Forgotten in Guatemala City: when U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl was killed in Pakistan, the world united in outrage. But when gay reporter Larry Lee was murdered in Central America, local officials treated it as a case of "another undesirable off the streets". (Crime).

Election Day is always tense in Guatemala, one of the world's poorest countries, known as much for its brutal politics as for its rich coffee. For Larry Lee, a gay American journalist living in Guatemala City, December 26, 1999, was especially busy. He worked well past 11 P.M. reporting every detail of the presidential election for the financial news service BridgeNews.

But Lee's day didn't end when he filed his last dispatch that night. And now, 2 1/2 years later, his family members are doing everything they can to figure out exactly how it did end--to determine what happened between Lee's last report and Tuesday, December 28, when his naked body was found pierced with multiple stab wounds in his 13th-floor apartment.

There are many theories surrounding his death. That it was committed by a jealous lover, unable to accept the news that Lee planned to leave Guatemala for Mexico City in January. That it was a botched robbery. That it was a hate crime against a gay man in a culture of machismo. That Lee's work on a sensitive political stow might have ruffled the wrong feathers. That a sexual rendezvous with a stranger had gone awry. Or that, in a country where guns are as ubiquitous as poverty, it was a random act of violence.

Larry Lee's brother, Scott Lee, and sister, Janine Zerger, can cite by heart the facts supporting and undermining each theory. Over the past 29 months, the family has teetered back and forth between several of the possibilities, convinced at times of one, then another.

Now, after countless E-mails and phone calls to Guatemalan authorities, U.S. embassy personnel, state department officials, FBI investigators, and U.S. congresspeople, they say they can be certain of only one thing: Because he was an openly gay man, Larry Lee's murder is not being properly investigated.

"The Guatemalan police are looking at it as, `Hey, there's another undesirable off the streets--why would we bother to investigate?'" says Scott Lee, who lives in suburban Minneapolis.

Scott Lee first realized his brother's case was being ignored when he traveled to Guatemala in February 2000, soon after the murder. "I met with the lead prosecutor, who questioned what he called Larry's `dangerous lifestyle,'" Scott says. "They obviously decided that Larry had picked up someone in town and that person killed him."

Zerger adds that "it's classic 'blame the victim' tactics. They're painting my brother as an extremely wild man. To them, he got what he deserved."

Larry Lee grew up in Doniphan, Mo., a small town along the banks of the Current River. His siblings say he always had a keen interest in politics and social issues, so they weren't surprised that he majored in journalism when he went to the University of Missouri in the mid 1980s. After graduation, his career took him to newspapers in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. It was in 1993, while at the The Knoxville News-Sentinel, that Lee came out as a gay man.

For Lee, being out meant being openly gay at work and even attending the annual conventions of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. But it didn't mean coming out to his family. Scott Lee and Janine Zerger didn't learn that their brother was gay until after he died. "I think he was afraid it might have changed the way some people in our extended family thought of him," Zerger says.

In the mid 1990s, Lee became engrossed by Central American culture when he started to do freelance reporting from Honduras and Guatemala Fluent in Spanish, he preferred to mingle with locals, avoiding tourists and American expatriates as much as possible. He'd take crowded public transportation rather than private taxis. And even though he could afford to live in more comfortable--and some would say safer--neighborhoods, he preferred to reside in poorer districts, where he felt he was in touch with the local culture. When he returned to the United States in 1998, he sold most of his belongings so he could go back to Guatemala as a correspondent for BridgeNews.

However, it wasn't long before Lee grew tired of reporting on the price of coffee. So after BridgeNews declined to publish some of his political and social stories, Lee, then 41, announced his plan to leave the company and head to Mexico City, where hoped to land a job with a political activist organization.

Again he set out to sell his possessions, plastering his neighborhood with fliers advertising items for sale. He was wrapping up the last of his job and his life in Guatemala when his assailant put and end to his plans.

Those people who were close to Lee say it s highly unlikely that he was killed by a random trick. "I don't think that was Larry's character," says Bobbi Nodell, who had known Lee since they attended journalism school together. At Lee's urging, Nodell visited Guatemala just prior to his death. The trip included a stay at Lee's apartment. And the day before Lee was killed, Nodell phoned him to say goodbye before she returned to Seattle.

"Larry was not reckless," she says. "He spoke the language exceedingly well. He taught me not to carry a wallet, not to carry a lot of cash, and to put whatever money I had on me in my shoe. He knew what buses had security guards. He was so responsible. He wasn't the kind to take chances like that."

Lee was fond of writing elaborate E-mail messages to friends, and close friend Cathy Shepherd received at least three or four of them each week. He would send her detailed accounts of life, from politics to the movies he saw every week. He also wrote frequently about his affairs with local men, including Manuel Santizo, who Shepherd says was known for his jealousy, and Jorge Garcia, Lee's lover at the time he was killed.

Lee wrote that Santizo was jealous of other men and angry that Lee was moving to Mexico City. Garcia, Lee's romantic interest at the time, visited every week and was the one who found Lee's body at about 3:30 P.M. on Tuesday, December 28. Both Santizo and Garcia agreed to blood tests that officials said cleared them of the crime.

Only twice in eight months did Lee write about sexual encounters with strangers, Shepherd says. And he never talked about picking up men on the fly. It's possible that such things happened and Lee didn't tell her, Shepherd acknowledges, but she doubts he would have censored those details. "We were like soul mates," she says.

