“[Sarah] knew that if she brought Adrianne to the house,” a source said, “she’d be able to test her trust, as long as Sarah didn’t inform [those in the house] of her plan.”
Sarah had told Adrianne that “it was cool” if Adrianne went off with one of the guys in the house and got her groove on. Some said she even encouraged Adrianne to do it. This was why Adrianne was so rattled by the name-calling and change in demeanor on everyone’s part. She couldn’t understand what was going on.
“She pretty much told Adrianne that everything was A-okay, but then as soon as Adrianne did it, Sarah turned around and changed her story,” a source recalled.
“Slut . . . whore . . .” They continued hurling insults at Adrianne over the telephone.
“What y’all doin’?” Henry asked as he walked in on the situation.
Sarah explained.
Henry laughed along with them, he admitted. Then, after they got sick of messing with Adrianne and hung up on her, Henry said, “Hey, let me have her phone number and I’ll call her, too.”
Sarah jumped. “Here,” she said, handing him the number. “Go ahead and call her.”
More laughter.
Henry Orenstein took the number and the phone and went off into the bathroom by himself.
As soon as she picked up the line, Adrianne screamed, thinking it was Nate, Sarah, Cory, and Jill calling her back.
“Leave me the fuck alone!”
“Yo, yo! Hold on there,” Henry said. He explained himself.
“What now?” Adrianne asked. She didn’t trust any of them.
“Hey, I’m not callin’ to give you any shit. I’m actually callin’ to see if you were serious about comin’ over to hang out with me.”
Adrianne went quiet. Then she stopped crying. “Sure, sure,” she said.
They set up a time to meet that same week.
“Guess what Adrianne’s doing?” Jill told Sarah after she walked into the party house. Jill looked toward the door heading down into the basement bedroom.
“What?” Sarah asked.
Jill pointed.
Adrianne was back, all right. In fact, Jill explained to Sarah, she was downstairs right then, having sex again—only this time with Henry Orenstein.
37
Adrianne would not have been able to go back over to the party house if Henry Orenstein had picked her up. Tony and Joanne Reynolds were somewhat onto Cory and Sarah. Adrianne had mentioned that she thought they were messing with her. Tony and Jo had seen how upset Adrianne had become over the situation. On top of that, Tony and Jo did not want boys picking Adrianne up at their East Moline home.
Adrianne had called and left Henry Orenstein a voice mail message early in the day. “Sarah turned everyone against me. . . . I don’t get it! I just want to be Sarah’s friend. I didn’t know she didn’t want me to sleep with Kory.”
So Henry Orenstein had Melinda Baldwin (pseudonym), another teen who lived in the house at various times, call Adrianne.
“Yeah,” Adrianne told Melinda, “please pick me up. . . . I cannot leave my house with a guy.”
Melinda said she’d be right over. The plan was for Melinda to tell Jo and Tony, if they asked, that she was Sarah’s sister.
Now Adrianne was back in the basement of the party house, after that phone call Henry Orenstein had set up; this time, however, she was in Henry’s bed, and Sarah Kolb was upstairs with Jill Hiers, listening.
Henry, of course, being the horndog that he admittedly was, had planned all along to get Adrianne into his bed. And if one believes him, “It wasn’t hard to do,” he recalled. But there was more in this for Henry, he added. He liked Adrianne.
Henry Orenstein didn’t think anyone else was in the house—besides Melinda Baldwin, who was upstairs in her room—while he and Adrianne were downstairs.
“We chilled,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” Adrianne told him as they snuggled after sex, “why Sarah and them hate me so much? They said they were my friends. I don’t know what I did.”
For Adrianne, this was the worst part of the tension separating her from Sarah, Cory, and the others: the not knowing. She had no way of defending herself, sticking up for her cause, if she didn’t know the problem.
Henry had no way of reading into Sarah, he said. He didn’t know her that well, other than seeing her at the mall, talking to her at the house, drinking and smoking with her once in awhile.
