Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  On Thursday, January 26, 1989, the Knoxville NewsSentinel ran a story with the headline “Remains identified as Knoxville girl,” byline Maria Cornelius, staff writer. It briefly recounted the discovery of the remains the previous Sunday, gave a description of Michelle and the party she attended, and then repeated Larry Lee’s account of what had transpired that night (though it did not name Larry Lee; to date, no news coverage had mentioned him by name). This account was attributed to a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation report. The TBI, however, had never investigated Michelle’s disappearance. The report was simply the preliminary missing-person report compiled by Detective McNair two years earlier and then passed along to the TBI when her remains were found.

  In the same article, Anita was quoted as saying that she had some relief in finally knowing her daughter’s fate, to at least know something. Soon after, she was interviewed by Channel 10 News. The reporter asked what she’d like to say to the person who killed her daughter, what she wanted. “I would like to kill him,” Anita replied. When she later saw the piece, she was so shocked that she didn’t do any more interviews. She hadn’t been shocked because she’d said those words; she’d been shocked because deep down, she knew she meant them.

  For the next few days, the papers covered any new details. The cause of death had not been determined, but the papers did name who would be investigating the case: Detective Jerry McNair and homicide Investigator Randy York. “McNair was assigned to the case two years ago when Michelle was reported missing,” his supervisor, Lt. Charles Coleman told the press. “The police are starting new. We were just notified, and a two-year-old complaint takes time.”

  After two years, there had been no real investigation by the KPD into Michelle’s disappearance. The investigative file contained statements taken from Anita and Larry Lee Smith, the original copy of the “satanic” letter left on Anita’s door, and a simple preliminary report stating that Michele was a missing person. So when Lt. Coleman told the reporter that the investigation into Michelle’s disappearance and death was “starting new,” he told a partial truth. In fact, it was just starting. The press were now ringing Anita’s phone and knocking on her door, but she was advised by the police to avoid saying much while the “new investigation” was ongoing.

  On February 2, 1989, the final report on Case No. 89-01 was issued by the UT Forensic Anthropology Center. Dr. Bass was unable to determine the exact cause of death, although he could rule out stabbing or a gunshot wound as evidenced by the skeleton. While most of the skeleton had been recovered, a number of small bones were missing, including the hyoid, the fragile curved bone in the throat that is usually broken during strangulation. Without it, the forensic team lost potentially valuable evidence. With the murder unsolved, Dr. Bass was hesitant to release the bones back to the family, who wanted healing and closure and believed that the physical remains of Michelle needed to be given a proper burial. Anita called him with that request.

  “You want the bones?” he asked, a tone of surprise registering in his voice, or at least that’s the way Anita heard it. It was the response of a forensic anthropologist concerned about evidence in an unsolved case. Anita, however, was a grieving, heartbroken mother. Dr. Bass’s Forensic Case 89-01 was all she had left of her baby. They weren’t speaking the same language.

  Dr. Bass convinced Anita to allow him one more day to photograph the bones for any future reference. He then released them to Rose Mortuary. The funeral service was set for Friday, March 3, 1989. Anita’s heartbroken father bought a lovely casket and he alone went to the mortuary to view his granddaughter’s remains.

  In a Knoxville Journal article headlined: “Teen’s burial Friday; death still a mystery,” Dr. Bass expressed concern to reporter Chuck Griffin when asked about the situation:

  “If you don’t think of everything that’s going to come along, you’ve buried your evidence.”

  Although Dr. Bass could not determine the exact cause of death, he could express his professional opinion: there were signs of foul play. He noted that no underclothing, shoes or socks were found on or with the victim. It appeared that Michelle had been dressed hurriedly and deposited in the woods minus those items. “She wasn’t walking in Cumberland County barefoot,” Bass was quoted as saying. He theorized that Michelle had been killed at another location and driven there. As to the timing: “She was killed the day she disappeared or the day after.”

