by Amanda Lamb
Gone was the calm man who had politely answered question after question, waiting patiently for the next one to be lobbed at him. This time around, Planten challenged and corrected almost everything the detectives said to him and threw it back in their faces. Gone was the subdued, shy, buttoned-up man they had met just a few weeks ago.
“People have seen you over at Bridgeport,” Copeland said to Planten firmly.
“That’s their opinion,” Planten replied.
“That’s not an opinion, Drew, that’s a fact,” Copeland retorted.
It was a long shot, but once again the detectives asked Planten for a DNA sample. They told him this was the easiest way to get them out of his hair for good.
“No, you’re not getting that. You trick people. I know what you do. I know how the police work,” Planten said defensively to the detectives.
At that point the detectives laid it on the line. Copeland told Planten because he had refused to cooperate with them he had “graduated to the class of suspect” and they would be “looking at him hard now.” Planten seemed to bristle at this suggestion. Rather than retreat, he took an even more combative stance. He bowed up his thin chest and crossed his arms.
“You’ve gone from a person of interest to a suspect,” Taylor told Planten in no uncertain terms.
“Once you’ve elevated yourself to a suspect, there’s a whole lot more I can do with you,” Copeland added, picking up where Taylor left off. But nothing they said seemed to move Planten. He simply glared at them and folded his arms with hostility even tighter into his body.
Realizing nothing they could do or say was going to break this man, the detectives decided it was time to go. They shook Planten’s hand awkwardly and said an abrupt good-bye. From this day forward there would be no more handshaking. Things were about to change dramatically. The gloves were off, and as far as Taylor and Copeland were concerned, the game was on.
Inside Job
One of Ken Copeland’s gifts as a detective was developing relationships with ordinary people in the community who might be able to help him with the investigation. He looked like a regular guy and spoke like a regular guy, not like some tough-talking detective you see in the movies or on television. People trusted him and spoke to him like they were chatting with an old friend over a beer.
When Drew Planten shut them down hard on the third visit, Copeland knew it was time to up the ante. He needed someone inside Planten’s little world who could watch him and maybe assist in helping detectives get a good DNA sample. Given his introverted personality and the fact that the surveillance team had noticed no friends coming and going from Planten’s apartment, Copeland felt like Planten’s office was the only hope of finding such a person.
After talking with several people who knew the hierarchy in Planten’s laboratory, Copeland zeroed in on Joanne Reilly, a section supervisor of several chemistry laboratories in the fertilizer division. In November 2004, she had been promoted to supervise the lab where Planten worked. Reilly was an accomplished state employee who had worked for North Carolina’s government off and on for the better part of two decades.
When she inherited Planten from the former supervisor, she didn’t know him other than to say good morning or hello. Before Reilly took the promotion, Planten had barely spoken to her, only in passing and only when she spoke to him first. In the beginning, because of his long hair and effeminate features, Reilly wasn’t even completely sure whether Planten was a man or a woman. She would see Planten from behind walking down the hallway and do a double take.
But Reilly, a gracious older woman with gray hair, a kind smile, and an affable way about her, made an effort as a supervisor to get to know all of her employees, including Planten. She was old enough to be his mother, and sometimes she felt her motherly instincts kick in when she was around him. Reilly pitied the reclusive young man who appeared to be afraid of any human interaction or contact.
“I would ask him about his family, what was he going to do that night, how was his dog doing? He would talk a little bit, but you had to drag it out of him,” Reilly said, recalling their early conversations.
To Reilly, Planten looked like a young hippie, tall and extremely lean with long, thin hair. Despite his unusually long hair, she felt he always appeared clean and well groomed at the office. Reilly considered herself a pretty good judge of character, and felt like Planten was a harmless young man who just needed some love and attention in order to come out of his shell.
“He had a really gentle face, just a really gentle face with the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen on a man or a woman. They were bright green,” Reilly remembered, her voice trailing off.
Joanne Reilly said people who worked in the office felt sorry for Drew Planten because he seemed so painfully shy and even more painfully thin. It wasn’t unusual for co-workers to bring in food for him. They wanted to fatten him up, but Reilly said she rarely, if ever, saw Planten eat anything.
In many ways, Copeland knew approaching Reilly was a risky move that could backfire badly. If she told Planten the police were onto him or told anybody what was going on, he might run. But, on the other hand, Copeland was out of bright ideas and losing ground on the case fast. The “water bottle incident,” as it was dubbed, was constantly being thrown back in his and Taylor’s face as proof they were on a witch hunt. But they knew better and were out to prove everyone wrong.
Copeland called Reilly one day at her office and set up a meeting with her for after work. He decided it was best to try to get her cooperation face-to-face instead of over the phone. In person, he could better assess her reaction to what he was asking her to do.
“He said he wanted to speak to me about an employee of mine,” Reilly said, intrigued. “He said it was totally confidential, and I was not to tell anyone. I agreed.”
