Evil Next Door (31 page)

Even without talking to Planten or his family, Dionise believed he had enough evidence with the gun and the other items found in Planten’s apartment to make the case against him. Dionise felt like “it was a great circumstantial case.” He was delighted when Stuart Dunnings agreed with him.

“He was going to be charged with murder for Rebecca’s death,” Dionise said confidently.

Wake County Assistant District Attorney Susan Spurlin was also talking to Dunnings. With Planten about to be charged with another count of first-degree murder, the question of who had primary jurisdiction had to be decided. In other words—who would try him first? Given the fact that Raleigh police had made their case first, Spurlin argued strongly that the first trial needed to be in North Carolina. There was also the additional issue that North Carolina had the death penalty, and Michigan did not. If Planten was convicted and received the death penalty in North Carolina, there would be no need for Michigan authorities to try him there.

Spurlin said she was determined to make sure Planten’s fate would be decided by a Wake County jury.

On November 1, 2005, the news reporters lurked around the hallway in the Wake County Courthouse waiting for Detective Ken Copeland to finish testifying in front of the grand jury regarding Drew Planten. The Bennett case had come to the grand jury in record time—less than two weeks. But prosecutor Susan Spurlin said that the case was so solid, she saw no need to wait any longer.

“They’ve been phenomenally thorough,” Spurlin said of the investigators. “There’s no question about it. It is one of the best, most comprehensive, complete, well-run investigations that I’ve seen. They’ve done an
excellent
job.”

On his way out of the grand jury room, Copeland ducked down the hallway and tried to sneak into the elevator unnoticed without talking to the media. Still, reporters spotted him and yelled out in his direction asking him for a comment. He said he was late for a meeting, thanked them for how well they had covered the case, and backed into an elevator with a little wave as the gray metal doors closed swiftly in front of him.

It was typical—before an arrest, the police needed the media to help them get leads and advance the case. But after an arrest, investigators said as little as possible leading up to the trial. Their biggest fear was revealing something that might compromise the integrity of the case in the courtroom.

Luckily, prosecutors were not bound by the same fears of the media as police. Spurlin had agreed to do an interview as soon as news broke that the grand jury had returned a true bill for first-degree murder against Planten. The fact that Planten had been indicted was no big surprise; what everyone really wanted to know was whether the state would seek the death penalty against him.

Prosecutors very rarely expressed their intentions to seek the death penalty outside of the courtroom, but as an indicator of how strong they felt the case was, Spurlin let the cat out of the bag.

“We’ll have a hearing in superior court in a few weeks where the state will officially declare the case a capital murder case,” Spurlin said without reservation.

Within minutes, every news website in Raleigh had the story posted. If convicted, Planten was now possibly facing what Stephanie Bennett had received—a death sentence.

The Rebecca Huismann case opened up a whole new set of possibilities for investigators who had suspected that Drew Planten may have killed other women, but had had nothing concrete to connect him to other crimes until now. The Michigan case prompted the Raleigh Police Department and other local law enforcement agencies to look even more closely at Planten when it came to other unsolved homicides in their areas.

“Any police department that is worth their salt on a case of this nature would be remiss if they did not look into other cases. So, yes we are examining other unsolved cases and looking at Mr. Planten to see if there is a possibility that he was involved in other crimes in our jurisdiction,” Major Dennis Lane said outside the police department during an interview on November, 3, 2005. “We’re certainly not at the end of our investigation. We certainly have more work to do, more leads to follow up on to tie our case together.”

Michigan authorities also started to relook at their unsolved cases, specifically at the case of the woman found raped and strangled in East Lansing with a small velvet jewelry bag stuffed in her mouth. While it bore little resemblance to the Huismann case, it had strong similarities with the Bennett case. The woman had been raped, like Stephanie, and gagged, like Stephanie. Because investigators had now connected Drew Planten to both Stephanie Bennett and Rebecca Huismann, it only made sense for authorities to rethink Planten’s possible connection to other cold cases in their areas.

The Raleigh police detectives also tried to follow up on every possible lead involving where Planten had been, and what he had been doing, since Stephanie’s murder. It was their strong belief that killers did not tend to take a break for this long, but they needed cold hard evidence, not just speculation, if they were going to link Planten to any other crimes.

“We found evidence where he had rented a car for one day here and there and drove hundreds of miles roundtrip,” Sergeant Clem Perry said. Considering that Planten was antisocial, investigators wondered where Planten could have possibly been going with the rental cars and what exactly he might have been doing.

Planten’s father, Robert Planten, had died in a house fire on April 9, 1993, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Raleigh investigators even looked closely at this case, especially after learning that Planten’s estranged father had been abusive to his wife and his sons. But after talking to authorities in Wyoming, Detective Jackie Taylor said they could never get anyone to confirm the death was the result of anything other than an accidental stove fire.

What continued to trip up investigators was the fact that serial killers tend to do the same things over and over again. Yet, the two cases in which Planten was now a suspect, Rebecca Huismann’s murder and Stephanie Bennett’s murder, were so completely different. One victim was shot; the other victim was strangled. One woman was raped; one woman was not. Because detectives couldn’t even determine a pattern with these two cases, they found it almost impossible to form a pattern they could track nationwide when it came to other cases in which Planten may have been involved.

Still, psychologist Teague was convinced that Planten, if not technically a serial killer (defined as someone who’d taken three or more lives) was well on his way to becoming one.

“There’s probably a third body that we’ve not found out there that would qualify him as a serial killer,” Teague said with confidence. Serial killers, he noted, are “just not human. They don’t have any human qualities, obviously no empathy.”

