Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  “Ahh…” Amanda said, thinking it over. “Sure. I could do that.”

  Amanda and her boyfriend arrived at Sasha’s hotel room and the three got acquainted over pizza delivered in. Amanda said she knew that Larry Lee was to be released from prison; she’d followed his annual parole hearing outcomes on the Georgia DOC website, but hadn’t corresponded with the Georgia Department of Pardons and Paroles in years. After talking to Sasha on the phone, she’d hoped that he was going to be prosecuted now for the disappearance and murder of Michelle. That was what she remembered hearing all those years ago. Back then, a number of people had hoped that would happen.

  Sasha filled Amanda in on the status of Michelle’s case, and they revisited the events of October 13, 1989.

  Following the assault, Amanda recalled, she’d been “a nervous wreck.” For a while she became afraid to go anywhere alone, especially at night. She no longer felt safe in her car; she didn’t drive it for weeks. Even stopping to pump gas in daylight felt too frightening. Seeing someone who resembled Larry Lee would send her into a panic, causing her to flashback to the moment of the assault.

  Sleep became difficult; sleeping alone in a room was impossible. It was the choking dreams that haunted her. She had them nearly nightly for years. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night not breathing—gasping, crying and shaking,” Amanda recalled, tearing up as she talked about it. When she learned Larry Lee was about to get out, the dreams started again.

  Already high-strung and emotive by nature, the assault impacted Amanda’s self-esteem. Although she had been the vulnerable victim—attacked by an impulsive serial rapist—Amanda felt somehow ashamed. But she didn’t confront the shame or her pain. For as long as she could, she ignored them, buried them deep. For her anxiety, she medicated. In time, she came to understand that this was not the best way to deal with her trauma and eventually sought professional counseling.

  She and Sasha walked through the trial and discussed the significance of Katherine McWilliams showing up to tell her story. “It was brave of her to come up and testify after all that time,” Amanda noted. “I’m sure it helped him receive a twenty-year sentence.”

  Then she paused, again becoming reflective: “He took my innocence… He took my trust. I still get angry when I think about it.”

  Funny, friendly and down-to-earth, Katherine McWilliams was easy to be with. The auburn-haired beauty seemed totally at ease in her jeans, bluejean jacket and boots as she and Sasha talked over sandwiches in Sasha’s hotel room in the North Carolina city where Katherine, her husband and kids had been living for more than ten years. Sasha filled Katherine in on the details of Michelle’s case, and Katherine shared thoughts and recollections about hers, a hint of her native Brooklyn still audible in the shape of her words.

  Katherine had not been easy to find. It was from Anita that Sasha first heard of Larry Lee’s conviction for the kidnapping and rape of a teenage girl in Florida five-and-a-half-years before he’d encountered Michelle. But Anita was never given a name or a date or even an exact charge in that matter. From the court records of the Amanda Sanders case, Sasha had learned the Florida victim’s name. She then made additional progress online in tracking down Katherine’s married name and current city and state of residence. She had then reached out to Katherine through Facebook:

  I am doing research on a cold case. The primary suspect is a man named L. L. Smith. If you are the correct person, I believe you had an encounter with this individual in 1981. If you understand the meaning of this communication, I would like to interview you. If I have contacted the wrong person, I apologize.

  Less than six hours later, Sasha had a response:

  I know exactly who you are writing about and I would be willing to help you in any way I can. Call me when you’re ready.

  As Sasha listened to Katherine tell her story, she noted that the spit-fire element of Katherine’s personality was still strong, though tempered by years of ever-wiser living. Katherine explained that she’d dealt with her feelings about the rape pretty thoroughly back when it happened. So it surprised her that just the day before, while thinking about this meeting, she’d broken down in front of a friend. She said she’d had a long, emotional cry, and it was all related to the rape.

  “Obviously, you’re not over it,” her friend had observed.

  “But I don’t think I swept it under the rug,” Katherine told Sasha. When Sasha had first contacted her and told her that Larry Lee was soon to be released, Katherine had looked him up on the prison registry. A rush of emotions had come over her, although Katherine wasn’t sure why. They had been swirling ever since. “At some point,” she said, “I think I forgave him. I mean, I had my chance to go to court.”

