Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  In an effort to reconstruct what had happened twenty-plus years before, Sasha first turned to those who knew Michelle best.

  6. DIFFERING DETAIL

  Anita had provided the number of Michelle’s best friend, Marci, with whom Sasha scheduled a meeting. Prior to departing for Knoxville, she called York to touch base. He’d be out of town that weekend, he told Sasha, but he had some news.

  Just the day before, he’d served divorce papers on Chas, someone whom Sasha very much wanted to talk to, but hadn’t located yet. No one seemed to know what had happened to him until York’s timely encounter. Chas was staying at a friend’s house on Blount Avenue in South Knoxville. York said that when he’d approached him, he’d brought up the subject of Michelle’s murder. “Either you did it or Larry Lee Smith did it,” York told Chas.

  “Do you think he’d talk to me?” Sasha asked, encouraged by this news.

  “I’m sure he would.”

  “Do you have a phone number?”

  “Call me back this time tomorrow. I’ll have it for you.”

  After two unanswered attempts, an early-morning call caught Chas at home. His roommate answered the phone and passed it over.

  Oh, yeah, a half-awake Chas said, York had told him to expect this call. Sure, he’d be glad to talk to her. Sasha told him when she’d be in Knoxville and they agreed to meet.

  The interview had been scheduled for a Saturday afternoon at Sasha’s hotel, but Chas had been avoiding her calls all day. Sasha had been calling him on her drive to Knoxville to advise him of her expected arrival time, but really she was making sure their meeting was still on, that Chas wasn’t going to back out. That had been his pattern all those years ago when York and DeVuono had tried to talk with him. He’d initially agree, then become evasive.

  Sasha arrived at her downtown hotel adjacent to the Knoxville Convention Center, built on the site of the 1982 World’s Fair, and tried Chas’s number again. The interview was scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes. And again she got his machine. But this time she changed her message:

  “Hi Chas. Sasha Reynolds again. Just wanted to let you know that I’ve checked in. Room 306. I’ve left several messages. Not sure if you’ve gotten them. But listen, that’s fine. If I don’t hear from you soon, I’ll just head your way. York gave me the address.”

  That last part wasn’t exactly true. York had told her that Chas lived on Blount Avenue, but offered no further details about the address. And Blount Avenue is a long, winding road.

  Sasha’s bluff, however, paid off. Within ten minutes the phone rang. It was Chas. He said he’d been sick. The doctor had him on strong antibiotics. “Could we reschedule for tomorrow?”

  “Sure, we can do that,” Sasha responded. “Ten o’clock?”

  “Okay.”

  “Hope you feel better, Chas. See you then.”

  Nine-thirty the next morning, the phone rang. It was Chas. The thing is, he explained, he didn’t have a car or a ride. “Could you come to my house?”

  “Absolutely,” said Sasha. She paused. “Can I get that address?”

  As Sasha pulled into the gravel drive, Chas recognized the sound of the turbo diesel engine in her sedan. It proved a nice ice breaker as he hashed over the merits and engineering of the car. He opened the screen door and held it as they entered the small, comfortable living room and settled into chairs to begin their talk.

  Sasha hadn’t known what to expect, but she found Chas friendly and talkative. He had a people-pleasing demeanor and often broke into a sudden, deep-throated laugh. When Sasha began asking about Michelle, he offered pieces and recollections of that night and the period that followed, although, he acknowledged, some memories had become a little fuzzy.

  Most of Chas’s stories focused on the drama of his adult life, replete with addiction and domestic violence and a tendency to make excuses for the latter. Chas was quick to tear up. He’d had a lot of pain, he said, and most of it was currently due to the impending divorce from his second wife and her restraining order against him.

  He was addicted to alcohol and cocaine, he admitted, but he’d been clean almost a year. In addition to being diagnosed with cirrhosis and hepatitis C, Chas reported that he was recovering from a serious fall at work eighteen months earlier. At the time, he was only three months into his second marriage. He was on a balcony spray painting a ceiling when he fell twenty-three feet to the floor below. After being unconscious for nearly a week, he’d spent another six weeks in intensive care.

