by Amanda Lamb
The dark-haired DA with a boyish face that belied his years was not his usual jovial self this day. Like Sheriff Harrison, Willoughby was skeptical about the way Drew Planten presented himself in the courtroom.
“It’s interesting they brought him in a chair,” Willoughby noted, with true grit in his voice, “but they’ve been watching him for weeks, and he’s been functioning perfectly well. No sign of any of this until after his arrest, so the whole thing is a ruse.” He continued, “This is America; you can behave any way you choose. You’re still accountable for what you do and the fact that you lay down on the floor and act crazy doesn’t really change things.”
Willoughby characterized Planten as a “very dangerous man.” He said the case had been solved because of the relentless unwillingness of the detectives to give up, and reiterated that what the public saw of Planten in the courtroom had very little to do with the realities of the case as he knew them to be.
“I’d say that’s drama suitable for television; that’s not real life,” Willoughby concluded.
Drew Planten
“He was a good person, an upstanding citizen. I didn’t know of him ever doing anything inappropriate,” Drew Planten’s mother, Sarah Chandler, told WRAL reporter Julia Lewis in a phone interview the day after her son’s arrest.
Drew Planten was born on March 7, 1970, in Paterson, New Jersey, to Sarah Chandler and Robert Planten. He was the third of what would end up to be a family of four boys. Planten had two older brothers, Ronald and Donald, and would eventually have a younger brother, Duane. Robert Planten was a municipal works supervisor who was convicted of official misconduct in 1985 for taking a vehicle hood ornament as a bribe in return for his approval on site plans for a local development project.
Sarah Chandler, who worked at a daycare at the time, said in published reports that her husband was verbally and physically abusive to her and her sons. For this reason, she ultimately left him. Chandler took an extra job waitressing to support her four children. She also enrolled in paralegal school, falling in love with the law and believing she could use it to help people.
To pursue her dream of going to law school, Chandler moved her family to Michigan so that she could attend Thomas M. Cooley Law School. When Chandler graduated, she set up a law practice in a charming old Victorian house on Cochran Avenue, in Charlotte, Michigan. The small salt-of-the earth midwestern town, with just under eighty-five hundred residents, wasn’t far from Lansing, the state capital. It seemed like the perfect place for a single mother to raise her four sons.
Chandler also wanted to give back to the community after all she had endured in her abusive marriage. She helped open a domestic violence shelter in Charlotte so that women who had gone through what she had would have a safe place to go for help.
Drew Planten attended East Lansing High School where he excelled at academics, but was not involved much in student life like clubs or sports. People who knew Planten back then said that he didn’t appear to have many friends or any girlfriends, and mostly kept to himself.
“He’s a very quiet man,” Chandler admitted to Lewis.
Planten graduated from high school in 1988 and then took pre-veterinary classes at a local community college before transferring to Michigan State University in 1990.
“He was a good student, always made good grades all through school and even in college he got good grades,” his mother said, sounding like she was mustering up as much pride as she could, given the circumstances. “He was always interested in science from the time he was a young person in grade school.”
On April 9, 1993, Planten’s father, who was fifty-four at the time, died in a house fire in Cheyenne, Wyoming. By that point in their lives, Drew Planten and his brothers had had little contact with their father. The local fire marshal ruled the flames started in a stove and that the deadly blaze was accidental. Still, Raleigh detectives always wondered if there wasn’t more to the fire, given Robert Planten’s violent history. There was no doubt the man had enemies who might have wanted him dead.
Drew Planten graduated from the university in 1995 with a degree in zoology. For the majority of the time he attended college, Planten continued to live with his mother in Charlotte, about twenty miles from the campus.
After graduation, Planten had difficulty finding a job. He worked briefly as a laboratory technician for a company called BioPort, which developed the anthrax vaccine, and for a short period of time he also worked for a company called Neogen, a food safety testing company. In spring 2000, he headed to Oregon for a seasonal job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture counting salmon as they swam upstream. Finally, in July 2000, he landed a permanent job as a chemistry technician with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture after a single phone interview.
Although moving from Michigan to North Carolina seemed like a long way to go for a job, Planten’s brothers had ties to the Tar Heel state. Older brother Donald was already living in Asheville and working for an architectural firm. Donald had married Martha Grainge in Raleigh on May 16, 1992, and oldest brother Ronald had attended North Carolina State University, also in Raleigh.
At the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, Drew’s job was to analyze fertilizer samples; he was paid $31,713 a year by the state—not much for a scientist, but he needed to work and hoped it might lead to higher pay down the road. He moved into the Dominion on Lake Lynn Apartments—just fifty yards through the woods from Stephanie Bennett’s apartment at the adjacent Bridgeport Apartment complex.
Planten lived at the Dominion Apartments from the fall of 2000 to about a year after Stephanie’s murder and then moved to a cheaper complex across town on Buck Jones Road, which is where he was living when he was arrested. By all accounts, Planten had had a pretty unremarkable life, living well beneath the radar of the people around him until October 19, 2005.
