Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Tony and Jo believed the Juggalos were “supportive” during their time of mourning. They respected that some of them were reaching out to extend a hand of love. They were saying, with this vigil, that they were sorry. This wasn’t a crime perpetrated by what Juggalos represented. It was important to them to get that sentiment across to Jo, Tony, and the media.

  Jo and Tony walked out into the snow-covered area where everyone was gathered. As she stood in silence, Jo looked on the ground and found “some burned-up papers,” and not knowing all the facts of the case, she believed that on the spot where she and Tony now stood mourning Adrianne was the actual crime scene where Adrianne’s body was burned.

  Jo felt sick.

  “This was all like a puzzle,” Jo recalled, talking about those early days when police weren’t telling them much. “We found out a little at a time.”

  Jo and Tony had received a letter from an unnamed Juggalo who wanted to say how sorry he was about what had happened. He said he liked Adrianne, had dated her, and cared about her as a person. The Juggalo wrote that Adrianne was a sweet girl who did not deserve any of this. He said he wished he could have been more of a friend to her, apologized for her death, said he was praying for her family, and knew Adrianne was in heaven with the other angels.

  The letter was signed anon.

  “Who sent us the letter?” Jo asked as she and Tony stood among the crowd of mourners, candles burning.

  No one answered at first.

  “I did,” said a teen, who stepped forward out of the crowd.

  It was Henry Orenstein.

  “Thank you for your letter,” Jo said.

  “I am a Juggalo,” Henry said. “But I never wanted Adrianne to die. I liked her a lot.”

  Everyone had white candles. Tony and Jo held pink candles in honor of Adrianne’s favorite color.

  The QC Juggalos opined to the Dispatch newspaper that “they joined the group [became Juggalos] because they didn’t fit in anywhere else.”

  There they stood at the vigil, wearing Insane Clown Posse T-shirts and hockey and football jerseys, very few of whom donned greasepaint on this night, staring down at an excess of candles on the ground, which burned a bright orange glow in their faces. The self-pronounced spokesperson for the Juggalos made an interesting point in speaking to Dispatch reporter Kristina Gleeson, explaining that in high school there were groups of kids, the jocks, geeks, preppies, druggies, etc., but those “left over” were the Juggalos.

  Part of the idea in having the vigil, the Juggalo spokesperson told Gleeson, was to let those kids in the community know that if “they hear someone say they’re going to hurt someone else, they need to tell an outsider.”

  It was a gesture across the aisle, a way for this group to say: Don’t judge us all by the actions of a few.

  Some of the Juggalos at the vigil insisted that Insane Clown Posse’s songs inspired them to put their salvation in God, citing an Insane Clown Posse lyric that spoke of God’s calling as a “carnival” and that “all Juggalos” needed to “find Him.”

  In all fairness to reality, however, it would be hard to bookend this type of argument around a band whose core “artistic” function (if you’ll allow me the gross use of the term in accordance with ICP) as “artists”—again, using this term very loosely—is to pen songs about killing and maiming and drinking and sex. One need only to Google the lyrics for a song called “Cotton Candy” to be schooled in the idea that no matter what the Juggalo movement says about Insane Clown Posse’s integrity as songwriters, it becomes clear that God is as far removed from this band’s set of inherent values as is any moral fiber whatsoever.

  At the end of the vigil, mourners stuck their candles in the snow like on top of a birthday cake and left the park in silence.

  Not long after Tony and Jo got home, several Juggalos showed up at the house.

  One of them stepped forward and handed Jo and Tony a frozen pink heart that had formed in the snow by accident as the candles melted.

  “We want you to have it.”

  Close to four hundred people turned out for a memorial service that Adrianne’s family held at the Esterdahl Mortuary on Sunday, January 30. The Reverend Gregory Moore, speaking to the crowd that sat dazed and stunned by this tragedy, wondering how the hell they had wound up sitting and mourning the death of a sixteen-year-old girl—for what seemed like no reason anybody could explain—referred to Adrianne’s killers as “undeniable evil.” The pastor said that none of what had happened could “ever be explained,” “forgotten,” or “made right.”

