As autumn wore on and the killer remained free, Lynne Sposito became totally preoccupied with the case. She placed daily calls to Broussard, Wills, the FBI, whomever she could get hold of, trying to find out what was going on with the investigation. Shock had given way to obsession, and a fear that if she were less active, the Biloxi police would bury the truth forever. She could think of little else, talk about little else—all Lynne wanted to discuss was the case, the frustrating lack of progress, her endless speculations on motives and possible suspects. Work, home, even husband and children began to slip into the background, extras on a stage where the main drama was murder.
Lynne’s family was understanding—most of the time. But now and then the kids wore that same glazed expression Lynne once adopted when her mother had spoken about corruption in Biloxi. As her husband and children looked on, Lynne was becoming Margaret Sherry, obsessed and unrelenting in her pursuit of justice.
A spare room upstairs at the house slowly disappeared beneath a mountain of newspaper clippings, notes she had jotted, and the voluminous records she had scooped up from her parents’ house. She sifted through this material constantly, and more came in all the time—friends in Biloxi sent her more clippings, people called with tips and theories, several psychics claimed to have seen visions related to the murder. Lynne wrote it all down. Someday it could come in handy, she knew.
Late in November, the Biloxi police asked her to meet an officer in Paducah, Kentucky, where Vince had safety deposit boxes at two banks. Lynne wanted to jump at the chance to participate in the investigation, yet this particular trip seemed futile. She tried to tell them it was pointless—one box had belonged to a long dead aunt, the other had been Vince’s mother’s. The boxes were opened in the 1940s. Neither had been used in years, as far as Lynne knew. Vince had never gotten around to closing them out.
The Biloxi investigators—who still had Diamond Betsy and her Mississippi-Kentucky connections in mind—said they had to be sure. Who knew what might be in there? Lynne couldn’t be certain Vince hadn’t put something in the boxes recently. After all, the police reminded her, Vince had gone to Kentucky for a bar association convention less than a month before his murder. Perhaps he had gone to the bank.
So Lynne agreed to meet them on November 20, to see what secrets the safety deposit boxes held. When the keys were turned and the boxes pulled from the wall, Lynne held them upside down and shook. Only paint chips tumbled out. Bank records showed that one of the boxes hadn’t been opened since 1974; the other had been untouched since 1981. The trip had been a waste of time.
Later, though, Lynne and Broussard spoke privately. The sheriff’s investigator did not know how much longer he would be on the case—he had been turned down for promotion and was considering leaving his department. Before he left, though, he had some warnings to pass on to Lynne.
“This could mean my job,” he told her, “but the police in Florida are going after Eric for drugs. They wouldn’t be doing it if not for Biloxi P.D. I personally think your family has been through enough, so you might want to tell him to clean up his act. I shouldn’t be saying this to you, but it’s a question of morality versus legality. I just don’t think it’s right.”1
Lynne considered it for a moment, then said, “I really appreciate this. Now I can be prepared. But there’s not much else I can do. I’m not going to warn him. Because if he is involved, getting caught would be the only thing that would stop him.”
Broussard was speechless. If he had any doubts about trusting Lynne with sensitive information before, they vanished. She continued, “You know, I knew he was drinking a lot, and I was really worried. Drugs and booze together will kill him.”
She didn’t mention it, but another factor lay behind her decision: Lynne wanted to maintain the trust of investigators working on the Sherry case. The FBI had begun talking to her, along with the sheriff and the newly elected D.A., a local football hero who had replaced a longtime political foe of Vince’s. They had started telling her things, and they listened to her. But if it became known she had tipped off Eric about a drug investigation, her contacts would dry up. No one would trust her again.
Lynne, without realizing it, had reached a turning point, her obsession so complete that even her own brother’s liberty had to take a backseat to finding the killer. She would not risk being cut off. The choice for her, in the end, wasn’t even close.
“Thanks,” she told Broussard again, “but I just can’t tell him.”
She pulled some papers out of her handbag, more records Broussard had requested. Then she mentioned Pete Halat, just in passing, something to do with difficulties she had encountered getting some records from the law office in order to settle the Sherry estate. And Broussard decided to give Lynne a second warning.
“Be careful of him, Lynne,” Broussard said. “Be wary of your dealings with Pete Halat.”2
“What do you mean?” Lynne wanted to know.
“Just be careful.”
“Well, I need a little more than that. He’s been pretty wonderful to us.” Halat had helped with the funeral arrangements and the wake, his secretary had handled hundreds of personal thank-you notes to people who had attended the burial or sent flowers. And there was that incredible eulogy. “Why are you warning me about him?”
So Broussard explained about the scam, about Kirksey McCord Nix, about LaRa Sharpe and the hundreds of telephone calls between the law office and the prison at Angola.
It was Lynne’s turn to be speechless. Broussard said the feds had known about the scam for months. “Nix has money going through your dad’s law office. And at this point, we don’t know if it’s your dad or Pete or someone else who was doing it. That’s why I wanted to get into the lock boxes, to see if there were large sums of money inside.”3
“I told you they were empty,” Lynne said, finally finding her voice. She was still trying to understand everything Broussard was saying. It seemed incredible: An imprisoned murderer was somehow making thousands of dollars, and he was tied to the law firm of Halat and Sherry.
“Well, we had to check,” Broussard said. “Anyway, just be careful. We don’t know exactly what’s going on. It might have nothing to do with the murders. But it looks bad.”
Lynne thought about it, still stunned. Then she asked, “Those phone calls to the prison, when were they made?”
