Evil Next Door

by Amanda Lamb

  The detectives asked Planten the same basic questions they had asked everyone else in their interviews about the case. They asked him what he knew about the murder, and whether he had ever been to the Bridgeport Apartments. He told them he had never been to the Bridgeport complex. Copeland countered with another question asking him if he was sure he had never walked his dog over there to which he said Planten replied, “Maybe I did.” Planten shrugged off the contradiction. He acted like the detectives had simply jogged his poor memory instead of catching him in a lie.

  The investigators asked Planten if he wore glasses. This was important given the fact that the Peeping Tom and the dog walker were both sometimes seen wearing glasses. Planten said, no, he did not wear glasses. Another red flag. Planten’s driver’s license included a “lens restriction.” By law, he needed glasses to drive.

  Detectives asked Planten whether he smoked. The peeper had reportedly been seen smoking cigarettes, but Planten told the detectives that he did not smoke.

  Planten answered the questions, but offered as little information as possible. Copeland found him to be so introverted that he had a hard time believing Planten had ever had a relationship with anyone, let alone a woman. He was probably the kind of guy that was so terrified by women, Copeland thought, that he had few, if any, dating opportunities.

  “I didn’t think he had a relationship with females,” Copeland said as a statement of fact rather than a judgment.

  “He was odd,” Taylor said. “He was an odd guy.”

  “He was a strange bird,” Copeland added. He knew from the answers Planten was giving him that things were not adding up. The guy was guilty of something. He had to be. He was acting so weird—keeping them captive in this little dingy kitchen and lying about small details like where he walked his dog and whether or not he wore glasses.

  Privately, at that moment, both Taylor and Copeland were starting to think that they had found their Peeping Tom. They didn’t know if Planten was the killer, but they had independently gotten a strong feeling that he was the kind of person who might be inclined to watch a woman through her window under the cloak of darkness—a woman whom he would never have had the courage to talk to in daylight.

  Even with his idiosyncrasies that day, Planten was a far cry from the man whom the detectives had met in the lobby of the fertilizer lab just two days earlier. He looked at them directly, and answered their questions without hesitation. He did not fidget or make dismissive gestures the way he had during their first encounter. On this day, Planten appeared calm, almost tranquil.

  “I won’t say rehearsed,” Taylor said, “but he had obviously decided he was going to carry on a conversation with us. He was a lot different than when we first met him because when we first met him he was very non-communicative.”

  They worked up to the big question of whether he would give them a DNA sample. Of all the questions they had asked him, they knew this would be the most important one, so they saved it for last in case he decided the conversation was over at that point.

  At this juncture in the investigation, they had already interviewed and taken samples from nearly 250 people. Not one of those people had refused to give DNA when it came right down to the moment of truth. Taylor and Copeland told Planten that it would be simple, just a quick swab of saliva from his mouth. But it wasn’t the procedure itself that Planten was afraid of; it was the result.

  “We’re only using this to eliminate you so we won’t have to come back and bother you again,” Copeland told Planten.

  “I don’t feel comfortable giving you that,” Planten said to them.

  Copeland basically told Planten it was obvious that he didn’t enjoy talking to the police. Who did? He said giving them the DNA sample was the easiest and quickest way to make them go away forever.

  The detectives said Planten seemed to know a lot about DNA. He countered their pitch with his concerns about what they might do with the results of the test.

  “I know about the databases and you’re going to put my name in a database and it’s going to be compared to a bunch of stuff,” Planten told the detectives with growing agitation in his previously calm voice.

  Copeland assured Planten that would not happen with his DNA sample; it would be used to compare with DNA only from the Stephanie Bennett crime scene.

  “My first line to a normal person would be, ‘Hell, if you ain’t got nothing to hide then don’t worry about it.’ But I wasn’t going to say that to him,” Copeland said, knowing he wasn’t dealing with a regular Joe on the street corner.

  Copeland and Taylor had done their research on Planten. They knew his mother, Sarah Chandler, was an attorney in Charlotte, Michigan. Given that fact, they knew he was likely to be wary of giving a DNA sample for legal reasons, fearing his privacy would be violated. To put his mind at ease, the detectives encouraged him to call his mother and get her input on the situation. The harder they tried to convince him giving the sample was no big deal, the more resistant Planten became.

  “First he just shut me down and said, ‘No.’ And then we said, ‘How about you give it some thought?’ Because we wanted to come back again,” said Copeland, not wanting to permanently close the door on their conversation. “We wanted a reason to talk to him again.”

  The detectives told Planten to consult with his mother about giving the DNA sample. They told him once he made his decision, he should e-mail Detective Copeland about whether he was willing to submit to the test. They gave him a deadline of 5:00 P.M. on the following Tuesday, May 31.

  The detectives left Planten’s apartment that day with more questions than they came in with. Even after spending more than an hour talking to the strange man, the truth of who he was and what he might have done remained elusive.

  The Moment of Truth

  Detective Copeland constantly checked his computer that Tuesday waiting for the e-mail from Planten. Every time he passed it, he would click on his in-box. Sitting there was like watching a pot and waiting for water to boil while constantly wondering if the burner was really on. He was up and down all day long, taking little walks and then always ending up right back in front of the blank screen. No new messages.

