Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  Joey recalled Larry Lee leaving town all those years ago. Ruby had switched rooms with Joey shortly after she’d gotten custody, giving him the bigger of the two bedrooms on the house’s main floor. In 1987, the year Michelle disappeared, Joey was six, going on seven; he remembered because he was just old enough to walk to Pippen Elementary. His father came into his bedroom one night to say good-bye. He told his son that he was heading over to Georgia for a while.

  If Joey’s childhood recollection of events is correct, that would mean that sometime during that first year after Michelle disappeared, Larry Lee left town for Georgia. But he was back in Knoxville by the time Michelle’s remains were found in early 1989. Joey was then eight and knew nothing, of course, about that case. But he knew about a cut brake line, because the family talked about that in front of him. Seems Larry Lee had gotten into his truck one day, discovered that he had no brakes, and crashed into a house down the hill at the end of the street. After that, Uncle Brad stayed with them until Larry Lee left town again.

  Sasha asked Joey to describe his relationship with his father before he left town. Joey couldn’t recall having much of one. He remembered playing with the kids across the street, but he couldn’t really remember spending time with Larry Lee or him even being around all that often. It seemed to him that Ruby sent Larry Lee off to do things a lot of the time. “I never really understood that,” he said. “I just thought it was normal.”

  “Do you think she was sending him away because of you?” Sasha asked.

  Joey squinted his eyes as he pondered. “Looking back? Yeah.”

  If Ruby was feeling protective of Joey around Larry Lee in the first years she had custody of her grandson, she’d apparently relaxed that standard by the summer of 1989, after Michelle’s remains were found, the summer Joey turned nine. He recalled spending several weeks with Larry Lee in Lawrenceville, Georgia, before he became homesick and returned to Knoxville. He remembered that Larry Lee drove a black hatchback during that time (the AMC Pacer identified in his assault of Amanda Sanders) and took him to the laser show on Stone Mountain with the carved men atop carved horses galloping out of the rock.

  The timing of that summer visit would have been between Larry Lee’s July “battery” of young Caroline Bronti in Lawrenceville and his October “kidnapping and assault” of Amanda Sanders in Stone Mountain. Larry Lee came home to Knoxville a time or two after that summer, Joey recalled, but by the following spring—just after the trial—he was told that his father was going away and wouldn’t be back for a long time. Few details were offered, and the subject would not be discussed again until Joey happened upon a video tape six years later.

  Larry Lee’s older brother, Brad, lived next door to Ruby. His sister, Nancy, and her kids lived on the other side. So Joey always remembered his aunt and uncle being around. Brad was tall, dark and engaging. At six feet, he was a half-foot taller than his little brother. He was also a wild, abusive alcoholic and a petty criminal who sometimes burglarized houses, dealt drugs, and stole air conditioners out of new construction for the copper they contained. Like his little brother, he was frequently in need of legal defense.

  Brad had served a stint in the Marines, but he’d been discharged for selling cartons of cigarettes out of the commissary in Korea. No one ever told Joey that story; he’d found his uncle’s discharge papers. No doubt Brad’s lifestyle was far from the model Joey needed, but he was the only consistent father-figure Joey ever had. “He tried to show me some things,” Joey said, a crooked grin spreading across his face. “Some of them, I’m not sure why he did.”

  Larry Lee had always looked up to his bad-ass brother, four years his senior. A bad-ass was something Larry Lee aspired to be. When he bragged of his drinking prowess, he was actually talking about Brad. When he claimed he’d been wounded in combat—as he’d done with Katherine McWilliams right after he’d raped her—he’d again been talking about Brad. Although the latter story wasn’t true for Brad either. Brad had been shot in the ankle by a KPD officer as he scaled a fence behind his mother’s house.

  To anyone outside the family, Brad always took up for his baby brother, but he would confront Ruby for always defending and protecting him. “He’s your brother,” Ruby would remind Brad. A fierce argument erupted between them one day when Joey was young, and it was over Larry Lee. Joey didn’t know the exact cause of the conflict, except that Brad was again accusing his mother of babying her younger son. In the emotion-charged altercation, Brad became so enraged that he threw a chair through the living room’s plate-glass picture window and into the front yard. Joey was sure a police record of that incident existed somewhere.

