Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Whatever, Kory thought at that moment. He wasn’t really interested in playing one of Sarah’s games, he later said.

  Then as Adrianne started to talk, Kory noticed something that interested him, and he perked up.

  “She had a Southern accent.”

  They talked; then everyone went back out into the living room.

  Nate Gaudet’s girlfriend, Jill Hiers, showed up at some point. Jill did not like Sarah all that much, she later told police, and thought Sarah was “creepy because she’s a lesbian.” Jill had no love for Cory, either, saying she believed him to be “disturbing.”

  “He had a lot of piercings,” Jill later explained. “He is very sexual and always talked about killing.”

  Jill was well aware that Sarah had brought Adrianne to the house to “test” her, as Jill later put it. “Sarah wanted to see how many guys in the house she could get Adrianne to sleep with. But we all knew Adrianne was looking to hook up with Sarah. Sarah was just interested in hurting someone. She was never interested in Adrianne, because she felt that Adrianne would cheat on her with boys.”

  While they were sitting around, Sarah, now feeling the Jack numbing her, got up and walked over to Jill.

  “Shut up!” Sarah said for no reason. “Don’t talk anymore!”

  Jill looked at her. “Sit down. . . .”

  Sarah sat next to Jill. She said, “Hey, watch Adrianne.” Adrianne was walking around the room, Jill later explained, “being the center of attention.” Sarah did not like this at all. Everyone was paying more attention to Adrianne, who seemed to suck it up.

  And this, Jill explained, “got Sarah very angry.”

  Later that same night, Nate Gaudet and Jill Hiers, who sometimes shared a room together at the party house, sat on Nate’s bed.

  Cory walked into the room.

  “How ’bout we pull a train on Adrianne?” Cory said. He laughed. “She’d probably be into it.” There was one instance earlier when Adrianne, someone in the group later said, walked around the room, pointed at each boy, and said, “I want to have sex with you, and with you, and with you. . . .”

  This enraged Sarah.

  “I’m serious,” Cory told Nate.

  Nate and Jill got up and left the room.

  Meanwhile, Adrianne sat next to Henry Orenstein in the living room.

  “I have a headache,” Adrianne said, leaning on Henry’s shoulder.

  The pain was intense. Throbbing.

  Henry had a room in the basement of the house. “Go down there,” he said, “and lay down. Chill out.”

  Adrianne waited for about an hour, but the headache wouldn’t go away.

  “I’m goin’ to lie down now,” she said.

  “Cool,” Henry responded. He took it as an indication, which Sarah had made clear earlier that night in the attic when they first met Adrianne, that Adrianne was going down into the bedroom to “get herself ready.” A wink-wink, in other words. An invitation for one of the guys in the house to go downstairs and have sex with her.

  It was understood throughout the house that although Sarah had brought Adrianne, and there might be some sort of a lesbian connection between the two of them, Sarah wanted to hook Adrianne up with Kory or Henry for the only purpose of seeing if Adrianne would have sex with either one, or both. Nothing more than that. Sarah later claimed that she did this only because Adrianne had made it clear to her that she wanted to “get laid.”

  Sarah didn’t quite see the visit to the house in the same way when she later explained it in court. She called it a meet-and-greet with the gang.

  “It was just to hang out, just to talk to everyone that was there,” Sarah said, playing down the entire night.

  Henry Orenstein realized Adrianne had been downstairs in his bedroom, trying to get rid of that headache, for about an hour. He looked at Kory. Nudged him.

  “Hey . . . there’s a CD downstairs in my room I want you to grab.” Henry explained which CD he wanted. “On the nightstand next to my bed.” He told Kory to hurry up. “Go get it now.”

  Kory didn’t take the hint. He went up and down the stairs three times.

  “Dude, I cannot find that CD,” he said.

  Everyone laughed.

  “What the fuck! Try looking in the bed,” Henry suggested. He smiled. Winked. “See if you see anything in the bed that interests you.”

