Evil Next Door (15 page)

In June 2004, Lieutenant Morgan took Perry and Copeland with him up to Carmon and Jennifer Bennett’s house in Rocky Mount. Above all else, Morgan wanted the Bennett family to know they would not be forgotten just because he was retiring. Morgan felt it was his responsibility to make sure Carmon had confidence in Perry and Copeland, if the grieving father was going to continue having a good relationship with the Raleigh Police Department.

Carmon had gotten so used to dealing with Morgan it was hard for him to imagine himself working with other detectives. Morgan was the guy he could call at 3:00 in the morning when he couldn’t sleep just to talk about the case.

When they came through the door of the Bennett home, Carmon immediately made it clear that he remembered Perry from the day Stephanie’s body was found. Perry was the one who had initially approached Carmon at the crime scene and kept him at bay until Morgan could speak to him directly. Perry wasn’t sure if that memory would bode well for him. He represented Carmon’s first contact with the police the night he found out his daughter was dead. He was nervous that Carmon would hold it against him and not give him a chance.

During the meeting in Virginia, Carmon pulled Morgan aside and asked him if the fresh-faced young cops were really old enough to be detectives. Morgan assured Carmon not only were they old enough but they were good, and they would take care of his family and the case.

“Clem is one of the most brilliant, effective detectives you could ever hope to have working on your case, and Copeland is too,” Morgan told Stephanie’s father.

Later, Morgan would look back on the decision to leave the Bennett case in the hands of these capable detectives as one of the best moves he ever made. As it turned out, he was right.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The six people named in former detective Sandy Culpepper’s file turned out to be just the leads Detectives Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor were looking for. The witnesses all had one thing in common: they had
seen the Peeping Tom.
After years of the investigation gravitating away from the theory of the Peeping Tom as the logical suspect, it was once again slowly moving back in that direction.

The detectives interviewed the six people, and those people gave them the names of other potential witnesses who might have also seen the peeper. Quickly, they started to develop a clearer picture of the suspect.

Psychologist Michael Teague admitted he too had moved away from the Peeping Tom theory. He had been convinced the killer was someone with military experience and maybe someone who didn’t necessarily live in the area, but perhaps only traveled through. Teague felt that the killer’s talented use of restraints and the way he was able to subdue his victim quickly without causing her more injuries might point to a military background. Also, because the killer had been so elusive, Teague thought maybe he was someone who had been deployed for periods of time during which he could not offend. Clearly, the Peeping Tom was more likely to be someone local. After Taylor and Copeland got on the case and started rethinking this angle, Teague did as well.

“Not all peepers rape, but just about all stranger rapists do peep,” said Teague in hindsight.

The most defining interview, as it related to the theory that the killer could be the Peeping Tom, was with a Czechoslovakian man named Blaze Szalay who also lived in the Bridgeport Apartments. In an early interview with police, Szalay told investigators he had seen the Peeping Tom crouched down near Stephanie’s window just a few weeks before she was killed. It happened early one morning while Szalay was walking his dog. The initial description he’d given investigators was very general, not enough for them to go on. But when Copeland called Szalay back three years later, he was able to get more information out of the man with a little creative probing.

“I asked him if he remembered the case. I asked him if he remembered seeing the Peeping Tom. He said, ‘Yes, like it was yesterday,’ ” Copeland remembered, recalling his excitement that they were finally onto something.

Szalay described a dark figure, a tall skinny man, looking into Stephanie’s bedroom window on the end of the building. Szalay told Copeland that when the man saw him, the peeper then retreated out of the shadows and slid down the side of the building in an effort to sneak away quickly without being seen up close.

Szalay told Copeland he was curious as to what the man was doing, so he followed him around to the front of the building where he spotted him again. With a little light on him this time, Szalay got a better look. He said the man was wearing a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt.

Szalay then told Copeland he had seen the man
again.
It was a few days later, and he saw the same man he believed to be the Peeping Tom walking a big brown or black dog, possibly a rottweiler, through the apartment complex parking lot.

“I told my wife, you see that guy right there? He’s bad news, look out for him,” Szalay told Copeland.

Szalay also told Copeland that the man walked back through the woods toward the neighboring Dominion Apartments. Originally, everyone had assumed the killer had come from the trail around Lake Lynn—but now they had a new lead. The Dominion Apartments were just fifty yards through the woods from Stephanie’s front door. This was consistent with what the other people who had seen the Peeping Tom had said—that he was either walking toward Dominion, or actually on the Dominion property. To get back to the lake, the man would have gone in a completely different direction, through the Bridgeport parking lot which bordered the path along the water.

Finally, they had a possible suspect, and they thought they knew where he lived. Now they just needed a name.

Good cops know they can get ten times more information by chatting with people than they will with a subpoena, not to mention getting the story in a timelier manner. Subpoenas can be used later to get the information on the record in a public document that can be used in court. But before getting a subpoena, the police have to know exactly what they’re looking for. As soon as Copeland and Taylor had the lead about the suspect possibly living in the Dominion Apartments, they decided it was time to get to know the people who worked there.

