By early 1991, Randy Cook and Keith Bell felt they had gone as far as they could. They believed they knew who had conspired to kill the Sherrys, if not who pulled the trigger. There were a limited number of people who could provide that crucial information, who could say with certainty what happened inside the home of Vincent and Margaret Sherry on the night of September 14, 1987—and Cook and Bell had tried talking to them all. Absent some unexpected break or surprise witness—the getaway driver or gunman Ransom ended up hiring, if any—they had nowhere else to turn.
“We’re one statement away from solving this thing once and for all,” Cook observed. “That was true the day we talked to Fabian, and it’s true today. We need someone who knows what happened inside that house. And we don’t have him. . . . Or her.”
And with that gloomy pronouncement, the prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Jackson found themselves left to puzzle out what to do with thousands of pages of reports and transcripts accumulated in a year and a half of questions and answers, lies and evasions. How, they kept asking themselves, do you charge a murder you can’t prove?
First Assistant Kent McDaniel gave his boss this assessment: Cook and Bell had done a remarkable job amassing a huge body of evidence to prove the scams, and a modest amount of evidence to show who conspired to kill the Sherrys. But despite their best efforts, they had not proved any of the conspirators actually carried out the murder. Bob Hallal could have gone home after his meeting at the Golden Nugget, and Kirksey Nix, John Ransom, and Mike Gillich might have said, Let’s forget the whole thing. Someone else could have killed the Sherrys.
They would be forced to bring a conspiracy case into court, McDaniel said, without any evidence of the actual murder. It would be legally permissible, but it was almost never done because the concept would be so alien to jurors: They would be asked to convict the suspects of conspiracy, even if they weren’t sure who did the murdering. McDaniel wasn’t even sure the grand jury—which traditionally rubber-stamps indictments requested by prosecutors—would buy this one. And if that was in doubt, how could they expect to persuade a trial jury, where the burden of proof would be so much greater?
“It certainly is a mess,” U.S. Attorney George Phillips agreed. “Bound to give ulcers to whoever has to work with it.”
But Phillips was not yet willing to pull the plug on the case. Too much energy and pain had been invested in it to stop now, he told his assistant. “Let’s give it to Tucker. If anyone can pull it together, he can.”
* * *
Thin and slightly rumpled, even when wearing freshly pressed pants and shirt, James B. Tucker had the droopy look of a basset and the deeply resonant voice of a born storyteller—qualities that helped camouflage the cutthroat instincts all good trial attorneys must possess.
Tucker was Phillips’s top prosecutor, the chief of his criminal division, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Justice Department. Tucker had been involved in every major prosecutorial success in the office in recent years, as well as its biggest loss, the prosecution and exoneration of Gerald Blessey. Now he would have to try to close out one of the state’s longest grand jury investigations ever, one that had received intense public scrutiny and that had generated enormous expectations for solving the Sherry murders.
Starting in the spring of 1991, Tucker spent the better part of a month locked in his office for eight, ten, sometimes twelve hours a day with a blizzard of paperwork from the case—computerized FBI summaries, police reports, grand jury transcripts, witness statements, legal pads scrawled with notes. He lugged bulging briefcases home with him at night, spewing the stuff on coffee tables and nightstands. Finally, he began writing a series of alternative proposed indictments for grand jurors’ eventual consideration—putting together different charges, different statutes, different sets of defendants. Some left out the mayor of Biloxi, others included him as a defendant. Still others left out Mike Gillich or John Ransom, while others alleged scam charges against everyone, but murder-related conspiracies against only a few of the suspects.1
The problem Tucker kept running into was firmly tying the scam to the murders. Charging them in separate counts wouldn’t work—the trial judge could easily decide that evidence about the scams was irrelevant to the murder case, and vice versa. If that happened, Tucker felt he had no chance to convict. But that problem evaporated if he could craft an indictment that made both the scam and the murder part of one massive conspiracy—a plot whose object was to defraud people of money to buy Kirksey Nix’s way out of prison, and which led to a murder plot against the Sherrys when the buy-out money vanished. By charging such a dual conspiracy in one count of the indictment, even marginal evidence of involvement in the murder plot would convict a suspect—so long as the evidence of scamming remained strong.
