The lush air that blows in off the Gulf each spring has a cleansing tang to it, a taste of gritty brine that mixes perfectly with the magnolias and wild grasses. Parts of Biloxi take on the intensely green aspect of a rain forest at this time, profuse vistas of heartbreaking beauty, uncountable shades of green. New leaves shimmer darkly in the sunlight, tunnels of emerald shade enveloping winding country roads mere blocks from the ocean, a green curtain that masks at times even the coastal blight of The Strip. The air smells new.
At the city’s southern edge, the green roads abruptly end at the coastal highway and its adjoining beach, swept clean of man’s imprint, the season too young for the approaching onslaughts of heat and coconut butter and jet skis. In March and April, and in some lucky years, May, there are only thumbs of blank white sand jutting out into gentle waters a bare half-shade darker than the sky above, empty and shorn of summer’s occupation.
This peaceful vista drew Lynne Sposito often, as it had Margaret Sherry before her, for long, mind-clearing walks early in the day, cool sand between her toes, each wave mimicking the sound of bacon sizzling, of Sunday morning in a household that no longer existed. At times, it seemed possible to close her eyes and forget she had been orphaned, to imagine her mother pacing there next to her, about to tell her what she needed to know.
But answers remained elusive. Her visits that spring to Biloxi to work with Rex Armistead had brought only doubt, confusion, and fear. So much had happened, she had learned so much, and yet the solution to her parents’ murder seemed more remote than ever. All her assumptions seemed mistaken, even those about Gerald Blessey, though she was loathe to admit this. By the spring following her parents’ murder, she did not know whom to suspect anymore, or whom to trust.
“That’s easy to deal with,” Rex Armistead had told her. “Don’t trust anyone.”
* * *
Lynne had embarked on a series of three extended trips to the Gulf Coast that spring, beginning with a visit to the Biloxi Police Department. A new “task force” had been announced with much fanfare in March 1988, a supposedly rejuvenated effort to take a fresh look at the investigation six months after the bodies were found.
This “task force” consisted almost exclusively of one very talented, mostly desk-bound police lieutenant with a weak bladder and a blood-sugar problem that at times mimicked narcolepsy. That was the task force: Lieutenant Mike Meaut, nicknamed “Rubber Ducky” within the department. He benefited from the part-time help of two other officers, but they were expected to keep up with their other duties and cases as well, so Meaut often was on his own. His official position as head of this nonexistent task force belied the reality of his true mission: cleaning up after the first task force’s botched murder investigation.
Though her poor relations with the department brass continued, Lynne instinctively liked Mike Meaut. He was a beloved misfit at the department, caring and capable. They began sharing information, as she had done earlier with Greg Broussard. Lynne arranged to get copies of her parents’ credit card receipts for him, and promised access to whatever else Meaut might need. In return, Meaut let Lynne sit in his office and read the autopsy reports on her mother and father. She had never seen them before, but felt she should—just to know.
When the time came, Lynne had to force herself to wade through the clinical descriptions of her parents’ remains, how each organ was removed and weighed, the texture of their heart tissue, the color of their lungs, the contents of their stomachs—the routinely obscene protocols of dissection and analysis every post-mortem examination requires, thousands of times a day, throughout the nation. These reports are not designed for daughters and sons to read. They are for the initiates, for the insiders who have built up years of calloused immunity. Autopsy reports are cold things, laboratory experiments, deliberately devoid of humanity even as they carve up that which was human. Diagrams showed the damage inflicted by subsonic pieces of lead tearing through the bone and skin and muscle of Vincent and Margaret Sherry. A dotted pencil line depicted the projectiles’ paths, passing through crudely drawn figures of the human body. It made Lynne want to scream, seeing her mom and dad reduced to schematics, their bodies something to be calculated and weighed, like interesting specimens. But she read every word in those reports, then read them again, then made photocopies for her own files. The only thing worse than knowing, she told Meaut, was ignorance. She had to know everything. Throughout her reading, Meaut hovered over her in his fastidious way, hands clasped in front of him, a kindly Oliver Hardy, worried and endearing.
