Shanda Renee Sharer was a 12 year old girl who was viscously murdered by a group of other teenage girls. The brutality of Shanda’s murder and the ages of the murderers caused this case to gain much media attention.
Shanda Sharer was born on June 6, 1979 in Pineville, Kentucky to her parents Stephen Sharer and Jacqueline Vaught. Shanda’s parents divorced when she was young and her mother remarried and their family moved to Louisville. Shanda, her mother Jacqueline, and her sister Paige eventually moved and settled in New Albany, Indiana, where Shanda was enrolled at Hazelwood Middle School and eventually transferred to the Catholic school Our Lady of Perpetual Help School. Shanda was known for being athletic and playing a variety of sports, such as basketball, cheerleading, softball, and volleyball.
Shanda Sharer met a girl by the name of Amanda Heavrin at Hazelwood Junior High School after the two of them got into a fight. They eventually worked out their differences and became friends. This friendship grew and the two girls eventually began to exchange romantic love letters to each other and started a relationship.
Amanda Heavrin’s ex girlfriend, Melinda Loveless, became jealous of the relationship between Amanda and Shanda. Melinda Loveless was born on October 28, 1975 in New Albany, Indiana. With a father who became emotionally scarred after fighting in the Vietnam War and a mother who was abused and suicidal, Melinda and her sisters grew up in a neglectful and abusive household. After her parents finally divorced in November 1990, Melinda ended all contact with her father. These events led to Melinda developing depression and getting into fights at school.
14 year old Melinda began dating Amanda Heavrin in 1990, but the relationship began to fall apart and the two split after about a year. In October 1991, Amanda and Shanda attended a school dance together, where they were confronted by a jealous Melinda. Later that October, Amanda and Shanda went to a festival together. At this, Melinda began planning to murder Shanda and even went as far as to threaten to kill Shanda in public. After becoming concerned and disapproving of Shanda and Amanda’s relationship, Shanda’s parents decided to transfer her to the Catholic school in November 1991. Despite this, Amanda would constantly try to talk to Shanda, sending her letters and calling her. Amanda later stated that she informed a youth prosecutor of the threats that Melinda was making toward Shanda, but nothing was done about it.
On the night of January 10, 1992, Melinda, who was 16 at the time, and her 3 friends, 15 year old Toni Laurence, 15 year old Hope Rippey, and 17 year old Laurie Tackett met up at her house. Melinda and Laurie were both friends and Toni and Hope were friends of Laurie who had not previously met Melinda, and all had gone through some traumatic events including parental divorces and sexual abuse. The girls rode together in Laurie’s car to Melinda’s house where she showed them the knife she was going to use to scare Shanda. Melinda explained to the girls that she did not like Shanda because she was a “copycat” and had stolen her girlfriend and then she explained their plan to scare her.
Later that night, the girls drove to Shanda’s house where Melinda told Hope and Toni to go and introduce themselves to Shanda as Amanda’s friend and then invited her to go with them to see Amanda who was supposedly waiting for them at an area known as “the Witch’s Castle” which overlooked the Ohio River. Shanda told them she was not allowed to go out, to which the girls told her that they would come back around midnight and wait for her to sneak out. The girls left for a while and then began heading back to Shanda’s home around midnight. On the way back, Melinda stated that she could not wait to kill Shanda. When the girls arrived back at Shanda’s house around 12:30 A.M., Melinda hid under a blanket in the back seat with her knife while Hope and Toni went to go get Shanda.
Though Shanda was reluctant to go along with them, she eventually agreed to go along with them. On the way to “the Witch’s Castle”, Hope asked Shanda questions about her relationship with Amanda. While asking, Melinda, jumped out from the back seat and held the knife to Shanda’s throat and began asking her about the sexual relationship between her and Amanda. When the girls arrived at the Witch’c Castle, the girls took Shanda inside and tied up her arms and legs with rope. The girls then taunted Shanda, stealing her Mickey Mouse watch from her and dancing around to the tune it played as well as threatening to cut off her hair and telling her that she would be the next remains to be left at the Witch’s Castle. The girls thought of taunting Shanda with fire, but feared that it would draw attention from cars passing by, so they chose to leave with Shanda. Shanda begged the girls to take her back home, but they refused. During this next car ride, Melinda ordered Shanda to remove her bra and then trade it with Hope’s.
After a while, the girls got lost and stopped at a gas station, hiding Shanda under a blanket. The girls then asked for directions and then phoned a friend in Louisville to calm them down, but did not mention the abduction. The girls later arrived at the woods near Laurie’s home where they began to torture Shanda.
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Hope and Toni became afraid and decided to wait in the car while Melinda and Laurie carried out torturing Shanda. First the two girls made Shanda strip naked, and then Melinda began to brutally beat Shanda. She slammed Shanda’s mouth into her knees over and over, causing Shanda mouth to cut because of her braces. Melinda then tried to slit Shanda’s throat with the knife she had, but the knife was too dull. Hope then exited the car and held Shanda down while Melinda and Laurie took turns stabbing her. They then strangled Shanda with a rope until she was unconscious.
