Little Lost Angel (41 page)

Laurie’s own attorney had referred to her in animalistic terms, such as “tiger” and “mad dog,” but of the four girls, she was clearly the intellectual superior. Melinda was a sixteen-year-old eighth-grader who made poor grades. And nothing in Hope’s or Toni’s background suggested that they were anything but average thinkers. Laurie’s problems with school stemmed from her radical behavior, not her learning ability. Unfortunately, Laurie’s mind had always sought escape rather than enlightenment, embracing the unsettling universe of the occult rather than finding a way through the hard reality of the world around her. Laurie’s life was a long, lonely progression from one delusion to another.

“I can’t say for sure why this was the night, why the conditions were right, for Laurie’s anger to explode,” Henry said. “Kary Pope said it didn’t matter to Laurie who she killed, and I think that’s true to an extent. As for that moment in time, I believe Laurie was trying to prove herself to Melinda, trying to play the man’s role in their relationship. Once Laurie had hurt Shanda badly, once she was past the point where they could take her home and not get in serious trouble, Melinda was in all the way. She saw killing Shanda as her only way out.”

Henry believes that Hope Rippey made the same choice, although hers came later that night.

“Hope was playing it both ways all night,” Henry said. “Whenever she was alone with Toni she’d be saying things like ‘Oh God, what are they doing,’ but when she was with Laurie she was a willing partner. Hope was the only one of the girls who had a chance to act outside the view of all the others that night and that came when she was alone with Shanda at the door. At that point she could have warned her that a trap was being set and the whole thing could have ended there, without the other girls even suspecting that she said something. She could have come back to the car and lied that Shanda’s father got up and wouldn’t let her leave. No, Hope went along with the plan because Laurie had left her at the door and she didn’t want to let Laurie down.”

Although it was never clear whether Hope was trying to help Shanda or Melinda and Laurie in the scuffle on the logging road, after that she returned to the car with Toni and did what Toni did—simply watched. She tried to distance herself from what was going on once again when she stayed with Toni at the house while Laurie and Melinda drove off with Shanda.

Testimony during Hope’s sentencing hearing showed that she willingly took part and even enjoyed the early stages of tormenting Shanda. Shanda, with her good looks and prim manner, was representative of all the preppy girls at Madison High who had looked down on Hope. But Hope didn’t really choose her direction until Melinda and Laurie returned to the house with Shanda in the trunk and Hope saw her bloody body. At that point Hope seemed to make a conscious decision, some might argue a practical decision, to get it over with, to finish her off, to dispose of the body and try to cover their tracks. She apparently sprayed Shanda with the Windex, thinking it might be an accelerant; she told Melinda how to find Shanda’s heart when Melinda wanted to stab her; she directed them to the burn site; she helped lift Shanda from the trunk and she poured the gasoline.

Although Hope’s actions were inexcusable, they weren’t inconsistent with the elements of group violence. In gang situations there are leaders and there are willing accomplices. Hope was one of the latter, the type who likes to hang
with a rough crowd and who, with the proper push, will do her part. Jails are filled with Hope’s type, those who enjoy the thrill of acting tough.

“Hope made a conscious decision to help kill Shanda after the girls got back to the house,” Henry said. “And that’s why she got fifty years and Toni only got twenty.”

There was a degree of public sympathy for Toni Lawrence, the only one of the girls whose actions, or lack of actions, seemed the least bit understandable, although not at all acceptable.
Courier-Journal
columnist Dale Moss expressed the feelings of many when he wrote after Toni’s sentencing hearing: “Toni Lawrence was gutless for not stopping her friends from murdering Shanda Sharer. But the hemorrhaging from this horrific chapter should end. Lawrence’s maximum twenty-year term only serves as understandable vengeance for Shanda’s loved ones. Lawrence clearly was far from ideal. At fifteen, she also was far from maturity. She apparently didn’t harm Shanda and she alerted police to the murder. She isn’t a lost cause, or, it would seem, a public threat. The longer she wastes her young-adult years in prison, the more likely she could be. Instead, after a more reasonable stretch, take Lawrence to high schools. Make her explain to every mealy-mouthed teenager with punks for friends the difference between being a hero and being a felon.”

Jacque Vaught was angered by Moss’s column. She had said many times that each of the girls was as guilty as the others. That Toni seemed to have more moral character than the others, but not the strength to exert it, earned her no sympathy from Jacque, who felt that Toni was the only possible hope that Shanda had that night and Toni was too weak, too selfish, to take that one step that would have saved Shanda—a phone call to police.

Dr. George Nichols, who performed Shanda’s autopsy, told Jacque and Steve that Shanda could probably have survived her injuries had she not been set on fire. The fact that Shanda’s life could have been saved during any of the seven or eight hours that Toni sat idly by was unforgivable to Jacque.

“Toni was convicted for doing nothing,” Jacque said.
“And it was due justice because if she would have done something, Shanda would not have died.”

The actions of Toni’s father, Clifton Lawrence, who insisted that Toni confess to the police, seem to demonstrate that Toni had been brought up by parents who knew the difference between right and wrong, who knew about social responsibility. What is also apparent is that whatever moral courage Toni learned from her parents was absent that night and morning in January 1992.

Of all the stories written about the murder, articles in the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Advocate
(California’s gay and lesbian voice), the
Baltimore Sun
, and many others, the most insightful may have been written by Louisville
Courier-Journal
columnist Jim Adams:

Do you know what people are thinking every time these teenage terrorists appear on the television screen being led from courthouse to jail? They think, “But these girls look so normal.”

