by Ray Black
TONI LAWRENCE
When Toni arrived back home on Saturday evening, it was immediately apparent to her parents Clifton and Glenda Lawrence, that there was something wrong. Directly behind Toni was her best friend Hope, followed by her parents Carl and Gloria Rippey. They all had solemn faces, but before Toni’s parents could ask any questions, she started crying uncontrollably and it was obvious that she was in a state of severe shock.
Clifton told his wife to take Toni into the other room while he had a talk with Hope’s parents. Carl told Clifton that the girls had told him they had witnessed a murder that morning. He said that although the details were a little skimpy he did feel that the girls were telling the truth. He asked the Rippeys to come to the police station with him, but they refused and said they wanted to speak to a lawyer before taking any action. Meanwhile, Clifton called his wife and daughter back into the lounge and said they were going to the police.
The Cliftons arrived at the Sheriff’s Office at around nine o’clock and as soon as Shipley heard that this family had information regarding a murder, he quickly ushered them into his office. As soon as Toni started to give details about what had happened the previous night, Shipley knew it was serious and decided to get everything recorded on tape.
THE ARRESTS
While the Lawrences were still at the sheriff’s office, Shipley received a missing person’s report from Clark County. Mr and Mrs Sharer had reported that their twelve-year-old daughter, Shanda, had gone missing around eight hours earlier. Shipley’s stomach lurched as he listened to the description of the young girl, it matched that of the body found on Lemon Road.
It was almost two in the morning by the time that Sheriff Shipley managed to obtain warrants to arrest Laurie Tackett and Melinda Loveless. They discovered Laurie’s truck at Melinda’s house and decided to call there first. Melinda’s mother answered the door and when asked where the girls were, she replied that they were upstairs sleeping. The two sleepy teenagers were handcuffed and taken back to the sheriff’s office where they were booked and put in custody. Due to the lateness of the hour, they decided to wait until morning before they started to ask them any questions.
The autopsy revealed that Shanda had received multiple injuries including ligature marks on her wrists and several lacerations to her neck, head and legs. Cuts and bleeding around her anus indicated that she had been sodomized while she was still alive. But most horrifying of all was the fact that they found soot in her lungs which meant that she was not dead when her body was set on fire.
By now the media had got hold of the story and the public, who were in shock, demanded justice for the death of Shanda Sharer. It was not hard to build up enough evidence to bring the case to trial as apparently both Loveless and Tackett had told their story to at least three other people, two of whom were quite eager to give statements to the police. So gradually the police managed to build up a detailed report of what exactly happened on that night. Even though each of the four girls involved tried to play down their part in the murder, most of the details in the statements corroborated.
JUSTICE
On March 15, 1992, both Hope Rippey and Toni Lawrence were charged with murder, arson, battery with a deadly weapon, aggravated battery, criminal confinement and intimidation. Melinda Loveless and Laurie Tackett were charged with seven additional crimes including, child molesting and criminal deviate conduct and, a month later, an additional count of felony murder was added.
Sixteen-year-old Melinda Loveless was sentenced to sixty years in the Indiana Women’s prison in Indianapolis, Indiana. With good behaviour she could be released in 2022.
Seventeen-year-old Laurie Tackett was also sentenced to sixty years in the Indiana Women’s prison in Indiananopolis, and could also be released in 2022 with good behaviour.
Fifteen-year-old Hope Rippey was sentenced to fifty years in the Indiana Women’s prison in Indianapolis, where she could be released in 2017 with good behaviour.
Finally, fifteen-year-old Toni Lawrence was sentenced to twenty years in the Indiana Women’s prison in Pendleton, Indiana. During the year 2000 Toni received an associate’s degree which reduced her sentence by one year and, added to that good behaviour, she was released from prison on December 14, 2000 and remained on parole until December 2002. She only actually served nine years of her twenty year sentence.
Larry Swartz
Our last case in this section is one involving parricide. Children who commit parricide are normally subjects of physical, emotional and psychological abuse from an early age. They frequently show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and hyperactive behaviour. Perhaps it is time for society to become more aware of the abuse these children have to bear and try and work out programmes which will give them other options besides killing . . .
Bob Swartz grew up in Pittsburgh during America’s Great Depression. In 1950 he moved to Ohio because he wanted to try and get an engineering degree. However, he dropped out of his studies to join the navy in 1952 but returned to study at the University of Maryland four years later. It was at the University that he met his future wife, Kate Sullivan.
Kate lived in Iowa and was brought up as a good Catholic girl by her parents. She was a bright pupil and achieved a master’s degree in teaching at the University of Maryland. Bob proposed to Kate while they were still studying and she agreed as long as he converted to the Catholic religion.
Shortly after they were married Bob and Kate discovered that they were among the unlucky few who were unable to conceive and, after much discussion, decided they would adopt. In 1973 they adopted a six-year-old boy named Larry Joseph. Larry’s blood mother was an unmarried teenage waitress and his father was an East Indian pimp. He had had a very unsettled start to his life and was frequently being shipped from one foster home to another, prior to his adoption by Mr and Mrs Swartz.
