Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Later that day, Adrianne saw a mutual friend of hers and Sarah’s, Cara Sands (pseudonym).

  “They still bothering you?” Cara wondered. She felt bad for Adrianne, who was beginning to bear the brunt of what was now a concerted effort to harass, degrade, and bully her. Cara had watched the entire thing play out.

  “Adrianne cut her hair short and started wearing more black-colored clothes. It seemed to me that Adrianne was changing so Sarah would like her more.”

  “Yeah . . . Hey, I ever tell you that I’d love to get pregnant and have a child?” Adrianne told Cara.

  Cara was surprised by this statement. It seemed to come out of nowhere. Adrianne, Cara later said, had been telling many of the kids in her class the same thing.

  “No . . . but why would you want that, Pinkie?”

  “A baby would be someone to love, without strings attached.”

  43

  When Sarah returned to school, she put the focus back on Cory once again. Cory was beginning to withdraw more as the new year went forward. He was smoking more pot than ever. Drinking more heavily than Sarah had ever seen. But even beyond that, Sarah noted in her journal, with Sean McKittrick now attending classes at Black Hawk and trailing along with Sarah, Cory was showing contempt for—as Sarah put it—this “me & Sean” thing. Sarah was into Sean, perhaps content in a relationship for the first time in what seemed like a hundred years, she noted.

  The following week, January 10, a Monday, Cory was missing from school. Sarah surmised he was still sleeping—probably hungover—or just had “no motivation” to show up anymore. That chronic, recurring social disease of today’s youth, depression, had gotten ahold of Cory, no doubt, and would not let go. Sarah, feeling it herself, saw how miserable and morose Cory was these days; yet she didn’t say anything much about it to him. At one point, Sarah resigned that she couldn’t “do anything” for someone who didn’t want to help himself; and Cory dropping out or getting expelled indefinitely because of his behavior was, Sarah concluded, “his own problem.”

  Sean was going to be getting a job at a local car wash. This made Sarah happy. The kid would finally have some money to take her out.

  Woo-hoo, she noted in excitement.

  On the opposite side of the hall, in her own way, Adrianne was confronting the problems she had with Sarah. In her journal, Adrianne wrote about going to talk to Jo, her stepmother. She spoke of her willingness to face the issues with Sarah and work through them.

  She’s gonna give my dad a call, Adrianne wrote, meaning Jo, and they’re going to get me help and I told her what’s going on with Sara and I.

  On that same day, Adrianne had a friend over to the house. Writing after the visit, she was proud of herself for not sleeping with the boy, even though he had gone and bragged about having sex with her to the kids at school the following morning:

  I showed him my guitar, watched TV, ate and sang, then he left.... That’s all that happened.

  The boy had asked Adrianne to go to a party with him that night, but she turned him down, and instead left with another friend and his parents.

  Adrianne entered into a penned conversation with Cory Gregory about the boy coming over to her house and what was being said around school about her that day. It seemed Adrianne could do no right. Whether she slept with a boy didn’t matter anymore. The kids in school were going to say she did, anyway.

  Why are you making a big deal of it? Adrianne asked Cory. Nothing happened! You can ask my brothers—because they were there, baby!

  Cory didn’t respond.

  Adrianne continued, adding, What’s your prob? Why are you hatin’ on me? I thought you still liked me but you’re accusing me of shit or, excuse me, thinkin’ I did shit, and I didn’t.

  Cory failed to respond to that statement also.

  Adrianne wrote again: What’s wrong? Beside it, she drew one of her signature sad faces, and then passed the notebook back to Cory for him to respond.

  Cory wrote that Adrianne’s “cross words” were pissing him off.

  Imagine that! A kid whose language skills consisted of the F-word and a litany of additional vulgarities—not to mention all the sexual innuendo he talked about—was preaching to Adrianne about her use of the actual English language.

  But Adrianne was smarter than that.

  That’s not all, she wrote back, sensing Cory was holding back. I know it isn’t. There’s something else. Talk 2 me, please. Quit flippin’ me off!

