What do you mean, Rex?” Lynne Sposito asked. She had taken the call in her kitchen, the smell of fresh coffee and the dishwasher’s watery hum providing an oddly homey counterpoint to the vocabulary of murder. But that was how Lynne’s life went these days, the warm trappings of workaday life continually juxtaposed with the ammonia slap of a homicide investigation she had long since stopped idly observing, and had instead begun to live. It was late 1988, more than a year since her parents died. “What do you mean?” she demanded.
“Sposito, I can’t get past Pete,” Rex Armistead repeated. He had taken to calling Lynne by her last name—for him, a token of respect. “The plan was to clear Eric, then look at Halat, then check out Gerald Blessey. The problem is, I can’t get past Pete Halat.”
The explanation that followed brought back the same cold nausea Lynne felt months before, when Pete had told her about his friendship with Kirksey Nix and Mike Gillich. Nix, Gillich, LaRa Sharpe—all were tied to the law office, Armistead said. All were tied to Pete. There were the unexplained deliveries of money to the law office. Pete drove Nix’s Mercedes, handled his money, and defended Nix’s stepdaughter-wife. Now the circle was complete, Armistead said: Margaret was dead, and Halat was running for mayor.
“Your mom’s death has worked out well for Pete,” Armistead said. “And for men like Mike Gillich—who might have suffered in a Sherry administration.”
After Lynne said good-bye to Armistead, agreeing to meet him in Biloxi later in the week, she called her friend Becky Field, replaying the conversation for her. Becky said she was not surprised to hear any of it. “A lot of little things have been bothering me about Pete,” she said.1
She had become Lynne’s confidante and confessor in recent months, the only person Lynne could comfortably talk to about the case. Her husband and children were supportive of her quest for the killers, Lynne knew that. But she had seen the change in the way they looked at her in unguarded moments, the distance her obsession had placed between them, the resentment her family couldn’t quite hide at the time she spent away from being mother and wife. But Becky understood the guilt, the anger, the helplessness that consumed Lynne—and her need to try to make something happen. They spoke almost daily about the case, comparing notes, sifting through bootleg copies of police reports.
“I just find it hard to believe Pete’s involved,” Lynne told her friend after speaking with Armistead. “Dad trusted him. Mom and Dad never said anything bad about Pete. Never.”
“Lynne, except for Gerald Blessey, your parents didn’t badmouth people they didn’t like,” Becky reminded Lynne pointedly. “They just didn’t have anything to do with them anymore. They just didn’t say anything about them. What were they saying about Pete before they died?”
“Nothing,” Lynne said after a moment. “They hadn’t said a word about him in a long, long time.”
* * *
At Rex Armistead’s suggestion, Lynne and Becky spent the fall and winter retracing the last days and hours of Vince and Margaret, quizzing friends and colleagues about everything from the Sherrys’ dinner plans to their occasional, vague talk of threats.
When they weren’t doing that, they staked out Mike Gillich’s nightclubs and his doughnut shop hangout on The Strip, looking to see whom he met, recording license plates, taking pictures. The police refused to do it, even after they learned the prime suspect in a Texas contract killing with similarities to the Sherry murders phoned Gillich’s club and several of his associates around the time of the murders.
One evening, a dark-colored car tailed Lynne and Becky as the two women left their stakeout of Gillich’s club for the night. Armistead had taught Lynne to watch her rearview mirror constantly, and she soon spotted the tail. Lynne turned suddenly from the highway and floored the gas pedal, the dark car’s headlights clinging to her rearview mirror as she glanced into the glare behind them—spying two heads silhouetted inside the pursuing car. Becky clung to the dashboard for balance, the Mazda’s engine whining, Lynne’s gun on the seat between them.
