by Amanda Lamb
“In all likelihood, he surprised her and got her before she could do much,” LeGrand said.
There were key details in the report that gave investigators clues as to how the crime was committed. They used these details to create a theory of what happened that night in Stephanie’s apartment—a theory they hoped would help them eventually zero in on a suspect.
Because the maintenance employee believed the front door to the apartment was dead-bolted when he entered the day Stephanie’s body was found, investigators assumed the killer most likely came through the window in Emily’s bedroom. A window screen was missing from the window and placed on the ground outside, and while the window was closed when police arrived, it was not locked.
Lieutenant Morgan believed that on the night she was attacked, Stephanie—who would’ve probably still been tired from her weekend trip to Greenville to visit Walter Robinson—was probably sound asleep when the killer entered through Emily’s bedroom window.
Investigators considered whether the killer had come to the front door and was let in by Stephanie, after which he dead-bolted the door again, but after much examination, it didn’t seem plausible. In this scenario, the killer would have had to have been someone Stephanie knew well for her to open the door to him. By all accounts, she was a very careful girl who always locked the door and would never have opened it to a stranger, especially not at night when she was already concerned about safety at the apartment complex.
Investigators also considered whether the killer could have forced his way in through the front door. But, again, this seemed unlikely and too risky for someone trying to keep a low profile in an apartment complex where young people came and went at all hours of the night and could have spotted him easily beneath the light of the front door. Another theory involved the killer picking the lock on the front door, and then staging it to look as if he had come in the window. But it was hard for anyone to imagine why he would go to all of the trouble to do this. So the window, which was cloaked in darkness and hidden from the parking lot by overgrown bushes, continued to be the logical point of entry.
In addition, there was physical evidence supporting the theory that the killer came through Emily’s window. An empty blue hamper just below that window inside the apartment held a handful of pine needles and leaves from the bush just outside the apartment. Lieutenant Morgan thought they could easily have fallen off of the killer’s clothing as he crawled through the window.
No one knew for sure what time the killer entered the apartment or how long he was in there before he attacked Stephanie. But based on the fact that some of the items from Emily’s bedroom were found to have been moved into her closet, one hypothesis was that he climbed in the window when Stephanie was still awake, and then hid in Emily’s closet until Stephanie fell asleep.
In that scenario, after Stephanie went to bed, the killer would have waited to make sure she was in a deep sleep before leaving the safety of the closet. Morgan imagined the man probably then crept quietly across the hallway, so as not to disturb his sleeping victim. Like a cat pouncing on his prey, the killer then jumped onto the bed where Stephanie slept, startling her into sudden wakefulness. For a moment, she would’ve resisted the evil force bearing down on her; Morgan believed the bruise on her face might have come from the killer hitting Stephanie in the eye in order to scare and subdue her while he was restraining her arms and legs. He probably had a gun, a gun that he would’ve held to her head in order to terrify her into immediate submission.
Once Stephanie was tied up and no longer posed a threat to her attacker, Morgan assumed the killer then took her tousled covers and piled them neatly on the floor at the foot of her bed where investigators later discovered them. This chilling detail alone always gave Morgan a reason to pause and wonder what kind of meticulous freak show of a person they were dealing with. Morgan felt like the killer had a playbook that he was going by, a set of rules and rituals he needed to follow in order to feel like he was truly in control of the situation. This particular detail regarding Stephanie’s bed covers further convinced him they were not dealing with an ordinary murderer, but someone who methodically planned and carried out an organized pattern of evil.
Three pillows were left on Stephanie’s bare bed in a U-shape. Morgan could almost imagine the young woman fitting snugly inside this little cocoon as she dreamed about her impending move to South Carolina to be with her boyfriend. It was the protocol for how she usually slept according to family and friends. Seeing the pillows this way further assured Morgan that Stephanie must have been sound asleep when the killer slipped into her room under a cloak of darkness. Maybe he was even able to pull back the covers first and fold them neatly on the floor without being detected by his sleeping victim, which would have given him unfettered access to restrain her quickly without any obstacles or interference.
The medical examiner’s report stated that when police arrived at the apartment, rigor mortis had already set in. Rigor mortis, the buildup of lactic acid in the deceased’s muscles that makes a body rigid, begins to take place within three hours after death. Morgan estimated that in this case, Stephanie may have already been dead eight or more hours by the time her body was discovered. Although the autopsy couldn’t pinpoint an exact time of death, it was believed to have taken place sometime after midnight.
LeGrand listed the official medical cause of death in the autopsy report as “ischemia secondary to ligature strangulation.” This meant the blood flow was cut off to Stephanie’s brain due to the strangulation. It caused her to go into “cardio respiratory arrest,” meaning her heart and breathing stopped as a result of the ligature being placed around her neck.
