On September 14, 1987, Circuit Court Judge Vincent Sherry and his wife, Biloxi city councilwoman Margaret Sherry, were found murdered inside their home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

There was no forced entry.

No robbery.

No obvious sign of a random attack.

At first, the case seemed to point in several directions.

Local politics.

City corruption.

Organized crime.

Revenge.

Or someone from Judge Sherry’s past as a criminal defense attorney.

Margaret Sherry had been an outspoken critic of corruption in Biloxi. She had fought publicly with Mayor Gerald Blessey and had planned to run for mayor again. Vincent Sherry, meanwhile, had once represented people tied to the Gulf Coast underworld before becoming a judge.

But the deeper investigators looked, the stranger the case became.

What started as a double murder investigation eventually led to a lonely-hearts scam being run from inside Angola Prison, money moving through a Biloxi law office, and a loose criminal network often described as the Dixie Mafia.

At the center of the story were names that still linger around this case decades later:

Kirksey McCord Nix Jr.

Pete Halat.

LaRa Sharpe.

Mike Gillich.

John Ransom.

Thomas Leslie Holcomb.

The first trial in 1991 brought convictions, but not a complete answer.

The later case, after Gillich cooperated with prosecutors, finally brought Halat and Holcomb into the courtroom. Halat, the former Biloxi mayor and Vincent Sherry’s former law partner, was sentenced to eighteen years in federal prison. Holcomb, identified in the later federal case as the hired killer, was sentenced to life.

But even after the convictions, questions remained.

Who drove the yellow Ford Fairmont seen near the Sherry home?

How much did people know before the murders?

And how long had Biloxi been looking the other way?

Cases like this do not wrap up cleanly.

The Sherry murders were not just about one killing, one motive, or one person pulling the trigger.

They were about power, corruption, prison scams, money, silence, and a criminal world that operated through relationships more than formal structure.

In this episode of The Southern Blueprint Podcast, I dig into the murders of Vincent and Margaret Sherry, the Dixie Mafia, the Angola prison scam, Pete Halat, Kirksey Nix, LaRa Sharpe, Mike Gillich, John Ransom, Thomas Holcomb, and the Sherry family’s long fight for answers.

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