  Michelle’s remains revealed the secret of how long she had lain in those woods, but not how she had died. As her soft tissues decomposed, so did any damning evidence left by her killer. “Death still a mystery,” proclaimed another newspaper headline. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation turned over Michelle’s clothing remnants and related “debris” to officials at the Knoxville Police Department, who forwarded the evidence to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, for analysis.

  In a letter dated April 7, 1989, Knoxville’s Chief of Police, Phil E. Keith, recorded the following evidence as being forwarded to the FBI lab:

  A. Pubic Hair

  B. Head Hair

  C. Cloth fragment and debris from bones

  D. Debris from clothing (1)

  E. Debris from clothing (2)

  F. Blue jeans from victim

  G. Hooded pullover sweat shirt from victim

  Chief Keith requested that the following be determined from this physical evidence: the sex, age and race of the victim from the hair samples, whether any semen was detected in the blue jeans hip and crotch remnant and whether any evidence of knife or gunshot wounds could be detected in the sweatshirt and bluejean remnants.

  Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing was still years away from the level and sophistication that would eventually become routine. In 1989, the blue jeans fragment was never tested for DNA, an issue that would become central to efforts to solve the case in the future.

  Just after sending the evidence for analysis, KPD Chief Keith also sent the “satanic” letter to see if anything could be learned from the handwriting or the two drawings possibly made with blood.

  On June 6, 1989, sixty days after the evidence collected from the recovery site had been sent for analysis, KPD Chief Keith received the FBI lab report. Test results on the possible blood samples found on the “satanic” letter were determined to be inconclusive. However, a written recommendation regarding the storage of this “blood sample” was made by the FBI lab and returned with the lab results. It requested that the “remaining blood stain be cut out, placed in an envelope and returned to the Knoxville Police Department with instructions to freeze for future comparison purposes [DNA].”

  The report also noted that six latent fingerprints were found on this letter and its accompanying envelope. Photographs of the prints were available through the lab “for any future comparisons you may request.” The report also included an analysis of the handwriting on the note and suggestions for comparing any handwriting samples to it in the future.

  The semi-intact blue jeans hip section and the deteriorated sweatshirt tested negative for gunpowder residue. No blood was found on any of the items. The blue jeans were determined to be “unsuitable for examination” in the effort to test for the presence of semen.

  All submitted specimens were noted as having been returned to the KPD by registered mail for future reference: the evidence scrapings, debris and hair samples, now stored in three pillboxes, two ziplock bags and one slide.

  Yet when the future arrived, no one at the KPD (or the TBI) knew what had become of this expertly collected, analyzed and catalogued evidence.

  It could not be found.

  8. ATLANTA BOOGIE

  Following the official announcement that the remains of a teenage girl found on a wooded Cumberland County hillside were those of Michelle Anderson, Anita was again instructed to report downtown to the Knoxville Police headquarters. There she briefly encountered Detective McNair. He greeted her in passing but made little eye contact. McNair, it turned out, would no longer be assigned to t
he case. Instead, Anita met with Homicide Investigator Randy York.

  Federal jurisdiction in kidnapping cases requires that the victim be transported across state lines. The remains of Anita’s hazel-eyed daughter were found within the state of Tennessee, but in a different county (a rural county, at that) from where she went missing, so the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had jurisdiction. The FBI closed its kidnapping case and opened a Domestic Police Assistance case in its place. Crossville-based TBI Agent Jim Moore requested a man on the ground in Knoxville to carry out the local interviews and investigation, although the case remained officially the TBI’s. York was selected to carry out the local investigation.

  For nearly two decades the handsome, dark-haired investigator had been part of the KPD rotating six-man homicide team. He looked long and hard at the KPD record on the disappearance of Michelle Anderson, which he’d just inherited. Then he looked again. There was no mention that Michelle’s disappearance was suspicious, or that the last person seen with the missing fifteen-year-old was a convicted kidnapper and rapist of a similarly-aged girl in Florida.

