The Burn Farm

fact.

Sheila LaBarre

It was like an X-rated retelling of Hansel and Gretel. The witch—a black widow dominatrix witch—liked to push boys into the oven. She burned her victims while quoting Daniel 3, a biblical chapter that depicted punishment by incineration.

This wicked witch lived in an idyllic setting, a farmhouse in the woods. The house had an old-fashioned New England chimney on its roof and wide-board pine paneling inside. As you approached the bucolic scene from the road, there were tall pine trees and a barn behind, several vehicles parked here and there to the left, a wishing well to the right, and fenced-in fields all around. Slats were falling off the shutters. Winters were hard on everything in New Hampshire, especially shutters. Along the sides of the house, a few rabbits nibbled at grass.

The nearest neighbors were a long ways away. A man being flogged here could scream and scream, and no one would hear.

The horse barn was well-tended, but the farmhouse was trashed. The place had run down since the old man died. It used to be a beautiful farmhouse, but not anymore. Now that the witch was living there alone—there was chaos and decay. The dormer was rotted and open to the elements. The porch screen was ripped out. Inside, wallpaper was peeling. Farm animals had been given the run of the place, and the air was heavy with the scent of rabbit shit and putrefaction. The floors were covered with piles of clothes and garbage. In the kitchen the linoleum was ripped up near the stove. The wide pine board floor in the hallway was warped. Crucifixes everywhere. The oven was filled with charred matter. There was a rotting steak in the sink. Here and there was old blood spatter—hard to see now that it had grown brown and covered with dust.

No one slept in the master bedroom anymore. In that room there was just an empty bed frame and a dresser. Above the head of the bed was a painting of a leopard reclining on a jungle branch. Sitting on the dresser was a photo of the woman with the witchy hair, nude. Power, baby. Don’t ever let them forget you got tits and ass.

The bathroom window had been nailed shut. Hefty bags covered the windows. By the sink was toothpaste and men’s deodorant. In the upstairs bathroom there was just a large hole in the wall behind the bathtub, a hole that went all the way through to the eaves.

And there were rabbits. Rabbits everywhere.

My babies, my beautiful children, she said.

The only scenario we have for the witch’s final grisly murder is a construction of her faulty mind, so take it with a grain of salt. We do know for a fact, because she made audiotapes, that her known murders tended to follow the same pattern. She would recruit her men from the ranks of the lost—men who were slight of stature, dim of wit, and far from home. She liked them mentally slow, and horny. She ran the same routine on them, made them dependent on her sexually—oh, the power of the pussy—and did things to hurt them, to make them sick, to make them bleed, to change the color of their skin to that of an olive-stained parchment. And she grilled them. Her need to dominate men took the form of religious zealotry. She knew what it was like to be dead. She’d been there, and the men in the white beards told her in Hebrew that they were going to send her back to earth on a mission. She was an angel—a mean bitch angel—an angel of vengeance! She was to rid the world of pedophiles. It was as if the mission had been handpicked for her. She had come from a home in Alabama where, when she was just a little girl, so little, she had to play bad games with Daddy and the men she was told to call Uncle.

Sheeeeeeeelaaaaaa. That’s a Spanish name, one uncle would say as he reached up under her skirt, so high, so deep. She had been hurt by pedophiles. And now she was to rid the world of them.

Sometime at a tender age, Sheila decided that life equaled war. As would any expatriate of the coven, she used both violence and her feminine charms to fight. When she lost a battle one night—to a man!—she took her own life and went to Heaven. They sent her back. Her time on earth wasn’t through. She still had too much fight in her, fight that could be used to send perverts—whose unnatural touching made her shiver and squeeze herself—to Hell, where they belonged. She got chills just thinking about it.

Her love affairs ran hot at first, although she let them know up front that she wasn’t fond o’ fellatio. Not fond of oral in general, pitching or catching, so it was fair. She liked men who could get it up twice a night, but it was okay if they couldn’t. Her vagina was tiny. Infantile. Some men were too big for her. When she was young, she thought she would stretch, but she never did.

