Millionaire Manhunt

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2:28It really is an example of a modern-day Trojan horse. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Beware of a man coming to your door bringing you flowers. If you want to get a woman to the door, all you have to do is bring flowers. On January 16, 1987, Lita Sullivan was preparing for her day when the doorbell rang. She called to her friend Poppy, who was staying over with her young child, Ingrid, and told Poppy she would get the door. She said, I'll get it. She opened the door. I heard her say good morning. He handed her the flowers. He produced a 9mm handgun. I heard the gunshots. I was stunned for a minute.

3:28I took my daughter out of the bed and into a bathroom and into a closet because I thought that whoever it was would come through the house. When I heard the police radio, I came out of the door and I asked the police officer if Lita was okay. He said she was barely alive. The bullet penetrated her almost left temporal area of her head. They transported her to Piedmont Hospital where she was pretty much pronounced dead upon arrival.

4:03Our daughter was taken away from us at the age of 35. At the age of 35. It was an assassination. The day she decided to divorce Jim Sullivan was when her life ended. Millions of dollars were at stake.

4:25My name is Sheila Ross. I'm an assistant district attorney with the Fulton County District Attorney's Office. I'm one of four prosecutors assigned to the case of State of Georgia versus James Vincent Sullivan. Jim Sullivan plotted and hatched the idea himself and then hired a hitman to kill his wife. What I think is so disgusting is that Jim Sullivan for 19 years lived as a free man.

4:51He was living in Palm Beach. He was a social climber. He was wooing other women. it seemed that he was untouchable, that no one could stop him, that no one could hold him accountable for his murderous act. In January of 1998, a woman named Belinda Trahan came forward with what could only be described as astonishing information. My name is Belinda Trahan, and I broke the Sullivan case wide open.

5:32Millionaire Manhunt.

5:36Understanding the remarkable saga of Lita Sullivan requires turning back the clock.

5:45Back to 1975, to the days of disco. In those days, Lita was still Lita McClinton, living the good life of an attractive single 23-year-old, the daughter of a prominent family in Atlanta. Lita was a happy, likable person. We had a lot of fun. Poppy Maribel was perhaps Lita's best friend. She was a very sweet person, so she loved entertaining her family and friends. It was a close-knit family. Amen. Welcome. Lita being the oldest child of Joanne and Emery McClinton. Lita is missed at every calorie. Lita was working in an upscale women's boutique, and one day, Jim Sullivan walked in. Well, Jim was quite charming initially.

6:39Lita was enthralled. Lita thought he was a nice person and a gentleman. Sullivan was a dashing businessman from Macon, Georgia, who'd inherited a business worth millions. And he lavished attention on Lita. On first glance, he's a gentleman. He knows how to play the part. And he played the part very well. He whined her and he dined her. She fell in love with him. She did. She truly did. But Lita's parents were worried about how a biracial couple might fare in Macon. And about the different side of Jim Sullivan that they were beginning to see. He's a pathological liar. Prone, the McClintons say, to omit inconvenient information.

7:30It was the night before her marriage before he told her that he had been married before and had four kids? That's correct. It was the night before, so you can imagine. We were not happy campers. But the next day, December 29th, 1976, Lita McClinton became Lita Sullivan. Which was a very small family wedding. And the newlyweds settled in Macon, Georgia. Sullivan seemed delighted. I think Jim thought he had a Barbie doll with no brains. But Poppy began to worry. I was a bit concerned. I didn't like the way Jim spoke to Lita. In what way? Sometimes it was in a belittling way. Plus, says Poppy, millionaire Sullivan was a cheapskate.

8:22Once even scolding Lita for spending too much of his money on, of all things, Girl Scout cookies. So he was quite annoyed with her that day that she had bought too many Girl Scout cookies. And then there were the affairs. Were you aware during their marriage of his cheating on her? Yes, I was. Lita hoped he would change when the couple moved to Ritzy, Palm Beach, Florida.

8:54to an oceanfront mansion, Casa Eleda. But Jim continued his old ways. Throughout their marriage, he was unfaithful. And finally, in 1985, after nine years of trying to make the marriage work, I think it just became intolerable. Leda gave up. Filed for divorce, packed up the Mercedes, and moved to an Atlanta townhouse the couple had purchased.

