Too Young to Kill (15 page)

Sixteen and no credits. They had no choice but to enroll Adrianne in that Black Hawk GED program and hope she could squeak out the equivalent of a high-school diploma.

27

The Black Hawk College Outreach Center program for high-school students in East Moline was the perfect fit for Adrianne’s sluggish and hostile attitude toward obtaining an education. Jo’s niece had gone through the same program. It seemed to be designed for Adrianne’s caliber of study: she could go in the morning and be home by early afternoon—which, in and of itself, proved to be an incentive for Adrianne to get out of bed every day.

According to Black Hawk’s website, students must be at least sixteen years old and no longer enrolled in a high school in order to qualify for its GED program. Black Hawk made
agreements with the six public high schools in the Rock Island Educational Service Region,
essentially allowing
students to earn diplomas from their home schools by completing requirements at an Optional Education site.

For those first few weeks she was enrolled during the early winter of 2004, Adrianne acclimated herself to an environment of kids whom she could relate to on many different levels: broken homes, troublemakers, drug users, boozers, you name it. Society’s broken, beaten, failed. Not that every kid from Black Hawk fell under this wide and dysfunctional umbrella, or the school catered to what might be seen as a “misfit” generation of children; but a good portion of Black Hawk’s enrollment at the time Adrianne went there included kids using their final educational lifeline. Black Hawk was a teen’s last shot. Fail here and a student was out of options.

The photo Tony and Jo had given to the press and police after Adrianne went missing, which became the image of Adrianne everyone in town recognized, was not, according to some of the kids she attended Black Hawk with, an honest depiction of Adrianne. The photo captured Adrianne sporting a semi-bob hairdo, like Victoria Beckham. In the photo, Adrianne had that signature lock of hair protruding over the right side of her face, the rest of her dark brown mane pulled back tightly, exposing her pierced ears. Her lips were bright red; her brown eyes wide and engaging. She came across innocent and sincere, and there’s no doubt her character and comportment could be described by both those adjectives. But more than that, Adrianne had a childish look in her eyes. She embodied the spirit of the generation she came from; there was a certain honesty radiating from her in that photo—a genuineness that spoke to the nature of her failings and desire to make a better life for herself.

Adrianne was not a quitter. She didn’t generally give up on things. She wanted to succeed, but life had not always cooperated.

Still, this photo, said a former classmate, was not the Adrianne Reynolds he met at Black Hawk when she first walked through those doors. And for many of those who hung around with Adrianne at school and out in the social world of being a teenager, she was a different person from the naïve young girl with the loud and sometimes nasty mouth she displayed at home. It’s clear Adrianne lived two separate lives. This is not to say that she deliberately changed who she was when in either environment. It meant that like most kids Adrianne’s age, she acted differently depending on who she was with, perhaps without realizing it herself. And this was never more evident than after she met and started hanging around with Sarah, Cory, and that core group of QC Juggalos.

Brad Tobias went to school at Black Hawk and openly admitted, “I was a pothead and smoked with Sarah [Kolb] and them.”

Sarah, Cory, and those they ran with perceived themselves as being part of the Juggalo crowd. Brad, on the other hand, did not.

“Oh,
hell
no,” he remarked later. “Not me.”

Brad tagged along with Cory, Sarah, and the others once in a while, because they liked to smoke weed. Sarah, he added, was “cool to hang out with then.” To Brad, Sarah seemed to be “just another girl.” She had her differences. Indeed, they all did. But there was nothing easily recognizable in her social personality to make Brad feel uneasy, uncomfortable, or particularly anxious around her. She was just one more kid who had rebelled against a system she felt was out to destroy her chances in life.

Sarah made no qualms about telling people she liked being with guys
and
girls. Beyond that, and the way she dressed, the only other obvious characteristic Sarah displayed within her peer group was that she wanted people to know she was tough.

“She really thought she had balls,” said a former friend.

