Then Larry Lee expanded his base. He worked as a night auditor at the Holiday Inn where his mother, Ruby, worked as a waitress, one of three jobs she held simultaneously. He had keys to all the rooms. If a guy came in wanting a girl, Larry Lee pimped out the services of his captive bride. Then he forced her to dance in a topless bar, where he’d position himself at a table on the side, collecting her earnings.
Ruby had very little use for this wounded, often intoxicated, woman-child that her baby boy had brought into her home. Sara and Larry Lee eventually moved into a little apartment, and Sara enrolled in high school, as required by local law. Ruby kept the baby, allowed Sara to see him once a week. At this point, Sara was completely under their control. She played by their rules, so well that one night, while both Ruby and Larry Lee worked, they let her watch Joey by herself. This was her chance. As soon as they left, she took a cab to her mother’s house.
“You’ve got to help me,” Sara pleaded, ultimately and surprisingly convincing her mother to allow her to move back home. The threat of harm to the baby had been Larry Lee’s hold on Sara. Now control of the baby was her way out.
While Joey stayed with Sara’s mother, Sara continued going to school. A week after her escape, Larry Lee entered the high school and approached Sara in the hallway. He reached for her hand and twisted her wrist as he pushed it into his pocket. “Say anything, and I’ll break it,” he whispered in a menacing tone. Then he led her out of the building, put her into his car and drove to the apartment they’d shared.“To this day,” Sara would muse years later, “I wish I’d let him break it.”
Her extreme fear had motivated her calculated escape. Now, face-to-face with her captor, her fear left her feeling defenseless. Sara just wanted the torture to stop. It would, but not before Larry Lee delivered one final, futile, near-lethal wallop.
Once inside the apartment, he knocked her out with a cast-iron skillet. When she came to, he was astride her, repeatedly punching her in the chest and abdomen. “Get the baby,” he told her. If she didn’t, Larry Lee said he would go after Joey Ray himself. But Sara knew this was unlikely. Her brother and stepfather lived at her mother’s house, and she knew Larry Lee would never confront them. He tried to avoid those confrontations. He found male fists frightening.
“You can forget it,” she said through her tears. “My mother won’t let you have him. Just kill me, please.” Then something happened that amazed Sara: Larry Lee shed a tear.
“Go get the baby and come back!” he demanded, and then he released her. She called a cab, stumbled into her mother’s house and collapsed. She had broken ribs and a bruised body, but she would never go back, and Larry Lee would not kidnap her again.
Sara was now free to fight the demons in her head, the nightmares of trauma and torture from the eleven months she had spent with her rapist husband, a psycho she’d married to escape from an abusive childhood. Now her abusive mother was her deliverance, all things being relative. It was early 1981, and Sara was just turning sixteen. Five months later, Larry Lee would be living in Clearwater, Florida.
Ruby loved her grandson, Joey. Almost to a fault, thought Sara. She’d watched Ruby’s protection of Larry Lee and her inability to hold him accountable for anything. She didn’t want that pattern repeated on Joey. But Ruby believed Sara was inadequate to care for her grandson’s needs. She began a custody battle that would last four years. Ruby had resources that Sara did not. And Ruby had visitation.
Sara also loved Joey, and she wanted to get this parenting thing right. But in time, she returned to the work she knew best and paid most. Sara was young and sexy. Men paid to see her dance and take off her clothes. It’s what Sara thought she was worth, and it was almost all she’d ever known.
It also paid the bills and supported the habit she used to cope with her trauma and the haunting dark side of the way in which she made her living. She plied her demons with alcohol and drugs. She ran through a series of unsavory boyfriends—she wouldn’t have known how to attract any other kind—but she exited the relationships herself, she claimed, if the guys so much as acted like they might get rough.
Ruby made reports against her to child welfare officials who, in turn, monitored Sara closely. She kept it relatively together for a while but blew it big time one day when Joey was four. Sara had given birth six months earlier to a daughter, and her boyfriend was another troubled soul. Sara was feeling overwhelmed by everything and angry with Joey for an incident. In the heat of the moment, she resorted to the belt. The marks were still visible that weekend when he visited Ruby. Sara would lose custody shortly afterward.