There was a risk, though: Such an unusual indictment might be ruled illegal by an unfriendly judge or appeals court—and the whole case could be thrown out of court, perhaps for good. Still, Tucker became convinced this was their only shot at victory.2
One key element seemed to be missing, however: John Ransom. For Tucker’s approach to work, everyone named in the indictment had to be linked to both the scam and the murder plot. Cook and Bell had brought in plenty of testimony putting Ransom in the middle of the murder plans. But in searching through the reams of material the investigators had put together on the supposed trigger man, Tucker could find no usable testimony placing Ransom in the scam—other than Ransom’s admissions, which he was barred from using by agreement, and Bobby Joe Fabian’s word, which was useless.
“You need to get me some proof Ransom was involved in the scam,” Tucker told Cook and Bell during a strategy meeting a few months before the grand jury’s expiration deadline. “If Fabian’s telling the truth about that, there must be someone else who can swear to it.”
The request led Cook and Bell on one of the oddest episodes in the case, a fittingly bizarre ending to their investigation. Fabian once told them Ransom had help in the Atlanta area, someone who had made scam pickups for him, fetching money orders from Western Union. Fabian even claimed to have talked to the woman, but he only knew her first name: Peggy, but with an unusual spelling.
A measly lead at best, but they had to try to check it. Randy Cook dialed the Atlanta Police Department vice squad, then told the first detective he could get on the phone, “I’m looking for someone named Peggy and she spells her name funny.” He felt silly—it was an impossible request.
Yet, without a moment’s hesitation, the cop in Atlanta replied, “Oh, you mean Pegi Williams. P-E-G-I.”
Cook could do little more than sputter. He had called a big-city police department with tens of thousands of suspects every year, and on the first try, he scored—just because Pegi Williams spells her first name a bit unusually.
“Yeah,” the Atlanta detective continued. “I’m working two cases involving her. You want me to have her call you?”
Nothing had ever come so easily in this case. “Sure, have her call me. That would be great,” he said, not believing for an instant he would ever hear from P-E-G-I Williams. It was too good to be true.
An hour later, at three o’clock on a slow Friday afternoon, the phone on Cook’s file-strewn desk rang, and the long-distance operator asked him if he’d accept a collect call from Pegi Williams.
Surprised again, yet still figuring this would be a useless exercise, Cook took the call, then explained that he was investigating the Sherry murders in Biloxi, that John Ransom was a suspect, and that he was contacting her because he had learned she knew Ransom. When he finished, Williams remained silent. “You there?” Cook finally asked.
“Yes,” the woman replied, saying nothing more. She sounded wary and tough, her response bitten off and spit out like a wad of tobacco. Cook decided to try to bluff her a bit—what did he have to lose?
“You picked up a bunch of money orders for John Ransom, didn’t you?” he asked, not knowing if this was true or not, relying upon Fabian’s dubious word.
“Yes,” she said again, that same hard, monosyllabic reply—which, nevertheless, floored Cook.
“Yeah, a couple times a day, six days a week,” Pegi confessed morosely. “I’ve been dreading getting a call like this for years.”
“Wait a minute,” Cook said, cutting her off, trying not to shout. He put her on hold and reached Keith Bell at his office on a three-way call. “You gotta listen to this.”
And with the two partners listening raptly on the line, Pegi Williams told them about scamming with John Ransom. Williams’s husband, an ex-con, an old friend of Ransom’s, and a printer by trade, had introduced Ransom to her sometime in 1985 or 1986. Ransom asked Pegi if she’d like to make some extra money—all she had to do was go to Western Union offices in the Atlanta area, pick up cash wired in her name, and give it to him. She could keep ten percent of everything she picked up.
“I said sure,” Williams told Cook and Bell. She was a manicurist and a nude dancer at the time, and could always use a few extra bucks. “I didn’t know where the money was coming from—I didn’t know anything about any sex scam—but I can’t say I wouldn’t have done it anyway. It was easy money. I just never asked.”
