Sometime around 10:30 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 30, Sheri Lash pulled her Chevy van off of tree-lined Peachtree Avenue in Murfreesboro and up the gravel driveway to her husband's house, a brick ranch-style with white shutters. Sheri, 32, and Elliot Lash, 26, had been separated for about a month. With the kids shuffling between her parents' place during the week and Lash's place over the weekend, someone was always winding up with the kids' wardrobe.
This time the children's clothes were at Lash's house. She tried to call him before dropping by, but he didn't answer. He must be at work, she thought.
Work, and money troubles, had been the main reason they'd separated. Sheri was alarmed back in October when Lash spent money they didn't have on a brand-new motorcycle. They were hanging on by a thread as it was. But when he quit his job a short time later, at Centennial Pediatrics in Murfreesboro, she'd had enough. The power company was threatening to shut off the electricity. They were behind on rent.
So she took their six young children, whose ages ranged from pre-teen to pre-K, and moved back to her parents' mobile home in Dickson County. It was cramped, but it beat worrying about impending eviction.
Yet Sheri had no intention of giving up on Lash. She talked to him every night and ended every conversation with an "I love you." They had weathered worse in their seven-year marriage. There had been other things that nearly split them up before. Things she could barely admit to herself when she lay in bed, thinking.
Somehow, though, they had always pulled through. Sheri was a stay-at-home mom, had been throughout the entire marriage. And he was the father of her children. A loving father. The kids adored him. Lash was like them — a goofy kid in many ways, hyperactive, forgetful, garrulous to a fault.
At 5 feet 7 inches, with big ears that Sheri always said looked like Dumbo's, Lash was cute, even cuddly. When he worked at Centennial, the parents of young patients raved about him. He could set at ease the most needle-fearing child. He was so good with children that it seemed a good fit when Lash started a new job in Nashville at Saint Thomas Medical Offices, training as a pediatric medical assistant.
But perhaps most important to Sheri, Elliot Lash was the second chance she thought she'd never have. When she was a 25-year-old divorcee with two young boys, Lash was her 19-year-old knight in shining armor. He had been so romantic. He loved her boys, even though they weren't his, and he later legally adopted them as his own.
Meeting him seemed almost too good to be true. So she set aside her misgivings, even when intuition told her she shouldn't.
As she gathered up small tennis shoes and jeans, Sheri decided to take a look at his computer. It had always been a major source of friction. She'd found things on it that repulsed her, and she confronted him time and again. Yet Lash always had a rational explanation for the unsettling images and videos she discovered over the years. She listened to his reasons and nodded, trying to ignore how threadbare they had become.
But she could never quite suspend her own suspicions. Lash told her he'd been working on a website lately for a little extra money. He always kept his computer locked up tight, for reasons she knew well by now. Today, though, for whatever reason, the computer was not locked. Sheri wanted to know what he was working on. She found a video file on his website and clicked play.
The video looked like it had been shot with a webcam. On the computer screen were two people. One was a young boy, whom the Scene will not identify. The other was a grown man. They were wrestling on a bed — the bed Sheri now sat on. The man in the video was Elliot Lash.
Sheri fast-forwarded. Now the two were lying down. Now Lash was caressing the boy. Now the child's pants were down. On the computer screen, Lash rubbed and slapped the boy's naked bottom. He leered directly into the camera, looking out into his wife's eyes.
Sheri stood up, rushed to the bathroom and vomited. She'd seen things on his computer before that raised a question she dared not face: Had she married a pedophile? She never wanted to believe it was anything more than a voyeur's fascination. But there in front of her was the monitor.
Recalling the moment, months afterward, Sheri says she wanted to kill him. Instead, she dialed 911. The blind eye she'd turned to the truth, along with Lash's long-kept secrets, would now be laid bare — a frightening prospect. Nevertheless, when a Murfreesboro police officer arrived at Peachtree Avenue, Sheri asked him to look at the video.
Even at that time, the officer later wrote in his report, she seemed to think she was "overreacting," as Lash had always led her to believe. And why not? she had told herself. Sheri knew well her family history of mental illness, not to mention her own panic attacks and suicide attempts. She could not shake the worry that she, not her husband, was the sick one.
