Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Then Hoffman was able to get the doctor to admit that strangulation generally involved a “choke hold,” and not necessarily smothering, and that it would, in fact, be “easier” to choke someone to death rather than smother.

  “It would be much more likely with a choke hold,” Bowman agreed.

  “I have nothing further,” Hoffman concluded.

  The media had watched and photographed him walking into the Justice Center. He looked scared and ghost white; his dark black hair was cut respectfully short.

  SA Jeff Terronez called Sean McKittrick. The Juggalo was obviously nervous; he walked in with a fidgety way about him, and it was clear Sean did not want to be there. Sauntering by Sarah Kolb’s table in front of the bench, Sarah’s former boyfriend didn’t take his eyes off the floor.

  He sat in the witness chair.

  Sarah stared at Sean as the bailiff adjusted the microphone to his height.

  The former boyfriend of the accused was now eighteen years old. Sean had a way about him: congenial, yet hard. Court viewers got the feeling that the kid had been through a lot in his short life and would rather forget about it and move on.

  He pointed Sarah out for the jury. She wore a long-sleeved, buttoned-up shirt, and held steady a look of despair and disdain on her ashen face.

  Sarah was a fighter. That much was clear in her manner.

  As he spoke about how he met Cory and Sarah, Sean McKittrick seemed to drift off. He was hard to hear.

  The lawyers and the judge told him to speak up.

  Within a few minutes, Sean walked jurors into the party house and introduced them to Nate Gaudet and several other Juggalos who hung out at the house. Then the SA had him talk about the relationship between Adrianne and Sarah. Sean had a backseat view of the tumultuous period between Adrianne and Sarah. He had witnessed Sarah’s hate for Adrianne through Sarah’s point of view, beginning at the first of the year, when Sarah and Cory picked up Sean in Cedar Rapids and brought him back to the QC. As far as his relationship with Sarah, Sean McKittrick said, he saw it slipping “at a down slope” by the time Adrianne was murdered, “and I noticed that it was not going to last, so that time (January 21, 2005), I would say it was over.”

  Terronez had Sean explain the setup at school. Class times. When the students had breaks. Where Sean and his crew hung out.

  Sarah’s name kept popping up as the leader, the one person they all went to for rides and advice.

  Quite surprising, Sean said Sarah had never spoken to him about Adrianne, which made one consider the question: if Adrianne was so much the focal point of Sarah’s wrath, why wasn’t she discussing the girl with her boyfriend, arguably her closest confidant?

  Sean categorized the relationship Cory and Sarah had as “odd.”

  After a few more questions about Cory and Sarah’s relationship, Terronez had Sean get into the reason why he was there: Taco Bell.

  First Sean jumped down off the stand and talked jurors through several maps and photographs of the Taco Bell parking lot that Terronez had set up.

  Sean said when Sarah grabbed Adrianne by the hair, his “attention” was piqued.

  “How did she have hold of her hair, sir?” Terronez wanted to know.

  “By the back of her head.”

  It was clear the attack was unprovoked. Adrianne had never said anything, nor had she hit Sarah before Sarah grabbed her by the back of the head and warned her to stay away from Sean and Cory.

  And that was about the extent of Sean’s role in all of this. When Sarah failed to heed his call to stop bullying Adrianne, Sean bailed out of the car and went back to school.

  Terronez asked Sean several questions about times and when he had spoken to Sarah and Cory, but Sean didn’t have much information to share. Sarah, he said, wouldn’t speak to him. The prosecutor did not ask Sean anything about the relationship he had with Sarah, or if kids in school were talking about the animosity between Sarah and Adrianne.

  Throughout the remainder of the day, Jeff Terronez and company brought in Brad Tobias, Henry Orenstein, Melinda Baldwin, Kory Allison, and several other students/friends of Sarah’s. Each provided a different take on the relationship Cory had with Sarah, along with the tenuous relationship Sarah had with Adrianne, and how the two collided like electrons after Sarah set Adrianne up with that social “test” at the party house.