“Do you think you’ll ever catch them?” Lynne asked when she was through. Her voice sounded hoarse.
Meaut looked sad but resolute—he was almost as preoccupied with solving the murders as Lynne. “I don’t know, Lynne. Sometimes I think this case is going to kill me first. I go to bed thinking about it. I wake up thinking about it. It’s going to kill me.”
Over time, as Meaut came to trust Lynne, he let her know just how bad things had been when he inherited the case. Lynne finally learned the fingerprints, hair, and fibers from the yellow Ford had been shelved when the car was ruled out as the one used in the murders. Mike Meaut, however, had figured out that had been a terrible mistake—the car never should have been discounted. The Ford was last seen at the car dealership from which it was stolen on Friday evening, September 11. It was discovered missing Monday morning, September 14—twelve hours or more before the murders occurred that evening. It was noticed parked at the Golf View apartments on September 15, the day after the murder, and had not moved since. There is absolutely nothing about the timing that would rule out the Ford as the murderer’s vehicle, Meaut concluded. Indeed, the timing of its theft was a perfect fit to the needs of a professional killer in town just long enough to do the job.1 The car was worthless to a car thief, its resale value nil, its parts not worth stripping. Its only use would be as a getaway car.
So, six months late, Meaut sent the evidence to the FBI lab. The car had long ago been returned to the dealer and sold. Lynne was horrified. She had been told over and over the lab results were pending.
It got worse. A painstaking attempt ordered by Meaut to peel off the old month and year stickers that had been glued to the Ford’s license plate by the killers yielded one fingerprint. Examined with much fanfare, it was revealed to be Lieutenant Bob Burris’s, the department’s evidence technician, a mistake made during examination of the plate.
The new task force leader also had learned officers failed to pursue a reluctant and fearful witness who had seen a man abandon the Ford in the apartment complex lot on the day after the murders. She should have been offered a look at mug shots and photo lineups, but never was. By the time Meaut got to her, her memory had faded.
No one had called the woman whose phone number was found in Vince’s pants pocket during the autopsy, either. When one of Meaut’s part-time partners finally did so six months after the fact, the woman said she was an old friend of the Sherrys. Vince had handled her divorce, and confided in her some months before the murder about threats on his life. But her memory had faded since then. She couldn’t recall whom Vince had mentioned as the source of the threats.
The cop who called her was dumbfounded. “And no one from Biloxi P.D., or any other law-enforcement agency, has ever talked to you about this before?”
“No,” the woman said. “No one.”
Meaut had no choice but to retrace many of the steps already taken by the first task force, tying down such loose ends where he could. He interviewed the Sherrys’ neighbor, Brett Robertson—the first time anyone from the department talked to him since Lynne and Vin first heard his story about the yellow Ford on the day of the wake. (The FBI secretly interviewed him shortly after Lynne told agents about him, however, followed by investigators from the district attorney’s office.) Meaut also finally sought to clear up suspicions about Ric Kirk—the officer Robertson accused of driving the car that night. Kirk consented to a polygraph test and passed. Until then, Lynne had considered Kirk a legitimate suspect, but Meaut told her not to worry about him. Better she should worry about the fact that there were no viable suspects at all.
The new task force leader told Lynne he would welcome Rex Armistead’s help. He’d gladly open the files to him, Meaut promised. “For what it’s worth.”
* * *
Lynne brought Rex Armistead to her parents’ home that spring. They found the house much the way her parents had left it, although the den and bedroom had been painted and repaired, blood and bullet holes hidden behind new plaster and carpeting. Armistead had to rely on Lynne to describe the scene, the blood, the placement of the bodies. He had seen the police photographs of the scene already and drew some conclusions. For now, though, Lynne had to summon those images again, as she had while reading the autopsy reports. Sadly, this task got easier each time.2
They had come to the house with Lynne’s new friends—Becky and John Field, who had known Vince and Margaret for years but had never met Lynne before the Sherrys died. John Field, the ex-Biloxi cop, had been the source of the ice cream message on the Sherrys’ answering machine that the police briefly found so suspicious. Becky had introduced herself to Lynne for the first time at the funeral, offering her a place to stay any time she was on the Coast.
