Unable to fill the gap any other way, the investigators returned to the place where their case had started: the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. There they spoke with more inmates, trying to sift the self-serving lies from the genuine testimony, finding a bit of each.
Bobby Joe Fabian continued to massage his story to fit each new development, making himself look like more of a liar with each retelling. Another inmate, Harold Vincent, told a story remarkably similar to Fabian’s, but when Cook and Bell brought him to Jackson for the grand jury, he began demanding parole and inserting new and preposterous details into his story, including a description of Margaret Sherry, whom he had never met, as being “like a mother to me.” They quickly dropped Vincent from the witness list.
Cook and Bell next turned to convicted kidnapper Richard “Lobo” Durr, an Angola lifer with another remarkable story. Durr told the investigators that Robert Hallal had not rejected the Sherry murder contract after all, but had taken the job, with John Ransom as backup. “Bob Hallal admitted to me that he killed the Sherrys,” Durr swore.
When it looked like Durr might be paroled in late 1987 or early 1988, Nix supposedly asked him to “clean house” for him by killing Hallal, Pete Halat, “Old Man Ransom,” and “La La”—Nix’s derogatory nickname for LaRa. “Nix said too many people knew his business,” Durr claimed. But Durr never got his parole, and so never cleaned house for Nix.
The most intriguing, if unprovable, part of Durr’s story was his explanation of the motive for the Sherry murders. He, too, spoke of several hundred thousand dollars missing from Nix’s scam earnings. But according to Durr, the money had been given to Pete Halat and LaRa Sharpe to pay Vince Sherry, who was supposed to use his judge’s authority to have Nix transferred to Mississippi on some bogus writ. Once in Mississippi county jail, with far less security than Angola, Nix had escape plans in place.
“But the judge froze up,” Durr said. “He didn’t make the transfer.”
Whether that was because Sherry double-crossed Nix, or because Halat or LaRa kept the money and blamed the judge, Durr couldn’t say. Nix blamed Vince and, according to Durr, put out the contract on both Sherrys.
Cook and Bell were reluctant to accept Durr’s story, even though elements of it appealed to them. Believing Durr meant discounting—and charging—Hallal, something they were not prepared to do. Yet some of Durr’s story checked out: The investigators found correspondence in which Nix called LaRa “La La,” one of those little details that Durr could not have invented on his own. And Gene Fields, the Jefferson Parish deputy chief sheriff who had helped bust Nix on the Corso case, had another tidbit. He uncovered an escape plot by an Angola inmate who had been transferred to a county jail in Louisiana. Crooks dressed as guards from Angola were going to sneak him out, but an informant revealed the plan first—and said it had been a test run for Nix. All Nix needed to complete the plan was a transfer out of Angola—just what Durr said Vince was to provide.
In the end, though, Cook and Bell decided not to rely upon Durr. He had no ties to the scam, no corroboration, no relationship with Nix. For the time being, at least, Durr would be held in reserve. If additional evidence pointed to Hallal as the real killer, Durr would become an important witness. Otherwise, he was just another inmate with a story.
Back in Biloxi, a cabbie named William Forehand popped up next, telling Randy Cook and Keith Bell that he recognized John Ransom’s image on television as a fare he picked up and took to the Golden Nugget late one night in early September 1987, just before the murders. Ransom had a suspicious bulge in his coat pocket, possibly a gun, Forehand swore. After leaving the cab, Ransom walked into the strip club, then emerged five minutes later with Mike Gillich and Pete Halat. The three men climbed into a Mercedes, then left the Nugget’s parking lot, the cab driver told Cook and Bell, then the grand jury. He recognized Halat because his aunt worked for him, Forehand swore.
His aunt was Ann Kriss, Halat’s longtime secretary, he said.
Forehand thought little of this scene until two years later, when he saw Ransom on television, linked to the Sherry murders. Forehand had hesitated several months before coming forward—he was distrustful of the Biloxi police—but when he learned the FBI was involved, he decided to contact Keith Bell.
Like so many other witnesses, Forehand had a credibility problem: his unlikely explanation of how he remembered John Ransom after two years. Forehand admitted he would have forgotten, except for one thing. Instead of paying the five-dollar fare, Ransom pulled a wad of money from his pocket.
“He gave me two one-hundred-dollar bills,” Forehand swore. “I said, ‘Do you know what you have given me?’ He said, ‘Yes, you ain’t never seen me before.’
“I told him, that’s fine. As a cab driver, what else am I going to say to him? I’m not going to stand there and argue with the man. A two-hundred-dollar tip is a big tip in a taxicab. It is something you don’t ever forget.”1
Forehand offered to take a lie detector test to prove his truthfulness, but prosecutors never placed much stock in his story. They feared that personal concerns might have motivated Forehand to try to become invaluable to the police. But the real problem was that Cook, Bell, and Kent McDaniel found his story nonsensical. Who would believe Ransom could be so stupid?
