by Amanda Lamb
Spurlin said she was determined to make sure Planten’s fate would be decided by a Wake County jury.
Indictment Day
On November 1, 2005, the news reporters lurked around the hallway in the Wake County Courthouse waiting for Detective Ken Copeland to finish testifying in front of the grand jury regarding Drew Planten. The Bennett case had come to the grand jury in record time—less than two weeks. But prosecutor Susan Spurlin said that the case was so solid, she saw no need to wait any longer.
“They’ve been phenomenally thorough,” Spurlin said of the investigators. “There’s no question about it. It is one of the best, most comprehensive, complete, well-run investigations that I’ve seen. They’ve done an excellent job.”
On his way out of the grand jury room, Copeland ducked down the hallway and tried to sneak into the elevator unnoticed without talking to the media. Still, reporters spotted him and yelled out in his direction asking him for a comment. He said he was late for a meeting, thanked them for how well they had covered the case, and backed into an elevator with a little wave as the gray metal doors closed swiftly in front of him.
It was typical—before an arrest, the police needed the media to help them get leads and advance the case. But after an arrest, investigators said as little as possible leading up to the trial. Their biggest fear was revealing something that might compromise the integrity of the case in the courtroom.
Luckily, prosecutors were not bound by the same fears of the media as police. Spurlin had agreed to do an interview as soon as news broke that the grand jury had returned a true bill for first-degree murder against Planten. The fact that Planten had been indicted was no big surprise; what everyone really wanted to know was whether the state would seek the death penalty against him.
Prosecutors very rarely expressed their intentions to seek the death penalty outside of the courtroom, but as an indicator of how strong they felt the case was, Spurlin let the cat out of the bag.
“We’ll have a hearing in superior court in a few weeks where the state will officially declare the case a capital murder case,” Spurlin said without reservation.
Within minutes, every news website in Raleigh had the story posted. If convicted, Planten was now possibly facing what Stephanie Bennett had received—a death sentence.
Serial Tendencies
The Rebecca Huismann case opened up a whole new set of possibilities for investigators who had suspected that Drew Planten may have killed other women, but had had nothing concrete to connect him to other crimes until now. The Michigan case prompted the Raleigh Police Department and other local law enforcement agencies to look even more closely at Planten when it came to other unsolved homicides in their areas.
“Any police department that is worth their salt on a case of this nature would be remiss if they did not look into other cases. So, yes we are examining other unsolved cases and looking at Mr. Planten to see if there is a possibility that he was involved in other crimes in our jurisdiction,” Major Dennis Lane said outside the police department during an interview on November, 3, 2005. “We’re certainly not at the end of our investigation. We certainly have more work to do, more leads to follow up on to tie our case together.”
Michigan authorities also started to relook at their unsolved cases, specifically at the case of the woman found raped and strangled in East Lansing with a small velvet jewelry bag stuffed in her mouth. While it bore little resemblance to the Huismann case, it had strong similarities with the Bennett case. The woman had been raped, like Stephanie, and gagged, like Stephanie. Because investigators had now connected Drew Planten to both Stephanie Bennett and Rebecca Huismann, it only made sense for authorities to rethink Planten’s possible connection to other cold cases in their areas.
The Raleigh police detectives also tried to follow up on every possible lead involving where Planten had been, and what he had been doing, since Stephanie’s murder. It was their strong belief that killers did not tend to take a break for this long, but they needed cold hard evidence, not just speculation, if they were going to link Planten to any other crimes.
“We found evidence where he had rented a car for one day here and there and drove hundreds of miles roundtrip,” Sergeant Clem Perry said. Considering that Planten was antisocial, investigators wondered where Planten could have possibly been going with the rental cars and what exactly he might have been doing.
Planten’s father, Robert Planten, had died in a house fire on April 9, 1993, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Raleigh investigators even looked closely at this case, especially after learning that Planten’s estranged father had been abusive to his wife and his sons. But after talking to authorities in Wyoming, Detective Jackie Taylor said they could never get anyone to confirm the death was the result of anything other than an accidental stove fire.
What continued to trip up investigators was the fact that serial killers tend to do the same things over and over again. Yet, the two cases in which Planten was now a suspect, Rebecca Huismann’s murder and Stephanie Bennett’s murder, were so completely different. One victim was shot; the other victim was strangled. One woman was raped; one woman was not. Because detectives couldn’t even determine a pattern with these two cases, they found it almost impossible to form a pattern they could track nationwide when it came to other cases in which Planten may have been involved.
Still, psychologist Teague was convinced that Planten, if not technically a serial killer (defined as someone who’d taken three or more lives) was well on his way to becoming one.
“There’s probably a third body that we’ve not found out there that would qualify him as a serial killer,” Teague said with confidence. Serial killers, he noted, are “just not human. They don’t have any human qualities, obviously no empathy.”
