Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  That’s a lot of kids—no matter how you add it up.

  Yet most of these children have left home by their own accord.

  Now, here is where the statistics get interesting. Of those nearly 800,000 reported missing kids, 203,900—a little over a quarter—are said to have been victims of family abductions; 58,200 of those are victims of non-family abductions (meaning neighbors, friends, acquaintances, strangers). But here’s the shocker: 115 children are victims of what the Department of Justice refers to as “stereotypical” kidnappings, a snatch and grab by someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child fifty miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently, the DOJ reports state.

  In other words, that pedophile in the park, the one all parents fear will snatch their kid out of thin air and do God knows what to him or her, is a rare culprit.

  So, based solely on the numbers, there was a good chance Jo and Tony should have considered that Adrianne—had she been abducted—would have been taken by someone she knew. Or, as the data seemed to bear out, it was a good bet that Adrianne had left home on her own accord.

  By late afternoon, Saturday, January 22, 2005, Jo and Tony hit the local airwaves pleading for Adrianne’s return.

  “We seriously thought—and firmly believed at that moment—she was hiding out at a friend’s house,” Jo said.

  Family and friends printed flyers. Adrianne’s photo—her sad brown eyes, a stray bang floating down off to the right side of her blemish-free face, her long, bulky signature earrings easily noticeable—was positioned front and center, the largest item on the flyer. Jo and Tony, along with Justin and Joshua, their spouses, Brooke and Kristen, Adrianne’s friends from the YMCA and neighborhood, along with cousins and other relatives, tacked flyers up wherever they could, passed hundreds of them out to passing motorists, and hoped for the best. One important location was on the drive-through window of the Checkers restaurant where Adrianne had worked. Tony had never thought he’d see the day, but there was his Lil’ Bit’s photo, the word “missing” scrawled in large font across the top, a description of her below, posted on the window where she worked.

  Adrianne Reynolds was now one of those numbers—every parent’s nightmare.

  Jo’s niece was also deeply affected. She drew a photo of herself staring at a telephone pole with one of those missing person flyers tacked at eye level, an arrow pointing to the child and the rock she stood on to step up and look at the flyer. It was more of a note to Adrianne, written by the innocent mind of a seven-year-old. I miss you, it said. I miss you very much. She pleaded for Adrianne to come back home . . .

  For we all miss you.

  The late edition of the local paper on Saturday night printed a brief article that would run again in the morning. It displayed the same photo under the banner headline: SEARCH FOR MISSING E.M. GIRL EXPANDS.

  Looking at that, Tony felt his heart race. The situation was becoming more unwelcoming as each hour passed.

  For the first time, a description of Adrianne was published. But it wasn’t the publication of her features that led police to believe they were dealing with a runaway—it was a line in the article that suggested Adrianne had taken off. The second-to-last paragraph, after describing what Adrianne might be wearing, said: She may have been carrying a backpack.

  This one implication, allegedly given to the newspaper by a source inside the police department, suggested to law enforcement that Adrianne was a runaway. Why else would she be carrying a backpack?

  To Tony and Jo, however, that nagging feeling, turning more dire in the pit of their stomachs, was becoming a thing of its own, too strong not to notice. The more time that went by without a call or indication from Adrianne that she was okay, Tony felt, the better the chances were that Adrianne had met up with trouble. And if there was one thing about Adrianne, it was that trouble for her could include any number of things—all of which spelled disaster.

  9

  Adrianne’s sometimes friend Sarah Kolb was at work on Saturday afternoon, ushering at the Showcase Cinemas just across the Mississippi River, in Davenport, Iowa, when Jill Hiers drove boyfriend Nate Gaudet, Cory Gregory, and Sean McKittrick—Sarah’s “boyfriend” when she swung the pendulum toward the male persuasion—to a local Best Buy store to look around. It seemed they were all waiting for Sarah—their archetypal leader—to get out of work.

  As they walked into the store, under the blue-and-yellow Best Buy logo, Cory caught Jill off guard when he whispered in her ear, “I’m going to prison.... The cops won’t stop calling me. They are going to just come and get me.” Then he laughed. “They won’t stop calling me about Adrianne.” This was in response to the breaking news that Adrianne was considered officially a missing person. Police had called Cory’s house looking for her after hearing he was one of the last two people to see her.

  “What are you talkin’ about, Cory?” Jill asked.

  He put on a mock sad face: “Will you come visit me?”

  “Is it your fault that Adrianne is missing, Cory?” Jill asked. What in the world was Cory implying with this conversation? Jill knew Cory was off-the-wall and said some crazy stuff, but was he just toying with her?

  “No, [Jill]! But let’s keep it quiet.”

  Jill shot Cory a look of confusion and decided to heed his direction not to talk about it again, at least for the time being.

  At the Davenport, Iowa, Showcase Cinemas, Sarah clocked in for her 3:00 to 10:00 P.M. shift. Primarily, after punching in, Sarah spent as much time as she could hiding out and talking on her cell phone. At one point late into the evening, Sarah was talking to a coworker friend of hers, when another employee, a girl she knew from school, walked by and overheard part of the conversation.

