Two weeks after Pete Halat succeeded a wearied Gerald Blessey as mayor of Biloxi, two Harrison County investigators made the long drive from the Coast back to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. County Attorney Payne wanted a second go at Bobby Joe Fabian. With him was Randy Cook, a sheriff’s captain assigned by Joe Price to take control of the Sherry murder probe. Cook would become a principal investigator in the case, the first in nearly two years to make actual progress.
Tall and lanky, with a long face and fine, sandy hair, Cook had that laconic, set-back-in-your-chair way of talking that suggested he’d be more comfortable in chaps than in the uniform pants with the single blue stripe he favored. Cook had worked briefly with the ill-fated first Sherry task force early in the case, seeing firsthand how disorganized the Biloxi-run investigation had been. Later, he had left the sheriff’s department for a brief and unsatisfying stint as chief of security for a cruise ship line. He returned to the sheriff’s department on June 1, 1989. A cop most of his adult life, Cook had missed the squad room badly, his misery on the job mounting daily, until his wife and young son finally begged him to go back to the sheriff’s department. The day after his return, Joe Price handed him a transcript of Fabian’s first interview, with a file containing John Ransom’s photo and criminal history, shipped from Georgia authorities.
“Have fun,” Price told Cook, who hadn’t even had time to unbox his files. “You got your work cut out for you.”
Cook and Payne arranged for a visiting room at Angola to be cleared, still trying to keep Fabian’s cooperation secret. They wanted to fill in the holes he had left in his first statement. But extracting details from Fabian proved a frustrating and mostly unproductive task—a bad omen, Cook knew. Fabian preferred to speak of his glory days with the Dixie Mafia rather than the subject at hand, deftly avoiding specific details when talking about the murders.
But Cook repeatedly pressed Fabian to replay the exact discussion during the supposed meeting at Angola to plan the murder of Vincent Sherry—the heart of his story. Finally, Fabian sat back in his chair, flicked the ashes from his ever-present cigarette, and said with that back-of-the-throat, jailhouse voice of his, “Halat said something has to be done. Nix says, yes, I’ll take care of it. He will bite the dust. That’s the terminology they used, you know. Halat said, all right, get with me on it.”
Once the deal to hire John Ransom was in place, Fabian said, “Ransom is supposed to have got in touch with Peter, you know. To get the layout and stuff, the judge’s house and all that. Give him, you know, the inside on what he needs to know to go in there, the best time . . . and so forth.”
Here, Cook noticed something troubling: The story had changed. In Fabian’s first statement, he had Halat merely shifting blame for the missing money onto his best friend. Then Nix, Fabian, and Ransom had done the rest, with Halat merely acquiescing. Now Fabian had Halat actively encouraging Vince’s murder: Something has to be done. Get with me on it. The first version made Halat out to be a contemptible Judas, but not a cold-blooded killer. Now Fabian made it sound like Pete wanted Vince dead all along.
Which was true? Cook couldn’t tell. Maybe neither—the truth never changes, but lies invariably evolve. And Fabian admitted to being a world-class liar and con man.
“This dude,” Fabian announced, attacking Halat even more vehemently than a month earlier, “is more of a crook than I am. I mean, he is more hungry than we are, ya see. He is wanting to, you know, get into everything. . . . He was bragging about how he is fixing all them cases and everything, making that money, too, and about how he got the governor to appoint [Sherry] judge.”
Fabian prattled on, nodding and grinning, puffing happily on his Camels. He ruminated on why Halat might have wanted both Vince and Margaret out of the way. “He could have been killing two birds with one stone. . . . He is eager, he is climbing the political ladder, you know.”
“Did it get him anywhere that you know of?” Cook asked.
A fleshy grin split Fabian’s pale, unshaven face. “Well, they tell me he is mayor now. . . . The next step will probably be governor, huh? Or Parchman, one.”1
Parchman was the location of Mississippi’s maximum security prison.