  It was September eleventh—a date he remembers for a whole other reason than terrorist attacks—when she left him. He’d totaled his car later that same month in an effort to do himself in. In court, his wife had refused his apology letter. Now, the divorce papers.

  Chas had been praying that the papers wouldn’t come, that maybe his wife would change her mind, but then up walks a nightmare from his past, Investigator Randy York. Chas had just finished working in the flowers in the side yard and was sitting at the table on the shady front porch eating Cocoa Crisps and reading his Bible when York pulled up. Chas saw the badge, the radio and an envelope of papers and felt the weight of disappointment.

  “I already know what it is,” he said as York approached from the car.

  “What is it?” York made him guess before handing over the dreaded documents.

  York’s duty done, he switched topics to the cold case of Michelle Anderson. He told Chas about Sasha Reynolds’s research into the matter. Chas said that he would cooperate in any way needed; he wanted to clear his name. He would talk to anybody, take another polygraph, whatever, if it would help.

  But after agreeing to meet with Sasha, he’d had second thoughts about doing so. Do I even want to talk to this woman? he asked himself. Is it any of my concern, my business?

  Then he reasoned that he owed it to himself and to Michelle’s family to help in any way that he could. After explaining all of this to Sasha, he paused and considered his words. It wasn’t so much that he owed it, he explained more clearly. He wasn’t feeling burdened. He wasn’t carrying any weight around—he didn’t want Sasha to get the idea that he was implying some kind of guilt—but if he could help in any way, he would.

  Chas told Sasha that he did feel guilty for being drunk that night, for not standing up to Michelle—“even though she was angry”—for letting Larry Lee drop him off first. Still, Chas clarified, he thought Michelle was being driven home.

  After she disappeared, he could sense the “animosity” of Michelle’s family, that at the very least they thought that he had “abandoned their daughter.” That’s one of the reasons he searched for Michelle with them so consistently for so long. He wanted them to see that he cared.

  But it was in this part of Chas’s account that he offered up a detail differing from the version he’d given to Anita and the others more than two decades before.

  When Chas first told the story about the intoxicated Michelle, semi-conscious in Larry Lee’s upstairs bedroom, he’d said their whole fight started because she called out the name of another guy. He said she’d called for Mike. Yet now, these many years later, Chas casually mentioned that Michelle called out for Tommy. This might have been considered a small and insignificant detail, but these were the names of two people who’d had significant—but very different—roles in the life of teenage Michelle. Mike was the boyfriend of Michelle’s best friend, Marci. So Michelle calling out his name had the potential to cause suspicion and jealousy—and perhaps that was Chas’s intention—but no one paid much attention to that detail. Marci trusted Michelle completely and Michelle had never shown any romantic interest in Mike. With Michelle missing, no one cared what name she’d called out.

  But Tommy was a different story. Tommy was Marci’s younger brother, and everyone knew that Michelle liked him. The summer before Michelle disappeared, rumors had floated around that Michelle and Tommy had hooked up (a story fabricated, by strange coincidence, by Larry Lee Smith). In Chas’s mind, Tommy was his
rival for Michelle’s affections. He was the guy she would have been with if she could have been, if he wasn’t locked up in a juvenile detention facility out near Crossville. She’d made plans to go visit him with Marci the next day. So if she had, in fact, called the name Tommy instead of Mike, this could have had a profoundly different impact on the drunken, jealous, violent Chas. Mike would have made him angry, maybe a little confused, but Tommy would have thrown him into a full-blown rage.

  Sometime in the year after Michelle’s disappearance, and after the videotaped interviews on Anita’s carport, Chas and his new girlfriend, Venus, ran into Anita and her boyfriend, Ted. Ted took Chas aside and told him that he’d watched his interview. Ted pointed out that Chas was laughing on the tape. He accused Chas of acting like the whole thing didn’t matter.

  “I think you did it!” Ted yelled at him.