  “The talk around the office had always been when you get the one who won’t give you the DNA, then you’ve got your suspect,” Detective Taylor said.

  Copeland finally decided Planten was simply going to ignore the deadline. He couldn’t figure out what kind of game this guy was playing, but he didn’t like it one bit. First, he had ignored all of their previous visits to his apartment. When he finally let them in, he forced the detectives to sit in the tiny kitchen and did not allow them to venture farther into the apartment. Something about this guy scared Copeland in a way the street thugs never had. Street thugs were predictable; Planten was clearly in his own bizarre league.

  Around 5:00 P.M. on May 31, Copeland and several other detectives were standing around his laptop watching the screen, waiting for the water to boil. They had pretty much given up on Planten replying, and were chatting among themselves about what to do next. All of a sudden, there it was. An e-mail from Planten popped up on the screen. Copeland immediately clicked on it, barely able to contain his excitement in front of his colleagues. It was one simple line. It read:I appreciate your consideration, however, I respectfully decline.—Drew Planten

  Copeland stared at the black words on the white screen in disbelief. Even in their simplicity, they seemed to be mocking him.

  “Oh boy,” Copeland yelled after he read the single line of text out loud to his colleagues one more time.

  Planten had technically made the deadline, but in Copeland’s mind, Drew Planten’s time had just run out.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Catch Me if You Can

  June 2005

  Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.

  —BALTASAR GRACIAN

  Detective Ken Copeland contacted North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Agent Mark Boodee and consulted with
him regarding how they should go about getting a DNA sample from Planten now that he had refused to cooperate. After years of testing what amounted to elimination samples, Boodee felt an instant adrenaline rush when Copeland let him know they might finally be onto an actual suspect.

  “They said, ‘We’ve got this guy who we really think is kind of hinky. He won’t give us a sample,’ ” Boodee recalled police telling him. “I thought, that’s kind of weird, let’s try and get a sample from him.”

  Boodee suggested the detectives try to swab Planten’s steering wheel, the door handle on his car, or the door-knob on his apartment door. He even suggested trying the handlebars on Planten’s bike. But the Raleigh Police Department’s legal staff shot these ideas down. They were worried about the legal liability of violating Planten’s right to privacy. Because they had no search warrant, they feared they would be treading on shaky ground if they didn’t play by the rules.

  Boodee countered their concerns by saying why not get one of Planten’s trash bags from the communal Dumpster at the apartment complex. By law, once you throw something out, it no longer belongs to you. Boodee figured that there might be something useful inside one of Planten’s trash bags that he could test for DNA. But the detectives told him they had recently learned from some sources at the apartment complex that Planten never threw out his trash. Nobody had ever seen him leave the apartment with a garbage bag or go near the Dumpster.

  “I was like, what the hell is going on with this guy? This guy is seriously whacked,” Boodee said.

  Watchful Eyes

  In June 2005, after more meetings about how they were going to get Planten’s DNA, the Raleigh Police Department’s Fugitive Task Force was assigned to follow Drew Planten twenty-four hours a day for a week. Their goal was to get close enough to him to get a credible DNA sample, but not so close that he would spot them. They wore street clothes and drove unmarked cars, but following Planten in his old rusty Camaro became a real challenge because it went up to only about thirty miles per hour. This made it virtually impossible for anyone to get behind Planten unnoticed because they always ended up practically attached to his bumper.

  The officers then decided it would be better to post up in strategic locations around the fertilizer lab on Reedy Creek Road and watch Planten come and go from work. Sergeant Clem Perry said this was when investigators started to witness Planten’s truly bizarre behavior.

  “He would come outside at lunch and sit inside his car and it was just smoking hot. It had to be a hundred and some degrees inside the car,” Perry said. Planten sat there with the windows closed, the car off, and no air-conditioning when the temperatures outside the car were well above ninety degrees. During these times, he never ate, drank, or read anything. He simply sat in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead and appeared to do nothing at all.

  Another odd thing investigators witnessed was that the car was in such bad shape, Planten had to place a pan beneath it to catch the leaking oil while he was inside working every day. At the end of the day, they said he would open up the hood and pour the oil from the pan right back into the car, presumably in order to make it home again.

  Sergeant Perry and Detectives Copeland and Taylor were instructed to stay away from the task force while they were doing their surveillance. They couldn’t risk being spotted because Planten already knew the detectives. Still, there were some days they couldn’t help themselves. They would find their own covert locations on Reedy Creek Road and watch the action from a distance just to see how things were going. Mostly they just listened to the radio traffic in order to monitor what the other officers saw and what Planten was doing. After all, it was their case. Who could blame them for wanting to know what was happening?

  “One time the sergeant on the fugitive task force actually caught us doing surveillance ourselves,” Perry said with a grin. “We were scolded and chastised a little bit for joining the surveillance unofficially. We were not close enough to be seen. We were just wanting to get out and listen to what was being said over on the police radio.”

