Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  A moment later, Roach started his car and drove back to work.

  “And then, before—before I knew it,” Cory first told police, “they quit choking each other, and Adrianne was blue.”

  Cory said he looked down at Adrianne after Sarah had lifted her hands from around Adrianne’s neck and believed, simply by looking at Adrianne, that Sarah had strangled Adrianne to death.

  “Her lips were blue and her face was blue.”

  Her body was limp.

  “She was dead. She wasn’t breathing and her entire face just turned blue.”

  “What the fuck . . . Sarah!” Cory observed.

  Sarah freaked out, yelling, looking around, wondering if anyone had seen what happened. After all, she and Cory had just killed someone in broad daylight, during the lunch rush at a popular and busy Taco Bell. And it was clear to both now that Adrianne Reynolds, a girl Sarah had been bickering with and threatening for well over a month, was dead.

  Cory jumped in the front passenger seat. Sarah pushed Adrianne’s limp body into the back. It fell with a thump on the backseat floorboard.

  “Sarah was scared, and I was scared, and then we—we were trying, well, we were trying to figure out what we should do. . . .”

  “We’ll get rid of her body,” Sarah suggested.

  “What? Fuck, Sarah. This is crazy. Where?”

  “Aledo.”

  Sarah’s grandfather had a farm there.

  Cory lit a cigarette. They needed to think this through.

  “I was scared,” Cory first said, “so I helped her.”

  Sarah covered Adrianne’s body with a black-and-tan coat. Started the car. Put the shifter in reverse. Backed out of the space. Then she drove out of the parking lot.

  Cory stared out the window.

  “Holy shit, Sarah. . . . You killed her.”

  48

  Sarah headed directly for her house in Milan. When they arrived, Sarah pulled her car into the garage, quickly got out, and then shut the door behind them. Both were in a state of shock, Cory claimed, running on pure adrenaline. Cory chain-smoked cigarettes. As time passed, Sarah seemed to hold herself together, rattled more by the idea of getting caught rather than the fact they had just committed murder.

  “What are we going to do?” Cory asked.

  “Burn her body,” Sarah suggested.

  “Huh?”

  “We’ll get some gas and a tarp here, roll her up in it . . . and then bring her somewhere. . . .”

  Cory had followed Sarah’s lead up until this point, why stop now?

  Sarah’s stepfather, Darrin Klauer, was home. It was two o’clock, Klauer later recalled in court. Sarah and Cory walked inside the house.

  “Hey . . . I parked in the garage,” Sarah said to her stepdad.

  Klauer didn’t respond, but, “I thought,” he said later, “’She doesn’t usually park in the garage.’”

  “I need to change,” Sarah said as she walked by. She headed into her bedroom and put on a new set of clothes.

  When she saw her stepfather again, after she put on a fresh pair of pants and T-shirt, Sarah said, “Cory’s with me. We’re going out to Aledo to wish Grandma a happy birthday.”

  Nonchalant. Business as usual in Sarah’s skewed world.

  Back in the garage, Sarah took a two-gallon plastic gas can, one of those red jobs every suburbanite has for his lawn mower. Then she grabbed a blue tarp, like the one used to cover a boat or collect leaves. Tossed them into her trunk.

  Adrianne was still in the car, on the backseat floorboard, her body covered with a jacket.

  “Where are we going?” Cory asked as they drove away from Sarah’s house. It appeared Sarah had a plan. Or was making one up as she went along.

  Sarah drove to a place called Big Island, a secluded area off Twenty-seventh Street West, in Milan. (The terrain is wooded, hilly farmland, same as around any lake. Not too many people in these parts. A few spots for fishing and hanging around. That’s about it.)

  She parked. “I believe,” Cory said later, “it was next to a dam.”

  Sarah got out of the car—she had to roll the window down and reach outside to open the driver’s-side door of her car, because the inside handle was broken. She walked around to the passenger side, where Cory sat. She took a quick look in every direction. Then she opened the door, pushed the seat forward after Cory stepped out, and pulled Adrianne’s body out by her legs, thumping her corpse onto the cold, frozen ground.

