Marvin Marable's life changed irrevocably on the day his wife's best friend was murdered.
Lita Sullivan, a 35-year-old Atlanta socialite, was beautiful, charitable, poised and polished. Her 1987 slaying and the subsequent 17-year-long investigation made international headlines.
Lita's husband, millionaire James Sullivan, was suspected and eventually convicted of hiring a hit man to kill his wife to avoid losing money in their pending divorce. But early on, investigators also pegged Marable -- a Sandy Springs businessman, former New York state police officer and family friend of the Sullivans -- as a possible conspirator.
Dogged by suspicion for nearly 20 years, Marable said he lost many business clients and a few friendships as police and FBI investigators sporadically turned up to probe his life. He said he is only now able to close the book on what happened by self-publishing a memoir on Amazon.com: "Deadly Roses: The twenty year curse" (www.deadlyroses.com).
"I say in the book that when [James Sullivan] was sentenced and convicted, the curse ended," Marable said. "But I think it really ended when I finished this book. I feel I am able now to move on with my life."
Marable's wife, Poppy, was a long-time best friend to Lita Sullivan. Marable said he socialized with James Sullivan because of their wives' friendship. He found Sullivan to be somewhat "abrasive."
"He felt that he was the authority over everything and there is no way anybody could know more than [he did]," Marable said. "Had it not been for Poppy's relationship with Lita, Jim and I would have never socialized."
Coincidentally, the Marables' marriage was beginning to fall apart at the same time the Sullivans were preparing to divorce. Believing that his wife, too, was plotting a divorce, Marable had bugged his home telephone. Several conversations Poppy Marable had with Lita, and that Lita had with others while at the Marable home, were captured.
When Sullivan became aware of the tapes, he asked Marable to send them to his primary residence in Palm Beach, hoping they would assist in his divorce. Marable agreed, but asked Sullivan to return the tapes after taking notes on them. When Sullivan mailed back the tapes, five of the 40 were missing.
"I was just very upset," Marable said. "I broke off all communications, all ties with Jim Sullivan."
Then, Marable said he got a panicked phone message from Sullivan eight months later on Jan. 13, 1987. When he returned the call, Sullivan, who was still living apart from his wife in Florida, wanted to know if Lita was driving the same car and living in their Buckhead townhouse. Marable said he thought Sullivan was still gathering evidence for the divorce case.
He told Sullivan he hadn't had any contact with Lita for several months.
Three days later, Lita was gunned down after she opened her door to a man pretending to deliver a dozen long-stemmed pink roses.
When police later obtained Sullivan's phone records, they zeroed in on the Jan. 13 phone call to Marable. He was asked to come to Atlanta Police headquarters for questioning, and he did with an attorney. Before the interview began, the detectives read Marable his Miranda rights.
Marable said his attorney advised him not to answer any questions.
"I was so shaken up, I'll never forget that," Marable said. "I just walked out without my coat in February."
Marable and his friends, family and business associates would continue to be questioned and investigated for the next 15 years by police officers, GBI and FBI agents and reporters. At social events in Atlanta, there were stares and whispers.
In 1990, he moved to New York and started a consulting business advising companies on how to get government contracts. But skittish clients dropped him whenever investigators called seeking information about him in connection with a murder.
"You have a warm, amicable relationship one day," Marable said. "You call the next day and they say, ‘I'm sorry Mr. Marable, I don't think we can work with you any longer.'"
So Marable moved again in 1993 to Virginia, where he got a job as a probation and parole officer and tried to continue his government contracting business on the side.
Meanwhile, Sullivan had long since fled the country. He was finally arrested in 2002 at a resort community on the coast of Thailand. And in March 2006, he was convicted in Fulton County of paying a hit man $25,000 to kill Lita. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Marable took little solace in the verdict. He was on the list of witnesses, but he was never called to testify. So he was never fully exonerated in the public eye. Some people still speculated publicly about whether he cut a deal with prosecutors or was involved somehow in the slaying.
"I felt there would be some kind of closure for me, but that didn't happen," Marable said.
Now 60, Marable is remarried and retired from the Virginia Department of Corrections. He lives in Halifax County, Va. And he is finally able to talk about what happened without fear of repercussions.
"I've found I don't have any problem in saying this is what happened to me," Marable said. "My life was just, in a day, changed forever."
