Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  When the two-year-old was reported to have suddenly collapsed on her Big Wheel, she and her siblings had been at home with their father. The mystery was the nature and extent of the child’s injuries, internal injuries unlikely to have been produced by a fall from the seat of a Big Wheel just inches off the ground. Everyone agreed that the explanation for her condition made no sense, but the father was sticking with his story. The mother stood by him, too, but she also seemed confused and scared, afraid she’d lose her children.

  While the two-year-old began to recover, the question as to what really happened to her remained unanswered. Detective McNair had the parents’ statements and took no further action on the matter. He didn’t see what else he could do—like continue to question or pressure them to produce a story that made sense, Sasha wanted to scream at him. She felt frustrated and in a quandary. This case appeared to be going nowhere.

  On her own, Sasha determined to root out a resolution. She stepped up her visits to the home and tried to time her visits so that she would have an opportunity to talk with the father alone.

  On one of these visits, while talking casually with him, using self-disclosure to build rapport, she mentioned how stressed out she remembered being at times when her kids were young. “I would lose it sometimes,” she confided. He nodded in agreement. “Do you ever lose it?” she asked him. He nodded in agreement again. “Did you lose it that day?” Again, he nodded in the affirmative. And then Sasha got the story, the true story.

  The father had become upset with the two-year-old daughter. While sitting on the floor in front of the sofa, he swung his arm outward toward the little girl, caught her in the abdomen with his forearm and slammed her back into the sofa’s front trim-board. The force of the impact produced the hidden injuries. Even though the little girl stopped crying and went out to get on her Big Wheel, she suffered severe internal bleeding and soon passed out.

  The father told Sasha that he was relieved on some level to have gotten that off his chest. He allowed Sasha to drive him to the KPD to give a new statement to Detective McNair. The child had nearly died, the father got time, and McNair got credit for solving the case.

  When the stars lined up for Sasha to share a second case with the detective, she tried to alter that course before it began. She’d received a report that two teenage sisters were being housed at the local runaway shelter, having escaped from their parents’ temporary home, a two-room motel suite. They were alleging sexual abuse at the hands of both parents.

  She went to the shelter to interview the sisters. As their story unfolded, revealing a level of family dysfunction and sexual abuse that was shocking, even to someone who investigated abuse for a living, Sasha contemplated the gravity of the case. The girls were giving clear and consistent details, coming off as very credible, and saying they would be willing to follow through with prosecution.

  Sasha stopped mid-interview and excused herself. She had to call the assistant district attorney who coordinated the investigative teams. After she informed him about the nature of the case, she asked what detective would be assigned. The assistant DA put her on hold, then picked back up, and said, “Detective McNair.”

  Sasha had a good track record; she’d handled her clients well, conducted competent interviews, collected essential facts, wrote better-than-average reports and testified effectively in court. At this point in her career, she’d earned both credibility and influence among her colleagues, so she thought it was reasonable to say, “Please don’t assign McNair to this case.” She knew she was pushing the boundaries here—social workers didn’t normally make such requests—but what surprised her was the sense of urgency in her voice.

  “Why?”

  “Because he will blow it,” she answered.

  “I’ll call you back,” the assistant DA replied. But when he did, his answer was blunt: “You’ve got him.”

  Sasha returned to the next room and completed the inter-view.

  The girls’ parents were informed that their daughters were being taken into temporary custody by DHS and would not be returning home at present. At some point, the parents were instructed to report to the police station for questioning. Sasha wanted to be there. In no other case had she participated in this portion of the investigation; it was not within her duties. But this case was different: she didn’t trust McNair’s work.

  The detective agreed to allow Sasha to question the parents with him. They split them up and took turns with each one. The couple had traveled the country in a motor home, hauling their family secrets from state park to state park, below the radar of local officials. The father was tough and seasoned, the mother his codependent co-conspirator. They were professionals at lying and evasion. They weren’t giving an inch, especially not to a passive, teddy-bear cop and a social worker.

  But Sasha knew they were scared.

  After hours of questioning, she and McNair regrouped and compared notes. She tried to convince him that there was probable cause with the girls’ statements and their willingness to testify. But McNair just answered her with his trademark shrug of the shoulders. He didn’t see where he could go from here.

  “Don’t let them leave,” Sasha urged. “Call a judge. Get an arrest warrant.” She’d seen it done many times.

  “I can’t do that,” he responded.

  “YES. YOU CAN!”

  But he didn’t. Sasha watched as the parents, probably amazed by the opportunity they’d just been given, slid out of the police station into the night. Before daylight, they’d slipped silently out of the state. At least they’d left their daughters behind.

  Within a few days, Sasha got a call from the assistant DA. “Would you like to tell me, I told you so?” he offered.

  “I told you so,” she responded.

  Three years later the parents were arrested on a routine traffic stop in Florida. By then they had several outstanding arrest warrants. They were extradited back to Tennessee where they stood trial. The daughters testified as they had always said they would, and the parents were sentenced to prison.

