Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  Sasha went to the website, followed Anita’s instructions, and there he was. She studied his round, pudgy face and his small, steel-blue eyes, accentuated by the blue collar on his Georgia prison garb. His now-short hair had turned almost entirely silver-white, with but a few fading hints remaining of the brown it had once been. He weighed two-hundred sixty pounds and was noted to have obtained a scar on his left forearm. Larry Lee was forty-six years old in 2007 and two years away from being released from Hays State Prison in Northwest Georgia.

  When Sasha began digging back into the Michelle Anderson case, she’d thought of it as a curiosity, an unsolved riddle from her past. But now, having talked to Anita, having heard her anger and her pain, she realized there was so much more at stake. And with Larry Lee nearing the end of his sentence, time was of the essence.

  The next time the two women talked, Sasha had just one question for Anita: “When can we meet?”

  “There he was, the first Sasha had ever laid eyes on him, the man who had driven off with Michelle. She studied his round, pudgy face and his small steel-blue eyes staring straight into the camera lens. Larry Lee was 46 years-old in 2007 and in the 18th year of his 20-year sentence in Georgia.”

  3. ANITA AND DOUG

  Anita and Doug took a seat on the sofa in the Knoxville hotel room. Anita smoothed her long, off-white sweater over her olive-colored slacks. A petite woman, she sported short hair that fell in wispy waves around her face. She rested her tan purse upon her lap, smiling hesitantly, though she carried an air of heavy-hearted reserve about her.

  Beside her, Doug wore a dark, button-up shirt under a crisply styled leather vest. His black, curly hair was long, parted precisely down the middle and pulled tightly back into a snug, neat ponytail. Sasha was glad Doug had joined his mother. Anita had told her that Doug was reticent to discuss Michelle—they all were—but that he was willing to sit down with Sasha if it could do some good.

  They talked again about the circumstances of Michelle’s disappearance and the ensuing investigations. They speculated about how events might have unfolded that tragic night, how things might have been handled differently. They also filled Sasha in on their lives since the investigation.

  Anita’s life had grown more placid with the passing years, although the unremitting grief of her daughter’s unsolved murder hovered over her. She had met Ted in the year after Michelle disappeared. They were still together twenty years later, living not far from her elderly parents. She’d taken a job with a company that offered security and good benefits. She considered it her best job, but she was inching toward retirement, and she could feel it. That was okay with her.

  It had been a number of years since her ex-husband, Doug Sr., had passed away. After the police returned Michelle’s crab pendant, the one given to her by her father, which she’d worn every day, Anita herself had worn it every day. She took comfort that something of Michelle’s was with her at all times. But recently Anita had come to fear that she might lose it. She couldn’t explain the source of this fear, but just a few days before the interview, she’d removed the pendant. Better to keep it put away, she explained, where it was safe.

  Doug’s life was fairly quiet, too, like Doug himself. He stayed private, his personal circle tight and small. He worked and lived near his mom and helped her look after his grandparents. He mowed their lawn and trimmed their bushes in the same meticulous and precise way that he combed his hair and arranged his clothes. Anita described him as an artist, a perfectionist. He continued to write poetry and songs and to draw. He never married, although, Anita noted, “He would probably make a fine husband and father. Doug is a very good person with a lot of feelings.”

  Doug remained attentive but largely quiet. Yet when he did speak, his input was thoughtful and insightful. He seemed relieved to be getting these stories out in the open. As he and Anita explored his recollections, Sasha turned to him and asked: “Were you and Michelle close?” The innocent inquiry seemed to land with a thump in his chest. Doug followed it with ten seconds of silence. He tried to regain his composure, but then stood without a word and walked out the door.

  Tears spilled down Anita’s cheeks and she began to sob.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sasha whispered.

  “I think I would have been okay if he hadn’t done that,” Anita said, her voice cracking. “He doesn’t talk about this. I’m surprised he’s talked this much today. He just told my cousin, Susan, that he’s never really accepted or come to terms with Michelle’s death.”