She wasn’t really sure how she felt about this. Sara hated the connections she believed Ruby had as a result of her employer and felt powerless to win against them. On the other hand, this parenting thing was a real challenge. The only parenting Sara had experienced was full of pain and neglect. She didn’t know how to value herself or validate her children. The whipping incident with Joey had left her feeling shaken, defeated and ashamed. Maybe Joey was better off with Ruby.
Not long after losing Joey, she decided to give up on the parenting thing altogether. To raise her daughter in her incestuous family seemed like a questionable proposition. And Sara’s growing want and need of mood-altering substances to dull her mental pain was another impediment to adequately caring for her offspring. When her daughter was six months old, Sara placed her with an adoptive family and would not meet her again until after she turned eighteen. At Ruby’s, she had visitation with Joey. Sara never had any more children.
Sara told Anita that she knew Larry Lee had served time in Florida for rape the year after she left him, but she didn’t know the details. She had little contact with the family. She did know that Larry Lee had returned to Knoxville sometime the previous year. He’d brought a girl with him, Maryanne, but she was gone now.
After hearing Sara’s story, Anita involuntarily leaned forward in her seat. Tears spilled from her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She pulled some tissues from her purse to absorb the flow. When Sara saw this, she too began to cry. For a few moments, no one spoke.
Finally, Ted thanked Sara, and she and Anita exchanged phone numbers. After dropping Celia off, Ted drove Anita home. They sat in shock. After an extended silence, he made them each a stiff drink.
During the past year, Anita had coped by following leads and persistently pursuing snippets of publicity about her missing daughter, meeting with only marginal success. Still, this had been her focus, her lifeline, her hope against hope that all these leads meant something, meant that Michelle was still out there somewhere. But as she reflected on Sara’s story, the horrible things she’d endured at the hands of Larry Lee, all the remaining hope she held regarding Michelle’s fate washed away.
7. WALKING THE DOGS
Late in 1988, almost two years after Michelle’s disappearance, Joseph P. DeVuono, Special Agent with the FBI, Knoxville Field Office, had business in the West Towne Mall branch of Charter Federal Savings Bank, where Anita’s cousin, Susan, was employed. Susan was much younger than Anita, only five years older than Michelle. She’d been close to the family since their return to Knoxville. In her cordial way, the bubbly, blonde Susan made small talk with Joe—as he insisted he be called—and she asked about his job with the Bureau. He was a warm, approachable kind of guy, Susan observed. He had dark, friendly eyes. She decided to take a chance.
Susan told him about her cousin’s daughter, Michelle, a sweet and lovely girl who was fifteen years old when she went missing. Susan explained that the last person known to be with Michelle the night she vanished had a criminal record for kidnapping and rape. The story pulled at the compassionate young agent. On his next visit to the bank, Susan was waiting with a scrapbook of clippings and pictures of Michelle. He found the whole case so disturbing, he said he would find some information on the Knoxville Police Department’s investigation. But there was nothing to find.
The more Agent DeVuono learned about the circumstan
ces of Michelle’s disappearance, the less he understood why the KPD had continued to treat the case as a runaway. It seemed so obvious to him that there was more to it. And you don’t treat a disappearance as a runaway just because a lot of kids run away, he thought. The fact that Larry Lee had a criminal record for sexual assault and was with her the night of her disappearance was enough to open the case as a potential kidnapping.
Agent DeVuono approached his boss with just that request. But the KPD case was two years old; his boss was reluctant. As a rookie agent, DeVuono wasn’t sure he could muster enough credibility to convince his superior to let him give it a try. Eventually, he talked him into it.
“You’ve got thirty days to come up with something,” his boss said.
DeVuono’s involvement and interest in the case brought comfort and some hope to Michelle’s devastated family. They were so hungry for someone’s concern, understanding, attention to what they’d gone through in their own investigation. Joe DeVuono was the FBI, and he got it. Finally!
