The Biloxi Department of Public Safety is housed in a condemned elementary school west of downtown, just a couple of blocks inland from The Strip. Its rank-and-file work areas were nominally refurbished with chipped and lumpy metal desks, cheap wood paneling, and stained industrial carpeting of uncertain coloration. The old and yellowed porcelain water fountains still dispense tepid, tinny water in the hallways, and the bathrooms still have rows of enormous floor-length urinals designed for all heights and aims. The chief occupies what had been the principal’s office.
The Special Investigations Office, which served as headquarters for the Sherry murder investigation, had been a fourth-grade classroom, divided now by cheap plywood partitions and piled high with papers and old case files. Several investigators working there had sat in that same classroom decades earlier, pursuing Dick, Jane, and the times tables long before they were assigned to one of the most sensational murder cases in Mississippi since the Civil War.
The Sherry killings drew statewide, then national headlines. Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ABC News, all joined the hunt, bringing enormous pressure to bear on the small city police department, which possessed a mere seventy sworn officers, including the lieutenant dog catcher. In Biloxi, the murders managed to penetrate the numb tolerance of violence fostered by an age of brutal ends and weekly true-crime miniseries. Gun sales soared after news of the murders broke. Strangers in the neighborhood were no longer universally greeted with Southern courtesy, but sometimes with suspicion and nervous calls to 911. You just don’t walk into a house in an affluent, country-club subdivision in Biloxi, mere footsteps from the Sunkist golf course, blow away a sitting judge and his mayoral candidate wife, then vanish into the night. The Dixie Mafia crooks had been killing each other on The Strip for years—that was almost tolerable, a bludgeoning here, a stabbing there. But the Sherry killings were different—a judge, a politician. Everybody knew them, or at least knew of them. As corrupt and venal as the city of Biloxi could be, things like this just didn’t happen. Until now.
The mayor and his public safety director wanted a swift solution to the case, they declared, trumpeting their massive task force committed to solving the heinous crime, the rhetoric predictable. But their initially hopeful pronouncements to the media quickly gave way to quiet despair inside the old elementary school. Thirty hours after the bodies were found at 203 Hickory Hill Circle, the task force of investigators from Biloxi P.D., with help from the Harrison County Sheriff, the Mississippi Highway Patrol, the district attorney, the state Attorney General, and the FBI, knew little more than the Sherry children had learned from a few harried phone calls and a visit to Pete Halat. Which is to say, they had a passel of suspicions, but no real idea who killed the judge and the candidate, or why. Some client of Vince’s? A defendant who came before him during his fourteen months on the bench? An enemy of Margaret’s? The possibilities seemed endless. They weren’t even sure when it happened—that’s how clean a job this had been.
All the police knew for sure was that the murder had been well planned and professional. There were no telltale fingerprints in the house, no murder weapon left behind. By the time Lynne Sposito had arrived in town, police scuba divers were in the process of searching for the gun in Biloxi’s Back Bay, not far from the Sherrys’ home, as well as in every alligator-and-snake-ridden water hazard at the neighboring golf course. Everyone knew this to be a hopeless exercise. The gun could be anywhere.
Inside the house, detectives concluded, nothing much had been disturbed by the killer—there were no obvious signs of anything missing. Vince’s wallet still sat in his back pocket. Margaret’s black purse lay atop a copy of the city’s proposed budget for 1988, the credit cards and forty-two dollars and change untouched inside. The small safe appeared unmolested. Robbery had not been a motive.
A .22 automatic, most likely a Ruger, judging from the markings on the shells and bullets, had killed the Sherrys. The small caliber required an expert’s aim to ensure fatality, while the low mass and velocity of the bullets guaranteed little noise and few, if any, exit wounds. The lead projectiles would have ricocheted inside the victims, maximizing damage to organs and blood vessels. The .22 is the weapon of choice for marksmen and assassins, and the killer had been both. All but one of the shots were fired in pairs, spaced tightly—“double taps,” the pros call them, for the quick, twin flicks to the trigger that fire off two rounds in rapid succession. Even the two bullets that missed Margaret were found embedded in the bedroom wall less than one inch above Margaret’s height, right next to one another, a barely errant double tap.
