Evil Next Door

by Amanda Lamb

  Reilly scanned the parking lot for police as she left and saw no sign of them which she thought was strange, but decided they must be keeping a low profile. No sooner had she gotten into her car when her cell phone rang again. It was Major Lane telling her to go back into the building and find Planten. A million thoughts went through her mind: Drive away; let them handle it; it’s not your problem anymore. But then something else went through her mind, a picture of Stephanie Bennett from the news flashed in her head. Stephanie’s beautiful, innocent smile edged its way into Joanne Reilly’s conscience. She knew what she had to do. She had come too far to let Stephanie’s family down now. She had to do the right thing. Reluctantly, she got back out of her car and headed for the building wondering just how all of this was going to end. She hoped not with a gunfight and hoped not with her in between Planten and the police.

  “As I did, he was coming out, and I held open the door while he maneuvered his bike through it,” Reilly said, her voice cracking with emotion as she replayed the moment in her mind. She tried to act casual as Planten nodded good night to her in their brief passing. She tried not to look back because she knew she wouldn’t like what she was about to see. Suddenly, she heard commotion behind her, loud voices, the clanking sound of the metal bike hitting the sidewalk. She stopped and forced herself to look back. “I turned and looked over, and they had his head down on the ground with his hair spilling over his face and guns pointed at him.”

  As hard as she has tried, Joanne Reilly has never been able to erase this image from her mind. She barely glanced at Planten on the ground before turning away, but it was enough of a look for the moment to be indelibly etched in her consciousness forever. It was a bittersweet moment, one of justice, but at the same time, one of loss, her loss. She lost the person she had come to believe Planten was—a meek, sensitive introvert who just wanted everyone to leave him alone. Yet, at the same time, she gained the satisfaction that in some small way she had helped police get a cold-blooded killer off the streets.

  Detective Ken Copeland remembered the moment vividly as well, but his recollection included no regrets. Only one feeling arose in his mind about that day: victory.

  As Drew Planten walked down the sidewalk away from the front door of the fertilizer laboratory, Copeland and his crew jumped out from their hiding place, an old beat-up van, and took him down to the ground. He let go of the bike, and it fell to the ground as investigators handcuffed him behind his back. It was seamless.

  “We just pulled right up beside him in the covert van, slid the door open, jumped out and grabbed him,” Copeland said, shuddering as he remembered the adrenaline rush.

  Copeland patted Planten down and, to his surprise, found a loaded handgun in his right cargo pants pocket. Both buttons on the pocket were fastened, but the detectives felt sure that if Planten had had any advance notice they were coming, things might have turned out differently.

  “I think if we had walked across the parking lot things might have gotten ugly,” Copeland said, shaking his head.

  Lane agreed that the gun was a red flag. In his mind Planten had a plan—suicide by cop.

  “We got on him so quick he couldn’t get to his gun,” Lane said. “But, if he could have gotten his hand in that pocket to his gun on the day that we arrested him, we would have had to shoot him. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

  The detectives were assisted in the takedown by the Raleigh Police Department’s Fugitive Task Force. Per department protocol, the team was told only that they were going to participate in a “high-risk arrest.” They were not told what the suspect was accused of doing or to what case he was connected.

  “Drew, you are under the arrest for the murder of Stephanie Bennett,” Detective Ken Copeland said in a booming voice after he picked the handcuffed Planten up from the sidewalk and brushed him off.

  With those words, the members of the Fugitive Task Force went wild and started cheering. They hadn’t known what Planten was being arrested for, and to hear it was the Bennett case blew their minds. This was one of those cases that was personal to the Raleigh officers. Almost everyone in the department had worked on the case at one point or another, and if they hadn’t, they surely knew enough about it to know that this was a big day.

  The detectives gingerly placed Planten into the backseat of a waiting police car. Throughout the entire arrest, Planten didn’t say a word. He just stared past the officers as if his mind were on a completely different planet. Copeland told Officer Allen Place, who sat in the backseat of the police car with Planten, to observe him throughout the ride to the police station. He told Place not to carry on a conversation with Planten per se, but to write down anything Planten said. Yet true to his original form, Planten said nothing at all on the way back to the station. It appeared that he wasn’t just shutting out the detectives; he was shutting out the world.

  A Father’s Prayers Answered

  Another major step: Sergeant Clem Perry needed to call Carmon Bennett and share the news with him. Perry and Copeland had become the points of contact for the family after Lieutenant Chris Morgan retired. Throughout the investigation, Perry had dreaded having to call Carmon month after month to say the same thing, “We’re working on it, but we don’t have anything.” Perry said that before every call that he would try to come up with different ways to say “we don’t have anything.” This well-intentioned mission to keep Carmon hopeful left Perry feeling exhausted and disingenuous.

  On occasion, Carmon would call the detectives and mention how he noticed that they had solved another murder case in Raleigh, yet his daughter’s case remained unsolved.

  “I’ve seen on TV that you guys have had another murder and you’ve made an arrest,” Carmon would say.

  “It was just so difficult. I’d look at Ken sometimes and say, ‘Ken, what are we going to tell him?’ ” said Perry.

