by Amanda Lamb
“I think it is a matter of time,” Walter said looking off in the distance as if he was gazing into a crystal ball. “He better walk lightly in the shadows and be very careful because he’ll make a mistake and when he makes a mistake they’re going to nail him.”
Reminders
For Carmon Bennett, every day was just another day without his daughter, Stephanie. As much as he wanted to go on with his life for the sake of his wife, Jennifer, and his son, Jay, there were reminders of Stephanie’s loss everywhere he turned. No matter what happened with the case, he would be mourning Stephanie’s loss for the rest of his life. As the investigation continued, he shared the constant reminders of his loss during his interviews with WRAL.
For example, Carmon couldn’t forget Stephanie’s first car—a red Honda Prelude. He couldn’t see one pass by without craning his neck and squinting his eyes to see who was behind the wheel. In his head, he knew it wasn’t her, but still, his heart always skipped a beat with foolish hope when one passed.
Tulips, Stephanie’s favorite flowers, were another emotional trigger for Carmon. Jennifer kept the vase on the kitchen table in their home full of tulips in honor of Stephanie.
Even Stephanie’s friends who visited the Bennetts on a regular basis were painful reminders to Carmon of what he’d lost. They were so full of life and strong potential. They had everything ahead of them. He couldn’t help but think Stephanie should have been with them, planning her bright future, not buried in the cold hard ground at Franklin Memorial Park beneath a sterile bronze nameplate.
“She had a personality that was outgoing and a smile that never quit. She always had a smile. Stranger or not, she had a smile for you,” Carmon recalled fondly. “She was just a wonderful young lady, and it’s so hard to believe [she’s gone]. She never caused me and the family a minute’s trouble. Always where she was supposed to be, doing what she was supposed to do.”
Carmon said Stephanie was the kind of girl who worked hard in school and was proud of what she accomplished. He said she was dedicated to her job, always on time, always doing her best.
“She had such a positive attitude. When you first met her you might not think she was outgoing, but she was very at ease, had a wonderful smile, and a pleasant tone of voice,” said the grieving father as he stared off into the distance at the green rolling hills Stephanie so loved surrounding his home. “She was just very easy to get to know and be friends with.”
A Mother’s Sorrow
“Last Mother’s Day Stephanie sent me the sweetest Mother’s Day card—she wrote in there how proud she was that I was her mom,” Mollie Hodges, Stephanie’s mother, shared in an interview with WRAL.
Mollie replayed the things she used to do with her daughter in her mind like a home video.
“If I go to [the] mall, I think of Stephanie. She loved to shop,” Mollie said. “If I go to the beach, I see her walking down the beach.”
The mother and daughter enjoyed many of the simple pleasures in life together—shopping, talking on the phone, taking vacations. Mollie said even after Stephanie moved to Raleigh, they often talked on the telephone several times a day. Stephanie was constantly calling her mother to ask her questions about cooking or how to fix something in her apartment. Although she was speeding toward her adult independence, part of Stephanie was still a little girl who needed her mother’s reassurance and guidance.
“Stephanie, she was so cheerful,” Mollie remembered tearfully. “We always had the best of times, and Stephanie was always happy-go-lucky, smiling.” Mollie had kept Stephanie’s cat with her in Rocky Mount when her daughter moved to Raleigh. Stephanie would ask her to put the cat on the phone so she could hear it meow into the receiver. It was the little things like this about home that Stephanie so obviously missed, and her parents were her constant reminders that home would always be there for her. It was also the little vignettes like that, the tender moments now frozen in time that always gave Mollie a lump in her throat when she remembered them.
Stephanie’s compassion for others is something Mollie would never forget about her daughter. On more than one occasion Mollie and Stephanie would pass a homeless man who frequented the corner at the stoplight near the local mall, always holding up a sign about needing money or food. Mollie said no matter how many times they drove by him, Stephanie couldn’t pass the man without wanting to help.
