“She opened the door to receive some flowers and before she could even take them in her hands she was shot and killed.”
“You normal people are puzzled over how someone else who acts and looks normal could be so vicious, could commit such an evil, immoral act.”
“Now I’m here alone. He would call me, tell me that he’s going to kill me. The individual behind it is a cold, calculating killer.”
“It was my responsibility to find out what had happened to that person who did it and bring him to justice.”
“The lady received a caller, a man not seen before in the neighborhood. Somebody wanted to get her at the door to shoot her, to do harm to her.”
“I don’t know what we have. I know we have a… while at the scene I found out that she had expired at the hospital. Then I knew we had a homicide, and it was my responsibility to find out what had happened, who did it, and bring him to justice.”
“Well, Mr. Christensen saw a man who was strange to the neighborhood, but he had an eerie feeling about the man. The man did not have a pleasant countenance about him, and he stared at him and stared at him to the point where it frightened him.”
“He heard the shot, he saw the man exit, and he went to Lita’s door, and that’s when he found Mrs. Sullivan lying in the floor wounded.”
“Everybody at that point is a person of interest. I can’t eliminate anybody because I don’t know anything about anybody.”
“We were pretty convinced that when the crime occurred, it occurred very quickly. So I doubt very seriously if there was enough time for anybody to go in to commit a robbery.”
“I was so afraid.”
“Whenever you have a woman who’s murdered and she’s been going through a nasty divorce, right away the husband would pop up.”
“He indicated he was home alone that morning and actually took a couple of phone calls.”
“Hello.”
“Lita had been doing a lot of partying and had dated several men since their separation. He suggests that any one of them could have something to do with her murder.”
“When you have multiple friends and partners, that elevates the risk. And so the circles you travel in, your lifestyle, your habits, your routine, all contribute to a much higher risk and level of vulnerability and potential—many more suspects—and we had to explore all of these.”
“Miss Sullivan was the type of person that she knew a lot of people. Her parents knew a lot of people, so she socialized.”
“We looked at the case as a hit, a murder for hire. We felt strongly that Sullivan had the motive.”
“Eventually, Sullivan volunteers to take a polygraph test and he passes.”
“You can’t force someone to take a polygraph test, so people agree to it because they’re telling the truth, and they want the police to know that and get the suspicion off themselves.”
“Many times in a homicide, you pursue hundreds of leads that are determined to be unfounded or not correct, and that’s got to be done in order to satisfactorily identify the real suspect.”
“They became a person of interest because we were trying to eliminate everybody as a suspect. Suki was a girlfriend, and Sullivan was still married. So obviously, she would become a suspect because she could have a motive for wanting Lita out of the way.”
“They tell police that Lita and Jim both wanted him to testify in their divorce proceedings. Feeling trapped, he decided not to testify for either, but he didn’t have the heart to tell Lita in person, so he sent the card.”
“Until we know what we got, like, you can’t just say, ‘Well, this person here is eliminated.’ You can’t do that. So you just go in with an open mind.”
“We knew that flowers were involved in the homicide, so we reached out and paid a visit to all of the local floral shops, and that sort of panned out for us because we actually came up with an individual in one of the flower shops.”
“What kind of flower?”
“He was able to give us a description of the people who came in and purchased some flowers.”
“Listen, stop, just let me have them.”
“Well, what about the card?”
“I don’t want a card.”
“Now, whether he was there to shoot or not, I don’t know, but it gives rise to the opinion that he was involved in some way.”
“In any investigation, we get information and investigative leads from many different types of people.”
“The investigation was an open book, and everybody was a suspect, and every lead could have possibly been the lead that we needed. So we followed each one of them as they came in to put together a puzzle of what transpired.”
“We went there to try to locate the person, to try to get pictures, to try to do a sort of a background investigation on that person. We found out that he had actually died while he was in jail. Make a long story short, that turned out to be a dead end.”
“Homicide investigations are long, tedious, and sometimes they can be frustrating, particularly when you reach the point where you run out of leads. The good thing about homicide investigations is that they’re never closed, and there’s always the possibility that one day you’ll get that bit of information that you need to solve the case.”
“In about 1991, Johnny Austin Turner, a career criminal, came forward with information that Clinton Bots and a Thomas Bruce Henley were involved in the Lita Sullivan homicide. We deemed it to be credible, and we certainly pursued it with a vengeance because no one at the time was in custody.”
“Turner indicated that Henley had bragged about this and that he had also seen Henley in possession of a 9mm Smith and Wesson, which was determined to be the murder weapon.”
