The prosecutors led with their strength: the scam. They sought to discredit the defendants with a mountain of evidence showing Kirksey Nix and his cohorts had sat atop a multimillion-dollar empire of theft, fraud, and lies. Once established as professional liars, the defendants’ pleas of innocence in the murder portion of the case would carry less weight. At least that was the theory.
And so, the first day of trial brought a parade of scam victims to the stand, capped by the emotional testimony of James Dickey, the California journalist who lost seventeen thousand dollars to Nix’s fictional Eddie Johnson.
“I saw him as a young man, a boy, who was caught up in the system,” Dickey said of his expensive and futile attempt to bring “Eddie” safely to California. “I thought . . . he was being possibly sent to prison for many, many years for something he was not really guilty of. I was bound and determined to rescue him from that, and it’s my nature to be a rescuer.
“And he picked up on it. Whoever Eddie is, is very perceptive.”
Nix grinned at this backhanded compliment. His lawyer did not try hard to disprove the victims’ testimony, largely because Nix did not care if he was found guilty of scamming. He was a lifer: Why not accept blame for his scams and just fight the murder charge? Maybe the jury would blame him for the scams and free the others.
The next day, jurors met the bearded and taciturn Robert Wright, the pool repairman who served as Nix’s bagman in Biloxi. He testified about the dozens of times he fetched cash from Western Union for Nix, delivering it to LaRa, Gillich, and Pete Halat’s office in exchange for a ten percent commission.
“It was easy money,” he admitted.
He also introduced the first bit of information that suggested the defendants were planning a murder. He reiterated his grand jury testimony of a year earlier—that he had been shown a silenced .22-caliber pistol stowed in LaRa’s camera bag at Nix’s house in Ocean Springs, and that Nix asked him to test-fire it for him.
“I said no,” Wright testified. “I had just been handed a loaded weapon I have never held. It was an illegal weapon.”
But the bulk of Wright’s testimony—like many of the prosecution’s best witnesses—linked the defendants to scams, not murder. After Wright, Robbie Gant, the other scam delivery boy in Biloxi, gave testimony that put LaRa Sharpe—and the Halat and Sherry law office—in a leading role in the scam, his word backed by the FBI tape in which LaRa encouraged him to lie to authorities. But he had nothing at all to say about murders. And as the trial progressed, the contrast between the strength of the scam evidence and the ambiguities of the murder conspiracy only made matters worse for the prosecution, for it was here that some of the witnesses wavered.
Ex-Angola convict and Nix protégé Arthur Mitchell came next, the first witness who was expected to provide crucial details about the murder conspiracy. But when he was asked to describe discussions he had with Nix about the Sherrys, Mitchell looked at his friend at the defense table, then began to squirm. Lynne Sposito, sitting in the spectator area with Becky Field, saw the look on Mitchell’s face, and gripped her friend’s arm, sensing what was about to happen.
“Well, they were not really prolonged discussions,” Mitchell muttered. “I know that, many times when we walk the yard, we discuss different things, many things.” He paused, then reluctantly continued. “On one occasion, we were walking in the yard and he mentioned that, that they had been killed over here, you know, that they were discovered, killed over here.”
Previously, Mitchell had described lengthy conversations in which Nix spoke of two hundred thousand dollars in missing scam money, and of the roles Pete Halat and Judge Sherry were supposed to play in buying him out of prison—all before the murders. Now, though, Mitchell barely remembered any discussions at all, and what he remembered occurred after the murders.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Al Jernigan, who was questioning Mitchell, shuffled papers at his table, buying time. But he had no choice but to push on. He tried another angle. “Do you remember what was said by Mr. Nix about the activities of Margaret Sherry in relationship to Mr. Gillich’s business?”
Previously, Mitchell swore Nix had criticized Margaret for threatening to close Mike Gillich’s clubs on The Strip. But again Mitchell altered his story.
“Not in direct relationship to Mr. Gillich’s business,” Mitchell replied. “But to everybody’s business on The Strip. . . . She was like a moral crusader or something. She was against it.”
It was an impossible characterization, because there were no other businesses like Gillich’s on The Strip—he had the monopoly. But jurors did not know this.
Still, Mitchell’s account, diluted as it was, startled Lynne. She was sitting in a middle row of the courtroom, furiously scribbling notes, as she did for all the witnesses, notebooks quickly filling with her neatly penciled longhand. “They must have really talked about her,” she said to Becky. “That sums up Mom perfectly: She was a moral crusader.”
Then something dawned on her, a point that wasn’t really coming through in Jernigan’s questioning, something the jury probably wouldn’t notice—but which seemed suddenly clear to Lynne: “This man never met Mom,” she said to Becky, “and neither did Kirksey Nix. But they know all about her. And that means someone, Pete or Gillich or LaRa, had to have been talking to them about Mom. And why would they do that unless . . .”
