Little Lost Angel (7 page)

A half hour later Melinda and Kary saw a car pull up to the convenience store and watched as a dull-faced girl with a stocky build and short, blond spiked hairdo stepped out with a bag full of clothes. Laurie, dressed in dark, loose-fitting clothes, smiled at Melinda and Kary and walked toward them with a cocksure strut. Melinda was a bit intimidated by the girl’s tough appearance, but Kary felt herself attracted to her. Laurie also liked Kary and admitted to her early on that she was a lesbian.

When the girls arrived back in New Albany they discovered that Crystal Lyles, who still lived with her parents, hadn’t gotten clearance from them for Laurie to move in. With nowhere to go, Laurie asked Kary if she could stay with her. Kary, who lived with her grandmother, welcomed the opportunity to spend some time with her new gay friend.

Although they didn’t have sex, Kary and Laurie became very close. Over the course of the next few days, Laurie would tell Kary all the intimate details of her troubled home life.

*  *  *

Laurie’s father, George Tackett, had spent two years in prison for robbing a gas station when he was a young man. He was a squat, stout, plain-faced man who tended to keep to himself. The household, which also included Laurie’s younger brother, Bubby, was dominated by Laurie’s mother, Peggy Tackett, who was a devout member of a Fundamentalist church called the Lighthouse on the Hill, whose members often spoke in tongues and had visions. The church, which Laurie’s father did not attend, forbade females
to wear makeup or jewelry. For years Peggy had made Laurie wear long dresses to school and did not allow her to take physical education because the church didn’t let girls wear sweatpants or shorts. The only type of music Laurie was allowed to listen to was gospel hymns, and her mother had sold the family’s television set because she’d made a vow to God that she wouldn’t watch TV anymore.

Other students would make fun of Laurie’s clothing, and one day she began to rebel against her mother. It started with small transgressions, like sneaking pants into her schoolbag and changing into them when she got to school. She was feeling the power of freedom now, and her changes soon became more dramatic. The clothing she wore away from home became more provocative. She’d wear miniskirts, net stockings, and open blouses. Guys came on to her and she went along, having sex with a number of them. She also began to have homosexual urges.

It was about this time that Laurie’s younger brother, Bubby, looked in her diary and discovered that she resented her family, that she no longer believed in God, and that she wished she were a boy instead of a girl. When Bubby showed the diary to Peggy Tackett, she had a heated argument with her daughter and asked why she couldn’t be normal. A short time later Laurie made her last visit to her mother’s church. The occasion was a mother-and-daughter banquet. Without her daughter’s knowledge, Peggy had spoken to the preacher about what she’d found in Laurie’s diary. And when the preacher began his sermon, it was aimed directly at Laurie.

“He preached that all homosexuals would go to Hell,” Laurie recalled. “I didn’t go back anymore because I was tired of all the preaching. I was tired of being condemned. I was tired of being judged.”

Seeking an escape from what she considered her dismal reality, Laurie took up an interest in the occult and spent long evenings with the Leatherburys, having séances, reading books about black magic, and trying to cast spells on people they disliked. She began wearing only black clothes, dyed her hair wild colors, and once even shaved it all off. After a group of black girls confronted her in Louisville and accused her of being a skinhead, Laurie began carrying a
knife for protection. Sometimes she would use that knife or a razor blade to cut herself as “a method of relieving stress.” She’d learned the trick from others in the radical group she’d begun hanging around with at school. It had also become fashionable among this group to carve initials into their own skin as a show of independence. She and Larry Leatherbury had once cut themselves and used their blood to draw a picture. They dubbed their creation “blood art.” Another time, after Laurie had cut her wrist with a razor, her mother called the preacher and had him come over to the house. Laurie barricaded herself in her room and wouldn’t let him in.

“I got the impression they wanted to exorcise something out of me or pray for me so the devil would leave me alone,” Laurie remembered. “It just made me mad. I put the most vile music I had on the stereo and turned it up full blast so I wouldn’t have to listen to them.”