The Juggalo culture in the QC was, at one time, “pretty much open,” a QC Juggalo explained to the author. “You could walk around, see somebody you didn’t know, and start up a conversation. You knew they were a Juggalo and you could just start talking to them without all the frills of introductions. . . .”
Sarah was not, by definition, a Juggalette. She didn’t like the rap music Juggalos listened to; but she did adhere to just about every other attribute of the culture, fitting right in.
Henry heard people walking upstairs.
“I’m goin’ up there to get a cigarette,” he told Adrianne. “I’ll be right back.”
He walked upstairs. No one was around. He went into the kitchen. Then he heard all of them in the attic above.
He went up.
“You got her down there, don’t you?” Sarah asked, smiling.
“Yeah . . . ,” Henry said with a bashful (if not boastful) smirk, indicating that he had slept with Adrianne. “And y’all need to leave her alone.”
They busted up laughing. By now, Cory was there, too. He and Sarah were as high as they could get without falling out. Nate Gaudet was with Jill downstairs.
Henry watched as they got up and decided, he later said, “to go sit in the living room.” In front of the door heading down into the basement.
They wanted to be there when Adrianne came up.
In the living room, Sarah and Cory sat together, eyes focused. Ready. Waiting. Nate and Jill came in and joined them.
Henry went back down to his basement bedroom.
“I have to use the bathroom,” Adrianne said. Henry could tell she was nervous. Adrianne knew who was upstairs.
Adrianne opened the door and went straight for the bathroom. Henry came up right behind her and waited in the living room.
When she came out of the bathroom, Adrianne slipped on some newspapers spread out on the floor outside the door and fell on her butt.
The crowd in the living room erupted into laughter.
“Look at you . . . on the ground!” somebody yelled.
“They started making fun of her,” one housemate recalled.
“Shut up!” Adrianne screamed. “All of you. Shut the fuck up!”
This brought out that different side of Sarah. She shot up from the couch and got right in Adrianne’s face.
Sarah was not smiling anymore.
“You dumb bitch!” Sarah yelled. “You fucking dumb, stupid bitch. You shut up!”
“Fuck you, Sarah,” Adrianne said.
The others were screaming, encouraging Sarah. Chanting. Laughing.
“Fight. Fight.”
“I’m going to kill you, bitch,” Sarah said through clenched teeth.
Adrianne was scared of Sarah, some claimed. “But she wasn’t standing down from her that day. She stood nose to nose with Sarah.”
“Why, Sarah? Why are you doing this to me?” Adrianne wanted to know. “I thought we were friends. Why?”
“I am going to beat your ass, bitch.” Sarah refused to answer Adrianne’s questions.
“Why?” Adrianne asked again.
“I am going to fucking kill you!” Sarah said.
Henry stepped in. “Come on. . . .” He grabbed Adrianne. “I’m going to get you a ride home.”
“I’ll kill you,” Sarah kept repeating, although she didn’t swing at Adrianne or attack her in any way. Sarah Kolb was, for the time being, all talk.
Adrianne wanted out of the house.
Sarah walked over to Adrianne as she left. She took out that knife she always carr
ied and started to open and close it, over and over. Slowly. Threateningly.
“You shouldn’t fuck with me,” Sarah said in a low voice a number of times as she stared at the knife.
Adrianne cried.
Jill went to console Adrianne, but Sarah put up a stiff arm, like a traffic cop. “Don’t you talk to her.”
Jill backed off.
Henry drove Adrianne home. All the way there, she kept asking why they all hated her so much. What had she done?
“I’ll talk to them,” Henry said.
Before dropping Adrianne off, up the street from her house so no one would see him, he made plans to hang out with Adrianne again.
Later, when Sarah Kolb was asked about this period during her relationship with Adrianne, she brushed it off as nothing more than a girl beginning to see the true colors of someone she had wanted to be friends with and possibly date.
Turned out, Sarah explained, she didn’t like what she saw.
Sarah framed her argument with zero culpability in the fact that a group of teenagers was bullying a peer. Nor did she admit how she had set the entire situation up, for no other reason, apparently, than they were all bored with the drugs, drinking, and Juggalo life they had chosen.