Agent DeVuono touched base with KPD Detective McNair, who proposed the theory that Michelle was still alive. He repeated Larry Lee’s story that Michelle ran away because she was pregnant. He suggested that Agent DeVuono check out medical and women’s clinics. The new agent doubted this strategy, but respectfully followed McNair’s lead.
Agent DeVuono knew that photo identification could be unreliable, but he needed to begin somewhere, and he had only thirty days. He showed Michelle’s picture to staff at local clinics and immediately got a hit. One of the staff said they recognized her, and that she’d been there just a few days earlier. This supposed sighting got the special agent’s blood pumping due to a specific detail offered up by the witness. Michelle had a mole that wasn’t very visible in pictures, but this witness had accurately described it.
Holy mackerel! This is fantastic, thought DeVuono. He was so excited that he almost shared the news with Anita, but then decided to hold back until he’d actually found Michelle. He started looking at patient names and sign-in logs, but couldn’t find a match. He followed up on one lead, visited a girl in a trailer, but she wasn’t Michelle.
It was the end of a work week. Agent DeVuono’s plan was to resume his search on Monday. Over the weekend, however, two weeks after the FBI had officially opened their case on Michelle’s disappearance, a new, course-changing development occurred.
It was a wet Sunday afternoon, January 22, 1989. After a low of twenty-one degrees overnight, the afternoon temperatures had climbed into the mid-fifties, melting snow from earlier in the day and turning the precipitation into a light rain. At five o’clock, just as the sun was setting on this Super Bowl Sunday, twenty-year-old Jason James was walking his dogs through the damp woods near the Alloway community in Cumberland County, 70 miles west of Knoxville.
He was climbing a hillside up from a small stream near a clearing for some power lines when he saw a white object protruding from the dense carpet of leaves. He thought it looked like a piece of Styrofoam. The canines ran ahead and sniffed the ground, their probing noses exposing the object more clearly. Jason caught up with them and squatted for a closer look, then bolted quickly back to a standing position. It wasn’t Styrofoam—it was a human skull.
He called his dogs and ran back to his house, where he immediately phoned Cumberland County Sheriff Dale Elmore in Crossville, the county seat. Elmore and his men, Investigators Benton Threet and Avery York, met Jason and accompanied him to the discovery site. Beneath emerging stars and a nearly full moon, flashlight beams illuminated more human bones and remains. The officers returned to their station and called the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
The next morning, outside the sheriff’s office in Crossville, Sheriff Elmore and his investigators met with TBI Agent Jim Moore and Tennessee State Forensic Anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass and his team. For almost twenty years Dr. William Bass had been a professor of forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT), the flagship campus of the state university system. He was head of the Department of Anthropology there and was also the founder of the UT’s Forensic Anthropology Center, dubbed the “Body Farm.” Accompanying Dr. Bass that morning were Dr. Alison Galloway, Assistant Professor of Forensic Anthropology at UT, and Murray Marks, UT graduate student.
They formed a car, truck and cruiser caravan, drove as close as they could to the recovery site and walked the remaining distance into the remote woods. Newspaper and television crews had learned of the gruesome discovery and already arrived to cover the investigation.
One of Susan’s coworkers called to tell her a body had been found near Crossville. Susan called Agent DeVuono. “I was hoping you hadn’t heard that,” he said, concerned about Susan’s level of stress (she was five months pregnant). He volunteered to call Anita. After getting his call, Anita turned on the local news and watched the investigation unfold on TV.
Dr. Bass and his team assessed the scene. The skeleton was scattered, but mostly complete, lying on and under layers of leaves. Dr. Bass quickly determined that the body had been placed on top of the ground, not buried. Fall had come and gone twice since the unknown victim had been hidden in the woods, and two layers of leaves had collected upon the remains. Abandoned wasp nests inside the skull and the jeans indicated the body had been fully decomposed by the previous spring. So it had lain there at least a year without flesh.
