From the moment she arrived in Biloxi, Lynne Sposito wanted to see the house. Partly, this was to reclaim already receding memories, to grasp some lasting trace of her parents—a forgotten tin of her mother’s infamous rum cake, the aroma of her father’s cigars (the ones he smoked only when he wanted to irritate Margaret). But more than that, she wanted, even needed, to walk through that front door, into the living room, on to the den, then finally the bedroom—to tread the same path the killer had taken, eyes wide, to see what he had seen. Maybe she would understand it then. Maybe she would see something the police had missed. Maybe something about this crime might finally make sense.
In the past week, her family had been dissected and discussed in that privacy-killing, dispassionate way only murder permits, with its evidence technicians and burning television lights. Vince’s and Margaret’s every word and deed had been replayed with a new, ominous coloration in place. It went beyond Eric’s adoption. The police wanted to know, as casual as if asking the time: Did your father go to whores? Was he on the take? Did he fool around on your mom? Was Margaret a racist? Would she have known if your dad was corrupt? It seemed almost an accusation: What could Margaret and Vincent Sherry have done to warrant their own deaths?
That was why Lynne needed to visit the house. She needed to see for herself, without the jaundice of suspicion the police seemed to carry with them. Then, she believed, she might understand what happened, and why.
For an entire week, the task force had held her at bay. Wait until the scene is processed. Wait until the FBI team from Quantico is through. Wait until the whole place is dusted for fingerprints, until it is swept for hairs and fibers, until the direction and velocity of each bullet and spatter of blood is measured and calculated. So Lynne had waited, impatient, straining. It was why she had gone out to the neighborhood and talked to Brett Robertson—the itch to see, to do something. To help set things straight.
Now the day had finally come. The police had called and said they wanted the family to go in. That’s how they put their request; it was time to go in, the way the commander of a Marine company or a SWAT team says, We’re goin’ in. And that was how it felt. Buddy Wills and Greg Broussard wanted to use the Sherry children’s eyes, their familiarity with the surroundings, their knowledge of their parents’ habits—even their intuitions—to better interpret the evidence left in that house. It wouldn’t be pretty, Broussard had warned. But it was important. It could help catch a killer.
This is what Lynne had been waiting for, and she had promised to be there without hesitation. So why, Lynne asked herself, as she stared at her reflection in the motel bathroom mirror, did she suddenly dread entering that house?
No answer suggested itself as she surveyed the short blond hair in the mirror, the hastily combed perm, the circles under her eyes, the extra thirty pounds she kept meaning to lose, the mouth that of late looked wrinkled and tight, as if she had forgotten how to smile. Yes, she needed to see what had been left behind. Yet, once that threshold was crossed, there would be no more indulging the fantasy that it had all been some terrible mistake. She would see it, smell it, know it in her bones. It wasn’t that she feared the house or the killer—only the certainty that her parents were truly gone. Nothing the police or the newspapers said could come close to slamming home that realization like a visit to Hickory Hill Circle.
Lynne traded the motel room for the harsh, gray glare of the Biloxi morning. It was Tuesday, September 22, six days since Vincent and Margaret Sherry were found dead, and Lynne Sposito was going home for the last time.
* * *
Even after a week, the stench assaulted the nostrils, a mixture of dog droppings, bodily fluids, the scent of blood. Policemen had sealed the windows that first day, a safeguard against any attempts to tamper with evidence. This was probably a precaution without purpose, since the killers had possessed up to two days to remove any damning evidence before the murders were discovered, and they undoubtedly had done so long before the bodies cooled. The walls and carpets in that closed house seemed to Lynne to radiate the scent of death. Lynne and her sister, Leslie, surveyed the yellow tape barriers draped and stuck everywhere, the black graphite fingerprint powder that dusted surfaces throughout the house, the general rummaging—as if the house had been pillaged.
None of this mattered at the moment, though. Only the blood in that room shocked—and angered—Lynne. Trails of dry, brown blood streaked the sliding glass door that led from the den to the yard. Blood had pooled on the vinyl cushions of Vince’s yellow reading chair, and on the carpet below, where strips of tape outlined the spot on which Vince’s supine body was found, a ghastly silhouette. A trail of blood led to that taped figure, stretching back from the spot Vince had occupied when the first bullet slammed into his face.
