Little Lost Angel (19 page)

Beneath Shanda’s bubbly personality was a girl with a deep longing to find the answers to life’s questions.

“There was a serious side to Shanda,” Betty Sharer said. “She asked me a lot of questions about God and what happens to us when we die. One time when we were out for a drive, Shanda asked what she had to do to be a good Christian. She was only about nine at the time. I asked her if she believed that Jesus died for our sins and she said yes. Then I asked her if she wanted Jesus to forgive her sins, and she said yes. I told her that if she kept Jesus in her mind she would be a good Christian.”

By the sixth grade Shanda was a budding beauty. She had long blond hair, pretty blue-gray eyes, and a trim, athletic figure. Boys from St. Paul, some of them seventh- and eighth-graders, would call her at home and she’d spend hours on the phone talking to them and then calling her girlfriends to giggle about what the boys had said.

“She was boy-crazy and the boys were crazy about her,” Jacque said later.

Steve Sharer remembers when Shanda, who was then eleven, introduced him to her new boyfriend, a boy of the same age.

“Nice to meet you, son,” Steve said, shaking the lad’s hand firmly. “Do you have a job?”

“No sir,” the boy said, casting a nervous glance at Shanda. “Not yet, sir.”

“Well, you better get one,” Steve advised him. “Girlfriends can be expensive.”

Shanda rolled her eyes. “Ohh, Dad, cut it out. You’re embarrassing me.”

In the six years since his divorce from Jacque, Steve had dated a number of women but none that he was seriously
interested in. Then a friend introduced him to Sharon James, an attractive, brunette divorcée who had two children of her own, a fifteen-year-old boy, Larry Dale, and an eighteen-year-old daughter, Sandy.

Sharon James had a little bit of a country twang, a lively sense of humor, and an infectious laugh. She and Steve hit it off right away. After they’d been dating for a couple of months, Shanda was dying to meet the new woman in her father’s life. She could tell that he was getting serious. All he ever talked about was Sharon. A few nights before they met, Shanda called Sharon on the phone.

“She wanted to know everything about me,” Sharon said. “She wanted to know how tall I was, what color my hair was, what my children’s names were. I bet we talked for hours.”

One night Steve took his mom, Sharon, and Shanda out to dinner. Steve had already told his daughter that he intended to ask Sharon to marry him. Shanda wasn’t about to miss out on something this exciting. She kept kicking Steve under the table and giving him a knowing smile. Finally she could wait no longer.

“Dad, are you going to ask her or not?” Shanda asked.

“Ask me what?” Sharon said with a smile, knowing what was on Steve’s mind.

“Will you marry me?” Steve asked.

“Of course I will,” Sharon said.

Shanda was thrilled to share in such a memorable occasion. She took an immediate liking to her stepmother, stepsister, and stepbrother, and after the wedding she spent nearly every weekend at their house in Jeffersonville. It didn’t take long for her to make a lot of friends in the neighborhood.

“Shanda took over the upper loft of the garage and made it a clubhouse for her and her friends,” Steve said. “They’d get up there and play school. Shanda always wanted to be the teacher when they taught religion. She loved to read from the Bible.”

When the weather warmed up, Steve and Sharon and Shanda would pack up their camping gear and head to the lake. Steve would put his small fishing boat in the water and tow a big air mattress behind the craft. Sharon and Shanda
would lay on the mattress, sunning themselves, as Steve fished for bass.

“He’d troll slowly along, fishing,” Sharon remembers fondly. “When he got a lure hung up on a stick, Shanda would roll off the raft into the water and get it loose.”

As she grew older, Shanda became even more of a daredevil. She persuaded Steve to let her ride behind him on his motorcycle. The first time she went with Sharon to Steve’s father’s farm, Shanda talked Sharon into riding with her on the tractor.

“She had me on the back of the tractor and she was driving,” Sharon said. “I said, ‘Are we going down that ditch?’ and she said no. Well, sure enough, when we got to the ditch, down we went.”

