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March 2006 - Posts

A verdict for a 19-year-old murder case

Posted: Friday, March 24, 2006 8:37 PM by Dateline Editor
Filed Under: ,

by Victoria Corderi, Dateline correspondent

As I sat in the Atlanta courthouse listening to attorneys’ dramatic closing arguments, it was hard not to think about the dignified couple sitting  in the front row—to wonder what these minutes were like for them.  Indeed, what the past 19 years have been like. They were sitting not ten feet from the man charged with engineering the brutal, point-blank assassination of their daughter.

 SOCIALITE SLAYING
Ric Feld / AP
Lita Sullivan's mother, state Rep. Jo Ann McClinton, right, and father, Emory McClinton, left, react as a jury reads the verdict in the case against James Sullivan, for hiring a hit man to kill his socialite wife 19 years ago.

When we cover a murder trial, we go to great lengths to present the back story.  We interview friends and family and attorneys in an effort to make the case come alive.  The victim in this case was Lita McClinton Sullivan.  She was murdered in 1987 when a gunman posing as a flower deliveryman shot her with a 9mm gun hidden by the roses he carried. Her parents were the people who really helped me to understand who Lita was, and the insight came not so much from what they told me about their daughter and her disastrous marriage, but what they conveyed about themselves and how they raised Lita.

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