“Well,” Bert wanted to know, “where’s she at?”
Cory could not speak.
Bert Gregory called Katrina Gates, Cory’s half sister. “You need to get over here.... It’s all bad,” he said. Bert was crying.
“What’s going on, Dad?” Katrina asked.
“The girl . . . that girl . . . she’s not alive anymore!” Bert said.
Katrina could hear the pain, fear, guilt, not to mention frustration and confusion in her father’s voice. How could these kids do this?
“He was just freaking out,” Katrina recalled.
Katrina didn’t remember driving from her house across town to her dad’s so she could be with her family. But Cory was there when she arrived.
“My dad was devastated and, like, on the floor bawling.”
“How could your brother get involved in something like this?” Bert kept saying out loud.
Cory was trembling like a junkie deprived of his poison. Sitting. Rocking back and forth. Then standing. Pacing. Staring at nothing.
“How? . . .” Bert repeated.
As late afternoon wound down, Cory lay in bed with his father. Katrina was nearby, kneeling on the floor. Cory and his dad were just staring at the wall, the ceiling, lost in thought. No one said anything.
Then Cory spoke: “Dad, I should have listened to you. You always told me . . . ‘It only takes one second to ruin your life.’ And now I’ve done ruined mine. I am going to prison for a long time.”
PART IV
“I DIDN’T MEAN TO KILL HER”
57
At 11:09 P.M. on January 25, 2005, Cory Gregory stood in the parking lot of Black Hawk State Historic Site and stared down at the hood of the police car in front of him. Cory had his coat zipped all the way up, hands in his pockets, his shaved head exposed to the cold air. The officers with him, ISP agent Mike Scheckel and EMPD detective Brian Foltz, were part of a team, including several other investigators and a state police dog, all of whom were prepared to head into the dark and frigid night to uncover Adrianne Reynolds’s head and arms. Cory had sat at the EMPD station house and given investigators a narrative of what had transpired over the course of the past several days, minimizing his participation in the murder as much as he could manage. As of now, investigators had no idea Nate Gaudet was involved—better yet how.
There were times during that interview when things weren’t adding up for investigators, and they called Cory out on his answers. After all, the investigation had yielded scores of interviews with Black Hawk Outreach students, Juggalos and Jugalettes (especially), on top of several other friends and family associated with Sarah Kolb and Cory Gregory. The cops knew a hell of a lot more than Cory was giving them credit for with his slipshod responses and passive involvement.
“. . . You got two people in front of you fighting,” one investigator asked Cory quite pointedly during the interview, talking about that moment inside Sarah’s car when she and Adrianne started arguing, “and you don’t do anything to break up the fight?”
“No” was all Cory said.
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“Basically, you’re told that after it happened, this is going to happen. ‘We’re going to go out and do this. We’re going to go out and do that.’” It was important during this type of interview, when law enforcement was in the information-gathering mode, not to reveal anything they had uncovered before they locked a suspect down to a statement. In lying, Cory was digging himself a hole, falling deeper away from potential negotiations with the district attorney (DA) in the future. “And you didn’t have any input whatsoever? You didn’t help out with anything at all?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“But you just went along for the ride?”
“Yes.”
Cory told police next that he didn’t even watch the fight—rather, he sat and “smoked a cigarette and looked out the window” while Sarah and Adrianne fought like cats.
The investigators interviewing him knew this was all lies.
“Basically, during the altercation in the car, you said you weren’t looking. Did you maybe hear a thud, like something hitting? You know, you can hear like a punch? Anything like that?”
“I heard,” Cory said, but then he hesitated, stalling, thinking, “. . . I heard them hit the sunroof.”
“What hit the sunroof?”
“Uh, I don’t know. That’s . . . that was about the time when they were . . . they got halfway in between the seats.”
“Was either of them asking you to help?”
“Both of them were.”
“They were both asking for help?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t do anything?”
“No.”
“So what happens when we, uh, recover the body parts and we find out that, um, Adrianne’s got a gash on her head? How do we explain that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay,” the investigator said, frustrated, “. . . I am having a hard time believing that one young lady choked another young lady out. You observed the body. Was there any injury on her face or on her head?”
“Her mouth was bleeding.”
“That’s it? There was no injuries on her head or anyplace else?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
There was a break in the interview. The investigators knew Cory was stonewalling.
“What I need to know,” one of the investigators asked, “is what really happened in the front seat of that car?”
“I know,” Cory said. “I’m having trouble recalling everything right off the bat.” Cory’s transparency was obvious to these lawmen, who were trying to say, in not so many words, that the more evasive Cory Gregory became, the lesser his chances were to catch a break on the back end of this ordeal.
Fess up or fall hard.
“Because I have a funny feeling that when we do recover the body parts, we’re going to find injuries that cannot be explained by what you told us happened. And then, well, right away, that, you know, that throws a little kink into the whole situation. So we need to know everything that happened, and we need to know the whole truth.”
“I understand.”
“Okay, so we need to know what happened,” the investigator repeated, adding, “. . . because what you’re making [it] sound like, you know, just, it just happened, there’s a lot more to that, isn’t there?”