At other times, Sharon said, Shanda could be the perfect young lady. “One time I took her with me to the racetrack. She was the only child in a group of adults, but she’d carry on these sophisticated conversations about which horse to bet on or this and that. All my friends were so impressed with her.”

While Steve and Sharon were enjoying the bliss of their new marriage, Jacque and Ronnie were having problems. After a series of arguments with Ronnie, Paije, who was then eighteen, left home and moved in with her boyfriend. Jacque and Ronnie were also arguing. Jacque had been moving up the ladder at the barge line. Her new job as an insurance-claims representative called for her to spend frequent evenings away from home having dinner with clients.

“Ronnie was extremely jealous,” Jacque said. “He’d call the restaurants I went to and have me paged. He was constantly accusing me of running around on him. The kids weren’t getting along with him, and I was miserable. I asked him for a divorce.”

Paije had since broken up with her boyfriend and moved in with Jacque’s older sister, Debbie, in an apartment in New Albany. When another apartment in the complex opened up, Jacque and Shanda moved in. It was to be only a temporary arrangement. Jacque hoped that she could soon save enough money for a down payment on a house. But
eight months later Shanda was dead and the walls of the townhouse held too many bad memories for Jacque to stay any longer.

“I stayed with Debbie for a while, and then I moved in with a girlfriend of mine,” Jacque said. “I never slept in there again after Shanda died.”

12

C
hief investigator Steve Henry knew that his job was only just beginning after he’d arrested Melinda Loveless and Laurie Tackett. Everything he knew of the murder had been told to him by Toni Lawrence, and parts of her story didn’t ring true.

Toni claimed that Melinda and Laurie took her and Hope home before they burned Shanda. But the times didn’t fit. Toni said she was dropped off at nine-forty-five in the morning. If that was true, Melinda and Laurie couldn’t have driven the fifteen miles to Lemon Road and set Shanda on fire until well after ten. Shanda’s body was stone cold when Donn and Ralph Foley found her at ten-thirty. Shanda had to have been set on fire earlier than Toni claimed.

Playing a hunch, Henry drove to the Clark Oil station where the girls had bought the gas and examined the cash-register receipts from the Saturday morning when Shanda was killed.

There was no record of a two-liter soft drink being sold between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty, the time that Toni claimed they were at the gas station. However, the receipts did show that a two-liter Pepsi and several dollars’ worth of gas had been purchased at eight-forty.

The next morning, Henry drove to the Clark Station again. At exactly eight-forty he bought a few dollars of gasoline and pumped it into his gas tank. He drove directly to the burn site on Lemon Road, parked his car, got out and opened the trunk, then walked slowly to the edge of the soybean field where Shanda was burned. After lingering a few minutes, he drove to the McDonald’s where the girls had breakfast. He bought a cup of coffee and checked his watch. It was exactly nine-thirty.

So that was the sequence of events. Melinda and Laurie had not taken Toni and Hope home after the gas was purchased. All four girls were on Lemon Road when Shanda was burned alive. Toni had lied.

Henry was eager to question Toni again. But by now she had lost some of her desire to cooperate.

“Clifton Lawrence called me about a week after the murder and said that Toni wasn’t going to talk to us anymore,” Henry said. “The media had tracked them down and were banging on the door day and night, asking for interviews. Mr. Lawrence was pretty upset about it all and they just clammed up.”

Hope Rippey was also silent. Darryl Auxier, the attorney for the Rippey family, had promised to bring Hope in for questioning. But now he was stalling, claiming that Hope wasn’t ready to give a statement.

Henry decided that he could afford to wait awhile on Toni and Hope. There were plenty of leads to follow. Television and newspaper reports on the murder had spurred a flood of phone calls to police.

Since the murder had happened in his backyard, Sheriff Richard “Buck” Shipley offered to serve as Henry’s partner in the investigation. The two set up their headquarters at the Jefferson County police station in Madison. It was a good pairing. Henry and Shipley had spent nearly twenty years together as state troopers and had great respect for one another’s abilities.