It appeared Vince had been shot first, bullets fired from less than two feet away into his face as he stood looking at the gunman, sending him pinwheeling backward, arms flailing, blood spraying on walls, ceiling, his clothes, and his yellow vinyl reading chair. The first shot, it appeared from the burns and black gunpowder stippling his skin, had come with the barrel inserted into his mouth. His hands may have gripped the barrel. The bullet sheared off a row of his teeth, sending white fragments of enamel and silver fillings sailing through the room. Vince always boasted about his perfect teeth, brushed and flossed with care—how that shot must have hurt, Lynne would later say, her own teeth gritted.
Next, the killer had pumped four shots straight down into Margaret’s head, killing her instantly. There was no spray of blood, just a rivulet of crimson down one cheek and the side of her neck, soaking her bra. She had somehow slumped down into a sitting position, her legs straight out in front of her, feet under her dresser, her back against the bed, hands cupped at her sides, still holding one earring. Had she fainted in this unlikely position? Was she cowering? Had the gunman ordered her to sit down? Investigators could not tell.
When Margaret was dead, investigators theorized, the killer returned to deliver a final shot to the judge, striking him just below his right eye, perhaps a coup de grace to silence his struggles. From the spray of blood around him, they could tell he had lived for a while after first being shot, which led them to believe Vince listened to his wife die before the final shot came to end his agony.
The only traces, aside from the nine Remington-brand brass shells ejected from the automatic pistol, were bits of plastic foam scattered around the bodies, some on Vince’s chest as he lay in the den, some caught in Margaret’s hair as she sat slumped wearing only her bra and panties. The police theorized that the shooter had muffled his shots with a pillow or seat cushion, which would explain why no neighbor heard the gunshots. It could also explain why Margaret appeared to have been surprised by the killer after Vince had been shot—she simply didn’t hear it. The only problem with this theory was that no pillows or cushions seemed to be missing from the home. The police divers added pillows to the list of items to be searched for, but none turned up. It seemed odd that a stone-cold killer would walk out carrying a pillow with nine smoking bullet holes in it, but no other explanation for the foam leapt to mind.1
Establishing the time of death also posed a major problem. A city councilwoman, Dianne Harenski, told police she talked to her friend Margaret by telephone between 7 and 7:30 P.M. Monday. She was sure of the time because Wheel of Fortune was on TV when she placed the call. Vince had been grousing in the background about wanting to go to dinner when the call was abruptly cut short, before the two women had completed their good-byes. Vince and Margaret could have died then and there, the police thought at first, but the contents of their stomachs suggested they probably went on to eat dinner later that night. This was far from certain, though, because the bodies had begun to decompose in the hot, closed house, making precise calculations difficult. The remains of large salads in their stomachs could have been a late lunch, though dinner seemed more likely to the coroner, based on calculations of the rate of human digestion.
There was one other witness, a parole officer who recalled receiving a telephone call from the judge on Tuesday morning, the day before the bodies were found. Vince had a question about a parolee who flunked his drug test—he wanted to cut the kid a break rather than revoke his parole. The parole officer was certain the call had been Tuesday morning. The contradictory information seemed irreconcilable, and a canvass of the neighbors failed to produce any leads. Nobody knew anything.
The killer had chosen an ideal time to strike: just before the Sherrys were to leave town to visit a veterinary hospital and their daughter Leslie in Baton Rouge. This meant they would not be missed in Biloxi for many hours, perhaps days, leaving ample opportunity for a clean getaway, for memories of passing cars and faces to fade in the neighborhood, for alibis to be constructed, if necessary. The implication: the killer had observed the Sherrys for a time, learned their habits and plans, and timed the hit so that it just preceded their trip.
Or, there was another possibility, the one the Sherry children had locked on: The killer knew Vince and Margaret well enough to know exactly what they were doing that night, and when best to strike.
