Evil Next Door (16 page)

“We had a few cases like that where we would get our hopes up,” Sergeant Clem Perry said, only to have them dashed.

Copeland said Planten’s picture sat on his desk for several weeks as he worked on other cases and tried not to get too pumped up about the possibilities. As long as the picture sat there, Copeland could tell himself they had not exhausted all of their leads. But the second they ruled Planten out, they would be back to what they had had all along. Nothing.

“People would walk in and say, ‘Who is this guy?’ I’d say, ‘Nobody,’ ” Copeland recalled as he tried to brush off any inkling that he and Taylor might be onto something when other detectives saw Planten’s picture on his desk. As long as no one had any real expectations of them catching the killer, they couldn’t disappoint, right?

In March 2005, Taylor and Copeland went by Planten’s apartment seven or eight times in between handling all of the other murder cases piling up on their plate. They discovered that he had moved across town from Dominion to a lower-income apartment complex called the Birchleaf Apartments on Buck Jones Road in West Raleigh. They would be out working on a current case and decide to give it another shot. They would swing by Planten’s apartment, knock on his door, and leave their business cards stuck in the door when no one answered. On one hand, they were determined to talk to this guy so that they could either eliminate him or start moving in on him. On the other hand, trying to speak to him at his apartment started to feel like an exercise in futility.

When the detectives knocked on Planten’s door, they would hear a dog scratching and whimpering on the other side of the door. The noise would have been too loud for Planten to ignore if he was home, so they assumed he was simply ignoring them. But hearing the dog gave them a strong feeling that they were looking at the right guy.

“We could actually hear the dog whining behind the door,” Copeland said. “So we felt like we were at the right place.”

The maintenance man in the apartment complex told the detectives that Planten drove the old rusty Camaro in the parking lot that looked like it couldn’t possibly pass inspection, let alone make it down the street. It was almost always parked outside Planten’s apartment when the detectives knocked on the door. They went at different times of the day hoping to catch him off guard. Taylor even went by herself one morning around 6:00 and still got no answer.

Clearly, Planten intended to make it difficult for the detectives to speak with him. But they weren’t giving up yet, not by a long shot.

On what would have been her twenty-sixth birthday, April 30, 2005, Carmon Bennett put roses on Stephanie’s grave. He was getting ready to present the third annual college scholarship in Stephanie’s name to the tune of twenty-five hundred dollars on the anniversary of her death. The money was raised through an annual golf tournament that had already netted seventy-two thousand dollars since Stephanie’s murder. While this was the silver lining that had come out of Stephanie’s murder, Carmon said the spring was the hardest time of year for him emotionally.

“Nobody should have to go through this at all,” Carmon said, shaking his head. “I think about her on a daily basis. She was such a wonderful young lady.”

It was May 16, 2005. Carmon had sat down to do what had become a ritual—an interview with WRAL on the anniversary of his daughter’s death. He said even three years after his daughter’s murder, he would sometimes forget she was gone. The phone would ring, and, for a split second, he would think, ‘It’s Stephanie.’ But then reality would quickly set in.

“I kind of keep waiting for her to call, and you have that realization that that’s not going to happen,” Carmon said wistfully, gazing out at the lush green hills and fields in the distance.

Carmon’s grief was beginning to have an angry edge to it. He was trying to be patient, to wait for the right lead that would crack the case wide open and bring Stephanie’s killer to justice, but it was becoming increasingly harder for him to do with every day that passed.

“Patience, I think, is a good virtue that I don’t have a lot of,” Carmon said with his trademark matter-of-factness.

Despite his palpable grief, it sounded like there might be something brewing behind the scenes. Carmon said Sergeant Perry was going to release some new details at the third-anniversary press conference scheduled for the following Saturday.

For the first time in years Carmon talked specifically about the investigation and what he thought might have happened in the days leading up to May 21, 2002. In the past, he had always stuck to talking about Stephanie and steered away from the details of the case.

“I believe whoever did this to Stephanie did their home-work real well,” Carmon said knowingly. He said he felt like the person was watching Stephanie, perhaps stalking her, and knew her roommates were out of town the night he struck. Carmon believed the killer knew exactly what he was doing and planned his actions very carefully. “Whoever did this I think had just singled Stephanie out because of her looks and her personality.”

Carmon and Perry had been talking. Carmon made a point of saying the press conference would be important to the case. It was clear something was happening behind the scenes. “Somebody has an answer for us,” Carmon said with conviction.

Mollie Hodges was wearing a cheerful top with brightly colored stripes that contrasted sharply with her solemn face. She sat in a white plastic chair in the backyard of the daycare center where she worked framed by the swing set in the background and an acre of freshly mowed green grass. The previous year of
still
not knowing exactly what happened to her daughter and why it happened appeared to have taken a toll on Mollie. Her shoulders seemed to be slouching under the weight of her ongoing emotional pain.

“I lost my only daughter,” Mollie said resolutely as tears welled up in her eyes, “and she wasn’t only my daughter, she was my best friend.” Almost immediately she began crying. The interview had to be stopped and started several times until she could regain her composure.

“We just celebrated her birthday and of course,” Mollie said before again trailing off into more sobs. “I’m sorry, I thought I could do it,” she apologized.

Mollie pulled herself together and started again. She said that she felt the anniversary of her daughter’s murder was always the hardest time of year because it fell just after Stephanie’s birthday, and just before Mother’s Day. On these three days she felt her daughter’s absence even more profoundly than usual.

“It’s hard being a parent thinking you’ve lost your child. It’s not a normal thing I don’t think for a parent to give up their children,” Mollie said, sharing the universal truth of all parents who lost a child. “I want them to remember Stephanie as a sweet young girl just starting her life—her life had just begun.”