Six times a week, two, even three times a day, Pegi would go to Western Union to pick up the cash. She paid no attention to who sent the money—the less she knew, the better. Ransom would come to her apartment and pick it up later the same day. She said she did this for about two months. Usually, Ransom would tell her when to get the money. Now and then, though, she would get phone calls from people she knew only as “Junior” or “Bobby” who would tell her amounts and times to pick up the money.
Then one day, the amount Pegi picked up turned out to be less than Ransom anticipated. When he counted the cash and found it short, Ransom threatened her, accusing Pegi of stealing. At first she was more incensed than anything. But when she complained to her husband, he warned her not to make Ransom angry. “Don’t mess with him. I did time with that man, and he is cold-blooded and dangerous. He’d kill you in a heartbeat,” Pegi recalled her husband saying.
Pegi stopped making pickups after that, and she steered clear of John Ransom whenever she could. He still came around to visit her husband, however.
When she finished describing her role in the scam, Cook and Bell realized they had what they needed—a witness that put Ransom in the scam. The method of money pickups was unmistakable, and the calls from “Junior” and “Bobby” cinched it. Who else could it be but Junior Nix and Bobby Joe Fabian? And who else but someone involved would know Nix’s nickname? Pegi put the scam money directly into Ransom’s hands, just as Tucker had asked. Cook and Bell started talking about having her fly out that weekend to make the next session of the grand jury. But then she blurted out something else that at first made them doubt her sanity:
“And another thing, that sonofabitch ruined every phone book I ever had.”
That quizzical remark brought the conversation to a standstill. “What do you mean?” Bell finally asked.
“I mean, he shot them full of holes out in back of our house. Uzis, machine guns, he’d test them out on our phone books. One time, he had a pistol with a silencer. An automatic. I watched him fire it.”
Cook and Bell had stumbled onto an unexpected jackpot. One of them asked, “When would that have been? You seeing him with a silenced automatic?”
“Sometime after I stopped picking up the money. In 1986, I think,” Pegi said. “Around then.”
1986: The same year John Ransom delivered “Wilbur” to LaRa Sharpe at Kirksey Nix’s request.
* * *
Pegi Williams’s testimony before the grand jury the following Monday completed the conspiracy, at least so far as James Tucker envisioned it. She was not the last witness grand jurors would hear—she was just the last one to add anything substantial to the case.
After Pegi, the case came down to asking for an indictment, or starting over. The grand jury was about to expire. The statute of limitations on some of the scam allegations would soon lapse. By May 1991, it was indict or go home.
Even with the new witness, Kent McDaniel, James Tucker, and other prosecutors in the office voted for the latter. Keith Bell and Randy Cook pushed for indictments. U.S. Attorney George Phillips wanted to consider one more point of view before making a decision.
“I believe in Keith and Randy,” Lynne Sposito told Phillips when he called to ask her opinion. “They’ve worked on this for a long time, and they would never want to do anything that would endanger the case. If they say it’s ready, I’ve got to believe them.”
She wanted everyone charged, if possible, Pete Halat more than anyone. For herself, for her family, for the city of Biloxi, some sort of outcome had to be reached, she said. “We can’t just let it slip away. We can’t just throw up our hands and say, We give up. You murderers get away with it this time.”
She remained calm and reasoned, but Lynne wanted to shout, Go forward, take a chance, go for broke. She couldn’t, though. Phillips had no legal or ethical obligation to consult her, and she was lucky he even extended her that courtesy. They had acknowledged her contribution to the case, what Phillips called her “grit and determination,” and Lynne appreciated this. It had not always been so: At their first meeting, Phillips had accused Lynne of threatening his job with her constant lobbying in Washington, which had produced some pointed calls to his office from congressmen curious about delays in the case.
“I’m not threatening your job,” Lynne had shot back. “I just want you to do your job.”
Now, though, she made herself stay calm. “I think you should take a safe course, file it however you have to so you’ll have the best chance of winning. But you’ve got to do something. It’s been so long. There has to be an ending to this.”
“I understand, Lynne,” Phillips said, sympathetic but not committing to anything.
“The people of Biloxi need to get past this,” Lynne continued, her voice rising, then falling to a quiet, almost desperate plea. “And so does my family.
“And so do I.”
* * *
There was one more person to hear from before Phillips made his decision. Fittingly, Pete Halat became the last witness to appear before the Sherry grand jury.
