Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  “Well then,” Steed said, “I think Joe will be willing to talk to you. I’ll give him a call.”

  9. MEANS, MOTIVE & OPPORTUNITY

  The week following Sasha’s meeting with Steed, she received an email from Joe DeVuono:

  Grey Steed told me that you are researching the Michelle Anderson case and may be interested in speaking to me. If so, you can email me at this address or call me… That case meant a lot to me; it stayed with me over the course of my career. I’m happy you are bringing it to light. What Anita and Sara went through is more than anyone should ever endure. By the way, how are they?

  Sasha emailed back right away, and a time was scheduled for their call the next day. At the agreed-upon hour, her phone rang. “Hi. It’s so nice to finally talk to you,” she’d enthused to the retired special agent. “I’ve heard such favorable things about you.”

  Sasha praised DeVuono’s diligence in his efforts on Michelle’s case two decades before. “Your going to Atlanta, tracking Larry Lee there and contacting the assistant DA in the Amanda Sanders case, informing her about his history, was amazing,” Sasha continued. “You were the link. You made them aware. That’s huge!”

  The tone of DeVuono’s voice was warm; he laughed easily. And he laughed now at the idea that his work behind the scenes back then was such a revelation. “Yeah, it was kind of unofficial,” DeVuono confessed. “But it made me feel better, actually, because of our lack of success in Knoxville.”

  For Sasha, the opportunity to talk shop, to probe the theories and possibilities of what had happened on the fateful night, was a privilege. She wanted to pick his brain, primarily in two areas of the cold case: what DeVuono thought about the treatment of Michelle’s case as a runaway for so long after her disappearance and what his opinion was about the role Chas might have played that night.

  After getting the go-ahead from his supervisor, DeVuono’s first official interaction in Michelle’s case had been with KPD Detective McNair. By nature, DeVuono is not a disparaging kind of guy, but even he had difficulty being diplomatic when it came to the KPD investigation. “Certainly, I wasn’t critical,” DeVuono recalled, “but I was surprised that KPD was treating this case as a runaway. I couldn’t believe this guy [Larry Lee] had a criminal history as a sex offender and that Michelle’s disappearance wasn’t being looked at as a potential kidnapping. There was some indication of an abduction. The indication was that she was last seen with a guy who had a history of sexual assault. It was pretty obvious to me.”

  But DeVuono didn’t think all the weight of the mismanaged case rested solely on the shoulders of the late detective. McNair had supervisors, those to whom he answered. The case should have been transferred to the unit that covered kidnappings and homicides, he reasoned. A good detective assigned early, getting search warrants, could have made all the difference in solving the case. “When York got involved,” he added, “it was like night and day.” Now, years later, with missed opportunities and missing case files, the likelihood of ever achieving justice in this very cold case seemed remote.

  “My instinct told me that Chas had more knowledge and possible involvement,” DeVuono added. “I’m not saying he killed her or intended to hurt her, but I believe he knew something that he didn’t tell. His lack of real cooperation led me to believe he had more involvement. And my feeling was influenced by his reaction when we tried to polygraph him. He’d had two years to build up some psychological wall to deal with the guilt.”

  Still, when DeVuono and Sasha Reynolds combed through the known facts, they concluded that Larry Lee alone had the means, the motive and the opportunity to have caused the death of young Michelle Anderson. They walked through each one.

  Means: transportation. Larry Lee had a truck in which to assault and rape his victim and then drive her body out to the remote frozen hillside. By his own account, he had dropped Chas at his grandparents’ house before driving off alone with Michelle, allegedly to give her a ride home. She never made it. His claim that he’d actually dropped her back near Chas’s grandparents’ house hours later seemed weak, illogical and highly doubtful.

  Just supposing she had been dropped off at Chas’s, Chas had no vehicle, although his brother had a truck. In the videotaped interview six months after Michelle’s disappearance, Chas claimed his brother, Bobby, was in Texas when Michelle went missing, although Anita believed Bobby was in Knoxville around that time. If he was, why did Chas lie? Of course, none of this could be explored after Bobby was murdered just a few months later.

