Little Lost Angel (33 page)

Kary’s braggadocio vanished once she stepped into the courtroom and was outside the sight of her friends. She kept her head down as she passed Melinda’s table and didn’t raise it again until Townsend started asking about the times she’d heard Melinda threaten to kill Shanda.

“How often did she discuss these killing aspects?” he asked.

Kary was reluctant to answer, until Townsend showed her a transcript of the statement she had given Steve Henry. Then he repeated the question.

Kary swallowed and answered, “About every day.”

When Melinda heard those words she shook her head and began to cry. Kary hung her head again, ashamed of what she was being forced to do. She breathed a sign of relief when Bob Hammerle began his cross-examination and shifted the focus to Laurie. Kary was still seething from the smart-ass letter Laurie’s “wife” had sent her. Laurie had played with her emotions. If it came down to Melinda or Laurie, there was no question: Melinda was the one she really cared for. As Hammerle asked questions about Laurie’s dark personality, Kary seemed more than willing to assassinate the character of her former friend. She told how Laurie once offered to kill her grandmother and how she said it would be fun to get high and burn someone alive. She told of Laurie’s channeling, her obsession with vampires and witchcraft, and her penchant for drinking her own blood.

Townsend knew there was a risk in putting Kary on the stand and he’d seen his worst fears come true. Hammerle had cleverly turned the state’s witness into a witness for the
defense. Kary’s most damaging statements had been aimed at Laurie, not Melinda. Now he had to go on the attack himself. He jumped out of his seat and swaggered over to the witness for re-cross-examination.

“Miss Pope, what did you say to Melinda when you gave her that long embrace out at the water cooler?”

“I told her I loved her and she’d always have a place in my heart no matter what happens with this.”

“Didn’t you tell her something else?” Townsend demanded.

Kary looked him in the eye. “I told her that I hope Laurie fries for this.”

Townsend and Melinda’s attorneys had been trading snide remarks since the hearing began, but it came to a head this time when Hammerle objected to the way Townsend had been hovering over Kary.

“I object to the prosecutor standing up in front of her with his hands on his hips and to the intimidation and argumentative nature of this approach,” Hammerle said.

Townsend responded sharply: “If Mr. Hammerle will tell me how he wishes me to position myself while we await this witness’s answer I will gladly accommodate him.” His last five words were emphasized as if they were an invitation to an alley fight. A tingle of excitement filled the courtroom as Townsend faced off with Hammerle and said with the pugnaciousness of a schoolboy daring a rival to cross a line in the dirt, “I find nothing wrong with the way I’m standing, Mr. Hammerle.”

Judge Todd had seen enough of these shenanigans and ordered both counsels to direct their comments to the bench. Then he turned to the witness and asked, “Do you remember his question?”

“Let’s see,” Kary began. “Oh yeah. I know Melinda pled guilty to murder, but I think that Laurie had control of her mind. I think Laurie was behind her and pushed her because I’ve been where Melinda was with her.”

Townsend struck the same pose that Hammerle had objected to earlier and forcefully asked, “So you’re saying it was Laurie who wanted Shanda Sharer dead, right?”

“It didn’t matter who it was,” Kary replied.

“Well, who was it who died? Who told you she wanted Shanda Sharer dead?”

Kary answered meekly, “Melinda did.”

*  *  *

The state’s next witness was no stranger to a courtroom. Tracy Lynn Plaskett, twenty-one, had a long history of run-ins with the law. She had been arrested in Louisiana in 1989 for suspicion of forgery, although the charges were eventually dropped. She was arrested again for forgery in Indiana in 1989 and then in Georgia in 1991 for power-of-attorney revocation. After serving a year for the Indiana forgery charges, Plaskett had recently been released from jail.

Plaskett, a slim, attractive brunette, walked into the courtroom with her head held high and a serious look of importance on her face. In short order, she told how she had spent several months in the Clark County jail with Melinda Loveless.

“What did Melinda have to say about the events that led up to her arrest?” Townsend asked.

“She would be laughing about it.” Plaskett looked directly at Melinda as she said this, but Melinda turned her head, not meeting the stare. “Melinda said it started over her boyfriend, whose name was Justin. But we got suspicious when she never got any letters from Justin. They were all from Amanda. Eventually she told us that she goes both ways. She told us about her sexual encounters with people.”