  “I thought we were gonna fight!” Chas told Sasha. His voice became louder and more defensive as he talked about his behavior on the day of the videotaping. “You’ve got a bunch of teenage boys over here making jokes, getting high, and a cop over here fucking with us. [Chas mistakenly believed Vance, the videographer, was a cop.] It’s serious. A death. A tragedy. If I could have been more mature, had more composure, but…” His voice trailed off.

  Chas leaned forward in his chair and rested his forearms on his knees. Then he shifted the subject from Michelle to his murdered younger brother, a topic that seemed easier for him. Chas explained that he felt a similar type of guilt in each case. He’d gotten angry with his brother, Bobby, for telling Venus that Chas was “drinking too damn much” and becoming just like their father. “Something I did not want to be.” So he’d refused to hang out with Bobby, who was gay, and Bobby’s new friend, Melvin.

  “Hell no,” Chas recalled saying when he turned down his brother. His chin began quivering and his eyes filled with tears. “Hell no.”

  Bobby never made it back. He and Melvin got into an argument and Melvin killed him, dumped his body on the side of the road and stole his truck. In another strange coincidence, his body was found near Crossville.

  Chas had lost two people close to him in one year, both murdered. In both cases, he felt he could have done something, saved their lives, but in both cases he wasn’t there. And in his last moments with Michelle and Bobby, he’d been angry with them, fighting, yelling, saying things he could never take back. And then they were gone.

  In the two years following Michelle’s disappearance, Chas never met Detective McNair—“Never talked to him,” he told Sasha. But in the months after Michelle’s remains were discovered he was questioned a number of times by York and Agent DeVuono, who also administered a polygraph exam. “I tried to do everything I could during the investigation. I told them what I did, who I was with, what we did after Michelle didn’t come home. I gave blood samples, urine, pubic hair, and hair from my head.”

  “When you took the polygraph and it reportedly showed deception, did you know about that?” Sasha inquired.

  “No. They were on the tip of saying that. The examiner told me that I was lying, that I had at least some knowledge. I really didn’t.”

  At age nineteen, the year after Michelle vanished, Chas had a child with Venus, who later became his first wife. It was in that relationship that he earned his reputation for getting rough with women, at least when drinking. It was this growing reputation, in part, that made Anita and others even more suspicious about his behavior the night Michelle went missing. Eventually, his violent behavior sent Venus and their son packing. She moved out of state to be with her family.

  Chas had another son with another girlfriend. He was a teenager now, at the house on the day of Sasha’s visit. Through more tears, Chas explained that this son is the only family he has left. He said he’d tried to understand what Michelle’s family had gone through.

  Chas told Sasha that he was glad he’d kept the appointment with her and that their talking had given him a sense of relief. His teenage son came out with their small pet dog and Chas introduced him to Sasha. He seemed like a nice kid.

  “Well, thanks so much, Chas,” she said. “Hope you continue to heal.” She stepped out onto the front porch and headed toward her car. She had to get back to her hotel. She’d already scheduled another interview.

  For the past seven years, Marci had been the owner of a maid service. She’d called ahead to tell Sasha she was running a few minutes late; she needed to help her crew finish a job. When Marci arrived at the hotel room, despite the passage of more than twenty years, Sasha recognized her from her videotaped interview, though her wavy hair was now more blonde than sandy brown. Michelle’s former best friend still possessed the same sense of self-assurance that was already evident in her teenage years. Now in her late thirties, she was a wife and mother of two teenage sons.

  When Sasha first contacted her, Marci wasn’t sure what help she could be. She hadn’t been with Michelle, Becka, or Chas in the latter part of the night and she’d never met Larry Lee. Sasha explained that as much as anything, she just wanted to hear Marci’s thoughts about what might have happened to her late best friend. Marci said she’d share what she knew.

  Marci and Michelle had met at school a year and a half before that night. The two girls hit it off right away despite Marci being a couple of years older. They were pretty much inseparable, she recalled. Marci stayed over at Michelle’s house a lot.

