Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

A couple of days after that telephone conversation, Adrianne arrived in East Moline, Illinois, on schedule, for a second time in a little over a year.

  It was the fall of 2004. She was sixteen. Within three months, Adrianne Reynolds would turn up missing.

  16

  Sarah Kolb’s mother called the EMPD at some point during the first four days of Adrianne’s disappearance. Kathryn “Kathy” Klauer knew the cops had been asking her daughter questions, and Sarah had been the last person, along with Cory Gregory, to be with Adrianne.

  Kathryn told police she had some information to share.

  She didn’t say from whom, but the information she had been given was that Adrianne “was supposedly going to babysit . . . sometime this past week [end].”

  Which, by itself, didn’t seem so suspicious.

  “But what was odd,” Kathryn Klauer relayed to cops, “was that the male [she was doing the babysitting job for] is twenty-six years old. . . .”

  Ten years Adrianne’s senior. Enough to worry any parent.

  Cops already had heard that Adrianne had a “crush” on this same guy, with whom she worked at Checkers.

  Could they have run away together?

  The EMPD called the AirTran airways at Quad City International Airport. Adrianne had flown AirTran in the past. They wanted to see if that guy (or Adrianne) had taken a flight via AirTran at any time recently.

  “Last time she flew with us,” a ticket manager said, “was in the fall of 2003. She flew from Dallas to Moline.”

  After calling additional airlines, it was clear that if Adrianne had flown out of the QC alone or with the guy at Checkers she’d had a crush on, she had not left from Quad City International Airport.

  Another lead.

  Another dead end.

  17

  The EMPD located three boys Adrianne had had close contact with over the past month. The idea was that any one of them could have helped her run away. Without money, a change of clothes, or a ride, Adrianne would have needed help. As much as Tony and Jo didn’t want to think she had taken off, there was still the possibility that Adrianne had disappeared because that was what she wanted to do.

  “I have not seen or heard from her,” said one male student, a kid from school Adrianne hung around with frequently.

  “Harboring a runaway,” the cop warned, “is a crime.”

  The boy said he understood.

  Another friend said he had not seen or spoken to Adrianne in two weeks, adding, “She does like to fool around, though. Party a lot. Use drugs.”

  “That all?”

  “She has problems with depression.”

  Finally they got ahold of that twenty-six-year-old guy Adrianne had worked with at Checkers—the man she supposedly had a crush on.

  “Sure,” he said, “she was supposed to babysit for my kids.” He explained that Adrianne was scheduled to watch the kids on that Saturday, the day after she went missing. “I have not seen or heard from her lately, however.”

  And so whatever stone the EMPD turned over, it appeared another obstacle or unanswered question rose from out of the dirt. As much as the EMPD was in need of leads, however, and still asking questions of many people, a blurry picture of what had happened to Adrianne Reynolds was slowly coming into focus.

  Late Sunday evening, January 23, 2004, Nate Gaudet called Jill Hiers.

  “Pick me up,” Nate said to his girlfriend. “I’m at Cory’s.”

  Jill said she couldn’t.

  During several phone calls, Nate pleaded, “I need a ride!”

  He sounded desperate.

  Jill got a feeling something was up.

  After she pulled up to Cory’s house, Jill watched Nate walk out. He was wearing that trench coat and carrying a black-and-red book bag. He looked withdrawn. Out of it. Depressed. Solemn.

  In another world.

  Nate placed the book bag in the backseat and told Jill to drive.

  “Take me to my grandmother’s house,” Nate explained on the way. Nate’s grandparents’ house was out in the country. He lived there, when he wasn’t staying at the party house in Rock Island.

  When they got to the house, Nate told Jill to wait downstairs in the kitchen for him after they walked in. He needed to do something in the basement.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Nate grabbed the book bag and headed toward the house.

  Jill followed.

  When they arrived at the back door, Nate let Jill enter first.

  Inside, Nate headed down into the basement, reminding Jill one more time to wait.

