Similar Transactions: A True Story Read online

  From the hospital Katherine and her mother were directed to the police station for interviews and statements. An image composition book was placed before Katherine—one of those books with flipping pages of eyes, noses, mouths, and other features. Katherine was exhausted and choosing the right features seemed hard, but when she was done, the image was a dead-ringer for her assailant. She was amazed. “It looks just like him,” she said.

  Katherine had a copy of that sketch in her possession for a while. She took it out one day, months later, and stared into the eyes of her assailant. Filled with a sudden rage, she pressed a lit cigarette into each one, burning holes all the way through. Then she torched the entire image. “I really hate him for doing that to me,” she admitted to a friend. “It was horrible.”

  From the Pasco County Sheriff’s office, a gruff police officer—“Unnecessarily gruff,” Jane recalled—drove Katherine and Jane around Clearwater in search of the fourplex apartment building where Katherine said she’d been taken. But Katherine was so exhausted by her ordeal that she was falling asleep in the car. Finally, Jane insisted that they be driven home.

  The next day, the mother and daughter were told to report to the Clearwater Police Station, in adjacent Pinellas County, where the crime had actually taken place. There Jane and Katherine met with two detectives, and Katherine was instructed to draw from memory a picture of the apartment building. She complied, drawing a rectangular two-story dwelling, the white gate and fence in front, and the stairs leading up to them. Now the challenge would be for the police to find Katherine’s assailant, somewhere out there in the community, with little precise information leading directly to him. But Katherine landed a special ally, a female officer who went out of her way in search of the structure, even looking in her off-duty hours. She’d been a sexual-assault survivor herself and felt great compassion for young Katherine. The female detective searched Clearwater neighborhoods, looking for a fourplex like the one drawn by Katherine, near a neighborhood with street signs named after planets.

  The detective was determined to locate the building; then she found a structure that she thought might be the one. Katherine and her mother were driven to see it. Pulling up in front of the building, Katherine knew it matched her drawing, but in daylight the fourplex looked different. She wasn’t completely sure it was the place until they walked inside. There it was: the smell. Unmistakable. Then she walked up to apartment four.

  Jane waited in the police car while the detective walked Katherine to the entrance. She looked up at the building her daughter was being led into and observed the similarity to Katherine’s drawing. When Katherine came walking back out of the house in tears, her mother knew it was the right place.

  Three weeks after the kidnapping, assault and rape of fourteen-year-old Katherine McWilliams, Larry Lee Smith was arrested at his job at the Clearwater Beach Holiday Inn. He’d driven Katherine past the hotel on the night of her abduction and assault, but she hadn’t known that he worked there.

  Despite Katherine’s ability to act cool and at times too old for her age, the sexual assault had shaken her badly. After Larry Lee’s arrest, she wrote a poem blaming him for the walls she felt herself erecting in her instinctive need to protect herself from a now-scarier world. He’d stolen her ability to feel safe, to trust. For a while, Katherine lashed out at her mother; she felt the need to blame something or someone, so she blamed Jane for moving to Florida. If she’d been allowed to stay in New York, the hurt and rebellious teen accused her mother, none of this would have happened.

  On July 16, 1981, twenty-year-old Larry Lee Smith was arraigned, charged with the kidnapping and rape of Katherine McWilliams. He was represented by attorney Douglas Prior, whose practice was based in Clearwater. The defendant pleaded not guilty.

  The Notice of Trial went out December 21, 1981. On January 5, 1982, Larry Lee changed his plea to “guilty” to the lesser charge of involuntary sexual battery—a deal had been struck—and he was sentenced by Judge Jerry R. Parker to five years in prison. He received credit for the one hundred fifty-seven days he had been incarcerated in the Clearwater jail since his July arrest.

  As the Circuit Court for the Sixth Judicial District of Florida dispensed its justice for Larry Lee Smith, it advised the following: “In imposing the above sentence, the court further recommends that the defendant receive any psychiatric or psychological evaluation and treatment as available.

