Evil Next Door (10 page)

Walter and Stephanie had met at a sorority dance at Roanoke College where they were both students. They came separately to the event with other dates, but somehow Walter had mustered up the courage to introduce himself to the attractive, demure brunette across the room. He asked her to dance, and she turned him down. She told him she was afraid his date would get upset and didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Robinson said that first meeting personified the woman he would soon get to know and ultimately love.

“She always cared about everyone else, she didn’t think of herself,” he said smiling with tears in his eyes.

The couple had planned on eventually getting married, though they had not actually gotten engaged yet. Walter had never even bought Stephanie a piece of jewelry, until Christmas 2001, when he decided to buy her a ring, not an engagement ring, but a promise ring of sorts to symbolize their future together.

Carmon Bennett more than approved of his daughter’s relationship with Walter. He considered the intelligent, witty young man to be part of his family. He felt confident that Walter, whom he described as a “fine person from a fine family,” would respect his daughter and take good care of her.

“Stephanie never asked for anything,” Walter said. “She was always content with what she had. I know she wanted more things, but she wanted to do it for herself.”

Walter’s eyes welled up with tears as he struggled to find the words to describe exactly what Stephanie meant to him.

“She was always smiling,” he said. “She was a happy person. She was looking forward to her life in the future,
our
life. She was excited about doing things on her own.”

After the two graduated from college, Stephanie went off on her own to take a job with IBM in Raleigh. Walter headed to Greenville, South Carolina, to pursue a graduate degree in engineering at Clemson University. They continued dating, but the distance was a strain on the relationship. After a year of long-distance romance, Walter finally convinced Stephanie to move to Greenville so they could be together again. The plan was for the two to eventually get engaged, married, and live happily ever after. “We wanted to be together. It just seemed like when we were around each other, when we were together, everything was right. Everything fit,” Walter said.

Walter knew he wanted and needed to be closer to the beautiful, gentle, understanding woman who seemed to find the good in everyone and everything. He said Stephanie’s excitement about life and her positive outlook made him a much better person.

“She’ll always be with me. She’ll always be in my heart. It’s just hard to grasp the concept right now that I’m not going to be able to see her, I’m not going to be able to smell her hair, hold her hand,” Walter said looking straight into the camera lens.

Walter’s tone changed from sweet reminiscence to anger when he was asked about the man who took Stephanie’s life.

“Somebody that does something like this is just an animal,” he said, his words drenched in rage. “I want him dead, and God have no mercy on his soul.”

“He was very sincere,” photographer Flowers said about Walter. “I think Stephanie was truly the love of his life.”

Even then—back in the infancy of the investigation—those who loved Stephanie had faith the case would eventually be solved. Even Walter, who wished out loud he could trade places with Stephanie, felt that justice would ultimately be served. He had no way of knowing just how long that would take.

“I think it is a matter of time,” Walter said looking off in the distance as if he was gazing into a crystal ball. “He better walk lightly in the shadows and be very careful because he’ll make a mistake and when he makes a mistake they’re going to
nail
him.”

For Carmon Bennett, every day was just another day without his daughter, Stephanie. As much as he wanted to go on with his life for the sake of his wife, Jennifer, and his son, Jay, there were reminders of Stephanie’s loss everywhere he turned. No matter what happened with the case, he would be mourning Stephanie’s loss for the rest of his life. As the investigation continued, he shared the constant reminders of his loss during his interviews with WRAL.

For example, Carmon couldn’t forget Stephanie’s first car—a red Honda Prelude. He couldn’t see one pass by without craning his neck and squinting his eyes to see who was behind the wheel. In his head, he knew it wasn’t her, but still, his heart always skipped a beat with foolish hope when one passed.

Tulips, Stephanie’s favorite flowers, were another emotional trigger for Carmon. Jennifer kept the vase on the kitchen table in their home full of tulips in honor of Stephanie.

Even Stephanie’s friends who visited the Bennetts on a regular basis were painful reminders to Carmon of what he’d lost. They were so full of life and strong potential. They had everything ahead of them. He couldn’t help but think Stephanie should have been with them, planning her bright future, not buried in the cold hard ground at Franklin Memorial Park beneath a sterile bronze nameplate.

“She had a personality that was outgoing and a smile that never quit. She always had a smile. Stranger or not, she had a smile for you,” Carmon recalled fondly. “She was just a wonderful young lady, and it’s so hard to believe [she’s gone]. She never caused me and the family a minute’s trouble. Always where she was supposed to be, doing what she was supposed to do.”

Carmon said Stephanie was the kind of girl who worked hard in school and was proud of what she accomplished. He said she was dedicated to her job, always on time, always doing her best.

“She had such a positive attitude. When you first met her you might not think she was outgoing, but she was very at ease, had a wonderful smile, and a pleasant tone of voice,” said the grieving father as he stared off into the distance at the green rolling hills Stephanie so loved surrounding his home. “She was just very easy to get to know and be friends with.”

“Last Mother’s Day Stephanie sent me the sweetest Mother’s Day card—she wrote in there how proud she was that I was her mom,” Mollie Hodges, Stephanie’s mother, shared in an interview with WRAL.

Mollie replayed the things she used to do with her daughter in her mind like a home video.

“If I go to [the] mall, I think of Stephanie. She loved to shop,” Mollie said. “If I go to the beach, I see her walking down the beach.”

The mother and daughter enjoyed many of the simple pleasures in life together—shopping, talking on the phone, taking vacations. Mollie said even after Stephanie moved to Raleigh, they often talked on the telephone several times a day. Stephanie was constantly calling her mother to ask her questions about cooking or how to fix something in her apartment. Although she was speeding toward her adult independence, part of Stephanie was still a little girl who needed her mother’s reassurance and guidance.