  “Help me,” Sarah said, looking at Cory, again panning in all directions, making sure no one was watching.

  Cory and Sarah hoisted Adrianne into the trunk. (Both would later claim the other did this.)

  “Where are we going now?” Cor y asked.

  “My grandpa’s farm.”

  The Engles’ farm was in Millersburg, a town of just under eight hundred people in Mercer County, part of the Davenport-Moline surrounding area. Sarah knew the topography of the farm well. It was a thirty-mile, forty-five-minute drive from Milan.

  Perfect.

  Her grandparents’ farm was off the beaten path. Far away from that Taco Bell. The Engles did not even live on the farm; their residence was in a different part of town. Sarah figured she and Cory could drive onto the farm, find a secluded area away from the main road, pour some gasoline over Adrianne’s body, and, like a Viking funeral, watch it burn into ash, the murder they had just committed going down in flames.

  No one would ever know.

  The idea that Cory later tried to sell was that the ground was too hard—frozen—to bury Adrianne, so they had to get rid of Adrianne’s body by cremation. But Cory never mentioned this to police during his first interview. From what he told police, it was Sarah’s plan from the get-go to torch Adrianne’s body in order to cover up what they had done. Fire, after all, is one way to destroy evidence. Many first-time killers choose this path thinking it will cover up their crimes. The problem is that most crematorium ovens shoot for an optimum temperature of between 1,600 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s not a matter of pouring some gasoline on a body and sparking a match.

  That’s Hollywood stuff.

  Fantasy.

  Sarah found a spot on her grandfather’s farm, out near the edge of a wooded area and large field. There was a lake deeper into the woods, Cory later said. But this spot would do just fine.

  After she parked, Sarah grabbed the blue tarp and spread it out on the ground in back of the car near the trunk. Then she reached into the trunk and, pulling with all her might, plopped Adrianne’s body onto the tarp.

  “Help . . . ,” she said.

  Cory came around and helped Sarah roll Adrianne up in the tarp.

  “Come on,” Sarah said.

  “What?”

  Sarah dragged the tarp “to this spot,” Cory explained, “just [to the] right, there’s like two roads, and then she took it to the lower part of the—the lower road.”

  Sliding Adrianne’s dead body turned out to be easier than they thought; the ground was frozen solid and there was a bit of snow.

  In his first account of the murder and subsequent cover-up, Cory Gregory minimized his role in the entire homicide and crimes committed afterward to the point where, reading the interview he gave to police, you’d think he was watching this from the bushes with binoculars, reporting on it. But Cory—make no mistake about it—was involved here on every level, participating in every aspect of this crime—probably much more than he later admitted. He helped Sarah in every aspect of the ordeal—and, perhaps most important, he did not do anything to stop Sarah from killing Adrianne inside her car. That is, of course, if he did not fully contribute to the murder itself from that moment after Sean McKittrick left the vehicle.

  “There is no way,” one law enforcement officer later told NBC, “that Sarah Kolb could have killed Adrianne Reynolds by herself.”

  49

  The inconsistencies in Cor y Gregory’s version of these events began to add up as he described the murder to
police in more detail. The investigators interviewing Cory had to push him continually for specifics. Ask him: What happened next? What did you do? What did Sarah do?

  According to Cory, Sarah took the can of gasoline out of her car and poured it over the tarp containing Adrianne’s body. They were deep in the woods, down in a ravine near a small stream on Sarah’s grandparents’ farm. (A video of the crime scene taken later, however, doesn’t show an area “deep in the woods,” as Cory recalled it, nor does it show a stream, frozen over or not.)

  After that, Sarah took what Cory said was a “red grill lighter,” one of those long-necked things with a trigger handle used to light a fireplace or gas grill, and lit the tarp. (Later, while talking about this same scene, Cory said: “I poured the gasoline on the tarp. It was a butane lighter. I used the lighter and lit it, and then Sarah and I, we just stood away. . . .”)

  Two different versions of one truth: burning Adrianne’s body.