  There was no explanation. No why. No purpose. No justifiable motive. It didn’t matter what the perpetrators would say in the coming days and weeks after they had time to consider their behavior. They were predators. Teens who had set their sights on a girl, decided to make her life as miserable as they could, then killed, burned, and dismembered her. What could come out of such a display of horror?

  And there was, according to a source who spoke to me under the guise of complete anonymity, an indication that this inexcusable, evil crime (along with many others committed by that group inside the Rock Island party house) was committed under the pretext that these teens thought going into the situation that if they committed the murder before their eighteenth birthdays, they would get off with slaps on the wrist and be charged as juveniles.

  The reverend made an indelible point when he told the crowd that what had happened to Adrianne happened “outside of God’s creation.” There was no other way to frame this. It was a crime no human being with a sense of right and wrong, or an intrinsic understanding of life being the precious gift it is, could have committed. The people responsible for this were empty inside, the reverend suggested. They were despicable. They were the Devil working his evil ways.

  Adrianne’s guitar—that tangible, subtle symbol of her dreams—stood in the mortuary, alongside flowers and wreaths and photos.

  Friends and family stood and talked about Adrianne’s smile.

  They spoke of how family members walked on the park grounds where Adrianne’s body parts were found so they “could feel her presence.”

  They talked about the fact that Adrianne would always be watching over them.

  How she had “blessed their lives,” whether she knew it or not.

  How they yearned for one more day with her.

  The ceremony, fittingly, ended with a version of “Amazing Grace,” the tune Adrianne had belted out so many times inside her room practicing for American Idol.

  Tony and Jo did not speak. They weren’t able to, Jo later explained. “It was a long day. I think we greeted people for two hours before services started, and it took people forty-five minutes in line to reach us. It was like people came out from my past. My best friend from fifth grade sent flowers. . . .” An old boss showed up. Neighborhood kids Jo hadn’t seen for years attended. There was even a trial witness there. Turned out the guy had gone to grade school with Tony, and he wanted to pay his respects.

  “The local florist,” Jo concluded, “had donated all the flowers—and it was amazing how many flowers were there. We had two wreaths made from the dried flowers, and they still hang in Adrianne’s room today (six years later).”

  63

  As each day passed, Sarah and Cory got stronger, emotionally. Cory was beginning to show signs of getting his head together, now having time to regroup and think about the future. Sarah was not talking. She was going to fight her way until the end. Cory didn’t indicate a desire to say much more than he had already, but the feeling was, sooner or later, Cory could be broken.

  After the interview with police at his grandmother’s house, Nate Gaudet had been released, knowing, of course, the hatchet was going to fall on his freedom any day. The time came at 4:30 P.M., January 31, 2005. Nate was picked up at his grandparents’ house, taken to the Rock Island County Sheriff’s Office (RICSO), and then turned over—because of his age, sixteen—to the Rock Island County Juvenile Probation system, whe
re he was booked as being “delinquent” because he was on probation for a previous unnamed crime. The new charges, however, were a bit more serious than any crime Nate could have committed in the past. He was charged with “acting in concert with others, with the knowledge that Adrianne Reynolds had died, by dismembering the body of Adrianne Reynolds and concealing some of the remains. . . .”

  Nate Gaudet was on his way to juvenile hall.

  Cory Gregory and Sean McKittrick had agreed to take lie detector tests, both of which were conducted back on January 26. The results of these tests came in late in the day on January 31.

  In Cory’s case, the test was built around the idea that Cory, during his first interview, had told police that all he did was help Sarah move Adrianne’s body, “but did nothing else to help conceal or dispose of the body.”

  Cory was obviously lying. The cops knew this, and they had several reports to the contrary. So they asked Cory during his lie detector test, “Prior to going to Taco Bell, did you plan, or have knowledge, that Adrianne was going to be harmed in any way?”