  The jury got it: Sarah was pissed that Adrianne had failed.

  And it was obvious Adrianne would not let it go without an explanation.

  November 4, 2005, gave the jury several witnesses whose testimony centered on Sarah Kolb’s building hatred toward Adrianne Reynolds and the fact that she wrote about it in her journal. By the end of this day, jurors understood that Sarah might have told several of her coworkers and friends she knocked Adrianne’s teeth out during a fight, but, according to what the pathologist had testified to, the evidence failed to back it up.

  It was obvious that Sarah Kolb was a liar—but was she the one who instigated and carried out this vicious murder? That was the question here, one that SA Jeff Terronez had not quite proven.

  The court took a break for the weekend.

  Back on November 7, a clear Monday, the sky so blue and cloudless it looked like water, the testimony bolstered Sarah Kolb’s case more than the state’s. Darrin Klauer, Sarah’s stepfather, talked about how he had observed an obsessive relationship between Cory and Sarah, with Cory routinely complaining about having other people around Sarah, many of whom he had to “contend” with at times. It was a strong argument for a case of revenge on Cory’s part.

  The only true piece of incriminating evidence SA Jeff Terronez could get out of Darrin Klauer—and it wasn’t much—was the fact that he found it “odd” when Sarah parked her car in the garage on the night Adrianne was murdered and again the day after.

  After a few more witnesses, who also described the bizarre behavior on the part of Cory Gregory and Sarah Kolb following Adrianne Reynolds’s disappearance, Mary Engle was called to the stand.

  Sarah’s grandmother looked terrified of speaking against her granddaughter.

  Once again, in what seemed to be a big buildup to nothing, as if the witness was going to drop the proverbial bombshell and blow the case against Sarah wide open for everyone to see, Mary Engle didn’t have much to add.

  Her testimony sort of went like this: “Was it dark out when [Cory and Sarah] left [the antique store]?”

  “It was dark out before I left Aledo. It was January. It was—there was a storm coming in.”

  “So you specifically remember a storm coming in?”

  “There was a sleet storm coming in, yes.”

  Inconsequential evidence, essentially, that, in the grand scheme of this case, meant little.

  Then Jeff Terronez moved on to a pack of cigarettes that Sarah and Cory were looking for, which they could not find, and ended his direct examination of Sarah’s grandmother.

  The state had made a case for it being odd that Sarah Kolb was out at the Engle farm that weekend. David Hoffman keyed on this point for a brief moment, asking Mary how often she saw her granddaughter.

  “Whenever they were in town,” Mary said, meaning Kathryn Klauer and Sarah, “to go to the doctor or whatever, they usually stopped. Just every now and then, Kathy would come down, just periodically. There was no set schedule. Any given day, I could be babysitting for some of the other grandkids.”

  Seeing the opportunity, Hoffman asked Mary Engle if she ever saw Sarah with Cory before that day inside the antique store.

  “No.”

  On redirect, Jeff Terronez asked Mary Engle a strange question, one that seemed to help Hoffman’s case more than his own: “Just so I’m clear on this,” Terronez said. “To your knowledge, Sarah Kolb had a specific plan to be out in Aledo the afternoon of January twenty-first?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  It was to say happy birthday to her grandmother with a birthday cake.

  Lunch came. The judge adjourned
until 1:00 P.M.

  As far as trials go, this one did not have the drama or intensity of a Perry Mason episode. Nor had it yet given jurors that CSI-inspired forensic evidence of supercomputers, high-tech gadgetry, or groundbreaking testimony from experts weighing their responses while chewing on the earpiece end of their glasses. There was no yelling. No screaming at witnesses. No testimony that sent newspapermen out into the hallways calling their editors in a frenzy.

  Still, an astute trial watcher would be able to see what was happening here: that the dynamic in this courtroom had shifted. A story was being told, however subtle. A tale of teen drama, entrenched in the common everydayness of ordinary life for a bunch of dropouts and druggies who decided to give life one more crack before giving up completely.