Cory looked at the investigators. Took a breath. “Well . . .”
Cory scanned the paper outlining his Miranda rights that sat on the hood of the cruiser as they stood outside on the night of January 25, 2005, inside the parking lot of the Black Hawk State Historic Site. After briefly reading through his rights, Cory signed off before leading the team down into the woods to find Adrianne Reynolds’s body parts.
“Cameraman, lead the way,” Detective Brian Foltz said as they started past a NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES sign, stepping onto the path leading down into a deeply settled wooded area of the park. The ground, frozen and covered with snow was crusty and brittle under their feet—that is, until they hit those wooden stairs and clip-clopped down, one person at a time.
“Get some flashlights,” a cop yelled.
The walk toward the manhole containing Adrianne’s head and arms was slippery. The cop holding the video camera, focusing the point of view of the film over Cory’s shoulder, had a hard time keeping it steady, giving the entire video an eerie Blair Witch feel. The shot stayed mainly on Cory as he led the way, hands in the pockets of his down jacket, his collar stretched over his mouth, a strange I’m screwed gaze in his eyes and implicit in his demeanor.
“I think if we go down that other trail there,” one of the cops said as they struggled to get a foothold while slipping down a steep slope, “there’s a better, easier way.”
“Are we here?” another cop asked. Cory, ahead of the group by several steps, had stopped at the bottom of the hill and looked aro
und.
The place seemed familiar.
“I think it’s way down at the bottom,” someone said, meaning the manhole.
At one point, the cameraman almost fell, the camera bouncing all over the place.
“Whoa,” someone said loudly.
Careful....
Cory looked around, trying to locate the exact parcel of land.
It was 11:16 P.M. when they stopped.
“Seems we got a spot right here,” someone said.
Cory pointed.
This wasn’t it.
They continued down an even steeper slope. It was muddy, icy, dark. Tree branches slapped them in the face as they walked.
A minute later, Cory spied a set of timbers on the ground laid out in a square-shaped pattern, one side missing.
He pointed to the ground nearby and walked off to an area without speaking.
“This is it?” a cop said, looking at Cory.
Cory nodded.
“Are you sure?”
Cory looked down at the spot and nodded his head again.
How could he forget?
Everyone backed away. The cop holding the dog, a German shepherd, let him go. The canine bolted directly for the area and put its nose to the ground.
A German shepherd’s sense of smell is ten times more sensitive than a human being’s. That may not sound like much. But consider the numbers: the shepherd has 200 million olfactory cells (think of these as tiny odor-smelling sensors or antennae), as compared to 20 million in a human being. Thus, a shepherd is far more equipped to find a corpse buried ten feet belowground. Still, what is called by scientists the “bouquet of death,” or the unique aroma of a dead person concealed in a particular area, is something that still baffles researchers who study cadaver dogs and their sense of smell.2
Two of the by-products of decomposition, reporter Laura Spinney wrote in 2008, putrescine and cadaverine, have been bottled and are commercially available as dog training aids. But they are also present in all decaying organic material, and in human saliva.
No matter how he did it, after he was unleashed, the police dog searching for Adrianne’s remains took about thirty seconds to find the exact spot over which that bag of Adrianne’s head and arms lay ten feet underneath. The worked-up canine circled a small area for a few moments. Then, with his tail wagging like a sprung car antenna, tongue flopped out, snout to the ground, he focused on one spot about the size of a garbage can lid—this before lying down on his belly, looking up at his master, waiting for further instruction.
The master said something.
The dog dug into the ground with his front paws.
The master tossed a bone over the dog’s shoulder, which sent him on his way. Another cop walked over to the hot spot with a shovel.
With one poke into the ground, there was that ding of concrete just below the surface.
The dog had been spot-on—literally.
One officer dug for under thirty seconds, exposed the manhole cover, lifted it up, and then hoisted the weighty lid to the side as if it were a bundle of newspapers.
The cameraman walked over and caught the moment on tape as they shined their flashlights down into the hole.
And there it was: the garbage bag.
“How far down we lookin’ at?” someone asked.
“Oh, ten feet,” said a cop.
There was some chatter between them for a few beats regarding how the bag sat at the bottom of the hole and how dangerous it might be to just jump in and retrieve it. The hole could cave in on them.
Speaking in a descriptive tone, one of the cops spoke into the camera’s microphone, describing the scene, “We have a black bag, looks like something protruding from the side. . . .”
Another cop interrupted, adding, “Yeah . . . looks like there could be a head right there.” He shined his flashlight on the corner of the garbage bag. “Looks like a skull.”
The cameraman zoomed in on the corner of the bag.
“Right there at the top.”
“We’re going to need a ladder.”
58
The next morning, January 26, Cory Gregory was at home. The Rock Island County State’s Attorney’s Office (RICSAO), responsible for prosecuting the case, allowed Cory to stay at his parents’ house while investigators were in the process of recovering Adrianne’s body parts.
Cory was talking and helping. He was not going anywhere.
