All day Wednesday September 5, the Kindle version of the book "The Girl Who Had No Enemies: and the Man Who Hated Women", by Dennis Fleming will be available for free at Amazon.com.

Anti Death Penalty Memoir

Just published my new book The Girl Who Had No Enemies: and the MaN WhO HaTeD WoMeN Available at Amazon.com new for $8.43. It is a rewrite of the previous edition titled, She Had No Enemies, and focuses on areas of interest that the first edition missed. The Girl Who Had No Enemies looks at serial killer LaRette's mental health and describes other murders that he committed. It also covers the heroic efforts of Florida deputy Pat Juhl and her six-year interrogation in which she was able to document the killer's admission to over two dozen additional murders. Anthony J. LaRette Jr., had been on a ten-year-long path of violence, murder, and rape. Eighteen-year-old Mickey Fleming had recently graduated high school and had stayed home from her summer job to nurse a migraine headache and a fractured collarbone. THE GIRL WHO HAD NO ENEMIES follows the parallel trajectories of these polar opposites until they meet and then chronicles the emotional damage and rebirth in the aftermath.

My Book is Published

The paperback version of She Had No Enemies: A Memoir became available on Amazon.com where you can explore it through the "look inside" feature.

subtitle of book

The full title of my memoir is She Had No Enemies: How I Turned My Sister's Death by a Serial Killer Into Something Positive in my Life

New Blog

I had a blog a few years ago and used it to record articles and post paintings. I ran out of time . . . work, family . . . but now I have time to devote to it and I've completed a book I've wanted to write for years. I thought this would be a good place to put a piece of the book for people who are interested in it. I'm posting the beginning of the book, flap copy, table of contents, and the first two chapters (the entire book is 192 pgs.). I published it on Amazon's Kindle and it's titled, She Had No Enemies.

I am more concerned that people read the book and learn about my sister, how serial killers behave, and how something positive can come from a tragedy. I hope you enjoy it and any feedback you wish to make please feel free to contact me. I’d welcome it.

Dennis Fleming

She Had No Enemies: A Memoir

By

Dennis Fleming

Flap Copy

“My youngest sister, Mickey, has been eighteen for more than twenty-five years now. That’s how old she was in the summer of 1980—when he murdered her. Anthony J. LaRette, Jr. was from out of town. We’d find out later, much later, that he was also a serial killer.”

So begins Dennis Fleming’s intensely personal story about the murder of his youngest sister. Through a combination of solid journalism and introspective reflection, Dennis weaves an intricate story filled with sadness, anger, and even humor about his attempts to cope with the greatest tragedy he’d ever known.

Though separated by twelve years, Dennis and Mickey had always felt a common bond. “It was a strange feeling—bonding with Mickey,” Dennis says. “It wasn’t that we didn’t love our brothers and sisters, but we just felt as if someone had dropped us into the wrong family.”

Anthony J. LaRette had traveled unnoticed throughout eleven states. The police placed the number of his victims—all women—at two dozen, but he later claimed to have raped and killed thirty. On July 25, 1980, at 11:10 a.m., LaRette parked his car in a corner grocery store lot in the small town of St. Charles, Missouri, and followed his last victim—Mickey—into her apartment. When the savagery was over, he thought he had left 18-year-old dead on the kitchen floor, but despite a gash across her throat and two deep knife wounds in her heart, she somehow ran, naked and screaming, across the street to a neighbor’s house, where she died on their front porch.

“My soul?” says Dennis. “LaRette tore it out of me, and the only thing that rushed in to fill that hole was hate. In the marine corps, they had trained me to kill, but I’d never unleashed those skills. Now a raw, violent, passionate hatred seized me, giving me the perfect reason for putting that training to use.”

Overwhelmed by a thirst for vengeance, Dennis finally vowed not to let it consume him and interfere with his love for his sister. Instead, he swore that he would honor Mickey’s memory by making something of his own life. Little did he know that keeping that vow would end his marriage, threaten his career, and plunge him into a depression that would end in a suicide attempt.

She Had No Enemies is a life-affirming story about one man’s twenty-five-year search for meaning and fulfillment in the face of a devastating situation.

From the shocking details of Mickey’s murder and his subsequent suicide attempt to the mixed feelings he experienced as he witnessed LaRette’s execution, Dennis delves deeply into the complex process of coming to grips with Mickey’s death—and of eventually finding forgiveness in his heart for her killer.

About the Author

Dennis Fleming began writing screenplays for short films that he produced and directed. He is currently writing a novel from his screenplay for a feature film titled Midland. He lives in Corning, New York, and St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife, Kathy. Dennis can be reached at dennyvision@charter.net .

CONTENTS*

Prologue

Part I

1. Outsiders: That's You, That's Me

2. Disbelief

3. Hearts And Souls

4. Things You Can’t See

5. So What?

6. Mona Lisa Smile

Part II

7. Jesus On Velvet

8. This Is Me

9. Mischievous Elves

10. Over The Edge

Part III

11. Life In Flashes

12. A Zero Not A One

13. Cooking With Fire

14. Letters

*Formatted without pagination to accommodate the Kindle’s ability to allow change in text size.

PROLOGUE

My youngest sister, Mickey, has been eighteen for more than twenty-five years now. That’s how old she was in the summer of 1980—when he murdered her.

Anthony J. LaRette, Jr. was from out of town. We’d find out later, much later, that he was also a serial killer. The police placed the number of his victims—all young women—at two dozen, but he claimed to have raped and killed thirty.

Mickey’s murder changed my life like nothing ever had before or has in the twenty-eight years since. Whatever grieving process allows people to gain closure with loss has somehow passed me by.

I took the capture of her killer, a thirty-year-old married man from Kansas, as something more than just a break from my emptiness and mourning. Everyone else in our family wanted him dead—I wanted to beat him to death.

LaRette’s capture released me from two agonizing weeks of confusion, anger, and frustration, not knowing who had killed my little sister. I thought my relief would come when I was finally able to accept the finality of Mickey’s death—but I was wrong.

Although most of us were broken in some way growing up in the chaos of our family, Mickey emerged intact.

