Lacey Fletcher, once a smiling, happy student who played volleyball at Brownfields Baptist Academy in Louisiana, disappeared from public view in 2002 when she was about 16 years old.

Very few people other than her parents, Clay and Sheila Fletcher, apparently knew that she was alive — literally rotting away on a leather couch in the family living room in the town of Slaughter, 20 miles north of Baton Rouge. Her death was reported in early January 2022 by her mother and the Fletcher lawyers have presented the Fletchers as loving, if misguided, parents.