Too Young to Kill (26 page)

Adrianne Reynolds was now a
this
and a
person.

Sarah had been on the verge of crying throughout the entire ordeal, Cory claimed. After she lit Adrianne on fire, Sarah walked over to where Cory sat and “laid her head on my shoulder.”

And then—according to Cory—Sarah broke down. Cory said he cried, too, but not outwardly, like Sarah. Tears, he explained, flowed down his cheeks in silence.

They both sat, staring, while at this human being in the distance—a sixteen-year-old girl whom they both had had a friendship with, a girl Cory had had sex with and Sarah was interested in dating—burned.

Sarah got up and walked over. Cory said he stayed behind.

“And then after a while,” Cory explained, “she, uh, and . . . well, she went and checked on her again. . . .”

Sarah stood over Adrianne.

“Fuck!”

The body still wouldn’t burn.

“What are we going to do?” Cory asked.

“Let’s go,” Sarah said, motioning toward her car.

Nate Gaudet worked a shift from 11:45
A.M.
to 6:00
P.M. ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 21, 2005. NATE HAD JUST GOTTEN THE JOB AT MD RACING, A MOTORCYCLE MECHANICAL SHOP IN OREGON, ILLINOIS. BY THE TIME SARAH AND CORY HEADED BACK TO HER HOUSE IN MILAN FROM THE BURN SITE, NATE WAS AT HIS GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE, GETTING READY FOR ANOTHER FRIDAY NIGHT OF BOOZE, CIGARETTES, DRUGS, AND FUN WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND, JILL HIERS.

Nate believed Cory and Sarah had a “closer” relationship than he and Cory did. Over the past few months, Nate had been with Cory and/or Sarah just about every day. Three weeks before Adrianne’s murder, when Sean McKittrick showed up in the picture, Sean became part of this daily crew. In the days before Adrianne was murdered, Nate had moved in with his grandparents; this happened after being evicted—along with everyone else—from the party house in Rock Island for not paying the rent.

Near nine or ten that Friday night, after two failed attempts to burn Adrianne Reynolds’s corpse, Cory and Sarah called on Nate for his help.

“What up?” Cory said.

“Hey . . . ,” Nate replied.

“What are you doin’?” Sarah asked, grabbing the phone from Cory, explaining that she and Cory were at her house in Milan, hanging out in her room.

“I’m—I’m copping,” Nate said. He was in the process of obtaining “some cocaine,” Nate later admitted in court. “And can drop by after I pick it up.”

“We’ll be at Cory’s,” Sarah said.

Nate told them he would be there around eleven.

Cory, Nate, and Sarah hooked up before midnight and snorted cocaine into the wee hours of Saturday morning, January 22, 2005. According to Nate, during that entire night of partying, neither Cory nor Sarah said anything about what had happened inside Sarah’s car and the attempts they had made to destroy evidence and get rid of Adrianne’s body. In fact, Nate Gaudet’s role in what was about to become the most gruesome homicide QC law enforcement had investigated in decades wouldn’t be set into motion until the following day.

51

Staying up most of the night to snort cocaine, smoke cigarettes and weed, trying to numb what was the reality of a horror show back at the Engle farm, Cory and Sarah fell asleep late that morning and woke up around two o’clock, Saturday afternoon.

Sarah had to work at the cinema at 3:00
P.M.
So they got up and drove to Sarah’s Milan house so she could get ready.

Reports were already beginning to filter into the community that Adrianne was missing. None of this deterred Sarah or Cory from their new plan. They still had a body to get rid of and evidence to destroy—if they were going to cover up their crimes.

And make no mistake what this was now about for Cory and Sarah: getting away with murder.

At some point, Sarah stopped and picked Nate Gaudet up at his grandmother’s house. The idea was for her to drop Nate and Cory off at Cory’s house, so they could hang out there until she got off work.

Nate sat in the backseat, behind Cory. Sarah drove.

She took a longer route, Nate later explained, not the normal, faster way.

Cory and Sarah had been looking at each other since picking Nate up. They had something they needed to share. Nate sensed it as she drove.

“Could you ever kill somebody?” Cory asked, according to Nate’s recollection.

“Yeah,
could
you?” Sarah added.

“I don’t know! What the fuck? . . . What are you two talking about?”

“What would you do if you ever saw a dead body?”