PART I

You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.

–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Chapter 1.

Outsiders: That’s You, That’s Me

From Mom’s first child when she was nineteen until her last at forty she was either pregnant, nursing a newborn, or trying to get pregnant again. Sometimes she was involved in two out of three at the same time. She and Dad managed about one birth for every two pregnancies, an eight-for-fifteen batting average. Had all Mom’s pregnancies been successful, I would’ve had fourteen brothers and sisters. We kids never thought about the size of our family until we grew older and saw that some of our friends didn’t wear their older siblings’ worn and out-of-date hand-me-downs. Their shoulders revealed none of the bruises from punches that gained force as they rolled down the pecking order.

Mom’s parents abandoned her and her younger brother in their childhood, and their maternal grandmother, a huge woman whom we called Big Grandma, raised them. Both she and her husband were German and spoke with thick accents. She referred to our car as a machine.

Whenever we visited Big Grandma, she made us sit on plastic-covered furniture or play on the polished linoleum in the sunroom. She handed out hard candy piece by piece and if you tried to grab an extra nugget, she’d smack your hand with her sausage fingers. Nein! Running wild, the way we did at Little Grandma Fleming's house, was strictly verboten. I think that the life Mom lived—staying at home with her children, pregnant, or with a newborn—was her way of making up for the loving atmosphere that had been missing in her own childhood.

Seeing Mom pregnant while bottle-feeding an infant was a common sight in our home. I asked her why she wanted so many children, and she said she was happiest when she was at home, cooking, doing laundry, toting a baby, watching a toddler, and resolving the issues of the older children. A simple goal that needed a dedicated partner.

Dad was lean and hard, like a callous. He was an alcoholic and could be violent—and by staying with him, arguing with him, and allowing him to beat both her and her children, Mom enabled his addiction.

Ever since Dad lost the 1958 Democratic primaries for state representative, things had been going downhill. Over the years, he lost businesses and jobs, and eventually went bankrupt. He’d go months without work, but he always found money for booze. During one of Dad’s longer stretches, we ate moldy bread and cupcakes—things the day-old bread store either discarded or sold for pig slop.

In his old age, Dad ran ads in local papers and traded junk. He called himself The Professor of Conology and claimed he always got the better part of a deal, yet his deals never seemed to work out right. His Achilles heel was his belief that he was smarter than he actually was.

If Dad wasn’t scheming, he was pushing some invention. One brainstorm that flopped was a hotdog roaster—a homemade fork made from a strip of flattened metal that he had split on one end and had shoved into a piece of wood he had whittled into a handle. A pair of wires—actually six feet of lamp cord—ran from the base of the handle to a plug. I was afraid to touch it, but he was a residential electrician—International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW Local One), so I figured he had to know something about basic electricity. He stuck a couple of fat hot dogs lengthwise on the tines and pushed the plug into a wall socket. Before the circuit breaker blew, sparks sprayed out of the wall socket, there was a loud pop and smoke poured from the wooden handle. The dogs spit end-to-end, their centers burned black—but the rest of the meat was pink and still cold.

My older sister, Joanie, got stuck helping Mom raise most of us. Joanie said it was the main reason she never wanted children of her own. She had already done that.

Mary Michelle (we called her Mickey) was the last child, the third of three daughters. Even at eighteen, she was still the baby of the family. She was born when I was twelve. Curly blond hair and hazel eyes like the rest of us, she made us a family of ten.

* * *

I left home when I was seventeen. We lived in St. Charles, Missouri, a town of 60,000, thirty-five miles west of St. Louis. Mickey was four at that time, and after I left, I didn’t follow her life closely, but we continued to have a special connection.

Over the next three years, I tried to find myself in experiments with various psychedelic drugs and wound up living on a diet of milk and peanut butter and sleeping in my beat up ’53 Chevy in Texas. I needed a way out and on a friend’s advice, I enlisted in the marine corps, just after the peak of the Vietnam War.

During my four-year hitch in the marines, I crisscrossed the country, moving from one military base to another—from California to Florida and then back to California. In 1972, my entire squadron—500 men and 12 fighter jets—left California. Within forty-eight hours, we arrived in Virginia and boarded an aircraft carrier. I spent a year traveling around the Mediterranean Sea with over 5,000 marines and navy men and seventy jets on the USS Forrestal. I lost track of everyone in my family, except for Mickey.

That year, Mickey and I corresponded often. I sent her little dolls from Athens, Istanbul, and Barcelona. I thought she’d like the female Greek dolls, wearing gowns under short vests of red, blue, and yellow (still my favorite colors); the satin Spanish dolls, wearing dresses trimmed in lace; and the male Turkish dolls in their tasseled fez hats.

Mickey loved the dolls and kept them in her bedroom. In turn, she sent me pictures she’d drawn on construction paper. Each colorful picture put an extra bounce in my step for days afterward. I never got that feeling from anything else.

Once she glued a piece of black construction paper onto the back of a calendar cover (one of those 11” x 14” calendars you hang on a nail in the wall and unfold the current month). She drew two pictures on white paper and glued them, one above the other, onto the construction paper. The top picture was of two hotdog-shaped butterflies floating in a blue sky. The butterdogs hovered on wings (which were simply wider versions of their bodies) above a rounded patch of green and brown, meant to indicate the earth. Then she colored the sky and earth to the edges of the paper.

She’d drawn both butterflies crudely, but it was clear which one represented me. I was about three times her size and green with yellow wings. Her butterfly was yellow with pink wings. She floated between me and a large brown tree trunk that touched a cloud of green leaves. In the lower left corner, she had printed her initials in pencil, M.M.F.

Despite the absence of noses, the smiley faces on the butterflies were radiant. I knew what she was trying to say. With me at her side, she could safely hover in the world, and it hurt me to think about how, like the rest of us, my baby sister had spent many nights feeling frightened and unsafe.

I remembered the night I threw Dad into the picture window. Mom had been home from the hospital a few days following a checkup for a heart problem. It was summer and hot. I was seventeen and sleeping in my bedroom. A crash from the living room woke me. I jumped up and ran to see what was going on.

