But regarding the purported new disclosure itself, Sasha could imagine it being true, at least in part. After dropping off Chas at the corner of Cherry and Jefferson, Larry Lee and Michelle would have been traveling north on Cherry Street, headed toward I-40W, which would have taken them to the Broadway Street exit in the direction of Michelle’s Tacoma Trail home.
But before getting on I-40W, Larry Lee would have been excited, impatient, anxious—as he was in all his impulsive attacks—to take control of this lovely, inebriated young girl who’d found herself caught in his snare. A secluded spot off Cherry Street would have been the ideal place for an assault, a rape, even a murder. And his claim of tossing Michelle’s things on the hillside by the interstate would account for the missing shoes, socks, underwear and purse when her remains were found two years later.
But following these reports of a confession, more than a year passed with no further updates from Larry Lee. Jeff Day did come upon a note in the TBI file in which a former employer stated that Larry Lee had delivered car parts in the direction of Crossville and would, therefore, have knowledge of the area. Sasha had also informed Day of Marci’s theory that Michelle, in her drunken state, had insisted on going to see Marci’s brother at the juvenile detention facility near Crossville. Larry Lee would have been only too happy to oblige, opening up an opportunity to assault, rape, and murder her somewhere along the way. But as with everything else, this was all conjecture. Day needed evidence. He was having meetings with Nassios so she could provide advice about what was needed to move forward with a solid case against Larry Lee, but the outcome remained uncertain.
To this day, the forensic evidence taken from the Michelle Anderson crime scene and York’s investigative file have not been found. And neither Sasha nor Anita ever learned the results of the DNA tests done on the nails provided by Dr. Bass (or if the nails were even sent for testing). Chas seems to have dropped back off the radar, but Day’s investigation remains focused on Larry Lee. Several people familiar with the case, including Sasha and Anita, believe Chas lied about what happened upstairs in Larry Lee’s apartment that night, but have presumed him to be the less likely suspect based on Larry Lee’s criminal history and pattern of kidnapping and rape. As Nassios stated, the possibility that Larry Lee operated in conjunction with Chas seems unlikely, but the unresolved nature of the case makes Chas’s involvement part of the mystery that remains.
In May 2013, Larry Lee Smith filed an appeal for a new trial in the kidnapping and rape of Ayesha Mack, arguing that his attorney, Mitch Harper, had failed to properly represent him and that he had been denied a fair trial due to the questioning about his prior felonies. In April 2014, after several delayed motions, Judge McGee denied a new trial, sending the State of Tennessee vs. Larry Lee Smith further along on its journey through the appeals channels of the legal system. These channels offered the serial offender a faint chance of hope—a connection, a distraction. The next stop would be the Tennessee Criminal Court of Appeals.
Sasha contacted Nassios and asked if Larry Lee could, in fact, get a retrial someday. Anything’s possible, Nassios told her, but then she informed Sasha that an appeals court would have Larry Lee’s entire criminal record on file. They’d know what kind of man he was, what kind of heinous crimes he’d committed. It was unlikely that he would ever walk free again.
Whatever the elements and experiences that had intersected, interacted and converged in the personality-building process of Larry Lee Smith, they had tragically amalgamated to produce an impulsive predator who looked for the right opportunity to overpower, dominate, and rape vulnerable young women. The community could not control him, and he could not control himself.
Someone posted a collection of family photos on Ruby’s obituary website when she passed away in the summer of 2010. One was of a shoreside family scene, taken on a beach blanket in the mid-1960s, with a late-thirtyish Ruby, a teen-age Nancy, a pre-teen Brad and preschooler Larry Lee. Absent from the photo was Bonnie. Was she the one taking the picture? Or had she already taken her life?
Little Larry Lee was making a g-r-r-r face in the direction of the photographer. He had his small hands clenched like claws and his body positioned to strike—a little pretend monster. Did the small boy in that picture still have a chance? Had the collision of forces derailing his life to one of obsessed predator already occurred, or had they just begun in this family set to implode?
