Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Further into the motion, Cory stated that because he had been poorly educated and had very little “command” over the English language, he did not fully understand that his conduct resulted in first-degree murder charges. He also said he felt threatened to take the deal—that if he didn’t, he was staring down the barrel of much more time. He said he believed if he gave investigators a confession and told the SA’s office what had happened, he was trading that information for a lighter sentence, under the impression that forty-five years was the cap.

  Cory called the judge’s sentence excessive and inappropriate.

  A local reporter called Jo Reynolds at work and asked her for a comment. Had Jo and Tony heard that Cory wanted to take his case to trial and take back his original plea?

  “What?”

  The reporter explained.

  “That son of a bitch. He held the belt!”

  The end of August came and Sarah Kolb was in Judge James Teros’s court once again to receive her sentence. This was Sarah’s chance to plead for herself and ask the judge to take into consideration all that had gone on (or wrong) in her life.

  Sarah put on witnesses and spoke to the court by way of a prepared statement. At one point, she read, “I was so good at not feeling that I felt no feeling as [Adrianne] died.” This after comparing her situation in life to Adrianne Reynolds’s, making the claim that neither she nor Adrianne was wanted by many of the adults around them throughout their lives.

  “If I really could have one wish,” Sarah said, “it would be to change the mistakes I’ve made.... Nobody else seemed to care,” Sarah added, her voice cracking, “what I was doing. I think it rubbed off on me. I know I could’ve done more to stop what happened.”

  During the testimony portion of the hearing, Sarah’s defense presented three witnesses, the most powerful being Sarah’s sister, whom Sarah looked up to. Sarah’s sibling told the court Sarah was “an abused child who was punished inappropriately.”

  No details were given.

  Tony Reynolds took the witness stand and spoke for his daughter. In tears, Tony said, “Adrianne came into this world kicking and crying. She left the same way.”

  Dressed in blue jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt, Sarah sat at the table in front of Tony and cried as he explained what his daughter meant to him.

  Then the judge spoke.

  Teros wasn’t buying any of Sarah’s nonsense. He talked of his disbelief that Sarah had been abused. She had provided no evidence of the fact other than crocodile tears and hollow words. He also said, which shocked some in the room, that Sarah possessed a “dark side” and he was convinced that she was capable of “killing again if she became angry.” He classified Adrianne’s murder as a deed done by two teenagers “for nothing,” adding at one point, “But for you, Miss Kolb, this murder doesn’t occur,” being sure to point out then how he thought Cory Gregory was just as responsible. Either teen, Teros made clear, could have stopped this senseless act of violence.

  Sarah shed more tears as Teros handed down a sentence of fifty-three years: broken down, the judge gave her forty-eight years for committing the homicide, along with an additional five for concealing it. The max he could have given the Milan teen was sixty for the murder alone.

  After the sentencing, Jeff Terronez was outside giving reporters one more grab for the nightly news, saying the case, in its entirety, was “replete with evil.”

  SA Terronez then pointed out something he felt had been missing from the proceeding, telling everyone that he was “not surprised” to hear Sarah offer no apology to the Reynolds family for killing their child.

  Judge Walter Braud allowed Cory Gregory his day in court—but not in the form of a full-fledged trial. That motion Cory had filed deserved a hearing. Here was Cory’s chance to plead his case.

  Cory took to the witness stand as Judge Braud listened. The teen said his “mind was clouded by drugs, alcohol, and depression” during that time when he “allowed” his attorneys to “convince him to plead guilty.”

  This opened up the opportunity for Cory to bring the court into what he classified as his tortured life of drug and alcohol abuse. Cory said he started drinking alcohol at the ripe age of fourteen, and he graduated to “a half gallon of whiskey or vodka every weekend” by the time November 2004 through January 2005 came.

  Further along, Cory stated that after he started “smoking marijuana in 2003,” at the peak of his use, he claimed to have gone through a “half ounce a day.” Ecstasy was something he and friends used on “a weekly basis.” Cocaine was a drug he had tried, he said, about “twenty to twenty-five times” from the age of fourteen until his arrest.

  When asked about the plea deal itself, Cory responded, “I didn’t feel like I had much of an option, really. I just assumed my lawyers were looking out for me.”

  The blame game.

  In truth, Cory sounded like a gambler who had purchased the wrong lottery numbers and was now complaining to the state that he should have looked at his tickets before leaving the window.

  Rock Island County Circuit judge Walter Braud had a look of are you done now? on his face after Cory finished testifying on his own behalf.

  SA Jeff Terronez put on a good argument, focusing on the fact that Cory had plenty of sobriety time in jail before making his plea. There were no drugs or booze clouding his mind—just plain old-fashioned reluctance.

  Braud called Cory’s testimony and motion to withdraw his plea “buyer’s remorse,” adding quite sharply, “At this sale, you can’t take it back!”

  The motion was denied.

  Jo cried out facetiously as Cory was escorted out of the courtroom, saying, “Boo-hoo. Boo-hoo.”

  Teresa Gregory shouted from her seat over Jo’s words, “Love you, buddy.”