9:27She had planned the divorce. She didn't just wake up one day and say, I'm divorcing Jim Sullivan. She made sure she had copies of his important papers. Before long, Sullivan had a new woman in his life, a local socialite named Suki Rogers, and Lita was getting ready for a rough court fight. She knew that he was the type of guy who just wasn't going to give up any of his money and she knew he was going to play dirty. He had played dirty their entire relationship. Assistant District Attorney Sheila Ross says in January of 1987, financially, everything was coming to a head. So time is running out for this man.

10:10It really is running out. An Atlanta judge was due to decide if Lita could challenge an agreement the couple had made about dividing Sullivan's roughly$8 million fortune. If Lita lost... She was going to get around$200 ,000 total. But if the judge ruled in Lita's favor... She could get anywhere from zero to all of his estate. She may have underestimated him in terms of how much he loved his money, but he also underestimated just how smart she was. On the very day the judge was to make his ruling, Lita's good friend, Bob Christensen, who knew all about her troubled marriage. This is your house, right?

10:58That's right, that's my house, yes. Noticed a stranger in the courtyard near Lita's front door. That's the wall I hid behind. The man was carrying a box of flowers. I started to walk toward him and I just got a very bad feeling about him. So Christensen turned and went back into his garage. Just waiting to go to work. Just waiting to go to work, right. Seconds later, he heard shots. All of a sudden, bang, bang, bang. Just about like that. What did you think had happened? I thought, son of a bitch, had it done. The second you heard those shots, you thought Jim Sullivan? Oh, yeah. No other earthly reason for something like that.

11:38Christensen rushed outside. Saw the shooter run off. And disappeared around here and went up the street. And then raced to Lita's side. She had been shot in the head. A dozen long-stemmed pink roses lay nearby, still in their box. She was pronounced dead, and my husband said he knew who did it. We knew him. We knew him, we think, a lot better than our daughter. And he did it because? Of money. of money. But Sullivan had an alibi. When Lita was shot, he was 600 miles away in Palm Beach. Despite that, police started taking a long, hard look at Jim Sullivan. Suppose, the investigators wondered, he had hired someone to do his dirty work for him, a hit man.

12:33With no murder weapon, they were left with only one real clue, a suspicious phone call made to Sullivan about 40 minutes after Lita was shot. It wasn't just the phone call. It was where it was placed from and where it was placed to. The call came from this rest stop. Coincidentally, about a 40-minute drive from Lita's home. The theory? The hitman called Sullivan to tell him the deed was done. What did you think was going to happen? We thought he was going to be arrested. But the phone call wasn't enough. and not only was Sullivan not arrested, within months he had married his girlfriend, Suki Rogers.

13:19The McClintons were appalled. He's just taken something that he had no right to take. And we are here to see to it that he's going to pay for this deed.

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16:52Jim Sullivan's carefree life in swanky Palm Beach seemed unaffected by Lita's death.

17:03He'd soon divorced his third wife, Suki, and began taking up with other women, lots of other women, one of whom gave these pictures to police. Sullivan's personal record of his many conquests. He exhibits this pattern of targeting women, finding women, and pursuing them aggressively and insistently and just not taking no for an answer. But analyzing Sullivan's social life didn't get authorities any closer to proving their theory that he had hired a hitman to kill Lita. They just didn't have enough hard evidence to charge him with murder. Then in 1992, five years after Lita's death, her frustrated family filed suit against him and eventually did win a$4 million judgment.

17:54But they didn't see a dime of it. Sullivan had long since stashed his millions safely offshore and out of reach. As was he, living the good life now in Costa Rica. The files accumulated, the years passed. Then in 1998, 11 years after the murder, in a small town in rural Texas, fate intervened in the person of one Belinda Trahan. Belinda worked as a receptionist for lawyer Ed Leek, and out of the blue one day, told him she needed to speak with him urgently. Belinda comes in and says, I've got a story to tell you, and I need you to listen really carefully. What is he doing? Her tale began back in the late 80s when she was living in North Carolina with one Tony Harwood, a mover for North American Van Lines.

