Little Lost Angel (40 page)

Worth noting here is southern Indiana police officer Gary Hall’s observation that two days before Shanda’s murder, a television tabloid show aired a lengthy report on the 1985 California murder of seventeen-year-old Missy Avila by two of her female classmates. The motive, as in Shanda’s case, was jealousy. There was never any evidence that Melinda or Laurie had watched that program, but Hall thought the similarities between the crimes—both girls were lured to their death and killed in the country—were, at the very least, sadly ironic.

While sociologists debate the causes, youth violence continues to grow. Attorney-General Janet Reno said in 1993 that violence by young people was “the greatest single crime problem in America today.”

Between 1987 and 1991, the last year for which statistics are available, the number of teenagers arrested for murder
around the country increased by 85 percent, according to the Department of Justice. In 1991, ten- to seventeen-year-olds accounted for 17 percent of all violent crimes, and there’s every indication that percentage is growing.

Judge Jeanne Jourdan cut to the heart of Shanda’s tragic death when she noted Hope Rippey’s “lack of mercy, of tender courage.” And who could dispute Jourdan’s warning that parents need to nurture their children.

But there were still many unanswered questions beyond who sodomized Shanda. Perplexing questions—not about the details of the murder, but around its very occurrence.

Prosecutor Guy Townsend’s theory that Melinda Loveless wanted someone killed and Laurie Tackett wanted to kill someone was generally accepted as a bare-boned but logical explanation of the murder. But Townsend readily admitted that his courtroom comments were fashioned for a clear purpose: to put the guilty parties behind bars.

“Obviously, the motivations at work here reach deeper than that,” Townsend said. “Who’s to say how these girls ever got to that point where murder came so easy? That’s for the sociologists to debate.”

When not on the job, Townsend is probably as liberal and open-minded a thinker as you will find in Madison and not one for quick judgments. But he had a hard time swallowing the defense’s arguments concerning the psychological damage done to Melinda and Laurie by their parents.

“The defense made a lot of hay out of Melinda’s and Laurie’s supposedly horrid home lives,” he said. “But I was never convinced that their home lives were as horrible as the defense attorneys and their paid psychologists claimed. They were hired to put on a show, and they did. As for Melinda’s sisters and cousins, they obviously had an interest in making Melinda—not Shanda—seem like the victim.”

Melinda’s co-counsel Mike Walro, however, thought that his client’s background had a tremendous effect on her psyche.

“When I first met Melinda I was struck by the vulnerability of this girl,” Walro said. “I couldn’t figure out how a girl
so nice, so normal, so genuine, so concerned for other people, could be involved in the things she said she did.”

Walro said all his questions were answered when he learned of the conditions she had grown up under.

“Melinda is a handicapped person in the sense that she comes from a home where the normal was not what we consider normal,” he said. “She and her sisters grew up where crotch grabbing, finger sniffing, and underwear smelling were the norm, where they saw their mother physically abused, mentally abused, and emotionally abused and where the same thing happened to them.”

But Dr. Nancy Moore, a Louisville clinical psychologist who followed the case through the news, said the testimonies of psychologists for Melinda and Laurie “should be taken with a grain of salt. Clearly, coming up with sympathetic opinions was what they were paid to do.”

While Moore agreed that victims of abuse are more likely to abuse others than those who haven’t been abused, she was quick to add that most abuse victims learn to deal with their painful pasts without turning to violence.

Dr. Rodney Young, another Louisville clinical psychologist, said, “I have talked with child sexual abuse victims about this case, and they were horrified that someone could do this to someone else. And these were girls who had gone through as much or worse than what supposedly happened to Loveless or Tackett.”

The fact remains, however, that many killers were abused as children. A study by researcher Dorothy Lewis published by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 1988 found that twelve of fourteen juveniles on death row in four states had long histories of severe beatings and sexual abuse.

Another Lewis study, quoted in a July 1993
Newsweek
article on teen violence, found that maltreatment increased children’s inclination to act impulsively, predisposed them to lash out, and often caused children to lose their ability to feel empathy for others. All of which is an echo of Laurie’s defense.