  Tony Reynolds put it all into perspective later when asked about all the posttrial nonsense, saying, “It really doesn’t make any difference what they do. Adrianne is still not coming home.”

  79

  Tony liked to take a three-mile jog every morning. The run kept the aging trucker in shape. Made him feel good—as good as good would get, that is—throughout his day. Since the months after Adrianne’s death, Tony had wanted to purchase a special vanity license plate from the DMV: LIL BIT. It was a way of putting a reminder of Adrianne on his truck that he would see every day.

  After calling the DMV and asking about the tag, he was told it had been taken, and there wasn’t any version of LIL BIT available to him at this point.

  Tony’s heart sank. This one thing. So much had happened. He felt guilty in so many different ways. He just wanted to honor his daughter.

  After the legalities surrounding Adrianne’s murder concluded—there would be appeals, but they would take time—Tony got back into the swing of his routine, which included that morning run.

  He usually took off somewhere near 4:30 or 5:00 A.M. He liked the quiet and dark tranquillity of early morning when no one was around.

  One morning, after stretching in the driveway and taking off down the street, Tony came around a corner near his house and stopped abruptly in his tracks.

  There it was.

  LIL BIT.

  Right in front of him.

  Sitting on the ground near his house, the same vanity license plate that Tony had wanted to purchase.

  Bizarre coincidence?

  “That was Adrianne,” Tony said later, his voice scratchy with emotion, “telling me she was okay.”

  Adrianne Reynolds hadn’t dated the poem, but the underlying message she wanted to convey was unmistakably prophetic—an eerie portend of her life. Adrianne felt an end was near. She knew, in some strange way, her time on the planet was limited.

  She titled the poem “Welcome to My Life.”

  Although she didn’t date it, it was not hard to tell that Adrianne wrote this near the time of her death, when those around her—the people she believed to be friends—had turned their backs on her and she couldn’t understand why.

/>   A painful life to be broken,

  but will never be.

  I scream in agony for someone

  to be there for me.

  Is there a reply?

  No!

  Wanting to unleash the demon

  inside just won’t work for anyone

  but me.

  I cry, but no one hears me,

  which makes me burn inside.

  I feel and keep reaching, far,

  but there is nothing.

  Nothing but blackness and

  raging death.

  Awaiting me is the fire

  of screaming agony.

  There I find “myself” screaming also,

  but is someone there to hear me?

  No!

  I’m ignored by my dark Angel because he

  has forgotten and left me screaming

  in the burning pits of hell!!!

  If there was one thing about Adrianne Reynolds no one could deny, it was how closely in touch this young girl was with her feelings. Adrianne wanted nothing more than to be loved. Doodling one day at work, Adrianne sketched the opposite side of her shattered life’s coin on a guest check, one of those light-green-and-white pads greasy spoon waitresses use to take orders. She titled it “My Perfect Life.” It was her way of dreaming out loud. There was darkness, sure, but light, too. Adrianne could see it off in the distance.

  And she wanted it.

  On the top of the green ticket, she wrote the name of the guy she dreamt about, a kid back in Texas she had fallen in love with and, presumably, lost her virginity to. This was the man she saw herself having children with someday.

  Her dream car was a Benz.

  Her favorite color was red. (Not pink, as so many had said.)

  Her job? Singer.

  Kids’ names: Michael David, Erica May, Kiara Rachelle.

  Adrianne wanted three kids. That was it.

  As for money, Doesn’t matter, she wrote, as long as we’re not poor.

  She saw herself living in a house or a mansion.

  But that didn’t matter, either.

  As long as I have my family and the one I love.

  EPILOGUE

  This case was one I truly wished did not have to be written. This murder, more than some of the others I have covered, seemed senseless and tragic in so many ways. They all do, of course. But this case had a particular heartbreaking quietness about it that grew on me as I entered each stage of Adrianne Reynolds’s life, and stayed with me every day I worked on it. I kept a photo of Adrianne close by. I wish I had known her.

  The path of Adrianne’s life was predictable in its aftermath. Her killers were despicable and heartless. Sarah Kolb refused to allow others to infringe upon her “Kool-Aid” (whatever the flavor of the moment was), and it angered the teen to the point of murder. Cory Gregory, on the other hand, not only showed how cold and careless he was for not stopping the fight in Sarah’s car, which escalated into murder, but also by participating in it. What made Cory much more selfish and heartless, in my professional opinion, was the fact that he befriended Adrianne in those days before her murder. It seemed to me, if I didn’t know better, that Cory and Sarah had talked about Cory befriending Adrianne so they could, at the very least, get her into Sarah’s car and beat her up—if not carry out a premeditated plan to kill her.

  And for what?

  Jealousy?

  Revenge?

  I don’t buy it.

  The outrage the Reynolds family felt continued long after Cory Gregory and Sarah Kolb were sentenced. Nate Gaudet was being denied parole by the board year after year. Yet, in November 2008, on his twentieth birthday, Nate was released.

  The boy who had carved Adrianne Reynolds into seven pieces and stuffed himself at McDonald’s afterward had served two and a half years of an “up to five-year” sentence. I was told Nate went into therapy while in prison, but he was quickly told he didn’t need it.