“I asked you people if they died right away,” Lynne said, her voice a quiet monotone. The four investigators taking part in this walk-through watched Lynne warily, Leslie brooding at her side. “I asked you if it had been quick for them, and you told me, yeah, it was quick. Now, you told me one lie. Don’t tell me any more.”
The detectives continued staring at her blankly. Lynne saw that it had been a good idea to insist that she and Leslie come to the house together—the police had wanted Leslie alone at first, as her memories of the house were freshest. But at Lynne’s suggestion, the four Sherry children had made a pact to face painful tasks in the next few days together, or at least in pairs. That way, there always would be at least one other person to talk to who had been through the same experience, the same shock. The way Leslie had clutched her hand after walking into that stifling house—and the anger she now felt boiling within her—told Lynne she had been right to resist being bullied into waiting outside.
“I’m a nurse, for Christ’s sake,” she continued, the words heated now, louder, pushed through gritted teeth. “You don’t pump arterial blood after you’re dead. You don’t wind up clear across the room with your blood on the opposite wall if you die instantly. Don’t lie to me.”
The one comfort Lynne had allowed herself—that her parents had not suffered—had been stripped from her. There was no denying it. Broussard and Wills, who were at this time functioning as the primary field investigators on the task force, apologized, saying they were sorry for playing down Vince’s death. But Margaret really had died quickly, they promised, four head shots, instantaneous, no time even for the nerve cells to fire off a pain message to her brain. That was gospel, they swore as they stood in the bedroom, explaining Margaret’s position in death. They had thought it would be easier on the family to say the same of Vince, to keep to themselves how he must have been left there, bleeding and helpless, perhaps listening to his wife die before the assassin finished him off. They had no idea Lynne would deduce the significance of all the blood. They assured her their intentions, though deceptive, had been honorable.
“I understand,” Lynne said. “But I can handle anything if I know what I’m handling. Once you accept the reality of somebody feeling the need to do this to your parents, you can handle just about anything—as long as somebody doesn’t jerk you around. So if you can’t tell me something, fine. Just tell me you can’t tell me. But don’t lie to me.”
Broussard and Wills agreed. They looked at Lynne with new respect. They would not underestimate her again.1
* * *
Together, they walked through the house, room by room—the four investigators, Lynne, and Leslie. At the investigators’ direction, the two daughters looked for anything that might be missing, particularly pillows because of the singed foam scattered around the bodies.
The walk-through, then, became a painful tour of Sherry family memories—the framed front page from the Sun Herald when Margaret barely lost the mayoral race, the photo of a black-robed Vince taking the oath of a circuit court judge, the diplomas and degrees, Vince’s in law and political science, Margaret’s in mathematics and art, wonderful accomplishments crammed carelessly in a closet.
In each room, Wills or Broussard asked the same questions: Is anything out of place? Is anything missing? Each time, Leslie and Lynne shook their heads no. The killers, it appeared, had taken nothing, at least nothing obvious—except for Vince Sherry’s appointment book.
In the kitchen, Lynne walked to the counter near the sink and picked up a plastic seven-day pill dispenser—her mother’s, for blood-pressure and thyroid medication. Lynne popped it open, looked inside, and said, “They were dead Monday night by ten o’clock.”
This abrupt pronouncement startled the investigators—as far as they knew, a firm time of death had not yet been determined. But to Lynne, it suddenly seemed clear. She showed them how each daily compartment in the medicine container held seven pills. Sunday’s was empty. Monday’s had two pills left inside. Margaret had taken her morning medication on Monday, September 14, but had never removed her evening dosage. Margaret’s and Vince’s nightly movements had attained ritual status, unvaried for years, Lynne explained: Every night, after the ten o’clock news, which they watched religiously, Margaret had a big glass of milk and took her last pills of the day. You could set your clocks by the regularity of Mom and Dad’s nocturnal habits, she said. “Mom was dead by ten o’clock, ten-thirty tops. There is no doubt. She never missed her pills.”
