Blinded by Desire
Deb Miller Landau's Edgar-nominated true-crime thriller
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
What makes people become who they are?
Deb Miller Landau more than 20 years ago wrote a feature on the murder of Lita McClinton, a 35-year-old Black woman in Atlanta. The story appeared in Atlanta Magazine 17 years after McClinton was killed at her home by a hitman posing as a flower delivery man.
The crime became a notorious cold case. James Vincent Sullivan, Lita’s estranged husband, hired high-priced lawyers and escaped conviction for the murder until 2006. Since then, he has been serving a life sentence without parole in a Georgia state prison in Augusta.
After publishing the magazine story, Landau several times considered pitching the banker’s box of documents she had assembled during her reporting.
Each time she put the box back on a shelf, “sensing there was more story left inside it,” as she wrote in the prologue to her book, A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton. It was published by Pegasus Books in August of last year.
She explained why she kept the documents this way:
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?
In my interview with Landau this morning for the Kindle Chronicles, I asked her if, after spending so many years covering this shocking murder, she is any closer to answering those questions.
Overwhelmingly, it’s about greed. It can blind you and make you do crazy things. Jim Sullivan had a very successful life in South Boston. He had four children, was married to his high school sweetheart, was working as an accountant. He seemed to have if not a dazzling life, certainly a full one.
That all changed when his uncle called and asked Jim to take over the family liquor distribution business in Macon, Georgia. Jim saw dollar signs and a way to escape a life that was less than he desired.
Lita was blinded by her own desires for an exciting life. Her parents feared the marriage would end poorly, and they were tragically correct.
I was moved by Landau’s passion and precision in her writing of this book. I’m not surprised that it has been nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award in the Best Fact Crime category.
The Devil Went Down to Georgia will be a Kindle Daily Deal on February 23rd as part of Amazon’s “Great Deals on Kindle” Goldbox. The ebook will be discounted from the current price of $17.99 to $1.99 that day only.