  What York saw most clearly was what was missing, what had not been done. No investigative interviews, no evidence, nothing. He cringed. Jerry McNair was a nice guy and a close friend. There were all those false sightings, York tried to reason to himself. Maybe they threw McNair off from investigating further, although not a one of them had ever been substantiated.

  “Within days of her disappearance, somebody should have been looking at this case hot and heavy, interviewing everyone at that party with Michelle,” York would later note, hesitant to speak critically of his former friend and colleague, or those that supervised McNair’s work. “Certainly, after a few days… I hate to say it. I thought a lot of Jerry, but he just wasn’t a barn-burner.” And no one over McNair at the KPD, apparently, seemed to have noticed a problem with his handling of the case.

  So the investigation into Michelle’s disappearance actually began with the finding of her remains. York, who carried a tape recorder, finally amassed a long-overdue investigative file. “I talked to kids for days,” he recalled. “I had a book.”

  By interviewing Anita, Chas and the other adolescents, York tried to reconstruct what had occurred the night Michelle disappeared. He couldn’t rule out Chas as a suspect because of Larry Lee’s claim that he’d dropped Michelle off near Chas’s house in the late hours of the night she disappeared. Chas denied that Michelle had ever come to his grandparents’ house that night. “I shared a bedroom with my grandfather,” he claimed. “If someone had come to the door to speak with me, my grandfather would have known.”

  York’s money was still on Larry Lee. He learned of Larry Lee’s criminal history, interviewed his estranged wife, Sara, and heard about the horrific abuse she claimed to have experienced at the hands of the suspect. York began tailing Larry Lee closely. “He’s got a worm in his head,” York later noted. “He’s a bad guy.”

  York received quiet assistance from FBI Special Agents Joe DeVuono and Grey Steed. DeVuono focused primarily on investigating the kidnapping and murder, while Steed provided advice about investigative techniques and supervised the collecting of information to be used by the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. They were working on a psychological profile of the suspect.

  On Tuesday, February 7, 1989, a week and two days after Michelle’s remains were discovered, DeVuono and an FBI colleague showed up at the Wendy’s restaurant on Chapman Highway in South Knoxville where Larry Lee was then employed. They showed identification, introduced themselves and asked to speak with him privately. They informed him that they were there investigating the disappearance and murder of Michelle Anderson.

  Larry Lee said he’d already talked to the police, told them everything he knew. Agent DeVuono informed Larry Lee that the FBI was offering him the opportunity to take a polygraph examination in order to remove himself as a suspect in the case. Larry Lee said he wanted to call his lawyer, and walked to the back of the restaurant. After remaining gone for a few minutes, he returned and announced that his attorney was in court.

  Agent DeVuono then advised Larry Lee that he’d already spoken to the attorney in question, who’d claimed that he did not represent Larry Lee at this time. Was there another attorney he wished to call?

  Larry Lee’s eyes shifted nervously as he tried to think of another way out. He knew his rights, he told them. Furthermore, he didn’t believe in the polygraph. Yet Larry Lee reluctantly agreed to accompany the agents to the local FBI field office in a bureau vehicle. “Do they know if someone stabbed or shot her?” Larry Lee asked during the ride.

  Dealing directly with violent criminals wasn’t normally a part of Agent DeVuono’s investigative domain. Dealing with a character like Larry Lee was a new and unpleasant experience for the young agent, whose senses were on alert. “I felt as if I were in the presence of pure evil,” he later said. “A psychopath with no remorse.”

  In the reception room of the FBI field office in downtown Knoxville, Larry Lee was nervous. While sitting with another agent, he made conversation and tried to deflect focus away from his being a suspect to him being a victim. He told the accompanying agent that two weeks before Michelle’s remains were found, his yard had been littered with garbage and threatening notes—although he couldn’t recall what messages they’d contained.