After the torture, the girls placed Shanda in the trunk of the car, thinking she was dead. They then went to Laurie’s home to clean up. While cleaning themselves up, the girls heard Shanda screaming in the trunk, to which Laurie went out and stabbed her a few more times with a knife. Melinda and Laurie then left around 2:30 A.M. January 11. While driving, they heard Shanda crying and making gurgling noises. They pulled over and opened the trunk and Shanda sat up, covered in blood with her eyes rolled to the back of her head, unable to speak. Laurie then beat her with a tire iron and told Melinda to “smell it”. They then drove back to where the other girls were and told them about the torture. Laurie’s mother was awoken by this conversation, to which she scolded Laurie for being out late and having friends over. Laurie then told her mother she would take the girls home and they all left. When they went out and opened the trunk again, Hope sprayed Shanda’s open wounds with Windex while saying, “You’re not looking so hot now, are you?”.
The girls then left with Shanda still in the trunk and drove to a nearby gas station where they filled an empty 2-liter soda bottle with gasoline. They then drove to a location that Hope knew of off U.S. Route 421. Toni stayed in the car while the other 3 girls got out and removed Shanda, who was still alive, and wrapped her in a blanket. They carried Shanda to an open field, where Laurie ordered Hope to pour some of the gasoline on Shanda, which she did. Melinda then took a match and set 12 year old Shanda on fire. The girls quickly left, but Melinda worried that the fire would go out, so they went back. Melinda then poured the rest of the bottle of gasoline on Shanda.
At around 9:30 A.M., the 4 girls went to McDonalds for breakfast, where they joked about how the sausages they were eating looked like Shanda’s body. Melinda and Laurie then dropped Hope and Toni off at their homes, where they told other friends about the murder. Melinda then called and told Amanda about the murder and planned to meet up with her to prove it. Melinda along with Laurie and another friend, Crystal Wathen, who they had told about the murder to go and pick Amanda up. At first, both Crystal and Amanda did not believe what they were told, until Melinda showed them the trunk and Shanda’s clothes that were covered in Shanda’s blood. Horrified Amanda ordered to be taken home, but before departing, she told Melinda she loved her and promised that she wouldn’t tell anyone what happened.
Later that morning, 2 brothers who were going hunting came across the body on the side of the road. Police were called at around 10:55 A.M. At first, investigators thought that this was a drug deal gone wrong and was committed by locals. That same day, Shanda’s father who she was staying with at the time of her abduction, noticed she was missing. At about 1:45 P.M. they went to the Clark County Sheriffs Department to report their daughter missing. At about 8:30 that night, Toni and Hope went to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department with their parents, telling a hysterical story of something that happened to their victim Shanda and saying that 2 other girls were also involved. The Sheriff then contacted the department in Clark County, which they were able to get a match on a missing person’s report.
Dental records were obtained and used to identify the body that had earlier been discovered, which was positively identified as Shanda. Toni and Hope were placed under arrest and on January 12, 1992, Melinda and Laurie were also arrested for the murder of Shanda. The girls were all charged as adults for their actions, but they avoided the death penalty by taking a plea bargain.
During the trial, the troubled backgrounds of the 4 girls were used in their defense. With the combination of suffering from abuse and mental disorders, the girls were treated with leniency. Oddly, they didn’t seem to take into account how much pain they were putting Shanda and her family through whilst carrying out their brutal crimes. What they went through didn’t seem to matter to them when they were doing the same things and worse to little Shanda.
After almost a year long trial, Melinda Loveless, Laurie Tackett, and Hope Rippey were sentenced to 60 years in prison. Toni Lawrence was sentenced to 20 years. However, none of them carried out their full sentence. Toni was released on parole on December 14, 2000. After serving 14 of her 60 year sentence, Hope was released on parole on April 28, 2006. Laurie was then released on parole on January 11, 2018, 26 years after Shanda’s murder. During her prison sentence, Melinda began training dogs, and Shanda’s mother even donated a dog to her by the name of Shanda in a way to honor her daughter. Melinda Loveless was eventually released on parole on September 5, 2019.
Feeling destroyed after his daughter’s brutal murder, Shanda’s father Stephen Sharer later passed away in 2005 of alcoholism, Jacque stating that he, “died from a broken heart.” In 2011, Shanda’s mother Jacque and sister Paige went on Dr.Phil, where they talked about what happened to Shanda, as well as confronting 1 of Shanda’s murderers, Hope Rippey, during the interview.
Though the girls have all been released and claimed to have changed, that still does not change the horrible crime they committed and it never will change because Shanda cannot come back. They can use the defense that they had tough upbringings, but they still knew better and were fully aware of what they were doing. There are plenty of people who have had terrible upbringings like the girls, but they didn’t let this guide them down a path of destruction. Shanda’s mother Jacque told Hope during their Dr.Phil confrontation that to make it up to Shanda and her family she could’ve, “…stayed in prison and served out [her] sentence.” That was the last thing all 4 girls could’ve done for Shanda’s family because nothing else can even come close to fixing what happened, not even a prison sentence.
It is so horrifying to think of what Shanda went through in those hours. Any of those girls could have done something to stop what was happening, but they chose to hurt an innocent child. Shanda was a sweet and outgoing young girl and that should remain her legacy.
Resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Shanda_Sharer#Aftermath
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