Little Lost Angel (6 page)

I love you, Melinda             
Amanda -n- Melinda          
Do you wanna fuck? yes. no.

In the border of that letter, Melinda had written: “Melinda loves Amanda always and forever.” And written upside down on the bottom of the page were the words “Horny people with an attitude read upside down. That’s why I read it first.”

With her rival out of her life, Melinda was in ecstasy. Her unbridled joy shows through in the following two love letters, all written in late November:

Poo,

I was in the hall and I went past this class and there was the most beautiful girl in there and she was holding her hair back in a sexy way and doing some work. Do you know her? I think her name is Amanda. Well anyway, I don’t feel too good today but I’m real hyper and in a playful way like chasing someone and jumping on them. Did you know we get off Thursday for Thanksgiving? I love turkey and all that good food! Do you want to come over to my house and eat? (Me) Na! I’m gone.

Love always,
Melinda       

Amanda,

I changed the heading on my note a little cause I got
sick of the same damn thing. I enjoyed eating lunch with you and I’m real sorry about jumping down your throat and being a sour puss but I get that way once in a while. I love you no matter what I do or say. And I don’t mean to take it out on you. We just need to agree and give each other’s opinions more often and then take turns. Well, I still have cramps and I’m still in a bitchy mood. So don’t mess with me! Na! I’m back. I’m in art class now and we’re listening to country and “I’m Shameless” came on the radio! I love that damn song!. Will you get the tape for me? Please!! Please!! Please!! I’ll get down on my knees and beg and then I’ll eat your puss! Na! I’m in a real excited mood! I’m acting real stupid and making everyone laugh! Well almost everyone. I’m going to leave you with one more thing to say: I love you!!

Love,            
Melinda        
XOXOXOX

But Melinda’s high spirits would soon come crashing down. At the same time that she was expressing her love in these letters, Amanda was carrying on a secret correspondence with Shanda, who was having a hard time adjusting to her new school. Through a series of phone calls, Shanda and Amanda had arranged to get together. Shanda was going to spend one night with her cousin, Amanda Edrington. Without Jacque’s knowledge, Shanda and her cousin would go to a Hazelwood dance, where Amanda would be waiting.

But Melinda caught wind of the plan and was waiting for Shanda in the school parking lot.

“Melinda jumped out at us,” Shanda’s cousin remembered. “She had Amanda with her and she told Amanda to tell Shanda that she didn’t like her anymore. Amanda told Shanda to get lost and Shanda started crying.”

Even though Melinda had won this face-off, she was growing tired of the constant worries. “It was the same thing all over again,” Melinda said later. “I just got fed up with it.”

Melinda vented her frustration in this letter dated November 26:

Amanda,

Yes! I think we should at least talk this out. If you have noticed all these uncalled for fights have been because of Shanda! Yes, I’m hurt and pissed at you! I can’t believe you! You better straighten your act up missy! I’m sick of hearing and seeing Shanda!! I think we should let me cool off cause I’m still let down with you. You have not shown me no improvement yet. Shanda is not gone! You haven’t got rid of her. It’s your problem not mine! Until her name and writing is off of your shit I’m not going to hang with you and your problem. I’m real mad at you! I feel like I need to cry! I want Shanda dead!!

Love,    
Melinda

In early December, Amanda’s father found this letter and dozens of others in Amanda’s room. Disturbed by the sexual content of many of the notes, Jerry Heavrin was determined to put an end to Amanda’s friendship with Melinda. He took the letters to Virgil Seay, the county’s juvenile-probation officer. At Heavrin’s request, Seay contacted Melinda and told her that if she didn’t stay away from Amanda she could face charges of harassment in juvenile court.

Melinda was livid. She felt that Shanda was responsible for all her troubles. Over the next few weeks she would tell one friend after another that she wanted to kill Shanda.

One night Melinda asked her longtime friend Crystal Wathen how to go about disposing of a dead body. Crystal coldly answered that the best way would be to put the body in a barrel full of leaves and set it on fire.

