Larry Lee calmly answered several softball questions and then ran through the story of how he’d come into contact with Ayesha. As he talked, his demeanor became more confident and laid back; his voice took on a friendly, folksy feel. He said he’d had an accident in his vehicle, back when he was staying in the Seymour community in Blount County, about a year before. He’d rolled it off a hill, injured his ankle. That had required pins and ongoing medical attention, which his sister, Nancy, provided when he moved back to Knoxville. Then he’d gotten a staph infection in the wound that left a hole “big as a dollar bill.”
“It was ghastly,” he added, directly to the jury.
Larry Lee explained that he’d met Ayesha through her boyfriend, Tamryn Conden, in October of 2011. They just hung out. He talked about fixin’ soup and grillin’ burgers and chattin’ it up with Tam’s girlfriend. “And I apologize if I confuse you,” he offered the court. He was going to have trouble calling Ayesha by her proper name, he explained, because he just knew her as Jade.
“Let me direct your attention to the date that we’re talking about,” Harper said. “October 24. What did you do on that date?”
Larry Lee sighed. He began his account with a story about making soup for himself and some others.
“Is that a normal kind of thing?” Harper asked. “Are you a cook at Volunteer Studios?”
“Well…” Larry Lee said, “in those photos”—the ones taken by KPD forensics and projected onto the courtroom wall—“you’ll see that I had a big, ’ol black pot. I like to cook a lot.” Then he turned to the jury and added, “I’m a big person. I like to eat.”
Larry Lee told Harper he’d made soup that Sunday night on his hot plate and that Khristy, Tam, Ayesha and David had been in his apartment. That’s when they watched the movie xXx. Then Larry Lee turned back to the jury. “That’s an action movie,” he said. “The reason I liked it was it had a ’67 GTO, which was my first car.”
In the gallery, Investigator Tipton gave Ayesha’s back a reassuring rub and whispered, “He thinks he’s charming. He really does.”
Anyway, Larry Lee continued, later that night he’d tried to get everybody to leave because he had to go to court the next morning to testify against the guy he’d accused of stealing his prescription OxyContin about a month earlier. The others left, but David remained behind, and he and Larry Lee ended up staying awake all night. In the morning, David wanted to stay in Larry Lee’s apartment to sleep while the defendant went to court, but Larry Lee wouldn’t allow it. “I made him leave,” he said. “Well, David went downstairs and robbed the washing machines of quarters. He took those quarters to Tam to buy something to—”
His attorney cut him off. “Let me direct your attention to what you said you were doing that morning. You’d been subpoenaed to court for some reason?”
“Yes, I was going to testify against a man by the name of Barry Eugene Evans.”
“That was the man you were talking to Patty Tipton about?”
“Yeah, he’d stolen some of my medication about a month earlier.” Larry Lee turned toward the judge and asked in a soft voice, “Can I have some water? I haven’t talked this much in a long time.”
Larry Lee received his water and Harper continued, “And when you got finished in court, what time of day was that?”
“It was around noon.”
When he got back to his apartment, he turned on the air conditioner and took off his shirt before Khristy came up and gave him the news about David and Tam getting arrested. She also showed him Tam’s iPod, which she was on her way out to sell. Then “Jade” knocked on the door and Khristy darted into Larry’s bathroom. When she re-emerged from the bathroom, she told Jade about David stealing the quarters and both he and Tam getting arrested, Tam for possession. Jade started crying and asked to use his phone.
“Now tell the jury about what happened when you and Jade were in the apartment together,” Harper instructed.
Larry Lee claimed that the first thing he did was try to comfort the sobbing Jade, touching her on the back and shoulder, making her some warm tea. He had apologized to her, he said, for not allowing David to stay in his apartment while he went to court. Maybe if he had stayed there, David wouldn’t have broken into the laundry machines, gone to see Tam in Khristy’s apartment, where the surveillance cameras followed him, and gotten them both arrested.