  Still, her sudden immersion back into the circumstances of the case had opened an old wound. Katherine reflected on that night and how she’d handled Larry Lee. In light of Amanda’s bold, daytime escape from their common captor, Katherine felt a small need to justify her strategy of compliance, although it wasn’t being questioned. Then, out loud, she reminded herself that Larry Lee’s assault on her was very different from the assault on Amanda. Amanda had been attacked in broad daylight in a busy urban setting where a witness had intervened. Katherine had been alone with Larry Lee, in an apartment, in the middle of the night.

  “You were fourteen,” Sasha reminded her. “Only fourteen. Your wisdom was amazing. You were still such a little girl!” Katherine’s intuitive cooperation was instinctively clever, Sasha stressed. She explained that a power rapist such as Larry Lee will usually exert only the amount of force necessary to gain control and submission of his victims. If Katherine had not cooperated, Larry Lee might have severely injured her, or worse.

  After the incident, Katherine finished high school in Florida, then moved back and forth between there and New York before settling in North Carolina in the late 1990s. She’d gone through a few bouts of the blues over the years, but overall, she felt her life was really very good. She was happily married to a good guy who made a good living. She had a daughter away at college and two handsome sons. The family took weekend getaways as often as they could. And she and her mother, who now resided in the same city, were very close.

  Katherine expressed great compassion for Michelle’s family. “I could just imagine her fighting back,” she reflected, speculating on the assault that must have led to Michelle’s death, “especially when she’d been drinking.”

  For Katherine, the thing that had been the hardest to let go of—the thing that she blamed herself for—was that she’d put herself in such a dangerous situation to begin with, that she’d accepted a ride with a stranger named Larry Lee. “It was difficult to forgive myself,” she said.

  8. STEED

  FBI Special Agent Grey Steed arrived at the Starbucks in West Knoxville dressed in khakis and a blue shirt and wind breaker that accentuated the blue-green of his eyes. He was tall and handsome with graying hair and a friendly, no-nonsense demeanor. He reminded Sasha of Gary Cooper.

  They ordered some coffees and settled into a couple of chairs by the window to talk. After his retirement from the FBI, Steed had launched a business in Knoxville, Grey Steed & Associates, where he offered services in forensic accounting, investigations and as a bankruptcy trustee. He informed Sasha that the FBI had officially closed their Domestic Police Assistance case on the Michelle Anderson murder investigation in 1991, but he remembered it clearly.

  Steed entertained Sasha with some interesting tales about his history as a special agent and the series of cases and circumstances that eventually led to his being involved in the Michelle Anderson investigation.

  Kidnappings and homicides were not his forté during the bulk of his FBI career. Raised in Nashville, Steed graduated from college with a degree in accounting and went to work for a large CPA firm before accepting a position with the Bureau. For seven years he was an agent in the White Collar Crime Program in the Chicago FBI field office. During those years Steed worked on
some prominent cases in the national news, including the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, which claimed seven lives.

  In the Tylenol case, FBI code-named TYMURS, Steed’s job was to track fugitive suspect Jim Lewis and his wife as they moved frequently and changed identities using false social security numbers. After that operation, a case of white-collar crime in Knoxville demanded his expertise.

  Jacob “Jake” Franklin and Cecil “C. H.” Butcher, the Butcher brothers, were larger-than-life figures in the cultural landscape of Knoxville and East Tennessee in the 1970s and early 1980s. Born and raised in Union County, just north of Knox County, their father ran a general store and served as president of a bank where the brothers cut their teeth in the banking business.

  In the late sixties, the Butcher boys began buying stock in numerous Tennessee banks, and their banking empire and influence grew. Jake Butcher founded United American Bank (UAB) and C. H. founded City and County Bank (C&C). Jake Butcher’s UAB handled over fifty percent of Knoxville’s commercial loans.