  Sarah had been sitting, listening, watching this take place, everyone later agreed.

  Kory went back downstairs.

  “Umm, when I went back down there,” Kory later said, “and noticed that she was coming up the stairs, I kind of put it together what everyone was kind of trying to do.”

  This time, once that basement door closed behind Kory, he did not return right away. Everyone, including Sarah Kolb, sat in the living room, laughing and getting their drunk on, knowing what was going on in the basement.

  “When he went down there that last time, Adrianne was awake and . . . they took their thing from there,” Henry explained.

  While they were “doing it,” Cory Gregory walked down the stairs to share some news with Kory.

  “Your baby’s mom is here, Kory.”

  “Shit.”

  Adrianne and Kory were in the middle of having intercourse, but now it was over.

  Forced to finish, Adrianne came up the stairs and walked into the living room. Sarah, Cory, Henry Orenstein, and others were waiting.

  After explaining how she had just had sex with Kory, Adrianne said her curfew was almost up. She had to leave.

  Cory, Sarah, and Adrianne walked out of the house together.

  There was very little conversation on the way home about what had taken place at the party house, according to Sarah. But Sarah wasn’t happy about what had happened—Adrianne sleeping with Kory. It “upset” her, Sarah later claimed.

  She never mentioned anything about a test Adrianne might have failed.

  Still, everyone in the house on that night later testified that Sarah had, for one, instigated the sexual liaison between Kory and Adrianne; and two, she never showed any sign of being the least bit disturbed by it after it had taken place.

  After Cory Gregory returned to the party house later that same night, after he and Sarah dropped Adrianne off, he sat with Nate Gaudet and another girl who sometimes lived at the house. They talked. Cory often blurted out bizarre things for no reason.

  According to the girl who was there, “out of nowhere,” Cory said, “he’d like to kill Adrianne.”

  He never said how or why.

  Nate and the girl looked at him.

  “What?” Nate asked.

  “Why would you want to kill her, Cory?” the girl asked.

  “Why not?” Cory said. “I could get away with it, and no one would know.”

  What could they say?

  “I’d like to kill her, yeah,” Cory said again.

  Teresa Gregory’s second husband, Cory’s stepdad, owned a piece of property outside East Moline. The house had forty acres surrounding it, and at one time had been a working farm.

  Continuing talking to Nate and the girl, Cory concluded, “I’d burn her body and bury her remains on my mom’s farm. . . .”

  35

  Patricia Druckenmiller had been teaching at Black Hawk Outreach since August 2004. Sarah Kolb was one of Druckenmiller’s students, who later explained how there were a few different programs the kids could take at Black Hawk. One was on the ground floor, where Druckenmiller’s classroom was located. It was, more or less, a high-school completion program. There were ninth-grade through twelfth-grade classrooms and a GED program on the same floor. The upstairs classrooms were an extended variety, with older students and some bonus classes and additional GED programs.

  Sarah took what was called independent study, history, and English, to be exact, from Druckenmiller. Sarah was one of the first students Druckenmiller met after going to work at Black Hawk that year.

  During the first five minutes of every class, Druckenmille
r made the kids open their journals and do what she called “free writing.”

  “There was only one rule,” Druckenmiller had told her students. “You just have to keep your pencil moving, and really you shouldn’t do any editing or any looking back at it.... So the kids understood,” she added, “that I did not look at these, so they could write anything they wanted, and, you know, it was . . . They were not graded. . . .”

  This was one way to get their young minds moving, allowing them a place where they could express who they were, knowing that no one was going to judge them.

  Druckenmiller recalled how Sarah did not have to be pushed into completing this exercise every morning, as did many of the other children.

  “I remember not having to remind her.”

  At the end of the five-minute session, the journals were placed in a stack with the students’ notebooks, wherever the kid happened to be sitting. Each student had a “little drawer . . . assigned to him or her, and they would put their stuff in the drawer.”

  Each drawer had a name tag on the front.