Even after three years of trying to process everything, Mollie still couldn’t understand why a young woman with so much ahead of her could have it all taken away so tragically in an instant.

“I would just like to know why,
why
it happened to Stephanie,” Mollie said, looking up at the pale blue sky dotted with white fluffy clouds. “I never dreamed anything like this would happen to Stephanie, I just never dreamed it,” Mollie said, her voice cracking again as tears streamed down her face.

Mollie had always been sad, but now she too was getting increasingly angry, angry that the man who killed her daughter was still roaming the earth free to possibly hurt someone else.

“It’s very frustrating that’s he’s still out there and that he could attack your mother, your best friend, anybody, anytime,” she said with venom in her voice. “There’s somebody out there who knows more than what they’re telling. They need to come forward.”

On Saturday, May 21, 2005, the third anniversary of Stephanie Bennett’s murder, the Raleigh Police Department held a press conference in the hopes of reviving the public’s interest in the case. The goal was, as always, to generate fresh leads.

Copeland and Taylor had not given up on Drew Planten, but they had yet to see him face-to-face and were reluctant to put all of their eggs into that one basket.

Lieutenant John Lynch had taken over as the head of the Major Crimes Task Force for Chris Morgan when he retired. Because Lynch hadn’t worked on the Bennett case all along, he relied on his detectives to let him know what was important to talk about at the press conference. He asked the team of investigators what they would like to see as the main focus of the event. Based on their recent interviews with people from the apartment complex, Sergeant Perry and Detectives Taylor and Copeland unanimously decided the Peeping Tom was once again the most probable suspect. They asked Lynch to concentrate on this fact when he talked about the case at the press conference.

They now had additional details from new interviews they had done that might help the public identify the killer. They wanted to emphasize the peeper along with the fact that he might also be the dog walker. Of course, in the back of their minds, they were also quietly hoping the name “Drew Planten” might surface as a result of what they released at the press conference, but they went into it casting a wide net to see just what they might catch.

Lynch stood in front of the television cameras at the podium dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and a gray and black checkered tie. His salt-and-pepper hair and studious-looking black glasses gave him the appearance of someone in charge, someone the public could trust and would listen to.

“The fact of the matter is that Stephanie was an innocent victim who suffered a homicide that shouldn’t have happened. What we need to do is we need to bring that person to justice and prevent that person from harming anybody else,” Lynch said in an almost monotone voice.

With a solemn tone Lynch told the media that the Raleigh Police Department had new detectives on the case who were trying to look at it with fresh eyes. He said they wanted the public to concentrate on identifying a man seen in the area around the Bridgeport Apartments in the weeks leading up to the murder. He gestured to a large aerial picture of Stephanie’s apartment complex along with the Dominion Apartments on the table next to the podium.

“We’re coming up with new ways to look at this. New ways to try and work it. We’re going to refocus our energies,” Lynch said. “Obviously, what we have done in the last three years has not gotten us the killer. We have to re-evaluate what’s already been out there.”

Lynch told the reporters that investigators were moving away from the original composite in the case and asked the journalists not to use it anymore—not to print it, not to air it, not to post it on the web, period.

“The composite was never really a strong composite as composites are judged,” Lynch said. “Although there may be some characteristics of the composite that were fairly accurate, obviously, that composite has not assisted the investigation in locating the suspect.”

Lynch explained that while several people had seen the Peeping Tom and given a brief description, the composite was mostly based on the recollection of one witness with a few small details from the other witnesses thrown in.

Lynch asked the public to put aside the information the police department had previously released about the case and to consider only the new information they were releasing on this day. Perry, Copeland, and Taylor were concerned about people getting bogged down in the composite and the profile released earlier in the investigation. They asked Lynch specifically to address this issue.

“If our profile has been too narrow, somebody who knows something may have decided they simply didn’t need to call because they didn’t think that information was significant,” Lynch said regretfully. “What we want to do is broaden that perspective. We want
any
information.”

Lynch gave the new description Taylor and Copeland had come up with through their many interviews.

“The individual is described as a white male in his late twenties or early thirties, with a thin build, standing 5’10” to 6’ tall, and with light brown or blond hair. He was variously described as wearing and not wearing glasses. At times he was seen walking a large to medium dark colored dog, but at other times the dog was not with him. The man was often seen wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt, even during warm weather conditions,” Lynch said.

Lynch was blunt about telling the group why they were holding the press conference. He stopped short of saying people might have information they were holding back, but he implied that for whatever reason they had not come forward before, they needed to do so now, and would not be judged for withholding it.

“We hope that we get some kind of splash out of this particular coverage. We hope that it’s going to trigger somebody to realize that they had something, and they just haven’t told anybody yet, and they will come forward and share that information with us,” Lynch said. “Somebody probably knows who he is. Somebody’s probably seen him come out of a certain apartment, saw him get into a certain vehicle, or saw him in a certain area, and that could reenergize the investigation and help us tremendously.”

The public already knew from the earlier information released by police that investigators had solid DNA evidence from the crime scene. This only added to the mystery as to why there had been no arrest in three years. To outsiders, it seemed like a no-brainer—the killer’s DNA should have turned up a match by now. After all, it happened every night on television crime dramas like
CSI
and
Law and Order.
To this end, reporters asked Lynch if he was relying on DNA evidence to ultimately solve the case.

“That is something we’re very hopeful about, but we are not simply placing our emphasis and our hopes on the fact that DNA is going to tell us who the killer is. We’re going to continue the investigation from many different avenues,” said Lynch.