Kirksey Nix’s long run of luck dodging the law—ended, it seemed, by Frank Corso’s bullet—had returned in force once he set foot on Angola’s gritty, humid sprawl. His crimes inside the penitentiary soon outstripped anything he ever did on the outside, both in profit and audacity. No matter how things might go wrong, no matter how much the authorities might learn or how poorly one of his confederates performed, no one seemed able to touch him.
In retrospect, it seems inconceivable and outrageous that federal, state, and local authorities could have allowed him to continue scamming and enriching himself at others’ expense for as long as he did. He was so open and obvious, his schemes exposed to law enforcement so many times, they could have shut him down years earlier. But the simple fact of the matter was, no one with the power to stop Nix, Inc., cared enough to act. He was a lifer, with no legal route to pardon or parole—essentially punishment-proof. Sentencing him to another ten years in the joint for fraud would be meaningless. He had only one lifetime to give.
And as for his victims, well, no one in law enforcement seemed to care much about them, either. Kirksey Nix had chosen his marks well. Older gays duped out of money while seeking liaisons with younger men didn’t generate much sympathy in the ranks of Southern police agencies—a reaction Nix shrewdly banked upon.
Certainly there had been ample opportunity to bring him down. As early as April 1984, the FBI had uncontroverted proof of Nix’s participation in the scams: a tape of Nix recruiting a friend to play the role of a halfway house director. Nix described in detail his scam technique, admitting he had made thousands of dollars defrauding innocent victims. The friend just happened to be an FBI informant.
“I’ve been writing these ol’ lonely hearts,” Nix explained in the taped conversation. “I gotta have somebody to talk to ’em on the phone about three minutes. . . . This is with a fruit, you know. The dude’s role is to verify that he’s providing the residence program for this person . . . but the plane fare has to be sent.”
During the conversation, Nix griped about Kellye and her propensity for buying drugs with money reserved for their mammoth scam-related phone bills—Nix’s lifeline, his telephone, had been shut off several times because of Kellye. Nix even confirmed his partnership with Bobby Joe Fabian for the FBI snitch: “I’m working with one now that’s made as much as anybody . . . Old Fabian . . . I listened to him romance one the other night.”1
A few months later, Nix called the same friend back and told him the scam continued better than ever, and asked that he pick up some money for him at Western Union. Then Nix instructed him to send the money to Peter Halat in Biloxi.2
With this information in hand, the FBI apparently launched an investigation, albeit a brief and ineffectual one, of the Angola scams. At the time, Kellye had been devoting several days a week to making pickups for Nix at Western Union offices in Baton Rouge, where she had moved in 1984 at Nix’s insistence. One day, FBI agents descended on her as she arrived there. They brought Kellye to the FBI’s Baton Rouge office and tried to sweat information out of her, threatening her with prosecution and prison.
But Kirksey Nix had prepared for this day. Kellye was still on good terms with him then, not yet addled by drugs and booze. “You don’t know anything about anything,” he had coached her repeatedly. “You don’t know what they’re talking about. And you want to talk to your lawyer. You call Pete. That’s it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kellye parroted for the agents. “I want to talk to my lawyer.”
“What are you charging her with?” Pete Halat asked once Kellye demanded the FBI call him.
“We’re not charging her with anything at the moment,” the agent said. “We’re just holding her for investigation.”
“Charge her with something and I’ll come over and represent her,” Halat demanded, “or let her go.”
Kellye walked out a few minutes later.3
That night, Kellye later recalled, Halat telephoned her at home with a warning to pass on to Nix: “You’d better tell Kirksey he’d better leave those fags alone.”4
Nix laughed off such warnings, as if he knew nothing more would come of that FBI inquiry. Nix’s casual reaction turned out to be justified. For reasons as yet unexplained—either lack of evidence, lack of interest, or lack of sympathy for victims—the FBI backed off. All they had to do was monitor calls from the pay phones in Nix’s area of the prison, then track down the victims. They could have nailed Nix with a reasonable effort. But they did nothing. And after a brief lull to make sure the FBI had lost interest, Nix gleefully expanded his telephone shell game.
“As long as we go after the fruits,” he told Fabian, “they’ll never touch us. People think they deserve it.”
