September 2009
The bitterness lingered in Biloxi well into the new century, even as the town tried to forget, to embrace its future as a glittering hub for casinos and new wealth. There was a new power in town, the gambling industry, gleaming, respectable and brimming with jobs and money for the Gulf Coast, against which the old bravado and brutality of the Dixie Mafia had little power or place. Yet the endless and increasingly futile appeals filed by Pete Halat and Kirksey Nix kept prodding the story of the Sherry murders back into the headlines, fueling a divide that never seemed to heal.
Then the forces of nature erased what human nature could not. Hurricane Katrina struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August 2005 with wind speeds as high as 125 miles an hour and a twenty-eight-foot ocean storm surge that swept through Biloxi and surrounding towns like a tsunami. The storm blasted away whole neighborhoods and tossed the enormous dockside casinos inland in awful mockery of a dice roll. Americans tend to remember the terrible toll inflicted on New Orleans whenever Hurricane Katrina is mentioned, but the Mississippi Gulf Coast suffered similarly epic devastation, with tens of thousands left homeless and more than $30 billion in property damage.
Nothing unites a community faster than shared tragedy and the outpouring of generosity that so often follows. Biloxi focused its collective energies first on survival, then on cooperation and recovery. The old wounds of the Sherry case, if not healed, were pushed aside for all but family and friends, dwarfed by the scale of the Katrina disaster. Mississippi’s most sensational and protracted murder case had finally made the inevitable transition from news to legend.
When the winds died and the storm waters receded, leaving fields of debris where Biloxi homes, businesses, and landmarks once stood, no vestige of Mike Gillich’s old joints on The Strip remained. They had been splintered and scrubbed clean from the Biloxi landscape where they had so long cast their shadows.
* * *
Lynne Sposito still lives in Raleigh with her husband, Dick. She continues nursing, and remains connected to friends and contacts on the Gulf Coast. She still chats now and then with FBI agent Keith Bell, now retired, and inmate Bobby Joe Fabian, and she still keeps tabs on exactly where and how each of the convicted conspirators is imprisoned.
Lynne’s children, well into adulthood, all live relatively close by in North Carolina. Catherine is the state health department’s lactation specialist, Tom works in the structural steel business, and Beth puts her chemistry degree to work in the pharmaceutical industry. Both daughters have small children, and nothing has grounded and healed Lynne more. “I love my children,” she tells them, “but the best thing about having kids is the grandkids.”
Lynne says she knows from experience that time does not heal all wounds, but the intense, almost physical pain that once accompanied thoughts of her parents and their fate has faded, replaced by a more wistful sense of loss:
“There are days I don’t even think about it now. And then I’ll look at the grandkids and think, oh my god, what fun Mom and Dad would have had with them. It still lays me low then.”
* * *
John Ransom, the lean and fearsome one-legged hit man, was released from prison in November 2003 at age seventy-six, ill and broken. The conspirator in the Sherry killings, who supplied the silenced murder weapon and who was once thought to be the triggerman, died in his home in Smyrna, Georgia, on February 4, 2006.
Thomas “The Thumb” Holcomb, the triggerman in the Sherry murders, was serving a life sentence in Beaumont, Texas, when he died in prison April 8, 2005. He was fifty-two.
Glenn Cook, the ex-cop and manager of Gillich strip clubs, who test-fired the gun and delivered the contract killer’s $20,000, was released from prison after sixteen years in June 2008. The sixty-six-year old was re-arrested a few days later for violating his release conditions by returning to Mississippi.
Sheri LaRa Sharpe was released from a federal prison in Florida in June 2002.
Pete Halat has lost all of his appeals to date. The U.S. Supreme Court twice refused to hear his claims, most recently in April 2006. He is scheduled to be released from federal prison in April 2013. He will be 70 years old that year.
Kirsksey McCord Nix Jr. remains in federal custody in the Sherry case and under a Louisiana state sentence of life without parole. He is housed at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois, where he is supposed to have monitored access to phones and computers because of his history of scamming and running criminal conspiracies from behind prison bars. He still manages to e-mail reporters and has a Facebook page. More than two decades after the Sherry killings, the sixty-five-year-old lifer is still maintaining his innocence and still filing appeals. The most recent was rejected in March 2009 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mike Gillich was released from custody in July 2000, nine years into his twenty-year sentence. He returned to the Gulf Coast and married his old flame, Frances.