Dr. Bass, the forensic team and officers walking uphill from the stream to the site of the remains in the woods. BELOW: Red flags were placed by Dr. Bass and his expert team at the location of each and every forensic find in the excavation of the remains.
The blue jeans of the victim had all but disintegrated by the time her body was discovered. The bones of the pelvic girdle were still contained within the semi-intact hip section of the size 5 Levis. The zipper was closed and no underwear were found with the remains. Below: “Abandoned wasp nests inside the skull…indicated the body had been fully decomposed by the previous spring.”
Although the skeleton was found to be almost complete—ninety-eight percent, it was later determined—it was spread out over a twenty-foot diameter, suggesting that small animals had rooted over and chewed on the body after it had been deposited. A pair of decayed, size five Levis were still zipped, the label readable inside, but the victim had on no underwear. A yellow and white striped sweatshirt lay nearby. The team carefully collected and cataloged the remains. They placed red, rectangle-shaped flags at the site of each find.
Based on information obtained from dental maturation, long-bone growth and growth-plate fusion, Dr. Bass determined that the victim was between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Noting characteristics of the cranium and the pubic bones, he determined that the skeleton belonged to a female and that her body had been in the woods for two years. Characteristics of the head and face determined that she was Caucasian; other features indicated that she was between 5’ and 5’3” tall.
An abundance of jewelry was found among the remains: four silver rings, three chains and four pendants. One pendant held a small gold crab.
Media coverage began immediately. Articles emanated from the Crossville Chronicle, the Knoxville News-Sentinel, the Knoxville Journal and the Chattanooga Times. “Skeleton of young woman found,” they announced; then, “Nationwide search launched to learn victim’s identity.” A southeast regional teletype went out to law enforcement agencies followed by a nationwide alert requesting help in identifying the remains. Messages began coming in from around the country. A spokesperson for the television show America’s Most Wanted called inquiring as to whether a known fugitive could be linked to the victim, and if so, the producers requested to be notified; they would be interested in filming an episode.
On Tuesday more details of the case were featured on the Knoxville evening news. Susan was watching. There was Dr. Bass holding the skull, examining it and discussing his forensic findings with a reporter. A vial of formaldehyde containing the victim’s hair was held up for dis
play. The image of the dark curl suspended in liquid burned a memory in Susan’s mind that she would never be able to forget. And then the reporter described the jewelry, including the crab pendant.
Susan called Anita.
Tears spilled down Anita’s cheeks, soaking into her sweater as she reached for a box of tissues. Looking back, she had always known how this would end. That first night after Michelle had disappeared, after the chase with Larry Lee Smith when Anita had come home consumed by panic and fear, her mother’s intuition had told her the outcome. “I just knew at that point that Michelle was dead,” she later confided. “I felt it.” But it was a feeling that Anita had pushed down as far as she could for as long as she could. Two whole years. But she knew for certain now. Before Dr. Bass could confirm an identity, she knew that the female who had spent the last two years alone with the sounds of the forest on that remote Cumberland County hillside was Michelle.
When Agent DeVuono and KPD Homicide Investigator Randy York arrived at Anita’s house to give her an update, they saw that she already knew. “Her heart was broken,” observed York, who had just been assigned to the case. “I felt so bad for her.”
Twenty-nine teeth of the victim were retrieved from the site. On Wednesday, January 25th, dental bitewing radiographs were produced from the remains by Dr. R. Douglas Beals, Michelle’s dentist and uncle, and Dr. Bass and his staff. These were compared with ones taken of Michelle’s teeth three years earlier in her uncle’s office.
Both men determined that they had found a match. Jane Doe No. 89-01 was now positively identified as Michelle Denise Anderson, date of birth 6/24/71; last seen 1/10/87; remains found 1/22/89. Agent DeVuono was present in Dr. Bass’s lab when he made the announcement. Dr. Bass held up the skull in triumph. Another forensic case solved. Agent DeVuono felt crestfallen.
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