"I'm not like anyone else," murderer says

Man facing life sentences for 3 slayings in Hardin, Wyandot counties gives jailhouse interview

By The Columbus Dispatch  • 

MARION, Ohio -- When Terry Shepherd was just a kid, he gutted animals for fun: groundhogs, rabbits, mangy dogs he found wandering the countryside.

Growing up on a Hardin County farm, he hunted for food and sport, too. But this was different.

"I killed everything I could find," Shepherd said in a two-hour interview at the Multi-County Correctional Center in Marion tonight, an exclusive for The Dispatch.

"I've always known I was different, that I'm not like anybody else."

On Friday, a Hardin County judge sentenced Shepherd, 40, to two consecutive life terms in prison for the Oct. 12 murders of 57-year-old Judy Kearley and 52-year-old Deb England, two Kenton women who were strangers to him but who had agreed to give him a lift.

Shepherd faces another life sentence in a Wyandot County court, where he has pleaded guilty to the Sept. 28 murder of 78-year-old Claradell Keller.

Police say he went to Keller's home to rob her; he says he wanted to hawk her jewelry and collectibles to pay the $350 rent on the home he shared with his wife and two young daughters. He killed Kearley and England, he says, because he wanted their truck to get out of town as the law closed in on him. In each case, he burned the bodies.

On Monday, he probably will be shipped back to prison, a place where he has spent most of his life since he was 12 years old, a place to which he says he is eager to return.

He says he cannot function on the outside.

He makes no apologies for what has happened. That, he says, would seem insincere.

"I know there has been pain," he said. "It was senseless, sure, but I just shut it down and block it out. I have no emotions."

By all accounts, Shepherd and his seven brothers and sisters grew up in a stable home with two loving parents who cared for them. His dad was a hard worker, trimming trees from morning to night.

"I had it better than most kids," he said. "We never went hungry and had all we ever wanted. More, really."

Still, it wasn't enough.

At age 12, he sneaked out at night and broke into a restaurant near his home. He says he doesn't remember why. That got him shipped off to a reformatory for the first time.

Since then, he has been behind bars for all but a few months as a juvenile and about three years as an adult -- the majority of that time for the rape of a 54-year-old woman when he was 16.

Just as others would talk about a treasured Christmas-morning memory, he recounts a return to prison in 2006 for a parole violation.

He becomes animated, his head lifts, his blue eyes snap with excitement.

"I wasn't 10 steps off the bus when there were probably 25 people lined up throwing cigarettes and comfortable shorts and stuff at me," he said.

The Noble Correctional Institution in Caldwell has a picturesque landscape. Shepherd says that his first night back, he was out in the prison yard, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. "I looked out over all that was before me and I thought, 'Finally. I'm home.' "

He has earned two college degrees in prison: in psychology and sociology. He took the classes to figure out what's wrong with him: "It's impossible. No one, not even me, can figure out what I am."

He said he enjoys prison. There, he can go to the library whenever he wants to pick up Western novels. He loves milk, and said he will smuggle plenty of it from the kitchen. In prison, he said, he knows how to get anyone anything they want, and that makes him a king.

The families of his victims see him as something else.

Deb England's sister-in-law, Mary Jo England, spoke directly to Shepherd in court at his sentencing Friday.

"What goes around comes around," she said. "We hope you rot in hell."