Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  A grin spread across Chas’s face. “Uhh…” His eyes shot toward nothing then back again to Vance. “Hit the sack,” Chas chose from the options offered by Vance.

  “You and Michelle?”

  “Yes.”

  “One kind-of-a-personal-question,” Vance said with a chuckle. Chas nibbled his finger as he listened. “You don’t have to answer. It doesn’t really make a difference. Was Michelle a virgin?”

  Now looking directly at Vance, Chas replied in his flat tone, “I believe she was. She said she was.”

  “Okay,” Vance said. “Just wondering. Please continue. What happened next?”

  “After Larry Lee carried Michelle upstairs, I was sitting there on the side of the bed, and she started calling for ‘Mike’ or somebody, and we started yelling.” Chas looked away again, rubbing his knuckles slowly back and forth across his upper lip.

  “You wanted to know who Mike was, huh?!”

  “Yes,” Chas answered.

  “A little jealousy, was there?” Vance teased.

  “Yes, there was.” Chas grinned widely now.

  He went on to give the account of Michelle rushing out of the apartment, his running after her, Larry Lee insisting upon driving them home, and his sitting in the bed of the truck until he was dropped off first at the end of his street.

  “Were you pretty stoned? Did you crash when you got home?” Vance asked.

  “No, I sat up and got something to eat.”

  “How long were you up?”

  “Probably forty-five minutes.”

  “Had you sobered up by then?”

  “Yes, I had.”

  “What time did he drop you off?”

  “That was around four a.m.”

  “Who all was there at that time?”

  “My grandfather and grandmother.”

  “Brother?”

  “No, he was in Houston, Texas.”

  This last comment stood out to Anita. As she recalled, someone in her family had spotted Chas’s brother Bobby just days after Michelle’s disappearance. And according to her recollection, Chas had told them that Bobby was still up when he got home that night and had eaten something with him. If Chas was telling different versions, he didn’t seem to be able to recall which one he’d told to whom.

  “Did you feel safe leaving Michelle with Larry?” Vance probed. Chas paused, eyes scanning the yard. Before he answered, Vance continued. “Or were you just so pissed about the other incident?”

  “I was just so pissed about the other incident.”

  “Was she pretty well—”

  “Yes, she was messed up,” Chas confirmed, cutting in.

  “Was she passed out up front?”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “Was she sitting next to him or the window?”

  “The window.”

  “What do you believe happened to Michelle? Did she ever mention running away to you?”

  “No, she did not. The whole time I was dating her, I never heard her say that.”

  “If Michelle ran away, who do you think she would contact first?”

  “I think she would call Marci.”

  Chas went on to say that if Michelle was out there he wished she would contact someone “to relieve a lot of people’s consciences and make a lot of people feel more at ease to know that she was okay.”

  “Do you ever pray for her?” Vance asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you believe in Jesus?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Why’d you stop coming around here?” Vance asked, indicating the Anderson home. “Too many bad feelings?”

  “Too many bad feelings, and I thought people were getting tired of me being around. I was here day in and day out.”

  “How long after Michelle disappeared did you start dating your new girlfriend?”

  Chas cast his eyes up as he calculated in his head. “About three-and-a-half months.”

  In the end, Vance’s efforts didn’t come to much. He gave Anita a copy of the videotape and showed Michelle’s picture around. A few people claimed to have seen her, but these sightings turned out to be false. Anita and her parents accompanied Vance to a place or two, but it was all for naught.

  “He pretended to investigate,” Anita later said of the production and the outcome, “but it was useless. I don’t know why he bothered. I was willing to give him a chance, grasping at anything or anyone who might help us.”

  In the ensuing months, any fantasy Anita still held that Michelle had run away was fading. On October 1, 1987, days short of the ten-month anniversary of her daughter’s disappearance, Anita sat down and wrote a letter to no one in particular and everyone in general who might have occasion to read it. She wanted the newspaper to publish it; she wanted the Knox County District Attorney, Ed Dossett, to read it; she wanted someone to hear her and help her—Please!

