The threats began in the spring of 1988, six months after Vince and Margaret died.
By then, Lynne had talked to dozens of people on the Coast, interviewing her parents’ friends, neighbors, council members, and more, trying to piece together what deadly truths her mother might have uncovered before dying. Like her mother, Lynne began speaking regularly with FBI agents, pushing for action and looking for help in finding a private detective. She asked uncomfortable questions about corruption in Biloxi, about the waterfront project, about who might profit from legalized gambling on the Coast—everything Margaret had tirelessly opposed. She appeared at city council meetings wearing a red dress, Margaret’s trademark, taking notes.
Lynne took anonymous tips and passed them on to investigators, met furtively with strangers in dark restaurants, heard rumors about her father, his best friend, the mayor, the police. One source claimed Vince accepted stolen property in lieu of legal fees. Another source told her Pete Halat had spoken callously about Vince’s death, supposedly saying, “Those are the breaks.”1 Yet another informant repeated a rumor that Pete and Vince had hatched a plot to kill Margaret together, so Halat could be mayor instead of Margaret. When Vince got cold feet, Pete killed them both, according to this rumor. Indeed, this groundless accusation had made the rounds so completely, Halat himself jokingly repeated it to the police when they came to interview him a second time.2
Lynne wrote it all down, passing much of it on to the FBI and the D.A. She felt it was only a matter of time before she found something of substance. And, apparently, she had begun to make someone nervous.
At first, they were just hang-up calls, silence on the other end of the phone: someone there, but saying nothing. This persisted for weeks, more irritating than ominous.
Then there was a call from a strange man who told Lynne as she stood in her kitchen that she and her family would be sorry if she did not stop looking for trouble in Biloxi.
“You’ll be joining your parents if you don’t wise up,” another caller told her after a newspaper published her criticisms of the Sherry task force.
Yet another time, her son, Tommy, then fourteen years old, picked up the phone. “Tell your mother she won’t make it through the night,” the caller said.
“Come on over right now, let’s rock and roll,” Tommy shouted back, then slammed down the phone.
“Jesus Christ, Tom,” Lynne exclaimed, rushing around the house locking the dead bolts and calling the police. No one appeared to accept Tommy’s rash invitation, but it had been unnerving, a sudden feeling of vulnerability washing over Lynne. Risking her own safety was one thing. But she had kept a tight leash on her children. She did not want them exposed.
Lynne’s response to the string of threats was to fire off a few clips at the shooting range, venting rage while improving her marksmanship. Dick began pricing home alarm systems. The kids had nightmares. Tommy’s grades plunged. Lynne’s brother Eric responded by granting an interview to a Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper. He declared that certain people in Biloxi knew who killed his parents and why, but were keeping silent.
“They were obviously going to lose some serious money by having an honest mayor and circuit judge,” he said of the murderers, an undisguised slap at Gerald Blessey. “I have lost hope with the local police.”3
The newspaper bannered the article across the top of its Sunday front page. Whatever reaction Eric Sherry sought to achieve from his incendiary statements, what he got was instant fury at Biloxi City Hall. According to a police report filed that same day by an investigator assigned to the murder case, Mayor Blessey had telephoned the department from Boston when he learned of the article’s contents, and told Director of Public Safety George Saxon to re-interview Eric Sherry and to get him to submit to a lie detector test. Saxon then passed on the request to the investigator. According to the report, the reason the mayor wanted to reopen what had been a closed line of inquiry against Eric was the newspaper article.4
Detectives were even sent to meet with the mayor’s wife, Paige Gutierrez, in her sun room at home, so she could repeat for them a series of unsubstantiated (and later disproved) allegations about Eric, including the suggestion that he was a wife beater estranged from the rest of the Sherry family. Gutierrez also asked if the police could compare a recording of Eric’s voice to some threats against the mayor’s family that had been taped during a radio call-in show, to see if Eric might be the culprit.5 Lynne eventually heard about this from sources within the police department. The direct involvement of the mayor and his wife only added to her conviction that they were out to get her family.
She had hoped all this turmoil would force some other agency to step in. But nothing happened. She began to despair of seeing the official police probe move forward, even as it focused more than ever on Eric Sherry.
It was during this state of siege on the family, with Lynne feeling threatened by people on both sides of the law, that a different sort of phone call came to the Sposito house in Raleigh, frightening in its own way, though it carried no threats. This call offered a promise—that, perhaps, the case of the murdered judge and mayoral candidate just might be solved after all.
After months of searching, Lynne had found a detective.
* * *
Her top choice for the job had come highly recommended by friends on the Coast, though he was alternately described as the finest investigator the state of Mississippi had ever seen, or as a virtual hit man for the police. He either possessed extraordinary ability and integrity, or he was unscrupulous and ruthless, a gun for hire. Given what she was up against in Biloxi, Lynne wasn’t quite sure which vision of this detective—famous or infamous—she most needed. Perhaps a little of both.