  Larry Lee Smith, in Knoxville, 1980, shortly before leaving for Florida, where he would kidnap and rape Katherine McWilliams.

  2. PSYCHOGENIC AMNESIA

  Larry Lee Smith celebrated his twenty-first birthday in the same month and year, January 1982, in which he began serving his five-year prison sentence for the kidnapping and rape of fourteen-year-old Katherine McWilliams. During the three-and-a-half-hour ride from the Clearwater jail to the Florida Department of Corrections Reception and Medical Center (RMC) in Lake Butler, the shackled prisoner no doubt worried about what lay ahead.

  Larry Lee wasn’t a man’s man; he wasn’t tough, not really. He’d readily strike or choke a young woman to get what he wanted, to act out the deviant fantasies fermenting within his mind, but he would go out of his way to avoid a fight with a guy. His build was squat and thick, but that was mostly fat. At heart, Larry Lee was a pudgy mama’s boy.

  Born to Ruby Jane and Edsel Ray Smith on January 27, 1961, Larry Lee was their youngest by six years, although Edsel was gone from Larry Lee’s life by age four and wouldn’t meet him again until he moved to Florida at age twenty, just weeks before Larry Lee’s assault of Katherine McWilliams. By all accounts, Ruby loved her baby boy—perhaps to a fault. Everyone knew how much she spoiled him and made excuses for any questionable thing he did.

  Secured in the back seat of a police cruiser, he gazed out the window at the lush, flat Florida terrain, probably mesmerized by the greenish-gray, lace-like Spanish moss draped from the many-limbed southern live oaks flashing by. Despite its name, Spanish moss isn’t a moss at all, but a flowering epiphyte, an air plant, which absorbs nutrients from the air and moisture from the rain and hangs and sways in long, graceful, intertwined masses. These would make good pictures, Larry Lee might have noted, thinking back to the photography classes he’d enjoyed in high school before dropping out five years earlier.

  The population of Lake Butler in rural Union County was under two thousand, barely outnumbering the captives held in the prison there. As the police vehicle carrying the new inmate turned up the entry road to the correctional facility, the flat-roofed structures of the compound came into view. Passing under the archway announcing Reception and Medical Center in large cutout metal letters, the cruiser rolled up to the cluster of white and tan concrete buildings, protected on all sides by razor wire-topped fencing.

  The cruiser door opened to the sunny, winter Wednesday as Larry Lee swung his short legs out, hoisted himself up from the seat, shuffled in his chains, and was escorted inside. At RMC new inmates were processed into the correctional system and provided with medical care, including psychiatric evaluation and hospitalization as needed. The full intake and assessment phase—administering questionnaires and conducting evaluations—would take several months. Reports would be written and recommendations would be made. Metal bolts clanged loudly in the heavy locks as prison doors opened to admit Florida DOC inmate #081525, and then locked again behind him.

  The first staff member to meet one-on-one with Larry Lee was the chaplain, whose job was to complete a spiritual assessment. Christian icons adorned the walls and shelves of his modest office, which was painted a pale blue. It would have been a welcome break from the bleak beige of Larry Lee’s cell. “Come in. Take a seat,” offered the chaplain, waving his hand toward a couple of wooden chairs as he reviewed Larry Lee’s admission papers. He noted to himself that Larry Lee was serving time on a “morals” charge. “Tell me about yourself,” the chaplain said. “Are you single or married?”

  “I’m divorced,” Larry Lee
answered. Actually, he and his estranged teenage wife, Sara, were only separated. All of Sara’s efforts to divorce Larry Lee had been successfully blocked (and would be blocked for years to come) by an attorney hired by Ruby, who was fighting for custody of Larry Lee and Sara’s son, Joey. In response to the chaplain’s inquiries, Larry Lee told him that he believed in God and daily prayer. Despite this declaration, he remained “noncommittal” about attending services in the prison chapel and declined to receive visits from the chaplain in his prison cell.