This revelation, combined with Margaret’s phone conversation with her friend Dianne around seven o’clock Monday night, gave Broussard and Wills enough information to narrow the time of death to a three-hour window, between seven and ten o’clock on the night of September 14. The sighting of the yellow Ford at ten or so that Monday night took on greater significance. It was no longer simply a strange car that might be relevant to the investigation; now it was a suspicious car in the neighborhood at exactly the time of the murder.
It wasn’t much, but finding evidence the police had overlooked gave Lynne the feeling of contributing to the case, of helping bring the killers to justice. But it also begged the question: Why hadn’t the police asked about this pill container on their own? It had been in plain view. Lynne would learn later this was only one of many oversights by the often fragmented, leaderless task force.
The walk-through ended in one of the extra bedrooms that had been used as an office, piled high with papers, much of the clutter from Margaret’s personal investigation of how the city was using—or, as she believed, misusing—federal grant money. The entire Sherry family would spend the next several days working with the investigators, going through these papers and the others spread through the house, retracing Margaret’s thinking and findings, reading Vince’s mail, burrowing through bank receipts—anything that might suggest a motive for murder.
They looked everywhere. There was the heating vent Margaret used to stash papers. Empty. They pulled books off the shelf and shook them, looking for messages tucked into the pages. Nothing. At one point, one of the investigators asked Lynne, “Where’s your dad’s toolbox?”
“Dad didn’t have a toolbox,” Lynne said. “But Mom’s is in the closet.”
The task before them was monumental. The Sherrys were packrats when it came to their documents, with utility bills and canceled checks going back to the 1970s, boxed and filed, utterly useless.
They also kept answering machine tapes, piling used cassettes in a cardboard box instead of recording new messages over the same tape. Theorizing that Vince and Margaret kept those old tapes for a reason—more threats, perhaps?—the investigators began replaying them one by one. As Leslie and Lynne rummaged through the old files in their mother’s office, they suddenly heard, drifting in from the next room, their father’s rich, clear voice.
“Hi, hon, pick up,” Vince was saying. He had been calling his wife from work. “I’m on my way home. Do you need me to pick up anything at the store?”
The pedestrian normalcy of that recorded call left both women speechless, frozen in place, papers quivering in their hands. The tape was from a week or so before the murders, a lifetime ago, when what to get at the market seemed the most pressing of concerns. The machine had clicked, cutting off Vince’s voice, Margaret picking up and no doubt telling him to bring home some milk or some ice cream or a dozen eggs. The ordinariness of the call, in that house the Sherry children could never forget and never again love, opened all their wounds, each word a razor stroke.
The tape found in the machine on the day of the murder was no less poignant: Friends had called on Tuesday and Wednesday, right up to the time the bodies were found. The machine had clicked on and off mindlessly, continuing to answer the phone and recording messages, each caller’s voice echoing in the house as the Sherrys lay unmoving, unnoticed. Norma had called Margaret about the seafood festival. A councilman called to discuss the city budget with her. Fred wanted to remind Vince of a meeting the following Sunday. The local librarian called to say a book was in. Then Leslie’s voice appeared, the message she left making it clear she was a little miffed, a little impatient: Where were you? Why did you stand me up? This had been left Tuesday, when the Sherrys missed their lunch date and veterinary appointment in Baton Rouge. A week later, the sound of her anger replayed was mortifying, the thought of her carping into that machine as her mother and father lay murdered almost unbearable.
From Wednesday, the tape had preserved a call from Pete Halat’s secretary, then from Halat himself—attempts to find out why Vince failed to come to court that morning. Then came a flurry of messages left just after eleven o’clock, when the first report of a possible homicide at the Sherry home went out on the police radio: Two friends of the family left messages, as had a radio news reporter, a court clerk, and a police dispatcher, all calling back-to-back, wanting to know the same thing, if anyone was home. All wanted to know: Was it true? Had there been a shooting?
No one had picked up those calls, of course. Pete Halat had dashed in and out already, and the police had yet to arrive. The tape ended, with the silence that followed a last plaintive question from a friend: “Is anyone there? Is anyone there?”