Given the gruesome nature of the murder, both lawmen originally suspected that the killer or killers might have been high. But Toni had denied that any of the girls had drunk or
used drugs that night. And a search of Laurie’s car turned up no evidence of alcohol or drugs.

Henry would later hear stories of Laurie’s occasional drinking and her minor experimentation with drugs. He also learned that Toni and Hope had both been infrequent users of alcohol and marijuana and that Melinda had gone through bouts when she abused alcohol. But nothing in his investigation led him to believe that any of the girls was under the influence of drugs or alcohol that night.

Henry and Shipley believed they had recovered all of the girls’ weapons, even though the knife found in Laurie’s pocket and a larger knife discovered alongside the road a few miles from the body and later identified as Melinda’s were clean of blood stains. Forensic expert Curtis Wells had also been unable to find Shanda’s fingerprints in the car or trunk, and there were no blood stains or fingerprints on the car’s tire iron. However, blood samples found in the trunk were of the same type as Shanda’s and fibers found in the car and trunk matched those of the burned blanket fragments clutched in Shanda’s hands. There was no doubt that Shanda had been in Laurie’s trunk.

With Melinda and Laurie behind bars and Toni and Hope unwilling to talk anymore, Henry and Shipley concentrated on nailing down the motive—Melinda’s jealousy—and proving premeditation. They also needed to unravel Toni’s quirky tale about Laurie’s bizarre fascination with the occult. Could Shanda’s murder have been some kind of satanic ritual?

The first name on their interview list was Amanda Heavrin. Amanda’s father had already contacted a lawyer, and the interrogation took place in the law office of Steve Lohmeyer. Amanda was noticeably nervous and reluctant to talk. She chewed on her fingernails as Henry tried to draw her out. Eventually Amanda began to talk about her relationship with Melinda and Shanda. Although she said that Melinda was extremely jealous of Shanda, she repeatedly denied that there was a lesbian relationship between any of the girls.

Amanda told the police officers that on the night of the
murder Melinda had called her at about nine o’clock from a pay phone at the hardcore concert. She claimed that it was just chitchat and that Melinda made no mention of her plans for Shanda.

Amanda broke into tears as she told the officers how she learned of Shanda’s murder. She described the scene at Melinda’s house on Saturday, putting all the blame for the murder on Laurie. She said that Laurie admitted to beating Shanda with the tire iron and setting her on fire. Henry and Shipley were stunned that Melinda had so readily told her friends about what had happened, and they were suspicious of Amanda’s claim that Laurie had been boasting of what she’d done.

“It was pretty clear that Amanda was trying to protect Melinda,” Henry said later. “I think she felt that now that Shanda was gone she had to stick by Melinda. She had no one else.”

The next stop for Henry and Shipley was the office of Virgil Seay, who was in charge of juvenile probation in Floyd County. It was Seay who had given Curtis Wells the information that led police to Melinda’s house the night of the arrest. Seay turned over the stack of letters that had been given to him a month earlier by Amanda’s father.

Henry read each one carefully. There was no longer any doubt that Amanda and Melinda had enjoyed a lesbian relationship and that Melinda hated Shanda for interfering. He read the last line of the last letter from Melinda over again: “I want Shanda dead.” The detective knew that he was holding a powerful piece of evidence.

That same day, Henry and Shipley learned that a young man by the name of Larry Leatherbury had called the police station, asking to speak to the chief investigator on the Shanda Sharer case. The dispatcher told Henry that Leatherbury was very insistent and said he had some vital information. He’d left his phone number and address.

Henry hadn’t been able to get the curious names of Larry and Terry Leatherbury out of his mind since Toni had told him that the twin brothers had practiced witchcraft with Laurie and had drunk each other’s blood.

Henry and Shipley drove to the worn-down section of
Louisville where the Leatherburys were living in a friend’s apartment and honked the horn.