19. CASELOAD
Sasha received email notifications whenever there was a change to Larry Lee’s TBI Sex Offender Registry page. But her research showed that his whereabouts as reported on the TBI SOR were sometimes unclear or inaccurate. When Larry Lee had to leave his mother’s house in Sevier County due to her cancer diagnosis, Sasha received email notifications of changes in his SOR information, but she experienced difficulty accessing his page on the registry. So she sent an email to Detective McCarter in Sevier County, where, at the time, she believed Larry Lee was still residing. It was then that she learned there had been a change in his circumstances and supervision. McCarter informed her that Larry Lee had since moved to Knox County and that McCarter had contacted the Knox County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO), and they were interested in reopening the Michelle Anderson cold case. He’d forwarded all the material Sasha had given him on to them, he said.
This was all news to Sasha, and would have been exciting, if any of it sounded right. She explained to Detective McCarter that KPD, not KCSO, had been working the case, and that cold-case homicide Investigator Jeff Day was the officer assigned. “Who is supervising Larry Lee?” she asked. McCarter couldn’t answer that question as Larry Lee no longer resided in his jurisdiction.
Sasha looked again at Larry Lee’s information on the SOR. It had now been updated to show that he had moved to Blount County, next door to Sevier, but not to Knox.
Sasha called the Blount County Sheriff’s Office. She learned that Larry Lee had registered as required, but there had been a “glitch” of some kind in entering the updated information on the registry. Sgt. John James was the man to whom Larry Lee now reported. Sasha left a message on his voicemail, and he called her back the next day.
Sasha introduced herself and tried to get clear on the trail of Larry Lee’s supervision. She asked how long he had been on Sgt. James’ caseload. More than six months, as James recalled. No, ma’am, he hadn’t been told anything about Larry Lee’s history when he moved into his area. No, ma’am, he didn’t know from which county Larry Lee had moved.
Sasha informed Sgt. James about the Michelle Anderson cold-case investigation and gave him the name of KPD Investigator Jeff Day. Sgt. James said he would like to talk to Day. “Oh yes, ma’am,” he said, “you just have him call me.”
But Sgt. James then informed Sasha that Larry Lee had come in to his office “just the other day,” ironically, to tell him that in three days he was moving back to the county from which he came. Sgt. James still wasn’t sure which county that was. Sasha told him it was Sevier.
“This guy is dangerous,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sgt. James said, “they all are, all three hundred on my caseload.”
Sasha informed Detective McCarter that Larry Lee was supposedly moving back to Sevier County. “That’s news to me,” McCarter replied. “I haven’t heard anything about this!”
She sent an email to Jeff Day updating him on her phone call with Blount County Sgt. John James and his request that the investigator call him. Day contacted James the next week, confirming for him the information about Larry Lee’s past crimes and his suspected connection to the unsolved murder of Michelle Anderson.
In the meantime, Sgt. James had paid a home visit to Larry Lee, confirming his living arrangements. Larry Lee hadn’t moved back to Sevier County after all. He was staying in Blount County with an “older couple,” according to Sgt. James’ report, in their trailer, where he was given access to a red Ford Mustang registered to a woman by the last name of King, as well as assistance getting a truck and a lawn mower for yard work.
This was just before the news piece aired identifying Larry Lee as a “person of interest” in the murder of Michelle Anderson. Larry Lee had watched it with his hosts. Before long, he was on the move again. This time, he headed back to Knoxville.
In 1970, the same year that floppy disks were invented, student protests resulted in the Kent State shootings, and the Beatles decided to end their musical collaboration, a new two-hundred-twenty-three-room Holiday Inn was built on the edge of downtown Knoxville, just off I-40, near the university, when the boundaries of the city were tighter and smaller. At the time, the four-story building was sharp and modern, with sliding glass doors opening onto every balcony. This was the Holiday Inn where Larry Lee had been employed, along with Ruby, before he’d left for Florida in 1981.