The officer had no such confusion. After viewing a snippet of the video, he called Murfreesboro Det. Tommy Roberts. The detective saw Elliot Lash's image — the doting husband, the kid-loving father — as a predator's camouflage. Sheri now had to face her own role in maintaining that illusion.
But she never thought that the nightmare would take a jarring, irreversible turn toward violence. When Elliot Lash killed himself just days later, in a gruesome public act at the site of his latest job, news of the suicide — and the circumstances behind it — quickly traveled across the Internet. What went untold was the long trail of near misses and ignored signs that led to that moment. Only one person knows how it felt to live in that maelstrom, in the midst of denial that grew as gradually as slowly heating water eventually cooks a frog.
Last month, she asked to meet and tell her story.
§§§
Sitting in a frigid pickup in the Cracker Barrel parking lot, just off I-40 in Dickson, Sheri Lash cannot bear to talk in the cozy, crowded restaurant. She weeps frequently, and for as many reasons as one can imagine. With each new revelation she receives about her late husband from police investigators, she feels a fresh stabbing pang of loss, guilt and shame.
Wearing what looks like a man's button-up work shirt and blue jeans, Sheri wrings her hands and rubs at the tears beneath her eyes until the skin beneath them is the color of a bruise. She says she has a lot to get off her chest, and yet she is afraid what people will think of her when they hear her story. Because it didn't begin on Nov. 30, 2009, with the discovery of a video.
It dates back at least to 2001, the year that Sheri discovered chat rooms. She was a mother of two, married (though not happily) and with no one to talk to other than her little boys. Sheri says her husband at the time was always "going fishing and not catching fish." The Internet proved to be one of the few places she could connect with people her age.
While visiting her brother in Alabama, Sheri joined her sister-in-law on an AOL chat room called "Parents 'r' Us." Her sister-in-law was chatting with a man named Randy — screen name "MDB_PRP" — who claimed to be an ER doctor at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Her sister-and-law got up and left Sheri to fill in. Before the conversation got far, Randy told Sheri a kid with a broken arm had just come into the ER and he had to go. But as he signed off, he handed her over to his co-worker, Elliot Lash.
It was awkward at first, making small talk with a man she'd never spoken to and whom she couldn't see. Then Lash sent her a picture of himself in his Emergency Medical Technician uniform. He looked cute, in a fresh-faced, disarmingly goofy way. After a brief chat, Lash and Sheri said farewell, and that was that.
Three months later, back in Tennessee, Sheri was visiting a chat room with her Alabama sister-in-law when Lash suddenly popped in. They hit it off. He was funny, Sheri recalls. He was fond of inciting medical discussions, in order to dazzle the laypeople on hand with what seemed like expert knowledge.
Over six or seven months, a friendship developed. He made none of the sexual overtures so common in chat rooms. Their back-and-forth was harmless, platonic. A few posters whose online activity seemed to revolve around Lash would sometimes join them. Randy, the ER doc, would pop in to ask Sheri if she'd heard from her new friend. She would also get messages from a guy she knew only as Shawn.
By this time, Sheri says, her husband was gone all the time. She was lonely. So one night, with her husband out and the boys in bed, Sheri blocked her number and picked up the phone. For the first time, she heard Elliot Lash's voice.
They began talking on the phone regularly, the lonely Tennessee housewife and the Yankee EMT in the faraway Northeast. It seemed they were always discovering something in common — say, a fondness for mixing green olives with vanilla ice cream. It was as though she'd plunged into the infinite ether of the online universe, only to somehow stumble upon her soulmate.
At home, life was far from a dream. She and her husband had separated, she remembers, but the break wasn't clean. So she loaded her boys into her Saturn, stuffed $2,000 in her pocket and lit out for Maine. An ex-boyfriend had told her it was the most beautiful state he'd ever seen.