  So far the week had been a bust. The surveillance team had failed to come up with any reliable sources where they could get Planten’s DNA. Finally, on the last day of the surveillance, officers got their chance. They saw Planten get into his car on his lunch break with a water bottle. After a few minutes, he got out of the car and threw the empty bottle into a nearby Dumpster in plain sight of the officers. They knew it would be easy to retrieve, and they were right. Bingo, this is it, thought Copeland and Taylor when they heard about the water bottle. Suddenly, they imagined all of their hard work was about to pay off, and their gut feelings would be rewarded with a perfect DNA match. Case closed.

  The water bottle was sent to Mark Boodee at the State Bureau of Investigation crime lab for DNA analysis. There was a rush put on the test. Boodee gladly sped up the process. He was almost as excited as the detectives to finally have a real prospect.

  The surveillance team also sent a cigar butt found on the sidewalk after Planten and a friend were seen smoking outside the building. This intrigued the detectives because Planten had clearly stated in his interview with them at his apartment that he did not smoke. Maybe it was just a little white lie, but it was a lie nonetheless. If he lied about this, what else had he lied about?

  As exciting as this development seemed to be at the time, neither sample gave the investigators what they were looking for. It was like a kick in the gut for Boodee, who, like Taylor and Copeland, had thought that this time they might really be onto something.

  “First of all, the samples didn’t match each other, and then they didn’t match up with the profile [of the killer] as well,” said Boodee after analyzing the cigar butt and the water bottle. “Either your 24-7 surveillance didn’t pick up the right stuff, or they were from someplace else, and he’s just trying to throw you off the track.”

  The cigar butt not matching had a logical explanation.

  “As fate would have it, we got the friend’s cigar because we weren’t close enough to actually see where it landed, so it was kind of a shot in the dark,” Perry said with regret.

  Copeland and Taylor were floored. There started to be rumblings among the cops at the station that they obviously had the wrong guy. But the detectives weren’t ready to give up yet. Their guts told them something was wrong with the samples, not with their suspect. They could explain away the cigar butt snafu, but the DNA from the water bottle not matching made absolutely no sense to them.

  “Sometime after that,” Perry said, “one of the officers assigned to the fugitive squad admitted they were not a hundred percent certain Planten had actually drank from the water bottle.”

  Given this information, it was possible Planten either didn’t drink from the bottle at all, or he switched it with a clean bottle before he got out of the car and threw the decoy into the Dumpster.

  “He very well may have made the surveillance detail on him,” Perry said. He added this didn’t reflect on the quality of the team, but on the fact that Planten was already anxious about police after having been visited by the detectives twice. As a scientist, he obviously knew the ways in which investigators might go about trying to get his DNA. So when the water bottle came back negative, Taylor and Copeland decided it probably wasn’t an accident after all.

  “At that point we thought, Drew really was smarter than we gave him credit for. He pulled one over on us,” Copeland said.

  Despite some skepticism from within the police department, Boodee was still on Copeland and Taylor’s side. He encouraged them to keep trying to get a good sample for him to analyze.

  “Those two were like dogs with a toy. They would not let go,” said Boodee. And neither would he.

  Three’s a Charm

  “We were told it’s not him, move on,” Jackie Taylor said, recalling their marching orders from the top brass.

  While many people at the Raleigh Police Department now doubted Taylor and Copeland’s hunch about Drew
Planten being the one who killed Stephanie Bennett, they were not deterred. The detectives decided it was time to pay Planten another visit. They would ignore the naysayers until they had exhausted every possible means to get a good DNA sample from Planten.

  This time Taylor and Copeland went unannounced to Planten’s apartment without an appointment as he had required for their second meeting. They stayed out of sight and waited for him to get home from work. They watched him go inside his apartment briefly, and then leave again to walk his dog. When Planten left with the dog, the detectives got out of their car, stood by his front door, and waited for him to return. They hadn’t rehearsed what they were going to say, but they had agreed it was time to be brutally honest with Planten about where this investigation was going and what role he played in it.

  When Planten rounded the corner and saw the detectives hovering around his front door, his expression turned dark. It was obvious he was surprised and unsettled to see Taylor and Copeland standing watch in front of his home. With a shaky voice he told them he needed to put his dog up and would come right back out and speak to them. He was gone so long, they wondered if he was really coming back. Seconds stretched into minutes as they both nervously glanced at their watches. He finally reappeared, but on this visit, Planten did not invite the detectives inside. They were unwelcome visitors. The three of them stood awkwardly outside Planten’s apartment door and waited for someone to speak first.

  “This interview was a little bit more argumentative and confrontational,” Taylor said. “It showed us just how smart he was because he could quote exactly what we had said to him in the first interview.”

  Taylor said she believed Planten had taken notes regarding what they talked about during their encounter with him a few weeks earlier in May. This was probably at his mother’s advice, seeing as she was a lawyer who was no doubt concerned about police interviewing her son. It was as if he had not only taken notes on their first meeting but had also memorized those notes. He spit back things the detectives had said to him verbatim whenever he spotted a contradiction in what they were saying now.