Too Young to Kill
Page 24
The belt.
Authorities knew Cory had lied about Nate’s role—he had never mentioned Nate’s name to the police. Rock Island County state’s attorney (SA) Jeff Terronez, taking charge of the case, wanted to get a feel for Cory’s reaction to Sarah’s rather public arrest. See what he said about his interview with police and the arrest of the girl he had proclaimed his undying love for.
Corrections officer (CO) Erin Taylor was at her guard station inside the jail when she called into Cory’s cell via intercom to ask Cory to clean up. When Taylor hit the intercom button, opening up a direct line between the two of them, before she spoke, Taylor overheard a conversation Cory had with his cellmate.
“Do you know that Reynolds girl?” Cory asked.
“Nope.”
“Yeah, well, I killed her.”
His cellie said nothing.
“Hey, Gregory,” Taylor said over the intercom, “you want to clean your cell?”
“Yeah,” Cory answered.
Cory was in a holding cell later on that same night when he opened his mouth again. It seemed he couldn’t shut up about what had happened. Or maybe Cory was trying to put a reputation for himself in play within the limits of prison culture? Cory was a small boy in a large man’s world. He was going to be spending a long time inside the system; he had better set himself up now as someone to fear.
Or pay later.
Cory talked about how the girl “he was with,” a prisoner in his holding cell later told police, strangled another girl. Then, still not mentioning Nate (and now outright defending him), Cory said Sarah cut up Adrianne’s body.
“I was there,” he told the guy, “but I had nothing to do with the murder.”
He told another cellmate Sarah had killed Adrianne, but he panicked. After realizing Adrianne was dead, Cory said, he and Sarah froze Adrianne’s body (outside in the cold weather) for two days after the murder, then cut her up.
“There was not a lot of blood,” Cory added, “due to the body being frozen.”
More newspaper reports were published late the following afternoon: SECOND TEEN CHARGED IN REYNOLDS SLAYING. Cory Gregory was now part of what was becoming a high-profile murder case inside the QC. One of the articles explained how “other suspects” could be arrested in the days to follow.
Meanwhile, Sean McKittrick’s father called the EMPD. He said his son had some things to say about the murder and he wanted to bring him in to talk it through.
McKittrick, with his dad, gave the ISP a videotaped interview, explaining every piece of the murder puzzle Sean knew, sparing no detail.
Then the floodgates—helped by the local news coverage—opened for investigators: witnesses, one after the other, came forward.
Jo and Tony Reynolds were overwhelmed. The idea that Adrianne had been cut into pieces—and all of these kids talking to the cops had known something about the crime—was too much for them to bear.
“It was devastating,” Jo said later. “When the police came at two in the morning [that Wednesday night], all they told us was ‘We found Adrianne’s body in a park.’ The next day, we listened to the police conference on television and that’s when we found out her body was dismembered.”
The police had “dashed”—Jo’s word—over to Tony and Jo’s East Moline house on Thursday to tell them Adrianne’s corpse had been burned, and that a few of her body parts were still missing, but they had recovered most of her torso, a leg, her head, and arms. They suggested (again, according to Jo and Tony) that after the autopsy, the best thing to do was to have Adrianne cremated. Much of her body had been badly burned. It seemed like the only proper thing left to do.
Complete the process Sarah and Cory had started.
“I’m not sure how I really feel about cremation,” Jo explained, “but it seemed to be the only answer.”
This sparked a riff between Tony Reynolds and Carolyn Franco, Adrianne’s birth mother. Carolyn wanted Adrianne’s body shipped back to Texas, but Tony wasn’t about to let his only child leave his side again. Tony felt if he let Adrianne’s body go, he had nothing to bury, so they proposed to Carolyn that they split Adrianne’s ashes and have her buried in both places.
“Carolyn really wasn’t for it,” Jo remembered, “but agreed.”
Adrianne’s ashes would be buried in Moline next to Tony’s younger sister.