Months earlier, Armistead had insisted Lynne learn defensive driving, police style—the art of high-speed turns, one-hundred-eighty-degree reversals, and how to approach a suspicious parked vehicle from a siderear angle, so Lynne could have a clearer shot than whomever she was up against. When Lynne initially protested his long list of driving commandments, Armistead told her his professional paranoia had kept him alive nearly sixty years, whereas her parents, fatalists to the end, had ignored threats to their lives. “Now you’re an orphan,” Armistead had said. “Do you want your children to have to deal with that, too?” She had been upset with his bluntness then, but she grudgingly admitted he was right, and adhered to his lessons.
Now the detective’s instructions were put to the test: Lynne led her pursuers on a screeching chase through Biloxi’s Back Bay, seventy miles an hour on residential streets, running stop signs, leaning through turns, crunching over potholes with bone-jarring thumps as the car bottomed out on the asphalt. After a while—three minutes, five, ten, Lynne couldn’t tell—she was aware of nothing but the roar of the Mazda’s car engine, her fingers numb on the steering wheel, her eyes locked on the dark streets she navigated. Finally, she felt Becky grab her and say, “We’ve lost them, Lynne. They’re gone. You can slow down now.” Becky said this three times before it registered, then Lynne eased up on the accelerator at last, coasting to a stop. She glanced over her shoulder at the empty street behind her, ears ringing, heart pounding. She looked at her friend. Becky’s face in the dark car seemed so pale it glowed. Then they headed home.
Lynne never learned who followed them, or why, though they were certain that nothing good would have come of it had they been overtaken and stopped. Obviously, they had touched a nerve. After that incident, Lynne and Becky seldom bothered with covert stakeouts. When they wanted to watch Gillich, they simply sauntered into the Krispy Kreme and sat down in a neighboring booth, watching the conversation dry up at Mr. Mike’s table, exchanging expressionless stares with their targets.
“This is damn dangerous,” an uncomfortable Becky Field whispered the first time they ventured into the hot-grease smell of Gillich’s turf. Lynne said nothing, but Becky thought she saw the hint of a smile pass across her friend’s lips. Lynne was enjoying herself, Becky realized. And that scared her just as much as anything else.
Later, Lynne interviewed a witness who saw a man in business clothes running near the Sherry house on the night of the murder but who could not identify the man, and another witness who saw a similar man drive by in a pickup truck a few blocks away.
Another witness, Dianne Harenski—the councilwoman who was among the last to speak with Margaret—explained to Lynne that all was not well between the Sherrys and Pete Halat, despite his claims to the contrary.
“Your mother thought Pete was going to run against her for mayor,” Harenski said. “I remember Margaret telling me time and time again, never trust Pete Halat. She admired his mind, and she thought he could be a big help at times, but she never trusted him.”2
She was the first person to suggest the Halat-Sherry friendship was not what Pete made it out to be—something she told Lynne but had never mentioned to the police. Worse still, Lynne obtained the Halat and Sherry phone records for all of 1987, including the last three months the Biloxi police had been unable to get. There were well over one hundred calls to and from Angola in September, October, November, and December—all after the murders. Whatever had been going on between Nix and the law office was still going on after Vince and Margaret were dead.
In January 1989, Pete Halat telephoned Lynne in Raleigh. She was concerned enough about him by then to secretly tape-record the call, the ostensible purpose of which was to discuss a bank loan of Eric’s that Vince had co-signed. Halat soon shifted the topic to news reports that Lynne had hired Rex Armistead. Halat said he heard Lynne paid the investigator $50,000, but she declined to confirm this.
“Fifty thousand sounds like a good number,” he prodded, but Lynne did not bite. He added that he had never met Armistead and knew him by reputation only. “What I’ve never heard is him being disparaged as an investigator.”
“I don’t want any screwups,” Lynne agreed.