“We were looking for the flower purchases, and Henley did have a similarity to one of the composites. They were unemployed career criminals and clearly good suspects in this case.”
“Just admit you killed her.”
“No, I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her.”
“Marvin Marble was a smart man, very articulate man, quiet, a person who would exercise his Fifth Amendment rights, just refused to cooperate other than the fact that he would give you his name and he would acknowledge the fact that he knew Mrs. Sullivan, but that was about it.”
“We had reason to believe because of information that we had developed that Marvin might have been a little bit jealous of the relationship between Lita and Poppy. Poppy and Lita were spending a tremendous amount of time together, and Marvin had some problems as a result of that with his wife, and that they were possibly about to end up going through a divorce proceeding themselves.”
“The tapes include details concerning the divorce Lita Sullivan was seeking from her husband for a price.”
“How much did you give for those tapes when you sold them?”
“Marvin was considered a suspect. He had a motive to see Lita harmed, so we was actively looking at Marvin to try to determine what his role would have been.”
“According to Johnny Turner, Marvin Marble was working directly with Thomas Bruce Henley and Clinton Bots, but that association soon unravels as both ex-cons are cleared of any participation.”
“All of that information was checked; they were interviewed, interrogated, they were polygraphed, we did search warrants and we used every investigative technique available to us, with no evidence that Marble was involved either.”
“When we’re looking at Marvin as playing some role in the homicide, we’re not sure at this point specifically what that role was.”
“James Sullivan was a self-made, you know, millionaire entrepreneur, liked jewelry and fancy cars, and in 1977 married Lita McClinton, a young woman from a very prominent black family. A few years later, Sullivan decides the couple should leave Georgia for a more glamorous lifestyle. He takes Lita to Palm Beach, which is very much old money, very connected people, and he arrives on the scene with a black female younger than he, which is not accepted in that community.”
“But by 1985, it has become clear that Lita will never fit into Jim’s new social circle in Florida, so she moves back to Atlanta. He continues his lifestyle down there, fancy-free, making the connections and traveling within the circle of friends that he had established without her.”
“The victim was an impediment to Sullivan’s financial well-being. Lita was looking toward at least one half of all of his assets in the divorce proceeding.”
“She was afraid for her life. Jim had told her the same thing that happened to Lita could happen to her, which directly inferred that he was responsible for what happened to Lita. Suki felt that Jim Sullivan would take her life if the circumstances warranted it.”
“The federal government decided to move on that with minimal evidence, and as a result, they wanted to conduct a search warrant of his residence in Palm Beach.”
“We didn’t discover anything that directly linked him to the homicide of Lita Sullivan, but his phone records may tell a different story.”
“We started looking at them for that particular date, the date of the homicide, and on that log of telephone call we saw one that was made from the Atlanta area in the 404 area to Palm Beach, and what struck me strange about it was the fact that it was during the time that we anticipated the murder took place, and I just had a good feelings and I said, ‘This right here is a key to this murder.'”
“Some anonymous person picked up and the person replied and said, ‘No man, this is a rest stop. It’s up 85 outside of Suwanee, outside the Falcon training camp.'”
“We had a stopwatch. We left the house on Slayton Drive and we proceeded down to the expressway and our plan was to ride on the expressway watching the stopwatch until the necessary amount of time went by, and once it did, we would look at where we were.”
“Three-quarters of an hour later we were at a rest stop off the expressway. We went to the first payphone and to my surprise, it actually matched the number that was on the phone records that we had obtained from Jim Sullivan’s.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“The telephone call was quite short. We’re talking about less than a minute, perhaps just long enough to call and say, ‘It’s done, we’ve left.'”
“When people lie, the stress of lying shows itself physiologically in their cardiovascular system, heartbeat, pulse rate, and your breathing patterns and other involuntary physiological indicators. So the polygraph is based on the idea that it is stressful to lie, and the instrument picks up evidence of that stress.”
“Jim Sullivan’s polygraph showed no signs of stress, suggesting he had no involvement in his wife’s murder.”
“What you’re lacking is that missing middle link, the shooter if you will, and though you know this, you can’t successfully prosecute.”
“I feel as though at that point we’re closer to a solution but we’re not quite there. We’re still without the flower purchasers and the shooter.”
“Thirty-five-year-old Belinda Tran, she began to tell me what had taken place several years earlier when she dated and lived with a man named Tony Harwood. But what Belinda told me specifically was that she felt threatened by Harwood because he had been involved in a murder for hire.”
“When he came back he was acting strange and I asked him, I said, ‘What’s with you?’ And he says, ‘The least you know, the better off you are.'”
