Little Lost Angel (15 page)

During the drive to the police station, Clifton and Glenda Lawrence waited for Toni to tell them it was just a prank and to take her home. But Toni said nothing, she just held her hands cupped to her mouth as if in prayer and bit down on a knuckle and whimpered.

*  *  *

Steve Henry and Sheriff Buck Shipley brought out spotlights at sunset and the officers continued working for another hour, driven by the fear that they might have overlooked a clue. But after seven hours there was nothing more to do. They called an ambulance to pick up the body.

Wells took photos as the other officers carefully lifted the burned body. The hair on the back of the head was soaked with blood, and a small puddle of blood had formed on the ground. They found an injury to the back of the head and a small puncture wound at the base of the neck. After placing plastic bags over the hands—to protect any fingerprints that might identify the victim—the body was lifted into an ambulance and taken to the morgue at King’s Daughters Hospital in Madison. The next day the body would be taken to Louisville, Kentucky, for an autopsy by Dr. George Nichols, Kentucky’s chief medical examiner and an expert on burn victims.

Cold, tired, and hungry, the men drove to a Hardee’s restaurant on the north side of Madison and got a meal and coffee. They wondered why the murderer, whom they assumed to be a man, had made no effort to conceal the body.

“He could have carried it another twenty yards to those woods and it may never have been found,” Buck Shipley said. “It just doesn’t make sense. It’s as though he didn’t care if it was found.”

“Maybe whoever did it thought the fire would burn the body down to ashes,” Henry said.

The men hunched over their coffees and talked a while longer before leaving for Shipley’s office in Madison. During the drive, Steve Henry considered his next move. He had an unidentified body and no suspects. Prospects were not good.

He had no way of knowing that all the pieces of the puzzle were about to fall into place.

9

T
he temperature had dropped below freezing by the time Sheriff Buck Shipley, Steve Henry, Randy Spry, and Curtis Wells arrived at the Jefferson County police station and jail, a two-story, concrete-block building across an alley from the county courthouse in Madison. They’d been inside only a few minutes when they learned that they had two visitors.

Darryl Pyles, a Madison resident, walked into the police station with an arm around the shoulder of his teenage son, Shawn.

“My son has something to tell you,” Darryl told Shipley grimly. “It’s about a murder.”

Shipley and Steve Henry quickly ushered the father and son into the sheriff’s office and closed the door. After a moment of nervous hesitation, Shawn Pyles told the officers the same macabre tale he’d related to his father half an hour earlier. The same story he’d heard that afternoon at the Anderson Bowling Alley.

“Toni and Hope said that two other girls had killed and burned a little girl,” Shawn Pyles told the police. “They said the girls were lesbians.”

Shawn said that he and another boy, Chris Alcorn, had
advised the girls to go to the police, and he asked Shipley if he’d heard from them. Shipley shook his head and asked the boy to repeat the girls’ names.

“Toni Lawrence and Hope Rippey,” Shawn said.

Steve Henry leaned closer to Shawn. “Did they say where or when this murder took place?” he asked.

“This morning,” Shawn answered. “In a field in the country.”

Henry and Shipley were still questioning Shawn when the door to the office opened. Deputy Randy Spry leaned in the doorway and told Shipley that the Madison police were on the phone. Shipley waved off the call, but Spry was insistent.

“You better take this call, Buck,” Spry said.

Shipley walked out of his office and picked up the phone. An officer at the Madison police station, which was a few blocks away, told Shipley that a teenage girl and her parents had just walked into their station. They knew something about the murder.

“What’s her name?” Shipley asked.

“Toni Lawrence,” was the response.

Shipley’s pulse raced but he said calmly, “Send them over.”

*  *  *

Toni’s parents wrapped their arms around their daughter’s narrow shoulders as they led her into the police station.

To Buck Shipley and Steve Henry, the thin, disheveled blonde looked like a frightened bird. They guided the Lawrences into Shipley’s office and closed the door. With a trembling hand, Toni signed a waiver of her rights. She sniffled as Henry switched on a tape recorder.