“Well, I can tell you, I don’t think the city of Biloxi is doing anything on the case now. . . . And I don’t think they’re gonna do anything—until I get in there in June.” To Lynne, there seemed to be little outrage in Halat’s voice over the city police department’s inaction. If anything, he sounded a trifle amused. He was fully into his run for mayor by then, and seemed supremely confident of victory. Maybe Vince’s and Margaret’s murder had become nothing more than fodder for his campaign, Lynne thought.3
The conversation brought to mind an earlier one with Halat, which was merely hurtful at the time, but that now raised more questions in her mind. Three months after the murders, Halat had asked her if his son could buy Vince’s old riding lawn mower. Lynne said no, she already had promised it to a task force investigator—if he solved the murders.
“Honey,” she recalled Halat saying with a laugh, “you might as well put that out on the front lawn with a for-sale sign on it, because there ain’t nobody going to solve this one.”4
Lynne couldn’t believe her father’s best friend would say something so callous. Now she had to wonder just what he had meant. And another comment attributed to Halat in a Biloxi newspaper on the anniversary of the murders also took on an ominous new coloration: “Somebody is out there looking at us,” he said, “and laughing about it.”
* * *
Still, Lynne hadn’t completely dropped her original suspicions in the case. She still hoped they were wrong about Halat, and that Margaret’s old nemesis, Gerald Blessey, was involved instead. She kept finding reasons to fuel this hope. An old friend of her mother’s told Lynne she, too, spoke with Margaret on the night of the murder. She had never told the police about this for fear of suffering Margaret’s fate, but the woman’s daughter, who had read about Lynne’s private investigation, prodded her into meeting with Lynne.
“When I told her I’d support her,” the woman told Lynne, “Margaret said, ‘That’s great. We need to get that crooked, corrupt man out of city hall.’
“I said, ‘Margaret! You can’t say things like that without proof.’
“And she said, ‘Don’t you understand? I have the proof.’ That’s what your mother said. Right before she was murdered. She had the proof.”
And there it was again—the suspicion Lynne harbored that the key to the murder was her mother’s pursuit of wrongdoing in city hall, not at Pete Halat’s office or Angola prison.
This belief was further bolstered when news broke that the FBI really did have a longstanding investigation of government corruption under way in Biloxi. Contrary to their past denials, agents had been examining many areas that had concerned Margaret after all, including alleged improprieties involving the city’s waterfront project.
Mayor Blessey’s outraged response to this assault on his administration’s integrity was curious, further resurrecting Lynne’s original suspicions: Once the existence of the investigation became public, he attacked the Sherrys. He accused the murdered couple and their FBI neighbor, Royce Hignight, of concocting the allegations to further their own, archconservative political agenda.
“Sherry was close to major underworld figures, especially in the drug-pushing business,” Blessey proclaimed, challenging the murdered couple’s integrity, then passing on what would later prove to be a false rumor: “. . . Mr. and Mrs. Sherry dined with known Mafia figures in New Orleans.”5
The Sherry family responded to the mayor’s odd attack on the defenseless dead by beginning their own barrage of public criticism of the Biloxi Police Department and Gerald Blessey. This, in turn, led to yet another renewed focus on Eric Sherry as a suspect.
On the one-year anniversary of the murders, Biloxi Director of Public Safety George Saxon—a few days after telling the press they had no viable suspects—publicly named Eric Sherry as a prime suspect in the murder of his parents. Saxon referred to contradictions surrounding Eric’s plans to come to the Coast at the time of the murders, even though investigators long ago had cleared up this confusion. He also criticized Eric for refusing a polygraph, despite Eric’s having been told by detectives that it wasn’t necessary.
“If he was truly innocent . . . he would demand a test to clear his name,” Saxon told the television cameras, turning the presumption of innocence on its head. No other suspect would ever be publicly named in the case by the Biloxi police.
Saxon went on to harshly criticize Lynne for telling a reporter that the killer took Vince’s appointment book. After keeping it secret for a year, Lynne mentioned it while being interviewed for a story on the one-year anniversary of the murders. The public safety director said he had wanted to keep the appointment book secret in order to debunk bogus confessions. Then, twisting the knife a little more, Saxon suggested the killer might have kept the book for the past year—a key piece of evidence if there were an arrest.
