The structure of this True Crime story is something new in true crime memoir. Serial killer 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 dissimilar lives until they meet, and then Fleming chronicles the emotional damage and rebirth in the aftermath. LaRette's story meshes 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 last victim.
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. For nine years, LaRette sat on death row waiting for his execution for murdering the author's sister, Mickey. Authorities at the Missouri State Correctional Center in Potosi were unaware LaRette was a serial murderer. The killer was uncooperative until 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 and confess to other murders and rapes, but he insisted the Juhl, and NO ONE ELSE, interview him.
So began a six-year odyssey as Juhl made frequent trips from Florida to Missouri 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.
This book is a companion to "She Had No Enemies" (available in Kindle version). 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. Fleming allows us access to all his secret spaces and disillusions 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.
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 anew out of the emotional wilderness created by his sister's murder. The author paints such a vivid image of Mickey, that readers feel her powerful influence on a big brother who obsessed over the loss of this special sister to the point of his eventual discovery of the true direction in his life. The book's theme of turning tragedy into personal growth is uplifting.