“Unless they were talking about getting rid of her,” Becky finished in an excited whisper. “Lynne, that’s what the prosecutors ought to be asking.”
Lynne made a note to mention this to Peter Barrett during a break, but by the time she got to him, the trial had moved on to other points. It would be one of many frustrating moments in which Lynne wished she could stand up and start asking the questions herself.
Mitchell, meanwhile, continued his evasive ramblings, nervously deflecting questions, especially when asked about Mike Gillich or Pete Halat. Finally Judge Pickering sent the jury out so prosecutors could remind Mitchell of his previous testimony to the grand jury—and the penalty for perjury.
Chastened somewhat, Mitchell, with still obvious reluctance, then repeated most of what he had said earlier: He claimed Halat visited Nix in 1987—despite what the prison logs showed—after which Junior began complaining of the two hundred thousand dollars in scam money missing from Halat and Sherry’s safekeeping.
With that, the prosecution established part of the motive for the murder conspiracy: Nix, his scam, and his plans for freedom had been ripped off.
Pete Halat, the unindicted co-conspirator, was implicated even further when Mitchell swore he delivered a thousand dollars to the lawyer while they stood outside Mike Gillich’s nightclub one night in 1988. Mitchell said he relayed an offer from Nix to give him one hundred thousand dollars if Halat could buy his way out of prison.
But Mitchell balked when asked if Nix spoke with him about wanting the Sherrys dead before they were killed. Prison housing records suggested he and Nix had little or no opportunity to talk after the Sherry killings, so prosecutor Jernigan suggested it must have happened in advance.
“How could I discuss something like that before it happened unless—” Mitchell began to answer sarcastically, then stopped himself, spotting the trap the prosecutor had tried to lead him into.
“Well, if somebody was planning it, you could discuss it before it happened,” Jernigan suggested with mock helpfulness, followed by a chorus of objections from the defense. But the point had been made.
On cross-examination, Mitchell gamely tried to undo any damage to his friend Nix. Oddly, though, by the time he was through, Mitchell’s hostility to the prosecution, his obvious desire to help Nix rather than hurt him, ended up enhancing his credibility as a witness for the government. Everything negative Mitchell had to say about Nix seemed doubly believable, because it came so unwillingly.
Even so, his testimony fell far short of what the prosecution had hoped to elicit. Arthur Mitchell left the courtroom with the case clearly in jeopardy and the jury looking confused. Five days of trial with a half dozen witnesses had gone by, and there still was no evidence that directly proved a conspiracy to kill the Sherrys. Just scam testimony and vague innuendos. Lynne fidgeted in her seat, waiting for something substantive.
“If it keeps on like this,” Becky told her worriedly, “they’re not going to convict these people of jaywalking.”
* * *
When the time came for Nix’s wife and scam assistant, Kellye Dawn Newman Nix, to take the stand, both Lynne and the prosecutors feared she, too, would have a change of heart. It was bad enough that she was chronically unreliable. But even the stoutest-hearted person would have second thoughts after learning what happened to the previously scheduled witness.
Roy Garland, the ex-con who swore he picked up several hundred thousand dollars in scam money for Nix, was supposed to have preceded Kellye. But on the night before he was to testify, he was shot in the face with a blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Suspicions flared that the shooting was an attempt to silence one witness and intimidate the rest. But Randy Cook and Keith Bell quickly determined Garland had been shot in a domestic dispute, having been caught sleeping with someone else’s wife. Hospitalized in guarded condition, disfigured for life, Garland was dropped from the witness list, with little damage to the government’s case—he would have spoken only about scams, not murder.
But with Kellye up next, scheduled to kick off the second week of trial, anything was possible. The investigators were certain Garland’s shooting had nothing to do with the case, but rumors to the contrary were everywhere. Bell, seated at the U.S. Attorney’s table with the prosecutors, and Cook, who baby-sat Kellye all morning and escorted her into the courtroom, had been certain she would try to flee. But she surprised them. “I’m not the same person I used to be,” she told them flatly. “I’m trying to get my life back together, and I can’t do that if I run. I just have to get past this.”
And, it seemed, she really had changed. Looking well scrubbed and prim in an uncharacteristically schoolmarmish outfit, Kellye proved to be a devastatingly effective witness for the prosecution, remaining unrattled by her ex-husband’s stares or the hostile cross-examination of the defense attorneys. This time, it was Kirksey who looked uncomfortable, spending much of her testimony staring down at his hands or looking mournfully at the young woman he inexplicably still loved. It was Kellye who made it clear that their entire life together had been riddled with lies—from the time she first met him at age eight, when he was courting her mother and making Kellye his stepdaughter, to their own bogus telephone marriage arranged by Pete Halat.
“Are you still married to him?” Peter Barrett asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said, so naked a reply the prosecutor seemed at a loss for words for a moment. How many people don’t know their own marital status? “The ceremony was performed in 1982,” Kellye explained, “but Mr. Halat and Mr. Nix both lied to me.”