  Carmon was a get-to-the-point kind of guy who immediately saw through Perry’s thinly veiled attempts to sound positive in light of the situation. But on this day, Perry finally had something positive to tell Carmon Bennett. He could change his mantra and give Carmon the good news that he had always hoped that he would be able to deliver. It was something Perry had thought about doing since that first night when he met Carmon at Stephanie’s apartment complex. He never actually dreamed he would be the one, however, to deliver it.

  “I’ve got some very important news I’ve got to discuss with you,” Perry told Carmon.

  Carmon had company at the time and was getting ready to sit down for dinner. Perry told him he might want to ask his company to leave. Perry was anxious about how to approach Carmon with the information. He knew in light of Carmon’s no-nonsense personality that he should just come right out with it, but Perry wasn’t sure how Carmon would react. Of course, Carmon had always wanted an arrest, but now he would have to deal with the ugly truth—there would be a face and a name attached to his daughter’s killer.

  “He is a very matter-of-fact man, and I was hemming and hawing with him,” Perry said, realizing he should have just gotten right down to business.

  “We have some very important news we’d like to tell you,” Perry reiterated.

  “Clem, just go ahead and spit it out. Tell me what’s going on,” Carmon said with growing agitation in his voice. “Get to the point here.”

  “We got a match,” Perry said clearing his throat nervously.

  When Perry finally told Carmon that the police had a suspect in custody in connection with his daughter’s murder, there was silence on the other end of the phone line. Carmon was in shock. It was the call he had been waiting for, for three and a half years. Perry could hear Carmon tell his wife, Jennifer, the news in the background. She started to cry. For a few moments all Perry could hear was Carmon’s heavy breathing and Jennifer’s sobbing. He imagined Carmon must have been comforting his wife while he waited patiently on the other end of the line.

  Perry went on to tell Carmon that he didn’t have a lot of detail
s for him yet because everything was still unfolding, but he promised to fill him in on what he could later. For Perry, the conversation was a fitting ending to the conversation he had started with Carmon on May 21, 2002, the day Stephanie’s body was found at the Bridgeport Apartments.

  “It made me feel good because I had been the one to tell him we thought it might be Stephanie in there. I think he knew she was dead, but I had basically confirmed it. So telling him about the arrest was good for me,” Perry said, remembering his overwhelming feeling of redemption on the day Drew Planten was arrested.

  Silence

  Drew Planten sat in the interview room at the Raleigh Police Department with detectives for almost six hours. It was a tiny, plain room with a long Formica table, three mismatched leather and metal office chairs, white cinder block walls, and a small observation window on the wall overlooking the table. The investigators went in and out of the room, taking turns trying to get him to speak to them. At first, he simply ignored their questions, played with his handcuffs, and fidgeted around in his chair. But as time went on, he became completely still and continued to be nonresponsive.

  Sergeant Clem Perry asked police psychologist Michael Teague to come up and observe Planten’s interview through the one-way window into the interrogation room. During his brief observation, Teague didn’t get the feeling that Planten was mentally ill. Planten acted like the investigators were not there—almost as though he were in a trance. Teague had seen people pretending to be crazy before. Crazy was not what he saw when he looked at Planten. What he saw was a smart man who realized his time had run out, and he had no more options.

  “Planten knew the game was up. Planten knew that he had left his DNA. He was a chemist. He knew that,” Teague said. “I think he was beginning to get his courage up to kill himself. He knew that life was not going to be fun from here on out.”

  Investigators had been startled to find the loaded handgun in the pocket of Planten’s cargo pants when he was arrested. They wondered how long he had been carrying a loaded weapon to work with him on state government property. They had assumed the gun was probably for self-defense against the police, but Teague thought otherwise.

  “I think the handgun was not to fight police. I think the handgun was to kill himself,” Teague said. “I think he was going to use that to blow his brains out.”

  While Teague’s instincts told him Planten was “ready to cash his chips in,” he obviously didn’t know for sure what was going on in the man’s mind, since Planten wasn’t talking to anyone. Teague told the detectives the Wake County Jail should be notified that Planten might be at risk for suicide and should be watched closely.

  As a detective, Copeland usually wore a jacket and tie, but on this day he was still in his police uniform because of his stint at the State Fair. He was afraid the outfit might intimidate Planten.

  “Uniforms just don’t tend to work too well in the interview room,” Copeland said. “We knew he was savvy enough that what we were about to do was going to be important. With Drew, we knew his mind was like a tape recorder.”

  Detective Copeland borrowed street clothes from another detective before he entered the interview room. Copeland will never forget the large red button-down short-sleeved shirt he was forced to wear because he didn’t have backup clothes at the station. It was all he had to work with, though, so he reluctantly put it on.

  The detectives’ guts told them that Planten wouldn’t talk, but Copeland and Detective Jackie Taylor had been in situations like this before where suspects faced with overwhelming evidence had broken down and confessed. They decided it was definitely worth a shot.

