Biloxi, Mississippi, is a city of contradictions, a lush green jewel on the Gulf of Mexico, a Southern Riviera steeped in Confederate history, where antebellum mansions command staggering ocean views. Yet it has also been home to The Strip, a beachside center of neon decadence, prostitution, drugs, and corrupt public servants — all in thrall to a shadowy band of criminals called the Dixie Mafia. Here in Biloxi, Old South virtue clashes with a long-standing tolerance for evil.

When one of the city’s most prominent couples — a judge and his mayoral-candidate wife — were shot in their home, their daughter embarked on a dangerous crusade for justice that would forever change the complexion of Biloxi. She wanted to accomplish what the police could not, or would not, do: find the assassins and shake the city of Biloxi from its jaded complacency.

In MISSISSIPPI MUD, Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist Edward Humes tells the inspiring and harrowing story of Lynne Sposito, whose obsession with solving her parents’ murder “irresistibly draws us into a ripe, teeming darkness,”* into a sin-belt world of conscienceless killers, illegal casinos and venal politicians. At the same time, MISSISSIPPI MUD provides a fascinating and vivid portrait of a little-known corner of the Deep South where corruption and betrayal arise not only from the criminal element but also from the good people of Biloxi’s long-standing tradition of turning a blind eye to the malignancy in their midst.

Though a work of nonfiction, scrupulously reported and documented, MISSISSIPPI MUD reads like and exquisitely taut and suspenseful novel, building toward a surprising — and chilling — conclusions, as the forces unleashed by Lynne’s investigation forever alter her life, and Biloxi’s future.

*Peter Straub

“With surgical brilliance, Edward Humes peels back the glittering skin of the Deep South’s sin belt and exposes a shadow society of almost unspeakable corruption... One of the most suspenseful and chilling crime books I’ve ever read.”

— Jonathan Kellerman

“Reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Humes... makes it read as smoothly as a finely crafted suspense novel.”

— Chicago Tribune

“A story almost too unbelievable to be true. But it is... Engrossing! Terrific.”

— Ann Rule

“This book is like some heat-seeking missile. It finds you and before you know it, you’re caught... It’s a mesmerizing read.”

— Leon Bing, author of Smoked and Do or Die

““MISSISSIPPI MUD irresistibly draws us into a ripe, teeming darkness that is just around the corner in Biloxi, Mississippi. Soulless murderers, almost giddily inventive conmen, corrupt glad-handers with warm smiles, and good old boys whose closets are stuffed with an astonishing number of very quiet skeletons, all conspire to take justice out in the backyard and give it a decent burial. This is a world that might have been bred by Elmore Leonard out of Carl Hiaasen, and like those writers, Edward Humes can make the wild amoral scheming sleazoids he parades before our eyes all but sing and dance on the page. Here is America, fat and happy, both hands crammed deep into the till.””

— Peter Straub

“MISSISSIPPI MUD reads like a well-constructed mystery novel, and Edward Humes lucid and unadorned prose admirably suits this complex story of venality and betrayal.”

— Margaret Maron, the New York Times Book Review

Mississippi Mud is that purest form of poker, a game in which the cards become irrelevant and the ability to bluff and betray fellow players reaps the greatest reward. The name is synonymous with a certain brand of corruption in the Magnolia State, undisguised and unashamed. By either definition, lying is an art form in Mississippi Mud, morality a fool’s distraction.

Prologue

Monday, September 14, 1987. Biloxi, Mississippi — The city’s worst day began quietly enough, when a used car salesman discovered one of his cars missing, an anonymous-looking yellow Ford. The theft was strange, because the boxy Fairmont was about the least valuable car on the lot, so ordinary, it seemed invisible — like an undercover police car. Or a getaway car.

The day ended quietly, too, with a muted popping noise, much like the sound of a newspaper rolled loosely into a fly swatter and slapped on a tabletop. Few people heard those nine innocuous pops, and those who did would never speak of them. Yet those sounds would destroy a family, alter countless lives, transform a city. Little would remain the same in Biloxi in their wake.

Between those two events, Vincent and Margaret Sherry lived as they always had, taking no special precautions, exhibiting few outward fears. He went to the county courthouse that morning as always, where he had served as judge of the Circuit Court for the past eleven months. She, as always, worked much of the day on her one great obsession — exposing Biloxi’s legendary corruption, in preparation for a mayoral campaign many Biloxians believed would earn her reign of City Hall.