  Ruby invested heavily in Joey; he became the center of her world. And the way she cared for the center of her world was to provide: to work, to earn money, to give things. Materially, Joey wanted for little. Ruby was a hard worker. She often worked three jobs simultaneously: housekeeping, waitressing and overnight patient sitting. To sustain her grueling schedule, according to some well acquainted with her at the time, she sometimes popped “Black Beauties,” a then-popular amphetamine supplied by one of her drug-dealing sons.

  “She wasn’t an emotional person,” Joey recalled. “When I would get mad at her, her way of making me un-mad would be to buy me something. I liked getting stuff, so…” Joey smiled wryly, then continued. “I loved my mom very much,”—he referred to Ruby as “mom”; she’d legally adopted him when he was twelve—“and she loved her kids, but she wasn’t sure how to raise them. She tried to give them everything. Brad went wrong early, and Larry Lee followed. She didn’t know how to stop it,” he theorized, “so she minimized it.”

  Emotionally, Joey needed structure and a little more of Ruby’s time. She assumed responsibility for everything he did, no doubt shades of her parenting style with Larry Lee. “When I was growing up, I could do nothing wrong,” Joey recalled. “When I set my desk on fire in second grade, she blamed herself, quit smoking and got rid of all the cigarettes and lighters in the house.”

  Regarding his biological mother, Sara, Joey had grown up feeling disappointed, hurt and resentful toward her. She had visitation, but was only as dependable as her addictions allowed, which was not very much. For a time, Joey became an angry kid. And he had questions about his father, too, but he kept them to himself until his preteen years. When he finally asked Ruby about Larry Lee, her answer revealed that she may have come to terms with the man his father had become.

  “Never forget he is your father,” Ruby told Joey.

  “But she also said that I needed to know my limits in being around him,” Joey recalled. “She didn’t say that she thought he was guilty, but when she told me that, I knew she thought there was some truth to it.”

  It is hard to imagine that Ruby could have sat in the Georgia courtroom, heard the testimony of Katherine, Amanda and the witnesses, and the summation of Assistant DA Elizabeth McNamara, and not had a change of mind, a shift in awareness, about the true nature of her son.

  When Joey was fourteen or fifteen, he found a VHS tape tucked away in the linen closet. He popped it into the VCR. “It was a TV news report about Larry Lee’s trial in Georgia, about him getting found guilty and sentenced,” Joey explained. “And it upset me a little bit. I asked my mom what had really happened, and the tape disappeared and never got talked about again.”

  “What did she say really happened?” Sasha inquired.

  Ruby told Joey what Larry Lee had told her—the explanation that he’d offered on the witness stand in Georgia—that it was all misunderstood flirtation. Larry Lee thought Amanda was flirting with him, he put his hand on her leg and she screamed rape. “I never believed that,” Joey clarified, “because you don’t get sentenced to twenty years in prison for touching someone. I never knew exactly what happened.”

  Ruby also told Joey, after he was grown, that of the five kids she’d raised, he was the only one “she raised right.”

  “How did she raise you differently?” Sas
ha asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joey laughed in reply, “because I had my fair share of problems growing up.” He speculated that one thing Ruby had done differently with him was to get him out of the neighborhood, placing him in boarding schools and private day schools.

  In the twenty years that Larry Lee remained in a Georgia prison, Joey visited him twice. The first time, when he was younger, he’d gone with Ruby. The second time, when he was seventeen, about a year after his Uncle Brad died, he drove down alone in his new car, the one that Ruby had just bought him. Larry Lee told him that his late Uncle Brad was probably his father. It was an accusation Larry Lee had thrown at Sara several times before. Joey was filled with rage. It wasn’t the idea of Brad being his father that so offended him—actually, that was kind of appealing, certainly more desirable than Larry Lee—it was his timing. “How could he sit there and tell me that in my face after that person was dead?” Joey asked Sasha. He said he’d asked Sara about it as soon as he got back, and she denied it, just as she had since she first got pregnant. Joey didn’t visit Larry Lee again. He made the trip one more time, driving Ruby down, but he waited outside.

