Evil Next Door (32 page)

The prosecutors also spoke about how they were consulting with Michigan authorities on which jurisdiction would try Planten for murder first, given the fact that he was now directly implicated in the Huismann case.

Recently released search warrants of Planten’s apartment for the first time publicly revealed the role of Joanne Reilly, Planten’s supervisor, in helping police get his DNA. Reporters were naturally curious about her connection to the case and how that might play out in court.

“We are thrilled that people, citizens that are out there, are willing to cooperate, and that’s what she did,” Spurlin said to the group of journalists assembled in the hallway outside the courtroom. “That’s what makes the justice system work when citizens are involved as well. It’s a
good thing,
” Holt stressed.

It appeared the case was moving along smoothly—exactly how Spurlin and Holt hoped it would. But experienced litigators know derailment is always possible even when the case appears to be chugging smoothly down the track with no obstacles in sight.

WRAL reporter Melissa Buscher and photographer Ed Wilson traveled to Michigan to talk to investigators there about the Huismann case and to get some perspective from her family, as well as from Drew Planten’s family.

“When we were in Michigan, everything just seemed to fit,” Melissa said. At one time, Planten had lived in a house in Rebecca Huismann’s neighborhood. Police in Lansing told Buscher that Planten was without a doubt the person they believed killed Rebecca. They also told her that they were even looking at him in connection with several other unsolved homicides of women in the area.

Buscher, being an experienced reporter, knew that it was always better to knock on someone’s door than risk being rejected in a phone call. Face-to-face, journalists always have a better chance of getting someone to talk to them. So, she and Wilson traveled to Newaygo, Michigan, and knocked on Glenna and Bernard Huismann’s door. They answered, and then invited the news crew into their home without a camera.

“We sat in their living room for about an hour, looked at pictures, and they shared stories with us about their daughter. They were overwhelmed that after so many years the painful memories about their daughter’s death were resurfacing,” Buscher remembered sadly. “They chose not to share their story in public [at that time], politely declining to go on-camera.”

Wilson and Buscher also journeyed to visit Sarah Chandler, Drew Planten’s mother, who lived about one hundred miles south of Newaygo in Charlotte, Michigan. Chandler met with the news crew at her law office, a charming old Victorian house that she had converted into her place of business. It was surprising that she agreed to do an interview on-camera.

“She was adamant that her son was
not
involved,” Buscher recalled.

“Drew was always a very shy, I call it, reserved person,” Chandler told Buscher. She said given her son’s personality she could not imagine him doing something like the crimes he was accused of committing. She said she did not believe her son had ever even owned a gun, despite the fact that police said they found a gun on him when he was arrested.

Chandler told Buscher her son was an athlete, a good student, and someone who was loved and supported by his family.

“He always had loving family members around him,” Chandler said. “Never did he feel like he was alone in the world or deserted.”

Chandler, instead of dwelling on the accusations against her son, chose instead to show Buscher pictures of Planten during happier times—him playing sports and graduating from Michigan State University in 1995.

Buscher left Chandler’s house that day not sure if she was dealing with a mother who was simply in desperate denial, or truly in the dark.

For Susan Spurlin, the case was starting to come together, but she had been sitting in the prosecutor’s seat far too long to take anything for granted. Having the case declared capital meant that the jury selection process would be long and arduous. They had to choose jurors who were “death penalty qualified,” meaning they would be willing to consider sentencing Planten to death if he was convicted. The major issue in qualifying jurors in these cases was that they often
said
they could consider the death penalty during the selection process, but when it came right down to it, they had a change of heart during the trial. To weed these people out, the selection process needed to be intense and in depth.

“It’s a case where the jury has to make that ultimate decision, so you’re very passionate about presenting everything so that the jury can in fact make
that
decision,” Spurlin said.

With her many years of experience, Spurlin knew that a death penalty case was the toughest case to try. She was ready for the challenge, yet even with excellent evidence in the case, she knew there would still be many obstacles along the way.

“There is no such thing as a slam dunk,” Spurlin said. “You never know what the jury is going to do, or what they’re going to respond to.”

Spurlin was wading her way through the thousands of pages contained in the case file that investigators had been compiling for three and a half years. Not only did she need to bring herself up to speed on the case, but she needed to make sure she wasn’t missing anything that might come back to bite her at trial.

“More than I’ve had in any other murder case,” Spurlin said of the sheer number of pages she had to go through and read. “It was an enormous amount of material.”

As part of the trial process known as “discovery,” Spurlin’s office was copying the voluminous case file and sending every single page to Drew Planten’s attorney, Kirk Osborne. A great deal of the paperwork dealt with dead-end leads that had nothing to do with Planten, but Spurlin felt like she still had to familiarize herself with all of it. It was part of her strategy to be able to anticipate anything and everything the defense might bring up at trial as a red herring to distract the jury.

“In any capital murder you want to know as much about the defendant as you can possibly know. The jury might only know information about the size of a quarter, but I think a prosecutor needs to know information that would almost fill this room,” Spurlin said, gesturing with both arms around her modest, square office with its gray walls and two-story-high ceilings.

Spurlin was getting into “the zone,” as her husband liked to call it. She was intently buckling down and immersing herself in the Bennett case. During those times, she slept with a legal pad by her bed so that if something about the case came to her in the middle of the night, she could sit up and write it down immediately so that it would not be lost.

On Spurlin’s wall in her courthouse office was a picture of Stephanie Bennett in happier times, joking around in a red sash and a big purple felt hat like the Cat in the Hat wore. In the photograph, Stephanie also wore a blue tank top and her now-familiar all-American-girl smile. Spurlin wanted a constant reminder of who she was really working for. Seeing Stephanie so joyful and full of life in the photograph gave her all the motivation she needed to continue pursuing the case day in and day out.