During that last day, Vince Sherry also found time to jog, to kibbitz with his law partner, to get his thick shock of brown hair cut at the local Air Force base barbershop (where he enjoyed the privileges of a retired colonel), and to gas up his battered station wagon in preparation for a trip Tuesday to Baton Rouge. The Sherrys planned to take the day off to visit their youngest daughter at her college campus, and to have cataracts removed from one of their beloved dachshunds, Meaux.

Margaret Sherry spent part of Monday shopping for clothes for her increasingly round five-foot frame, buying two electronic calculators, planning a United Daughters of the Confederacy convention she was chairing the next month, and speaking to three friends on the telephone about her plans to reveal scandals in city government. At one time or another during the day, she told people she had been working with the FBI, that she now had enough evidence to expose a major corruption case in the city, and that she would put the man she hated most — the mayor of Biloxi — in jail.

“You can’t talk like that without evidence,” one of her friends warned upon hearing this final pronouncement.

“Don’t you understand? I have the goods,”” Margaret said in her quiet, commanding way. “I have the documentation.”

She told another friend that she planned to make her claims public the next day, at Tuesday’s city council meeting, when the city’s budget was to be adopted.

Oddly, her last conversation of the evening was cut short, in mid-sentence, just as Margaret was about to say good night to her friend, Dianne Harenski, an occasional ally on the City Council. This was after 7 p.m., and Vince had been clamoring in the background. He was hungry, he was saying, it was time for dinner. Margaret’s friend could hear him clearly. A minute or two later, when the phone clicked dead in her hand, Harenski simply assumed Margaret had rushed off the line to appease her hungry husband.

Later — minutes or hours, no one can say for sure — that anonymous yellow Ford cruised by the Sherrys’ ranch-style four-bedroom home on Hickory Hill Circle, then stopped down the block. The lonely street was empty, its houses locked tight against the thick, wet air of the Gulf. The only sounds piercing the humidity were the whir of crickets hidden in dense lawns, the dry flap of bats overhead.

Vince was still wearing his blue seersucker pants and white shirt from court that day, his trim frame stretched out on the couch in the den as he watched the Atlanta Braves on television. The knock on the door brought him to his feet. He shunted the barking dachshunds, Meaux and Fritz, into the master bedroom, where Margaret was midway between dressed and undressed, then he pulled the door shut. He muted the television and tossed the remote control onto the coffee table, which, like many areas of the house, sat obscured beneath a burial mound of papers, magazines, newspaper clippings and legal files, some of it his, some of it Margaret’s. They were voracious readers, and they threw out nothing. Then he opened the front door and waved whoever had knocked inside.

They walked back to the den, where Vince and his company that night may have chatted awhile. Vince could have even offered a visitor a cup of tea — police would later find a lone, used bag of Lipton’s sitting on the kitchen counter, a cup rinsed and on the drain board. Then again, business may have overtaken politeness immediately, and Vincent Sherry may have turned around, still smiling in greeting, to face a .22-caliber Ruger automatic, the black tube of a silencer sitting fat and obscene on the lip of its barrel.

Inside the bedroom, Margaret had stripped to her bra and panties, her glasses on the bureau, her gray-streaked brown hair tousled. As she reached up to take off an earring, she heard, faintly, that popping noise, followed by a vague sound of movement in the living room. Perhaps, her family would later speculate, she shook her head and smiled, thinking: There goes Vince, swatting flies again. She loved him dearly, but Vince had been a cleanliness bug throughout all his fifty-eight years, the type who washed his hands before using the bathroom, who flushed with his foot, who would never have something as unsanitary as a flyswatter around the house. Vince would use a newspaper, flailing about the room, knocking over books and papers. Then he’d throw the offending page with its flattened insect into the trash, as if disposing of toxic waste. It always made Margaret laugh.

After a moment, the bedroom door glided open, a slight creaking. The dogs rushed out, yapping. Margaret did not grab for her housecoat draped over the television — what would be the point? After nearly forty years of marriage, why bother trying to cover up the ravages of time when your husband walked in the room? Margaret would hardly have looked up at the blurry form in the doorway. She was so near-sighted without her glasses.