For reasons no one seemed to know, Sarah was afflicted with a repressed rage that showed its face in the crowd every so often—sometimes for no apparent reason other than she just lost control of her emotions. This image of who Sarah was meshed with the Juggalo way of life she fell into. The Juggalo insignia was found on everything from T-shirts to jewelry, from websites to decals and posters, from tattoos to the Psychopathic Records label. It depicts the shadow image of a guy with a clown Afro running, and what appears to be a meat cleaver in his hand (sometimes a chain saw). The icon screams violence. Certain groups of Juggalos like to paint their faces with black-and-white “killer clown” makeup and carry hatchets and knives and skulls as props, presumably for effect. That Juggalo insignia of the running, meat cleaver–yielding madman in the Afro is often drenched in, and dripping, blood. To say the least, it all promotes aggression. Doesn’t mean Juggalos run around killing people and look to perpetuate violence; what it
does
say, however, is that there is a desire there to wade in the waters of the darker side of life. An indication that they want to be separated from the world they live in. If Quentin Tarantino had a fan club following him around, dedicated to celebrating the blood and violence depicted in many of his movies, Juggalos would fit that bill. Insane Clown Posse, the popular Detroit band (which dresses in full face paint—think Ronald McDonald meets KISS, with a little Rob Zombie and Slipknot tossed in for effect), coined the Juggalo term. They claim their music is in a category of its own—the genre is horror rap.

Blood. Guts. Violence. Hard rock. Some rapping. The songs these kids listen to have lyrics that speak to a rebellious crowd of teenagers and twenty-somethings who seem to have little direction and choose to assuage their aggression and to speak socially through the way they dress and the music they listen to. Juggalos, it should be noted, are no more prone to committing crimes or perpetrating violence in numbers than other violent sects found in communities throughout the nation. They are a generally calm people, looking to make a statement about the way they view (and value) life. And this was the bait Cory and Sarah, along with the group of friends they hung around with, became attracted to. They felt comfortable within this environment. They had finally found a place to fit in.

Especially Sarah.

“Sarah could be a real bitch, like hard-core,” said a friend.

In that environment of Juggalos, that crazy, bitchy attitude Sarah embodied served her well. She could be who she felt she was, and no one said anything.

There was one day when a group of them stood around in a circle playing hacky sack outside on the grounds of Black Hawk. Hacky sack is a game whereupon you kick a small beanbag ball (a little smaller than a tennis ball) back and forth, trying not to let it hit the ground. Kids like to play this game at concerts, in parks, standing around convenience stores, on the corner, and in between classes at school.

When break was over, the kids stopped the game and went back to class.

Sarah thought she had the hacky sack, but when she realized she didn’t, “she started freakin’ out,” said a student inside the classroom.

Actually, Sarah Kolb lost it.

She snapped.

A full-fledged panic attack set in.

For a few minutes, absolute terror, as though she had lost a family heirloom or her wallet, settled on Sarah. She was stricken with a terrible bout of anxiety. She rummaged through her desk, hurriedly looking for the hacky sack.

She couldn’t find it.

The kid who had the ball on him said, “Hey, Sarah, I have it.” He sort of rubbed it in her face, taunting and teasing Sarah a little bit, allowing her to freak out and go crazy looking for it, while knowing what she was frantically searching for. He had let her stew.

Sarah didn’t like this. She turned red. Then she hit the kid holding the hacky sack in the face with a punch, storming out of the classroom in a rage.

All over a hacky sack ball.

“She had a short fuse,” said a friend, “that could go off at any time.”

This anecdote explained, in a subtle way, that you had better not mess with Sarah’s possessions. Her “things” were important to her. She was territorial.

And this, Adrianne Reynolds was about to find out, included her friends—girlfriends, particularly.

28

Brad Tobias met Cory Gregory at Black Hawk. Cory hung around with Sarah Kolb. The way Brad viewed that relationship, “Cory was just another guy obsessed with a chick.”

Everyone seemed to see Cory in this way.

Sarah and Cory were best friends. At least in terms of how the relationship progressed. Cory was smitten. Totally taken in by whatever aura Sarah had.