Clearly, somewhere between the nature and the nurturing of Larry Lee, things had gone seriously awry. Family systems theories would likely label him a mascot, the youngest member of a dysfunctional family who was never allowed to grow up, was never independent of his mother, was never held accountable and didn’t really fit into the world at large. His awakening sexuality merged with his already-developed insecurities, his feelings of inadequacy, his suppressed anger, leading to fantasies of control and domination. He became pathological in his compulsions: the kidnappings, assaults and rapes.
Just how and when events in Larry Lee’s life and mind had collided to create the compulsive sexual predator he’d become would never be clear. Yet it had happened; it could not be denied. Just as he had stated at his most recent sentencing hearing: “I know I have a messed-up life,” just before he looked at Ayesha and denied his assault of her one last time.
Spring had arrived in full, lush bloom at Sasha and Bert’s mountaintop cottage. A breeze blew in through the slatted bamboo shades over the windows. On the north-facing porch, vividly colored flowers spilled out of large red pots. Perched on a branch in the large pecan tree just outside the office window, a bird chirped a short two-tone refrain, over and over: the first note climbing, the second one flat and low. Sasha stopped her typing to listen. Between the warbling of birds, the croaking, guttural chorus of nearby frogs, the crow of a neighboring rooster, and the eerie late-night howls of coyotes, she and Bert were surrounded by a symphony of nature that serenaded Sasha as she scrutinized the nearly-complete manuscript.
Was Larry Lee a victim before he became a perpetrator? Sasha wondered this as she sat at her laptop. What were his thoughts during moments of quietude? Did he ponder the state of his life and wonder about the source of the impulses that had controlled him and victimized others? Did he experience remorse and regret, not just for getting caught, but about his actions?
As his case entered the appeals process, Larry Lee was in his fifth decade. Of his thirty-five adult years—from age eighteen to fifty-three—he’d spent approximately ten years as a free man. The remaining twenty-five years had been lived as a resident of a state penitentiary: first Florida, then Georgia, and now in his home state of Tennessee.
All along this path, he’d lied. While his victims pointed fingers, while law enforcement collected evidence and juries found him guilty, he’d made excuses, denied guilt, blamed others, called his accusers the real liars.
But what did he tell himself about the state of his affairs? Sasha wondered. She would welcome the opportunity to talk one-on-one with Larry Lee; she’d wanted to interview him for years. Since Sasha had been researching and writing about his crimes and victims, she’d tried multiple times to reach out to him, but he’d never responded, as she’d expected.
On the day of the most recent assault, as he paced the interview room at the KPD after he’d shown Investigator Patty Tipton the photos of women bound with the ties on his bed, and she’d gone to his apartment in search of evidence, the camera in the upper corner caught him saying to himself aloud: “They’re going to put me away for life.”
It was a premonition that came true. Yet even in the face of strong state’s evidence, Larry Lee never waved the white flag, never said, Okay, you’ve got me. Even when he’d already made compromising statements, he’d backtracked, changed his story, said he didn’t mean the very thing he’d already said.
But now that he is in his fifties and imprisoned for the remainder of his life—if his appeals are unsuccessful, and statistically speaking, the odds are against him
prevailing—does he still hold onto the faint hope he might someday be free again? Even if each shot at freedom had ended the same? After two decades in the slammer—going in as a man in his twenties and leaving in his late forties—Larry Lee was still not able to control his deviant behavior, not even to remain free. When that monster inside of him perceived an opportunity, the more rational side of Larry Lee disappeared. Those compulsions, they are something else! And now, here he was, in prison again.
