Jan 19 2007
NO BREAK FOR DIXIE MAFIA MEMBER
Bobby Joe Fabian helped solve Sherry murder case
ANGOLA, LA. — Testimony that solved one of Mississippi’s most difficult murder cases didn’t win a reduced sentence for a 62-year-old inmate, one of the few surviving members of the “Dixie Mafia.”
Former federal prosecutor George Phillips, now head of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, was among officials asking the Louisiana Pardon Board to cut Bobby Joe Fabian’s life sentence to the 36 years he has served for kidnapping and shooting two Louisiana police officers.
Fabian’s testimony connected lucrative telephone scams run by Angola prison inmates to the September 1987 slayings of Biloxi Circuit Court Judge Vincent Sherry and his wife, Margaret, a former Biloxi City Council member.
“Mr. Bobby Joe Fabian literally handed us the Sherry murder case on a silver platter. The state and locals had been working on this case for over two years and didn’t even have a suspect, didn’t have a lead,” Phillips said.
The Sherrys’ daughters, Lynne Sposito of Raleigh, N.C., and Leslie Miller of Lafayette, joined Phillips, retired FBI agent Keith Bell and Fabian’s attorney, Cynthia Speetjens, in supporting Fabian.
The five-member board’s “no” was unanimous.
Phillips said Fabian’s cooperation helped federal authorities convict seven people, including former Angola inmate Kirksey McCord Nix Jr., former Biloxi Mayor Pete Halat and the hired killer, Thomas Leslie Holcomb.
Nix, a convicted murderer, ordered the killings from Angola after Halat, his attorney, told him the judge had stolen thousands of dollars Nix had accumulated in the 1980s by bilking homosexual men who thought they were helping young men who had minor brushes with the law.
Prosecutors said it was actually Halat who took the money.
Board Chairman Ronald Cox said Fabian “did a wonderful thing for Mississippi,” but “has a brutal past” including the 1970 attacks on Trooper Wendell Lewis and Delhi Marshall Bill Curry, for which he was convicted of aggravated kidnapping.
The Dixie Mafia was the name lawmen gave a group of traveling criminals in the late 1960s.
Sposito said the investigation and prosecution of the Sherrys’ killers would have been impossible without Fabian, who is in an undisclosed prison under a federal witness protection program.
“It seems so bizarre that someone with that background would do the right thing,” she said.
The Associated Press, January 19, 2007, http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070119/NEWS/701190356/1001/NEWS
Fabian has served over 35 years. He is serving time for shooting two policemen in the leg. He does have a previous criminal history, but for turning states evidence he SHOULD BE PAROLED!!!!! Other criminals will now think twice about coming forward.
Fabian was also convicted of being the trigger man in my father’s contract killing in 1970. If he would like to truly do something good. He could start by telling the state of Mississippi who hired him to kill my father. Then we could really talk about parole.
I do wish people could let this go cause no one person involed in this wuz innocent, i mean not a one. They all had a hand in the cookie jar at one time or another!
they will never let it go it is too much left to find out but i agree with you that they all in it for the money but i did time with a guy named richard durr and i read the book mississippi mud and durr looks like fabin to me do you know any thing about durr he told me some stuff so i know he had something to do with the dixie mafia but what i dont know do you
I don’t think he should be let either, with a past
and history that violent , I wrote to him
a few years ago and he hasn’t changed a bit,
he was trying to get me to place some
ads in the paper to con people out of their money,
like this one. How to save big money on
your heating bills ? Answer, Get a fan ,
and have it pointed towards the ceiling so it
will redistribute the heat . He roared with
laughter about that one, thought it
was so funny. I didn’t do it though.
I found him to be an awful man, and
I believe a liar. Kirksey Nix , on the other hand,
was much more decent, at least to me.
There is good and bad in everyone , and sometimes, though someone does good, the bad
overweighs it. I hope that he does get
out sometime, maybe when he’s too old
to do anyone else any harm.
where is kirksey mcord nix?
I agree with Debbie 100 percent.
They ought to get him special food, privileges, something besides the extra protection he’s getting which only counterbalances the threat of being stabbed for turning police informant. The sad thing is that the system requires incentives and if they do not reward him other inmates might not be as inclined to come forward.
Kirksey Nix is in Marion, Illinois.