Too Young to Kill (8 page)

Sarah—the only friend of Nate’s who drove a red car.

“Your friends are here,” his grandmother said.

Nate’s grandmother watched from behind a curtain as Nate sat inside the car for “a couple of minutes.” There were two other males, the grandmother thought, sitting inside the car. One she knew to be Cory Gregory, she recalled to police.

They talked back and forth for a short time.

When Nate got out of the car, he walked back into the house, went down into the basement for a few moments, moved some things around, then went back out the door and got into the red car again.

A short moment later, the car pulled out of the driveway and drove away.

Nate’s grandmother called Nate’s mother. “He left with two other boys,” she said. It was easy enough to mistake Sarah Kolb for a boy. Many had done it.

“And? . . .”

“He was dressed in all black—pants, shirt, and a black beanie hat.”

Nate looked like a Black Panther. Ready to riot.

The other strange thing about Nate was that he was wearing contact lenses: black “with a white conclave or a X” for the irises.

Scary stuff.

“He’s still upset over a fight with [Jill] last night,” the grandmother concluded. She was worried about Nate and what he was up to. He and his girlfriend had gotten into it loudly the previous night. Nate was prone to depression. Things set him off.

“I’ll call him,” Nate’s mother said. “Try not to worry.”

An hour later, Nate’s mother reached her son on his cell phone. There was loud music playing in the background. She could hardly hear him.

“What are you doing? What is going on with you?”

Nate sounded upbeat. “We’re watching a music DVD at Cory’s house.” He never said who else was with him.

“Where are you going after you watch the DVD?”

That music was blaring now. What an annoyance.

“Probably go to the movies,” Nate said.

“Nate, are you going to be returning to your grandmother’s tonight? She’s worried about you.”

“Yes . . . yes.”

“Are you mad at them (his grandparents), Nate?” If anyone knew, Nate’s mother understood that he had a bad temper and it could get out of hand at times. “You need to control your temper better.”

They hung up.

Sarah Kolb had to work Sunday afternoon into the evening. She and a coworker were cleaning the bathrooms when Sarah, looking at herself in the mirror, said, “Someone called me ‘pizza face’ the other day.” She smiled at herself and looked at the skin on her cheeks and forehead, from side to side.

The coworker walked over and stared at Sarah. She noticed red blemishes all over Sarah’s face.

“It’s not acne,” Sarah said, moving closer to the mirror. “They’re scratches.”

The conversation ended there. Sarah never said how she got the scratches. Both girls went back to work.

Later that evening, Sarah and the same coworker went on break together. Sarah told the same story of going to Taco Bell with Adrianne, “the Mexican” (Sean McKittrick), as Sarah called him, and Cory, and how she and Adrianne got into a fight. And she knocked her teeth out, then dropped her off at McDonald’s.

“What was the fight about?” the girl asked.

Sarah thought about it. “She was dipping in my Kool-Aid. . . .”

“Adrianne will be at school tomorrow,” the coworker prophesized. She was certain of it.

Sarah didn’t respond.

Outside a while later, Sarah was smoking a cigarette by the Dumpster with another coworker. She talked about Adrianne and the fact that she was missing.

“Do the cops think you whacked her?” the coworker asked. It was Sarah’s tone, the way she described all the calls from the cops and how she was the last one to be with Adrianne.

Sarah shrugged. “I guess so.”

In the past, this same coworker later explained, Sarah had been open about her sexuality. One day, Sarah had said that “she had been with Adrianne” sexually, but Adrianne had “slept around too much” and Sarah became uninterested.

“Plus, she was with a guy I know—
and
she gave me chlamydia!” Sarah said. “I had to let her go after that. I didn’t want any part of that shit. I got more class than that.”

13

Sunday evening began on a low note for Jo and Tony Reynolds—as if things could get any worse. Tony called down to Texas to see if Adrianne’s mother had heard from her. Tony and Carolyn Franco, Adrianne’s biological mother, had been in close contact throughout the ordeal, but Tony was beginning to think that maybe Adrianne and her mom had gotten together and pulled one over on him—even though the scenario didn’t make much sense. Custody of Adrianne was never an issue in Tony’s life, for him or for Carolyn.

