The call came to Becky Field’s house one evening in April 1989. Lynne had returned to Biloxi to press the police about their idle investigation—a year and a half since the murders, no arrest in sight. She had always imagined a solution would come in days or weeks, not months or years. She had always assumed an arrest would come before the pain lost its edge, before her obsession destroyed her and her family—and before she had to strain, eyes closed, to summon the image of her parents’ faces as she last saw them.
Now she was halfheartedly getting ready for a buffet fundraiser at the Holiday Inn for Pete Halat’s mayoral campaign. Halat was locked in a tight race with a county supervisor for the Democratic nomination. He had campaigned on returning Biloxi to fiscal responsibility, improving basic services, cracking down on crime—the Margaret Sherry platform. One of his campaign promises included a vow to redouble efforts to solve the Sherry murders. Pete had asked Lynne to come to the fundraiser, and though she didn’t particularly feel like it, she didn’t want to arouse his suspicions by saying no. And she still harbored hopes that Rex Armistead would be proven wrong about Halat. Even if he was scamming with Nix, she kept telling herself, he would never hurt Dad. Maybe he would be a good mayor. Maybe he would help catch the real killers.
Then Armistead’s telephone call from Angola changed everything. Becky handed Lynne the phone, sensing something momentous about to happen. She picked up an extension and listened in.
“I’ve got it, Sposito,” the detective said. “I know who killed your mama and father.”
Armistead’s deep, flat, matter-of-fact voice froze her in Becky’s office. “Kirksey, Pete, and some other inmates up here got together in the spring of eighty-seven for a meeting. They put a hit on your parents.”
Lynne was too stunned to speak. She could only listen.
“This old boy here was working with Nix, he says they’ve been running scams for years, extorting homosexuals through the personal ads. They made hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more. Nix was saving it up to buy his pardon. And Pete, he was supposed to be holding the money.”
Lynne closed her eyes, sensing where this was going.
“But then five hundred grand came up missing,” Armistead continued. “That’s when they had a meeting up here. Kirksey asked Pete what had happened. Pete supposedly blamed your dad. And they put out a contract, Sposito. Nix hired a man named John Ransom. He’s a stone killer, a hit man out of Georgia, old-time Dixie Mafia. He’s one of the few contract men who would kill a judge and a woman like that, just like I told you. The kicker is, your dad probably didn’t take the money. The old boy I’m talking to here says he thinks Pete took it. Pete, and maybe LaRa, too.”
Lynne could not begin to describe her feelings at these allegations. Years later, the word “stunned” would be the best she could do, along with nauseated and faint and so angry she thought the top of her head would detach. She had spent more than a year convinced that an innocent man—Gerald Blessey—was behind the murder, and it was not easy to admit she had been wrong. She was not stunned to hear there had been a hit man—she had known this all along. But to have the hit man’s name, and to hear that he had been hired because Pete Halat had blamed his best friend for the theft of a criminal’s loot, it was beyond comprehension. Maybe beyond belief.
“How do you know this, Rex?” she asked, striving to sound calm, but feeling as if her throat was almost too constricted to speak. “Who told you?”
“Bobby Joe Fabian. He’s an old Dixie Mafia criminal I put in jail. He’s got a life sentence for murder in Mississippi, and he’s in here for kidnapping and shooting a state trooper. He’s been a criminal and a con man his whole life.”
“Then how do you know anything he says is true?” Lynne asked. She could not bring herself to accept this new theory of the case. It was too horrible, far more cold-blooded than anything she had ever imagined. “Why believe anything this man says?”
“Sposito, how many front-row members of the First Baptist Church do you know that have personal knowledge of a contract killing? This is the kind of person we have to deal with if we’re going to get the truth.”
Lynne had nothing to say to this. She knew from her dad’s work as a lawyer that an overwhelming number of witnesses in criminal cases were criminals themselves. Who else is present when crimes are plotted and carried out? Armistead assured Lynne that nothing Fabian told him would be accepted until some of it could be corroborated—a link established between Nix and Ransom, for instance, or proof that the meeting Fabian spoke of had taken place. But the detective said he believed much of Fabian’s story, and that he felt confident the corroboration would be found.