Nix would be proved correct time and again. When he scammed a former private detective out of a two-hundred-dollar plane fare, the victim provided the FBI and other authorities with extensive memos detailing his own investigation of the scam. He provided receipts, a series of scam-related personal ads in the Advocate, mail drops, and the names of Nix’s road dogs, including LaRa’s helper, Robbie Gant. In short, the victim handed over a complete case. But the result was just as Nix predicted:
“United States Attorney’s Office, Muskogee, Oklahoma, has declined prosecution in this matter inasmuch as he does not feel the case can be successfully prosecuted . . . due to its lack of jury appeal,” an FBI memo on the case says.
In other words, prosecutors decided jurors would be unlikely to sympathize with homosexual victims in the case. As in 1984, federal authorities had hard evidence of Nix’s scamming, yet did nothing to stop Nix or protect the public.
* * *
There was so much in Nix’s favor that his complacency is not all that hard to explain. More than mere lack of interest or homophobia on the part of law enforcement was at work. The small, cash-strapped jurisdiction that encompasses Angola—West Feliciana Parish—had a tiny district attorney’s office, lacking resources to prosecute crimes at the immense prison. So the prison staff itself tried to deal with the scams by doling out punishments and withholding privileges. These attempts were desultory at best—casual corruption and the trading of favors enabled Nix and the more sophisticated scammers to elude them with ease.5
“The scams were legal in prison,” Nix once said. “The guards knew, the wardens knew. It’s like they approved.”
LaRa, however, stumbled badly. In November 1986, with her false legal credentials from Pete Halat, she arrived to visit Nix in an attorney conference room. But prison officials, suspicious of LaRa’s relationship with the lifer, searched her and her car and found marijuana and rolling papers. They also found in her purse a copy of a photograph of a young man in a tan suit and tie—another Eddie Johnson, whose image had been seized countless times from prisoners.
“Yes, it’s mine,” she told Angola’s chief investigator, Captain D. K. Basco, when initially confronted with the photo. Then a few minutes later, she called the snapshot a plant. “I’ve never seen that photograph in my life.”6
LaRa eventually pleaded guilty to a minor drug charge, ending her “paralegal” visits to Angola. But Nix suffered no consequences, nor did Halat for lying in LaRa’s affidavits. Halat would later say LaRa stopped working out of the Halat and Sherry law office as a result of the November incident, and LaRa would swear she ended her participation in the scam even before that. Both claims would be contradicted in time by other witnesses and evidence.
Postal inspectors with jurisdiction to investigate mail fraud decided to make a run at Nix next, teaming up with prison officials to take on the scammers. In early 1987, they searched Nix and his in-prison cohorts, shaking down their cells, seizing phone lists and other scam documents, even yanking the phone and a pile of scraps of paper from Junior as he made one of his supposed legal calls.
The inspectors and guards found they were overmatched, however. Most of the incriminating entries were in code. Nix merely smirked and hollered about his rights being violated when the guards toted away a boxful of his belongings. His latest scam partner, Arthur Mitchell, managed to destroy many of the most sensitive documents, while Nix’s old partner in the Corso case, Peter Mule, held on to phone lists, knowing the guards would leave him alone.
The guards did, however, manage to wrestle away from Nix a script for part of the scam and, even more interesting, one of his datebooks. Although there was a swastika emblazoned on the inside cover along with a white supremacy slogan written in German, the book contained no Nazi ravings—just extensive calculations for Nix’s finances. These included references to oil ventures, limited partnerships, real estate and resort investments, oil depletion allowances, company cars, even wine investments. The book did not make clear whether these were real investments, phony tax dodges created for his huge scam income, or mere doodlings. In any case, the figures accompanying these investments stated Nix had an annual income totaling $746,000, and assets exceeding $2.4 million—boggling figures for a man who made two cents an hour sweeping prison floors. There were numerous references to Peter Halat in this same journal, reflecting a constant exchange of phone calls.
A search of Nix’s locker turned up an unmailed, sealed envelope, stamped and marked legal mail. Inside, prison officials found 154 photographs of nude women, mostly of LaRa Sharpe, large and self-assured, and Kellye Dawn Newman Nix, trying to look sexy, but appearing more pitiful, scared, and childlike than anything else. The photos, investigators assumed, were for Nix’s heterosexual scams. The envelope was addressed to Peter Halat.7
“I have no idea if or why my name would come up with that stuff,” Halat said when questioned about the photos. “I certainly have never received anything like that.”8
When all the searches were done and the investigation within the prison finished, no criminal charges were filed. The in-house disciplinary proceedings were so weak that the prison ended up returning Nix’s datebook and other papers. Nix skated, as always.
