On the morning of a crucial hearing in her divorce from her husband, Atlanta socialite Lita McClinton Sullivan opened the door of her opulent Buckhead home to a deliveryman who, in an instant, handed her a box of long-stemmed roses and fired a gunshot in her head.

In the past 19 years since the 35-year-old's death, the investigation has produced all the elements of a crime novel, from wealth, greed and sex to class warfare, international intrigue and a fugitive on the run.

The reality of the case, however, has remained grim for the victim's parents, Emory and JoAnn McClinton, who have faced their daughter's ex-husband and accused killer, James Vincent Sullivan, several times in court without ultimate resolution.

Even after the McClintons, prominent members of Atlanta's black elite, won a $4 million wrongful death judgment against James Sullivan in 1994, the millionaire with roots in Boston's Irish working class managed to evade criminal charges by fleeing to Thailand, where he remained on the lam for four years.

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After two years of fighting extradition from Thailand, James Sullivan was returned to the U.S. in March 2004 to face murder charges for arranging his ex-wife's murder, in one of Atlanta's most highly anticipated trials in the past 20 years.

Finally, it seems the story of Lita Sullivan's murder may reach its end as the millionaire-turned-fugitive's death penalty trial opens Monday in Fulton County Superior Court.

Even though mountains of circumstantial evidence implicated James Sullivan in his estranged wife's death early on, for a long time, the strongest indictment against him was his suspected motive.

The hit man posed as a flower deliveryman.

On the morning of Jan. 16, 1987, when a hit man carrying flowers arrived at Lita Sullivan's front door, the couple was in the midst of a bitter and potentially costly divorce, in which Lita Sullivan accused her husband of infidelity and cruelty.

On the day of the murder, James Sullivan was hundreds of miles from the crime scene in his Palm Beach mansion, where his wife, who was 10 years younger, had left him in 1985.

The 10-year relationship between the self-made millionaire and the debutante had taken a turn for the worse in 1981, when the couple left Atlanta to start a new life in a $2 million landmark Palm Beach mansion with hopes of ascending the ranks of high society.

The climb to the upper echelons of Palm Beach's social scene proved difficult for the biracial couple, and eventually, James Sullivan was seen on the town with women other than his wife, according to Lita Sullivan's divorce petition.

Lita Sullivan was shot and killed on Jan. 16, 1987.

Lita, whose upbringing in a prominent black Atlanta family had accustomed her to the fineries of life, also accused her husband of stinginess, in spite of his net worth.

On Jan. 16, 1987, Lita Sullivan was scheduled to attend a court hearing in downtown Atlanta to determine the legality of a postnuptial agreement limiting James Sullivan's financial payments in any divorce settlement.

She never made it to the hearing.

A new wife

With nothing linking James Sullivan to the crime scene, a judge dismissed an indictment in 1987 for lack of evidence, and the investigation stalled.

Meanwhile, with a third wife on his arm eight months after the murder, James Sullivan resumed his life with greater success as he assumed the role of head of the Palm Beach Historic Preservation Board.

The couple's happiness was short-lived, however, and Hyo-Sook Choi Rogers filed for divorce in 1990.

During the divorce proceedings, his wife, who went by Suki, implicated James Sullivan directly in his second wife's murder.

Suki Sullivan testified that she began to fear her husband after he confessed to setting up the hit on Lita Sullivan to avoid a costly divorce payout.

Hyo-Sook Choi Rogers (right), James Sullivan's third wife

Suki Sullivan claimed that, after a fender-bender in which her husband was the driver, he begged her to take the blame in order to keep suspicion off him in light of the continuing investigation into Lita Sullivan's death.

Suki Sullivan agreed, but the scheme was discovered. James Sullivan received one year of house arrest for felony perjury, under which he resided as the divorce trial began.

Suki's statements paved the way for the McClintons' wrongful death suit, for which a jury awarded them $4 million in 1994. Representing himself, James Sullivan went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court to argue that a statute of limitations barred the McClintons from suing him.

But by the time the Supreme Court affirmed the $4 million judgment in 1999, James Sullivan had fled the country.

When Suki Sullivan gave her statements in court, federal prosecutors had amassed enough circumstantial evidence to indict James Sullivan on five charges of violating interstate commerce.

The evidence came in the form a record of a collect call to James Sullivan's Palm Beach home from a pay phone at a rest area outside of Atlanta about 40 minutes after Lita Sullivan was killed.

Also, wiretaps of James Sullivan's Palm Beach home after the death produced a recording of him talking to a friend about the caliber of the .9 mm murder weapon, information the police had withheld from the public. Although prosecutors theorized that Sullivan had arranged Lita's murder via telephone across state lines, they didn't have enough to charge him with murder.

But the circumstantial evidence wasn't even sufficient for a conviction for violating interstate commerce. James Sullivan's high-profile attorneys questioned the content of the telephone call from Georgia to Palm Beach, and attacked Suki Sullivan's credibility as a gold-digger.

In November 1992, James Sullivan's trial ended in a directed verdict of acquittal based largely on the lack of provable substance of the phone calls.

Once again, the millionaire was a free man.

Part II: A second shot at prosecution