There is the one whose hair could have been painted by Botticelli, whose wardrobe is the sort compiled only through serious mall time. We’re repelled by the horrible crime, and then we’re confused by the young and immaculate murderess. And that name—not even a bad novelist would call a heartless villain Melinda Loveless.

Two others cross our living rooms, appearing well treated by life. Laurie Tackett, on the other hand, is the possible exception to the conflict between manner and deed. Her TV face is hard, and old beyond her years.

The teen years as I knew them twenty and twenty-five years ago are long dead. The level of parental control we knew is gone. Twenty-five years ago, I’d never heard of four girls in their midteens who ever actually stayed out all night; even the wildest girls in school had curfews, and no one ever heard them talk the next day about murdering any small children while they were out on the town.

Even the standard of normalcy has changed beyond recognition. As just one sickened newspaper reader, I
can barely stand to face one more story about what kids are doing to each other.

Creatures such as Loveless and Tackett aren’t made by freak chance, and they aren’t made in healthy, loving homes.

What is frightening, therefore, is just how close to normal they may actually be.

Epilogue

A
s the
Courier-Journal
reporter who covered Shanda’s murder, I knew all too well what my colleague Jim Adams was feeling. As I researched this book, seeking the answer to the question “Why?” I pored through a labyrinth of interviews, court transcripts, depositions, letters, psychological reports, magazine articles, and books. I never found a satisfying solution to the question, but I did come across two clues that linger with me and may one day help me understand. One was a stream-of-consciousness essay Laurie Tackett wrote while in prison:

PLEASE HEAR WHAT I’M NOT SAYING

Don’t be fooled by me. Don’t be fooled by the face I wear. For I wear a mask, a thousand masks. Masks that I’m afraid to take off and none of them is me. Pretending is an art that’s second nature to me. But don’t be fooled. For God’s sake don’t be fooled. I give you the impression that confidence is my name and coolness my game. That the water’s calm and I’m in command and that I need no one. But don’t believe me. My surface may seem smooth, but my surface is my mask, ever-varying and ever-concealing. Beneath lies no complacence.
Beneath lies confusion and fear and aloneness. But I hide this. I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed. That’s why I frantically create a mask to hide behind, a nonchalant, sophisticated facade to help me pretend, to protect me from the glance that knows. But such a glance is precisely my salvation. My only hope and I know it. That is, if followed by love. It’s the only thing that can liberate me from myself, from my own self-built prison walls, from the barriers I so painstakingly erect. It’s the only thing that will assure me of what I can’t assure myself. So, I play my game—a mask without, and a trembling child within. The empty parade of masks. I tell you everything that’s really nothing and nothing of what’s everything, of what’s crying within me. Only you can wipe away from my eyes the blank stare of the breathing dead. Who am I, you may wonder. I am someone you know very well. Yourself.

The other piece that puzzles my mind is an essay taken from the book
Diary
, written by Andrew O’Hagan, an assistant editor of the
London Review of Books
. Reacting to the 1992 abduction and murder of a two-year-old boy from Liverpool, allegedly by two ten-year-old boys, O’Hagan reminisced about his own childhood endeavors into violence:

The kids who were targeted were thought deviant in some way—maybe they were serious, bright, quiet, keeping to themselves. When I was nine, there was a particular boy who lived two squares up. For years, I’d listened to boys telling of how they’d love to do him in. I sort of liked him, but I joined in the chase when we pursued him in and out of housing projects and across fields.

If all this sounds uncommonly horrific, then I can only say that it did not seem so then. There was no steady regression toward the juvenile barbarism famously depicted in the
Lord of the Flies
. We lived two lives at once. We all made our First Communion, did
our homework and became altar boys. We didn’t stop to think, nor did our parents, that something dire might result from the darker of our extracurricular activities. Except when that murky side took over and our bad-bastardness became obvious to everyone. It was scary and competitive, and it brought out the very worst in anybody who had anything to do with it.

It’s not that any of us were evil but now and then we got out of hand. The boys I hung with were always losing their heads. What started out as a game of crazy golf would end up as a game of clubbing the neighbor’s cat to death. A night of camping could usually be turned into an opportunity for the wrecking of vegetable gardens, or killing frogs and people’s pet rabbits. Mindless stuff. Yet now and again people would get into things that you sensed were about to go over the edge or were already over it. Something happened when we were all together. We were competitive, deluded, and full of our own small powers. As only dependents can be, we were full of our own independence. The approval that really mattered was that of the wee pals we ran around with. There are times when I’m sure we could’ve led one another into just about anything.

The essay ended with O’Hagan’s recollection of David, a three-year-old boy from his neighborhood. O’Hagan admitted that he and others would often take sport in roughing up the lad, once beating his legs with a coiled strap. One day David disappeared after being last seen playing on a construction site frequented by O’Hagan and his young cohorts. The boy was never found, and adults assumed that he’d either fallen into a pipe trench and been covered or that he’d been abducted.

“Yet in silent, instinctive ways we understood something of David’s other possible end, the one that wasn’t an accident,” O’Hagan wrote. “We knew something of children’s fearful cruelty to children. None of us believed that David was playing alone at that building site that day. As many of us grew older, we came to think it not inconceivable
that David had come to grief at the hands of boys not a lot older than himself.”

*  *  *