*  *  *

Melinda didn’t know it yet, but the confrontation in the Hazelwood parking lot had been a turning point in Shanda’s friendship with Amanda. Amanda had contacted Shanda afterward and apologized for telling her to get lost. But
Shanda had about had it with Amanda and her fickle ways. It turned out that Shanda was beginning to like her new school. She was making new friends, nice girls like those she knew at St. Paul, and boys who were eager to court the pretty new girl. Shanda joined the basketball team and started going with a boy at the school.

“She was trying to get away from Amanda,” said Shanda’s cousin, Amanda Edrington. “She stopped writing Amanda and wouldn’t talk to her when she used three-way calling to get to Shanda. Amanda started calling me and asking what was wrong with Shanda. I told her that Shanda was meeting new friends now.”

Jacque could see the changes in her daughter. Shanda was now spending every school-day morning jockeying with Jacque for position in front of the bathroom mirror so she could fix her hair. Shanda spent hours on the phone with her new friends at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, including a boy who called constantly.

“After she got away from those girls at Hazelwood, Shanda became herself again,” Jacque said. “She wanted to do things. She wanted to go shopping. She wanted to lay on the couch with me and watch television. She’d laugh and joke. She was Shanda again.” By the time Christmas break rolled around, Jacque was feeling secure in the normalcy that had returned to their lives.

Then on Christmas Day, the phone rang and Jacque answered. It was Amanda.

“She asked if she could wish Shanda a merry Christmas,” Jacque said. “I told her that she could not. She said, ‘I know you think I’m a lesbian but I’m not.’ I said, ‘Amanda, I don’t give a damn what you are. It’s none of my business. I could care less. But I will tell you one thing. I don’t want you around my daughter. Don’t you ever call back again.’”

A few days later, Shanda told Jacque that Amanda had been having other girls call on a three-way connection so that Amanda could talk to Shanda. “She told me that if certain girls called I should hang up because it was Amanda trying to get to her,” Jacque said.

In a letter that Shanda wrote to her friend Lisa Livergood on January 2, she complained about Amanda trying to draw
her back into their relationship. “I can’t take all this pressure,” Shanda wrote. “I wish she would stop calling me and following me.”

*  *  *

Jacque hugged her daughter one night in early January and said, “Shanda, I know you were mad at me because I made you change schools, but don’t you feel like you’ve got a second chance?”

Shanda returned the hug and said, “Yeah, I didn’t think I could ever find my way back. I had been so bad. I had done so many bad things. I didn’t know what to do.”

Shanda had never wavered from her claim that Amanda had not touched her, and Jacque didn’t pressure Shanda to tell her more now. That would come in time, she thought. Now was the time for healing old wounds and for getting their lives back together again.

Little did she know that time was running out and that Melinda Loveless was already plotting her revenge.

4

R
ural Kentuckians tend to think of Louisville, the state’s largest city, as a wide-open town. And it’s true that it probably has more bars per capita than most Midwestern cities its size. But even though it cultivates a laid-back, good-time image, at its heart Louisville is a blue-collar, churchgoing, family-oriented, softball-playing town with tree-shaded streets and middle-of-the-road views. Nearly all of its politicians are Democrats, yet the most popular show on the most popular radio station belongs to arch-Republican Rush Limbaugh. Louisville is not so much wide open as it is relaxed, and its relaxed ways seem to keep it a couple of years behind other cities its size when it comes to most fashions and trends.

Despite the Middle America conservatism of the area, the teens that Melinda had fallen in with had carved out their own niche of places to go and things to do.

The alternative music scene in Louisville was flourishing, and many of the local bands would play at off-the-beaten-track teen clubs, where these young iconoclasts would congregate. Another place they felt at home was amid the eccentric shops, coffeehouses, and music stores in Louisville’s Highlands and Crescent Hill neighborhoods, two of
the few places in town where punk hairstyles and clothes did not draw stares. Every so often, when the
Rocky Horror Picture Show
would make one of its frequent appearances at the avant-garde Vogue theater in Louisville, the teens would follow in that cult film’s tradition and come to the theater dressed in bizarre costumes.