In the end, Sheri says, a loose flywheel sidetracked her to Philly, where Lash was hoping she'd call. Sheri paid for a hotel room, and she, Lash and her boys vacationed there for a week. No sex, she says. It wasn't like that. It was as if they were longtime friends who hadn't seen each other in years.
Her boys were delighted. They all visited Atlantic City. They went to the beach. When time came to rinse off the sand, Lash even volunteered to take one of the boys with him to the shower. Why not, Sheri thought. He seemed like a decent guy.
When she packed up to return to Tennessee, Lash startled her by blurting that he loved her. Sheri was taken aback by his touching, albeit premature, confession. "I love you...too?" she stammered.
Lash told her that by August 2002 he would be leaving for boot camp. Like many young men his age, he joined the Navy after 9/11 in a fit of patriotic zeal. Sheri doubted that she'd ever see him again. But she gave him her address and said goodbye.
In the intervening months, Sheri heard Lash got a new job as a mentor of sorts. He told her that his chat room buddy Shawn had landed him a gig in Virginia with an elderly couple who were at their wits' end. Their 12-year-old grandson's parents had recently died, and the kid was acting out. Lash offered to come in and lend a hand, which Sheri thought was noble.
Geographically and personally, Sheri and Lash were closer than they'd ever been, and the bond between them only grew stronger. Soon, it was time for Lash to travel to Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Ill., to begin his training. His heart was set on becoming a Navy corpsman, as a route to his medical career.
Oddly, as Lash made his way to the recruit intake, Dr. Randy, or MDB_PRP, vanished from the online community. Sheri asked Lash where he was. He said that Randy had been having marital problems, and that he'd taken his six boys and left Philadelphia for Florida. It was a shame, he said, and she thought nothing more.
Several weeks into boot camp, Sheri got a letter from Lash. She wrote back, and so began an almost daily correspondence that lasted until boot camp was over. Her life became a Hollywood script, replete with a young man in fatigues scrawling desperate love letters from a bunk in a far-off barracks. Lash wooed her with his pen, and Sheri, in due course, fell hopelessly in love.
Eventually, Lash asked her to marry him. But she declined — after all, she was still married. He invited her to his boot camp graduation, and when he was officially a Navy man, standing before her in dress uniform, Lash popped the question once again. This time Sheri said yes, determined to end her rocky marriage.
§§§
On Dec. 27, 2003, Sheri and Lash were married. The date was predicated more by necessity than by her desire to get hitched right after Christmas. He would be stationed at Naval Station Great Lakes just outside of Chicago, and if she were going to enjoy military-spouse status it needed to be official. Sheri became pregnant with her first daughter soon thereafter.
On one of Lash's visits back to Tennessee, his chat room friend she knew only as Shawn drove down from Maryland. Sheri thought he was strange — harmless, maybe, but strange. He stayed for roughly eight hours, most of which Sheri says he spent on his laptop, and he drove back home that night. In between, he was always tossing the word "proper" into conversations: "You need to be proper." Sheri didn't know what that meant.
Lash said he'd met Shawn Brady back in 1995 in a chat room. At the time, Lash was 14; his parents had divorced, and he was living with his father. He thought Shawn was just a kid like him. Shawn, who then lived in California, amazed Lash with his techno-wizardry. Once he opened Lash's CD-ROM drive through the Internet. Lash told Sheri it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen.
Two weeks after they met online, Lash said, Shawn drove from California to Philadelphia to meet him. But the person who arrived was no kid. Shawn was 19 years old.
Sheri found this exceedingly strange, and her misgivings about Shawn festered. (Shawn Brady could not be located for comment.) She'd started to notice other peculiarities too. In early 2004, just as Sheri and the kids joined Lash in the frigid Midwest, a minor house fire forced the family into a hotel while repairs were completed. Sheri wondered why her new husband insisted on lugging his bulky desktop computer up three flights of stairs to their room.
Even stranger was the fact that he kept his computer locked up tightly while he was at work. She couldn't even get on it to check her email. The man she loved, who'd been so emotionally accessible, was now distant, secretive.