  Dear _____________,

  My daughter, Michelle Denise Anderson, age 16, [Michelle had a birthday over the summer] has been missing since January 10, 1987. We have heard hundreds of rumors since then, however to my knowledge, no one has heard a word from her. The local authorities believe that she is a runaway. We do not believe this. The circumstances under which she disappeared are unusual: She attended a party on the night of January 9 where she and two friends accepted a ride from a man, Larry Smith, 26 years old, who was a stranger to all of them… [She went on to describe the events after the party and Larry Lee reportedly dropping Michelle off alone.]

  …Larry Smith would not submit to a polygraph and the police have questioned him only once. I later found out through his family lawyer that he was in prison in Florida for raping a fourteen year old girl, and his parole wasn’t up until January of this year… I am convinced that my daughter would be home if it had not been for this man. Why is the criminal protected?

  I have been unable to obtain a warrant for contributing to the delinquency of a minor [for buying and supplying alcohol] and the police will not ever question this man again, despite his record of rape. I hope that he is innocent and that Michelle is just afraid to come home. But he could be guilty of a crime even worse than rape. My family and I are nearly crazy from worry with absolutely no answers. Michelle has appeared on television nationwide through the “Missing Children Help Center.” Even on that report they said to “expect foul play.” If Larry Smith had not been involved, I might be able to accept that Michelle did run away, but she had no reason to do so, and she had nothing with her except her purse. I am writing to you out of desperation; I don’t know what to do next or where to turn.

  Sincerely,

  Anita H. Anderson

  6. CAPTIVE BRIDE

  It was the holiday season, 1987—the first for the family without Michelle. She’d now been missing for nearly a year and no one was any closer to solving the mystery of her disappearance. Anita was struggling to get through, willing the days of celebration to pass by quickly. She’d gone out to an office Christmas party on a Friday evening, and her mother, Marie, had stopped by the house to pick up a cake pan when the aqua-blue wall phone began ringing.

  “Hello?” Marie answered.

  “Who is this?” a strange sounding female caller asked on the other end.

  “Who are you looking for?” a surprised Marie replied, trying to decide the best way to respond to this odd caller.

  “I found this number on the picture of a dark-haired girl. It was on my coffee table. Is my husband messing around with her?”

  “Umm… I don’t know. Can you tell me your name and describe this picture?”

  As Marie chatted with the suspicious woman, who identified herself as Celia, she tried to put her at ease and comprehend the meaning of her call. She eventually realized that the “picture” was the flyer about Michelle.

  Celia sometimes suffered from spells of misapprehension and occasional occurrences of unreasonable paranoia. Thus the unusual manner in which this call began. Marie assured Celia that no one there kn
ew her husband and explained that her daughter, Anita, had distributed many flyers of her missing daughter. It was Anita’s phone number on the flyer.

  As Celia calmed, the two women chatted. Marie told Celia all about Michelle’s disappearance, about her last being seen late one Friday night the previous January, riding in the truck of a man named Larry Lee Smith.

  “I know who he is!” Celia exclaimed suddenly. “He’s the ex-husband of my friend Sara. Sara Smith!”

  Celia was Sara’s friend and former neighbor. Marie was stunned by the caller’s fortuitous connection to Larry Lee. She listened with great interest, taking down Celia’s information and phone number. When Anita arrived home, Marie was waiting to deliver the news.

  Anita called Celia the next day. Celia told her she’d already spoken to Sara, who had agreed to meet with her. A couple days later, Anita and her boyfriend, Ted, followed the directions they’d been given to Celia’s house. She lived in an older Knoxville neighborhood where the avenues are named after well-known American cities: Milwaukee, Orlando, Chicago, and so forth.

  “Yes. Well, okay,” Celia said stiffly as she answered the knock at her front door. “We’ll go meet Sara now.” Celia wore her golden-brown hair long and uneven. She had recently begun to believe that she might be a witch, pulling dark and complicated messages from the Bible verses she compulsively read. Sara had tried to convince her friend otherwise, but the voices in Celia’s head held increasingly greater sway over any on the outside. Still, her heart was kind and her intent was good. She climbed into the car with Anita and Ted. “Turn right at the end of the next block,” she instructed.

