Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Teresa’s astute and perceptive answer was: If I was to say anything about this as a final word it would have to be a warning to parents and teenagers to understand that life can change in the blink of an eye. That one wrong decision can and will change your life path forever. Teenagers are very impulsive and have not had enough life experience to understand that the way they feel and think at the moment is not always going to be the way they feel or think. Depression, drugs and the longing to fit in to the point of having the willingness to do anything for a “friend” are warning signs we as parents so often miss. Please, parents, talk seriously to your teens, find out what they think and how they feel.

  Good advice.

  Teresa went on to say thanks for allowing me to say a few words about my son. I love Cory and I always will. We are not a horrible family and Cory is not a horrible person at heart, even though what they did was horrific.

  Both Sarah Kolb and Cory Gregory appealed their cases.

  Both appeals were denied.

  Tony Reynolds wanted me to publish one of the poems he wrote for Adrianne. I think it explains a lot. I have not edited this poem:

  Roses are red, violets are blue.

  I’m sorry Adrianne, I wasn’t always there for you.

  Your life was never easy,

  And a lot of it was very sad.

  But after you came up here,

  I just wanted to be your dad.

  I wanted you to smile,

  I wanted you to have fun.

  I wanted you to know you were my only one.

  I know before you left this world, you knew I loved you.

  And I know you loved me too!

  You touched everyone’s life while you were here,

  In their hearts you’ll always be near.

  Uncle Mike fixed your string,

  But it broke again!

  I got the message,

  I won’t mess with it again.

  Except to look at it now and then.

  You’re singing with the angels now.

  I see you in the front row.

  Doing your best, stealing the show.

  God had a plan for you,

  and singing with him was it,

  You keep singing girl,

  Don’t you ever quit.

  Cause your Adrianne Leigh.

  The one I call Little Bit!

  Love you, Daddy

  The Reynolds family has a website: http://www.caringbridge.org/il/adrianne/index.htm. You can go there and read additional poems, write to the family, sign the guestbook, peruse more photos of Adrianne, and read anecdotes about her life. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of anything on the site; I did not use it as a source for this book.

  THANKS

  I need to express my gratitude to those Juggalos and former friends of Cory’s, Sarah’s, and Nate’s for trusting me and agreeing to interviews. Your insight into this obscure and misunderstood culture was something I valued immensely as I wrote this book, not to mention your courage for admitting your own faults and talking about the lives you led. I stripped the Juggalo movement bare in this book. I did not want to come across like Tipper Gore, circa 1985, stepping up on her soapbox in front of Congress, pooh-poohing music lyrics as evil, influential, and degrading. But come on, anyone who reads the lyrics to an ICP tune (and many of the other bands associated with Psychopathic Records) with an open mind cannot honestly deny the vulgarity and violence, not to mention disrespect and disregard for females. This sort of shock rap, or horror rap, is not confined to ICP and Psychopathic Records, of course, but I found it to be at a level of disgrace unlike anything I have come across. If I have offended fans of the band, well, I’ll own that.

  Anybody who knows me understands that I am grateful for their help and support when writing a book. It takes a group of professionals to publish a successful book; my literary posse is populated with smart and hardworking people, many of whom continue to support my career and work hard for me behind the scenes.

  I want to thank everyone at Beyond International for supporting me throughout the years by asking me to participate in the “Deadly Women” series. Andrew Farrell, Geoff Fitzpatrick, Therese Hegarty, Elizabeth Kaydos, and everyone else at Beyond with whom I have worked over the years have been respectful and gracious. These are top-notch people working in a tough television landscape.

  Certified forensic examiner and founder of STALK, Inc., serial killer expert profiler John Kelly has been a true gentleman and longtime friend; and whether he realizes it, John’s insight helps me in more ways than I could ever put into words.