  Cory didn’t write back. But later that night, he wrote Adrianne a letter, spelling out what was going on, and his place in it all. He addressed Adrianne as “Kid,” a charming nickname he had been calling her. He explained how he had never lied to her about anything. He called himself an honest person.

  Adrianne had, in the interim, called Cory on his relationship with Sarah and his role in bullying her. It seemed to Adrianne that whenever Sarah, Nate, or any of the other Jugs were around, Cory acted differently. He went with the crowd. When she was alone with him, he appeared to be her friend. Adrianne asked him which was the real Cory, and what was the purpose for the act?

  Cory wrote that he wasn’t involved in the rumor mill or the bullying on the level Adrianne had perceived—but he had gone along with that so-called test Sarah had devised back in mid-December.

  Sarah wanted to see how you would be . . . , Cory wrote.

  If Adrianne was wondering why Sarah did it, Cory said he had a theory. He explained that every girl he brought over to the party house (prior to Adrianne) had ended up sleeping with someone who lived there. Sarah was picky, Cory clarified, when it came 2 females, so she had to test Adrianne in order to see if she was datable. She wasn’t keen on letting just any slut into the group.

  Word traveling through the party house lately was that someone had passed around a sexually transmitted disease. Adrianne was infuriated by this, thinking it was another way for them to torment her, true or not.

  Cory said that, as far as he knew, only Nate and Jill had it. But there was a chance, he added, that the other Kory had been infected.

  Which meant there was a possibility Adrianne might have gotten it.

  Cory left a postscript, clearing up something Adrianne had confused in one of her conversations with him earlier that day. Cory had said he didn’t “like Sarah.” Adrianne had it all wrong.

  I love her, Cory spelled out.

  No matter what Cory said, it was clear to Adrianne that Sarah Kolb was still pulling his strings.

  Sarah had been up all night on January 12, 2005. It wasn’t cocaine, X, or any other illegal substance keeping Sarah from finding some shut-eye; it was her hair.

  Yes, hair.

  It took seven hours, she wrote in her journal the following morning, most of the previous day, to braid her hair. The tight cornrows had made her head burn and throb. She couldn’t sleep at all because of the pain.

  As much as Sarah said she was fed up with Adrianne, she was stringing Cory Gregory along, telling him one thing to his face, while talking “shit” about him behind his back. She told one friend that all Cory and Nate did these days was drugs. They were both lazy. If they weren’t drinking or drugging, they were sleeping. She referred to Cory as “the Jew,” keeping up her bigotry-inspired, I-hate-the-world, Nazi image. She mentioned how Nate and Cory were buying X . . . like crazy. This, mind you, when they have rent to pay. Cory was basically living at the party house these days. Neither he nor Nate had a job. The little bit of money they managed to scrape up, they spend on drugs.

  Two kids whose lives were going nowhere.

  Sarah had zero patience for losers.

  That being said, Sarah next wrote about leaving class one day in January to go pick up a friend so they could go buy an ounce of weed. She was excited about this. After they scored, they were going to get high, then sit around and roll joints until they filled a cigarette pack with them.

  Apparently, doing drugs was okay for her.

  As the week of January 17 began, Sar
ah had Sean McKittrick and their relationship on her mind. She wrote about how much she liked being with Sean, but was fighting off an ex-boyfriend who had contacted her in a drunken rage one night and mentioned how he wanted to get back together. The reason the ex was pissed off turned out to be because he had seen Sarah with Sean.

  At the end of this entry, Sarah noted how Cory pulled Sean aside one day and apologized to him for being in love with her. But there was nothing, Cory told Sean, he could do about his feelings. He loved Sarah. She was everything. He couldn’t change that.

  A friend asked Sarah if Cory would ever get over her. She said it would take some time, but ultimately he would. After all, Sarah added, [I haven’t] slept with [him] in over seven months.

  44

  On January 17, 2005, Henry Orenstein got a call from Adrianne Reynolds, who sounded concerned, demanding to know what was going on at the party house.