An amber glass ashtray was wobbling upside down among cigarette butts and beer on the hardwood floor.

Dad had Mom pinned by the neck in the Naugehyde recliner and was pounding on her chest. He flashed his alcohol-yellowed eyes at me, and then continued driving his fist into Mom’s sternum.

I yelled for him to stop, but he ignored me. Dad was a construction worker and ox-strong. I was afraid he was going to kill Mom, so I grabbed him, pulled him away from the chair, and body-slammed him onto and end table that broke apart on the floor amid the wet cigarette butts. He stumbled to his feet, slipped on the beer and pulled over a standing lamp, darkening the room.

That’s when Mom started hitting me, screaming, “Leave him alone, Denny! He’s your father!”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I decided at that moment that I no longer cared.

“You can both go to hell!” I shouted. “You want to die, Mom? Go ahead! Let him kill you!”

I stomped through the kitchen to the den and flopped onto my back on a heavy slate billiard table—one of his temporary possessions, destined for sale.

I stared up at the ceiling lights, thinking, “Let the son of a bitch kill her. Then he’ll go to jail and leave us alone. Fuck them both.”

The commotion continued in the living room as if I’d never interfered. Then I heard a different sound from behind me—like kittens mewing. I sat up to light a cigarette and saw six-year-old Susie and Mickey (who was four). They were standing in the kitchen entry, cowering helplessly against Mom’s desperate pleas and Dad’s threats to put her into the ground. Susie cried out something about Dad killing Mom, but I just flicked cigarette ashes onto the green felt and spit out, “Good. Maybe they’ll kill each other.”

The stupidity of my statement angered me even more. What a god-damned pity. Those two little girls had never known life without this lunacy. At least I could remember a time when Mom and Dad hadn’t fought, we’d gone to church as a family, and I’d felt loved.

Little Mickey was clutching her pillow like a life preserver and shaking so hard she looked like she was shivering from the cold. Mickey jumped each time we heard a punch land with a thump behind her. The girls were so innocent and helpless. How could our parents put them through such endless hell?

I ground the cigarette into the felt and leapt off his billiard table. As I rushed past the girls, I motioned toward the den.

“Get in there—and stay there!”

When I reached the living room, Dad had Mom pinned in the recliner again, so I grabbed him by the T-shirt and pulled him to the floor. Mom scrambled out of the chair and ran away. I guessed she’d finally had enough.

Dad tried to get up, but I kicked him back down again with an intensity that frightened me. I checked around the room, looking for something to hit him with.

I suppose using Mom as a punching bag had sobered him up. He rose to his feet, but I shoved him into the recliner, buried my left knee in his stomach, and began pounding him in the chest. What the hell, why not? He had a bad heart too.

To my surprise, Mom came back into the room and began whipping me with a coat hanger, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!”

“He’s trying to kill you, Mom! Are you crazy?”

While I fought to get the coat hanger away from Mom, Dad struggled to his feet and came at me. I knew that if his strength and senses returned, there was no telling how far he’d go. He might even go for his gun.

I grabbed him by the hair and belt and rammed him headfirst through the sliding glass below a large picture window that faced the front yard. The thought of him lying there with his throat sliced open excited me—at least until I thought of the consequences. What if he died? I’d probably go to jail.

He lay slumped on the shattered glass of the windowsill, a summer breeze gently moving the dangling curls of his greasy hair. He took a deep breath and slowly pushed himself up to a seated position. Mom knelt beside him and checked him over—no blood.

“Look what you did to your father,” Mom said.

“He’s not my father,” I said, “He’s not anybody’s father.”

That was in 1967, and the last day I lived at home. I swore that one day I’d get my little sisters out of there, too, but I never did. I had stopped Dad from killing our mother that night—and thirteen years later, on the courthouse steps in St. Charles Missouri, I’d stop him from killing Anthony J. LaRette, Jr. at his pretrial for murdering my baby sister, Mickey.

After Mom and Dad divorced in 1970, Mom was able to move into a clean, quiet, peaceful neighborhood, but Dad continued to bother her for years, slashing her tires, sending nasty letters to her boss and making crank phone calls to the house. Finally, he grew tired of it all and left her alone most of the time.

Whenever I think back on my childhood, I recall those ugly images. It’s a curse, something like what Carolyn See refers to in her book Making a Literary Life as an Irish memory—the ability to remember the grim details of one’s life, but few of its beautiful moments. Maybe the reason I only have beautiful memories of Mickey is because none of them were bad.

Dad eventually felt guilty for all his bad behavior. On holidays and birthdays, he’d pick up the girls and take them on shopping sprees, spending far more on them than anyone thought he could afford on his social security and union pension checks. Mom and the girls were able to live comfortably and in peace.

Mickey sent me another picture that she called the sugar plum tree. She had drawn arrows pointing at two of many purple balls on the limbs and had written, “This is the sugar plum tree. That is you. This is me.”

It seemed strange. There I was, on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Mediterranean, occupied with my duties as an electrician, keeping our phantom fighter jets in the air. And here were these sweet drawings from my cute little sister. They pulled a smile from somewhere deep within me. I loved the little girl who had drawn and sent me the pictures—young, innocent, and delicate. I tucked them into my footlocker for safekeeping.

Years later, I was moving a box of my art supplies and found Mickey’s sugar plum tree drawing in a sketchpad I used to hold my own feeble attempts at drawing. At that moment, I had the time to reflect on Mickey’s picture—and I could feel the love crying out from it. At eight years old, she had focused all her energy on a picture depicting herself and one of her five brothers on a family tree. The sugarplums looked alike, but two were special. To Mickey, the twelve years between us didn’t matter. To her, we were the same. A feeling we shared of being outsiders had been there long before she could verbalize it.

Mickey’s picture made my heart ache because I hadn’t seen all of that when she’d sent it to me.

* * *

After I got out of the marine corps, I married my first wife, a Southern California blond named Charlene who went by her nickname Chaz. I attended California State University at Fullerton and planned to graduate, but one July weekend I phoned Mom—and everything changed.

Candy, my brother Mike’s wife, was visiting Mom, and Candy answered the phone. We hadn’t spoken with each other in over four years. When I asked how she was doing, she joked that she was doing as much as she could.

