Lacey Fletcher, once a smiling, happy student who played volleyball at Brownfields Baptist Academy in Louisiana, disappeared from public view in 2002 when she was about 16 years old.
Very few people other than her parents, Clay and Sheila Fletcher, apparently knew that she was alive — literally rotting away on a leather couch in the family living room in the town of Slaughter, 20 miles north of Baton Rouge. Her death was reported in early January 2022 by her mother and the Fletcher lawyers have presented the Fletchers as loving, if misguided, parents.
A family friend, meanwhile, described their actions as “pure evil.”
On Tuesday, the Fletchers, both 66, were booked into East Feliciana Parish Prison, having pleaded no contest to an abruptly reduced charge of manslaughter. They had spent almost 18 months denying second-degree murder after being indicted twice by a grand jury in Clinton, Louisiana.
Each will face up to 40 years when they are sentenced on March 20.
Jeri Lowe-Howell, who was Lacey’s ninth grade teacher at Brownfields Baptist Academy, sobbed over the phone Wednesday when she learned of the young woman’s death.
“Lacey was precious and a wonderful spirit,” Lowe-Howell told The Post. “She had the most beautiful blue eyes and the most precious smile. I am absolutely heartbroken. She was gentle and sweet and loving and she deserved to be loved. There is no excuse for what happened. None.”
She said she remembers meeting with Sheila Fletcher during Lacey’s school days and believes the mother may have been in denial about whatever was wrong with the girl — which the Fletchers and their lawyers have variously described as autism or social anxiety.
“She may well have had autism but that is no excuse for letting her rot away for years until she died,” Lowe-Howell said. “Even if she was in some way resistant or difficult, that’s when parents call in the professionals. It’s not as if she moved out and was in her own home and wouldn’t let them help her. She was in their house! They weren’t helpless. There are resources. I just can’t understand this.”
When paramedics responded to a call from Sheila on Jan. 3, 2022, they found Lacey’s body fused or, in the words of the coroner who also came that day, “melted” into the couch where her parents said she had lain for at least 12 years.
She was emaciated and naked except for a shirt, and she was covered with wounds, sores and pressure ulcers that had also been infested with maggots while she was alive. Her body was covered with both fresh and crusted excrement. Bits of yellow foam from the couch and feces were found in Lacey’s stomach and the only nutrient found nearby was a bag of hard candy.
Her official cause of death was sepsis due to a chain reaction of multiple conditions, including bone infection, prolonged immobility, malnutrition and “severe chronic neglect of a special needs individual.”
Photos obtained by The Post show Lacey lying sideways, half inside the couch. One of her buttocks had almost totally rotted away.
“I’m still traumatized two years later,” said former East Feliciana coroner Ewell Bickham who examined Lacey’s body at the home.
Bickham, according to several sources familiar with the investigation, is the hero of the story — going to the DA personally to expose details of the case and also appearing on TV because he wanted the world to know the horrible conditions Lacey lived and died in.
“I have seen every kind of death and dead body in all my years of this work, but I’ve never seen anything like what happened to Lacey,” Bickham told The Post. “No one deserves to suffer like that.”
Bickham, like a number of others interviewed by The Post, does not believe claims by Sheila Fletcher’s lawyer, Steven Moore, that Lacey’s mother “loved her to death” or regularly ate lunch with her and slept on the couch with her at night.
“The stench in that house was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” Bickham told The Post. “There was no way anyone could stand even being in there and I’m not sure the parents even lived there.”
Diana Fitzpatrick Logue worked for Sheila Fletcher and her sister Mona Almond from March 2000 to November 2021, taking care of their mother, Frances “Bunkie” McCulloch, now 92, who has dementia.
“Sheila was upset at the time she hired me because she felt the former caregiver had not treated her mother well,” Logue told The Post. “So she had cameras 24/7 to make sure she was watching me. Can you believe that? So much care for her mother and none for Lacey.
“When we found out about Lacey’s death I texted Sheila. I told her it looked like the cameras were at the wrong house.”
Logue said she didn’t even know Sheila had a daughter until she found a ceramic container in the house one day with the young woman’s name on it.
“In one of her lucid moments, Bunkie once asked about Lacey, but Sheila and Mona never mentioned her,” Logue said.
Jess Easley, who knew the Fletchers for 25 years — attending church with them every Sunday and fishing with Clay weekly — said he never even knew they had a child.