“We ultimately had a private burial,” Jo explained. “We bought Adrianne a pretty pink cremation box. It had a pink rose on it. The burial was just our close family and a few close friends.”
Within a few days, however, remembering Adrianne Reynolds would be a public affair, and would include, incredibly, several unexpected—and unlikely—mourners.
PART V
PINKIE’S TIME
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Rock Island County SA Jeff Terronez was thirty-four years old when Adrianne Reynolds’s murder was brought to his attention. Terronez’s office was in charge of making sure those responsible were charged and prosecuted to the full extent—the QC community would expect nothing less.
Terronez had been on the job eight weeks when this gruesome case of teen-on-teen violence took top priority for him. In the moments after Adrianne’s remains had been recovered from Black Hawk State Historic Site, and Terronez was informed, the SA later told Quad-City Times reporter Barb Ickes, he went home “in the wee hours” of that night and, carefully and quietly, opened the door to his daughter’s bedroom, where he stood for a moment and watched her sleep. Then he “pulled [her] out of bed” and “rocked her in the rocking chair.”
Considering the depravity of the crimes, it’s safe to say Jeff Terronez wasn’t the only father in the QC appreciating his daughter a little more during those days. The case had been tough on all of those in law enforcement who were involved. This type of murder, with young people involved, pulled at the heartstrings; many of the cops investigating the case had kids the same age, and they could not help but consider the what-if questions associated with staring an evil of this magnitude in the face.
Even with all of the sorrow and wonder floating about the QC over Adrianne’s murder, Tony Reynolds still had his detractors.
“Where was this guy all of her life?” asked one QC resident close to the case. “For sixteen years, this guy did nothing for his kid. Then she’s murdered, and he’s all over the news and in the papers getting his ‘fifteen minutes.’”
The newspapers were calling Adrianne’s homicide “the biggest” murder case to hit the county in over a decade, and perhaps it was; but Terronez, not yet a polished public official who could rattle off sound bites on the cuff, had little to say about the case he was building against Adrianne’s murderers.
One of the problems Terronez faced was figuring out who actually killed Adrianne, while looking at the fight inside Sarah’s car that had erupted between the two teens. Sarah wasn’t talking. Cory was telling different stories—some of what he had to say just did not add up.
Still, quite surprisingly, the way Terronez framed his case publicly, observers would think it was a slam dunk: “The evidence . . . will show that during that lunch period, in the Taco Bell parking lot, Sarah Kolb began an attack on Adrianne Reynolds . . . [and] Adrianne Reynolds was murdered.”
By whom, exactly, Terronez wasn’t saying at this early stage. His team was still in the process of collecting evidence.
Part of the case, in the form of a report Terronez had received, centered on one of the crime scenes: Sarah’s red 1991 Geo Prizm. ISP crime scene investigation (CSI) techs John Hatfield and Thomas Merchie had taken over a request by the EMPD to go through Sarah’s car, millimeter by millimeter, and see what they could come up with. The inside of the Prizm had a story to tell, a story that could then be matched up against what Cory Gregory was saying.
The Prizm inspection took place inside the East Moline City Maintenance building on Tenth Street. EMPD detective Jeff Ramsey was there waiting for the two CSI techs; he filled both men in on what they had thus far.
The search yielded very little blood or trace evidence—only that one swath of carpet, which was reported earlier.
Terronez got his hands on a report regarding the contents of the black garbage bag found at Black Hawk State Historic Site, which had been looked at under close forensic examination in the lab. Investigators were confident that they found many different things that could ultimately help Jeff Terronez and the state’s attorney’s office. Yet, the most incredible piece of evidence to come out of that bag was Adrianne’s body parts themselves, along with the way in which they had been uncovered.
