�Թ���

Every journalist is always on the lookout for their next great story. For Vancouver-born Deb Miller Landau, a magazine article on a cold case in the American South became the assignment of a lifetime, leading Miller Landau to write an entire book on the explosive, racially charged case—and even become a sought-after expert on the case.

As a professional writer, Miller Landau, BFA ’96, has had a remarkable career: working as a news reporter and copywriter, writing travel guides and magazine features, creating corporate content and eventually teaching journalism. But it was her 5,000-word, 2004 magazine article about the 1987 murder of American Black socialite Lita McClinton that put her in the public eye. It catapulted her into the spotlight when it was anthologized in Harper Perennial’s Best American Crime Writing and then became the basis for her 2024 book, A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton (Pegasus Books).

Now based in Portland, Ore., Miller Landau grew up in North Vancouver before enrolling in UVic’s Writing department in the early ’90s. Having taken a couple of years off to travel Europe and the Middle East after high school, Miller Landau recalls being an older student who felt “a bit out of place” at UVic. She was also a rower, so she was going to poetry readings until 2 a.m. then getting up at 5 a.m. to go to Elk Lake. She says she has no regrets.

She was particularly influenced by her classes with non-fiction experts Stephen Hume and Stephen Osborne.

“It’s hard to develop an honest, authentic voice right out of high school,” she says. “But I knew more about the world and was clear on what I wanted to do. Before I graduated, Hume said I should go to the Northwest Territories and be a big fish in a small pond, but I wanted to take the world by storm and write big stories, so I went to California and instead became the small fish in a big pond,” she chuckles. “I actually just emailed him a couple of months ago to thank him for all of his teachings.”

That pond initially involved splashing into an entry-level position at the Mill Valley Herald newspaper in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. It was a “sink or swim” job where she wrote everything and made little money—but learned a lot. She then moved on to Lonely Planet Publications, where she eventually edited and wrote more than three dozen travel guides. After marrying, she and her husband moved to Atlanta where, after publishing some travel stories with Atlanta magazine, the editor offered her the chance to do an update on a nearly 20-year-old murder case.

A sensational story

When Lita McClinton was gunned down on her doorstep by a hit man pretending to deliver roses at 8 a.m., it sent shockwaves through the affluent Atlanta suburb where she lived. While the actual hit man remained elusive, it didn’t take investigators long to trace a string of clues back to Lita’s ex-husband Jim Sullivan: a white millionaire originally from working-class Boston. Jim had already taken up with another woman and was in the midst of a potentially expensive divorce from Lita when he decided to pay ex-con Tony Harwood $12,500 to “take care” of her... and then didn’t even bother to show up for his late wife’s funeral.

But far from being an open-and-shut case, the murder investigation was hampered by racial bias in the initial court proceedings, a lack of direct evidence and Sullivan’s subsequent escape from the country to Costa Rica and then Thailand. It would take nearly 20 years and an international manhunt before Sullivan was finally arrested and convicted in 2006 of five crimes that “caused or directed another to commit the murder” of Lita McClinton.

Yet while the crime itself occurred back when Reagan, Mulroney and Thatcher were the political leaders of the day, it was the events of the past few years—including Black Lives Matter, the #metoo movement and the pandemic—that helped shaped Miller Landau’s original article into A Devil Went Down to Georgia, the first complete account of the entire case. The fascinating book was selected to be part of UVic alumni’s book club this year, with Miller Landau even giving an author talk.

New insights on an old case

Miller Landau recalls when she got the original assignment from her Atlanta editor. “They wanted somebody with fresh eyes to do a retrospective on the case because Sullivan had just been caught in Thailand,” she recalls. “So, all my experience to date—travel writing, research skills, finding my voice, managing my time—all got put to the test.”

At the time, Miller Landau had no idea the impact this story would have on her career. “Then the article was published and got anthologized in Best American Crime Writing, and it became one of the biggest stories of my life,” she says. Indeed, she’s since become an on-camera expert for various TV and news outlets, including Dateline, America’s Most Wanted and FBI: Criminal Pursuit, among many others.

During the pandemic, Miller Landau decided to pull out her box of original notes and transform the entire saga into a book. One of the hardest aspects of the project was contacting Lita’s family. “By this point, they’d had to live with the case for almost 40 years... I remember Lita's mom saying to me, ‘Just tell an honest story’—that felt like a big north star for me,” she says. 

Holding the thread

Miller Landau says this big-picture approach was essential as she developed A Devil Went Down to Georgia. Despite the 15-year time lapse between her original article and the book, Miller Landau says she never lost interest in the case. “I always kept tabs on what was happening,” she says. “But it never fully got quiet because I would get asked to be on news shows about it, and I’ve kept in touch with a few of the key players, especially when [suspected hit man] Tony Harwood got out of prison.”

While the case may have been cold, 2024 was a hot time to publish a true-crime book, given the current slew of podcasts, books and TV shows. Yet despite her success—A Devil Went Down to Georgia now claims the coveted number-one spot on the Oprah Daily “best true crime books of all time” list—Miller Landau has some issues with the genre itself.

But she’s hoping that’s a trend that’s changing, given the number of female-fronted podcasts out there. “I think more women are getting into the true-crime content-creation space today because they are more drawn to understanding and empathizing with what happened in the situation,” she says. “That’s made it potentially more fascinating and more accessible to a lot more people.”

Miller Landau bookends A Devil Went Down to Georgia with a tense scene where she comes face-to-face with Tony Harwood, the man who orchestrated the hit on—and quite possibly actually killed—Lita McClinton. “When I finally met him, he was so much less than what I had envisioned him to be: he's now 74, he’s spent 20 years in prison, he's got back problems... but that’s the moment I find really fascinating as a journalist: when you finally connect with somebody, everything about them changes and you can’t help but see them as more human.”

Which brings her right back to her days in UVic’s Writing department. “You know, I taught magazine writing at the University of Oregon for a couple semesters, and the students were all about emailing or texting for their interviews. But I told them, ‘No, you have to get out there and see people, hear how they talk, discover their mannerisms.’ I mean, it was probably totally irresponsible of me to go meet Tony in person, in a parking lot, by myself—but that’s the juice, that’s the Stephen Hume way: find what you love and go get it.”

—John Threlfall, BA ’96

This article appears in the UVic Torch alumni magazine.

For more Torch stories, go to the UVic Torch alumni magazine page.