Little Lost Angel (22 page)

The forty-nine-year-old Townsend had reason for doubt. He’d been in office for only a year and had never tried a murder case. His experience as a prosecutor was limited to four felony trials: an assault, a burglary, a child molestation, and the trial just completed. Prior to becoming prosecutor he’d tried only one case before a jury: He’d defended a drunk driver and lost.

“Suddenly I was faced with a monstrous responsibility,” said Townsend. “I knew there was the possibility that I could be dealing with death-penalty trials. My first reflex was one of flight. Was there any way I could get out of this?”

Although the murder had taken place in Jefferson County, the abduction of Shanda had occurred in Jeffersonville, which was in Clark County and outside Townsend’s jurisdiction. That gave Townsend an out. He could have asked the Clark County prosecutor, Steve Stewart, a well-respected attorney with death-penalty trial experience, to take over the murder case.

“Steve Stewart probably would have accepted the case and taken me off the hook,” Townsend said. “But the more I thought about it, the more I knew that it was my responsibility. It was the job I had been elected to do.”

Such introspection was a trait of Townsend, a tall, trim man with an easy manner and a clever wit. It wasn’t that he was plagued by self-doubts. Quite the contrary, he was a man of many accomplishments and a healthy dose of self-pride. It was just that he sometimes wondered how someone who’d received a Ph.D. in British history from Tulane University after writing a doctoral thesis titled “British Reaction to the Belgian and Polish Revolutions of 1830: A Study of Diplomatic, Parliamentary and Press Responses” had ended up a prosecutor in a small Indiana county.

Born in Memphis and raised in Arkansas, Townsend’s first love was academics. After getting his degree from
Tulane, he taught history for five years at colleges in South Dakota, Florida, and Georgia, while serving stints in the National Guard, the Air Force Reserve, and the Army Reserve.

Somewhere along the line he lost interest in teaching and drifted through a series of jobs. He was historian for the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, an insurance investigator, an office manager, a warehouse manager, a bookstore manager, a magazine editor, and a newspaper bureau chief. While publishing the
Mystery FANcier
, a quarterly publication circulated to mystery buffs worldwide, Townsend, who’d recently gone through a divorce, struck up a friendship with one of the magazine’s subscribers, Joseph Hensley, who was at that time the Jefferson County circuit judge in Madison.

Hensley helped Townsend get a job editing a weekly newspaper near Madison. While there, Townsend met his second wife, and after a series of other jobs in Arkansas and Pennsylvania the couple moved back to Madison. Townsend wrote a mystery novel that didn’t sell well, and when the small publishing company that he’d started in Madison ran into financial trouble, Hensley helped out Townsend by hiring him as a probation officer in his court.

That’s when Townsend, then thirty-nine, decided to go to night school to become a lawyer. He got his law degree and went into private practice in 1988.

After only one year as a practicing attorney, handling mostly civil cases, Townsend had the audacity to run against three-term incumbent Fifth Judicial Circuit prosecutor Merritt Alcorn in the Democratic primary in 1989.

Few political insiders thought Townsend had a chance. Not only was Alcorn a deeply entrenched incumbent, but his chief deputy prosecutor, Wilmer Goering, was chairman of the local Democratic party, a position that guaranteed Alcorn certain advantages.

The campaign between Townsend and Alcorn quickly degenerated into a mudslinging contest after Townsend accused his opponents of trying to intimidate him into withdrawing from the race. There was a great deal of silliness over a Townsend campaign billboard that Goering said was in violation of a state law, and Alcorn accused
Townsend of doing a shoddy job as Hensley’s probation officer. Townsend responded by assailing Alcorn’s record as a prosecutor. When all was said and done, Townsend pulled off a major upset by beating Alcorn in the primary, then winning the general election in November.

Suddenly Townsend, who knew more about British history than he did about Indiana case law, who’d written a crime novel but had virtually no criminal trial experience, was the chief law-enforcement officer of two counties.

*  *  *

It was nearly midnight when Townsend arrived at his office in Madison. He was met by Don Currie, his tall, lanky, blond-haired chief deputy. In short order, Currie brought Townsend up to date on the investigation. An exhausted Townsend told Currie to take care of the night’s business—the warrant for the arrest of Melinda Loveless and Laurie Tackett—then he went home to bed, knowing that tomorrow would be a big day.