  Inside the kitchen, just off to the left of the back door, Nate’s mother and grandmother sat at the kitchen table with Nate’s ten-year-old sister and played Scrabble.

  Jill walked over.

  When Nate returned, he stood next to his girlfriend.

  “You two want to play?” Nate’s mother asked them.

  “No,” they both said.

  “I hate those things,” Nate’s mother said, pointing out Nate’s strange and scary contact lenses.

  Jill said, “I know—me, too.”

  Nate took off into his room without saying anything more.

  Jill leaned down and whispered into Nate’s mother’s ear: “He’s high.”

  Then she walked into Nate’s bedroom.

  What in the heck was going on with Nate all of a sudden? Jill wondered. What was he up to? He had been acting strange all weekend, Jill noticed. They had been fighting more than usual.

  Nate was on the bed. He appeared to be crying, Jill realized.

  “What the fuck is going on?” she asked.

  Nate wouldn’t say.

  “He just became very emotional,” Jill later told police.

  The EMPD called Carolyn Franco, down in Texas, on Monday morning. They wanted to know if she had any news to share, or if she could shed some light on the situation.

  “I haven’t seen or heard from her,” Carolyn said. “Something must have happened to Adrianne. . . .”

  “What would make you say that?”

  Carolyn reiterated what Tony had been saying all along: Adrianne had never picked up her paycheck. She had no clothing with her. She would have never left home without a change of clothes. And certainly not without her paycheck. Adrianne knew the value of money on the streets.

  “Anything else?”

  “Adrianne had a drug/alcohol problem when she was twelve,” Carolyn said. “She was unhappy in Illinois. That I know.”

  What Tony and Jo were not being told—as Monday evening, January 24, 2005, fell over the Quad Cities—was that as much as the EMPD had kept quiet about what they were doing behind the scenes, they were working diligently and, together with the Illinois State Police (ISP), had started to make some progress.

  What was shaping up, however, was not the news Tony had wanted to hear.

  Jo called one of the officers she had been in contact with throughout the weekend. “Can you tell us anything?”

  “Yeah, we’re trying to get a search warrant for Sarah Kolb’s car, but the state’s attorney’s office won’t give it to us.”

  What? A search warrant for Sarah’s . . . ?

  This sent the butterflies in Jo’s stomach into a frenzy.

  Why a search warrant? What are they looking for?

  “Why?” Jo pressed.

  “Well, we know there was a fight in Sarah’s car.” According to Jo, the cop explained that they had interviewed Sean McKittrick, who had claimed to be Sarah’s boyfriend. He also said he was in the car with Adrianne, Sarah, and Cory Gregory on that early afternoon when Adrianne disappeared. Sean had reported that when Sarah and Adrianne started yelling back and forth and fighting, he got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked back to school.

  They had interviewed every McDonald’s employee working on that Friday afternoon, and not one person had reported seeing Adrianne or Sarah’s red car. Not that any of them would recall such a thing all that easily, suffice it to say, as busy
as McDonald’s was on any given day. But if Adrianne had had her teeth knocked out and was bleeding, as Sarah herself had proclaimed, the theory was that she would have gone into the restaurant to clean up before walking home. Or risk waltzing into her house with blood all over her face and several teeth missing.

  Tony had also heard—which he had passed along to the EMPD earlier—that Sarah and Cory had devised some “plan on being nice to Adrianne to get her into Sarah’s car.” The EMPD, in turn, had located the source of the information and interviewed the girl.

  Turned out she was a neighbor of Cory’s who sometimes hung around with the Juggalo crowd. She told police that Sean McKittrick had knocked on her door late Friday afternoon, January 21, and asked to come in. He appeared upset and pissed off. He explained how he had jumped out of Sarah’s car in a huff at the local Taco Bell because Sarah and Adrianne were fighting, and he kept telling them to stop, but neither would listen.