“Stephanie, she was so cheerful,” Mollie remembered tearfully. “We always had the best of times, and Stephanie was always happy-go-lucky, smiling.” Mollie had kept Stephanie’s cat with her in Rocky Mount when her daughter moved to Raleigh. Stephanie would ask her to put the cat on the phone so she could hear it meow into the receiver. It was the little things like this about home that Stephanie so obviously missed, and her parents were her constant reminders that home would always be there for her. It was also the little vignettes like that, the tender moments now frozen in time that always gave Mollie a lump in her throat when she remembered them.

Stephanie’s compassion for others is something Mollie would never forget about her daughter. On more than one occasion Mollie and Stephanie would pass a homeless man who frequented the corner at the stoplight near the local mall, always holding up a sign about needing money or food. Mollie said no matter how many times they drove by him, Stephanie couldn’t pass the man without wanting to help.

“She would always say, ‘Mom, do you have a dollar [or] two that we could put in his bucket?’ ” said Mollie. “Stephanie was kind. She was kind to everybody.”

For Mollie, her memories of Stephanie were all she had left. She tried to focus on the good, as impossible as it seemed. She knew Stephanie would have wanted it that way. But it was hard to be positive when her daughter was dead and her daughter’s killer was still roaming the streets.

“Stephanie didn’t want anybody to be down in the dumps and she wouldn’t want it today. She wouldn’t want us to sit around and grieve. She would want us to be happy,” said Mollie fighting back more tears as she feebly attempted to put on a brave face.

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

—MARTIN FISCHER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“There were so many nights when I just went to bed with a sense of dread saying, is this the night when we get another victim?” Lieutenant Chris Morgan said. “Is this the night where I’m going to get a call and there’s going to be another dead girl?”

Morgan couldn’t sleep. He knew he needed more help than he was getting. His resources were stretched. The chief had recently downsized the homicide division to just one unit from two, and his people were already running ragged on so many cases; he couldn’t ask them to do any more than they were already doing on the Stephanie Bennett case. Yet, unlike most homicides for which they had a hunch who the killer was and were working on amassing evidence against the suspect, in this case they still had absolutely nothing. In Morgan’s opinion, the Bennett case deserved more attention because a killer was on the loose in Raleigh and could very well strike again.

As part of the Special Victims Unit (SVU), Detective Ken Copeland concentrated on solving sex crimes. The SVU was occasionally asked to help with unsolved murder cases, to be another set of eyes in addition to the regular detectives already assigned to the homicide cases.

Because Stephanie’s murder involved sexual assault, Morgan thought members of the SVU might have unique insight into the case given the fact that they handled sex crimes day in and day out. There was speculation that Stephanie’s killer might have been involved in consensual acts of bondage with other sex partners whom he did not kill. Morgan asked detectives to find women who specialized in offering sexually deviant services, like bondage, in the Raleigh area and see if they had come in contact with anyone who might be a potential suspect in Stephanie’s murder.

Psychologist Michael Teague recalled that at this stage of the investigation detectives had started looking closely at anyone who was into sexual deviance, especially bondage, since Stephanie had been restrained. They even talked to a “bondage madam” in a sleepy little suburban bedroom community of Raleigh called Holly Springs whom Teague said had one of the most “syrupy southern accents” he had ever heard. He remembered her accent as a sharp contrast to the violent acts performed for money behind closed doors in her home.

The investigators also found out about a bondage club that met monthly at a local Chinese restaurant and interviewed some of its members. No sex crime, or participation in sexual deviance, was deemed too minor to investigate when it came to looking for possible links to the Bennett case.

Detective Ken Copeland remembers the spring day in May 2003, right around the first anniversary of Stephanie’s murder, when his group sat around a table getting cold-case assignments from Morgan. For the most part, everyone was assigned two cold homicide cases to review on their own time in between working their regular cases. The goal was for the SVU detectives to assist the homicide detectives in their most difficult unsolved cases. During the meeting Copeland received just
one
case, the case of a homeless man named Bernard Walker found dead behind a McDonald’s. He wondered why he wasn’t getting the same amount of work as the other officers.
Did they think he wasn’t good enough to handle more than one case?

After the assignments were handed out, Morgan came into the investigations area and sat in a chair in front of Copeland’s desk with a serious look on his face.
What have I done now?
Copeland thought. Copeland was ready to confront Morgan about giving him only one case, but he decided to hear the lieutenant out first. Maybe he had his reasons.

“Hey, what other case is Ken going to have?” Detective Amanda Salmon shouted sarcastically in Morgan’s direction from her desk across the room.

Copeland remembered how the question pissed him off, because he assumed he was being passed over for some reason but, on the other hand, it was the question he had wanted to ask anyway. It was gnawing at him. She had just beaten him to the punch. He looked directly at Morgan and waited for him to answer.

“Well, he’s going to be working on the Bennett case,” Morgan fired back at Detective Salmon with a grin, knowing all too well that his answer would stop her sarcasm in its tracks.

It was
the
case everyone wanted to solve. Copeland was beyond excited about the opportunity to work on such a high-profile case, not to mention the challenge. The anger he had momentarily felt about getting slighted immediately dissipated.

“I was interested in the case. Everybody in the office was interested in the case,” Copeland said zealously.

To this day, Morgan fondly remembers that moment—the moment he first gave Detective Ken Copeland a little piece of the pie which would later turn out to be Copeland’s pie altogether.

“If I ever made a good decision in this investigation, I picked the right man to get the job done because I knew he was persistent,” Morgan said.

Morgan had dubbed Copeland “The Garbage Man” because he was so detail-oriented. He’d pick up every piece of evidence no matter how small or seemingly unimportant and examine it. It was a way of operating that would ultimately serve him well in the Bennett case.