Little Lost Angel (13 page)

Shortly after sending the message, Spry saw a truck approaching on Lemon Road. It was Donn’s son Greg, returning from Madison after buying some cigarettes. Greg
pulled up beside the three men standing on the gravel road and rolled down his window.

“That farmer called the cops on you, didn’t he?” Greg said, halfway enjoying the opportunity to preach to his old man. “See, I told you he was serious about not hunting there.”

Donn Foley shook his head and told his son to step out of the truck. They showed him the charred body. Greg was unable to pull his eyes away from the figure. Spry asked him whether he’d noticed it when he drove by half an hour earlier. Greg told the officer that he hadn’t seen it and that if he had he would have stopped.

“I can’t believe I passed it by,” Greg Foley said.

*  *  *

Richard “Buck” Shipley, fifty-two, had been elected sheriff of Jefferson County a year earlier, after spending twenty-five years as a trooper for the Indiana State Police. He was sturdily built, with light brown hair and an easy smile.

It was noon before Shipley arrived at the scene from his home in Madison. At first glance he was as perplexed as the others. He’d seen a lot of dead bodies, but he’d never seen one in such a curious position, flat on its back, with its legs spread wide and its arms in the air.

Shipley pulled off his glasses, squinted, then put them back on. Only then was he sure it was a human body.

Shipley didn’t know where the trail of such a grisly crime would lead, but he knew that he had neither the manpower nor the resources to handle a complex investigation. He decided to call the state police and request a detective and lab technician.

*  *  *

After dropping off Hope, Laurie and Melinda drove back to Laurie’s house so they could wash the blood off the car.

“Laurie goes in like nothing happened,” Melinda recalled. “She was cheerful. She complained to her dad that her muffler had come loose, so he got under the car and fixed it.”

The girls didn’t realize until George Tackett was under the car that blood stains remained on the outside of the trunk. They stood around and watched him reattach the tailpipe to
the muffler, making sure to block his view of the blood when he crawled out from under the car. Then, not willing to take any more chances, they quickly moved the car around to the back of the house, got out a garden hose, and washed the inside and outside of the trunk.

There were bloody hand prints all over the inside of the trunk. Laurie found a blood-stained white sock that had belonged to Shanda and tossed it on the burn pile. They deposited Shanda’s other clothes there and started a small fire to burn them. Looking into the trunk again, Laurie told Melinda to come closer. Laurie was picking at something, which finally came loose from the bottom of the trunk. She held the bloody mass between her fingers and turned to Melinda.

“Look—a piece of her skull,” Laurie said, laughing. She extended her hand toward Melinda. “Smell it.”

Melinda slapped her hand, and the fleshy substance fell to the ground.

“I guess the dog will eat it,” joked Laurie.

They walked into the house, and Laurie asked if she could spend the night with Melinda. Peggy Tackett looked at Melinda and noticed how nervous she seemed.

“It’s okay with me if it’s okay with Melinda,” she said.

Melinda nodded to say that it was, but she was already wanting to get away from Laurie. She’d accomplished what she’d set out to do. Shanda was out of her life. Laurie had come through like gangbusters. But now Melinda wanted to put it all behind her. Laurie was beginning to give her the creeps.

Before they left, Peggy Tackett told Laurie that Hope had called and said that it was very important for Laurie to call her.

*  *  *

When Hope entered her home after being dropped off by Melinda and Laurie, she found herself alone for the first time in more than twenty-four hours. Her mind raced with images of Shanda’s fiery death. Hope ran through her home, screaming, “This isn’t happening.”

Suddenly she saw a reflection in the living-room mirror and her heart jumped.

“What the hell is your problem?” asked her older brother, John, whose nap in the basement had been disturbed by the commotion.

“Nothing, nothing,” Hope replied. She couldn’t tell him what happened. He wouldn’t understand. “I’m okay,” she said, then slipped into her bedroom.

Hope and John did not get along. It was years since they’d had a long conversation. But John was worried about Hope. He’d never seen her so upset. He stuck his head in her door and saw his sister sitting on the bed, sniffling. “Hope, what’s wrong?” he asked.

Hope knew she couldn’t tell him the truth, but she had to say something. “John,” she said, “I saw some people burn in a car crash last night.”

“Is that all? So what?” he crowed unsympathetically before marching back downstairs.

“I decided I would call Laurie and have her come over,” Hope recalled. “When I called I was really upset, and Laurie’s mom asked what was wrong with me. Her mom’s really sweet and we’re sort of close. I told her I’d broken up with my boyfriend and I needed to talk to Laurie.”

Hope was hysterical when Laurie got her on the phone. Laurie told her to calm down and promised that she and Melinda would be right over.

“I can’t take it,” Hope said when Laurie and Melinda arrived. “What if we get caught? My God, what if someone finds out?”

“Take it easy, Hope,” Laurie said. “If everyone keeps their mouth shut, nobody will ever know.”

Laurie had brought her pouch of mystical stones with her. She spread them out on Hope’s bed.

“The signs are favorable,” Laurie assured her. “Everything is going to be just fine.”

*  *  *

Desperate minutes had stretched into hours. The search by Steve Sharer and his father had been fruitless. Shanda’s friend Michele and her mother were in the Sharer kitchen, helping Sharon make phone calls to everyone who had been at the party the night before. They found other phone numbers in Shanda’s purse and called them all. The answers
were all the same. No one had seen or heard from Shanda. Sharon even called Amanda Heavrin, who told her that she hadn’t talked to Shanda for weeks.