Then again, she told herself, she was only now truly getting to know Lash. Much of their relationship up to this point had taken place over the phone, on the computer or in letters. They were opposites in many ways. She was quiet and slow to trust, whereas he was talkative — the kind of guy who'd never met a stranger. He was also the kind of guy who had a hundred friendly acquaintances, but few real friends. Most of his human connections were online.
As much as she wanted to ignore her suspicions, Sheri recalls, she couldn't. She'd been cheated on before, she says, and she was determined to find out what was going on. Over the next two months, she accessed his computer and installed all manner of common surveillance software: keyloggers and a program that took snapshots of the screen each minute. Sheri would know every image he viewed. She would see every keystroke.
What she found, however, was not what she expected.
She found video of a 5-year-old boy being spanked mercilessly. She found Instant Messenger chats where Lash and others role-played child-spanking scenarios in painstaking detail, along with medical images of a child's reddened bottom. Perhaps worst of all, she found file-shredding programs — the kind used by someone who knew he needed to cover his tracks.
When she confronted him, Lash didn't believe she'd actually seen anything. As he watched, though, she accessed his computer. She had him pull up the files saved by the keylogger and the screen snapshot program. "Everything you're seeing, I've seen," she said. Lash, she remembers, turned several different shades of green.
"If he could have disappeared," Sheri recalls today, "he would have."
Then he opened up — in a way. He told her Shawn had installed the file shredders because he was always sending Lash something. He was stumbling over his words. She could tell she still wasn't getting the whole truth out of him. "What do you mean it's what he's into," Sheri remembers asking him. "What do you mean he's into spanking children?"
Sheri didn't believe him. With his back against the wall, Lash decided to prove he wasn't lying. Reluctantly, he told her he didn't want to hide anymore — and with that, he logged into a Yahoo! chat room that was, quite literally, a world unto itself.
There were usually 20 people in a single room — a community. In this instance, it was a ranch. Each inhabitant cultivated a character. Some were parents. Others pretended to be children. Lash, of course, was usually a doctor. They went about mundane chores, carrying out cyber-lives through their fingertips. The banality of it all only fed the eroticized act around which the fantasy revolved — the spanking of children.
It's a relatively uncommon paraphilia, says Dr. Peter Collins, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Toronto who also works with the Ontario Provincial Police. What he finds particularly troubling, though, is the way it seems to intersect with sadism, or a sense of gratification brought on by inflicting pain — in this case, on a child.
In this chat community a child might, for example, get in trouble for going to the pond alone. This would require corporal punishment. And it would be carried out in detail that was both agonizing and sexually charged.
For Lash, these communities brought a kind of fellowship he couldn't find anywhere else. Shawn was even a member. Sheri had no idea what to think.
When he found out that Lash had told her about their secret world, Sheri says Shawn was enraged. He left furious voicemails on Lash's phone and sent accusatory Instant Messages: "How could you betray me?" Lash was stunned. If he'd never before realized what he was doing was wrong, Sheri says, he did now. He told her he felt Shawn was a predator who had sought him out all those years ago.
He told her he was finished with the chat rooms and finished with the online spanking fantasies. After that, it was as though Sheri got her husband back.
§§§
In September 2004, Sheri gave birth to her first daughter. Rather than feeling celebratory, though, she didn't feel right. She felt anxious and paralyzed by panic attacks. Worse, a familiar gulf was opening between Sheri and her husband that brought painful memories of her first husband's infidelity. She found a few IMs here and there, but not much else. When they visited Philadelphia in March 2005, her suspicions sharpened. She began making connections between what she had seen during her brief foray into Lash's online world and the things she heard.
Who was this Dr. Randy — or MDB_PRP, as he was known in the chat room she met him in? And why was he no longer a presence in any of the chat rooms they'd conversed in before? She'd seen PRP used in Lash's spanking community: it was short for "proper" or, more specifically, "proper punishment" — in a word, spanking. Shawn had used that word when he came to visit: "You need to be proper." What he was actually saying was, "You need a spanking." All along, he and Lash had been speaking in code — a dark inside joke she was not invited to share. A suspicion formed in her mind, too chilling and insistent to ignore.