“You can’t keep staying in hotels,” Becky had said. “It isn’t safe.”
Lynne felt wary at first of trusting anyone in Biloxi, but Becky endeared herself by showing Lynne around her home this way: “Here’s your room, here’s where we keep the towels, and here’s a three fifty-seven Magnum and two speed loaders to keep with you.” She held out the weapon and bullets for Lynne as if they were no more extraordinary than a nice cup of tea. Becky Field’s mix of motherly Southern charm and steely resolve caught Lynne completely off guard.
“Honey, John and I each keep a gun, one on each side of the bed,” Becky explained. “Nothing’s going to happen to you while you’re staying with us.”
(The pistol Becky gave her went to good use: Months later, this was the same weapon she kept trained on Rex Armistead during that tense ride from the airport.)
Walking through her parents’ house, Armistead said the killer used a silencer. “There was no pillow. I’ve seen those foam bits at other crime scenes,” he said. “Margaret was caught by surprise, though.”
To prove this, he had carried from his car a bucket of sand and a homemade silencer, filled with foam rubber.
“You two go in the bedroom and shut the door,” he told Lynne and Becky. “You’ll hear what Margaret heard.”
With the door closed behind them, Armistead set the bucket down in the den, where Vince had stood, and fired the .22-caliber Ruger he had brought for the occasion into the sand. Inside the bedroom, the two women heard a sound, distinct, but not too loud. It sounded just like a newspaper slapping down hard on a tabletop.
“Like Dad swatting flies,” Lynne whispered. “He was always doing that. Mom never would have known they were shots.” Three or four silent tears ran down her face. Becky watched her, waiting for more, but none came.
Afterward, Armistead explained why the foam-filled silencer apparently used in the murders was so unusual. Normally, steel wool or the small metal grommets used to attach snaps to clothing are preferred for silencers. They fit into baffles in the metal tube of the device, muffling the sound of the gunpowder igniting and propelling the bullet from the gun barrel. Foam worked quite efficiently at silencing the gunshot, too, but it could catch fire or clog the weapon as bits of foam came loose and flew out with each shot. That was why singed pieces of foam were scattered around Vince and Margaret when the police found them.
“Why use it, then?” Lynne asked. “Why not use the normal type?”
“This type of silencer has its advantages, too,” Armistead said. Assembly came quick and easy—a soda can or plastic bottle could be used, stuffed with foam rubber, then taped to the barrel of the gun. The materials were easy to obtain, easy to dispose of, and completely legal, unlike a real silencer. Possession of foam and a can of root beer is no crime, yet such mundane items from a grocery store undoubtedly could be transformed into something deadly.
There was a name for such a foam-filled device, Armistead added: an “Angola Silencer.” The name honored the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where inmates had shown a marked preference for the makeshift device.
Lynne had already heard of the prison, of course. Angola was where the Halat and Sherry law firm had exchanged so many telephone calls. It was the place Kirksey McCord Nix, Pete Halat’s deadly client, called home.3
* * *
In May, Lynne Sposito met with Harrison County’s newly elected district attorney, Glenn Cannon. A local football hero, he had replaced the former D.A., Cono Caranna, whose enmity with Vince had been common knowledge. Cannon assured Lynne he would undertake a more visible role in the murder investigation than his predecessor. John Field went to work for him as an investigator, and had explained to Cannon Lynne’s still-lingering concerns about the Biloxi Police Department. Cannon said he understood, and he agreed to withhold information from BPD when necessary.
Then the D.A. passed on a tip he had received about possible improprieties with the Sherrys’ bank accounts. He urged Lynne to check it out. As administrator, she could examine bank records whenever she wished without arousing suspicion, while Cannon would need a subpoena.
