Little Lost Angel (39 page)

When court reconvened the next morning, Judge Todd delivered his verdict. “Miss Lawrence,” he said, “after considering all the evidence and your personal statement, I believe you have the ability to make something of your life
in the future. You can still lead a good and useful life in the future. As you well know, Shanda does not have that chance.”

Although Todd cited some mitigating circumstances—Toni’s age and her previously clean record—he said he would sentence her to the maximum of twenty years because “this is a crime of a particularly gruesome nature that resulted in the torture, beating, and death of the victim. You knew before the murder that the other girls’ actions could lead to Shanda’s death. Anything less than the maximum sentence would depreciate the seriousness of the crime committed.”

Toni began crying as deputies led her to a court anteroom, where she met with her parents, sisters, and other relatives. As her parents consoled her, Toni let out a wail and began shaking nervously. The Lawrences ignored questions from reporters and quickly left the courthouse while their daughter was escorted to jail.

Judge Todd said later that Toni’s sentence was the hardest of the three to determine. “I lost a lot of sleep over Toni’s case,” he said. “I gave a lot of consideration to giving her less than the maximum. The thing that kept me from it was the phone call she’d made from the first gas station. She had a golden opportunity there to tell the boy she talked to what was going on. At that point she knew that Shanda was in dire danger, yet she made a conscious decision not to take that step to help her. In my eyes, that was unforgivable.”

Shanda’s parents were relieved and mildly surprised by the sentence.

“We all wanted the maximum and were very pleased with the judge,” Steve said. “I think he’s right that Toni is an intelligent girl who can still have a good life after her time in jail. I felt it was justice for her. I know that if Shanda’s and Toni’s positions had been reversed, my daughter would have done something to stop it. I think that most kids would.”

Jacque said, “I think he did the right thing. I think he sent a message to people that society is not going to tolerate this.”

*  *  *

Hope Rippey’s sentencing hearing was moved from Madison to South Bend, Indiana, at the request of her attorney,
Darryl Auxier, who hoped to distance his client from the media pressure he felt was influencing the sentencings.

“Hope had already been tried and found guilty by the local press,” Auxier said later.

Hope had pleaded guilty to the same charges as Melinda and Laurie and faced the same sentence—between thirty and sixty years in prison—but Auxier felt he could persuade the new judge, Jeanne Jourdan, to set punishment at the lower end of that range.

When the hearing began on June 1 in St. Joseph’s Superior Court in South Bend, Jacque Vaught was on edge and volatile. She burned with anger as she saw Steve Henry exchange friendly remarks with Hope during a court recess the first day of the hearing. Jacque later confronted Henry in the hallway and derided him for being cozy with Shanda’s murderer. Henry walked away, saying that he didn’t need to take such abuse. Later, after Steve, Doug, and Sharon had chided Jacque, she apologized to the detective who had worked so hard on the investigation. As was his nature, Henry genially shrugged it off and told Jacque to forget about it. “No offense taken,” he said.

The easygoing Henry couldn’t hold a grudge against Jacque any more than he could work up any hatred for Toni, Hope, or even Melinda and Laurie. It was his job to put Shanda’s killers behind bars, and he devoted himself to that purpose. But he felt no malice toward the girls, only sorrow for their fate.

“When I go to the mall anymore I end up looking at all the teenagers and thinking this is where those four girls ought to be,” Henry said later. “I tried to be straight up with each one of them. I told them it was nothing personal. It was just my job. I ended up getting along with all of them, even Laurie.”

Henry was determined to see something good come out of Shanda’s horrific murder, and he’d had long talks with Kary Pope, Larry Leatherbury, and other teens he’d met during his investigation.

“I told them up front that I didn’t care about their sexuality,” Henry said. “I talked to them like I would talk to my own kids. I told them that they had a second chance at
life. Any one of them could have come along with the other four girls in the car that night. I hope that they learned something from all this. Kary Pope calls me every once in a while and tells me how she’s doing. She’s got a job now and I think she’s on the right track.”

Henry’s deepest regret was that he never learned what was going through the girls’ minds during those hours when Shanda’s life hung in the balance.

“I asked every one of them to tell me what they were thinking about that night,” he said, “but none of them ever truly opened up the way I wished they had.”

Hope hadn’t testified at the other hearings.

Townsend had decided it would be pointless to put Hope on the stand. Since she was charged with the murder, she could refuse to answer questions on the grounds that it could incriminate her. “The only way that she was going to talk was if I granted her immunity and obviously I wasn’t going to do that,” he said.

Shortly before her hearing, Hope gave her only statement on the murders. Auxier, who had not forgotten Townsend’s damaging cross-examination of Laurie, thought it best that Hope not testify in her own defense.

“Hope’s statement was like all the others,” Henry said. “We were able to get what we needed but not all we wanted. It was like pulling teeth with Hope, just like it was with the others. She wasn’t very forthcoming.”

Hope had admitted her most horrendous act: pouring the gasoline the first time. She also told Henry about Melinda’s reluctance to help at the burn site.

“She was disgusted with Melinda for helping to lift Shanda out of the trunk,” Henry said. “The only thing she denied was spraying the Windex on Shanda. She claimed she’d just sprayed it on a sweater to try to get it to ignite.”

*  *  *

The change of venue seemed to have recharged Townsend’s batteries. He had bounce in his step and a determined look on his face as he came into the courtroom for the first day of Hope’s hearing.

The strategy of Auxier and his co-counsel, Charles Asher, was to show that Hope had acted under the domination of
Melinda and Laurie. Their key witness was psychologist Michael Sheehan, who began by saying he was impressed with Hope’s “honesty and forthrightness. I found that she was somewhat immature for her age but that she was basically a healthy individual. I was stunned. I have evaluated a number of murderers and Hope was not like any of them.”