Plaskett said that Melinda “would literally burst out laughing when she told us about how Shanda was killed.”

Hammerle rose from his chair and circled the courtroom in front of Plaskett like a hawk eying his next meal. He’d made mincemeat of Plaskett’s kind before. Nothing is more pleasurable to a criminal attorney than to have a convicted criminal on the witness stand. You can bring up their past crimes, you can probe into what kind of deal they got to testify, you can destroy their credibility with a few choice questions.

With a clipped, terse delivery that showed his disregard
for the witness, Hammerle quickly established that Plaskett had used various aliases, including her own daughter’s name, on bogus checks.

In relentless fashion Hammerle hammered home the details of Plaskett’s extensive criminal record. At various times Townsend and Don Currie, the deputy prosecutor, shouted objections—so often, in fact, that Hammerle complained to Judge Todd.

“Could we have one prosecutor at a time responding to me, or is that impossible?” Hammerle asked.

For once, however, Judge Todd seemed to be enjoying the furious exchanges. “Everybody’s been double-teaming each other now and then,” he said. “I will allow that. It’s a tag team.”

Hammerle began harping once again on Plaskett’s soiled record when the interrogation took an unexpected turn.

“My criminal record has nothing to do with this case,” Plaskett stated with a sudden show of feistiness. “I spent my time. I paid my dues in jail. I’ve paid my debt to society and I don’t have to be subjected to this.”

Hammerle retorted, “Why were you put in lockdown in the Clark County jail for thirty days?”

“For fighting,” Plaskett answered back sharply. “She was a prostitute.”

“What were you fighting about?”

“Her mouth. I don’t like to be bullied around. If somebody bullies me, I will bully back.”

“I don’t doubt that one bit,” Hammerle said derisively.

Plaskett wasn’t through. “I will not stand for somebody pushing me around. And this was a big girl. She was five-eleven and three hundred pounds.”

Hammerle smirked. “Well, did you beat her up pretty good?”

“No.”

Hammerle pointed at Melinda. “She was bigger than that little girl, wasn’t she?”

“She was bigger than both of us put together.”

The spectators chuckled at the last remark. Plaskett’s spunkiness had won them over.

Hammerle seemed to be struggling to retain control. “Let me ask you this: Did you plead guilty to twenty-six counts of forgery?”

“Yes, I did. I’ve answered that question three times. I mean, it’s not like I stole a checkbook and wrote twenty thousand checks. My husband was in the service and restricted to the barracks, for God’s sake. We were having marital problems. I was told to pay the bills, so I wrote some bad checks. I got caught and like a stupid idiot I pled guilty.”

The spectators giggled again.

Off balance but determined to end on a high note, Hammerle questioned Plaskett about what kind of deal she got in order to testify: “Did you decide to come forward because you suddenly got a revelation to become a good citizen? You were seeking some deal, weren’t you?”

“No, I did not. I’m a parent. If you’re a parent, you tell me you couldn’t go forward and tell what somebody told you on something like this. It’s a disgusting crime.”

Hammerle couldn’t resist a final remark: “I’m a parent, but I don’t have three prior felony convictions, ma’am.”

Plaskett snapped back, “My prior convictions have nothing to do with murder either.”

Townsend could see that Hammerle was still smarting from his skirmish with Plaskett, so he decided to rub salt in the wound when he questioned the witness.

“Ms. Plaskett, did Mr. Hammerle ever talk to you before today?”

“Yes, he did.”

“What did he tell you about your testimony?”

“He said that my testimony was not crucial.”

Hammerle could see that Townsend was about to accuse him once again of tampering with one of the state’s witnesses. He shouted an objection: “I want a hearing on this. What are we going into now? I interviewed her in the hallway.” Hammerle pointed at the witness as he sneered, “This little felonious person makes an allegation, and I want a hearing off the record.”

Judge Todd seemed puzzled by the outburst. “What is it she said?”

Townsend filled him in. “She said that Mr. Hammerle talked to her about her testimony and told her that her testimony didn’t amount to anything and that it wouldn’t hurt Melinda Loveless.”

“And that was in the hall here?” Todd asked.