Laurie got into punk, hardcore, and other forms of alternative music. The darker, the more neurotic the themes, the more volatile the music, the better. Her favorite artists—Sinead O’Connor, The Cure, the Violent Femmes, and Nine Inch Nails—had one thing in common: They sang about frustration, anger, and resentment and railed against the evils of authority with a mind-numbing vengeance. There were songs about suicide, self-mutilation, and violence. There was no Beatles’ “Good Day, Sunshine,” no Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” on Laurie’s play list. The music she listened to was brooding, bitter, and bleak. Within the walls of her bedroom, Laurie would crank the volume high and take it all in.

When she was sixteen, Laurie cut her arm so badly with a knife that she was taken to the hospital. The doctors thought it might have been a suicide attempt and committed her to a mental hospital for several weeks. Shortly afterward Laurie dropped out of school and worked a series of minimum-wage jobs. She began dating a boy named Aron Hall, but he broke up with Laurie when he learned that she’d had sex with a girl named Danielle. Aron’s rejection stung Laurie, and one day she retaliated by trying to run him over in her car. He jumped out of the way just in time. Fed up with
guys, Laurie threw herself into her relationship with Danielle, but when Danielle suddenly moved to another state, Laurie again fell into a depression. She ran away from home in the summer of 1991 but, after staying a few days with her friends Larry and Terry Leatherbury, she returned home. She left home again a few weeks later to go to New York.

*  *  *

Kary was fascinated with her new friend, but their relationship was interrupted when Kary, who’d been abusing drugs, checked into a hospital to sober up.

While Kary was hospitalized, Laurie and Crystal Lyles finally got together and began sharing an apartment. As soon as Kary got out of the hospital she fell back in with Laurie, Crystal, the Leatherburys, and the rest of her old crowd and once again began doing drugs. She and Laurie dropped acid together a couple of times.

It was not difficult for the girls to get drugs. Since the late 1960s drugs had been readily available to teenagers in Louisville and even its smaller neighboring cities in Indiana. The secret to finding marijuana, acid, or cocaine was a simple matter of knowing the right people. Alcohol could be obtained in the same way. It might take an evening’s work, but eventually a fake ID would do the trick, an unscrupulous liquor-store clerk would look the other way, or an older friend would make the purchase.

Money was not always necessary in these transactions: Melinda’s friend Kristie Brodfuehrer, for example, exchanged sex for cocaine. Nearly every group of teens included someone who either worked or received a generous allowance from their parents, and there was no surer way to secure one’s cool status than to turn on one’s friends, whether by paying for a wine cooler or buying a hit of acid.

Although she liked to get high occasionally, Laurie wasn’t hooked on drugs and could do without them if they were scarce. She did need money for other things, however, and after a few months during which she was unable to hold down a job in New Albany, Laurie swallowed her pride and returned to her parents’ home in Madison.

After his daughter had persuaded him that she couldn’t hold down a job without her own transportation, George
Tackett bought his daughter a seven-year-old, four-door sedan. Laurie finally landed a job at the Madison K-Mart, but she didn’t like the work and hated spending time in a dull town like Madison. Whenever she could, therefore, she took advantage of her new mobility and drove to New Albany or Louisville to see Kary, the Leatherburys, and their strange circle of friends.

By this time, however, those friends were beginning to tire of Laurie. Even in this group where eccentricity was glorified and weird behavior prized, Laurie had become too bizarre. She often spoke about a dream she had about charred, mutilated infants hanging from trees. She said there were times when multicolored hands would come up through the floor of her bedroom and try to pull her down into Hell.

Laurie told Kary she’d enjoy killing someone because it would be fun to get the publicity. She went on at great length about how she’d love to stick a knife in someone’s stomach just to see what it felt like to push it in. She also said she’d like to watch someone being set on fire. She even offered to kill Kary’s grandmother, who was giving her friend troubles at the time.

Laurie was also taking her habit of self-mutilation to extremes. At a party attended by Kary and the Leatherburys, Laurie drank her own blood after cutting herself, then tried to talk others into letting her drink their blood.

Larry Leatherbury had often held the others spellbound with his so-called ability to channel—to speak in the voices of people caught in the spirit world. But Laurie was starting to upstage Larry, saying she had learned to channel with the dead.