Two years later Bob and Kate decided to adopt another child, an American Indian boy named Michael, who was six months older than Larry. Then in 1979 they adopted their final child, this time a South Korean girl by the name of Annie.
PROBLEMS WITHIN THE FAMILY UNIT
Bob and Kate always considered their oldest son, Michael, to be the biggest problem. Michael never did very well at school and when he became a teenager he took to drinking and sneaking out of the house late at night. His parents decided to have an assessment carried out and through this they discovered that Michael had a learning disability. In an effort to improve his learning abilities, Michael was placed in special education classes. But, despite his fathers constant lectures and alleged beatings, his grades did not improve. By the time Michael was the age to go to high school, Bob and Kate felt they could no longer handle him and arranged to have him permanently institutionalized.
Larry, on the other hand, was the pride of joy of his adoptive parents. He always seemed eager to please them and after eighth grade, to their great delight Larry joined St. Mary’s Seminary to study to become a priest. Unfortunately, after only two semesters Larry failed his exams and was asked to leave the priesthood. His parents were totally embarrassed and ashamed by his failure and on his return home they treated him with disdain. With Michael no longer living at home, Bob Swartz turned his anger and frustration towards his first adopted son.
When Larry first arrived back home his parents enrolled him at Broadneck High, Maryland, where his mother taught English. Once again he tried to win back their approval by taking part in extracurricular activities, and even obtained the position of co-captain of his junior varsity soccer team. But all his efforts still were not good enough for his parents. Considering he had been an orphan with a very bad start in life, as adoptive parents they should have taken a far more understanding and patient attitude towards his upbringing. Also, the fact that he had been in and out of foster homes for six years before coming to the Swartz home, lacking any sense of family bond, they should have known better than to exert such pressure on the confused boy. However, instead of helping him with love
and affection, Mr and Mrs Swartz punished Larry for his poor grades by refusing to let him get his driver’s licence.
BOILING POINT
By the time Larry Joseph was seventeen, he had simply had enough. On January 17, 1984, he was sitting in his room drinking rum following a violent argument with his father. At around 11.30 p.m. he came downstairs to the family room, where his mother was lounging around in her pyjamas, drinking a glass of beer and watching the television. The first thing she asked Larry, was how he was doing at his classes, to which he replied that he had flunked out of Spanish. Once again the lecturing began and while listening to the constant whining of his mother’s voice he spotted an axe lying on top of some wood in front of the fireplace. Larry, in an insane rage, picked up the axe and proceeded to swing it at her head. He was so obsessed with the constant nagging that all he wanted to do was to get her to stop.
On hearing the sound of his wife’s blood-curdling screams, Bob Swartz dashed down the stairs only to be met by his son, Larry, wielding a steak knife he had taken off his mother’s dinner plate. Without giving him a chance to say a word, Larry went for his father with the knife, stabbing him over a dozen times in his brain, lungs, arms, stomach and shoulders. In a matter of minutes it was all over and his father’s lifeless body slumped to the floor.
By this time Larry was being driven by the devil, his heart was racing, and he was completely devoid of any sense of reason. The voice in his head told him that he had to keep going, his appetite for revenge was not satisfied. Still standing over his father’s corpse, Larry looked around the room only to find that his mother had gone! With the knife still in his hand, Larry ran out through the open sliding glass doors in their back yard. To his demonic delight he found his mother had collapsed in the snow, with blood still forcefully pumping out of the deep gash in her head. Larry knelt over the body and stabbed her seven times in the jugular vein with the knife that he still held in his hand.
Once he was certain that she was dead, he removed her pyjamas and proceeded to sexually abuse his inert mother. This seemed to be the final act in what seemed to be a bout of temporary insanity.
With his pulse back to normal and his bloodlust satisfied, Larry went back into the house, picked up the axe and the knife and threw them both into a swamp behind his house. Then he went back indoors, left the two bodies untouched, and made his way back to his bedroom where he fell peacefully asleep.
THE NEXT MORNING
The following morning at around seven o’clock, his kid sister Annie, woke Larry up saying that she couldn’t find her mum and dad and that they weren’t in their beds. When they went downstairs and discovered the butchered bodies, Larry feigned shock and called the police quite calmly to state that Bob and Kate Swartz had been murdered.
For three days Larry denied committing the murders and tried to implicate his brother, Michael. This seemed quite an appropriate line of action considering his brother was in a mental institution.
The police carried out intensive interviews on both Michael and Larry and, although they were certain it was Larry, decided to gather a bit more information before making an arrest. While the police were making further investigations, Larry actually disclosed to his lawyers that he was the one that had in fact brutally murdered his parents.
Luckily for Larry, the judge at his trial was quite a softie, and actually felt sorry for the young lad who had had such a traumatic upbringing. He told the lad that because of his age he felt that there was possibility of rehabilitation and he would be lenient with the sentence. Judge Bruce C. Williams gave Larry two concurrent twenty-year sentences and then suspended all but twelve years of each.
