Little Lost Angel (20 page)

“I didn’t want to go to the door because there was no telling who else was in there,” Henry said. “I wanted to talk to him in the car, where he was on my home turf.”

In answer to the horn, Larry Leatherbury came out of the apartment and walked slowly toward the car with a swaggering gait. It was a bitterly cold day, but Larry was wearing only black shorts and a black T-shirt. On his feet were black combat boots and around his neck a black flowing cape that flapped behind him in the brisk January wind.

“Is that who we’re here to interview?” Henry asked Shipley.

Shipley, who had met Leatherbury before, grimaced and said, “I’m afraid so.”

At Shipley’s beckoning, Leatherbury climbed into the backseat of Henry’s car. The two officers turned around to face him, but before they could say a word, Leatherbury volunteered a detailed account of his whereabouts at the time of Shanda’s murder.

“He gave us an alibi even before we asked him the first question,” Henry said.

The cocky Leatherbury said he’d been in Lexington, Kentucky, on the night that Shanda was taken from her father’s home. He had gone there with his brother, Terry, and two girls, Kary Pope and Carrie East. The foursome had attended an alternative music concert, where Larry met a male college student from Morehead State University. Making no secret of his sexuality, Larry told Henry and Shipley that he’d spent Friday night, Saturday, and most of Sunday with the young man before returning to Louisville on Sunday night. He gave the officers the young man’s name and phone number and encouraged them to verify his story.

“Everything he told us checked out,” Henry said. “His alibi was airtight.”

Once he’d established his whereabouts that weekend, Larry eagerly told Henry and Shipley everything he knew about Laurie Tackett and Melinda Loveless. The lawmen listened with dismay as Larry described in eerie detail
Laurie’s fascination with the occult. He told of the séances in which Laurie would claim that spirits had entered her body. During these channeling episodes, Laurie would take on alter egos and communicate with the dead. Larry described how he and Laurie cut their own arms and used their blood to draw pictures. Sometimes, he said, Laurie would drink her own blood.

“Laurie is obsessed with death and the prospect of performing a human sacrifice,” Larry said. “She talked often about burning someone.”

Larry also volunteered information about Laurie’s home life and her rebellion against the strict Fundamentalist doctrines embraced by her mother. He told Henry and Shipley that he’d had sex with Laurie but that she now considered herself a lesbian. He even turned over photographs of Laurie with Melinda and told the officers how to get in touch with Kary Pope.

“Larry was extremely helpful,” Henry said. “He seemed to get a kick out of talking to us.”

Meanwhile, Steve Henry’s older brother, Howard, was helping out in the investigation by following up another lead. An anonymous phone caller said that two girls, Crystal Wathen and Thea Board, had been talking about the murder at Jeffersonville High School. Howard Henry went to the school and talked to both girls. While Thea was cooperative, telling Henry that Wathen claimed to have spent the afternoon following the murder with Melinda, Crystal was not. She denied even talking to Melinda since the murder.

“Whoever told you that was a liar,” Crystal said.

“Crystal,” Henry said sternly, “you are aware that if you fail to tell me the truth, it can be considered an obstruction of justice.”

“I told you, I don’t know anything about it,” Crystal insisted.

Seeing that he wasn’t getting anywhere, Howard Henry went back to the police station. A short time later he interviewed Dale Gettings, the last person other than the four girls to see Shanda alive.

Gettings told Henry about the two girls he’d seen at the Sharer household Friday night when he stopped by looking
for Shanda’s stepbrother. Looking at mug shots, he was able to identify Laurie as one of the girls.

Steve Henry and Sheriff Shipley’s list of people to interview, meanwhile, kept growing. Laurie’s neighbor, Brian Tague, called the police station, wanting to talk. He said that Laurie had called him early that past Saturday morning, asking if he had any gasoline that she could use in her car. Tague told her he didn’t and thought it strange that Laurie had then asked for kerosene. He didn’t realize the significance of it until he read about Laurie’s arrest.

Leslie Jacoby, a classmate of Melinda, came forward and said she’d talked to Melinda on the phone the afternoon following the murder. She said Melinda was crying and eventually told her that Shanda had been killed and that she’d been involved. “Melinda and Shanda hated each other,” Leslie said. “Melinda was real possessive of Amanda. She didn’t want anybody to be close friends with Amanda. She thought Shanda was trying to steal her away. She’d say, ‘I’m going to beat that bitch up.’”