There were unsolved murders every day across the country where the information never got entered into a national crime database. There were women killed along the I-95 corridor who were never even reported as missing because they had no identification on them and were estranged from their families and friends.
Early on, investigators had presented the case to the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, to the FBI, and at homicide conferences throughout the country. The thought was that another police department might be dealing with a similar case connected to the same suspect. But they had no luck in finding any case just like Stephanie Bennett’s.
Detective Jackie Taylor agreed with Teague’s theory that there were other unknown victims. “I don’t think he went that long without killing,” she said of Planten.
“I’m convinced he had done so too,” Detective Copeland added.
Lieutenant Chris Morgan, on the other hand, was never convinced that Planten was connected to other murders besides Stephanie Bennett’s and Rebecca Huismann’s. Morgan believed Planten was reeling after what appeared to be his botched assault on Rebecca. He believed it was a murder Planten hadn’t really intended to commit, and thought Planten then spent the next few years planning his attack on Stephanie. To Morgan’s thinking, Planten was then afraid he could never top that one, and so he laid low looking for another similar opportunity, which never came his way.
“I think [she] was the perfect victim. The crime went perfectly; nothing went wrong in this crime for Drew Planten,” Morgan said with disgust. “Everything about him was fantasy and ritual. I think Planten had this fear, ‘If I try to do this again, it’s not going to be the same. It won’t be as good.’ ”
Death Knell
“The state does officially declare in writing and in open court that we will be seeking the death penalty in this case,” prosecutor Susan Spurlin said to the Superior Court judge Donald Stephens, as she stood in front of his bench.
Spurlin wore a red power suit to court on the day of the Rule 24 hearing. Seeking the death penalty wasn’t a decision she entered into lightly, and even though she knew that law-and-order Stephens, given the nature of the crime, would most likely acce
pt her request, she still had to go through the legal motions to make it official.
First, she laid out the details of the case to the judge to support her decision to seek the death penalty.
“What the evidence will show is that on May 21 of 2002, Stephanie Bennett was found nude, having been strangled and having been sexually assaulted in her apartment,” Spurlin said in a professional, solemn tone. “There’s also evidence that both her hands and her feet had been bound, Your Honor, and semen was recovered from the body of Stephanie Bennett.”
Drew Planten was not required to be at the hearing, and therefore he was not, but his court-appointed attorney, Kirk Osborne, sat at the defense table and appeared to be listening intently to every word Spurlin uttered. Osborne was an accomplished defense lawyer from Chapel Hill who would, without a doubt, give Planten excellent representation. With his long gray hair and wire-framed glasses he had an artistic look about him, but in the courtroom, Spurlin knew he was a worthy adversary.
“They approached this defendant and requested his DNA. He refused to provide a sample, but officers were able to obtain a sample of Drew Planten’s DNA,” Spurlin said with an increasing level of intensity in her voice. “When that DNA was compared with the semen that was taken from Stephanie Bennett, it was found to be a positive match.”
Spurlin paused for a moment after saying Planten’s DNA was a match. It was almost as if she wanted to make sure that very important fact sunk in for everyone in the courtroom. Her subtext: It was a match; does anyone have any question as to what that means?
Spurlin went on to say that personal belongings taken from Stephanie Bennett’s apartment had been found in Planten’s apartment during a search by police. She also talked about how other items from that search led them to an unsolved murder case in Lansing, Michigan—that of Rebecca Huismann. The gun that had been used to kill Rebecca was also found in Planten’s apartment, she told the judge.
“They found that the projectile that was used to kill Rebecca Huismann, and the spent shell casing that was recovered there at the scene, was a positive match from that weapon,” Spurlin said.
Again she paused, letting the fact that the murder weapon used to kill a Michigan woman six years before Planten’s arrest in Raleigh had been found in Planten’s apartment. Spurlin’s silence once again had a read-between-the-lines quality to it: What else could this possibly mean other than the obvious?
Under North Carolina law, to seek the death penalty the state must prove there are two or more aggravating factors that merit the sentence. Spurlin had no shortage of aggravating factors in the Bennett case. She laid them out to the court.
“The murder was committed during the commission of a rape, possibly during the commission of a robbery, and the crime was especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel,” Spurlin said, letting the tiniest bit of emotion creep into her voice.
During the hearing the state also asked that they be able to redact personal information about people interviewed during the investigation—addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers—before handing over the documents to Planten’s attorney as required under the law, during what’s known as the discovery process. Spurlin argued that hundreds of people were interviewed early on in the case that had absolutely nothing to do with the murder, and they should not be penalized for their cooperation by having their personal information made part of the public record.
Osborne, on the other hand, argued that he needed access to all of this information so he and his client could determine if it was relevant or not to the case. He said that without this information, he could not guarantee Planten would get a fair trial.
“We will want to run down everything. This is a very serious case and we believe that we’re entitled to that material under the statute and request that none of this information be redacted from discovery,” Osborne said in a booming voice that belied his mellow appearance.