  It was a stint in the military, Joey reasoned, that helped him mature. “I think the fact that I was raised without my biological parents made me want to do something good so my kids didn’t have to grow up like I did,” he said. So far, he had succeeded with that goal.

  When Larry Lee was released in the fall of 2009, Joey was away on a job and would be gone for several months. Larry Lee stayed away from the Fern Avenue house, living with Ruby in neighboring Sevier County, but she was soon diagnosed with cancer and moved back into her old home so Natalie could help take care of her. As Ruby’s cancer progressed, she alternated staying with Natalie—Joey was still away with work—and with her daughter, Nancy, who still lived in Knoxville. Larry Lee sometimes stayed with Nancy, too, although this information was never shared with the officers he reported to as a registered sex offender. He ended up sharing a trailer with an older couple in nearby Blount County, just south of Knoxville. Larry Lee would call Natalie to check on Ruby, but he wasn’t welcome at the house.

  After Joey returned home, he established the terms for Larry Lee to be able to visit his dying mother: he couldn’t come over when Natalie and their daughter were home unless Joey was also there, and he had to be “one-hundred percent honest” about anything Joey and Natalie asked him related to his offenses. Larry Lee agreed.

  On one of his first visits, Natalie asked him about his Florida conviction. She wanted to know exactly what happened in that case. Well, Larry Lee explained, he was twenty and Katherine was seventeen. In his “one-hundred-percent truthful” version, he said they were dating and her parents didn’t approve, so they turned him in to the police.

  At this point in the interview the conversation shifted. Now it was time for Sasha to share some information. Joey didn’t know the specifics of any of his father’s crimes, which is why he’d agreed to meet Sasha in the first place.

  Sasha described Larry Lee as a long-term compulsive liar by habit, so she wasn’t surprised he’d lied about the Florida conviction. He certainly couldn’t risk telling his son and daughter-in-law the awful truth. Sasha laid out the details in a blunt and straightforward manner. Larry Lee was twenty. His victim was fourteen and needed a ride home. He lured her into his truck with words aimed to win her trust, and then he got her alone, punched and choked her, ordered her to undress, raped her, made her clean-up and cover her eyes, and then he drove her home. She explained that Larry Lee hadn’t been charged with statutory rape in that case, as he’d told Joey and Natalie. Instead, a plea deal had been offered to him on assault, kidnapping and rape charges in order to avoid the cost of a trial. Larry Lee had accepted, pleading guilty to the lesser charge of attempted sexual battery.

  Joey sighed. “I want to know a lot of things, but at the same time, I don’t want to. You know what I mean?” As disturbing as the other crimes of Larry Lee might be, it was the questions about what happened within the family that haunted Joey the most. Those were the answers he wanted from his father: Did you tie Sara up in the basement? Did you touch any kids in my family? Did you ever touch me?

  Over the years, Sara had told Joey vague stories about Larry Lee tying her up in the basement and having his way with her. Joey didn’t really place much stock in these stories, because he didn’t place much stock in Sara. “My biological mother has a lot of imagination,” he observed. It wasn’t that he believed Larry Lee over his mother—after all, he hardly knew the man—but Sara had lied to him about coming to see him or pick him up so many times that he’d written off her reliability. But at the same time, when pressed, he acknowledged that there was probably some basis of truth to them.

  Then there was the question of his older cousin Jenny. She was the daughter of Larry Lee’s sister, Nancy. Joey had heard whispers that Larry Lee had possibly molested Jenny when he was a teenager and she was very young. When it came to all of these stories, he said, “I wasn’t sure what to believe and my mother [Ruby] wouldn’t discuss it. You know, Larry Lee said he would be honest with me. After all this, I want to ask him if he did it.”

  Lately, Larry Lee had been calling. Joey usually didn’t answer, but he’d responded to his father’s call a few days after the TV spot ran on the evening news. “I saw you on TV, just so you know,” Joey said to him. “Did you see it?”