Surreal did not begin to describe how gruesome this part of the investigation became. Examining the contents of the bag, a report filed by the ISP indicated, revealed the victim’s severed head and two severed arms, with hands attached to the arms. The skin of the victim appeared to have been burned. A melted blue, plastic-like material was observed on the remains. A red ring on the victim’s right index finger and several earrings in the victim’s ears were also observed. A small chain-like bracelet was observed on the victim’s right wrist.
Terronez had to realize that once a jury got a chance to hear this evidence, with nothing else added to it, the appalling reality alone was going to be hard for them not to feel for the family and convict Adrianne’s murderer or murderers. The key was to build a circumstantial case around the results of this horrifying crime and the forensic and pathological evidence. The idea was to lead jurors in the direction of the horrendous events by building up the blocks of the relationship among Cory, Sarah, and Adrianne.
A major part of the court case was proving that the ringleader and true motivator behind Adrianne’s murder was Sarah Kolb. Still, Terronez needed Cory Gregory to convict Sarah; and, conversely, Sarah to convict Cory.
Or did he?
The RICSAO had Nate Gaudet, who was in no position to bargain. Nate’s testimony would prove pivotal and, probably, the most important in terms of the after-the-fact argument. But the real mystery was the relationship between Cory and Sarah. How would those two respond to each other in court?
As the investigation continued into the weekend of January 30, 2005, a key piece of evidence emerged. It was the work of a concerned citizen, a guy whose daughter had told him something he thought might have the potential to solve the case.
Bill Hodges (pseudonym) called the EMPD and explained that his daughter had handed him a composition book. “A female friend of hers at school,” Hodges said, “gave her the book and told her to get rid of it.”
Hodges met with a cop inside the parking lot of a local McDonald’s. It was 1:40 P.M. when Hodges stepped into the cop’s cruiser and explained that his daughter had just called him. “She was very upset” because she had Sarah Kolb’s notebook/journal from school, which another girl, Jennifer Fox (pseudonym), had placed in her book bag and told her to get rid of immediately. Hodges’s daughter was afraid she was somehow now involved.
She wasn’t, of course, but the EMPD needed that notebook. The cop asked if Hodges knew the contents.
“My daughter asked the girl what was in the book,” Hodges said. “[Jennifer] replied, ‘It’s Sarah’s diary, and it says things in it bad about Sarah killing Adrianne.’ My daughter told me that this girl wanted her to destroy the book.” There was even some indication, Hodges added, that kids at school had made threats against his daughter, saying that if she didn’t do what she was told, she would end up like Adrianne.
“Where is the book?”
“I have it . . . and I didn’t understand the significance of the book until I read it myself.”
According to a police report detailing this tip, Jennifer “approached” Hodges’s daughter on January 31 and asked her if she had destroyed the book.
“No,” Hodges’s daughter told Jennifer. “I gave it to my father.”
Jennifer “Jenn” Fox, a classmate of Sarah’s, had a slightly different story to tell. Sarah had given Jennifer rides home from school on occasion, with Sean McKittrick and Cory Gregory tagging along.
“Honestly,” Jenn said later, “Sarah was so nice. I couldn’t even believe what happened. She was the sweetest girl ever! This thing blindsided me. I didn’t believe it until she was [later prosecuted].”
One of the reasons why Sarah had insisted on giving Jenn rides was because Sarah told Jenn it was “too dangerous” for her “to walk home from school” by herself. It’s also safe to say that Sarah might have been trying to get with Jenn.
Still, there was some genuine friendship and concern there on Sarah’s part, Jenn insisted.
“She knew that I liked girls,” Jenn said, “but I don’t think that was ever the issue here with us. She never pressed anything toward me that way. She never hit on me, or anything.”
Sarah hated that Jenn rode the bus home; but, more interesting, Sarah equally hated that the guy Jenn was with would, in her words, “make her” ride the bus. Sarah, it is clear, had this strange love-hate feeling where guys were concerned: she didn’t think many guys valued the affections of a female, and she did everything in her power to see that she took care of the girls she liked, either romantically or on a friendship level.
