Evil Next Door (20 page)

The detectives told her that they needed more information about Planten, information his acquaintances and co-workers might be able to help them get. They told her the only way to eliminate him as a suspect at this point was by comparing his DNA to the killer’s DNA.

“We told her we wanted to make sure he didn’t kill himself or hit the road,” Copeland said. “We said, ‘if he doesn’t come to work one day would you call us?’ He appeared to be a little emotionally unstable.”

Reilly told the detectives Planten had a very solid track record in the fertilizer laboratory and generally kept to himself. She said he came to the lab on time and completed his work accurately and efficiently. While she didn’t think there was any way this quiet, timid man could have had anything to do with such a violent crime, in her heart, she felt it was her duty to help clear his name even if it meant working behind his back with police. The end result would be the same, she thought. They would eliminate Planten as a suspect, and he would never even have to know what she had done.

“I was so sure he was innocent, I was willing to work with the police and exonerate him,” Reilly said with confidence in her voice.

Reilly took her new role as an undercover liaison to the Raleigh police investigators very seriously. There was no task too tedious or too challenging that she wasn’t willing to tackle. She decided not to let her managers in on the situation yet, preferring to go it alone until she had a compelling reason to reveal the situation to them. Her motivation continued to be clearing Drew Planten’s name and having the police move on to the
real
killer.

Detective Ken Copeland asked Reilly if she could get them a good phone number for Planten. Copeland was sure Planten had multiple numbers, and the investigators needed access to all of them. In order not to raise his suspicions, Reilly created a form on her computer and sent it out to all of her employees asking them to update their contact numbers. The plan worked, and she turned over Planten’s phone numbers to Copeland.
Mission accomplished.
Reilly was proud she could deliver on what the police were asking her to do.

On another occasion, Reilly said Copeland asked her to get Planten’s e-mail address. Again, Copeland suspected Planten had several e-mail accounts, and he wanted to know the address for every single one. This time Reilly enlisted the help of Planten’s direct supervisor for this mission even though investigators had specifically told her not to tell anyone what was going on. But Reilly felt like she needed help to do what was being asked of her, and she knew she could trust her colleague.

When Planten was on the computer, his supervisor would call Reilly, and she would casually come down and chat with him while looking over Planten’s shoulder in an effort to get his e-mail address. During one of these encounters, she was able to see the address clearly and memorize it. Reilly was so excited, she immediately called Copeland with the information. She was disappointed to find out it was the address Copeland already had.
Mission aborted.

The detectives also asked her to try to get Planten’s timesheet from May 21, 2002, the day Stephanie was found dead in her apartment. They wanted to find out whether he had shown up for work that day, and if he had, whether he was on time. Copeland knew asking Reilly for a state employee’s personnel record was no simple request.

“We knew that would take a little finagling,” Copeland said with a grin, knowing all too well the bureaucracy they would have to go through to get information out of a government office through normal channels. But he had a feeling his newest honorary detective was up to the task.

Once again, even though investigators had asked Reilly not to tell anyone in her office about what she was doing, she knew she would not be able to get the timesheet without some help. So she asked a co-worker with connections in the human resources division if she could get the document. The co-worker told her it would have to come from downtown, meaning that the officers would have to get a warrant to search Planten’s employee records and wade through a mile of red tape in the process. But to Reilly’s surprise, the next day the co-worker called her down to her office and told her there was something for her on the desk. She said she would leave her office, and Reilly could take it if she wanted to. Having Reilly pick the document up off of her desk eliminated the co-worker from any direct responsibility for the act.

When Reilly opened the envelope and saw Planten’s timesheet from May 21, 2002, the day Stephanie Bennett’s body was found, her heart dropped. It showed that he’d been
one hour
late that day. This wouldn’t have been so unusual expect for the fact that in Reilly’s experience with Planten, he had
never
been late for work.

Reilly was starting to feel a pang of doubt about Planten. It wasn’t a persistent, threatening feeling but more like an uneasy voice in her head telling her things were not looking good for him. But then she realized it was not up to her to decide anything. She was not an investigator. It was up to the detectives to figure this puzzle out. She slid the timesheet back into the envelope and called Copeland to let him know she had something he needed to see.

Detectives were still getting calls from people who had lived in the Bridgeport Apartment complex and the Dominion Apartment complex at the time Stephanie Bennett was murdered. Some of the callers were just now remembering things that might pertain to the case. Others had been holding on to information for all of these years and only now realized it might be relevant.

“Now we’re looking at Drew, and we’re trying to see if what these new people were telling us fit Drew,” Ken Copeland said.

One woman told the detectives she was walking her dog in the breezeway of the Bridgeport Apartments one morning when the dog stopped and started growling intensely at something in the nearby bushes. She had to pull back hard on the dog’s leash to keep him from leaping into the shrubbery.

“Her dog started growling at the cedar bushes right there by Stephanie Bennett’s window and, lo and behold, a man stepped out of the cedar bushes, but he didn’t look like the composite,” Copeland said, recalling what the woman had told him. He said because the man didn’t fit the composite, she hadn’t bothered telling anyone about the incident when she found out that Stephanie had been killed. But once investigators broadened the description of the suspect, she thought it might be important information for detectives to have.

This woman introduced investigators to another woman who also had a strange encounter with a man near the Dominion Apartments. She too had been walking her dog early one morning—but instead of in the apartment parking lot, she was walking around the lake.

