Parents of Lacey Fletcher, who ‘melted’ into couch after not moving for more than a decade, sentenced to 20 years in prison
The parents of a badly neglected Louisiana woman found “melted” into a maggot-infested couch were each sentenced to 20 years in prison Wednesday after pleading no contest to manslaughter last month.
Sheila and Clay Fletcher, of East Feliciana, were arrested in January 2022 after their 36-year-old daughter, Lacey Fletcher, was discovered dead in a fetid crater in the family’s sofa, covered by urine and feces.
Lacey, who vanished from public view in 2002 when she was roughly 16, had not moved from the spot for 12 years and weighed only 96 pounds when she was found, prosecutors said.
A stunned local medical examiner concluded that she died from acute neglect — and said he remains traumatized by the case two years later.
“I have seen every kind of death and dead body in all my years of this work, but I’ve never seen anything like what happened to Lacey,” Ewell Bickham told The Post last month.
“No one deserves to suffer like that.”
Lacey had become “fused” to the couch through her rotted skin, and when she was found, her bones were protruding from her body, according to the coroner.
“We respect the judge’s decision. If you had a horse that was in the stall behind your house, and you go back there and the flesh is just gone from its body, and you can see bones exposed … You wouldn’t even treat your animal like that,” West Feliciana District Attorney Sam D’Aquilla told The Post following the sentencing.
The Fletchers insisted on their innocence, asserting that Lacey was of “sound mind” while suffering from a severe case of Asperger’s syndrome and social anxiety that first flared in her youth.
They told police that she refused to leave the living room sofa, and they brought her her meals and set up a potty for her on the couch.
They also claimed Lacey suffered from locked-in syndrome, a neurological disorder that prevented her from moving any muscles except for her eyes.
But several sources familiar with the case and family said that was false — and laid blame squarely on the Fletchers.
According to the case file, Lacey’s parents took her to a psychologist around 2000, when she was 14, and relayed that she was suffering from severe social anxiety.
They came back to the doctor in 2010 without Lacey and said she was refusing to leave their home and was urinating and defecating on the floor.
The physician told them to consider hospitalization, but they never followed up.
Close family friend Jess Easley, who knew the Fletchers for 25 years, said he never knew they had a daughter despite weekly gatherings.
“Clay and Sheila were like your model citizens,” he told The Post.
“Nice, soft-spoken. Or so we thought. I am beyond shocked at what happened. I’ve never felt this heartbroken in my life.”
Forensic pathologist Dana Troxclair found that Lacey’s body was riddled with pressure ulcers and that she suffered chronic bone infection with “polarizable fibers and maggots embedded in the exposed surface of the bones,’” according to the Daily Mail.
“Maggots were present in the perineum and areas of the decubitus ulcers. If the maggots would have appeared after death, there would have been at least a minimal presence of eggs or larvae in the region of the eyes, ears, or nose,” he wrote.
Her cause of death was listed as sepsis due to a combination of multiple conditions, including bone infection, extended immobility, extreme malnutrition and “severe chronic neglect of a special needs individual.”
Prosecutors brought in victim advocate Dana Lovett at their plea hearing last month, WBRZ reported.
“Nobody should have to have lived like she did all these years,” Lovett said.
“They had so many resources at their fingertips. Why she didn’t utilize those resources when she was actually almost hand in hand with people that could help is beyond me.”
