In a statement to police shortly after the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Dr. Gary Shipley blamed his wife for feeding the girl pepper and using ”other harsh punishments,” contending that he went along only because he was afraid his wife would leave him if he didn`t.
The statements of Shipley, a physician, and his wife, Gloria, a former nurse, were made public Thursday at a bond hearing for the couple in Lake County Superior Court in Crown Point, Ind.
The Shipleys, who are from the Crown Point area, are charged with murder and child neglect in connection with the Nov. 8 death of their daughter Amy, whose body was covered with bruises from head to toe, according to
prosecutors, who attributed her death to dehydration, malnutrition and beatings.
Shipley gave authorities two statements, the second of which detailed how Amy was kept locked in a bathroom where she slept, how she was forced to eat pepper as a punishment for stealing food and how he and his wife, Amy`s stepmother, ”used to have a lot of arguments about me thinking we were too hard on the kids.”
About a month before Amy`s death, Gloria Shipley started putting black pepper into Amy`s breakfast cereal as a punishment for stealing food, and on the night before her death tried to force her to eat a whole mouthful, Dr. Shipley told police.
”Gloria worried that the kids loved me more than they loved her,” he said. ”We would argue about the punishment, and I would take the kids into the other room and pretend to spank them. But instead I would take them into the other room and hug them, and Gloria would come in and catch me doing this, and she would get mad at me, and we would have an argument,” Shipley said in his statement.
On the night before Amy`s death, Shipley told police that he beat her with a leather belt because he caught her stealing food. Later that night, Shipley said, he saw his wife ”giving Amy black pepper.”
”Gloria was angry because Amy would not swallow a whole mouthful,” he continued. ”Gloria was yelling at Amy to swallow the pepper. Amy spit some of the pepper out of her mouth, and Gloria got mad, and I told her I would take Amy into the bathroom and give it to her.
”I went into the bathroom with Amy and pretended to give her the pepper, but I never gave her any.” According to medical testimony by one doctor at last week`s bond hearing, which is not expected to conclude for several weeks, Amy died from choking on her own vomit, which contained pepper. Other experts testified that her death was the culmination of months of abuse. In her statement, Gloria Shipley did not say anything about pepper or punishing Amy or her other two stepchildren, Danielle, 7, and Krista, 3.
On the morning of her death, Amy ate toast and drank milk, Mrs. Shipley said. ”Then she just started acting funny like something was wrong. She was waving her arms and she couldn`t talk.”
Amy ”was sort of falling,” she continued, so she picked up her daughter and administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation because the girl was breathing slowly. Mrs. Shipley was a former nurse whose license was suspended by Indiana authorities for drug abuse.
Mrs. Shipley acknowledged that she and her husband spanked their children. At one point she was asked by investigators if she realized that
”these spankings or beatings were not normal or beyond correcting the child?”
She responded: ”I realize that Amy was spanked harder than I was when I was a child. But there were so many things going on that I just think I didn`t allow myself to think about how hard she was being beat.”
In his statement, Dr. Shipley said he would often argue with his wife over the way in which his three children were disciplined, and he told her,
”I just couldn`t take being mean to the kids.”
”She (Gloria) would always get real mad and say she`d heard it all before,” he continued. ”She would always tell me to just make a list of punishments that I`d want to use. The only problem was that it never lasted, because Gloria would always talk me into doing the old things, with the threat of leaving.”
