A few days after Christmas of 1999, an American journalist would be mysteriously slain in Guatemala, one of thirty-seven journalists murdered that year, though the motives behind his killing are still unclear.
Forty-one-year-old Larry Dale Lee was originally from Rockford, Illinois, but spent most of his formative years in the small town of Doniphan, Missouri. After obtaining his graduate degree in journalism in 1987, he went on to work for numerous different newspapers in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee. In 1998, he took a position for the second-largest financial news agency in the world, BridgeNews, and moved to Guatemala to act as a correspondent.
After a little more than a year on the job, however, Larry was apparently growing tired of reporting on financial matters, and reportedly told friends that he was planning on selling most of his things and moving to Mexico City, with a view to perhaps getting more into social services. He filed his last story for BridgeNews, about the Guatemalan presidential election, at approximately ten-thirty p.m. on December 26th, 1999.
Two days later, a friend dropped by Larry’s apartment in Zone 1 of Guatemala City, but received no answer to his knocks. The friend fetched a janitor to unlock the front door, at which point he discovered Larry Dale Lee lying dead on his bed. He was naked, and had been viciously slashed several times across the throat, chest, back, and wrists.
The investigation into the journalist’s death apparently left a great deal to be desired, with some sources reporting that police never even bothered to check the apartment for fingerprints and may have contaminated the crime scene. There were also so many varying lines of inquiry in regards to a motive that the case seemed doomed from the start.
Since Larry was a journalist, the possibility had to be considered that he was murdered for something he had written that someone didn’t approve of. Though much of his work centered around money matters, he did write about politics and their intersection with other social and financial issues. He had, in fact, recently penned an article about a former Guatemalan leader and allegations of human rights abuses against him.
As the investigation progressed, detectives also discovered that Larry was gay, which gave them another possible angle to pursue. Though Larry had been out to his friends since 1993, his family was not aware of his sexuality. Police speculated that Larry might have been slain by a current or former lover, or perhaps was the target of a hate crime.
Then again, it was also plausible that Larry had not been specifically targeted at all, but was simply the victim of a robbery or a random attack. The fact that his neighborhood was allegedly fairly dangerous and didn’t house a lot of foreigners might have made him an appealing mark, as did the fact that he had advertised some of his possessions for sale in preparation for his move to Mexico, which might have attracted the attention of violent thieves.
Sadly, the murder of Larry Dale Lee seems to have been all but forgotten, and the slapdash investigation by Guatemalan authorities makes it unlikely the crime will ever be resolved.
Crime Immemorial 