Little Lost Angel (36 page)

“When Laurie told us that none of her teachers ever liked her we didn’t think that could be true,” O’Connor said. “But we couldn’t find one of her teachers who would testify in her behalf. Laurie was an outsider. People considered her weird. Laurie had a desperate need to be accepted but no one accepted her. Peer pressure is tough under normal
circumstances, but Laurie didn’t grow up under normal circumstances.”

O’Connor said that evidence would show that Laurie had been sexually abused as a child and tormented by her zealously religious mother for not sharing her beliefs.

“Laurie is someone who has been a victim all her life,” O’Connor said. “She’s not the evil demon that took over” and coerced the others to kill Shanda. “She wasn’t the leader. She wasn’t the planner. Laurie was a chameleon who would do anything to get people to like her.”

O’Connor closed by saying, “Clearly these are not normal children that were involved with this crime. They come from dysfunctional homes. People say that’s not an excuse. Well, it’s not. It’s an explanation.”

*  *  *

After Steve Henry and Toni Lawrence gave testimonies nearly identical to those they’d given at Melinda’s hearing, Melinda herself was called to the stand. Dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, Melinda scooted quickly across the courtroom and settled into the witness chair without even a glance at the table where Laurie sat with her lawyers.

For two hours, Melinda calmly answered Townsend’s questions about the abduction and murder of Shanda. Melinda’s testimony was almost identical in its particulars to the statement she’d given Steve Henry a month earlier.

“Tackett didn’t cry the whole night,” Melinda said. “I’ve never seen her cry. She just laughed and said it was so neat and so cool.”

O’Connor began her cross-examination by grilling Melinda about her relationship with Amanda Heavrin and her jealousy of Shanda. Melinda handled herself well, and it was only when O’Connor brought out photographs of Shanda’s dead body that she succeeded in placing Melinda off balance.

“Do I have to look at these?” Melinda whined.

O’Connor shoved the photos within inches of Melinda’s face. “Can you show me the places where you saw Laurie make the slash marks?”

“Oh, God!” Melinda shrieked, covering her eyes with her hands, and gasping for breath.

Jacque Vaught was offended by Melinda’s histrionics. She muttered something under her breath and abruptly marched out of the courtroom. Standing in the stairwell, she lit a cigarette, her eyes livid with anger. “They’re all liars. Melinda is just better at it than the others. All this crying. I bet she wasn’t crying when she killed my Shanda.”

Back in the courtroom, Melinda continued to sob softly between answers, stopping every once in a while to dab her teary eyes with a crumpled tissue.

“You’re getting me confused,” Melinda moaned as O’Connor trapped her in a minor inconsistency about the chronology of events surrounding the murder and repeatedly badgered her. After three hours of questioning, it appeared as if Melinda was finally tiring. She was becoming irritated. Her answers no longer rang with careful sincerity. She was becoming defensive. Through sheer endurance, O’Connor had worn her down.

“Why didn’t you tell Laurie’s mother what was happening when you had the chance?”

“I never thought of it.” Melinda’s answer was quick and snippy.

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“I was scared,” Melinda said sharply, as if that explained it all. “I was scared of the whole situation. I felt like we were going through a nightmare.”

O’Connor closed the distance between them with a few quick steps. She hovered over the shaken witness. “You went to Shanda’s house with a knife that night, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Melinda answered. “But I just wanted to fight her. It got out of hand.”

O’Connor stepped even closer, moving in for the kill. “You took a knife to a fistfight, right?”

Melinda’s body shrunk down in the chair and she tugged at the sleeves of her shirt until they covered her hands. She studied the ends of the sleeves for a second, then answered, “Yes, but I just wanted to scare her.”

*  *  *

Laurie’s lawyers began their defense with Sarah Lee Gaylord, a pleasant-faced young woman in her late teens who had once gone to church with Laurie and her mother.

“At one point a girl got up and started dancing around the church and when some of us looked at the minister kind of strange he said she was just in ecstasy and told us to ignore her,” Gaylord said. “There was a laying on of hands of one woman. You could hear some of the ladies wailing and quite a bit of shouting. There was a lot of gibberish and speaking in tongues.”

