The murder described in this book was the subject of an investigative report on the IDTV program, “On the Case with Paula Zahn” in April 2015. The author was interviewed.
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.
This book is a rewrite and was formerly titled “She Had No Enemies” (available in Kindle version). This current edition includes a substantial amount of background information on serial killer Anthony J. LaRette Jr. and many of his victims.
Also included is more information on the author’s sister’s activities during the days leading to her death.
The story is based on the author’s best efforts to remember personal experiences. Information on some people, conversations, and events was gathered from court documents, interviews, research, journals, press accounts, and the memories of friends and acquaintances. Every effort was made to represent events and circumstances as they happened. To protect the identity of some individuals, such as witnesses, their names and identifying characteristics have been changed. No person or event has been fabricated or condensed.
THE GIRL WHO HAD NO ENEMIES revisits every aspect of the tragedy, not only by taking the reader to the scene of the crime in visceral detail but by uncovering layers of revelations in a tense and absorbing way. We are allowed access to all of the writer’s secret spaces and disillusionment and share with him a profound awareness of the human condition when he witnesses the execution of his sister’s killer and finds a way to write about the love he and his Mickey shared. Though the story begins with a horrible murder, it is not a typical work in the true-crime genre. The book’s structure lays out, in sound-bite fashion, the killer’s life of repeated hospitalization in mental health facilities and incarcerations in penal institutions. LaRette’s story is interjected with increasing frequency into the loving relationship between young Mickey Fleming and her older brother until the murderer’s ten-year rampage ends with Mickey, his final victim.
For nine years, LaRette sat uncooperative on death row at the Missouri State Correctional Center in Potosi, Missouri, until he was introduced to a young detective, Patricia Juhl, from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department in Florida. After that first meeting, the killer promised to cooperate on other murders and rapes in which he was implicated, but he insisted on being interviewed by Juhl — and no one else. So began a six-year odyssey as Juhl made numerous trips from Florida to Missouri in order to interview LaRette, who would dole out tantalizing murder details—a test to see if Juhl would verify their accuracy—before giving her the rest of the information she needed to solve the case. The investigation eventually led to LaRette’s confession to over two dozen rapes in eleven states.
In this heart-rending work of nonfiction, a sharp depiction of personal emotional loss, Fleming has crafted a work memorable in its brutal exploration of the author’s own odyssey to emerge psychologically a new out of the emotional wilderness created by his sister’s murder. The author paints an image of Mickey so vivid that readers feel her powerful influence on a big brother who obsessed on the loss of this special sister to the point of his eventual discovery of his own true direction in life. The book’s theme of turning tragedy into personal growth is uplifting.