Sarah said after she had left the house that first night, when Adrianne had taken off and slept with Kory Allison, she made several realizations.
“The conclusion was,” Sarah said in court, “that I didn’t want a future with Adrianne Reynolds.”
But yet she continued to call her—or have someone else do it—and harass the girl, which she left out when talking about this period under her lawyer’s questioning.
Sarah said she “had not formed a good opinion of” Adrianne after that first night. But Adrianne, even after the second time at the house (when she slept with Henry), kept calling her cell number.
“Every day,” Sarah said, referring to the calls, as if to imply it was the reason why she stayed engaged in the situation.
Adrianne could not walk away from a circumstance in which a group of kids who did not like her had given her no reason why. Adrianne needed answers. Which was why she continued to call Sarah.
At school, Adrianne also continued to pass Sarah notes.
“I refused to take the notes from her,” Sarah said.
This gave Sarah that power she craved. She had it over Cory Gregory, and now she knew she had it over Adrianne, too. Sarah was calling the shots. As long as Adrianne didn’t know why they hated her, Sarah knew Adrianne would keep crawling back.
38
By the middle of December 2004, living life under a cloud of doubt and question, Adrianne Reynolds still couldn’t figure out why her new friends were treating her so poorly.
Part of it, Cory Gregory later told NBC, was Sarah Kolb feeling threatened by Adrianne’s presence in the group. Sarah struggled to maintain a position of “I’m number one.” And it was clear to Sarah, Cory suggested, that Adrianne had the potential to take that role away from her. “After that first day at the party,” Cory added, “they fought every single day I seen them since. Sarah would make her cry.”
Adrianne, however, continued to reach out to other friends at Black Hawk Outreach and maintain relationships. She wasn’t entirely broken by Sarah’s taunting—either that or she never let on she was. On December 14, 2004, Adrianne passed notes with a classmate, ruminating about her dream of becoming a country singer. She saw herself working hard toward this goal. She would get over any “nerves” of being on stage, Adrianne said, Because I want . . . I want people to like me.
On December 15, Adrianne wrote a note to Sarah: How come you don’t talk to me?
Two weeks later, Adrianne was telling Sarah she had been going out of her way not to be her friend and it was upsetting.
But again, this only gave Sarah more power to control the situation.
By the end of December, Adrianne confided in her stepmother.
“I’m scared,” Adrianne told Jo.
“Scared?”
“Yeah. They’re all threatening me and bad-mouthing me at school.”
By this time, Sarah was talking to Adrianne again, if only sporadically, telling Adrianne, hoping to convince her, that the only way out of it all was to slit her wrists.
Commit suicide.
“It was Sarah running all of this,” Jo said later. “She was the one scaring Adrianne and threatening her more than anyone else.”
Even after all Sarah had done to Adrianne, Adrianne wanted to give her the benefit of being friends. She sent Sarah a note near Christmas, saying, in part: I wanted a chance for us to start over again and to at least be friends. . . .
In another note, Adrianne asked, Why do you hate me so much?
Then, Why do you want me to die?
Sarah responded by continuing to barrage Adrianne with name-calling and insults, and by ignoring Adrianne. Sarah and several family members were celebrating her mother’s birthday at the local IHOP one night in late December. They were eating and talking when Sarah looked down and saw that her cell phone was buzzing.
It was Adrianne.
“Give me a minute,” Sarah told her dinner guests.
“What do you want?” she asked Adrianne.
Adrianne said she was hoping to talk about things. “Why are you hating on me?”
“I’ll call you back. I’m busy.”
Sarah never did.
39
Adrianne started to see a counselor at school in a group therapy setting. According to the counselor’s notes, Adrianne—being the talkative person she had always been—shared regularly with the group and had no trouble opening up about things. Equally apparent, however, was that she did not let the group know about the trouble she was having with Sarah and the rest of the Juggalo gang.
Adrianne had a sense of where her life was headed. In her journal, she drew a picture of a cross and wrote die on the right-hand side of the upper arm. Underneath it, she wrote: Death awaits you, and signed her name.