When Fabian finished this second rendition, Cook asked him to prove it. Any of it. But the convict just shook his head and said, “They covered their ass pretty good.”
Still, just when it sounded like Fabian had no proof of anything, and Cook and Payne began to see him and this new line of inquiry as a waste of time, he would come up with something firm—and accurate. In between his rambling discourses on the Dixie Mafia, he provided information on LaRa Sharpe, explaining how Halat had helped her pass as a paralegal, getting her access to the prison’s attorney-client room where she and Nix could exchange scam documents, and, according to Fabian, enjoy unofficial conjugal visits. There would have been no way for Fabian to know of Halat’s false affidavits for LaRa unless he was privy to the scheme. Fabian wasn’t all hot air, after all, Cook concluded.
He and Payne left a short time later, returning to Biloxi to chart a course of action. As he left the prison grounds, the sheriff’s captain took in the work gangs headed to the farmland, the guards on horseback staring back at him with flat, uncurious expressions, the smell of dust and manure in the humid air. There was something about this place, a sense of utter corruption just below Angola’s bucolic surface. You could see it in the way certain inmates sauntered as if they ran the prison, and in the whispered exchanges he had seen among some of the guards he passed, a feeling of things hidden and dark, as if they were the prisoners, not the men in blue denim marching to the fields.
“I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end there,” Cook told his companion as they drove back toward St. Francisville, passing through a green tunnel of oak and sycamore and Spanish moss, fresh, cool air cleansing the rank grit of Angola from the car’s interior. “You spend a little time there, and you realize anything’s possible.”
* * *
Randy Cook found himself banging on LaRa Sharpe’s door a few weeks after returning from Angola. A meeting with federal and state prosecutors was arranged where LaRa demanded immunity from prosecution in exchange for her help. She got it—then promptly denied any knowledge of the Sherry murders, just as she had done months before with Armistead and the Biloxi police.
LaRa did toss them a bone, however, this time admitting a small role in Nix’s scams. But she insisted that she bailed out after a mere four months of helping Nix in his fraud operation, returning to law-abiding ways by late 1985. The prosecutors and investigators present for LaRa’s latest statement believed little of it and, after a few hours more of useless interrogation, LaRa went on her way, the investigators no better off than they had been two months earlier, while LaRa enjoyed an infinitely better position, relaxed and jovial and immune.
The one contribution she made lay in her phone bills—stacks of them, thousands of dollars a month in calls, accumulated while she worked the scams for Nix. These bills proved invaluable. The sheer weight of phone calls between LaRa and the prison seemed impossibly huge—2,666 calls, not counting four months’ worth that LaRa had conveniently omitted from the packet of bills she handed over. The calls extended well into 1986, long after she claimed to have quit the scam and reduced her contact with Kirksey Nix. LaRa had provided evidence that undermined her own story.
She could have destroyed them instead of handing them over to Randy Cook and suffered no consequences. The phone company at that time destroyed long-distance records every few months to free up computer capacity. LaRa could have ditched the bills and been in the clear. Instead, she inadvertently convinced Cook she had lied.
The bills even provided a first bit of corroboration for Fabian’s story. They showed numerous three-way calls between Angola, LaRa, and John Ransom, though there was no way of knowing what had been said in those conversations.
“What do you think?” one of the prosecutors asked Cook after LaRa had left.
“I think she’s in it up to her neck,” Cook said. “I think she knows we don’t know anything, and she lied her ass off. She knows we can’t prove anything.” He paused, then added, “Yet.”
* * *
Through most of July 1989, the revived Sherry investigation remained a closely held secret, a joint project of the D.A. and the sheriff, with backing from federal prosecutors in New Orleans. Although Lynne had continued to request it, the FBI had not joined the case.
Cook and his fellow investigators wanted to avoid tipping off the suspects they stalked, avoiding any publicity about a breakthrough in the Sherry murder case. Besides, there was the matter of Fabian’s credibility: No one wanted to impugn, or even destroy, Mayor Pete Halat’s reputation on the basis of unproven testimony from a convicted murderer.