  At first, Taylor and Copeland went into the interview room together, then Taylor went in alone. She was known for her strong interviewing skills, plus there was a thought that a woman in this situation might be able to get through to Planten in a way a man could not. Not unlike the way he warmed up to Reilly, investigators thought Taylor might be able to make him do the same, but Planten didn’t budge, not even an inch.

  “What do you want us to do with your dog, is there someone we should call?” Taylor said to Planten hoping to get a rise out of him. Nothing.

  “He was acutely depressed,” said Teague—his professional assessment of Planten that night. “I think he knew the world was closing in on him, and why he didn’t run earlier, I’m not sure.”

  Teague wasn’t sure what had made Planten stay in the area after Stephanie’s murder. Was it because he felt like he would have a hard time getting another job? Was it because he was stalking other local women, potential victims? Or was it simply that he was in denial that he could be arrested? Had he thought he was smarter than the cops?

  Investigators weren’t as hung up on the “why” as Teague was. To them, Planten was in police custody, period. There would be plenty of time to answer the other questions later. It was now time for them to brave the bright lights of the television cameras waiting outside the Raleigh Police Department and take Planten to the Wake County Jail. It was just after 10:00 P.M. and the detectives knew that the media was chomping at the bit to get the story ready for the 11:00 news. They just needed one thing: video of the accused killer. While the Raleigh police generally avoided parading suspects in front of television cameras, this was a case for which they didn’t mind the media being there. They wanted them to document this historic moment.

  The investigators paused and all took collective deep breaths as they walked off of the elevator and saw the glare of the bright yellow television lights gleaming through the glass front doors of the police station. Here we go.

  Taylor had a serious look on her face as she gripped Planten just beneath his right shoulder. In her blue blazer, white shirt, and khakis she looked every bit of the tough, no-nonsense female detective. Her blond hair was neatly pinned back, and she looked straight ahead ignoring the throng of distractions as she steered Planten through the crowd of photographers to the waiting police car about twenty feet from the front door of the station.

  Copeland held Planten just under his left arm. The detective’s oversize red shirt that he had borrowed from another officer seemed to glow beneath the powerful television lights against the backdrop of the black sky. Like Taylor, Copeland moved toward the blue and white patrol car with no expression on his face, mindful the video would probably be repeated multiple times on every local television station in the days and weeks to come. He didn’t want to regret anything about this night.

  Planten wore a white T-shirt and baggy green pants. His gangly arms were handcuffed behind his back. His hair hung limply in his eyes, almost completely obstructing his face from view. His body appeared so frail it looked like he might just collapse to the ground if it wasn’t for the two detectives on either side of him supporting his weight. Drew Planten never looked up at the cameras. It appeared he was determined to remain a mystery, not just to the police, but to everyone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Searching for Answers

  October 20, 2005

  All actual heroes are essential men, and all men possible heroes.

  —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

  On October 20, 2005, the Raleigh Police Department’s top brass, Chief Jane Perlov and Major Dennis Lane, held a press conference to officially announce the arrest of Drew Planten in the murder of Stephanie Bennett. A sign in the building’s lobby read: “WAY TO GO MAJOR CRIMES.” Planten’s mug shot was pasted in the middle of the sign with the police radio code “10-95” beneath it, which means “suspect in custody.” It was a fitting tribute to all of the hard work done by detectives and an example of just how much solving the case meant to the entire department.

  “I’ll tell you in all my years in this business, and there have been quite a few, this stands out as one the best pieces of dogged dedicated work that I’ve ever seen anywhere in any community,” Perlov said. Coming from a chief who was as tough on her people as she was on crime, this was the highest possible praise.

  The
petite, blond chief with her pixie haircut stood behind the podium beaming like a proud parent as she congratulated the detectives who had worked so hard on the case. Behind her, retired Detective Sandy Culpepper, Sergeant Clem Perry, and detectives Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor stood solemnly listening to her with rapt attention. They were no doubt so excited by the outcome of the case that they wanted to jump out of their skins, but instead, they controlled their emotions and appeared like reverent parishioners in church on Sunday morning listening intently to the preacher, a.k.a. the chief.

  Perlov bragged about how Taylor and Copeland had gone back to basics and spent countless hours poring over the evidence in the case again, knocking on doors, and re-interviewing people.

  “They worked hard and they worked smart,” Perlov said proudly. “I cannot say enough about their dedication and their commitment to solving this crime, but I can sincerely say thank you from everybody for all you have done.”

  The attorney general of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, also spoke at the press conference about the role that the State Bureau of Investigation crime laboratory, which he oversaw, had played in solving the case. One of Cooper’s pet projects had been to get more funding from state lawmakers for extra agents at the SBI lab. Before he did this, the lab had become so backed up it often took months to get DNA tested, if at all. To Cooper, the Bennett case was proof that his lobbying had been well worth the effort.

  The handsome, affable politician was never one to shy away from a television camera, especially when his office had a credible reason to take credit for something positive.

  “This case shows that it often takes DNA to close the deal,” Cooper said. “Once again it’s DNA to the rescue. Once again this incredible technology has helped assist determined police officers to solve a murder case and make a community safer.”