“As much of what?” I asked.

“Whatever you’ve got!” she said. I recognized the tone in her voice from my old drug days. It said, “Let’s talk dope.”

Candy was the mother of four children, one of which she already had in tow when she met my brother. Mike began cheating on Candy during the first year of their marriage, and he strayed further and further from any kind of healthy relationship, yet he always bragged about how great sex was with her. He used to talk about the soft pink skin of natural redheads, but I never paid much attention to him, since Mike embellished practically everything.

Before I joined the Marines, I had been as deep into drugs as my brothers. One reason I had enlisted was to get away from that culture, but Candy’s comments worried me. What about the children? With both parents into dope, what chance did they have? Someone should watch over them.

I didn’t know what I could do, but I had to do something—I had to take action, and I knew that it would take more than a short visit. Chaz had never lived anywhere except Southern California, but she could see how worried I was and understood that I needed to go. With the exception of Dad’s two-day visit the previous summer—a bungled con had made it necessary for him to get out of town and lay low for awhile—I hadn’t seen my family in four years.

The next weekend, the landlord let us out of our lease and we sold everything we could at a swap meet at a converted drive-in theater in Santa Anna. We gave what was left away, and then dragged the rest of what we owned to Missouri in a rented trailer. A severe thunderstorm caught us one evening as we drove east across the Kansas prairie. We could see the horizon for miles in every direction. The radio crackled and high winds threatened to push the trailer over. Thunder shook the car, and lightning either struck the ground like vertical spears or came clawing down to earth like long boney fingers.

As a Midwesterner, storms didn’t frighten me, but this one freaked me out a little, and poor Chaz, born and raised in southern California, was a basket case. An earthquake she could handle, but she’d never seen anything like that storm. She squeezed my right arm, shook and screamed so much that I had to stop at a liquor store, buy a bottle of whiskey, and then sit, drenched, as I watched her chug a quarter of it in fifteen minutes, but it was worth it, because it worked. Chaz slept through the storm and most of the rest of the way. We reached St. Charles seven hours later.

I had made several calls to Mom before we left California, so the entire family, including Mom, Dad, and my seven siblings, should have known that Chaz and I were coming. I expected most of them to be waiting.

It was after midnight on a moonless night when we drove into a city neighborhood of small bungalows set on lawns of weeds and un-mowed grass. We pulled up to the curb in front of Mom’s house. The front lawn slanted upward for ten yards from the uneven sidewalk to a two-bedroom house dwarfed by its relatively large front porch. The lights were off. One of my younger sisters was waiting there alone, a small silhouette sitting on the porch high above the street. She ran down the stairs and jumped into my open arms, crying and burying her face in my shoulder.

I thought the young girl held was probably Mickey, but I didn’t want to hurt Susie’s feelings if I was wrong. Whichever sister it was, she was four years older than the last time I’d seen her. Mickey would be fourteen, two years younger than Susie and still roughly the same size. I took a chance and asked.

“Are you Mickey or Susie?”

She slumped in my arms for a moment, then tightened her embrace. I could sense her joy melting into disappointment and sadness.

“How can you ask me that, Denny? How can you even doubt it’s me?”

I felt foolish, disappointed that no one else had been waiting for us. None of them had met my wife.

Susie, I later learned, was spending the night at a girlfriend’s house. Mom was asleep in her bedroom, and my brother, Mark, was sleeping in his van in the backyard. At least he had come. We woke them, and then sat in the kitchen and talked for an hour. I kept catching Mickey staring at me, but whenever I’d acknowledge her, she’d cry, happy to see me, and leave the room.

Mom kissed her new daughter-in-law on the cheek and then went back to bed. Chaz was disappointed at our reception and over the next few years, she’d form varying opinions about each family member. Yet, she never forgot the sight of me holding Mickey—and the love that passed between us. Seeing Mickey again was my homecoming.

* * *

My relationship with Mickey was unique, unlike my muddled relationship with the rest of the world and the family. My nature is to be funny. I’ve rarely passed an opportunity to make a fool of myself, the more ridiculous the situation, the better. I love the attention, love being in the spotlight, with everyone waiting for me to do something else to make them break up. Laughter feeds my spontaneity and making people laugh, making them happy, makes me feel good. More importantly, it makes me feel needed. People who don’t even know me like me. As long as they’re laughing, they’re not judging—and I feel as if I’m perfect, just being me.

I’ve never quite felt integrated into society. Whether it’s at work, a church meeting, or even with my family, I feel separate—an outsider. However, I feel that I bond with people when I’m making them laugh. I’m part of them because I have something to offer them.

Losing Mickey was like losing the world, yet we were so far apart in age I didn’t have the chance to know her, really know the tangible things about her—favorite color, movies, ice cream. Four siblings separated us, and by the time I was fifteen, I was doing everything I could to avoid Mom and Dad. The best way to do that was to stay away from home—putting distance between their violence and me. I couldn’t live with them anymore. But a feeling detachment from the family connected me to Mickey.

I wondered if the two people who raised me were my real parents and I thought I was the only one in my family to feel that way. However, one afternoon I picked up Mickey and we drove to the University of Missouri St. Louis (UMSL), where I’d eventually receive my undergraduate degree. She wanted to sit in on a class. On the way, Mickey became quiet and reflective. Something was on her mind.

“Can I say something that might sound crazy?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“You have to promise that you’ll take me seriously.”

“Yeah, of course. What is it?”

“No, really, Denny,” she said. “You joke around a lot, but this is serious. It’s weird, so don’t be goofy about it, OK?”

“All right, I promise.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m adopted.”

I smiled and I touched her shoulder. She didn’t have to say another word.

“I understand,” I said. “You feel like you’re betraying the family.”

She nodded, tears beginning to slide down her cheeks.

“Want to know something funny?” I said. “I’ve felt that way since I was about your age.”

“I feel terrible. What can I do?” she asked.

“Nothing. You have to be yourself, Mickey. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if we’re not the only ones who feel this way. Mom and Dad sure don’t act like parents—at least, not what I think of as parents.”