“But he’s certainly destroyed it now,” Saxon said, implying that Lynne had damaged the case that had become the center of her life.
It was a dubious theory—a professional killer would almost certainly have destroyed such a piece of incriminating evidence immediately. But Saxon’s remark had the desired effect. More than anything, this notion that she could have inadvertently helped her parents’ killers hurt Lynne deeply, consuming her with doubt. Then Saxon, a normally affable man who had admired and liked Margaret Sherry despite her poor relations with his boss, couldn’t resist taking one last shot at his new archcritic. Lynne Sposito says she wants the case solved, Saxon quipped, but she apparently prefers to see her name in the news.
“They’ve been looking for an out since day one,” Lynne responded. “Now they are trying to use me as an out.”
Provoked and outraged, Lynne looked for any excuse to back off investigating Pete Halat, and to renew the hunt for evidence against Gerald Blessey and his police department.
“You don’t know whether it is genuine ignorance or a very sloppy cover-up,” she said in an interview with the capital city newspaper. “We are very frustrated.”
Sometimes the warfare got to be too much for Lynne. After Saxon’s tirade on the anniversary of the murders, Lynne, in Biloxi for the occasion, disappeared from Becky’s house without a word. Armistead and Becky, concerned for her safety, hunted her down at her parents’ empty house. Lynne was in the master bedroom, sprawled facedown on her mother’s side of the bed, quiet sobs shaking her body.
“Don’t you smell it, Becky?” Lynne asked, looking up at her friend.
“No, I don’t, Lynne. What am I supposed to smell?”
“I can smell my mom on this bed.” She inhaled deeply, sensing where no one else could the faint scent of talc and perfume and hairspray that was Margaret’s—the complex and unique mixture of odors that we learn as children, pressed close to our parents, their power to summon memories across lifetimes never waning, never forgotten. “I feel close to her here. I feel at peace here.”
It was the only time, before or since, Becky Field would remember Lynne saying she felt at peace over anything.
* * *
A month after the anniversary of the murders—and after Lynne and George Saxon had repeatedly dueled in news articles and television shows in Mississippi—Lynne received a call at her home in Raleigh.
“I’ve had some conversations with your mother,” a softspoken woman named Sheri6 told Lynne after introducing herself. She was calling long-distance from Biloxi, her voice high and thin, fear or uncertainty, Lynne wasn’t sure which, making her speak haltingly.
“Yes, go on,” she prodded. “When did you talk to Mom?”
“Ever since the murder,” Sheri said. “I spoke to her last night. Margaret comes to me.”
Oh, Christ. Not another one, Lynne thought. She had already been contacted by several psychics. There was the man in Kentucky who wanted anything metal Vince and Margaret had touched so he could pick up “mental images” from the Sherrys. Then there was the woman who swore she saw Vince, Pete Halat, and another man eating at a table in the Keesler Air Force Base officer’s club when she suddenly “heard” one of the men at the table thinking, “You need to be killed. I’d like to shoot you in the head.” The woman even relayed this information to the Biloxi police.
Now here was Sheri on the phone, timid and hesitant. She said she didn’t like the label “psychic.” She just called her ability to speak with spirits and the dead “my gift.”
“I don’t pick my cases,” Sheri said. “God picks them for me.”
Lynne listened politely as Sheri explained she had never met Margaret or Vince in life, that she knew nothing about Biloxi politics or government, that she was just an ordinary homemaker—a “domestic engineer,” she liked to say. But she had this gift, ever since she was a teenager, she claimed. Margaret had come to her the day after the bodies were found. It had been the first time she had seen a spirit, she said. Previously, she had only heard voices in the darkness.
“I have a ritual. I say, Do you walk in the white light of Christ? The spirits say, We do. I had just gone to bed when Margaret came to me. I thought I might be going crazy, because I have never seen a spirit before. But I wrote down what she said. And after that, it happened repeatedly. I started seeing Vince, too, but Margaret did most of the talking.” Sheri groped for words here, then said, “She, like, dictated everything to me.”