Then there was that swatting sound again, two pops, louder now, followed by the sound of something hitting the wall behind her. This wasn’t fly swatting, after all. The sound was coming from the doorway, from a man who was approaching her now, flying at her, coat flapping, a man she must have finally realized wasn’t Vince, even as the sharp odor of cordite filled the room. This smell she knew well, because she was a crack shot herself, could shatter a bottle at one hundred yards with a .22 rifle by the time she was twelve, that pungent aroma stinging her nostrils with every shot. She slid to the floor, a gold-ball earring clutched in her right hand, the other still dangling in place, as the man who wasn’t Vince loomed over her.

She never heard those last four quiet pops. Consciousness, identity, dreams, fear — all were obliterated before the sound of that first silenced shot stopped echoing. And the day ended as quietly as it had begun, with a nondescript Ford disappearing down a deserted street, the sound of dogs barking muffled behind a closed front door.

Chapter 1

Without warning or symptom, the Twentieth Century’s version of Plague came calling on Lynne Sposito at exactly ten minutes past two on the afternoon of September 16, 1987. She’ll always remember the kitchen clock’s position then, because the moment marked her permanent passage from normalcy. This was the day her life changed, irrevocably, in ways as incomprehensible then as they remain now, for such is the power of death, grief and obsession to mold us, whether we will it or not. Such is the power of that disease called homicide to change everything.

Lynne’s oldest brother, Eric Sherry, was on the line, telephoning from his home in Florida, searching for a way to explain to his big sister what had happened to their parents.

#8220;There’s no easy way to say this,” he finally said, voice crackling with strain, as if he was lifting something heavy. “So I’ll just say it: Mom and dad are both dead.”

The things that go through your mind at a time like that, Lynne would later marvel. She and a neighbor had returned home from shopping for furniture a short while ago — the Spositos had just moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and much of their new brick Colonial sat barren of decor. Now she stood in the kitchen, face gone white, waving off her friend who kept asking what’s wrong. She couldn’t make the transition from end tables to the fact that she would never hug her parents again. She’d never argue with her father. Never smell her mother’s perfume. Never.

“What? What do you mean?” she asked, bafflement making her whisper. She still cradled the phone casually between chin and shoulder, the way you would hold it while answering a survey or ordering from a catalog. She transferred the receiver to a sweaty, cold fist. “Was it an accident?”

“No, it wasn’t an accident,” Eric said. “They were killed."

Again, Lynne groped for comprehension: What her younger brother was saying made no sense to her. She had unpacking to do, a job interview at a medical center set for that afternoon, dinner to get ready. How could her parents be dead? She had just talked to her mother a few nights before. Then she remembered a family friend in Biloxi who had lost his parents in a gas explosion. “Was there an explosion, Eric? Did the gas main blow up?”

“No, Lynne. They were killed by someone. They were found today. That’s all I know.”

They were killed. They were found. Her parents, it seemed, had become inanimate objects, things to be discovered, like lost car keys. The words filled her head, threatening to drown out everything else Eric was saying.

She heard him dimly after that, though later she would remember every word, replaying the conversation over and over. Eric told her their father’s law partner in Biloxi, Pete Halat, had found the bodies. A friend of Eric’s in Florida had called within the hour to offer her condolences after hearing about the murders on the radio — assuming, incorrectly, that Eric already knew. When Eric placed a frantic call to Halat to ask what happened, he found out their youngest sister, Leslie — still “the baby” to Lynne, though she would turn twenty in a month — also had learned of the murders, and just as abruptly as Eric. She had called the law office to complain about her parents standing her up the day before, only to have a lawyer clumsily tell her to find her roommate and sit down, he had some bad news to give her. Now she was on her way to Biloxi, Eric said. Lynne pictured Leslie’s five-foot form hunched at the wheel, grimacing, with knuckles white and gas pedal floored.

“Vin doesn’t know yet, though,” Eric said, anticipating Lynne’s next question. At twenty-seven, one year younger than Eric, Vincent Sherry III — Vin to his family — was the most mercurial of the four Sherry children, the one most likely to do something rash or vengeful once he heard the news.

“I’ll tell Vin,” Lynne found herself saying, vaguely surprised she could speak at all. Then she realized she had no idea what to say to Vin. “What can I tell him, Eric?”

