The trial convened in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on September 30, 1991, four years and fourteen days after the bodies of Vincent and Margaret Sherry were discovered.
The small federal courthouse in Hattiesburg’s modest downtown overflowed with members of the press and public, gripped by that same sort of sweaty excitement that permeates casino floors and race courses. Snack vendors set up shop on the sidewalk as if catering to a sporting event. Mobil television studios towered at the curb, microphone-toting reporters rehearsing lines for live broadcasts from the courthouse steps.
Inside the darkly paneled courtroom of U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering, the defendants assembled one by one, Mike Gillich uncustomarily wearing a tie and jacket, John Ransom looking reedy and lost inside his own ill-fitting khaki leisure suit, and LaRa Sharpe sweeping into the courtroom in sunglasses, flowing white-blond hair, and her prim Sunday best, smiling and waving at the reporters. And Kirksey Nix, who had traded his prison whites for a striped shirt, red suspenders, and a bright, wide tie, was positively boisterous, mugging for the reporters, still smug and cocky, bushy eyebrows gyrating wildly, basking in the circus limelight of Mississippi’s most notorious murder case. The first time he caught sight of Lynne Sposito in the gallery, Nix mouthed the words, It’s not me. She grabbed Becky Field’s hand so tightly when she saw this, Becky winced, but Lynne made no outward sign of recognition toward Nix, staring stonily through him, willing herself to ignore those fleshy lips hurling silent pleas in her direction.
Security precautions were unusually intense, with marshals posted on either side of the defendants’ table, the courtroom protected by guards and a double battery of metal detectors. Attempted escapes, and attempts to kill the accused, were both feared, Lynne was told. The marshals’ eyes never stopped scanning the courtroom and crowd, passing over her just as coldly as anyone else, as if she might pose a threat.
While awaiting the judge’s opening gavel, the men, women, and children crowded together noisily in the hallway outside the courtroom, a mix of witnesses, attorneys, and supporters of the accused, mingling with ordinary citizens drawn to the courthouse in their free time. Together they formed a gauntlet through which everyone entering the courtroom had to pass, each witness, attorney, and spectator enduring furtive inspection and commentary. “Is he somebody?” was a common question hissed anonymously in the hall. As Lynne walked through the double doors of the courtroom, she could hear someone whisper knowledgeably, “That one in the red dress, she’s one of the daughters.”
It seemed everyone expected a dramatic resolution to the long-drawn-out case. It had captured the entire state’s attention. At last, it seemed, a solution to the mystery of the Sherry murders was at hand.
But at the prosecution table, queasy stomachs and shaken confidence prevailed. The intense news coverage and unrealistically high expectations about the case made the prosecutors nervous because they felt no one understood what was really about to happen. The headlines kept screaming SHERRY MURDER TRIAL, but the prosecutors had no intention of even mentioning to jurors what happened inside the Sherry house on the day of the killings. They just wanted to talk about plots and conspiracies that may or may not have moved forward, meetings held a month or more before the murders. Their case was supposed to end there, dry and simple. But the press didn’t seem to get it, and now the prosecutors wondered: Would the jury be equally confused, dissatisfied by a conspiracy in which the juicy details of murder were never discussed?
Problems with the prosecution’s case had started long before—shortly after the grand jury issued its indictment. With few attorneys confident it could be won, the case had been passed around the U.S. Attorney’s Office like an unwelcome relative. The veteran prosecutor James Tucker, who drew up the indictments, ended up not trying the case—as Lynne Sposito had been promised he would. A new team was assigned less than a month before trial, capable attorneys who nevertheless seemed unfamiliar with large blocks of evidence gathered by Randy Cook and Keith Bell.
Peter Barrett, a short, stout fighter renowned for his vigorous hand gestures and explosive, red-faced outbursts in court, had been pulled from the U.S. Attorney’s Biloxi office and teamed with Al Jernigan, an experienced trial attorney with a quiet, jovial manner that offset Barrett’s mercurial temper. They were dedicated to the case—Barrett, in particular, was one of the few attorneys in his office who seemed to be sure of victory—but they had to cram for the trial like students on a term paper. Lynne worried they had too little time to prepare adequately. Too often, in helping them with the witness list in the weeks before trial, Lynne had realized she knew things about the case that they didn’t.
