Evil Next Door (27 page)

The appointment in question was Planten’s move from the Wake County Jail to North Carolina’s maximum security facility, Central Prison, just down the road. Central Prison had a hospital where Planten could receive medical care unavailable at the local jail. Central Prison was also the home of the state’s death row and housed a majority of the first-degree murderers in North Carolina who were serving life sentences. Planten was preemptively being moved to the place where he would most likely spend the rest of his life if he was convicted of Stephanie Bennett’s murder.

The ultimate decision to move him came from Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison, who was in charge of the local jail. Harrison said his officers simply could not handle someone in Planten’s state, someone who would not eat or care for himself.

When Harrison talked to the media in the hallway after the court appearance, he scoffed at the suggestion that Planten was actually catatonic. In his opinion, Planten’s bizarre behavior was all just a well-rehearsed act.

“You’ve got to remember, for three years he’s walked around. All of a sudden when he gets arrested, he’s in this state, so you figure that out for yourself,” Harrison said through gritted teeth, in his strong southern drawl. “But he’s been this way since he’s been in our custody. [Although] he has gotten up and used the bathroom, so like I said, you can read between those lines.”

Harrison said his officers had had no choice but to bring Planten into the courtroom the way they did, tethered to the wheelchair. By law, everyone who is arrested in North Carolina must have a first court appearance within the next business day.

“That was because he didn’t want to get up on his own,” Harrison said without apology. “He would not pay us any mind, so we just put him in the chair.”

Harrison also confirmed that Planten had been on suicide watch at the Wake County Jail given both the severity of the crime he was charged with, and also the unusual way in which he was acting.

Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby also showed up for Planten’s first court appearance. He had been overseeing the case, as he did all high-profile cases, even though it was officially assigned to one of his most experienced prosecutors Susan Spurlin. While Willoughby let his assistant district attorneys handle their own cases independently, he was always in the loop about what was going on and was always available to assist them when they needed him.

The dark-haired DA with a boyish face that belied his years was not his usual jovial self this day. Like Sheriff Harrison, Willoughby was skeptical about the way Drew Planten presented himself in the courtroom.

“It’s interesting they brought him in a chair,” Willoughby noted, with true grit in his voice, “but they’ve been watching him for weeks, and he’s been functioning perfectly well. No sign of any of this until after his arrest, so the whole thing is a ruse.” He continued, “This is America; you can behave any way you choose. You’re still accountable for what you do and the fact that you lay down on the floor and act crazy doesn’t really change things.”

Willoughby characterized Planten as a “very dangerous man.” He said the case had been solved because of the relentless unwillingness of the detectives to give up, and reiterated that what the public saw of Planten in the courtroom had very little to do with the realities of the case as he knew them to be.

“I’d say that’s drama suitable for television; that’s not real life,” Willoughby concluded.

“He was a good person, an upstanding citizen. I didn’t know of him ever doing anything inappropriate,” Drew Planten’s mother, Sarah Chandler, told WRAL reporter Julia Lewis in a phone interview the day after her son’s arrest.

Drew Planten was born on March 7, 1970, in Paterson, New Jersey, to Sarah Chandler and Robert Planten. He was the third of what would end up to be a family of four boys. Planten had two older brothers, Ronald and Donald, and would eventually have a younger brother, Duane. Robert Planten was a municipal works supervisor who was convicted of official misconduct in 1985 for taking a vehicle hood ornament as a bribe in return for his approval on site plans for a local development project.

Sarah Chandler, who worked at a daycare at the time, said in published reports that her husband was verbally and physically abusive to her and her sons. For this reason, she ultimately left him. Chandler took an extra job waitressing to support her four children. She also enrolled in paralegal school, falling in love with the law and believing she could use it to help people.

To pursue her dream of going to law school, Chandler moved her family to Michigan so that she could attend Thomas M. Cooley Law School. When Chandler graduated, she set up a law practice in a charming old Victorian house on Cochran Avenue, in Charlotte, Michigan. The small salt-of-the earth midwestern town, with just under eighty-five hundred residents, wasn’t far from Lansing, the state capital. It seemed like the perfect place for a single mother to raise her four sons.

Chandler also wanted to give back to the community after all she had endured in her abusive marriage. She helped open a domestic violence shelter in Charlotte so that women who had gone through what she had would have a safe place to go for help.

Drew Planten attended East Lansing High School where he excelled at academics, but was not involved much in student life like clubs or sports. People who knew Planten back then said that he didn’t appear to have many friends or any girlfriends, and mostly kept to himself.

“He’s a very quiet man,” Chandler admitted to Lewis.

Planten graduated from high school in 1988 and then took pre-veterinary classes at a local community college before transferring to Michigan State University in 1990.

“He was a good student, always made good grades all through school and even in college he got good grades,” his mother said, sounding like she was mustering up as much pride as she could, given the circumstances. “He was always interested in science from the time he was a young person in grade school.”

On April 9, 1993, Planten’s father, who was fifty-four at the time, died in a house fire in Cheyenne, Wyoming. By that point in their lives, Drew Planten and his brothers had had little contact with their father. The local fire marshal ruled the flames started in a stove and that the deadly blaze was accidental. Still, Raleigh detectives always wondered if there wasn’t more to the fire, given Robert Planten’s violent history. There was no doubt the man had enemies who might have wanted him dead.