“They . . . handed sole custody over to us,” Tony said; though Carolyn later disagreed with Tony’s explanation.

The EMPD had checked with the local airlines, bus depots, trains, and any other way Adrianne could have skipped town via public transportation.

They found nothing.

The idea that Adrianne was hiding in Texas with Carolyn was ridiculous, Tony realized after thinking about it. He and Carolyn did not always see everything under the same light, but they got along enough to understand that doing something like this was equal to torture.

No way.

Tony had no other choice but to get up and go to work on Monday morning, January 24. He couldn’t give up. He needed that sense of normalcy in his life. If something happened, or Adrianne came home, Jo would call him.

Jo had other plans, however. She became more worried that Adrianne was in big trouble and unable to call or contact anyone.

“I was frantic. I just wanted to know that she was okay.”

Uneasy to the point where Jo picked up the Yellow Pages, riffled through while licking her fingertips, and, in desperation, called a psychic.

She asked the man to come over to the house. Jo had gone paranormal in the past. She called a psychic long ago and the woman, Jo claimed, had been spot-on with several of her “visions” (if you’ll allow that term).

“I
was
desperate.”

There was a knock not long after Jo made the call. She got up and opened the creaky door.

On her front steps stood an old, frail man, Jo recalled. “Creepy and short.” He had a scraggly, unkempt beard, a reserved look in his eyes. It was as if he knew something but didn’t want to divulge the information just yet.

Jo invited him in.

“Can I go into her room?” the self-proclaimed psychic said without much small talk.

Jo led the way.

The old man took off his fedora, held it in his hands, stared around the room, then walked slowly toward Adrianne’s bed. There was some indication that he was familiar with the case from reading about it in the newspapers and seeing some of the television coverage.

He gestured toward the bed, motioning that he wanted to sit down. Was it okay?

“Go ahead,” Jo offered, thinking,
What am I doing? . . . If Tony only knew.
She had never told her husband.

“Can I have something of hers?” the man asked in a gentle voice. “Something personal and dear to her heart.”

That was easy for Jo. One of Adrianne’s favorite things was her stuffed teddy bear. It was a shade of red, almost rust colored, black eyes, a pink bow around its neck, a half-moon black button nose. Adrianne adored the furry creature and rarely ever slept without it.

Jo picked up the bear, stared at it, a twist of pain in her gut, then handed it off.

The guy closed his eyes, massaged the teddy bear some, and seemed to be meditating, or, as he put it, calling upon his “gift.”

After a few moments, he said, “She’s alive.”

Then he opened his eyes. Stood.

Jo nearly broke down. It was like being underwater longer than your lungs could take, then coming up for that first burst of air.

Relief.

“I’m getting that she’s in somebody’s basement,” the man said.

“Oh my,” Jo responded. A smile. Then a quick flush of anguish and respite. “Thank you. Thank you.”

The man walked out of the room. That was all he had. He grabbed his jacket and hat, and headed for the door.

“How much do I owe you?” Jo asked as the psychic stepped over the threshold and onto the porch. He had never told Jo what he was going to charge.

“Don’t worry about it. No charge.”

And then he was gone.

Jo wanted to call Adrianne’s mother in Texas. She ran to the phone after the psychic drove away.

She explained to Carolyn what had just occurred inside the house, adding that the way the psychic had phrased his “visions” indicated that Adrianne was hiding out in someone’s basement. She wasn’t being held against her will. She was scared. Yes. She’d done something wrong. She didn’t want to come home.

Adrianne’s biological mother was speechless.

While Tony was driving on that Monday, he said he looked into every vehicle he passed. There were times when he was four hours away from home, but he still wanted to know that his angel wasn’t inside one of those cars he’d passed. It made for an excruciatingly painful, long day. He’d stop and call Jo periodically: “You hear anything?”

“No. Sorry, honey.”

There was another part of this drama playing out almost nine hundred miles south of East Moline, in Gregg County, Texas, where Adrianne had lived for most of her life with her biological mother and, at times, a stepfather.

Prosecutors in Gregg County, hearing now for the first time that Adrianne Reynolds, a juvenile they knew quite well, was missing,
instantly wondered,
said an article written by Barb Ickes, a
Quad-City Times
reporter,
if the teen’s parents in Longview, Texas, were somehow involved
in her disappearance.