The behavior of the Sherrys’ beloved dogs, Meaux and Fritz, supported this theory to an extent. The two dachshunds would not have attacked a friend. They hadn’t bothered Pete Halat, for instance, when he had come in to discover the bodies. But when two strange policemen showed up a short time later, Meaux had stood sentry in front of Vince, then rushed into the bedroom to keep the police away from Margaret, barking and baring his fangs. The first two patrolmen who arrived at the house couldn’t touch the bodies, so ferocious was the little dog’s efforts to save his two motionless masters, who had doted on those animals, called them The Boys, their two newest sons. Even Vince, who had made Lynne wash her hands with bleach when she touched a dog as a child, let The Boys kiss him on the lips and sleep next to him in bed. Leslie Sherry was convinced only a friend could have done it. Only a friend could have gotten past The Boys without being bitten or hurting the dogs. And whoever it was might be feigning incredulity and grief along with the rest of the city right now.
Halat had told the police he went to the Sherrys’ home Wednesday after Vince’s court clerk called wondering why he failed to show up for work. Halat got no answer when he tried calling the Sherry home, then sent his wife, Sandra, over to check on things. She called back to say both Vince’s and Margaret’s cars were parked in the driveway, but no one answered the door. So Pete and a lawyer in his employ, Charles Leger, drove over in Pete’s Mercedes.
Halat’s description of what followed had been vivid. “I looked into the, I looked in the, ah, room there, through the glass in the door, and I could see the puppies, the dogs . . . I saw some dog excrement on the rug. This kinda alarmed me a little bit . . . In an attempt to check to see if the door was locked, I put my hand on the door latch; I pressed down and it was open. As the door opened an odor came from the room and I immediately perceived in my mind something was wrong. . . .
“I very slowly walked through the hallway, through the entranceway, through the living room, and as I approached the door to the kitchen, I, I saw Mr. Sherry laying on the floor on his back, his feet toward the front door and his head toward the sliding glass door. It was my initial impression at that time that Mr. Sherry was dead. I turned around and went out and told [a neighbor] to please call the police as quickly as he could.
“I had no idea that Mrs. Sherry was in the house, but I did not re-enter the house, for reasons that I can’t explain right now.”
Halat told the police that he had no clue who might have killed the Sherrys or why. Although rumors had begun to float around the city to the contrary, Halat was certain that neither of them had received any threats and was equally certain that if they had, the Sherrys would have confided in him before anyone else. He was their best and most trusted friend and confidant, he said.
“I’m not in favor of the death penalty,” Halat concluded, “but if y’all catch this guy and he’s convicted, I’ll volunteer to pull the switch.”2
Halat’s statement seemed so complete that the Biloxi detectives saw no need for more than a cursory talk with the law firm associate Halat had brought to the house that morning, Chuck Leger. Two years would pass before investigators would correct that mistake and ask for Leger’s distinctly different version of events that morning.
* * *
Without any hard evidence, the task force investigators were forced to cast about for potential suspects, hoping that luck would take them where facts could not. So far, they had little to show for their efforts. Dozens of useless tips about suspicious men in the vicinity were doggedly checked. Composite drawings of two men—whose crime consisted of asking for directions to the Sunkist Country Club on the day of the murders—were circulated. No evidence against them existed other than the fact that they had expressed a desire to visit a golf course near the Sherry home on the day before the murders. But such was the desperation of the police department to show progress, to have something to hand out at the press conferences. Newspapers statewide dutifully published the composites, generating dozens of spurious tips. The men depicted in those artist’s renderings were never identified, however—fortunately for them.
The task force briefly considered Pete Halat as a potential suspect. A politically wired and ambitious partner would be a good place to turn in any homicide. He was the last person to see Vince Sherry alive, and he was the first to find the bodies. But the detectives saw no motive. Vince, with his perilously high blood pressure, had been turned down for an insurance policy on behalf of the firm and Pete. Halat didn’t get a penny from Vince’s death. If anything, his practice stood to suffer. And even the kids said he was Vince’s best friend.