Bad things happened when the sex cooled off. Her men did very, very bad things, horrible things. She lubricated herself as she thought about how horrible—and they needed to be punished. That was when the hate started, the need to humiliate and torture. She physically hurt her men, beating them with a stick. Or a belt. Or whatever was handy.

The abuse was also verbal. She debased her lovers. With the humiliation came brainwashing. She told them that they had raped children. That they’d had sex of every imaginable sort with their own mothers. Oh, the horror! Oh, the sweet, unholy viciousness. It needed to be wiped from the face of the earth. And she made them confess: Yes, I raped children. Yes, I had sex with my mother.

After a while, after they started looking sick, like a thick layer of putty-colored death had been smeared over their faces and bodies, they would vanish. If anyone asked, and sometimes they didn’t, she’d say they’d run off. Police wouldn’t think twice. Until the last one ... the one she called Adam.

Just a few days before, things had gotten switched. She lost control. He had the power. Sheila had called her sister and in a cold whispery voice told her she was naked and all balled up and sitting under the kitchen table. She couldn’t look at Adam. She was afraid. He was staring at her with those evil, pedophile, incestuous eyes, freaking her out. She thought about the places his Vaseline fingers had been and she hugged her knees and rocked back and forth. Chills!

But she got that control back. As she told it, she and Adam had been enjoying sadomasochistic sex. That was why the windows were covered with black plastic. So snoopers couldn’t see their fun. She beat him with a belt. They’d fallen asleep naked. She said she woke and caught him rummaging through the house, looking for stuff to steal. That was the last straw. She could feel his hands on her throat. Or perhaps they were the hands of Captain Shaw, the ghost who haunted her house. Whatever, they were choking her. It had to end. Adam was a horrible, horrible person. It was time for the angel to avenge—time to send the pervert to hell. He was a large rabbit that needed to be put down. She chased him up the stairs and they fought. He fell and cracked his head open on the tub. Maybe she helped with the bashing in of his skull. The first time she told the story she included mention of taking a sledgehammer to him.

Either way, his head was bashed. For a time she was calm. The violence, like sex, had peaked, and now she was in a nurturing peace. The avenging angel in her had been appeased. Maybe she could save the dying man. She plunged a knife in the front of his neck, a knife with a small blade, one she usually used to cut baling twine. She unsuccessfully tried to jam a straw in the hole she had made. But it didn’t matter. He was dead. She put his naked body entirely in the tub and went to get her tools—the hedge clippers, the pruning shears, the big-bladed knives—and she took care of the necessary labor. She sawed and smashed and snipped the bones. Carrying Adam to the fire, she cremated him—just as she had the others.

Dreams Squandered

Sheila Kaye Bailey was born on the Fourth of July, 1958, and raised in Fort Payne, Alabama, a mill town with a population of about thirteen thousand. Sheila was the youngest of six children, the baby of the family. Daddy worked for the state of Alabama in the highway road division. He used to like to take the family driving down the roads that he had built. He was also drunk, and mean, and he dripped of sick lust. Mama worked in environmental services at the hospital. She was too weary to do anything about Daddy. She’d married him for life, and that’s the way it was, no matter how twisted he was.

Sheila was very smart and never much trouble, her mother, Ruby Bailey, said, eighty-eight-years old in 2006 and still living in Fort Payne. Some people are kind of slow learners to read and things. She always was real easy to learn things. But she never did nothing bad that I know of when she grew up.

Sheila didn’t remember having friends as a child. It wasn’t until puberty hit—and it hit her hard—that she had friends. Mama wouldn’t let her be a majorette because majorettes went off with the boys. Mama didn’t want Sheila getting pregnant. Mama had gotten pregnant, and life had been hell ever since.

I didn’t travel in the circle of the popular girls, Sheila later recalled. I didn’t drink and I didn’t do pot then. Boys would call me. I started seeing a Cherokee Indian boy and my family hated him. We never had penetrating sex. That never occurred. He said he didn’t want to do that to me. I don’t know how to say this. It’s kind of graphic. I’m very tight, I’m very small, I think I have an introverted uterus. Might even need a C-section. My mother used to always say to me, ‘Sheila, something just tells me you should never have children.’