“Clay and Sheila were like your model citizens,” Easley told The Post. “Nice, soft-spoken. Or so we thought. I am beyond shocked at what happened. I’ve never felt this heartbroken in my life.”
It’s unclear if Lacey’s uncle David Almond, who was the town of Slaughter’s police chief until recently, and his wife, Mona, currently an alderwoman in the town, knew of their niece’s predicament. The two, who live a five-minute walk away from the Fletcher home, did not return a call from The Post.
Dana Lovett, a local accountant who acts occasionally as a victim’s advocate and said she had supported Lacey in court, explained that the Fletchers are “very well connected politically” in the Baton Rouge suburbs where they grew up and still live.
“They were high school sweethearts at Baker High School,” Lovett, 60, told The Post of Sheila and Clay. “He was a football star and she was on the dance team. They’re connected. At one point Sheila worked for the police chief of Baker.”
The Fletchers’ lawyer, Steven Moore, who did not return a call from The Post, gave an impassioned statement to court, saying his clients were “remorseful” but had simply buckled under the pressure of having an allegedly handicapped child.
The Fletchers told the responding police officers that Lacey was “intellectually and mentally normal but that she has some degree of Asperger’s,” a form of autism, though there is no specific evidence of an autism spectrum diagnosis. They said she had not been to a doctor in recent years because she was never sick and that she had developed a “phobia” that made her afraid to get off the couch.
But the parents have also changed their stories about Lacey, after initially proclaiming their innocence and saying Lacey had always been “of sound mind” and that it was her choice to stay on the couch.
Clay Fletcher worked for a local nuclear energy plant. Sheila had been a police and court clerk in Baker and, more recently, an assistant to the city prosecutor in Zachary. She was also an alderwoman and the mayor pro tem, or vice mayor, in the town of Slaughter until resigning three weeks after her daughter’s death.
Online reports that Lacey had “locked-in syndrome” do not appear to have any validity, according to numerous sources familiar with her case.
According to medical reports in the case file, Lacey’s parents took her to a psychologist around 2000, when she was 14, and told him she had severe “social anxiety.” They returned to the same doctor in 2010 without Lacey and told him she was refusing to leave the house and was urinating and defecating on the floor. The doctor then told them to consider hospitalization and outlined the steps they should take for their daughter.
The doctor never saw or heard from the Fletchers again, according to the case files.
The Fletchers’ neighbors, the late Robert Blades and his son, told the Daily Mail in 2022 that they remembered Lacey to be a “fun normal kid” who liked Disney movies and was “smart as hell” but acted younger than others her own age. They had last seen her about 15 years before, outside the Fletchers’ home, exercising with weights and said she gave no indication she was handicapped or disabled.
“This sounds like the word autism is being used as a bit of a red herring in this case,” said Kim Rossi, managing editor of the Age of Autism news site and a mother of three young women with profound autism. “Autism has become very watered down as a diagnosis. What was keeping her on the couch and why didn’t the parents take advantage of the numerous resources available to them?”
Until now, the Fletchers have enjoyed tremendous support from some of their neighbors and friends and from some parishioners at the First Baptist Church in Zachary, some of whom wrote letters of support to the district attorney of East/West Feliciana Parish, Sam C. D’Acquilla.
“I know that Clay and Sheila are strong people of good faith and follow Christ,” Edward Spurlock, an associate pastor at a Baptist church in Arkansas who grew up with the Fletchers in Baker, LA wrote to D’Acquilla. “It is the only way they have been able to love and care for Lacey all her life as well as find strength to take one day at a time through the trials of these charges.”
Many of Lacey’s classmates at Brownfields Baptist Academy, which shut down in 2004, declined to comment to The Post.
“They’re scared because of the politics around here,” Lovett said
Lacey’s former teacher Lowe-Howell said something seemed to be off with Lacey in her last year at school.
“She had a vacant stare sometimes and it was hard to know what she was thinking,” Lowe-Howell said. “I only knew her for a year but the other kids and parents had known her for years and said she had only just recently begun to change and act differently. But she was started to fall behind academically and socially.”
It is unknown if Lacey transferred to home schooling or achieved a high-school diploma.
“Don’t tell me there was love there,” Jess Easley said of the Fletchers. “They may have seemed nice but there was a terrible disgusting side to them. How could anybody do that to another human being much less your own child? There is no way you can sugarcoat this, no way. This is pure evil is what it is. Pure evil.”