The case for Melinda’s premeditation got an even bigger boost when Jeffrey Stettenbenz came by the police station. The portly, frizzy-haired fifteen-year-old, who had been with Amanda Heavrin at the mall when Melinda picked her up after the murder, claimed he’d also been at Amanda’s house on the Friday night that Shanda was abducted and that he’d listened on a second phone when Melinda called Amanda. He told police that he’d overheard Melinda tell Amanda that she was going to kill Shanda.

Another that volunteered information was Valerie Hedge, a friend of Melinda and Laurie’s. Henry and Shipley drove to Valerie’s home in New Albany to talk to the sixteen-year-old. With her mother sitting next to her, Valerie explained that she’d met Melinda at Hazelwood Junior High and the two of them hung around with the same crowd that included Laurie, Kary Pope, and Larry and Terry Leatherbury.

“Did any of these people ever mention anything about killing anyone?” Henry asked.

Valerie nodded her head, then related an incident that had occurred a few months earlier. She’d been out in Kary’s car with Laurie and the Leatherburys. They were driving
through the hills of Floyd’s Knobs, a scenic area north of New Albany, when the conversation took a macabre turn. Kary and the Leatherburys began talking about what crimes they would like to get away with, and someone wondered what it would be like to kill someone.

“That’s when Laurie said she’d always wanted to kill somebody,” Valerie said. “She said she wanted to burn somebody.”

Valerie told Henry and Shipley that Kary Pope probably knew more about Melinda and Laurie’s friendship than anyone else. Larry Leatherbury had said the same thing. The next day, Henry and Shipley arranged for Kary to meet him at the police station in Sellersburg. Kary came with her mother, and she was noticeably nervous. She seemed self-conscious of her boyish appearance and masculine manner. Although Kary normally liked to flaunt her lesbianism, Henry sensed that it was causing her some uneasiness.

“I tried to make her more comfortable by letting her know right up front that I had no interest at all in her sexuality,” Henry said. “I wasn’t going to judge her. I just needed her to be straightforward with me.” It didn’t take long for Kary to warm up to the softspoken Henry. Henry had two teenagers of his own, and he knew that the best results came with patience and a kind but firm manner.

“Just tell us everything you know about Shanda Sharer’s murder,” Henry said. “Don’t embellish anything. Don’t make it more than it is, but don’t leave anything out. We want exactly the truth.”

At first Kary shied away from questions about Melinda’s jealousy of Amanda and Shanda’s friendship, but eventually she opened up.

“Melinda and Amanda had been together, like girlfriend-girlfriend type of thing, and Amanda had started hanging around with Shanda and spending the night with Shanda,” Kary said. “Melinda kept threatening Amanda to stay away from Shanda. Melinda and Amanda would get into fights and would break up and Melinda would come to me and say let’s go kill her and stuff like that. You know how kids say stuff like that. I mean, I say it sometimes but I really don’t mean it. I never took to heart what she was saying. Amanda
was seeing Shanda, but to my knowledge they were just like really, really good friends, but Melinda would always get jealous and would want to go beat up Shanda because she thought Shanda was going to take away Amanda.”

“How often did Melinda discuss killing Shanda?” Henry asked.

“About every day.”

“Did she ever say how she was going to do it?”

“No. But Melinda always wanted me to take her to Shanda’s house so she could beat her up,” Kary said. “She’d say, ‘I’m going to kill her.’ She wanted someone to take her there and help her beat the hell out of Shanda. She’d tell me that if I didn’t take her to Shanda’s house she’d just go on a rampage at school and get suspended. I told her to just talk to her. I told her she didn’t need to be getting into trouble.”

Kary said that when she and Melinda first met Laurie they both liked her.

