by Amanda Lamb
Spurlin was amazed by how many items Planten had been able to stuff into the tiny little apartment. She was also confused as to why someone would choose to have so many duplicate items with very little real monetary or practical value.
“There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason,” Spurlin said, throwing her arms in the air.
Psychologist Teague saw the hoarding component of Planten’s lifestyle as part of his “obsessive-compulsive personality.” Teague said this trait fit right in with the rest of Planten’s psychological profile.
According to a paper published in the December 2003 issue of Clinical Psychology Review, Compulsive hoarding (or pathological hoarding) is the acquisition of, and failure to use or discard, such a large number of seemingly useless possessions that it causes significant clutter and impairment to basic living activities such as mobility, cooking, cleaning, showering or sleeping.
No one who saw the apartment could imagine how anyone could have functioned in such a small space with so much clutter. It was so tight, it looked like the stuff would literally keep closing in on a person until he eventually disappeared, which may have been exactly what Planten wanted to happen.
“If he had one of something, he had ten,” Taylor said. “It was an organized mess.”
Teague also believed what he perceived as the killer’s obsessive-compulsive behavior may have manifested itself in the way Stephanie was sexually assaulted. He believed the crime probably followed a detailed, ritualistic pattern involving specific sexual acts performed in a rigid order—that it was less about lust, and more about following certain steps.
Probably the most disturbing thing investigators found in the apartment were the references to other women who detectives thought might have been intended as future victims. Investigators found directions printed to the home of a woman who lived in Kenly, about thirty miles from Raleigh. At one time she had worked with Planten at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture.
During a separate search of Planten’s work space at the fertilizer laboratory on Reedy Creek Road, investigators found a document bearing the name of a woman who had moved to the Dominion Apartments and into the same building as Planten just after Stephanie’s murder. Police also found a two-page list of other women’s names.
“Any female name we found, we set it aside to research,” Copeland said. “ ‘Who she was; was she dead?’ ” Police ultimately contacted every woman referenced in Planten’s apartment that they could find.
One thing they learned from researching the women on whom Planten seemed to focus was that he appeared to have a type.
“He had a thing for very, very petite, skinny women,” Copeland said. “If you were not the perfect girl, he considered you fat, and he would not have anything to do with you.”
There was no doubt in the detectives’ minds that Planten had been stalking other women—and maybe even preparing to rape and kill them, as they believed he had done to Stephanie.
By the Grace of God
There was one particular woman named Angela Smith1 who had rented an apartment on the third floor of Planten’s building when he was still living at Dominion after Stephanie’s murder. Investigators discovered a videotape taken of her at a party with friends.
When Smith had decided to move into the Dominion Apartments in the fall of 2002, her mother’s friend had called her and told her there had been a murder in the area just a few months earlier and that she was concerned about Smith’s safety.
“That means the rents are going to be low,” Smith recalled telling her mother’s dear friend flippantly. “Bad things happen.”
Smith was not the type of woman to let anything scare her. She had even taken a self-defense class and felt like there was very little she couldn’t handle. So, despite the warnings from her mother’s friend, she took the apartment.
She loved being on the third floor because it seemed like a safe location for a young woman living alone, but she had a new puppy, and she didn’t love traipsing up and down the stairs with him. It seemed like she was always running up and down those damn stairs at all hours of the day or night. In her tired stupor, she would often pass her first-floor neighbor walking his dog. That neighbor was Drew Planten.
Smith had noticed Planten immediately after moving in because of his strange appearance and extreme antisocial behavior.
“He was just kind of a very creepy looking guy,” Smith said. “He’d never make eye contact with you. He never said hello. He was just kind of an oddball. He was very quiet. He had this beat up old car.” She told her friends he made her feel uncomfortable. Smith was a cautious young woman who always paid attention to her surroundings. One thing she didn’t always pay attention to, however, was locking her door when she stepped out to walk her dog.
When Raleigh Police contacted Smith after searching Planten’s apartment, they told her that Planten had stolen items from her apartment at Dominion. By this time she had moved in with her fiancé and was living in Hickory, North Carolina, a town about 175 miles west of Raleigh. The investigators explained they had found the videotape, as well as some photographs of Smith and some mail belonging to her. They told her that Planten, the man who was in possession of her belongings, had been arrested for Stephanie Bennett’s murder.
“Your heart just kind of skips a beat,” Smith said of her feelings the day she first spoke to police. “You’re just freaked out. Just felt thankful. I just felt really lucky that none of it had ever happened to me. Obviously, he had the ability and was the kind of guy who could go that far and do really horrible things, and for whatever reason, he didn’t do that to me.”
The videotape, Smith explained, was actually a tape full of high school memories made by her friends. She had always kept it in the trunk at the end of her bed. The photographs came from an album that she had kept in a chest in her bedroom. She knew the tape was still in the trunk because she had looked at it recently. Detectives then concluded Planten must have somehow gotten into Smith’s apartment, stolen the tape, copied it, and then returned the original to its original location so that she would not know it had been taken.
