While the FBI investigates last week's bombing death of a federal judge in Alabama, investigators here are still puzzling over the mysterious 1987 slayings of a Biloxi judge and his wife.
The investigation has unearthed links among the Dixie Mafia, an organized crime group that once flourished on Mississippi's "Golden Gulf Coast"; a sex and extortion ring allegedly run from a Louisiana prison; the mayor of this coastal city; and a purported hitman sitting in a Georgia jail.A federal grand jury has spent months investigating the deaths of Circuit Judge Vincent Sherry, 58, and his wife, former Biloxi Councilwoman Margaret Sherry, 57. So far, there have been no indictments.
The Sherrys were shot to death Sept. 14, 1987, in their home. The judge was shot three times in the face, and his wife four times.
Their bodies were discovered two days later by Vincent Sherry's former law partner, Peter Halat, who has since become mayor of Biloxi - and has been implicated in the crime.
Halat worked with Sherry until Sherry was appointed judge in 1986.
Louisiana prison inmate Bobby Joe Fabian, a convicted murderer, has said Halat attended a 1987 meeting at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in which the killings were plotted. Halat angrily denied the accusations last August, saying he wasn't at the prison when the meeting allegedly took place.
Fabian claims the Sherrys were killed because inmates believed the judge kept about $400,000 from an extortion scam that ran ads in homosexual magazines and newspapers.
Respondents to the ads were told their "friend" was getting out of the Louisiana prison and needed money for airfare to meet them. Authorities claim hundreds of thousands were taken in the scheme.
Kirksey McCord Nix Jr., suspected of being a member of the Dixie Mafia, has been indicted in the scam. Fabian claims that Nix, who is serving a life sentence for killing a New Orleans grocer, was a party to the murder plot.