“So, in a roundabout way, you felt responsible for Tam,” Harper reflected.
“Yeah! We talked about that. I didn’t understand at the time, but that kind of made Jade mad. That started it!” The “it” being one of Larry Lee’s versions for why Jade was accusing him of rape; she wanted revenge because he’d indirectly gotten Tam into trouble.
Larry Lee claimed that he and Jade discussed what they were going to do for money, and she said she was going to go down to the gas station to make some money. “Let me explain,” he said, again turning toward the jury. “That doesn’t mean she was going to go sell sex or anything like that. What I’ve seen her do, she’ll go down to the Pilot and she’ll panhandle, you know? Guys’ll give a pretty girl money in a heartbeat. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. When I was working, I’d hustle, find spare car parts, get scrap metal and I’d get a kickback out of that. That was my hustle.”
“So, you were having a conversation about money,” Harper continued, “and then what?”
“Then we started talking about Tam, and Jade started crying all over again. I just walked over and held her and said, ‘You don’t have to worry.’ And then we started talking about our clothes.” Larry Lee alleged that Ayesha complained about always wearing the same clothes, so he trashed Tam for not buying her any with those Target gift cards that he’d seen a couple people give Tam. “And so I talked bad about him.”
“To Jade?” Harper clarified.
“To Jade—and that is where I made my mistake, okay?” Larry Lee paused, as if he was having some kind of epiphany. “I’ve been trying to figure out for months what I did wrong to really make Jade mad, and I didn’t realize it until yesterday.”
“What was that?”
“I was talking bad about Tam. Jade loves that boy. And here I was talking bad about him. I’m the biggest monster in the world. I messed up. I’m sorry.”
“And what happened after that?” Harper asked. “How did that conversation end?”
According to Larry Lee, Jade pulled a prescription pain pill out of her pocket, put it on the table, crushed it and split it with the defendant. She snorted her half as he licked his off his index finger. Then Jade proposed a plan, a drug-selling scheme. “She wanted me to come up with five hundred dollars to buy crack. Well now, I’m on medication, OxyContin.”
“Prescribed to you by a doctor,” Harper added. “What did you tell her about your ability to come up with five hundred dollars?”
“I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is getting a little ridiculous here.’”
Sasha felt a chill. When she had read the 1990 transcript from the Georgia trial for the kidnapping and assault of Amanda Sanders, she’d seen Larry Lee’s words in print. Now, listening to him in person, those words from twenty-three years earlier came to life. His testimony offering an alternate version of events from that of Amanda Sanders, in which he was the innocent victim, was peppered with that same expression: whoa, whoa, whoa.
“‘Jade, you’re my buddy, my friend,’” Larry Lee said he responded to Ayesha, “‘but I can’t come up with no five hundred dollars.’ She said, ‘Yeah, you can.’ I said, ‘I’m already late on my rent. Okay, tell me how.’
“She wanted me to tell this other guy we know by the name of ‘T’ that if he gave me five hundred dollars, I would have it back to him by Thursday or when I went to the doctor, and if I didn’t have the five hundred dollars, I’d give him my ’scrip. And I said, ‘No, no, no. You’re not going to get me like that.’ We got into an argument about it. Eventually she started getting mad at me. I said, ‘You’re not going to get
me like that. I can’t afford no felony. That first felony will put me in jail.’”
Seated at the prosecutor’s table, Leslie Nassios wrote the words “first felony” on the yellow legal pad in front of her, drew double stars beside them, then added the word bingo before she twisted around in her chair and briefly locked eyes with her assistant, Kim Strike, seated just behind her on the front row of the gallery.
“What did Jade do?” Harper continued.
“She started crying again. She cried three or four times. She’s good at that. She really is. She said, ‘I’m going to leave.’” In response, Larry Lee said to her, “‘You can leave, but you can stay here if you want to.’ And that’s when she left.”
