51
Staying up most of the night to snort cocaine, smoke cigarettes and weed, trying to numb what was the reality of a horror show back at the Engle farm, Cory and Sarah fell asleep late that morning and woke up around two o’clock, Saturday afternoon.
Sarah had to work at the cinema at 3:00 P.M. So they got up and drove to Sarah’s Milan house so she could get ready.
Reports were already beginning to filter into the community that Adrianne was missing. None of this deterred Sarah or Cory from their new plan. They still had a body to get rid of and evidence to destroy—if they were going to cover up their crimes.
And make no mistake what this was now about for Cory and Sarah: getting away with murder.
At some point, Sarah stopped and picked Nate Gaudet up at his grandmother’s house. The idea was for her to drop Nate and Cory off at Cory’s house, so they could hang out there until she got off work.
Nate sat in the backseat, behind Cory. Sarah drove.
She took a longer route, Nate later explained, not the normal, faster way.
Cory and Sarah had been looking at each other since picking Nate up. They had something they needed to share. Nate sensed it as she drove.
“Could you ever kill somebody?” Cory asked, according to Nate’s recollection.
“Yeah, could you?” Sarah added.
“I don’t know! What the fuck? . . . What are you two talking about?”
“What would you do if you ever saw a dead body?”
“What the . . . Did you guys go and kill somebody?”
There was a beat of silence.
“Yeah,” Sarah said. She looked at Cory. They could trust Nate.
“What?” Nate had a feeling they were serious. “Who?”
“Adrianne.”
“What? . . .”
Sarah continued, “I started hittin’ that bitch with my fists and Sean got out of the car . . . and walked back to school. Then I picked up my stick and started hitting her in the face. She punched me in the nose. Then Cory held her arms back while I choked her to death.”
Cory sat and said nothing, Nate later explained. He was listening, shaking his head in agreement with Sarah.
“What . . . where?” Nate asked.
“Taco Bell parking lot.”
According to what Sarah said to Nate in the car as they drove, the fight had started on a different note. “She said,” Nate later explained, “she asked Adrianne for a hug and I guess they started hugging, and then Sarah grabbed Adrianne by the back of her hair and said, ‘Don’t you ever come around Cory or Sean again.’ And then she started hitting her with her fists.” Sarah claimed Adrianne “broke her nose.” She also told Nate that when she choked Adrianne “blood came out of her mouth. . . .”
Both of these statements were likely added to enrich the drama and “toughness” of Sarah’s reputation. It is unlikely that Adrianne broke Sarah’s nose, simply because the bleeding stopped rather quickly and photographs of Sarah taken in the days after do not show any injuries to Sarah’s face consistent with a broken nose. Likewise, unless Cory and Sarah stabbed Adrianne, or beat her so badly with that stick that she developed internal injuries, there’s not a chance Adrianne had bled from her mouth while they choked her.
More shocking than any of this, however, was what Nate said next. He claimed that after Sarah was “done choking Adrianne, Cory grabbed a belt and wrapped it around Adrianne’s neck while Sarah drove. . . .”
Nate told a different version of what had happened at Big Island, implicating Cory even more. He said Sarah told him—again, with Cory in the car, nodding in agreement—that when she and Cory arrived at Big Island, Sarah parked, got out, went around to the passenger side of her vehicle, opened the door, and “Adrianne’s head flopped out” of the side of the car.
This scared Sarah, Nate noted.
So she had Cory grab Adrianne’s body and placed it in the trunk. (A scenario, incidentally, that makes more practical sense, seeing there was no way Sarah could handle picking up Adrianne’s body by herself.)
Throughout this conversation Nate had with Sarah and Cory inside Sarah’s car the day after Adrianne’s murder, Cory never butted in and changed any of the facts as they were being laid out by Sarah. Rather, Nate claimed, Cory added to the drama.
As Sarah drove, she said to Nate, “Listen, we’re going to pick you up tomorrow morning and drive out to Adrianne’s body.” Sarah said she had to work that day and night.
By now, they had arrived at Cory’s house. Sarah let them out.
