Little Lost Angel (18 page)

“I remember thinking how beautiful it was,” Steve said later. “It seemed so peaceful. After all the horrible things that had happened to Shanda, I felt she was finally at peace.”

*  *  *

In the days following Shanda’s murder, Jacque and Steve turned down repeated requests for interviews.

They knew that reporters were bound to ask questions about Shanda’s relationship with Amanda, and they didn’t know how to deal with that. They were convinced that the media would sensationalize the lesbian aspect, and they couldn’t risk smearing their dead daughter’s reputation.

Jacque and Steve remained silent as the hosts of local radio talk shows began to speculate about how a twelve-year-old could get involved is such a sordid and tragic affair. Some listeners were ready to place part of the blame on Shanda’s parents. “This wouldn’t have happened if that little girl’s parents had done their job,” said one caller to a Louisville radio show.

Steve and Jacque kept their silence, even though they
ached to shout out to the world the truth: That Shanda had been cared for and loved. That they’d done the best they could, the very best they knew how. That, like other parents, they never believed that anything this horrible could happen to their child. That they’d learned the hard lesson that nothing in life is guaranteed.

11

F
lipping an old Indian head nickel in 1971 was how Steve Sharer and his best friend, Mike Boardman, decided which would be the first to ask out the new girl in school, Jacque Watkins.

Steve and Mike were seniors at Clarksville High School and normally they wouldn’t have considered dating a sophomore. But this girl was something special. She had long blond hair and a gorgeous smile, and though she was only fifteen, she looked more mature than half the girls in the senior class.

“I called tails,” Steve remembered. “It came up heads.”

At the time of the coin toss, neither Mike nor Steve knew how vulnerable Jacque was. Her parents had just gone through a divorce, and Jacque and her mother and older sister, Debbie, had moved from their spacious home in Jeffersonville to a small house in Clarksville. Jacque hated her new home and her new school.

“I was as angry and mixed up and lonely as a girl could be at that age,” Jacque recalled later. “Mike Boardman was my white knight.”

Mike was the class cutup, a natural charmer with a friendly smile and rich sense of humor. Jacque couldn’t
believe that a good-looking senior had asked her out, and she was even more amazed when after their first date he asked her out again. Suddenly Jacque’s emotional burden didn’t seem so heavy. She had someone to lean on, someone who cared for her, someone who would soon tell her that he loved her. When Mike and Jacque started going steady, Steve decided it was time that he too settled down. He began going steady with a girl in his class, and the two couples became inseparable, double-dating to movies, high-school basketball games, and parties.

Mike and Jacque had been going together about a year when he gave her an engagement ring. Then, shortly after Jacque turned sixteen, she learned that she was pregnant, and she and Mike got married. Jacque went to night school until right before their daughter, Paije, was born. The marriage lasted only another two and a half years.

“We were just too young,” Jacque said later. “I was a baby raising a baby. I felt trapped, and Mike wasn’t ready for the responsibility of being a father and a husband.”

A single mother at nineteen, Jacque began working two jobs while relying on relatives to babysit Paije. Jacque had lost contact with Steve after her divorce from Mike and didn’t know that he had left town to start up a heating and air-conditioning business in Middlesboro, Kentucky, a coal mining town two hundred miles away.

When he came back to Jeffersonville one weekend to visit his parents, Steve stopped in at the town’s most popular night spot, the Garage Club, where he ran into Jacque. The two old friends spent most of the night reminiscing, talking about Mike Boardman, about Paije, about former classmates, and about themselves. After several drinks Steve grew bold. He moved closer to the pretty girl he’d lost in a coin toss years before and kissed her. They kissed again.

The next three months brought good times but also misery. Steve would leave Middlesboro after work every Friday afternoon in time to take Jacque out that night. By Sunday afternoon he was back on the road to Middlesboro. Weekdays were spent at work. Weeknights were spent on the phone.

“The phone bills were enormous,” Steve said later. “I
finally told Jacque that we’re going to have to do something about this. She said, ‘What do you want to do?’ and I said the best thing that we could do was get married. That way we wouldn’t have to worry about the doggone phone bills. So we did.”

Steve had worried how Jacque would adjust to mountain life in Middlesboro but to his relief she seemed to enjoy the country as much as he did. They set up residence in a former dairy house that had been converted into a nice home. They lived simply but comfortably. Steve’s business was doing well and they bought enough camping gear to spend many weekends in the nearby national park. It was on one of those camping trips, Steve and Jacque believe, that she became pregnant with Shanda. On the night that Jacque’s water broke, Steve rushed her to Pineville Hospital. He was so nervous that he wrecked the truck in the hospital parking lot.

“When we got to the Pineville Hospital the nurse told me that I wasn’t in labor and I should go home,” Jacque said. “I told her that I’d had a baby before and I knew that I was in labor and I wasn’t going anywhere.” The doctor who examined Jacque said she was still a long way from giving birth. He sedated her, then left to perform another operation. Moments later, Shanda Renee Sharer was born.

“The nurse was on the intercom trying to page another doctor when I went ahead and delivered Shanda natural. Believe me, I had no intention to do so. She literally fell out on the table. I always used to tell her that she came into this world with a vengeance.”

To this day, Steve and Jacque tell different stories about why they moved back to southern Indiana. Jacque claims that it had to do with a coal miners’ strike about nine months after Shanda’s birth. Life in Middlesboro, as in most eastern Kentucky towns, revolves around the coal industry. When the miners go out on strike the entire economy crashes. Jacque said that Steve’s business suffered during the strike and they went back to Indiana because they were having trouble making ends meet.

Steve, however, contends that he was still making a good living when Jacque became hopelessly homesick.