"I don't think Randy exists," she said, confronting her husband. "I think Randy is either you or Shawn."
With that, Lash confessed. Dr. Randy was simply an alter ego. On the Internet, Lash could be whoever he wanted to be — even a successful MD with six boys. Sheri felt duped, devastated ... but not enough to leave. She forbade him from entering the chat rooms and communicating with Shawn.
Her home life, far from getting better, got worse. The panic attacks brought on by her pregnancy were crushing. She was sure that the schizophrenia that had plagued her grandmother was now poisoning her mind.
The truth was far more complicated. Sheri had recently switched from Wellbutrin to Zoloft, a drug used to treat major depression and panic attacks. Meanwhile, she'd recently quit taking hydrocodone — to which she'd developed an incredible resistance — after fixing some persistent dental problems. Watching her husband grow ever more distant, she felt less and less able to cope.
Finally, after one particularly bad day, she closed the garage door and climbed into her van. She turned the ignition.
Sheri composed letters to her children, while the engine droned its lulling white noise. Fumes slowly filled the enclosed space. By the time Lash found her, she was nearly unconscious.
After that, Sheri sought counseling. In addition, the Zoloft began to take effect. As her anxiety subsided, so did her anxieties. She believed that her suspicions were nothing but a byproduct of a troubled mind, which was now soothed by a psychotropic salve. Perhaps she was making "mountains out of molehills" over the chat rooms. After all, Lash told her she was a completely different person now.
A short time later, Sheri was pregnant again, this time with a son. And life was again as it should be. Sure, she'd catch an image on his computer here and there, but she chalked it all up to something that simply hadn't been deleted. Just a leftover relic from before. Maybe things were better now.
Then Lash told her something that rekindled all her old worries. Shawn was coming down for a visit. "Sheri, I can't cut him completely off," she remembers him saying.
Lash was afraid of Shawn. He was afraid he'd retaliate by "running his mouth to the cops" about what they used to do. So she let it go. Shawn, she thought, might be like everything else she fretted over before. Mountains out of molehills. But then why was he worried about what Shawn might say? She must be overreacting again, like she had so many times before, she thought — and the familiar tortured logic began all over again.
But there was reason to worry about Shawn. At the time, Shawn was living with Dr. Jeffrey Beck, a 50-year-old osteopath in California. In a chat online with someone he thought was a 14-year-old boy, Beck expressed interest in "paddling" the underage teen. What he did not know was that he was actually addressing Perverted Justice, a website that specializes in pedophile stings. In August 2005, Beck showed up at a home in Maryland expecting his online pal, only to find Dateline NBC correspondent Chris Hansen waiting instead. The resulting confrontation would make for uncomfortable viewing in the show's notorious "To Catch a Predator" exposé.
The episode, however, would not air for several months. Shawn, on the other hand, was right here on their doorstep. So when Lash suggested they go out on a date and let Shawn watch the kids for a few hours, she reluctantly agreed. After all, they never went anywhere alone anymore. Mountains out of molehills.
They returned from their night out to a houseful of sleeping children. After no more than 13 hours in Great Lakes, Shawn drove home that night.
Sheri gave birth to their son in January 2006. Soon after, Lash told her he wanted to visit the chat rooms again — with a difference. He didn't want to do it behind her back anymore. In fact, he wanted her to join him. He said it wouldn't be like before. There would be no spanking, just a fun way to blow off some steam. So they formed their own group. Lash invited some people he knew online, and a small role-playing community was established.
At first the role-reversal was kind of fun, Sheri thought. She took on the role of a husband, and Lash took on the role of her wife. Other members of the group pretended to be their children. It was odd, yes, but certainly no stranger than a lot of acceptable Internet role-playing — until a member of the group couldn't resist.
A man was playing the role of their 4-year-old girl, who for some reason was still in diapers. The man confessed to Lash he had done something that required corporal punishment. Lash couldn't seem to resist the entreaty. As Sheri read, he dealt it out in lurid literary detail.
She saw now that there were no half-measures when it came to his role-playing. Whether Lash would admit it or not, he either couldn't or wouldn't stop. When she checked his computer, she found he was visiting sites full of stories about spanking young boys.