Her birth surname was Gary. In that same notebook /journal, she dedicated a page to “Gangsta Baby,” writing her name as Adrianne Leigh Gary. Then there was the saying she often scribbled: Fly high or die.
A page later, How come you don’t like me anymore? she asked, referring, it appears, to Cory Gregory. She couldn’t understand why everyone was playing head games with her, especially Cory. What had she ever done to him? It hurts.
The consummate doodler, Adrianne liked to draw pictures of crosses, roses, and hearts, with words inscribed, like tattoos. Most guys aren’t worth it, she sketched on a page of her journal, then drew a heart with an arrow—dripping blood—through it.
Most girls aren’t, either, she wrote underneath.
On another page, Adrianne wrote out a numbers game she liked to play when she was bored. The words she used in the game were “Hard Sex” and “True Love.” She would determine the number of letters in the names of the people corresponding to those two-word phrases. Adrianne chose Brad Tobias and Cory Gregory. She added up the totals for each, and then multiplied those numbers to determine a percentage. That percentage of both words added together determined the compatibility of the two people. It sounded as confusing as it looked on the page, but it was something Adrianne liked to do. When she completed the game for Cory Gregory’s name, Adrianne came up with 92 percent, which meant, as sex partners, Adrianne and Cory, according to the numbers, fit together perfectly.
Whatever, she wrote underneath the results.
The book was filled with the insecurities Adrianne felt. She wanted to be accepted: Everybody ♥’s Adrianne (Pinkie), she wrote on the top of one page.
Adrianne was insightful when writing short comments that sounded like sayings you might have heard before:
My life is my sacrifice.
Underneath that saying, she drew a pentagram with an upside-down cross inside it.
It’s wonderful, but confusing, she doodled on a page, perhaps talking about her life as her fri
endships with Cory and Sarah were falling apart.
Adrianne wrote Sarah another letter. In all of her missives, Adrianne addressed the recipient at the top/center of the page. Giving Sarah a direct message, next to Sarah’s name, Adrianne drew a devil’s pitchfork heading into a heart. Sarah was her Lucifer, quite obviously, piercing those feelings of inadequacy pent up inside Adrianne. Yet, Adrianne always seemed to be willing to forgive.
Hey chick, Adrianne began, waz up? . . . Juss chillin’ in class. She said she was hungry and tired and was wondering how come you don’t talk to me? Honestly, this weekend, I am going to have to find something to do. But she hadn’t yet figured out what to do as of yet. Was just wondering why you haven’t wrote and what not.... See ya, hottie! P.S. Hit me back!
It had been almost two weeks since Cory Gregory sat on the edge of Nate Gaudet’s bed and said he wanted to kill Adrianne. In her journal, Adrianne dedicated a page to Cory: PINKIE-N-CORY, she sketched out in the middle. (“Pinkie” was another nickname for Adrianne.) I love Cory Gregory, she added, because he’s respectful, cute, nice, honest, and the sweetest guy I’ve ever met, and I think I’m beginning to trust him.
On that same day, during group therapy, Adrianne’s counselor wrote a note detailing how Adrianne had expressed a lot about violence . . . [and] shared with the class the experience her family has had with violence and why she thinks that happens.
The next week, closer now to Christmas, was consumed with doubt and wonder for Adrianne. Sarah Kolb would not speak to Adrianne, who was at her wit’s end over the situation. She’d reached out to Sarah time and again, and Sarah wanted nothing to do with her. Sarah failed to return her calls or write back.
Then Adrianne sat down one morning and wrote Sarah a long letter, this time laying everything out in the open. There was no way Adrianne could walk away from the relationship knowing that another person hated her guts. There was no doubt in Adrianne’s mind that Sarah did, in fact, despise her in a way Adrianne had not experienced.
Adrianne opened the letter by saying how she had been talking to Henry Orenstein and he had gotten the story from Cory Gregory that Sarah had set Adrianne up that first night she went over to the party house.
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