Little Lost Angel (21 page)

Henry had heard enough to realize that Kary probably had a better feel for the dynamics behind Shanda’s murder than anyone else he’d interviewed. “Just assume for a moment that Laurie Tackett killed Shanda Sharer,” he said. “In your opinion, would she have done it as Laurie Tackett, or would she have done it as somebody else? Would she have channeled?”

“Probably.”

“Who do you think she would have been?”

“Deanna the Vampire.”

“Would her voice change when she did this?”

Kary lowered her voice to a soft growl. “She’d sound like this. She would tilt her head to the side and go out of it. She always told me that if she was out for more than five minutes I should hold her arm and say the name ‘Lucinda’ and it would bring her back out of that dimension.”

“What do you think happened on the night of the murder?” Henry asked.

“I think Melinda got mad at Shanda because Shanda had been flirting with Amanda. I think Melinda told Laurie she wanted to kill her and Laurie told Melinda, ‘Let’s do it.’ Melinda probably didn’t take her seriously because Melinda is not that kind of coldhearted person. I think that Laurie did most of it because Laurie would do anything for a friend to keep a friend. I think Melinda wanted to beat the hell out of her, but that was it. I think Laurie did the rest because she was always wanting to cut somebody. She was always wanting to burn somebody. When she got really mad she’d hold it in and then she’d feel crazy. She’d scream or something and would just go into another world.”

“Have you heard who set Shanda on fire?” Henry asked.

“Laurie and Hope.”

“Who told you that?”

“Melinda called me one night from jail and told me that it was all Laurie and Hope. She said that Laurie and Hope took the body out of the back of the car and Laurie started cutting on her and stuff. Melinda said that she and the other girl were back behind the car burning evidence and Melinda didn’t know what was going on until she saw Laurie drop a match. Laurie told her that it was better that way. She told
Melinda that Shanda needed to die. Melinda told me that all she did was beat her up and that Laurie did the rest and that Hope had helped her. She said Laurie told all three girls that if they told on her she would channel and kill all of them.”

“What about the fourth girl, Toni?”

“Melinda said she was there too. They were all four there when it happened.”

Henry was ready to wrap up the interview, but he still couldn’t get Larry Leatherbury off his mind. “Do you think he was involved in any way with the murder? He seemed eager to give us his alibi.”

“He told me that he had called the police,” Kary said, cracking a smile for the first time. “You’ve got to know Larry. He just thought it would be neat to be interviewed about a murder.”

Henry shrugged. “He seemed to be having a good time.”

*  *  *

Another girl who had hung with the same crowd was Carrie East. Carrie, who’d been Melinda’s lover for a short while, confirmed that Melinda was jealous of Shanda, but mostly she wanted to talk about Laurie, who she believed pushed Melinda into the murder.

Laurie “was just crazy,” Carrie said. “When we went driving with her she’d swerve all around the road. I mean, you can just look at her and see that she’s evil. She was always screaming and stuff. There’s hardly any time she’s calm, and when she is she just sits there and stares.”

In late January, Crystal Wathen admitted that she’d lied to the police when they first questioned her. Upon the advice of her lawyer, she wrote a lengthy letter to the police, recounting the afternoon she’d spent with Melinda and Laurie after the murder. The letter was obviously written to help Melinda’s case. In it, Crystal gave a detailed account of how Laurie stuck the tire iron under Crystal’s nose and demonstrated how she’d beaten Shanda.

Not long after receiving Crystal’s letter, the police got another break in the case. Tony Downs, a New Albany police officer, told Henry that his niece, Kelly Downs, had received a letter written by Melinda’s friend Kristie Brodfuehrer. In it, Kristie described her and Melinda’s
attempt to abduct Amanda Heavrin. Kristie was initially reluctant to talk to police. But she eventually told Henry everything that happened that night, including that she’d had sex with a boy to pay for cocaine.

This proved that Melinda had not only talked about killing Shanda, she’d actually tried the exact same abduction plan on Amanda. Although the plan wasn’t carried out, it showed that the abduction of Shanda wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. Melinda had devised the plan months earlier.

Kristie’s story was not as shocking as some of the things Henry and Shipley had heard from Kary Pope and Larry Leatherbury, but it seemed more unsettling coming from the petite, innocent-looking Kristie.

“Kary and Larry had a certain look about them. What they told me about their lifestyles, as bizarre as it was, didn’t seem as startling as hearing Kristie talk about that night,” Henry said later. “I looked at Kristie and I could see my own daughter or the neighborhood kid. For some reason it really bothered me.”

Henry spent an entire day retracing the girls’ steps. He found the remains of a small fire in the Witches’ Castle but no hard evidence to prove that the girls had taken Shanda there. The next stop was the dirt road near Laurie Tackett’s house. He got out of his car and kicked the frozen weeds, looking for a sign of the fight that Toni claimed had occurred at the end of the road. He was about to leave when he noticed a pair of girl’s shoes side by side on the road. After placing them in a plastic evidence bag, he called Shanda’s mother. They were the shoes Shanda had gotten for Christmas.

Since he was in the area, Henry called on Ace Newman and Michael Starkey, who lived in the trailer next door to the Tacketts’ home. Newman told Henry that he’d gone to school with Laurie but he didn’t really know her.

“I didn’t know her to have any friends,” Newman said. “Never talked to her before that night.”

“What night’s that?” Henry asked.

Newman told the lawman about Laurie’s visit the night before the murder.

“She was real nervous. Her eyes were puffy and red. She said she’d knocked the muffler off her dad’s car and was real upset. I got her a Big Red. Her voice was shaking. She acted like she was going to cry.”

