Shortly after midnight on April 11, 1971—Easter Sunday—Marian Corso arose from bed in her one-story Lakefront home in New Orleans. She had been up late dyeing eggs with her sixteen-year-old daughter, preparing Easter baskets for her two younger children and her grandkids. Ready for sleep, she was about to turn out her bedside light when she realized she had forgotten a glass of water to wash down her evening medication. She walked to the kitchen.
As she poured some ice water, Marian noticed the back patio light had been left off, contrary to household custom. She flicked on the switch, and there they were: three men in her backyard, staring back at her through the window in the door, startled by the unexpected light.
They froze, the four of them, a long second or two, a frightened woman and three strangers, separated by seventy-five pounds of wood and a pane of glass. The man closest to her was painted with light, his young face twisted in surprise, his hair wild. As she yelled to her husband, “Frank, Frank! Come quick!,” this man turned toward her, a cold expression piercing her through the door’s window.
“Lady, be calm, and no one will get hurt. We’re coming in,” Kirksey Nix said.1
The job had been well planned, or so Nix thought. The Corsos owned a grocery store in the French Quarter and Frank Corso was known to be both rich and eccentric, wary of banks. He had been rumored to maintain large amounts of cash in the house, possibly from illegal bookmaking operations—false rumors, it turned out.
A hydraulic jack capable of exerting four tons of pressure had been used to break in quietly, just a slight cracking sound as the doorjamb spread and the wood frame gave way. Telephone lines to the house had been tapped, then cut. Nix had disposable handcuffs in a satchel to secure the people in the house, and a walkie-talkie to maintain contact with his getaway driver, who was monitoring a police radio. But the plan relied upon one thing Nix no longer possessed—the element of surprise.
As Marian Corso screamed and ran from the room, Nix and his latest crime partners, a low-level Mafioso named Peter Frank Mule and Florida thug John C. Fulford, burst through the loosened door and into the kitchen. Frank Corso, awakened by his wife’s shrieks, rushed from the bedroom at the same time, pajamas flapping, a pistol in hand. Eleven-year-old Susan Corso had run from her bedroom to see what was wrong. There followed a brief, terrible silence. Then Marian Corso heard Kirksey Nix shout, “I’ve got your child.”
Before Marian could react, Corso, Nix, Fulford, and Mule faced off in the hallway connecting kitchen to bedrooms. The four men opened fire at once. Marian cowered in her bedroom door, bullets peppering the walls around her.
Nearly thirty shots flew before the battle ended. The other two children leapt from bed, running and screaming in the halls, somehow escaping injury while crossing the lines of fire. Only after the firing stopped did Marian realize Susan had hunkered in a chair, unhurt despite Nix’s threat.
But Frank Corso fell heavily to the floor, struck by five bullets—though not before he put a .38-caliber slug into Nix’s abdomen. As his attackers backed out of the kitchen and stumbled outside, Marian Corso scooped up her husband’s gun and emptied the last two shots at the retreating criminals, striking the kitchen wall. Nix raised his gun and pointed it at her as he was half-carried, half-limped from the house. “Mamma, you’re gonna get shot,” Susan screamed, but to Marian’s amazement, Nix never fired. She blinked, and they were gone.2
With their cohort slumped and bleeding, Fulford and Mule dragged Nix from the house to a dark blue Oldsmobile where a fourth accomplice, James Knight, waited behind the wheel. As they fled, they dropped Nix’s 9mm-automatic pistol, the hydraulic jack, the bag with the handcuffs, and a sizable amount of Junior’s type A blood—evidence that would combine later to bring them down. The reason why Nix had not shot Marian Corso became obvious as well. He had not been moved by compassion to hold his fire. The gun was jammed when police found it, an expended shell stuck in its ejection port.
The marauders sped through the empty streets to an apartment hideout, a place Nix had rented under the assumed name Accardo. Their plan lay in tatters. They could not risk alerting the New Orleans police by going to a local hospital, yet Nix’s wound was too bad to ignore—he was slowly bleeding to death.