The truth was, according to Raymond Smith, a U.S. Postal Inspector who has tracked pedophiles for decades, the groups he belonged to made him feel at ease because they validated his behavior. In the real world, Smith says, pedophiles are regarded as freaks with taboo desires. In the chat groups, they're among like-minded individuals. Not only that, the chat rooms provide a forum for the sale and exchange of child pornography.
Sheri tried to psychoanalyze Lash. She tried to fix him. She took what she had learned in therapy and the psychology books she'd read, and attempted to apply it to him. She sought indications of childhood trauma, even though most recent research examining the "cycle of abuse" theory has found little linkage between childhood sexual abuse and adult pedophilic behavior.
But her efforts did nothing to slow what seemed an avalanche of woes. To her dismay, Sheri discovered she was pregnant again: twins. Lash was about to receive an honorable discharge from the Navy for scoliosis. They would soon be trying to raise six children on Lash's monthly $140 disability check. Amazingly, the entire family moved into the double-wide trailer Sheri's mother and stepfather owned.
To make matters worse, Lash had started to pump what little money they had into online gambling and lottery tickets, sometimes as much as $300 at a time. There was also the matter of Sheri's mental concerns. Faced with these problems, the couple decided simply to "let the Lord take it into His hands."
But at least Sheri and her husband were together. He knew what it was to grow up in a broken home, and he didn't want that for their children.
"He was just trying to keep his family together," Sheri says.
When Lash's mother showed up that Thanksgiving, however, the double-wide grew even smaller, if that was possible. Tensions escalated further, and under the stress Sheri's water broke prematurely. This was late November; the babies weren't due until January. The pregnancy had already been difficult. Doctors informed her in October that her twins were afflicted with a relatively rare disorder called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome — one twin receives a disproportionate and dangerous amount of blood and fluid, while the other is starved. Sheri was rushed to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where a C-section was performed.
The underdeveloped twins stayed in the neonatal intensive-care unit for weeks. It was February 2007 before they could come home. Not only did the couple now have their hands full with children, two of them were incredibly fragile. The close quarters and constant stress made the trailer a powderkeg. In May 2007, it blew.
Sheri and Lash began arguing, as they did more and more these days. In a rage, Lash hurled his cell phone across the room, nearly striking their now 5-month-old twins. He continued to blindly dash whatever was within arm's reach against the walls and floor of the mobile home, and Sheri feared that he would strike her next.
Around that time, her stepfather returned home from work. Lash appeared to be cooling down when her stepfather asked him to move his car. Sheri remembers Lash responding with a snide comment, and match struck tinder. Her stepfather told Lash he'd slap him if he didn't mind his tongue. A scuffle broke out, and in the ensuing melee, the stepfather grabbed Lash by the throat.
Lash broke loose and stalked down the road toward nearby Johnson's Market, where he called the Dickson County Sheriff's office to report the assault. Deputies showed up and questioned everyone. Lash changed his mind about pressing charges, but Sheri's mother and stepfather unburdened themselves of everything they found troubling about Sheri's husband — everything. And he had indeed been acting strange, paranoid. He had a habit of standing in the living room, pretending to watch television while obviously eavesdropping on conversations.
Allegations of eavesdropping and spending hours alone on a computer did not constitute probable cause. Still, with tempers in the house boiling, the deputy said Lash could not stay there. Lash didn't know many people in Tennessee and didn't have any real friends. His parents offered to buy him a plane ticket back to Philadelphia. Heartbroken, Sheri volunteered to drive him to the Nashville International Airport, right out of her life.
Nearing the airport, Sheri felt the weight of what was happening acutely — the father of her children, her second chance, was leaving. As they reached the parking garage, she swallowed whatever medication she could find in her purse, then snapped the tape off a metal tape measure. With the jagged end, she gouged her wrist.
The damage wasn't life-threatening, but it was enough to get Sheri emergency medical attention. It was also enough to convince Lash that she didn't want him to leave. He postponed his flight.
