Evil Next Door (23 page)

“I was aware of it from the sense that it was so tragic, because you had a victim that did not put herself in harm’s way,” Spurlin said. “Everyone ought to be safe in their home. This was a terrible, violent crime. I was aware early on that once they identified the person it would be conclusive because of the evidence that was left at the scene.”

Spurlin had been kept up-to-date all along and consulted with investigators throughout the summer about what they were trying to do in order to get Planten’s DNA. The detectives wanted to make sure their actions were legal and wouldn’t get them into hot water down the road if the case went to court.

“They did it in ways that you legally can collect DNA. They didn’t invade his privacy. They didn’t take anything for which he had any expectation of privacy,” Spurlin said firmly.

They considered every possible idea that was brought to the table for getting Planten’s DNA. For example, investigators discovered Planten had failed to change the address on his driver’s license when he moved from Dominion to the new apartment complex across town. They considered doing a traffic stop and arresting him on this minor violation simply in order to get his DNA, but after consulting with attorneys, they decided this might be considered entrapment.

Boodee kept the pressure on investigators to go forward with his plan to get Planten’s work gloves, which he wore when he performed experiments. He insisted the best place for them to get the DNA was from the fertilizer laboratory. Boodee reasoned that because Planten was employed by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, the lab was state government property. According to Spurlin, this gave law enforcement carte blanche to search the area without Planten’s permission because it was owned by the state of North Carolina.

“Our legal advisors informed us there would be
no
expectation of privacy for him there,” Perry stressed.

But before they went into the lab, investigators wanted to make sure they had the best possible items to choose from that might contain his DNA. With Planten’s history of sanitizing his work space, they knew it was going to be a challenge to find usable samples.

Detective Ken Copeland talked to Joanne Reilly about things she saw Planten touch in the lab on a regular basis. He wanted to glean what locations might offer the investigators their best shot at getting a credible DNA sample. Reilly told Copeland that yes, sometimes Planten wore his lab gloves when performing experiments, and that all of the scientists had personal sets of gloves assigned to them. But Copeland had also learned from Boodee that the DNA in the gloves had to be fresh in order for it to be a good sample. He needed Planten to have worn the gloves just before the State Bureau of Investigation agents entered the lab to collect the DNA.

Reilly cleared the SBI agents’ visit to the lab through top administrators with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. They were now running the show when it came to Planten. Reilly said they had become somewhat reluctant but were, nonetheless, participating in the unfolding drama. She had agreed to help the investigators with the glove issue, to make sure Planten wore them at some point on the day of the search.

On Monday, October 17, 2005, at 10:07 A.M., she e-mailed Copeland:

Because limestones are rough on the hands, chemists in the laboratory usually wore gloves when performing experiments involving them. Reilly hoped Planten would wear the gloves while he reevaluated the ten limestone samples she had assigned him to review. There was no guarantee, but it was their best shot.

At 10:39 A.M. on that same day Reilly wrote an e-mail to Copeland again. There was just one simple line:

The entire investigative team had met on the previous Friday, October 14, 2005, and decided the search of the fertilizer laboratory would take place the following Monday after work. Detective Ken Copeland was working off-duty security at the North Carolina State Fair that same week and would not be able to participate in the search. It was an annual stint that paid so well he couldn’t pass it up. Besides, he knew the Bennett case was in the capable hands of the scientists now. He had done all he could do.
This was it.

On Monday, October 17, Sergeant Perry, Detective Taylor, and two agents from the SBI, including Boodee, waited for Drew Planten to leave the laboratory. They sat in their cars across the street waiting for Reilly to give them the all clear that Planten had left the building.

Reilly hustled across the parking lot of the art museum around 6:00 P.M. to tell them that Planten had
finally
left. Boodee said she was sweating profusely as she told the investigators that Planten had lingered that evening for some strange reason. The security guard had found him uncharacteristically sitting alone in the break room of all places, two hours after he was supposed to have left for the day. Finally, the security guard told Planten he was locking up the building. Planten reluctantly got on his bike because his rusty old Camaro was still out of commission and left.

“What they thought is that he was waiting for everyone to leave so he could clean and get his gloves,” said Boodee.

Reilly accompanied the team of investigators into the lab and showed them where Planten worked. Boodee said they swabbed Planten’s computer, his wooden stool, and the dial on a radio near his workstation.

“It took a long time. They swabbed
everything
that he could have possibly touched,” Reilly said, sounding exasperated at the mere recollection of the search.

But Planten’s gloves were what they’d really come for. The gloves were made of thick rubber and looked like the kind of gloves people wore to wash dishes.

“What is the best item of evidence?” Perry asked Boodee point-blank as they stood together in the laboratory assessing the situation.

“Those gloves are,” Boodee said without missing a beat.

The question everyone had was whether to simply take samples from the gloves and leave them, or to take the gloves themselves and replace them with a similar pair. Planten’s gloves were of a particular style and color not made anymore. They had also become stained and worn in specific places from so much use. The concern was that Planten might notice the differences if they switched the gloves, and even with a rush job, it would take at least a day or so to do the DNA test. If he noticed the gloves had been switched, he was more likely to run.

They also thought about simply taking the gloves and then not replacing them in the hopes that Planten would think he had lost them. But given his meticulous nature, it was unlikely Drew Planten had ever misplaced anything.

Perry wanted the agents to swab the gloves; Taylor wanted them to take the gloves. Boodee told investigators the best way for him to test the gloves would be to take them back to the lab where he could cut them up and test the individual pieces of the gloves for DNA.

“I want the gloves,” Taylor said over and over.

