Little Lost Angel (30 page)

Mikel called Toni “a very caring person. She’s honest and she’s there if you have a problem. Toni’s real emotional. A boyfriend broke up with me once and Toni got more upset about it than I did.”

“She was just always a nice person,” Kelli said. “She was not the type of person to get in a fight because she’s so small she knew that people would beat her up.”

Most of Toni’s friends were surprised to learn that she’d even been along in the same car as Laurie Tackett. “Toni didn’t like her,” Mikel said. “I still don’t know why she went out with her that night.”

*  *  *

While those who knew Shanda’s assailants strained to understand what had happened, the community was doing the same without the insight of personal knowledge.

Louisville and its surrounding metropolitan area—which included the small cities of New Albany, Jeffersonville, and Clarksville directly across the Ohio River—had a population of about one million. And Louisville, particularly, had seen its share of brutal murders in the past few years. Some—like the sadistic, torture murder of a beautiful young woman, Brenda Sue Schaefer, and the decapitation of Kathleen Strange by her husband, John—had grabbed front-page headlines and been continuing stories on local television stations.

To a certain degree, the community had become desensitized to the growing violence. Once one sensational murder trial was over, it seemed that another had begun. It was something people just put out of their minds as they went about their daily lives. Even though the violence they had always associated with bigger cities had suddenly settled in their backyards, they felt some satisfaction that things were far worse elsewhere. They lived in an area where the highlight of the year was a huge festival centered around the Kentucky Derby. They had their college basketball in the winter and their Triple A baseball club in the summer. Although political leaders constantly talked about what needed to be done to keep pace with faster-growing cities like Indianapolis and Nashville, most folks seemed satisfied to be half a step behind. There was a security here, a feeling that life, though it may be slow, was all right.

Shanda’s death seemed to change that overnight. No other murder in memory disturbed so many people so
completely, probably because no other murder had crushed so many deeply held beliefs. Suddenly their children didn’t seem as safe as they had been. As the circumstances of Shanda’s gruesome torture murder and Melinda’s jealous motivations—and the even more scarier revelation that Laurie, Hope, and Toni didn’t even know the victim personally—were drawn out in increasing detail by the press, the community’s disillusionment grew.

Preachers shouted out warnings from the pulpit that parents needed to nurture their children, and neighbors conversed over backyard fences, making pacts to keep their eyes on each other’s kids.

A few days after the murder,
Louisville Courier-Journal
columnist Betty Baye wrote under a headline “Cradle of Violence” about the shock and confusion the community was feeling.

My mind simply can’t shake away the imagined sound of Shanda’s screaming as she was beaten and finally stuffed half-dead into an automobile trunk, while her assailants calmly filled a two-liter soft drink bottle with gasoline they used to burn her body. What manner of jealousy could provoke such young girls to such hatred?

How well I recall my wise mother constantly warning my sisters and me, reminding us, “Jealousy is a rotten disease.” But I see cradles being robbed all too often these days by children so consumed by envy that they can injure and, yes, kill others who have greater material wealth, better looks, brighter personalities, or higher grades.

Shanda Renee Sharer didn’t live in a big city. She lived in southern Indiana, where small towns abound, where families know each other by name, and where many teenagers’ version of a big night out is going to a movie or hanging out in a shopping mall.

Shanda’s murder should remind us that living in a small place doesn’t guarantee immunity from violence. It’s a reminder that no walls are high enough, no
highways wide enough, no bridges long enough, and no rivers deep enough to separate us from senseless violence.

Four months later, another
Courier-Journal
staffer, Linda Stahl, wrote a lengthy article about the rise in violence among teenage girls in the community.

“In this day and age, there’s nothing to be surprised about,” said a mother whose daughter was assaulted by a gang of teenage girls. “Too many kids out there are ruling their parents, or they don’t know where their parents are. It’s no surprise they think my daughter’s face is a beanbag they can beat on.”

A sixth-grade girl whom Stahl interviewed said she got into fights because “it makes you feel like a sissy if you don’t.”

“It lets out stress,” said another.

A sweet-faced blonde with freckles described a fight she’d had recently: “I hit her real hard. I grabbed her hair from behind and hit her head against the wall. I saw blood.”

A police officer quoted in the article said, “Girls don’t have that prim and proper conditioning they had before. All they have left to model themselves after is the harshness of reality and the hardness of men.”

Stahl’s story ended with the director of a mental health center commenting on Shanda’s murder. “I’m reminded of
Lord of the Flies
. Socialized kids living by the laws of the jungle. I’m so glad I’m not a girl today. Isn’t that awful to say?”

It was a bitter pill for the community to swallow, and it went down even harder in the town of Madison, forty miles upriver.

The flush of publicity over Shanda’s murder seemed a terrible irony for the town of Madison. For many years it had cultivated its image as a shining example of small-town America. Now Madison was appearing on regional newscasts every night as the site of the most atrocious murder in anyone’s memory.

In 1958 the town was considered so typically American that MGM studios came to town to film
Some Came
Running
, a story based in the heartland and starring Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Dean Martin.

It’s still much the same in downtown Madison, with its 150-year-old architecture of Greek Revival, Italianate, and Gothic Revival buildings. Many of the old buildings have been turned into antique shops, gift shops, and restaurants to capitalize on the growing tourism business. And farmers still bring their produce to sell it on the sidewalk outside the old courthouse.

In a
Courier-Journal
feature on the town written shortly after the murder, one resident called it “a real time ghost, a Brigadoon.”