Once again, Lynne assumed the role of investigator. She went to her parents’ bank and asked to see records on their accounts. There it was on the computer printout: one account stood out, opened and closed on the same day.
“That’s not unusual,” someone in the accounts department said when she pointed it out. “Attorneys often open an account when they receive a settlement, then disburse it that same day.”
“Oh, I understand that,” Lynne said. “There’s only one problem with that. This account was opened six months after my parents were dead and buried.”
After a flurry of consultation, bank officials told Lynne the notation must have been a computer glitch. She didn’t buy it—nor did she know what to make of it. The discrepancy was never resolved.
Lynne had already found bank statements in her mother’s name, addressed to a Biloxi post office box—which turned out not to be her mother’s. She also had learned her parents opened a new safety deposit box at their bank in May 1987—about the time the threats on their lives started. When she checked it, however, the box was empty. Lynne wondered: Had they neglected to put anything inside? Or had someone else emptied the box after they died? Was that why she could never find her parents’ will?
After leaving the bank, Lynne went to her father’s law office to ask Pete Halat what he thought. He wasn’t in. Instead, she found Halat and Sherry’s longtime secretary, Ann Kriss, at her desk, hard at work writing in a ledger book, copying information from a stack of canceled checks. Lynne glanced at the paperwork and saw Kirksey Nix’s name at the top. Ann was copying the amounts from each check onto the ledger, which apparently was Nix’s. Greg Broussard’s warning came back to her. She decided to ask a few questions, trying to seem casual.
“Isn’t it easier to keep a ledger sheet at the same time you’re writing the checks?” Lynne asked, working hard to sound innocent, barely interested.
“Oh, I did that,” Lynne recalls Kriss saying. “But about three or four months ago, Kirksey wanted his ledger. And I asked Pete if I should make a copy, he said no, just send him the damn thing. Then he came out and he told me that I needed to redo the ledger sheets.”
As Lynne would later remember the conversation, Kriss then said that, the funny thing is, the ledger she was completing would be inaccurate, because she was starting with a zero balance. “Kirksey has never had a zero balance,” Lynne recalls Kriss saying. “He makes twenty-eight thousand dollars a year on this account.”
“How in the hell does somebody earn twenty-eight thousand dollars a year in prison?” Lynne asked.
“I don’t know,” Kriss replied, as Lynne tells it. “And I don’t want to know. The checks come in, I deposit them. I disburse them as he sees fit.”4
Lynne decided not to press the issue. She needed to think about this, talk to Becky or Rex. Troubled, she prepared to leave the office, but Ann Kriss interrupted her farewells to answer the telephone as Lynne stood by.
“No, Pete’s in Jackson,” Kriss told the caller, as Lynne remembers it. “I’ll tell him it’s an emergency when he gets in.”
When Kriss hung up, Lynne remembers her saying, “I hate that man. It’s always an emergency with him.”
“Mike Gillich.” Gillich was Biloxi’s strip-joint king. Vince had befriended and worked for the old Dixie Mafia crony, while Margaret detested him, hoping to shut him down if elected mayor. Lynne wasn’t sure what to think as she left.
The next day, Lynne returned to the Halat and Sherry office, her father’s name still on the sign, causing a pang every time she read it. This time, Pete was in. Lynne said she wanted to discuss the dissolution of the law firm partnership, the building, the assets, the debts—all the issues she needed to resolve to settle the estate, and which she felt Halat was avoiding. Pete ushered her into his office, dismissing her concerns once again by saying, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
Then, as Lynne recalls it, he said, “I understand you saw Ann working on a ledger sheet yesterday. I think I ought to explain that to you.”
He told her Royce Hignight, the Sherrys’ FBI agent neighbor, had come over recently and said Kirksey Nix was under investigation for running a fraud and scam ring out of prison. It was just as Broussard had told her months before. Halat said he had known nothing about it, but that the FBI apparently believed Nix was using the office to launder his scam profits. Hignight wanted Nix’s ledger sheets, Halat said, which is why Kriss was working on them. Halat had promised to cooperate. In fact, he was so concerned about the allegations, he had immediately fired a letter off to Nix saying he would no longer represent him.5
“Well, then, why are you giving the FBI inaccurate information?” Lynne demanded, an edge to her voice.