The report also noted severe petechial hemorrhages, small broken capillary blood vessels in Stephanie’s eyes—a calling card of strangulation. And on the back of Stephanie’s neck was a crisscross mark indicating a garrote, a ligature with a stick inserted to twist the device around someone’s neck, was used to cut off her air supply. None of the details of the autopsy told the police or the public who killed Stephanie Bennett, but they did reinforce once again that Raleigh had a truly cold-blooded killer on its hands.
Crime Scene Revisited
In the summer of 2002, Lieutenant Chris Morgan gave the media a tour of Stephanie’s empty apartment. WRAL reporter Len Besthoff and photographer Chad Flowers were invited to see the crime scene for themselves, as well as videotape the now-bare apartment.
Morgan narrated the tour with a measured tone and, once again, a stoic face devoid of expression or emotion. He simply laid everything out and let the journalists read between the lines. He wore his usual white fedora, but tipped it back slightly so that the camera could catch a glimpse of his eyes as he spoke. In many ways he wasn’t actually speaking to the journalists, but to the killer who just might be watching the case unfold on the evening news.
He told the reporters that nothing out of the ordinary seemed to have happened on the day before Stephanie’s murder. She’d come home from work on Monday, May 20, and followed her normal routine that evening. She’d had a conversation with her boyfriend, who was in South Carolina, before going to bed. Morgan said investigators believed the killer attacked her after she went to bed, and then took her into her roommate’s bedroom adjacent to her room where he raped and killed her.
“Sometime during the night things went very bad,” Morgan said. “We know [that] while Stephanie Bennett slept in her bedroom at the end of this hall,” he gestured dramatically to a door that was ajar, but made no effort to allow anyone to enter the room, “that the intruder came into the apartment, that she was attacked probably as she slept, and that events occurred that led to her death.”
Other than the smudged black fingerprint powder lining the doorways and windows, and the blocks of carpet removed by crime scene investigators, it looked like any other apartment vacated by young tenants. It was a surreal combination of everyday life mixed in with the horror of what had occurred there.
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p; There were restaurant takeout menus strewn about the kitchen, an empty wine bottle in the sink, and a half-full container of eye drops on the counter—mundane items in a space where mundane had no place.
“What truly struck me was the Chinese food menu still held on the fridge with a magnet,” Besthoff said. “It made me think about how just a few weeks ago this was just a normal apartment, with this nice young woman leading a normal life.”
“It was an eerie reminder of how ordinary her life had been before she was brutally murdered,” said Flowers, who, after having witnessed his share of murder scenes, was often no longer moved. But this one was different. Stephanie was different. An entire city was in mourning for her and even hard-nosed journalists couldn’t help but be touched by her story.
Consent Is the Magic Word
“The first six months of this were probably the hardest. We had so many theories, so many possibilities,” Lieutenant Chris Morgan said.
Morgan had five detectives working under him in the Major Crimes Task Force; he could have used ten, fifteen, or even twenty. They had other murders to investigate, and with such a limited staff, they couldn’t devote every moment to the Stephanie Bennett case. It frustrated Morgan to no end, but he had to work with the resources he was given.
“Morgan told me he had few leads,” WRAL reporter Besthoff remembered. “You could tell right off the bat he had his concerns this was going to go cold quickly.”
In December 2002, one of the department’s rising young stars, Sergeant Clem Perry, was transferred from the robbery squad to the Major Crimes Task Force. Morgan was confident Perry would be a huge asset to the Bennett case. Perry had been in on the case as a peripheral player from that very first night when his squad was called to the Bridgeport Apartments to assist the homicide detectives, but now he would be in the thick of things. It was exactly where he wanted to be, working to solve a case that mattered to so many people.
Once on board, Perry and the other detectives on the task force continued to visit Stephanie’s apartment complex. In early 2003, they handed out more fliers and interviewed more tenants. They even conducted traffic checkpoints around the perimeter of the complex—they would stop drivers in the area, hand them a flier, and ask them if they had any information regarding the case. Perry was amazed to discover not everyone was familiar with the Bennett homicide even after they had spent so much time canvassing the neighborhood. With all of the legwork they had done already and all of the media coverage of the case, he could not imagine anyone not being aware of the murder. He wondered what cave they must have been living in if they proclaimed not to know anything about it.
Sergeant Perry still couldn’t get the memory of Stephanie’s father, Carmon Bennett, out of his mind from the night Stephanie’s body was identified. Perry had been the first real contact Carmon had had with the Raleigh Police Department, and he hoped the grieving father wouldn’t always remember him as the man who kept him from crossing the yellow crime scene tape and prevented him from seeing his dead daughter. His heart had ached for Carmon that night. It still did.
As a robbery detective, Perry had always believed that an armed robbery was just a murder that didn’t happen. Whenever there was a firearm involved in a crime, there was a chance someone might die. But now he was a homicide detective and thinking about people dying was no longer a what if, but a reality. Maybe it was because it was his first murder case. Maybe it was because he was young and ambitious. Maybe it was just because it was Stephanie—but somehow, somewhere along the line, the case became personal to Perry. He suddenly realized the gravity of what he was charged with. He and his colleagues were responsible for getting a random killer off the streets, someone who could strike again if they didn’t act quickly. It was all he could think about.