Private detective Rex Armistead sounded like their best hope, but Lynne and Dick grew so concerned about his reputation—especially in light of the death threats she had been receiving—that they took precautions: Their son, Tommy, positioned himself in a neighbor’s second-story window, covertly photographing the detective when he came to the Spositos’ home for an interview. On the way back from picking him up at the Raleigh airport, Dick drove while Lynne rode in the backseat, her hand in her purse during the entire ride. Inside, her fingers were wrapped around a .357 Magnum, pointed through her handbag and the car seat, right at Armistead’s back. She had put her other children in hiding, hugging them good-bye, then telling them she loved them and that she hoped to see them that night if all went well. And yet no one in the Sposito household questioned these precautions. That is what life had become for them. That is what the killers had accomplished, long after Margaret and Vince Sherry were buried: Lynne, Dick, and their children thought of themselves as targets.
* * *
Rex Armistead was a broad-shouldered, bald-headed man, middle-aged, trim and handsome, with piercing blue eyes and an expensive, well-tailored suit. A pair of thick gold jeweled rings flashed on one hand. A faint scar rippled one cheek, a long-ago brush with some enemy’s bullet.
Years before, Harrison County’s chief deputy sheriff, Joe Price, had worked as a criminal investigator for the Mississippi Highway Patrol with Armistead as his supervisor. They had gathered intelligence and pursued killers, pimps, and gamblers together on The Strip in Biloxi for many years. Later, Armistead had helped form the Regional Organized Crime Information Center, becoming its first director, tracking the Dixie Mafia and other career criminals for police agencies throughout the South. He had posed as a hit man in Georgia to help bust an heir to the Orkin pesticide fortune in an alleged murder-for-hire scheme. Not bad for a former constable, the monied son of a plantation owner in tiny Lula, Mississippi, about sixty miles south of Memphis.
But Lynne had also heard stories of him coercing and threatening suspects, along with rumors that he acted as a virtual assassin on behalf of law enforcement. One story had him cornering a Dixie Mafia killer in a ditch by the side of a highway as the fugitive tried to elude a roadblock. Confronted by Armistead, the crook threw down his gun and put up his hands. But Armistead supposedly leveled his gun at the fugitive and told him to pick his pistol up again. “You don’t want to come out of that ditch without your gun now, do you?” Armistead told him, his own weapon cocked and ready.
Only the man’s cries—“My gun’s in the ditch, don’t let him kill me!”—and the presence of a nearby television crew saved him, the convicted murderer would later claim.6 Lynne suspected such stories were mere rumor, expanded to mythic proportions by years of retelling and embellishment. But she had heard a sufficient number of them from enough people to be concerned. Maybe there was something there. So they had taken what they considered to be prudent precautions—kids safe, camera snapping, gun poised.
Once in the house, seated in the living room, coffee served, Lynne’s papers and notes spread out on the table, she decided to bring up her concerns. “I just want to say, right at the top, that everything about this investigation has to be open and aboveboard. I want to find the truth, but it has to be legal—there can’t be any threats or coercion that would wreck the case. It has to stand up in court.”
Armistead said nothing. Lynne finally spoke again to fill the uncomfortable silence. “I just had some concerns. I heard there might be some, ah, problems with you.”
He laughed then, genuinely amused. “Okay. So you’ve heard some stories. Things have been blown way out of proportion. Let me just say this: I would never do anything that would endanger the prosecution of the people who killed your mother and father.”
Lynne left it at that for the moment. The point had been made. In truth, meeting Armistead went a long way toward allaying her and Dick’s concerns. As the three of them began to talk, his intelligence, his insights into the case, his commanding manner—all combined to put Lynne and Dick at ease. Most important to Lynne, he listened. He did not dismiss her suspicions. He had no agenda of his own, no political cronies to protect, no secrets to hide. It seemed he just wanted to find the truth. There was no other word for it: Rex Armistead was refreshing. After discussing Armistead’s game plan to investigate the case, they found themselves doing something that no longer came easy after their dealings with the Biloxi police. They found themselves trusting the man.
Lynne made her priorities clear. She was worried, but not too concerned, about possible intrigue at the Halat and Sherry law office. She knew Pete would never hurt her father. As for Eric, she felt he had been pursued by the police out of desperation and, possibly, retaliation for the family’s statements about the mayor. She knew he was innocent, and the police department’s focus on his adoption as motive for murder was all the more despicable because it had been kept secret all these years. “I’d love to know how they found out about that one,” Lynne said.
Finally, she told Armistead that the police had ignored what she considered the most promising avenue of inquiry: Margaret’s crusade to expose corruption in the city.
“She was helping the FBI, so they killed her. And they threw in Dad for good measure. They assumed he knew what Mom knew, and that he would expose the killers if he lived.”
