A nightmare plagued Charles Leger, clinging to his sleep like sweaty, twisted sheets. For months, a face swam in and out of focus as he slept, taunting and haunting the young attorney—the face of a stalker, intent on murder. He didn’t know the name of the man who owned that face, but he knew he’d never forget it.
Then, in August 1989, he saw it again. Only this time, the face of a killer did not appear in his dreams. It floated into view on his television set. The face belonged to John Elbert Ransom. For the past year, Chuck Leger had been dreaming about the man investigators had just named as a suspect in the killing of Vincent and Margaret Sherry.
Leger would later swear the hair stood up on the back of his neck when he saw that gaunt old man on television, shivers gripping him in the midst of summer. The memory came back to him then. He knew that face not just from his nightmares, but from his waking life, an unnerving encounter in downtown Biloxi—an encounter that occurred shortly before the Sherry murders. And it scared him to death.
After some hesitation—he knew his story sounded odd at best—Leger wrote to the district attorney. In short order, he was sitting down with Randy Cook, giving a statement under oath. A few weeks later, he became one of the first witnesses in the Sherry case to come before the new federal grand jury convened by U.S. Attorney Phillips.
In the summer of 1987, Chuck Leger had gone to work for Pete Halat, picking up the slack after Vince Sherry left the firm for the bench. A few months after joining the firm, he had driven with Pete that terrible day in September 1987, when Halat found the bodies of Vince and Margaret. Leger’s nightmares began a short time later, he told Cook.
They were always the same: He would awake rigid and sweating, exhausted from fleeing a tall, gaunt man with sallow skin, scarred or wrinkled, and piercing, dead eyes.
At first, he could not remember where he first saw that face. Then it came to him—the encounter behind the law office a day or two, or at most, a week or two, before Vince and Margaret died.1 The tall, lanky man had blocked Leger’s path and demanded to know where to find Vince. When Leger suggested the courthouse, the man stared icily at him in silence, then stalked off, limping slightly, as if something were wrong with his right leg.
“Someday, that man’s going to be arrested for something, and I’ll see his face in the paper,” Leger told a friend and fellow attorney after the nightmare had come to dominate his sleep. “Then I’ll know who it was.”
That prediction came to pass a few days after Bobby Joe Fabian’s moment of fame, when a televised news report on the Sherry case included a photo of John Ransom, sitting handcuffed in a police car in Georgia.
“It’s him. I’ve seen him—the man I’ve been dreaming about,” Leger frantically told a friend of his, another attorney. He had described the dreams to this friend a year earlier.2 “He’s the one they think killed Vince.”
Randy Cook might have found this whole story of nightmares hard to believe, given Leger’s reliance on a two-year-old memory of a momentary encounter, filtered through the distorting gauze of dreams. Hard to believe, except for one thing: Leger not only had described Ransom with a limp, but he had named the correct leg, the right one. Leger distinctly remembered Ransom wearing some sort of boots, perhaps cowboy boots, and stepping down off a curb awkwardly, as if something were wrong with his right foot. The NCIC printout on Ransom was right there on Cook’s desk: Under identifying features, it showed Ransom’s right leg lost in shotgun blast, replaced by an artificial limb. At that time, none of the news reports had mentioned Ransom’s wooden leg. Leger could not have known about it unless he had seen the peg-legged killer himself, just as he claimed.
Chuck Leger had provided a breakthrough in the case: The hit man fingered by Bobby Joe Fabian had been in Biloxi at the time of the murders, prowling about and asking for one of the victims by name. There was no way Fabian could be accused of fabricating this. It did not prove Ransom a murderer, only that he had been in town at the right time, and that he had some connection to the victims. Still, it was powerful, damning testimony.
“It all sounds so bizarre and so incredible,” Leger told grand jurors within a month of sitting down with Cook. “But if you ever look this man in the face, you will see what I’m talking about. If he gives you this kind of look, it is like, you know, a cold-blooded, I’m-going-to-kill you kind of look. And that is the way he looked at me.”3
* * *
Chuck Leger’s contribution to the case did not stop with his remembrance of John Ransom. He also told Randy Cook, and later, grand jurors, about LaRa Sharpe’s suspicious use of the law office and telephones, how she took over the law library and made him feel unwelcome there. LaRa spent at least an hour on the telephone daily, he recalled—with her presence in the law office continuing well into 1988. After she left, the office kept getting calls for an attorney named LaRa—apparently she had posed as a lawyer as well as a paralegal, Leger said.
“All I could ever see was that she was talking on the phone and I thought, well, this is not productive. . . . She seemed to have the run of the office.”4
Cook saw immediately that Leger’s testimony put LaRa Sharpe at Halat and Sherry long after she claimed to have left the office, and long after she claimed to have parted company with Nix and his scams. To secure her immunity agreement, LaRa had vowed she had stopped working in the law office by the end of 1986. Yet Leger had not gone to work there until May 1987, and he remembered LaRa being around for a full year after he started. Cook had caught LaRa in a crucial lie.5
Leger’s recollections about his former employer, Pete Halat, seemed equally damning to Cook. When Halat became mayor, for example, Leger was supposed to inherit the office’s case files, but he never could find the records on Kirksey Nix. Then one day late in July, Halat’s secretary, Ann Kriss, who had moved to city hall with the new mayor a month earlier, showed up at the law office, looking for the Nix file. This would have been just after the first news stories appeared linking Ransom and Angola inmates to the murders, but before Bobby Joe Fabian appeared on the evening news with his stunning accusations against Pete. Kriss hunted down the Nix file, finding it in Pete’s old office, then hauled the thick bundle back to city hall. Leger never did see what was in the file, nor did he know why Halat suddenly wanted it days before Fabian accused the mayor of murder.
