The Biloxi police had been unable to find LaRa Sharpe, not in a year and a half of investigating the Sherry murders. It remains unclear just how hard they looked, if they looked at all. She had been tied to a prison scam, busted with pot at Angola, dated a convicted murderer, and lived in the murderer’s house in Ocean Springs—all while she worked at the Halat and Sherry law firm. True, she said she left the firm before the murders, but she still popped in regularly. She had even sent flowers to the Sherry funeral and baked a ham for the grieving friends and relatives—signing her sympathy note from LaRa, her daughters, and “Kirksey.” Yet the Biloxi police and its vaunted Sherry task force hadn’t bothered to check out LaRa Sharpe.
It took Rex Armistead about three days to find her in early 1989, and to begin following her off and on, certain she would provide a key to the case. He confronted her after a week of quiet watching and note taking, but instead of reacting in fear, LaRa readily accepted his invitation to talk and suggested they go to a seafood restaurant along Biloxi’s waterfront.
Once seated, Armistead wasted no time on small talk. First, he told her he knew who killed the Sherrys and why—attempting to bluff his way by saying he had evidence the murders grew out of Kirksey Nix’s prison scams. “And I know both you and Pete are involved in it up to your eyeballs, too,” he said.
LaRa just shook her head and continued eating. She did not seem upset. She seemed so at ease, she even kicked off her shoes under the table, then tucked her feet under her as she sat.
“Listen, LaRa,” Armistead pressed on, “you have no idea how dangerous a position you’re in. You can either cooperate with the investigation and get some police protection, or you’ll go down with everyone else. And you will go down, I promise you that—unless Kirksey decides to have you killed first, just to shut you up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” LaRa said, staring levelly at Armistead. She put her fork down. “It’s ridiculous. I liked Mr. Vince. He was a peach.”
LaRa, it seemed, was no ordinary mark for Armistead’s intimidation tactics. Hardened and fearless—except when it came to her two young daughters, Heather and Amanda—she steadfastly denied knowledge of either scams or murders, no matter how hard the detective pressed. All she would cop to was recognizing Armistead’s name and bald head from stories she had heard during her youth spent worshiping Nix and the other Dixie Mafia heavies. “You’re the guy they all used to hate,” she said. “You were always trying to bust them.”
Even when Armistead suggested the police could arrange a new identity for cooperative witnesses who helped solve one of the South’s biggest murder mysteries, LaRa Sharpe said no way.1
When they were through talking, the detective parted with LaRa in the restaurant parking lot, got in his car, and appeared to drive away. But he circled back and followed LaRa as she drove a few miles west on Highway 90, the waters of the Gulf a blue-black abyss to her left. Armistead watched as she pulled into a stained parking lot, spots of crankcase oil on asphalt reflecting murky rainbows of neon. LaRa hurried from her car and entered a warehouse-sized building, the thump of rock music briefly audible as the door opened.
After being accused of scamming and murdering Vincent and Margaret Sherry, LaRa Sharpe had made a beeline to the Golden Nugget and Armistead’s old nemesis, Mike Gillich.
* * *
“This is the girl you need to talk to,” Armistead told his friends at the Biloxi Police Department a short time later. George Saxon had welcomed his old colleague Armistead by then, teaming him with Mike Meaut and publicly smoothing things over with Lynne Sposito—once Armistead made it clear he was not pursuing Gerald Blessey as a suspect. Lynne still had doubts about the mayor and anger at the police, but the private detective was moving in other directions, and even Lynne had to admit that, rumors and emotions aside, no hard evidence against Blessey had ever surfaced.
At Armistead’s suggestion, detectives questioned LaRa’s most recent boyfriend, a Biloxi carpenter and boat builder named Michael J. Lofton. He and LaRa had met in a nightclub in early 1987, eventually moving in together. He gradually became concerned about her, however, as he learned of her involvement in scams with Kirksey Nix and an assortment of other unseemly characters. Once, in the summer of 1987, he recalled sitting in the car with one of LaRa’s daughters for more than an hour while LaRa spoke on a pay phone with Nix. She had cried through most of the conversation, Lofton recalled. The air conditioner was going full blast in the car, so he didn’t hear what she was saying—it was so hot the speedometer cable melted—but there was no mistaking how upset LaRa appeared. Her face was wet and red, eyes swollen, makeup running.
