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It didn't take long before the life he'd so carefully crafted started to crack. In March 1990, three years after Lita's death, Sullivan got into a three-car fender bender while driving his Rolls-Royce. His driver's license had been revoked in 1989 due to more than a dozen traffic violations. Rather than dealing with the fines, he took the matter to court and said Suki had been the one driving. The traffic cop told the court that Suki wasn't even in the car.
Sullivan was convicted of two counts of perjury and sentenced to house arrest for a year, confined to his home except for "te
By this point, Suki had filed for divorce. At her divorce trial, she testified that after they got arrested for perjury, Sullivan admitted his role in Lita's death. In choppy English, she explained: "He turned the TV high. He say anybody can listen to this conversation…so he tell me he hired person to kill Lita…He said let's sell this house as soon as possible and he say, we go anywhere you want, anywhere in the world." She later told lawyers, "He mention in Georgia in countryside you can hire those people for nothing, you can do anything you want to have done."
While in jail, Sullivan got into a jailhouse scuffle with convicted robber Paul O'Brien, who broke Sullivan's nose.
In January 1992, federal agents indicted Sullivan on interstate murder-conspiracy charges in Atlanta. Sullivan spared no expense in hiring Ed Garland and Don Samuel-two of the top criminal defense lawyers in the country. The duo's long list of clients include Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, acquitted of involvement in a post-Super Bowl Buckhead bar brawl that left a man dead; Larry Gleit, CFO of the now-defunct Gold Club, who walked away with a misdemeanor charge in his federal racketeering case; and Jim Williams, protagonist in the nonfiction tale Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, acquitted of murder in his fourth trial.
The federal charge of interstate murder conspiracy, by using interstate commerce to commit murder, put the onus on the federal government to prove interstate nexus. Despite the circumstantial evidence-primarily the collect call Sullivan received the day of Lita's shooting-prosecution could never prove the content of the phone conversation. Judge Marvin Shoob dismissed the case for insufficient evidence on November 23, 1992.
Though a free man back in Palm Beach, Sullivan was reduced to riding around town on his twelve-speed Peugeot bicycle. He became reclusive, now shu
Sullivan sold the Palm Beach mansion for $3.2 million and moved to a more modest place in nearby Boynton Beach.
In 1994, the McClintons and their lawyer, Brad Moores, took Sullivan to West Palm Beach Civil Court in a "wrongful death" suit. In civil court, judgments are based on the weight of evidence, whereas in criminal court, a defendant has to be deemed guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
A few days before that case went to trial, Sullivan fired his lawyers, opting to represent himself.
"I think it was a strategic decision," says Moores. Lawyerless, saying that he lacked the funds to get proper representation, Sullivan hoped the jury would sympathize with him.
In his opening address to the jury, Sullivan pouted and said "… something else that is terrible and that is to be wrongly accused of murder, to have to live through that and with that is another form of death, another form of murder of the spirit." He added, "To be a husband and to lose your wife violently is the worst thing that can happen to a husband."
Because Sullivan represented himself, he questioned Jo A
The jury heard testimony from Suki and Paul O'Brien, the convicted robber who had broken Sullivan's nose in jail. O'Brien told the court that Sullivan confessed to arranging Lita's murder, and that the only thing he couldn't account for was the collect call made from the interstate.
It didn't take long for the jury to reach its verdict. On February 25, 1994, Sullivan was found guilty and ordered to pay the Mc-Clintons $4 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The McClintons were elated. "For us, it was never about the money," says Jo A
Sullivan, now quick to hire lawyers, appealed. Devastating to the McClintons, in 1995 the Florida Supreme Court overturned the 1994 verdict, ruling that the court case hadn't been filed soon enough. Unlike in criminal cases, where there is no statute of limitations on murder, civil court has a two-year statute for wrongful death, and those two years had long passed.
Moores counterappealed, arguing that the statue shouldn't apply when Sullivan concealed his involvement in the shooting. "You shouldn't be able to beat the system because you're clever and fraudulent," says Moores. "Finally, the Florida Supreme Court agreed with us." In 1997, the court reinstated the guilty verdict.
The decision prompted a wave of media attention. After a story about Sullivan appeared on TV's Extra, authorities got a break in early 1998. A woman in Texas, Belinda Trahan, called Atlanta police and told them she recognized Sullivan. Her ex-boyfriend, Phillip Anthony "Tony" Harwood, was the same truck driver Sullivan had met when he first moved to West Palm Beach. She told the GBI that Harwood had met Sullivan in a Florida diner, shortly after Lita's death. She saw Sullivan slip Harwood an envelope full of money. The final payment. It was a link authorities desperately needed.
In May 1998, Sullivan and Harwood were indicted by a Fulton County Grand Jury for the murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan. With Harwood in custody, authorities called Sullivan's lawyers to get him to surrender. But by then, Sullivan had disappeared.
In September 1998, the state issued its intent to seek the death penalty against Tony Harwood. In 2003, Harwood pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter with an agreement to testify against Sullivan when he eventually got to trial. In exchange, Harwood's sentence was reduced to twenty years. He sits in the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville.
For nearly eighteen years, Sullivan has been a prime suspect in Lita's murder. At the top of the FBI's most-wanted list for four years,
Sullivan led investigators on an international manhunt throughout Central America to, eventually, Thailand.
In 2002, America's Most Wanted ran a segment on Sullivan and, incredibly, someone in Thailand recognized him. He was living in Cha-am, a luxury condo community about 150 miles south of Bangkok. He lived with Chongwattana Reynolds, a Thai divorcee he had met in West Palm Beach.
More than fifteen years after Lita's shooting, Thai police arrested Sullivan and took him to Lard Yao Prison, on the outskirts of Bangkok. There his lawyers fought extradition, hoping to use international laws to avoid the death penalty.