His new wife, Sandra Llewellyn Rutherford Nix, blond, waifish, and fearless, put towels on his wound and fed him orange popsicles, the only food Junior could keep down. She and Nix had met in Oklahoma a few years earlier. She was tough—tougher than her husband in many ways—raised in an orphanage, with no one but Nix and his family to provide any semblance of roots. Their brief marriage had been punctuated by prison and jail terms for each of them. Sandra was running some sort of photography business, while Nix divided his time between ski-mask robberies of New Orleans gamblers with Mule and Fulford, and periodically flying to Ecuador, where he had dreamed up a high-end scam to build a resort and casino on the environmentally sensitive Galapagos Islands. U.S. oil interests were investing heavily in the region at that time, and Nix harbored visions of fleecing money-laden oil workers in a tropical version of The Strip. He had been trying to close a deal with corrupt Ecuadoran officials when the Corso case cut his plan short.
Despite his constant infidelities and their relatively short periods of time living together, Sandra remained fiercely loyal to her husband. When his cohorts seemed about to abandon Junior, she fixed them with a deadly stare. “You’ve got to get him help,” she told them. “Do it. Now.”
Desperate to get Junior out of town, they turned to his old friend Creeper Cook in Dallas. Late that night, Cook arrived in New Orleans aboard a rented airplane. He picked up a still-bleeding, barely conscious Nix and returned to Dallas, with the wounded man alternately sucking ice chips and vomiting en route, barely able to speak. Sandra booked a commercial flight and arrived first, meeting the small plane at the airport, then driving Nix to the hospital.
Back in New Orleans, the failed burglary and shoot-out at the Corso home became front-page news. A home invasion in a middle-class neighborhood on Easter Sunday enraged the people of that staunchly Catholic city. The fifty-year-old grocer clung to life until five o’clock on the evening he was shot, then finally died of his wounds. Police saw the trail of blood leading out of the kitchen, and wondered if one of the killers had met a similar fate.
The Texas hospital, as a matter of routine in gunshot cases, called the authorities. When the Dallas police saw a teletyped bulletin on the Corso shooting, they called New Orleans P.D. to say Kirksey Nix had checked into a hospital there with a gunshot wound. The New Orleans police already knew of Nix: They had him under brief surveillance a few months earlier, along with Mule and Fulford, during an investigation of the ski-mask robberies of gamblers. All three became instant suspects in the Corso killing. An informant who knew them and had been to Nix’s apartment confirmed the suspicions for police, then led them to the getaway driver, Knight.3
Knight confessed, agreeing to testify against his cohorts and completing the case for the police. With formal murder charges filed, Marian Corso identified the three men as the killers. The Dallas police marched into Nix’s hospital room and chained him with leg irons to his bed until he could be shipped to Louisiana, Frank Corso’s bullet still inside him.
Once there, he won a lengthy legal battle to keep the lead slug where it sat, lodged near his large intestine, affirming a legal principle that the state has no right to cut open a man in order to find evidence of a crime. Nix’s cause had been helped when a team of court-appointed doctors said executing a search warrant for the bullet—with scalpels—might execute the man as well.
Jim Garrison, the district attorney who unsuccessfully prosecuted Clay Shaw for conspiring to kill President John Kennedy, delivered the opening statement in the trial, which had to be moved outside of New Orleans because of intensive media coverage. Several abortive escape attempts were made and failed. Corso’s wife and family, as well as the getaway driver, Knight, were kept in protective custody for months, tribute to the Dixie Mafia’s reputation for eliminating witnesses. State troopers were assigned to guard the judge on the case and the D.A. twenty-four hours a day (the widow Corso eventually married one of them).
Nix’s father, retired from his appellate court seat on full disability shortly after Junior’s arrest, joined his son’s defense team, as did his mother, Patricia Kerr. Father protested son’s innocence, though just a few years before, in order to retain his judgeship, he had publicly branded Junior a boy gone bad, defending himself against an opponent’s criticism. “They can’t question my character, ability, honesty, or performance of duty except by innuendo,” Judge Nix had told the Oklahoma Journal. “The only thing they can criticize me about is my son, who has not lived with me for eighteen years. They have written him up every time he’s turned around. I sincerely regret the boy didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped.”4
Junior Nix also proclaimed his innocence. He complained that police reports originally said the Corso killers wore masks—suggesting that Marian Corso could not have seen his face, and that her subsequent identification of the murderers had been a police-concocted fable.