Carmon Bennett had given the picture to Spurlin when she’d traveled to Virginia to meet the family for the first time. Spurlin felt like it was a critical part of the process for the victim’s family to meet her and to know she cared deeply about Stephanie and the case. Beneath her professional cool exterior, Spurlin always had a soft spot in her heart for victims’ families and what they had gone through. She knew that she couldn’t ever walk in their shoes, but, with their help, at least she might be able to understand a little bit of what they were experiencing.

“It was to say, ‘Hello, I know that I’m walking into your life, and I’m taking on a very important role in the prosecution of the death of your daughter,’ ” said Spurlin of her trip to the Bennett home in Virginia. “This is who I am. I like to meet them. I like them to put a face with a name.”

It was early December 2005 when Spurlin and her partner Rebecca Holt headed to Rocky Mount to meet with Stephanie’s family. Holt was no stranger to high-profile murder cases herself. Her most recent case had involved Ann Miller, who’d ultimately pleaded guilty to poisoning her husband, Eric Miller, with arsenic. She had worked on the case with Lieutenant Chris Morgan. With the culmination of that case, Holt now had the time to fully assist Spurlin with the Bennett case, and there was no one else Spurlin would’ve rather had on her team.

Spurlin also took Morgan with her to the Bennetts’. She knew how close Morgan had become to the family in the first two years of the investigation and felt like the Bennetts might be more open to her introduction if it came through Morgan. Spurlin wanted their relationship to start out on the right foot.

Morgan was glad to help Spurlin get to know Stephanie’s family. He felt it was the least he could do; the fact that he hadn’t been able to solve the case himself still gnawed at him almost daily, but he was able to put his pride aside for the sake of the justice he had been seeking all along.

Morgan recalled that Stephanie’s father was more enthusiastic than Morgan had ever seen him before on that early December visit with Spurlin and Holt in Virginia. Morgan said Carmon was uncharacteristically raring to go, ready to do whatever he had to do to make sure that Drew Planten not only got convicted but also received the death penalty. It was very clear where Carmon stood on the topic of capital punishment, especially when it came to the man police said murdered his daughter.

“He was ready to go out and fight another battle,” Morgan said about Carmon that day. Morgan figured his excitement was the result of three-plus years of holding all of his fury inside. Now he was like a champagne bottle whose cork had been popped, overflowing with renewed vigor and confidence in the justice system that had finally rewarded him for his patience. He was ready to slay the dragon.

After chatting for a while, prosecutors Spurlin and Holt asked Carmon and Jennifer if they could take a peek into Stephanie’s bedroom in an effort to get to know the victim a little bit better. Anything personal they gleaned from seeing her room, even the tiniest detail, might help them paint a more personal picture of Stephanie for the jury. “That bedroom was very much like it had been in 2002. It was us wanting to get to know Stephanie,” said Spurlin solemnly. “It was important for me to somehow connect with the victim.”

The blue and white flowery room with its teddy bears, smiling photographs, and proudly displayed diplomas told Spurlin quite a lot. What Spurlin learned about Stephanie that day was that she was the kind of girl almost anybody would want as a daughter, sister, or friend. Spurlin knew it would be up to her to relay to the jury what a tremendous loss this death was to so many people, but she had to do it in the calm, measured tone the courtroom required of her.

“If I had any emotion that I felt about her, any tears that I might have cried about Carmon’s loss, the loss of so many people with her death, were emotions that I would experience and I would have to set aside,” said Spurlin. “I can’t take those kinds of emotions into the courtroom because it would definitely interfere with my effectiveness.”

At this point in the investigation Spurlin had not yet looked at the crime scene pictures or the autopsy photographs of Stephanie’s body. The joke around the office was that Spurlin “didn’t do pictures.” She usually waited until she was close to trial to finally pull out the pictures because they were so difficult for her to look at no matter how many cases she had prosecuted.

Spurlin didn’t need the photographs in front of her to prepare her case. She needed instead to get inside the victim’s head and try to understand what happened on May 21, 2002. After poring over all of the evidence, there was one chilling detail that stood out in her mind—a detail she needed to relay to the jury above everything else. Surely, at some point during the attack, it had to have become very clear to Stephanie that this man was not about to let her go. No matter what she did to keep calm and acquiesce to his demands, she was not going to walk away from this alive.
Stephanie Bennett knew she was going to die.

“Just imagine that,” Spurlin said.

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

—GANDHI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Christmas season had always been Stephanie Bennett’s favorite time of year. While her loss was always felt more intensely by her family and friends as the holidays neared, 2005 was the first time since her murder that anyone who loved Stephanie had come close to finding some kind of peace. The single electric candle in the window in her father’s Virginia home seemed to shine a little brighter this year. While the trial and its difficult details loomed in the distance, the knowledge that Stephanie’s suspected killer was behind bars let everyone breathe a little bit easier. Smiles had returned even to Carmon Bennett’s face. Joy had become a rare thing in the Bennett house since Stephanie’s death.

The investigators were now concentrating on new murder cases, but their victory in solving a three-plus-year-old unsolved case was the best Christmas present anyone in police work could have imagined. They knew they couldn’t rest on their laurels forever, but even if they knew the glory would be fleeting, for the time being it was nice to bask in their accomplishment.

For a brief moment, all was right with the world in Raleigh, North Carolina. A feeling of safety had returned to the community and there was an overwhelming sense that justice might be more than a vague concept bantered around in a law school classroom, a tangible phenomenon within reach.