The two bird hunters who found the body of 12-year-old Shanda Renee Sharer on that cold, sunny morning in January said it looked at first like a department store mannequin, dumped off near some woods beside an isolated gravel road. But as Donn and Ralph Foley walked up to the charred figure, just a few hundred yards from their home north of Madison in Jefferson County, they quickly realized that it did not have joints like a mannequin. Shanda's burned and tortured body was all too real, and the chilling details of her death would leave the 12,000 residents of this picture-postcard Ohio River town deeply shaken and searching for answers. Some in Madison have laid the blame on evils that seeped in from outside their town. But for others, Shanda's death has opened the shutters on a darker place in their own community, a place that stands in stark contrast to the nostalgic image they present to tourists. It was an image that had no room for the murder of children. "We have policemen and firemen who get cats out of trees," said Sharon Steinhardt, 34, who works on Main Street for the Chamber of Commerce. "This is Mayberry." The police had more serous work on that January weekend. Within hours, Indiana State Police had arrested two girls, ages 16 and 17, and charged them with Shanda's murder. One of the suspects was from Madison. The second was from New Albany, Ind., a suburb of Louisville, Ky., 45 miles away. That two young girls could be suspected of such a thing became even more astonishing when the dimensions of the crime were sketched by Dr. George Nichols. The hard-bitten chief medical examiner from nearby Kentucky was called in by Indiana police to conduct the autopsy. Even he called the findings gruesome. Shanda's wrists and ankles had been bound, he said. Her legs had been slashed, and she had been beaten repeatedly on the head with a blunt object. She also was brutally sodomized with a foreign object. Finally, she was doused with gasoline and burned beyond recognition, Nichols said. He listed the official cause of death as burns and smoke inhalation. She had been burned alive. And there was more. The transcript of a late-night probable cause hearing before the arrests revealed that two other Madison girls, both 15, were also suspected of involvement. One had turned herself in to police, and was talking. Shanda was killed, police quoted the 15-year-old as saying, because one of the other girls believed Shanda was "trying to steal her girlfriend." By March, all four girls would be charged as adults with murder, and the county prosecutor refused to rule out seeking the death penalty in any of the cases. The county prosecutor, Guy Mannering Townsend, 49, clamped a lid on all official information about the crime. He and defense lawyers refuse to comment publicly on the case. Despite the scarcity of facts, or perhaps because of it, rumors and whispers about another dimension to the crime soon began to drift across town. Today, virtually anyone you ask in Madison has heard the talk _ none of it officially confirmed _ that the dead girl and one of her killers were involved in a lesbian lovers' triangle, or satanism. Or both. The teens who hang out behind the fast food store on Michigan Road claim they know of lesbian and satanic circles among other Madison teens, so many of them believe the talk about Shanda's killing. Even Madison Police Chief Bill Tingle, whose department has had no official role in the murder investigation, said he knew "there possibly was a 90 percent chance" that lesbian jealousy touched off the crime. Speculation about the killing was so intense in Jefferson County that Circuit Court Judge Ted Todd ruled that all jury pools for the trials would be drawn from another county. Anticipation that the worst of the rumors might be proved true in court has only increased Madisonians' dread of the three scheduled trials, the first one set for Aug. 17. County prosecutor Guy Townsend is a former newspaper reporter with a Ph.D. in British history. On the job just 18 months, this is his first murder. The county of 30,000 has had just four in 12 years. But none like Shanda Sharer's. Ten hours after the body was discovered, police got their first big break in the case. It was 9 p.m., and Toni Lawrence, a 15-year-old sophomore at Madison High had appeared at the city police station with her parents. She was in hysterics, and she wanted to talk about a murder. Detective Stephen Thomas Henry, a 20-year veteran of the Indiana State Police, was assigned to interview her. His testimony at a probable cause hearing at Judge Todd's house at 1 a.m. that night has provided the only detailed account so far of the crime. Toni told him that the night of horror began Friday when she and another Madison High sophomore, Hope Rippey, 15, were picked up after school by Mary Laurine "Laurie" Tackett. Henry testified that the three girls drove down to New Albany, where they picked up Melinda Loveless, 16, a friend of Laurie Tackett's who was unknown to Toni and Hope. Together, they all drove into Louisville, where they attended a concert Henry described as a "punk rock type." Afterward, as the girls left Louisville, Henry said, Melinda Loveless began talking about Shanda Sharer, and "how . . . Shanda was trying to steal her girlfriend named Amanda, how . . . she would like to kill Shanda." A Catholic school seventh-grader, Sharer is described as looking closer to 16 than to 12. Police said she was unknown to Toni and Hope. So, the four girls drove to Shanda's father's home near Louisville and, with Melinda Loveless hiding under a blanket on the floor of the back seat, they persuaded Shanda to join them in the car. As they drove off, with Shanda in the front seat, the conversation eventually turned to Shanda's new relationship with Melinda's former girlfriend, Amanda. That, Henry said, was when "Melinda . . . came up out of the back seat and put a knife to Shanda's throat, and pulled her hair back." As the girls drove back toward Madison, Toni Lawrence told Henry, they made several stops for torture. At various times, Shanda was tied up, threatened with death, cut on the legs, choked, and beaten with a metal rod, perhaps a tire tool. The autopsy would reveal severe lacerations caused by sodomy. Sometime after daybreak, with Shanda bleeding but still alive in the trunk, the girls went to a Madison gas station where they filled a two-liter soda bottle with gasoline. Henry testified that Laurie Tackett and Melinda Loveless told Toni they "planned to burn Shanda's body." But Toni said she was dropped off at home before Shanda was killed. The body was discovered an hour after Toni got home. In a plea bargain reached in April, Toni Lawrence agreed to testify for the prosecution in exchange for a guilty plea on a single count of criminal confinement. There is no agreement on her sentence. All four girls are being held without bail in separate prisons.