To explain the bullet in his gut, he accused a conveniently dead Mafia hit man of shooting him for refusing to extend a loan. He even produced the hit man’s stroke-impaired girlfriend to confirm the tale. The main problem with the story was its inability to explain Nix’s flight to Dallas. Why flee when he had done nothing wrong? Why, the prosecutor asked, hadn’t Sandra Nix—who had died in a car crash during Nix’s trial—simply called the police and an ambulance if he was an innocent shooting victim?
“She wasn’t that type of person!” the hit man’s girlfriend exclaimed. “I think there is something wrong with a woman calling the police any time.”
The prosecution easily countered this defense, at least as far as the jury was concerned. Not only did Marian Corso identify the killers under oath (and deny the presence of masks), but so did her daughter Susan. Police witnesses produced the jack used to break down the Corsos’ door, linking it by receipts and a sales clerk’s testimony to Peter Mule. A map with pencil marks tracing the route to the Corso home was found at the head of Nix’s blood-stained bed in an apartment rented to Kirksey and Sandra “Accardo.” Nix’s blood type matched blood found in Corso’s kitchen.
Nix’s Dixie Mafia connections became clear when police searched his apartment: They found a trial transcript of a criminal case in Oklahoma against Nix’s suspected partner in the Gypsy camp killing, Bill Clubb, and a copy of a confidential police file leaked to Nix about the “traveling criminals” Rex Armistead had helped write. There was even an issue of Startling Detective magazine with a long feature on the Gypsy camp murder in with Nix’s things.
It played no role in his trial, but there was one other item found in Nix’s apartment, innocuous-seeming at the time, though a different set of investigators puzzling over the Sherry murders fifteen years later would have found it all too significant had they bothered to look. Amid gun parts and ammunition, the New Orleans police searching Kirksey Nix’s apartment for clues in the Corso murder found a large piece of foam rubber.
* * *
In March 1972, just under one year after Corso died, Nix, Mule, and Fulford all were convicted of murder. Jurors and judge alike found the evidence in the case overwhelming. But the jury also found against capital punishment, and Nix and his accomplices each received a sentence of life in prison “at hard labor.” Under Louisiana law at the time, the men could never receive parole; the sentence was “for the rest of their natural lives.” Only a governor’s pardon could set them free. A decade’s worth of appeals accumulated in state and federal courts, twenty-four volumes in the Louisiana Supreme Court alone, to no avail.
Nix next went to Leavenworth to serve out a five-year federal prison term for being a felon in possession of a firearm, another old charge that finally caught up with him. He had already done six months for contempt of court for refusing to provide a sample of his handwriting.
After his federal time ran out, he shipped off to what had been one of the most infamous prisons in America, a bastion of nineteenth-century penal philosophy, where road gangs and guards on horseback remained everyday sights: the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
At age thirty-two, he entered for good this world of utter ruthlessness, where abuse, despair, and death awaited the weak, but where the strong and the clever could carve a special, privileged niche.
There was never any question where Kirksey McCord Nix would fit in this world. It took him time to realize it, but he had finally found a place where he felt at home, a place where he was expected to be an outlaw.
Yet, without ever perceiving the irony, Nix devoted his time there to finding a way out. He’d buy his freedom if he had to, he decided, through bribes, payoffs, whatever it took. The Louisiana penal system was notoriously corrupt. Pardons could be purchased with the right contacts and enough money. He set out to make that money.
Dedicated to this cause, Nix became a far more successful criminal from within prison than he ever was on the outside. He pioneered scams that began bringing in thousands of dollars, then hundreds of thousands. Using his Dixie Mafia contacts, he put an army to work for him, in and out of prison. Mike Gillich was there for him in Biloxi, and others throughout the South, the network he had forged in the Dixie Mafia.
And then there was Peter Halat and Vincent Sherry.