Too Young to Kill (28 page)

“Just by the way you are right now,” Katrina told him, “I know you . . . Cory. . . .”

“Okay.”

“Cory, I need to say this,” Katrina said before he left her house, putting a hypothetical situation to Cory in motion. “If there was one person in the world who knew where [your niece] was hiding out, and they wouldn’t tell
me,
how would that make all of us feel?”

Cory was close to his niece. Katrina wanted Cory to put himself in the position of Adrianne’s family and think about things from that perspective.

Hands in his pockets, head pointed toward the floor, Cory stared at the carpet.

“What do you mean?” Cory asked.

“Well, Cor, if she ran away or something happened to her, is it fair to me to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what happened?”

Perspective was the picture Katrina wanted to paint for her little brother. A common New Age way to articulate this, of which Dr. Wayne Dyer once said, is:
If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.
Katrina was saying,
Smarten up, kid, and tell the girl’s parents where she’s hiding out
.

Katrina later said she wasn’t thinking that Adrianne was dead; she believed Cory and Sarah had driven Adrianne out of town and helped her run away; and that they were now two scared kids who didn’t want to admit they were involved.

Cory broke down. Started crying. Sat on the couch.

The tears, Katrina recalled, came upon him and would not stop.

“Take me home . . . ,” Cory said. “I need to talk to Dad.”

Cory arrived at home and Sarah called. Now, though, Sarah had a different outlook. She said something that spooked Cory.

Sarah said her parents had hired her an attorney.

What had Sarah told them?

Cory went numb. He called a friend for a ride to his mother’s workplace.

He walked into Teresa Gregory’s office with his head hung low, hands in his pockets, his skin gray like concrete.

“What’s going on, Cory?” Teresa asked. She knew right away something was up. She had never seen him like this.

Cory looked up at a video camera in the corner of the office ceiling. “Is everything being recorded?”

“Come on,” Teresa said. “Let’s go outside and talk.”

“The girls got into a fight,” Cory explained. He lit a cigarette. Took a deep pull. Blew it out in relief. Then he talked about how Adrianne and Sarah fought inside Sarah’s car on the previous Friday, how Adrianne was now missing, and the fact that the cops were calling and asking him and Sarah questions.

“Listen, Cory, if you guys know where this girl is, you had
better
tell someone. Her parents are likely worried.”

There was a pause.

“Is she at the party house in Rock Island?” Teresa wondered. She knew about the house and its sordid past.

“No. We don’t even have the house anymore. Those guys got kicked out.”

“Where is she, Cory?”

“I don’t know. We dropped her off. . . .”

“Cory,
what’s
going on here?”

Cory paused. “Sarah and her parents are going to see a lawyer.”

That put a pit in Teresa’s stomach.

“
What
is going on, Cory? Why in the heck is she going to see a lawyer?”

Teresa’s son now paced in front of her. His head was bowed down again. He spoke softly, as though people were listening. At times, he looked in all directions as though someone was watching them.

Pure paranoia.

Teresa knew at this point something was drastically wrong—something beyond a runaway child. She could feel it. Teresa had been a mother many times over, and there was no mistaking that maternal instinct, screaming at her to ask more questions and find out the truth.

But Cory would not say anything.

“If you guys haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” Teresa said.

Teresa had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon. Cory left his mother’s workplace without saying much else. But after her doctor’s appointment, Teresa stopped at the Moline Police Department. She asked a cop at the desk what was going on with this missing child who was in the news.

He said Adrianne’s case was an East Moline PD investigation. They at the Moline PD had nothing to do with it.

So Teresa left there and started driving toward the EMPD. Along the way, Cory phoned her and said he needed a ride from a friend’s house. He was stranded there alone and wanted to go home.

Cory was at Sarah’s. She and her parents had taken off somewhere.

Teresa went to get him.

Inside the car, on the way back to Cory’s house, Teresa pressed her son again, demanding to know what in the world was going on. Now was not the time to hide anything. Teresa told her son she needed to know, so she could help him.

Cory would not tell her. Instead, “I spoke to Dad. He said I need to go see a lawyer.”

