Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Investigators had interviewed Brian Engle, Sarah’s grandfather, for a second time, on January 26, 2005.

  “I spoke to Sarah,” he said. The conversation had taken place earlier on that same day.

  “And? . . .”

  Brian didn’t seem as though he wanted to talk. He said begrudgingly, “Well, she told me she is going to ‘take care of it’ all.” She was crying, he added. It appeared Sarah was in the process of coming forward and speaking about her role in the tragedy. “She and her mom are looking for a new attorney.” The first attorney they had spoken to did not want to take the case.

  “Can you tell us anything else, Mr. Engle?”

  The guy knew more. Cops were certain of it.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t want my daughter to hate me. Whatever Sarah has to say will come from Sarah. She is meeting with a new attorney soon and will be going to the police station. You’ll know soon enough.”

  “Has she ever told you anything about this?”

  “No. Never. She has never said anything incriminating. And even if she did,” the farmer added, “I would not tell you guys.”

  “It’s vitally important for you to continue to cooperate with us. As the head of your household,” the investigator said meaningfully, trying to twist the grandfather’s arm a bit, “you should not be putting yourself in jeopardy by withholding evidence or information. Whatever Sarah did should rest on her shoulders.”

  Brian thought about the cop’s quasi-threatening statement.

  “I’ll call you if anything new comes up.”

  59

  Jill Hiers took a call from Pat Corbin, Nate Gaudet’s grandmother, several days after Adrianne disappeared, she explained to the ISP, when two troopers interviewed her on January 26, 2005.

  “Nate’s mother was also on the call,” Jill told police.

  Both Nate’s grandmother and mother, Jill told police, told her during that phone call that “Sarah killed that girl.”

  Jill explained how odd Nate had been acting and how he was wearing that trench coat on January 23, the day she picked him up at his grandmother’s house. In not so many words, Jill tried to ask the women during the call if perhaps Nate was also involved in Adrianne’s murder.

  They didn’t want to hear anything about it.

  Jill told the women she was calling Nate at work and asking him point-blank what the hell was going on.

  The call ended.

  Nate had an eerie ringtone. He looked down at his cell, that strange music playing, and saw that it was Jill calling him.

  “What?”

  “Tell me what happened,” Jill stated.

  “Sarah did it!” Nate said. “Cory didn’t.”

  “How . . . what . . . You have to tell the police what you know.”

  “Sarah killed Adrianne. She was mad and jealous of her. Adrianne had a thing for Cory and Sean.”

  “What happened?”

  “Sarah reached into the backseat and began choking Adrianne by the neck . . . and then . . . well, then Cory finished her off with a belt.”

  Nate went on to say Sarah and Cory were the only two in the car when this occurred. He told Jill that Sean had exited the vehicle and walked back to school by then. Sean McKittrick was not involved.

  Jill couldn’t believe what Nate was telling her.

  “Sarah carried her out of the car,” Nate continued, “put her in the trunk, and then took her out and burned her.”

  Jill had a feeling there was more. She implored Nate to keep talking.

  “Last Sunday,” Nate explained, “Sarah and Cory called me to see if I wanted to go paintballing with them. They told me to bring a saw to cut some wood for targets. They were playing mind games with me. When we arrived to where we were supposed to be playing paintball, I saw something covered in a tarp. Cory and Sarah kept asking me, ‘Do you believe we could kill someone? Do you think you could kill someone?’”

  “Nate . . . ,” Jill said. “You have to go to the police.”

  “There’s more. Sarah asked me, ‘Do you think we have a body under there? Do you believe us if we told you there was a dead body under there?’ Then I saw the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my life. They removed the tarp and no one spoke. She was burned! We lit her on fire again.”

  As they stood watching the fire sizzle out, Nate explained to Jill, “I asked them, ‘Is this why you wanted me to bring the saw?’ And they just kept telling me to ‘do it, do it, do it.’”

  Nate did not need to be told; he knew what Sarah and Cory meant by “do it.”

  Cut Adrianne into pieces.

  “Why did you do this, Nate?” Jill asked. She was appalled. Scared. Worried. Confused. Her boyfriend, she had just realized, had dismembered another human being.

  “They told me to” was all Nate could say.

  By the end of the conversation, Nate told Jill that “Cory and Sarah had planned the whole thing at school” on the morning of the murder.

  Premeditation all the way.

  On the afternoon of January 26, Sarah Kolb was arrested and charged with Adrianne Reynolds’s murder.

  Then Sean McKittrick was hauled in. Booked. And questioned.

  The local media went into a frenzied state. Reports buzzed that four teens had been arrested for murdering and dismembering a peer.

  Detective Brian Foltz took a call late that afternoon from Tom Kolb, Sarah’s father—that is, Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Kolb. The guy was a law enforcement officer in Idaho. He said his ex-wife, Sarah’s mother, had called to tell him what was going on. It was the first he had heard his daughter was in custody and under arrest.

  “Why has my daughter been arrested?” Deputy Kolb wanted to know.

  Foltz explained the murder charges. “I cannot discuss any details of the case, however.”

  Tom Kolb left his phone number.