“This is where the answers are,” he said. “Fabian is one of these people. He was in the middle of it. He knows if he lies to me, I’ll put him away for your parents’ murder.”
Lynne felt a sudden urge to run from it, almost wishing she had never opened this up. Then she remembered what Pete had told her right after the murders: “Drop it. You can’t bring back your parents. Put it behind you.” The memory made her remember her anger, that feeling of fury she could summon whenever she pictured her parents facing a killer’s gun, or whenever she picked up a copy of the Jackson Clarion Ledger front page she had saved, from the day after the funeral, where an enormous picture of her sister Leslie’s face, crumpled with grief, stared out at her. Now she had another image to make her furious: Pete Halat, face lined with apparent concern, telling her to back off an investigation that ended up leading to his doorstep. She took a deep breath. This is what she had sought: Answers. She asked Armistead, “What do we do next?”
“We take it to the police. And you must go to the fundraiser. Like nothing happened.”
“You just told me my father’s best friend may have set him up to be murdered,” Lynne said, her words running together. “There’s no way I can see him now.”
“Oh yes there is,” Armistead said, stern now, almost rebuking. “If you don’t go, it’ll arouse suspicion. We have one chance to prove this. If they figure out we’re on to them, Fabian could be hit in a minute. You’ve got to put on a good front. You must go.”
Reluctantly, Lynne agreed. Becky, meanwhile, had begun to rummage around for notes she had taken months earlier. She found them eventually, hurried jottings from October 1988—when Sheri the psychic had called with the names of Vince’s and Margaret’s killers.
“She told us it was John Rathman who pulled the trigger,” Becky said. “And Rex just said it was John Ransom.”
Lynne felt cold all over. She had focused on what Armistead had said about Pete, and hadn’t given that much thought to the hit man. It was too much, an information overload. How could any of this be true?
“Sheri said Rathman and Hicks,” Becky said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, the paper shaking in her hand. “Rathman and Hicks. Ransom and Nix. Damned if she wasn’t just about right.”1
* * *
Pete Halat wore his high-wattage smile, basking in the show of support at his fundraiser, working the crowd of fifty or sixty people in the hotel conference room, shaking hands, snagging hors d’oeuvres, clapping backs. Vince had always said Pete had charisma, that he could light up a room, that he thrived on center stage. Lynne could see he had been right: Pete looked like a candidate from central casting. The gathering was enthusiastic, the people sensing that their man was a winner, someone who could rescue Biloxi from stagnation and bankruptcy and the cloud of investigations and allegations that had crushed the Blessey administration in the past year.
Halat’s secretary, Ann Kriss, greeted Lynne at the door, excited and flushed, as if her son was running for mayor, not her boss. An old friend of Vince’s and Margaret’s clasped Lynne’s arm. “I wish this was your mamma’s,” he said quietly, wistfully. “But Pete will do his best.”
Lynne found herself looking at the toes of her shoes. “I hope to God you’re right,” she mumbled.
Nervous, frightened, and dubious of Bobby Joe Fabian’s story all at the same time, Lynne kept thinking of all the good people at this gathering with such high hopes for the future, banking on Halat. She wondered, would they be feeling in a few weeks what I’m feeling now? Were they in for a terrible disappointment and hurt if all this proved to be true? She kept stealing looks at Halat, watching him greet his supporters or exchange a word with his wife. He looked no different than he always had. No evil revealed itself lurking behind his eyes, no revelation gripped Lynne. She remained as confused as ever by her mixed emotions about him. She lingered a few minutes, then fled back to Becky’s.
The next day, she received a collect phone call from Bobby Joe Fabian. He wanted to speak with her in person. Rex had said he might call, but she hadn’t really expected him to, at least not so soon. She accepted the charges and listened as Fabian provided a more lengthy and colorful version of Armistead’s account, his slang sometimes impenetrable, but the meaning of the punch line of his tale unmistakable.
“Pete told us your daddy had swung with the money,” Fabian drawled. “I never believed it. I figured Pete had swung with the do-re-mi, but Kirk said we had to do something about it. You couldn’t let yourself get ripped off like that without someone payin’ the price, ya see. So he decides we have to reach out and touch someone.”