Sheri then informed Lynne matter-of-factly that her mother was the primary target in the murders, not Vince, and that it had something to do with what Margaret called “the rackets.” She said Margaret had told her there was information hidden on the back of a picture in the house, and that it was important to the case. It could help them find the killers, Sheri said.
At this point, Lynne was ready to extricate herself from the conversation, politely if possible, rudely if necessary. But then Sheri silenced her by beginning to describe the murder itself, and by posing an odd question—odd enough to make Lynne listen a bit longer.
“I’ve seen it happen many times,” Sheri said, “and there’s one thing I’ve never understood. Don’t your brothers live out of state? I thought I read that in some of the articles.”
“Yes,” Lynne said slowly. “That’s right.”
“And they weren’t visiting or anything, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, that’s what doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve seen the killing . . .”
Lynne, at this point, was saying to herself, Oh my God, this is insane, why am I listening to this? But still she listened.
“. . . and I see this hand reach out and it pushes open the bedroom door, and it fires at your mother and misses . . .”
Lynne began to grip the phone more tightly, her palms suddenly sweaty. Sheri was now describing, compellingly, a scene Lynne herself had pictured too many times, the detail so vivid. Too vivid. But of course, the papers reported that the killer missed Margaret twice, Lynne reminded herself. That’s how this Sheri person knows this.
“. . . and your mother’s thinking in her mind, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to see my kids again, I’m never going to see my grandkids again.’ And then she thinks, ‘Where are The Boys? Where are The Boys?’ ”
Lynne was stunned, unable to believe what she just heard. She could not speak.
Sheri continued, lost in her own recollections, her voice puzzled, unaware of the impact she was having. “And that’s what I don’t understand. Why would she be wondering where your brothers are? They weren’t supposed to be there. It just never made sense to me.”
The Boys. Not Eric and Vincent III, not Margaret’s sons. It was Meaux and Fritz, the two dachshunds the Sherrys loved so much, the ones found guarding the bodies with their little fangs bared. Only the Sherry kids and their best friends knew Vince and Margaret called those dogs The Boys. Where are The Boys? Sheri was suggesting Margaret’s last thoughts were that those dogs might somehow save her. Where had Sheri gotten that information? It couldn’t just be a lucky guess, Lynne thought. Could it?
Sheri sounded like a complete flake to Lynne. But there she was, whispering her mother’s last thoughts, Where are The Boys? Sheri didn’t want money or fame, she had asked for nothing but anonymity—and for Lynne to listen.
“Tell me more about this picture, Sheri,” Lynne finally said. “Tell me everything.”7
* * *
The picture, Sheri said, was supposed to have a man or a woman on it. It had been framed and in the Sherrys’ house in Biloxi at the time of the murder. Margaret said something in back of it was important, and that Lynne needed to find it. That was why Sheri had called. Margaret told her to.
Still not certain what to believe, Lynne called Becky Field in Biloxi and told her what Sheri had said. Becky had a key and reluctantly agreed to go over and rummage around for it, feeling silly. It was a pretty vague description, so Lynne suggested she go though everything framed at the house. Becky called back later that evening.
“I couldn’t find a thing,” Becky said.
Lynne felt disappointed and relieved at the same time. But just to be thorough, she climbed the stairs to her office, where her files on the murder case had grown like cancer—and where she had collected a few treasures of her parents’, some framed pictures and photos among them. Most of these had rested against a wall since Lynne had returned from the funeral. Now she flipped through them one by one. Halfway through the pile, she came to a framed front page from the Biloxi Sun Herald—June 5, 1985. The headlines and stories detailed Margaret’s narrow loss to Gerald Blessey in the mayoral race. It had a particularly nice photo of Margaret, graceful in defeat, which is why Vince had gotten it framed and given it to his wife. Vince had also intended it to be a reminder for Margaret to try even harder in 1989. Lynne recalled seeing this picture after the murders, leaning against a stack of papers in the spare bedroom that served as her parents’ library.