  ISP case agent Mike Scheckel stopped by Nate Gaudet’s place of work and approached the gawky, skinny Juggalo as the sun set that same night. The state police acted on a tip from one of Nate’s family members, who found “a bloody saw” in the basement of her house.

  Nate looked nervous, twitchy. Ready to crack.

  “I need to talk to you, Nate.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your mother and grandmother asked me to come and get you, take you back to your grandmother’s house so I can interview you.”

  Nate dropped his shoulders, looked toward the ground. (“I knew I was going to jail,” he later said when describing this moment.)

  “You know why I need to speak with you, Nate?” Scheckel asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Nate answered.

  Nate wore that dark-colored, wool winter cap and a black T-shirt. He sat slouched deep into the cushion of his grandmother’s couch in the living room; old-school walnut paneling comprised the backdrop. Nate had his hands folded in front of him. He stared into the camera as though he was getting ready to talk about himself for a singles video.

  Yet the look on Nate’s face told another story. This kid was scared shitless. A boy in a man’s world. The jig was up.

  Nate knew it.

  For the first several minutes of the interview (with two investigators who did not know Sarah and Cory’s names until Nate told them), Nate Gaudet talked about how he met Sarah through Cory and how they started to hang out together. He said he did not know Adrianne well and had only been enrolled at Black Hawk four days when she disappeared.

  “Who strangled [Adrianne Reynolds]?” was the question of the hour. Did Nate know who—Cory, Sarah, or both—carried out the murder? This was the central focus for cops. They had two different versions of what had happened.

  “Sarah strangled her,” Nate said.

  “How did she strangle her?”

  “With her hands.”

  “She use anything else?”

  “On the way, they put a belt around her neck.”

  “Who put the belt around her neck?”

  “Cory.”

  �
��What did that belt look like?”

  “Black, with holes in it.”

  “Did you see the belt?”

  “Yup.”

  “Where was it?”

  “In [Sarah’s] car.”

  “Okay, what happened next?”

  “Me and Cory,” Nate said, using his hands to explain, pointing down at his palm at times, gesturing and waving his hands in the air at others, “chopped up the body.”

  “Chopped it up? With what?”

  “A saw.”

  “Did you ‘chop’ it, or did you ‘saw’ it?”

  “Sawed the bone,” Nate remarked with a patronizing tone, as if to say, Come on, dude, how does one chop a bone with a saw?

  “What parts of the body did you saw?”

  “The head and the arms.”

  “What parts of the body did Cory saw?”

  “The legs.”

  Nate answered several questions about Sarah and Cory and the day he spent with them. He gave all the names of those inside the party house who knew Sarah and Cory. Then one of the investigators asked, “When did you cut the body up?”

  “Saturday,” Nate said. As he turned his head and the investigator asked him to be more specific about times and what had happened, a loud wail came from the background. It was a woman’s cry, presumably Nate’s mother or grandmother, who, for the first time, had learned what Nate had done. As Nate described in more graphic detail the time and place of the dismemberment, the woman continued to weep in animated, loud tones. Listening to this, one gets a sense of how many people this gruesome crime was in the midst of affecting—a ripple effect that would continue to grow as the days, months, and years passed.

  “So you cut the body up on Saturday,” the detective said over a tremendous moan, with the woman now adding between sobs, “Oh, my God. . . . Oh, my God. . . . No . . . no.... Oh, my God.”

  The investigators wanted to know why Sarah chose to bury Adrianne’s head and arms in the park.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why’d you decide to help them?”

  Nate did not hesitate to answer this question: “’Cause they’re my friends. . . .”

  It was, in the scope of what these kids had done, a cold response drowned out by a wailing woman, crying hysterically, while chanting loudly, “Oh, my God. . . . Oh, my God. . . . No, no. . . .” Police officers had just asked a seventeen-year-old boy why he dismembered a teen peer he barely knew with a hacksaw, and the only answer he could come up with was “’Cause they’re my friends.”

  60

  It was thirteen degrees on the morning of January 27, 2005, when Dr. Jessica Bowman got into her car and drove to work. The sun shined bright on this day, but the air was bitterly crisp and cold, the high for the day predicted to be no more than twenty-six degrees.

  There were two red body bags wrapped in white sheets waiting in the cooler inside Bowman’s autopsy suite—both contained the remains of Adrianne Reynolds. The autopsy of Adrianne’s body parts was performed at the Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, Illinois, a three-hour drive south of the QC. Bowman began the autopsy at 10:30 A.M. Beyond her normal duties of logging an official report for the state, the pathologist was in search of a cause of death, which would give law enforcement the advantage when continuing to talk to Cory, Sarah, Sean, and now Nate Gaudet. If they knew how Adrianne was murdered, that information could help in determining who committed the crime.

  Bowman, with medical licenses in five different states, was able to cut open and explore the inside of Adrianne’s lungs, where she uncovered no sign of “soot in the airways.”

  This was important.

  It proved Adrianne was dead when they torched her remains.

  The doctor found many other significant factors as the morning progressed, including minor hemorrhage within the scalp and a laceration over the left eyebrow without associated hemorrhage; no lethal blunt force, sharp force, or gunshot wound injury identified; evidence of dismemberment of the body after [author’s emphasis] initial thermal injury due to lack of thermal injury of the deep neck tissue and both cut surfaces of the upper arms.

