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.
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.
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