  Brian Engle, Sarah’s grandfather, testified after the lunch break.

  Engle had a farmer’s well-mannered way about his posture and attitude. He was a guy who certainly didn’t mince his words. He’d tell people how he felt, regardless of what they wanted to hear.

  He told the jury that his farm was 160 acres. It was remote. “There’s a blacktop road on the one side [going in] and a gravel road on the back [going out].”

  Engle then explained how he had spotted that car on Friday, January 21, 2005, in a pasture and chased it away, only to find out later it was Sarah and her friend, Cory.

  With that, SA Jeff Terronez had placed both Cory Gregory and Sarah Kolb on the farm on the night Adrianne was murdered.

  Engle also claimed to have never seen Cory before that night.

  When David Hoffman was given his chance at Sarah’s grandfather, he said he didn’t have anything to ask the man.

  The final witness of the day was John Engle, Sarah’s second cousin, who testified to finding a pack of Marlboro Reds out on the farm near two sets of footprints in the snow.

  70

  Wry questions fired randomly at witnesses don’t win murder cases. Ostensibly unimportant questions, however, become necessary in order to either get a witness to feel comfortable, or to act as a hand-holding mechanism to walk a witness down a road of dropping that one statement that can—with any luck—take a case over the top.

  On Tuesday, November 8, 2005, SA Jeff Terronez called his most important witness to date, Nathan Gaudet, who had pleaded guilty in February 2005 to “concealing a homicide.” After Nate finished testifying, he was going to be shipped straight back to the detention center holding him until his sentencing, which would come after the litigation against Cory and Sarah had concluded.

  Nate could put Sarah at the murder scenes and give the jury his best recollection of the conversations he’d had with both assailants. It was Nate, after all, to whom Cory Gregory and Sarah Kolb had admitted to murdering Adrianne.

  With his hair buzz cut, UFC short, wearing a blue T-shirt, a look of contempt on his face, sixteen-year-old Nate sat and looked toward the wall, staring into the pale nothingness that had become his life.

  The boy who cut Adrianne into pieces spoke softly. He was almost afraid to answer the questions—certain, of course, that each answer would ultimately (at least from where Jeff Terronez stood) tighten the noose around Sarah’s neck and, at the same time, make himself out to be the monster those in the QC had judged him to be.

  In the months following Nate’s arrest, his family had been threatened. Called names. Spat on. Given dirty looks at fuel pumps and the supermarket. They had tried to come to terms with what Nate had done. And they felt the impact of a community, by and large, that hated this kid, who he was, and those who had reared him.

  “I think that what Nate Gaudet did,” one person closely connected to the case later told me, “was worse than what Cory and Sarah did.”

  Nate did not want to be known as the snitch of the case. But what could he do? He had a lifetime ahead. If he could get out of this with a light sentence, maybe—just maybe—Nate Gaudet could get a second chance.

  Terronez had Nate explain how Sarah and Cory brought Adrianne around to the party house.

  “She,” Nate said, meaning Sarah, “was putting Adrianne through a test to see if she would be loyal to her in a dating relationship.”

  Nate discussed his drug use. How he, Sarah, and Cory ended up together on that Saturday, January 22, 2005. It was during a car ride that afternoon, Nate explained to jurors, when Cory and Sarah talked about “killing somebody.” Could Nate himself, they asked, ever digest the possibility they had actually done it? When Nate said no way, and showed signs of disbelief, Cory and Sarah decided to show Nate their handiwork.

  Nate had a hard time speaking up. The grimmer the subject matter, the softer his voice got. It was clear he wanted no part of going back to that day that changed his life.

  For the next ten minutes, Nate went into what Sarah and Cory had told him about how they had killed Adrianne. According to Nate’s version, Cory and Sarah were equally responsible for Adrianne’s murder.

  Then Nate talked about taking the saw from his grandmother’s house.

  He said it was Sarah who ordered him to get the saw and cut up Adrianne.