It was a strange feeling—bonding with Mickey because of a shared awareness of our estrangement. It wasn’t that we didn’t love our brothers and sisters. We just felt as if someone had dropped us into the wrong family.

* * *

UMSL was a pedestrian-looking set of buildings within the city limits of St. Louis. Unlike other schools whose letters are pronounced as letters—UCLA, NYU, and USC, UMSL was pronounced as an acronym, Umzle. There was a campaign to replace that epithet with UM St. Louis, but it failed, and Umzle stuck, like an unwanted nickname.

The day Mickey accompanied me to school was a light-class day. After giving her a tour of the campus, I had only one class to attend, Inorganic Chemistry—an easy introduction class, made difficult by its brilliant and demanding teacher, Dr. Charles Armbruster. Well studied in the sciences and the arts, Dr. Armbruster made it clear that he knew he had a reputation for being tough, but he told us that he had a good reason. Many of us would go on to careers in medicine or pharmacy, and it was his job to weed out the weak so that we’d discover early whether we were cut out for those careers. According to his reasoning, Dr. Armbruster was doing us a favor.

Of course, most of us didn’t see it his way, but no one wanted to tangle with the eloquent Renaissance man. Along with his intellectual credentials, Dr. Armbruster was handsome—about six feet tall with neatly combed dark hair, and always wore a sport coat, crisp shirt, and tie. Rumors surfaced weekly about the attractive women (none of them students, apparently) accompanying him to cultural events around town.

When Mickey and I entered the lecture hall, her eyes grew wide as she looked around.

“It’s like a movie theater!” she said.

I left Mickey standing near the doorway and then went down to talk to Dr. Armbruster, who was standing next to the podium at the base of the stage. I pointed up at Mickey and asked if she could quietly sit in on the class. Dr. Armbruster immediately strode up the aisle, weaving between arriving students.

Mickey looked as if she was going to run, but Dr. Armbruster offered his hand and with a broad, confident smile, leaned toward her as if she were made of crystal and might break. He was utterly charming, and when Mickey blushed, her face reddened, like an overripe tomato. She couldn’t hide it, and it stayed long past its biological purpose.

She extended her right hand while her left hand shook as she tried to cover her mouth. Mickey’s awestruck reaction to a college professor—and not a movie star or rock star—made me proud of her.

She looked at me with a shrug that said, “Help?”

Dr. Armbruster waved his open hand toward the empty seats, telling her to sit anywhere she’d like then he returned to his podium.

During the drive home, we talked about how Mickey would one day attend a university, and when she was excited, Mickey’s bright blue eyes always seemed to shine and to reflect more of the world. She was full of life—full of potential.

* * *

All five Fleming boys got along with their sisters, but I wasn’t always the first brother Mickey turned to for advice. One summer evening, she dropped in on one of Mark’s parties. She was sixteen and had been crying. I was concerned about her being at Mark’s shindig. Booze was everywhere, and pot made the rounds like an hor d’oeuvre. There were also hard drugs: psychedelics, amphetamines, and barbiturates. I saw a syringe once and immediately split. I had a no-fault policy on needles.

At party in Houston once, I saw two speed freaks melt amphetamine tablets in a spoon. To separate the waxy coating from the dope, they drew the liquid through a cigarette filter. They had only one needle, and the dude waiting for his fix lost his cool and nearly yanked the needle out of the other’s arm halfway through his shoot. I watched as the dope took over the first guy. His metamorphosis from mania to post-orgasmic afterglow really shook me. He had gone through all that trouble to become normal. After that, I left any party where I saw a syringe.

Over the years, I usually drank more around my family than I did in other social situations, and the more I drank, the more I craved a cigarette. It didn’t take much. I ended up smoking after about three beers. At Mark’s party, Mickey saw me and began walking toward me. I quickly crushed my cigarette into an ashtray. She looked at the ashtray and then at me.

“Why are you smoking?” she asked.

“Beer brings up old habits, I guess. What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“Mark. He thinks I’m a slut.” Her face, reddened from crying, grew redder.

I pulled Mickey close to me and we hugged. I knew Mark would never have said something like that unless it was a joke—a bad joke, maybe—and one that Mickey hadn’t gotten.

“Have you been drinking?” I asked.

“I only drank part of one beer, Denny,” she said. “You know I don’t drink.”

“Well, then, what’s this about?”

“My boyfriend wants to have sex. He says that we’re at that point in our relationship. Sex is important to him and he doesn’t want to wait. I told him I’m not ready, and when I asked Mark what I should do, he just laughed and said, ‘What’s the big deal?’”

I held her for a few moments, envious that she had gone to Mark first, yet grateful at the same time, because without thinking, I might have given her similar advice. I wasn’t a good person to seek advice from on the topic of losing virginity. I’d lost mine at thirteen to a friend’s twelve-year-old sister.

Her name was Karen, and she and I made good use of the park across the street from our house in Washington, Missouri. We did it on a bench in the baseball dugout on the night the Beatles first played on the Ed Sullivan Show.

If Mickey had come to me first, we might have discussed her situation. I might have probed into the length of her relationship and the kind of protection they were using. I might also have told her it might be time, but since she’d gone to Mark first, I knew where she stood, so I could support her—and save face at the same time.

“What does Mark think I am?” she asked indignantly.

“Mark’s stoned, Mickey,” I replied. “He’s not thinking about it seriously. Besides, let’s count Mark’s successful relationships. Ready? Let’s see…umm…nope, he hasn’t had any, zero! You see? You’re the only one who can determine when you’re ready to have sex, and at sixteen, you probably aren’t, so don’t let what Mark says bother you.”

She thanked me and when she left the party, she was happier than when she had come to me earlier. I had given her some good advice. Things often worked out that way for us.

Unfortunately, Susie and I didn’t have that kind of relationship. It just never developed. I’ve never understood her. She’s a giving person, but she’s also skeptical about life overall. Even so, she’s managed to maintain a view of acceptance about people—almost to a fault, which has led her into some abusive relationships with men.