Steve called his longtime friend Joey Craig, a police officer from the neighboring town of Clarksville. Craig checked with all the police departments in the area but found no leads on Shanda’s whereabouts. At ten o’clock, Craig picked up Steve in his car and the two began another search of the area, stopping everyone they passed to ask if they’d seen a young blond girl. It was nearly noon when they returned to the house. Still no word about Shanda.

“Steve kept saying that somebody grabbed her,” Sharon recalled. “But I didn’t believe it. I kept reassuring him that she’d turn up. I thought she’d gone to somebody’s house when she got locked out and that she would turn up at any minute. I just refused to think that someone had taken her.”

Steve had put off calling Jacque because he didn’t want to upset her, but he couldn’t wait any longer. There was a chance Shanda had somehow made her way to her mother’s home.

*  *  *

Jacque and her sister, Debbie, had gone out to dinner the night before. They hadn’t stayed out late because Jacque was tired. The next morning, while she was reading the paper and drinking coffee, Jacque had an urge to call Shanda.

“It was about ten o’clock and I remember wanting to call Shanda and tell her I loved her,” she said later. “I thought it was odd at the time, because I usually called her at night when she stayed with Steve and Sharon. Well, I called over there and got no answer. [Steve and Sharon were both out searching for Shanda at that time.] I didn’t think anymore about it and went on getting ready.”

Jacque was thinking about moving out of the townhouse, and she and Debbie had planned to go house hunting that day. When Debbie arrived around noon, Jacque went into the bathroom to brush her teeth and was met by an odd sight—a vision that she would later believe was a sign from God.

“My tongue was black,” Jacque recalled. “I was able to brush it off, but it kind of scared me. I called my doctor, and
he said that perhaps a viral infection had settled into my tongue and he called in a prescription of antibiotics for me.”

Little did Jacque know that sixty miles away, her daughter, Shanda, lay dead, burned beyond recognition.

Jacque and Debbie were walking out the door when the phone rang. It was Steve.

“Jacque,” he said, “I didn’t want to call earlier because I didn’t want to upset you. Shanda’s disappeared. We can’t find her anywhere.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jacque arrived at Steve’s house and they called the police. A Clark County police officer come to the house and had them fill out a missing-persons report. By this time the Sharer home was filled with nervous relatives and friends. Every once in a while someone would think of another phone number to call, but mainly they just waited.

To take their minds off the worry, some of the men started in with the remodeling. But Steve was too jittery to be of much help. Every so often he would make up some excuse to leave the house and he’d walk to the garage, where no one could see him, and he would cry.

8

I
ndiana State Police Detective Steve Henry was going bald at forty-two, and his strong face was creased with the weathered wrinkles he’d earned working his mule teams in the fields of his farm in the evenings and on weekends. Although his face showed his years, his build was that of a college halfback.

Steve Henry had followed in his older brother Howard’s footsteps and become a state trooper when he was twenty-two. The close-knit brothers now worked together at the state police post in Sellersburg, about forty miles west of Madison.

Howard Henry was the region’s chief detective, and normally this would have been his case, but when the senior detective couldn’t be reached that day, the assignment fell to his younger brother. Steve Henry had assisted in dozens of homicide cases, but this would be his first as the lead detective.

Steve Henry and Curtis Wells, a lab technician who also worked at the Sellersburg post, both arrived at the crime scene at about the same time. Steve Henry already knew Donn Foley. They’d met years earlier and discovered that
they shared a common interest—raising mules. Henry also knew Randy Spry and Sheriff Buck Shipley. Spry had grown up not far from Henry’s farm in western Jefferson County, and Henry and Shipley had become friends during their years together as state troopers.

The four police officers crowded near the body. It was a gruesome sight. As Steve Henry studied the troubled look on Buck Shipley’s face, he remembered feeling the same way himself years earlier when he and an older trooper had investigated an especially grisly murder in Indianapolis. At that time the older trooper had made a remark that eased the tension. Recalling the trooper’s words, Henry turned to Shipley and said matter-of-factly, “Heart attack.”

Shipley laughed. To a layman it might have seemed a callous remark, but it served its purpose of relieving the stress, and Shipley knew it was no measure of Henry’s true feelings. Shipley could tell that Henry was deeply disturbed by what he saw.

“Looks like she might be in her early twenties,” Shipley said.

“I’d guess a little younger, maybe seventeen or eighteen,” Henry said. “What kind of animal would do something like this?”

They studied the curious position of the victim’s arms, which were raised into the air with clenched fists. Curtis Wells felt that the pugilistic position of the arms could mean that the young woman had been alive when she was set on fire and that she’d fought to free herself from a burning housecoat or blanket. That would explain the burned red cloth held tightly in her fists.

Thinking that the victim might have been abducted from her home in her housecoat, then murdered and burned by a rapist to cover his tracks, Shipley used his car radio to ask local police departments to check missing-persons reports for a young woman in her late teens to mid-twenties.

As Wells videotaped the body and surrounding area and followed up with color photographs, Steve Henry questioned the Foleys, then sent them on their way. Henry figured that since the body had been cold when Donn Foley touched it at 10:40
A.M
. and Greg Foley had not noticed
smoke when he drove by half an hour earlier, the young woman had to have been burned sometime before ten o’clock.

The fire had thawed the ground around the body, and there were footprints other than those of the Foleys and the police. Wells made plaster casts of the footprints and tire tracks in hopes they might provide a clue to the murderer’s identity.

Henry noticed that gravel on the road was disturbed at a point about a hundred feet from the body, possibly indicating a scuffle. The detective called the county highway department and learned that the road had been graded three days earlier. The gravel had been kicked around since then.

Fragments of a heavy red cloth were gathered near the body. So was the melted remains of a plastic two-liter soft-drink bottle.

Radio messages came back with missing-persons reports, and none matched the description of the victim.