In a soothing voice, Henry asked Toni if she had something to tell him. She muttered something under her breath, then began her story in a halting whisper.

She hadn’t been talking long when Henry stopped her, wanting to make sure he had gathered it all in. “Okay,” he said. “Shanda had been flirting or trying to go out with Amanda, right? What was Melinda’s reaction to this?”

Toni looked Steve Henry in the eye. “Melinda hated her and she said she wanted to kill her.”

“How old is Shanda?”

“Thirteen,” Toni said, not aware that she was actually younger.

Henry and Shipley were shocked by the age. It sounded too young for the body they’d found.

“Do you know Shanda’s last name?” Henry asked.

If Melinda had mentioned it, Toni could not remember it now. She went on with her tale, recounting how the girls had lured Shanda into their car.

“Melinda jumped up and put a knife to Shanda’s throat and said if she didn’t talk to her she was going to slit her throat . . . .”

Toni’s voice trailed off and she began crying. She bit the back of her hand and began to rock back and forth in her chair.

“Let’s take a little break,” Steve Henry said. He flipped off the tape recorder and followed Buck Shipley out the door, leaving Toni and her parents in the room.

Curtis Wells and Randy Spry were huddled at the booking counter, waiting to hear what the teenage girl had told the other officers about the murder.

“Call down to Jeffersonville,” Henry told Wells. “See if there’s a missing-person report on a thirteen-year-old named Shanda.”

The lab technician’s eyes questioned Henry.

“That’s right,” the detective said. “Thirteen years old.”

Shipley spoke to Wells and Spry in a low voice so that the Lawrences, who were in the next room, couldn’t hear. “It looks like the Pyles boy might be right. All we’ve heard about so far are girls. Teenagers. She mentioned a Laurie Tackett. That could be George Tackett’s girl. I think he has a daughter about that age.”

There weren’t too many people in Madison that Shipley didn’t know, particularly people with a record. George Tackett had spent time in prison for robbery when he was a young man. Since then he’d worked at a factory and remained out of trouble. Shipley also vaguely knew George’s wife, Peggy, who worked part time at a local bakery.

Henry flipped a cigarette from his pack and poured a
fresh cup of coffee. “Do you have any idea how we can find anything on a sixteen-year-old from New Albany named Melinda?” he asked Wells. “She might be a lesbian.”

“I’ll call Virgil Seay, the chief probation officer down there,” Wells volunteered. “If she’s been in any trouble before, Virgil will know her.”

Henry looked at Shipley and asked, “Ready for more?”

Shipley nodded solemnly and followed Henry back into the room where Toni was waiting with her parents. The thin girl seemed to have regained her composure, and she picked up her story, telling the officers about the Witches’ Castle, the assault on Shanda on the dirt road, and about Melinda and Laurie’s long drive with Shanda in the trunk.

Toni began to stammer. “They said that every time they heard her screaming . . . they would . . . they would hit her in the head with a crowbar. They said they were going to take gasoline . . . They were going to pour it on her body and they were going to burn her. And they even said they did. They told us they did.”

Toni began crying again. She seemed to shrivel and become smaller as she hunched down in the hard wooden chair. Glenda Lawrence reached over and put an arm around her daughter to console her. While Henry waited for Toni to get control of herself, Shipley got up slowly and walked out of the room. In the booking room, he told Deputy Spry to go to Laurie Tackett’s house and try to find the car described by Toni: a white sedan with a brown vinyl top.

“Give us a call when you get there and let us know what you find,” Shipley said.

Back in Shipley’s office, Henry was coaxing Toni to continue.

“Did you get the impression that these girls had been to the Witches’ Castle before?” he asked.

“Laurie had,” Toni said. “She used to be a Pentecostal and she quit and she started hanging around with Larry and Terry Leatherbury and then she got back into church and then she quit again and got in all these cults and they drink . . . blood.”