After the Native American came the black guy. Robert. This was in the seventies, the Barry White music, the incense, the African-American guys, they tend to be very romantic, Sheila recalled. Again, the family wasn’t thrilled. This was Alabama. White folks still used the N word. Robert never completely penetrated her either.

Like he would get over me and put it in me just that much. She gestured with her thumb and forefinger. He had a long, tapered penis. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you are the tightest girl I’d ever met. I wouldn’t because I would split you!’ Still, it felt good.

One Fort Payne resident who had vivid memories of Sheila was Anthony McAnelly. We were best friends since grade school, McAnelly recounted. We had a little deeper relationship. We rode bicycles, dated a little. We were figuring what we wanted out of life. Sheila really blossomed in high school. She entered a junior miss pageant and her talent was reading a poem she wrote. She was a knockout. She really was a knockout.

She liked to sing, hated math, and often functioned on too little sleep, awake listening to her drunken father rant, or, worse, waiting for him to come home. Nobody slept when Daddy came home.

Sheila graduated from Fort Payne High School in 1976 with dreams of becoming a fashion model. Friends recalled that her dreams were squandered by a series of bad relationships with men. After high school Sheila worked at a motel, as did Lynn, her older sister. After that, she worked as an assistant administrator at a nursing home. She liked that job until her female boss hit on her. At least she felt like she was being seduced. Sheila liked to wear boots. The boss urged her to dress more feminine. You look like you’re goin’ riding. Go home and put on a dress, Miss Bailey, the boss said. Sheila went home, all right. She went home and never came back. She was eager to get the hell out of Alabama, but when a boyfriend asked her to move to Texas with him, she thought it was too big a change. She had her own apartment for a while, but her landlord, she said, jammed his tongue down her throat, so she moved back home. Depressed, she stood on bridges and thought about jumping. She was forging prescriptions for painkillers.

Several of Sheila’s bad relationships with men turned into bad marriages. One of those bad marriages was to Ronnie Jennings, of Fort Payne. Ronnie flipped burgers at a restaurant. Jennings later said, She didn’t care about anyone. She just wanted everything her way.

They were married by a judge in Georgia sometime during the 1980s, and the marriage became downright peculiar within minutes of the wedding ceremony. According to Jennings, As soon as we got out back to the car, she turned to me and said we shouldn’t have got married. She had really wild mood swings. Pretty soon I was thinking it wasn’t that great of an idea either.

The relationship became violent. Sometimes—a lot, actually—she was the one dishing out the pain. According to Jennings, Sheila was beautiful but unbalanced. He said, She was just crazy, to put it bluntly.

According to Sheila, one problem was that she had extremely tight genitalia and he was hung like a horse. They had to use Vaseline. She thought her vagina needed to be stretched. She thought it would get better with time. Finally she realized she just couldn’t handle him.

Jennings told how Sheila had threatened him: If you’re fooling around, I’ll ...

He said, I’ll bang whoever I want.

She countered, I want a divorce.

He said, I ain’t never givin’ you a divorce.

I want out. I’ll show you how bad I want out, she replied. And so she knocked back a bottle of pills with Wild Turkey right in his face. She grabbed his keys and took off in his car, driving until she lost consciousness at the wheel.

Last I remember, everything was turning gold and I felt like I was entering a new dimension, Sheila later recalled. She got a helicopter ride to the University of Alabama at Birmingham Medical Center, where they pumped her stomach. She was in a coma for eight days.

Jennings was asked what were some of the marriage’s other low points. He recalled the one night near the end of their relationship when, during an argument, Sheila threatened to stab him to death with a pair of scissors while he was asleep. He stayed awake all night, afraid to go to sleep for fear that Sheila would make good on her threat.

The pair eventually moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where their relationship continued to deteriorate. They divorced—after four long, long years of marriage—and Ronnie Jennings lost track of her.

