by Amanda Lamb
CHAPTER TWO
False Leads
Summer 2002
The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
—CICERO
On May 27, 2002, the Raleigh Police Department released to the public a sketch of a man seen in the vicinity of Stephanie Bennett’s apartment. They didn’t refer to him as a suspect in the murder, but simply as a man whom they “wanted to talk to.” The person pictured in the composite was thin with short brown hair, narrow features, and glasses. The sketch, like most composites, was so nondescript it was almost comical. It could have been any young white man.
To be fair, the first composite in a case often looks a little cartoonish, because people have tenuous memories at best when it comes to recalling someone’s exact features. Ten people could see the same person and describe him in ten slightly different ways, depending on their vantage point, how long they had observed the person, and what built-in biases they brought to the table.
This picture of a man, drawn in charcoal on a stark white background, looked more like the guy who might mow your lawn or change the oil in your car than a cold-blooded killer. But there is almost always some minute detail, some key feature witnesses subliminally pick up on, that makes its way into a composite sketch, something that seems to inevitably ring true about the initial image. Years later, if that rudimentary drawing were to be put next to the person police ultimately arrested, there would arguably be some minor resemblance.
As a rule, Sergeant Clem Perry didn’t like composites. He worried they might be too restrictive and keep the public from considering other possibilities. But in this case, as in many others in which the suspect was elusive, he felt that it was a necessary evil.
“It was the right thing to do. It’s all we had,” Perry said, outstretching his arms and opening his palms to the ceiling. He recalled how detectives were already fresh out of leads and going nowhere fast. They needed something, anything, to give them some traction in the case.
Investigators had interviewed dozens of people who lived in Stephanie’s apartment complex or in nearby apartment complexes. They had gotten a description from a neighbor of the Peeping Tom seen near Stephanie’s apartment on April 27, just a few weeks before her murder. This was the man on whom they based the composite. But despite the fact that he seemed like the most obvious suspect, not everyone was on board with the theory that the Peeping Tom was the killer.
“There were a lot of discussions about the Peeping Tom as a suspect, some rather heated discussions,” Perry recalled.
Perry said investigators spent countless hours just talking to people in the area, hoping someone would give them a shred of information, a tidbit, anything that might lead them in the right direction. They knocked on hundreds of doors and spoke to anyone who answered while they canvassed the majority of the apartments encircling Lake Lynn.
Detectives were specifically looking for people with criminal records, people who had been seen walking around late at night, people with what Lieutenant Morgan called “obvious red flags.” What Morgan couldn’t have known at the time was that one of those people wasn’t waving any red flags, but still had something very big to hide.
Weird Science
It was clear from the beginning, based on the amount of semen the killer had left at the scene, that the case would ultimately hinge on DNA. The technology of DNA had recently gone from somewhat unreliable to undeniably accurate in just a decade.
Assistant Special Agent Mark Boodee with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) was on the cutting edge of this breakthrough science. After graduating from the University of Virginia, he started working for a private company in Maryland in 1989 called Selmark Diagnostics doing forensic DNA analysis.
“I was doing DNA analysis even before the FBI had DNA analysis,” Boodee said proudly.
Not long after his stint in Maryland, Boodee was recruited by the North Carolina SBI to help them set up their DNA analysis program. He was excited to be given almost free rein in creating the brand-new laboratory that would turn out to be a model for DNA analysis across the country.
On May 24, Boodee agreed to work over Memorial Day weekend to analyze vaginal, rectal, and oral swabs from Stephanie Bennett. Boodee was a dedicated scientist who believed passionately in DNA analysis, and he welcomed the opportunity to use the process to solve a major crime.
“The victim’s DNA is mixed up with the suspect’s DNA and your job is to try to get out as much of the victim’s DNA in order to be left with the suspect’s profile so you can use that for comparison purposes,” Boodee explained.
Boodee was able to create a solid profile of the killer’s DNA. Any suspect’s DNA brought to him by police would then be analyzed against this profile throughout the investigation to see if it matched.
He then compared the killer’s DNA profile to four DNA samples that the detectives had already submitted in the initial stages of the investigation. Several of the samples came from Stephanie’s family members, whom police needed to eliminate as suspects before they could begin looking at people outside of her inner circle. Another sample, according to Morgan, came from a rape suspect in a separate case in Alabama in which the attacker had tied up his victim with her own underwear. Because of the use of the underwear and restraints, investigators felt there might be the chance of a connection between the Alabama case and Stephanie’s murder.
Morgan got a call from Boodee at about 10:00 that Saturday night, telling him that the Alabama suspect was not their guy. He was disappointed but, at the same time, was impressed with Boodee’s work ethic and glad he was the SBI agent assigned to the case.
“I was just flabbergasted because I never knew anyone at the SBI worked on weekends,” Morgan said with a chuckle.
Investigators continued to send DNA samples to Boodee from practically everyone they interviewed. Morgan kept the swabs used for collecting DNA—long sticks with cotton on the tips—in a jar on the corner of his desk, and told his detectives to take a handful every time they went back out to the Lake Lynn area. They were the same kind of swabs doctors used to test patients for strep throat. It was a simple, quick, and painless process for the officers to take a quick sample of saliva from the inside of someone’s cheeks.