  So to Sasha, Detective McNair’s lack of interest in the matter of Michelle Anderson was all too familiar. She felt bad for Anita, knowing that the police had already given up on her little girl. But circumstances in Sasha’s own life pulled her away from the story, and from Knoxville. She accepted a job offer in Alabama to coordinate a family program in a residential treatment center. It was in Alabama that she met her husband, Bert. Her work and her hectic personal life took over, and Michelle’s disappearance drifted to the distant recesses of her mind. She was no longer in touch with the Knoxville community. She didn’t know what had transpired in the case after she moved. She never heard about the discovery of Michelle’s body or the joint investigation by the FBI, TBI, and KPD. She had never even heard the name Larry Lee Smith.

  Things changed on a lazy winter afternoon in the mid-1990s—nearly a decade since Michelle had gone missing. Sasha and Bert were watching a TV show that profiled police cases that had used forensic science to identify bodies and solve crimes. The narrator began talking about a case involving the skeletal remains of an adolescent female found in the mountains of East Tennessee. That got Sasha’s attention. She’d lived there for twelve years.

  Then forensic anthropologist Dr. William Bass appeared on-screen, discussing his findings. For Sasha, watching this scene unfold before her was a bit surreal; she had minored in cultural anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, when Dr. Bass was head of the anthropology department there. He’d admitted her to the graduate program. In 1981 she’d studied under his late wife, nutritional anthropologist Dr. Mary Ann Bass.

  A picture of Michelle Anderson flashed on the screen. And there it was, confirmation of what Sasha had always suspected. Michelle had been murdered. The narrator ended the segment by noting that the crime remained unsolved.

  While the show didn’t cause Sasha to spring into action, it did plant a bug in her brain. Even though she was busy wo
rking as a program director for adolescents in foster care, running a part-time therapy practice and writing and editing for a local publication Bert had started, she began to entertain the idea that she might learn a little more about the unsolved case of Michelle’s murder, maybe even do a little digging on her own. Whenever those thoughts cropped up, she quickly dismissed them. Too much time had passed, she told herself. She couldn’t even remember the name of Michelle’s mother, and no one she knew did either.

  Detective McNair had, himself, passed away about six years after Michelle’s remains were found. He’d run over a nest of ground bees while mowing his lawn in late spring and was attacked by a swarm of the aggressive insects. He died from anaphylactic shock a short time later.

  Still, Michelle’s case stayed with Sasha. And as the years ticked by, it began to haunt her.

  On a Saturday in late September 2007, Sasha and Bert stopped in the local Ace Hardware store in Guntersville, Alabama, a town on the Tennessee River named for a trader who’d settled among the Cherokee there back in 1785. The couple were in need of supplies to work on the small, mountaintop cottage they’d purchased nearby.

  On the way back to their car, Sasha spotted the local weekly newspaper in its rack. She deposited two quarters and scanned the small-town community headlines. She wasn’t expecting what she saw: “Authors to speak on latest ‘Body Farm’ book.” The next day, Sunday, Dr. William Bass was scheduled to speak about his book, Beyond the Body Farm, at the Guntersville Senior Citizen’s Center.

  In the decades since Sasha had been a student at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Bass had become even more renowned in forensic circles, mostly through the research that he and his colleagues and students did at “the Body Farm” on the edge of the UT campus in Knoxville.

  Then Sasha learned that his book was coauthored with Jon Jefferson, a Guntersville native! The two men had collaborated under the pen name Jefferson Bass and had also published a series of popular body farm mystery-thrillers.

  Really? Dr. Bass here? Tomorrow? Sasha was stunned. This was her chance. She would approach Dr. Bass after his talk and see if he would discuss the cold case of Michelle Anderson.

  2. NOW I JUST WAKE UP SAD

  Sasha leaned forward and nervously placed her copy of Beyond the Body Farm in front of Dr. Bass. She’d found his talk fascinating, but she’d also been distracted by the anticipation of this moment. She remembered the very day—over twenty-five years before—that she sat opposite him as he admitted her into the graduate program in anthropology, but she hadn’t studied under him—forensic anthropology wasn’t her concentration—so Sasha didn’t expect him to remember her all these years later. Dr. Bass gave her a friendly smile, but a look of recognition did not register on his face.

  Conscious of the long line of people waiting patiently to get their books signed, but determined not to miss this opportunity, Sasha launched into a rapid-fire speech, informing Dr. Bass who she was, that she had studied under his late wife, that she needed to speak with him about an old unsolved murder case from outside Knoxville—the Michelle Anderson case—on which he had been the forensic investigator years earlier.

  Dr. Bass stared at Sasha with a kind but slightly bewildered look. After a few seconds, he flipped her book open to the back, jotted down his phone number, and pushed it toward her.

  As Sasha walked away, avoiding the angry glares from those still waiting in the long line, she tingled with excitement.

  “Hello?” answered the friendly voice on the other end.

  “Hello, Dr. Bass. This is Sasha Reynolds. I spoke with you a few days ago about an old case of yours at your talk in Guntersville.”

  “Yes. Yes. How can I help you?”

  Sasha explained her interest in the Michelle Anderson case and what she knew about his involvement, having seen the forensic show in which he had been featured. Dr. Bass still seemed unclear about which case she was referring to; it had been nearly twenty years since the remains had been discovered, and he’d researched a lot of cases in his career.