"Not only did I not want to do it by myself," Sheri remembers, "I didn't want to do it without him."
Between the assault complaint and the suicide attempt, however, authorities had begun to wonder whether both she and Lash might pose a danger to their children. They suspected he might have child pornography on his computer. For two and a half weeks, neither Lash nor Sheri was allowed to see their children, who were placed in the temporary custody of her parents. Sheri herself was placed in a short-term rehabilitative facility for caregivers, and her medication was tweaked.
Meanwhile, the Dickson County Sheriff's Office detective, who did not return repeated Scene requests for comment, asked Sheri to hand over Lash's computer voluntarily. He didn't have a warrant, but if there was nothing illegal on the computer, Sheri remembers him saying, then her husband had nothing to worry about. He would simply give it back.
But Sheri was worried. What if there was something on the computer left over from before? She didn't want to lose the father of her children over something he wasn't even involved in anymore. Or so she hoped.
So she told the detective she would not give him Lash's computer. Then, as soon as she could, she destroyed it. Sheri might have had her suspicions, but she wasn't about to let them ruin her family.
§§§
After a few months taking classes at Austin Peay State University, Lash dropped out to find gainful employment. He held odd jobs here and there to support his family, and for a while managed a convenience store chain. He was happiest, though, when working in the medical field. Sheri recalled coming back from a Gatlinburg vacation when they came upon an overturned vehicle in a ditch. Lash sprang to action. She'd never seen him this way. She didn't know the man who rubbed the pinned woman's breastbone with razor-like focus, stabilizing her until the paramedics arrived.
"To see him focus like that," Sheri says. "It was amazing."
In October 2008, Lash began work at Centennial Pediatrics. Four months later, he was doing well enough to afford to rent a house. He found one in Murfreesboro, in a quiet neighborhood not too far from the Stones River Greenway System. By that summer, though, the familiar distance began creeping in between them. He shut down and became a brooding, silent man — not the man Sheri fell in love with. He told her before that this silence didn't mean he didn't care. He said it meant that he knew what he was doing hurt her deeply, and so it hurt him too.
Sheri decided to do the one thing she could rely upon as a lie detector: check his computer. The video she found this time — apparent rape footage — was the worst yet. The time stamp was recent. The computer was relatively new. This was not something he'd forgotten to delete when he was in Great Lakes.
"You're a pedophile," she told him.
Lash sobbed and begged on his knees. He had no idea how it had gotten onto his computer. He promised he'd never do something like that. It was disgusting. He'd never hurt their children — and if he ever did, he said ominously, he'd kill himself before he'd ever go to prison.
"It's not just my children I'm worried about," she said.
Lash wrote her a letter: "I am not who you think I am. The groups .... yes they have always been a part of my life ... and although I can't explain why, they make me feel at ease." He concluded with a novel defense: The video was a personal litmus test. "I wondered myself before, and tested myself to see if that WAS who I was, and I wasn't," he wrote. "It is repulsive to me."
Wanting to believe that, however incredibly, Sheri let the incident pass again. She didn't find anything for months after that, yet Lash remained secretive. In October he quit his job at Centennial. He sold the Mustang he'd paid off and bought a 2009 Harley Davidson Sportster. Suddenly he was a motorcycle fanatic and joined the local Patriot Guard — an organization composed mostly of veterans who attend the funeral services of fallen soldiers. Their next-door neighbor said Lash seemed like a strange guy. He couldn't really put his finger on exactly what it was. But he recalled seeing Lash hanging out in the gravel driveway next to his Harley, chain-smoking Newports.
Lash took a trip to Florida that fall to see if his grandfather could help him attain a loan, and for days Sheri didn't hear from him at all. It was like he was having a midlife crisis in his mid-20s. They were thousands of dollars behind on rent. The electricity was about to be shut off. So Sheri escaped once again to the family trailer.
By the end of November, though, things seemed to be looking up. Lash had just gotten his job at Saint Thomas, and he mentioned he had found a way to make a little extra money elsewhere writing short stories. And he was doing work for some website, too.