  Regardless who lit the thing, a poof went up as the gasoline vapor and the fuel itself exploded.

  “And then,” Cory explained to police, “Sarah and I stood there, but we couldn’t look. We couldn’t look at it.”

  They stayed with Adrianne’s body for about a half hour, Cory claimed, watching it burn and then sizzle out. Then they walked back to the car, which was parked away from where Adrianne’s body had been torched.

  Once they got back to the car, Cory explained, they sat and stared at each other without speaking.

  “And we listened to music.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Sarah said after a time. She needed to check on the body. Make sure it had completely disintegrated into ash.

  The fire had nearly gone out. Adrianne’s body was still intact.

  “Shit. . . .”

  They had to do something.

  “Let’s go to the antique store,” Sarah suggested. Inside Sarah’s grandmother’s antique store might be something they could use to dispose of Adrianne’s body—what, exactly, Cory never mentioned.

  “We need more gas,” Sarah said as they rummaged through the store, looking around. It was close to four o’clock, witnesses inside the store later reported, when Cory and Sarah arrived.

  Della Smoldt, Sarah’s aunt, was working behind the counter. Sarah had been in the store the previous afternoon looking at a “trunk and a pair of red glasses” she seemed interested in. Smoldt said this was the first time she had ever met Cory Gregory.

  “Sarah . . . how are you?” Della asked her niece.

  Sarah was preoccupied. Della noticed what looked to be a “fresh scratch” on Sarah’s face, she later said. She wondered what had happened. (Sarah must have washed up at home right after murdering Adrianne, because nobody later reported any dried blood on her face.)

  “You okay?” she asked Sarah. “How’d you do that, honey?”

  “Cory and I were wrestling around,” Sarah said.

  Della noticed that Cory had very short fingernails. This was a strange answer from Sarah, who seemed awfully nervous and preoccupied, Della thought. Twitchy. Out of it. Very much not herself.

  Sarah’s aunt went over to Mary Engle, Sarah’s grandmother, who was working in another part of the store, getting ready to close the shop at 5:00 P.M. and head home. Della told Mary about the trunk and red glasses.

  Mary approached Sarah.

  “You want the trunk and glasses?” Mary asked her granddaughter.

  Cory piped in, saying, “Sarah has acquired a recent fondness for red. . . .”

  The fact that Cory had admitted to this statement says a lot about his demeanor that day. One would have to ask: Would someone freaked out and totally shocked by a murder his friend had just committed by herself say such a thing?

  Just then, Cory and Sarah walked to the back of the store, whispered something to each other, and left.

  “Sarah got more gas,” Cory claimed, “and then we went back to the farm.”

  On the way, Sarah called one of her friends, an eighteen-year-old girl she knew. Someone old enough to buy cigarettes.

  “Can you get me a pack of smokes at [the store]?” Sarah asked, “I’ll meet you there.”

  With a fresh few gallons of gasoline and a pack of Marlboro Reds, Cory and Sarah drove back to Adrianne’s body. It was close to five o’clock now, the sun had fallen from the sky, darkness settling.

  Cory claimed it was Sarah who poured the additional few gallons of gasoline over Adrianne’s body and lit it on fire that second time.

  “We figured since we couldn’t bury the body (frozen ground),” Cory told NBC, discussing this second time he and Sarah went to dispose of Adrianne’s remains, “the only proper thing to do would be cremate it.”

  Yet, Cory never mentioned this to the police.

  It was dusk now, the sky almost completely dark as molasses. As he would later explain to the police, Sarah’s grandfather was out in another pasture of the farm, feeding his cows, when he noticed a car off in the distance. Brian Engle never reported seeing any flames.

  Adrianne’s body would not catch fire and burn into ash, as Cory and Sarah had hoped.

  “What the fuck do we do now?” Cory asked, turning to Sarah for direction.

  Just then, Sarah saw her grandfather coming up the road.

  “Shit. . . . Come on . . . hurry.”

  Sarah and Cory took off, the lights on her Prizm off.

  Sarah drove straight to her grandparents’ house.