“I’d say, ‘You got your swabs? Don’t come back here with less than five swabs,’ ” Morgan recalled his perpetual command to his officers.
On one occasion, detectives were having a hard time getting three young men who lived in an apartment above Stephanie to give DNA samples. Several different detectives had approached them, and each time, they had refused to cooperate. Morgan decided to put his most tenacious detective, Mary Blalock, on the mission.
“Mary Blalock is a woman who knows how to get things done,” Morgan said slapping his open hand on his desk. “If I had a difficult job I needed to have done, I knew I could go to Mary.”
Morgan told Blalock she had to get samples from these three men. They were the only holdouts in Stephanie’s building. They had told the other detectives who had tried and failed that “they didn’t believe in giving DNA samples,” to which Morgan naturally responded with a stream of obscenities.
Two hours later, Blalock returned to the police station and threw three envelopes on Morgan’s desk. Each one contained a swab from one of the three men who lived above Stephanie. Blalock’s young, eager partner, Amy Russo, related to Morgan how Blalock got the samples.
“She walked right up to [one] boy and told him to open his goddamn mouth. She stuck the stick in his mouth and told him to spit on it. She put the stick in the bag and went to the next one,” Russo told Morgan as she recalled Blalock’s heroic efforts.
The samples Blalock took, like all of the other samples, were sent to Boodee to analyze. Like all of the samples before them, they didn’t match the killer’s DNA.
“Initially they came in groups of five, and then they started coming in groups of twenty or thirty,” Boodee said with a weary s
mile, remembering the massive amount of work he did on the case.
“A lot of them would just sit on the shelf because we wouldn’t analyze them right away because we had a lot of other active cases,” Boodee pointed out as he remembered the juggling act required to keep up with all of his work at the time. “They would pile up; months’ worth of these suspects would pile up.”
Eventually, Boodee asked investigators to submit the DNA samples in groups of ten to make it easier to test them and record the data without overwhelming the laboratory. The state lab had never before had a case with so many DNA samples that needed to be tested. It was a learning experience for everyone involved, including Boodee who until then thought he had seen it all.
Boodee wasn’t cavalier about his job; quite the opposite. But he was quite sure that anyone who willingly gave a DNA sample was probably innocent, and so running the samples at times seemed like a futile and tedious process. “You’re never going to get people who volunteer to give their sample and think they’re going to fool the system,” said Boodee.
Yet he knew for legal reasons it had to be done. Investigators could not definitely rule people out unless they had been tested and eliminated as a match to the killer’s DNA. So Boodee kept eliminating suspects and kept hoping one day investigators would come to him and say, this is the one. He was sure it would eventually happen; he just had no idea how long it would take.
If the DNA Doesn’t Fit
Investigators determined that Walter Robinson, Stephanie’s boyfriend, had been the last person to talk to her before she died. They’d spoken on the telephone at around 8:00 on the evening of Monday, May 20. At the time, Walter was in Greenville, South Carolina, about 270 miles southwest of Raleigh. Investigators quickly determined he was too far away to have come to Raleigh and committed the murder. Nevertheless, like Stephanie’s other friends and relatives, Walter willingly submitted to a DNA test. As a result, he was quickly eliminated as a potential suspect in the case. Walter’s eager cooperation fit in with Agent Mark Boodee’s theory that innocent people had nothing to hide and were more than willing to provide DNA samples.
After eliminating people in Stephanie’s family and tight-knit circle of friends, investigators started looking more closely at the bigger pool of suspects in and around the Lake Lynn apartment complexes. Dozens of Raleigh police detectives in plain clothes were sent out to troll the area undercover at various hours of the day and night to see if they ran into anyone who looked suspicious. The goal was for the officers to be able to observe people when they didn’t think they were being watched, to catch them off guard.
On June 3, 2002, an officer at the Governor’s Point Apartment complex, which was just across the lake from the Bridgeport Apartments, saw a man peeking into a window. The officer kept his distance and observed the man to see if he might try to break into the apartment. A few minutes passed, and the man then moved to another window. That’s when the officer noticed that the man had pulled down his pants and was masturbating. Within a few minutes, a group of Raleigh police officers surrounded the Peeping Tom, took him to the ground, and arrested him.
Investigators interviewed the three women who lived in the apartment where the man had been peeping and discovered at least two of them had been getting in or out of the shower during the time the suspect was looking into their bathroom window.
The man police arrested was thirty-four-year-old Christopher Lee Campen. He was charged with “secret peeping,” a misdemeanor crime that police often considered a gateway crime to more serious sex crimes like rape. The arrest seemed to be the first promising lead in the Bennett case. Campen had a long criminal record for minor charges including peeping and stalking. He was convicted of misdemeanor stalking in 1998. Everything seemed to fit the working profile of the killer in Stephanie Bennett’s case.
“There was a moment of this could be the guy,” Sergeant Clem Perry said, recalling his hopefulness at the time Campen was arrested.