In Tennessee, the newly single Sheila, living in a YMCA, an adult trying to make it on my own, tried to get some spiritual help. She went to her local clergy and bared her demons. The clergyman tried to get Sheila to sit on his lap. She tried a shrink—an attractive guy, too, with dark hair—but he asked questions like: Did Ronnie penetrate your rectum with his penis? And he called her at home to ask, What are you doing right now? Are you touching yourself?

Although many men found Sheila to be attractive, she preferred after her first marriage to find her boyfriends using personal ads in newspapers and in magazines. Maybe it was because Sheila had unusual tastes when it came to the mating process, and she didn’t want to hook up with any men who might get the wrong idea. Sheila wanted to be dominant. She wanted to be in charge, both in bed and in life. Perhaps she fantasized about becoming a dominatrix. By using personal ads to find sex partners, perhaps she could more efficiently weed out the men who were not willing to be submissive to her. She eventually met Bill LaBarre in 1987 through a personal ad in what Sheila referred to as a dating magazine. He placed the ad and she answered it. They hit it off right away.

The Gentleman Farmer

Widower Dr. Wilfred Bill J. LaBarre was a chiropractor who owned a horse farm in New Hampshire. He was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1926, graduated from the Norwich Free Academy, and attended Aviation Technical School in Putnam, Connecticut. He was an aerial gunner specialist in the navy during World War II, and after the war he attended chiropractic school. He was licensed to practice in 1953. Since the early sixties he’d been living in Epping, New Hampshire. He served as Epping’s health officer and established the successful Straight Chiropractic Clinic in nearby Hampton, where—it was said—he had a perfect attendance record. His partner in the practice was also his first cousin, Dr. Edward G. Charron, known as Ed. Wilfred’s father and Ed’s mother were siblings. Ed brought a little flavor to the practice. In addition to adjusting spines, he taught drums, played in jazz bands, and was a former New England gymnastics champ who had once run away with the Siebrand Circus.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Wilfred served as president of several chiropractic societies, and in 1983 he was named Chiropractor of the Year by Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic. His first wife, Edwina, died in 1983. He quickly remarried a woman named Leone, but she left him after a couple of years. From his first marriage he had a daughter, Laura, and a son, Gregory. After that, he had a vassectomy.

In 1987 he was a lonely sixty-year-old man, once widowed and once divorced, visiting Tennessee. Sheila was twenty-nine and had plenty of curves. She was into photography and dreamt of becoming a country-music singer.

Sheila and Wilfred visited Fort Payne a few times during their relationship, and Sheila’s mother recalled, He was a real good guy. She actually seemed to like him. I never heard her say anything about not liking him.

Within months of their meeting, Bill brought Sheila to his 115-acre farm, on Red Oak Hill Lane, just north of Epping, where they lived together for a time. The farm was one of several working farms in the area, interspersed with old farmhouses, and newer custom-made homes. To get there, you had to turn off the main road onto a narrow paved country road, and turn off again onto a rutted dirt road, which worked its way into a woods. After a while the dirt road was straddled by New England–style stone walls. Beyond those walls were hay fields. The farmhouse was small and well covered by trees. It had been painted white some years back, but had weathered to a light gray.

Sheila was blissed out by life on the farm. I’d never heard a June bug before, she recalled. The remoteness made her feel peaceful, a previously unknown peace.

Dr. LaBarre was a highly-respected and well-liked chiropractor and a beloved member of the community. "He is a master chiropractor," Sheila liked to brag. He was a horse lover and gentleman farmer. Neighbors remembered him as a man who enjoyed harnessing his favorite Standardbred and driving into town on weekends in his carriage. He would often ride around town on his horse and buggy, offering rides to small children. When a dying neighbor asked that Bill ride his horse and buggy in his funeral procession, Bill was proud to oblige. He was not only loved by his patients, but by the whole town. There was quite a buzz along the grapevine when news got out that Dr. LaBarre was back from Tennessee—and he was traveling with a woman! And what a woman.