The previous fall, Melinda had been initiated into this motley mix of young rebels by Kary Pope, a friend who’d boldly come out of the closet and openly flaunted her homosexuality, taking pleasure in shocking people with her punk clothes, dyke hairstyle, and butch behavior.

Among those introduced to Melinda by Kary were two seventeen-year-old twin brothers with weirdly poetic names, Larry and Terry Leatherbury. The two slightly built, darkly handsome brothers had recently moved to Louisville from Madison, Indiana, a small town about fifty miles upriver from Louisville.

Compared to Louisville, Madison was Old World. Madison had been portrayed in a military propaganda film during World War II as a typical small town, to remind soldiers of the way of life they were defending. Madison had changed little in the subsequent fifty years and still prided itself on its homespun values.

Teen life in Madison revolved around high-school basketball and football games, bowling alleys, and hanging out in shopping-center parking lots. None of these pastimes appealed to Larry or Terry. Both were extremely bright, but they spent less time on schoolwork than they did playing Dungeons and Dragons—a board game based on medieval legends—and reading books about the occult and pagan rituals. Larry especially was fascinated with the dark side of occult beliefs. He dabbled in black magic and carried himself with the smugness of an all-knowing shaman. He often dressed in black and wore exotic accessories such as black fishnet gloves. Often ridiculed by other students at Madison Consolidated High School, Larry got even with one of his taunters. He pulled a knife on the boy in a classroom and slit the youth’s throat. The boy recovered, but Larry was suspended from school (he later dropped out) and was brought up on juvenile charges.

Both Leatherburys now lived in an apartment they shared with another young man in a run-down area of Old Louisville. Larry made no secret of his bisexuality, and Terry had confided in Kary Pope that he too was bisexual. Both brothers were a central part of the clan with which Melinda and Kary now ran.

It was through Larry and Terry that Kary and Melinda first heard of Laurie Tackett.

Laurie had been a close friend of the Leatherburys in Madison, and she shared their fascination with the occult. Although Laurie was a loner with few friends, she’d had sex with a number of boys, including Larry. But she’d recently found herself more attracted to girls. A lesbian relationship with a girl in Madison had convinced her that she was gay, and she was heartbroken when the girl left town.

While Madison was boring to the Leatherburys, it was a bottomless pit for Laurie. She lived with her parents in a small, inexpensive home in the rural countryside, a long drive from the heart of town and seemingly a million miles away from where she wanted to be.

Classmates made fun of her strange haircuts—she once shaved her head—and since her lesbian lover left town, Laurie was lonelier than ever. Madison was not a place where people were open about homosexuality. The previous fall, Laurie had moved to New York City to live with her cousin, thinking she’d fit in with the underground crowd there. But that adventure ended in disappointment when her cousin broke up with her boyfriend and Laurie no longer had a place to live.

When she arrived back in Madison she contacted the Leatherburys, who told her of the radical group they were running with in Louisville and New Albany. They introduced her to one of their friends, Crystal Lyles, and Crystal agreed to let Laurie stay with her in New Albany. But Laurie’s father was fed up with his daughter’s rambling ways and refused to drive her the fifty miles to Crystal’s home. Crystal came up with a solution. She told Laurie to call her friend Kary Pope and ask her for a ride.

Kary and Laurie had heard each other’s names through the Leatherburys but had never met. Melinda was at Kary’s
house the day Laurie called and introduced herself, then asked Kary to chauffeur her from Madison to New Albany. The round trip would take two hours and Kary was a bit reluctant, but Laurie sounded nice on the phone and Kary felt sorry for her predicament. With Melinda tagging along for the ride, the two girls drove toward Madison but only got as far as Hanover—a small town ten miles south of Madison—before they lost their bearings and called Laurie for better directions. Laurie told them she knew the spot they were calling from. She told them to wait there, saying that her father would take her that far.