Flower delivery turned murder

Jim Sullivan’s lawyers knew they had a mound of incriminating evidence to overcome if they were going to spare their client from a murder conviction and perhaps a trip to Georgia’s death row. 

Victoria Corderi, Dateline correspondent: You were gonna have to attack, attack, attack.

Ed Garland, defense lawyer: We were going to present what the weaknesses were in the case.

And there were weaknesses for the defense to exploit. There was no murder weapon, no financial records to back up the state’s claim that Jim Sullivan had paid $25,000 (part of it in a cashier’s checks) for the murder.

Garland: There’s not one shred of evidence that Mr. Sullivan ever paid anybody anything.

Defense lawyers Ed Garland and Don Samuel set out to cast the prosecution’s case in a new light. They disputed the claim that Jim and Lita Sullivan had an especially nasty split. Jim Sullivan’s divorce lawyer testified the breakup was not any more contentious than others he’d handled.

The core of the defense case was a full-on attack of two key prosecution witnesses: Tony Harwood, who had been identified as the hit man, and who had made a deal to testify after he was arrested; and his former girlfriend, Belinda Trahan, who first pointed the finger at Harwood.

Defense lawyers were eager to show that those witnesses hurt the prosecution case more than they helped.

When Tony Harwood was being questioned by the prosecutor, his story started to unravel. 

Prosecutor lawyer: Did you agree to participate into the death and the murder of Lita Sullivan?

After a long, long pause, Harwood— the man serving time for conspiring to kill Lita Sullivan—mustered a strange response.

Tony Harwood: To be honest, I would have to answer no.

Harwood seemed to tell two different stories on the stand.  And there were other problems, too: Remember how Belinda Trahan demonstrated how Sullivan slid that folded newspaper filled with payoff cash at the diner? Tony Harwood told a different story.

Harwood: Mr. Sullivan and I went into the restroom and he handed me the money.

And it got worse. Harwood admitted he had a history of lying to authorities about the case, and he acknowledged he’d once given his girlfriend a very different account of who had ordered him to kill.

Harwood: If I remember correctly, I told her the mafia was involved.

Corderi: How would you characterize him as a witness?

Don Samuel, defense lawyer: Totally lacking in credibility. Obliterated by the prosecution in their supposed direct examination of him. They ridiculed him, basically stole our script for the cross-examination.

Defense lawyers were so confident Harwood had self destructed on the stand, they decided not to cross examine him.

As for Belinda Trahan, the defense had a different strategy: Lawyers argued that her testimony was a well-rehearsed show. And they picked apart her story about driving to a restaurant and seeing Sullivan pay Harwood as they sat in a booth. Under tough grilling, she admitted she was not sure of the name or the location of the restaurant. Nor did she remember how long it took to get there.

Garland: You can’t say whether it’s one hour 6 hours or 20 hours? Is that right?

Belinda Trahan:  That’s right.

Corderi: The way you saw it was, and the way you presented it was here’s a woman who has total memory lapses about key things. Yet she remembers so perfectly this dramatization, this reenactment. She’s coached. And if she’s coached.

Garland: You can’t trust her. There would be reasonable doubt.

The defense pointed out that while Trahan easily identified Jim Sullivan in the courtroom, she had struggled to ID him when she was shown a photo lineup eight years ago. The defense argued Trahan had taken so long to ID Sullivan because she’d never seen him before in her life.

And why would she lie to finger Sullivan?  One reason, the defense argued, was to get her hands on a hefty reward Lita’s parents had offered to find their daughter’s killer.

Lawyer: You understood that you couldn’t get the reward unless someone was convicted, didn’t you?

Trahan: I guess so.

Garland: Our analysis was that her credibility had been crippled.

Corderi: After you got through with her

Garland: After we finished all of the approaches to her.

Still, there were those incriminating phone calls to explain away— the ones between James Sullivan’s Palm Beach mansion and the Howard Johnson’s where Harwood stayed, and the call from the truck stop when Harwood said he wished Sullivan “Merry Christmas” because the job was done.

But as the defense points out, there’s no proof of what actually was said during those calls.

Defense lawyer: For all we know, Jim Sullivan was calling these people saying “Don’t kill my wife, don’t kill my wife, whatever you do don’t kill my wife. We just don’t know what was said.”

After eight days of testimony, both sides had one last chance to tie it all together for the jury in closing arguments.

Defense closing: Let’s look at the evidence, and when you look at the evidence, you have to look at the source of the evidence. The essential worthlessness of the testimony of Tony Harwood. If you’re going to uphold our system, you should reject everything that came out of his mouth.

Corderi:  Were you gauging what was coming from the jury—

Garland: Yeah.

Corderi: When you were doing that.

Garland: They were very attentive. They started taking notes during the defense arguments. And they hadn’t been taking notes in the prosecutor’s argument. There was a certain comfortable feeling that we were communicating.

The prosecution wrapped up with a literary flourish.

Prosecution attorney: I want to tell you something. It comes from a famous author. His name is Ernest Hemingway. He took a quote “For Whom The Bell Tolls.”

Prosecutor Clint Rucker rang a doorbell at the start of his closing. It was, he said, what Lita Sullivan must have heard that January morning.

Rucker: When I thought about the last few seconds of her life what I realized is she probably still had that ringing in her ear when the first bullet tore through her brain.

Prosecution attorney: I’m gonna ask you through your verdict of guilty to each and every count to tell James Vincent Sullivan – “For Whom The Bell Tolls.” Tell him that “It tolls for thee, for you, for you.”

Corderi: You were looking directly at him.

Rucker: Uh-huh.

Corderi: when you finally locked eyes what did you see?

Rucker: Defiance. Defiance, even to the bitter end.

But was it the bitter end?

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