The Witch’s Castle

Shanda Renée Sharer was twelve, a seventh grader in New Albany, Indiana, and she had started seeing a girl named Amanda Heavrin. Amanda’s former girlfriend, sixteen-year-old Melinda Loveless, did not take it well. On the night of January 10, 1992, Loveless and three other teenagers drove to Shanda’s father’s house in Jeffersonville.

Hope Rippey and Toni Lawrence, both fifteen, went to the door with a message that supposedly came from Amanda, and Shanda left with them. Over roughly eight hours the four girls beat and stabbed her, moving between an abandoned stone ruin above the Ohio River that local teenagers called the Witch’s Castle, seventeen-year-old Laurie Tackett’s home, and back roads in between. Before dawn on January 11 they stopped at a field off Lemon Road north of Madison, poured gasoline over her, and set her alight. Hunters crossing the frozen field found her body that morning.

Lawrence and Rippey walked into a police station the same day. All four were charged as adults and pleaded guilty. Lawrence received twenty years and was released in December 2000. Rippey’s sixty-year sentence was later cut to thirty-five, and she left prison in April 2006. Tackett and Loveless each received sixty years; Tackett was released in January 2018 and Loveless in September 2019.