“What the . . . Did you guys go and kill somebody?”

There was a beat of silence.

“Yeah,” Sarah said. She looked at Cory. They could trust Nate.

“What?” Nate had a feeling they were serious. “Who?”

“Adrianne.”

“What? . . .”

Sarah continued, “I started hittin’ that bitch with my fists and Sean got out of the car . . . and walked back to school. Then I picked up my stick and started hitting her in the face. She punched me in the nose. Then Cory held her arms back while I choked her to death.”

Cory sat and said nothing, Nate later explained. He was listening, shaking his head in agreement with Sarah.

“What . . . where?” Nate asked.

“Taco Bell parking lot.”

According to what Sarah said to Nate in the car as they drove, the fight had started on a different note. “She said,” Nate later explained, “she asked Adrianne for a hug and I guess they started hugging, and then Sarah grabbed Adrianne by the back of her hair and said, ‘Don’t you ever come around Cory or Sean again.’ And then she started hitting her with her fists.” Sarah claimed Adrianne “broke her nose.” She also told Nate that when she choked Adrianne “blood came out of her mouth. . . .”

Both of these statements were likely added to enrich the drama and “toughness” of Sarah’s reputation. It is unlikely that Adrianne broke Sarah’s nose, simply because the bleeding stopped rather quickly and photographs of Sarah taken in the days after do not show any injuries to Sarah’s face consistent with a broken nose. Likewise, unless Cory and Sarah stabbed Adrianne, or beat her so badly with that stick that she developed internal injuries, there’s not a chance Adrianne had bled from her mouth while they choked her.

More shocking than any of this, however, was what Nate said next. He claimed that after Sarah was “done choking Adrianne, Cory grabbed a belt and wrapped it around Adrianne’s neck while Sarah drove. . . .”

Nate told a different version of what had happened at Big Island, implicating Cory even more. He said Sarah told him—again, with Cory in the car, nodding in agreement—that when she and Cory arrived at Big Island, Sarah parked, got out, went around to the passenger side of her vehicle, opened the door, and “Adrianne’s head flopped out” of the side of the car.

This scared Sarah, Nate noted.

So she had Cory grab Adrianne’s body and placed it in the trunk. (A scenario, incidentally, that makes more practical sense, seeing there was no way Sarah could handle picking up Adrianne’s body by herself.)

Throughout this conversation Nate had with Sarah and Cory inside Sarah’s car the day after Adrianne’s murder, Cory never butted in and changed any of the facts as they were being laid out by Sarah. Rather, Nate claimed, Cory
added
to the drama.

As Sarah drove, she said to Nate, “Listen, we’re going to pick you up tomorrow morning and drive out to Adrianne’s body.” Sarah said she had to work that day and night.

By now, they had arrived at Cory’s house. Sarah let them out.

Sean McKittrick (“the mooch,” Sarah called him) was at Cory’s house when they showed up.

After Sarah left, at Nate’s request, Jill arrived in her Ford Explorer.

They all went out that afternoon while Sarah was at work. Then Nate and Jill dropped Sean and Cory off back at Cory’s house.

Cory called Nate and Jill near 10:00
P.M.
: “I need a ride to the mall. . . .”

Jill and Nate picked Cory up and dropped him off.

Sarah got out of work. Cory was waiting for her.

By eleven, Sarah and Cory were back at Cory’s house, where they stayed and talked for a few hours.

“I’m going home,” Sarah said to Cory. “I’ll call you when I get there.” The implication was:
Don’t do anything on your own
.
Wait until I give the order.

Cory understood.

He waited.

Sarah called about a half hour later and told Cory she was home. She said they both needed to get some rest. They had a big day ahead of them on Sunday. With Nate’s help, Sarah explained, they were going to finish what they had started out at the farm.

Cory called Nate at ten the next morning, January 23, 2005.

“We’ll be there soon.”

Nate said he’d be ready.

Just before noon, Sarah and Cory arrived at Nate’s grandmother’s house to pick him up and head out to Millersburg.

As Nate stepped into Sarah’s car, she stopped him. “Hey, grab a saw,” Sarah said.

Nate said, “What?”

Cory added, “A saw, man. Get a saw.”

By now, Nate knew why he needed that saw. In his testimony, Nate explained how they had briefed him about the plan to dismember Adrianne’s body and literally spread it around the state of Illinois so authorities wouldn’t identify or find the body parts.