On the other side of that tape, older calls had been recorded. One of them raised investigators’ suspicions. John Field, a former Biloxi cop who had left the force under a cloud years earlier, had called to tell Vince, “Come on over. The ice cream’s ready.”
That same morning of the walk-through, the police had cracked open a safe that had been brought from the Sherrys’ bedroom closet to the police department. Amid the old insurance policies and other assorted, innocuous documents, the police found a three-by-five sheet of notebook paper with a row of what appeared to be figures in kilo amounts. Suspicions immediately flared that Vince might have been involved in drug trafficking—measurements in kilograms are, among other things, the hallmark of cocaine dealers. The police already knew Vince had represented a number of heavy traffickers. Then there was his friendly associations with the Gulf Coast’s criminal element—his address book had been filled with gangsters, crooks, and other assorted toughs, right next to the senators, congressmen, and judges he also counted as friends. He was friends with a corrupted judge, a corrupted sheriff, a variety of notorious gangsters. Vince, the police had concluded, liked to rub elbows with the dark side. Maybe, they theorized, he had crossed over the line himself.2
Now, in this context of suspicion, the telephone message reference to “ice cream” was not seen as a simple invitation to dessert, but as a possible reference to cocaine. Maybe a shipment had just arrived and this was code—coke was often called snow, flake, white lady. Why not ice cream? Drug deals had led to more than one murder, the police knew, and Vince, with his lawyer’s connections and criminal friends, could easily have gotten involved. Poor Margaret could have simply been dragged down with him.
The suspicions did not pan out, however, no matter how odd the kilo figures mixed in with other ordinary family papers might seem. When task force investigators went to question John Field about the message machine tape, he went to his freezer and hauled out a bucket of strawberry ice cream his wife had made.
“Vince loved Becky’s ice cream,” a tight-lipped Field told his inquisitors, in that same deliberate, hoarse basso voice so recognizable on the Sherrys’ answering machine, though now it was dripping with contempt. “Y’all got any other hot leads like this one?”
Nevertheless, the paper with the kilo amounts was sent to the FBI crime lab to see if there were traces of cocaine on it. The drug is persistent and pervasive, often contaminating money and papers used by people who handle the substance. The paper would later come back clean, another puzzle piece that didn’t fit.
* * *
“You keep saying it was clean, a clean job, nothing left behind,” Lynne said during a pause in the tape playing and rummaging. “Now we’re saying nothing’s missing. What else can you tell us? What does this mean?”
“Well, one thing we can tell you is, it’s a contract hit,” Broussard replied. “Every step of the way was professional.”
“How can you tell that?” Lynne wanted to know.
“Because they used a twenty-two.”
Lynne was still innocent in these matters, though that, too, would change. She asked them why the caliber of the gun meant anything.
“Well, a twenty-two will penetrate the skull once, but it usually won’t come out,” Broussard explained. “It does a lot of ricochet damage, and this person knew where to aim. Plus, they’re easy to obtain, and they’re easy to get rid of.”
Lynne was surprised. She had been wondering about the killer’s choice of gun. “God, if I was a contract killer, I’d figure you’d use a cannon, as big a gun as you could get,” she suggested.
The investigators shook their heads. The pros don’t need the cannons. They use finesse. They hit where they’re aiming. They know just the right gun to use, just the right amount of firepower, no more, no less.
“So what you’re saying is, either a hit man killed my parents, or a cop.”
The room went silent. The Biloxi police had officially discounted the reported sighting of an officer driving the yellow Ford that night, but Lynne had not. She was curious to see what reaction she’d get. Finally, one of the policemen asked what she meant.
“Well, you guys would know how to fake a contract killing,” she said, backing off from a direct accusation against one of Biloxi’s finest. “Someone like me would come in and use a cannon. I wouldn’t know how to make it look like a professional job. A cop would.”
The subject changed after that, but Lynne had made her point. She was saying no one, from her perspective, was above suspicion. They could go after her brother. But, if necessary, she would go after them.
* * *
They did go after Eric, that same day. Later in the afternoon, Leslie and Lynne met their brother at the Halat and Sherry law office to root through papers and to box up Vince’s books and personal possessions. Broussard and Wills showed up after a while, ostensibly to ask Eric and Leslie some follow-up questions.