The words, copped from a telephone company promotion and given a new and terrible meaning, chilled Lynne. It sounded all the more ominous delivered in the sweet tang of Fabian’s molasses-slow drawl. She actually shivered at those words, an uncontrollable, brief shaking that moved down her body, neck, shoulders, arms, legs. They had to reach out and touch someone. That was how this man described the execution of her parents. This man, a lifer in prison, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars with people who killed her mother and father—and he had reduced it all to the homilies of a television advertisement.
For the first time since Armistead called her from Angola, she began to believe—really believe—that the answer to the mystery had arrived, even if it came in the guise of a smooth-talking killer with ulterior motives and a gift for metaphor.
“I want to do what’s right,” Fabian told her. “And maybe then you can help me get a fair shake. That’s all I ask.”
When she hung up on Bobby Joe Fabian, Lynne went to the bathroom and threw up, heaving long after her stomach had emptied.
* * *
When Armistead returned from Louisiana, Lynne reluctantly accompanied him to see Lieutenant Mike Meaut in his basement office at the Biloxi Police Department. Armistead had insisted on following protocol and beginning with the department Lynne so distrusted. Meaut still constituted a task force of one investigating the Sherry murders—in between his other duties and cases. In truth, very little had been happening in the investigation, other than the interview with LaRa and her former boyfriend. Now Lynne watched Meaut’s broad face sag and darken as Armistead laid out Bobby Joe Fabian’s story linking Nix and Halat to the murders. Until that moment, Lynne had never heard the sagacious and eminently proper lieutenant use foul language.
“You’ve got to get the hell out of here,” Meaut hissed when Armistead finished. “Don’t you know I’m probably gonna be working for the murdering sonofabitch in three months. Take it to the sheriff. Take it to the D.A., the FBI. Anywhere, I don’t care. Just take it the hell out of here.”
Lynne felt a surge of genuine affection and respect for Lieutenant Meaut then. He was a man of principle, and she had been wrong to distrust him. Meaut had become red in the face as he spoke, and Lynne asked if he was all right. He shook his head and repeated something he had told her a year earlier: “This case is going to kill me, Lynne. Now go on.”2
After leaving Meaut’s office that day, Lynne asked her private detective where they would turn next.
“We’ve gone through proper channels,” Armistead said with satisfaction. “Now we can take it where we want.”
Lynne went to see the new district attorney, Joe Meadows, asking him to request federal help. Meadows had been appointed to replace local football-hero-turned-D.A. Glenn Cannon, whose attempts to help Lynne solve the case were cut short by his arrest for bankruptcy fraud, an old Coast pattern of political corruption. Meadows promised to ask the U.S. Attorney to step in.
Armistead, meanwhile, took his old Highway Patrol buddy Joe Price, the Harrison County chief deputy sheriff, and County Attorney Bobby Payne, an ex-cop turned prosecutor, to see Fabian. The convict met them in the chaplain’s office at Angola, where Fabian was confident no one would spot him talking to the heat. Church was the last place anyone would think of looking for Bobby Joe.
Chain-smoking and sipping a warm, flat Coke, Fabian swore to the investigators that Halat had traveled to Angola in mid- to late March 1987—six months before the murders—to have an attorney-client visit with him, Nix, and a third inmate named Kenny Roy. At this meeting, according to Fabian, Halat shifted blame for the missing money to Vince Sherry, making him the “escape goat.” The meeting should have been recorded in prison visitor logs, but Fabian said such corroborating evidence might be hard to find—the logs were easily tampered with and therefore were worthless, he swore.
“Peter come up with the deal that the judge swung with the money, ya see,” Fabian explained. “And I tried to convince Kirksey that Peter Halat swung with the money and, ya see, he was just using this guy up, more or less. But Kirksey believes in Peter because they are like brothers.”
Fabian then quoted Halat as saying, “You guys are in a position you can’t let people fuck you over.”
“I can get anything I want done to anybody,” Nix supposedly replied. “It ain’t nothing but a phone call away.”