Armistead nodded, listening, saying little, taking an occasional note, now and then posing a question. He was particularly interested in what Greg Broussard and Buddy Wills had told her of the investigation, and in the copies of police reports friends at the department had occasionally leaked to her.
After Lynne laid out what she knew and what she suspected, Armistead held up a hand. By then, it was after midnight. The litter of Chinese take-out cartons and old cups of coffee were spread around them.
“Here’s what I would propose as my game plan if I take the case,” Armistead said. “I’ll look at Eric first. From what you told me, I don’t expect any problems there. We should clear him once and for all.”
But if something did turn up involving Eric, he added, that would be it. His investigation would stop there. Lynne would have to accept it, and decide what to do—Armistead would pull no punches. Lynne nodded. The idea that Eric might be guilty was unthinkable, impossible. But she would not have trusted a detective who said any less.
“Once we rule out Eric,” Armistead continued, “I want to check out Pete Halat.” When he saw Lynne’s faint look of surprise—she had expected him to say the mayor came next—Armistead held up his hand again.
“You always check out whoever finds the body, Lynne. It’s routine. We don’t know how far the Biloxi police went, if they went after him at all. So we start from scratch. And all those phone calls to Angola bear checking, too. Something’s not right there—I’ve crossed paths with Kirksey Nix before.”
He seemed particularly amused that the Biloxi police had actually visited Nix in prison—as if such a hardened criminal would have told them the truth about anything. “With him in the mix, there’s no telling what might be involved,” Armistead said. “We need to find out just what was going on in that law office, with your dad, with Pete, with Nix, with everyone.
“And when I get past Pete, then we go after Blessey. We find out what your mother had on him, what he might have stood to lose, and who else might have been worried enough to want to silence her. If there’s something there, we’ll find it.”
As he investigated each suspect, Armistead said, he would assume they had hired a killer, rather than pulling the trigger themselves. The murders seemed professional, and neither Eric, Halat, nor Blessey should have been able to pull that off alone. So at the same time he went after those three, he would also search for a likely trigger man, using contacts and informants he had maintained from his police intelligence days.
Even with the paucity of physical evidence, this might not be as impossible a task as it sounded, he said. Only a few professional killers in this part of the country would have taken the job, according to Armistead. Many hit men would reject it because one of the victims was a judge, fearing the intensive police investigation that would result. Others would pass on shooting a grandmother in the head four times. Put the two together, and the list of potential suspects grew quite short, he declared.
Lynne raised her eyebrows, but Armistead said, “No, believe it or not, these assholes have standards. There’s probably only two or three contract killers my sources know of who would take the job.” Someone with no fear, no feelings, no honor, he said. A terrible man.
So that was the game plan: Prove her brother innocent, resolve her gnawing doubts about Pete, then go after the suspect she wanted pursued all along, had he not controlled the very police department conducting the investigation.
There would be one other thing, Armistead said: Lynne would have to help. She would have to continue traveling to Biloxi, talking to people, giving interviews. She’d have to go on the radio, ask for tips, make the rounds. “We’ll need the extra arms and legs.”
Dick Sposito had to smile at this. Whether Armistead knew it or not, he had just made his best selling point. He made it sound as if Lynne would be a partner in the investigation, exactly what she had envisioned.
“Good plan,” she said, exchanging looks with Dick. “When?”
As she had been warned, Armistead did not come cheap. He could start right away, but he’d need fifty thousand dollars. Results could take months, maybe longer, he said, and the informants he dealt with expected money for their help. Lynne said she’d have to talk it over with her husband first, but, in truth, she already had decided.
After he left, and Tommy and the other kids returned, all the precautions they’d taken, the bulge in her handbag, the camera in the window, suddenly seemed silly. Lynne asked Dick what he thought.
“What do I think? I think, finally, there’s a cop on the Coast with some brains.”
Later, Lynne sheepishly described for Armistead the precautions her family took for his visit. “I heard you were a hit man for the cops, Rex,” Lynne explained.
Armistead looked at her mildly, but those cool, blue eyes never wavered from hers. “Listen to me. I’ve never shot anyone when it was not self-defense. I’m a Presbyterian and I have a strong conscience. And I sleep well.”
Lynne laughed, and that was the end of the subject. She decided to trust Armistead, for better or worse. But many months later, Lynne once again heard the story of how Armistead ordered a cornered fugitive to pick up his gun so he might execute the man in mock self-defense. This time, though, Lynne heard the story from the convicted fugitive himself. And she just had to ask Armistead if it was true.
“That boy needed killing,” Armistead replied with that same mild, noncommittal look of his.
“Rex!” Lynne said, shocked by his bland pronouncement. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“Well,” Armistead responded, “he was a terrible man.”
Lynne left it at that. She didn’t want to know any more. And even if she did, it would not have mattered. If anyone was going to bring her parents’ killer in, she had come to believe, it would be Rex Armistead.