After talking with Newman, Henry walked next door to the Tackett residence. Larry Leatherbury and Kary Pope had told him about Laurie’s altar and her collection of books on the occult, and he was eager to examine them. But the room was nearly empty. Peggy Tackett had already thrown out most of Laurie’s things. As Henry talked to Laurie’s mother, he could see that she was having a hard time keeping her composure. She told him that she and her husband had had no idea what was happening that night. She said they would have saved Shanda if they had only known that she was in Laurie’s trunk. She said she’d yelled at Laurie for being out late but that Laurie was beyond her control. It appeared to Henry that Peggy had already disowned her daughter.

After leaving the Tackett home, Henry checked in with the police station and learned that Shanda’s mother had found some important evidence.

Jacque had waited a few weeks after Shanda’s funeral before beginning the unsavory task of cleaning the toys, games, and familiar clothes out of her daughter’s closet.

She packed up the clothes she intended to give to one of Shanda’s cousins, then sat down and cried when she found the page of a coloring book that Shanda had colored a few days before her murder. She was about to put off cleaning out the rest of the closet when she discovered a shoebox hidden under a larger box and tied shut with a string. Written on the top in Shanda’s handwriting were the words “For my eyes only. Please do not open.”

Jacque opened the box with trepidation. Inside were dozens of letters. Two were from Melinda, the rest from Amanda.

The content of the Amanda letters convinced Jacque that her daughter had been manipulated and seduced by Amanda.

“I can’t imagine the amount of mental anguish she was going through without having anyone to talk to about it,”
Jacque said later. “I know she was carrying around a ton of guilt. I do believe there was physical contact between Shanda and Amanda. I will never believe that she was a lesbian. I believe that all this absolutely devastated her emotionally, but it also created a bond between her and Amanda and that’s why she could never pull herself away. She was not only ashamed of what she’d done but was afraid that everyone would find out. I was close to my mom, but when I was twelve I couldn’t have told her that I’d let another girl touch me. I can’t imagine what she was going through.”

After receiving the letters from Jacque, Steve Henry went to talk to Amanda again.

“I left Amanda and her father in the room together for a few minutes so she could tell him what was in the letters,” Henry said. “She could no longer deny that she was a lesbian. When I came back in, it seemed as if there was an understanding between the two of them. Amanda owned up at that point and admitted that she’d been Melinda’s lover. But she wasn’t very helpful to us. It was like she was bored during the whole interview. She kept looking at the clock and telling her father that she was going to be late for basketball practice.”

*  *  *

Although Amanda had tried to hide her sexuality from her father, Detective Henry could not get over how casual some of the other girls were about their lesbianism. This was not an area of the country where homosexuality was generally accepted. While gay and lesbian organizations in Louisville would occasionally show up on the nightly news for one reason or the other, it was not a community comfortable with open displays of homosexuality. There were several gay nightclubs in downtown Louisville, but they didn’t advertise in the daily newspapers and their addresses were known, for the most part, only to their patrons. There were one or two streets in that city’s more open-minded neighborhoods where a gay couple might be seen walking hand in hand, but even there it was an uncommon sight.

There were no gay organizations in New Albany, where Melinda, Amanda, Kary, and the rest of their small group
lived. Spotting an outwardly gay couple strolling the streets of New Albany was about as likely as seeing them on an “Andy Griffith” rerun.

Although Melinda and Amanda would sometimes show their affection for one another at school, their lesbianism was not widely accepted by the other students, and the two girls would often hear derisive remarks. Both girls were far too self-conscious about their sexuality to flaunt it on the streets of their hometown.

“Some of the girls in their circle had told their families about being gay. Others, like Amanda, hadn’t,” Henry said. “She probably wouldn’t have told her father for some time if we hadn’t forced the issue.”

In the book
Gay and Lesbian Youth
, Dr. Gilbert Herdt cites studies indicating that probably 10 percent (nearly 3 million) of the nation’s 29 million adolescents are gay. But Dr. Margaret Schneider, a Toronto psychologist who contributed to the same book, contends that gay adolescents are less visible than their adult counterparts because they are unlikely to belong to gay organizations and too young to go to gay bars.

While it’s difficult to determine whether there is a higher percentage of gay adolescents today than there was in the past, Schneider said there is a growing trend for gay adolescents to feel more liberated.

“Adolescents are coming out now at a time when some pop culture figures (k.d. lang, Boy George, etcetera) are openly identifying themselves as gay or lesbian and when rock songs occasionally refer to same sex eroticism,” she wrote. “Sometimes this is the youth’s first indication that she is not alone.”

If not for Shanda’s murder, however, it’s unlikely that the community of New Albany would ever have realized the existence of this group of gay girls.

13

O
n the Saturday that Shanda Sharer’s body was found, Guy Townsend, the chief prosecutor for Indiana’s Fifth Judicial Circuit, was in the next county trying the cases of two women charged with helping three inmates escape from the Switzerland County jail.

Townsend had planned to wrap the trial up on Friday, but it had dragged on an extra day. At ten that evening, while the jury was still out and the exhausted Townsend was chugging coffee, trying to keep his wits about him, the phone rang. It was his chief deputy, Donald Currie, calling from Madison.

“We’ve got a murder and it’s a bad one,” Currie said. “It’s a young girl and we’re getting ready to arrest two suspects. You won’t believe this, Guy. We think two teenage girls did it.”

Townsend was still on the phone when a bailiff tapped him on the shoulder and told him that the jury had finally reached a verdict. It was time to go back into court.

“I’d been thinking about nothing but that trial of those two women for weeks and suddenly it didn’t seem very important,” Townsend said. “All I could think about was getting back to Madison to find out more about the murder.”

After hearing the jury’s verdicts—both women were found guilty—Townsend jumped in his car and headed back to Madison. “All the way back I’m thinking, Do I want to do this? Do I want to deal with something as horrible as this? Do I want to prosecute children for killing a child?”