During the decades in which Larry Lee had been in prison, however, the hotel had transitioned from a quality, overnight inn, to run-down, long-term lodging known as Volunteer Studios, where furnished studio “apartments” could be rented by the week, month or year. It had a pool and an online presence, but its location and condition attracted a level of clientele that included transients, addicts, drug dealers, prostitutes and others who lived their lives hanging by a thread.
Residents smoked cigarettes while leaning in the sliding glass doorways next to torn curtains and sagging shades. They hung over balconies and slouched on scarred and rickety patio furniture. People were assaulted in its hallways. Drug deals were a common sight in its doorways. A place like this, which would accept nearly anybody, attracted registered sex offenders who had difficulty renting anywhere else—so that’s where Larry Lee stayed.
How Larry Lee earned money for rent and his day-to-day living costs was questionable. Although he had been out of the Georgia prison for going on two years, he’d never identified an employer. He’d been spotted at the local blood bank a couple of times, and he had that lawn mower and his panhandling scam. It was on a nearby exit ramp that Joey had spotted him begging for money.
In addition to mowing lawns, Larry Lee claimed he made a small income off scrapped metal. But then he was in a car accident and injured his ankle bad enough to require pins and a brace. Soon after, he got a nasty staph infection in the wound. According to a neighbor, Larry Lee began selling and trading the pain pills he’d been prescribed for his injury. He also struck up a pseudo-relationship with a drug-addicted prostitute who lived one floor below him. It was through these activities that Larry Lee came into contact with troubled young women who had no inkling of his violent and checkered past.
KPD Investigator Jeff Day said he liked the idea of Larry Lee moving into Knoxville. “That way I can keep an eye on him.” Of course, keeping an eye on Larry Lee didn’t fall under the job duties of the cold case investigator. That task belonged to KPD Investigator Krista Sheppard, the officer to whom Larry Lee now reported as a registered sex offender living in Knoxville. Jeff Day gave Sheppard’s name and number to Sasha and said he’d filled the investigator in on the history and crimes of Larry Lee.
Investigator Sheppard did not respond to Sasha’s phone and email messages. Sasha eventually reached out to the investigator’s supervisor, which finally resulted in a response email from Investigator Sheppard; it suggested Sasha visit the TBI sex offender registry website for information and updates.
Working with Investigator Sheppard was clearly a dead end. Sasha would have to put her faith in Investigator Day and hope that, in the meantime, Larry Lee didn’t strike again.
Part Three
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
20. CAN I USE YOUR PHONE?
Larry Lee knew her only by her alias, Jade. He first met her in October 2011, when he purchased some drugs from her boyfriend, Tam. Jade’s real name was Ayesha Mack. This charming, petite, deeply-dimpled, African-American beauty, the eldest of six children, had run away from her Georgia home at the tender age of sixteen. Now nineteen, she bummed around Knoxville with Tam, her handsome, dread-locked, drug-dealing boyfriend, who was also several years older than her. They crashed wherever they could: friends’ apartments, homeless shelters, and the streets, if they had to.
For six months in 2010 they had rented a room at Volunteer Studios, where they got to know many of the local residents. Now they were crashing at the apartment of Larry Lee’s companion of sorts, Khristy, a thirty-year-old, drug-addicted prostitute living one floor be
low him. Khristy let them stay there in exchange for crack, which Tam sold along with a few other illicit substances. Larry Lee was also a client.
Larry Lee liked to call Khristy his girlfriend, and to Ayesha, who’d known them both for only a few weeks, the two were together so much that she thought it was true. But Khristy’s addiction was so severe that she’d sell her sexual services for a quick fix. There were times when Tam and Ayesha observed her coming home with a bruised and battered face, which she’d attribute to a john. She’d lost custody of her kids and was supposed to be working to change her life so she could get them back, but not much about Khristy’s current lifestyle seemed to support this goal.
On Monday morning, October 24, 2011, Ayesha walked uptown to the central branch of the Knoxville Public Library on West Church Street. There she logged into her Yahoo email account and checked replies to job applications she’d recently submitted online. She was also sending emails to Tam, which he would receive and respond to on his phone.
