Little Lost Angel (29 page)

“I don’t know why it worked out that way,” Steve said. “But I had to do routine maintenance of the convent’s heating and air-conditioning system, and it seemed like every time I went there I was at my lowest point. Sister Mary Amelda, a little, sweet lady, would always end up having a long talk with me.”

Steve is a Methodist and Jacque a Catholic. Although neither was a steady churchgoer, they both believe strongly in God and saw to it that Shanda went to church or Sunday school regularly. Not that Shanda needed to be pushed, since she’d always had a fascination with Bible stories.

“Shanda had not been baptized yet,” Steve said. “She was always on us to get her baptized but we felt she should wait a few years until she was a little older, then let her decide on her own if she wanted to be a Methodist or a Catholic. But after she died the fact that she wasn’t baptized troubled me. I asked Sister Amelda how I would know she was in Heaven if she wasn’t baptized. Sister asked me, ‘Did she believe in God and did she believe in Jesus?’ and I told her yes. Sister Amelda said, ‘Well then, don’t worry. She is in Heaven already.’ That sweet lady helped me get through this. I will always owe her a debt.”

Steve’s wife, Sharon, tried to console her husband, but she was consumed by her own grief. Sharon and Shanda had become very close during the three and a half years of her marriage to Steve.

“Shanda was not just Steve’s daughter,” Sharon said. “I thought of her as my daughter too. She was another grandchild for my parents to love, another sister for my children and a niece for my brothers and sisters. They all loved her very much and she loved them in return. Whenever Shanda came into our house she would always hug and kiss everybody. When she called on the phone she never hung up without saying ‘I love you’ and she meant it. I hurt for my husband because I see his sorrow and pain every day. And I hurt for Jacque too because even though Steve and Jacque are divorced, we’re a family and we all care about each other. Shanda loved all of us. They’ve taken more than her away. They took her love from us. I know she’s in Heaven now and that’s the thing that helps me through it.”

Jacque Ott had also returned to work shortly after Shanda’s death, but each day was a struggle to keep herself from breaking down into tears.

Like Steve, Jacque was plagued by what-ifs. On the Friday morning before the murder, as Jacque was taking Shanda to school, her daughter asked if she could stay home that
weekend. Shanda knew that Steve would be working on the house and figured he wouldn’t have much time for her. Jacque told Shanda that Steve and Sharon would be disappointed if Shanda didn’t spend the weekend with them. And Sharon had bought tickets to a Rod Stewart concert in Louisville for Saturday night and had planned to take Shanda.

“When I reminded Shanda about the concert she perked up and said she thought that would be fun,” Jacque said. “I keep thinking back on that conversation. If I’d have just told her she could stay home, she would still be here with me.”

Jacque became infuriated when she learned from Steve Henry about the letters that Amanda’s father had turned over to the Floyd County probation office. One of the letters said that Melinda wanted Shanda dead. And although probation officer Virgil Seay had spoken to Melinda about the letters, he hadn’t notified Jacque or Steve of their contents.

“At that point I had no idea that Melinda had threatened Shanda,” Jacque said. “Steve and I would have been even more protective, we’d have taken more precautions, if we knew that Melinda was after Shanda. I will never forgive that man for not telling us about those letters.”

The questions and regrets weighed heavily on Jacque.

“Every day at three o’clock I’d find myself sitting by my office phone waiting for Shanda to call and tell me that she was home from school, as she always did,” she said. “I began to drink a lot. I thought that would help me put it all out of my mind. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how much Shanda must have suffered. I could hear her screaming for me. I wanted to die so I could be with her. I started thinking about committing suicide and I realized I needed help.”

Jacque checked herself into Jefferson Hospital, a mental-health facility in Jeffersonville.

“Walking through those doors was like admitting defeat,” Jacque said. “I had always been strong. I had told myself that I was strong enough to deal with this, but I wasn’t. I was at the end of my rope.”

At first Jacque didn’t respond to private counseling or group therapy. She was reluctant to talk about her feelings. Her emotions had been wound so tight for so long she was afraid they would spin out of control if she let go. Finally, counselor Sandra Graves found the right button to push. Graves told Jacque to imagine that Shanda was sitting in an empty chair she put in front of Jacque and to tell her everything she wanted to say to Shanda. Then she told Jacque to sit in the chair and for her to be Shanda and to say what she believed Shanda would say to her.