Jefferson Circuit judge Ted Todd held a hearing on Sunday afternoon to arraign Melinda and Laurie on charges of murder. Townsend arrived early and found a dark-haired woman waiting in the courtroom. It was Melinda’s mother, Marjorie Donahue.

“At that point she didn’t know who I was, but since I was in a suit and a tie she must have figured that I knew something of the case,” Townsend remembers. “She asked me what was going to happen to Melinda. She wanted to know what was the worst that could happen. I told her that if Melinda was found guilty, then the death penalty was a possibility. By the look on her face I could tell that she hadn’t yet considered that possibility.”

It was moments later that Townsend got his first look at Melinda.

“The first time I saw Melinda Loveless I thought she was one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen,” Townsend said. “I remember thinking that I might have trouble convincing a jury to convict this girl. She was that attractive.”

After hearing evidence that neither girl had enough money to hire her own counsel, Judge Todd appointed
public defenders for both of them. Both attorneys, Michael Walro for Melinda and Robert Barlow for Laurie, were capable Madison lawyers, but neither had ever been involved in a case of this magnitude.

To ensure that the girls would not be able to communicate with one another, Todd ordered that Melinda be transferred immediately to the jail in adjoining Clark County.

*  *  *

Wayne Engle, a reporter with the
Madison Courier
, was the first to catch wind of the murder, and by late afternoon Townsend and Sheriff Shipley were fielding calls from newspaper and television reporters in Louisville. On Monday morning, Madison felt the first effects of the coming intrusion. The sight of television crews parked outside the courthouse and reporters hunkering outside his door aggravated the normally mild-mannered Judge Todd.

“I had never been exposed to anything like the media crush of the first few days, and I was uneasy with it,” Todd said later. “My first reaction was to barricade myself in my office. After a while I realized that most of the reporters were experienced with this type of thing and that the questions they were asking were procedural things that I could answer.”

*  *  *

Within a few days of meeting with Laurie, her attorney, Robert Barlow, told the court that he might seek an insanity plea. He asked that she be evaluated to determine whether she was mentally capable of standing trial.

It took the staff of psychologists at the Indiana State Women’s Prison less than a month to complete their report, a copy of which was sent to Townsend.

In the sixteen-page evaluation, staff psychologist Dr. Paul Shriver refers to Laurie by her first name, Mary (Laurie’s full name was Mary Laurine Tackett, but she had always gone by “Laurie”):

Mary is a bright, articulate adolescent whose intellect is clear and unimpaired. Her spelling is near perfect and she has very high social intelligence and communication skills. [Shriver later found Laurie to
have an IQ of 110.] She is probably without any intellectual, perceptual, or cognitive impairment due to any genuine psychosis. She is very anxious about her circumstances and her future and feeling helpless and doomed. She is seeking “rescue” with a strong sense of desperation and is inventing and enumerating every symptom she can think of or ever heard of.

She spoke most typically in a low, expressionless monotone without making eye contact. She appeared sad and anxious most of the time and animated and enthusiastic only when discussing her beliefs in her psychic powers and various aspects of her new age philosophy, which appears to be an amalgamation of spiritualism and hippyism left over from the 1960s with a heavy emphasis on ESP.

Laurie told the psychologists that she drank alcohol and experimented with marijuana, but her main outlet for releasing stress was to cut herself with a knife. Her case history showed that on one occasion, when she was at the home of Toni Lawrence, Laurie cut her hand so severely she had to be treated at a hospital. Shortly after that she was admitted to a Jefferson mental institution for several weeks of counseling. The counseling ended because her parents couldn’t afford the treatment.

The report submitted by Dr. Paul Smith, another psychologist, states that Laurie was also in counseling for about four weeks beginning in June 1991, after she had run away from home. “The psychiatrist she was seeing placed her on Prozac. She took the Prozac until the prescription ran out at the end of the summer. She felt it was beneficial to her. Mary stated that she has been depressed her entire life. She stated that her memory of events before the age of ten or eleven was practically nonexistent.”