“Man, and I have no idea why,” said a kid from that group of friends. “Have you ever
seen
Sarah? I mean, why was Cory so into her?”

Cory had wanted to date Sarah for the longest time—ever since he met her. Their friendship began when they ran into each other in town one day. They were both sophomores in high school then, going through the same problems, embodying the same defiant natures. They believed society had perpetrated difficulties and barriers against them, which no one else seemed to understand. Cory was going to a public school, but Sarah soon convinced him to transfer to Black Hawk and leave the alternative school connected to Moline High School, which he was registered at.

“He seemed to be doing okay there,” his mother, Teresa Gregory, later told me.

Cory came home one afternoon and told his father, Bert Gregory, whom he lived with, “I transferred schools.”

Not that he
wanted
to transfer, or was asking his dad for his permission, but that he had already gone and done it.

“What?” Teresa asked when she heard.

“We accepted it,” his mother later remarked. “It was better than him dropping out.”

Just before Cory turned seventeen, in the fall of 2004, he told his mother he had decided to join the military. Teresa thought it was a good direction for her boy, who, same as many kids his age, did not seem to have any direction whatsoever.

After going down and talking to the recruiter, Cory came back with, he claimed, disappointing news. He said he was told that he had to get his GED (or have a high-school diploma) before the military would take him.

“Too bad they changed that policy,” Teresa Gregory said later. Their lives would have likely been a whole lot different if Cory had joined the military.

This is simply not true. Either Cory lied to his mother, or he never bothered to check with the military, because the army, for one, will allow an enlistee to join while still in high school. (A recruit can even go to boot camp between his or her junior and senior years.) And there is no regulation stopping someone from applying to the army with a GED.

Cory continued hanging (and now doing other things) with Sarah Kolb, who was no doubt influencing his life and decisions, if not telling him what to do and when to do it.

“I met Sarah at the mall,” Cory said during an interview with NBC, “and then we ended up going and smoking weed behind [a department store].”

Weed and booze—both became Cory’s greatest loves, besides, that is, Sarah Kolb, whom he was now seeing every day. Cory wanted to sleep with Sarah something bad, friends said. Sarah knew this, of course, and used it to keep him on a leash. In this early stage of the relationship, she never came out and said no to Cory, but then she didn’t say yes, either. Cory was always left to feel as though he was in the middle, and had a shot with Sarah.

“In the back of his mind somewhere,” Teresa Gregory said, “Cory always believed there was a chance for the two of them—that if he just
hung
in there long enough, best friends would become lovers.”

“He was always trying to get with her and she wouldn’t have anything of it,” Brad Tobias explained. “She used him for whatever she wanted to use him for. If she wanted to use him as a ride somewhere, she used him as a ride. If she wanted to use him as someone to cry on, she used him for that. If she wanted him to beat up someone, she had Cory beat someone up.”

As they became closer, the relationship with Sarah defined who Cory became. Some said he liked the idea that she was “in control” of his life and told him what to do. He needed that sort of direction. Cory had come from a broken home in which his mother had left the household. That’s a very important factor in how his life was shaping up with Sarah, who quite possibly picked up on this lack of femininity in Cory’s everyday life and filled that role, knowingly or not.

At times, Cory wrote Sarah letters, telling her exactly how he felt. In one, he said he loved her:
I have since I first laid eyes on you.
Sarah was all he ever thought about. She was the only person, Cory wrote,
I [feel] I [can] speak my emotions [to]. . . .
He concluded by saying he would be there for Sarah in the same way, no matter what it was she needed.

That last line spoke to the manipulative temperament brewing inside of Sarah, giving her a considerable amount of power over Cory. Something she learned to coddle and experiment with—a switch she could turn on and off whenever she wanted.

Sarah liked the idea of being in charge—the leader of the pack. And this was how the relationship between her and Cory progressed. Every day Sarah began to feel more in control over Cory Gregory.

But then, Adrianne Reynolds walked onto the scene, nudging her way into Cory and Sarah’s lives.