Part Two: Men Who Kill
Are These Men Monsters?
Edmund Kemper, a serial killer in the 1970s, once said: ‘It was an urge . . . A strong urge, and the longer I let it go the stronger it got, to where I was taking risks to go out and kill people – risks that normally, according to my little rules of operation, I wouldn’t take because they could lead to arrest.’
As no-one can really get inside the mind of a killer it is difficult to say whether they are actually insane monsters or merely the result of violence and abuse when they were adolescents. We have already seen in the previous section of this book that children will often re-enact the abuse that they received at their hands of their parents, so it is very possible in some of our case histories that this was carried on into adulthood.
For years psychiatrists have tried to discover where this strong urge to kill comes from, and why it is so overpowering, to the point of blinding the person from any sense of morality. Could it be genetic? Could it be hormonal or biological? Or could it be the result of cultural conditioning? These are all questions we would love the answers to. Maybe we all have monsters inside us, but it is our strong sense of morality and guidance that helps to keep it under control. What we are endeavouring to find out is why in the psychopathic killer does the monster not only emerge, but they seem to become slaves to its constant lust for blood.
We have the statements of various serial killers who gave very different reasons for their crimes: Ted Bundy claimed it was the responsibility of pornography, while Jeffrey Dahmer said that he was born with a ‘part’ of him missing. Herbert Mullin who killed thirteen people, blamed the voices that he heard in his head and when it was time to kill they told him to ‘sing the die song’. Bobby Joe Long blamed a motorcycle accident for making him hypersexual, subsequently turning him into a serial lust killer. Others blamed prison, their upbringing and one murderer even turned the blame on his victims and said that they deserved to die. Whatever the reason they gave they must all surely be out of their minds.
In our normal, adjusted minds we would like to think that they are all insane, because it is hard to accept that any normal human being would actually enjoy taking the life of another. But the really chilling factor is that the majority of serial killers are rational, calculating and, as Dennis Nilsen put it, ‘a mind can be evil without being abnormal’.
THE SERIAL OR ORGANIZED KILLER
The definition of a serial killer is someone that leaves a cooling off period between their murders of anywhere from days or weeks to even months or years. Their murders are always premeditated and very carefully planned, often selecting victims according to a specific characteristic. It is a known fact that nearly all serial killers are caucasian males that range between the ages of twenty and thirty-five at the time when they commit their crime. These killers feel a strong urge to try and dominate others and may be prone to violent outbursts. They generally have an unnatural fascination for pornography, bondage and indeed any abnormal sexual acts. Another strange phenomenon is they are often obsessed with material things and fascinated by anything to do with police work, uniforms and the apparatus they use.
What makes it hard for the police to track down the serial killer is the fact that he does not stand out from the crowd. They normally require very little sleep, are articulate, charismatic and are quite particular about their appearance. These traits are quite unlike those of the disorganized killer who will often appear dishevelled and very often withdrawn.
Although serial killers do not generally develop a long-term relationship, they do normally have a string of short-term sexual partners. Perhaps it is their fantasies about sex and violence that stops them from forming a successful one-to-one relationship.
Let us delve a little deeper and go into some of the childhood factors that could have had an effect on the way they behave as an adult. The order of birth seems to play quite a large part in the profile of an organized killer, since they are generally the firstborn. They will normally stand out at school either by acting the clown or become the classroom bully. Most reports on serial killers state that they come from very insecure backgrounds where they were abused and received very little affection. Often the killer will use fantasies about their childhood in order to escape the truth about their home life. These fantasies, rather than being ab
out a better life, are generally about aggression and revenge.
The type of victim a killer chooses can also tell us a lot about the sort of man he is. There are generally three types of victim – high, moderate and low-risk. Organized killers like to target the high-risk victims like prostitutes, hitchhikers, vagrants or children. They may pick a victim because of the way they look, or possibly because they remind them of a past lover, family member, or something from his past. Organized killers always pursue the same type of victim and they often bear a striking resemblance to one another. For example: the colour of their hair, their occupation, age, height etc. Almost all the victims will be white as inter-racial killings are extremely rare.
The organized killer is perfected in the art of deception. They are very adept at impersonating either police officers, security guards or people in authority which forces their victim into a false sense of security. Another con is to lure prostitutes with the promise of large sums of money or children by the promise that they will take them home to their parents. They will usually have enough contact with their victim prior to the assault, as to make the whole matter more personalized.
Then there is the method of killing which will also have a pattern of similarities. The organized criminal will not attack his victim until he feels he is complete control of the situation. This control may be achieved by the use of various restraints including ropes or handcuffs, and they usually like the death to be slow and deliberate. They prefer a hands-on methods of killing, for example strangulation or stabbing, as this allows the killer to get closer to their victim thus exerting more control. Forensic reports will often report bite marks on the bodies of their victims, or semen in body orifices. Also the sexual attack generally takes place while the victim is still alive, as opposed to the disorganized killer who seems to prefer the inert corpse.