Sheila didn’t have to live in tiny Epping (population seven thousand) for very long before the locals noticed her. She was flashy and loud and she liked attention. Opposites attract, some said, but others shrugged and said aloud, I sure hope Bill didn’t make a mistake.

As soon as Sheila moved in, she decided that the horse farm needed a distinctive name. Up until Sheila’s arrival, the farm had been known as the Old Harvey Farm, since it used to be owned by the Harvey family—who were still around and were neighbors. The hill upon which the farm sat was informally known as Harvey Hill—although its official name was Red Oak Hill.

Sheila convinced Bill to change the name of the farm. She wanted something bold and sassy, just like her. She chose the Silver Leopard Farm, and the country chiropractor was powerless to disagree. A sign was made up and placed at the entrance. She liked the name, unaware that it made some of the locals snicker, while others simply raised an eyebrow.

Sheila gained notoriety in the community in other ways too. Driving around the New England town in her sleek silver Mercedes, well, you couldn’t miss her. Not long after arriving in Epping, she strode onto a local airstrip while wearing a leopard print flying outfit. She announced that she wanted flying lessons. The pilots nicknamed her Sheiler the Peeler in hopes that her provocative stride might culminate in her peeling off her clothes.

It didn’t take long before Sheila acquired the worst kind of reputation in Epping. In most of the nearby towns as well. She was an easy lay. Promiscuous. Those fellows weren’t psychologists, of course, but the word nympho came to mind.

At first, Bill was smitten. Sheila had lots of everything. Lots of these and lots of those. Lots of body, lots of reddish brown hair, lots of smarts, and lots of libido. She quickly became the talk of the town. But what had initially appeared to be flirtatious eccentricity fast developed into something far more menacing. It was a peaceful place, and she had an incendiary temper that often caused her to threaten violence. She often reminded people with whom she disagreed that she owned guns, and wasn’t afraid to use them. Sheila had a piercing voice, and when the wind was blowing in the right direction, neighbors could hear it, filled with anger, barking orders, in charge and dominating, echoing off the hills that surrounded the LaBarre farm.

Neighbor Bruce Allen recalled that the honeymoon period between Wilfred and Sheila had been short-lived. Not long after she moved onto the Epping farm, she could be heard screaming at the man.

Wilfred’s daughter, Laura Melisi, heard Sheila screaming at her father, I’m gonna kill the horses and I’m going to kill you too.

Laura later recalled, My father was not a fearful person at all, but after Sheila came, his whole personality changed.

Sheila tried to take over every portion of Dr. LaBarre’s life, including the professional side. Before Sheila’s arrival, LaBarre’s office in Hampton was a family affair. His patients paid what they could, there was often bartering involved, and daughter Laura was the office manager. It was a relaxed place, suitable for treating people with sore backs and other ailments. In 1990 Sheila decided to assume control of Bill’s chiropractic business. It wasn’t making enough money. She was going to do something about it. Instead of patients paying according to their budget or the doctor’s whims, Sheila made up a fee chart and pasted it on the wall. In the past Dr. LaBarre and Dr. Charron had often lingered with patients who needed treatment, sometimes healing their stress as much with friendly conversation as with hands-on manipulation. Sheila put a stop to that. If a session was running long, she would angrily interrupt it, bursting right in on the doctor and his patient, saying, Come on, hurry it up. Why is this taking so long?

He had a mountain of work to do, Sheila later explained. I was the one who changed all that for him. That didn’t happen until a few years after I was up here, but he asked me—he asked me to simplify. When someone who owed Bill money would skip town, Sheila played private eye and tracked him down. She was very happy. She filed numerous small claims in Hampton District Court. A clerk there, John Clark, called her the most organized plaintiff he’d ever encountered. Always polite, Sheila was a joy to have around the courthouse.

She did lots of little things to make Bill happy, Sheila believed. At first, she was a hero to his family.

Sheila and Bill had a sexual relationship for a while. They talked of marriage, but never seriously. Things were good. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He encouraged me to take his name and said we had a common-law marriage, she later claimed.