  Keeping all of their work inside the classroom was something many of the teachers, including Druckenmiller, mandated. If you did that, the kids could not come in the next day and say, “I forgot my journal. . . . I lost my textbook. . . . The dog ate it.”

  Rather, it was always there.

  That journal, for Sarah, became more than just a way of interpreting her feelings. It was an outlet. For her aggression. For that pent-up anxiety drumming through her veins. For anything she wanted to vomit from her confused mind onto the page. Every morning, Sarah went to that paper and unleashed the demons. Only now, as her anger for Adrianne grew to a level she perhaps could not have foreseen, Sarah turned to the journal not to talk about how much she wanted to get with Adrianne, but how much she was beginning to despise this new girl from Texas, who, she felt, was trying to take her place.

  It didn’t matter, one person from the group said, if they were hungover or not. When morning came, those who had jobs went to work, and those who had school got up and went to class.

  The day following the night Adrianne had had sex with Kory Allison, she and Sarah spoke in school, according to what Sarah later told police.

  Sarah said she was upset over the fact that Adrianne had slept with Kory.

  Adrianne couldn’t understand why. After all, she was under the impression Sarah had given her blessing.

  “It will never happen again,” Sarah claimed Adrianne pleaded with her that day.

  “I don’t want to talk to you about it,” Sarah told Adrianne. Then she walked away.

  Two of Sarah’s friends, including Cory Gregory, then relayed a message to Sarah that Adrianne wanted to extend her apologies even more; she was truly sorry, and “she still wanted the [lesbian] relationship between them to work out.”

  Adrianne didn’t know she had flunked a test Sarah had devised. One of the main reasons for bringing Adrianne over to the party house and exposing her to the “horndogs” who lived in the house, Sarah later told a friend, was “to see if Adrianne was really gay. Sarah was sexually attracted to Adrianne, but she needed to test her.”

  “Sarah hated sluts,” a former friend added. “Sarah said that since Adrianne had come into the house and fucked Kory Allison, ‘she’s a bitch and she’ll pay.’”

  Sarah was back at the party house with Jill Hiers later that day after school. Sarah asked Jill to call Adrianne at home. She wanted to harass her.

  Sarah leaned into the phone receiver so she could hear the conversation.

  Under Sarah’s direction, Jill told Adrianne she had made a huge mistake in sleeping with Kory. She should have never done it.

  The call seemed to prove that they were messing with Adrianne. Teasing and taunting her. Playing some sort of a game.

  Bullying.

  Adrianne sounded sincere. “I made a mistake, come on. Tell her I made a mistake!”

  Sarah listened and laughed.

  “I will. . . .”

  Sarah and Jill looked at each other. Giggled.

  “It was just one little mistake and it will never happen again.”

  Adrianne reached out to several of Sarah’s friends, telling them she was desperate for Sarah’s forgiveness. But she also wanted to know why Sarah was now trying to turn everyone against her.

  True. One by one, Sarah went around and started to bad-mouth Adrianne to those in the group.

  Mean Girl stuff.

  From that moment on, Sarah later admitted, Adrianne called her cell number repeatedly.

  “Every hour on the hour.”

  But Sarah did not always answer.

  It was as if she was torturing Adrianne for doing something Sarah herself had set up and put her stamp on. To Adrianne, she and Sarah were not an item. It wasn’t as if she had gone out and cheated on Sarah. What the hell was the big deal?

  Get over it.

  The next day (now two days after Adrianne had slept with Kory), Adrianne was at the party house hanging out. She had gone over to see Henry Orenstein.

  Sarah showed up and initiated an argument with Adrianne.

  “Slut!” Sarah screamed at her. Adrianne was officially now on Sarah’s shit list. She could do no right in Sarah’s eyes.

  “Why do you hate me so much?” Adrianne asked. “I thought you liked me, Sarah.”

  Sarah got in her face. Henry was there, watching.

  “Whore!” Sarah said. Then she pulled a knife from her pocket and, after flipping the blade open, held it out in front of herself.