Sean McKittrick (“the mooch,” Sarah called him) was at Cory’s house when they showed up.
After Sarah left, at Nate’s request, Jill arrived in her Ford Explorer.
They all went out that afternoon while Sarah was at work. Then Nate and Jill dropped Sean and Cory off back at Cory’s house.
Cory called Nate and Jill near 10:00 P.M.: “I need a ride to the mall. . . .”
Jill and Nate picked Cory up and dropped him off.
Sarah got out of work. Cory was waiting for her.
By eleven, Sarah and Cory were back at Cory’s house, where they stayed and talked for a few hours.
“I’m going home,” Sarah said to Cory. “I’ll call you when I get there.” The implication was: Don’t do anything on your own. Wait until I give the order.
Cory understood.
He waited.
Sarah called about a half hour later and told Cory she was home. She said they both needed to get some rest. They had a big day ahead of them on Sunday. With Nate’s help, Sarah explained, they were going to finish what they had started out at the farm.
Cory called Nate at ten the next morning, January 23, 2005.
“We’ll be there soon.”
Nate said he’d be ready.
Just before noon, Sarah and Cory arrived at Nate’s grandmother’s house to pick him up and head out to Millersburg.
As Nate stepped into Sarah’s car, she stopped him. “Hey, grab a saw,” Sarah said.
Nate said, “What?”
Cory added, “A saw, man. Get a saw.”
By now, Nate knew why he needed that saw. In his testimony, Nate explained how they had briefed him about the plan to dismember Adrianne’s body and literally spread it around the state of Illinois so authorities wouldn’t identify or find the body parts.
The saw was “for Adrianne Reynolds, to dispose of her body,” Nate told the court.
This part of the plan was all Sarah Kolb’s idea, Nate insisted.
“Hold on,” Nate said to Cory and Sarah. He walked back into his grandmother’s house (as Nate’s grandma watched from a window), went down into the basement (“the furnace room”), and found a hacksaw that one might use to cut wood or metal. Some call it a box saw, or miter, one of those rectangular-shaped saws with fine teeth used in finishing woodworking.
Before stepping back out of the house with the saw in his backpack, Nate went into his room and put on a long, ankle-length black trench coat. He wore gloves—those black leather driving gloves with the fingertips cut off. The gloves were a Juggalo thing.
The drive out to the farm took an hour. During the ride, Cory and Sarah “restated,” Nate recalled, just about everything they had the previous day, going through the plan all over again.
At the farm, Sarah pulled over and parked.
“Right there . . . ,” she said, looking out the windshield, pointing.
That was the spot where Adrianne Reynolds’s body lay in wait for Nate Gaudet and his hacksaw.
52
Sarah Kolb and Cory Gregory got out of Sarah’s Prizm and walked into the wooded area where Adrianne’s body had been burned on two previous occasions.
Dressed all in black, including a black winter wool cap, Nate Gaudet followed.
Their shoes crunched against the hard, snow-covered ground. It had actually snowed fairly heavily on Saturday, the previous day, and there was a solid covering of the white stuff, a top layer of which had harden
ed like two-day-old frosting on a cake.
Sarah had covered Adrianne’s body that Friday night before they left. There was a ravine just beyond the path they had walked up, Nate remembered, where Adrianne’s body lay, waiting.
Cory walked over to the narrow passage and removed the brush Sarah had used to cover Adrianne’s charred remains.
Nate stood at the top of the ravine. He looked down at both of them removing the sticks and brush.
“Come on,” one of them yelled up to Nate, who ran down the slight hill, then stood by Cory and Sarah. They noticed “a gardening tool” Nate had with him. He found it inside Sarah’s car. She had grabbed it from her house. (“It was a wooden stick with a metal claw on the end of it,” Nate said. “Shovel length.”)
“Shit . . . I should have grabbed her necklace . . . before I burned her,” Sarah said as she looked down at Adrianne’s head, still attached to her body, despite most of the skin burned away.