The saw was “for Adrianne Reynolds, to dispose of her body,” Nate told the court.

This part of the plan was all Sarah Kolb’s idea, Nate insisted.

“Hold on,” Nate said to Cory and Sarah. He walked back into his grandmother’s house (as Nate’s grandma watched from a window), went down into the basement (“the furnace room”), and found a hacksaw that one might use to cut wood or metal. Some call it a box saw, or miter, one of those rectangular-shaped saws with fine teeth used in finishing woodworking.

Before stepping back out of the house with the saw in his backpack, Nate went into his room and put on a long, ankle-length black trench coat. He wore gloves—those black leather driving gloves with the fingertips cut off. The gloves were a Juggalo thing.

The drive out to the farm took an hour. During the ride, Cory and Sarah “restated,” Nate recalled, just about everything they had the previous day, going through the plan all over again.

At the farm, Sarah pulled over and parked.

“Right there . . . ,” she said, looking out the windshield, pointing.

That was the spot where Adrianne Reynolds’s body lay in wait for Nate Gaudet and his hacksaw.

52

Sarah Kolb and Cory Gregory got out of Sarah’s Prizm and walked into the wooded area where Adrianne’s body had been burned on two previous occasions.

Dressed all in black, including a black winter wool cap, Nate Gaudet followed.

Their shoes crunched against the hard, snow-covered ground. It had actually snowed fairly heavily on Saturday, the previous day, and there was a solid covering of the white stuff, a top layer of which had hardened like two-day-old frosting on a cake.

Sarah had covered Adrianne’s body that Friday night before they left. There was a ravine just beyond the path they had walked up, Nate remembered, where Adrianne’s body lay, waiting.

Cory walked over to the narrow passage and removed the brush Sarah had used to cover Adrianne’s charred remains.

Nate stood at the top of the ravine. He looked down at both of them removing the sticks and brush.

“Come on,” one of them yelled up to Nate, who ran down the slight hill, then stood by Cory and Sarah. They noticed “a gardening tool” Nate had with him. He found it inside Sarah’s car. She had grabbed it from her house. (“It was a wooden stick with a metal claw on the end of it,” Nate said. “Shovel length.”)

“Shit . . . I should have grabbed her necklace . . . before I burned her,” Sarah said as she looked down at Adrianne’s head, still attached to her body, despite most of the skin burned away.

Nate didn’t need to be asked. He knew why he was there and what to do. It was the only reason they had called him. Nate had a reputation for wading in the dark side. Some claimed he liked to maim and hurt animals, cut them up, in his younger years.

Nate bent down on one knee, took the saw in hand. The way he described what he did next sounded as if he was talking about a television show he had seen. While on bended knee, Nate said, “I started cutting her head off. . . .”

As Adrianne’s necklace fell off her headless corpse and broke into pieces, Sarah reached down, picked it up and put it in her pocket.

Nate Gaudet cut Adrianne’s head off, he said, “because Sarah wanted me to cut the body in pieces.”

It appeared that Sarah had some sort of strange power over Nate. Note the choice of language: “the body.” This is one way people who commit such savagery trivialize the act and take the human aspect out of what is heinous behavior. In using such a common choice of words—Cory and Sarah would later use the same type of references—it distances one from what he has done.

In truth, Nate didn’t have to be told. After cutting Adrianne’s head from her body, he moved down to Adrianne’s arms, later describing this as matter-of-factly as one could describe it: “I cut the arms off.”

As Nate went from one arm to the next, Cory opened a black garbage bag they had brought with them and placed Adrianne’s head inside the bag.

Sarah Kolb stood and watched all of this, Nate said, but she refused to touch any of Adrianne’s body parts.

When Nate finished with Adrianne’s arms, Cory walked over, picked them up, and placed them inside the same bag.

Nate moved onto Adrianne’s legs. After cutting off both limbs, for reasons that he could not later explain, Nate cut Adrianne’s torso in half, he said, “under the ribs.”

The reason why Sarah wanted Adrianne cut into pieces was twofold: Most important, so they could hide her teeth in fear of being identified by dental records, and to place her body parts in various locations around the QC so authorities would never find her.

“If we put [her] in different places, she will be harder to find,” Sarah said as Nate and Cory finished.