Henry testified that the three girls drove down to New Albany, where they picked up Melinda Loveless, 16, a friend of Laurie Tackett's who was unknown to Toni and Hope. Toni told him that the night of horror began Friday when she and another Madison High sophomore, Hope Rippey, 15, were picked up after school by Mary Laurine "Laurie" Tackett. that night has provided the only detailed account so far of the crime. His testimony at a probable cause hearing at Judge Todd's house at 1 a.m. She was in hysterics, and she wanted to talk about a murder.ĭetective Stephen Thomas Henry, a 20-year veteran of the Indiana State Police, was assigned to interview her. It was 9 p.m., and Toni Lawrence, a 15-year-old sophomore at Madison High had appeared at the city police station with her parents. Ten hours after the body was discovered, police got their first big break in the case. The county of 30,000 has had just four in 12 years. On the job just 18 months, this is his first murder. 17.Ĭounty prosecutor Guy Townsend is a former newspaper reporter with a Ph.D. Speculation about the killing was so intense in Jefferson County that Circuit Court Judge Ted Todd ruled that all jury pools for the trials would be drawn from another county.Īnticipation that the worst of the rumors might be proved true in court has only increased Madisonians' dread of the three scheduled trials, the first one set for Aug. The teens who hang out behind the fast food store on Michigan Road claim they know of lesbian and satanic circles among other Madison teens, so many of them believe the talk about Shanda's killing.Įven Madison Police Chief Bill Tingle, whose department has had no official role in the murder investigation, said he knew "there possibly was a 90 percent chance" that lesbian jealousy touched off the crime. Today, virtually anyone you ask in Madison has heard the talk _ none of it officially confirmed _ that the dead girl and one of her killers were involved in a lesbian lovers' triangle, or satanism. He and defense lawyers refuse to comment publicly on the case.ĭespite the scarcity of facts, or perhaps because of it, rumors and whispers about another dimension to the crime soon began to drift across town. The county prosecutor, Guy Mannering Townsend, 49, clamped a lid on all official information about the crime. Shanda was killed, police quoted the 15-year-old as saying, because one of the other girls believed Shanda was "trying to steal her girlfriend."īy March, all four girls would be charged as adults with murder, and the county prosecutor refused to rule out seeking the death penalty in any of the cases. One had turned herself in to police, and was talking. The transcript of a late-night probable cause hearing before the arrests revealed that two other Madison girls, both 15, were also suspected of involvement. She had been burned alive.Īnd there was more. He listed the official cause of death as burns and smoke inhalation. She also was brutally sodomized with a foreign object.įinally, she was doused with gasoline and burned beyond recognition, Nichols said. Her legs had been slashed, and she had been beaten repeatedly on the head with a blunt object. Shanda's wrists and ankles had been bound, he said. The hard-bitten chief medical examiner from nearby Kentucky was called in by Indiana police to conduct the autopsy. That two young girls could be suspected of such a thing became even more astonishing when the dimensions of the crime were sketched by Dr. The second was from New Albany, Ind., a suburb of Louisville, Ky., 45 miles away. Within hours, Indiana State Police had arrested two girls, ages 16 and 17, and charged them with Shanda's murder. The police had more serous work on that January weekend. "We have policemen and firemen who get cats out of trees," said Sharon Steinhardt, 34, who works on Main Street for the Chamber of Commerce. It was an image that had no room for the murder of children. But for others, Shanda's death has opened the shutters on a darker place in their own community, a place that stands in stark contrast to the nostalgic image they present to tourists. Some in Madison have laid the blame on evils that seeped in from outside their town.
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