“Okay . . .,” Teresa answered, rolling her eyes, her heart ready to burst out of her chest.

When they got to Cory’s house, Teresa and Bert Gregory called a lawyer.

“We didn’t even know
why
we were calling a lawyer for him,” Teresa said later. “We didn’t know what he was so scared of.”

Cory still wasn’t talking.

They found a juvenile attorney out of the Yellow Pages and took Cory to see him, not knowing why.

The lawyer came out of the room after speaking privately with Cory and said, “I don’t handle this sort of thing.”

Teresa and Bert looked at each other.

“You’ll need to call a defense attorney,” the lawyer explained.

A chill shot through Teresa. The juvenile attorney gave them a name. They took Cory to see the guy right away.

After Cory and the lawyer talked, the lawyer came out and said, “What does he need me for?”

Bert and Teresa were confused.

“They’re going to question him about this missing girl,” Teresa said. “Cory’s nervous. Can you just be there for his rights?”

The attorney said sure.

The next morning, Tuesday, January 25, Teresa called the attorney. She was at work. She wanted to know that everything was okay with her son.

“Everything seems fine,” the lawyer said. “They (the police) are just questioning all the kids.... There’s nothing to worry about.”

56

Bert Gregory came home late Tuesday afternoon to find his son wearing a path in the carpet. The look on Cory’s face spoke loud and clear: he was expressionless; his skin tone white as paper; there were dark circles under his eyes. He had a surreal look about him, like a vampire. He was shaking. Sweating. Chain-smoking. Bert could not ever recall seeing his boy in such a state of fear and panic. Even on the previous afternoon, when they met with the attorneys. No. This was a different Cory Gregory. Whatever he wasn’t talking about was growing inside him like a virus, a cancer, eating away at any sanity the kid had left.

Funny, what guilt can do.

“What’s wrong?” Bert asked. Cory had stayed at his mother’s house the previous night. By this time, Cory’s parents had told him that he was not to return to school until the matter was resolved, and he was
not
to speak with Sarah.

Cory looked up at his dad.

Tears.

“Cory . . .
what’s
wrong?” Bert asked again.

He kept repeating this question.

Cory cried. His entire body shook. “I need to go talk to the police with my lawyer,” Cory said softly.

“Come on, Cory. What’s going on here?” Bert pressed.

Then Bert started to cry. He hugged his son.

Cory would not say anything more. So Bert called Teresa. He asked her to come to the house, and see if she could get Cory to open up about what was troubling him—why, in fact, he needed to speak with the police.

Teresa Gregory had seen her son on the previous Thursday (the day before Adrianne’s murder). Cory had stopped by Teresa’s work then. He was alone. Teresa, who knew the attachment Cory had with Sarah, asked where Sarah was and why she wasn’t with him.

Cory shrugged. “She’s mad at me, Mom.”

Teresa asked why.

“’Cause I went out with somebody she don’t like.”

Teresa was puzzled. She asked who her son was talking about.

“Just a girl from school.”

“Look, Cory,” Teresa said, “Sarah’s
not
your girlfriend. You can go out with any girl you want.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told her.”

“Who was it that you went out with?”

“Adrianne,” Cory said, and he explained who she was and a bit about what was going on between Adrianne and Sarah.

This was the first time Teresa Gregory had ever heard Adrianne’s name.

Teresa had not seen her son on that Friday, when he was with Sarah murdering Adrianne. This was strange, Teresa thought as the day came and went. Cory had always stopped by her work on Fridays. “That’s payday,” Teresa recalled. “He always wanted money. They all hit me up for money! Come on, if I didn’t see one of my kids on Fridays, I saw all four of them.”

It wasn’t until Saturday, January 22, that Teresa saw Cory next.

“Did you see what’s going on?” Cory said to his mother that Saturday. “The news is reporting about that missing East Moline girl. . . .”

Teresa said no, she had not heard anything about it. “What’s up, Cory?” She felt her son was trying to tell her something.

“Oh, she went to school with us,” Cory said. “Yeah, and . . . we all went out to lunch yesterday (Friday). Then Sarah and I skipped the rest of the day at school and went out to her grandmother’s for her grandma’s birthday.”