But the subject eventually came around to Eric’s travel plans: Was he or wasn’t he planning a trip to the Gulf Coast around the time of the murders, as they had been told? Eric said yes, he had planned to go to New Orleans, little more than an hour’s drive from Biloxi, for a disc jockey job that weekend, and to spend some time on the Coast as well. The trip fell through when he had to work his regular job in Florida, which is why he failed to bring it up to the police before. “I didn’t think it was worth mentioning,” he said.
The investigators stared impassively at Eric, his longish, dark hair, his thin mustache—so unlike the other Sherry children. Did he know the truth about his origins, they wondered, had it eaten at him?
They didn’t mention the little talk they had had with a policeman back in Eric’s city of residence, Fort Walton Beach, Florida, who told them Eric had been off from his regular job at the time of the murders—another contradiction to fuel their suspicions. Nor did they mention how the police suspected him of small-time drug dealing out of the dance club where he deejayed. This allegation had resonated with the kilo notations in Vince’s safe, and with another tip they received: that Vince had used his influence to save his son from a drug rap, pinning it on a Biloxi dealer who then sought revenge. Though this tip later proved false, as did the information about his work schedule, the list of reasons to suspect Eric kept on growing as far as the police could see. He had been seen around town since the murders, hanging out in seedy bars known for drug dealing and other questionable activities, huddling with known criminals and their children, including several offspring of Dixie Mafia killers and vice lords. He would later tell Lynne he had been trying to unearth information from these lowlifes he knew from high school. But to the police, it was almost as if Eric was begging to be considered a suspect. And he seemed not to have a clue.
Lynne, however, listened to the questioning warily, still worried the police might spring the subject of the adoption to see how Eric might react. They didn’t, but their inquiries took an equally ominous turn.
“There’s really not much to this,” Wills said, after they had queried him about his planned trip to the Coast. “But we’d like you to think about taking a polygraph test.”
Eric seemed genuinely perplexed at this request. “A lie detector test? Me? Why?”
“Well, because of the trip you were planning out here, and some other things, we’d just like to get it out of the way, to completely rule out you having anything to do with this. Then we can go on with other things, and forget about it. It’s just a formality.”
Lynne shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Eric was still looking puzzled, sitting there behind his father’s desk, Vince’s blotter and pencils and framed photos there on the desktop, as if he might walk through the door and sit down to work any minute.
“What do you think, Lynne? Should I do it?”
Lynne thought, God, they’re going to hook him up to that machine and ask him about the adoption. They’ll have their answer—and Eric will feel like he’s lost everything. She couldn’t let that happen. “I don’t think you should, Eric,” she said, thinking fast. She turned to Wills and Broussard. “You’re putting Eric in a no-win situation.”
“What do you mean?” one of the detectives asked.
“My God, we just buried our parents. If he blows it because he’s nervous or upset, you’re gonna say you’ve got your person. You’ll stop looking. And if he passes it, you can always say he’s a sociopath, he could be lying and still pass it. Or he’s on drugs, he could pass it. There’s no way this would do anything but hurt him.”
The detectives exchanged a look, as if to say, we should have button-holed Eric when he was alone, got him to agree to the test without Lynne around. Then he couldn’t have backed down—it would look too bad for him.
Lynne took their silence as encouragement. She turned to Buddy Wills and asked, “If it were your parents, would you take it?” After a moment, he surprised Lynne by saying he didn’t know. Then she looked at Broussard.
“Probably not,” he said. She knew then that she had been right to trust him. Other investigators would have said whatever they had to say to get the result they wanted—believing that to be their job. But Broussard had been honest. He turned to Eric and said, “Just think it over.”
After they left, Eric wanted to know why Lynne had been so vehement about him not taking the test. “It’s not that big a deal, Lynne. I didn’t go to New Orleans. I didn’t see Mom and Dad. I sure as hell didn’t kill them.”
“I know that, Eric. But it’s bullshit. And we’ve been through enough. You don’t need to go through any more.”