When Copeland told her the man they wanted to talk to her about was Drew Planten, a “person of interest” in a murder case, she was speechless.
“I thought oh my God, he would be the least likely person, he looked so weak,” Joanne said of the frail, meek young man.
Copeland also told her that he wanted to make sure Planten had left the building before they met with her because he didn’t want to risk running into him.
Around 4:30 P.M., when Planten normally left for the day, he was instead on his stool hunched over his lab table working. Reilly said good night and called Copeland on his cell phone to tell him Planten was still hanging around in the building for some reason. She left the laboratory and drove across the street to the North Carolina Museum of Art to make it look as if she were going home for the day. When she returned a few minutes later, Planten and his bike were gone. (Recently, Reilly said, Planten had been riding his bike to work because, no surprise, his car was out of commission.) The coast was clear.
Reilly let Taylor and Copeland into the building through the front door and led them back to a small library where they could talk privately. Once everyone shook hands and sat down, the detectives told her they were investigating the Stephanie Bennett murder and Planten’s possible connection to the case.
“We went in there the first day to get a feel for her,” Copeland said. “Just to see if she was tight with Drew. We were dancing kind of a fine line.”
Reilly was devastated at the mere thought that one of her employees could be involved in such a brutal crime. As an avid news watcher, she had followed the Stephanie Bennett case closely and knew just about every detail. It couldn’t be him, no way. It’s not possible.
“It just really hurt my heart,” Reilly said of the murder. She recalled the beautiful pictures of a smiling Stephanie splashed across the television screen and on the front page of the local newspaper. She remembered seeing tearful interviews with Stephanie’s family pleading for the public’s help in solving the heinous crime. It made her tear up just to think about it.
“We explained to her that we had spoken to Drew, and Drew had not cooperated,” Copeland said.
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��They said out of 246 people so far, he was the only one who had consistently lied to them and refused to give a sample of DNA,” Reilly said.
Knowing how shy Planten was and that his mother was a lawyer, Reilly wasn’t immediately swayed into thinking Planten was guilty just because he refused to give a DNA sample.
“I could see him saying, ‘That’s private, you need a warrant to get that,’ ” she said.
The detectives asked Reilly lots of questions, questions to which she didn’t have the answers. While she supervised the laboratory where Planten worked, she did not directly oversee him on a daily basis. But because Planten was painfully shy, even those who worked with him more closely knew little about him. Reilly figured she had as much of an opportunity as anyone to help investigators learn more about Planten.
The detectives told her that they needed more information about Planten, information his acquaintances and co-workers might be able to help them get. They told her the only way to eliminate him as a suspect at this point was by comparing his DNA to the killer’s DNA.
“We told her we wanted to make sure he didn’t kill himself or hit the road,” Copeland said. “We said, ‘if he doesn’t come to work one day would you call us?’ He appeared to be a little emotionally unstable.”
Reilly told the detectives Planten had a very solid track record in the fertilizer laboratory and generally kept to himself. She said he came to the lab on time and completed his work accurately and efficiently. While she didn’t think there was any way this quiet, timid man could have had anything to do with such a violent crime, in her heart, she felt it was her duty to help clear his name even if it meant working behind his back with police. The end result would be the same, she thought. They would eliminate Planten as a suspect, and he would never even have to know what she had done.
“I was so sure he was innocent, I was willing to work with the police and exonerate him,” Reilly said with confidence in her voice.
Private Eyes
Reilly took her new role as an undercover liaison to the Raleigh police investigators very seriously. There was no task too tedious or too challenging that she wasn’t willing to tackle. She decided not to let her managers in on the situation yet, preferring to go it alone until she had a compelling reason to reveal the situation to them. Her motivation continued to be clearing Drew Planten’s name and having the police move on to the real killer.
Detective Ken Copeland asked Reilly if she could get them a good phone number for Planten. Copeland was sure Planten had multiple numbers, and the investigators needed access to all of them. In order not to raise his suspicions, Reilly created a form on her computer and sent it out to all of her employees asking them to update their contact numbers. The plan worked, and she turned over Planten’s phone numbers to Copeland. Mission accomplished. Reilly was proud she could deliver on what the police were asking her to do.
On another occasion, Reilly said Copeland asked her to get Planten’s e-mail address. Again, Copeland suspected Planten had several e-mail accounts, and he wanted to know the address for every single one. This time Reilly enlisted the help of Planten’s direct supervisor for this mission even though investigators had specifically told her not to tell anyone what was going on. But Reilly felt like she needed help to do what was being asked of her, and she knew she could trust her colleague.
When Planten was on the computer, his supervisor would call Reilly, and she would casually come down and chat with him while looking over Planten’s shoulder in an effort to get his e-mail address. During one of these encounters, she was able to see the address clearly and memorize it. Reilly was so excited, she immediately called Copeland with the information. She was disappointed to find out it was the address Copeland already had. Mission aborted.