  Prison psychologist Dr. Margaret Beatty administered a battery of tests to determine the prisoner’s level of cognitive functioning and degree of emotional stability. In her “Psychological Screening Report,” Dr. Beatty noted that Larry Lee had an IQ of 91, placing him smack in the middle of average, with a reading level of 6.6, slightly above mid-sixth grade. Larry Lee reported that he’d obtained a GED and had skills as a cook and a photographer. Dr. Beatty identified depression and an emotionally unstable personality as “special difficulties” that Larry Lee was dealing with at the time.

  Yet little was real or honest in most things Larry Lee said and did. When the psychologist administered a test to determine Larry Lee’s personality makeup and psychopathology, Larry Lee deliberately chose answers that reflected mental or emotional illness. The test had been designed to catch such skewed responses. When the psychologist determined that Larry Lee had “faked bad” on his answers, she ruled the results “invalid.”

  Larry Lee had good reason to fake his evaluation. If he appeared more psychologically disturbed, he would have a greater chance to remain in a treatment setting and not in the general prison population. And if all went well, he could secure an early release.

  After taking the evaluation, Larry Lee informed Dr. Beatty that he also wanted to consult with a psychiatrist. Soon after, Dr. Jose Ramirez, Psychiatric Services Coordinator at RMC, summoned Larry Lee to his office. A well-worn, green leather sofa with matching chairs formed a seating area in which Dr. Ramirez sat opposite Larry Lee.

  “So, you asked to see me,” Dr. Ramirez began.

  “I think I have a sex problem,” Larry Lee confessed, and told the psychiatrist that he wanted to understand why he was attracted to young girls. This was something that he’d never admitted to anyone. Then he confessed that he’d tried to rape his niece six years earlier when she was eight years old. (Six years earlier, the niece in question was actually six years old.) And he’d also tried to rape a fifteen-year-old friend of his wife. His wife, pregnant at the time, had rescued her friend from the assault.

  Whether he truly wanted help or was just scheming to stay in a psychiatric setting, Larry Lee got what he wanted. Dr. Ramirez assessed the inmate to be clear of mind and emotionally stable at the time of the clinical interview, but with a fragile personality overall. He determined that Larry Lee most likely suffered from a personality disorder—a long-term, extremely dysfunctional pattern of relating to people and situations with ongoing, consequential mood changes. Dr. Ramirez did not prescribe any medications, but his “Psychiatric Consultation Report” concluded with the recommendation that Larry Lee be accepted by the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) and placed in their program for the treatment of mentally disordered sex offenders. Larry Lee expressed agreement with this plan.

  He spent three months at the RMC awaiting his transfer. During that time his ability to keep it together, to remain clear of mind and emotionally stable, became more challenged. Two months into his stay, RMC staff recorded an incident where he became visibly stricken with grief and anxiety after talking to his mother on the phone.

  When Larry Lee was finally transferred, he was not immediately sent to the state hospital for admission into its sex-offender treatment program. He was first transferred to Sumter Correctional Institution in Bushnell, a small town in the Florida peninsula. It was there, in early June, less than five months into his sentence, that Larry Lee appeared to have a mental breakdown. His dorm officer found him crying in the corner of the room and talking to himself, unresponsive to the efforts of others to talk to him.

  The babbling inmate was taken to the prison medical clinic where the staff psychiatrist assessed Larry Lee as appearing delusional, oriented to neither time nor place. He was talking about having been with his sister and mother just the night before. It was determined that he was suffering from separation anxiety related to his family, especially his mother and older sister, upon whom he was deemed “extremely dependent.”

  Although Larry Lee had seen two medical staff earlier that day, he denied any memory of these contacts. The doctor decided that his “amnesia” was most likely hysterical in nature, brought on by psychological stress, not physiological causes. Larry Lee was diagnosed as suffering from Psychogenic Amnesia and Passive-Dependent Personality Disorder. To rule out a more serious psychotic disorder, a call was made to Dr. Ramirez back at the RMC in Lake Butler. He authorized Larry Lee’s transfer back there for further diagnostic evaluation and treatment.

