Author Talk with Deb Miller Landau of A Devil Went Down to Georgia
Wednesday, April 29th 2026 at 6:00 PM EDT
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The 1987 murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan sent shockwaves through the affluent Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, Georgia like few other crimes before it. The neighborhood, with its stately mansions and top-tier schools, was simply not the kind of place where women were gunned down in cold blood in broad daylight. How many socialites had enemies so dangerous they would be murdered by a hitman pretending to deliver roses on an early winter morning?
Lita was an intelligent, accomplished, and stunning Black woman from a respected Atlanta family. Her interracial marriage to white millionaire Jim Sullivan, who hailed from working-class Boston, was a newsworthy occurrence in 1970s Georgia. For a while, the couple made the marriage work, but it wasn’t long before Jim’s roving eye and controlling nature put Lita on edge. When he bought a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida (without telling her), the façade of their life together began to crumble. Finally, after a decade of marriage, she loaded her belongings in a U-Haul and never looked back.
But as the legal battle over the divorce raged and Jim’s financial outlook grew precarious, he had a chance encounter with a long-haul trucker, a smooth-talking ex-con who said he could he’d "take care" of Jim’s wife problem. . . .
Deb Miller Landau first began investigating Lita McClinton Sullivan's murder for Atlanta Magazine in the early 2000’s and has since become an authority on the case. Her article on the murder was anthologized in Harper Perennial's Best American Crime Writing, and her work has been cited by news stories and TV documentaries, including America's Most Wanted, Dateline, Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege & Justice, FBI: Criminal Pursuit and, most recently, Oxygen Network's 2022 Real Murders of Atlanta. Additionally, she appears as a primary on-screen expert in BET's 2019 docudrama, Murder in the Thirst.
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