Gone South

When the federal case against Jim Sullivan was dismissed in 1992, Lita McClinton's family thought they'd lost their last chance at justice. They were wrong — but it would take another fourteen years, a tip from a receptionist in a Texas refinery town, an international manhunt, and a four-year fugitive run through Costa Rica and Thailand before Lita's killer finally stood trial.
In the second of a two-part series, writer Deb Miller Landau picks up the story where Part 1 left off: with a wealthy man getting away with murder. She walks us through the trucker who admitted to pulling the trigger, the prosecutor whose phone call may have tipped off the killer, the resort in Cha-Am where the FBI finally caught up with Jim Sullivan, and the verdict that came nearly twenty years after Lita McClinton answered her doorbell.
Deb Landau's book is "A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton​":
https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Went-Down-Georgia-Privilege/dp/1639366830
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In January 1987, Lita McClinton answered her doorbell in one of Atlanta's wealthiest neighborhoods and was shot dead by a man holding a white flower box with a pink rose. She was 35, the daughter of one of Atlanta's most prominent Black families, and on her way to court that morning for a pivotal hearing in her divorce from her white millionaire ex-husband, Jim Sullivan. Police were sure Jim had ordered the hit. They just couldn't prove it.

Writer Deb Miller Landau first reported on the case for Atlanta Magazine in 2004 — and never let it go. In this episode of Gone South, she walks us through her years-long investigation: an interracial marriage that began in 1970s Macon, a $2 million mansion on Palm Beach, a sloppy hit, a payphone call traced to a Georgia rest stop, and the long, twisting road to justice for Lita McClinton.
Deb Landau's book is "A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton​":
https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Went-Down-Georgia-Privilege/dp/1639366830
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Connect with Jed Lipinski:
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https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/
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⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/⁠

In 1954, Dallas executed a 19-year-old Black man named Tommy Lee Walker for the rape and murder of a young white woman near Love Field. Walker had no criminal record, eight alibi witnesses placing him across town at the time, and he recanted his confession the moment he was returned to his cell. None of it mattered. Three months after his arrest, a jury sentenced him to die in the electric chair.

Seventy years later, Innocence Project attorney Chris Fabricant set out to do something that had never been done before: exonerate a man who'd already been put to death. Jed talks with Fabricant about the coerced confession, the junk-science polygraph, the racial panic that swept Dallas in 1953, and what it took to finally clear Tommy Lee Walker's name.
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In 2016, nine men tied to the College of Charleston's Kappa Alpha fraternity were arrested in what police initially described as a 40,000-pill Xanax bust. The real number was closer to three and a half million, along with cocaine, LSD, weed, luxury watches, a fleet of cars, and a grenade launcher. The crew had spent years pressing counterfeit pills in rented beach houses and shipping them across the country in Skittles bags, fueling an unregulated drug economy that ran straight through one of the most beautiful college campuses in America.

Jed talks with journalist Max Marshall, author of the book "Among the Bros," about how he embedded himself in this world, his hundreds of hours of late-night phone calls with an imprisoned ringleader, and what the case reveals about American fraternities and the lives of the men inside them.
Max Marshall's book is "Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story"

https://shorturl.at/ynPGO
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When Australian comedian John Safran flew to Rankin County, Mississippi to confront a white nationalist named Richard Barrett with a surprise DNA test, he had no idea the man would be killed eleven months later — by a 22-year-old Black neighbor he'd hired to do yard work. Safran returned to Mississippi to write his first true-crime book, expecting a clear-cut story about racism and a perfect victim. What he found instead was something stranger: a town built on things left unspoken, a killer who scammed him for gift cards from jail, and a relationship between victim and killer that defied the assumptions he'd brought with him.

Jed talks with Safran about his book "Murder in Mississippi," the ethics of crime reporting, and what an outsider notices about the South that the rest of us miss.

John Safran's book is "Murder in Mississippi"
https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mississippi-John-Safran/dp/034913426X

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Connect with Jed Lipinski:⁠
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