Gaylord, who came across as credible, said that Peggy Tackett was a demanding and oppressive mother. “There were a few times when I saw Laurie’s mother really get on her for things that didn’t really make any sense to yell or scream about,” she said. “One time Laurie had gotten a glass of water and hadn’t rinsed out the glass, and her mother started yelling at her that she was a devil’s child just because she hadn’t rinsed out this glass after she drank out of it.”

Laurie’s stoicism lifted briefly during Gaylord’s testimony, and she gave the friendly witness a smile as she left.

Jan Singer, a middle-aged woman who’d lived down the street from the Tacketts, testified next. Singer recalled that several years earlier, Laurie appeared at her door one afternoon, begging to come inside. Laurie was screaming that her mother had gotten her down on the bed and tried to strangle her. There were marks on Laurie’s neck, and Singer had reported the incident to the welfare department. Shortly after that, social workers forbade Peggy Tackett from physically disciplining Laurie.

Singer said Laurie was always different from the other youths in the neighborhood. “She wasn’t really cute like the other girls,” she said. “She had no self-confidence. She was picked on, and my son was as guilty as the other kids.”

*  *  *

After Singer had stepped down, Wil Goering nudged his client gently. “Your honor, the defense calls Laurie Tackett.”

Laurie rose slowly from her seat as if in a daze. Her eyes were downcast and her arms hung stiffly by her sides as she walked around the table and took the witness seat facing Judge Todd.

For the first time during Laurie’s hearing, her father, George Tackett, was not in the courtroom. Tackett, a short, stocky, balding man with powerful arms, waited in the hallway as Laurie testified. Laurie’s attorneys wanted it this way. Her testimony was going to heap blame on her mother, Peggy Tackett, who had not even visited Laurie since her arrest. It would be better if George Tackett didn’t hear this.

With Goering encouraging her, Laurie denied threatening Shanda at the Witches’ Castle, denied beating Shanda with the tire iron, and denied setting her on fire. She launched another protracted assault against Melinda, then went into great detail about her allegedly abusive home life, claiming that her mother first beat her at the age of nine when she resisted going to church.

“She would hit me and get me down on the floor and strangle me or at least try to.”

“How often did this happen?” Goering asked.

“At least four times a week, from the time that I was nine until the welfare office stepped in when I was thirteen.”

Goering gently prodded Laurie into talking about the times she’d been sexually molested. Laurie said an older cousin had forced her to touch his penis when she was six and that a man in the neighborhood had accosted her by fondling her breasts and trying to kiss her when she was nine. At the age of sixteen, Laurie said, a boy got her high by making her inhale gasoline fumes and then raped her.

“What’s the best thing that ever happened to you?” Goering asked.

“Going to prison.”

“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

“Being born.” Laurie had delivered the last two responses patly, as if they’d been rehearsed.

“How do you feel about what happened?”

Laurie began to cry. Choking back tears, she said, “I don’t feel human. I can’t believe it happened. I know how terrible it must be to lose somebody. I’ll live with that night for the rest of my life. I think about it every day. It’s just . . . I just don’t know.”

Guy Townsend was unimpressed by Laurie’s sudden show
of emotion, but he let her have a moment to compose herself before starting in with his own questions.

“You told Mr. Goering that your mother strangled you four times a week, is that right?”

“Well . . .” Laurie paused as if in deep thought. “She hit me four times a week. The strangling she didn’t do as often.”

Townsend left his chair and walked to the center of the courtroom. “So she would hit you four times a week and maybe strangle you once a week. Why did she do these things to you? Would you do anything to provoke her actions?”

“I can’t remember anything particular except not wanting to go to church,” Laurie muttered.

“You resented being told what to do?”

“I resent it now. I hated her for making me go.”

Townsend grilled Laurie about her claim of being sexually molested at the age of six. “Didn’t you tell one of your prison psychiatrists that you didn’t have any recollections of anything before the age of nine?”

Laurie stared grimly at Townsend. “All the recollections I have of my childhood are bad memories. I don’t have any memories of sunny days. All my memories are black like night.”

