Evil Next Door (29 page)

“I’ve wondered why didn’t he take those steps,” Smith said. “What was I giving off that he didn’t go that far with me?”

The police told her they believed there were several factors that prevented her from becoming a victim—that she lived on the third floor, had a dog, and had an alarm system. Investigators told her all three probably helped save her life. Smith was also a young woman who exuded a kind of inner-strength, the kind of strength that might scare a potential attacker away. After all, if Teague was right about Planten’s personality, he seemed to be a person who would have shied away from a woman he thought would put up a good fight.

While Smith was very shaken after learning that Planten had been in her apartment, she decided almost immediately that she wouldn’t let the situation define her life. She wouldn’t be the girl who almost got killed. Instead, she would be the girl who survived.

“When something like this happens you can either decide the whole world is just evil waiting to happen, or you can decide this was a really bad man who could have done a really bad thing, obviously did do a really bad thing,” Smith said. “But there’s no point in dwelling on it. All that matters is that I never did walk in and he was there. I never did wake up and have him looking at me. Nothing like that ever happened. I was totally unaware.”

Smith vowed not to let what Planten could have done to her change the way she approached the world. She refused to give him that kind of power over her life.

“Compared to what happened to Stephanie Bennett, nothing happened to me,
nothing,
” Smith said.

On Friday, October 21, 2005, Detectives Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor were finally alone in Planten’s apartment. They took the opportunity to go through things slowly and methodically. Without all of the chaos and distractions of the other investigators, they could finally get down to the detail work they felt still needed to be done. Planten’s apartment, like his life, was one big puzzle, and it was a puzzle they needed to figure out
before
they took the case to trial.

Maybe it was because they could finally see a clear path through the clutter or maybe it was because all the noise was gone or maybe they just got lucky—but on this day they found a 1998 Social Security refund check inside a video game box on a shelf in Planten’s bedroom. The check was written to a woman by the name of Rebecca Huismann. There was also a postcard found addressed to the same woman in Lansing, Michigan. At the time, the name didn’t raise a red flag. It was just another woman whom Planten had probably admired from afar, investigators thought. Just another name for them to check out.

On Saturday, October 22, 2005, the detectives came into the office to research the names they had found in Planten’s apartment. They started by looking up the names online on various websites, including that of Rebecca Huismann.

“We ran her name and it came up with a ‘D’ beside it which means deceased,” Taylor said with a bewildered look as she remembered the moment she realized there might be another victim.

Sergeant Perry called police in Lansing, Michigan, and asked if the name was familiar to anyone there.

“As a matter of fact it’s an unsolved homicide,” the Lansing cop who answered the phone told Perry.

“Jackie and I went,
wow,
” Perry recalled.

The officer who answered the phone told Perry it was Detective Joey Dionise’s case, and he eagerly gave him Dionise’s cell phone number. Dionise was in the car on his way to his daughter’s track meet when he got the call. Dionise was all business, no time for chitchat. He immediately cut to the chase and wanted to know why investigators in Raleigh, North Carolina, would be interested in a cold case from Lansing, Michigan, nearly eight hundred miles north of their jurisdiction.

“I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about it,” Dionise said of the phone call. “I can still remember that day. So what does that tell you?
There is a God.
”

When Perry told Dionise what they had, he pulled over to the side of the road and asked his wife to drive so that he could concentrate on the call. Dionise hopped into the passenger seat, pulled out his briefcase, and started furiously taking notes on what Perry was telling him. Then it was Dionise’s turn to tell Perry about Rebecca’s case.

Dionise told Perry that Rebecca had been shot and killed in Lansing on October, 19, 1999. Ironically, it was the very same day Drew Planten would be arrested six years later—on the anniversary of Rebecca Huismann’s murder.

That was a night Dionise would never forget, the night his city was under siege. Rebecca’s was the third unrelated murder in Lansing the night of October 19, and Dionise had handled every single one.