  There’d been around twenty teens in their adolescent clique, gathering in one venue or another, goofing off, drinking alcohol and sometimes smoking pot. She and Michelle could hold their liquor. They could kill a fifth, walk a straight line and do it again, she confided, amazed herself at their tolerance. “I tell people now that I had a drinking problem when I was a teenager. My father’s an alcoholic, so that’s probably where I get it,” Marci noted. “I gave my mom a lot of grief when I was young; I know I hurt her. Stupid teenagers. You think you know it all. She tried to give me a curfew, but when I was drinking, I didn’t want to come home.”

  But Michelle’s disappearance had changed all that. It wasn’t typical of Michelle to go off to someone’s house, the way she had with Chas to Larry Lee’s. Michelle was trusting. She didn’t know a stranger. She thought everyone was good. Marci knew Michelle would not have made that choice if she’d had less to drink. That part tortured Marci. “I didn’t touch alcohol again for years and years,” she said. She’d been scared straight by the chance encounter that had befallen her best friend.

  Marci had nightmares, bad nightmares, for a long time. “I still have nightmares,” Marci told Sasha. “I see Michelle in a neighborhood somewhere, after twenty years, like she’s just been there all along.”

  Marci and Mike married the year after Michelle’s disappearance and tried not to look back. She focused on raising a family. She’d done her best to move on, to live a satisfying and productive life, but she still had strong opinions to express concerning the investigation into Michelle’s murder.

  “I just never understood how Larry Lee Smith was not charged,” she said. “He was supposedly interviewed and admitted he gave her alcohol. She was a minor. He was the last person to be seen with her. How could they not have charged him with something?”

  Marci didn’t know what role Chas might have played that night, with his drinking and his temper, but she believed Larry Lee had killed Michelle. She always had.

  Just like the other teenage witnesses that night, Marci had not been contacted by the police after Michelle disappeared. She’d never met Detective McNair. She had gone down to the Knoxville Police Department twice after Michelle’s remains were found: once to be interviewed by Investigator York, and then a short time later to identify her hooded, yellow-and white-striped sweatshirt which Michelle had borrowed, found among the thick leaves on the forest floor still cradling her disconnected bones.

  When asked about her brother, Tommy, Marci said he always seemed to be in trouble back then. That’s why he was incarcerated in a juvenile fac
ility in Pikeville, the Taft Youth Development Center. But Michelle was crazy about Tommy, Marci said. They’d visit him at the center every month. They were going to visit him the day after she disappeared. Marci claimed that she knew Michelle better than anyone, and it was her opinion that Michelle and Tommy were in love. She’d heard from some of the kids with Michelle at the party that night that she’d been saying she wanted to go to Pikeville to see Tommy (whether she was talking about her impending visit the next day or if she planned to go sooner is unknown).

  The road that led to Pikeville, Highway 68, passed by Crossville, a half-mile from where Michelle’s remains were found. Knowing this, Marci pieced together her own nightmare scenario. She believed that after Larry Lee dropped off Chas, Michelle asked for a ride up to Pikeville so that she could see Tommy. In her angry, intoxicated mind, this seemed like the thing to do in the middle of night, especially after a fight with—and possible sexual assault by—her boyfriend. Larry Lee, taking advantage of the situation, had obliged. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped the truck, raped her, killed her, and then dumped her body on the wooded hillside off Highway 68.

  “That would have been a reason to take her up there,” Marci observed.

  7. THE SURVIVORS

  Hello? answered a melodic voice with an enthusiastic, girlish quality to it.

  “Hi, is this Amanda?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “Hi, my name is Sasha Reynolds. This call might seem a little strange,” she cautiously began. “I’m doing some research into the 1987 disappearance and murder of a girl in Knoxville, Tennessee, named Michelle Anderson. Larry Lee Smith, the man who assaulted you, was giving her a ride home, but she never made it.”

  “Oh, yes. That monster. I remember hearing about that case during the trial.”

  “I wondered if I could meet with you to talk about what happened to you. I’ll come to Atlanta.”