Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  Anita and York agreed to meet her there. More than twenty years had passed since York and Anita had seen one another, but the retired investigator recognized her immediately as she came through the entrance to the City-County Building. He squinted at her playfully and declared, “Haven’t aged a bit!”

  They walked together to the criminal court one level above. York checked, and Larry Lee’s name was still on the docket, but there was no sign of him in the courtroom. Then York spotted Larry Lee’s attorney, a colleague of sorts. He strolled up behind Harper, a slender man of average height with hawk-like features and close-cropped hair, and squeezed him on the shoulders, then bent down and asked about the hearing.

  Even Harper wasn’t sure why it was on the docket, but he said a motion on the case against Larry Lee would not be heard in court that day. This was disappointing news. Sasha had driven hours to be there, and Anita had taken the whole day off from work. She’d been anxious about the hearing, fearful of her reaction at the sight of Larry Lee, the first she would have laid eyes on him in nearly twenty-five years. She had even brought along a paper bag in case she began to hyperventilate.

  “Well…” Sasha exhaled.

  “Well, indeed!” Anita agreed.

  As they pushed through the brass-rimmed glass door to exit the courtroom, they encountered Leslie Nassios preparing to walk in. Anita took the opportunity to introduce Sasha, as the two had never met in person. In this brief interaction, Sasha could sense that Nassios felt great compassion for Anita. Nassios invited them to join her across the hall in the district attorney’s conference room.

  Now Sasha was about to engage in a face-to-face with the assistant district attorney, prosecutor in the newest case against Larry Lee. So… she noted to herself, this is why we’re here.

  Anita and Sasha picked from the blue swivel chairs that encircled the long, shiny, oval-shaped wooden table. Nassios, who wore her dark, wavy hair just below her shoulders, sat facing them on the opposite side.

  She focused her attention first on Anita, checking up on her, then turned to Sasha. “I appreciate the information you’ve emailed to me,” she said.

  “I’ll be glad to share any documents I have,” Sasha replied, “anything that you can use.”

  “Obviously this case will hinge on the victim showing up,” Nassios said. “In the beginning she seemed very eager to prosecute. This case is set for September. I’ve got a murder trial the end of August. I know you’d like answers today, but we just deal with our cases as they come up. We usually wait until a month or so before the trial to start preparing.”

  The pending prosecution of Larry Lee may have been on her office’s long list of cases, but at this moment, it had her full attention. She shifted her focus again in the direction of Anita. “Nothing regarding your daughter is going to come into evidence. You understand that, right? I’m just trying to prepare you.”

  Anita’s eyes filled with tears and she struggled to find any words at all.

  The prosecutor’s face reflected both compassion and confusion. “Why are you crying?” she asked gently, concerned that she might have upset Anita. “I’m really sorry about your daughter.”

  “She’s held it in for such a long time,” Sasha offered. “There’s never been any real resolution or closure for the family.”

  Eventually Anita gained control of the sobs enough to utter some words of response. “I’m just not used to talking about it,” she confessed. “It’s still very hard.”

  As Anita’s tears slowed and she regained her composure, Nassios continued, stating that unlike Larry Lee’s Georgia trial twenty years earlier, no evidence of any prior convictions was likely to be admitted during his new trial. “Larry Lee’s previous convictions are not going to come into evidence unless he testifies, and still the court may make a ruling that it’s too similar in nature to what he’s charged with and too prejudicial for that to come into evidence.”

  What a difference another state can make. Nassios didn’t know the particulars of Georgia’s more liberal policy toward the admission of “similar transaction” evidence in sex-offense cases, but she provided a perspective on the way these matters were usually handled in Tennessee. She said she’d be more likely to get evidence of a similar crime admitted if it was, for instance, a drug store robbery and the defendant used a similar kind of unusual note or a type of bomb or asked for a particular drug. “I just know the Tennessee law is restrictive, particularly on sex cases.”