“She would always say, ‘Mom, do you have a dollar [or] two that we could put in his bucket?’ ” said Mollie. “Stephanie was kind. She was kind to everybody.”
For Mollie, her memories of Stephanie were all she had left. She tried to focus on the good, as impossible as it seemed. She knew Stephanie would have wanted it that way. But it was hard to be positive when her daughter was dead and her daughter’s killer was still roaming the streets.
“Stephanie didn’t want anybody to be down in the dumps and she wouldn’t want it today. She wouldn’t want us to sit around and grieve. She would want us to be happy,” said Mollie fighting back more tears as she feebly attempted to put on a brave face.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Garbage Man
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
—MARTIN FISCHER
“There were so many nights when I just went to bed with a sense of dread saying, is this the night when we get another victim?” Lieutenant Chris Morgan said. “Is this the night where I’m going to get a call and there’s going to be another dead girl?”
Morgan couldn’t sleep. He knew he needed more help than he was getting. His resources were stretched. The chief had recently downsized the homicide division to just one unit from two, and his people were already running ragged on so many cases; he couldn’t ask them to do any more than they were already doing on the Stephanie Bennett case. Yet, unlike most homicides for which they had a hunch who the killer was and were working on amassing evidence against the suspect, in this case they still had absolutely nothing. In Morgan’s opinion, the Bennett case deserved more attention because a killer was on the loose in Raleigh and could very well strike again.
As part of the Special Victims Unit (SVU), Detective Ken Copeland concentrated on solving sex crimes. The SVU was occasionally asked to help with unsolved murder cases, to be another set of eyes in addition to the regular detectives already assigned to the homicide cases.
Because Stephanie’s murder involved sexual assault, Morgan thought members of the SVU might have unique insight into the case given the fact that they handled sex crimes day in and day out. There was speculation that Stephanie’s killer might have been involved in consensual acts of bondage with other sex partners whom he did not kill. Morgan asked detectives to find women who specialized in offering sexually deviant services, like bondage, in the Raleigh area and see if they had come in contact with anyone who might be a potential suspect in Stephanie’s murder.
Psychologist Michael Teague recalled that at this stage of the investigation detectives had started looking closely at anyone who was into sexual deviance, especially bondage, since Stephanie had been restrained. They even talked to a “bondage madam” in a sleepy little suburban bedroom community of Raleigh called Holly Springs whom Teague said had one of the most “syrupy southern accents” he had ever heard. He remembered her accent as a sharp contrast to the violent acts performed for money behind closed doors in her home.
The investigators also found out about a bondage club that met monthly at a local Chinese restaurant and interviewed some of its members. No sex crime, or participation in sexual deviance, was deemed too minor to investigate when it came to looking for possible links to the Bennett case.
Detective Ken Copeland remembers the spring day in May 2003, right around the first anniversary of Stephanie’s murder, when his group sat around a table getting cold-case assignments from Morgan. For the most part, everyone was assigned two cold homicide cases to review on their own time in between working their regular cases. The goal was for the SVU detectiv
es to assist the homicide detectives in their most difficult unsolved cases. During the meeting Copeland received just one case, the case of a homeless man named Bernard Walker found dead behind a McDonald’s. He wondered why he wasn’t getting the same amount of work as the other officers. Did they think he wasn’t good enough to handle more than one case?
After the assignments were handed out, Morgan came into the investigations area and sat in a chair in front of Copeland’s desk with a serious look on his face. What have I done now? Copeland thought. Copeland was ready to confront Morgan about giving him only one case, but he decided to hear the lieutenant out first. Maybe he had his reasons.
“Hey, what other case is Ken going to have?” Detective Amanda Salmon shouted sarcastically in Morgan’s direction from her desk across the room.
Copeland remembered how the question pissed him off, because he assumed he was being passed over for some reason but, on the other hand, it was the question he had wanted to ask anyway. It was gnawing at him. She had just beaten him to the punch. He looked directly at Morgan and waited for him to answer.