Head Games
According to psychologist Michael Teague, research shows the most common trait in a rapist is an “avoidant personality.” In his opinion, Drew Planten fit this description unequivocally.
“He avoided people he wasn’t perversely attracted to,” Teague said. “I was told by one of the women we interviewed if a woman was overweight, he wouldn’t talk to her.”
Yet, Drew Planten was unusually kind to older women, like Joanne Reilly at the fertilizer laboratory, who, Teague thought, probably represented a mother figure to him. Teague surmised Planten’s mother was probably the only woman who had ever shown him unconditional love, and thus if he was going to trust anyone other than her, it was going to be someone like her. But when it came to physical attraction, Planten wanted young, pretty women, women who wanted nothing to do with him, women who were way out of his league.
“ ‘These young women have turned me down and made fun of me so much I have a right to unload on them,’ ” Teague said, imagining what might have gone through Planten’s mind regarding the women he admired. Teague felt like it was this consistent negative treatment of Planten by women that made him want to punish them physically.
The avoidant personality disorder is defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (published by the American Psychiatric Association) as:characterized by a pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, extreme sensitivity to negative evaluation and avoidance of social interaction. People with avoidant personality disorder often consider themselves to be socially inept or personally unappealing, and avoid social interaction for fear of being ridiculed, humiliated, rejected or disliked. They typically present themselves as loners and report feeling a sense of alienation from society.
Based on Joanne Reilly’s observations of Planten at the fertilizer laboratory, Teague figured Planten had learned just enough social skills to get by in a work setting but not enough to keep him from being labeled as “strange” by the people who interacted with him.
Teague suspected that childhood physical and sexual abuse most likely played a role in causing Planten to turn o
ut the way he did, but he also pointed out that one in seven boys are sexually abused in the United States, and the majority never kill.
Teague also theorized, based on the manner in which Stephanie was sexually assaulted, that Planten suffered from a sexual disorder known as a “paraphilia.” The term was coined in the 1920s by psychologist Wilhelm Stekel, an early disciple of Sigmund Freud. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders characterizes the condition as:recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
This theory went hand in hand with Teague’s powerful belief that Planten may have staged or posed Stephanie in front of a video camera. Again, it’s a theory that was never supported by tangible evidence and was not shared by most of the detectives who worked on the case. Still, Teague to this day believes a videotape or pictures of the crime may have been destroyed or hidden somewhere and never found.
“I think his mind was completely pornographic. Sex was not at all about relationship to him. It was all about lights, color, action, positions,” said Teague.
Planten’s mother, Chandler, on the other hand, said she couldn’t comprehend what people were saying about her son. She had never heard him speak of Stephanie Bennett, and she had never known him to do anything violent to anyone.
“I’m in shock because he’s never been in trouble before. It’s hard for me to believe that he’s even suspected of something like this,” she said, her voice laden with deep sadness in the phone interview with WRAL the day after her son’s arrest.
The Blame Game
With an accused killer behind bars, Carmon Bennett and his attorney, Charles Bentley, refocused their attention on the civil lawsuit against the Bridgeport Apartments. In it, Carmon alleged that the apartment complex had been negligent in providing a safe environment for its tenants and thus contributed to Stephanie’s murder. Bentley spoke in an interview for WRAL on October 26, 2005, about how the criminal case might affect the civil case.
“It’s really a combination of having a vicious criminal attracted into this environment that acted as sort of a magnet for something like this,” Bentley said.
The lawsuit contended that the apartment complex should have done more to make their tenants secure—like trimming back bushes to keep them from obscuring windows, having better lighting, and hiring a security guard. It maintained that the height of the bushes allowed Planten to sneak into the apartment undetected because the windows could not be easily seen from the parking lot. They also said the apartment complex should have notified its residents about the original Peeping Tom report in April 2002 so that tenants could have been more aware of the potential danger.
Bentley said he felt Planten’s arrest supported the lawsuit’s contentions and made the civil case even stronger.
“Our case is really centered on the fact that there was a suspicious person out there, and there were unsafe conditions—that the unsafe conditions attracted someone like this into that area that was then provided with the physical opportunity to commit the crime,” Bentley said. “Really, his arrest confirms a lot of the thoughts that we’ve had.”
Drew Planten’s arrest also confirmed a lot of people’s thoughts about what someone who would do something like this might look like. In his mug shot, on video, and in newspaper photographs, he did in fact look like the bogeyman. But there were still more surprises to come, such as the secrets that the bogeyman’s apartment held.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Organized Chaos
October 20, 2005
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
—EARL WARREN
The day after Drew Planten’s arrest, investigators executed the search warrants for his apartment, his 1976 Chevrolet Camaro, his financial records, his state personnel files, his computers, and his person. The warrant for his person allowed investigators to get a fresh DNA sample from Planten in a controlled environment. This would allow them to double-check the match. The new DNA sample obtained through this warrant would be used in court to prove there was no doubt that Planten was the one who had been in Stephanie Bennett’s apartment the night she was murdered.
