Little Lost Angel (28 page)

Melinda’s sisters and mother told Johnson that Larry was a loathsome sloth, who would lay around the house for months at a time while Margie, a nurse, worked double
shifts at Floyd Memorial Hospital to keep food on the table. They said that Larry would get sopping drunk and explode into violence.

“He beat my mom right in front of us,” Michelle said. “He choked her. Threw her down steps. He raped her one time in the bathroom. This all went on in front of Melinda, who would beg him to stop. Sometimes when he punished me he’d lock me in a closet and wouldn’t let me out all night.

“There was no privacy in our house,” Michelle continued. “Your bedroom wasn’t really your bedroom. He would come in and sleep in the bed and he would come into the bathroom when you were in the shower. Sometimes he’d pour cold water on you when you were in the shower or would make you get out. He would watch us from the mirror and look at us in the bathtub, and if you asked him to stop he would say, ‘Why would I want to look at you? You’re ugly. You have nothing I want to see.’ And sometimes when you wanted to use the bathroom he’d make you pee in a dixie cup in front of him. He would wear my clothes. Sometimes I’d come home and he’d have on my underwear. He would wear my running shorts and my shirts. He’d use my makeup and my perfume. I was scared to death to throw my underwear away because he would get them out of the garbage and smell them in front of everyone and tell me they stink. He had a gym bag full of underwear, and he would masturbate in them and put them under the mattresses throughout the house and on the windowsill outside the house.”

Michelle and Melissa both said that their father would fondle them and insisted on pulling down their pants to spank them until they were in their midteens and strong enough to fight him off. Although they never saw him touch their younger sister in her private areas, he would often take Melinda, whom he called Lindy Star, with him to bed and close the door. This occurred from the time Melinda was an infant until she was a teenager.

“He’d say, ‘Lindy Star, let’s go to bed, come up to my bed,’” Michelle recalled. “I would say, ‘Dad, please don’t take her.’”

Johnson was told that when Melinda was about five, Larry
suddenly embraced religion and announced to the family that he was a born-again Christian. He began to quote zealously from the Scriptures, and he forced Margie and the girls to dress conservatively and to follow several feet behind him when they walked together.

At one point, Michelle said, Larry decided that all his children’s toys had been possessed by demons and he burned them in an incinerator. He also became obsessed with the thought that Melinda had been possessed by the Devil and he took her to have an exorcism.

“We drove to this motel and dropped her off with a middle-aged man for several hours,” Michelle remembered. “My dad took her in his arms and carried her to the door of this motel room and gave her to this man.”

Margie told Johnson that she’d tried suicide on two occasions. On the first, when Melinda was five, the girls found their mother in the basement, passed out from an overdose of sleeping pills, with pictures of her three daughters scattered around her.

The second attempt came on the tumultuous night that Larry left the family. That evening began with Larry taking Melinda, who was then thirteen, and her cousin Lisa, who was twelve, swimming at the indoor pool at the New Albany Holiday Inn. When they came home, Lisa was crying. She said that Larry had been peeking over the shower at her and Melinda and poking their naked bodies with a cane. Margie exploded. She chased Larry out of the house with a kitchen knife and ended up slashing his hand before police arrived and took him away.

Later that night Margie took an overdose of sleeping pills and her daughters had to walk her around the house, keeping her awake until the ambulance arrived.

After Larry left, Melinda became quiet and withdrawn. Despite all the abuse she’d witnessed, Melinda had remained close to her father.

“You see, she always took up for my father and stayed by his side,” Michelle said. “They had always had a relationship that was more husband and wife than father and daughter. When he left she didn’t really want to talk to any of us.”

It was shortly after Larry left that Melinda began her relationship with Amanda. Even though Michelle and Melissa were lesbians themselves, they claimed they discouraged Melinda from getting serious with Amanda.

“We told Melinda she was too young to be involved with anyone, male or female, and she told me that Amanda spoke and acted like my dad,” Michelle said. “She thought Amanda looked like my dad.”

Even more graphic descriptions of Larry’s sexual abuses came from Melinda’s cousins, Teddy Lynn Barber and Eddie Rager. In the hope of helping Melinda’s defense, the two cousins agreed to talk to Johnson.

Thirty-two-year-old Eddie Rager, who used to babysit the Loveless girls, described her uncle Larry as “a very sick, warped personality.”

Rager said that whenever she spent the night at the Loveless house, Larry would get her panties out of her overnight bag and smell them. At other times, Rager claimed, Larry would parade around the house smelling Margie’s panties and making rude remarks.

Rager contended that Larry first abused her on a Saturday morning when she was ten years old. She was lying on the living-room carpet of the Loveless home, watching cartoons, when he lay down beside her and started to fondle her breasts. Rager said Larry’s hand worked its way down her stomach and into her panties.

Another alleged molestation took place when Rager was sleeping in the same bed as her aunt Margie, and Larry slipped into bed beside his niece.

“I thought I was having a nightmare and I was trying to wake out of it,” Rager recalled. “In the nightmare somebody was holding their hand over my mouth. When I did wake up, Larry’s hand was over my mouth and his other arm was around me and his penis was in my rectum.”

Rager’s younger sister, twenty-nine-year-old Teddy Lynn Barber, told Johnson that Larry started abusing her when she was ten. She said it started in a playful manner with him tickling her feet, but he soon started touching her breasts and vagina. Barber claimed that this took place within view
of Michelle and Melissa, who were several years younger than she.

“It got to where he would have vaginal, anal, and oral sex with me,” Barber later testified in court. “He would pull me in bed and then he would have sex, all different kinds, with me.”

