When Sidney Dorsey suffered the humiliation of a surprise reelection loss as DeKalb County sheriff to a police officer and political backbencher, he ordered his successor killed and thus set fire to his own once-impressive law enforcement career.
The flamboyant and mercurial former DeKalb County sheriff, who a quarter century ago garnered international headlines for his arrest and conviction for masterminding the assassination of Sheriff-elect Derwin Brown by a hit squad of loyal underlings, died March 2 of natural causes at Augusta State Medical Prison. He was 86.
Dorsey’s death marks the end of the tragic villain’s saga of a once-promising Atlanta police officer who first gained notoriety in the late 1970s as one of the lead detectives in Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered Children cases and who went on to become DeKalb County’s first elected Black sheriff.
He was convicted in a Georgia court of murder and public corruption in July 2002, 19 months after Brown fell in a hail of bullets fired by a man Dorsey had promised a sheriff’s office promotion in exchange for the murder. The gunman, Melvin Walker, and David Ramsey, the backup shooter, are currently serving life sentences in federal prison.
Those who knew Dorsey remember him as a man with often conflicting attributes: He was affable, menacing, ostentatious — at times appearing in parades on horseback and in cowboy clothes — as well as devoted to his family and community, they said.
The same lawman who garnered both community respect as well as workplace ostracism for blowing the whistle on an Atlanta police department cheating scandal in the 1970s once killed a man during an argument at a gas station. A manslaughter charge against Dorsey was later dropped after he claimed his gun fired accidentally.
“He was a Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde,” said former DeKalb County Public Safety Director Thomas Brown (no relation to Derwin Brown), who was Dorsey’s successor as sheriff. “He could be a perfect gentleman, the kind of guy that, you know, you can sit down with and have a steak and a beer and just have a good old-fashioned conversation. And then, you know, something could flip.”
The flip that triggered Dorsey’s downfall came on Aug. 8, 2000. That’s when Derwin Brown pulled off a stunning runoff election upset over Dorsey, who had nearly won the primary outright three weeks earlier. Instead, Brown trounced Dorsey by a 2-to-1 margin after hammering the incumbent with corruption accusations. Among them: that Dorsey had misused deputies for personal errands, stolen county resources and engaged in sexual misconduct with subordinates. Those allegations not only cost Dorsey the election — they triggered state and local investigations into his tenure as sheriff.
Enraged and despondent over his defeat, Dorsey believed he was the victim of a racist crusade by white prosecutors and police, abetted by the Black sheriff-elect and the Atlanta news media. In his final months in office, Dorsey launched a plot to force a special election to reclaim his office by having Brown killed. He enlisted four employees from the sheriff’s office and his private security firm. The squad ambushed Brown in his driveway on Dec. 15, 2000.
A joint local, state and federal task force was immediately created to hunt for the killers. But the squad struggled for months to scrape up little more than circumstantial evidence linking the suspects to the crimes.
A break in the case came nearly a year later when two of the co-conspirators, Patrick Cuffy and Paul Skyers, agreed to testify against Dorsey, Walker and Ramsey to avoid prosecution.
Dorsey was convicted on Georgia murder and racketeering charges in July 2002. Walker and Ramsey were convicted in federal court in August 2005 after an unsuccessful state prosecution. All three were sentenced to life in prison.
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
Two years later, during a prison interview with law enforcement authorities, Dorsey confessed to ordering the hit on Derwin Brown, though he insisted he had later tried unsuccessfully to persuade the hit squad to call it off. According to Thomas Brown, who does not believe the convicted sheriff ever had second thoughts about the assassination plot, Dorsey would later tell him during a prison visit that he had decided to confess to prevent a local pastor from launching a campaign to grant him a new trial.
“I think that he had come to terms with accepting full responsibility for what happened and seemed to me to be very remorseful that it did happen,” said Zenobia Waters, an attorney who also visited Dorsey in prison. “I hope that in the end, he made peace with himself and peace with his God.”
Waters, who visited Dorsey about a decade into his sentence to discuss making financial arrangements for his family, said he was starting to show clear signs of cognitive decline at the time. Thomas Brown said Dorsey in recent years had appeared to have lost the ability to speak. Dorsey’s former wife, Sherry, declined to comment, and attempts to contact other family members were unsuccessful. Dorsey had five children, including his son, Sidney Jr., who died in 2018.
Cuffy, who once called Dorsey a “father figure” for whom he’d had conflicted feelings since testifying against him, said he was overwhelmed with sadness when he learned of Dorsey’s death.
“He was not an evil guy, even though we did an evil thing,” Cuffy said. “It was a bad mistake, and we had to pay for it.”
Derwin Brown’s daughter, Brandy, was sad for an entirely different reason: Answers she had long sought will be buried with Dorsey, she said. Then she spoke with a measure of pity about the man who ended her father’s life and devastated her family.
“Every day we wake up, we have the opportunity to re-create ourselves, our lives, and leave our stamp on the world,” Brandy Brown said. “And I just hate that he made the choice to leave this as his stamp on the world. You know that is his legacy. He will forever be known for that.”
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