  He said he knew why he was “grabbing the saw” when he left the car that day and went down into his grandparents’ basement.

  “Whose idea was it to dispose of Adrianne’s body?” Terronez asked.

  “Sarah Kolb’s.”

  After Nate told the jury he drove out to the farm with Sarah and Cory, he spoke—in brief, but very stunning and powerful sentences—of what he did next as though he was talking about helping a friend paint her house or wash a car. He had detached himself from what he was saying, totally uninvolved on an emotional level.

  “I cut the arms off.”

  The key word there being “the,” as opposed to “her” or “Adrianne.” In saying “the,” Nate was taking the person out of it, whether he realized it or not.

  “. . . I cut one off at a time, and Cory grabbed a black garbage bag and picked up the head”—again, “the”—“and arms with the garbage bag and put them in the bag.”

  “Where else did you cut?”

  “I . . . both of the legs and torso.”

  “The,” again.

  “You cut the torso?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where at?”

  “Under the ribs.”

  “And you were successful in terms of cutting the torso?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you cut the legs, you said?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was that the extent of the cutting that you did, sir?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Nate told jurors how Sarah stood and watched throughout this horror show.

  “Did Sarah touch any of the body parts, sir?”

  “No.”

  Nate confirmed that the main reason why they cut Adrianne’s head and arms off was to hide those body parts so dental and fingerprint records wouldn’t be found in the same spot as the torso and legs. It was the only way to accomplish this task, he suggested.

  Terronez asked Nate what they did after they chopped Adrianne into pieces and began to plot how they were going to get rid of the body parts.

  “We drove to McDonald’s in Aledo.”

  “You drove to McDonald’s in Aledo?” Terronez repeated.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What purpose? . . .”

  “To eat.”

  “Were you hungry at that point?” The prosecutor seemed to harp on this for no apparent reason other than its shock value.

  “Yes, sir,” Nate said, looking away.

  A few questions later, after discussing the necklace Sarah took from Adrianne, Terronez went back to: “Did everybody eat at McDonald’s?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It wasn’t long after that when SA Jeff Terronez passed Nate Gaudet to David Hoffman.

  After a ten-minute break, David Hoffman went right into his problem with Nate Gaudet’s testimony. He began by asking the teenage Juggalo about the videotaped interview he gr
anted police on January 26, 2005, in relation to his testimony before a grand jury and two additional interviews with police. Hoffman had a problem with the synchronization of all three.

  Or the lack thereof, rather.

  First, though, Hoffman asked Nate about his drug-using habits during the same time frame—that Saturday and Sunday, January 22 and 23—when he was with Cory Gregory and Sarah Kolb, and the following week, while he was being questioned by police.

  “Were you on drugs at the time?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Were you on Ecstasy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Were you using marijuana?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you, in fact, use it on Saturday and Sunday?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you use cocaine Saturday?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In fact, Mr. Gaudet, did you see things that weren’t there and hear things that weren’t said?”

  “Not really on that day. I was just . . . Sometimes I will see shadows or something like that when I’m coming down off Ecstasy.”

  Hoffman asked Nate to explain several comments he had made to police, some of which he had since rescinded and denied.

  “Did you tell the police that you had no idea why you were going out [to the farm] with them that day? You thought [you were all] going out for some paintball exercise?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “First you ever heard about this killing was on Sunday. Isn’t that what you told them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was that just a lie?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And why were you lying to them?”

  “So I wouldn’t be caught.”

  This type of back-and-forth went on for an hour or more. Nate admitted he lied to the police on several occasions to serve his own needs. Jurors had to consider that this boy was on three different drugs—two of which greatly affect the mind—and he had lied to police. What good was his testimony, taking all of this into account? Hoffman was suggesting. How reliable a witness was a drug-using liar? Could Nate’s testimony—the idea that the murder was Sarah’s idea from the get-go—truly be trusted as tangible enough to put a young girl away for no fewer than fifty years?