Sasha wondered about the psychic defenses employed by the personality of the prisoner. Did Larry Lee’s eyes really become watery when Investigator Day questioned him about Michelle? Or was that all a show? Did he know the pain of his victims? Or had he always reasoned to himself that in some way they asked for it, or that they enjoyed it once he had overpowered them into submission? Did he see his need to dominate as just a quirk, an eccentricity—sort of like his new fictional hero, Christian Grey? Had he rationalized his compulsion to rape as merely a personal preference, a kind of problematic fixation, admittedly a bit difficult to control?
Yet now that he was a registered sex offender, now that his mother was gone, now that he’d failed in his efforts at normality in the free world once again—having assaulted and raped another girl—had he begun to reflect on his “problem” a little differently? Did he finally feel the direness of his disorder more clearly?
What if Larry Lee understood that peace of mind will not be found in pursuing his likely-unattainable physical freedom, but by his psychological acceptance of his predicament in this life—that predicament being his psychological and sexual disorder, his compulsion to forcibly rape young women? Larry Lee could claw at the confinement of his captivity through appeals, hoping for a miracle reprieve. But given his options at this juncture of his life and status of his incarceration, it seemed to Sasha that now there is only one choice that holds the promise of real peace for Larry Lee Smith—the truth.
Sasha imagined the mental freedom to be gained by Larry Lee at this stage of his saga, if instead of battling unlikely appeals by perpetuating more of his lies, he simply stopped and told the truth. Like an addict taking that first step toward getting clean: admitting there’s a problem, a powerlessness, an unmanageability. And then, having owned “the problem,” he would acknowledge the harm he had done to his victims, their families, his family, even to himself.
And if he were sincere, he would make amends, where possible, starting with the family of Michelle. He would come clean about that crime. Her family deserves to know; they need to know, no matter how upsetting the details.
One might suppose, for the very welfare of his own soul, Larry Lee needs to tell that truth, at long last.
Having nothing left to lose can be freeing in a way. The decisions become less difficult, less complicated. If Sasha Reynolds had the ear of Larry Lee Smith, she would tell him that.
EPILOGUE & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I don’t know if it was destiny that I tell this story; I don’t know if I was supposed to write this book, but it has often seemed so. Doors opened, people talked, reports and records came my way. A passion began to burn somewhere within.
At times the journey seemed to propel itself, and I merely rode along like a passenger delivered to the next information stop on a human conveyer belt. As I connected events and people across states and decades, I began to get a clearer sense of what likely happened to Michelle, a fifteen-year-old girl from my old neighborhood who’d failed to return home one cold Friday night twenty years before. Pressing long-forgotten pieces of the puzzle into place, a picture began to take shape in my mind.
I learned that on that Friday night she’d run into a man named Larry Lee. And it turned out she wasn’t the only one.
* * *
From the beginning of this seven-year-plus undertaking, I experienced immense gratitude for the kindness, interest, cooperation, collaboration, support and feedback this book project received from so many:
Dr. William Bass - Stumbling upon the talk to be given by Bill Bass and his coauthor Jon Jefferson (pen name, Jefferson Bass) in Guntersville, Alabama, on that fall afternoon in 2007, marked the beginning of this compelling expedition. Bass’s forensic report and the related newspaper articles, which he generously mailed to me, laid the foundation for my ongoing quest.
Randy York - York’s interest and cooperation in the exploration of this cold case gave life to my research. The commitment of this retired KPD homicide investigator, who initially came on board the case two years after Michelle’s disappearance, is exemplary. No one worked harder to solve this crime than he did.
Grey Steed and Joe DeVuono - It was through a chance meeting over twenty years ago that the local FBI became involved in investigating Michelle’s disappearance at all. Working purposefully behind the scenes, Special Agents Steed and DeVuono assisted York and the KPD in an effort to solve the crime. When I reached out to the agents not long after their retirement from the FBI, they generously offered much valuable perspective and insight on the history of the case and about their investigation that had gone on before.