Katrina Gates was at the house that morning with the family. Cops from the EMPD and the ISP were on their way over to pick up Cory so he could lead them out to Sarah’s grandparents’ farm. As Cory waited, Katrina took a jacket off the coatrack in the house and went to put it over her brother’s back. He looked cold. He would need something to wear while out at the Engle place.
Cory jerked away suddenly.
“He about hit the floor and passed out,” Katrina recalled. “I mean, he turned ghost white. I had never seen a person turn this shade of white like that before.”
Because of a jacket?
“What is your problem?” Katrina asked.
“Get that coat away from me—get it away from me!”
“Why, Cory? What’s wrong with you?”
“That coat was on Adrianne!” Cory snapped. “How did it get here? It was in Sarah’s trunk. . . .” (The same black-and-tan coat that Sarah had placed over Adrianne inside her car after they murdered her.)
“I believe Sarah was setting him up to take the entire fall,” Katrina recalled. “I mean, how could that coat have gotten into our house?”
Katrina started to shake. Gooseflesh appeared on her arms.
“What am I supposed to do with this coat?” she asked.
Bert Gregory stepped in. “That has to go to the lawyer. It’s evidence.”
EMPD detective Brian Foltz looked into the camera and stated his name. He had a clipboard and pen in his hand. Cory had a terribly ashen color about his face that contrasted sharply with the black coat he wore as he stood alongside lawyer Dennis DePorter.
Investigators had picked up Cory at his father’s house. By 10:30 A.M., they were out at the Engle farm in Millersburg, Illinois, where there was no shortage of law enforcement men and women waiting.
Cory listened to Foltz “re-Mirandize” him. The seventeen-year-old Juggalo had noticeable dark circles under his eyes, a chatter of his lower jaw due to the bone-cold temps and nerves, his face all but hidden inside the pointed covering of a black hoodie. DePorter wore a black do-rag over his head, glasses, and, in all due respect, looked more like a biker than a lawyer watching over Cory’s rights. Cory had told cops he could help them find the remainder of Adrianne’s body parts and show them where the events he had described in his first interview had taken place.
Once again, Cory led the way. They were walking in what must have seemed like a remote section of the farm to Cory and Sarah at night (and truly was to anyone unfamiliar with it), but during the daytime seemed directly off the well-worn path of a dirt road running through the farm.
As they came upon a tepee-type structure of sticks and long branches of wood stripped of bark, the cameraman located and filmed a “burned area,” as he called it, on the ground near a small tree. Just beyond that was a larger area of burned wood and scraps of a blue papery material on the ground.
“There’s a piece of the tarp there,” the cameraman observed, focusing the camera closely on top of it.
In front of an area of burned ground, where small pieces of the tarp Sarah and Cory had used to wrap up Adrianne’s body, was that tepee-shaped structure, which was actually a beaver or fox hole over a small, mostly dried-up stream, where Nate and Sarah had placed the remainder of Adrianne’s body.
It was 10:54 A.M. when the cameraman zoomed in through the stacked sticks and logs. There was something inside the structure.
One of the investigators got down on bended knees and shined a flashlight into the mesh of branches and tree limbs. Other cops walked over and pulled off the limbs.
“I gotcha . . .,” he said.
Half his body was inside the hole, the other half outside.
“Oh, man,” the cop said, “I gotta lose some weight.”
There were laughs among them. This was how cops dealt with situations where they knew that what they were going to recover would never leave their minds. They would face the images on this day forever embedded in their brains. Joking around was one way to cope with the inevitable horror in front of them.
By noon, they had recovered half of Adrianne’s burned and charred torso from the hole, along with the other half, and one of her legs. They laid the body parts out on what looked to be a dark blue body bag unzipped and spread open. It was a strangely sad and peculiar staged scene of what looked to be props from a Hollywood movie set. Adrianne’s right leg, its foot and toes entirely intact and clearly distinguishable, was the most chilling, recognizable body part of the lot. Here was this teen’s leg and foot, dismembered at about the middle of the thigh, sitting next to two chunks of blackened flesh, with very little skin left—all that was left, besides a severed head and arms, of a young life.
As the cameraman zoomed in and out, focusing for a period of time on each individual body part, a horrific understanding arose from the images juxtaposed against other parts that seemed entirely foreign. It was clear, for example, exactly where Nate Gaudet—a name cops had not yet heard as being connected to this case—had sawed off the bone on Adrianne’s torso/hip. This video, with all of its low-tech, grainy, shocking imagery, depicted the horror these kids had perpetrated. When a jury had the chance to view the video, it was going to be all over for Sarah and Cory.
With Adrianne’s body recovered and Cory in custody (still talking), it was time to bring in Sarah Kolb.
Over a twenty-four-hour period, the investigation had yielded several new developments. The EMPD had obtained a search warrant for Sarah Kolb’s car and had found 1 strand of hair from the passenger side and 1 piece of fabric from the front passenger side seat—[along with a] possible blood stain. Investigators had spoken to twelve more witnesses who knew Sarah from Black Hawk Outreach, each giving cops one more piece to fit into a puzzle that was beginning to form the clear picture of an arrest warrant with Sarah’s name on the top.
Too Young to Kill Page 22