“That’s absolutely untrue,” Hammerle responded. “I interviewed her to find out what she was going to say.”

Townsend said, “This is the second lie by Mr. Hammerle. It’s quite a coincidence, I would say.”

For the second time in two days, Townsend and Hammerle were at one another’s throats, and Judge Todd had seen enough. He ordered them both to his chambers and administered a tongue-lashing. He made it clear to Hammerle that he would not stand for any interviews outside the courtroom that could possibly be construed as tampering with a witness. Todd then chastised Townsend for his poor courtroom manners.

“Now let’s get out there and conduct ourselves like professionals,” said Todd, ever the peacemaker.

Russ Johnson would later say of Todd, “The man had the disposition of a saint to put up with everything that happened in that courtroom.”

*  *  *

The four days of the hearing had taken their toll on Steve Sharer. Every morning he and Sharon and other members of their family would make the forty-five-minute drive from Jeffersonville to Madison, traveling the same route that Melinda and the others had taken the night they abducted Shanda.

Each day he’d sit in the front row with his family, listening to the horrors inflicted on his daughter. During court recesses he’d slip off into the stairwell to smoke a cigarette and would do his best to join in the conversation when someone brought up college basketball or some other topic.

Once, when a group of spectators were complaining about the persnickety old radiator in the courtroom, Steve, a heating and cooling technician, pulled the court bailiff aside and gave him some tips on how to correct the problem. During these moments, Steve’s buoyant nature would surface
and an easy smile would cross his lips. But the sadness never left his eyes, and it would grow deeper every day.

“I don’t know how I’m hanging on,” he said one day while waiting for court to reconvene. “I really don’t. I sit in there and it’s like a nightmare that will never end. Every day it gets worse.”

Now, sitting in the witness chair, Steve was called upon to tell the court about Shanda’s last night at home and the heartwrenching experience of discovering her gone the next morning. With the effort to restrain his emotions obvious, Steve recalled the events of that night and the following day. When that was done, Townsend asked Steve to tell the court about his relationship with Shanda and what her loss meant to him.

Steve closed his eyes tightly for a few seconds and swallowed hard. Then he said, “I feel a great deep hole in my chest. My heart sags sorrowfully. What happened to my daughter goes a lot deeper than what they have done to her. They have just totally ruined our family with the loss of Shanda. It’s very hard to go to work when you see the school buses and the little children getting on them. It just rips through me.”

Steve began to weep. “Give me a minute here,” he said in a choked voice. “I guess my mother said it best. Every morning when she gets up she says, ‘Well, I’m just one day closer to Shanda.’ I say, ‘That’s right, Mom, because we know where Shanda is now. Nobody can hurt her and maybe one day we’ll get there.’”

Steve’s shoulders slumped forward and he wiped the tears from his eyes. With what seemed like great effort, he sluggishly lifted himself from the witness chair and returned to his seat.

Sharon Sharer gave her husband a hug as she passed him on the way to the witness chair, where she talked about her love for Shanda. She ended her emotional testimony by asking Judge Todd to give Melinda the maximum sentence.

When Melinda heard those words she lowered her head to the table and let out a shivering scream. Her long wavy hair concealed her face, but everyone in the packed courtroom could hear her moaning and blubbering. Melinda’s attorneys
patted her on the back, but she continued to cry softly with her face to the table as Shanda’s half-sister, Paije, got up to testify.

Paije was in her seventh month of pregnancy, and the long days in court had caused her physical discomfort. Earlier in the week, a deputy had found her a soft chair and placed it at the end of the front-row bench, placing her closer to Melinda than anyone else in her family. Occasionally during the hearing, Paije would turn to Melinda and stare for long minutes at the girl who had taken her little sister’s life. Now as she walked to the witness chair, Paije stared again, and as if by cue Melinda lifted her head at that exact moment. Their eyes met, and Melinda turned eyes away, just as she had time and time before when she had found Paije studying her.

Paije began by looking directly at Melinda, her eyes showing her contempt. “They sit and cry, but they didn’t cry when they were doing it to her. Why should they cry now? Because they’re in trouble. My sister doesn’t have a chance to cry. She didn’t have a chance at anything. She didn’t have a choice but to die.”