Unimpressed with Laurie’s turgid prose, Townsend pressed her to reveal the name of the cousin who’d allegedly molested her.

Laurie stuttered, then said, “I’m not going to say it to the court.”

But Townsend turned the screws, persuading Judge Todd to instruct Laurie to write the cousin’s name on a piece of paper. Asking for particulars about each of the molestations, Townsend soon had Laurie befuddled and contradicting herself. Whatever hopes the defense had for building sympathy over the molestations was sinking fast.

Townsend seemed to notice for the first time that Laurie, who usually dressed in jeans and dark shirts, was wearing a flower-print dress. Remembering her earlier testimony about how she hated her mother for making her wear long dresses, Townsend asked, “Did your mother make you wear that long dress today?”

“No, my mother did not.”

“When your mother made you wear long dresses to school, you didn’t like that, did you?”

Laurie snapped back, “Would you want to wear a long dress?”

“No,” Townsend said, only momentarily startled by the sharp remark. “I look funny enough without a long dress on.”

Judge Todd cracked a smile and said, “I think we’ll recess for the day on that one.”

The next morning, Laurie showed up wearing her customary dark jeans and shirt. But there were no more questions about clothing. Townsend kept her off balance by quizzing her about the claims she’d made to her prison doctors that she had multiple personalities.

“Who is Sissy?”

“That is who I . . .” Laurie stopped in midsentence, then answered, “No.”

“Who is Sarah?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who is Darlene?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who is Geno?”

“I don’t know.”

“Now don’t you know who Sissy, Sarah, Darlene, and Geno are?”

Laurie responded angrily, “I know who I said they were, but they’re not real.”

“So you lied,” Townsend trumpeted, lifting his arms in mock astonishment. “Are you aware that the autopsy report indicates that Shanda had an object shoved three and a half inches up her anus?” he asked.

“I don’t remember that taking place,” came the pat answer.

Townsend had grown frustrated in his attempts to find out about the sodomy, and he let his emotions show. “That’s just as true as all the other testimony you’ve given today.”

Goering objected to the prosecutor’s statement, and Judge Todd sustained, but Townsend shrugged it off. He was
almost through with Laurie now, but he had one more trick up his sleeve—or, rather, in his shirt pocket.

“You had some matches, didn’t you? Was it a book of matches or a box of matches?”

“Just a book of them. They were in my pocket.”

“How did the gasoline get on her?”

“Hope got out of the car and poured it on her.”

Townsend moved closer to the witness. “You knew at that point certainly that Shanda was going to die, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you bent down and were going to talk to her, weren’t you?”

Townsend took another step closer, and Laurie recoiled slightly. “I was going to try to get her to talk to me.”

“Isn’t it true, Laurie, that you went up to Shanda’s body after Hope had soaked it with gasoline and took that book of matches out of your pocket?” At that point Townsend reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a book of matches. “You took one of those matches,” he said, pulling a match from the book and striking it. He held the flame out toward Laurie. “You were going to show that match to Shanda Sharer before you set her on fire?”

“No,” said Laurie anxiously.

“Oh, that’s right. Somehow she just spontaneously combusted. Is that right?”

“I’m not saying that. I don’t know how the fire started.”

“But you were there beside her, weren’t you? You were so close to her that you were getting ready to talk to her.”

“I wasn’t . . . I had just bent down when the fire went up in my face.”

“Where did you bend down? Right beside her?”

“Yes.”

Townsend dropped to one knee, still holding out the flaming match. “Okay, you’re kneeling down beside Shanda’s still living body, and you want to say something to her?”

“I wasn’t kneeling like that,” Laurie protested.

“Like this?” Townsend lowered his other knee to the floor and leaned over an imaginary body.

“Yes,” Laurie said.

The flame was beginning to burn Townsend’s fingers but he wasn’t about to fan it out. Not yet. “You’re getting ready to talk to Shanda Sharer, and all of a sudden in the subfreezing temperature her body combusts.”

“The fire just went up.”

The flame was too hot finally and Townsend blew it out. He gazed into Laurie’s eyes. “What were you going to say to her? What do you say to someone you’re about to burn to death?”