Sheehan said that Hope was a timid type who learned at an early age to avoid confrontation. “When verbal violence did happen in her home, she coped by avoidance,” he said.

Throughout his testimony, Sheehan praised Hope. “She was willing to accept responsibility for her actions. She never whined about any unfairness. I saw a sixteen-year-old with a lot of potential character. In her own heart she knows she’s not a murderer. She did not participate in the cruelty, the tormenting. She puts on a tough act but inside she is real tender.”

Sheehan said his interviews with Hope convinced him that she was “a reluctant participant” who was coerced into helping kill Shanda by “the dominant personalities of Melinda and Laurie.” Hope had adopted Laurie as a “surrogate big sister,” he said. “She went along with Laurie because she didn’t want Laurie to be mad at her. You had one girl [Laurie] who wanted to kill someone, one girl [Melinda] who wanted someone killed, and you had two chumps [Hope and Toni].”

Townsend’s first witness, Steve Henry, recounted Hope’s involvement throughout Shanda’s abduction and murder, stressing that she had chosen the spot to burn Shanda and had been the first to pour the gas. On cross-examination, Auxier asked Henry if he had an opinion on who had sodomized Shanda.

“Yes, I do,” Henry said. “Melinda and Laurie pointed fingers at each other in every other aspect of the murder. But when we asked them about the anal injury they both claimed ignorance. It’s just my opinion, but that leads me to believe they both did it.”

Hope showed up for the second day of the hearing wearing her jail uniform and with her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. She sniffled as Steve Sharer took the stand.

“My stomach turns and knots up when I hear what was done to my Shanda and how she must have felt,” Steve said. “To me torture is the meanest, most horrible thing to do to any living creature on this earth.”

The next person to testify, Jacque, related once again how Shanda’s death had torn apart the lives of the family she’d left behind. Jacque asked Hope to close her eyes and think of how she would feel if a young niece she particularly loved were burned alive.

“Imagine how you would feel if someone did to your niece what you did to our child,” Jacque said as Hope lowered her head and began to cry. “You cannot know the pain we’ve felt. There is no greater pain than losing your child.”

In closing, Townsend scoffed at the testimony of Dr. Sheehan, calling it “a wonder land. I thought the Mad Hatter and the White Rabbit would run through this courtroom while the good doctor was testifying. Dr. Sheehan said the optimal feature of Hope’s personality is that she cares. I’d hate to think of the horrors she might have inflicted if she didn’t care. In one sense, Hope was guilty of pouring gasoline on two occasions. The first was when she asked incendiary questions of Shanda’s friendship with Amanda that were virually guaranteed to rile the heated passions of Melinda Loveless, who was hiding in the backseat, armed and dangerous. Hope Rippey was the only one of the four that did have an opportunity to act outside the group dynamic. When she was alone with Shanda at the door, she could have derailed the whole course of events with the word of warning that Melinda was waiting in the car.”

Auxier argued for a sentence of thirty-five years with fifteen years of probation for his client because Hope had “acted under strong provocation from the aggressive, hostile personalities of Tackett and Loveless.”

Co-defense attorney Charles Asher said that much of Townsend’s case against Hope was based on the testimony of “two liars”—Melinda and Laurie—and that during earlier sentencing hearings Townsend had placed most of the blame on Melinda and Laurie. “You can’t have it both
ways,” he said. “The state would have you believe that if you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. It’s not that easy.”

Judge Jourdan had a few words to say herself before she passed sentence: “Hope Rippey lacked mercy. She thinks of herself as tough on the outside and tender on the inside. Neither is true. If mercy requires tender courage, and I think it does, Hope showed no courage and felt no tenderness. As Melinda and Laurie improvised each hideous step of the way, Toni sat silent, strong enough to avoid action, too weak to take the action needed to help. Hope had choices. There were avenues of escape, ways to help herself, ways to help Shanda. She decided to help Laurie, even though she knew it would hurt Shanda. She poured the gasoline so no one would get caught, even though she knew it would kill Shanda. Her lack of mercy, of tender courage, is a horrifying lesson to us all.

“Children need nurturing, protection, guidance, and good examples from all adults. The judicial world is not able to make the world safe for children. Kids grow up outside of courtrooms. Television, other kids, the adults in each child’s life—these are the things that provide the lessons by which kids learn to grow. The prosecutor, the defense lawyer, and the judge act after the harm has been done. It is too late to spare Shanda the harm that was done her. I cannot make it right. It is beyond this court’s power to reverse the harm. But it is not beyond our power to touch the people in our lives. I encourage us all to learn a lesson from this. And that lesson is to nurture our children.”

Judge Jourdan looked directly at Hope as she said, “I sentence you to sixty years with ten years suspended and ten years of probation.”

Hope was in tears as a deputy shackled her with handcuffs and led her from the room. The fifty-year direct sentence meant that she would have to spend at least twenty-five years in prison, and after that she would still be on probation for another ten years.

“This chapter is over,” Steve told a group of reporters outside the courtroom. “I know Shanda is in Heaven, so I don’t worry so much about that. But I’m always thinking
about her friends and cousins because it’s hard for them. They come up to me and give me a hug and a kiss and say they don’t understand.”

Jacque said, “I’m glad it’s over, but in some ways I’m having a hard time with this being the end. As long as this was going on, people had to listen and hopefully learn something from how horrible it was. I’m just afraid that now everyone is going to forget about Shanda, and I don’t want that to happen.”

21

A
ccording to an article in
Scholastic Update
, the typical sixteen-year-old has witnessed an estimated 200,000 acts of violence, including 33,000 murders on television. Inevitably, contend some experts, some young people will imitate the brutalities in real life. All that violence is numbing, and it signals that violence is normal.