And David DeWitt, an openly gay design editor at The New York Times who was a close friend of Lee's--and probably the last person, other than the murderer, to communicate with him--adds his voice of disbelief to the notion that a pickup murdered Lee. "I firmly believe that didn't happen," DeWitt insists.

Throughout Election Day, Lee sent several E-mails to DeWitt--including one at 11:18 P.M. that said he was exhausted from a full day of reporting. "Time for bed!" Lee wrote. An earlier E-mail, sent at 4:34 P.M., mentioned that a friend named "Alberto" was on his way over to Lee's apartment and that the two were going to a Subway restaurant just a few blocks away. By the time he finished typing his E-mail, "Alberto" had arrived and Lee was ready to go. Neither DeWitt nor Shepherd had previously heard Larry mention "Alberto."

"If Alberto had been a regular in Larry's life, I'm sure he would have mentioned him to me," Shepherd says. She can't help but wonder: If they find "Alberto," will they find the killer?

On a trip to Guatemala in April 2000, when Scott Lee finally gained access to Larry's apartment, it became evident, he says, that the police hadn't done even the most routine legwork on the case. Almost four months after his brother's death, Scott says, he walked into the apartment and found the bathroom doorknob smeared with blood, droplets of blood in the sink and shower, and a bloodied towel tossed behind the TV.

"Here was clear evidence left by the murderer, just sitting around unnoticed, untouched," Scott Lee says, seething. "I felt very angry and frustrated."

Those feelings would only grow as more evidence eventually came to light--and was ignored, he says. Including a lead that might well have led directly to "Alberto."

Along with a VCR and a camera, Larry's cell phone was missing from his apartment. (Other valuables--including cash, a laptop, a fax machine, and a bicycle--were left untouched, casting doubt on robbery as motive.) When Scott Lee and Zerger obtained the cell phone calling records, they noted an unusually large volume of calls starting at 8:31 A.M. on Monday, December 27--which they believe to be the morning after their brother was killed. Many of those calls were repeated in January, until the phone was cut off. Despite being presented with phone numbers, local authorities have yet to follow up by interviewing people who received those calls, the siblings say. Even worse, they say, the police are dismissing investigative work done by St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Karen Branch-Brioso, who did contact some of the people called from the stolen phone.

One of those people was Pietro Marroquin, a dentist who suspected a former employee of his, Juan "Alberto" Marroquin Estrada, of making the calls. Furthermore, it turns out Estrada was a suspect in another murder case and had been arrested in connection with it but was released on his own recognizance.

Despite this new information, the Guatemalan authorities made no effort to contact Estrada and interview him, Scott Lee says, adding that they also decided against comparing Estrada's fingerprints or blood type (collected during his prior arrest) to evidence found in Lee's apartment. According to an E-mail the family received from an American embassy official, the prosecutors decided the lead was not "hard evidence."

Prosecutors are now focusing on a suspect named Roberto Gutierrez Espinosa, who was a friend of Lee's. According to Zerger, Espinosa was named as a suspect from early in the case, but officials have recently made it sound like he is more suspicious because he has been evasive and allegedly noncooperative in giving a DNA sample.

But Zerger worries that the police are presenting him as a "new" lead--and a stronger suspect than he may really be--to alleviate some of the pressure from the media. She also is concerned that subtle prejudice may be the major factor in naming Espinosa, who she says is from Nicaragua, as the lead suspect: "Unless the police know something they aren't telling us, the fact that he is a foreigner there seems to be the only reason they're looking at him."

Having lost faith in the Guatemalan authorities, Scott Lee and Zerger are now pushing for help from the FBI. Spokeswoman Judy Orihuela says the FBI gets involved "all the time" in cases of Americans murdered or missing in foreign countries. However, she adds, "it's never an FBI-led investigation. We would just be there to assist" local police. And the FBI "can't just go down there and do whatever we want. We have to be invited in by the host country. So far, Guatemala hasn't invited us."

In February, however, two FBI investigators, along with two homicide detectives from Miami, did travel to Guatemala to review files on eight Americans killed there in the past two years--including Larry Lee.

"At the time, they gave suggestions to the authorities there about what follow-up should be done" in Lee's case, Orihuela says. But she declined to elaborate on just what those suggestions were, a timetable for them to be carried out, or what the FBI might do if those suggestions were ignored.

Scott Lee and Zerger have persuaded several U.S. senators and congresspeopie and to take an interest in their brother's story. Rep. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington State, has been one of the most sympathetic to their plight.

"Larry's personal life is no excuse for not investigating his murder," Inslee says. "The FBI has made some recommendations, and if those are not seen through, we will try to artfully and graciously get the FBI invited in. But that's a very sensitive issue that has to be approached delicately."

For Lee's family, there's nothing delicate in the way his life has been devalued by the Guatemalan government. Or in what Zerger calls the "lukewarm" response by American embassy officials who at times seem embarrassed to push her brother's case, perhaps partly because he was gay, she fears.

"All we want is a proper investigation," Scott Lee says. "It's been 2 1/2 years, and we're no closer to knowing what happened or why. We've been left in limbo, and the not knowing is excruciating."

Dahir also writes for Self, Business Traveler, and Good Housekeeping.