  “Sean told me,” the source further explained to police, “that Sarah and Cory tricked Adrianne into getting into Sarah’s car with them. They took her to the Taco Bell . . . [and] they argued . . . and Sarah grabbed Adrianne by the hair. Sean said he told her to stop it, but Sarah told him to get out if he didn’t like it. He called Sarah from my house to ask her if everything was okay. Sarah told him she and Adrianne had made up.”

  A detective found Sean. Spoke to him. He backed up what this new source claimed. Without being given any details, Sean told the same story, in fact.

  That night, just to be sure, the EMPD gave Sean a polygraph.

  Confusing matters, however, he failed part of it.

  The EMPD knew something was up—the Taco Bell/ McDonald’s story was not adding up. Investigators had a feeling Sarah was lying about a few things, which prompted the question: why would Sarah Kolb lie if she didn’t have anything to hide?

  On that afternoon, the EMPD was able to get Sarah, with her mother, to come into the EMPD station house for an interview. But there was someone else with them, a man whose presence put another spin on the investigation. Sarah Kolb was now lawyered up. His name, Bob Rillie.

  Why did Sarah Kolb need a lawyer?

  “We agree to this interview,” Rillie said, eyeing both investigators, “only if no questions are asked about the fight—or a direct question asking if Sarah killed Adrianne.”

  The detectives running the interview looked at each other.

  A video camera recorded the interview. Sarah sat and told the same story she had over the past few days, adding how she knew a girl who worked at McDonald’s and was there that day, and had also “possibly seen Adrianne enter the restaurant.”

  “Was Adrianne in good physical condition when she left your vehicle?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  “Would you consent to a polygraph?”

  Sarah and her mother waited a beat.

  Then they shook their heads.

  “No,” Sarah and her mother said at the same time.

  18

  Jo and Tony had no choice but to go to bed on Monday night without knowing where Adrianne was, or what might have happened to her.

  “At this point, we’re back to thinking she’s a runaway,” Jo explained.

  The Natalee Holloway syndrome: She’s alive. She’s dead.

  Alive.

  Dead.

  Adrianne’s parents had no idea how they were feeling anymore because they were numb. Each hour that passed brought with it another theory or thought. An impulse. An aha moment. Then more questions. Confusion. Finally . . . pain.

  It was maddening.

  On Tuesday morning, a day anyone connected to the case would not soon forget, Tony got up and went to work. Jo had Tuesdays off, as a normal course of her workweek.

  Not long after Tony left, the EMPD called the house.

  “Can you bring your computer down here?” an investigator asked Jo.

  Now they were getting somewhere. There was obviously a break.

  Jo got that sick feeling back in her stomach as the investigator explained how they needed to go through the computer and find out if there was any communication between Adrianne and Sarah at all over the past week, month, or before Christmas the previous year.

  Jo packaged the computer and drove it down to the police station. She and Tony had been “very strict” with Adrianne regarding use of the computer. “I didn’t allow her on the computer unless I was home.”

  Adrianne herself talked about this to her psychologist, saying she was watched so closely on the family PC, it got to the point where it wasn’t worth using it anymore. That said, however, as any parent knows, unless you stand over the shoulder of your child and watch every mouse click and tap of the keyboard, you could be standing in the same room while she “chats” with someone you don’t want her to be.

  Sarah Kolb, though, was not on that list of people Tony and Jo did not want Adrianne communicating with via the computer.

  “I didn’t allow her in the chat rooms,” Jo recalled.

  While she was down at the EMPD, Jo found out that the ISP had been called into the investigation on a more hands-on basis. This, of course, worried her. Things were damn serious if the state police were involved.

  “Can [the state police] go out and search Adrianne’s room?” a cop asked Jo. Two ISP detectives were ready to drive out to the house right away.

  Jo said, “Yes, of course.” She had that what’s going on? look about her face.

  “Ma’am, we’re looking for any connection or communication between Adrianne and Sarah.”

  Jo understood, but she wondered why.

  “We want you to know that Sarah and Cory are refusing to take a polygraph test.”