It was 5:55 in the morning, and Dionise was finally on his way home after a grueling night. Lansing detectives had a suspect in custody in the first murder case, and Dionise had interviewed him earlier in the evening. Dionise got the call about murder number three just as he was walking out of the jail after interviewing the suspect in the second murder case. The third victim was a woman who had been found shot in her car at 121 Lathrop Street less than two miles from the Michigan State University campus, he was told.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dionise said to the dispatcher calling him back to work.

In a city with maybe a dozen-plus murders a year, this night was one in a million for Lansing investigators, including Dionise.

“What the hell happened here in the city? Three in one night, it was unheard of,” Dionise remembered.

Dionise knew the neighborhood where the third murder had occurred well. It was on the east side of Lansing, in an area populated mostly by college students. Dionise went to church almost directly across the street from the house where the young woman had been killed. He had grown up around the corner just off of Michigan Avenue.

At this point, Dionise had been on the clock for twenty-four hours straight, but he knew he still had to go to the murder scene. This was how it worked in homicide. Detectives didn’t clock out until the job was done. And on this night it seemed like the job was never going to be done.

Dionise said twenty-two-year-old Rebecca Huismann had been found shot in the head with one foot set just outside of her Ford Escort. The rest of her body was slumped over the steering wheel of the car. Dionise figured the loud garbage trucks that cruised up and down Michigan Avenue at that time in the morning must have muffled the sound of the single gunshot.

It looked like Rebecca was just getting out of her car when she was approached by the killer. She was shot just one time in the left side of her face with a .45-caliber handgun—the only good news was that it was an unusual caliber. Dionise hoped that fact might help investigators identify a suspect. A statewide APB went out immediately for any handguns of this type confiscated by law enforcement.

The detail about where exactly on her body Rebecca was shot was leaked to the press early on by an eager police captain; something Dionise said set the investigation back tremendously. It was something Dionise had wanted kept close to the vest, because it was a detail only the killer knew. But once it was out of the bag, he couldn’t exactly reel it back in and lock it up again in a vault, so he just tried to ignore it.

Rebecca had been a dancer at a men’s club called Dream Girls on South Pennsylvania Avenue, about a twelve-minute drive from her house. It was easy to see why the attractive brunette with a great figure and a megawatt smile was a hit at the club. But outside the club, everyone police interviewed said she lived a clean life. There was no indication that Rebecca was involved in anything untoward outside of her job description as an exotic dancer. People who knew her from the club said she simply did her job and went home. Her family said it wasn’t what she wanted to be doing, but it paid the bills for the time being. She was saving up to go to college—and the money at the club was good. “She was a nice girl. She danced, big deal, nothing illegal,” Detective Dionise said with a thick Michigan accent.

The night Rebecca Huismann was killed, her purse had been found on the ground next to her car with eighty dollars in cash inside, so investigators ruled out robbery as a motive early on in the case. But this left the lingering question—if robbery wasn’t the motive, and rape wasn’t the motive, what was?

“Somebody wanted her dead; why?” Dionise said. Immediately, investigators started canvassing the neighborhood, talking for the most part to college students who lived in the many rental homes and apartment buildings. Rebecca’s boyfriend, Ernie, had been asleep inside the house when she was shot. He had come running outside and found her slumped over in her car. He was the one who’d called 911 and identified her for the police.

“He was a wreck,” Dionise said.

Detectives then notified Rebecca’s parents, Glenna and Bernard Huismann, of their daughter’s murder. They were obviously devastated and shocked by their child’s death. Not unlike Stephanie Bennett, Rebecca Huismann was a young woman who had been just starting her life and was not ready to leave the world.

The first thing investigators had to do was eliminate Rebecca’s boyfriend as a suspect. Dionise said Ernie cooperated on a limited basis early on in the investigation, and then he got a lawyer and stopped talking to them. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for police to clear him.

“We had to go through a lot of hoops,” said Dionise of trying to eliminate Ernie as a suspect.