Even though the dirt road to the LaBarre property was a town road, Sheila considered it a private driveway and had been known to threaten with a gun pedestrians who dared walk past the house. Neighbors and the townspeople came to fear Sheila. They would talk about Sheila sightings, and conversations about her always took the form of ridicule. That was what she brought out in people when she wasn’t terrorizing them. Wilfred’s first cousin Ed decided to retire rather than continue in the practice. Sheila had raised Ed’s rent in the apartment above the chiropractic office, and he suspected she had killed his dog.

According to Sheila, Bill condoned her affairs. Bill called himself an old fart and told Sheila that he worried about her, so far from home in case something happened to him. She should find a younger man, she claimed Bill said. She didn’t like to think about Bill aging, but it was a fact. His heart would stop beating sometimes, she later said.

Wayne Ennis

One of these lovers was a Jamaican immigrant named Wayne Ennis. She’d known Ennis for years, even before she met Bill. She’d gone to Jamaica on vacation and Ennis was a guy who drove tourists around. When she returned to Jamaica with Bill, she made sure they crossed paths with Ennis. The Jamaican had recently been hit by a bicycle and Bill examined his spine. Sheila decided to work on getting Ennis a visa so she could take him back to New Hampshire with her. She would later say that she was never in love with Ennis. Bill had stopped having sex with her and she had needs. Simple as that. She didn’t completely ignore Bill. Dr. LaBarre was well-equipped for sex and she still, as she later put it, satisfied him with her hand.

Sheila’s relationship with Ennis was as volatile as her others. Sheila explained: Oh, he was wonderful in the beginning, but then he showed his true colors. On January 15, 1995, Sheila drove to the Epping police station and filed a report complaining that Ennis had assaulted her the day before. He tried to force my car off the road, he punched me in the head and kicked me. He threatened to cut off my fingers and shoot me in the face, Sheila claimed. Sheila sought and received an order of protection.

Despite the fact that she was still in ever-increasing control of Bill’s life, and police had to get involved at least once more with her relationship with Ennis, Sheila decided that it was a good idea for her to become a bride. According to Sheila, Wayne Ennis begged her to marry him and she finally said okay. Bill gave them his blessing. She could tell by the look in his eye that he was disappointed, but he mostly wanted her to be happy. Ennis moved into the farmhouse at first; Bill slept in one bedroom alone. When the brawls started, Ennis and Sheila moved to the apartment over the chiropractic office, the same space recently occupied by cousin Ed and his ill-fated dog.

Sheila retained her dreams of being an actress and country singer. A prenuptial agreement written by Sheila, and signed by Sheila and Ennis, read: Sheila will forever be the only owner of any songs she wrote, sold and/or recorded prior to or after marriage. Any proceeds from Sheila’s singing, songwriting, or acting remain hers alone. The prenup stated that if the marriage produced any children, Sheila would get full custody. Any property acquired after the marriage will be sold and the proceeds split. The property is to be sold by Sheila and Sheila will give full disclosure of any amounts paid to Wayne.

Sheila and Wayne were married on August 22, 1995, in York, Maine. Not long after the wedding, Sheila claimed, Ennis began drinking Red Stripe beer, and he didn’t stop.

On December 28, 1996, almost two years after the first complaint involving Sheila and Ennis, Epping police received a 911 call from the LaBarre farm, followed by a disconnect. By this time Sheila and Ennis were married, but they had already decided to get a divorce. Using caller ID, police were able to determine the source of the call, and a car was sent out to the farm to see what, if anything, was the trouble. As it turned out, trouble started when Ennis caught Sheila in bed with another man. When police arrived, Ennis claimed that Sheila had struck him four times in the head with the phone as the other man held him down. Sheila told the other man, Ennis claimed, to go out to her car and get her gun.

In March 1997 Ennis and Sheila completed a court-ordered alternative dispute resolution program. The program didn’t take. On April 2, 1997, Sheila was granted a restraining order against Ennis. In her divorce papers Sheila wrote about Ennis, The defendant has been arrested many