  The EMPD had reached out to Cory and asked him the same set of questions as they had Sarah—and they got, basically, the same answers.

  A lump developed in Jo’s throat. What is going on here? One of the questions that kept popping up in Jo’s mind as she heard that lie detector tests were being offered and refused became: Why aren’t they asking me and Tony to take a test? My boys? Neighbors? Known pedophiles?

  Must mean they know something they’re not telling.

  Jo got herself together and called Tony, but she gave him only certain details. Why worry the guy when he was two hundred miles from home. It would only cause unneeded stress.

  Smart move.

  With information coming in gradually, Jo felt Adrianne might not be coming home. Such a seesaw of emotions. Such a litany of situations to consider.

  Alive. Dead.

  To Jo, it still didn’t feel as if Adrianne was not ever going to come home. It was just that she was, well, gone. Like they had dropped her off at the airport and she had gotten on a plane and traveled. But had not reached her destination yet.

  Limbo.

  This was the beginning of that “closure” everyone involved in these types of situations will eventually talk about.

  Answers become imperative to one’s sanity. Without them, a parent is left in a state of perpetual grief and mourning. It’s like leaving a movie ten minutes before it’s over: You will wonder. You will ask yourself questions. You ultimately will write your own ending.

  The two detectives doing most of the footwork, Sergeants Timothy “Tim” Steines and Mike Britt, went over to interview Cory Gregory’s neighbor Clair O’Brien (pseudonym) on January 25, 2005, at 11:34 A.M. They figured Clair knew a lot more about the case than they had thought previously.

  While they were driving up to Clair’s house, who came walking out the door?

  None other than Cory Gregory himself.

  He was carrying a CD.

  “Cory,” one of the cops said, nodding. “How are you?”

  Cory appeared very nervous at the sight of both detectives as they greeted him, a report detailed.

  As Cory walked home, the detectives found Clair and she let them into her home. As they got settled inside the house, Clair’s doorbell rang.

  Was it Cory?


  Clair said, “Yeah?”

  “Are they cops, [Clair]?”

  “Yes.”

  Cory didn’t say anything more. He turned and walked back toward his house.

  Clair recalled exactly what she had told the other cops the previous night, adding that Sean McKittrick “had lived with Cory and was basically a homeless kid otherwise.”

  Which begged the question: was Sean more involved than he had let on?

  One of the things Sean had told Clair, which she explained in great detail to Steines and Britt, was that Sarah had become upset at Adrianne because she found out that Cory and Adrianne were “passing love notes.” Another piece of information Clair relayed—that had not been known until then—was that Cory’s father, Bert Gregory, had advised Cory not to have any additional contact with Sarah.

  They asked about Cory and what he was doing at her house before they arrived.

  “Strange,” Clair said. “He came over here to use my phone to call Sarah. Then he took it and went upstairs to talk privately.”

  “Why is that odd?”

  “He’s never done it before. They’ve never hid their conversations from me. I tried to ask him about what happened Friday . . . but he only told me the same story.”

  The fight . . . McDonald’s . . . the last time they saw Adrianne.

  Near lunchtime, ISP special agent Chad Brodersen, along with Special Agent Chris Endress, caught up with Brian Engle, Sarah Kolb’s grandfather, at the Treasure Hunt Antique Shop in Aledo, Illinois. Aledo is about an hour south of East Moline on Route 67. It’s a quiet ride through the country: farms, dirt roads, roadside diners, and vegetable stands. That sort of thing.

  Brian and his wife, Mary, owned a farm with some land in the same general region, and Sarah, along with her mother, made the drive out to visit them from time to time. In fact, Brian Engle said, Sarah was out at the farm on Friday night, January 21. But not with her mother. This time, she was with Cory Gregory, he said. But that was not the first time Brian had seen his granddaughter that day.

  It was somewhere between 4:50 and 5:00 P.M., Brian recalled, when he first ran into Sarah.