About an hour before lunch on Nov. 30, when she stopped by to pick up her kids' clothing, Sheri Lash found out what that work was.
§§§
At around 8:30 that night, Sheri got an IM on the family's computer from Lash: "Call me."
Sheri wrote she couldn't: Their son was on the house phone, and her cell phone was dead. But this wasn't true. She was afraid to talk to him. He couldn't know that his computer was in the hands of a detective, and Sheri knew she would not be able to maintain her composure on the phone. She could hide it in an online chat, though.
"Why were you in the house?" he asked, and Sheri told him the truth, or most of it.
"And the computer?" he probed. She said she'd simply dropped by to get clothes. Sheri played dumb, but she could tell he was desperate.
"Where is it?" he wrote. "CALL ME."
Sheri again told him she couldn't. She said she never went into his bedroom, and that she grabbed the clothes out of the laundry room and left. But Lash left little doubt about the gravity of the matter. He wrote that he was giving up and instructed her to tell their children that he loved them. It wouldn't be the last time he threatened suicide over the next few days.
Though Lash's hell might have been a private one, Sheri's was very much a family affair. She had been questioned by investigators, and so had all six of her children. The next few days were a blur of frantic calls, many of them from Lash's mother Cindy. "[Lash's father] Jack told me he's just not there," she said in a recorded phone conversation on Wednesday, Dec. 2. "He's sick. Like mentally sick. He called my mother crying last night because he couldn't get a hold of me. He didn't have enough gas to get home from work."
That same day, Sheri says, Roberts called him and asked him to come by the station. Lash said he told the detective that he had to be at work. He thought it might have something to do with a television he'd reported stolen.
In desperation, Lash's mother called Sheri again the next day, trying to find out something, anything. "I have been advised by an attorney that I'm not supposed to talk to you," she said. But that didn't stop her from pressing Sheri for information: "What's on the computer? Is there child porn on there again?"
Sheri began to tell her everything she knew. After she got off the phone, she says, Lash's mother called him and repeated what Sheri had told her. The date was Dec. 3, 2009.
Thirty minutes later, at 4:30 p.m., the sun was beginning to set over Nashville. The sky was overcast and the mercury was rapidly sinking. Lash steered into the Saint Thomas Medical Offices parking lot in a rented Mercury minivan. He had Det. Tommy Roberts' phone number scrawled on his hand.
He might likely have entered the building through glass doors leading into a five-story atrium. He would have walked past leafy potted plants, an abstract steel sculpture and a Bank of America branch. In his work scrubs, Sheri says, he picked up his paycheck. He took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked onto a pathway that looked out into the atrium.
Through the five stories of plate glass, he would have seen the terraced parking lots of nearby buildings. Without a word, Lash leaped over the handrail. He fell soundlessly through the dusk-dimmed atrium, past a third-floor waiting area, past marble-paneled walls. The impact of his body shattered the relative quiet.
Metro officers wouldn't let Sheri see her husband once the scene was secured. The trauma to his head was simply too great, they said — so awful that several witnesses had to be treated for chest pains. But when Sheri went by Saint Thomas to pick up Lash's minivan so she could return it to the rental agency, she walked inside the hospital. It seemed as though that one violent instant still reverberated in the atrium. She looked up to the fourth floor and around the atrium and thought to herself, My God, what these people must have seen.
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Since then, Murfreesboro police, with the aid of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's computer forensics lab, have been working to locate others Lash may have been involved with. Det. Tommy Roberts declined through a spokesman to comment for this story, but Sheri says he told her they'd found hundreds of images on Lash's computer. Sheri knows Lash was planning on selling that video, but to whom?
Even so, Sheri still loves Elliot Lash. She can't help it. Her Facebook page is filled with almost daily pronouncements of her devotion. But now everything she wants to believe about her husband, needs to believe, is beyond her grasp.
"I mourn for the man I loved and adored," Sheri Lash says, as condensation clouds the pickup's windows. "Yet I'm angry because of what he became.
"And then I wonder: Is it something he became, or was he really that all along?"
Email editor@nashvillescene.com.