After about forty-five minutes, something odd happened: Tam stopped responding to her messages. She logged out of her account, gathered her purse and began the one-and-a-half-mile trek back to the apartment building. When she reached Volunteer Studios, she headed straight for Khristy’s apartment. Neither Khristy nor Tam were there, so Ayesha went one floor up to the apartment of the man she knew only as Larry and knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” he yelled.
“It’s Jade,” she answered from the hallway.
“Come in,” he said, opening the door. Larry Lee looked terrible. He had been up all night smoking crack with Khristy and their friend David. Then that morning he’d gone to court as a witness at the preliminary hearing of a man named Barry Eugene Evans, accused of robbing Larry Lee of his prescription OxyContin a month earlier. He’d just returned from downtown and taken off his shirt. He wore only a pair of loose, khaki-colored pants held up by one suspender strap; the other strap was broken.
“Have you seen Tam?” Ayesha asked.
Khristy emerged from the bathroom, surprising Ayesha, who hadn’t known she was there. “Tam and David got arrested a little while ago,” Khristy said. She explained that David had broken into the hotel’s laundry machines earlier that day. He’d stolen the change, then walked to Khristy’s apartment where Tam was staying. The apartment manager, Kathy Brown, learned of the theft, used security footage to track David to Khristy’s apartment, and called the police. When KPD showed up, they arrested David for the theft and Tam for the drugs found in the apartment.
Khristy didn’t inform Ayesha that as soon as Tam had been arrested, she’d gone through their things, looking for items to sell or trade. As she stood there, she had Tam’s iPod in her pocket; she was on her way to trade it for drugs at another run-down hotel nearby.
Ayesha burst into tears. She felt like the world was always conspiring to keep her and Tam apart. A couple years earlier, she had been arrested for shoplifting, which put her on probation. A quick trip home to Georgia had put her in violation of that probation, and when she returned to Knoxville she had spent time in jail. That time away from Tam had been unbearable. Now, she’d been back with him only a few weeks and they’d been forced apart again. This couldn’t be happening.
“Can I use your phone?” she asked Khristy, sobbing out the words.
Khristy hesitated and looked at Larry Lee. “Uhh… I’m going to get a phone now,” she said.
“Yeah,” Larry Lee said. “My phone is out of minutes and I need to make a call, too.”
“Well, let me come with you,” Ayesha said.
“No…” Khristy said. “Really… I’ll be right back.”
Ayesha noted that Khristy seemed uneasy, but she was far too distracted by thoughts of Tam’s arrest to focus on Khristy at the time. She needed to slow her racing thoughts, sort through this crisis, figure out a plan, but she couldn’t halt the flow of tears.
Khristy left and Ayesha slumped down onto a green plastic chair, the only place to sit other than the bed. “Everything is going to be all right,” Larry Lee reassured her. His hand touched her lightly on the back. “How about a cup of tea?”
“Okay,” she answered softly. He stepped into the bathroom, washed out two cups and prepared the tea. Ayesha’s mind remained focused on Tam and her dilemma. She really had nowhere else to go, she reasoned as Larry Lee emerged and handed her the cup of warm liquid.
“Can I get you something to eat?
“No, thanks,” she answered in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Well, I’m going to fix myself something to eat,” he told her. He opened a can of peas, chopped up part of an onion and heated them together in the microwave. Then he requested that she move from the chair to the bed. He wanted to eat his peas by the table, he explained. “Aren’t you going to drink your tea? Did I waste my time making it?”
“No… I’m just letting it cool,” she said as she moved to the bed. The double-size bed was minus a headboard, or even a frame, and rested instead on a foundation of evenly-spaced concrete blocks. Ayesha sat at the edge while Larry Lee polished off his peas. Where is Khristy with that phone?
After some minutes, Larry Lee suggested they watch a movie. He said it would distract her from her worries, kill time while they waited for Khristy to return. He put in the action flick xXx, starring Vin Diesel. Then he turned the volume up—a little too loud, Ayesha thought—and sat on the bed beside her.