“They drink what?” Henry asked, not sure he’d heard correctly.

“Each other’s blood,” Toni said, her voice shaking.

Henry swallowed hard. Toni shifted uneasily in her chair. The room was still silent when Shipley returned from talking with Randy Spry. Henry looked at Shipley for a moment, then took a deep breath and continued his questioning.

“Who are Larry and Terry Leatherbury? Are they into this same type of thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Do they go to school?”

“I don’t know if they do anymore,” Toni said. “I haven’t seen them lately.”

Henry needed a cigarette. “Let’s take a little break,” he said. The weary detective walked out to the garage, Shipley at his side, and took a drag on his cigarette, sighing deeply. “This is too weird,” Henry said, gazingly blankly at the ceiling. “Lord, these are teenage girls.”

Shipley spoke in a brotherly manner: “Come on, Steve, let’s finish up with her. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

*  *  *

When they started again, Toni said that Laurie and Melinda had dropped her and Hope off at their homes at around nine-forty-five that morning and then had gone on from there to burn Shanda.

She told the lie smoothly, but Henry was suspicious. Toni’s home in Madison was at least a twenty-minute drive from where the body was found. If Toni’s story was right, Melinda and Laurie couldn’t have arrived at the burn site until after ten o’clock. That was about the time that Greg Foley drove down Lemon Road and only half an hour before Donn and Ralph Foley found an already cold body. Something didn’t fit, Henry said to himself. The girl was hiding something.

Henry and Shipley listened in silence as a perplexed Clifton Lawrence suddenly took over the questioning of his own daughter.

“When they said they were going to burn her—was that
after they dropped you off or before?” the father asked his daughter.

“Before.”

Clifton Lawrence was still puzzled. “They told you when they dropped you off that they were going to burn her?” he asked urgently.

Toni shifted uneasily in her chair. “Yes.”

Clifton Lawrence seemed to be wrestling with a dreadful realization. He’d been home when Toni came into the house that morning. She had walked right by him and said nothing about a little girl’s life being in danger. If Toni knew at that point that the other girls were going to burn the little girl, why hadn’t she said anything to him or his wife?

Henry wanted to make sure he’d heard correctly. “They burned her after they dropped you off this morning?” he asked.

Toni nodded. “They even went and got gasoline,” she said.

Clifton Lawrence stuttered in disbelief. “On the way home . . . on the way to bring you home? Did they get gasoline before they brought you home?”

“They got it on the way to my house,” Toni replied sheepishly.

“This morning?” Henry asked.

Toni nodded.

“Where was Shanda then?” Henry asked.

“I guess she was in the trunk,” Toni said matter-of-factly.

Clifton’s anger overwhelmed him. “You don’t know?” he asked sharply. “Where did they put the gas?”

“They put it in a two-liter bottle that Melinda had,” Toni answered meekly.

“When did you see inside the trunk?” Henry asked.

“Huh?” Toni said. She seemed to be stalling.

Clifton leaned toward his daughter and tersely repeated Henry’s question: “When did you see inside the trunk?”

Toni began rocking back and forth as tears welled up in her eyes. “When they had her on the ground. They took her out on the ground because Laurie had a butcher knife and that’s when . . . Oh God . . . they were going to stab her or
something. But they didn’t stab her. They beat her over the head and then I looked up and blood was on the trunk. They put her back in the trunk.”

“Did Shanda appear to be alive?” Henry asked.

“Yes,” Toni said, beginning to cry.

Henry suspected that Toni was lying about her involvement, but he wasn’t ready to charge her with being an accessory to murder. Not yet, anyway.

*  *  *

Before the Lawrences left the police station that night they told Henry and Shipley about the Rippeys’ plan to spend the night in a motel. The officers knew there would be little chance of finding the Rippeys that night. Their spirits got a lift, however, when Deputy Spry returned to the police station from his trip to the Tackett residence with news about Melinda and Laurie.