  Then there was the fact that Chas lived with his grandparents. The house wasn’t huge; Chas reportedly shared a bedroom with his grandfather. Where was he going to undress Michelle and murder her before catching a ride to cart her body off to the remote location an hour away?

  Motive: Of the last two people to see Michelle alive, one of them was an impulsive, disorganized, violent, opportunistic serial rapist of young girls. Larry Lee had struck out with Becka that night, so he focused instead on Michelle, whose profile was a complete match to that of his other victims: young (15), small (size 5; 5’ tall), attractive, vulnerable, and accepting of a needed ride in his truck. Neither Chas nor Larry Lee excelled in the area of natural intelligence, but one was a decade older, a practiced sexual deviant, and sober. No doubt, to some degree, Larry Lee was just playing it by ear, waiting for another opportunity to strike.

  Chas had a drinking problem and a temper. And he was drunk the night Michelle disappeared, while Larry Lee was not. By both Larry Lee’s and Chas’s accounts, Larry Lee had carried the passed-out fifteen-year-old upstairs to a bedroom. What a friend twenty-six-year-old Larry Lee was to the eighteen-year-old Chas, who he had just met that night, to be so supportive and interested in Chas having a sexual encounter with his young, unconscious girlfriend.

  What was the payoff for Larry Lee? While a goofy, drunken Chas might have thought his deviant host was just being this cool guy, Larry Lee no doubt had ulterior motives of his own. He’d forced his estranged wife, Sara, to have sex with other men while he hid in the closet and watched. Maybe he’d hoped he could watch Chas and Michelle in the same way. Or maybe he thought he could get in on the action. Or maybe he was already scheming for a reason to drive Chas home first and get Michelle alone.

  Chas claimed that he was trying to get “intimate” with Michelle upstairs, but she wasn’t cooperating. Given Chas’s known history of domestic violence when drinking, it’s likely he got rougher than he admitted with Michelle, which supposedly sent her darting down the stairs and out the door. Suddenly Larry Lee was cast into the role of rescuer. Very convenient. Splitting them up by making Chas sit alone in the back of the truck and dropping the unwitting, intoxicated boyfriend off first would fit Larry Lee’s modus operandi.

  “Of course, Larry was a great manipulator,” DeVuono reasoned to Sasha. “He could have easily created a scenario where he gets Chas and Michelle together with the ultimate aim to get Michelle alone… All he had to do was work with the group, buying drinks and hanging out with them until he got them where he wanted.”

  Opportunity: What if Chas’s role in the whole affair had been more than a drunken argument with Michelle? What if he had assaulted her in some way, sexual or otherwise? Then it seems unlikely that Larry Lee would have given Chas the cover story of taking him home first and then driving off alone with Michelle. So DeVuono and Sasha figured that last part, Chas being dropped off alone, was the truth. The part about dropping her back at the end of Chas’s street later seemed more like an afterthought, something Larry Lee concocted when no other explanation would work. By saying he dropped her back at the corner of Cherry and Jefferson, at her request, at four in the morning, he attempted to shift the focus back to Chas, or at least away from himself. But with no investigation by the KPD after Michelle’s disappearance, just about any story would have allowed him to get away with murder.

  If Larry Lee did assault and rape Michelle (and everyone with knowledge of the case believed
he had), it was difficult to conceive that he would have allowed her to live. Perhaps Larry Lee had learned a lesson in Florida, where he’d let his victim go and thought he’d covered his tracks. He’d been wrong, and served over two years in prison for his mistake. With Michelle, there would have been no way to turn back, if he’d raped her; no way to cover his tracks, if he’d allowed her to live. DeVuono and Sasha entertained the idea that, at the very least, he might not have intended to kill her. Michelle might have fought back when Larry Lee went for her throat—as he was nearly always reported to do in his assaults—and her choking death might have been accidental.

  “If that’s what Larry Lee did,” Sasha concluded.

  “Right,” DeVuono said. And he ended the interview with an ominous warning: “He needs to be dominant and aggressive over young girls. He still needs to be watched.”

