Too Young to Kill (42 page)

During the summer of 2006, an announcement came that Nate Gaudet, after pleading guilty to one count of “concealing a homicidal death,” had been sentenced “up to five years” and was serving his time at the Illinois Youth Center in Harrisburg, Illinois.

Nate was punished as a juvenile in exchange for his testimony against Sarah Kolb. The way he was sentenced would, theoretically, give Nate the chance at parole before his twentieth birthday. But nobody believed that would ever happen, considering what Nate had done.

“I was appalled,” Tony Reynolds said. “That boy cut up my little girl and got away with it.”

About six weeks after he pleaded guilty, Cory Gregory had a change of heart. Sarah Kolb’s sentencing hearing was coming up. Now, as the first week of August fell on the QC, Cory decided he wanted to take back his guilty plea and take his case to jury trial.

His lawyer filed the appropriate motion. In it, Cory’s lawyer said it was the sentencing that changed his client’s mind—that forty-five years, which could have been in the neighborhood of twenty, was inconsistent
with the defendant’s history of peace and tranquility.

Further into the motion, Cory stated that because he had been poorly educated and had very little “command” over the English language, he did not fully understand that his conduct resulted in first-degree murder charges. He also said he felt threatened to take the deal—that if he didn’t, he was staring down the barrel of much more time. He said he believed if he gave investigators a confession and told the SA’s office what had happened, he was trading that information for a lighter sentence, under the impression that forty-five years was the cap.

Cory called the judge’s sentence
excessive and inappropriate.

A local reporter called Jo Reynolds at work and asked her for a comment. Had Jo and Tony heard that Cory wanted to take his case to trial and take back his original plea?

“What?”

The reporter explained.

“That son of a bitch. He held the belt!”

The end of August came and Sarah Kolb was in Judge James Teros’s court once again to receive her sentence. This was Sarah’s chance to plead for herself and ask the judge to take into consideration all that had gone on (or wrong) in her life.

Sarah put on witnesses and spoke to the court by way of a prepared statement. At one point, she read,
“I was so good at not feeling that I felt no feeling as [Adrianne] died.”
This after comparing her situation in life to Adrianne Reynolds’s, making the claim that neither she nor Adrianne was wanted by many of the adults around them throughout their lives.

“If I really could have one wish,”
Sarah said,
“it would be to change the mistakes I’ve made.... Nobody else seemed to care,”
Sarah added, her voice cracking,
“what I was doing. I think it rubbed off on me. I know I could’ve done more to stop what happened.”

During the testimony portion of the hearing, Sarah’s defense presented three witnesses, the most powerful being Sarah’s sister, whom Sarah looked up to. Sarah’s sibling told the court Sarah was “an abused child who was punished inappropriately.”

No details were given.

Tony Reynolds took the witness stand and spoke for his daughter. In tears, Tony said, “Adrianne came into this world kicking and crying. She left the same way.”

Dressed in blue jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt, Sarah sat at the table in front of Tony and cried as he explained what his daughter meant to him.

Then the judge spoke.

Teros wasn’t buying any of Sarah’s nonsense. He talked of his disbelief that Sarah had been abused. She had provided no evidence of the fact other than crocodile tears and hollow words. He also said, which shocked some in the room, that Sarah possessed a “dark side” and he was convinced that she was capable of “killing again if she became angry.” He classified Adrianne’s murder as a deed done by two teenagers “for nothing,” adding at one point, “
But
for you, Miss Kolb, this murder doesn’t occur,” being sure to point out then how he thought Cory Gregory was just as responsible. Either teen, Teros made clear, could have stopped this senseless act of violence.

Sarah shed more tears as Teros handed down a sentence of fifty-three years: broken down, the judge gave her forty-eight years for committing the homicide, along with an additional five for concealing it. The max he could have given the Milan teen was sixty for the murder alone.

After the sentencing, Jeff Terronez was outside giving reporters one more grab for the nightly news, saying the case, in its entirety, was “replete with evil.”

SA Terronez then pointed out something he felt had been missing from the proceeding, telling everyone that he was “not surprised” to hear Sarah offer no apology to the Reynolds family for killing their child.

Judge Walter Braud allowed Cory Gregory his day in court—but not in the form of a full-fledged trial. That motion Cory had filed deserved a hearing. Here was Cory’s chance to plead his case.

Cory took to the witness stand as Judge Braud listened. The teen said his “mind was clouded by drugs, alcohol, and depression” during that time when he “allowed” his attorneys to “convince him to plead guilty.”

This opened up the opportunity for Cory to bring the court into what he classified as his tortured life of drug and alcohol abuse. Cory said he started drinking alcohol at the ripe age of fourteen, and he graduated to “a half gallon of whiskey or vodka every weekend” by the time November 2004 through January 2005 came.

Further along, Cory stated that after he started “smoking marijuana in 2003,” at the peak of his use, he claimed to have gone through a “half ounce a day.” Ecstasy was something he and friends used on “a weekly basis.” Cocaine was a drug he had tried, he said, about “twenty to twenty-five times” from the age of fourteen until his arrest.

When asked about the plea deal itself, Cory responded, “I didn’t feel like I had much of an option, really. I just assumed my lawyers were looking out for me.”

The blame game.

In truth, Cory sounded like a gambler who had purchased the wrong lottery numbers and was now complaining to the state that he should have looked at his tickets before leaving the window.

Rock Island County Circuit judge Walter Braud had a look of
are you done now?
on his face after Cory finished testifying on his own behalf.