Still, the Sherry investigation had been reduced to a simple straight line: Trying to corroborate—or disprove—Bobby Joe Fabian. The investigation no longer flew in dozens of unproductive directions, as it had under the Biloxi Police Department’s guidance. The problematic task force was history. Indeed, Cook and the others felt the Biloxi police had to be kept out of the loop. Pete Halat had been sworn in as mayor that July. No one knew if the new mayor had been tipped about Fabian—LaRa, certainly, could not be trusted to remain silent—but telling Biloxi P.D. would be tantamount to sending Halat a telegram.
Some parts of Fabian’s story began to check out. Cook spoke to a distant relative of his in Dallas, Cathy Warner, who admitted acting as a go-between for Fabian and John Ransom. She said she picked up scam money, which she then sent to Halat.
At the same time, though, a review of the Nix ledger that Halat had provided to the FBI showed no huge influx of money as described by Fabian, no hundreds of thousands of dollars in scam cash. The ledger showed only a total of seventy-one thousand and change received between 1985 and mid-May 1988, an average of twenty-one thousand dollars a year. Certainly a great deal of money for a convict, Cook concluded, but not the scam wealth Fabian spoke of. Bobby Joe explained it away, saying Halat would never keep an accurate record because it could hang him.
Later in July, an agent from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation called Cook with a startling development. A man named Rodney Gaddy, six-foot-two and three hundred pounds, had been shot in the head five times with a .22—a professional killing, the body abandoned in rural Carroll County, Georgia, not far from Atlanta, Agent Roy Olinger told Cook. Three days later, on July 21, a tip led police to John Ransom and another man, Donald Short. Olinger had arrested them for the execution-style slaying.
Olinger later came across a note in Ransom’s file that stated photos and criminal records had been sent recently to Cook’s office.
“I figured you were looking at Ransom for something out your way, and that you might want to know we picked him up on a murder warrant,” Olinger said.
Randy Cook could hardly believe this turn of events. After the Sherry case had sat idle so long—almost two years—Fabian talks about a killer named Ransom, and suddenly he’s booked for murder. The weapon used to kill Gaddy was similar to the one used on the Sherrys, though in this case, there had been no silencer. There were, however, black smudges on Gaddy’s hands, as if he had been holding the gun barrel when he was killed—just like Vince.
Cook told the Georgia agent about Fabian’s story linking Ransom to the Sherry murders, and the two investigators met in Georgia the following week to search Ransom’s home.
Expecting to arrive at some dark and dreary hovel on the outskirts of town, Cook instead found Ransom’s house on a suburban street of ranch homes and minivans, kids’ bikes on the sidewalk, the smell of charcoal barbecues in the air. Ransom’s neighbors thought he worked in the salvage and pawnbroker business. His wife was a businesswoman, his daughter worked for the city of Smyrna. This was not the scene Cook had expected to behold at the home of the Dixie Mafia’s notorious one-legged killer.
Yet, hidden in the crawl space beneath the Ransom house, the investigators found wrapped in cloth an unused silencer—professionally machined, the type that uses steel wool and metal grommets, not foam, to muffle gunshots. An assassin’s weapon, with no purpose other than murder—merely possessing such a silencer is a crime. But it was different from the type used on the Sherrys, and so held little value for Cook. In Ransom’s workshop, however, they found something more in keeping with the Sherry case: a roll of foam rubber. Later, attempts to match it to bits found in the Sherry home proved futile—there was no scientific method of comparison available. Besides, the roll was virginal, with no pieces cut out.
In Ransom’s briefcase, Cook found a telephone and address book with LaRa Sharpe’s number written inside. There was also a phony stock certificate from a scam Nix and Sharpe had put together, which involved the Halat and Sherry law firm.