  How can this happen in our American justice system?

  Nate was driven to an undisclosed location in another part of the country (I heard) far away from the QC. This decision was based on the anger—and threats—from the community Nate and his family received. Many people believed Nate was more evil than his two “homies,” as one blogger put it after Nate was released. Another blogger encouraged Juggalos in the QC to find Nate upon his release and give him a beat-down.

  Tony Reynolds, who had sat in front of the parole board to argue against Nate’s early release, said if Nate had planned to apologize, he could stuff it. Tony did not want to hear any words of empathy from the boy.

  I reached out to Nate and his parents, who—through a third party—said they were considering talking to me. In a brief missive, I told them:

  I don’t think your entire story has been told, especially by the one person who knows it best. I was hoping I could count on interviewing you. . . . I would allow you to tell your story without censorship or constraints. Allow you (and perhaps family members and friends) to talk directly to my readers and show them who you truly are. I am sure that what you admitted to in court does not define or reflect who you are as a human being, or your life as a whole.

  I never heard from Nate or his mother. His father, Andrew Gaudet, called about five months after I sent that letter. We talked for close to two hours. There is a pain in Andrew’s voice I’m convinced will be there for the rest of his life. The man seemed at a loss for words as we started talking. He had a hard time understanding and comprehending why and how this had happened. Nate had called his father about a year after his release from prison.

  “Hey, Dad. . . .”

  “Son.”

  “I’m doing all right.”

  Nate would not say where he was or where he planned to live. He had a job. He was building a new life.

  I got the impression from talking to Andrew Gaudet that he and his son had had a good relationship, until divorce came in between them when Nate was thirteen.

  This one moment in Nate’s life—however gruesome and horrific—certainly was not something anyone in his family saw coming. There are reasons why teenagers drink and drug (which Nate was actively involved in daily), namely, to forget about their lives and the pain. I wanted you—the reader—to hear from Nate himself why he did this, which was the reason I wrote to him. In speaking with Nate’s dad, however, it’s clear to me that Nate himself is not certain what happened and why.

  “While he was in jail during that first month,” Andrew told me, “Nate had this look and sense about him that he was going to walk out of jail any day. He didn’t grasp the situation.”

  Nate did tell his father that Cory Gregory and Sarah Kolb threatened his life if he did not participate. Nate told a Juggalo friend the same thing.

  I could find no other corroborating evidence of this, however. In fact, all of the evidence I found indicated to me that Nate Gaudet willingly and willfully dismembered Adrianne Reynolds simply because his friends had asked him.

  I wrote to Sarah Kolb, who sent me back a scathing letter tainted with that same anger she had shown others throughout her life.

  Sarah said she did not appreciate me intruding on what semblance of a life she has at this point. Nor did she like the idea of me reaching out to her stepfather (which I did via Facebook) or any other family member. (Sarah’s stepfather and mother are no longer together. Darrin Klauer was clear regarding not wanting any part of being interviewed.)

  From that point on, Sarah seemed to brag about her story being of interest to other authors before me, letting me know that her life was not a fucking story or a thriller. She indicated that she had stayed out of the media since her story broke because she didn’t want to talk about it.

  That falls in line with who Sarah was before her arrest: the consummate denier. Unwilling to face the nightmare that has become her life, or the horrors that she has caused other families.

  In her familiar condescending tone, Sarah encouraged me to write to Cory Gregory and ask him abo
ut his role in the case. She said she was sure he’d be willing to talk about it. (She gave me his address and prisoner identification number, just in case I didn’t have it.)

  She said if I was lucky enough to find Nate (I sensed a sarcastic laugh there, as if she knew where he was), then I should speak with him, too.

  Unlike what she didn’t do for the Reynolds family, Sarah apologized to me for, in her words, being belligerent. This entire episode was a touchy subject for her, she admitted.

  Go figure. Sarah took the life of a sixteen-year-old girl, and talking about it (confronting it) had not made her feel so fuzzy inside.

  She wished me luck with my novels, clearly not understanding that my books are nonfiction.

  And that was it.

  It is my belief she’ll talk openly about this someday in the years to come. Sarah is still immature. She is still locked in that fantasy that what happened was somebody else’s fault. That she was cajoled, tricked, and set up by a friend.

  The problem is, the evidence in her case does not support that argument.

  It took Cory Gregory months to get back to me. He had been “in seg” much of the time and was unable to write, I was told by his mother. In his letter, Cory asked me to call the prison and speak to the legal department so someone from that office could set up a phone call between us. Cory said he would hear me out and, if he liked what I had to say, he would talk to me. But no promises.

  Phone calls between inmates and journalists don’t work like that. I explained to Teresa Gregory that her son would have to put me on his call list and phone me collect. I would gladly accept any calls from Cory Gregory. I gave Cory a deadline, as I am under tight deadlines myself.

  As I handed in the manuscript, I had not heard from Cory.

  I asked Teresa Gregory for a final word about her son. Teresa has been beaten down by this tragedy. You can hear it in her voice. There’s a pain that will never go away. I often talk about the ripple effect of one murder—this case proves that theory.