“We got records from last December, up until September fifteen,” Broussard said. “Nine, ten months before your mom and dad were killed.”
“What about after?” Lynne said. “Were there more calls afterward?”
Broussard saw what she was getting at. If the calls stopped after Vince died, they would know he had been in touch with Nix. If not, then it was someone else in the law firm doing the talking. But the police had no phone records beyond the day of the murders. “We couldn’t get them, at least not without a warrant,” Broussard said. “The phone company took the position that anything after the murders was irrelevant. They wouldn’t release them.”
“I can get them,” Lynne said. “As administrator of the estate, I’m entitled. And then we’ll see.”
* * *
Greg Broussard eventually shared his information about the scam with the Biloxi police, and in early December, two investigators, Buddy Wills and Ric Kirk, took the four-hour drive through densely wooded backcountry to the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Kirksey Nix awaited them in manacles, seated in a sparse visiting room. The convicted murderer—a notorious leader of the Dixie Mafia—immediately made his position clear.
“You gotta understand, even if I knew anything, I wouldn’t tell you,” Nix said, a tight smile on his jowly face. “I won’t rat on anybody. I may have the person who did it taken out. But I’d never tell the police.”4
Of course, this was all academic, he said. He was innocent. Yet he found talking about the case irresistible, and his comments suggested he knew more than he was admitting. “Judging from what I’ve heard,” he said, “no more than three to four people would be involved, from the person who had the job done, to the person who pulled the trigger. Unless one of those people says something, it will never be solved.” Investigators had been coming to a similar conclusion themselves—but how would Nix know that?
Nix also displayed detailed knowledge of the mechanics of the Sherry murders, going so far as to suggest the gunman probably escaped into the night by walking across the country club golf course across from the Sherrys’ home. Biloxi investigators had also entertained this thought. Indeed, they had found one witness who, during a stroll with her husband and friends on the night of the murders, saw a man in a white shirt and dress slacks run behind a building and into a wooded area adjacent to the golf course and the Sherry home. The witness put the time she saw this man at just before 7 P.M.—which is about the time of Margaret Sherry’s last phone call. The running man could easily have been involved in the killing. Unfortunately, the witness did not get a good look at his face. Two hundred fifty miles away in Angola, Louisiana, Nix managed to precisely mimic her account of the runner’s movements—an account that had never been made public.5
How a fellow who had been locked up since 1971 could know the layout of the Sherrys’ neighborhood would later strike some investigators as odd. Detective Kirk, however, summed up the conversation this way in his report: “Nothing was learned from Nix other than theories that we have all already discussed.” Inexplicably, the Biloxi police decided pursuing Nix and his scam amounted to a dead end, just as they had done earlier with the yellow Ford Fairmont. Soon after the visit to Angola, the entire Sherry case and all the accompanying files were passed on to a new team of investigators at Biloxi P.D., who began retracing the original investigation from the beginning, developing their own theories. No one at the department pursued Nix further. No one questioned the girlfriend, LaRa, who had abruptly left the law firm. Nor did anyone question Pete Halat about all those odd phone calls.
Greg Broussard, with his one-man sheriff’s investigation, wanted to pursue the subject, but he had no chance. Not long afterward, Broussard left the sheriff’s department, ending his involvement with the Sherry case.
With Broussard out of the picture and the Biloxi police at a standstill or worse, Lynne sought help from the FBI. She called an agent in Jackson, Mississippi, she had spoken to before. He was sympathetic but noncommittal.
“We can’t get involved with a murder investigation without an invitation from the local police, or evidence of a federal crime,” the agent told her. “They haven’t invited us, and there’s no federal crime we know of.”
This was an explanation Lynne had heard before—one she was sick of hearing. “What you’re telling me is, I have to depend on a politically corrupt system, run by a man who hated my father and mother, to invite you to investigate? It’s a Catch-22. They’re not doing anything, and you won’t do anything!”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” the agent agreed. “But there is another way. This case is beyond most small police departments anyway. They don’t have the manpower or the expertise. But you could think about hiring your own investigator. Then something might shake loose.”
“Hire my own detective?” The idea had never occurred to Lynne before. In a murder case, she had always supposed, you had to stick with the proper authorities, no matter how displeased you might be with the results.
“Yes,” the agent said. “Why not? You bring us evidence of a federal crime, and we’ll move in.”
This off-the-cuff suggestion from an FBI agent became something of a revelation for Lynne. She could hire her own investigator to probe the areas she thought needed to be looked at. And if the case proved too big a job for one pair of hands, she would take on some of the investigating herself. Look what she had found out from Brett Robertson. She, not the police, had dug up phone records showing that the barrage of calls between the law office and the Louisiana prison continued for months after her father’s death. Lynne began to relish the prospect of taking control. She realized she had wanted to plunge in all along.
And, that quickly, she decided. Lynne would see the murders solved—with or without the help of the police.
That decision would consume Lynne Sposito—not for the months she imagined, but for years. Before she was through, she would find her marriage shaken, her children in need of counseling, her home a virtual stranger’s, her purse weighted down with guns and bullets—all from that one snap decision to take control. Yet the obsession could not be stopped once it was started—quitting was unthinkable. She would come to know more about Biloxi corruption and the Dixie Mafia than most policemen, more about Gulf Coast politics than most of the local pols.
But knowledge would be a long time coming. On that day in December, Lynne simply told her family—and promised herself—that she would not stop until the killers were caught and punished. They’d have to come after her before she’d give up.