by Amanda Lamb
Finally, they had a possible suspect, and they thought they knew where he lived. Now they just needed a name.
Seek Local Knowledge
Good cops know they can get ten times more information by chatting with people than they will with a subpoena, not to mention getting the story in a timelier manner. Subpoenas can be used later to get the information on the record in a public document that can be used in court. But before getting a subpoena, the police have to know exactly what they’re looking for. As soon as Copeland and Taylor had the lead about the suspect possibly living in the Dominion Apartments, they decided it was time to get to know the people who worked there.
The detectives paid a few visits to the Dominion on Lake Lynn Apartments—the official name of the complex. They were always greeted warmly and would casually sit and eat cookies, drink sweet tea, and shoot the breeze with the people who worked in the main office. Since Carmon Bennett had filed the civil lawsuit against Bridgeport Apartments, investigators were pretty much banned from that office because the management had been told by their attorneys not to speak to anyone, not even the police.
The day Detective Copeland talked to Blaze Szalay, he decided it was time to go to Dominion and get some real answers. Copeland said he and Detective Taylor chatted for a few minutes with the ladies in the office and then he casually dropped the bomb, “Who is the white guy with the rottweiler?”
“It was like a record had scratched. It was silent. I’ll never forget it. It was kind of eerie,” Copeland said. Suddenly, a woman appeared out of the back room.
“His name is Drew Planten and he’s a strange bird,” she said.
She described Planten to detectives as being tall and skinny with long shaggy brown hair. She added he was “frail looking.” The woman told the detectives Planten used to live at Dominion, but had moved out about a year ago. She said he did have a large rottweiler that he often walked around the complex.
Copeland and Taylor were excited, but they tried not to show it. For the first time in months they had a promising lead, but they had been disappointed so many times before that they didn’t want to get their hopes up. They glanced at each other and their eyes locked. Without saying a word each one knew what the other was thinking. Hold it in. Act casual. This could be it. Or it may not be. Don’t blow it.
Copeland changed the subject and casually asked the office workers if they knew of any “nosy neighbors,” someone who had lived at Dominion forever and was into everyone’s business. The office staff pointed the detectives in the direction of an older woman in the complex who had lived there a long time and seemed to always be in the loop on all of the latest gossip.
Copeland and Taylor moved swiftly out of the office and headed for the woman’s apartment. Once they were safely away from the office, they both smiled, but they knew they had to remain focused. Keep it together. Keep cool.
The detectives knocked on the woman’s door, identified themselves as police officers, and were cordially invited inside. They sat on the woman’s couch and chatted with her for a few minutes to put her at ease—or maybe to put themselves at ease—before they started probing their new lead. Then the investigators got down to business. They told the woman they were investigating the murder of Stephanie Bennett.
“Ya’ll ain’t arrested nobody yet? I thought everybody knew the man with the dog did it,” the woman exclaimed to the stunned detectives.
Copeland remembers being so shocked about hearing this bold declaration that he literally felt his jaw drop open. He wanted to jump right up and run out and find this guy. But there was work to do, a lot more work to do. First, he had to finish hearing the woman out.
“Everybody knows the man that used to walk the dog around here is the one killed that girl,” the woman reiterated, in case they hadn’t heard her the first time. She left no room for interpretation about what she had said.
Taylor was also flabbergasted by the simple, direct way that the woman told them the dog walker, a.k.a. Drew Planten, was the killer. All Taylor could think about was, Why had no one ever looked at this guy before? If this lady knew about him, why didn’t the Raleigh Police?
The woman went on to tell the detectives that she would stand around with other residents in the parking lot and talk about the strange man and his possible connection to the murder. They asked her when these conversations took place—she said she wasn’t sure, but she remembered one detail: The crime scene tape had still been up. Crime scene tape is only up for a few days after the murder, at best. The neighbors had been talking about this character three years ago.
Both detectives looked at each other in amazement. They couldn’t believe they were just now hearing this critical information. Too much time had been wasted looking everywhere except in Stephanie Bennett’s backyard. Copeland and Taylor vowed not to waste one more minute.
Picture This
Like all good detectives who always crossed their T’s and dotted their I’s, Detectives Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor then prepared a subpoena for the tenant records at the Dominion Apartments. From those records they were able to determine that Drew Planten had in fact lived at the apartment complex in May 2002 when Stephanie Bennett was murdered. The records also revealed something else—tenants had to list all pets on their leases, and Planten’s lease indicated that he owned a rottweiler.
Copeland and Taylor received a picture of Drew Planten from the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV). One immediate conflict that they had to contend with was that the original report of the Peeping Tom that led to the composite involved a man with short hair, and yet Planten’s driver’s license photograph showed him with shoulder-length light brown hair. Copeland slid the DMV picture next to the composite on his desk to compare the two.
“This doesn’t look very promising. Look at it,” Copeland said to Taylor as he put the pictures side by side.
