TRUE LIFE
Lacey passed away on the spot she hadn’t left for 12 years
BEHIND THE BIG CRIME
Friends and neighbours who remember Lacey Ellen Fletcher describe her as ‘just a fun, normal kid’.
‘One of the sweetest people you could ever meet’, one old school pal said.
A quiet girl, yet vocal about her opinions.
Lacey went to a small private school, called Brownsville Baptist Academy.
At 12, she played for the volleyball team.
Photos of Lacey as a teenager show her fresh-faced and smiling with her teammates.
Only, around the age of 14, something changed.
She’d been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and it accelerated in her teens.
Lacey became more isolated from her friends. Robert Blades, who went to school with Lacey, said that she wasn’t a ‘typical teenager’.
‘She wasn’t as mature as us. She still liked children things, not teenage things,’ he said.
Like Disney films. Worried about bullying, Lacey’s parents Sheila and Clay Fletcher withdrew her from Brownsville to homeschool her.
Around that time, Sheila also took her daughter to see a clinical psychologist, Dr Donald Hoppe, saying that she suffered ‘severe social anxiety’, autism and a below-average IQ.
It was the worst thing the coroner had ever seen
Between the years 2000 and 2002, when Lacey was around 14-16, she had 12 sessions with Dr Hoppe.
After that, Lacey vanished from public view.
A neighbour saw her fleetingly when she was around 21, exercising in the street, carrying dumb-bells.
But she wasn’t seen again. Then, on the morning of 3 January 2022, Sheila called 911.
Her daughter was dead.
Emergency services turned up at their home in Slaughter, Louisiana, and were immediately hit by the sewer-like stench.
Then they found 36-yearold Lacey.
Sat crossed legged, but sunken into a hole almost up to her shoulders in the worn-through, maggot-infested living-room sofa.
Her emaciated body was caked in human faeces and urine.
It was in her ears and matted in her hair.
She was covered in ulcers, sores and wounds that exposed her bones.
The floor underneath the couch was buckling due to pooling urine.
Experts believed she could have been sitting in that same position for as long as 12 years.
She hadn’t seen a doctor for two decades.
It was the worst thing coroner Dr Ewell Bickham had ever seen.
He said the poor woman had ‘melted’ into the sofa. Lacey’s cause of death was ruled as sepsis due to multiple conditions.
They included bone infection, prolonged immobility, malnutrition and ‘severe chronic neglect of a special needs individual’. She weighed just 6st 12lb. Maggots had infested her body while she’d been alive.
In her stomach