A similar article published in the January 17, 1994 issue
of
U.S. News & World Report
—an issue that featured a photo of Laurie Tackett—quoted Terence P. Thornberry, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Albany, as saying, “Violence does not drop out of the sky at fifteen. It is part of a long developmental process that begins in early childhood.” Thornberry said that kids who grow up in families where there is a history of violent behavior learn early on to act out physically when they are frustrated or upset.

Most experts agree, however, that child abuse is just a piece of the puzzle and that the epidemic of youth violence in our society can also be blamed on the general breakdown of families, schools, and other community institutions. Then there are those who point to the dehumanizing effect of television and movies, from
A Clockwork Orange
to
Menace II Society
, that feed children a steady diet of glorified violence.

Not only is youth violence more widespread, it has taken on a more vicious, remorseless nature. Police report increasing instances of youths killing for kicks and then bragging of their exploits.

Court testimony showed that Laurie Tackett had wanted to murder someone for all the publicity. Similar sentiments were expressed last year by seventeen-year-old Raul Omar Villareal, one of six teenage boys arrested in the brutal rape and strangulation of two Houston girls. “Hey great, we hit the big time,” said Villareal, who added, “Human life means nothing.” And Melinda’s glee following Shanda’s murder was echoed last year when one of three teenage boys arrested for fatally stabbing another teen in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, reportedly laughed about the killing afterward.

“We’re seeing a new breed of young people who are very reckless, very carefree, and who have thrown off the inhibitions that typically constrained adolescent behavior,” Victor Herbert, the executive director of New York City’s public high schools, told
Scholastic Update
. “They take the attitude, ‘Why not do almost anything, why not knock someone over if they are in the way.’”

Colonel Leonard Supenski of the Baltimore County police
department told
Fortune
magazine in 1992, “There are a whole lot of disaffected, alienated youth out there who use violence, and use it with no remorse.”

Dr. Richard Johnson, a clinical psychologist in Louisville, felt that Laurie Tackett’s fascination with the occult just compounded those nihilistic feelings. The occult is enticing to some teenagers because it “places no limits sexually or physically on pleasing yourself,” Johnson said. “If you want to hurt someone, go for it. That appears to be the kind of behavior displayed here.”

The
U.S. News & World Report
article said, “Behind the rash of violence is a startling shift in adolescent attitudes. Suddenly—chillingly—respect for life has ebbed sharply among teenagers.”

Just as chillingly, Shanda’s murder, with all its peculiarities, seems to fit neatly into one of the typical scenarios for teen violence, that of group participation. Unlike adult criminals, who usually act alone, violent teens normally move in a pack. In the
Newsweek
article University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang said that research has shown that about 85 percent of juvenile offenses are committed by groups of two or more. In a gang the conscience that would normally stop a healthy person from committing a crime is damaged or missing altogether. That’s when gruesome acts can happen. The victim becomes dehumanized in the attackers’ minds, said Richard Pesikoff, a Baylor College of Medicine psychiatrist for children and adolescents. “Then they are treated as things.”

Dr. Eric Engum, the psychologist who testified on Laurie’s behalf, described this as “sharks in a feeding frenzy,” where one person’s actions spur others to do things they wouldn’t have considered on their own. “As horrible as the violence is, everyone goes along with the crowd rather than go it alone.”

“I think that makes sense here,” Dr. Nancy Moore said. “We’ve all seen how adolescents behave in a group, how they lose their sense of what’s normal. What these girls did to Shanda Sharer is that taken to the extreme.”

Wayne Engle, who covered Shanda’s murder for the
Madison Courier
, also believes that was the case here.

“There was a synergism between Melinda and Laurie,” Engle said. “Although Melinda said she wanted to kill Shanda, I don’t think she was strong enough to do it until she met Laurie. Their personalities meshed into someone or something that was capable.”