Nate didn’t need to be asked. He knew why he was there and what to do. It was the only reason they had called him. Nate had a reputation for wading in the dark side. Some claimed he liked to maim and hurt animals, cut them up, in his younger years.
Nate bent down on one knee, took the saw in hand. The way he described what he did next sounded as if he was talking about a television show he had seen. While on bended knee, Nate said, “I started cutting her head off. . . .”
As Adrianne’s necklace fell off her headless corpse and broke into pieces, Sarah reached down, picked it up and put it in her pocket.
Nate Gaudet cut Adrianne’s head off, he said, “because Sarah wanted me to cut the body in pieces.”
It appeared that Sarah had some sort of strange power over Nate. Note the choice of language: “the body.” This is one way people who commit such savagery trivialize the act and take the human aspect out of what is heinous behavior. In using such a common choice of words—Cory and Sarah would later use the same type of references—it distances one from what he has done.
In truth, Nate didn’t have to be told. After cutting Adrianne’s head from her body, he moved down to Adrianne’s arms, later describing this as matter-of-factly as one could describe it: “I cut the arms off.”
As Nate went from one arm to the next, Cory opened a black garbage bag they had brought with them and placed Adrianne’s head inside the bag.
Sarah Kolb stood and watched all of this, Nate said, but she refused to touch any of Adrianne’s body parts.
When Nate finished with Adrianne’s arms, Cory walked over, picked them up, and placed them inside the same bag.
Nate moved onto Adrianne’s legs. After cutting off both limbs, for reasons that he could not later explain, Nate cut Adrianne’s torso in half, he said, “under the ribs.”
The reason why Sarah wanted Adrianne cut into pieces was twofold: Most important, so they could hide her teeth in fear of being identified by dental records, and to place her body parts in various locations around the QC so authorities would never find her.
“If we put [her] in different places, she will be harder to find,” Sarah said as Nate and Cory finished.
Cory ran up the hill, the bag containing Adrianne’s head and arms slumped over his shoulder and back as though he were Santa Claus. Then he placed it inside the trunk of Sarah’s car.
Nate brought the saw up and put it inside the trunk next to the bag.
Back at the site where Nate had butchered Adrianne’s body, Sarah took the gardening tool she brought from home and pushed the two halves of Adrianne’s torso, along with her legs, into the small gully (or “stream,” they called it) running through the ravine.
The body parts sank in the mud.
Nate returned. He found a fox hole near a timber that had fallen over and into the stream. So he forced Adrianne’s legs and torso into it with the gardening tool.
Sarah brought the gardening tool back up the hill and placed it in her trunk.
When Cory explained this part of the crime to police during his first interview, he blamed it all on Sarah, never once mentioning Nate had been with them.
Cory stated that Sarah proceeded to cut the head off Adrianne’s body, then the arms, an EMPD report filed on January 25, 2005, read. Sarah then placed the head and arms in a trash bag. Sarah then cut the torso in two. The legs were already dismembers [sic] from the body because of the fire....
In the remainder of this particular report, Cory blamed every aspect of the crime on Sarah: from the murder to the cover-up, to the dismemberment and the hiding and burying of the body parts. It is clear from this report that he was hoping by minimizing his role in the crime, he would get off with being an accessory, and completely save Nate from any charges.
Cory Gregory lied to save himself and his friend, finally turning on the girl he had claimed all along he had loved.
When Nate returned after forcing Adrianne’s torso and legs into the fox hole, a tepee-shaped structure made out of old logs and brush, he and Cory (now standing up by the car, smoking a cigarette) watched Sarah take Adrianne’s necklace out of her pocket and toss it into the trunk.
“Let’s eat,” one of them suggested.
“McDonald’s,” Nate said.
Cory had a double cheeseburger. Nate ate a Big Mac. Both later said they forgot what Sarah ordered, but she ate, too.
The job was not yet complete, however.
Inside Sarah’s trunk were Adrianne’s head and arms. Thus, the question remained: what were they going to do with the body parts that could identify Adrianne?
Sarah started her car.
She had an idea.