“She told me she had gotten tied in with something bad, and that she was trying to get out of it, but she couldn’t,” Lofton told the police. This caught the detectives’ attention. Was she trying to get out of the scam? Or out of a murder plot? Lofton couldn’t say.2
After much prodding, LaRa eventually agreed to speak to the police—with her lawyer present. In a lengthy and often heated interview at the Biloxi Police Department, six detectives asked her repeatedly about the murders, Pete Halat, Mike Gillich, and Kirksey Nix. Few of her answers seemed to satisfy her interrogators, but she seemed oblivious, insisting she agreed to come simply because she wanted to help any way she could to catch Vince’s killer.
First, she claimed to be a part-time employee of Halat’s—something both he and she would later contradict. She said she did most of her work for Pete, and had done very little for Vince—a statement LaRa later would also reverse when it suited her to do so.
As for relations between Nix and Halat, LaRa said they were friends as well as attorney and client. Halat “handled just about everything” when it came to Nix’s business dealings, she said.
She knew that, LaRa said, because her job at Halat and Sherry required her to make frequent trips to Angola to see Nix and other inmates, and to carry paperwork between Halat and Nix. She admitted the paralegal credentials that gave her special visitation privileges were a ruse. The main purpose of her job at Halat and Sherry, she said, was to work on Kirksey Nix’s case, with the goal of winning his freedom so they could settle down together. Before she became fed up with him, LaRa said, she would have done almost anything to help Nix.
“I was totally in love with this fellow,” she said.
But, she insisted, she had always drawn the line at breaking the law for Nix. Suspecting the Biloxi detectives lacked hard information on her, she denied any knowledge about the Sherry murders, and she lied openly about her knowledge of the scams. She said she only had hints about what Nix was up to, “things that you just pick up in a conversation.” Even when the investigators confronted her with some of Rex Armistead’s findings—that she had used phony names and Social Security numbers for various telephones, then left bills chockfull of scam calls unpaid—she still denied any wrongdoing.
“I told him on more than one occasion, ‘I don’t want anything to do with anything illegal. I will not go to jail for anybody.’ I’ve got two daughters who’ve got nobody but me . . . I’m the only one in my family who’s never gone to jail. . . . I was raised in whorehouses and bars, and that’s not the kind of life I wanted.”
Gradually, her interrogators lost patience with LaRa’s denials. When she described Mike Gillich as “about the nicest man that I think I’ve ever met,” even the mellow Mike Meaut lost his temper at her lies. “We’re talking about criminals, lady. We’re talking about a man in Angola for murder, doing life. We’re talking about Mike Gillich, a major crime figure here in Biloxi, not only here in Biloxi, but along the Coast. Nothing big moves through here without him knowing about it, or having his hand in it.”
“Well, I was totally unaware of that,” LaRa said mildly, shaking her white mane, her blue eyes locking on Meaut, unwavering, unblinking, the way a truthful person looks at you without effort, the way a liar looks for effect. She refused their offer of protection in exchange for information, and shook her head again when one detective suggested, “Vince might have come across something in this little group here that could’ve resulted in his death.”
“The reason I’m here and came down willingly,” LaRa said, “is I would like very much for whoever killed them to be caught.” She made it clear she had no idea who that person could be.
Yet, when asked if Nix might be involved, LaRa gave a curiously tepid response: “Not to my knowledge.”3
* * *
Four hours after LaRa’s visit to the BPD ended, shortly after ten o’clock that night, an attorney from Oklahoma City named Beau Ann Williams pulled into the desolate Ramada Inn parking lot along the beachfront in Biloxi. Williams, Kirksey Nix’s cousin, had just arrived in town to take depositions for a medical malpractice suit she had filed on behalf of Kellye’s disabled daughter, Meagan. Nix had high hopes of cashing in on the little girl’s misfortune, and he had hired his cousin and Pete Halat to handle the case.