  But the Butcher brothers brought more than banking services to the citizens of Knoxville and East Tennessee; they brought flair, flamboyance, and vision. In the late 1970s, when Sasha first moved to Knoxville, UAB’s new Plaza Tower, a twenty-seven story, glass-sided high-rise on Knoxville’s Gay Street, was a symbol of opulence, progress and a city moving forward. It remains Knoxville’s tallest building. City and County Bank’s Riverview Tower, built by C. H. in the early 1980s, is Knoxville’s second tallest building.

  The exceedingly handsome Jake Butcher, often in the news, was a major player in bringing the 1982 World’s Fair to Knoxville. Held over a period of six months, the Knoxville International Energy Exposition, as it was dubbed, attracted more than eleven million people to the mid-size city on the banks of the Tennessee River. It was deemed one of the most successful world fairs ever held.

  The prosperous Butcher brothers had secrets, though. It was these secrets that Agent Steed was brought in from Chicago to uncover. On November 1, 1982, the day after the Knoxville World’s Fair closed, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation bank regulators raided the twenty-nine branches of the Butcher brothers’ banks. A paper trail of bank fraud in the form of illegal loans, forged documents and other evidence led to lengthy prison sentences for both brothers.

  After the bank-fraud investigations and prosecutions were over, Steed stuck around and soon found himself drawn into a murder investigation with many parallels to Michelle Anderson’s. In September 1984, Rosalyn Goodman—called Rosie by her family and friends—a thirty-five-year-old mother of two from Memphis, had driven across the state alone in her 1970 yellow Volkswagen beetle to spend a few days backpacking in the Cades Cove area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

  Cades Cove is a lush meadow ringed by mountains. Tourists drive its eleven-mile loop, leisurely stopping at the functioning grist mill and restored historic churches and log cabins along the way. Trails lead off for day hikes, and visitors can register to backpack overnight in the majestic mountains.

  That’s what Rosie Goodman did on that September day. When she didn’t return home days later, as scheduled, the family alerted police. Her car was discovered at a bus station miles away, cleaned of all fingerprints and other identifying evidence with a cleanser-like substance. Two months after she disappeared, her skeleton was found by hikers. Three years later, the case remained unsolved.

  Sasha had been living in Knoxville when Goodman disappeared and remembered the story of the murdered Cades Cove hiker. She’d followed the case in the local paper and on the news. It was a story that had troubled her greatly: this young mother, described as a free spirit, murdered by an unknown assailant in the peaceful sanctuary of the mountains.

  At the FBI office in Knoxville, Grey Steed’s desk happened to be nearby the agent assigned to the case, which had by then grown cold. They’d gotten a single lead years before that ran into a seeming dead end. A maid at a local rundown hotel claimed that she had met Rosalyn Goodman when she brought a man staying there back to pick up his camping gear. The FBI agent initially assigned to the case had obtained a picture of the man in question, taken during the grand opening of a new Bob Evans Restaurant in town, where the man had been working. In the photo, he is standing among a group of fellow employees along with the Bob Evans.

  Harry Steven Mercer was this man’s name—only it wasn’t. The real Harry S. Mercer was a man in Texas. No one knew who this guy, using Mercer’s social security number, actually was. “Close it,” the other agent’s supervisor instructed. “We’ll never solve it.”

  “Let me have a shot at it,” Steed said.

  “What can you do?” the supervisor asked.

  “I know from having worked the Tylenol case that I can get a warrant for this individual, John Doe, for using someone else’s social security number.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, if he was using someone else’s social security number there, he used it other places, and we’ll start tracking him.”

  The case was reassigned to Steed and that’s what he did, track John Doe and his wife—also using a bogus social security number—all over the country. They were moving every three weeks and going from one fast-food restaurant job to another. Grey Steed got arrest warrants for both of them, but they stayed just ahead of him. He resolved to try a different tactic.

  Steed decided he would get the case profiled on America’s Most Wanted, then a relatively new show he’d seen only a few times. With this in mind, he planned to watch an episode that very evening. Yet the special agent would be in for a big surprise, because profiled in this very episode for another crime was his guy, John Doe. Turned out that his guy was among the “U. S. Marshall’s 15 Most Wanted,” for a rape and robbery in Florida. Real name: William Hewlett.

