BANGKOK, Thailand — Thai police raided a beachside condominium and arrested an American wanted for the highly publicized murder of his socialite wife in Atlanta 15 years ago, officials said Wednesday.
James Vincent Sullivan, who had been under police surveillance for weeks, was arrested Tuesday night in a condominium in the Cha-am beach resort, 100 miles south of Bangkok, said police Col. Somchai Yoklek.
He said Sullivan's arrest was requested by the FBI. Sullivan, 61, has been indicted in the United States on charges of hiring someone to kill his estranged wife, Lita McClinton Sullivan, in 1987.
News of the arrest was welcomed by the slain woman's father.
"We've waited a long time for this," Emory McClinton, the victim's father, told told WSB-TV in Atlanta. He said, however, the arrest would force him and his wife to relive the sorrow of their daughter's murder. "We will have to go through the process again. We will have to resurrect all those memories and go through this trial."
Sullivan is being held in custody while the Foreign Ministry organizes extradition proceedings, police Maj. Gen. Surasit Sangkhaphong, the head of the Crime Suppression Division, told reporters.
Sullivan, who also has Irish citizenship, is listed on the FBI Web site as one of the agency's most wanted fugitives.
U.S. authorities claim Sullivan, a millionaire investor from Palm Beach County, Fla., paid someone $25,000 to kill his wife to avoid losing property in a costly divorce.
The alleged hit man was arrested in April 1998 and is on trial in Atlanta for murder.
Soon after the killing, Sullivan is believed to have left Florida for Costa Rica, where he bought a second home, and fled Costa Rica after his indictment.
It is not clear when Sullivan arrived in Thailand, but he obtained a resident visa in 1998 and married a local woman. That year, the couple bought a unit in a hotel-condominium complex in Cha-am and had lived there since then, a police statement said.
The manager of the condo complex, Sompob Prasraki, said that Sullivan was feared by staffers at the complex for his short temper and mostly remained in the condominium.
Prosecutors in Georgia are seeking the death penalty for the alleged hit man, Phillip Anthony Harwood. They say that he took a box of pink roses to McClinton Sullivan's Atlanta town house and shot her in the head.