In the weeks following, Melinda threatened Shanda in public and began to write letters to Amanda saying she wanted Shanda dead. At the dance, Melinda tried to fight Shanda, but Amanda stopped her. The sight of Shanda and Amanda together made Melinda furious. In October, they attended a school dance where they encountered Amanda’s ex-girlfriend, 16-year-old Melinda Loveless. The friendship soon developed into more and the two girls began exchanging love letters. Since it began, Shanda’s grades were slipping and she was getting into trouble. Jackie, Shanda’s mother, was unsettled by the friendship. The two ended up in detention together, where they resolved their issues and became friends. ![]() Early on in the school year, she got into a fight with 14-year-old Amanda Heavrin. There is no agreement on her sentence.Shanda started at Hazelwood Middle School in New Albany. In a plea bargain reached in April, Toni Lawrence agreed to testify for the prosecution in exchange for a guilty plea on a The body was discovered an hour after Toni got home. Detective Henry testified that Laurie Tackett and Melinda Loveless told Toni they "planned to burn Shanda's body." But Toni said she was dropped off at home before Shanda was killed. Sometime after daybreak, with Shanda bleeding but still alive in the trunk, the girls went to a Madison gas station, where they filled a 2-liter soda bottle with gasoline. At various times, Shanda was tied up, threatened with death, cut on the legs, choked, and beaten with a metal rod, perhaps a tire tool. came up out of the back seat and put a knife to Shanda's throat, and pulled her hair back."Īs the girls drove back toward Madison, Toni Lawrence told Detective Henry, they made several stops for torture. That, Detective Henry said, was when "Melinda. Senior High Principal Roger Gallatin described Hope Rippey and Toni Lawrence - both also 10th-graders - as "above-average students, not discipline problems." A classmate said Toni and Hope had been spending time with the black-clothes group but had not changed their appearance.Ĭontinuing with Toni's story, Detective Henry testified that the three girls drove down to New Albany, where they picked up Melinda Loveless, 16, a friend of Laurie's who was unknown to Toni and Hope. Her attorney would say in court that she had a history of mental problems. Last fall, after her 17th birthday, Laurie dropped out of school. She joined a small clique of perhaps a dozen like-minded kids at Madison High who were known as the "Alternatives." In the eighth grade, she cut short her long blond hair and began to dress in black. Madison Junior High Principal Larry Cummins said that Laurie, 17, had been "a fine elementary student" with "good values." A classmate recalled that Laurie had once been very religious, like her Christian fundamentalist parents.īut then she changed, her classmates said. Toni said 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. At Christmastime several years ago, a group of 14- or 15-year-olds stole the baby Jesus doll from the courthouse creche, wrote "666" on it - the "number of the Beast" from Revelations - and burned it. 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 investigation, said he knew that "there possibly was a 90 percent chance" that lesbian jealousy touched off the crime.Īs for Satanism, he knew of only one concrete incident. "That's what my granddaughter brought home from junior high school," said Fauna Mihalko, 62, who works in the town library's genealogy section. 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. ![]() Despite the scarcity of facts, or perhaps because of it, rumors and whispers about another dimension to the crime soon began to drift across the town, like some cold fog off the Ohio.
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