Teresa wondered why her son was telling her these things. Teresa asked him why he had skipped school.

“Oh, um . . . Sarah . . .,” Cory said, stumbling through his words. “Sarah, uh, she wanted to go see her grandmother. Her cell phone wouldn’t work out there, and um . . . when we got back, there was messages from Adrianne’s parents asking if we knew where Adrianne was, because they thought she ran away.”

Teresa wasn’t stupid. “Do you
know
where Adrianne is, Cory?”

“No, no . . . we dropped her off at home—well, a block from her house.”

On Sunday, Cory called his mother. “The cops keep calling me, Mom.”

“They are going to do an investigation, Cory. Do you
know
where the girl is at?”

“No,” Cory answered.

The police never called Teresa Gregory.

Like his ex-wife, Bert Gregory also was under the impression that Cory’s breakdown on Tuesday evening, January 25, was related to what had been going on with Adrianne: the fact that Tony Reynolds had been over to the house looking for Adrianne the previous Friday; and, on the same night, Cory had said something to Bert about Sarah and Adrianne getting into a fight inside Sarah’s car. Add to that the behavior Cory had displayed over the past two days, the lawyers, talk of going to see the police, and Bert Gregory and his ex-wife knew this was a very serious situation.

This was not some runaway kid Cory and his friends were hiding out.

“Did something happen to Adrianne inside that car?” Bert Gregory asked his son. There was a certain gravity in Bert’s inflection. He knew.

Cory nodded his head, indicating yes. He turned toward his mother. “Mom, I’m so sorry. I’m
so,
so sorry.”

Teresa’s heart fluttered, she later remarked. She and Bert knew their lives would never be the same.

“Did the girl get hurt in the car?” Bert asked.

Yes, Cory motioned, moving his head up and down, tears coming on.

“Did she get hurt bad, Cory?”

“Really, really a lot,” Cory answered.

“Cory, is she dead?”

Cory could tell that his dad wanted an answer.

He looked at his parents. Nodded yes one more time.

“Well,” Bert wanted to know, “where’s she at?”

Cory could not speak.

Bert Gregory called Katrina Gates, Cory’s half sister. “You need to get over here.... It’s all bad,” he said. Bert was crying.

“What’s going on, Dad?” Katrina asked.

“The girl . . . that girl . . . she’s not alive anymore!” Bert said.

Katrina could hear the pain, fear, guilt, not to mention frustration and confusion in her father’s voice.
How could these kids do this?

“He was just freaking out,” Katrina recalled.

Katrina didn’t remember driving from her house across town to her dad’s so she could be with her family. But Cory was there when she arrived.

“My dad was devastated and, like, on the floor bawling.”

“How could your brother get involved in something like this?” Bert kept saying out loud.

Cory was trembling like a junkie deprived of his poison. Sitting. Rocking back and forth. Then standing. Pacing. Staring at nothing.

“How? . . .” Bert repeated.

As late afternoon wound down, Cory lay in bed with his father. Katrina was nearby, kneeling on the floor. Cory and his dad were just staring at the wall, the ceiling, lost in thought. No one said anything.

Then Cory spoke: “Dad, I should have listened to you. You always told me . . . ‘It only takes one second to ruin your life.’ And now I’ve done ruined mine. I am going to prison for a long time.”

PART IV

“I DIDN’T MEAN TO KILL HER”

57

At 11:09
P.M.
on January 25, 2005, Cory Gregory stood in the parking lot of Black Hawk State Historic Site and stared down at the hood of the police car in front of him. Cory had his coat zipped all the way up, hands in his pockets, his shaved head exposed to the cold air. The officers with him, ISP agent Mike Scheckel and EMPD detective Brian Foltz, were part of a team, including several other investigators and a state police dog, all of whom were prepared to head into the dark and frigid night to uncover Adrianne Reynolds’s head and arms. Cory had sat at the EMPD station house and given investigators a narrative of what had transpired over the course of the past several days, minimizing his participation in the murder as much as he could manage. As of now, investigators had no idea Nate Gaudet was involved—better yet how.