“It’s come full circle,” Cook reported to Joe Price by telephone. “We have a definite link between Nix, Ransom, Halat, and LaRa—just like Fabian said there would be.”
As word of the new break in the Sherry case spread through the Harrison County District Attorney’s Office, the sheriff’s department, and other quarters—and to Rex Armistead and Lynne Sposito—someone leaked the story. A day after Cook arrived in Georgia, as he tried to arrange an interview with Ransom, a news van from a Biloxi television station pulled up at the courthouse in Newnan, Georgia, where the murder suspect had been charged. Overnight, the Mississippi press knew all about John Elbert Ransom—and his possible role in the Sherry murders.
In the space of the next three days, newspapers in Biloxi and in the capital city, Jackson, published articles with headlines reading, “Georgia arrests may be break in Sherry case,” “Police have answers in Sherry case,” and, most alarming to Lynne Sposito and Bobby Joe Fabian, “Louisiana inmate gave police tip in Sherry case.” In rapid succession, the stories detailed Ransom’s history as a contract killer, named Kirksey Nix as a suspect, then suggested that inmate scams at the Angola prison lay at the heart of the murders because convicts there believed Vince Sherry had stolen their money. Clearly, someone with inside knowledge of the investigation was blabbing. The only key element missing from the stories was Fabian’s name, and the suspicion that the new mayor of Biloxi might have somehow been involved in the murders.2 The omissions proved small comfort.
Fabian immediately called Lynne. “Are they trying to get me killed?” he bellowed. “Do you think Kirksey and them just might figure out who that Louisiana inmate is that’s done all the talkin’? I’m dead. I’m dead. I’ve got to have protection, Lynne, or it’s game over.”
“Okay, okay, Bobby Joe. I’ll get on it.” Lynne immediately called the district attorney and Joe Price, and asked them to arrange for Fabian’s protection. Both men had been quoted extensively in the press after the initial story on Ransom broke, and Lynne had become thoroughly irritated with them. Secrecy had been the investigators’ only advantage, allowing those who had gotten away with murder for two years to remain complacent. Now Nix and Halat and everyone else knew they were under investigation.
If she had known this would happen, Lynne realized, she could have made it all public before the election. Now Fabian’s life was in danger for no good reason. She had begun to develop an odd affection for the man and his constant line of bull. More important, she needed him. “You’ve got to do something about Bobby Joe,” she told Price. “He says he’ll be killed, and I believe him.”
Price promised to talk to the Angola warden and take care of things, mollifying Lynne somewhat, though she remained uneasy. Her fears were confirmed when Fabian called her the next day. With revelations about the case mounting in the press daily, Fabian remained vulnerable and frightened. He had been branded a snitch, yet he had gotten no help, he said.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do, Lynne. I think somebody wants me dead, so this whole thing’ll go away. They don’t want to deal with going after a mayor.”
Lynne told him to calm down. She had been thinking about ways to keep Fabian safe. “Maybe I know someone who will want to deal with all this,” Lynne said slowly. “I know someone who would love to talk to you.”
The next day, August 1, Randy Cook called Price again from Georgia. He was finishing up, frustrated in his attempt to question Ransom. He started griping that he could get no further than small talk, but Price cut him off.
“You’d better hurry back, Randy,” Price said. “All hell’s breaking loose. Bobby Joe Fabian gave an interview to a television station. It’s gonna be on the air tonight.”
* * *
Fearing for the life of the key witness to her parents’ murder, Lynne had turned to a television reporter she knew, Ed Bryson. He had reported on Margaret Sherry’s election bid and, later, the murders. Lynne suggested Bryson could talk to Fabian, check out his story, and preserve it on videotape as a kind of insurance policy against attempts on his life. Instead, Bryson came back with what he considered the story of his career.