And it showed, once the bailiff silenced the courtroom with a bellowed command for order and Judge Pickering took the bench, instructing the attorneys to begin their opening statements. From the outset, the prosecutors seemed to be on the defensive, apologizing to the jury for their case’s shortcomings even before they started presenting evidence. Barrett’s opening remarks, in which he was supposed to forcefully preview their case, capturing the interest and curiosity of the jury, instead left jurors looking vaguely perplexed. Influenced perhaps by press coverage of the case, Barrett spent much of his time explaining what he wouldn’t be able to prove.
“It’s so very important for you to know what this case isn’t about,” Barrett told the jury, “because this case isn’t about who pulled the trigger. It’s not about who shot Vincent Sherry in the head. It’s not about who shot Margaret Sherry in the head on September 14, 1987.
“. . . There aren’t going to be any silver bullets in this case. There aren’t going to be any smoking guns in this case. You’re not going to hear any of these defendants say on tape that he or she did all the things they are charged with.”
The list of what the case wasn’t went on for much of his presentation, followed by a confusing attempt to explain Nix’s complex scam and its tenuous ties to the conspiracy to murder the Sherrys. Barrett closed, then, with a promise to the jurors, but even that was tinged with a qualifier: “It’s going to be clear,” he said. “And it’s going to be close.”
Not so, the battery of attorneys representing the four defendants told the jury, pouncing immediately on Barrett’s soft pitch, showing all the confidence and certainty the prosecution seemed to lack. One by one, lawyers for each of the defendants rose in counterpoint before the jury, outlining their basic trial strategy, the same line Kirksey Nix had taken in his earlier televised interviews: The government’s witnesses were liars all, more corrupt and venal than any of the defendants. Bobby Fabian, Robert Hallal, and Bill Rhodes lay at the heart of the government’s case, and these admitted liars and con men knew nothing more about the murders than what they had garnered from newspapers and magazines and one another.
“You will find in this case that the scam being perpetrated here is a scam that is being run on the United States government,” began Kirksey Nix’s lead defense attorney, Jim Rose, the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s most prominent criminal lawyer. A tall, fit, marathon runner in his early fifties, Rose stood at the court’s podium, commanding attention, the epitome of righteous indignation. “. . . The witnesses who will testify for the government, each and every one of them, are looking for something. They are looking, you will find, for freedom. They are looking, you will find, for money. They are looking, you will find, for glory, or to solve what has been so far an unsolvable case. . . .
“There are no silver bullets, Mr. Barrett said. He also told you there is no smoking gun. Because there is no evidence whatsoever that those people are dead today as a result of anything these three men had to do.”
Rose then decried the prosecution’s case for sullying the image of a fine and upstanding citizen. He was not talking about Mike Gillich or LaRa Sharpe, and certainly not Kirksey Nix or John Ransom. He was talking about Vincent Sherry.
If you believe the prosecutors, Rose argued, if you conclude that Vince was killed for ripping off scam money from the killers, then you have to believe he was involved, too. That he was a criminal, like them. The problem was, no evidence supported this, he said. No one has ever been able to prove that Vince Sherry received one penny of scam money.
“It’s all a lie,” Rose said. “Every bit of it.”
Lynne winced at this unexpected proclamation. Hearing Nix’s lawyer defend her father seemed a cruel irony. Worse still, during a break, Rose approached her in the hallway, hand extended, solicitous and solemn, saying how much he had admired her father and his integrity. Lynne thanked him, barely biting back the comment she later hissed to Becky Field once Rose was out of earshot: “So why the hell are you defending the man who murdered him?” To Lynne, it seemed rank hypocrisy—though, at the same time, she remembered having the same sort of argument with her father many years before, Lynne complaining about his criminal clients, and Vince chiding that every accused man deserved a good defense. “If Dad were here,” she ruefully admitted to Becky, “he’d be taking Jim Rose’s side.”
When his turn came, LaRa Sharpe’s attorney, Michael Adelman, a soft-spoken Michigan native whose accent seemed out of place in a Mississippi courtroom, portrayed his client as a woman who made mistakes out of love for Kirksey Nix, not greed. And those mistakes ended with helping Nix with his scams, Adelman said.