KPD Lieutenant Jeff Stiles and Investigator Jeff Day - A corner was turned in the efforts to revive the investigation into the cold case of Michelle Anderson’s disappearance and death when Lt. Stiles learned of its existence. Any progress that unfolded through the KPD afterward followed Stiles’ assignment of cold-case Investigator Jeff Day. It was Day’s work, through his Channel 6 News feature, that brought the story back into the public eye. I applaud the efforts of both of these officers.
And I am also grateful to Detective Jeff McCarter in Sevier County for meeting with me and openly and honestly describing the challenges and parameters of managing a caseload of registered sex offenders.
Assistant District Attorney Leslie Nassios - It was gratifying to experience the entrance into the story of this prosecuting attorney in Larry Lee’s latest attack on a young female. I was far outside any official loop of information-sharing on this case, so I just played my cards as opportunity allowed. And suddenly opportunity allowed for me to have an audience with this skillful litigator. Nassios has an astute mind, and I got to spend over an hour gleaning bits of legal wisdom from it. I can’t thank her enough for giving me that time and for the stellar job she subsequently did in the courtroom.
And I remain indebted to Nassios’ assistant, Kim Strike, who made sure her busy boss laid eyes on my timeline containing the history of Larry Lee.
Jim Balloch and Jamie Satterfield, Knoxville News Sentinel - We’d come so far. The cold case had been reopened, the survivors had banded together, the victim of Larry Lee’s latest assault was following through, and the trial was about to begin. But few in the city knew of that pending trial or the story of Larry Lee; his latest attack hadn’t made the news, even if his bail was set high enough that he’d remained in jail for the fourteen months leading up to the trial.
Chance led me to reach out to Jim Balloch, and through him, Jamie Satterfield: both were reporters at the newspaper. Media coverage fell into place smoothly with a front-page story leading into the trial and coverage of it each day. We couldn’t have wished for more.
The Survivors - Of course, the central survivor in this story is Anita, a mother without a clear answer about her daughter’s death. She is a private woman who agreed to talk to me, because, more than anything, she wants and needs to know. Still, it took time for her to trust. I wanted to tell her private story in a public way.
When I went looking for the story of what happened to Michelle that night, I ultimately found the stories of the others: Katherine, Amanda, Ayesha, Sara, Maryanne and Jenny. The first three, along with Anita and myself, became the Band of Sisters. Each survivor shared a piece of themselves in the telling of this story, most importantly with each other and especially with Anita and Ayesha. It was an honor for me to be allowed into their respective lives.
Joey and Jenny - I know that communicating with me was not a straightforward decision for either of them, eac
h for different reasons. Yet they did, freely and voluntarily, let me into their familial world just long enough to get a glimpse of the inside through their eyes. And that matters, a lot, because every story is personal and complicated and experienced individually by those in disparate roles. The stories of Joey and Jenny enriched and enlightened the narrative of this saga. I thank them.
In addition to the officials who played major roles in the investigation and prosecution of Larry Lee, there were myriad individuals who also assisted me in my effort to accurately capture this tale, including court and records clerks whose phones I rang off and on, sometimes over a couple of years. Also among the people I want to thank is Ms. Ellen Barnes, retired court reporter from DeKalb County, Georgia, who allowed me to purchase the entire transcript from Larry Lee’s Georgia trial. She and her grandson were a delight to meet.
Numerous folks read test chapters and sections of this book manuscript, which expanded, contracted and evolved over a period of years. And they provided valuable feedback to me. Among those willing souls, to whom I am immensely grateful, are Alex, Angela, Celesté, Dolly, Glenda, Herb, Judy, Karen, Kristen, Marianne, Max, Nancy, Nkechi and Rebecca.
A sometime partner in my pursuit of the story was not a person but a place. Well, actually a person at a place, the general manager at the Hampton Inn in historic downtown Knoxville, Anita Lane. The hotel sits at the corner of Main and Henley, facing the same direction as the City-County Building on their shared street. The façade of this pleasant downtown hotel is designed to fit in with the historic surroundings, and it does so nicely.
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