  “I did see it,” Larry Lee answered.

  “Pretty interesting.”

  Joey would learn that Larry Lee had been watching the news while sitting with the older couple who had taken him into their trailer. It wasn’t long before he had to find a new place to live.

  “Had Ruby ever come to see Larry Lee as guilty?” Sasha asked. Natalie shook her head no. She didn’t think Ruby had. Although she recalled Ruby’s strange behavior one time when Larry Lee stopped by the house early, when Joey wasn’t home and Natalie and their daughter had not yet departed. At this point, Ruby was extremely weak and seldom rose from her bed. Yet on this occasion, upon hearing Larry Lee’s voice in the adjoining room, she pulled her frail body from her resting place, as if willing it into the living room.

  “Granny, what are you doing!?” Natalie asked in shock.

  “She’s protecting you from me,” cracked Larry Lee.

  Joey and Natalie had a couple cookouts in the spring and summer of 2010. They knew that Ruby wouldn’t live much longer, so they invited the family to come spend time with her. Larry Lee was invited, too, and he came.

  One weekend Larry Lee earned some needed cash helping Joey pour concrete in the Fern Avenue driveway. He mentioned to his son more than once that he didn’t know how hard Larry Lee had it. He said a few thousand dollars would sure go a long way to help straighten things out. But Natalie had put her foot down. She said she and Joey had a family to support and there was no way any money was going out of their bank account and into his.

  Later, Joey was driving down the 17th Street exit ramp off I-40 in Knoxville and suddenly there was Larry Lee. On the exit ramp. Panhandling. He was holding up a sign that said he needed money for gas. “I debated just driving on by,” Joey said, chuckling, “but he looked at me, and I saw him look at me, and it was like: Okay, I’m gonna stop. So I said, ‘Do you need me to take you to get gas?’”

  “No. I can’t let you do that,” Larry Lee said.

  “I’m not just going to leave you here.”

  “It’s my scam,” Larry Lee confided to his son. It was one way he got money, acting as if he’d run out of gas, that his truck was on empty.

  “I actually asked my wife today,” Joey told Sasha, on the day he’d helped bury his half-sister’s adoptive mother, “if somebody dies and there’s no one to take care of the remains, what happens to them? Because I won’t pay for his funeral.”

  There was another cousin, Jenny’s younger sister, who Joey thought might be willing to talk. Sasha gave her card to Joey to pass on to her. If she was will
ing to talk, Sasha would let her make the call.

  As the meeting between Sasha, Joey and Natalie came to a close, the conversation and comments shifted to banter and lighter topics. The couple still had to pick up their young daughter. “How old is she?” Sasha asked.

  “Three,” Natalie said, giving a proud grin. “The terrible twos don’t have anything on the horrible threes, let me tell you. She is so independent. She won’t hold your hand, she won’t let you do for her.”

  “I do it,” Joey mimicked in his best little-girl voice, smiling, imitating the cute way his young daughter proclaimed her independence.

  A couple of days later, before she left Knoxville, Sasha talked again with Joey. He’d spoken to the cousin he’d mentioned, but she declined to talk to Sasha and, instead, cautioned him about doing the same. She was afraid that her children would learn about the history of their Uncle Larry if Sasha wrote about the story.

  But Joey also had some good news, he said. He’d picked up Sara the evening following his meeting with Sasha, and after a few drinks, they’d talked more openly about the past than ever before. Joey decided that he would talk to Larry Lee and, if he did it, try to get him to confess. A bold, wishful plan.

  It was the last time Sasha would communicate with Joey. He decided, it seems, to take his cousin’s advice. No doubt he’d said all he wanted to say, perhaps more than he ever intended. The thing that Joey really wanted was more answers, and at that point, he could only get them from Larry Lee, though that was unlikely to happen.

  Against the odds, perhaps, Joey had achieved what many never do. He’d become a loving, responsible and available parent. A couple of weeks after her meeting with Joey, Sasha called Sara to check in. Sara sounded upbeat. “Joey said he understood more than he did before. He hadn’t realized what all I had gone through and I wanted to thank you.”