From all reports, it appeared there was a lot about Adrianne’s life back home in Texas that Jo and Tony Reynolds had never heard about.

14

Adrianne was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, an industrial town mainly run by oil companies, in the deep south-central part of the state, nearly on the Louisiana border. It was 1988, the year George H. W. Bush was elected, taking over the Oval Office from Conservative superhero Ronald Reagan, and also a year that brought the opening of the Berlin Wall’s west end that November. Tony Reynolds was living in El Dorado. He had met the woman who would become Adrianne’s grandmother, Beverly, and they hit it off. At the time, Beverly had a teenage daughter, Carolyn, who was pregnant (with Adrianne). Tony didn’t have kids. They all lived together in the same house. After Adrianne was born, just a few weeks after Carolyn’s sixteenth birthday, Tony and his wife welcomed the baby into the home.

Soon it was decided that Tony and Beverly would adopt Adrianne from Carolyn, who was admittedly too young to take care of the child herself. Tony and Beverly were in their late twenties, ready to be parents, anyway.

When Adrianne was two months old, Carolyn signed over parental rights to Beverly and Tony, who was now Adrianne’s legal father.

“We all got along pretty good,” Tony said. “Eventually Carolyn met some guy, moved out, and went on with her life. Adrianne stayed with us. Bev and I done raised her from that point on.”

According to Carolyn, giving up Adrianne wasn’t something she did willingly, or as simply as Tony had explained it later.

“I had wanted to live out on my own,” Carolyn later told me. “It was supposed to be a temporary thing—that they (Tony and Beverly) were going to keep Adrianne until I could get on my feet. And things got kind of hard. They got attached. And didn’t want to let her go. But the adoption was done because Adrianne’s [biological] dad was trying to fight me for custody . . . and we were worried he would get custody.”

Tony turned thirty that October. He had just purchased his first house. He was manager of a tire company, a job he’d had for over a decade. He had a child. Things were going all right. Tony and Beverly enjoyed Adrianne. Life was not perfect, but it was getting better every day.

As time went on, however, problems between Tony and Beverly started. Then verbal fighting became the norm. Like many households, the center of their arguments was about finances. Tony felt Beverly wasn’t managing the family money the way he wanted. One day, he told Bev, “Look, if I cannot trust you with my money, I sure as heck can’t trust you with anything else!”

The disagreements between them continued, and silence replaced the trust a marriage needs to survive. “We parted ways,” Tony recalled. “She went hers. I done went mine.”

Beverly took Adrianne. (If you’re keeping score, this would be the second time Adrianne had had her young life racked by separation—and the kid was just about old enough to start talking.)

In the divorce decree, Tony was obligated to pay child support. Adrianne was three years old. It was 1992.

“Bev and I remained good friends, as far as being exes an’ all,” Tony explained. “I could still go over and see Adrianne anytime I wanted. In fact, I helped them get the house they moved into [there in El Dorado]. I never wanted to be mean.”

In 1995, shortly before Adrianne turned six, as she was getting ready to start school, Beverly took Adrianne and Carolyn and moved to Longview, Texas. Longview was a haul from Arkansas. For Tony, it was approximately a three-hour ride, or 160 miles due southwest. Beverly had family in Texas, where she was born and raised. Beverly’s parents, on the other hand, were still living in El Dorado. So Tony understood he would see Adrianne quite a bit as Bev and Adrianne returned to visit family and friends.

“They made trips back to El Dorado pretty regular,” Tony recalled, “and I made trips down to Texas.”

Adrianne’s biological mother, Carolyn, eventually met a man, got married, had another child, and “got her life back on track while they was in Texas,” Tony recalled.

Now she wanted Adrianne back.

“Me and my ex,” Tony said, “talked about it. Then decided, you know what, that might be the best thing for Adrianne.”

As Adrianne entered her formative years, Carolyn divorced her husband. This was the third blow to Adrianne’s view of what a healthy family unit should be. The idea of family life—up until this period, hard-wired into Adrianne’s fragile psyche—was that every couple of years you moved or someone left the home. It must have been devastating on her young mind. It seemed Adrianne’s idea of a family was constantly changing.