  Now Steed had an accurate identity for the guy. He just didn’t have any proof. “We had a pile of evidence on a guy who’d last been seen with Rosalyn,” Steed explained, “just like the Michelle Anderson case. And also like Michelle’s case, we had a pile of bones that animals had picked clean, so we couldn’t even prove the cause of death.”

  Steed tirelessly worked the Rosalyn Goodman case for the next nine months. John Walsh’s crew from America’s Most Wanted flew into Knoxville and filmed a segment on the murder and the search for the fugitive. A viewer from Pearlington, Mississippi, near Gulfport, called the show to say that William Hewlett had been to her office. She was told to call the U.S. Marshall or the FBI if he came around again.

  Hewlett didn’t know he’d been profiled on the show. “So, sure enough,” said Steed, “he backtracked to this place. The caller then slipped across the street and phoned the FBI.” Hewlett was arrested.

  “Now I had a guy in custody in Gulfport, Mississippi, that I thought had killed Rosalyn Goodman,” Steed continued, noting again the parallels between the cases, “but I didn’t have any proof of that, and he was going to be held by the U.S. Marshall for the rape in Florida. So I flew down to Gulfport.”

  “There’s nothing to be gained by me talking to you,” Hewlett told Steed at the beginning of their meeting in the Gulfport jail.

  “Well, William, that’s not really true,” Steed countered, searching for an angle to entice the murder suspect. “The difference is that I can get you federal time for the murder of Rosalyn Goodman as opposed to you going back to the state prison for the rest of your life.” It was the same offer Steed later made to Larry Lee.

  Hewlett pondered Steed’s proposition, contemplated his odds. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he finally said. “When I get to Knoxville, I’ll solve cases that you don’t even know about.” So the FBI flew Hewlett to Knoxville where agents met with him and his court-appointed attorney. Hewlett pleaded guilty to the murder of Rosalyn Goodman. Said he’d raped her before strangling her with a piece of cord. Hewlett also confessed to a number of other rapes and crimes committed under multiple aliases in thirty-five states.

  Steed received accolade
s for solving the Rosalyn Goodman case. So when the less-experienced FBI Special Agent Joe DeVuono began working on the disappearance and murder of Michelle Anderson, seasoned agent Grey Steed was assigned to be his training agent. And that’s how Steed went from CPA to FBI, from crunching numbers to catching killers.

  Sipping his coffee, Steed wasted no time in transitioning to the story at hand. He reflected on Larry Lee’s discussion and demeanor the day that he, DeVuono and York had traveled to the DeKalb County jail to interview the prisoner following his conviction for the kidnapping and assault of Amanda Sanders. “The thing I remember most about the interview that day was that Larry Lee was trying to play games,” Steed remarked, “trying to break his routine by talking to us, but not really giving us anything. He kept saying that he didn’t do it, but that he might have some evidence that could help us. He was very cocky.”

  He discussed the difficulty in building a case against Larry Lee after Michelle’s remains were found, and how difficult it would be to reopen the cold case in the present. “The problem is that the case wasn’t treated properly on the front end by the investigating officer. Even if they had treated it properly, it wouldn’t have changed Michelle’s fate. There would be a circumstantial case against Larry Lee Smith that, without DNA or something that the DA would have built a case on, it’s anybody’s guess what would have happened. People don’t realize how much of the district attorney’s budget it takes to try a case in court.”

  Despite the many roadblocks ahead of them, Steed pledged to support Sasha in any way he could. “It’s horrific that these predators are out there,” he said. “They’re always repeat offenders, the ones you have to worry about.”

  The conversation turned toward Joe DeVuono. Echoing the sentiments of nearly everyone who’d had any contact with DeVuono, Steed described him as a “super caring guy with a big heart.” Sasha informed Steed that she hadn’t yet spoken to DeVuono. She knew he’d relocated in the early 1990s and kept in contact with Anita and Sara for several years afterward, although they eventually lost touch. Sasha tracked him to the FBI field office at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, his hometown. But when she’d called that FBI office, she learned that DeVuono, too, was now retired.