Investigators approached his apartment on Buck Jones Road with extreme caution. His dog had already been removed and taken to a shelter, so that was not the issue. The issue was whether Planten had booby-trapped the apartment. Based on how careful Planten had been not to leave his DNA anywhere, they now assumed that Planten had in fact realized that they’d been following him. Because of this, police were concerned he might have left them a little surprise in the apartment in the increasingly likely event that someone searched it. Given this concern, the Raleigh Police Department’s bomb squad went into the apartment first to make sure that Planten had not left anything dangerous that could harm the officers who were about to conduct the search. They found nothing. Once the bomb squad deemed the apartment safe, the detectives got down to business.
“The first day, it was overwhelming,” Detective Jackie Taylor said.
Officers from the Raleigh Police Department and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation were divided into teams with assignments to search and catalog items in specific locations within the apartment. Taylor remembers that the small apartment was so full of stuff and people, it was almost impossible to get any real work done.
Because of his continued involvement in the case, SBI Agent Mark Boodee was also invited to help with the search. As an agent who spent most of his time in the laboratory analyzing DNA samples, Boodee jumped at the chance to work in the field and to maybe learn a little more about Planten.
Boodee described his initial impression of the apartment as a “crappy bachelor pad.” “That was like no other place I’d ever seen before,” he said, shaking his head. There was nothing on the walls, and old beat-up furniture filled the den. There appeared to be nothing of real value in the apartment other than a television and a VCR. Surrounding this rather depressing setting were boxes of assorted items including magazines, clothes, shoes, and video games, crammed into just about every possible nook and cranny.
One of the first pieces of evidence investigators found was the laundry basket that had been taken from Stephanie Bennett’s apartment.
The laundry basket was a significant find because along with Planten’s DNA, it made the connection between him and Stephanie even more tangible. There was no logical, innocent reason for Stephanie’s laundry basket to be in Planten’s apartment.
The last time this basket had been seen, it had been full of laundry and sitting on the floor of Stephanie’s bedroom. The laundry had been found in a pile on the floor, and detectives had theorized that the killer had probably dumped the laundry out in order to use the basket to carry and conceal Stephanie’s portable stereo as he left the apartment. The stereo, however, was not found in Planten’s apartment.
The investigators did find, however, newspaper clippings about Stephanie’s murder from the local paper, the News and Observer. This, investigators considered, was evidence that Planten had gloated privately about what he had done and what kind of attention his evil deeds were getting in the media.
Investigators also found guns, nice guns, expensive guns. The arsenal included nine handguns and two shotguns, and a stockpile of ammunition. And there were knives, lots of knives. Forty knives, one sword, and a machete were discovered in Planten’s apartment. They also found unusual items that might be used in the commission of crimes, such as a lock-pick set, duct tape, and handcuffs.
Planten had cut a path through his towers of stuff in order to get into his bedroom. There were cardboard boxes stacked shoulder-high all around his bed, filled with items such as brand new, apparently never worn clothing with the tags still attached.
There was plenty of evidence of hoarding—seventy-six pairs of men’s shoes, twenty-fiv
e jars of spaghetti sauce, and hundreds of video games. The shoes, mostly sneakers, were stacked in their original boxes in the bedroom closet. Like the clothing, most of the shoes had never been worn. At least half of the three hundred or so video games were still in the wrappers. Many of those were crammed into the kitchen cabinet above the microwave.
There was a mountain of evidence illustrating what appeared to be Planten’s sexual deviance—pornographic videos, photographs, books, magazines, and sex toys.
“He had tons of porn, like I’d never seen before. Like he’d have three copies of the same Penthouse still in the plastic,” Agent Boodee recalled. “He had milk crates full of porn, magazines, stacked from the floor to the ceiling.” The material was not all recent. Detective Copeland said Planten had classic editions of Playboy dating back to the 1970s stacked up neatly in the corner of his room, still in their original plastic wrapping. They had never been opened or read.
“There was underwear, tampons, used tampons,” said Copeland as he recalled some of the more disturbing items belonging to women found in Planten’s apartment.
Prosecutor Susan Spurlin joined in the search as well. As someone who had handled many high-profile murder cases, she knew it was important for her to get the best understanding she could of the suspect—something she couldn’t get from simply reading the case file. She needed to see how Drew Planten lived firsthand. She wanted to gain insight into who this man was so that she would be able to relay the full picture to the jury.
“I was hoping that somewhere there would be an answer to the question, ‘Why?’ ” said Spurlin. “At that point there is so much to learn. Just because officers make an arrest, doesn’t mean it’s over.”