  Of course, no one had said it, but there was always the underlying possibility (not to mention concern) that, despite what Cory and Nate had told police, Adrianne had been dismembered while she was still alive, or shortly after her death, then set on fire. There were even rumors floating around the QC that Adrianne was alive and breathing when Cory and Sarah took her out of the trunk, so they beat her to death with a shovel.

  The evidence seemed to show that none of this could be true. This one piece of evidence told the doctor that Adrianne was not alive when her body was cut up.

  It was small, but when Adrianne’s family found out, they would be comforted by this news.

  In what would make Tony Reynolds proud—if there was a silver lining under any of this horror—was that the toxicology report came back negative: Adrianne was clean. No drugs. No booze. The tox screen checked for every possible drug the teen could have ingested: amphetamines, antidepressants, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, cannabinoids (THC), cocaine, lidocaine, methadone, opiates, and several others.

  Bowman concluded that the cause of Adrianne’s death was undetermined. She found no evidence of lethal blunt force, sharp force or gunshot injury, but noted there was limited examination due to severe charring and dismemberment. Probably most important to the investigation, thus far, was the fact that Dr. Bowman could not exclude several causes of death, including asphyxia due to strangulation either manual or with a ligature, compressional asphyxia, smothering, or a combination of compression and smothering (burking).

  There was little skin intact on Adrianne’s body parts that Bowman could find. Furthermore, for some reason, Adrianne’s neck has been cut in half, and her anterior lower neck was found to be absent.

  Why?

  The doctor felt the leftover tissue was in keeping with carnivore activity—an animal of some sort had eaten part of Adrianne’s neck.

  There was no way for the doctor to find out if Adrianne had been sexually assaulted—beyond submitting a rape kit including swabs taken of her internal sexual organs, because her vaginal and anal orifices cannot be visualized due to the severe thermal injury. If she couldn’t get a good look at Adrianne’s vagina and anus, there was no way for the doctor to test for any trauma.

  The doctor found some skin on Adrianne’s right hand; she uncovered a metal ring band on Adrianne’s right first finger, wide and red, the word “hottie” printed on it.

  Dr. Bowman discovered a violent injury, which would have been made by a fairly hard blow above Adrianne’s left eyebrow and another behind her left ear. The skin had been separated, each injury about 4.5 cm in maximal length; the skin break about 5.2 cm long. There were patchy areas of hemorrhage . . . noted on the scalp, but the underlying skull and brain show[ed] no trauma.

  Someone had struck a blow to Adrianne’s head with an object of some sort, but there was not enough force behind it to penetrate and/or bruise her skull.

  The person who struck Adrianne was weak.

  Adrianne’s organs were mostly intact, except for her kidneys, which Nate Gaudet had cut in half when he dismembered her torso. Many of her remaining organs had been cooked, essentially, and were of no use to the doctor’s examination. Adrianne’s thymus, a lymphoid organ situated in the center of the upper chest just behind the sternum, was missing, once again due to carnivore activity. None of Adrianne’s bones showed breakage or trauma, except, obviously, where Nate had cut them in half.

  Cory Gregory was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of “concealment of a homicidal death.” His bond set at a million dollars.

  Cory would not be sleeping at his father’s house any longer.

  The headline on top of the fold that day told a confused community mourning Adrianne’s untimely, shocking death, in the largest font a newspaper generally used, exactly what had happened to the sixteen-year-old: MISSING TE
EN DISMEMBERED. The sub headline was more shocking: Search has grisly end; classmate, 16, arrested.

  The photos accompanying the headline were of Sarah, handcuffed, wearing a white turtleneck, baggy blue jeans, a sobering look of despair on her pale white face. She was being led from one building to another by sheriff’s deputies. Although Sarah was sixteen, she would be turning seventeen on April 23 of that year. For now, she would be held as a juvenile. But she would be transferred to an adult facility—and charged as an adult—in a matter of months.

  To the left of that photo was the familiar picture of Adrianne with her bob cut, a smaller headline underneath Adrianne’s unforgettable smile, a caption spelling out the person she was: Adrianne “cared about everything.”

  Sarah, who had been booked on first-degree murder charges, was being held on a $1 million bond at the Mary Davis Home, a detention center. She was the only suspect named publicly, thus far. “Other suspects” were involved in the crime, accompanying articles in the newspaper promised, but were being left “unnamed” at this time. The reason, many in the know assumed, was that Sean McKittrick, Nate Gaudet, and Cory Gregory were talking to police. And there were still questions left to be answered regarding who would be charged with which crimes.

  Cory was in Rock Island County Jail, talking not only to the police, but his cellies—digging himself a deeper hole. The jail staff had been told to “keep an eye” on Cory as the early-evening TV news came on at five o’clock the night after Sarah was arrested. Why they did this was never discussed in the report detailing what happened next, but it’s safe to conclude that, for prosecutors and cops, they were still not on board with the idea that Cory was an innocent bystander and Sarah acted alone. It was that one comment a few witnesses had shared with police.