  Sara opened the door to her second floor apartment. She was a striking woman of twenty-four, slim, medium height, with dark, silky hair that she wore long and straight. “Hi. Come on in. I’ve got coffee, coke or beer,” she offered with a warm smile in a throaty-yet-feminine voice. As her guests took a seat, Sara lit a cigarette and asked, “What has Larry Lee done now?”

  Anita filled Sara in on the circumstances of Michelle’s disappearance, her own encounter with Larry Lee the day after and what had transpired (or not) in the nearly twelve months since. Sara focused intently on Anita as she talked. The weight of Anita’s story seemed to bear down upon her.

  When Anita finished, Sara inhaled deeply, allowing some moments of silence to pass before responding. “I wish I could give you some good news… but he is a bad man. He raped me, tortured me, nearly killed me. I’m terrified of him. And his mother won’t believe any of it. She protects him every step of the way.”

  The odds had been heavily stacked against Sara from the moment she was conceived inside the womb of her drug-addicted mother. She was the seventh and final child of a woman who had given up babies four and five for adoption. If Sara had been one of those siblings, she might have had a chance.

  As it was, she was first molested as a child by an uncle who’d also molested her mother. The ongoing rapes by her uncle were followed by those of her brothers, cousins, and stepfathers. This became Sara’s normal, accompanied by neglect, yelling and regular beatings. For the longest time, she didn’t know that life wasn’t this way everywhere. She still startled at the sound of a zipper or woke with a start if she heard it in a dream. The smell of cigar smoke could trigger panic.

  Sara had loved school, loved learning, although she struggled. It was hard being the “poor kid,” a label she keenly felt. Her clothes were hand-me-down; her hair was a mess. Dressing and grooming her youngest child was far down on the priority list of Sara’s mother, preoccupied as she was with other things. By age nine, Sara was helping her locate veins to inject pain killers, narcotics that added far more pain to the family than they ever removed. By age twelve, Sara’s mother was finding veins for her. Then her mother began coaxing her attractive young daughter to trade sex with her male friends for a fix.

  At age fourteen, Sara, by then a raven-haired beauty, decided she’d had enough. She ran away, hitchhiking as far as Tucson, Arizona, where she met a guy who befriended her, allowing her to stay with him and his mother in their trailer for a while. Then they bought her a bus ticket home. She called her mother. Yes, she could come home. No, she wasn’t in trouble. But as soon as Sara returned, she was picked up and placed in juvenile detention for three weeks for running away and missing school. That would teach her.

  Before long the routine of Sara’s dismal life resumed. The year was 1979, and she was now fifteen. At a park in South Knoxville she met a small-time dope dealer named Larry Lee Smith, who sold her some pot and eventually asked her out to the movies. He was eighteen and kind of cute: brown, bushy curls, round blue eyes, a sort of turned-up nose and a wide, seemingly friendly mouth.

  Sara accepted his offer, and a romance began. Two months later she was pregnant with their child. For Sara, this development brought hope. Her mother immediately kicked her out, which seemed more than ironic to Sara because her mother had never cared where she was or what she did. She didn’t want another kid to raise, Sara surmised. But Larry Lee loved her and wanted to marry her. Sara would be free of her past at last. Everything was going to be fine.

  Larry Lee had a private basement room in his mother’s house; the basement had its own entrance from the back. Larry Lee was into photography and had a dark room down there. They began their life together, a life that seemed okay to her at first. He was attentive, generous, normal, at least as close to normal as she’d ever known. She thought she loved him.

  Larry Lee’s mother, Ruby, however, was a woman given to fits of screaming about nearly anything. At first, Ruby tolerated the young woman in her basement. She was carrying the baby of her baby, after all. But as Larry Lee’s attitude toward his teen bride changed, so did Ruby’s.