“Unlike the Scottish village of Broadway legend, however, old Madison didn’t just appear out of the mists,” wrote reporter David Goetz. “It was preserved in a sort of museum case formed by the hillsides and the river.”

With preservationists discouraging commercial growth downtown, new businesses sprung up along IND-62, a five-lane highway on the hill above town. Here it is a different Madison, with fast-food restaurants, movie theaters, gas stations, shopping centers, bowling alleys. And here is where the teenagers hang out on the weekends, congregating in shopping-center parking lots, sitting on car hoods, and swapping stories.

But there was only one story in town after Shanda’s murder, and it was a story that lured reporters hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of miles to the small community that had been branded as the spawning ground for murder.

“The age of innocence here ended about 10:45
A.M
. last January 11 on a dirt road fifteen miles out of town,” wrote Ron Grossman, a reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
.

“It’s like you took the Leopold and Loeb case, recast it for girls, and set it in Main Street, USA,” Grossman quoted
Madison Courier
reporter Wayne Engle as saying, recalling the notorious 1924 case of two homosexual college students who killed a fourteen-year-old boy for thrills.

USA Today
reporter Andrea Stone found Madison adults eager to make excuses for the murder. “Satanism is connected to this,” Carol Fisher, forty-two, told Stone. “I don’t
think teenage girls are capable of doing what they did on their own. It’s basically evil what they did.” Court clerk Carolyn Peak said, “People are just amazed and shocked at their age and their being girls. Good golly. People aren’t born that mean.”

The
USA Today
story quoted Madison Consolidated High principal Roger Gallatin: “This is supposed to be an area protected by the values system. When this happens, where do we have a safe place to raise a family?”

A reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
stopped in at Damon’s Restaurant across the street from the courthouse and was told by owner Damon Welch, “I guess we never thought that something like this would happen in our little town. Pretty frightening, isn’t it?”

In addition to articles in such newspapers as the
New York Times
, the case attracted attention across the Atlantic.

British journalist Richard Grant visited Madison, searching for a key to unlock the mysteries of the horrible murder. In an article that he wrote for the London
Independent
, he implied that the murder could be blamed in part on the unfocused boredom of Madison teenagers, whom he characterized as wild-spirited louts who got drunk and screwed each other every weekend and skirted the edges of violence.

“There ain’t much to do around here but drink and fuck,” said one unnamed teenager quoted in Grant’s article.

Grant observed that “the problem with Madison is the problem with any small town. There is nothing to do. Life is a constant battle against boredom, in which alcohol and cannabis are the most dependable allies. Otherwise, one can have sex in cars, drive at high speed along winding country back roads, or, for an added thrill, drive while drunk at high speed. Almost without exception, the girls wear heavy makeup, and have permed, teased and frosted hairstyles. Eighty percent of them are fiercely blonde. They marry young and divorce young. They dream about escaping Madison, but seldom make it past Louisville. Beyond that, the world is televised. The boys rev their engines and brag about their latest sexual conquests. The girls sit three or four to a car, chattering about school, television, who slept with who, the guy from out of town in a red Corvette Stingray.”

Another teen quoted by Grant and identified only as Susan said she “wants to be there when they ‘lectrocute that devil-worshiping bitch” who killed Shanda.

According to Grant, the teens he talked to explained the murder with a “crazy-devil-worshiping-Lesbo-bitches-on-acid” theory.

Grant played loose and free with the facts of the case. For instance, he quoted Madison teens who claimed to have “partied” with Shanda and observed her drinking, smoking pot, and having lesbian sex. Whether any of the kids he quoted really existed is questionable, but one thing is not: Shanda had never been to Madison before the night she was killed.

Grant had begun the article with a quote from Donna Jackson, the clerk at the Madison courthouse. Jackson told him that “if that poor young girl had been killed in New York, instead of Madison, Indiana, none of you fellows would have batted an eyelid. We’ve got a nice little town here, and it’s a shame that it takes something like this to get us noticed.”

Jackson would later tell a
Courier-Journal
reporter that her quote appeared to be the only truthful thing in the article, which made its way back to Madison when a resident happened to pick up the magazine while in England.

“Everybody is infuriated by it,” Jackson said. “It puts down our kids, and we have a lot of good kids in this town.”

Local television and newspapers tried their own cultural analyses, interviewing psychologists and sociologists and focusing attention on the growing trend of teen violence. One television station went so far as to have a handwriting expert analyze Melinda Loveless’s handwriting. The expert said that the way Melinda shaped her
Fs
and Ss demonstrated her sexual frustration.

The townspeople preferred to view the whole matter as an aberration.

Said Madison mayor Morris Wooden, “This is the type of freak event you expect to happen somewhere else in the world. Anywhere but Madison.”

18

A
line of television trucks from Louisville, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis lined the street outside the Jefferson County courthouse in Madison.

It was December 14, 1992, the opening day of the sentencing hearing for Melinda Loveless.

A cutting wind blew outside the stately three-story brick building, and reporters and camera crews turned their coat collars up as they stood in the alley between the courthouse and the jail, waiting for Melinda to make her appearance.

Suddenly there she was, looking nervous but still lovely with her long curls and pretty face. She wore a dark blue blouse, loose beige pants, and handcuffs, and was surrounded by two burly sheriff’s deputies and her three attorneys, Russ Johnson, Bob Hammerle, and Mike Walro. The cameras pushed closer and the reporters shouted their questions. She said nothing, her eyes downcast, and in seconds she was inside, taking the stairs to the third-floor courtroom of Judge Ted Todd.