  “Didn’t your truck get trashed shortly after the girl went missing?” the agent asked. Larry Lee nodded, then told him that the day after Michelle disappeared a Knoxville police detective [McNair] had searched his Western Heights apartment and found nothing. He asked to make another phone call, to a different lawyer. Permission was given. Larry Lee called his mother instead. After a few minutes of mumbling into the phone, he twisted his head away from the receiver and toward the agent. “Am I under arrest?” he asked.

  “No. As we said before, you’re not under arrest.”

  Larry Lee repeated this information into the phone, after which he informed the agent that he was no longer willing to take a polygraph examination or speak with the FBI agents. He was taking his mother’s advice; he was leaving.

  Agent DeVuono and his colleague were obliged to accommodate Larry Lee by offering to drive him back to his place of employment. “No. Take me to my new lawyer’s office,” Larry Lee said as he directed them to the corner of Gay Street and Summit Hill Drive. Ruby had come through for her deviant son one more time. As they reached the intersection, Larry Lee turned to the agents. “You would think by now you would have caught the guy who did it… or the girl,” he said, grinning. Then he climbed out of the car and walked inside the building.

  Like York, Agent DeVuono had little doubt in his mind about the guilt of Larry Lee, but he also hadn’t ruled out Chas as an accomplice. Tragedy had followed Chas since Michelle’s disappearance. Less than a year after she’d gone missing, he had a falling out with his brother, Bobby, who accused Chas of being a drunk like their father. Bobby, who was gay, was seeing a young man named Melvin. One night he asked Chas to party with them, but Chas refused. He never saw his brother again. Bobby and Melvin got into an argument over taking a road trip to Mississippi—Melvin wanted to go and Bobby didn’t—so Melvin killed him, dumped his body, and drove down to Mississippi in Bobby’s truck. In an eerie coincidence, Bobby’s body was found alongside a road near Crossville, not far from where Michelle’s remains were found. It was a double whammy that year for Chas. First Michelle, then Bobby. And he wasn’t there either time to help.

  In early April 1989, more than a couple months after Michelle’s remains had been discovered, Chas answered a knock at the door of his grandparents’ house. When he stepped out onto the wide, gray planks of the front porch, he met Joe DeVuono and a colleague. They identified themselves as special agents of the FBI investigating Michelle Anderson’s disappearance and death.

  “We’d like to talk to you,” DeVuono told him.

  “No problem,” Chas said, but
then he explained that he’d promised his pregnant fiancé, Venus, that he would accompany her to the doctor. Agent DeVuono said this wasn’t a problem and asked Chas to stop by their field office. He then told Chas the address, phone number and directions. What he didn’t tell Chas was that he was being watched. A short time after the agents left, a dark hatchback picked Chas up. No car fitting that description was seen at the alleged doctor’s office at the appointed hour, and Chas did not show for his interview at the FBI field office that afternoon.

  A few days later the agents stopped by Chas’s house again, this time coaxing him into their car and driving him to their office to administer the polygraph exam. Chas ran through the whole story: who he was, who he was with, what he and Michelle did that night, what he did after she didn’t come home. At one point during the questioning, the polygraph showed evidence of deception and the examiner told Chas he was either lying or hiding something. Chas, who already seemed near breaking, began sobbing intensely. Then, almost as quickly as he had broken down, he pulled himself back together.

  To the agents, it was like he had thrown a switch, turned off the feed to his emotions and his tears, snap, just like that. “That’s all I know,” Chas told them, also closing down any further communication. By then he’d had two years to compartmentalize and block out his involvement, reasoned DeVuono, whose instincts told him that Chas had more knowledge than he was admitting. He may not have been directly involved in Michelle’s death, but he knew something.

  York stepped up his surveillance of Larry Lee. He observed that Larry Lee had a pattern: after leaving a local club or bar, he’d prowl around in his car at night. “Everywhere he went, I—or someone from KPD—was there, and I made sure he knew I was there,” York recalled. “I’d find out what people he’d had contact with, and I’d go interview them. His lawyer filed on me, claiming harassment.”