In the DMV picture, Planten looked like someone out of a grunge rock band, but the man in the composite looked clean-cut and preppy. Once again, the double-edged sword of using a composite was revealed. Copeland said because the composite didn’t have long hair, the people who had seen the long-haired dog walker never came forward because they were convinced it wasn’t the same man as the Peeping Tom. It wasn’t until Copeland and Taylor re-interviewed these people that they discovered there was a connection between the peeper, who could’ve had his long hair tucked into his hooded sweatshirt, and the dog walker.
The detectives used a computer program to shorten Planten’s hair in the photograph and compare it with the original composite. But as many times as Copeland put the pictures side by side, he simply couldn’t tell if it was the same person. One minute he was sure it was the same man. The next minute he was sure it was not. He wanted the pictures to match so badly that he suspected his eyes were playing tricks on him on the days when they appeared to be similar.
“It didn’t excite us a lot when we saw his picture. We’d been disappointed on so many things,” Copeland said wearily.
Meanwhile, several other cases cropped up that seemed to have potential connections to the Bennett case. There was a sex offender from whom they had previously taken a DNA sample who then killed himself in a field in Johnston County just outside of Raleigh. At the time of his suicide his DNA sample had yet to be tested. After his suicide, they put a rush on the test. Unfortunately, it came back with the same answer they had seen so many times before—no match.
Then there was a man who had moved out of Stephanie’s apartment building around the time she was killed. Copeland said the man left behind a bunch of sex toys. They tracked him all the way to the Philippines and were able to get a DNA sample from him. The sex toys and the timing of his move were big red flags. But once again—no match.
“We had a few cases like that where we would get our hopes up,” Sergeant Clem Perry said, only to have them dashed.
Copeland said Planten’s picture sat on his desk for several weeks as he worked on other cases and tried not t
o get too pumped up about the possibilities. As long as the picture sat there, Copeland could tell himself they had not exhausted all of their leads. But the second they ruled Planten out, they would be back to what they had had all along. Nothing.
“People would walk in and say, ‘Who is this guy?’ I’d say, ‘Nobody,’ ” Copeland recalled as he tried to brush off any inkling that he and Taylor might be onto something when other detectives saw Planten’s picture on his desk. As long as no one had any real expectations of them catching the killer, they couldn’t disappoint, right?
In March 2005, Taylor and Copeland went by Planten’s apartment seven or eight times in between handling all of the other murder cases piling up on their plate. They discovered that he had moved across town from Dominion to a lower-income apartment complex called the Birchleaf Apartments on Buck Jones Road in West Raleigh. They would be out working on a current case and decide to give it another shot. They would swing by Planten’s apartment, knock on his door, and leave their business cards stuck in the door when no one answered. On one hand, they were determined to talk to this guy so that they could either eliminate him or start moving in on him. On the other hand, trying to speak to him at his apartment started to feel like an exercise in futility.
When the detectives knocked on Planten’s door, they would hear a dog scratching and whimpering on the other side of the door. The noise would have been too loud for Planten to ignore if he was home, so they assumed he was simply ignoring them. But hearing the dog gave them a strong feeling that they were looking at the right guy.
“We could actually hear the dog whining behind the door,” Copeland said. “So we felt like we were at the right place.”
The maintenance man in the apartment complex told the detectives that Planten drove the old rusty Camaro in the parking lot that looked like it couldn’t possibly pass inspection, let alone make it down the street. It was almost always parked outside Planten’s apartment when the detectives knocked on the door. They went at different times of the day hoping to catch him off guard. Taylor even went by herself one morning around 6:00 and still got no answer.
Clearly, Planten intended to make it difficult for the detectives to speak with him. But they weren’t giving up yet, not by a long shot.
Angry Grief
On what would have been her twenty-sixth birthday, April 30, 2005, Carmon Bennett put roses on Stephanie’s grave. He was getting ready to present the third annual college scholarship in Stephanie’s name to the tune of twenty-five hundred dollars on the anniversary of her death. The money was raised through an annual golf tournament that had already netted seventy-two thousand dollars since Stephanie’s murder. While this was the silver lining that had come out of Stephanie’s murder, Carmon said the spring was the hardest time of year for him emotionally.
“Nobody should have to go through this at all,” Carmon said, shaking his head. “I think about her on a daily basis. She was such a wonderful young lady.”
It was May 16, 2005. Carmon had sat down to do what had become a ritual—an interview with WRAL on the anniversary of his daughter’s death. He said even three years after his daughter’s murder, he would sometimes forget she was gone. The phone would ring, and, for a split second, he would think, ‘It’s Stephanie.’ But then reality would quickly set in.
“I kind of keep waiting for her to call, and you have that realization that that’s not going to happen,” Carmon said wistfully, gazing out at the lush green hills and fields in the distance.
Carmon’s grief was beginning to have an angry edge to it. He was trying to be patient, to wait for the right lead that would crack the case wide open and bring Stephanie’s killer to justice, but it was becoming increasingly harder for him to do with every day that passed.
“Patience, I think, is a good virtue that I don’t have a lot of,” Carmon said with his trademark matter-of-factness.