To which Halat supposedly said, “That sounds good enough to me. And that’s what has to be done.”3
Fabian then claimed he assisted Nix in hiring the killer John Ransom. Fabian said he phoned Ransom and even haggled with him over the price for the contract. They settled on ten thousand dollars in cash and another twenty-five thousand in “crank”—methamphetamine—that Ransom could resell on his own.
One hour and twenty-five minutes after the Fabian interview began, Armistead, Price, and Payne left the chaplain’s office. They had a convicted murderer’s word, and little else to go on—but the pieces fit too well to ignore. It would be checked out, Price and Payne told Armistead.
Armistead called Lynne and told her the next step would be to try to corroborate Fabian’s story. Though he would continue to help, they had to relinquish control to the authorities, he said. If they didn’t, charges of conflict of interest and bias could be raised by the suspects down the line, he explained.
“It’s in their hands now, Sposito. We have to wait.”
* * *
The waiting did not come easily for Lynne. It had taken more than a month for Armistead and Lynne to persuade Joe Price to go see Fabian. The chief deputy seemed reluctant to Lynne to take on the popular mayoral candidate—perhaps, Lynne thought, because Price, who was running for sheriff himself, needed the same voters who supported Halat.
Price had also been unwilling to interrogate or surveil Gillich.
“He’d just lie to me,” the silver-haired chief deputy had drawled, his pale blue eyes earnest, when Lynne begged him to talk to Mr. Mike. “He’s the kind of person you get a call from in the middle of the night if he’s got something to say.
“You’re young, girl,” he told Lynne with a wry smile. “You’ll probably live to see this solved.”
Once Price finally did see Fabian in May 1989, his visit, as far as Lynne could see, was followed by more inaction. By then, the two-year anniversary of the murders was just a few months away, and still nothing had been done about the allegations against Halat and Nix. Nix still scammed happily at Angola, and Halat was well on his way to winning city hall, where Blessey was retiring without running for a third term. Lynne finally decided to take matters in her own hands, unable to bear seeing Halat campaigning on Margaret Sherry’s back, uttering what had been her promises of reform. She called a press conference.
“Contrary to the beliefs of many, a vote for Pete Halat is not a vote for Margaret Sherry,” Lynne told a group of reporters gathered at her parents’ house. “As a family, we are upset that this myth is being used for political gain.”
This statement—the first public indication of any discord between the Sherry children and Vince’s best friend—took the reporters, then the entire community, completely by surprise. The reporters knew Lynne was actively investigating her parents’ murder, and they asked the obvious question: Had she uncovered something that caused her to speak out against Halat’s candidacy? Lynne wouldn’t say, though the implication behind her veiled remarks seemed clear. Instead, she deflected the pointed questions by comparing her desire for justice to the efforts of a famous Nazi hunter.
“I am a fanatic about this investigation,” she announced. “I admit that I am obsessed with it, but I saw a movie the other night about Simon Wiesenthal, where he said, ‘How, when I die, can I look in their eyes and say that I didn’t love them enough not to find out who did this?’ That’s the way I feel. There’s no way I’ll ever stop this investigation, not till we have the people who have done this. . . . I just think about what my father must have felt with that gun stuck in his face, or those two shots that missed my mother, and the kind of fear she must have felt, and that anger gives me all the strength I need.”
Halat seemed as shocked as everyone else by Lynne’s press conference. It ended any semblance of cordial relations between them.
But the press conference turned out to be only a minor distraction in Biloxi’s tumultuous political scene. That same week, Mayor Blessey and several other officials were indicted by a federal grand jury on fraud, conspiracy, and extortion charges. The FBI investigation Margaret Sherry had helped launch years earlier—of alleged misuse of public funds in the waterfront project—had finally led to formal charges. News reports on the existence of the investigation had already damaged Blessey’s political career—despite the fact that he would eventually be acquitted of every charge against him. At the time of the indictment, however, the story dominated headlines and newscasts, eclipsing Lynne’s press conference. Lynne found herself wishing it could be otherwise for the man she had once believed responsible for her parents’ murder—not because she felt sorry for him, but because his misfortune was a distraction from the official homicide investigation.