  She recalled past cases she had tried in which the “prior bad acts”—as these similar offenses were called in Tennessee law—reflected clear “similar transaction” evidence—proof of motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, or absence of mistake or accident—but was still not allowed by the presiding judge. In the prosecution of sex crimes in Tennessee, Nassios explained, the admission of evidence of similar “prior bad acts” is very, very rare.

  And while the prosecutor lamented those times when she felt she’d met the standard for admission of such evidence and still been denied, she still defended the need for caution. “The reason why a defendant’s past history can’t come into evidence is because it would be really difficult for a juror to keep that out of his or her mind and try the defendant for the case that’s there in the court that day. It would be really hard for that kind of prejudice not to cloud your judgement in a particular case. I would have difficulty setting it aside. If he raped somebody before, he did it in this case, too. And so the law errs on the side of the defendant.”

  Sometimes, Nassios pointed out, all a prosecutor can do with the knowledge of a perpetrator’s pattern of past crimes is use it to motivate him or her to strive even harder to win the case. “Will you send me the numbers and information on those other court cases?” she asked Sasha.

  “Absolutely.”

  Nassios then shared more examples of cases she’d prosecuted that had elements in common with the one against Larry Lee, including trials of serial rapists and murderers, and one in which evidence had also been lost. She wanted Anita to know she wasn’t alone in these experiences. “The incompetency level that we sometimes tolerate…” Nassios observed, letting the thought trail off. Then referring to the lack of investigation when Michelle initially went missing, she said, “I don’t know why the detective didn’t do more to try to find out where Larry Lee went and document, document, document. For some, it’s easier to believe that girls ask for it, that they run away.”

  The discussion evolved to the specifics of the night and early morning of Michelle’s disappearance. Sasha, who very much desired to hear Nassios’ thoughts on this topic, once again laid out the reported series of events on that last night of Michelle’s life, including the involvement of her boyfriend, Chas. “I don’t think Larry Lee is the kind of guy to work with anybody,” Nassios speculated. “He drove off alone with her.”

  Then as they talked about it further, the prosecutor proposed a different angle. “What makes you think they both didn’t rape her? Looking at all of this objectively and trying to think of what is the most likely thing that happened—and I’m calling upon thirty years of experience dealing with rapists and murderers—I try to figure out how they think, how things happened. In this case, it seems the most likely scenario is she’s drunk, she passes out, they rape her, she comes to and she wants to get out. She’s coherent enough that she pulls on her pants. She doesn’t look for her underwear. She’s in a hurry. She doesn’t have time to put on her shoes. She makes a fuss and he strangles her to make her shut up. And then he’s got a girl he’s got to get rid of.”

  “I’ve thought about that, too,” Anita said.

  “And stranglers strangle,” Nassios continued, “over and over. Now that is something that is unique. They use that mechanism to shut women up, to get control of them.”

  Larry Lee was most certainly a strangler, Sasha pointed out, a fact he’d proven over and over across the decades. “But why would Larry Lee give Chas an alibi b
y saying he dropped him off first at his house?” Sasha asked.

  “Because they’re protecting each other,” Nassios speculated.

  “That was my initial thought,” Anita responded. She had developed suspicions about Chas in those first months after Michelle disappeared, and she’d never been able to let them go. “The two stories were just so perfectly… I mean… they were exactly the same.”

  “Their stories are the same until Larry Lee says he dropped Michelle back near Chas’s house,” Sasha interjected. “He tries to implicate Chas in the end by saying, ‘I dropped her off near your house.’”

  “Not really,” Nassios countered. “Why would he put her at a location away from the house?”—a few doors down at the corner of Cherry and Jefferson—“Why would you not drop her at the door? That doesn’t make any sense. He was actually helping Chas by having her dropped off not in front of the house. If he says he dropped her off in front of the house, it’s going to be hard for Chas to explain that she didn’t knock. The police might not believe that. On the other hand, Larry Lee says, ‘I dropped her on this corner’—a dangerous area at a time when who knows who can be out—it kind of absolves Chas from explaining why she didn’t knock at the door. How could something happen from the street to the doorway? Do you see what I’m saying?”