  When Anita indicated that she was ready to continue, Sasha asked, “Did you ever go to therapy?”

  Through new tears Anita shook her head no. She’d thought about it, just never did.

  “How did you cope? How did you grieve?”

  “I guess at first by just doing everything I could to find out what happened. Later, I sometimes drank,” she admitted. “You may have expected me to say God or church, but I was very angry with God. I really haven’t coped very well. You can see how fresh the pain still is.”

  Aided by the power of nicotine to calm the nerves, Doug regained his composure and returned to the interview. “I’m not used to being asked questions about this,” he said.

  “You’ve held it inside for a long time,” Sasha reflected.

  He nodded in the affirmative. “Without Dad around, I think that I was protective of Michelle—sometimes overly, and evidently not enough.” He explained that after Michelle went missing—and especially after her body was found—he had trouble discussing her with anyone, even Investigator York. He couldn’t process it. He was in shock.

  Sasha asked Doug about Chas, who’d been Doug’s friend for four years before he began dating Michelle. Doug said he hadn’t stayed in touch with Chas through the years, but knew he was still around. About a year earlier, Doug had run into him and learned that he’d fallen at work and was seriously hurt. But Doug didn’t know anything else.

  “Why do you suppose the investigators thought Chas might have been into satanic worship?” Sasha asked. Anita had alluded to this in a previous communication with Sasha.

  Doug shrugged his shoulders. “People probably thought I was, too, but I wasn’t.”

  “Why would people think that?”

  “I joked about it a lot, you know, the heavy metal and everything, but I never took it seriously,” Doug explained. “Never knew anyone who took it seriously. Chas had an inverted pentagram tattooed on his arm. To my knowledge, it represented nothing more than a band called Motley Crüe. It was on their album covers and was very popular at the time. We all knew of the symbol’s satanic association, but I don’t think anyone took it seriously.”

  As they brought the interview to a close, Doug offered Sasha his email address, in case she had more questions for him. She appreciated this gesture of trust.

  Anita suggested that Sasha contact KPD Investigator Randy York, but she could no longer tell Sasha how to reach him since he’d retired. She’d heard that he had another job, but couldn’t remember the details. Eventually, after calling around, Sasha got a tip that led her to York’s office voicemail, where he currently worked as a legal process server. She left a message.

  A few days after Sasha’s meeting with Anita and Doug, Anita followed up with an email:

  Thank you so very much for taking the time to meet with us. I didn’t expect that reaction from Doug, but he’s right, we never talk about it. It would be helpful, I am sure, to do so and get past the crying, which we thought we did a long time ago. But it is still hard. The holidays are always so hard for us because of the timing. I dread them every year. Obviously she shouldn’t have been out there. Obviously I should have been a better mother. The worst part is knowing that I could have prevented it. My grief is overshadowed only by my guilt.

  4. YORK

  Retired KPD Investigator Randy York was a punctual man. He still lived in the Knoxville area and arrived at Sasha’s hotel room in the downtown Hampton Inn at exactly one o’clock in the
afternoon, as planned. “I hated that we couldn’t solve the case,” he said as he settled onto the sofa. “Larry Lee Smith’s one sick guy.” Of medium height and build, the handsome York was dressed in khaki-colored slacks and a yellow button-down-collar shirt. His dark, neatly-trimmed hair had only a touch of gray; his overall appearance reflected the look of a man a decade or so younger than his actual years. “You know,” he continued, “years before, I’d arrested his brother, Brad, on burglary charges. They were really rough people.”

  Sasha took the chair opposite York and again explained her interest in Michelle’s case. They had spoken on the phone already, when Sasha had explained who she was and what she hoped to learn from him on her visit to Knoxville. York had been more than happy to sit down with her. In the hotel room, she updated him on Larry Lee’s current inmate status, explaining that he had less than two years of his sentence left to serve. She also discussed her history of working with Detective McNair and her questions about his handling of Michelle’s case.