Lynne flipped over the frame. On the cardboard backing, she saw two parallel tears—the sort of marks that occur when masking tape is pulled off and the top layer of cardboard comes with it. The tears formed the shape of a large envelope, big enough to hold legal papers, the frame deep enough to hold quite a bundle of them. Unquestionably, something had been secreted there, secured with tape.
Inexplicably, Sheri had been right. Something had been behind a picture in the Sherrys’ house. But someone had taken it. Maybe the same person, Lynne thought, who took her father’s appointment book: the killer.
Still, she didn’t want to jump to conclusions. Yes, it was an eerie fulfillment of Sheri’s pronouncement, in a way. Yet the marks could have occurred innocently. Or something might have been hidden there once, but her parents could have removed it long before the murders.
It was only when she was standing in the kitchen the next day, talking to a friend, that she realized the significance of this find. She was explaining about Sheri and the picture when her friend picked it up and said, “Hey, Lynne, what’s this?” She pointed out three reddish brown smudges, one on each side of the brushed aluminum frame, and one on the bottom. Lynne peered at the small splotches.
“Jesus Christ, it looks like dried blood,” she gasped. As if someone with blood on their hands had gripped the frame and picked it up.
Lynne immediately called Armistead, who told her to call the district attorney’s office on the Coast. After all the sniping in the press, they were not about to trust this find to the Biloxi police. That same day, Lynne shipped the picture off to the D.A., who arranged for a lab analysis. Lynne got the results a few days later: human blood. It was too small and deteriorated a sample to type and match, but it was human blood, nevertheless.
The killer had known to look behind that picture. No other explanation fit. The lab said he wore gloves, probably rubber, leaving small smudges of blood, probably Vince’s. The gun had been in his mouth, no doubt spraying blood on the killer’s gun hand. The picture had not been in the room with either body, so the killer had to have left the blood—and taken whatever was behind it.
After that, Lynne told Sheri to call her whenever she wanted. It wasn’t easy for Lynne, but there was no denying Sheri seemed to be on to something. And so when Sheri called a month later with more information from Margaret, both Lynne and Becky wrote down what she said. According to Sheri, Margaret had mentioned something about “scams”—a word that, once again, brought Lynne up short. Then Sheri said a man whose name sounded like “Hicks” had been involved, and that Margaret and Vince died at the hands of a man whose name sounded like “John Rathman.”
Sheri read from her journal, the next words—supposedly Margaret’s—giving Lynne chills. They seemed so on the mark, so personal. “The time is near, the deal is close. Waterfront material. Scam . . .
“The detective is right. Eric is not guilty. Hugs and kisses. Becky, kiss the kids and the grandson. They were after me. My daughter is doing a fine job. Proud. John Rathman is the man.”
Some of it made sense, some was hard to follow, but Lynne didn’t care. It was strangely thrilling to hear Sheri quoting Margaret—saying, it appeared to Lynne, that her private detective was on the right track, that answers were close, graspable, immediate. She kept telling herself it couldn’t be real, that some odd little woman she had never met who called herself a domestic engineer could not possibly be talking with her dead mother. Yet Sheri had been right about the picture, and The Boys. Lynne had to admit part of her desperately wanted it to be true, all of it.
When she and Becky told Rex Armistead about their new source of information, he scoffed at Sheri, seizing on her country manner and nicknaming her “Goober Dust.” If she did know anything, Sheri should be investigated as a suspect, he groused. “I don’t believe in that shit,” he growled. “I’m Presbyterian.”
But as of October 13, 1988, the date Sheri imparted this new information, Lynne made sure they would look out for anyone connected to the case named Hicks or Rathman. Even Rex, who was dogging LaRa Sharpe’s trail at the time, grudgingly agreed to that much.8
And Lynne would allow herself to believe one other thing: that, yes, her mother just might be proud of her if she could only see her now.