Stephens struck down Osborne’s objection and accepted the state’s motion to redact the information. He also declared the case a capital case, which meant the state was free to seek the death penalty. The judge ordered the state to copy and deliver all of its documents to Osborne by the end of January. He also appointed another attorney for Planten who by law was entitled to two court-appointed attorneys in a death penalty case.
After the hearing, Spurlin and her partner, Assistant District Attorney Becky Holt, held an impromptu press conference in the courthouse hallway. They told the media that they had talked to Carmon Bennett about the decision to seek the death penalty in the case but declined to say what his opinion was. It was standard for prosecutors to discuss the issue with the victim’s family in these types of cases and take their feelings into consideration. This didn’t mean prosecutors always acquiesced to the family’s wishes, but their thoughts did play a major role in making the decision.
The prosecutors also spoke about how they were consulting with Michigan authorities on which jurisdiction would try Planten for murder first, given the fact that he was now directly implicated in the Huismann case.
Recently released search warrants of Planten’s apartment for the first time publicly revealed the role of Joanne Reilly, Planten’s supervisor, in helping police get his DNA. Reporters were naturally curious about her connection to the case and how that might play out in court.
“We are thrilled that people, citizens that are out there, are willing to cooperate, and that’s what she did,” Spurlin said to the group of journalists assembled in the hallway outside the courtroom. “That’s what makes the justice system work when citizens are involved as well. It’s a good thing,” Holt stressed.
It appeared the case was moving along smoothly—exactly how Spurlin and Holt hoped it would. But experienced litigators know derailment is always possible even when the case appears to be chugging smoothly down the track with no obstacles in sight.
Going North
WRAL reporter Melissa Buscher and photographer Ed Wilson traveled to Michigan to talk to investigators there about the Huismann case and to get some perspective from her family, as well as from Drew Planten’s family.
“When we were in Michigan, everything just seemed to fit,” Melissa said. At one time, Planten had lived in a house in Rebecca Huismann’s neighborhood. Police in Lansing told Buscher that Planten was without a doubt the person they believed killed Rebecca. They also told her that they were even looking at him in connection with several other unsolved homicides of women in the area.
Buscher, being an experienced reporter, knew that it was always better to knock on someone’s door than risk being rejected in a phone call. Face-to-face, journalists always have a better chance of getting someone to talk to them. So, she and Wilson traveled to Newaygo, Michigan, and knocked on Glenna and Bernard Huismann’s door. They answered, and then invited the news crew into their home without a camera.
“We sat in their living room for about an hour, looked at pictures, and they shared stories with us about their daughter. They were overwhelmed that after so many years the painful memories about their daughter’s death were resurfacing,” Buscher remembered sadly. “They chose not to share their story in public [at that time], politely declining to go on-camera.”
Wilson and Buscher also journeyed to visit Sarah Chandler, Drew Planten’s mother, who lived about one hundred miles south of Newaygo in Charlotte, Michigan. Chandler met with the news crew at her law office, a charming old Victorian house that she had converted into her place of business. It was surprising that she agreed to do an interview on-camera.
“She was adamant that her son was not involved,” Buscher recalled.
“Drew was always a very shy, I call it, reserved person,” Chandler told Buscher. She said given her son’s personality she could not imagine him doing something like the crimes he was accused of committing. She said she did not believe her son had ever even owned a gun, despite the fact that police said they found a gun on him when he was arrested.
Chandler told B
uscher her son was an athlete, a good student, and someone who was loved and supported by his family.
“He always had loving family members around him,” Chandler said. “Never did he feel like he was alone in the world or deserted.”
Chandler, instead of dwelling on the accusations against her son, chose instead to show Buscher pictures of Planten during happier times—him playing sports and graduating from Michigan State University in 1995.
Buscher left Chandler’s house that day not sure if she was dealing with a mother who was simply in desperate denial, or truly in the dark.
Preparing for Battle
For Susan Spurlin, the case was starting to come together, but she had been sitting in the prosecutor’s seat far too long to take anything for granted. Having the case declared capital meant that the jury selection process would be long and arduous. They had to choose jurors who were “death penalty qualified,” meaning they would be willing to consider sentencing Planten to death if he was convicted. The major issue in qualifying jurors in these cases was that they often said they could consider the death penalty during the selection process, but when it came right down to it, they had a change of heart during the trial. To weed these people out, the selection process needed to be intense and in depth.
“It’s a case where the jury has to make that ultimate decision, so you’re very passionate about presenting everything so that the jury can in fact make that decision,” Spurlin said.
With her many years of experience, Spurlin knew that a death penalty case was the toughest case to try. She was ready for the challenge, yet even with excellent evidence in the case, she knew there would still be many obstacles along the way.
“There is no such thing as a slam dunk,” Spurlin said. “You never know what the jury is going to do, or what they’re going to respond to.”