In the end, her public comments did nothing but put Halat on guard: The investigators who went to talk to Fabian sat on their information while the election drew near. Lynne felt helpless—going public with explicit allegations could endanger the investigation and anger the men she now had to rely on to make an arrest. Silence, however, might mean Halat would become mayor. She could only hope something would happen before then.
But as Lynne watched from the sidelines, Pete Halat went on to win the Democratic primary. With a weak Republican opponent facing him in the general election in what was then a very Democratic city, Halat seemed assured of victory. Lynne prayed for an arrest or an indictment, hounding the sheriff’s department and Rex Armistead with phone calls and visits, without any apparent impact, other than sympathetic nods and assurances. Armistead counseled patience. “Joe’s okay,” he promised. “He would never play politics with the investigation.”
As much as she wanted to press onward, all the old doubts still gnawed at Lynne. What if the investigation was stalled because Fabian had lied? What if Halat was innocent? Part of her hoped fervently this would turn out to be true. This hope briefly flared when she met a Biloxi teenager who turned her suspicions back toward an old target. The youth claimed to be part of a sophisticated burglary ring, and he swore he saw the ring’s leader accept a briefcase full of money from Gerald Blessey in exchange for agreeing to assassinate Vincent and Margaret Sherry.
The teenager, whose mother had approached the police, then Lynne, at first sounded plausible. He mentioned certain details that seemed telling to Lynne. He correctly said, for instance, that the Sherry family had a home in Kentucky where papers were stored. He went on to say Margaret had secreted important evidence there, and that Blessey had ordered its retrieval as part of the murder contract.
“Maybe I was right all along, Rex,” she excitedly told an openly dubious Armistead after talking to the boy. “There’s something there. We’ve got to check it out.”
“I’ll talk to him, Sposito,” Armistead agreed. “But don’t get your hopes up. I don’t believe it’s going to check out.”
And, in fact, the youth’s story quickly fell apart as he spun an ever more ridiculous and lurid account. None of his details about the murder or the burglary ring proved true. Eventually, he ended up claiming that he witnessed the mayor and the hired killer sign a written “murder contract”—the boy’s absurd fantasy of what a hired killing entailed. First they signed it, the teenaged burglar said, then they burned it. The boy could not even identify a photograph of Gerald Blessey. And when Dick Sposito traveled to Kentucky to check the old family home at Lynne’s request, he found no sign Margaret had hidden anything there in recent years, or that anyone had searched the place. He even hauled back a trunk full of Margaret’s old papers, none of which shed any light on the murders.
“I wanted so much to believe that boy,” Lynne told Becky Field a week before election day, on yet another visit to Biloxi. “Now I’m not sure what to do.”
In desperation, Lynne went to lunch that week at a Biloxi motel restaurant, where a law-enforcement convention was under way. She asked a television news reporter, Gurvir Dhindsa, to join her, choosing a conspicuous table near County Attorney Bobby Payne. Lynne made a show of whispering to Dhindsa and looking pointedly at Payne, who began to look concerned at Lynne’s choice of luncheon companions.
Later, in an aside to the county attorney, she said, “I haven’t told Gurvir anything about Bobby Joe.” Before Payne could say anything to this assurance, she added a warning. “That might change if something doesn’t start to happen.”
Payne assured her things were happening behind the scenes. They were working hard on checking out Fabian’s story. After that conversation, it seemed to Lynne that the investigation really did pick up pace. But it was too late to affect Pete Halat’s march to city hall. He trounced his opponent in the June 1989 general election. Voters heard not a word about Bobby Joe Fabian. They saw only a chance at a fresh start with a new leader.
“This is Biloxi the way it can be, the way it should be,” an ebullient Halat said in his victory speech. “This is the Biloxi that will work for all of us.”
As he spoke, the investigation of Fabian’s allegations crawled forward. Halat would hardly have his office furniture arranged in Biloxi’s ornate mayor’s office before he would be forced to fight for his political survival. And the city would find its hopes for a new, scandal-free administration dashed once again. It was, they realized, Biloxi the way it always had been—and, they feared, always would be.