DEATH OF MY SISTER - Interview with Dennis Fleming

BIO

The heart of Fleming’s literary work is found in the intersection of memoir and true crime. He wrote and self-published the memoir She Had No Enemies. The memoirs depict a harrowing and deeply personal story, exploring the real-world events surrounding the murder of the author’s sister, Mary Michelle Fleming by serial killer Anthony J. LaRette and detail the impact of the murder on Fleming and his family. The revised version also recounts Detective Patricia Juhl’s six-year odyssey interviewing the killer, who confessed to over two dozen murders. The story was featured nationally on IDTV’s On the Case with Paula Zahn – A Window to Murder.

INTERVIEW

LYNN: I’m always amazed by the strength some victims show in the face of violence and was especially surprised by Mickey’s ability to run to a neighbor’s house after being so very badly injured. Were you surprised by the fact she would fight so hard to stay alive?

DENNIS: I was not surprised by her strength or will to live. She had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to college. Dad was set to buy her a car. Her boyfriend had written “I love Mary” on the St. Charles water tower for everyone entering the city to see. (Mickey was a family name. To the world she was Mary.) She was her softball team’s captain and catcher. 

I’m sure she gave LaRette trouble. Her hands and arms were covered with defense wounds. He must have thought he’d ended her life when he left her on the kitchen floor. Something that has haunted me is whether, during the struggle, she cried out for her father or one of her brothers. I wondered if she thought of me in her darkest moment. I wrote to LaRette, awaiting execution, and asked him if he remembered her calling out names. He wouldn’t answer. A prison official said, he wouldn’t talk about his victims because it made them real and took away his fantasy that he was only trying to rob them.

LYNN: In the book, you talk about the dysfunction and abuse within your own family, but that somehow Mickey came out intact. What does that mean?

DENNIS: Being the youngest of the family, and treated delicately because of that, Mickey was able to observe the good and the bad behavior of our parents and siblings. She definitely saw me change from a juvenile delinquent into a caring, honorable man who was proud of his accomplishments, but not overshadowed by them. She saw how I changed during my four-year enlistment: my record-shattering fitness performances, meritorious mast, academic accomplishments (I started college during my deployment on an aircraft carrier). She admired me, an island in a sea of alcohol, drug, and physical abuse pulling family members apart. She was following in my footsteps on her way into adulthood but wasn’t going through the delinquency and drug abuse we all did.

LYNN: You make the point in your book that LaRette had already killed fourteen women, and that it was almost as if Mickey had to die so that he could be finally pay for his crimes. Can you explain that a little more?

DENNIS: Had LaRette not been interrupted by a phone call that day, he would have raped Mickey and finished her off. Instead, he panicked and fled. They were in a condominium, and I think he feared a neighbor heard the ruckus, and he was in danger of being caught.

He’d stabbed her heart and sliced through her throat. He thought he’d killed her and took off. The police maintain that had she died in the kitchen, her body wouldn’t have been discovered until Mom got home from work four hours later. They attribute their ability to catch him to the fact that Mickey had gotten up and run across the street, knocking on a neighbor’s door. The husband (a night worker) and wife, and young child, were all home and called 911.

Law enforcement became aware of the murder minutes after it happened. They put out a bulletin and immediately notified the press. A news flash interrupted local TV programs. The lead that resulted in his capture came from a woman who’d seen a man rushing to a car in a hurry to leave. She claimed she might not have recalled anything or connected the dots had she not heard about some young girl’s murder until later or the next day.

The car was easily identifiable: a yellow convertible with loud mufflers. Mickey’s effort to get help prevented countless other women from suffering the same fate. LaRette had been on a tear. He’d gone off medication a few years earlier and went on a rape/murder binge throughout eleven states. 

LYNN: Were you or your family frustrated by the investigative process and/or communications with law enforcement during the two weeks it took to find and arrest LaRette?

DENNIS: I don’t recall any of us being frustrated with law enforcement. There were more than two dozen people on the major case squad. Members would meet with us brothers and send us on errands to find out if so and so was home. I think the primary reason was to keep us occupied at the time.

I’m a US Marine. All of us worked construction jobs, and we were functionally insane. One of the investigators pulled me aside, telling me he hoped he would find the suspect and thought he might have been one of the locals and may have somehow known Mickey or about her. After all, she was popular at school and participated in athletics, music, art, etc.