“We looked at him hard,” Morgan agreed.
But unlike Perry, Morgan had a gut feeling that this was not going to be their guy. He didn’t think Campen had the wherewithal to commit such a heinous and highly organized crime; it just didn’t fit with his track record of being charged with minor crimes for so many years, crimes that never escalated into more violent acts.
It turned out that Morgan’s gut feeling was right. Within days, DNA tests cleared Campen of any involvement in Stephanie’s murder. The investigators’ promising lead had vanished almost as quickly as it had surfaced. But this first squashed lead didn’t deter them from aggressively exploring other potential connections to the Bennett case.
Investigators thought they had another possible lead when a man in Florida, who was wanted in connection with the kidnapping and rape of a girl in Columbia, South Carolina, committed suicide. He had also been a primary suspect in the murders of three girls near Fredericksburg, Virginia. But once again, the magic of science eliminated this lead when the man’s DNA failed to match that of Stephanie Bennett’s killer.
DNA from the Bennett murder scene was also continually run through the state’s DNA database, which contained roughly sixty-five thousand samples at the time, and through the national database called VICAP (for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program). But no matter how many times they ran it, the answer was the same every time—no match.
It was as if the killer were invisible, a ghost, someone who didn’t really exist. In a sense he was taunting the investigators. Their strongest piece of evidence, DNA, was ruling out almost everyone and pointing to no one.
Trophies
Initially, investigators discovered Stephanie Bennett’s murderer took eight dollars from her wallet, a boom box, and a laundry basket from her bedroom. At least that’s what they knew he took. It was possible other items were missing that had not been identified.
Police learned, with the help of Stephanie’s roommates, that a small portable stereo was missing from a console in her room. It had been a gift from one of her mother’s boyfriends. Police described it as a 1995 compact JVC MXC- 220 stereo system with both dual cassette decks and a three-compact disc changer. The stereo had sat in a small open cabinet against the wall beneath a portable television set near Stephanie’s bed. Investigators circulated pictures of the stereo with a detailed description to the media and the public hoping it would generate some new leads in the case.
Investigators knew the five-year-old laundry basket was taken from Stephanie’s apartment because the killer had dumped out her clothing onto the floor in the very spot her roommates confirmed the basket always sat. Detectives spent weeks trying to figure this one out.
“Why take a damn laundry basket you can buy at any Wal-Mart?” Morgan said.
Ultimately, the supposition was that the killer used the laundry basket to carry the stereo as he made his escape from Stephanie’s apartment. The basket also gave him the additional benefit of looking like he was simply heading for the apartment complex laundry room if someone spotted him walking around the parking lot early in the morning.
But at the end of the day, the stereo and the laundry basket looked like every other stereo and laundry basket in any young person’s apartment in Raleigh. Police were going to be hard-pressed to find them unless they developed a solid suspect. Only one person knew where Stephanie’s belongings were, and he wasn’t talking.
Sexual deviance and control, not robbery, were shaping up to be the primary motives in the case. But still, trying to identify what might have been taken from the apartment was important, because the killer most likely held on to these items as souvenirs of the crime. Psychologists call the items taken from a murder scene for this purpose “trophies.” They are seen by the murderer as prizes or awards for what he has done. They are tangible items he can take out and look at when he wants to think back on what he accomplished. Psychologists say just seeing and touching these things may give the killer further sexual satisfaction.
The media was l
et in on everything except the laundry basket—that detail was held back. It was the investigators’ ace in the hole, something only the killer knew about, something that might ultimately trip him up. They figured if the killer didn’t think the police knew it was missing, he’d be more likely to hold on to it. If they caught him, and found the laundry basket in his possession, it would only make their case stronger.
Autopsy Revealed
Cause of death—strangulation.
On June 20, 2002, Stephanie Bennett’s autopsy went public. The gruesome details terrified the community and reignited the pressure on the police department to catch the killer.
The report from Dr. Gordon LeGrand at the Wake County Medical Examiner’s Office was much more specific than the sketchy details that had been previously released to the public by police. Even the sterility of the medical terminology couldn’t lessen the impact the report would have on the public.
“This one I remember more than others,” LeGrand said. In all of his years performing autopsies, LeGrand said he always remembered the women and the children the most. They were always the saddest cases that touched him more deeply than others. “Here was somebody living in an apartment, going about her life and there is a psychotic deviant lurking around.”
First, the autopsy report set the scene—it stated that Stephanie had been found nude, lying on her back in the bedroom adjacent to her own. She had a pair of pale blue women’s underwear stuck in her mouth. The underwear had apparently been used as a gag to prevent her from screaming during the attack.
The report went on to describe the state of the body. There was a thirteen-inch ligature mark around Stephanie’s neck. Her wrists and ankles also had marks on them consistent with the use of restraints. The doctor stated the double red lines on Stephanie’s wrists might be from handcuffs, although he couldn’t say for sure. The only real injury on Stephanie Bennett’s body was a pronounced bruise above her right eye, but LeGrand also noted some minor evidence of self-defense, small scratches here and there. There was also clear evidence of sexual assault including dried semen on the body.