* * *
Still, the spring of 1987 was a difficult time for Kirksey Nix. All the attention began to worry him. After years of refusing to bust the scam, the authorities were taking an uncomfortable interest. From speaking to LaRa, Robbie Gant, and other sources, he knew his web of victims and confederates had begun to unravel. His bagman in Biloxi, Robert Wright, had been questioned by the FBI. He had the unstable Kellye Dawn to worry about, and the explosive LaRa. Then there was Fabian, who had threatened to set up a rival scam after an angry blowup with Nix over money. Nix desperately wanted to plug any potential leaks, to eliminate any weak links. Someone, he decided, was talking. And they had to be silenced.
At about the same time, Nix also learned he had been beaten at his own game. He began to complain to his fellow inmates that hundreds of thousands of dollars he had squirreled away from his scam earnings had vanished—anywhere from a quarter to a half million dollars, bilked by someone on the outside he had trusted. The bounty he had accumulated to pay for his Louisiana pardon had been squandered without result.
The possibility that a trusted minion might have ripped him off, then covered his or her trail by informing on him, had Nix seething with rage. Whoever had done this to him, Nix assured his fellow inmates, would have to pay. He didn’t care who it was. Whoever had stolen from him, whoever had ratted on him, had to die.
“One phone call,” he bragged in the spring of 1987, “and it’s done.”9
In Biloxi that same spring, three hundred miles and a world away from Angola’s barbed wire, Margaret Sherry told her daughter that she hoped some unnamed enemy wouldn’t “come after my kids.” That same month, she also told her son, Vin III, there was a contract on her life. And Judge Vincent Sherry spoke in open court of threats against his life—one from within the city, and one from out of state.
I know where it’s coming from, Vince had said. But I’ll see myself in the pits of hell before I’ll be afraid of these people.
* * *
Three months later, in August 1987, a sixty-year-old ex-con, John Elbert Ransom, sought permission from his parole officer in Georgia to travel to Bowling Green, Kentucky, the Sherrys’ old hometown. Ransom was well known to police in the South for decades for two main reasons: He had been a close friend of Kirksey Nix for many years, and he was supposedly the nation’s only one-legged hit man.
He had lost his leg in a bar fight in 1950, blown off by a shotgun blast. An artificial leg gave him an almost imperceptible limp, though he still could move impossibly fast over short distances, producing a pistol almost magically in a hand that had been empty moments before. He was a gangly, Ichabod Crane figure with long, spindly fingers, enormous knuckles, and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed like a fisherman’s lure. His odd but essentially innocuous appearance and slow, gravelly but always refined diction belied his record—Ransom had been arrested fifteen times by 1970, when he first met Nix, charged with rape, burglary, robbery, assault, bootlegging, and other crimes. He had been suspected in a number of murders—usually involving the sudden and violent ends of men and women on the verge of bearing witness against Dixie Mafia figures. Ransom, invariably, was close by—though never close enough to be charged.
Nix and Ransom knew each other from The Strip in Biloxi, where the peg-legged killer was good friends with Mike Gillich’s other protégé, Little Henry. Ransom visited Nix when he was imprisoned in Georgia back in the seventies, impersonating an attorney to gain access. They had been in a shoot-out with police together near Atlanta—Ransom got busted, Nix escaped—and later, after the Corso murder, Ransom tried to engineer Junior’s escape while Nix was hospitalized in Dallas. Ransom even named his son Kirksey.
Once Nix settled into Angola, Ransom sent jewels and drugs to LaRa and Kellye for his friend, and made scam pickups in Atlanta through a crew of bagmen he had hired. He was always there for Nix when he needed help. They were in constant contact.
Late in the summer of 1987, Ransom told his parole officer he had to go to Kentucky to pay a relative’s funeral bill. He offered no convincing reason why the personal check he eventually gave to the funeral home could not have been mailed instead of delivered in person. Still, Ransom got permission to cross state lines.
At the same time, Vincent and Margaret Sherry were preparing to leave Biloxi for Paducah, Kentucky, about three hours from Bowling Green. Vince was to attend the Kentucky Bar Association’s annual convention.