The detectives also asked her to try to get Planten’s timesheet from May 21, 2002, the day Stephanie was found dead in her apartment. They wanted to find out whether he had shown up for work that day, and if he had, whether he was on time. Copeland knew asking Reilly for a state employee’s personnel record was no simple request.
“We knew that would take a little finagling,” Copeland said with a grin, knowing all too well the bureaucracy they would have to go through to get information out of a government office through normal channels. But he had a feeling his newest honorary detective was up to the task.
Once again, even though investigators had asked Reilly not to tell anyone in her office about what she was doing, she knew she would not be able to get the timesheet without some help. So she asked a co-worker with connections in the human resources division if she could get the document. The co-worker told her it would have to come from downtown, meaning that the officers would have to get a warrant to search Planten’s employee records and wade through a mile of red tape in the process. But to Reilly’s surprise, the next day the co-worker called her down to her office and told her there was something for her on the desk. She said she would leave her office, and Reilly could take it if she wanted to. Having Reilly pick the document up off of her desk eliminated the co-worker from any direct responsibility for the act.
When Reilly opened the envelope and saw Planten’s timesheet from May 21, 2002, the day Stephanie Bennett’s body was found, her heart dropped. It showed that he’d been one hour late that day. This wouldn’t have been so unusual expect for the fact that in Reilly’s experience with Planten, he had never been late for work.
Reilly was starting to feel a pang of doubt about Planten. It wasn’t a persistent, threatening feeling but more like an uneasy voice in her head telling her things were not looking good for him. But then she realized it was not up to her to decide anything. She was not an investigator. It was up to the detectives to figure this puzzle out. She slid the timesheet back into the envelope and called Copeland to let him know she had something he needed to see.
Sightings
Detectives were still getting calls from people who had lived in the Bridgeport Apartment complex and the Dominion Apartment complex at the time Stephanie Bennett was murdered. Some of the callers were just now remembering things that might pertain to the case. Others had been holding on to information for all of these years and only now realized it might be relevant.
“Now we’re looking at Drew, and we’re trying to see if what these new people were telling us fit Drew,” Ken Copeland said.
One woman told the detectives she was walking her dog in the breezeway of the Bridgeport Apartments one morning when the dog stopped and started growling intensely at something in the nearby bushes. She had to pull back hard on the dog’s leash to keep him from leaping into the shrubbery.
“Her dog started growling at the cedar bushes right there by Stephanie Bennett’s window and, lo and behold, a man stepped out of the cedar bushes, but he didn’t look like the composite,” Copeland said, recalling what the woman had told him. He said because the man didn’t fit the composite, she hadn’t bothered telling anyone about the incident when she found out that Stephanie had been killed. But once investigators broadened the description of the suspect, she thought it might be important information for detectives to have.
This woman introduced investigators to another woman who also had a strange encounter with a man near the Dominion Apartments. She too had been walking her dog early one morning—but instead of in the apartment parking lot, she was walking around the lake.
“And when she turned around, a man was just standing right up on her. He had the hood over his head, and he was right in her face,” Copeland said. The woman described the man as tall and skinny, just like Planten. She said he quickly left the path bordering the lake and walked away in the direction of the Dominion Apartments.
A third woman told detectives she moved out of the Bridgeport Apartments because she felt like a man who lived in the area was stalking her. The woman was now living in New York. It took investigators about a week to track her down. She told them that back when she lived at Bridgeport, she would sit on her patio, and a tall, skinn
y, sickly looking man with long, grungy hair would sit on a picnic table across from her apartment and stare at her.
“That was important,” Copeland said, “because that picnic table sat right behind Stephanie Bennett’s apartment.”
Copeland then told the woman that a young girl had been killed at the Bridgeport Apartments after she moved out. He explained that they were trying to figure out who killed the victim, and whether he had stalked other women in the area. For a moment, the line went silent, and then Copeland began to hear a sobbing sound on the other end of the receiver that was growing in intensity.
“She got so upset she wouldn’t talk to me anymore. She busted up crying and hung up the phone,” Copeland said.
He called the woman back, and she told him that she was just so upset she couldn’t talk about it at that time, but would call him later. He told her he understood. As much as he desperately wanted to hear what the woman had to say, Copeland knew from experience that he had to be patient when it came to delicate situations like this one.
As promised, a few days later, after she had calmed down, the woman called Copeland back and told him the rest of her story. She said the man on the picnic table made her so anxious, she would move inside her apartment from the patio. Then he would start peering through her windows from what he obviously must have thought was a safe distance until she finally closed her blinds. The situation made the woman so nervous, she ultimately moved to another apartment complex on the other side of the lake.
With new details like these starting to emerge so many years after the crime, Jackie Taylor and Ken Copeland continued to pore through the hundreds of pages of reports, thinking they might have missed something. They were looking for anything to absolutely confirm or definitively rule out Planten as a suspect. They knew it was often the smallest details that made no sense at the time, but later proved to have the most relevance to a case.