53
It had been a long day of smoking weed, dismembering and disposing body parts, which could ultimately send them all to prison for a long time, and gorging themselves on fast food. And yet there was still one important job left to be done: hide Adrianne’s head and arms, the two most distinguishable parts of a human being: teeth and fingerprints.
Sarah needed gas for her vehicle. So they stopped at a pump station in Aledo and Nate pumped gas into the tank while Cory went inside to pay the cashier.
Sarah waited inside her vehicle.
For the time being, Sarah and Nate were alone outside at the pumps. What would become an important issue in the coming months, Sarah never said a word to Nate. In fact, she had every opportunity to grab Nate, pull him aside, and plead whatever case she wanted to make. But Sarah never did any of that; instead, she waited patiently and quietly.
Nate had left his bowl (a pipe for smoking weed) in his room at his grandmother’s house. They needed it. So Sarah drove to Nate’s grandmother’s so he could grab some more weed and the bowl.
Leaving there, Sarah suggested getting rid of Adrianne’s body parts at Big Island. There was enough open area and some water. Plenty of secluded ground to choose from.
When they arrived, Sarah didn’t feel comfortable; there were people fishing. Others were wandering around.
So they smoked a few bowls and took off.
“We’re going to my house,” Sarah said.
After parking in front, Sarah got out of the car and walked into the house.
Nate and Cory sat inside Sarah’s car and smoked a cigarette.
Soon Sarah came out of her garage with a shovel.
“Black Hawk State Park,” she said as she started her car. There were plenty of places inside the Black Hawk State Forest section of the site to dispose of Adrianne’s head and arms: a watchtower, a bird observation area, an abandoned coal mine, picnic shelters, and plenty of thickly settled forest. According to information on its website, Black Hawk State Historic Site is a 208-acre steeply rolling tract that borders the Rock River, in Rock Island County.
Sarah knew of a spot down the main trail, which they could get to easily by parking in the yellow-lined public lot. There was a wood stairway that led to a river. She had been there before with Cory and other Juggalos. They could find a hidden location out there to get rid of the bag.
Nate
, Cory, and Sarah walked through the woods for at least five minutes. It was icy and slippery, tree branches stingingly whipping them in the face as they walked.
Soon they came to a set of wooden stairs, as Sarah later explained, which led down to a secluded area of two “dirt stairs” built into the ground.
“Here,” Sarah said. “Right here.”
Cory had the shovel. Nate carried the bag of Adrianne’s body parts.
“Dig a hole, Cory,” Sarah ordered, pointing. “Over there.”
Cory walked over and put the shovel to the ground, but he had a hard time breaking through the frost barrier. It was like trying to stab a shovel through concrete.
Time for plan B.
Sarah pointed: “Try over there, then.”
Nate placed the bag on the ground, walked over to Cory, grabbed the shovel out of his hands, and “walked up the hill a little bit and started digging.”
The ground seemed softer over there, for some reason. Nate was able to plow right through the first few inches of earth as though the ground had thawed. As he did this, the shovel hit something, making a ding.
Concrete?
“A manhole cover,” Nate said. A cement lid.
Perfect.
“Help me out, Cory.”
Cory walked over. He and Nate hoisted the lid off the manhole.
The hole was about “twelve feet deep,” Nate estimated later. He was wrong. Based on the videotape taken by the police, the hole is about eight to ten feet deep. There were rocks and concrete cinder blocks strewn about the bottom of the hole. It was a concrete pipe, actually, probably part of the park’s rainwater flushing system, or a sewer drain, either active or abandoned. The hole went straight down, and then another pipe crisscrossed through it at the bottom in a T formation.
Cory ran over, picked up the bag of body parts, and dropped it inside the drainage ditch.
They stood over the hole and looked down at the bag.
Was this a good idea? Sooner or later, some workman would have to go down into the hole. Looking from the top of the hole down at the bag—with Adrianne’s head pressed tightly against one corner of the plastic—they could actually make out her facial features. It looked as if a piece of black latex had been stretched over a skull.
Too Young to Kill Page 20