St. Charles’ population was ~37,000, which is half what it is today. At the hospital that day, I was in shock, getting loud, insisting they let me see the body. The surgeon was summoned and told me he’d taken the extra step of breaking her ribs open in the off chance they could restart her heart. His daughter played softball with Mickey, and he knew she was exceptionally fit. My point is that even he was affected by the loss. 

Local police had every baddie in town profiled. The way the murder was done, so brutal, they were almost certain it’d been someone passing through the area. We wouldn’t know for a decade that LaRette was a serial killer. I can’t overstate the professionalism and effectiveness of the St. Charles Police Department.

LYNN: Did your behavior change after the murder? For instance, did the family take precautions? Did your siblings (especially your sisters) become more cautious or vigilant? Did Mickey's murder change the family dynamics at all?

DENNIS: My mother never set foot in the house again. We were all emotionally and psychologically devastated and had to move her to a new place. My two sisters, Joan and Susie, became far more cautious. They locked house doors, car doors, carried mace, etc. Mickey had been the only family member not affected by alcohol, drugs, cigarette addiction. She was a diamond in a coal pile. The whole family sought further refuge in alcohol and drugs. My older sister, Joan, and Mom were close. But a fight over my murdered sister’s piano tore the relationship apart.

My issues were temporary. I’d removed myself years earlier from the family environment by joining the Marine Corps. I weathered the storm better. The rest of the family plunged deeper into their addictions, never truly recovering, although two of my brothers recovered later in life (in their 50s).

The two routine family gatherings ceased. We always gathered at Joan’s every Thanksgiving and at Mom’s at Christmas. We’d lost Mickey in July and tried to get through the next November and December holidays. They were the last ones. Mickey was such a part of them, they seemed empty no matter how hard we tried to gather without her. To quote my brother, Brian, in his interview with Paula Zahn on IDTV’s On the Case, “Events like this bring some families together and tear others apart. Our family was worse off.”

LYNN: Your book covers the lingering hole left behind in your life when you lost your sister. How did losing her in such a brutal way shape you as a person?

DENNIS: The afternoon of her death, having seen the effects on my mother and siblings, all imbued with murderous revenge, I left the hospital. I walked the few blocks to the banks of the Missouri River to be by myself. Years later, I would write a letter to LaRette awaiting execution and tell him he’d not only taken a sibling from me, but he’d taken my whole family.

Mickey and I were connected in a unique way, not felt with any other family member. We were the college-bound, the athletic, clear-headed. We both felt we’d been adopted. When I thought of the concept of ‘family’, I thought of Mickey and felt love. Otherwise, the word family had negative connotations.

At the riverbank that day, I promised my little sister I would honor her life by making mine better. Her death would inspire me to make the most of my life. I began my memoir with the line: “My youngest sister, Mickey, has been eighteen for more than twentyl-five years now.” Since her death, not a single day had passed without her entering my mind in some way. 

Two years after her death, I entered eighteen months of weekly therapy. I was a pharmaceutical microbiologist, and by the time I finished therapy, I was studying filmmaking. That eventually led to my resignation in order to matriculate to NYU’s Tisch School of Arts’ MFA in filmmaking. And as recently as this month, I’m querying agents for my upmarket psychological thriller, The Psychopath’s Daughter, based on elements from my memoirs.

LYNN: You were present for LaRette’s execution, and I was taken with the fact that you didn’t seem to feel anger toward him then. In fact, instead of feeling satisfied by his death, you felt sadness for humanity. Can you explain that?

DENNIS: I attended his execution for one reason; he was the last person to speak with Mickey. He attended her death; he caused it. I would attend his. I felt I was her proxy.

During a discussion on a local (St. Louis) radio program, I found myself arguing against the death penalty for that type of crime, not all crimes, but especially for serial killers. LaRette sat on death row for nine years, refusing to talk with profilers or novelists who offered to pay for his story. Had he been executed before meeting Detective Patricia Juhl working on a Florida case, we wouldn’t have known he was a serial killer.

Dozens of families and hundreds of loved ones would never have known who took their mother, sister, daughter, aunt, cousin, best friend, etc. And in such a horrific manner. A simple act of kindness encouraged LaRette to confess to all of his murders. By the time he was executed, fifteen years had passed, and I’d studied serial killers and pedophilia for a screenplay I was writing. I’m convinced society does not benefit by putting these psychologically damaged people to death.