  Sasha was intrigued by Nassios’ reasoning, and she would readily defer to the assistant DA’s experienced legal mind. The account given by Larry Lee and Chas of what had happened in Larry Lee’s bedroom that night never had the ring of complete truth. Sasha had concluded long ago that Chas had taken advantage of Michelle’s inebriated state and either had sex with her while she was passed out or forced himself on her when she was barely conscious. And, at the very least, Larry Lee enjoyed being a stairway spectator to this event, just as he had enjoyed prostituting Sara and Maryanne and watching from closets while they were with other men.

  Still, Sasha had reasoned that Larry Lee’s lie about dropping Michelle off at the corner was his way of covering for the fact that she never arrived at Chas’s house. And the part about Chas being made to ride back in the cold truck bed—a detail provided in both of their accounts—seemed to fit in with Larry Lee’s modus operandi: splitting them up before driving off alone with Michelle. That detail, Sasha had determined, brought no additional merit to their respective stories except that it inadvertently lent credibility to the account of Chas being dropped off first, alone, and seemed unlikely to have been made up. Larry Lee was a compulsive liar, just not a particularly skillful one.

  “Well, obviously, I think it’s all a lie because he was dumping her body,” Nassios clarified. “But you have to explain, where is the underwear? Where are the shoes? Assuming we ever got enough to take this case to trial, we’d have to prove venue, where the crime happened. Venue is presumed to be where the body is found. She would have to have been kidnapped or harmed in Knoxville, initially, for us to even have jurisdiction. The only way to connect him to her death is to connect him to the location of her remains. That’s impossible to do at this point.”

  Why had Larry Lee chosen the wooded hillside outside Crossville, fifty miles west of Knoxville, Nassios wondered. When Larry Lee’s niece, Jenny, had contacted Sasha just months earlier, she’d raised this same question. Jenny had only recently learned of Michelle’s murder and that her uncle was a primary suspect. She said she had no difficulty believing Larry Lee capable of Michelle’s death, because she had experienced his sadistic ways first hand, but why was the body placed outside Crossville, off Highway 68? Jenny thought there had to be a connection. “He’s just not that clever,” she’d said. “That’s a long way to go with a body… unless she was still alive.”

  Now Leslie Nassios seemed to draw a similar conclusion: “Larry Lee has some kind of connection to that area. It’s too particular. He knew that area. He could have just dumped her body off the interstate.”

  25. OH, I’LL BE THERE!

  The pending trial of Larry Lee Smith was pushed back from September 2012 to Monday, February 25, 2013, sixteen months and one day since his attack on Ayesha. He’d been incarcerated the entire time.

  For the past few months, Sasha had been in intermittent contact with Ayesha. The two had been communicating since Ayesha had reached out to Anita some months before. She had given Anita permission to pass her contact information along to Sasha. While Ayesha answered texts, she was less consistent in responding to emails, whether from Sasha, Anita or Amanda Sanders, who also had reached out to her as a fellow victim of Larry Lee. None of them were sure what to make of Ayesha’s sporadic responses until Sasha got a surprising email from her on a Thursday evening two days into the new year, just two months before the beginning of the rescheduled trial:

  Hey. How you doing? This is Ayesha. Could you give me a call when you get a chance?

  The cell phone number she provided was new. Sasha gave her a call that very night.

  “Hey. Thanks for calling,” Ayesha responded in her cordial manner. “I wanted to find out what was going on in the case. I haven’t heard from anybody in a while. And I want to tell you about this guy who said he is a lawyer coming to my house.” She went on to describe how she wasn’t home when this attorney stopped by, but that her mother or brother had given him Ayesha’s phone number, and he’d called and left a message. When Ayesha called him back, he asked her what happened the day of the assault, and she told him. Then the attorney informed her of Larry Lee’s side of the story, that he and Ayesha had an ongoing sexual relationship, and that she had come to his apartment that day in search of drugs. Supposedly, the attorney said, there were witnesses.

