The Girl Who Had No Enemies

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.Everyone knew Mickey, with her stellar grades and driving ambition, would eventually follow her older brother's path and become the only other family member to graduate from a university. Though separated by twelve years, Mickey and Dennis had always felt a common bond.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 Mickey into her apartment. When the savagery was over, he thought he had left the girl dead on the kitchen floor. But despite a gash across her throat that nearly decapitated her and two deep knife wounds in her heart, she somehow ran naked across the street to a neighbor's house, where she died on their front porch. Her final desperate attempt to live provided a key to capturing her killer.Based upon the author's previous book, She Had No Enemies, 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 deputy, 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 thirty murders and rapes in eleven states. The serial killer carried a portrait of Juhl into his holding cell and awaited his execution with only her picture as his companion.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 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.THE GIRL WHO HAD NO ENEMIES is a life-affirming story about personal strength in the face of horror and a young deputy's unwavering dedication to find truth. It's also about keeping a promise to someone you love.