard of white and Black. The McClintons’ lives intermingle with white friends and work acquaintances, but their world is still decidedly segregated.

Every evening the family eats together; on football Sundays they eat at halftime so Emory Sr. and Jr. won’t miss the game. Dinnertime conversations are robust and cerebral. Everyone is expected to contribute; there is