“What do you mean?” Halat asked.
“Ann said it’s inaccurate because you started with a zero balance, and that account never had a zero balance.”
As Lynne recalls it, Halat became agitated then, a sudden fury that seemed far too extreme for the circumstances. He told her that he was just giving Hignight what he requested, nothing more. “He asked for 1985 forward and, Goddamn it, that is exactly what he is getting.”
As Lynne sat in front of Pete’s desk, he leaned toward her, face flushed. She remembers him pointing his finger at her, close to her face, and saying, “I’d better explain something to you. Kirksey Nix has been a client of mine since 1979. He is also a friend of mine. He is a friend of Mike Gillich’s, and he used to work for Mike Gillich. Mike Gillich is a friend of mine. He always has been. He always will be. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, girl?”
Lynne felt as if her body temperature had dropped twenty degrees—she had not felt so afraid since she first learned her parents were dead. His pronouncement sounded to her like a threat, one more in a long line—though she hadn’t expected it from her father’s best friend. Halat gave her one more glare, then stalked off to the law library. Lynne just sat there for a while, then left the office. She never did get to ask Halat about that phantom bank account.6
Only that evening, after the shock had passed, did Lynne realize the significance of something Halat had told her during his tirade: Mike Gillich and Kirksey Nix knew one another. Mike Gillich, the sleaze merchant Margaret Sherry wanted to shut down, and Kirksey Nix, a murderer who might have been running dirty money through the Halat and Sherry law office, were connected. No one had ever told her that.
The conversation would carry Lynne Sposito and her personal quest for her parents’ murderer in a new direction. She started questioning every cop she knew about Nix. Mike Gillich, she learned, was Nix’s mentor, personal banker, the convict’s most trusted friend. Gillich, in turn, sent to Halat’s office some of the cash for Nix’s trust fund. If Nix was involved with a scam in Biloxi, then so must Gillich be involved, Lynne would be told by more than one source.
And Pete Halat, Lynne recalled, had labeled both men friends.
When she phoned home and told Dick about this latest revelation, he said, “Well, what about the argument your dad and Mike Gillich had? Did Pete say any more about that?”
“What are you talking about?” Lynne asked. She knew nothing about any argument.
“The one Pete told us about.”
Lynne remained baffled. “I don’t remember that, Dick.”
“It was when we went over to Pete’s house, the day after the bodies were found. He took us upstairs, showed us his new gun, asked about Charlie Acevedo. Remember?”
“Yeah, I remember that,” Lynne said. “But I left the room right after that.”
“Jesus,” Dick exclaimed. “I was so out of it then, I didn’t notice. I thought you knew. Pete told me that, about six months before the murder, your dad and Mike Gillich had some big argument. He asked if we thought Gillich might be a suspect.”
“He wasn’t then,” Lynne said, pieces suddenly beginning to fall into place. “But he is now.”7
Every assumption Lynne had made—about her parents, the police, Gerald Blessey, Pete Halat—all went out the window then. Because of these revelations, Lynne would undertake a crash course in Biloxi history in the coming months, taking her back two decades and beyond, to a time when a still-young lawyer named Vincent Sherry, and an even younger judge’s son named Kirksey Nix, each chose to call Biloxi home—beginning a long and unlikely series of events that would inexorably draw the two men together.
Lynne would learn, too, that prison does not always stop a criminal’s career. Sometimes it only makes him more ingenious.
Some time later, Rex Armistead called with a progress report. He had been carrying out his game plan: He had worked on Eric. He had worked on Pete Halat. He was supposed to investigate Mayor Blessey next.
“So where are we, Rex?” Lynne asked.
Armistead’s next words would have shocked her at one time. Now she just felt numb.
“I can’t get past Pete,” Armistead said. “I can’t get past Pete.”