Larry Lee then testified that he walked from his apartment to a neighbor’s, then back to his, then to the front office, where Ayesha had already gone. Regarding the reports that he appeared sweaty and disheveled, he turned toward the jury, laughed and said, “I was getting tired. I’m like a big bear. When I eat, I like to go to sleep… plus I’d been up all night.”
Then he explained that, once downstairs, he’d sat outside with Scott Brown, waiting for the police to show. “I’m not running,” he emphasized to the jury. “I didn’t do anything.” Eventually the police arrived, checked Larry Lee over and transported him to the KPD where he met Investigator Patty Tipton.
“Pretty quickly you indicated you didn’t want to talk to her about the facts,” Harper said.
“Yeah. I really didn’t want to talk to her. I don’t know why. She just made me feel… wrong. But I really wanted to know what was being said.” Then, in a hushed tone, he noted to both his attorney and the jurors, “Do you know that I didn’t even know, totally, what Jade had said until yesterday?”
“You didn’t seem to have a problem with them swabbing your hands,” Harper observed.
“No, because I didn’t do anything! DNA on my hands? Yeah, I touched her.”
“What did you mean by that statement?”
“Jade was my friend. I… I tried to comfort her. I could see what was happening,” Larry Lee continued, referring to his becoming a suspect in the eyes of Investigator Tipton. “I wanted to go ahead and get some defensive material in for me. And, I was craving a cigarette. I chain smoke, and it had been a couple of hours.”
He turned toward the jury again. “I don’t know if you smoke, but it’s an addiction.”
With that final disclosure, Mitch Harper concluded his direct examination of Larry Lee, and the court took a recess.
29. THEATRE OF THE ABSURD
Part II: No, no, no…
In preparation for her cross-examination of Larry Lee Smith, Leslie Nassios informed Judge McGee—while the jury was out of the courtroom—that she wanted to impeach part of the defendant’s testimony. On the witness stand, under oath, Larry Lee had testified that he’d refused to engage in a prescription drug-selling scheme as allegedly suggested by Ayesha. “You’re not going to get me like that,” he’d testified telling her. “I can’t afford no felony. That first felony will put me in jail.”
In fact, Nassios informed Judge McGee, Larry Lee had two prior felony convictions: one in Florida and the other in Georgia. Each conviction involved the kidnapping and sexual assault of a teenage girl. And now that Larry Lee had mentioned his criminal record—false as he was—he had opened a Pandora’s Box. Nassios argued that she was now free to question him about his prior convictions.
Defense Attorney Mitch Harper countered that he didn’t believe his client had said “first” felony, whereupon the court reporter reviewed that portion of the trial transcript. Yes, she noted, the defendant had said “first.”
In contrast to the relative ease with which the former DeKalb County prosecutor Elizabeth MacNamara had been able to introduce the “similar transaction” evidence from Larry Lee’s 1982 Florida conviction into the 1990 Georgia trial, the Knoxville judge advised caution. This is “dangerous territory,” McGee counseled Nassios. He granted her permission to question the defendant with regard to the existence of prior felony convictions—but not to the nature of those felonies.
While Nassios may have felt some frustration regarding Judge McGee’s decision, she wasn’t surprised. “It’s a good ruling,” Sasha overheard her say to Strike when she returned to the prosecution table. She also told the Court that she had one other element of impeaching evidence that she intended to introduce during her cross-examination of the defendant: additional content of the recorded jail phone calls between Larry Lee and Nancy.
The jury filed back into the courtroom and Nassios began her cross examination of Larry Lee.
“Mr. Smith, is it your opinion that a jury’s duty is to determine whether you’re telling the truth or Ayesha Mack is telling the truth?”
“I believe that’s what a jury does.”
“And so the issue of Ms. Mack’s credibility is a crucial one to consider.”
“No, no. See…” Larry Lee responded, suddenly seeming flustered. “I’m not calling her a liar. I’m calling her vengeful. But I’m not—”
“Well, let’s talk about—”
“She’s credible. You can be credible on anything and wrong on something else.”