I thought I had a special relationship with my sister Joanie until I realized that she had a way of making all her brothers feel special. Somehow, it made me jealous, and I wondered how she could speak so highly of Mark, who was smoking so much dope, or of Brian, who had a chronic problem with alcohol. Joanie admired Kevin’s independence. He had hitchhiked across the country and majored in music at North Carolina Central University, attending as a minority white student. Kevin met his wife, Lynn, in Charlotte, settled down, and started a pizza company that delivered movies.

Mike was the only one who was in Joanie’s disfavor. Mike the oldest—six years older than I was—died of lung cancer in 1998 at the age of 52. I’d always thought Mike would be the first of the children to die—and to die penniless–since drug use in the 1960s had developed into a lifelong addiction. Considering how he neglected his wife and four children, I could understand Joanie’s feelings. We all had a problem with Mike, including Mom.

Mike had deserted his wife and children, and returned to them only to collect a little welfare cash. Mom cut him out of her will, an act that Dad assured us he’d negate upon his death by leaving Mike a disproportionately higher amount of inheritance. Dad never kept his promise—it was his last con.

Dad had a special place in his heart for his firstborn child. Mike had been premature, short of six months, and in 1944, that was a dangerous situation. I heard stories about how Mike was in an incubator at the hospital, diapered in Dad’s new handkerchiefs.

When Dad died in 1992, we paid an additional fee for a double-deep grave. We knew that Mike was also going to need a place to rest someday, but we hadn’t considered that he’d opt for cremation—so Dad sleeps unnecessarily deep, which is probably apropos.

Chapter 2.

Disbelief

On Monday, July 21, 1980, I turned in my two-week notice at work. I had accepted a position with an independent drug testing laboratory, with a thirty percent increase in pay. Our daughter, Megan, was six months old at that time, and the extra money made Chaz feel more secure. Our marriage was going through a bad period, and we needed a change.

The job I was leaving was as a quality control microbiologist for a small cosmetic and toiletry manufacturer and I was tired of being a big fish in a little pond. Life, as a little fish in a bigger pond, was going to get better, with fewer bills, less stress, and a career in a more interesting field.

I’d learned all I wanted to know about the microbiological attributes and the chemistry of personal care products: hand lotions, shampoos, conditioners, and bubble baths. The regulatory requirements for pharmaceuticals are more stringent than for cosmetics and toiletries. My new job testing pharmaceuticals would be more important, and a step up in my career. One of my jobs was to test products by inoculating sub-samples into various microbiological media. Based on test results twenty-four hours later, I’d either release or hold back each product batch.

The next Friday at about 11:30 a.m., I was in the plant, gathering samples of shampoo batches, when I heard my name blaring over the intercom. They’d probably tried my laboratory first, but the processing plant was noisy, with 5,000–10,000-gallon batch tanks feeding fourteen fill lines. I was just placing a red sticker on a fill line connected to a 5,000-gallon tank of baby shampoo when I heard the page through a lull in the noise.

“Dennis Fleming, pick up line two,” a voice said. “Dennis, pick up line two.”

I didn’t want to miss the call, so I used the phone on a wood column fifty feet from my lab. A strange yet familiar voice came through static, like an overseas connection. It was my mother.

“I can’t hear you, Mom. You sound like you’re far away,” I said.

I had a mental image of her as a tiny person in the distance. I thought she was saying something about Mickey, but I couldn’t hear well enough to be sure.

“Mickey what?” I asked.

She repeated something about Mickey, but it made no sense. I jiggled the line connected to the phone, but it didn’t help.

“What’s wrong, Mom? Can you speak up?”

“Mickey is dead, Denny! She’s dead.”

“Bullshit, Mom,” I said angrily. “What’s really wrong?”

I knew that something probably was wrong, but Mom tended to dramatize things—and I hated having to pry information out of her.

“I’m telling you, Denny,” Mom said between sobs. “Mickey’s dead! Somebody murdered her.”

“Murder? Mickey is dead?” I said in disbelief. “No, Mom. What happened? Was she in a car accident?”

Suddenly, Mom was no longer far away or tiny. She was simply speaking with as much effort as she could manage at that moment, which wasn’t much.

“She was stabbed to death in the house,” she stammered. “You have to come to the hospital right away.”

“Stop it, Mom! Why are you saying all this?”

“I had to identify the body, Denny. I’m at the hospital in St. Charles.”

“Do they know how it happened?”

Mom tried to say more, but I couldn’t make it out.

“Tell me this isn’t happening, Mom.”

“Please come to the hospital. Your little sister is dead.”

I could only suppose that Mom needed some form of verification as to whether or not the horrible situation she was facing was real.

“I’ll find out what’s going on, Mom. I’m on my way. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

I fumbled to cradle the receiver and twisted the chord in knots before slamming it down. What was it I had to do? In the midst of my shock and disbelief, I just stood motionless, staring at the wood column in front of me. The thick grain seemed to hang frozen in a slide toward the floor.

Like a computer program, my brain automatically told me what to do next. I had to tell Norm, my boss, that I was leaving. I started toward his office, but then I stopped. What was I doing?

A coworker said, “That didn’t sound like a good phone call. What’s going on?”

I turned toward him, but somehow I couldn’t make out his face among the stacks of pallets.

“That was my mother,” I said slowly. “She was calling from the hospital. My little sister is dead.”

I turned away and pretended to check a release sticker on a nearby pallet of boxed hand lotion. I wiped the tears from my cheeks with the sleeve of my white lab coat. The faceless man mumbled something, but I couldn’t make out the words.

My boss really enjoyed his work. A former science teacher, Norm had found his niche in life as a manufacturing chemist and was rarely in a bad mood.

As I entered Norm’s office and tried to speak, I couldn’t get it out.

He motioned to a chair and said, “What’s wrong, Denny? Sit down. What is it?”

I suddenly found myself sobbing in a corner behind the sample shelves at the back of the office.

Facing an empty corner of the room, I strained to say, “Norm, my sister is dead. I have to leave and go to the hospital.”

On my way out of Norm’s office, I could hear the distant voices of people who were talking to me and trying to console me—but I couldn’t understand anything they were saying. I was out of touch with reality—out of touch with myself. I was lost in an unfamiliar emotional place and didn’t know how to behave.