“We didn’t know she’d be, you know, psychotic or anything like that,” she said. “After a while me and Laurie got in a fight. Then me and Melinda got into a disagreement and she started hanging around with Laurie. She knew that Laurie had been telling everybody that she would enjoy killing somebody. Laurie had said it was her destiny to kill somebody and hear them screaming. She just talked like that. You see, Laurie doesn’t keep friends for a very long time. When she makes a friend she’ll lie to them, she’ll steal for them, she’ll do anything to keep that friend. When I stopped hanging around with her she told people that she was going to put a death spell on me. She was into witchcraft and stuff like that. I got scared of her and tried to keep away from her, but she kept bothering me. She’d call me up and disguise her voice and threaten me. Melinda had told me that if she had a chance she would kill Shanda. Laurie was the type of person that would probably help her just to keep her as a friend.”

Henry, still bothered by Larry Leatherbury’s smug attitude, asked Kary if she thought he had anything to do with the murder.

“I really don’t know,” Kary said. “The Leatherburys stopped hanging around with Laurie about a month ago
because they thought that she was just a big fake. She’d always be doing channeling and stuff like that to get attention. She’d bring people back from the dead. She would go out of her body and have somebody come into her body. That’s why she scared me, because I thought it was real. I had never experienced stuff like that, and when she first started doing it I believed her. Then I found out she was just full of it. Terry tries, but Larry is the only one that really channels. Larry said Laurie was faking it and Larry knows more about channeling than Laurie ever has.”

Kary was on a roll now, and Henry kept her talking with a few pointed questions. “Tell me about the times Laurie talked about killing somebody,” he said.

“She told Larry and Terry and me how it would be fun to kill somebody,” Kary said. “She’d want to go trip on acid and kill someone and not remember it in the morning. We were at a party once and she started cutting herself and saying that she loves hurting herself and how she would like to do it to someone else. She said she’d like to stick a knife through someone’s stomach just to see how it feels.”

“How often does she do acid?”

“Only once when I was with her. I just thought she was pretty weird. Anybody that sits there and cuts herself and gets joy out of it is pretty strange. One time I got mad at my grandmother and Laurie said, ‘Let’s go kill her.’ That would really scare me. She thought it was fun. She thought it would be a blast to do something like that before she died. She’d always go around saying that she was going to kill herself. She said she wanted to go out a different way than everybody else. One night she was channeling and she said her name was Deanna the Vampire and she would love to kill somebody. She told me she was a goddess and that she wanted me to become dead with her so I could be a vampire too. It scared me, but what was I supposed to do? You really can’t report this to the police or nothing like that. I mean, if I told my mom something like that she probably wouldn’t believe me.”

Henry looked into Kary’s eyes and assured her, “I know Laurie Tackett and I believe you.”

“She scared me,” Kary admitted. “I know that some
people say that people can’t control your mind, but she influenced me a lot and I believe she had a hold of my mind.”

Kary was starting to sniffle back tears. Henry told her to take a moment to compose herself, then asked her to tell him more about the connection between Melinda and Laurie. Kary said that when she told Laurie she didn’t want to see her anymore, Laurie told her that she was moving to Utah.

“I said, ‘Well go.’ I said it didn’t make any difference to me. I had my own life. The next thing I knew, she and Melinda were hanging out together. You see, Melinda is the type of person who will use you. If you have a car, she’s going to take advantage of you.”

Sheriff Shipley had been listening quietly to Kary’s bizarre tale when he remembered some remarks made by Valerie Hedge and Larry Leatherbury that Laurie had talked about burning a body. “Did she ever say that to you?” he asked.

“Yeah. She said she wanted to kill somebody by burning them.”

“Did she give a reason for that?”

“She thought it would be fun. She would always burn stuff. She would always cut stuff. One night Laurie asked Tracy [who was Kary’s new girlfriend] to cut herself so Laurie could suck the blood out of her. Tracy told her she was crazy. No one was paying attention to her that night, so she said that somebody had taken possession of her body and that we were all in danger because the person in her was going to kill us. She just flipped out and everybody felt sorry for her, but she was just trying to get attention.”

“What do you think makes her act like this?” Henry asked. “Is it something in her home?”

“Her parents hate her. They keep wanting to kick her out of her house. They think she’s a devil worshiper, and I think there’s really somebody in her head. Somebody has convinced her that there is stuff like witchcraft and she’s been practicing it and she believes in it and she thinks she can get away with a lot of things. She don’t care if she dies. She don’t care if somebody kills her.”