As she parked Nix’s Mercedes—Halat had given up use of the luxury car around the time he severed his formal attorney-client relationship with Nix—Williams noticed a black pickup truck pulling up behind her, honking. Mike Gillich hopped out and said, “I’ve got to talk to you.”
Reluctantly, Beau Ann brought the strip-club magnate up to her room, where the normally taciturn Gillich, clearly upset, said, “LaRa is talking to them. She is driving them around town telling them everything. You have got to get word to Kirk.” Then he handed her a note to deliver to Nix, which she later found to be incomprehensible. The only word she could be sure of was “LaRa.”
Williams, who had been sleepy and eager to see Gillich leave, snapped to attention at these odd pronouncements. She didn’t want to hear this, she didn’t want this man’s crumpled note. My God, she thought to herself, he thinks I am one of them. That I know what he’s talking about.
Mike Gillich then began to talk about what he called “rumors going around”—rumors about his monopoly on strip clubs on the Coast, how Margaret Sherry had been investigating this monopoly, and how she had been ready to “blow the whistle on a whole bunch of folks—even if it burned Judge Sherry.”
“The rumor is, that’s why she was murdered,” Gillich complained, throwing up his hands in disgust. The air conditioner roared in the claustrophobic confines of the motel room. “I’ve never ordered a hit on anyone.”
As he spoke, Beau Ann grew increasingly fearful. It seemed clear Gillich believed LaRa was informing on him. And cousin Kirksey was somehow involved. “I got the impression,” Beau Ann would later say, “that whatever Mrs. Sherry was exposing was a whole lot more than a strip-joint monopoly. . . . And that ‘all these folks’ meant people of position and power that could help him effect his keeping this monopoly.”
As he left, Gillich made sure Beau Ann understood the urgency of his wishes. “You’ve got to get word to Kirk right away.” When he was out of sight, Beau Ann wadded up the note and threw it away, fearful of getting involved.4
Four hours later, at about one in the morning, Beau Ann’s phone rang. A woman’s voice she did not recognize and who did not identify herself told her to look outside her door in ten minutes. Instead, a thoroughly unnerved Beau Ann hung up the phone and called the hotel security guard, who came to her room and found a note stuck in the doorframe.
The guard knocked and Williams opened the door a crack, leaving the security chain on. He handed the note through. Williams seemed extremely upset and nervous to him. The note shook so hard in her hand, the guard wondered how she could even read the words. The note said:
1. I was questioned three hours.
2. Mostly V. and M. questions.
3. Not much Junior questions. Then later many.
4. Many questions Pete.
5. Mr. G. many questions.
6. Offered protection yesterday.
7. Today I said, “Leave me alone or take me in.”
(Give him my love, Punkin)5
Whether Beau Ann guessed that V. and M. might refer to Vince and Margaret Sherry remains uncertain. Obviously, whoever wrote the note assumed the meaning would be clear, implying that the writer had discussed the subject with Nix enough for the meaning to be obvious. Beau Ann did know her cousin, whom she had grown up with, was commonly called Junior. And given her conversation with Mike Gillich a few hours earlier, she might have guessed who Mr. G. was. Certainly she knew cousin Kirksey called Halat “Pete”; for that matter, so did she, ever since he began serving as local counsel on the medical malpractice suit. Beau Ann did not, however, know LaRa Sharpe’s nickname was “Punkin,” so the source of the note remained a mystery to her, even as LaRa had sat in another room in the same hotel, awaiting Beau Ann’s response. Her note, clearly, was intended to convince Nix she was not telling the police anything of significance, no matter what Mike Gillich believed. She told her lawyer to pass on a similar message to the police the next day: “I have nothing to say.”
Armistead pursued LaRa for several more weeks, trying to convince her that Nix would have her killed unless she obtained police protection by coming clean on the scams and the murders. “They’ll go after your kids,” he told her, attempting to weaken her resolve by striking at her most sensitive point. LaRa remained unmoved. Lynne and Armistead would have given much to see that note from Punkin, or to talk to Beau Ann Williams about her meeting with Gillich, but they had no way of knowing about any of it.