“She’d sit there and go into a trance and her voice would change and her mood would change,” Kary recalled. “Everything about her would change. She said she could bring back people. She would bring back her great-grandmother. She’d put curses on people. She’d bring vampires back. She’d say she was Deanna the Vampiress and that she would love to kill somebody.”

Larry took his occult practices seriously, so he was peeved
at Laurie. He felt she was degrading these channeling ceremonies by faking her communication with spirits. At the same time Kary was also withdrawing from her friendship with Laurie, who, she felt, was trying to control her mind. Kary had struck up a relationship with another lesbian by now, and she told Laurie that she didn’t want to hang around with her anymore.

Suddenly Laurie was on the outs with the circle of friends she’d tried so hard to impress. Desperate to find her way back in, she began calling Melinda.

Melinda had always been wary of Laurie. She knew about her penchant for cutting herself and her channeling. Kary and both Leatherburys had told her that Laurie once killed a cat as a sacrifice to Satan. But Melinda had also had an argument with Kary recently, so she responded to Laurie’s offer of friendship. Laurie was unlike anyone Melinda had ever met. She just didn’t seem to give a damn—not about herself, not about other people, not about anything. (Actually Laurie cared deeply what others thought about her; she just refused to show it.)

Now an outcast among a group of outcasts, Laurie was determined to become better friends with Melinda, to whom she was sexually attracted although too intimidated by the girl’s beauty to make any advances. (All of Laurie’s other sexual conquests had been as plain-looking as herself.) She was sure that Melinda didn’t like her in that way, but she held out hope. Maybe if they became close enough, Melinda’s feelings for her would change. But even if they didn’t, Laurie had to be sure she didn’t screw up this friendship. She’d tried hard to make friends outside of Madison, and if she lost Melinda she’d lose her connections in New Albany.

Melinda also had her reasons for cultivating Laurie’s friendship: She knew that this was someone with a capacity for violence, someone who could help her get back at Shanda.

Laurie knew all about Melinda’s problems with Amanda and Shanda, which was all Melinda wanted to talk about. Even after Shanda had transferred to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Melinda was obsessed with the thought that Shanda
and Amanda were still sneaking around behind her back. She often told Laurie that she wanted to beat up Shanda, and sometimes she said she wanted her rival dead.

*  *  *

On January 8, 1992, Laurie called Melinda and invited her to a hardcore concert in Louisville that Friday night. Hardcore was the rough-edged stepchild of punk and heavy metal music, and there were plenty of young local bands playing this new sound. Melinda called some of her friends to see if they wanted to come along, but they’d heard about Laurie’s reputation and none of them were eager to spend the evening with her. Melinda called Laurie back the following night and said she’d go, but on one condition: She wanted the evening to include a trip to Shanda’s house.

She told Laurie that she needed her help in a plan she’d concocted to lure Shanda out of her house. Laurie played along, saying she’d do whatever Melinda wanted. Melinda said she wanted to kill Shanda and Laurie coldly agreed that it could be done. Then Laurie told Melinda that she’d already asked two girls from Madison to come with them that night. Melinda asked if they would go along with the plan to get Shanda, and Laurie assured her that it wasn’t a problem.

Actually it was a problem. Laurie was sure that one of the girls, Toni Lawrence, wouldn’t go if she knew about the plot against Shanda. Too much like the preppy kids at school who had ridiculed her, Toni was too skittish for Laurie’s liking. The other girl, Hope Rippey, was a different story. Laurie held considerable sway over Hope, and she knew that Hope, who’d been in a number of fights herself, was game for anything and wouldn’t shy away from a little terrorism.

Now that the Leatherburys lived in Louisville, fifteen-year-old Hope was Laurie’s closest friend in Madison. They’d met in grade school and formed an immediate kinship. While other youngsters were ridiculing Laurie’s strange ways, Hope was always there to lend a sympathetic ear, particularly when Laurie was going through her problems with her mother.

Hope also had her share of family problems. After years of heated arguments, Hope’s parents had divorced when she
was seven. The couple’s oldest son, John, stayed with his father, Carl Rippey, who worked as an engineer at the Clifty Falls Power Plant in Madison. The three other children—Dan, Tina, and Hope, the youngest—moved to Michigan with their mother, Gloria.