When asked to define her relationship with Nix—the defense sought to make Kellye out to be a vengeful gold digger who feigned love in exchange for a generous allowance—she said with simple sincerity, “I was good to him because he was very good to me and my daughter.
“He was under the impression that I would fall in love with him in time,” Kellye explained later in her testimony, again seemingly without guile, making no attempt to hide the fact that she profited from their relationship without being devoted to Nix. “That’s what he was hoping for . . . I wanted to be in love with him like he was me, but I wasn’t obsessed about him. There was a difference. That’s what he told me, anyway, that he was crazy in love with me.”
At the same time, Kellye said, Nix made her dependent on him by having Pete Halat continually bail her out of legal trouble, including the time when cocaine mailed to her by John Ransom was found to be baking powder after it was placed in a police evidence locker.
“Kirksey told me . . . that Mike Gillich and Peter Halat would take care of it, that they had friends at the police department.”
Kellye provided a richly detailed portrait of the scam, starting with the three-way calls she made for her husband, sometimes to scam victims, sometimes to John Ransom, and once to LaRa, whom she overheard discussing a “trick” in Canada who had coughed up hundreds of thousands of dollars. She told jurors how Nix bought a sophisticated computer from Gillich’s nephew that automatically put through three-way calls, enabling him to phone anywhere without the call being traced back to Angola. “It could do everything for him,” she said. “Just like a secretary.”
When asked to define Halat’s relationship with Nix, Kellye provided crucial testimony about the goal of the scam—at the same time attributing less than pure intentions to the mayor of Biloxi. “I was told by Mr. Nix that Mr. Mike and Peter Halat knew someone political that could arrange to possibly get Mr. Nix out of prison for two hundred thousand to two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”
This was perhaps Kellye’s most important statement, because it matched the testimony of Arthur Mitchell, who had reluctantly spoken of two hundred thousand dollars in “buy-out money” entrusted to Halat—the money that later “came up missing.”
Halat took another hit from Kellye, who accused him of continuing to accept money from Nix even though he knew the convict earned a living ripping off gay men.
“He just told me that I had better tell Kirksey he better leave the homosexuals alone,” Kellye swore, in describing a 1983 conversation with Halat. “One other time, I overheard him on the telephone with Mr. Nix. It was later in eighty-three. Mr. Nix had been caught with some paperwork on him, some of the supposed tricks’ numbers on him. . . . And Mr. Halat jokingly said to him, ‘Boy, I told you to leave those homosexuals alone. They are going to get you in trouble.’ And he laughed about it.”
Still, as bad as she made the defendants—and Pete Halat—look, Kellye had little to say about the Sherrys. She offered only one bit of evidence pertaining to the murder plot. While jailed in Louisiana on scam charges, Kellye had sat in on a jailhouse meeting between Nix and his old lawyer, Wayne Mancuso, who had represented him on the Corso killing two decades earlier. While Kellye watched from across the small visiting room, the two men drew a map of Biloxi’s Vieux Marche, focusing on the area directly behind the Halat and Sherry law office. They spoke in whispers—though Kellye could hear part of what was being said. Then Nix laughed, pointed to a spot and said, “That man just happened to be there that day. It was just a coincidence.”
According to Kellye, Nix had been referring to John Ransom and his encounter behind the law office with the lawyer Charles Leger, just before the Sherry murders. If Kellye was to be believed, this represented a damning admission from Nix that the contract killer was in Biloxi at the time of the murders, looking for one of his victims.
After a full day of grueling testimony, Kellye Nix finally left the stand, gratefully leaving the courtroom behind, stepping into the crowded hallway. Lynne approached her there, already reconsidering her original unflattering estimation of the young woman. Kellye was not the drug-addled, money-grubbing, selfish girl-child Lynne had expected. Lynne had been ready to heap blame on her for being part of something that ended in her parents’ death, but somehow she no longer saw Kellye that way. This woman appeared to be drug free, devoted to her daughter, anxious only for a fresh start and an escape from everything Nix represented. In her own way, Kellye seemed to be just another victim of Nix’s lies, Lynne decided. If it was an act, she thought to herself, it was a good one.
“I just wanted to thank you for coming in here and telling the truth,” she told Kellye. “I know it wasn’t easy for you.”
That was all she had wanted to say, but to Lynne’s surprise, tears began to roll down Kellye’s cheeks. Then, jostled by the people heading from the courtroom to the elevator, Kirskey Nix’s wife embraced the daughter of Vincent and Margaret Sherry.
“I’m so sorry,” Kellye whispered to Lynne, who had stiffened in surprise. “I never knew what we were doing would end with your parents dead. I never knew. I would have done something if I knew.”
As Kellye wept softly, Lynne slowly returned the embrace, hugging Kellye tight.