Dr. Charles Patrick Ewing, a professor of criminology at the State University of New York in Buffalo and author of the book
Kids Who Kill
, said that when murders are committed by more than one person “a group mentality comes into play, a kind of one-upmanship that may start harmlessly but escalates to violence as one says to the other, ‘You did that; well, I’ll do this.’”

When juveniles kill, “they tend to overkill,” said Ewing, who was familiar with the details of Shanda’s murder. “The violence they inflict is extreme, much more than is necessary to accomplish the murder. Boys are twenty times more likely to kill than girls, but when girls do kill, they tend to have an accomplice, as in this case.”

Girls more than boys seek group acceptance for their anger, said Judith Lambeth, executive director of Maryhurst, a home for emotionally troubled teenagers in Louisville.

“If boys are angry they tend to explode and it’s over,” Lambeth said. “Girls carry it on and talk about it until they work themselves into a frenzy. It’s altogether possible that Loveless said she wanted to kill her, but she never really believed that she would, and it was like a snowballing effect, with none of these kids being strong enough to stop or say no. I think Tackett was the colder one and that Melinda was the emotional one. What was Tackett’s motive? Her payoff was the evil of it.”

A number of studies have shown that girls are committing violent crimes with increasing frequency. In 1987, 15 percent of the crimes that girls were convicted of committing were violent offenses. By 1991, that number had soared to 38 percent.

Deborah Grisham Blair, a Louisville clinical psychologist, said, “I see girls acting out violently. I didn’t used to see girls like this. I really didn’t. They are more aggressive. Are we raising a generation of paranoid kids who are overly
responsive to possible threats? Or are we socializing our kids less and neglecting them more and letting them raise themselves?”

Arlene Taylor, a bus driver in the Louisville school system, sees fighting escalating among girls. “Girls did not fight like that a few years ago. Girls now really inflict pain when they fight. They scratch, pull hair, claw, and bite. They carry knives for protection. When I ask them why they say, ‘You don’t know what it’s like out there.’”

“I’ve been amazed by the brutality of the beatings of girls by other girls,” Dr. Naftali Berrill, director of the New York Forensic Mental Health Group, told
Newsweek
magazine, which cited the rise in girls committing violent acts as a sign that “the plague of teen violence is now an equal-opportunity scourge.”

Louisville psychologists who followed the Sharer case had various opinions about why Toni Lawrence apparently stood by and watched the beatings and murder but didn’t directly participate.

“She might have feared for her own safety,” Dr. Nancy Moore said. “Once you get a picture of that rage, you don’t want that rage turned on you.”

Judith Lambeth suspects Lawrence was in shock. “Sometimes when viewing a traumatic event, it becomes like an out-of-body experience,” she said. “You are there, but you are not there. You disassociate so that you don’t have to deal with it.”

Richard Coomer, a psychiatric social worker in Louisville, believes that each girl crossed a personal line that night from which there was no turning back.

“For one it might have been the kidnapping,” he said. “For another the beating. But there was a point where each of them should have said: ‘Oops, I messed up. I made a mistake in getting involved. This is enough.’ But they didn’t, and once they crossed that line, they felt they were in too much trouble. They were out on a limb and there was no turning back.”

Detective Steve Henry, who knows more about the case than anyone, had his own opinion of why it happened. Henry said that when Melinda lost Amanda to Shanda, it
wasn’t at all like a typical junior-high girl losing her boyfriend to another girl. If Melinda had been older it would have been easier for her to find another gay companion. At that age, where life revolves around your school, there wasn’t much likelihood of finding another classmate who would return her affections.

“That’s why Amanda was so special to Melinda,” Henry said. “The normal jealousy that a girl would feel by being jilted was heightened to a dangerous level.”

Even so, Henry believes that Melinda probably did not intend to kill Shanda when she lured her to the car that night and that her purpose was always to just hurt her.

“I think Melinda was ready to stop at the logging road and that’s where Laurie just took over,” Henry said. “Laurie had all this frustration building up inside her for years and this was her chance to let it out.”