For whatever reason, the move was made. And things were never the same between Steve and Jacque. They began to drift apart. There were squabbles over finances, and the trouble that was brewing between them came to a head with a terrible argument at a Halloween party. Jacque and the girls moved out and Steve filed for divorce.

The divorce was granted, but after a few months Steve and Jacque cooled down and began to have second thoughts about their decision. They knew that the girls were in turmoil. Paije had never really known her natural father. It was Steve she called “Dad.” And Shanda, at three, was too young to understand why she could only see her daddy on weekends. Steve and Jacque decided to give it another try. They didn’t remarry, but Jacque and the girls moved back in with Steve at a house he was renting in Jeffersonville. Things went well for about a year, but then the arguments started again.

“Things just didn’t work out,” Jacque said later. “We’d grown apart.”

This time the parting was amicable. Jacque was given custody of the girls, but they usually spent every other weekend with Steve, who liked to take them to visit his father’s farm in Kentucky.

At five, Shanda’s independent spirit was already starting to emerge. She’d often heard Steve brag about how he’d learned to drive a tractor when he was five or six. If he could do it, so could she. Shanda argued until she got her way. She jumped up in the tractor seat with Steve crouched behind her, showing her how to work the gas pedal and brake. It wasn’t long before Shanda felt ready to solo.

“Dad, I know how to do this,” Shanda said. “You already showed me.”

“Well, what about shifting gears?”

“I don’t care about shifting gears,” Shanda said. “I just want to steer it.”

Without saying a word, and without Shanda seeing him, Steve stepped off the back of the tractor. Thinking her father was still crouched behind her, Shanda putted along in first gear for a while, then tightened her grip on the big steering wheel and began a wide turn, pushing and pulling the wheel
with all her strength. Finally, after completing the turn, Shanda had the tractor headed back the other way. Only then did she see Steve standing in the field.

“Her eyes got real big, her mouth dropped open, and then that big smile of hers came across her face,” Steve remembers. “She’d done it on her own. My dad was standing next to me, and he said, ‘Steve, I remember when I did the same thing to you. She’s a chip off the old block.’ I couldn’t keep her off that tractor after that.”

To supplement her income from her job as a clerk at a barge line, Jacque began working on weekends with her sister, Debbie, as a mutual clerk at Churchill Downs, the thoroughbred racing track in Louisville and home of the Kentucky Derby. One day another mutual clerk asked her out on a date. His name was Ronnie Ott. At forty-one, Ronnie was ten years older than Jacque. He’d been married once before but had no children. Ronnie lived well. In addition to working at the racetrack, he received two pensions, one as a disabled veteran and the other for a workplace injury that had cost him his job as an electrician at the Naval Ordnance Station in Louisville.

It was a whirlwind romance. Ronnie showered Jacque and her daughters with gifts, he’d cook them elegant dinners at his beautiful home in southwest Louisville, and he made it clear early on that he had marriage on his mind.

“My mother kept saying, ‘Jacque, this is what you need in your life. Your life has been so unstable,’” Jacque said later. “And early on Paije and Shanda thought he was the best thing since peanut butter. I was at a point in my life where I saw an opportunity to make a good life for us all.”

Shanda was seven at the time of her mother’s marriage to Ronnie Ott. After a few years at a public elementary school, Jacque enrolled Shanda in St. Paul Catholic school, where she would spend the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. When she was ten, Shanda won a crossword-puzzle contest at a McDonald’s restaurant. The prize was an all-expense paid trip for her family to Disneyland in California.

“Shanda felt like the belle of the ball after winning that contest,” Jacque said later. “She got to ride on an airplane for the first time, and we had a limousine that chauffeured
us everywhere. It made her a real bigshot with her friends at St. Paul.”

Shanda never had a problem making friends. She was a bright, humorous child, who made above-average grades and who never had enough time for all the things she wanted to do. She joined the Girl Scouts and 4H, she made the cheerleading and gymnastics squads, and played on St. Paul’s basketball, volleyball, and softball teams.

Shanda had a mischievous nature, a bit of moxie that endeared her to her playmates. Shanda was always the first one to hurl a water balloon at a birthday party, to sneak on the neighbor’s trampoline, to flirt with the new boy in class.

“She loved to be the center of attention,” said Shanda’s friend Joyce Robertson. “I can’t remember anybody I had so much fun with. She just had so much life in her laugh and the way she talked.”

“Shanda kind of looked out for me,” said another St. Paul classmate, Brittany Thompson. “We were trick-or-treating one Halloween and some boy threw a water balloon in my bag. Shanda marched up to the boy’s house and told his mother that she owed me a whole new bag of candy.”

Jacque said that Shanda was “always a bit of a showoff. She’d always want to put on a performance for you. She’d do her new cheer or the new dance she learned. She always wanted to be like her big sister, Paije, but in one respect they were worlds apart. Paije was hard-headed like me. If I got mad at Paije she’d argue with me until she was blue in the face. Shanda was the opposite. If Shanda thought she did wrong or had hurt your feelings, she would cry. Her feelings got hurt so easily. She was very emotional. She got that from Steve’s mother.”

There was a special bond between Shanda and Steve’s mother, Betty Sharer. Shanda delighted in spending the occasional weekend with her grandmother. When Shanda was just a toddler, her grandmother designated one drawer in the kitchen as Shanda’s and was always filling it with surprises for her grandchild. Betty Sharer taught Shanda how to sew clothes for her dolls and instilled in her a love for reading.

“Books fascinated Shanda,” Betty Sharer remembers. “I
had a bookcase at my house and Shanda was constantly pulling books off the shelf and asking me to read to her. When she got older she wanted to read for me. I’d take her to the bookstore to buy a new children’s book and she’d have a hard time finding one she hadn’t read. She had two favorite books. One was a story about a little tugboat, the other was the Bible. She loved for me to read about little Jesus in Bethlehem.”