“I was worried about taking them, the whole expectation of privacy thing. [Detective] Jackie [Taylor] was not as concerned as me,” Perry said.

Taylor and Boodee won the debate. They took the gloves. Investigators replaced them with a similar pair, hoping that Planten wouldn’t notice, at least right away, and it would buy them some time. They knew they were taking a chance. Their biggest fear was that if he learned they were definitely closing in on him, he might take off or try to hurt himself. They decided it was a risk they had to take if they were going to solve this case.

The team left the laboratory that night feeling like they were sprinting to the finish line. Finally, identifying the man who might be Stephanie’s killer seemed within reach. They were determined not to let him go.

“We’re feeling very, very strong that we’re cooking with gas,” Perry remembered.

On Tuesday, October 18, 2005, Agent Mark Boodee began analyzing the samples he’d obtained from Planten’s workstation. While he was on an emotional high believing he might just have the literal key to the case at his fingertips, he knew the true job of a scientist was to deal only in facts. Scientific facts don’t lie. It is the most credible evidence you can have in a criminal trial. It is also what jurors expect to see. In a day and age when television crime dramas solve cases in an hour, jurors want everything, including DNA, handed to them on a silver platter.

Boodee ran all of the samples from the lab and studied what are called
electropherograms
—peaks on a chart that show whether the sixteen specific areas on a chromosome are the same as those same areas on the suspect’s chromosomes.

He was hopeful that they had been able to retrieve good samples from Planten’s lab, but he also knew that in public spaces, it was always a gamble trying to get a clean DNA profile with no contamination from another person. Yet, right away, the computer showed Boodee that he had taken several clean samples from Planten’s work space, primarily from the gloves and from the dial on the radio.

There was one unusual configuration of a chromosome Planten had that matched with an unusual chromosome in the killer’s profile. Boodee had rarely, if ever, seen this particular chromosome configuration before in any sample he had analyzed previously in his career.

“I was like, I can’t believe it. It’s either him or it’s a very
close
relative,” Boodee said.

By itself, the unique chromosome configuration meant nothing, but it was a promising start to the process. Next, Boodee clicked on the rest of the profile analyzed by the computer program and, voilà!, there it was.

“Then I looked at all the rest of them, and they
all
matched up. I was like
holy shit!
I can’t believe we got the right guy. I can’t believe this is finally coming to an end,” Boodee said excitedly.

At the same time, Boodee also ran the samples taken from Drew’s brother Donald, which had been obtained from a blue ballpoint pen, two brown Newcastle Ale mugs, and the door handle of his car. While they were similar to Drew Planten’s profile, they did not match the killer’s profile.

“At that point I was like, that’s it! I know we have the right guy,” Boodee said.

Boodee told his supervisor, Bill Weis, about the results of the tests. Weis immediately got on the phone with Raleigh police chief Jane Perlov to tell her what they had found.

“ ‘Look, we’ve got the right guy. It’s time to take him down,’ ” Weis said to the chief.

Boodee said that up until that point, everyone at the State Bureau of Investigation had been sworn to secrecy about the latest development in the Stephanie Bennett case. But the rush of knowing that they finally had a match was almost too much for Boodee to keep to himself.
It was really happening.
He hoped an arrest would be imminent so he could share the good news with the world.

“I always knew that this case would be solved eventually, simply for the fact that I know that DNA is such a great tool,” Boodee said with a smile from ear to ear.

The science had worked. It was now time to sit back and let the police do their work.

On Wednesday, October 19, 2005, Sergeant Clem Perry and Detective Jackie Taylor were walking around in a daze at the police station. They were physically and emotionally drained from the case, and from waiting for the DNA test to come back. Detective Ken Copeland was still working security at the State Fair, waiting patiently for his colleagues to call him when the results of the DNA test came in.

They knew Agent Boodee had put a rush on the test, but they also knew science took time. After all the time they had put into the case, what were a few more hours of waiting? Who were they kidding?
It was agony.
If the DNA didn’t match this time, they were right back where they had started—nowhere. It was unlikely they would get any more chances. If Planten’s DNA didn’t match, it was over. The investigators’ anxious haze was interrupted by a call from Bill Weis, the director of the State Bureau of Investigation laboratory.

“Okay,” he said to Perry. “Are you sitting down?”

“Give it to me, Bill,” Perry said anxiously.

“You got him,” Weis said matching Perry’s level of excitement through the phone. “Now we have a question for you: Which one do you think it is? Is it Drew or his older brother?”

This debate had been an ongoing discussion between Perry, Copeland, and Taylor. Even though they had gone through the motions to get Donald Planten’s DNA, Taylor and Copeland never had any doubt in their minds that Drew was their killer based on everything they had learned in the past few months. They never really considered Donald a viable suspect.

“It’s Drew,” Perry said to Weiss definitively.

“Yeah,” Weis said. “Let everyone know.”

It was a surreal moment for the detectives who had waited so long for this day. Taylor was literally jumping up and down in the Major Crimes office unable to curb her excitement. After taking a breath, she immediately called Copeland on his cell phone at the fairgrounds to tell him the good news.

“It’s Drew, it’s Drew,” Taylor shouted into the phone at Copeland.

“We
knew
it was Drew,” Copeland said as his partner confirmed what they had believed for some time now.

The excitement of the DNA match was quickly replaced by the seriousness of planning the next step—the arrest. The detectives didn’t want Planten to spend one more minute on the street where he might be able to hurt someone, but at the same time, they needed the blessing of the district attorney to move forward, even with the damning evidence they now had.