By the time Randy Cook returned home, the city of Biloxi had been transfixed by the extraordinary melodrama playing out on its television sets. Wearing sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, and chugging a can of Dr. Pepper, his features computer-scrambled but his accent unmistakable, Bobby Joe Fabian told his story on statewide TV. He repeated for the camera his key allegation—about a meeting at Angola between Nix, Halat, himself, and one other inmate, in which the murders of the Sherrys supposedly were planned.
“Peter Halat knew . . . that somebody was gonna die,” Fabian drawled, pausing for dramatic effect. “And better Sherry than him.”
The interview, broadcast by Station WLBT in Jackson then seen throughout the South in subsequent rebroadcasts, created a sensation—eclipsing all other news for days. Even the coincidentally timed start of the conspiracy trial of former mayor Gerald Blessey seemed tame by comparison. And Lynne Sposito had caused it all.
Fabian spilled everything—then Joe Price confirmed on the air that some of Fabian’s story had checked out. This was crucial corroboration for Bryson, enabling him to report that the allegations against Halat carried some credibility.
Asked on camera if he had been involved in the Sherry murders, Halat calmly branded the allegation “preposterous,” and labeled anyone who said otherwise a liar.
The story aired that same August night on the ten o’clock news—and then it took over every TV station, radio program, and newspaper in the state, then the region. City hall telephones jammed with calls from press organizations nationwide the next morning, network anchors, news magazines, and pulp tabloids vying for interviews Halat would not grant. In a matter of hours, everyone wanted a piece of the mayor accused of murder.
The decision to broadcast the story would remain a controversial one, subject to much second-guessing. Other press organizations might have investigated further and longer before airing or printing such an unproven accusation. Many would have sought corroboration of Fabian’s account of a meeting at Angola to plan the Sherrys’ demise. Still others might have waited to see if formal charges were filed before impugning a man’s reputation. Halat, after all, had not been convicted of any crimes. He had not been arrested. He was, by law, an innocent man. Lives could be—had been—destroyed in a moment by unproven allegations spotlighted and amplified by the press. True, the broadcast that night did not say Fabian’s allegations were true—merely that the police were investigating them. Still, the risk of unfairly tarring an innocent man remained enormous.
“Whatever happens,” Lynne told her husband that night, after Becky Field described the newscast to her, “I feel sorry for Pete’s wife and kids. They’re going to suffer for this.”
Yet she did not regret her decision to call Bryson. Fabian got his protection after the interview—in a hurry. And she had come too far to allow herself any regrets. Instead, she looked forward to receiving a videotape from Becky so she could watch Bryson’s report and Pete Halat’s response. Once again, she would watch Pete’s eyes and look for truth.
* * *
The next day, Pete Halat called a press conference to denounce as irresponsible the news report of Fabian’s allegations. He stood at a lectern before a packed audience in the city council chambers, tan, fit, his red power tie and dark suit immaculate, his eyes small behind wire-rim glasses, muscles jackhammering uncontrollably inside one cheek. At times bitterly sarcastic, other times plaintive—but never at a loss for words—Halat reiterated his denial of involvement in murders and scams, then fielded every question thrown at him for as long as the assembled reporters had questions to hurl. He re-enacted his discovery of the bodies (weaving in a few minor inconsistencies only Lynne Sposito, with her endless re-reading of police reports, would notice). He outlined his relationship with Kirksey Nix (minus some telling details, such as the telephone marriage he set up, the Mercedes he drove, the home he helped Nix purchase, and his trips to Angola with Mike Gillich). Halat said Fabian knew him only because he briefly represented the con man, who then used his knowledge of Halat to concoct a sensational story.
In all, Halat constructed a vehement defense of himself. Surrounded by the creamy white columns of the council chambers, the Confederate battle flag furled behind him, Halat gave a gutty, bravura performance even some of his detractors had to admire. His supporters, along with city hall workers, delivered him a standing ovation at the end.
“As far as the Sherry murder investigation is concerned,” he avowed, “my life is an open book—legal, personal, or otherwise. . . . These reports were based upon statements made by a twice-convicted murderer . . . who has plainly said he hopes his statement will help expedite a transfer from Angola to Mississippi.”