* * *
An Angola guard, Marlene Hunter, surfaced next, describing a bizarre incident in late March 1987 allegedly involving Pete Halat. Hunter was fearful and reluctant about coming forward. She had suffered a series of home break-ins and threats since the incident. But she finally pulled aside Randy Cook during one of his trips to Angola and told him about it. At least at first, her story seemed to represent devastating evidence against the Biloxi mayor.
Hunter claimed she was on duty in the section of the prison where Nix was incarcerated on March 26, 1987, when a man approached her who identified himself as Peter Halat. He presented a bar association identification card, then asked to see Nix. Hunter found this odd, because no attorney-client visit had been scheduled. Normally, attorneys did not come directly to the prison housing areas to meet clients. But she said it would be okay—if he signed the visitation logbook.
“I’m an attorney and I don’t have to sign,” he replied, according to Hunter.
“Then you can’t enter.”
Agitated, the man who said he was Pete Halat grabbed the book, turned to the back, and signed on a page designated for a much later date, Hunter told Cook. She let him pass and he stayed with Nix for about an hour. Later, she realized he not only signed in the wrong place, but had used a phony name. More than two years later she saw Halat giving his post-Fabian press conferences and heard him deny visiting Angola in March 1987.
“I knew he was lying,” Hunter told Cook.
Cook and Bell thought they had a witness that would utterly discredit Halat. But the investigators’ elation soon faded when Angola officials dug out a three-year-old log book and Hunter pointed out the signature she said Halat put down in the back. The signature turned out to be from a legitimate visitor and not in Halat’s handwriting. Hunter’s insistence that this was the signature she remembered destroyed her credibility as a witness. If she couldn’t remember the signature, how could they be sure she remembered Halat correctly?
Their trips to Angola always seemed to end in frustration, leaving little to show for the effort. What the investigators really wanted was a clean witness, someone outside the sullen, what’s-in-it-for-me world of Angola. They would fantasize about it during their long drives, the one honest witness that would convince Kent McDaniel—and perhaps themselves—that the case wasn’t hopeless.
The odd thing about it was, they finally found such a witness—at Angola. They had gone to the warden’s office, combing through the telephone logs, compiling information on Halat’s endless contacts with Nix.
They also found the name of another attorney, another frequent caller to Nix: Beau Ann Williams, Nix’s cousin in Oklahoma City. And with her, the case finally seemed to come together. She became the outside witness they had sought.
* * *
Beau Ann Williams provided a string of seemingly damning revelations in the case, first to Cook and Bell, then before the grand jury in Jackson where they rushed her after their interview.
First she recounted an odd telephone call she received in September 1987 from her cousin, in which he described in detail the Sherry murder scene, right down to Margaret holding something in her hand when her body was found—her earring. Nix told Beau Ann the killer had been welcomed as a friend, a telling bit of insider knowledge.
The call, as far as Williams could tell from her phone bills, came on September 15, 1987. That was one day after the murders—and one day before the bodies were found.
Williams also described her encounter with Mike Gillich in March 1989, the same night the Biloxi police first interrogated LaRa Sharpe. “He said . . . LaRa is talking to them and she is telling them everything. You have got to get word to Kirk.” To Cook and Bell, this showed Gillich’s consciousness of guilt—innocent men don’t need to issue or receive such warnings.
Williams recalled being badly frightened by Gillich, who treated her like a confidante, “like I was one of them and I was to be entrusted with anything.” Clearly, she said, Gillich feared LaRa would reveal his and Nix’s involvement in murder. That’s why he felt such urgency, Williams said.
Beau Ann also recalled her cousin’s response to the message from Gillich about LaRa informing on him: “She wouldn’t do that. She has kids.”
“I took that to mean—and I took it to heart—that her kids’ safety was in jeopardy if she talked.”
Williams had firsthand knowledge of Nix’s habit of threatening families and children. The two cousins had a falling out over the Meagan Nix malpractice suit—Williams won a half-million-dollar settlement to compensate the baby’s birth defects, but Nix considered her fee too large. He also criticized her handling of custody arrangements for Meagan while Kellye was jailed. When Williams disagreed, he responded by threatening Beau Ann’s daughter, Brook.
“How would you feel,” Nix told her in one call, “if Brook all of a sudden one day could not walk or talk or function in this world. . . . That is a very real possibility.”
Later, Nix made another threat: She had to follow orders, or Kellye would implicate her in the homosexual scam and the Sherry murders, using Beau Ann’s phone calls and visits to Nix to concoct a story against her.
“My response to him,” Williams said, “was ‘Eat shit and die.’ ”
Finally, Williams related a troubling conversation she had with one of Nix’s scammers—the testimony Cook and Bell had been hoping for.