  York thought a lot of the late detective, he told her. McNair was his friend. York had been a pall-bearer at his funeral. Yet he recognized that the investigation into Michelle’s disappearance had not developed as it could have. The “investigative file” he’d inherited from McNair had been virtually empty.

  “Jerry drug his feet on this, big time,” York lamented. “Within twenty-four hours, two-to-three people should have been interviewing the kids at that party and others. Certainly after a few days—at the least when she didn’t return—someone should have been looking at this thing hot and heavy. Keep in mind, this wasn’t really my case,” he said. “I hate cleaning up somebody else’s mess.”

  Although the case was never officially York’s, no one did more work on it than he. When Michelle’s remains were found in an adjacent county, the case officially transitioned from McNair and the KPD to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The TBI got involved for two reasons: Michelle’s remains were located in rural Cumberland County, outside the KPD’s jurisdiction, and the TBI regularly helps rural counties with homicides.

  “After her body was found,” York continued, “a TBI agent from Crossville, Jim Moore, called and asked me if I’d do the follow-up here, interview her friends and all.” York was moved and motivated by the case. He threw himself into it—with FBI Special Agents Grey Steed and Joe DeVuono coaching and assisting him along the way.

  Back when York was interviewing the teenagers involved with the case, he’d run into the “satanic panic” full force when he was told that Chas and Doug were involved in devil worship. While he hadn’t known what to make of Michelle’s brother—the unreadable, withdrawn young man with long hair dressed all in black—he never fully bought into those stories. And as for the “satanic” note that had been left on Anita’s door, York thought it was just another ruse by Larry Lee.

  During the investigation, York talked to Ruby a number of times about her son, telling her that no young female was safe around him. “Ruby would get so mad,” he recalled. “She’d defend Larry Lee, saying that he’d been ‘the nicest little boy.’” But York had actually met Larry Lee when Larry Lee was just a child and would visit relatives who lived near York’s family. He recalled that Larry Lee always looked unkempt and untended. He often had a lost, vacant look in his eyes, even then. Not at all the “nicest little boy” that Ruby remembered.

  York had kind words for Larry Lee’s estranged wife. “Sara tugged on everyone’s heartstrings, and she was more than willing to do anything needed to help bring Larry Lee to justice.” He talked about the abuse Sara had reported experiencing at the hands of Larry Lee. “She was terrified of him. Sara was a sweet girl—real confused, but somebody you’d like.”

  York said he’d known Larry Lee was involved in Michelle’s murder, but back then he couldn’t rule out Chas either, not with the way he was acting during the investigation.

  Then York told Sasha about his investigative file, the one he’d compiled during the months after Michelle’s remains were found: interviews, statements, documents. “I had a book on that thing,” he said, a look of frustration on his face. He claimed that his memories had grown fuzzy on some of the details of the two-decade-old cold case, so that file would come in mighty handy for Sasha’s research. But there was a problem: the file was missing.

  When York retired, he took copies of certain unsolved case files with him, as was standard procedure. The file on the Michelle Anderson case was one of them. A few years back the captain of the KPD Major Crimes Unit called York wanting to borrow York’s copy of the file. They were reviewing old cases and couldn’t find the KPD copy of York’s Michelle Anderson investigation. York was happy to hand over his files. Later, he heard that they had located the KPD copy, but he never got his copy back, and now neither of the files could be accounted for.

  Although, York told Sasha, the case was technically the TBI’s, so they should have some documents on file. He suggested Sasha start there. He also suggested she track down FBI agents DeVuono and Steed. In the meantime, he’d keep trying to get his KPD file back, but he warned Sasha that it didn’t look promising.

  At the end of the interview, Sasha gave York her card. “I’m glad somebody’s following up on this,” he noted as he shook her hand. “I’ll be glad to help in any way I can.”