18:58We were together about three years off and on. She said she would never forget the bizarre story he told her after an overnight run to Palm Beach. There's this rich white man that wants to have his black wife taken care of. But Tony loved to brag, and Belinda's reaction was more or less, oh sure, some guy wants you to kill his wife. I never believed it. Never, never did I believe this. Harwood insisted his story was true, explaining that there were other people in on the job too, and that it would come off the next time he went to Georgia. I was like, oh, okay, the story's getting real good. But Harwood came back disappointed, saying the intended victim hadn't cooperated, refused to answer the door.

19:53Whereupon Belinda joked that, well, if you want a woman to come to the door, take her flowers.

20:03I wish I'd never said that. Because that's exactly what happened. When Harwood returned from a second trip to Atlanta, he said the job was done.

20:17Did you believe him this time? No. I still didn't believe him. By now, Harwood was determined to prove he wasn't making it up. Telling Belinda to get in the car, he drove overnight to a roadside diner. She has no idea what it was called or even what state it was in, but she remembers clearly what happened there. This guy comes in and he looked right at me and then he looked over at Harwood and he says, what is she doing here?

20:51Then the man pushed a newspaper across the table. Harwood put his hand on it and pulled the newspaper towards him. It wasn't until they were back in the car that Belinda realized the newspaper had an envelope in it. That's when he opened the newspaper and there was an envelope in there containing money. Lots of money? Yeah. In fact, half of what Harwood said was the$25 ,000 payoff for the murder of Lita Sullivan. Now, finally, Belinda believed him, and she split, moving to Texas to start over. Eventually, she got married. But Harwood never let her forget what she knew, or what would happen if she told.

21:44Yeah, he threatened me pretty much the whole time. He never stopped? No. For 11 years, it worked. Belinda kept her mouth shut. But by January of 1998, she had had it with the threats, and she finally challenged him. And I even bluntly said it on the phone. I said, did you kill that woman or what? And he says, I don't want to discuss that right now. And that's when Belinda decided to go to the cops. Her boss, the lawyer, knew that they would have two big questions. Why had she stayed silent for so long? And was she perhaps also involved, since she was the one who had suggested those flowers? But in the end, the authorities were so blown away by Belinda's story, they agreed that in return for her testimony, they would not press charges.

22:38She provided details that only someone that was associated with the crime would know. Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent John Lang, now retired, got the case. She was very, very nervous, very concerned for her safety. His question, after so long, could she still ID the man who had paid Harwood off? He showed her a photo array. And does she say, oh my God, that's him? No, she says, I'm 40 % sure this is the guy. But after a few minutes, she again pointed right to the picture of Jim Sullivan. And then I turned around to John Lang and I said, I'm 100%. Once he had her positive ID, Lang set out to verify the rest of Belinda's story.

23:33We went to the North American van lines and just by the grace of God, we're able to find in the attic these records that had not been purged. The first box I opened was the moving invoice with James Sullivan's signature on it, Tony Harwood's signature on it. It was a huge breakthrough. The first hard evidence linking Harwood and Sullivan in the months before Lita was killed. I was just ecstatic when I found that because then we knew what she was saying was true. There was that connection right there. Belinda is the only person that saw these two men together. And she's the only person that saw the exchange of money.

24:22It was crucial. But was it enough to nail Jim Sullivan?

24:39All right, girl. Today, Belinda and her husband, Tim Trahan, share a picture-perfect life in rural Texas. A far cry from 1998 when Belinda feared for her life and literally went underground. I lived up beneath here for about four months.

25:07She retreated in fear to this crawl space, barely four feet high, living deep under her house with a TV, a bed, and a loaded.357 Magnum. She knew she was a target. She was hiding in terror from her ex-boyfriend, Tony Harwood, and from Jim Sullivan. He could hire a professional hit man. He could take me out at any time. I felt that if he paid$25 ,000 to kill his wife, that what's$100 ,000 to kill the eyewitness that could put him away for life? In the 11 years since Leta's murder, Sullivan had been a free man. And yet even with Belinda's story, police still didn't have enough solid evidence to charge him.