Lacey Fletcher, once a smiling, happy student who played volleyball at Brownfields Baptist Academy in Louisiana, disappeared from public life in 2002 when she was about 16 years old.
It appears that few people knew she was alive other than her parents, Clay and Sheila Fletcher. It was literally rotting away on a leather couch in her family’s living room in the town of Slaughter, 20 miles north of Baton Rouge. Her death was reported by her mother in early January 2022, and Fletcher’s lawyers argued that the Fletchers were loving, if misguided parents.
Meanwhile, a family friend described their actions as “pure evil”.
On Tuesday, the Fletchers, both 66, were booked into East Feliciana Parish Jail after pleading no contest to suddenly reduced charges of manslaughter. They had spent nearly 18 months denying second-degree murder after being indicted twice by a grand jury in Clinton, Louisiana.
When they are sentenced on March 20, each faces up to 40 years in prison.
Jeri Louhauer, Lacey’s ninth-grade teacher at Brownfields Baptist Academy, sobbed over the phone Wednesday after learning of the young woman’s death.
“Lacey was a precious person and had a great spirit,” Lowe-Howell told the Post. “She had the most beautiful blue eyes and the most precious smile. I am truly heartbroken. She was kind, gentle, loving, and worthy of love. What happened There is no excuse for that. None.”
She said she remembered meeting Sheila Fletcher when Lacey was at school and believed her mother was in denial that the girl had a problem. The Fletchers and their lawyers describe it in various ways, including autism and social anxiety.
“She may have been autistic, but that’s no excuse to leave her alone for years until she dies,” Lowe-Howell said. “Even if the daughter resists or has difficulties in some way, the parents will then call in the professionals. It’s not like she won’t move out and stay in her own home and let them help her. was in their home! They were not helpless. They have resources. This is the only thing I don’t understand.”
When emergency crews responded to a call from Sheila on January 3, 2022, they found her body fused, or in the words of the medical examiner who was there that day, “melted” to the couch where her parents had been sleeping. I found that it blends into the. 12 years.
She was emaciated, naked except for a shirt, and covered in sores, sores, bedsores, and infested with maggots during her lifetime. Her body was covered in both fresh and hardened excrement. Pieces of yellow foam from the couch and feces were found in Lacey’s stomach, and the only nutrients found nearby were a bag of hard candy.
Her official cause of death was sepsis due to a chain reaction of multiple conditions, including a bone infection, prolonged immobilization, malnutrition, and “severe chronic neglect of a person with special needs.”
Photos obtained by the Post show Lacey lying half-lying on her side on the couch. She had one side of her butt almost completely rotten.
“Two years later, the trauma remains,” said Ewell Bickham, a former East Feliciana coroner who examined Lacey’s body at her home.
According to multiple sources familiar with the investigation, Bikam is the main character in the story and personally went to the prosecutor’s office to reveal the details of the case. Appear on television Because I wanted the world to know about the horrific circumstances in which Lacey lived and died.
“I’ve seen all kinds of deaths and corpses in my years in this business, but I’ve never seen anything like what happened to Lacey,” Bickham told the Post. “No one deserves to suffer like that.”
Bickham, like many others interviewed by the Post, said that Lacey’s mother “loved her to death,” that they regularly ate lunch together and slept on the couch together at night. I don’t believe Sheila Fletcher’s lawyer, Stephen Moore, that she did.
“The smell in that house was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” Bikam told the Post. “Nobody can bear to be there and I don’t know if my parents lived there.”
Diana Fitzpatrick Logue worked with Sheila Fletcher and her sister Mona Almond from March 2000 to November 2021 to help their 92-year-old mother, Frances “Bunky,” who has dementia. -I was caring for Mr. McCulloch.
“When Sheila hired me, she was upset because she felt her former caregiver wasn’t treating her mother well,” Logue told the Post. “So she had cameras installed 24/7 to make sure she was watching me. Can you believe that? I’m very careful about her mother, but… She doesn’t pay any attention to Lacey.
“When I learned of Lacey’s death, I texted Sheila. I told her it seemed like the cameras were installed in the wrong house.”
Logue said she didn’t even know Sheila had a daughter until one day she found a ceramic container in the house with the young woman’s name engraved on it.
“In his moments of lucidity, Bunky asked about Lacey, but Sheila and Mona never mentioned Lacey,” Logue said.
Jess Easley, who has known the Fletchers for 25 years, attended church every Sunday and fished with Clay every week, said she didn’t even know they had children.