  10. SARA

  Not long after Sasha interviewed DeVuono, she received an uplifting email from the retired FBI agent that reflected his reputation for goodwill:

  I enjoyed our conversation very much. By shining a bright light on Smith and bringing pressure to bear on Knoxville PD to reopen the case, you have done a great service to those who have suffered so greatly through Smith’s actions, Anita and Sara especially.

  Anita and the investigators had all spoken highly of Sara, but nobody knew her current whereabouts or anything about her present circumstances. They hadn’t seen or talked with her in years. So locating Sara in plain sight was a complete surprise. She was listed in the Knoxville phone book under Sara R. Smith.

  Sasha dialed the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, hi,” Sasha responded. She introduced herself and explained why she was calling. Sasha hadn’t known what to expect from Sara, but there was no reason for concern; Sara was still as good-natured and friendly as everyone had described. She told Sasha she had moved in with an elderly aunt and uncle in North Knoxville. She was helping take care of them. She and her three small canine companions occupied a room in the basement. “Kind of like Cinderella,” she joked.

  When Sasha asked about the Michelle Anderson case, Sara answered excitedly, “You know, I was just thinking about her the other day! Oh, please tell me you got more developments on that, ’cause he’s getting out. You know that, right?! Anything that I can do to help, please count me in. Whatever you need me to do on this case, I’ll do. With everything he did to me, I know he did something to her. He’s a baad boy, and he does not need to be on our streets.”

  Despite battling several addictions and surviving a history that would wreak havoc on anyone’s body, Sara was still pretty. She wore her dark-and-shiny hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Sorry for my appearance,” she said in the deep, raspy voice of a forty-five-year-old lifetime smoker, apologizing for being in her work clothes: jeans, sneakers and a sweatshirt. She’d caught a ride to the hotel straight from work—she didn’t have transportation of her own—where she was employed part-time as a pet groomer. She was working her way up from shampoos to cutting. It was a new career for her, one of many. The owner was giving her on-the-job training. “I like it,” Sara said. “I’ve got three Pomeranians of my own.”

  Sasha offered Sara some take-out food, but Sara claimed she was too nervous to eat. “I do love work,” she said self-consciously, making small talk as she tried to settle in. “That’s all I do. I worked as a truck driver for four years. Been to all forty-eight states at least ten times and Canada and Mexico. You don’t like smoking, do you?”

  “Well… it’s a non-smoking hotel,” Sasha responded. “We can go down to the parking garage.”

  The concept seemed to surprise Sara. “I’ll be okay,” she uttered and braved a smokeless interview, during which she sometimes launched into a deep and rumbling cough.

  “Well, I’ll be honest with you,” Sara confessed. “I have some mental problems—post traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety.” She described the diagnoses she’d been given and explained that she’d been a patient at the local mental health center. “Smoking helps relax me. I don’t have health insurance. If it wasn’t for Cherokee Health Systems, I don’t know what I would do.” Sara rattled off a long list of medications that were, she explained, essential to her daily coping. “I’ve just got so much stuff in my head, not just from Larry Lee but everyone. I have nightmares every night.”

  It wasn’t difficult to get Sara to tell her story. She’d been telling it for years. She’d reduced a lifetime of pain and chaos to a series of scenes and symptoms regularly repeated to doctors, investigators, social workers and mental health staff. It was a troubling and compelling tale to tell: neglect in the crib, rape at age five, addiction by twelve, pregnant and married to Larry Lee by age fifteen. She gave Sasha a synopsis of her life, including her marriage to and captivity by Larry Lee. Eventually, she felt relaxed enough to unwrap her sandwich and open her bag of chips.

  “So, how did you get in this,” Sara inquired, turning the tables on Sasha. Sasha then shared her own history related to the case.

  “What time is it getting to be?” Sara eventually asked. She was fidgeting. Sasha could see she was seriously in need of a cigarette—or something more—but not willing to say so. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay. I take care of my elderly aunt and uncle.”

