In 2004 as a writer for Atlanta magazine, I wrote a retrospective about the murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan, a Black socialite who was gunned down by a flower deliveryman in 1987. It was a story that stunned the city—Buckhead, the Atlanta neighborhood known for its stately mansion and top-tier schools, was simply not the kind of place where women where women were shot in broad daylight.

Lita was an intelligent, accomplished, and stunning Black woman from a respected Atlanta family. Her interracial marriage to white millionaire Jim Sullivan, who hailed from working-class Boston, was a newsworthy occurrence in 1970s Georgia. The marriage had its challenges. Jim was duplicitous and controlling. He wore his dead uncle’s underwear so he wouldn’t have to buy his own, then spent freely on tailored suits. He’d tell Lita to keep the air conditioning off to keep the bills at bay, dock her measly allowance for basics like dog food, then turn around and throw luxurious dinner parties. His former in-laws say he’d tell new acquaintances his father worked in the Hearst publishing empire, then deny it when the truth came out that his dad was a typesetter who struggled to make ends meet.

When he bought a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida (without telling Lita), the façade of their life together began to crumble. Finally, after a decade of marriage, she loaded her belongings in a U-Haul and never looked back.

But as the legal battle over the divorce raged and Jim’s financial outlook grew precarious, he had a chance encounter with a long-haul trucker, a smooth-talking ex-con who said he could he’d "take care" of Jim’s wife problem. . . .

This remarkable story stayed with me for decades. I hauled a banker’s box of files across country, never able to stop thinking about Lita and her family. Finally, I re-opened the box and spent three years researching, interviewing, and writing A Devil Went Down to Georgia (Aug 2024, Pegasus Books), the only complete telling of this incredible story.