Drew Planten graduated from the university in 1995 with a degree in zoology. For the majority of the time he attended college, Planten continued to live with his mother in Charlotte, about twenty miles from the campus.

After graduation, Planten had difficulty finding a job. He worked briefly as a laboratory technician for a company called BioPort, which developed the anthrax vaccine, and for a short period of time he also worked for a company called Neogen, a food safety testing company. In spring 2000, he headed to Oregon for a seasonal job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture counting salmon as they swam upstream. Finally, in July 2000, he landed a permanent job as a chemistry technician with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture after a single phone interview.

Although moving from Michigan to North Carolina seemed like a long way to go for a job, Planten’s brothers had ties to the Tar Heel state. Older brother Donald was already living in Asheville and working for an architectural firm. Donald had married Martha Grainge in Raleigh on May 16, 1992, and oldest brother Ronald had attended North Carolina State University, also in Raleigh.

At the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, Drew’s job was to analyze fertilizer samples; he was paid $31,713 a year by the state—not much for a scientist, but he needed to work and hoped it might lead to higher pay down the road. He moved into the Dominion on Lake Lynn Apartments—just fifty yards through the woods from Stephanie Bennett’s apartment at the adjacent Bridgeport Apartment complex.

Planten lived at the Dominion Apartments from the fall of 2000 to about a year after Stephanie’s murder and then moved to a cheaper complex across town on Buck Jones Road, which is where he was living when he was arrested. By all accounts, Planten had had a pretty unremarkable life, living well beneath the radar of the people around him until October 19, 2005.

According to psychologist Michael Teague, research shows the most common trait in a rapist is an “avoidant personality.” In his opinion, Drew Planten fit this description unequivocally.

“He avoided people he wasn’t perversely attracted to,” Teague said. “I was told by one of the women we interviewed if a woman was overweight, he wouldn’t talk to her.”

Yet, Drew Planten was unusually kind to older women, like Joanne Reilly at the fertilizer laboratory, who, Teague thought, probably represented a mother figure to him. Teague surmised Planten’s mother was probably the only woman who had ever shown him unconditional love, and thus if he was going to trust anyone other than her, it was going to be someone
like
her. But when it came to physical attraction, Planten wanted young, pretty women, women who wanted nothing to do with him, women who were way out of his league.

“ ‘These young women have turned me down and made fun of me so much I have a right to unload on them,’ ” Teague said, imagining what might have gone through Planten’s mind regarding the women he admired. Teague felt like it was this consistent negative treatment of Planten by women that made him want to punish them physically.

The avoidant personality disorder is defined by the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(published by the American Psychiatric Association) as:

Based on Joanne Reilly’s observations of Planten at the fertilizer laboratory, Teague figured Planten had learned just enough social skills to get by in a work setting but not enough to keep him from being labeled as “strange” by the people who interacted with him.

Teague suspected that childhood physical and sexual abuse most likely played a role in causing Planten to turn out the way he did, but he also pointed out that one in seven boys are sexually abused in the United States, and the majority never kill.

Teague also theorized, based on the manner in which Stephanie was sexually assaulted, that Planten suffered from a sexual disorder known as a “paraphilia.” The term was coined in the 1920s by psychologist Wilhelm Stekel, an early disciple of Sigmund Freud. The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
characterizes the condition as:

This theory went hand in hand with Teague’s powerful belief that Planten may have staged or posed Stephanie in front of a video camera. Again, it’s a theory that was never supported by tangible evidence and was not shared by most of the detectives who worked on the case. Still, Teague to this day believes a videotape or pictures of the crime may have been destroyed or hidden somewhere and never found.

“I think his mind was completely pornographic. Sex was not at all about relationship to him. It was all about lights, color, action, positions,” said Teague.

Planten’s mother, Chandler, on the other hand, said she couldn’t comprehend what people were saying about her son. She had never heard him speak of Stephanie Bennett, and she had never known him to do anything violent to anyone.

“I’m in shock because he’s never been in trouble before. It’s hard for me to believe that he’s even suspected of something like this,” she said, her voice laden with deep sadness in the phone interview with WRAL the day after her son’s arrest.

With an accused killer behind bars, Carmon Bennett and his attorney, Charles Bentley, refocused their attention on the civil lawsuit against the Bridgeport Apartments. In it, Carmon alleged that the apartment complex had been negligent in providing a safe environment for its tenants and thus contributed to Stephanie’s murder. Bentley spoke in an interview for WRAL on October 26, 2005, about how the criminal case might affect the civil case.

“It’s really a combination of having a vicious criminal attracted into this environment that acted as sort of a magnet for something like this,” Bentley said.

The lawsuit contended that the apartment complex should have done more to make their tenants secure—like trimming back bushes to keep them from obscuring windows, having better lighting, and hiring a security guard. It maintained that the height of the bushes allowed Planten to sneak into the apartment undetected because the windows could not be easily seen from the parking lot. They also said the apartment complex should have notified its residents about the original Peeping Tom report in April 2002 so that tenants could have been more aware of the potential danger.

Bentley said he felt Planten’s arrest supported the lawsuit’s contentions and made the civil case even stronger.

“Our case is really centered on the fact that there was a suspicious person out there, and there were unsafe conditions—that the unsafe conditions attracted someone like this into that area that was then provided with the physical opportunity to commit the crime,” Bentley said. “Really, his arrest confirms a lot of the thoughts that we’ve had.”