“The least you know, the better off you are.”
“Harwood eventually confesses to Belinda that the man he just moved to Florida has hired him to kill his wife.”
“I just didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe that at all.”
“Goodness, I can’t imagine.”
“No, I’m serious. If you don’t believe me, come with me. I’ll take you to meet the man, and you can be present when he pays me.”
“Come on, I want to take you somewhere.”
“In comes with this guy, tall, lanky guy, and he just didn’t look like he belonged there. He looked like he belonged, you know, on a yacht. And he looks over at Harwood and he says, ‘What is she doing here?’ And Harwood says, ‘It’s okay.'”
“Then the man pushes a folded newspaper across the table to Harwood and there’s a large envelope in there and it’s got money in it. He just fanned it and then I thought, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, now I’m in fear for my life.'”
“He would call me, tell me that he’s going to kill me, he’s going to kill me, he’s going to do this and that. He has always, always threatened me, called me constantly since 1987. You know, I was afraid.”
“Give Tony the…”
“When I pointed him out, they asked me how sure I was of it, and I said, ‘I’m 99% sure that’s him.'”
“I was the only one that could link the face of Sullivan to Harwood.”
“That was the only way that we could get Harwood to admit to where he was at.”
“My feelings towards it was it was something I need to do, I want to do.”
“My instructions to her was just have a normal conversation and to kind of go back over the murder.”
“Tony Harwood began coaching Belinda on what to say to law enforcement, so you know, to have his voice on there talking about the murder was overwhelming evidence.”
“And I went to the moving company that Tony had worked at and I found the contract where Jim Sullivan and Tony Harwood both signed off on the moving agreement.”
“I’ve been waiting for you guys for a long time.”
“So after that, everything just fell into place. We were convinced that we had the right person.”
“The mastermind mistakenly believes that if they get someone else to commit the murder they’re going to be home free because they have an alibi.”
“Tony Harwood told us that he met Jim Sullivan when he picked up a load of furniture from Macon, Georgia and transported it to Palm Beach to Jim Sullivan’s mansion. He and Sullivan had a conversation regarding having Sullivan’s wife bumped off.”
“He claimed—and no one believed him—that he was just a getaway driver, he was just the real trigger man’s accomplice. But in my opinion, Harwood was the assassin.”
“Tony Harwood indicated that there was other people involved. However, he said that he did not know who they were, none of which we believed.”
“Sullivan ran immediately when Harwood was arrested. I have no doubt in my mind that Sullivan was notified, whether it be via an immediate account attorney, don’t know who, but he was notified and he immediately fled.”
“We’re never concerned about whether or not we’re going to find Mr. Sullivan. We just know that it’s going to be a lengthy investigation, especially somebody that has the money that Mr. Sullivan had.”
“With his millions of dollars, Sullivan could realistically be anywhere. You know, if Jim Sullivan had the opportunity, he would have any one of the witnesses killed, and people were in fear.”
“I went into hiding and we actually have a crawl space in our house, and I was living up beneath the house with my .357, and just waiting for them to find out something, where he was, where’d he go. I was very scared and I was very scared for my family.”
“America’s Most Wanted has always been a friend of law enforcement. They’ve always been very helpful in assisting and locating fugitives, especially fugitives that are very difficult to catch.”
“He was in total shock and disbelief that he had been located and continued to deny any involvement in the murder of his wife.”
“They don’t look like monsters, but there’s something inside them that’s broken. They have these terrible personality disorders that don’t manifest itself until they commit these crimes, and then we’re left wondering how could anyone do such a thing?”
“He felt that his financial well-being was more important than his wife’s life. So that the only way he could get out of this was to have his wife murdered. He could see no alternative, and so he had her killed.”
“Murder for hire is difficult to get away with because between the time that the mastermind meets the hitman and the time of the murder, there are all kinds of people involved.”
“The mastermind’s fingerprints are really all over the crime even though they’re not at the scene of the crime.”
“He looked like he was just numb to everything. He didn’t show much emotion of any kind.”
“The polygraph detects the stress associated with lying. Now, a sociopath or pathological liar who actually can either convince himself that he’s telling the truth or has no stress whatsoever and lying isn’t going to react.”
“Sullivan just felt as though he was smarter and better than everyone, and I think there’s a sense of satisfaction when you pursue someone like that and ultimately try and convict them, that he got exactly what he deserved.”
“What I can’t get over in murder-for-hire cases is that otherwise intelligent and successful people would do such a thing. It’s the cold-blooded, premeditated nature of this kind of homicide—this is the most disturbing.”
