Millionaire Manhunt

Wanted For Murder, A Man Evades Authorities For Nearly Two Decades

(CBS)  But analyzing Sullivan’s social life didn’t get authorities any closer to proving their theory that he had hired a hit man to kill Lita. They just didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with murder. In 1991, five years after Lita’s murder, her frustrated family sued him, eventually winning a $4 million judgment.

They didn’t see a dime of it; Sullivan had long since stashed his millions safely offshore and out of reach, as was he living the good life in Costa Rica.

The files accumulated and the years passed. But in 1998, 11 years after the murder, in a small town in rural Texas, fate intervened in the person of one Belinda Trahan.

Trahan worked as a receptionist for lawyer Ed Lieck, and out of the blue one day, told him she needed to speak with him — urgently

Her tale began in back in the late ‘80s, when she was living in North Carolina with a man named Tony Harwood, a mover for North American Van Lines.

"We were together about three years, off and on," Belinda says.

She said she would never forget the bizarre story he told her after an overnight run to Palm Beach.

"He was like, ‘Well, there’s this rich white man that wants to have his black wife taken care of,'" Belinda recalls.

But Harwood loved to brag, and Belinda says she never believed his story.

Harwood insisted his story was true, explaining that there were other people in on the job, too and that it would come off the next time he went to Georgia.

Trahan was still incredulous.

But Harwood came back, disappointed, saying the intended victim hadn’t cooperated, refused to answer the door — whereupon Trahan joked that if you want a woman to come to the door, take her flowers.

"I wish I’d never said that," she says in hindsight.

Because that’s exactly what happened. When Harwood returned from a second trip to Atlanta, he said the job was done.

But Trahan still didn't believe her boyfriend.

By now, Harwood was determined to prove he wasn’t making it up, telling Trahan to get in the car. He drove overnight, to a roadside diner. She has no idea what it was called or even what state it was in, but she remembers clearly what happened there.

"This guy comes in. He looked right at me and then he looked over at Harwood and he says, 'What is she doing here?’" Trahan recalls.

Then the man pushed a newspaper across the table, and Trahan says Harwood pulled the newspaper towards himself.

It wasn’t until they were back in the car that Trahan realized the newspaper had an envelope in it with lots of money. In fact, it had half of what Harwood said was the $25,000 payoff for the murder of Lita Sullivan.

Now, finally, Trahan believed him. She split, moving to Texas to start over. She eventually got married.

But Harwood never let her forget what she knew or what would happen if she told. "Yeah. He threatened me pretty much the whole time," she says.