  “No,” Cory answered.

  “On January 21, 2005, while in the parking lot at Taco Bell, did you actively participate in any way in killing Adrianne?”

  “No,” Cory answered.

  “Besides on Big Island after Adrianne’s death, did you help move her body at any other time?”

  “No.”

  “Did you participate in any way in sawing up Adrianne’s body?”

  “No.”

  The results of the report confirmed what police had believed all along. In the opinion of the examiner, based on polygraph recordings, Cory Gregory was “not telling the truth. . . .”

  The questions posed to Sean were a bit different.

  “On January 21, 2005, did you see Sarah Kolb and Adrianne Reynolds physically fighting in her car at Taco Bell?”

  “No,” Sean answered.

  To this question, the examiner believed Sean was lying.

  “Do you know what happened to Adrianne Reynolds?”

  “No,” Sean said.

  “Did Sarah and Cory plan to harm Adrianne?”

  “Yes,” Sean answered.

  To those last two questions, the examiner indicated Sean’s responses were “erratic and inconsistent” to the point of which the polygraphist could not tell if he was telling the truth.

  64

  The first hearing surrounding Adrianne’s murder took place on Tuesday, February 1, 2005. The fulcrum and mainstay of the state’s cases were Cory and Sarah, of course, both of whom were in court to hear the charges officially filed, enter pleas—both ultimately pleaded not guilty—and find out if the cases merited enough evidence to go to trial.

  This was the first time many of the gruesome details were made public. One of the more revealing pieces of testimony came when one of the investigators explained to the court that Nate Gaudet’s grandmother actually had found the bloody miter saw that her grandson had used to dismember Adrianne. It was in the basement of her house. She called police. They quickly took off to grab Nate at his job and bring him back to the house for that now all-important videotaped interview he gave. From there, the public learned for the first time that Nate had told police he overheard Cory and Sarah talking about killing Adrianne two days before she was murdered.

  Bombshell.

  Steve Hanna, Cory’s attorney, who took over for DePorter, made a good point when he asked the investigator if the state had any trace evidence linking his client to the murder. People could say what they wanted about Cory Gregory, but where was the evidence tying him to these crimes?

  “No,” the investigator answered, explaining that the ISP was still waiting for results from several forensic tests. The case was only two weeks old.

  In the end, Judge James Teros issued an “order of the court” for police to obtain hair, blood, and fingerprint samples from Cory and Sarah.

  Sarah’s jury trial was set for April 4, 2005 (same as Cory’s).

  Things were moving at warp speed, apparently.

  Over the next few weeks, affidavits and search warrants were unsealed and the public began to hear the minutiae behind the crimes. The state compiled its list of witnesses and informed both defense teams representing Cory and Sarah that it was unlikely the state’s attorney was going to be interested in sitting down and cutting deals.

  The fact of the matter was, however, the state was waiting for Cory and Sarah to fall on his or her sword and, begging for a plea, enter into an agreement to become a state’s witness against the other. It was, truly, one of the only ways the state’s attorney’s office was going to be able to prove first-degree murder charges.

  Cory Gregory was still telling people he loved Sarah and would do anything to protect her. Most knew, however, that his mind would change once Cory got a true taste of what life behind bars inside a state prison was like. The Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) had seven maximum-security prisons, some of which held on to reputations for being one step away from hell on earth. The men inside these places did not play on a field inhabited by children; these were tough men—men who could take a kid like Cory and turn him out quickly.

  Near the end of February, the state took the death penalty off the table. It was a long shot, by and large, anyway. Juries were not known to send kids to death row, to begin with. Add to that the lack of any concrete forensic or trace evidence, and SA Jeff Terronez and company were going to be lucky to get convictions, let alone twelve votes for execution.