“It was very emotional,” Jacque said. “Then she told me to be Shanda and she would be me. I talked to her as if I was Shanda and it brought me closer to Shanda. I ended up crying uncontrollably. Everything I had been storing up came pouring out. I have a strong belief in God and Sandra helped me realize that I would see Shanda again and that there was a purpose to my life.”

After that day, Jacque began to open up in group sessions. With each day she grew emotionally stronger, although there were occasional setbacks. There were evenings when she would sit alone in the gazebo behind the hospital and stare into space until the memories and the tears overwhelmed her. One evening when Jacque went to the gazebo she found someone else there. The tall bearded man nodded at her, smiled softly, then lit a cigarette and turned his attention the other way.

The man was so quiet Jacque soon forgot he was there. She smoked a cigarette herself and thought about Shanda. She didn’t realize she was sobbing until the man touched her on the shoulder and asked if she was all right.

“I just opened up to him,” Jacque said. “I told him everything. He sat on the floor next to me and held me while I cried.”

Suddenly Doug Vaught’s own worries seemed very small. The thirty-nine-year-old ex-Army paratrooper had checked himself into Jefferson Hospital when his marriage failed and he’d begun drinking too much. “What I had gone through was nothing compared to what Jacque was dealing with,” said Vaught, a postal worker in Louisville.

Jacque was drawn to Doug’s quiet strength and laid-back nature. They began meeting at the gazebo every evening and would take walks around the hospital property.

“I’d been through a lot of relationships and so had Doug,” Jacque said. “We were attracted to each other, but we were both scared to get involved because we both knew how vulnerable I was. We decided to just be friends, but after I checked out of the hospital I realized how much I missed him.”

Jacque’s counselors had told her that she had turned the corner. She had come to grips with her grief, and it was time for her to take the next step. It was time for her to leave. Jacque moved in with her friend Connie Dean. Then one day she got a call from Doug, who had left the hospital on the same day as Jacque.

“When we saw each other again we knew we didn’t want to be separated again,” Jacque said. “We knew we were in love.”

On October 2, less than two weeks after Melinda and Laurie had accepted their plea agreements, Jacque and Doug were married in a quiet civil ceremony. They bought a house in a small village north of New Albany. Jackie gathered together some of Shanda’s photographs and keepsakes and had them put under glass in two large shadow boxes. She hung them on her living-room wall. They contained the mementos of an active life. There was the bright red letter jacket she had worn after playing basketball at St. Paul Catholic School, the ribbons she’d won in gymnastics, her softball batting glove, her Girl Scout and 4H merit badges, pictures of her on the cheerleading squad, and a picture of the heart-shaped headstone that marked her grave.

Jacque and Doug had invited Shanda’s older half-sister, Paije, to move in with them. Paije, nineteen, had become pregnant that spring and decided to have the child out of wedlock.

“When Paije first told me I was so angry,” Jacque said. “She had gotten pregnant just six months after Shanda died. I thought it was a cruel joke. Then I realized that a new life
was coming into our family and I realized it was a gift from God.”

Paije, a student nurse, had her own difficulties dealing with her little sister’s murder. She broke down in the days following the funeral and spent three weeks at Our Lady of Peace, a mental health hospital in Louisville.

After her stay in the hospital, the engaging brunette with the pleasant disposition became the rock of the family, offering a shoulder to lean on for Steve, Sharon, and Jacque.

Paije would say later that although she’d come to terms with Shanda’s death, she would never understand why it had happened.

“Because of jealousy, she’s now gone,” Paije said. “My sister can never come back again. These girls can get out of prison and go on with their lives. My sister can’t. I worry about my mother every day. I worry about whether she’s going to make it or not. Shanda was Steve’s only child. They’ve taken that away from him. I’ll never understand.”

Paije said she didn’t know how Melinda, Laurie, Hope, and Toni could live with themselves.