I make an analogy, a poor one, but broadly applicable. Were we to put rabid animals to death and not study them to find the cause, we’d never have found a cure for rabies. The analogy is weak because I’m comparing a physical disease to a mental illness. But aren’t the human mind, nerves, electrical signals, tissue, and liquids physical? I would rather spend money studying these killers in search of anything that could help spot the cause and prevent it.

I think each of us is capable of the worst we can imagine. I don’t think serial killers randomly decide on a career to rape and murder. Psychology Today (and many articles from studies) describes a cycle these men get caught up in. Generally seven phases. Aural, Trolling, Wooing, Capture, Murder, Totem, Depression. The depression "comedown" eventually triggers new fantasies, starting the aural phase of the cycle again.

LYNN: I was also struck by the juxtaposition you painted between the sterile, almost peaceful nature of LaRette’s death and the brutality of Mickey’s. Tell me more about that.

DENNIS: It was an existential moment. I felt a bit untethered to life holding these two ideas in my mind at the same time. Seeing it objectively, here’s a young, healthy, smart woman who had no enemies and a full life ahead. She’s brutally tortured and murdered in the most heinous fashion and in private. Then, you have a man who’d lived over half his potential life (he was ~45). And yet, for committing the horrific actions that took a woman's life, he’s quietly, respectfully put to death.

We killed him in a delicate, compassionate way in public. It says something good about us as a society. But it’s an unsettling juxtaposition. I’ve had many experiences in life: true love, the miracle of childbirth, relative wealth (until my ninth birthday), poverty, domestic violence, etc. Because of Mickey’s death, I experienced an anger and hatred of another human being that I can’t imagine being any worse.

For a period or days or a week, my truest heart’s desire was to kill another human being--Tony LaRette. Literally. I wanted to tear him apart, bite into his heart, and spit it in his face. LaRette caused me to experience the ultimate depth of my anger. I would have killed him, knowing full well it would have ended my freedom and possibly my life. I pondered that fact a lot and came to the same conclusion again and again. Eventually, I realized the anger and the hatred was so intense, it felt like an evil lived within me, and I knew it would destroy me and my promise to honor Mickey.

LYNN: What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

DENNIS: It’s an example of survival. The event had devastating effects on so many people. After the book was published, people began contacting me for various reasons. One woman called from Florida and made an arrangement to meet me for lunch. She’d gone to school with Mickey. Even after decades, she said Mickey appeared in her dreams every night.

But I made a decision after appealing to my heart, my love for my sister, and not the anger and hatred my family turned to. And my life has been blessed for taking that road. My hope is that a reader can see that the power of love can truly win for you if you turn to it when tragedy strikes.

I was overcome by the worst elements in me, yet I pulled away from them. Many wrong decisions, nights I remember only as lessons in misbehavior, wrong decisions in relationships and failures like everyone else. As bad or worse in many ways was the loss of our son, Patrick, in 2015. My wife, Kathy, suffered, and I suffered, but the difference for me was that I’d been to a similar place. I felt I could comfort her and not let the darkness envelop us.

LYNN: You were especially close to your sister and painted her as someone I think anyone would have wanted to know. What’s your favorite memory of Mickey?

DENNIS: I was visiting Mom, and Mickey and I banged out the simple tune, Heart and Soul on the piano, driving our siblings up the wall. She was around sixteen. I can still see her standing on Mom’s porch as I drove away. She’s laughing, one hand covering her mouth, so out of control she’s about to spit up. She’s reaching for the porch railing, steadying herself with one hand, bending at the knees and squeezing her legs together trying hard not to pee in her pants. All the while, she’s looking at me with gratitude for the joy I’d given her by my visit. I liked nothing better than making her laugh.

A few metaphysical events happened in my life after Mickey’s death, signs that eventually led back to an error on her headstone; the year of her death on the headstone was wrong. Were these events Mickey talking to me? Or my mom or dad, who had both passed? I don’t know, but it solidified in me the idea that while our bodies die—we don’t.

LYNN: Thank you so much, Dennis. I’m so sorry for your loss, but happy that you were willing to share your thoughts and feelings with us. Your sister was lucky to have you as an older brother. If you'd like to pick up Dennis' book and learn more about Mickey and his journey, click below. You can find Dennis' book "She Had No Enemies" on Amazon.