  Ayesha told the attorney none of that was true. He said he was in his car when she’d called and couldn’t take notes. He’d have to call her back. Ayesha decided to contact Sasha first.

  “Was this guy’s name Mitch Harper?”

  “Yes, it was!” Ayesha confirmed.

  “He’s Larry Lee’s attorney,” Sasha explained. She was surprised by this news. According to certain law enforcement and public officials who’d had occasion to work with Harper, he usually made adequate efforts to defend his clients, but he wasn’t seen as particularly overzealous. So what Ayesha was saying he had done on behalf of his client was surprising. But Sasha also understood why Ayesha had talked to him. Ayesha had lost contact with nearly everyone involved in the case and hadn’t heard anything for months. She wanted information.

  In the time since Ayesha had returned to live with her mother and siblings in Georgia, she’d been working at a fast-food job. It hadn’t been the easiest year: she and Tam had broken up and he was on the run, her relationship with her mother remained strained, and the intrusive memories of her kidnapping and rape—as well as apprehension about the pending trial—kept her stressed out and on edge.

  Not long after she’d returned home, Ayesha’s phone number changed and both she and her mother had lost the names and phone numbers of Nassios’ staff. She’d had minimal contact with them up to that point, anyway, so she didn’t think much of it. Because Nassios’ office had the wrong address on file for Ayesha’s mother, Ayesha never received the subpoena. She’d been completely in the dark about the case until she began talking to Anita and Sasha on the phone. So she was surprised to come home one day and find out that this lawyer had dropped by her house while she was at work.

  Harper had left his business card with his number, and Ayesha’s mother told her to call it. Now she felt foolish for calling Harper back. She was also miffed at her mom for urging her to do so. Sasha reassured the naive, inexperienced teen that it was reasonable for her to be confused, to want information instead of waiting around in the dark.

  “It’s his job to defend Larry Lee,” Sasha explained to Ayesha, “to try to get him off. Mitch Harper is trying to scare you into not testifying. Larry Lee’s been telling everyone that you won’t show.”

  “Oh, I’ll be there!” Ayesha asserted. “I think about what he did to me every day. I shake if I
see someone somewhere who looks like him.”

  Ayesha said she was uncertain about who, exactly, represented her. The state represented her, Sasha explained, and told her about Leslie Nassios. Ayesha remembered meeting with Kim Strike, Nassios’ assistant, when Ayesha and her mother attended a preliminary hearing in Knoxville. That had been back in November 2011.

  “I’ll email their names, numbers and email addresses to you again tonight,” Sasha said. “And I’ll contact them tomorrow and give them your new phone number.”

  “Okay. Thanks. That’ll be good.”

  “Don’t talk to him again.”

  “Oh, trust me, I won’t!”

  That evening Sasha sent an email to Leslie Nassios and Kim Strike, giving them Ayesha’s contact information and informing them about the unexpected visit of defense attorney Mitch Harper. She passed along what he had asked Ayesha and what he had alleged about Larry Lee’s and Ayesha’s “relationship.” She also reported on Ayesha’s verbalized commitment to be present for the trial.

  Mid-afternoon the next day, Sasha got a courteous and professional reply. Nassios thanked her for the information and informed her that she had spoken to Ayesha that day. She signed off with:

  We are in good shape. I appreciate your help.

  Sasha knew Mitch Harper was just doing his job, but she also thought he might need a little education about the client he’d been appointed to defend. Finding an email address for the attorney online, Sasha sent him a message:

  Mr. Harper, Larry Lee Smith has been charged in three rapes (so far, convicted of two) of young girls who needed help, Ayesha Mack being the latest…