Despite his palpable grief, it sounded like there might be something brewing behind the scenes. Carmon said Sergeant Perry was going to release some new details at the third-anniversary press conference scheduled for the following Saturday.
For the first time in years Carmon talked specifically about the investigation and what he thought might have happened in the days leading up to May 21, 2002. In the past, he had always stuck to talking about Stephanie and steered away from the details of the case.
“I believe whoever did this to Stephanie did their home-work real well,” Carmon said knowingly. He said he felt like the person was watching Stephanie, perhaps stalking her, and knew her roommates were out of town the night he struck. Carmon believed the killer knew exactly what he was doing and planned his actions very carefully. “Whoever did this I think had just singled Stephanie out because of her looks and her personality.”
Carmon and Perry had been talking. Carmon made a point of saying the press conference would be important to the case. It was clear something was happening behind the scenes. “Somebody has an answer for us,” Carmon said with conviction.
Mollie Hodges was wearing a cheerful top with brightly colored stripes that contrasted sharply with her solemn face. She sat in a white plastic chair in the backyard of the daycare center where she worked framed by the swing set in the background and an acre of freshly mowed green grass. The previous year of still not knowing exactly what happened to her daughter and why it happened appeared to have taken a toll on Mollie. Her shoulders seemed to be slouching under the weight of her ongoing emotional pain.
“I lost my only daughter,” Mollie said resolutely as tears welled up in her eyes, “and she wasn’t only my daughter, she was my best friend.” Almost immediately she began crying. The interview had to be stopped and started several times until she could regain her composure.
“We just celebrated her birthday and of course,” Mollie said before again trailing off into more sobs. “I’m sorry, I thought I could do it,” she apologized.
Mollie pulled herself together and started again. She said that she felt the anniversary of her daughter’s murder was always the hardest time of year because it fell just after Stephanie’s birthday, and just before Mother’s Day. On these three days she felt her daughter’s absence even more profoundly than usual.
“It’s hard being a parent thinking you’ve lost your child. It’s not a normal thing I don’t think for a parent to give up their children,” Mollie said, sharing the universal truth of all parents who lost a child. “I want them to remember Stephanie as a sweet young girl just starting her life—her life had just begun.”
Even after three years of trying to process everything, Mollie still couldn’t understand why a young woman with so much ahead of her could have it all taken away so tragically in an instant.
“I would just like to know why, why it happened to Stephanie,” Mollie said, looking up at the pale blue sky dotted with white fluffy clouds. “I never dreamed anything like this would happen to Stephanie, I just never dreamed it,” Mollie said, her voice cracking again as tears streamed down her face.
Mollie had always been sad, but now she too was getting increasingly angry, angry that the man who killed her daughter was still roaming the earth free to possibly hurt someone else.
“It’s very frustrating that’s he’s still out there and that he could attack your mother, your best friend, anybody, anytime,” she said with venom in her voice. “There’s somebody out there who knows more than what they’re telling. They need to come forward.”
Anniversary Presser
On Saturday, May 21, 2005, the third anniversary of Stephanie Bennett’s murder, the Raleigh Police Department held a press conference in the hopes of reviving the public’s interest in the case. The goal was, as always, to generate fresh leads.
Copeland and Taylor had not given up on Drew Planten, but they had yet to see him face-to-face and were reluctant to put all of their eggs into that one basket.
Lieutenant John Lynch had taken over as the head of the Major Crimes Task Force for Chris Morgan whe
n he retired. Because Lynch hadn’t worked on the Bennett case all along, he relied on his detectives to let him know what was important to talk about at the press conference. He asked the team of investigators what they would like to see as the main focus of the event. Based on their recent interviews with people from the apartment complex, Sergeant Perry and Detectives Taylor and Copeland unanimously decided the Peeping Tom was once again the most probable suspect. They asked Lynch to concentrate on this fact when he talked about the case at the press conference.
They now had additional details from new interviews they had done that might help the public identify the killer. They wanted to emphasize the peeper along with the fact that he might also be the dog walker. Of course, in the back of their minds, they were also quietly hoping the name “Drew Planten” might surface as a result of what they released at the press conference, but they went into it casting a wide net to see just what they might catch.
Lynch stood in front of the television cameras at the podium dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and a gray and black checkered tie. His salt-and-pepper hair and studious-looking black glasses gave him the appearance of someone in charge, someone the public could trust and would listen to.
“The fact of the matter is that Stephanie was an innocent victim who suffered a homicide that shouldn’t have happened. What we need to do is we need to bring that person to justice and prevent that person from harming anybody else,” Lynch said in an almost monotone voice.
With a solemn tone Lynch told the media that the Raleigh Police Department had new detectives on the case who were trying to look at it with fresh eyes. He said they wanted the public to concentrate on identifying a man seen in the area around the Bridgeport Apartments in the weeks leading up to the murder. He gestured to a large aerial picture of Stephanie’s apartment complex along with the Dominion Apartments on the table next to the podium.