  The most important part of what I do is the reader. I need all of you to know that I am entirely grateful and humbled by the fact that you keep coming back, book after book. I truly respect your opinions, read every letter and e-mail (even though I cannot answer every one personally), and write these books for you.

  Many, many thanks.

  Of course, I would not have written this book without the support of Joanne and Tony Reynolds, and I appreciate the trust they put in me to write about Adrianne’s life. I hope I kept my promise of answering some questions they had about this case.

  Court reporters Candace Zaagman and Francine Morgensen were gracious and helpful. I appreciate how quickly they were able to turn around my orders for transcripts.

  Rebecca Bernard was my only hope inside the RICSAO, a public office that needs to be schooled in what public documents truly are and why the public deserves unobstructed access to them. Rebecca Bernard (my savior there!) came through with thousands of pages of documents no other reporter had reviewed. Those documents, as they always do, changed this book.

  Jeff Terronez refused to speak with me and did not return one of my calls or requests for interviews. He did, however, grant NBC interviews when he sat down with Dateline.

  Teresa Gregory was open with me, and I greatly appreciate her honesty.

  My family is always there: Matty, Jordon, April, and Regina. My friends too: Mark and Ann Gionet; Josh, Mike and Olivia; Wendy and Dan; Katie and Alex Tarbox; Jean Valvo; everyone at St. Luke’s; and those great people who surround my life. I appreciate all of you for allowing me to talk so much about what I do.

  Kensington Publishing Corp.—Laurie Parkin, the Zacharius family, in particular, and my editors, Michaela Hamilton and Richard Ember, along with Doug Mendini, and every other employee who works on my books—has been there with me for well over ten years now, supporting me and always trying to figure out how to reach more readers. I am both indebted and grateful for having such a great team of publishing people in my corner.

  Lastly Peter Miller, my business manager, has been a constant in my life and career. I am blessed to have him working for me. PMA Literary and Film Management, Inc., anchors Adrienne Rosado and Natalie Horbach-evsky have been equally important and helpful to me throughout the years. Without their love of books and tenacity to get things done, I would be lost.

  Thanks, ladies!

  Enjoy this exclusive preview of M. William Phelps’s next exciting true-crime release!

  NEVER SEE THEM AGAIN

  Four bloodied bodies . . . a dark secret.

  M. William Phelps

  Coming in March in hardcover from Kensington Books

  Turn the page for a preview

  PROLOGUE

  It was just after six o’clock on the evening of July 18, 2003. Eighteen-year-old Brittney Vikko (pseudonym) had been calling Tiffany Rowell, her BFF since middle school, for the past ninety minutes. Something was wrong, Brittney knew. She could sense it. She kept dialing Tiffany’s number, but she wasn’t getting a response.

  Brittney had spoken to Tiffany’s boyfriend, Marcus Precella, earlier that day, after Marcus had answered Tiffany’s cell phone, saying, “She’s in the bathroom.” It was close to four o’clock then.

  “I’ll call back,” Brittney said.

  Thirty minutes later, Brittney began phoning.

  But no one—not even Marcus—picked up.

/>   “I was in the area, so I drove over to Tiffany’s house,” Brittney recalled. Brittney’s boyfriend, her nephew, and her boyfriend’s cousin went with her.

  Brittney drove. They stopped at a McDonald’s after leaving an appointment Brittney had downtown, at 4:10 P.M. A few minutes after six o’clock, Brittney pulled into Tiffany Rowell’s driveway in the stylish suburban neighborhood of Millbridge Drive, Clear Lake City, Texas. She noticed immediately that Marcus and Tiffany’s vehicles were there. Tiffany’s truck was parked in front of the house, its back wheel up on top of the curb. Marcus’s car was parked next to the garage in the driveway.

  Brittney pulled in behind Marcus’s vehicle.

  Odd, she considered, looking at both vehicles. They must be here....

  Brittney got out and rang the doorbell.

  No answer.

  She rang it again.

  Nothing.