  50

  After her grandfather questioned Sarah about why she had taken off with her lights out, he threw up his hands in frustration and left the room.

  That was close, Sarah and Cory knew.

  Sarah told Cory, “Come on, let’s go.”

  She wished her grandmother a happy birthday and walked out of the house.

  During this part of his interview, Cory Gregory said something rather interesting regarding this particular moment of the night.

  “And then Sarah took us (emphasis added) back out there. . . .”

  “Who’s us?” the detective interviewing Cory asked, picking up on the odd pronoun.

  “Back out to the farm,” Cory answered nervously.

  “Who’s us, though?” the cop pressed.

  “Uh, her grandparents’ farm.”

  “But you said, ‘Took us.’ Who went back out to the farm?”

  “Oh,” Cory said, as if he suddenly figured it out, “Sarah and I . . . sorry.”

  As Cory went back to explaining the remainder of the night, he was more relaxed. He said after they went out there for what was the third time, Sarah poured another round of gasoline over Adrianne’s body and lit it on fire. Cory didn’t stand and watch this time, however, noting: “It was too hard. I couldn’t. . . . It was too hard . . . because this was a person.”

  Adrianne Reynolds was now a this and a person.

  Sarah had been on the verge of crying throughout the entire ordeal, Cory claimed. After she lit Adrianne on fire, Sarah walked over to where Cory sat and “laid her head on my shoulder.”

  And then—according to Cory—Sarah broke down. Cory said he cried, too, but not outwardly, like Sarah. Tears, he explained, flowed down his cheeks in silence.

  They both sat, staring, while at this human being in the distance—a sixteen-year-old girl whom they both had had a friendship with, a girl Cory had had sex with and Sarah was interested in dating—burned.

  Sarah got up and walked over. Cory said he stayed behind.

  “And then after a while,” Cory explained, “she, uh, and . . . well, she went and checked on her again. . . .”

  Sarah stood over Adrianne.

  “Fuck!”

  The body still wouldn’t burn.

  “What are we going to do?” Cory asked.

  “Let’s go,” Sarah said, motioning toward her car.

  Nate Gaudet worked a shift from 11:45 A.M.to 6:00 P.M. on Friday, January 21, 2005. Nate had just gotten the job at MD Racing, a motorcycle mechanical shop in Oregon, Illinois. B
y the time Sarah and Cory headed back to her house in Milan from the burn site, Nate was at his grandmother’s house, getting ready for another Friday night of booze, cigarettes, drugs, and fun with his girlfriend, Jill Hiers.

  Nate believed Cory and Sarah had a “closer” relationship than he and Cory did. Over the past few months, Nate had been with Cory and/or Sarah just about every day. Three weeks before Adrianne’s murder, when Sean McKittrick showed up in the picture, Sean became part of this daily crew. In the days before Adrianne was murdered, Nate had moved in with his grandparents; this happened after being evicted—along with everyone else—from the party house in Rock Island for not paying the rent.

  Near nine or ten that Friday night, after two failed attempts to burn Adrianne Reynolds’s corpse, Cory and Sarah called on Nate for his help.

  “What up?” Cory said.

  “Hey . . . ,” Nate replied.

  “What are you doin’?” Sarah asked, grabbing the phone from Cory, explaining that she and Cory were at her house in Milan, hanging out in her room.

  “I’m—I’m copping,” Nate said. He was in the process of obtaining “some cocaine,” Nate later admitted in court. “And can drop by after I pick it up.”

  “We’ll be at Cory’s,” Sarah said.

  Nate told them he would be there around eleven.

  Cory, Nate, and Sarah hooked up before midnight and snorted cocaine into the wee hours of Saturday morning, January 22, 2005. According to Nate, during that entire night of partying, neither Cory nor Sarah said anything about what had happened inside Sarah’s car and the attempts they had made to destroy evidence and get rid of Adrianne’s body. In fact, Nate Gaudet’s role in what was about to become the most gruesome homicide QC law enforcement had investigated in decades wouldn’t be set into motion until the following day.