Sarah was always quiet about her family history in front of Jenn. The reputation Sarah had, according to Jenn, was that of a tough girl. Jenn described inside the school was not a lot different than how others spoke about it: the school was made up of “misfits,” she said. “You had your little groups—the Mexican group, who spoke Spanish in class all the time. Then you have the blacks. Then you had the freaky kids, those Juggalos, and then there were a few of us who didn’t fit in anywhere.
“Very segregated,” Jenn commented. “You messed with one, you messed with all of them.”
When Jenn heard about Sarah’s arrest, she thought of the journals they were asked to write in every morning and figured the journal would hurt her friend. She didn’t take the notebook to cause trouble, but more out of her loyalty to Sarah and belief in her innocence. Jenn knew where Sarah’s journal was all the time, because Sarah was always asking her to put it away.
“So I went in there, took it out, looked at it, and realized it said something about how Adrianne was messing with Cory and that was her ‘Kool-Aid,’ and that she shouldn’t be messing with him and that she was going to kill her for it.”
But after reading it, Jenn took it a different way. Sarah was pissed off, she thought, that this girl wanted to “get with” Cory. How many kids in school say “I’ll kill you” or “I’ll kill her,” and so on, every day?
“I didn’t take it as though she was going to ‘kill her.’ I believed Sarah was going to beat her up.”
As Jenn was reading the journal, a friend looking over her shoulder said, “You should rip that page out!”
“I ain’t ripping out nuttin’,” Jenn remarked.
“Take it home then. . . .”
I’ll take it home, Jenn thought, and if they ask for it, I’ll give it to them.
After police spoke to Hodges, three detectives knocked on Jenn’s door.
“We heard you have a journal,” one of them said.
“Ah, like, yeah.”
They wanted to come in.
“And proceeded to ask me a zillion questions about Sarah and if I was there [when Adrianne was killed]. They wanted to know why I wasn’t at school that day [Adrianne was murdered].”
Jenn told them she wasn’t at school because she didn’t feel like going.
“One of the detectives had been [talking to me] weeks before about some other stuff.”
T
hey kept, Jenn insisted, “trying to drill me, and I didn’t know anything.”
Jenn did not even know Adrianne. “And Sarah,” she said, “never talked about her to me.”
The detectives explained that the RICSAO would be in touch. Jenn would have to testify if Sarah’s and Cory’s cases went to trial.
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Joanne Reynolds did not want to go, but Tony insisted. Anything, Tony felt, but sit around the house and ask himself why, stare out the windows and wonder, think about what he did wrong, see Adrianne’s face and feel her presence anywhere he turned inside the house.
So they piled into Tony’s vehicle and headed out.
It was Saturday night, January 29, now a week and a day after Adrianne’s murder. There was a candlelight vigil inside Black Hawk State Historic Site, close to the spot where Adrianne’s head and arms were recovered. It was, of course, slated to be a moment of reflection. Emotions in the QC were raw. Teens didn’t know how to feel. Members of this otherwise calm farming community in Middle America had committed a ghastly act of evil, and people were trying to figure how this could have happened and why. It wasn’t as though some random killer had stumbled into the QC, picked Adrianne, and took her life. She was murdered by her peers. Shocking. Alarming. Sure. But more than any of that, the murder was a brutal reality check, letting the community know that times had changed, innocence was gone.
Among the approximately one hundred mourners standing, holding photos of Adrianne, were about fifty members of the Quad City Juggalos. The local newspapers reported that Adrianne—along with Cory and Sarah—were “members” of the group, but Adrianne was certainly no Juggalette. The vigil, in fact, had been organized by the local Juggalos, specifically a twenty-five-year-old guy who, the newspaper reported, “never knew Ms. Reynolds.” The man told reporters that although he had never met Adrianne, he considered her “family” because she was a Juggalette.