He testified for two and a half hours, accompanied by his wife and his attorney who, by law, had to wait outside the grand jury room. Afterward, he met the crush of cameras and newspeople on the courthouse steps in Jackson, once again proclaiming himself innocent and assuring the public that he would never be indicted. He did not mention his private encounter with the FBI polygraph machine, or his request to prosecutors that he be allowed to turn himself in, sans handcuffs, if he were indicted. Rather, he exuded for public display an angry confidence, just as he had for the past two years of suspicion and unproven accusation, insisting he was not a target of the grand jury that had just questioned him. He reminded all present that in America, everyone is innocent until proven otherwise, and therefore he was an innocent man.
“I can die right now and go before my maker, and I’m satisfied that I’ve told the truth about this case, which is something that can’t be said for a lot of other people who testified.”
The next day, May 15, 1991, Keith Bell and Randy Cook made the three-hour drive to Jackson, leaving the Coast before daybreak. They had prepared a summary of their entire investigation for the grand jury, recapping the highlights of the 117 witnesses who testified, starting back in August 1989 with Bobby Joe Fabian.
When the grand jury left for its lunch break, McDaniel and Tucker emerged looking glum, worrying that they might get a “no bill” vote—a refusal by the grand jurors to return an indictment. Cook and Bell had holed up in the tiny witness room next to the grand jury chamber, excluded from the discussions in which no one could participate but jurors, prosecutors, and, when summoned, witnesses.
“We still don’t think you’ve got a case,” McDaniel told Cook and Bell. “We may not ask them to vote.”
“At this point,” Cook pleaded, “let’s let the system do its thing. Let them vote. If they say no bill, I’ll go home.”
McDaniel and Tucker remained unconvinced. They returned to their office and tinkered with the proposed indictments one more time, putting in one defendant, taking out another, all at the last minute. They finally settled on the version they thought would give them the best shot at victory. Then they went to Phillips with it. They handed it over, then gave him their recommendation: Hold off. They wanted to wait until they had enough evidence to be sure.
To their surprise, Phillips shook his head. “It’s too late to turn back now. I think we’ve got enough to win,” he told them simply. “Let’s give it a shot, and see how it turns out.”3
It turned out that the grand jurors found the case more convincing than the prosecutors had thought. Without a dissenting vote, they returned the indictment James Tucker and Kent McDaniel had brought before them: one count alleging Tucker’s massive scam and murder conspiracy, another charging wire fraud, and two counts of traveling in interstate commerce with the intent of committing murder for hire.
The last two counts were a particularly ingenious creation of Tucker’s because they required no proof that the Sherry murders even occurred—only that people crossed state lines to discuss murder for hire. It was tailor-made for the limited evidence in hand.
Cook and Bell were ecstatic at the news, though they could tell no one, not even Lynne. The indictments were sealed by court order until arrest warrants could be served on those charged.
But word that some sort of indictment in the Sherry case had been handed down spread through the courthouse, then the state, fueled by speculation that the mayor of Biloxi might be charged. Lynne Sposito got a call within minutes of the vote—a simple, declarative sentence from Kent McDaniel.
“Well, you got your indictment, Lynne.”
It was the moment she had been awaiting for almost four years. Someone finally was going to have to answer for striding into her parents’ home and snuffing out their lives. Someone was going to have to pay for ruining her family. Dick and the children stood with her in the kitchen in Raleigh, watching, waiting. They had been certain she’d want to celebrate if good news came, but Lynne found she felt none of the relief she had long anticipated.
“We’ve still got to convict them,” she said grimly as she hung up the phone, and any thoughts of celebration in the Sposito house vanished.
If anything, the uncertainty about exactly who and what had been charged in the still-secret indictment left her more anxious than ever. McDaniel wouldn’t give her any details, and she could only wonder what would happen next. She was glad they hadn’t dropped the case, certainly. But somehow she suspected that this long-awaited indictment would turn out to be less than a total victory.
Lynne was soon proved right. A few days later, with the indictment unsealed at a packed press conference, she had to try to hide her disappointment as reporters began calling her house for comment on its surprising—and confusing—contents.