“Well, he’s going to be working on the Bennett case,” Morgan fired back at Detective Salmon with a grin, knowing all too well that his answer would stop her sarcasm in its tracks.
It was the case everyone wanted to solve. Copeland was beyond excited about the opportunity to work on such a high-profile case, not to mention the challenge. The anger he had momentarily felt about getting slighted immediately dissipated.
“I was interested in the case. Everybody in the office was interested in the case,” Copeland said zealously.
To this day, Morgan fondly remembers that moment—the moment he first gave Detective Ken Copeland a little piece of the pie which would later turn out to be Copeland’s pie altogether.
“If I ever made a good decision in this investigation, I picked the right man to get the job done because I knew he was persistent,” Morgan said.
Morgan had dubbed Copeland “The Garbage Man” because he was so detail-oriented. He’d pick up every piece of evidence no matter how small or seemingly unimportant and examine it. It was a way of operating that would ultimately serve him well in the Bennett case.
“I don’t know whether I’m thorough or lucky,” Copeland said. “I think I just look at what is reasonable, what is there. I can’t read somebody’s mind. You have to look at the facts. And when you have nothing else you have to go by the facts that are there.”
Born to Investigate
Detective Ken Copeland came to police work through hard work. A proud member of the Haliwa Saponi Indian tribe, Copeland grew up in the small rural community of Warren County about eighty-five miles northeast of Raleigh. His father, Archie, a tobacco warehouse employee, and his mother, Keasey, a stay-at-home mother, raised Copeland and his two sisters to respect authority and work hard at whatever they chose to do in their lives.
Copeland joined the U.S. Marine Corps twenty-four days after graduating from Warren County High School in 1988 and served a four-year tour of duty. He still sports a short flat-top haircut and the in-shape physique of a military man.
After getting his associates’ degree from Nash Community College, Copeland joined the Raleigh Police Department in 1994. From the start, he had his eye on being a detective, but he knew he would have to pay his dues first. On December 23, 1999, Copeland achieved that goal; he was awarded the coveted gold badge with the word Detective on it.
“I had become what I aspired to be,” Copeland recalled proudly.
His first case as a detective was an embezzlement from a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on New Year’s Eve. Copeland got the suspect to confess to the crime after just two hours in the interview room. He was exhilarated by his newcomer’s success, but still, he knew it was a far cry from handling a homicide case.
Getting a crack at the Stephanie Bennett case, even as a bit player, was the opportunity of his career for Copeland. He started his investigation by comparing every sex crime with any potential connection to Stephanie’s murder. He was sure of one thing: Stephanie did not know her killer. While most sex crimes involve someone the victim knows—an ex-boyfriend, a co-worker, an acquaintance—there was no evidence Stephanie knew her attacker. That alone motivated Copeland to want to work even harder to solve the case. Random sex crimes, let alone random murders, were not something that usually occurred in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he wanted to make damn sure it didn’t happen again.
“This one was one that you could definitely look at with one hundred percent certainty and say, this is a stranger. This was not meant to happen. And she is a true victim,” Copeland said.
Copeland started looking closely at the city’s sex crimes to see if there were any similarities to Stephanie’s homicide. If there was strangulation, bondage, anything involved that might be linked to the Bennett case, it raised a red flag for him and received his extra attention.
The sexual component in Stephanie’s murder made it one of the most heinous crimes Copeland had ever seen. The thought that this young woman had been tortured by a pervert for God knows how long before she was killed made him physically ill. It consumed him daily as he worked on it in between all of his other cases. What made the crime even worse in Copeland’s mind was that it had happened in the sanctity of Stephanie’s home, a place where everyone should have an expectation of safety.
“This was a bad combination of sex and murder. It was one of the worst. It was brutal. The thought of being in your own home and being bound and gagged like that . . .” said Copeland. “I could not imagine what Carmon Bennett was going through.”