And then, Dionise said, “the case went cold.” The Michigan investigators interviewed everyone who worked at Dream Girls or who patronized the nightclub on a regular basis. At first, they considered that an obsessed customer at the club might be responsible for the murder, but nothing along those lines panned out. Detectives found no connection between Dream Girls and Rebecca’s murder.

“Every lead we followed, it ended,” Dionise said with frustration in his voice.

Dionise wasn’t used to having cold cases in Lansing. Even the cases that were technically unsolved, the cops
knew
who had committed them, but just didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest. But in Rebecca Huismann’s case, they had absolutely nothing. It was as if the murderer had simply vanished without a trace.

The Lansing police then decided to create a task force along with other local law enforcement agencies that had unsolved homicides of women in the same general area to see if there was a pattern. The East Lansing police and Michigan State University police compared notes on their unsolved murder cases with Dionise’s department, but there seemed to be no common thread linking any of the local unsolved murder cases together.

Before Rebecca’s murder, another young woman had been killed in an East Lansing apartment complex hallway. A velvet bag meant to hold jewelry was found stuffed inside the victim’s mouth. The case seemed to have few similarities with Rebecca’s case, but it was still looked at closely to see if there might be some underlying connection that wasn’t immediately obvious. Still, no matter how hard they tried, investigators found nothing tying that case to Rebecca Huismann’s murder.

Throughout the investigation, Lansing detectives tried to keep Rebecca’s story in the media so the public wouldn’t forget about her. On the anniversary of her death every year they would remind people about the case in the unlikely hope that someone might come forward with new information. That’s the way it went for six long years.

“We never closed it,” Dionise said as he remembered how the files sat on one of his detective’s desk for six years. The files were never actually put away into the file cabinet where they belonged—it was as if that simple, ordinary act might have been a sign that investigators were giving up. Dionise refused to take that step. He would see the files sitting on the corner of the desk and say to himself—
Someday that one will be solved.
His heart told him that putting away the files was like filing away Rebecca Huismann’s memory into a dark hole where it would never again be found. His head told him that he was crazy, but as long as tips came in, in his heart, he felt like he could reconcile keeping the case active.

“People would still call, and we would investigate every lead,” Dionise said proudly.

But the best lead Lansing detectives got was from the Raleigh Police Department on a brisk fall day in October 2005. When Sergeant Clem Perry and Detective Joey Dionise finished talking, it was clear to both cops that Drew Planten may have killed Rebecca Huismann.
Six years, six long years.
Dionise almost couldn’t believe it. But then Perry dropped the bombshell, the information that sealed the deal for Dionise.

“Well, we recovered a .45 caliber pistol,” Perry told Dionise.

“Look, I think we’re coming out there,” Dionise said excitedly.

Dionise immediately hung up the phone and called one of his detectives with the news. He couldn’t keep it to himself. Even though Dionise didn’t have the evidence in his hands yet, he had always believed the gun would be the key to solving the case. His mind drifted back to the files on the corner of the desk. He had never given up on Rebecca Huismann, and with good reason. Despite what others may have thought, the case was solvable. He always believed that.

“It looks good,” Dionise said to his detective on the phone after hanging up with Perry. “It looks real good. We’re going to Raleigh.”

“The state police were waiting for me when I got home from school that day,” Glenna Huismann, a teacher and Rebecca Huismann’s mother, said as she remembered the day her daughter was killed—October 19, 1999. “What happened to her, us, only happens to other people you don’t know. You never think it could happen to you.”

Glenna said her daughter was a vivacious, outgoing young woman who dreamed about traveling the world and taking part in wild adventures. She wanted to bungee jump and see the pyramids in Egypt. Rebecca wanted to do it all. She had big plans for a big life. She was working to save money in order to go back to school at Lansing Community College to study acting. She had recently become engaged to her boyfriend, Ernie, and was planning to get married in 2000.