“Was she wrong about you sticking your fingers up her vagina?”
Larry Lee looked stunned. “I did not do that!”
“So she wasn’t credible when she told the jury about that?”
“She wasn’t truthful.”
“So you agree with me that whether or not she was telling the truth yesterday is an issue of grave importance in this trial.”
“Yeah.”
After confirming with Larry Lee that on a number of points he and Ayesha concurred in their accounts, Nassios walked him through them one by one—not completely dissimilar from the methodology of Assistant DA MacNamara in Georgia twenty-four years before.
He agreed that Khristy was a mutual friend, that she was in his apartment on the Monday in question when Ayesha knocked on his door, that subsequently Khristy left and Larry Lee was alone in his apartment with Ayesha for a period of time.
“I would say about an hour,” he said.
“And you will agree that in the course of that hour you were wearing a pair of khaki pants.”
“Of course.”
“And you will agree that you had on at least one suspender. Your suspenders were broken.”
“No. I had on a belt,” Larry Lee answered.
“So, she’s lying when she says you had on suspenders?” Nassios asked.
“I’m not saying she was lying. On that she was mistaken, because I wore a belt to court that day.”
But Nassios wasn’t going to let the suspenders go. It painted a picture of the large, domineering, shirtless Larry Lee looming over his tiny victim, dropping his pants with a quick flick off his shoulder of the single functional strap, exposing his naked self in one fluid motion. So she explored the issue of the broken suspender further. Larry Lee agreed that he did, in fact, own a pair of suspenders with a broken strap. They broke, he said, when his sister, Nancy, attempted to wash and dry them.
Nassios asked Larry Lee if he agreed that when police searched his apartment they found items consistent with Ayesha’s report, including a knife on the table.
“Two,” clarified Larry Lee.
“And… what else?” the prosecutor pondered aloud. “There were neckties, right?”
“Yes.”
“So they did find the neckties that Ms. Mack described?”
“Yes.”
“And there was a loop on one end?”
“The golden tie, whatever you want to call it, was looped on one end and tied on the other end to the other ties. So, I have a question about that,” Larry Lee said. “If she untied her hand like you are trying to insinuate, did she also take the time to untie that tie from the other ties?” He was referring to the two disconnected ties in the chain shown to the jurors during Officer Byers testimony.
“I don’t know,�
�� Nassios replied. “Did you not have time to do that while you were there and she went to report the—”
“I don’t… I don’t… That tie was a dress tie.”
“You mean the one you used to restrain her while you were performing sexual acts on her?”
“No, no, no, no.” Larry Lee shook his head, too flustered to speak.
“Please explain to this jury why you have three or four neckties tied together and kept under the bed.”
“I have no problem with that, because I asked my attorney to let me explain that earlier and he forgot. I did, too.”
“Go for it.”
Larry Lee cleared his throat. “Khristy and I, as you know, had been seeing each other for a while.” He turned toward the jury. “Khristy’s thirty years old. I thought Jade was twenty-one, because that was my rules. But Khristy and I have had sex before, and we play games. I’m sure somebody in here has read Fifty Shades of Grey by now. We played games!”
Two women on the bench behind Sasha simultaneously slid down in their seats as they struggled to stifle their laughter.
“There are pictures on my phone,” Larry Lee continued, “of me and Khristy and—”
“The ones you showed Investigator Tipton?” Nassios cut in.
“Yes… I don’t know what she saw, but I know there were pictures.”
“Well, you showed them to her, right?”
He was evasive in his response, but when Nassios questioned him again about the accuracy of Tipton’s report, he didn’t argue. As she tried to redirect the questioning, he blurted out an additional comment: “I’m just a tease.”
“Your Honor, I would ask that you admonish the witness that he is to respond to questions—not engage in theories.”
“Just answer the questions,” Judge McGee instructed.
Larry Lee agreed that he’d sat outside Volunteer Studios with Scott Brown waiting for the arrival of the KPD officers, but denied telling him, “She wanted it…”
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