  “Hey,” Adrianne said, “Sarah called me. She said everyone at the house has chlamydia.” (Chlamydia is a sexually transmitted infection, common among those who sleep around. It is treatable with antibiotics.)

  Adrianne was worried that maybe she had gotten it because she had slept with Henry Orenstein and Kory Allison.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Henry assured her. “I’m clean.” It was basically Nate Gaudet who got it, he explained.

  “I don’t believe you!” Adrianne snapped.

  “Come on . . . ,” Henry said.

  “No, no . . . I would believe Sarah over you any day!”

  “You can fuck off then,” Henry said. “If you want to go and believe somebody who hates you, well, fuck it, go right ahead!”

  Dial tone. End of the conversation.

  And the friendship.

  This would be the last time Henry Orenstein ever spoke to Adrianne Reynolds. She would be dead, dismembered, and buried (in two different places) within three days of this conversation.

  John Beechamp worked with Adrianne at Checkers. Adrianne would approach John and complain about her hours. Checkers was not giving her enough.

  “She was very cheerful, upbeat, liked to get to know people,” John remembered. “She liked to make friends. Just a regular sixteen-year-old.”

  In many ways, Adrianne was ready to take on the world as one more curious teenager. John Beechamp had a girlfriend and three kids at home. He was twenty-six, a decade older. He saw part of himself in Adrianne: a rebellious, active teenager who needed to get past the next few years and realize adulthood was a hell of a lot simpler than those teen years, when it seemed no one understood how she felt.

  John worked Saturdays; Adrianne generally didn’t. He asked her one afternoon, “You want to babysit for me some Saturday?”

  “Sure,” Adrianne responded. She could use the extra money. But there was more to it than that. John was older. He had a family. Adrianne had always liked the idea of someone taking care of her. She didn’t care that John Beechamp was already spoken for.

  “Why don’t we first have you come over to the house to meet my kids and girlfriend.”

  Adrianne agreed.

  “I’ll pick you up,” John offered.

  It was January 19, 2005. Two days before Adrianne went missing.

  “Can I bring a friend?” Adrianne asked. “His name’s Cory. He’s a guy I like.”

  John didn’t care for a lot of people he didn’t know hanging around his house. He thought about it.

  “I guess.”

  “Can you pick him up for me?”

  “Sure,” John said.

  He later told police, “She had a crush on me.” Adrianne had written John Beechamp a letter disclosing her feelings. Addressing it to “babe,” she opened by saying how she was well aware of the difference in age: But listen to what I have to say, ok?

  Adrianne said how much she really liked Beechamp because he was so unlike the guys she dated. She could talk to Beechamp and relate to him in ways she couldn’t with the others.

  Adrianne, however, was no dummy: I know, for you, she wrote, I am jail bait. She warned him not to lead her on by flirting and asking for lap dances while at work. It wasn’t just about sex, she made clear. I’m fixing to be 17 soon and for the past few years I’ve wanted a family and a guy who cares for me.

  She mentioned future plans. If she wasn’t with a guy after she got her GED that June, she was taking off and moving back to Texas. This didn’t mean settling for some loser who would ultimately cheat on her; she wanted a man. She talked about being a legal adult in eighteen months and told John Beechamp that if they were to enter into a relationship now, she had no trouble keep[ing] a secret that long. . . .

  John later told police he tossed the letter in the garbage after reading it. He said he never flirted with Adrianne. He did, however, tell her that she looked nice, on occasion, in passing small talk, but only as a compliment. Adrianne, apparently, took the comments another way. He denied talking about having a sexual relationship with Adrianne, saying that sex was all anyone at Checkers ever talked about.

  At six thirty, Wednesday night, January 19, John picked up Adrianne. Without telling her, he had begun to second-guess Adrianne’s babysitting skills. Was she going to have friends come over to his house while she was babysitting? Was she going to be partying and not watching his kids?

  Maybe this was a bad idea.

  John then picked up Cory, as Adrianne had suggested. But instead of taking them over to his house, he drove to a friend’s.

  “We kind of just hung out,” he recalled. “Played some PlayStation.”