“I don’t know anything, Lynne,” Eric sighed. Halat had refused to give him any details by telephone, he said. Pete wanted to talk to them in person first. “Get down here quick,” that was all he said.

“You’ve got to get to Biloxi as soon as you can, Lynne,” Eric said. “I’m heading out the door now.”

Later, Lynne couldn’t remember saying good-bye, only staring at the telephone on her kitchen wall, the receiver mysteriously back in place on its cradle, her friend still asking what was wrong, barely audible, like a television set with the volume way down, drowned out by a roaring in Lynne’s ears that threatened to drive all thoughts from her mind, all warmth from her soul.

“My mom and dad are dead,” she heard herself say. The enormity of it had just begun to dawn on Lynne as she uttered the words, then watched her friend instinctively recoil, as if murder could be somehow contagious.

What would she tell her seven-year-old daughter, Beth, she wondered? The little girl had just announced how happy she was that Grandma planned to visit in a month. Or Tommy, her moody thirteen-year-old — what would she say to him? He had always blossomed in the small-town security of his grandparents' Biloxi home. No more. How could she tell Cathy, the oldest sixteen-year-old Lynne had ever known, a girl who just a week earlier spent an hour on the phone with her grandmother, laying plans for Margaret’s next mayoral campaign. Worst of all, whatever she managed to tell them, she would have to do it alone — her husband Dick was out of the country on business. Again. Lynne found herself cursing his new job, his success, his long trips away. She needed him here, now, their seventeen years of shared history to blunt the agony. She felt an insane urge to run from the house, to tell no one, not even Vin or the kids. Impossible, of course. But she allowed herself that brief moment of fantasy, that maybe, just maybe, it would all go away if she simply ignored it.

And then Lynne remembered a conversation she had with her mother four months earlier, so innocuous at the time, so ominous now. Mom had known, Lynne realized. She knew this was coming. And terror began to compete with bewilderment, a row of bass drums thumping in Lynne Sposito’s chest.

* * *

“Things are getting hot down here,” Margaret Sherry had told her daughter. “Maybe too hot to handle.”

On the other end of the telephone, fifteen hundred miles away and living in Virginia at the time, Lynne had steeled herself. Her mother had spoken for years of exposing Biloxi’s corruption — so often, it had begun to sound commonplace to Lynne, like family gossip. Truth be told, Lynne wasn’t much interested in the political machinations of Biloxi, Mississippi that so consumed her mother. So she would just say, sure mom, uh-huh, Lynne’s mind on her three kids, or the dinner bubbling on the stove, or her plans to return to nursing now that her children were old enough. If her mother noticed the lack of interest, she never let on.

“I’ve nearly got enough,” Margaret was saying. “I’m going to blow the lid off this town.” And then she added that last, strange remark: “I just hope to God they don’t come after my children.”

Odd as this sounded to Lynne — odd enough, certainly, to stick in her memory — she still didn’t say anything. It was just mom going off again, overdosing on politics. Nothing her mother might have discovered could be that serious, she figured.

So the forbidding words had melted into the hiss of the telephone lines. Then Lynne said something like, oh, mom, come on, and the subject changed, to grandkids' report cards and plans for Margaret to visit in the fall. Lynne never did ask her mother what she had meant about them coming after her children, nor did she raise the implied alternative — that “they” might skip the kids and go directly after the parents.

Later, when the internal chant of How did I miss it? would grow especially fierce, Lynne would lie awake nights and relive that conversation, her mother’s soft drawl in her ear, memories weighted with regret and the leaden anguish of having heard without listening. Even Lynne has to admit she couldn’t have changed what happened, but this truth offers little comfort. On those sleepless nights, when the longing left by lost chances lays another layer of brick and mortar around her heart, Lynne Sposito can’t help but wish she had asked her mother one thing: to tell her exactly who they were.

So Lynne could make them pay.

True Crime Books n’ Authors

Napoleon of Crime — I love this book. Ben McIntyre’s historical true crime tale of Adam Worth, a master criminal who prowled the den of thieves that was New York City a century ago, versus the prototypical detective, William Pinkerton. Evocative and revealing, I chose this book for an Edgar when I served on the judging panel a few years ago (we ultimately voted for another worthy but very different book, The Death of Innocents, by Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, which told a chilling story of child murders mistakenly attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).