Eric shrugged and, to his sister’s relief, didn’t press further. “You’re the one thinking of all the questions to ask. I’ll leave it to you.”3
* * *
The issue would have died then and there if it had been up to Lynne. But it would not go away. Under pressure from Biloxi’s director of public safety—and later from the mayor himself—Wills and Broussard, then their predecessors, would continue to ask Eric to submit to a lie detector test. Privately, they assured Lynne they would not broach the question of his adoption if he agreed to the test, but she continued to refuse.
The idea that they were sniffing around after Eric while ignoring the mayor as a suspect had Lynne beside herself. She still believed Gerald Blessey, and therefore his entire police department, had a conflict of interest because of his enmity with the Sherrys. Few people other than the family and Mayor Blessey’s most fervent opponents endorsed this position. Surrendering jurisdiction of a murder case solely on the basis of political differences with the victims would be legally unprecedented, not to mention intensely embarrassing for the city and its mayor (as would a more apt reason for bailing out of the case—admitting that the small city police force was in way over its head). City officials made up much of the multiagency task force as a means of avoiding any conflict of interest, but the reality was that Biloxi police retained total control. Lynne believed the city should hand the case over to the FBI, or the sheriff’s department, the Mississippi Highway Patrol—anyone else would do, so long as it removed the taint of bias, the suspicion of cover-up.
“That’s not gonna happen,” Broussard told her. In fact, the FBI—Lynne’s first choice to take over the case—was legally barred from assuming jurisdiction without evidence that a federal crime had been committed. Murder—even of a state court judge—is strictly within the purview of local authorities. The FBI could help, but that was all. Its role in the task force quickly faded to a token effort at best.
“If Blessey’s innocent, I would think he’d want an objective investigation from outside,” Lynne argued. “Otherwise, people will always say he covered it up, that it was a whitewash.”4
“Not gonna happen,” Broussard repeated. “It’s their case, do or die.”
So Lynne surprised him. “All right. Eric will take the lie detector test. In fact, all of us will, all the kids. But only on one condition: Gerald Blessey and the city council have to take a polygraph, too.
“All he has to do is answer two questions,” Lynne continued. She had stayed up most of the night constructing just the right wording to ensnare someone who might have hired or sanctioned or even simply encouraged a killer, without witnessing the murder itself. “One: Do you know who killed Margaret and Vincent Sherry? And two: Do you have knowledge of any illegal activity on the Coast that could have contributed to their deaths?”
Silence followed. She didn’t know what sort of reaction to expect—outrage, bafflement, ridicule. Instead, Broussard started laughing. Finally, all he said was, “Do you mind if I take this request to the mayor myself?” He sounded like he was planning to enjoy himself.
Lynne said sure.
Later that same day, Broussard called her back at the house. He was laughing again. “I guess Eric won’t be taking that polygraph, Lynne, because when I took your request over to Biloxi, the chief of detectives brought it in to his honor, and he was told, ‘I will not take a polygraph, I will not be questioned, and I will not be considered a suspect. Now get the hell out of my office.’ ”5
They both laughed about it then. Greg Broussard was the one cop on the case Lynne had begun to feel might actually accomplish something. He had started to share some of his findings with her, and she had opened up to him.
But a few days later, Broussard wasn’t laughing when he called Lynne with the latest news. The polygraph request had backfired: He had been ordered off the case. Chief Deputy Sheriff Joe Price had called Broussard into his office and said Mayor Blessey wanted him off the task force. The demand had been relayed to the sheriff by Director of Public Safety George Saxon. Price said he had no choice—it was Biloxi’s jurisdiction, a killing within the city limits. They would handle the investigation alone.6
Broussard told Lynne he would be working a separate inquiry for the sheriff on his own, but the days of cooperation were over. Worse, it looked like Buddy Wills would leave the case as well—in favor of Ric Kirk, the detective Vince and Margaret’s neighbor swore had been driving the mysterious yellow Ford on the night of the murder. The case, Broussard told her, might never be solved.
“Don’t they understand you’re the only one over there we trust?” Lynne said. “You’re the only one the family will talk to.”
“They may know it, Lynne,” Broussard told her. “They just don’t give a damn.”