If there was one thing The Garbage Man was known for, it was never giving up. As long as he had anything to do with the Stephanie Bennett case, Detective Ken Copeland vowed to live up to his reputation.
CHAPTER FIVE
One Year and Counting
Spring 2003
The best way out is always through.
—ROBERT FROST
On Saturday, April 12, 2003, relatives and members of Stephanie Bennett’s sorority gathered at her alma mater, Roanoke College, in Salem, Virginia, to dedicate a handmade bench in her memory. Stephanie had graduated from college in the spring of 2001 just a year before she was killed. The event was bittersweet as Stephanie’s loved ones tried to concentrate on honoring her memory, but were also painfully aware that nearly a year had gone by and no one had been arrested for her murder.
The beautifully handcrafted cherry bench made in Stephanie’s honor sat beneath a shady tree dappled in bright sunlight as it streamed through the branches. A large festive yellow ribbon was tied to one armrest. Someone had laid a bouquet of yellow tulips on the seat. Next to the bench on the ground at the foot of the shading tree was a plaque that read: “Time goes on, people touch you and then they’re gone. But you and I will always be friends like we were then. In Loving Memory of Stephanie Bennett ’01.”
Reporters approached Mollie Hodges, Stephanie’s mother, as she walked up to the gathering. While others in the group wore somber colors, blacks and grays, Mollie wore an almost blindingly bright orange suit. It was as if she were paying tribute to her daughter’s affable personality with her color choice. But her drawn face and eyes hidden behind massive sunglasses told a different story, the story of a mother still in the throes of deep mourning.
“It’s wonderful. Stephanie’s sorority sisters were her greatest friends, and she would be so proud,” Mollie said to the reporters. “It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful, and the girls did a great job.”
But Mollie couldn’t help but mourn her daughter’s absence on this sunny spring day—alumni weekend, a weekend Stephanie would have enjoyed coming back for, to see old friends. Stephanie should have been there talking excitedly about her job, about her love life, and reminiscing with her old pals. Instead, a solitary picture of Stephanie in her cap and gown from her college graduation leaning against the tree next to the bench was the only likeness of the beautiful young wom
an.
“She was always so happy,” Mollie said running her fingers beneath the edge of her large sunglasses to wipe away tears. “She always had a smile on her face, and if she was here today she’d still have that big smile.”
The school chaplain, the Reverend Paul Henrickson, addressed the solemn crowd peacefully at first, but then infused a bit of fire and brimstone into his tone.
“These are words I shared last year on May 25 at Stephanie’s funeral service,” the reverend began as he turned to survey the group assembled before him. “There are three things in the world of which we can be certain beyond any doubt—there is beauty, there is evil, and there is hope. We know beauty. We’ve seen it. We’ve touched it. We’ve loved it. We have held it as a newborn baby. We have celebrated the beauty of a daughter, a friend, one loved so dearly. Beauty is to behold. At the same time we know evil. We know that evil can topple large buildings. Evil can create wars. Evil can destroy happiness, can take away what is beautiful and innocent, and snatch it away in the blink of an eye. Evil is real, and it is powerful, and it longs only for suffering and death. We know beauty. We know evil, but we also know hope—hope that is not just wishful thinking. Hope looks at a handful of seeds and imagines fields of flowers.”
Mollie visibly choked back tears as the school chaplain spoke. She wiped her eyes beneath her sunglasses with a tissue at each mention of the word beauty. Stephanie’s sorority sisters stood quietly behind her mother in respectful reverence with their heads bowed and arms around one another.
Stephanie’s father, Carmon Bennett, stood stoically in the front of the crowd in his Sunday best—a gray blazer, a white shirt, and a striped tie. As always, his wife, Jennifer, was by his side. Like Mollie, Carmon wore dark sunglasses to hide his grief. On one side of Carmon and Jennifer stood Lieutenant Chris Morgan, like a secret service agent guarding the president. Psychologist Michael Teague stood on the other side of the couple.