That, Detective Henry said, was when "Melinda. Senior High Principal Roger Gallatin described Hope Rippey and Toni Lawrence - both also 10th-graders - as "above-average students, not discipline problems." A classmate said Toni and Hope had been spending time with the black-clothes group but had not changed their appearance.Ĭontinuing with Toni's story, Detective Henry testified that the three girls drove down to New Albany, where they picked up Melinda Loveless, 16, a friend of Laurie's who was unknown to Toni and Hope. Her attorney would say in court that she had a history of mental problems. Last fall, after her 17th birthday, Laurie dropped out of school. She joined a small clique of perhaps a dozen like-minded kids at Madison High who were known as the "Alternatives." In the eighth grade, she cut short her long blond hair and began to dress in black. Madison Junior High Principal Larry Cummins said that Laurie, 17, had been "a fine elementary student" with "good values." A classmate recalled that Laurie had once been very religious, like her Christian fundamentalist parents.īut then she changed, her classmates said. Toni said the night of horror began Friday when she and another Madison High sophomore, Hope Rippey, 15, were picked up after school by Mary Laurine "Laurie" Tackett. At Christmastime several years ago, a group of 14- or 15-year-olds stole the baby Jesus doll from the courthouse creche, wrote "666" on it - the "number of the Beast" from Revelations - and burned it. The teens who hang out behind the fast food store on Michigan Road claim they know of lesbian and Satanic circles among other Madison teens, so many of them believe the talk about Shanda's killing.Įven Madison Police Chief Bill Tingle, whose department has had no official role in the investigation, said he knew that "there possibly was a 90 percent chance" that lesbian jealousy touched off the crime.Īs for Satanism, he knew of only one concrete incident. "That's what my granddaughter brought home from junior high school," said Fauna Mihalko, 62, who works in the town library's genealogy section. Today, virtually anyone you ask in Madison has heard the talk - none of it officially confirmed - that the dead girl and one of her killers were involved in a lesbian lovers' triangle or Satanism. Despite the scarcity of facts, or perhaps because of it, rumors and whispers about another dimension to the crime soon began to drift across the town, like some cold fog off the Ohio.
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