Ted Conover — Author of Newjack, the award-winning story of prison-guard life at New York’s infamous Sing Sing prison. Conover trained and worked as a guard in order to write the book — and idea that came to him after prison authorities refused to let him visit their training academy for an article he was working on. Read an update to the book here.

Mark Arax — Award- winning Los Angeles Times reporter and author of In My Father’s Name, investigates his own father’s murder and pulls back a window on life and corruption in California’s Central Valley.

Deanne Stillman — I used to write about the Marines as part of my newspaper work, so I have a special affection for the title setting of Stillman’s true-crime, narrative-nonfiction bestseller, Twentynine Palms. There’s no place quite like it, and Stillman catches its dusty, searing weirdness to a “T.”

Ann Rule’s Home Page — What can you say? Ann Rule is the Queen. The Stranger Beside Me is one that sets the gold standard of true crime writing. And she’s written more bestsellers than anyone in the business.

Jack Olsen’s Home Page — Another great author in the true crime genre, recently passed away. His Doc is a true- crime classic. One of his most recent works, Last Man Standing, told the Geronimo Pratt story, a tale of gross injustice and the long battle to set an innocent man free. A Q & A with Olsen on the Pratt case can be found here.

True Crime Direct — Links True Crime Readers and Writers Should Click

Famous Trials — University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor Douglas O. Linder has been building his collection of essays on famous trials since 1996. An impressive piece of work that offers up a cornucopia of famous and infamous tribunals, from the Trial of Socrates to the trial of the Manson Family. Very cool. His illustrated exploration of evil in the legal system has some interesting points as well.

Dr. Death — Speaking of evil, check out this fascinating archive of the trial in South Africa of Wouter Basson, the man they called Dr. Death, for allegedly heading apartheid South Africa’s secret bio and chemical warfare program that is said to have killed thousands. (To the shock of few who followed the trial — and the judge’s consistent rulings that hamstrung prosecutors — Basson was ultimately acquitted.) Then check out Edward Humes’ article on Basson’s American colleague, Dr. Larry Ford

The Smoking Gun — Every day, a new legal document is posted: One day it’s Jennifer Lopez’s divorce petition, the next it’s Robert Blake’s criminal file, then Noelle Bush’s latest arrest report. You just never know. A running archive lets you browse for past hits.

The First Enron — Energy company scandals. Corruption involving the president and members of his administration. Insider trading and accounting scams. Stock crashes. Sound familiar? But this time, the president was a Harding, not a Bush, and the scandal was called Teapot Dome. History does repeat — read all about it.

Court TV — All crime news, all the time. And a great famous case files section, too.

APBNews.com — It may be bankrupt, but some great pieces of the site are still up and running, containing a fascinating wealth of information on crime, criminals and notorious cases. Try the actual FBI file of serial killer Ted Bundy.

The FBI Forensic Services Manual — Read about the vaunted (though recently tarred by scandal and allegations of sloppy procedures) FBI Lab’s procedures and practices.

FBI FOIA Reading Room — Wade through documents, some of them even legible, that the FBI has released through the Freedom of Information Act, including the Martin Luther King assassination files; files on Werner Von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who became the father of the U.S. space program; J.Edgar Hoover’s personal correspondence; the Venona files, and much more.

Computer Crime — Excellent site with information and links to all things related to cybercrime.

How Techno- criminals Operate — a primer on the four types of computer crime from the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.

The Code of Hammurabi — Talk about classics. This site explains one of the earliest legal systems in the civilized world. This is where our notions about justice began, including the first recorded contract law. If you want to know who to thank for our litigious society, and how it got that way, Hammurabi should be on the list. Hammurabi on divorce: “If a man wish to separate from a woman who has borne him children, or from his wife who has borne him children: then he shall give that wife her dowry, and a part of the earnings of field, garden, and property, so that she can rear her children. When she has brought up her children, a portion of all that is given to the children, equal as that of one son, shall be given to her. She may then marry the man of her heart.” For the actual code (translated), click here.

The Salem Witch Trials — Yes, the original witchhunt’s transcripts from 1692 are online, in glorious Olde Englishe. John Alden, Abigail Barker, they’re all there. Now that’s witchcraft.