SA Jeff Terronez put on a good argument, focusing on the fact that Cory had plenty of sobriety time in jail before making his plea. There were no drugs or booze clouding his mind—just plain old-fashioned reluctance.

Braud called Cory’s testimony and motion to withdraw his plea “buyer’s remorse,” adding quite sharply, “At this sale, you can’t take it back!”

The motion was denied.

Jo cried out facetiously as Cory was escorted out of the courtroom, saying, “Boo-hoo. Boo-hoo.”

Teresa Gregory shouted from her seat over Jo’s words, “Love you, buddy.”

Tony Reynolds put it all into perspective later when asked about all the posttrial nonsense, saying, “It really doesn’t make any difference what they do. Adrianne is still not coming home.”

79

Tony liked to take a three-mile jog every morning. The run kept the aging trucker in shape. Made him feel good—as good as good would get, that is—throughout his day. Since the months after Adrianne’s death, Tony had wanted to purchase a special vanity license plate from the DMV:
LIL BIT
. It was a way of putting a reminder of Adrianne on his truck that he would see every day.

After calling the DMV and asking about the tag, he was told it had been taken, and there wasn’t any version of
LIL BIT
available to him at this point.

Tony’s heart sank. This one thing. So much had happened. He felt guilty in so many different ways. He just wanted to honor his daughter.

After the legalities surrounding Adrianne’s murder concluded—there would be appeals, but they would take time—Tony got back into the swing of his routine, which included that morning run.

He usually took off somewhere near 4:30 or 5:00
A.M.
He liked the quiet and dark tranquillity of early morning when no one was around.

One morning, after stretching in the driveway and taking off down the street, Tony came around a corner near his house and stopped abruptly in his tracks.

There it was.

LIL BIT
.

Right in front of him.

Sitting on the ground near his house, the same vanity license plate that Tony had wanted to purchase.

Bizarre coincidence?

“That was Adrianne,” Tony said later, his voice scratchy with emotion, “telling me she was okay.”

Adrianne Reynolds hadn’t dated the poem, but the underlying message she wanted to convey was unmistakably prophetic—an eerie portend of her life. Adrianne felt an end was near. She knew, in some strange way, her time on the planet was limited.

She titled the poem “Welcome to My Life.”

Although she didn’t date it, it was not hard to tell that Adrianne wrote this near the time of her death, when those around her—the people she believed to be friends—had turned their backs on her and she couldn’t understand why.

A painful life to be broken,
but will never be.
I scream in agony for someone
to be there for me.
Is there a reply?
No!
Wanting to unleash the demon
inside just won’t work for anyone
but me.
I cry, but no one hears me,
which makes me burn inside.
I feel and keep reaching, far,
but there is nothing.
Nothing but blackness and
raging death.
Awaiting me is the fire
of screaming agony.
There I find “myself” screaming also,
but is someone there to hear me?
No!
I’m ignored by my dark Angel because he
has forgotten and left me screaming
in the burning pits of hell!!!

If there was one thing about Adrianne Reynolds no one could deny, it was how closely in touch this young girl was with her feelings. Adrianne wanted nothing more than to be loved. Doodling one day at work, Adrianne sketched the opposite side of her shattered life’s coin on a guest check, one of those light-green-and-white pads greasy spoon waitresses use to take orders. She titled it “My Perfect Life.” It was her way of dreaming out loud. There was darkness, sure, but light, too. Adrianne could see it off in the distance.

And she wanted it.

On the top of the green ticket, she wrote the name of the guy she dreamt about, a kid back in Texas she had fallen in love with and, presumably, lost her virginity to. This was the man she saw herself having children with someday.

Her dream car was a Benz.

Her favorite color was red. (Not pink, as so many had said.)

Her job? Singer.

Kids’ names: Michael David, Erica May, Kiara Rachelle.

Adrianne wanted three kids. That was it.

As for money,
Doesn’t matter,
she wrote,
as long as we’re not poor.

She saw herself living in a house or a mansion.

But that didn’t matter, either.

As long as I have my family and the one I love.

EPILOGUE

This case was one I truly wished did not have to be written. This murder, more than some of the others I have covered, seemed senseless and tragic in so many ways. They all do, of course. But this case had a particular heartbreaking quietness about it that grew on me as I entered each stage of Adrianne Reynolds’s life, and stayed with me every day I worked on it. I kept a photo of Adrianne close by. I wish I had known her.

The path of Adrianne’s life was predictable in its aftermath. Her killers were despicable and heartless. Sarah Kolb refused to allow others to infringe upon her “Kool-Aid” (whatever the flavor of the moment was), and it angered the teen to the point of murder. Cory Gregory, on the other hand, not only showed how cold and careless he was for not stopping the fight in Sarah’s car, which escalated into murder, but also by participating in it. What made Cory much more selfish and heartless, in my professional opinion, was the fact that he befriended Adrianne in those days before her murder. It seemed to me, if I didn’t know better, that Cory and Sarah had talked about Cory befriending Adrianne so they could, at the very least, get her into Sarah’s car and beat her up—if not carry out a premeditated plan to kill her.

And for what?

Jealousy?

Revenge?

I don’t buy it.

The outrage the Reynolds family felt continued long after Cory Gregory and Sarah Kolb were sentenced. Nate Gaudet was being denied parole by the board year after year. Yet, in November 2008, on his twentieth birthday, Nate was released.