“And when she turned around, a man was just standing right up on her. He had the hood over his head, and he was right in her face,” Copeland said. The woman described the man as tall and skinny, just like Planten. She said he quickly left the path bordering the lake and walked away in the direction of the Dominion Apartments.

A third woman told detectives she moved out of the Bridgeport Apartments because she felt like a man who lived in the area was stalking her. The woman was now living in New York. It took investigators about a week to track her down. She told them that back when she lived at Bridgeport, she would sit on her patio, and a tall, skinny, sickly looking man with long, grungy hair would sit on a picnic table across from her apartment and stare at her.

“That was important,” Copeland said, “because that picnic table sat
right behind
Stephanie Bennett’s apartment.”

Copeland then told the woman that a young girl had been killed at the Bridgeport Apartments after she moved out. He explained that they were trying to figure out who killed the victim, and whether he had stalked other women in the area. For a moment, the line went silent, and then Copeland began to hear a sobbing sound on the other end of the receiver that was growing in intensity.

“She got so upset she wouldn’t talk to me anymore. She busted up crying and hung up the phone,” Copeland said.

He called the woman back, and she told him that she was just so upset she couldn’t talk about it at that time, but would call him later. He told her he understood. As much as he desperately wanted to hear what the woman had to say, Copeland knew from experience that he had to be patient when it came to delicate situations like this one.

As promised, a few days later, after she had calmed down, the woman called Copeland back and told him the rest of her story. She said the man on the picnic table made her so anxious, she would move inside her apartment from the patio. Then he would start peering through her windows from what he obviously must have thought was a safe distance until she finally closed her blinds. The situation made the woman so nervous, she ultimately moved to another apartment complex on the other side of the lake.

With new details like these starting to emerge so many years after the crime, Jackie Taylor and Ken Copeland continued to pore through the hundreds of pages of reports, thinking they might have missed something. They were looking for anything to absolutely confirm or definitively rule out Planten as a suspect. They knew it was often the smallest details that made no sense at the time, but later proved to have the most relevance to a case.

In the reports, the detectives found an interview with a woman who had been walking through the breezeway at Dominion with her son. A man passed them wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses. The woman recalled her son saying hello to the man, but the man didn’t speak to the child.

“Who is that guy you’re speaking to?” the woman asked her son. She was startled that her young son was talking to someone who was a stranger to her.

The boy told his mother the man was the uncle of one of his friends. When the interview was first recorded, everyone assumed the boy was speaking about a man who did live with his nephew on the top floor of this particular apartment building.

But then Copeland and Taylor went back and re-interviewed the boy. They discovered that he was actually talking about a man who lived on the bottom floor of the building. The man had hung out with a young boy he referred to as “his nephew,” when in fact he was not really related to the child. The “nephew” turned out to be the same young man who had admitted to stealing the underwear and throwing it on the shrubbery the night Stephanie was murdered.

Putting all of the witness statements together, Taylor and Copeland determined the man this woman had seen, and the man who another woman witnessed in the breezeway talking to a little boy, both had to be Planten. There was just no other logical explanation. The description fit, and the building where he had lived at the time was just on the other side of a narrow patch of woods from Stephanie’s apartment building.

“And that’s when we said,” Copeland said banging on the table with a fist, “he’s right there at her front door.”

Joanne Reilly felt uncomfortable talking to the detectives on the phone at her office. She just knew at any moment Drew Planten might walk in, and she would be caught talking about him behind his back. Given her feelings, Ken Copeland suggested they start communicating through e-mail.

Reilly had started to notice strange things about Planten. He rarely if ever ate or drank and was constantly wiping down things he touched or putting them in his knapsack after he used them. It was if he knew that someone might be trying to get a DNA sample from him. But how could he know? Reilly didn’t think she had done anything to tip him off, but she also knew he was very bright and probably paranoid after his last visit with detectives.

By this time, Planten’s direct supervisor and Reilly had started talking about ways they could get a DNA sample from him for police. Every day one of them would stay late and look for strands of Planten’s hair around his workstation. They thought that surely, with such long hair, he was bound to leave a strand or two behind, but every day they came up empty.

“He used to comb his hair, and save it, put it in his pocket,” Reilly said. “And apparently, he would clean it up off the floor before he left every day.”

Reilly confided in Copeland that despite her strong initial feelings that Planten could not be their suspect, his unusual behavior had started to make her nervous.

On Thursday, August 25, 2005, at 7:30 in the morning, Reilly wrote an e-mail to Copeland:

In another attempt to get Planten’s DNA, one day Reilly gave Planten a can of Pepsi. After he left for the day, she and Planten’s supervisor searched his workstation and all of the trash cans inside and outside the office for the can. It was gone. It had simply vanished. The only explanation they could come up with was that Planten was obviously onto them and was making sure he left nothing with his DNA on it anywhere in the laboratory. Still, Reilly reassured herself that this didn’t mean he was necessarily guilty; it only meant that he didn’t want anyone to violate his privacy by testing his DNA.

One night Reilly was working late when she ran into Planten standing alone awkwardly in the office thirty minutes after he was supposed to have gone home. She had no idea he was still there and was startled. For a moment, she was frightened by his sudden appearance, but then she looked at him as he meekly slinked away, and she told herself once again the police had to be wrong.
This gentle man could not be a killer.