“I don’t know if he had been forewarned about an interview or whatever,” Leger said. “But that was the Friday before the interview.”
Then there was Leger’s account of the morning Pete found Vince and Margaret dead in their home. To Cook’s amazement, no one with the Biloxi Police Department had interviewed Leger in depth. No one had taken the time to find out that Leger’s recollection of that morning differed dramatically from Pete Halat’s. Cook hadn’t even known Leger had been present until the lawyer told him—Halat had always made it sound as if he entered the house alone.
That morning in September 1987, as Leger had prepared to take a telephone deposition, Halat popped his head through the office door and asked what he was doing. After Leger told him, Halat replied, “Okay, let me know when you are done.” No explanation, no sense of urgency, as Leger recalled it—just “see me when you are through.” At this point, there was some general tension in the office, because the staff already knew Vince had not shown up for work.
Thirty or forty minutes later, Leger finished his deposition and reported to Halat, who said, “Let’s go for a ride.” Again, no explanation or hurry. Halat just issued the order, and they walked out to Kirksey Nix’s blue Mercedes.
They drove for a while. Leger recalled that he had no idea where they were headed, but Halat seemed nervous, habitually rubbing his hands as he steered. Finally Halat said, “We have got a problem. No one has heard from Vince for at least two days. No one has seen him or Margaret.”
They drove on in silence after that, ten tense minutes. At the house, instead of just knocking on the door, Pete chatted with a next-door neighbor, then shuffled around the cars parked in the Sherrys’ driveway, trying to determine if they had moved recently. Throughout this inspection, Pete told the others not to touch anything, Leger recalled. At the same time, Leger started to rifle the mailbox to see when the Sherrys had last collected their mail. Again, Halat seemed concerned, calling out, “Don’t touch anything!” As Leger told it, Halat issued these instructions before going into the house—before anyone should have known they had stumbled onto a crime scene, where fingerprints and other evidence could be crucial.
Leger next recalls Halat walking around the left side of the house, still without knocking or trying the door. Lynne Sposito would later question why Halat did that. A frequent visitor like Pete should have known the most direct way to the rear door off the den lay on the right side of the house. If he had walked that way, Halat would have come to that blood-streaked glass door, through which Vince lay clearly visible, clearly dead. But Halat did not do that.
Instead, Leger swore, Halat came running back to the front door. Leger had tried it, found the door unlocked, and yelped for Pete to come quick. As the dogs barked furiously inside, Pete pushed the door open all the way and, after gasping at the terrible odor rushing out at them, the two lawyers walked inside, Halat first, followed by Leger.6
As Leger stooped in the entryway to calm the frantic dogs, Halat walked a few steps inside, toward the kitchen-den area and out of Leger’s line of vision. He returned almost immediately, pushing Leger outside and shutting the door behind them, panic and nausea etching his face. Leger remembers Halat crying out then, “Oh God, no, not Vince. Not Vince, oh God, no, no. Not Vince.”
When Leger saw the shock on Halat’s face, drained of color, he asked what he had seen. Halat seemed on the verge of tears.
“Vince is dead,” Leger recalls Halat saying. And then, without having come near the Sherrys’ bedroom, Pete declared something else—something he should not have known. According to Leger, Halat announced, “Vince and Margaret are dead.”
Randy Cook at first dismissed this part of the story as vaguely interesting, but not particularly useful. Halat could simply have drawn the obvious conclusion from the evidence at hand. He had not actually seen Margaret’s body in the bedroom, but he could easily have assumed she had been killed. Then, in his grief and horror, he stated his suspicions as though they were fact as he stumbled out of the reeking house into the cauterizing sunlight of Gulf summer.
But then Cook started thinking about it, and he realized this only made sense because he had the benefit of hindsight, the knowledge that Margaret really was dead. On the morning of September 16, 1987, however, there had been no reason for such certainty. For all Halat knew, Margaret could have been kidnapped, or sitting gagged and tied up in a closet. She could have been lying unconscious, for that matter, in need of immediate medical attention. But Pete hadn’t rushed inside to see if she needed help, an arguably reasonable reaction. No one had done that—because Pete said she was dead. To Cook, it raised serious questions. To Lynne Sposito, who spoke with Leger a short time after Cook, Pete’s announcement seemed an admission of foreknowledge.
After he finished questioning Leger, Cook pulled out the box of files he had inherited from Biloxi. There it was: Pete Halat’s initial statement, taken that same day, four hours after Halat first crept into the hot, stinking house. Halat had been very clear on the point: “I had no idea that Mrs. Sherry was in the house, but I did not, did not re-enter the house for reasons that I can’t explain now.”
It was a serious contradiction, based not on the word of a felon with ample reasons to lie, but an honest man, an associate of Halat’s who, if anything, had reason to be grateful to the new mayor, not vindictive. Halat had appointed Leger to a city court judgeship, had given him a job, helped him get started in private practice. Leger had given this contradiction little thought at the time of the murders, but over the years, he had begun having doubts about Pete. Halat had seemed sincerely griefstricken when he emerged from the house that morning, so overcome with horror. And yet, there was that inexplicable declaration, Vince and Margaret are dead.
“I keep thinking, was Pete acting that day?” Leger testified. “No, I’m thinking he wasn’t acting. And I keep thinking, was he acting? I don’t know.”7