  She knocked. Then she tried to look through a nearby window with both her hands cupped over the sides of her eyes to block the light.

  But again, not a peep out of anyone inside.

  Brittney kept banging, harder and louder, eventually forcing the door to creak open.

  Brittney’s boyfriend and the others watched from inside Brittney’s vehicle as she carefully—and slowly—walked into the house.

  “Tiff? . . . You here?”

  Something seemed peculiar about the situation. It was eerily quiet inside the house, a steely, metallic smell in the air.

  The door left unlocked and open? Both cars in the driveway and no one around? This was so unlike Tiffany.

  Where was everyone?

  There was a short foyer Brittney had to walk through before she entered the living room.

  She took five steps and found herself standing, staring at a scene that, at first, didn’t register.

  Then, as Brittney’s boyfriend got out of her vehicle, he saw Brittney come running like hell back out the same door she had just walked through.

  Brittney Vikko was screaming, a look of terror on her face.

  “Call the cops!”

  Out of breath, approaching her boyfriend, who was now looking toward the house, “Call . . . the . . . cops!” Brittney yelled again. She was hysterical.

  So her boyfriend walked up to the doorway and approached the inside of the house.

  Then he came barreling out the door, screaming.

  Brittney was on the ground by then, yelling, crying, smashing her fists into the grass. Her boyfriend noticed a neighbor across the street talking on his cell phone.

  He ran toward the guy. “Call the police! Call the police!”

  The man dialed 911.

  “There was blood everywhere,” Brittney’s boyfriend later said, describing what he had seen inside Tiffany Rowell’s house.

  1

  It happens when your life is static. Nothing is happening. Just out of high school, you’re still running on teen angst. To think about college seems overwhelming. Your parents are getting on you. Life is not something you want to think about right now. You want to go with the flow. Take the summer and discern. And yet, that’s when a good dose of reality—in all of its ugliness—grabs hold and shakes you.

  When you’re least expecting it.

  In the second largest city in the south central portion of the United States, the atmosphere was volatile on this day. The three H’s were present: hazy, hot, humid—a fourth counting the city of Houston, the largest in Texas, fourth in the country. The dew point was near seventy-five. “Oppressive,” they call stickiness in those numbers, about as high as it can get without rain. In addition to the stuffy air, it was almost ninety degrees. The kind of day when a “severe storm,” the talking heads on the Weather Channel like to get excited about, could roll in at any time, darken the skies as if it were night, turn on the torrential downpours, kick up damaging winds, and drop hail the size of Ping-Pong balls.

  Ah, yes, summertime in the Bay Area of Greater Houston. Sunny out one minute, and the next you’re running for the nearest storm shelter.

  As the skies decided what to do, yellow POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape fenced off Tiffany Rowell’s house from the road and swelling crowd. Strands of the familiar crime scene ribbon fluttered in mild gusts of wind, slapping and whipping, making a noise of a playing card flapping in a child’s bicycle spokes. Lights of blue and red flashed against the sides of the house, pulsating a warning to the residents of this exclusive community just outside Houston, where some say “the city’s wealthiest and best educated” lived, that something horrific had happened inside the one-story contemporary. Brittney Vikko running out the door screaming, neighbors heading inside to have a look, only added to talk circulating around the block that evil had reared its nasty face in an otherwise quiet residential district.