There were unsolved murders every day across the country where the information never got entered into a national crime database. There were women killed along the I-95 corridor who were never even reported as missing because they had no identification on them and were estranged from their families and friends.

Early on, investigators had presented the case to the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, to the FBI, and at homicide conferences throughout the country. The thought was that another police department might be dealing with a similar case connected to the same suspect. But they had no luck in finding any case just like Stephanie Bennett’s.

Detective Jackie Taylor agreed with Teague’s theory that there were other unknown victims. “I don’t think he went that long without killing,” she said of Planten.

“I’m convinced he had done so too,” Detective Copeland added.

Lieutenant Chris Morgan, on the other hand, was never convinced that Planten was connected to other murders besides Stephanie Bennett’s and Rebecca Huismann’s. Morgan believed Planten was reeling after what appeared to be his botched assault on Rebecca. He believed it was a murder Planten hadn’t really intended to commit, and thought Planten then spent the next few years planning his attack on Stephanie. To Morgan’s thinking, Planten was then afraid he could never top that one, and so he laid low looking for another similar opportunity, which never came his way.

“I think [she] was the perfect victim. The crime went perfectly; nothing went wrong in this crime for Drew Planten,” Morgan said with disgust. “Everything about him was fantasy and ritual. I think Planten had this fear, ‘If I try to do this again, it’s not going to be the same. It won’t be as good.’ ”

“The state does officially declare in writing and in open court that we will be seeking the death penalty in this case,” prosecutor Susan Spurlin said to the Superior Court judge Donald Stephens, as she stood in front of his bench.

Spurlin wore a red power suit to court on the day of the Rule 24 hearing. Seeking the death penalty wasn’t a decision she entered into lightly, and even though she knew that law-and-order Stephens, given the nature of the crime, would most likely accept her request, she still had to go through the legal motions to make it official.

First, she laid out the details of the case to the judge to support her decision to seek the death penalty.

“What the evidence will show is that on May 21 of 2002, Stephanie Bennett was found nude, having been strangled and having been sexually assaulted in her apartment,” Spurlin said in a professional, solemn tone. “There’s also evidence that both her hands and her feet had been bound, Your Honor, and semen was recovered from the body of Stephanie Bennett.”

Drew Planten was not required to be at the hearing, and therefore he was not, but his court-appointed attorney, Kirk Osborne, sat at the defense table and appeared to be listening intently to every word Spurlin uttered. Osborne was an accomplished defense lawyer from Chapel Hill who would, without a doubt, give Planten excellent representation. With his long gray hair and wire-framed glasses he had an artistic look about him, but in the courtroom, Spurlin knew he was a worthy adversary.

“They approached this defendant and requested his DNA. He refused to provide a sample, but officers were able to obtain a sample of Drew Planten’s DNA,” Spurlin said with an increasing level of intensity in her voice. “When that DNA was compared with the semen that was taken from Stephanie Bennett, it was found to be a positive match.”

Spurlin paused for a moment after saying Planten’s DNA was a match. It was almost as if she wanted to make sure that very important fact sunk in for everyone in the courtroom. Her subtext:
It was a match; does anyone have any question as to what that means?

Spurlin went on to say that personal belongings taken from Stephanie Bennett’s apartment had been found in Planten’s apartment during a search by police. She also talked about how other items from that search led them to an unsolved murder case in Lansing, Michigan—that of Rebecca Huismann. The gun that had been used to kill Rebecca was also found in Planten’s apartment, she told the judge.

“They found that the projectile that was used to kill Rebecca Huismann, and the spent shell casing that was recovered there at the scene, was a positive match from that weapon,” Spurlin said.

Again she paused, letting the fact that the murder weapon used to kill a Michigan woman six years before Planten’s arrest in Raleigh had been found in Planten’s apartment. Spurlin’s silence once again had a read-between-the-lines quality to it:
What else could this possibly mean other than the obvious?

Under North Carolina law, to seek the death penalty the state must prove there are two or more aggravating factors that merit the sentence. Spurlin had no shortage of aggravating factors in the Bennett case. She laid them out to the court.

“The murder was committed during the commission of a rape, possibly during the commission of a robbery, and the crime was especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel,” Spurlin said, letting the tiniest bit of emotion creep into her voice.

During the hearing the state also asked that they be able to redact personal information about people interviewed during the investigation—addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers—before handing over the documents to Planten’s attorney as required under the law, during what’s known as the discovery process. Spurlin argued that hundreds of people were interviewed early on in the case that had absolutely nothing to do with the murder, and they should not be penalized for their cooperation by having their personal information made part of the public record.

Osborne, on the other hand, argued that he needed access to
all
of this information so he and his client could determine if it was relevant or not to the case. He said that without this information, he could not guarantee Planten would get a fair trial.

“We will want to run down everything. This is a very serious case and we believe that we’re entitled to that material under the statute and request that none of this information be redacted from discovery,” Osborne said in a booming voice that belied his mellow appearance.

Stephens struck down Osborne’s objection and accepted the state’s motion to redact the information. He also declared the case a capital case, which meant the state was free to seek the death penalty. The judge ordered the state to copy and deliver all of its documents to Osborne by the end of January. He also appointed another attorney for Planten who by law was entitled to two court-appointed attorneys in a death penalty case.

After the hearing, Spurlin and her partner, Assistant District Attorney Becky Holt, held an impromptu press conference in the courthouse hallway. They told the media that they had talked to Carmon Bennett about the decision to seek the death penalty in the case but declined to say what his opinion was. It was standard for prosecutors to discuss the issue with the victim’s family in these types of cases and take their feelings into consideration. This didn’t mean prosecutors always acquiesced to the family’s wishes, but their thoughts did play a major role in making the decision.