“Clay and Sheila seemed like model citizens,” Easley told the Post. “Okay, in a gentle tone. Or so we thought. I’m beyond shocked by what happened. I’ve never been so heartbroken in my life.”
It’s unclear whether Lacey’s uncle, David Almond, who until recently served as Slaughter’s police chief, and his wife, Mona, who is now the town’s alderman, were aware of their niece’s plight. The couple, who live a five-minute walk from Fletcher’s home, have not returned calls from The Post.
Dana Lovett, a local accountant who sometimes acts as a victim’s attorney and said she supported Lacey in court, said the Baton Rouge suburb where the Fletchers were born, raised, and still live is “very politically deep.” There is a connection.”
“They were high school sweethearts at Baker High School,” Lovett, 60, told the Post about Sheila and Clay. “He was a star football player and she was part of the dance team. They are connected. At one point, Sheila worked for Police Chief Baker.”
The Fletchers’ lawyer, Stephen Moore, did not return calls from the Post, but gave an impassioned statement in court, saying his clients were “remorseful” but disabled. She said she simply succumbed to the pressure of having a child.
The Fletchers told responding police officers that Lacey was “intellectually and mentally normal, but suffers from some degree of Asperger’s Syndrome,” a type of autism, but was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. There is no concrete evidence that this has happened. They said she had never been sick and had not seen a doctor in recent years because she had developed a “phobia” that made her afraid to get off the couch.
However, the parents changed their story about Lacey after initially declaring their innocence and stating that Lacey had always been of “sound mind” and that it was her choice to sit on the couch.
Clay Fletcher worked at the local nuclear power plant. Sheila has served as a police officer and court clerk in the City of Baker, and most recently as an Assistant City Attorney in the City of Zachary. She was also a Slaughter town councilor and mayor pro tem, or vice mayor, until she resigned three weeks after her daughter’s death.
Numerous sources familiar with her case say there is no validity to online reports that Ms. Lacey suffered from “locked-in syndrome.”
According to a medical report in the case file, Lacey’s parents took her to a psychologist around 2000, when she was 14 years old, and determined that she suffered from severe “social anxiety.” He said he told him. They visited the same doctor in 2010 without Lacey, who reported that she refused to leave her house and was urinating and defecating on her floor. The doctor then advised her to consider hospitalization and outlined the steps to take for her daughter.
According to the case file, the doctor never saw or heard from the Fletchers again.
Neighbors of the Fletcher family, the late Robert Blaise and his son; told the Daily Mail In 2022, they say they remember Lacey as a “fun, normal kid” who loved Disney movies and was “insanely smart,” but who acted younger than other kids her age. The last time they saw her was about 15 years ago, when she was doing weight training outside the Fletcher family’s home, and there was no indication that she was disabled or disabled. she stated.
“It sounds like the word autism is being used as a bit of a red herring in this case,” said Kim Rossi, the paper’s editor-in-chief. era of autism She is a news site and mother of three young women with severe autism. “Autism has become a very thinly veiled diagnosis. What was it that kept her on the couch? Why didn’t her parents take advantage of the many resources available? Do you want it?”
So far, the Fletchers have received a lot of support from First Baptist Church in Zachary, where parishioners and pastors have written letters of support. Sam C. D’Aquila, District Attorney for East/West Feliciana Parish;
“I know that Clay and Sheila are strong men of good will and followers of Christ,” associate pastor Edward Spurlock said in a letter to D’Aquila. “This is the only way they were able to love and care for Lacey throughout their lives and find the strength to live one day at a time through the ordeal of these charges.”
Many of Lacy’s classmates at Brownfields Baptist Academy, which closed in 2004, declined to comment to the Post.
“They’re scared because of the politics around here,” Lovett said.
Lacey’s former teacher, Rowe Howell, said something seemed off about her during her last year at school.
“She looked blank at times and it was hard to understand what she was thinking,” Lowe-Howell said. “I had only known her for a year, but the other kids and parents had known her for years and could see her changing and acting differently. She said she only started recently, but she was starting to fall behind academically and socially.”
It is unclear whether Lacy transferred to homeschooling or earned her high school diploma.
“Don’t say there was love there,” Jess Easley said of the Fletchers. “They may have seemed kind, but they had a really nasty side to them. How could they do that to another human being, let alone their own child? There’s no way to sugarcoat this, Absolutely not. This is pure evil itself. Evil incarnate.”