Tony Wippold, a friend from the front office, took me by the arm and was leading me to the front door when, Pat Farrell, a lab technician, stopped us.

Only a few weeks earlier, Pat had told me what it had meant to lose her brother. I could tell that it bothered her to talk about it, and I felt privileged that she had confided in me. I thought I understood the pain she must have felt—but now I knew. At that time, I had understood with my mind, but now a giant piece of me had been stolen, and I was screaming inside, shouting meaningless words into a vast nothingness.

Pat threw her arms around me and whispered in my ear, her voice sincere and certain. Her words were strong, and for a moment, I believed her.

“You will get through this.”

* * *

The drive to the hospital in St. Charles took about twenty-five minutes. Tony and I had been friends since I’d started with the company two years earlier. We shared a common love of intellectual pursuits—literature, politics, and art. The sun was high overhead amid a sky of drifting white clouds. I don’t remember most of the ride, except that everything seemed to be bright.

We had the windows down to let the warm breeze in, and the day seemed to be just the opposite of what such a tragic day should have been. It always rains in movies when tragic things happen. Missourians usually suffer in the July humidity, but that Friday was a dry, beautiful summer morning.

I was grateful that Tony had volunteered to drive. I couldn’t have done it myself. Even Tony had to keep wiping his own tears as he tried to calm me. His steadiness made me realize how out of control I was at that moment. I was flipping back and forth between several emotional states—brief moments of rational thought, alternating with bursts of extreme sadness and anger. One moment I was talking with Tony, trying to understand what was happening; the next moment I bent forward, screaming and crying uncontrollably. An invisible force was pulling on my chest, trying to rip out a part of my soul.

St. Joseph’s Hospital sat on a hillside overlooking the Missouri River three blocks to the east. When Tony dropped me off at the emergency room entrance, I thought about asking him not to come, but I didn’t want to be inconsiderate. Reading my thoughts, Tony sat tightly gripping the steering wheel with both hands, searching for the right words.

“You need to do this with your family, Dennis.”

He looked past me, at two of my younger brothers, Mark and Brian, who were standing near the emergency room door, smoking cigarettes and glancing toward the river or down at the sidewalk in front of them.

“Call me if there is anything I can do,” Tony said as he pulled away from the curb.

I thanked him and hurried toward my brothers.

I went straight to Mark—the calm, quiet one—and said, “Is it true? Is Mickey really dead?”

Before Mark could say anything, Brian interjected. The youngest and the shortest, Brian had never grown out of his childhood habit of pushing his way into conversations.

“We’ve got to find the son of a bitch before the cops find him!” he said, throwing his cigarette down and toe-twisting it into the sidewalk. “Then we’ve gotta kill the motherfucker.”

Mark’s face, which was normally red from working outdoors in the summer sun, had lost its color. He looked toward the river and added, “Some sick fucker did this.”

In the waiting room, I found Mom sitting near a phone behind a small counter, which seemed appropriate, since it felt as if she’d just called me two minutes earlier. Her face was pale and streaked from crying. I was mad at her, but I hugged her anyway. She always got things confused when she was upset and then got everyone in a panic. She lit a fresh cigarette from another half-smoked one, then I took one from the pack and lit it. The ashtray on the counter in front of her was already full.

“Are you absolutely sure about all this, Mom?”

In my mind, I still held out the possibility that maybe Mickey had only been badly hurt—but dead? It just seemed impossible. Mom always made things seem worse than they were, although things may have been worse than we’d realized when we were kids.

“Mom?” I said again.

She nodded silently and began to cry.

“I had to identify her body, Denny. Her throat was…and she’s been stabbed in the heart.”

A nurse walked up and placed her hand on Mom’s shoulder, rubbing in circles below the base of her neck. Even as a professional, she seemed far too calm for someone involved in the murder of an innocent teenage girl. I asked the nurse if she was positive that Mickey was dead.

“Yes,” she said softly, showing no emotion.

How could she be so autocratic, so unaffected as she rubbed Mom’s neck? It seemed amazing to me that she wasn’t as upset as we were.

The nurse pulled a chair toward me.

“You have seen her, seen the body?” I asked.

“I’m really sorry, Mr. Fleming. Would you like to sit down? Can I get something for you?”

“His name is Dennis,” said Mom, barely able to get the words out.

“I want to see her,” I said. “Can I see her?”

A different nurse approached us and said, “Dennis, my name is Beth. I can give you something to calm you down?”

“I don’t need anything to calm me down!” I shouted. “I just want to see my sister! I just want to look at her, that’s all!”

There seemed to be a time lapse between the words I was yelling and the realization that I was yelling them. Each passing second felt like an hour, as if I was drunk on adrenalin.

Across the room, another nurse was busy trying to calm Mark and Brian, who were talking over each other’s sentences as they loudly asked their own questions. Beth told me she’d ask the attending physician if I could see Mickey’s body.

“I’m OK, goddamn it. I don’t need anything,” I said to no one in particular. “I just want to see my sister. I have a right to see my own sister.”

A doctor came through a set of double doors. I thought I saw a trace of sympathy cross his stoic face.

“I understand that you want to view the body, Mr. Fleming,” he said matter-of-factly, “but I’ve closed the examination, and since this is a case under investigation, we’d have to get legal authorization to reopen it.”

“No!” I screamed. “I have to see her! I have to see her dead body.”

“I know that hearing what I’ve just told you is difficult, and that you’re having trouble accepting this traumatic event, Mr. Fleming, but your mother has already identified the body.”

“I know!” I said. “Mom told me that, but I still want to see her!”

“Look, Mr. Fleming,” the doctor said, the tone of his voice changing, “your sister played on my daughter’s softball team. I knew Mickey, she was strong, and there was only a small chance that we could save her. I opened her chest, but the heart had been damaged.”

The way the doctor said the heart sounded cold and clinical.

“Her heart,” I shouted. “Her heart. She’s a person—she was a person!”

Everyone at the hospital was treating us so cordially, so calmly. Couldn’t they see what this was doing to me—to all of us?