  “Yeah,” Sarah bragged. “I beat her ass. Broke out four of her teeth.”

  Sarah was always talking about how tough she was, how big and badass she could be whenever she wanted. This time, she’d had a brawl, it appeared, with another girl, and was playing up the idea of how badly she’d whooped the girl’s butt.

  “Why did you get into the fight?” the employee asked. “What happened?”

  “Bitch was dipping in my Kool-Aid—and she knew the fucking flavor!” Sarah said.

  “No kidding?”

  “I have her blood and one tooth in my car,” Sarah said, never mentioning who she was talking about. Everyone knew it was Adrianne, however. “You know how I can get rid of the blood?” Sarah asked them.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said another kid, who had walked up and stepped into the conversation. “Ever see that CSI show? The cops will find it, even if you get rid of it.”

  “What happened?” someone else asked. A little crowd was gathering.

  Sarah enjoyed all the attention. It not only fed a low self-esteem problem she contended with, but made her feel as if she was fulfilling that role of leader she saw herself in.

  “After beating her ass,” Sarah continued, “I dropped the bitch off at McDonald’s and left.”

  A friend of Sarah’s had gone to the movies that night with his brother. They ran into Sarah on the way out. It was near the end of Sarah’s shift.

  “Hey,” he said, walking over.

  “I told Adrianne not to hang with us anymore,” Sarah said for no apparent reason, after catching up with the kid. He was from that group that Sarah, Cory, Nate, Sean, and the others hung around.

  “You did?” he asked. They all knew Sarah and Adrianne hadn’t been getting along for more than a month now, and Sarah was pissed off more recently because she believed Adrianne had made a play for Sarah’s place in the gang. Not to mention several other things Sarah didn’t have time to talk about at the moment.

  “Yeah . . . I got into a fight with her today in the car and it went into the McDonald’s parking lot. I just left the bitch there.”

  “Later,” the kid said.

  Sarah went back to wor
k.

  10

  Saturday evening turned solemn inside the Reynolds household, now considered to be ground zero, a residence full of people wanting to help any way they could. It was funny how when you needed people most, they came, Tony thought, standing around, looking at everyone, wondering where his Lil’ Bit had run off to. Inside, a fire burned, tearing Tony apart. He was unable to help Adrianne, perhaps when she needed him the most. Here was a big powerful guy like Tony taken down to his knees, wondering what had happened to his only child.

  Helpless—the worst feeling in the world for a parent.

  There was a negative undertone to all this public attention being focused on Adrianne’s disappearance. But what could he do? As a father, he had to involve the press. The worst part of it stemmed from the same dynamic playing out during any number of high-profile missing person cases that CNN and the other networks jumped on as soon as the first whiff of fresh blood emerged. The problem was that as the community rallied, friends and neighbors got together to help and posters went up, the news coverage picked up pace, and the missing child might decide to go deeper underground, for fear of now being the cause of such a massive manhunt. Publicity could work against a family in a situation like that.

  Definitely a God-fearing man, Tony could only hope and pray that this turned out to be the case; that Adrianne, scared and not wanting to cause any more trouble for her family, didn’t want to come out of hiding.

  Jo had gone into work on Saturday. She was a basket case, and they sent her home.

  “It was beginning to look like Adrianne was gone,” Jo recalled.

  Puff!

  No one could deny that feeling of absence. Adrianne was all about being the center of attention and making her presence known, wherever she was or whatever room she entered. Part of what she had wanted out of the therapy, Adrianne had told her doctor, was to learn “how to talk less.” Her life revolved around friends. The fact that no one had seen her since school on Friday was beginning to concern Tony and Jo more than an itchy feeling of her being a runaway.

  Just a week or so before she went missing, Adrianne had asked her father and Jo if she could spend the night at Sarah Kolb’s house. Adrianne said she wanted to go to a party with Sarah and then crash at Sarah’s after the party. She didn’t want to come home late and wake everyone up. It would be a lot easier to stay at Sarah’s.

  Tony said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

  Jo wasn’t that naïve. She piped in, “Oh no, she’s not!”

  Jo explained: “We didn’t know Sarah’s parents. It wasn’t that we didn’t trust Adrianne.” That was something Adrianne never really got. “But we never met Sarah’s parents. How would we know if Sarah was in the house at midnight?”

  Or at all, in fact.

  Tony agreed. He went and told Adrianne that she was to come home after the party, adding, “And make sure you’re home by midnight.”

  “Okay,” Adrianne said. Since being back in Illinois this second time, Adrianne knew better than to give Tony any lip. She understood that when Tony spoke, that was the final word. She was on borrowed time here, anyway, so why make matters worse?

  On the night of the party, Adrianne went out—and returned home by midnight.

  Staring out the window, thinking about that conversation, Tony quivered. That feeling was back, tugging at him. The silence . . . it was so unlike Adrianne.