If anyone had been threatening their lives or stalking the two of them, the trip to Kentucky would have been a perfect opportunity to strike. Away from Biloxi, their bodies would have been found in a town where they were relative strangers, where their deaths would generate far less publicity and investigative fervor. It didn’t happen, of course: Margaret backed out at the last minute, so she could sew dresses for her daughter Leslie. Vince came home unscathed.
However, on the Halat and Sherry phone bills that month, Lynne Sposito would later find an unexplained collect telephone call from Paducah on August 28, made from a hotel pay phone there. Lynne believed the call was not from Vince Sherry—she remembered him using a calling card. Who else, then, Lynne wondered, had been in Kentucky then, and have reason to call the law firm, to ask, she imagined, “Where’s the wife?”
A few days after that call was made, Charles Leger, the lawyer who went to work for Halat and Sherry after Vince accepted his judgeship, walked out of the office in downtown Biloxi and headed toward the parking lot. As he approached his car, a tall, thin man with a scarred or pocked face—Leger later wasn’t sure which—beckoned to him.
“Where can I find Vince Sherry?” the man demanded, without greeting or nicety. Impassive and grim, the man towered over the slight Leger, who stared up at the stranger with alarm, saying nothing. Leger found himself mesmerized by the man’s pale eyes, piercing, intent, utterly cold—the personification of evil, the lawyer would later say.
“Where can I find Vince?” the man repeated. He was blocking Leger’s path now. Leger wondered how such a skinny man could project such menace.
“Well, he’s probably in the courthouse,” Leger finally stammered. “In Biloxi or Gulfport.”
Without another word, the man stalked off. Leger noticed he had an odd limp, his right leg trailing stiffly, as if it didn’t bend properly.
The face of that man haunted his dreams for the next year, though he wasn’t sure why. He kept dreaming that man wanted to kill him. Long after he had forgotten the incident itself, the face pursued him at night, attached to that whipcord body, limping but moving with a spider’s speed.10
A few weeks later, on September 14, 1987, a professional assassin strode into the home of Vincent and Margaret Sherry, leaving behind his bloody handiwork, to be discovered two days later by Pete Halat.
* * *
Shortly after the murders in Biloxi, after the pressure of the postal-prison investigation lifted in the fall of 1987, Kirksey Nix’s inmate cronies noticed that he stopped complaining about missing money and got back to work.
Bobby Joe Fabian, angry over his share of the lost money, parted company with Nix for good, then tried to inform on him for scamming. No one listened, in part because no one in law enforcement wanted to pay the price for Fabian’s cooperation—freedom for a murderer. So he decided to bide his time. Sooner or later, he’d have a chance to make another bid for freedom—and to take Kirskey Nix down at the same time. Fabian would say and do anything to find freedom.
Nix’s scams were not quite in the clear, however. The memo and reports from the enterprising scam victim who conducted his own investigation had been passed around to various FBI offices. Finally, after six months, someone in the Jackson, Mississippi, FBI office decided to check out the scam helper, Robbie Gant. After learning from his mother that FBI agents were hunting for him, Gant turned himself in and spilled his guts, describing the whole scam and naming most of the principals, Nix and LaRa Sharpe chief among them. It was that easy.
Gant even telephoned LaRa Sharpe for the FBI, reaching her by calling the Halat and Sherry law office. Halat later claimed LaRa had stopped working there a year earlier—after her dope bust at Angola—but Gant had no trouble reaching her through the law office. Halat’s secretary was even expecting the call. And while the FBI tape recorder spun, capturing every word, LaRa told him not to panic, to keep quiet, and to lie about everything to the FBI, blaming it all on another Angola inmate—not Nix—if necessary. Money for an attorney would be provided him later, she promised.
“You just have to tell ’em that you didn’t realize it was illegal. . . . When people stick together, then that’s when they overcome things. Not when they fall apart, if you know what I mean.”
This conversation occurred on October 23, 1987—exactly five weeks after Vince and Margaret Sherry were found murdered in their home.
Gant thought at the time he was bringing the great Kirksey Nix down. Not so. Nearly two more years would pass before any legal action would be taken to stop the scammers. And other than passing on a tip to Sheriff’s Investigator Greg Broussard, who tried unsuccessfully to find answers in the Sherry case, nearly two years would pass before any real attempt was made to determine if a link existed between the scams and Mississippi’s most notorious double homicide.
All the while, Nix kept making money and ruining lives. And the Sherry murders remained unsolved.