  Clueing everyone else in were all the cops roaming around. The coroners’ vans parked along the street. The detectives huddled together, talking things over: pointing, measuring, comparing notes. Flashbulbs inside the house made lightning strikes in the dusk. Whatever was beyond the slightly ajar front door into Tiffany Rowell’s house was surely going to be big news in the coming hours and days. Anybody standing, staring, wandering about the scene, was well aware of this. Still, this neighborhood in Clear Lake City, Texas, “a pretty peaceful area,” according to one resident, was used to the sort of high-profile crime—especially murders—the discovery inside the Rowell house was going to reveal. Who could forget that homely-looking woman who wore those large-framed glasses, a dazed look of nothingness in her eyes, Andrea Yates? While her husband was at his NASA engineering job nearby one afternoon in June 2001, Andrea chased their five kids through the house and, one by one, held each one underwater in the family’s bathtub. Then she calmly called police and reported how she’d just killed them. And what about the infamous astronaut, Lisa Nowak, who, in February 2007, donned an adult diaper and drove from Clear Lake City to Florida—some nine hundred miles—to confront her romantic rival at the airport, the tools of a sinister plot to do her opponent harm later found inside Nowak’s vehicle. And lest we forget the dentist’s wife, Clara Harris, who would run her cheating husband down with her Mercedes-Benz after catching him with his receptionist, whom Harris had gotten into a hair-pulling catfight with only moments before the homicide.

  Those notorious crimes, on top of all the murder and rape and violence that doesn’t make headlines and “breaking news” reports, all happened here, within the city limits of this plush Houston suburb, just around the corner from this quiet neighborhood, where all the attention was being thrust. In fact, inside the Rowell house, some were already saying, was a tragedy of proportions that would dwarf anything Nowak, Yates, or Harris had done: if not for the severity and violence connected with the crime, the point that, among the four dead bodies the cops were stepping over, taking photos of and studying, not one of the victims had reached the age of twenty-two, and three of them were teenagers.

  Neighbors, reporters, and bystanders gathered on the opposite side of the crime scene tape as cops did their best to hold back the crowd.

  Some cried openly, their hands over their mouths.

  Oh, my God. . . .

  Others asked questions, shook their heads, wondered what was happening. After all, this was Brook Forest, a “master-planned community.” Panning 180 degrees, street level, you’d find well-groomed lawns (green as Play-Doh), edged sidewalks, expensive cars, boats on trailers propped up by cinder blocks waiting for the weekend, kids playing in the streets. Brook Forest certainly isn’t the typical place where violence is a recurring theme. Not to mention, it was just after seven o’clock on a Friday evening, the scent of barbeque still wafting in the air, and the murders had occurred, by the best guesstimates available, somewhere between 3:14 and 3:30 P.M.

  That was the middle of the day, for crying out loud. A mass murder had taken place, and no one had seen or heard anything?

  It seemed so unimaginable.

  Investigators were talking t
o Brittney Vikko, getting her version. But she had walked in after the fact. As far as the neighbors standing around could see, nobody had noticed anything suspicious in the neighborhood or at the Rowell house all day long. The Rowell place was located on Millbridge Drive, a cul-de-sac in a cookie-cutter farm full of them, a neighborhood sandwiched between the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center and Ellington Air Force Base, Galveston Bay a ten-minute drive east, Clear Lake just to the south, ultimately spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. This is suburban bliss, likely created in a civics lab somewhere, maybe by a former NASA engineer (the region is full of them) or some city planner driven to construct middle-class perfection; but certainly not a haven for a crime on this scale.

  “I walked inside and saw Tiffany and a guy on the couch,” Brittney Vikko told police, “and another girl on the floor in front of the television. At first, I thought they had been partying too much—and then I saw all the blood.”

  With the sight of carnage in front of her, Brittney Vikko bolted out the door and screamed for her boyfriend to call the police. Neighbors, cops, fire trucks, EMTs, started to arrive shortly thereafter.

  Consoling the community best he could, Houston Police Department (HPD) homicide investigator Phil Yochum released a statement, hoping to calm things: “I think it happened very quickly; but it was very, very violent. It looks like some type of confrontation happened at the front door, then moved into the living room.”

  There had been no sign of forced entry—that familiar set of words cops use when they don’t have a damn clue as to what the hell went on. A news release gave the concerned and worried community a bit more detail, but was still vague: The bodies of four people were discovered . . . two males, two females . . . shot multiple times, and two of the victims had sustained blunt trauma to the head.