MISSING CHILD Hoaxer makes plea deal

Shannon Sherrill was 6 when she disappeared.
LEBANON, Ind. (AP) -- A woman pleaded guilty but mentally ill to claiming she was a girl missing since 1986, a hoax that crushed the child's hopeful parents last summer.
A judge sentenced Donna Walker to 18 months in prison today under a deal between the defense and prosecutors.
Walker, 36, was also ordered to comply with any mental health treatment recommended by probation officials and have no contact with the family of Shannon Sherrill, who was 6 when she vanished while playing hide-and-seek.
Walker declined to speak in court when Judge Matthew Kincaid asked whether she wanted to address Shannon's family. She also did not talk with reporters as sheriff's deputies led her from the courthouse.
Tough on family
Dorothy Sherrill, the missing girl's mother, testified at the 45-minute hearing that the episode has been difficult.
"It's torn my family apart," she said. "I don't see how someone could do this."
Walker, of Topeka, Kan., admitted felony attempted identity deception and misdemeanor false reporting.
She could have faced up to four years in prison if she had been convicted of the 12 felony counts filed against her last year.
After Shannon disappeared, hundreds of people spent days scouring fields and wooded lots around her mother's mobile home in Thorntown, about 30 miles northwest of Indianapolis, and family members clung to hopes of finding her someday.
Walker told a judge during a bond hearing last year that she had been adjusting to new medication for mental illness when she telephoned the child's father, William Sherrill, last July and claimed to be Shannon.
Walker had been jailed under $50,000 bond since September.
Prosecutor Todd Meyer said this week that she suffered from a mental disorder that compels her to perpetrate "grand hoaxes" to gain attention.
Court records and interviews indicate Walker has had brushes with the law in California, Kansas, Virginia and Nebraska. Charges included making crank calls, reporting a false fire alarm, writing bad checks, making a bomb threat and using stolen credit cards to run up long-distance charges.