As for the photographs, at one point, she had noticed there were gaps in the album, missing pictures here and there, but she thought maybe she had removed some of the pictures at one point to make a collage and simply forgotten about it. Detectives told Smith they believed Planten had also taken some of her items from the trash, like her mail and even her used tampons.
Smith’s fiancé’s quiet strength and support helped her get through the ordeal. Her parents, who lived in the Washington, D.C., area, were understandably very upset after they learned that a killer may have been stalking their daughter.
“It was just a scary thing for everybody to realize that—to even go into the realm of what could have happened,” Smith said.
Smith had lived at the Dominion Apartments for three years, and she remembered police officers passing out fliers in the neighborhood, looking for more information to help them solve the Stephanie Bennett case. She remembered stories on the news on the yearly anniversaries of Stephanie’s murder. All she could think about after finding out that Planten had been in her apartment was, Why not me?
“I’ve wondered why didn’t he take those steps,” Smith said. “What was I giving off that he didn’t go that far with me?”
The police told her they believed there were several factors that prevented her from becoming a victim—that she lived on the third floor, had a dog, and had an alarm system. Investigators told her all three probably helped save her life. Smith was also a young woman who exuded a kind of inner-strength, the kind of strength that might scare a potential attacker away. After all, if Teague was right about Planten’s personality, he seemed to be a person who would have shied away from a woman he thought would put up a good fight.
While Smith was very shaken after learning that Planten had been in her apartment, she decided almost immediately that she wouldn’t let the situation define her
life. She wouldn’t be the girl who almost got killed. Instead, she would be the girl who survived.
“When something like this happens you can either decide the whole world is just evil waiting to happen, or you can decide this was a really bad man who could have done a really bad thing, obviously did do a really bad thing,” Smith said. “But there’s no point in dwelling on it. All that matters is that I never did walk in and he was there. I never did wake up and have him looking at me. Nothing like that ever happened. I was totally unaware.”
Smith vowed not to let what Planten could have done to her change the way she approached the world. She refused to give him that kind of power over her life.
“Compared to what happened to Stephanie Bennett, nothing happened to me, nothing,” Smith said.
Another Needle in the Haystack
On Friday, October 21, 2005, Detectives Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor were finally alone in Planten’s apartment. They took the opportunity to go through things slowly and methodically. Without all of the chaos and distractions of the other investigators, they could finally get down to the detail work they felt still needed to be done. Planten’s apartment, like his life, was one big puzzle, and it was a puzzle they needed to figure out before they took the case to trial.
Maybe it was because they could finally see a clear path through the clutter or maybe it was because all the noise was gone or maybe they just got lucky—but on this day they found a 1998 Social Security refund check inside a video game box on a shelf in Planten’s bedroom. The check was written to a woman by the name of Rebecca Huismann. There was also a postcard found addressed to the same woman in Lansing, Michigan. At the time, the name didn’t raise a red flag. It was just another woman whom Planten had probably admired from afar, investigators thought. Just another name for them to check out.
On Saturday, October 22, 2005, the detectives came into the office to research the names they had found in Planten’s apartment. They started by looking up the names online on various websites, including that of Rebecca Huismann.
“We ran her name and it came up with a ‘D’ beside it which means deceased,” Taylor said with a bewildered look as she remembered the moment she realized there might be another victim.
Sergeant Perry called police in Lansing, Michigan, and asked if the name was familiar to anyone there.
“As a matter of fact it’s an unsolved homicide,” the Lansing cop who answered the phone told Perry.
“Jackie and I went, wow,” Perry recalled.
The officer who answered the phone told Perry it was Detective Joey Dionise’s case, and he eagerly gave him Dionise’s cell phone number. Dionise was in the car on his way to his daughter’s track meet when he got the call. Dionise was all business, no time for chitchat. He immediately cut to the chase and wanted to know why investigators in Raleigh, North Carolina, would be interested in a cold case from Lansing, Michigan, nearly eight hundred miles north of their jurisdiction.
“I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about it,” Dionise said of the phone call. “I can still remember that day. So what does that tell you? There is a God.”
When Perry told Dionise what they had, he pulled over to the side of the road and asked his wife to drive so that he could concentrate on the call. Dionise hopped into the passenger seat, pulled out his briefcase, and started furiously taking notes on what Perry was telling him. Then it was Dionise’s turn to tell Perry about Rebecca’s case.
Dionise told Perry that Rebecca had been shot and killed in Lansing on October, 19, 1999. Ironically, it was the very same day Drew Planten would be arrested six years later—on the anniversary of Rebecca Huismann’s murder.
That was a night Dionise would never forget, the night his city was under siege. Rebecca’s was the third unrelated murder in Lansing the night of October 19, and Dionise had handled every single one.
It was 5:55 in the morning, and Dionise was finally on his way home after a grueling night. Lansing detectives had a suspect in custody in the first murder case, and Dionise had interviewed him earlier in the evening. Dionise got the call about murder number three just as he was walking out of the jail after interviewing the suspect in the second murder case. The third victim was a woman who had been found shot in her car at 121 Lathrop Street less than two miles from the Michigan State University campus, he was told.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dionise said to the dispatcher calling him back to work.