  Where in the heck is she?

  During that Saturday afternoon, the EMPD had made contact with Sarah Kolb for what was the second time since Adrianne had gone missing, this after hearing from several people they had interviewed that Sarah was bragging about a fight she’d had with Adrianne earlier in the day on Friday. None of this information, however, was ever relayed to Jo and Tony. It wasn’t the right time. Cops don’t fill the family in on every single detail of an ongoing investigation. They like to keep their cards close. Just in case, of course, someone in the family is involved.

  “I’m calling because of Adrianne Reynolds,” the cop explained to Sarah. “She’s been missing and could be a runaway. Do you know where she is, Miss Kolb?”

  The EMPD was looking to resolve this case. It was dragging on. Was Adrianne a runway or not? The best place to uncover that fact was with her friends. Her closest allies. If no one else, Adrianne’s friends would know where she had run off to.

  “I dropped her off at McDonald’s on the Avenue of the Cities,” Sarah offered. “I wish I knew more because now I’m concerned.”

  “Contact us if you find anything out,” the cop told Sarah.

  “I will. You do the same.”

  Sarah was inside a friend’s van outside Showcase Cinemas after her shift ended, when she once again brought up that fight she said she’d had with Adrianne on Friday. Sarah said that a guy Adrianne knew was supposed to drive Adrianne home from school, but that he never showed up for class. So the chore fell on Sarah.

  She laughed. “Fucking Jiffy!”

  “Jiffy” was one of those terms Sarah used for a girl who, she later said, “spreads her legs easy, like peanut butter.” Sarah hated the idea that Adrianne slept around. Sarah despised easy girls, who she believed disrespected the female culture in general.

  “What happened?” the girl in the van asked.

  “Ah, she said something that upset me and it started a fight in my car. . . . She punched me. I punched her. Broke four of her teeth. I was choking her and then she started choking on her own teeth!” Sarah stopped then, she explained. “She spit her damn teeth out at Cory. He was in the car, too. There was blood all over my car, on my clothes. On Cory, too.”

  “Did she go inside [the restaurant] for help?”

  “We made up. I dropped her off at McDonald’s.”

  At some point on Saturday night, after Sarah got home from work, the EMPD made contact with her again. They had spoken to Cory Gregory earlier in the day, the cop said, and there were some differences—slight as they were—in the stories Sarah and Cory had told police. The EMPD needed to clear things up.

  Were Sarah and Cory covering for Adrianne? Making up a story so Adrianne could run off without being chased?

  It was after 10:00 P.M. when Officer Kevin N. Johnson called Sarah on her cell phone. Johnson wanted a complete description of the events that Friday—exactly what happened, when, where. He needed to fill out a report, get Sarah Kolb on record with her version of the story from the time they left school until she dropped Adrianne off at McDonald’s.

  “Okay,” Sarah explained without hesitating, taking a breath, as if to say, Here we go again. “I was driving to the Taco Bell in Moline. Sean [McKittrick], Cory, and Adrianne were in the car. I wanted one of those half-pound things at the Taco Bell . . . you know. I started arguing with Adrianne. She had told me that she was falling for Cory and that she had never met anyone like him.”

  “Okay. Continue.”

  “I mean, she barely even knew him. Cory wasn’t interested in her.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “He wasn’t saying anything. I made a reference that she was sleeping around with a lot of guys.... She called me a whore! I punched her. She punched me back.”

  “What about Sean?”

  “Sean got out of the car and started walking back toward Black Hawk Outreach in East Moline. Adrianne and I continued arguing. At some point, I told her I was taking her home.”

  Sarah went on to explain how she and Adrianne “made up on the way” to McDonald’s, a location where Adrianne had insisted she be dropped off. “She said something about her dad seeing Cory in the car and being upset that she was with a boy.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I dropped her off in the front parking lot of McDonald’s and drove around to the drive-through. When we left the drive-through, we did not see Adrianne again.”

  “We spoke to Cory,” Officer Johnson explained. “Why wouldn’t he tell us why you two were arguing? Or say anything about you two punching each other?”

  S
arah went quiet for a beat. Then: “I asked him to lie about it, since Adrianne is missing.” Sarah said she didn’t want any trouble. She and Adrianne fighting; Adrianne turning up missing; she and Cory dropping her off; the last two people to see her. . . . Two and two made four. Sarah didn’t want to be blamed for something she didn’t do. “I didn’t want anybody to know I was fighting with her just before she came up missing, you know.”

  “Tell me about Adrianne—what she was like?”

  Sarah had no trouble answering this question. “I’d estimate that she has slept with, oh, maybe about fifty guys in the time she moved back up here to East Moline. She constantly writes me notes about how bad her life is and everything she does. I was there one night when she took off and had sex with a guy.”

  “You remember his name?”

  “No. Adrianne didn’t even know his name. She’s disturbed and unstable. I know she went over to [a friend’s house] with Cory one day and she asked them about a threesome, but Cory wasn’t interested.”