  In late July, after little more than a month back in the hospital at the RMC, Larry Lee’s doctors determined that he was stable enough to enter the Dr. Geraldine Boozer Rehabilitation Program for Sex Offenders, a “self-help rehabilitation program” located at the twenty-five-year-old South Florida State Hospital, a mental institution where the halls and rooms were uniformly painted a pallid pea green.

  Although a criteria of the program was that the patients could not be psychotic, the sex offender program was part of the forensic unit for the “criminally insane.” After Larry Lee’s transfer, the hospital’s clinical psychologist administered another personality test. The test again revealed that Larry Lee had deliberately chosen answers he believed would portray a mental illness. The psychologist noted that despite Larry Lee’s willingness to admit to at least some of his sexual offenses, he showed “little remorse” when discussing them. The clinical team described him as exceedingly immature, someone who continually seeks negative attention through defiant behavior. Staff complained that he was overly critical of fellow group members in sessions, yet he resisted all feedback given to him. Group members complained that he lied constantly and couldn’t be trusted. During sessions, Larry Lee reported a history of heavy drinking and eventually claimed that he had a drinking problem and had been intoxicated when he’d kidnapped and raped Katherine McWilliams, something that neither party had reported at the time of the crime.

  After a year at the state hospital, Larry Lee had received forty rules violations and failed to complete assigned therapeutic activities related to his treatment. He then requested to be discharged from the program and returned to the general inmate population. At that time, the psychologist administered a second personality test, and it was again flagged for deliberately false answers. Now that Larry Lee wanted to leave, he had picked answers he believed would reflect his improved mental health.

  From the two tests given to Larry Lee at the South Florida State Hospital, the psychologist observed that a number of insightful conclusions could be drawn about his personality. He would likely have sudden mood swings and be prone to strong feelings of inferiority and hopelessness. He was an individual who was resentful, argumentative and overly sensitive to the demands of others, and he had difficulty trusting people, always keeping them at a distance, fearing emotional involvement. His primary defenses were likely to be projection (blaming others), rationalization (making excuses) and acting out.

  The psychologist’s report went on to say that while Larry Lee was capable of having positive social interactions with others, these interactions would likely be shallow, superficial, selfish and insincere; he would seek only to meet his own desires. The report claimed that such individuals are unpredictable and unable to express their emotions in a modulated, adaptive way. In fact, at the time of Larry Lee’s request to be released from the treatment program, the psychologist observed that he appeared to have increased in his potential to act out aggressively.
r />   Given Larry Lee’s lack of progress and desire to leave, the clinical team determined that there was nothing more they could offer him. In their final assessment and discharge summary, they noted that Larry Lee had requested to be discharged, demonstrated no desire to change, was unrehabilitated and remained potentially dangerous. His discharge diagnosis read: Mentally Disordered Sex Offender, Unimproved.

  On April 17, 1984, eight months after asking to be discharged from the sex offender treatment program and two years and four months into his five-year sentence, Larry Lee Smith was paroled from the Florida prison. If early release had been his plan all along, then it worked. He was a free man again.

  He remained in Florida until sometime in 1986, when he packed up his new girlfriend and her young son and returned to his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee.

  Part Two

  Gone Missing

  3. 24 HOURS

  It was a cold, gray Saturday morning, January 10, 1987, with temperatures below freezing and a thin layer of snow on the ground. The first inkling Anita Anderson had that something was amiss was when she woke with a start in the predawn hours and her daughter’s bed was still empty. Sleep-stumbling through the rooms of the one-story house, Anita called out her name softly, “Michelle?” When she opened the bedroom door of her son, Doug, three years Michelle’s senior, Anita heard him snoring lightly beneath a pile of covers. No one else was in there, or anywhere in the house; Michelle had not come home. That was a first. Although parenting her fifteen-year-old daughter had become increasingly challenging of late, this had not been part of the pattern.