Next, one by one, the task force looked at Vince’s former clients. They considered a cocaine-smuggling preacher from Gulfport who had accused Vince of taking a big fee, then selling him out. There was a Chicago mobster and Colombian cocaine smugglers to consider, as well as the king of Biloxi’s Strip, Mike Gillich. Vince’s files were a veritable Who’s Who of Gulf Coast crime.
Most promising of Vince’s former clients was Betty “Diamond Betsy” Inman, a Tennessee-based cocaine smuggler who earned her nickname from an Imelda Marcos–style hoard of drug-financed jewels, furs, clothes, and shoes stashed in her Nashville condo. Years earlier, she had paid for Vince’s legal representation in Mississippi and Puerto Rico by signing over her two Lincolns, a Dino Ferrari, a motor home, and a pile of cash. (The corpulent, occasionally incoherent trafficker also suggested he dump Margaret and run off with her as part of the retainer, a package deal Vince politely declined.) When she drew a prison term despite Vince’s best efforts, Inman decided Sherry had betrayed her. Her love letters turned to threats. The task force heard that Betsy had told associates Vince had looted her possessions, swearing she’d kill Sherry if given the chance.
But Diamond Betsy had been in jail when Vince and Margaret died, the task force soon found. Her threats, apparently, had been idle ones.
The task force would spend weeks pursuing clients of Vince’s without success. It was all speculation. Without evidence from the crime scene or witnesses to implicate a particular person, there was nothing to really investigate. The police ended up telephoning or visiting these clients of Vince’s and, in essence, bluntly asking them to confess. No one did.
Faced with so many dead ends, the much-publicized task force began to dwindle in size after a handful of days as its members found less and less to do. They knew a truism of the field of homicide investigation: Except for a tiny majority of cases, murders are solved within forty-eight hours of their commission. Or they are never solved at all.
* * *
If the police had trouble finding a suspect, the rumor mill in Biloxi did not. Within hours of the discovery of the bodies, rumors that Biloxi’s favorite son, Mayor Blessey, might be a viable suspect were being discussed avidly in grocery store lines and over morning coffee across the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Certainly Lynne’s suspicions, her whole family’s, focused on the mayor. She was certain her mother’s worst political enemy had to be involved, and many townspeople reinforced that suspicion, relishing the gossipy intrigue. One woman approached Lynne later, at her parents’ wake, and said, “Seventy-five percent of Biloxi thinks Mayor Blessey did it, darlin’. The other twenty-five percent are related to him.”
This suspicion was studiously ignored by the Biloxi police officials in charge of the case in all their public pronouncements and investigative actions. In one press conference, Director of Public Safety George Saxon admitted that, three days after the bodies were found, investigators still could not determine the motive for the murders. Yet in almost the same breath, he declared, “Politics had nothing to do with the killings.” Gerald Blessey sat next to him at the conference.
Lynne saw in this a huge conflict of interest, but the truth was, even outside investigators brought in to help the city police department agreed that there was absolutely no evidence to link the mayor to the murders.
Still, Lynne had a point: The city’s director of public safety and his police chief served at the mayor’s pleasure, and Gerald Blessey had made it abundantly clear that he would not be considered a suspect simply because he and the victims were enemies. The fact that Blessey was out of town during the time of the murder and had uncharacteristically missed a crucial city council meeting Tuesday, just as Margaret had, was duly noted, though it was never couched in terms of an alibi.
A sheriff’s detective on the task force who asked to question Blessey, if only as a matter of routine, was told by the sheriff at the time not to pursue it.3 This got back to Lynne eventually, infuriating her and compounding suspicions of cover-up and complicity.
Long before that, from her first day in Biloxi—even while Leslie Sherry spoke of how only a friend could get past her parents’ dogs—Lynne Sposito had focused on her mother and father’s worst enemy: Mayor Gerald Blessey. On that first day in Biloxi, she walked into the city police department expecting the worst from the police department the mayor commanded.
And even then, Lynne had no idea just how bad it would get.