In a city with maybe a dozen-plus murders a year, this night was one in a million for Lansing investigators, including Dionise.
“What the hell happened here in the city? Three in one night, it was unheard of,” Dionise remembered.
Dionise knew the neighborhood where the third murder had occurred well. It was on the east side of Lansing, in an area populated mostly by college students. Dionise went to church almost directly across the street from the house where the young woman had been killed. He had grown up around the corner just off of Michigan Avenue.
At this point, Dionise had been on the clock for twenty-four hours straight, but he knew he still had to go to the murder scene. This was how it worked in homicide. Detectives didn’t clock out until the job was done. And on this night it seemed like the job was never going to be done.
Dionise said twenty-two-year-old Rebecca Huismann had been found shot in the head with one foot set just outside of her Ford Escort. The rest of her body was slumped over the steering wheel of the car. Dionise figured the loud garbage trucks that cruised up and down Michigan Avenue at that time in the morning must have muffled the sound of the single gunshot.
It looked like Rebecca was just getting out of her car when she was approached by the killer. She was shot just one time in the left side of her face with a .45-caliber handgun—the only good news was that it was an unusual caliber. Dionise hoped that fact might help investigators identify a suspect. A statewide APB went out immediately for any handguns of this type confiscated by law enforcement.
The detail about where exactly on her body Rebecca was shot was leaked to the press early on by an eager police captain; something Dionise said set the investigation back tremendously. It was something Dionise had wanted kept close to the vest, because it was a detail only the killer knew. But once it was out of the bag, he couldn’t exactly reel it back in and lock it up again in a vault, so he just tried to ignore it.
Rebecca had been a dancer at a men’s club called Dream Girls on South Pennsylvania Avenue, about a twelve-minute drive from her house. It was easy to see why the attractive brunette with a great figure and a megawatt smile was a hit at the club. But outside the club, everyone police interviewed said she lived a clean life. There was no indication that Rebecca was involved in anything untoward outside of her job description as an exotic dancer. People who knew her from the club said she simply did her job and went home. Her family said it wasn’t what she wanted to be doing, but it paid the bills for the time being. She was saving up to go to college—and the money at the club was good. “She was a nice girl. She danced, big deal, nothing illegal,” Detective Dionise said with a thick Michigan accent.
The night Rebecca Huismann was killed, her purse had been found on the ground next to her car with eighty dollars in cash inside, so investigators ruled out robbery as a motive early on in the case. But this left the lingering question—if robbery wasn’t the motive, and rape wasn’t the motive, what was?
“Somebody wanted her dead; why?” Dionise said. Immediately, investigators started canvassing the neighborhood, talking for the most part to college students who lived in the many rental homes and apartment buildings. Rebecca’s boyfriend, Ernie, had been asleep inside the house when she was shot. He had come running outside and found her slumped over in her car. He was the one who’d called 911 and identified her for the police.
“He was a wreck,” Dionise said.
Detectives then notified Rebecca’s parents, Glenna and Bernard Huismann, of their daughter’s murder. They were obviou
sly devastated and shocked by their child’s death. Not unlike Stephanie Bennett, Rebecca Huismann was a young woman who had been just starting her life and was not ready to leave the world.
The first thing investigators had to do was eliminate Rebecca’s boyfriend as a suspect. Dionise said Ernie cooperated on a limited basis early on in the investigation, and then he got a lawyer and stopped talking to them. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for police to clear him.
“We had to go through a lot of hoops,” said Dionise of trying to eliminate Ernie as a suspect.
And then, Dionise said, “the case went cold.” The Michigan investigators interviewed everyone who worked at Dream Girls or who patronized the nightclub on a regular basis. At first, they considered that an obsessed customer at the club might be responsible for the murder, but nothing along those lines panned out. Detectives found no connection between Dream Girls and Rebecca’s murder.
“Every lead we followed, it ended,” Dionise said with frustration in his voice.
Dionise wasn’t used to having cold cases in Lansing. Even the cases that were technically unsolved, the cops knew who had committed them, but just didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest. But in Rebecca Huismann’s case, they had absolutely nothing. It was as if the murderer had simply vanished without a trace.
The Lansing police then decided to create a task force along with other local law enforcement agencies that had unsolved homicides of women in the same general area to see if there was a pattern. The East Lansing police and Michigan State University police compared notes on their unsolved murder cases with Dionise’s department, but there seemed to be no common thread linking any of the local unsolved murder cases together.
Before Rebecca’s murder, another young woman had been killed in an East Lansing apartment complex hallway. A velvet bag meant to hold jewelry was found stuffed inside the victim’s mouth. The case seemed to have few similarities with Rebecca’s case, but it was still looked at closely to see if there might be some underlying connection that wasn’t immediately obvious. Still, no matter how hard they tried, investigators found nothing tying that case to Rebecca Huismann’s murder.