On January 16, 1987, a vibrant, beloved Black woman, 35-year-old Lita McClinton Sullivan, opened the door of her townhouse in a wealthy Atlanta neighborhood to a man who seemed to be delivering flowers. Instead, he gunned her down, killing her with one shot to the head. Later that day, a judge had been scheduled to announce the division of assets in her divorce after 10 years of marriage to white millionaire Jim Sullivan. Nineteen years later, in 2006, Sullivan was convicted of hiring a hit man to kill Lita; his conviction was based largely on the testimony of that hit man, who in 2003 received a 20-year prison sentence for his role in the murder.
Journalist Deb Miller Landau writes a sweeping account of this crime and prolonged road to justice in A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton. Landau first covered the case for Atlanta magazine in 2004. She writes of that story, “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 case continued to haunt her, and after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Landau, who is white, wondered, “How clearly had I seen Lita the first time I wrote this story?”
She revisited McClinton’s parents, now in their late 80s: Her mother, the “still glamorous” Jo Ann, is a former Georgia General Assembly representative; her father, Emory, is a retired engineer who has cancer and dementia. Neither parent approved of Sullivan, a divorced father of four who was 10 years older than their debutante daughter. As one source told Landau, “He was a real sociopath. He could be charming, but he could turn on you like a cobra.”
Landau excels at laying out decades of details, deftly weaving her recent investigations, including her meeting with the hit man, into the long timeline. While she does try to focus on Lita’s perspective, the victim’s long-silenced voice is hard to capture. In contrast, Sullivan’s misdeeds and bizarre behaviors reverberate, including his womanizing and lavish spending that alternated with extreme miserliness, despite the fact that he and Lita had been living in a 17,000 square foot mansion, a historic landmark called Casa Eleda in opulent Palm Beach, Florida.
A Devil Went Down to Georgia chronicles a collision course of race, power, class and, most of all, Sullivan’s narcissism and endless greed. It’s a page-turning saga, as well as a testament to Lita, her devastated family and the determined investigators and lawyers who sought justice for them.