In February 1989, she traveled South to work on the malpractice case. Former Angola inmate Arthur Mitchell, a scam partner of Nix’s on both sides of the prison fence, had picked up Beau Ann at the New Orleans airport. He proudly told her he served as “Kirk’s legs.”
While they waited for a rental car, the subject of Pete Halat came up. He was working with Williams at that time on the malpractice case, at Nix’s insistence. Mitchell told Beau Ann that there was “heat” on Halat, which Williams took to mean the police were investigating him.
“Well, I know Pete is denying responsibility for Sherry’s murder,” Williams recalled Mitchell saying. “But in a way, he is responsible . . . because he is the one that got him involved in all of this. When Judge Sherry wanted out, he couldn’t get out, and Pete could not protect him.”
Beau Ann drew the same conclusion from this as Cook and Bell. “My impression was that Pete had some prior knowledge that the Sherrys were going to be murdered. . . . I believed that Kirk and Peter Halat were involved in something financial that got Judge Sherry murdered.”
After that conversation with Mitchell, she stopped working with Halat on the malpractice case, she said. She even mentioned her concerns at the time to another lawyer involved in the malpractice case, who had since been elevated to the Mississippi Supreme Court.
To Cook and Bell, Beau Ann Williams seemed a godsend. She was a respected lawyer, with nothing to do with scams or plots, related by blood, not by choice, to Kirksey Nix. She was well spoken, well groomed, attractive—something that could not be said about most of their witnesses. And if Arthur Mitchell backed her up, Cook and Bell reported to the U.S. Attorney, their case would be close to complete.2
* * *
Arthur Mitchell would be the last Angola inmate to make Randy Cook and Keith Bell’s list. A three-time loser with a string of armed robbery convictions and a substantial amount of his adult life invested in Angola, Mitchell unabashedly admitted that he considered Kirksey Nix a genius, his personal mentor. And he did, indeed, spin an interesting tale—once Cook and Bell made it clear he would go down on scam charges himself unless he cooperated. The threat carried added weight because Mitchell was out on parole at the time, and wanting to stay that way. But his story was not exactly what Cook and Bell had hoped for.
It began promisingly enough: One day in early to mid-1987, Kirksey Nix left their camp at Angola for an attorney-client visit, telling Mitchell on his way out that his scam-financed release finally was at hand. The visit, Mitchell said, was either with Halat or someone conveying a message from Halat. A few hours later, though, Nix returned bitter and angry.
“I just found out all that money I’ve been putting away for my pardon is gone,” Nix announced. “Misplaced. Missing.”
By Mitchell’s estimate, Nix by that time had entrusted somewhere between two hundred and two hundred fifty thousand dollars in scam money to Pete Halat for the purpose of getting Nix out of prison, supposedly with Judge Sherry’s help. Mitchell thought Nix would have both Sherry and Halat killed immediately.
Mitchell’s story had all the right elements: He provided a logical motive for murder, he had Pete Halat involved with payoffs and scam money, and he had Vince in a position to be blamed when the money vanished. Mitchell even recalled Nix complaining bitterly about Margaret Sherry, calling her a “moral crusader” who irked Nix with her threats to shut down Mike Gillich. She posed a “delicate problem” that had to be “handled carefully,” Mitchell said.
But from there, the contradictions began. Despite providing the setup for accusing Nix of murder, Mitchell swore his criminal mentor did not kill the Sherrys. Nix thought Vince would help him, Mitchell said, and he never stopped dealing with Halat, even after the money was lost. Mitchell never understood why Nix trusted Halat, but he did. Mitchell said Nix even sent him to meet Halat outside the Golden Nugget in Biloxi in 1988 so he could deliver a thousand dollars to the lawyer, with the promise of one hundred times that if he could engineer Nix’s release. No matter how hard Cook and Bell pressed, Mitchell insisted Nix did not have the Sherrys killed.
Yet he admitted making the statement Beau Ann Williams recalled—that Halat got Sherry involved in the scams in some way, then was unable to protect the judge, leading to his murder. This statement implied Mitchell knew who had the Sherrys killed—and why. But he would say no more.
In an odd way, Cook and Bell felt his insistence on Nix’s innocence made Mitchell more believable. If he were lying, he could have given them Nix and Halat on a platter, telling the investigators whatever they wanted to hear. The truth is always messier, though—Mitchell provided key testimony, especially coupled with Beau Ann Williams’s, but he didn’t solve the case for them.
“I don’t know who did it,” Mitchell later told the grand jury. “I know . . . Halat has political aspirations to the extent that you can’t understand. He is determined to be in high politics. People, you know—people do things for power that they won’t do for money. If given a choice of winning the sweepstakes, that ten-million-dollar foolishness they have at Publishers Clearing House—if given a choice of winning that, or being governor, perhaps he would prefer being governor. Power is something.”3