  Back on February 4, the ISP submitted a list of some thirty-two items for testing to the Morton Forensic Science Laboratory. That list had given several clues as to the case the state was in the process of building against Sarah and Cory, the results of those tests not boding too well for either defendant. There was blood found in Sarah’s room at her house, on her clothes, on the saw used to cut Adrianne up, and hair and DNA samples on the stick discovered in Sarah’s car. Item number 26 was a “black leather belt,” which looked to be the weapon used to strangle Adrianne, at least according to several witnesses who had spoken to Cory. Number 32, handed over to the state police by Steve Hanna, Cory’s attorney, was the winter coat that had freaked Cory out back at his house.

  Cory and Sarah, in light of this new evidence, were in trouble.

  Then the results of Nate Gaudet’s polygraph came in, and somewhat confused things. For example, Nate answered “Did Sarah Kolb tell you that she choked Adrianne Reynolds?” with a resounding “yes.” And the question “Did Cory Gregory and Sarah Kolb tell you that Cory Gregory held Adrianne Reynolds’s arms so Sarah could choke her?” with an additional unimpeded “yes.”

  This scenario, of course, made the most sense. There was no way Sarah Kolb could have killed Adrianne by strangulation alone. Sarah just wasn’t strong enough—and there was plenty of evidence indicating Adrianne was a hell of a lot tougher than Sarah. It was Cory himself, moreover, who put that strangulation theory out there.

  Yet, all that being said, a new problem within this dynamic emerged. The polygraphist indicated Nate’s test showed the boy was “not telling the truth,” but that the test couldn’t be trusted because Nate had been in psychiatric treatment within the past ninety days, making one wonder why they had even tested him.

  What few people knew was that Nate had been treated for bipolar disorder his entire life. He was on meds at the time of the murder.

  The final question on the test was “Are you the only person that sawed apart Adrianne Reynolds’s body?” This yielded a “yes” response from Nate, which the examiner indicated he could not render an opinion on because of Nate’s “lack of emotional response.”

  The most chilling aspect of this was the idea that Nate Gaudet sat and admitted to sawing up a human being but had absolutely no emotional reaction to it whatsoever.

  Flat. Numb. Hollow.

  A shell.

  If nothing else, the polygraph showed how desensitized Nate was to the real world.

>   Which made one wonder: was Nate Gaudet a clinical sociopath?

  Investigators dug up some interesting evidence as they spread out and spoke to several of Sarah Kolb’s classmates at Black Hawk. Everything Sarah had written or talked about had now taken on a new context. Sarah’s scribbling and her doodling were no longer just the pastimes of some strange girl jotting down her thoughts at random. In looking at some of what she had written (with the idea that no one was ever going to see it), investigators had to scratch their heads and wonder how deep Sarah was touched by whatever demon seed had been planted inside her. On an English syllabus handout, Sarah covered the facsimile with incomplete sentences (ironic in and of itself) and various words that were on her mind at the time, as well as arbitrary thoughts speaking to how dark the world inside Sarah’s head was on any given day. The paper was not dated, but it must have been written within the past six or seven months.

  Starting at the top, Sarah apologized, repeatedly, writing she was fucking sorry for any number of things, including an unnamed person whom she viewed as always being right and Sarah always [being] wrong. She said she wanted to die. She wasn’t good enough. Sarah felt ugly. She called herself a failure. She wanted to slice the years (whatever that meant) and make all the pictures in her head disappear. There was no way out. She considered herself to be nothing special. She called her life “hellacious.” She said she was lonely, and when she felt that way, everyone in her life was walking away from her, as opposed to consoling and loving her unconditionally. She wrote the word “masterpiece” above the word “mutilation.”

  And so there was Sarah Kolb writing these types of random thoughts on one end of the hallway; while at the same time, Adrianne Reynolds was writing things along the lines of Love and hate is just a game./ Played by a bunch of people / Who just want to get laid. On top of In agony I’m screaming, crystal tears of blood pouring down me, with a jagged blade in my hand, I’m engraving diagonal lines. . . . (Perhaps this was Adrianne’s artistic way of dealing with the cutting she identified as being a release from the emotional pain she endured.)