  As far as John could tell, Cory seemed “all right, like a good guy.” He was into Insane Clown Posse and that whole Juggalo movement, John could tell by the way Cory talked and dressed. But that didn’t make him a bad dude. He and John talked about tattoos and ICP for a while.

  “Random talk” was how John later framed the conversation.

  As the night wore on, John noticed that Cory and Adrianne were kind of attached to each other. They held hands. Kissed. Laughed together. Acted like a couple.

  “Hugged up on each other,” John told police. “They were cuddled up next to each other and very friendly. . . .”

  The night concluded without any problems. John saw a different side of Adrianne. She seemed responsible.

  “Can you babysit for me this Saturday?” he asked. Adrianne had reconvinced him throughout the night that she was the right person for the job.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sure.” Adrianne hopped out of the car and walked into her house.

  John took off. As he drove, Cory announced, “I got my penis pierced.”

  What a random thing to say.

  “No shit.”

  “Hell yeah!” Cory was proud of this achievement.

  “You know Adrianne well?” John asked.

  “She fucked a few of my friends,” Cory said. “She wrote me a letter telling me that I’m her boyfriend.”

  “No kidding. . . .”

  Cory said he wasn’t too interested in dating Adrianne, but he said, “Yeah . . . love to fuck her.”

  “She told me she likes you,” John shared.

  “Yeah?” Cory said.

  “She doesn’t like that Sarah chick, though.”

  45

  He called them his “bitches,” Sarah later noted. Cory Gregory, even though she wasn’t interested, would carry on, Sarah claimed, about what he liked to do to the girls he dated. One of the bitches at this stage of Cory’s life was Adrianne. Cory was hanging out with Adrianne more than he was with anyone else. And Sarah Kolb did not like this. She felt slighted by it, in fact. As if Cory had gone and purposely defied her.

  “Dat bitch is dippin’ in my Kool-Aid” was how Sarah put it more than once that week Adrianne went missing. Sarah was referring to Cory and a second rumor she heard about Adrianne wanting to get with Sean—a big no-no in Sarah’s rather short book of social rules.

  In the eyes of his relatives, Cory Gregory had disengaged from being a normal part
of the family unit seven months prior to that January. Cory was not by any means a straight-A student, polished and genteel, goal oriented and eager to take on the world as an adult. But he wasn’t the trash-talking, alcohol-abusing druggie he had turned into, family members claimed, after meeting and becoming obsessed with Sarah Kolb, who seemed to have a hold on Cory that no one could explain.

  Katrina Gates, Cory’s half sister, the oldest of Cory’s siblings, was close to her brother up until that time when he stepped away from the family and into Sarah’s grasp. Katrina had moved out of the house when she was sixteen. Cory spent every other weekend with his sister, who had a daughter, Cory’s niece, similar in age.

  “He didn’t have any time for his family anymore,” Katrina said, talking about that period after Cory met Sarah. “This was strange, because he used to spend [a lot of time] at my house. He was constantly here. He babysat all of my friends’ children and was just this funloving, outgoing boy who always had the cutest girlfriends.”

  There was another side of Cory that Katrina began to see emerge, however.

  “I kept hearing that he was doing drugs, you know, popping pills. And Cory didn’t keep it quiet.” He never tried to hide what he was doing. “He’d come over my house talking stupid all the time. Saying how he smoked weed, popped some pills, did X, acid . . . whatever.”

  Cory’s sister believed the pain Cory was trying to numb with all of this behavior was rooted in the fact that he “grew up without my mom in the house.” Cory was eight when his parents divorced, an important age. This is where, psychologically speaking, Sarah fit into the mix. She filled that function as gatekeeper and authority figure for Cory, but also the feminine role, the comforter and caretaker. In Sarah, Cory found a female who could tell him what to do, when to do it, and he felt comfortable enough to accept what she said.

  There were no boundary lines.

  In junior high, Cory played football, had a lot of friends, and enjoyed the innocent things kids do when they’re teetering on the edge of being a teenager. It was in high school, his mother Teresa Gregory said, when Cory started to act differently.