  Around the seventh month of Sara’s pregnancy, cracks began to appear in the façade of Larry Lee’s normalcy. Sara had invited Cindy, an old school friend, over to the house to hang out. The three of them rode in Larry Lee’s car to the Pizza Hut on Chapman Highway to grab a bite before returning to the basement room. There Larry Lee offered Cindy a Quaalude, something Sara didn’t think was such a good idea. But her adolescent husband was cooking up one of his plans, plans that Sara had yet to become aware of. Cindy took him up on the offer.

  It had been a humid East Tennessee day and Sara was feeling sweaty. She announced that she was going upstairs to take a quick shower. She’d be right back, she said, and climbed the stairs to the first-floor bathroom. Sara cranked the music up loud and hummed with the radio as she worked up a lather over her pregnant teenage body. Rinsing away the last of the soap, she turned the shower off, stepped out and reached for the towel. Then she became very still. Sara thought she heard something, loud voices, like someone was yelling. She turned the volume down and made out muffled screaming.

  Wet and half naked, Sara bolted down the stairs and followed the sounds to the basement bedroom. There she found Larry Lee on top of Cindy, wrestling her down, forcing himself on her. Sara climbed on top of her grappling husband and attempted to pry him off. Cindy struggled free and got away, accusing Sara of having set her up. Shocked and hysterical, she grabbed her clothes, haphazardly pulling them on and bolting out the door.

  Sara was baffled and mortified. “What were you thinking!?” she yelled. Larry Lee brushed her off, insisted that Cindy wanted it but changed her mind. Larry Lee’s demons were making their appearance. This was the attempted rape that he would later confess to the prison psychiatrist in Florida. It was the first real hint for Sara of what lay ahead.

  Instead of defending himself, Larry Lee hurled accusations at Sara, accusing her of messing around with his big brother, Brad. Sara denied his charges, but he became increasingly cruel to her. Not long after the attempted rape, while Sara was still pregnant, Larry Lee punched her in the abdomen, a beginning to the future beatings she would endure.

  In the summer of 1980, their son, Joseph “Joey” Ray Smith, was born—“Joseph” after the middle name of Sara’s father, whom she’d
met only a few years before, and “Ray” for the middle name of Larry Lee’s father, who’d been gone from his life for nearly as long as he could remember. It was a couple of weeks later that Larry Lee revealed the full nature of his darker side.

  Sara liked to drink. Alcohol warmed her body and numbed her wounded psyche. But this drink Larry Lee made for her seemed different. She suddenly felt dizzy, disoriented, and then nothing. As she slowly came to, wrapped in a thick haze, she heard strange, distant sounds—drilling of some kind. As the fog slowly lifted, she realized that Larry Lee had drilled holes in the corner bedposts, through which he’d inserted large hooks. Sara was on her stomach, a dog collar around her neck, arms chained to either post, a gag in her mouth. The sexual torture was about to begin. Sara still had stitches from having given birth to a nearly ten-pound baby two weeks earlier. This didn’t concern Larry Lee. He sodomized her while she was chained in this prone position. And when he was done, he beat her on the back of her head.

  She had better keep her mouth shut, he warned her, or he’d harm the baby, cut him up in little pieces. “Don’t think I won’t do it,” Larry Lee threatened as he unchained one of Sara’s arms. Then he got in his car and left. It took a while for Sara to get her other hand free and crawl up the stairs. She was bleeding and needed help.

  “What happened to you?” Ruby demanded, sounding annoyed, the baby in her arms.

  “Your son did this to me!” Sara cried.

  Ruby would hear none of it. Sara was lying, she said.

  When Larry Lee returned he chained Sara again, for two weeks this time. He beat her randomly, without provocation, using his fists, coat hangers, broom sticks and, on at least one occasion, a skillet. He was teaching her, Larry Lee explained. He wanted her to beg. And beg she did. She did anything he said. That was the plan: Larry Lee confided to her that he’d always had a fantasy about keeping a sex slave. Soon, he had her performing sexual favors for his friends. He plied her with alcohol and drugs and then threatened to chain her up again if she didn’t comply. And he taunted her with the things he would do—or said he had done—to baby Joey, who she’d rarely seen since the torture began.