Four people were charged: Kirksey Nix, Mike Gillich, John Ransom, and LaRa Sharpe. Pete Halat was not indicted. To Lynne, his absence from the case was a crushing blow, though she was not entirely surprised.
In the end, Phillips and his prosecutors decided, their best chance of winning was to keep Halat away from the defendants’ table, where his reputation and standing might make a strong argument for acquittal—not only for himself, but for all the defendants. They felt certain evidence against Halat was lacking; what they did have would be held in reserve while the hunt for new witnesses continued.4 The proposed indictments penned by Tucker that had named Halat got filed away, souvenirs that would never see daylight.
Their reasoning might have made sense inside the prosecutors’ strategy meetings, but the indictment confused the press and the public, which had long believed Bobby Joe Fabian and his story implicating Halat to be the centerpiece of the case. Yet the portion of the indictment dealing with murder contained not a word from Fabian’s story, focusing instead on the convict Robert Hallal’s testimony about meeting Gillich and Ransom to discuss a hit on Judge Sherry.
An even more glaring omission, one that was particularly hurtful to Lynne, was the name of Margaret Sherry. The complex, eight-page indictment didn’t even mention her—because Hallal had never mentioned her. Only the conspiracy to murder Vince was discussed. The indictment remained silent on the other alleged meeting to discuss contract murder in Biloxi in 1987—the one described by Bill Rhodes, who spoke of a plot against both Vince and Margaret. Rhodes was left out because putting his account in the indictment made no sense without charging Pete Halat.
“It’s like Mom didn’t even exist,” Lynne muttered as she read the text of the indictment, faxed to her shortly after it was unsealed. But to reporters, she forced herself to remain upbeat, to say, “There will be more charges. . . . In all honesty, I do believe that this is the beginning, not the end.”
Mayor Halat sounded a very different note. Tuesday, May 21, 1991, the day the indictment was unsealed, was his day of vindication, as he called it. He convened yet another press conference in Biloxi to announce, among other things, his intention to run for reelection. Then he excoriated the news media for its unfair treatment of him, for propounding a “preposterous and pathetic story” told by a “lying thug.” Among his opening words: “I told you so.”
“The grand jury investigating this case for the past two years did not name me because I was in no way involved in any prison scam, or the plot to murder my friends the Sherrys. That is what I told you the day you came to me with the insulting suggestion that I was somehow involved. That is what I told you for the past two years. That is what I told you last week after I testified before the grand jury. And that is—plain and simple—the truth.”
The U.S. Attorney offered no comment other than the obligatory expression of confidence in their case, whether they felt it or not. They could not tell anyone who else they had seriously considered indicting.
Even so, Pete Halat’s vindication had a bittersweet note to it. Instead of being named as a defendant, Halat became an unindicted co-conspirator. Though he would be spared the legal battle of his life, this designation meant he would have to endure continuing allegations that he participated in crimes. Without being formally charged, he nevertheless would remain a shadow defendant in the case—referred to as an alleged co-conspirator, but lacking the defendant’s constitutional right to confront his accusers. To his lasting dissatisfaction, the absence of his name on the indictment did not remove Pete Halat from suspicion.
* * *
In Raleigh, Lynne pored over the facsimile copy of the indictment, its curled pages quivering in her hands. Reporters kept calling all day. She tried to sound sensible and serious when they asked the inevitable stupid question, How do you feel?, but later, when she read the press clippings Becky sent her, she cringed at her quotes, so pompous and formal.
Why didn’t I tell them, How the hell do you think I feel? Lynne thought. These bastards killed my mom and dad and the damn indictment doesn’t even mention Mom’s name.
She felt anxious and raw, as if she had somehow failed to do something that might have added to the case, that could have made the indictment more powerful. It was so wordy and dense. It never said who actually killed Vince and Margaret. It didn’t satisfy.
After her eighth or ninth reading of the thing, after talking it over with Dick and Becky and Rex Armistead, who was still monitoring the case, still working his sources, but who had no consolation to offer, she finally got Kent McDaniel on the telephone. If she wasn’t celebrating, no one would.
“Okay,” Lynne said. “So we’ve got an indictment. Now, when does it go to trial?