  They called it a wrap, and Sasha drove her home. But she would meet with Sara several more times on her trips to Knoxville. She wanted to get past Sara’s unconscious soundbites, her oft-repeated scripts, her guardedness and sense of shame. Usually, Sasha would pick her up and continue the discussion over dinner. Sara admitted she wasn’t always sure how she felt about probing the past; sometimes she felt relief and sometimes she felt back in the nightmare.

  Sara had maintained a relationship of sorts with her son, Joey, who was raised by his grandmother, Ruby. And through Joey Sara had also reconnected with the daughter she’d given up for adoption at six-months-old. When the girl turned eighteen, Joey had reached out to her. Sara described her relationship with her kids as “good” and produced pictures of some of the grandchildren—she had five and one on the way, Joey’s wife was pregnant—but Sara’s contact with them was sporadic. Her daughter had a close relationship with her adoptive mother. But physically, in the pictures, both Joey and his half-sister resembled Sara; they’d inherited her dark hair and elements of her good looks.

  Although Larry Lee had not come after Sara again—not after he’d fled to Florida, gotten arrested, served time and then returned to Knoxville—she never stopped looking over her shoulder. The beatings, captivity, and sexual and emotional torture she’d experienced at his hands had left a permanent mark.

  No therapist at the mental health center had ever been successful in guiding Sara through that or any of her other trauma. The meds were her fix, those and the alcohol she still drank, sometimes in copious amounts, more often than she admitted. Sara was accident prone and getting “falling-down-drunk” only exacerbated the matter, the evidence being the numerous scars, pins and plates that held her body together. If only the intrusive memories and thoughts would stop. If only her brain would give it a rest, and her mind would be still.

  Sara felt deep empathy for Anita and the rest of Michelle’s family. She was a compassionate person by nature and she knew the nature of Larry Lee. In the early years after Michelle’s remains had been found, Sara ran into Anita a couple of times at a little club off North Broadway. Anita would quietly slip in alone and give her endless grief over to the inhibition-releasing power of the brew. On those nights, Anita would cry as the drink unleashed torrents of pain.

  “I felt for her so much,” Sara recalled sadly. “I knew how he was and what he was capable of, and there was nothing I could do about it. I felt helpless, completely helpless. I just knew in my heart, and I still know, that he did it. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

  Sara did help in the investigation following the location of Michelle’s skeletal remains. She’d never met Detective McNai
r, of course; he’d never attempted to contact her. But Sara had worked with KPD Homicide Investigator York and FBI Special Agent Joe DeVuono. Everyone who’d worked with Sara had praised her warm and generous nature. They could see that she was “a mess”—she’d readily admitted as much herself—but she also had an innate integrity, a core of genuine goodness that stood out, with a sense of humor and irony thrown in.

  For Sara, Joe DeVuono’s genuine acceptance and nonjudgement of her was uplifting. He appreciated her assistance and felt her pain. “I loved that man to death,” Sara said. “He was very gentle and kind and made me feel at ease. And he understood. I mean, he was just awesome. He really wanted to get Larry Lee.”

  Sara was a survivor. Her addictions kept her spinning like a hamster in a wheel, but she held on. And she’d gained some insight into the dysfunction that had dominated her life, beginning as a child in the home of her neglectful and abusive mother.

  “It’s a pattern,” Sara told Sasha. “It happens that way. I come from a long line of incest. Beatings and torture, even. That’s why I was so gullible for Larry. Because I’d always been treated like shit. Always! I mean there was never a day I wasn’t treated like shit by my mom, her boyfriends, my uncles, my cousins, even my brothers! It’s always been there. I thought that was normal. I thought that was how people treated one another. Hell, I didn’t have a clue for years.”

  One evening, as they finished a nice meal at a local restaurant, Sasha showed Sara some case-related photos on her laptop. As she scrolled through the images, up popped a picture of Larry Lee. It was an older image, grainy, a scan of a photocopy of a mug shot. Regardless of quality, Larry Lee’s eyes peered menacingly and directly back at them.