  5. INVESTIGATING THE INVESTIGATION

  After meeting with Anita, Doug, and Investigator York, Sasha returned home knowing she had her work cut out for her. But more importantly, she had a purpose. She began this project thinking that if there was enough information available, she might write a story about it. But now there was more than a story—or even a book—at stake. There was justice. Justice for Michelle and any other woman who’d had the misfortune of crossing paths with Larry Lee Smith.

  Sasha decided to take a two-prong approach to her research, which she squeezed into the hours around her demanding job as a clinical program director. She needed to investigate Larry Lee Smith, that was obvious, but she also needed to investigate the investigation of Michelle’s disappearance and murder. She started by reaching out to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, like York had suggested. But she hit an instant road block. TBI records are confidential, she was told over the phone. Information on an open case could not be released without a subpoena, and a case was not closed until it was solved. She wasn’t allowed phone access to any human to argue otherwise, and all emails were ignored.

  The FBI had officially closed their Domestic Police Assistance case on the Michelle Anderson murder investigation in 1991. So Sasha filed a Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts request for the records from their closed Michelle Anderson file. This lead seemed promising, though she had no idea how long it would take for the file to arrive.

  Even though York told her that the Knoxville Police Department had lost their files on the case, Sasha decided to reach out to them anyway, to introduce herself at least. She had a feeling they would be communicating a lot in the future. She started by emailing Lt. Doug Stiles of the Crimes Against Persons Unit. She sent him an overview of the Michelle Anderson case, indicating pertinent dates and developments. She concluded with the question:

  If a fifteen-year-old female didn’t return home under suspicious circumstances, would it be standard procedure to presume she was a runaway and do no search?”

  Lt. Stiles emailed back the same day:

  That is a hard question to answer. I need more information please.

  Sasha answered:

  I have a lot more info and yet there are pieces that I am just now filling in. Michelle did not return home one night in 1987. Detective McNair identified her as a runaway even though no one else felt that she had. So, in essence, there was no investigation into her disappearance. Her remains were found two years later and there was some investigation then, but the ball had been dropped a long time.

  Lt. Stiles replied:

  Very interesting. I’ve never heard of this case before. Jerry McNair has passed
away, any other detectives involved? Where did they find her body? Please let me know when you come to town.

  With contact made at the KPD, Sasha began looking into Larry Lee. She had some dates and case numbers from his Georgia Department of Corrections prisoner information page. She used those to follow Larry Lee’s trail of court activity leading up to his incarceration. A visit to the records room of the DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Georgia, yielded the two-volume transcript of Larry Lee’s 1990 trial for the kidnapping and assault of Amanda Sanders.

  The transcripts included Larry Lee’s police statement, Amanda Sanders’ Victim Impact Statement and court documents from Larry Lee’s 1982 conviction for the kidnapping and rape of Katherine McWilliams in Florida. Katherine McWilliams: Sasha now had a name for the Florida victim to whom Anita had alluded.

  The detailed first-hand accounts of two of Larry Lee’s victims, as well as his own words spoken on the witness stand, provided much insight into the saga and psyche of Larry Lee Smith, whom she now understood to be a serial rapist with a predictable pattern. She had little doubt in her mind that if he was released from prison, he would strike again.

  If Sasha wanted to learn what had transpired in the past, then she would have to continue talking to those who’d once been involved. Based on the documents she’d gathered so far and her interviews with Anita, Doug and York, she compiled a database of people she needed to interview: victims, witnesses, family members, and investigating officers. Many of the people on her list had retired, moved or married. Sasha wasn’t a law enforcement officer, a private investigator or any other person whose occupation gave her access to special databases. Fortunately, she could turn to the internet for help. She had several websites and social networks at her disposal (Facebook proved especially useful). As details became available, she added them to the database. Her “Who’s Who” list quickly grew to nineteen people.