Here was the old trial lawyer’s tactic: Accuse the accuser. He knew he could not lose such a credibility contest. Still, his occasionally tight smile, jittery demeanor, and dripping sarcasm undercut his message at times. When asked why police maintained heavy security during the press conference, an imperial Halat snapped, “Because I wanted them here.” And when another reporter asked where he was on the night of the Sherry murders, he couldn’t resist the wiseguy quip, “Where were you?” To some, he came across cold, concerned only with his fate, rather than with the truth about the murder of his best friend. Others seemed merely confused by the accusations. A city bewildered and still reeling from scandals left over from the previous mayoral administration now had to deal with yet another city government embroiled in controversy—and a far more sinister controversy, at that.
Despite his best efforts, Halat failed to put the story to rest. If anything, his fiery denials only made it that much more sensational. Follow-up stories began to appear detailing Halat’s participation in the questionable marriage of Kellye Dawn and Kirksey Nix, the presence of LaRa Sharpe in Halat’s office, the suspicion that the law office had received scam money, and the unusually large numbers of phone calls from Nix. Halat watched in amazement as the stories escalated, ever more damaging—all of it rooted in the word of a man whose lies were legendary, who admitted he made a living as a con man.
So Halat called another press conference five days after the first, and produced his own blockbuster. He had copies of the visitor logs from Angola, which showed nothing like the meeting Fabian had described with Nix, Halat, and company. According to those logs, the Sherry murder planning session never happened.
“Totally false and easily refutable allegations were made linking me to the planning and the assassinations of Vincent and Margaret Sherry,” Halat railed. He said the logs were in the warden’s office, within one hundred yards of the Bryson-Fabian interview. Failing to check them represented “the type of mistake that could only and should only be made by first-year journalism students.”
He had been able to obtain this information in one hour, he claimed, yet a TV station intent on broadcasting Fabian’s allegations had not even tried to get it.
“. . . Outside of the allegations of Bobby Fabian, I stand before you accused of no crime, yet still having to defend my name.”
The logs showed Halat had never jointly visited Fabian, Nix, and another inmate at Angola. Halat made a special point of emphasizing that they showed no visit by him to the prison in March 1987 (or any month in 1987), which is when Fabian claimed the Sherry murder planning session took place. And that meeting lay at the heart of Fabian’s story.3
Yet, though the logs did tarnish Fabian’s already dubious credibility, they did not entirely clear Halat. They showed Halat had scheduled an attorney-client meeting with Nix on December 3, 1986, arriving almost two hours late. No purpose for the visit was offered in the logs, and Halat chose not to dwell on this fact.
The logs also showed Halat had scheduled, then canceled at the last minute, a meeting with Fabian and another inmate on January 30, 1987. The cancellation came too late to stop the unwieldy visitation mechanism at the massive prison: Fabian was hauled to the visiting area anyway. Halat explained to the press that he had been retained by Fabian to examine the possibility of getting him transferred to Mississippi, which he soon determined would be impossible, making the meeting at Angola unnecessary.
Halat had scheduled a second visit with Nix, the logs also revealed, along with Peter Mule and another inmate, on February 23, 1987, at 1:30 P.M.—a meeting that would have been uncomfortably close in time and attendance to Fabian’s recollection. But an anonymous scrawled notation on the log seemed to exonerate Halat here as well—indicating that the meeting was canceled by telephone at 1:25 P.M. Once again, though, the inmates he had arranged to see were hauled to the attorney-client visitor’s bullpen in preparation for the visit, giving them a chance to mingle and talk—just as Fabian had said.
Still, as the mayor told it, the overall message of the prison logs proved him innocent and Fabian a liar. His eyes glittered behind his glasses when he asked one reporter, “What else do you need?”
Strangely, copies of the prison logs were not given to the media until after the conference had ended—although they had been in hand in Biloxi since early that morning. The delay spared Halat from having to answer questions about two oddities that appeared in the log excerpts.