“It’ll be okay,” Larry Lee said again, rubbing her back as tears spilled down her cheeks. He offered her a rolled cigarette.
In her stressed and distracted state, Ayesha lacked the mental energy to analyze what was going on. Yet somewhere in her psyche, warning bells began going off. Khristy had been acting strange. Going to get the phone didn’t make a lot of sense, and she should have been back by now. And why was Larry Lee, who was now sitting right next to her on the bed, so insistent on her drinking her tea? A deep uneasiness began to creep up her spine, paralyzing her with fear. She didn’t know what to do, so she didn’t do anything, just watched the movie, gripping her full cup of tea.
They stared at the TV in silence for several minutes when Larry Lee shifted his focus to a stack of materials on the floor beside the bed. “Can you help me move these?” he asked. It seemed a strange request, but Ayesha didn’t know why she should object, or how Larry Lee would react if she did, so she set her cup of tea on the table and bent down to assist.
In a blur, the two-hundred-fifty-pound Larry Lee clamped his hand down on Ayesha’s neck. He quickly secured the one-hundred-fifteen-pound girl with his signature throat-choking hold and began slapping her back and forth across her face.
“What are you doing?” she gasped, barely able to breathe.
“I’ll kill you,” he threatened, then pinned her down to the mattress. Using his forearm to maintain pressure on her neck, he reached under the bed and retrieved a chain of neckties, looping the already-knotted end of a blue-gray, diagonally-striped tie around her right wrist. It happened so quickly that Ayesha couldn’t determine just how he’d accomplished this. As he tightened the pressure on her throat, he attempted to secure her left wrist with the loop of a golden brown necktie on the other end of the chain, which proved too short for the task.
“Just cooperate, Jade, and you won’t get hurt,” Larry Lee hissed. Ayesha eyed him wildly. She prayed for God to rescue her as her assailant dropped his pants with a flick of the single suspender strap off his shoulder. Naked, he climbed upon her, using the force of his weight to wedge himself between her tightly clamped thighs.
When Ayesha resisted, a horrifying look of crazed lust and anger filled his eyes. “I’ll break your fucking legs,” he hissed. Larry Lee’s hot breath was now all around her; his sweat dripping onto her face and chest as she struggled against his control. But the squeeze on her throat was more than she could resist. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she could feel her consciousness slipping away as Larry Lee tugged off her leggings and
underwear and thrust the fingers of his right hand in and out of her vagina.
Then suddenly and unexpectedly, someone pounded on the apartment door. Larry Lee froze. “Nobody’s here!” he yelled. “Come back later!”
But he was distracted just long enough to unconsciously loosen his grip on Ayesha’s throat. She gasped, sucking in a single breath as her mind sprang to survival mode. She fully believed her very life depended upon this moment, this unforeseen opportunity. “Somebody’s here!” she shrieked. “I’ll be right there!”
Larry Lee panicked, glanced nervously around the room. He released Ayesha, jumped off the bed and backed away from her. Ayesha never took her eyes off him as she reached over her head with her left hand and unhooked the necktie from her right wrist.
“Jade, I’m sooo sorry,” Larry Lee said. He was nervous, shaking as he stepped into his pants, slipping the single suspender strap back onto his shoulder. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Keeping her eyes locked upon her assailant, Ayesha grabbed for her clothes and cautiously pulled them back on.
“Just don’t call the cops,” Larry Lee pleaded, but Ayesha didn’t say anything. She just continued pulling on her clothes and glaring at her attacker. So Larry Lee changed his strategy. He slid a pocket knife off the table and dragged the green plastic chair to the door, where he sat down to block her exit. “You’re not going anywhere,” he warned her in a voice low and steady.
Whoever had knocked before didn’t knock again. So Ayesha couldn’t count on anyone to help her. She began backing toward the sliding-glass door leading to the second-floor balcony.
“Just don’t say anything,” Larry Lee repeated, shifting yet again to a more pleading tone. “Here,” he said, and held out his hand, offering her the knife.
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