“At their age how could they do the things that they did to my sister and look at themselves in the mirror? It’s ruined my life. Every time I lay down at night I can hear her crying for help. My sister wasn’t a mean person. She loved everybody. She wanted to be friends with everybody. She would never have hurt anybody. She didn’t deserve to die.”

Shanda’s murder had also deeply affected her young friends.

“I didn’t believe it for a long time,” said Michele Durham. “I guess I was in shock. I don’t guess I’ll ever get over it.”

Shanda’s cousin Amanda Edrington said it hurt to think about all the fun times they’d had together.

“I looked up to Shanda a lot,” Amanda said. “She kind of mother-henned me. She was just that way. I miss her so much. It scared me to think that someone I loved could be taken from me just like that. It still scares me.”

The murder was also troubling to the students at Hazelwood who didn’t know Shanda well but were well
acquainted with Melinda. While many students at Hazelwood were aware of Melinda’s homosexuality and her jealous dominance of Amanda, and many had seen her in a few pushing and shoving matches, few of them had thought her capable of such a violent act.

“It’s hard to accept that any of this is true,” said Jennifer Risner, a classmate. “It just doesn’t seem like Melinda. None of us can believe this happened.”

“Melinda was a loner when I met her,” said Dennis Smith, fifteen. “That’s one of the reasons I liked her. She was different. She helped me out when I was having a tough time getting to know people in the seventh grade. She was a good friend. I still don’t think she was involved in killing Shanda. I don’t care what the police say.”

The students at Madison Consolidated High were equally stunned by the arrest of Toni Lawrence and Hope Rippey. They were not, however, surprised to learn that Laurie Tackett had finally gone over the edge. They’d witnessed Laurie’s transformation from a shy, self-conscious, church-going nerd into a weird, obnoxious showoff who would boast about her magical powers.

“She said she knew a spell she could put on a teacher and that she could punch the air and he’d feel it,” said classmate Mikel Pommerehn. “She told us that when she got mad she could make stuff fly around her room.”

Pommerehn said that she and most other students kept their distance from Laurie. Her instability scared them. The bolder among them would tell Laurie exactly what they thought of her: She was nuts. Few expressed any regrets when Laurie stopped coming to school in the fall of 1991. Good riddance.

Even after she left school, Laurie clung to her friendship with Hope, said Hope’s father Carl Rippey. “Hope sort of felt sorry for Laurie. She would act sisterly to her. But Laurie wasn’t Hope’s only friend. She was not a loner. She had lots of friends. She was a happy child who could find humor in just about anything.”

Hope had an outgoing personality and a bit of brashness about her that won her the acceptance of the more radical
crowd at school, though it put off some of her more refined classmates.

“I didn’t like Hope that well,” said Kelli Skirvin, sixteen, a good friend of Toni. “She was in a, well, lower class sort of.”

“Me and Kelli told Toni a few times that she shouldn’t hang around with Hope,” said Mikel Pommerehn. Mikel thought that Hope, who smoked, cursed, and had gone through a string of boyfriends, was too wild for Toni.

After Hope’s arrest her sister, Tina, told an Associated Press reporter that she believed Hope was innocent, although she didn’t sound too convincing. “When she’s put on trial for murder, what am I supposed to do, say she’s guilty like everyone else? She’s my baby sister and I’ll stand by her.”

It was Toni Lawrence’s involvement that shocked students and teachers most. The psychological evaluations performed on Toni after her suicide attempt painted her as a pompous and manipulative child, and Henry would say later that Toni seemed to be disrespectful of her parents. But in the eyes of Toni’s friends and teachers, she was no more rebellious than the average teenage girl. Most students knew her as a somewhat shy but pleasant girl who did volunteer work at a nursing home, wrote poetry, participated in Girl Scouts and 4H, played trumpet in the school band, and went out for cross-country track, softball, and the swim team.

“I was shocked and stunned to learn that Toni was messed up in this,” said Mary Davee, Toni’s English teacher. “I remember Toni telling me she wanted to take fashion design in college. She was sometimes talkative and giggly in class but never disruptive.”

Beverly Cook, Toni’s French teacher, said, “I think Toni would be the last person I’d have picked to be involved in something like that. You could tell from her appearance that she came from a good home.”