  Adrianne looked down. “If you want to kill me,” she said, “do what you must!” She started crying. Ran down into the basement.

  Sarah left.

  36

  Several days after Adrianne had sex with Kory Allison, Sarah showed up at the Rock Island party house. By now, Cory Gregory later said, Sarah and the others—including himself—were referring to Adrianne as a “slut” and “whore.” And also spreading vicious rumors about her. Yet, things were about to get much worse than name-calling for Adrianne Reynolds, who believed she could gain back Sarah’s trust and friendship.

  “I was just going over there to hang out,” Sarah later claimed, referring to the day she showed up at the house after that night when Adrianne had had sex with Kory Allison. Sarah made it sound as though she had just happened to be in the area and decided to pop in and party a little bit with whoever was on hand at the house.

  This was a lie.

  Jill Hiers was there. As soon as Sarah walked in, Jill approached her. She had some “huge” news to share. From this alone, it’s obvious Sarah showed up at the house because she knew what was going on.

  “Adrianne’s here,” Jill told Sarah, “and you’ll never guess where she is.”

  Before Adrianne had retreated to the basement with that “headache” on the night she first went to the party house, she and Henry Orenstein had sat together on the couch in the living room and talked.

  “She was brought to the house, just kind of,” Henry remarked later, “everybody was just walking around talking to everybody that was there. Eventually I just got to Adrianne and was talking to her for a while.”

  This was before Adrianne went downstairs with Kory.

  Adrianne and Henry expressed a desire to see each other and hang out again in the coming days. They wanted to spend time together alone. Henry had a soft spot for Adrianne. He liked her. She was not some object to mess with and tease. Henry, who was slightly older than Cory and Sarah, undoubtedly more mature, saw Adrianne as a fragile teenager, like himself. Someone who needed a friend.

  But after Adrianne retreated downstairs and had that tryst with Kory Allison and left, Henry realized he never got the chance to obtain her phone number. With Adrianne gone, he figured, What the heck. Didn’t matter. Maybe he’d see her again, maybe not.

  “I wasn’t really interested in Adrianne in that way at first,” Henry said. “She kind of grew on me.”

  Adrianne opened up
to Henry earlier that night, telling him about some of the problems she’d had back home in Texas. She also spoke of her passion for singing and a career in music someday. Adrianne told Henry she loved Tony, her father, but more than that she respected him.

  “She couldn’t say the same thing for Joanne,” Henry recalled. “Adrianne was hurt that Joanne didn’t trust her.”

  Henry came home from work the day after that party-sex with Kory to find Nate Gaudet, Sarah, Cory, and Jill together in the living room. They were laughing. They seemed high. They had someone on the other end of the telephone line. Someone they were obviously messing around with.

  It was Adrianne. They were calling her any insult they could think of.

  That day, Henry soon found out, had started with Sarah showing up at the house and telling Jill she was “jealous” of Adrianne and all the attention she was getting from the group. “You call her,” Sarah ordered Jill, “and talk some shit to her. I don’t want that bitch over to this house anymore!”

  Sarah dialed Adrianne’s number and handed the phone to Jill.

  Henry didn’t like what he had walked in on, but he didn’t say anything. He knew his place.

  They were taking turns, passing the phone around, “talking shit,” one of the kids later said. “Calling her [names].”

  “You’re a stupid bitch,” Sarah said at one point. “I’m gonna beat your ass next time I see you.”

  “You’re a liar!” Nate Gaudet shouted.

  “Whore!” Cory screamed, his hands cupped on the sides of his mouth.

  Then they’d all laugh out loud, sure Adrianne could hear.

  Sarah and Cory viewed Adrianne as an outsider, someone who seemed “cool,” but someone they didn’t truly know much about. On top of that, Adrianne lived in what was a strict household compared to the rest of them. They wanted to be certain Adrianne was the person—the rabble-rouser—she had claimed to be. Sarah came up with the idea that the best way to see who she was would be to give Adrianne that little test. See if she passed.