  “Do you remember where the body was found?” he asked.

  “I seem to recall that it was near Crossville,” Sasha responded, relieved that she’d remembered that detail from the forensic TV show years earlier.

  It began to come back to him. “Yes, I remember the case,” he said. “Her uncle is a dentist here in town. He identified the body through her dental records. I’ve got the case files in my office. I also keep copies of the newspaper articles related to the cases. I’m retired now and don’t go into the office everyday. But when I go in, I’ll locate the forensic report and the newspaper articles and send you copies.”

  “Thank you so much!” Sasha replied, grateful and moved by Dr. Bass’s generosity. After providing the professor emeritus with her mailing address, she reflected on the surprising and encouraging way in which events were suddenly unfolding, opening up opportunities, like a series of doors, for her to walk back into Michelle’s case. There was so much she didn’t yet know about what had transpired since Michelle went missing and Sasha had moved away, but she was determined to learn.

  When Dr. Bass’s promised package arrived, Sasha pored over every report, every article, every detail. She began connecting the dots and filling in the missing pieces, which only led to more dots and more missing pieces. Dr. Bass’s files gave her specifics she could research and the newspaper articles provided a key name: Anita Anderson, Michelle’s mother.

  Armed with her newly-acquired knowledge of the case, Sasha felt confident reaching out to Anita. Now the task would be to locate her. How would she respond? Would she think Sasha was some kook from the past, stirring painful memories?

  Sasha began her search online and soon got a hit: a probable address and phone number. On December 1, 2007, Sasha dialed the number. An answering machine picked up, and she left a message. A day later, she got a return call from Anita’s long-time partner, Ted. He asked what Sasha wanted and what the call was about. He sounded cautious, defensive, but not unfriendly. She briefly explained her interest in the now twenty-year-old case of Anita’s daughter. Ted seemed somewhat disappointed that Sasha was seeking information, not necessarily providing any.

  “So, you don’t have any information?” he asked.

  “No. I don’t.”

  After a pause, he said, “I guess I can have her call you.”

  Sasha wasn’t sure that would happen. But it did happen. Anita called her the next day. She too was cautious. “Who are you again?”

  Sasha repeated what she had told Ted the day before and also told Anita about calling her all those years ago, shortly after Michelle had gone missing. Anita faintly recalled that someone from the neighborhood had phoned to ask if Anita thought Michelle had run away. Sasha then explained her history with Detective McNair and Dr. Bass. Her contact stirred Anita’s pain, but also brought her some sense of comfort—a strange person out of nowhere was interested in her daughter’s cold case.

  “You must surely imagine my shock to get a phone call like this after so many years,” Anita said. “My son Doug and I have never been able to accept Michelle’s death, and it is still very hard to talk about. Too painful.” It was unfinished business for this quiet family, a scabbed-over wound festering below the surface of verbal and emotional expression.

  Anita’s communications were initially like this: guarded and polite. But as she and Sasha exchanged more calls over the next few weeks, she became more open.

  “Life as I knew it ended on January 10, 1987,” Anita confessed to Sasha one night over the phone. “We will never be the same.” She admitted that she continued to see Michelle in her dreams nearly nightly, all these years later. In virtually the same dream, over and over, Michelle comes to her after having been away but won’t tell her where she’s been. As Michelle prepares to leave again, Anita panics, becomes fearful “of never seeing my baby again.”

  “In the early years, I used to wake up screaming,” she tearfully explained to Sas
ha. “Now I just wake up sad.”

  It was a little surprising to Sasha that Anita let her in as easily as she did, needing whatever it was Sasha might be offering, grateful for the interest in her daughter’s case and any possibility of resolution it might bring these decades later. Despite her quiet, low-key demeanor, Anita needed to talk. “I really hope that you and I can accomplish something,” Anita told her. “You’re the first intelligent person who has contacted me. The others were either ‘psychics’ or just plain weirdos.”

  It was from these conversations that Sasha first heard the name Larry Lee Smith. His name had not appeared in any of the reports or newspaper articles sent by Dr. Bass. Anita filled Sasha in on her strange meeting with Larry Lee and the lack of an initial investigation into his involvement in Michelle’s disappearance. She also told Sasha about the possible involvement of Michelle’s boyfriend, Chas, and the unsuccessful murder investigation into both Larry Lee and Chas after Michelle’s remains were found. Sasha was glad to learn that Larry Lee had received a twenty-year sentence for the assault of Amanda Sanders in Georgia. A small consolation.

  Halfway through Larry Lee’s twenty-year sentence, he came up for parole. Anita was notified in writing by the Georgia Corrections and Parole Board Office of Victim Services in Atlanta. She, along with her sister, brother-in-law and cousin, attended hearings, wrote letters, and sent emails to make sure Larry Lee stayed behind bars. Their efforts paid off and the parole board upheld Larry Lee’s sentence. Anita and her family continued their campaign every time Larry Lee came up for parole, but time was running out.

  If Sasha was interested in Larry Lee, Anita told her, she could pull up his profile on the Georgia Department of Corrections website. Anita had kept tabs on him there for years.