Lita McClinton

Lita LaVaughn McClinton (January 7, 1952 – January 16, 1987) was an American socialite who was murdered the day her divorce was to be settled. She was the daughter of Georgia state representative JoAnn McClinton and former U.S. Department of Transportation official Emory McClinton.

McClinton was shot when receiving a box of pink roses at her doorstep. In 1997, Phillip Anthony Harwood was identified as the hit man and indicated that he had committed the murder for $25,000 at the behest of James Sullivan, the former husband of Lita McClinton, who had been in Palm Beach, Florida, during the shooting in Atlanta, Georgia. Sullivan escaped arrest by fleeing abroad. On July 2, 2002, he was arrested in Thailand, and in 2004, he was extradited to Atlanta. In March 2006, Sullivan was convicted of murder for arranging the 1987 shooting of his wife and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, in a Georgia prison. The case was profiled on Unsolved Mysteries in 2001, the year before James Sullivan was arrested.

Philip Harwood has since been released.

• Collins, Marion. The Palm Beach Murder. St. Martin's True Crime Library. ISBN 0-312-99086-3.
• Landau, Debra Miller (October 2004). "Social Disgraces". Atlanta Magazine.
• Marable, Marvin. Deadly Roses - The Twenty Year Curse. GCCI. ISBN 978-1-4392-5747-0.

• Lita McClinton at Find a Grave
• "Lita McClinton, Black Socialite is Murdered". African American Registry. Retrieved 2024-05-08.

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