In Dr. Shriver’s report he stated that “Mary claims her mother has been physically abusive to her, including kicking, beating and choking her, for which she was arrested one time when Mary was thirteen. (Laurie said the abuse from her mother stopped after school officials noticed her bruises and contacted the county welfare department.) Abuse took
place daily after school between ages nine and thirteen. Mary seemed to feel freer to rebel openly after her mother’s arrest and flaunted her violations of their religious prohibitions by her clothing, makeup, social activities and sexual acting out.”

Laurie also told Drs. Smith and Shriver about an incident when she tried to interfere with her father who was beating her brother with a baseball bat. “Mary says her father took the bat and struck her several times on the head and shoulders,” Shriver wrote.

Even though Laurie told Dr. Smith that she had no memories of early childhood, she told Dr. Shriver that she’d begun having hallucinations at age two.

Shriver wrote:

The reported hallucinations include millions of dots, dark specks, lights, Mickey Mouse, a tall elf, a man who looked like a cricket, someone who looked like cousin It from “The Addams Family,” hands coming out of the floor of her room, and UFOs. She also claims to hear voices moaning, whispering and telling her to come with them. She says she hears them off and on daily. She says they sound like little demons. At times they have ordered her to hurt her parents or friends by telling her to “destroy them.” She believes she has been psychic all her life. She claims she can see auras around people and has the ability to “astral travel”—to be aware of what is happening in other places. She claims that she can channel with vampires and other dead people. Her mother has dismissed these beliefs as witchcraft or Satanism.

The bulk of Shriver’s report is dedicated to Laurie’s claims that she was raped at an early age (this despite earlier claims that she had no memories before the age of ten) and the bizarre reaction she had to those alleged rapes:

Mary reports having been raped by a cousin at age four and a neighbor at age six (both of which she has mentioned to other examiners). She added, to this
examiner, a report of another rape by a neighbor when she was nine and another at age sixteen. She claims to have lost awareness each time this happened, with only partial recall afterward and having acquired a new personality at the age of the trauma.

Laurie told Dr. Shriver that each of her alternate personalities had names:

They were Sissy at age three, Sara at age four (but the reported rape was at age six), Darlene at age nine, Geno (a male) at age fifteen (about the time she decided she was gay) and Deanna (who was twenty-three) at age sixteen. She has rather vague and incomplete descriptions for each person, but they tend to be one-dimensional. Darlene is mischievous and impulsive. Geno is tough and protective and can be aggressive and delinquent. Deanna likes to play at being a vampire but does not really believe she is. Mary reported that Darlene, Geno and Deanna were all alternately present during the offense (murder of Shanda), but “Laurie” herself was not. Although she admits she likes to tell wild stories, she claims that her multiple identities are real and complains bitterly that no one believes her. She says she deeply fears death and wants to live forever. She is fascinated by vampire myths because of this aspect of the legend.

When the skeptical Shriver asked Laurie to produce one of her alter egos, she did so eagerly. He described it in his report:

She herself chose “Deanna” the twenty-three-year-old. Mary first dropped her eyelids as if meditating, she raised her face with a different expression and degree of mischievousness which fit a prior description of the “alter ego,” but expressions and manner already observed in Mary continued to be seen. She reported that she was maintaining the personality’s presence with effort and acted exhausted afterward. None of this
behavior is typically reported in studies of multiple personalities.

In summation, Shriver wrote that Laurie “is desperate at the moment to avoid conviction and a prison sentence and appears quite willing to fabricate and exaggerate symptoms in order to support a defense of insanity and avoid prosecution as criminally responsible.

Shriver reported that Laurie’s claims of having multiple personalities

appear to be calculated to produce an impression of severe psychosis and achieve a commitment to a mental institution. Mary seems to believe that if her normal personality of Mary was unconscious at the time of the offense she cannot be held responsible for the behavior of her other personalities. For example, if Deanna was present at the time of the offense, the court could not punish her without punishing Sissy and Sara who were not even present at the time. She sincerely believes she cannot be held responsible for the actions of her alter egos over which she claims to have no control.