Murder of Shanda Sharer

Shanda Renée Sharer was a twelve-year-old girl living in Jefferson County, Indiana. Born in 1979, she was described by those who knew her as friendly and outgoing, a child in her first year of junior high school. In January 1992 her life was ended in a crime that became one of the most widely discussed in the state's history.

On the night of January 10, 1992, Shanda was lured from her father's home by a group of four teenage girls. Over the hours that followed she was held against her will and driven through several southern Indiana counties. The ordeal continued until the early morning of January 11, when she was killed and her body left north of the city of Madison, where it was discovered later that day.

Investigators quickly identified those responsible. The central figure was sixteen-year-old Melinda Loveless, whom prosecutors described as the driving force behind the attack; her involvement grew out of jealousy tied to a personal relationship. She acted together with seventeen-year-old Laurie Tackett and two fifteen-year-old girls, Hope Rippey and Toni Lawrence. Two of the four were arrested within days, and all four were charged in connection with the crime.

Although three of the defendants were younger than eighteen, all four were charged as adults under Indiana law. Each ultimately entered a guilty plea rather than proceed to trial, an arrangement that removed the possibility of a death sentence. Loveless and Tackett pleaded guilty to murder, criminal confinement, and arson, and each received a sixty-year prison sentence. Rippey pleaded guilty and was sentenced to sixty years, later reduced to thirty-five years on appeal. Lawrence, whom prosecutors regarded as the least culpable and who cooperated with investigators, pleaded guilty to criminal confinement and received a twenty-year sentence.

The convictions and sentences were reviewed in later proceedings. In 1994 the Indiana Supreme Court upheld Loveless's sentence, rejecting arguments that her difficult upbringing should have reduced her culpability. Loveless later sought to overturn her conviction and to secure early release, but those requests were denied.

Over the following decades each of the four women completed her sentence and supervised release. Lawrence was the first to be freed, in 2000, followed by Rippey in 2006 and Tackett in 2018. Loveless, the last still incarcerated, was released in September 2019, more than twenty-six years after the crime.

The case has drawn extensive commentary because of the age of the victim, the youth of those responsible, and the questions it raised about how the justice system should treat serious crimes committed by minors. For many it remains most closely associated with the memory of Shanda Sharer herself, a child whose life was cut short at twelve years old.