Barber told Johnson that some of the abuse also occurred in the Loveless bathroom, where Larry would force her to perform oral sex on him. Although Barber never actually saw Larry molest his daughters, she said he would often take Melinda into the bathroom with him and close the door.

Barber said there were times when she and the Loveless girls witnessed Larry and Margie having sex with other adults who would come to their house. During these orgies “the girls would be there and there were no doors closed to hide anything,” Barber said.

Barber claimed that she told her mother about the molestations when she was a teenager and that her mother talked to Margie about it. She said that the incidents were never reported to the police or any social agencies, however, “because you didn’t talk about things like that back then.”

Luckily for Johnson and the defense he was constructing, some of the details of Larry’s abuse of his wife and daughters had been documented. There were police reports of some of his beatings of Margie. In addition, Michelle had sought therapy for depression in April of 1990, shortly after her parents were divorced. At that time she told psychologists at LifeSpring Mental Health Services in Jeffersonville that she and Melissa had been sexually abused by their father and she suspected that Melinda had been abused as well.

In February of 1991, Melinda told a counselor at Hazelwood that her mother disapproved of her lesbian relationship with Amanda. The counselor met with Margie and suggested that they both seek professional therapy. Over the next several months, therefore, Margie and all three of her daughters received counseling at LifeSpring.

In her report on Melinda, Lifespring staff therapist Mina Thevenin wrote: “Melinda exhibits worry and anxiety
about her sisters’ alleged sexual abuse by their father. She was also recently involved in a same-sex relationship which caused increased conflict between her mother and herself.”

Melinda told Thevenin about the time that her father watched her and her cousin in the shower at the Holiday Inn, but she insisted that she had no clear memory of her father ever sexually molesting her.

Still, Thevenin had her suspicions. She wrote in her report: “As patient’s father allegedly molested her two older sisters, it is possible that she was also molested. She reports having some nightmares about her father molesting her.”

Melinda’s sisters and cousins agreed to testify about the abuse. “They were all very brave young women,” Johnson would say later. “They were willing to relive those horrible memories in order to help Melinda.”

Although Margie had concurred with much of what her daughters told Johnson, he couldn’t risk putting her on the stand.

“Margie wanted to be supportive but I soon discovered that she needed emotional support herself,” Johnson said. “We’d be in Melinda’s jail cell and her mother would come in. Melinda would sit on her lap or vice versa and they would do nothing but hug each other and cry. I also knew that her mother would have to take part of the blame for the abuse Melinda suffered as a child.”

Usually there’s no better character witness than a defendant’s mother. But then most mothers haven’t been accused of participating in group sex in front of her daughters. Johnson knew that any prosecutor worth his salt would destroy Margie on the witness stand. Melinda’s mother would have to sit this one out.

The same went for Melinda herself.

“Going into the hearing I was 99 percent sure I wasn’t going to put her on the stand,” Johnson said. “I was afraid she would break down under the pressure. Melinda was having a tough time dealing with everything that had happened. I don’t believe she fully comprehended the seriousness of her situation. She was dealing with it as if it was a dream that she was going to wake up out of eventually.”

17

N
o sooner had Shanda’s parents fended off the local press than the long-distance calls started.

Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, and Sally Jesse Raphael extended invitations to fly them to New York. The tabloid television shows “Hard Copy,” “A Current Affair,” and others offered to send film crews to their homes. Movie producers dogged the family for screen rights to Shanda’s story.

Behind their interest and concern, Jacque and Steve could imagine the backroom conversations. A bizarre murder in America’s heartland had all the ingredients for a boffo movie of the week. Talk about a ratings sweep. Teenage killers. Lesbians. Rumors of witchcraft and blood drinking. The burned corpse of a twelve-year-old. Parents in anguish. Hell, it was too sensational. It might even have to be toned down to get past the censors. “But we’ll treat it with proper respect, that we promise you, Mrs. Ott. It will be a fitting tribute to Shanda’s memory, Mr. Sharer. You have our word.”

“Jacque and I decided early on not to talk to anyone,” Steve Sharer said. “We were afraid to do anything that might jeopardize the case against these girls.”

Coping with Shanda’s death was tough enough without the distractions. Steve was haunted by the thought that his daughter might still be alive if he’d only let Michele Durham spend the night that Friday. If Michele had been there, it’s likely that would have discouraged her daughter’s kidnappers.

Steve also believed that Shanda hadn’t left willingly, that she’d been forced into the car. Even though Toni, Melinda, and Laurie had all given statements that Shanda didn’t put up a struggle, Steve didn’t buy it. If Shanda had planned on going with the girls, why didn’t she take her purse and coat? Then there was the question of why the family dog was outside and limping that morning. Shanda knew that Sparky, the miniature rottweiler, was supposed to stay in the house at night. Even if Shanda had gone with the girls willingly, she wouldn’t have left Sparky outdoors.

Steve believed it happened like this: Hope and Laurie told Shanda that Amanda was waiting in the car, so she went out for a quick talk without her coat and purse, with Sparky by her side. When Shanda saw that Amanda wasn’t in the car she tried to leave, but the girls forced her inside. Steve thinks that Sparky tried to interfere and was hit or kicked by one of the girls or else the dog gave chase to the car and was somehow struck as it drove away.

“Sparky was limping badly when I found him on the driveway that morning,” Steve said. “His left rear hindquarter was so sore he wouldn’t put any weight on it.”

Steve had returned to his job within a week of Shanda’s murder, thinking it best to keep his hands and mind occupied. “It was an escape for me,” he said. “If I sat around the house all I would do was think of Shanda.”

Still, there were times when the grief seemed to overwhelm Steve, and he took comfort in the counsel of Catholic nuns at the St. Catherine Convent in Louisville.