“LaRa Sharpe had nothing to do with the preparation, the planning, plotting, any type of conspiracy regarding the murders of Judge Vincent and Margaret Sherry,” he declared.
Mike Gillich had a phalanx of four lawyers on his case, including his daughter, Tina, and his son-in-law and a former partner of Pete Halat, Keith Pisarich. (Tina Gillich eventually had to vacate the defense table, at Judge Pickering’s direction, though she kept passing notes up to her colleagues throughout the proceedings.) But it was Gillich’s lead counsel, Albert Necaise, the ex-district attorney, who rose up to deliver his attack on the government’s case.
Necaise had the booming, drawling persona of the prototypical Southern lawyer, Frederic March in Inherit the Wind, protecting God and country from the devilment of evolution. Here, though, his task was to take the king of nude dancing, gambling, and prostitution on Biloxi’s Strip and remake him into a God-fearing blue-collar hero whose respectable living was made in the “nightclub business,” and whose only mistake was holding money for his good friend Kirksey Nix, no questions asked.
“Mike Gillich didn’t have anything to do with bringing people, encouraging people, asking people to come to Mississippi to plan to kill Judge Vincent Sherry,” Necaise thundered. “Not . . . Vincent Sherry, a man who had represented some of his employees, a man who had sat in his place of business, a man that he knew.”
The blustering Necaise also took a shot at Rex Armistead, just in case the government decided to call him and Bobby Fabian as witnesses. As part of their strategy, the prosecutors had encouraged this impression by listing five times as many witnesses as they intended to call, including Fabian. They had yet to reveal their abandonment of him as a witness, hoping the defense lawyers would waste time preparing to confront him and his ever-changing story. Necaise bit, declaring Armistead a “bounty hunter” who, in partnership with Fabian, concocted a lie-riddled solution to an unsolvable case so he could collect a handsome fee from the Sherry family. It sounded damning as Necaise said it at the beginning of the case, but later, when no evidence to support his contentions surfaced, Gillich’s defense suffered.
Last came Rex Jones, the former county attorney appointed to represent John Ransom. With severely cut gray hair and a Clint Eastwood squint, Jones was, of all the defense attorneys, the most brief and to the point, plain talking without theatrics or artifice. His task was to show someone other than Ransom had murdered the Sherrys—namely, the driver of the yellow Ford the night of the killings. Lynne Sposito’s initial detective work in the case came back to haunt her here, as the defense sought to use it as proof to foil the prosecution. No way could that large bearded man spotted in the car that night be John Ransom, Jones said, looking toward his client. Everyone on the jury turned and saw the razor thin, balding man sitting in his leisure suit—“a wore out old man,” as Jones described him. They had to wonder, why was the only talk about eyewitnesses to the murder coming from the defense?
Jones had another challenge for the prosecution, and again it harkened to something Lynne had done: the picture frame Sheri the psychic had helped her find, with the bloody smudges on it. It turned out that investigators had found a fingerprint on that frame that did not belong to Vince, Margaret, or any member of their family. That print had never been identified, Jones said, and it quite possibly belonged to the killer.
“And the proof in this case will show,” Jones said, “by the FBI’s own records, that John Ransom’s fingerprint was not on there.”
That meant someone else killed the Sherrys, Jones argued, hoping the jurors would agree, then disregard the law—which said conspirators in a murder plot could be found guilty even if the conspiracy failed and someone else did the killing. Jones believed the jury would never convict if it believed the real killers remained free.
Lynne felt her stomach begin a slow roll. Jones’s remarks were the only ones that really upset her. The idea that her attempts to move the case forward could be used to aid the suspects galled her. She thought the prosecutors should try to stop this tactic, but they hadn’t said a word.
“Isn’t all that irrelevant, George?” she asked George Phillips. “I thought the case stopped before the murder, that just the conspiracy was being proved. Now they’re trying to prove someone else did the murder.”
“Yeah,” Phillips said, the grin on his face surprising Lynne. “Isn’t it great?”
The defense had walked into a trap, he and his prosecutors believed. It wouldn’t become apparent until the trial nearly ended—if at all. But early on, those comments by Rex Jones gave the prosecutors their first glimmer of hope.1