“There was a sense of urgency,” Perry said. “It was a sexual homicide of a young girl.”
Perry grew up in Louisburg, North Carolina, about thirty miles northeast of Raleigh in a family he described as “the Cleavers.” But despite his all-American upbringing, Perry was not sheltered. His father was a career firefighter, and Perry grew up at the firehouse hearing the firefighters’ stories and interacting with the local cops who often stopped by the station. From a young age, Perry knew he wanted to be a police officer; all he’d ever wanted to do was to help people.
Perry said the parents of young women who lived in Stephanie’s neighborhood were calling his unit wanting to know if their children were safe. The pressure to solve the case was increased immensely by the concern in the community that a deadly sexual predator was roaming the streets. He thought about how he would feel if he had a daughter living in the apartment complex where a young woman was killed. It wasn’t a good feeling.
“There was a great deal of tension on everybody,” Perry said with a furrowed brow.
Investigators had already collected a mountain of information in the case. They had compiled “lead books,” which included hundreds of pages of tips that had come in through phone calls and e-mails. It was an overwhelming amount of material to consider.
Detective J. J. Mathews had recently been assigned as the lead detective on the case and would be supervising Perry and the other detectives. His first priority was to get the files organized so investigators could make some sense out of them. Perry recalled there were many meetings about how to manage all the information in the Bennett case on top of working the other homicides that continued to take place in the city. It was an unsavory balancing act for Perry to have to put aside the Bennett case to work on more recent, more solvable murders.
The leads were organized into a large notebook when they came in, and then assigned to one of the detectives. But even as they forged ahead, there was a constant feeling they were spinning their wheels, not making any real dent in the huge volume of information they had amassed.
“Everybody in the unit was completely frustrated,” Perry said shaking his head. Another problem they were faced with, Perry said, was “the number of leads still coming in almost on a daily basis from the composite that was released.”
Perry made it clear to everyone who would listen that he was not fond of composites. He worried they were misleading because nine times out of ten they were always a little bit off. The fact this particular one had generated so many false leads only added to his level of discomfort about using the picture. But it was all they had, so they continued to use it.
Because they seemed to be looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack at this stage in the investigation, Perry said the detectives were still concentrating on eliminating people rather than focusing in on a suspect. They used DNA tests to eliminate as many people as they possibly could. After they interviewed someone, they would then ask him to submit to a simple saliva mouth swab. They would then test the sample against the killer’s DNA found in Stephanie’s apartment. By the time the case was all over, they had run DNA tests on a total of 283 people. For the most part, Perry said people consented to being tested because they had nothing to hide. It was a tedious process with seemingly no end in sight. No one, including Perry, knew if it would ever pay off.
Even though solid DNA evidence is a detective’s dream, it’s not a slam dunk by itself. To identify the killer, his DNA had to already be on file in a criminal database so that investigators can make a match; if the killer had never been arrested before he murdered Stephanie, his DNA wouldn’t be on file. It’s the perfect evidence only if you can find a match. But the detectives kept plugging away hoping against hope that the process would eventually lead them to the right person.
“For the most part, everyone we approached consented,” Perry said with his outstretched hands in the air again, his palms facing the ceiling.
Perry used to joke with his colleagues if he ever found someone who wouldn’t submit to the DNA test, he had found the killer. Little did he know how true this statement would turn out to be.
Color Blind
While the detectives Lieutenant Morgan s
upervised on the Major Crimes Task Force toiled away on the day-to-day task of eliminating potential suspects, Morgan was looking at the big picture, trying to figure out what they were missing, what piece of evidence would help them complete this seemingly never-ending puzzle of who killed Stephanie Bennett.
Without a suspect, DNA couldn’t tell investigators who the killer was. But just maybe it could tell them a little bit more about whom they might be looking for. Morgan felt strongly that knowing variables such as the race of the offender would help them tremendously narrow down the pool of potential suspects. Unfortunately, agents at the North Carolina SBI told Morgan that they didn’t have the technology to determine race from simply analyzing the killer’s DNA. Morgan wasn’t sure if this issue was simply a political hot potato or a scientific truth, but he knew he didn’t have the background to challenge what they were telling him. He also knew DNA science was constantly evolving and just because it couldn’t be done in North Carolina didn’t mean it couldn’t be done somewhere else.
In a coincidental twist of fate, just as Morgan was pondering this issue, he got a call from a scientist at a local private laboratory that did DNA analysis. LabCorp often did work for law enforcement when the SBI lab was too busy or didn’t have the technology or resources to handle a particular task. Morgan’s friend at LabCorp told him she had been following the Bennett case religiously and had heard about a company in Florida that might be able to help him narrow down the profile of the suspect.