“I’m very sorry for you and your family. Please try to understand—this isn’t something that a loved one should see. As I said, I’d have to follow several legal steps to reopen the examination, and you really don’t need that memory. It will be far better if you remember Mickey as she was.”

In my heart, I knew the doctor was right. It made no sense for me to see Mickey’s bloody, abused body—but I still couldn’t believe that she was dead, and no amount of third-person testimony could have made it seem real. Mickey was only eighteen. She’d just graduated from high school and would soon be going to college. I’d heard people who’d lived through traumatic situations say it all seemed surreal, and now I knew exactly what they meant. I was in denial—though only part of me knew it.

My older sister Joanie arrived with her husband, Bob Dowie. Joanie always received the family news before I did, but somehow I knew that she was going to act as if she hadn’t heard anything about Mickey’s murder. I was right.

“What is going on?” Joanie asked as she entered the waiting room.

I always hated when my siblings acted uninformed so they could draw the spotlight. I knew that someone had to have called Joanie or she wouldn’t have been there. So she knew exactly what was going on.

I snapped, “Mickey’s in there somewhere. She’s dead. Somebody cut her throat and stabbed her in the heart. That’s what’s going on—and you goddamn well know it!”

Joanie reached for Bob, which seemed strange. I wondered whether she really hadn’t known or whether she was in denial, too.

After a few moments, she regained her composure and said, “Damn you, Denny! Bob called me at work and then picked me up. He told me we were going to the hospital right away. That was all! Now you’d better be lying about the rest of it!”

Joanie looked at Mom and realized that I wasn’t lying. I hugged Joanie and tried to apologize, but she felt like stone. The doctor who had spoken to me took her aside and began to speak to her in hushed tones. A moment later, Joanie screamed and I realized she had awakened to the fact that the nightmare was really happening.

I went outside, walked down to the river, and sat on a wood bench. I thought it would be foolish to pray. After all, why would God grant me anything special? Even though I was an agnostic, I had prayed in the past—for peace or for someone else. I envisioned God as a non-associated deity, undefined by a particular religion, and I never expected a direct response to my prayers.

Maybe I’d never been humble—truly humble. The truth was, I didn’t know if I could be humble. It required a modesty I didn’t possess.

I prayed at that moment anyway—I prayed like never before—and it was honest. I’d never felt so honest in all my life. I was prepared to believe anything, to do anything for Mickey, so I prayed as earnestly as I could.

“Dear God. What can I say to you? Am I a fool for coming to you now? I feel foolish, but I have to beg. I’m going to ask you for something. It’s not just for me—it’s for my whole family. Please give Mickey back to us. Heal her and give her back.”

Impulsively, I slid off the bench and knelt in the dirt.

“I don’t think anyone knows exactly how you do things, God. Maybe you plan things, maybe you don’t. Maybe randomness is part of your scheme, or maybe you control everything, every detail—but I’m asking you now, please change this situation. You can take me instead of Mickey. I’ve lived longer, and I know I should pay for some things, but Mickey doesn’t deserve to die this young, and in this way.”

Life and death and God. What was the point?

I thought I had some idea of what life was all about—about the big picture—but I didn’t know anything. My little sister was gone, lying dead on a slab in a cold examination room. Only hours before, she’d been alive, I was at work, and everything was fine—but nothing would ever be the same again. It would all change me somehow, in some way—I felt sure. It would change all of us.

There was no sense to it, no reason, and no way of looking at Mickey’s death that would put it into perspective. It was like a bomb thrown into a daycare center. What could have caused this horror? Mickey couldn’t have brought it upon herself. Had she smarted off to some scumbag who had then paid her back? I felt cold and I was sweating struck with the horror that someone had meant to kill her and had then killed her that way. I could have made sense of a car accident—that’s what I’d thought it had been as first—or an overdose experimenting with drugs. Eventually, I might even have put together reasons for a suicide, but Mickey’s death hadn’t been her decision. Someone could have chosen not to do it—but did it anyway.

* * *

Mickey’s murder shocked the quiet town of St. Charles. Many people in Mom’s neighborhood couldn’t live with the horror of it. They knew Mickey as a good, clean-cut kid. They’d asked her into their homes to babysit their children.

The vicious nature of the murder—her palms and forearms slashed from futile attempts to fend off the killer’s knife, her throat slit from ear-to-ear, her heart punctured—disgusted them. Investigators found sandals and cut-offs, common apparel worn by many neighborhood girls, in a large blood-soaked circle of carpet in the living room. They found her panties lying on the linoleum kitchen floor where the killer had attempted to rape her as she was dying. They were all unnatural events—evidence of evil to many in our quiet neighborhood. Several families moved out of their apartments or sold their homes. Susie and her one-year-old son had also been living with Mom and they all moved in with Joanie until the police apprehended the killer.

After years on death row and many interviews, investigators connected Anthony LaRette to twenty-five other rape/murders. He had raped several of his victims after killing them, but in Mickey’s case, he had left quickly.

Fifteen years later, on the day of LaRette’s execution, in a November 29, 1995 interview with The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, my brother Brian said that he’d called Mickey about an hour before the murder. They were supposed to spend the afternoon at the park, but when he called later to remind her, the line was busy. A few minutes later, he called again, but a police officer answered, making Brian the first to hear the news.

Had Brian gotten a busy signal because Mickey had pulled the phone off the hook? A thick trail of blood ran down the wall from the bloody kitchen phone. That may have happened after LaRette had dragged her, fighting and struggling, into the kitchen. With the phone off the hook and Mickey’s screams likely to alert the neighborhood, LaRette might have thought he’d lost control of the situation, had lost the opportunity to rape her, and fled.

We’d learn years later that LaRette always raped his victims—he never simply killed them. Thinking Mickey was dead, he had slipped out of the house and scurried down the sidewalk, trying not to draw attention to himself. Then he drove off in a borrowed car.

Mickey was strong. Her wounds would have kept most people down, but she somehow rose from her pool of blood and tried to run, smearing the white kitchen walls with red streaks in the process. Was she searching for the phone? Twenty-five years later, I still see those red streaks in my mind.

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