Beau Ann Williams, meanwhile, hastily canceled her trip to see Nix and fled back to Oklahoma. She recalls throwing out both notes she received that night. When she finally drove to Angola two weeks later, she reluctantly passed on Gillich’s message verbally, repeating his statement about LaRa talking to the authorities and telling them everything. Whatever everything was.
Nix’s response was matter-of-fact and unconcerned, and the remarkable thing about it was how his mind seemed to work so much like Rex Armistead’s. As if he was stating an unalterable law of physics, he said, “LaRa wouldn’t do that. She has kids.”6
* * *
The modest brick headquarters of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department were not exactly what Lynne had expected when Rex Armistead suggested they drive to New Orleans, a city renowned for its garish splendor in everything from eating to music, sex to politics, crime to architecture. This place, though, seemed disappointingly ordinary, a squat, square building that could have sat happily in suburban New Jersey or Connecticut, were it not for the blast of humid Gulf air that enveloped Lynne in a warm, sweaty fist as she stepped from Armistead’s Cadillac. No place else smelled or felt like this, a rich gumbo of brine, pollen, the spice of riotous greenery and overheated asphalt, a sweet hint of rot.
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office was in the small suburb of Harvey, across the river from New Orleans’ old-world sprawl. Nothing about this innocuous building suggested to Lynne that the key to solving her parents’ murder awaited them inside.
Armistead had said simply that he wanted Lynne to meet some old police buddies of his. He had heard they were working an informant who periodically passed information out of Kirksey Nix’s domain, Angola prison. Their first attempt to break down Nix’s organization through LaRa Sharpe had failed. So the next logical move, Armistead said, was to try and penetrate Nix’s Angola turf, the place where the lifer felt safest.
“All of which,” Lynne reminded her detective, “assumes that Pete and Nix and Gillich are involved, rather than Gerald Blessey. Maybe LaRa is telling the truth.” Armistead just shook his head. He introduced her to Deputy Chief Gene Fields, who, seventeen years earlier, had been a sergeant with the New Orleans Police Department and helped bust Nix in the Corso murder case.
“We’ve got an informant at Angola who says he’s heard some things about Nix and murders on the Coast,” Fields said. Then he turned to Lynne. “The thing is, every informant has got a price. This one wants a shot at getting out of prison. Would you be willing to talk to the governor about getting clemency or a pardon for this man?”
Lynne thought about it a moment, her stomach beginning to churn. She reflexively wanted to say yes, whatever it takes—but then stopped herself. What if she helped turn loose something worse than the killers she pursued?
“If he’s in for murder,” she said slowly, “I don’t know that I could do that. I don’t want to help someone who put anybody else through what we’ve been through.”
Fields held up his hands. “He’s not in for murder.”
“Well, then I don’t have a problem with it, assuming it’s good information, that it’s credible and usable and leads to a prosecution. I’ll talk to anyone he wants me to then.”
* * *
A week or so later, Armistead drove alone to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola to make contact with this informant and several other inmates, ending up, finally, with the man he had arrested—and nearly shot—twenty years before, a man who had been close to, but who now said he despised, Kirksey McCord Nix.
“Man, seein’ you is like seein’ my worst fuckin’ nightmare,” Bobby Joe Fabian exclaimed when he saw who was awaiting him inside a secure and private visiting room. “I got nothin’ to say to y’all,” he said, and turned to leave.
“Well, how about I go out there with you and thank you nice and loud for all your help?” Armistead said.
The color drained from Fabian’s face then, at least what little there was in his pallid, fleshy cheeks. He sat down heavily. Armistead looked at the convict’s flabby body, the gaudy jewelry, the red eyes of a substance abuser. He knew a beaten man when he saw one, and he didn’t hesitate to twist the knife. Bobby Joe Fabian had a way of knowing things—and being in the middle of them.
“The children of Judge Sherry and his wife hired me to find their killer,” Armistead said, then offered the same bluff he had tried on LaRa Sharpe. “Now, you can help me bring the killers down. Or you can go down with them.”
It didn’t take Bobby Joe Fabian very long to make his choice.7