The first was a tiny handwritten notation on the log pages showing they had been photocopied on an earlier occasion by Harrison County Sheriff’s Captain Randy Cook. The copies had been made August 3, the morning after Halat’s first press conference and four days before the mayor sent his Biloxi chief of detectives to fetch them. Cook had driven to Angola to gather the logs before anyone else could meddle.
The other oddity appeared in log notations for the December 1986 meeting between Halat and Kirksey Nix. A notation indicated Halat had tried to bring someone with him to visit Nix: strip-club magnate and Dixie Mafia crony Mike Gillich. Gillich apparently tried to enter as a private investigator, but was turned away for lack of professional credentials. The significance of this notation eluded almost all of the reporters, as did another striking entry on the prison’s front gate log, a separate record that showed Halat’s entry to the Angola grounds for that December visit. That log listed a license number for Halat’s car—a number that belonged to the Mercedes registered to Mike Gillich: Kirksey Nix’s Mercedes.
And no one at the press conference thought to ask Pete Halat the question that puzzled Lynne Sposito when she reviewed the tape of the press conference: Why was Halat so adamant about denying being at Angola in March 1987?
True, March was the month Fabian claimed to have met with Nix and Halat to discuss killing Vince Sherry. But the convict had told this to only five people: Rex Armistead, Joe Price, Lynne Sposito, Bobby Payne, and Randy Cook. He never mentioned it in his televised interview with Ed Bryson. Lynne watched the tape three times to make sure before she told investigators what she had seen—once again noticing something where others had not. As far as anyone watching the now-infamous broadcast could tell, Bobby Joe Fabian never said when this supposed meeting took place. It could have been any time before the murders.
It was Pete Halat who brought up March 1987.
* * *
For Randy Cook, the prison logs also provided a revelation, but not the evidence of innocence Halat saw. He agreed with Fabian that the logs could be doctored or incomplete, blunting Halat’s assertions of innocence. Cook himself once got on the prison grounds without showing up in the log books.
The revelation for Cook lay instead in that scribbled notation about Mike Gillich. It was the first time the crime lord’s name had surfaced since Cook had become involved in the Sherry murder investigation. Fabian had never mentioned him. Yet here was Pete Halat, Biloxi’s future mayor, visiting the notorious Nix with the equally notorious Mr. Mike in tow—in a Mercedes registered to Gillich.
In the wake of Pete Halat’s press conferences, another, lower-key announcement was made. George Phillips, the veteran U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, announced that his office, along with the FBI, would join the resurgent investigation. A federal grand jury in Jackson would be convened to probe the case—the subpoenas were about to fly.
Almost overnight, Bobby Joe Fabian’s revelation and heavy publicity did something Lynne Sposito’s pleas had not accomplished in two years. At last, the agency she wanted all along to look at the murders, the FBI, was involved. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Lynne Sposito had one word to say when Becky Field called with the news: “Finally.”
The publicity brought more than an end to inaction, however. An outbreak of conscience—or opportunism—gripped Angola. Prison officials had finally cracked down, creating a “scam tier” where Nix, Fabian, and his fellow con men were kept in special isolation, with mail, visitation, and phone privileges greatly curtailed. A federal judge monitoring prison conditions there had declared a “state of emergency.” The inmates had even more time on their hands, and Randy Cook’s number would be passed around among inmates as avidly as the scammers once had passed out pictures of fetching young men. This was one of the consequences of publicity Cook had most feared: Convicts looking for a break on their sentences suddenly wanted to help solve the Sherry murders—whether they had genuine information or not. And all of them called Cook.
The first witness to come forward after Fabian talked was indeed influenced by all the publicity Lynne had caused. But he did not come from prison or jail. To Randy Cook’s amazement, the next key witness in the Sherry murder investigation came from within the office of Halat and Sherry. He had been there all along, and no one ever realized it.