The detectives paid a few visits to the Dominion on Lake Lynn Apartments—the official name of the complex. They were always greeted warmly and would casually sit and eat cookies, drink sweet tea, and shoot the breeze with the people who worked in the main office. Since Carmon Bennett had filed the civil lawsuit against Bridgeport Apartments, investigators were pretty much banned from that office because the management had been told by their attorneys not to speak to
anyone,
not even the police.

The day Detective Copeland talked to Blaze Szalay, he decided it was time to go to Dominion and get some real answers. Copeland said he and Detective Taylor chatted for a few minutes with the ladies in the office and then he casually dropped the bomb, “Who is the white guy with the rottweiler?”

“It was like a record had scratched. It was silent. I’ll never forget it. It was kind of eerie,” Copeland said. Suddenly, a woman appeared out of the back room.

“His name is Drew Planten and he’s a strange bird,” she said.

She described Planten to detectives as being tall and skinny with long shaggy brown hair. She added he was “frail looking.” The woman told the detectives Planten used to live at Dominion, but had moved out about a year ago. She said he did have a large rottweiler that he often walked around the complex.

Copeland and Taylor were excited, but they tried not to show it. For the first time in months they had a promising lead, but they had been disappointed so many times before that they didn’t want to get their hopes up. They glanced at each other and their eyes locked. Without saying a word each one knew what the other was thinking.
Hold it in. Act casual. This could be it. Or it may not be. Don’t blow it.

Copeland changed the subject and casually asked the office workers if they knew of any “nosy neighbors,” someone who had lived at Dominion forever and was into everyone’s business. The office staff pointed the detectives in the direction of an older woman in the complex who had lived there a long time and seemed to always be in the loop on all of the latest gossip.

Copeland and Taylor moved swiftly out of the office and headed for the woman’s apartment. Once they were safely away from the office, they both smiled, but they knew they had to remain focused.
Keep it together. Keep cool.

The detectives knocked on the woman’s door, identified themselves as police officers, and were cordially invited inside. They sat on the woman’s couch and chatted with her for a few minutes to put her at ease—or maybe to put themselves at ease—before they started probing their new lead. Then the investigators got down to business. They told the woman they were investigating the murder of Stephanie Bennett.

“Ya’ll ain’t arrested nobody yet? I thought everybody knew the man with the dog did it,” the woman exclaimed to the stunned detectives.

Copeland remembers being so shocked about hearing this bold declaration that he literally felt his jaw drop open. He wanted to jump right up and run out and find this guy. But there was work to do, a lot more work to do. First, he had to finish hearing the woman out.

“Everybody knows the man that used to walk the dog around here is the one killed that girl,” the woman reiterated, in case they hadn’t heard her the first time. She left no room for interpretation about what she had said.

Taylor was also flabbergasted by the simple, direct way that the woman told them the dog walker, a.k.a. Drew Planten, was the killer. All Taylor could think about was,
Why had no one ever looked at this guy before? If this lady knew about him, why didn’t the Raleigh Police?

The woman went on to tell the detectives that she would stand around with other residents in the parking lot and talk about the strange man and his possible connection to the murder. They asked her when these conversations took place—she said she wasn’t sure, but she remembered one detail: The crime scene tape had still been up. Crime scene tape is only up for a few days after the murder, at best. The neighbors had been talking about this character
three years ago.

Both detectives looked at each other in amazement. They couldn’t believe they were just now hearing this critical information. Too much time had been wasted looking everywhere
except
in Stephanie Bennett’s backyard. Copeland and Taylor vowed not to waste one more minute.

Like all good detectives who always crossed their T’s and dotted their I’s, Detectives Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor then prepared a subpoena for the tenant records at the Dominion Apartments. From those records they were able to determine that Drew Planten had in fact lived at the apartment complex in May 2002 when Stephanie Bennett was murdered. The records also revealed something else—tenants had to list all pets on their leases, and Planten’s lease indicated that he owned a rottweiler.

Copeland and Taylor received a picture of Drew Planten from the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV). One immediate conflict that they had to contend with was that the original report of the Peeping Tom that led to the composite involved a man with short hair, and yet Planten’s driver’s license photograph showed him with shoulder-length light brown hair. Copeland slid the DMV picture next to the composite on his desk to compare the two.

“This doesn’t look very promising. Look at it,” Copeland said to Taylor as he put the pictures side by side.

In the DMV picture, Planten looked like someone out of a grunge rock band, but the man in the composite looked clean-cut and preppy. Once again, the double-edged sword of using a composite was revealed. Copeland said because the composite didn’t have long hair, the people who had seen the long-haired dog walker never came forward because they were convinced it wasn’t the same man as the Peeping Tom. It wasn’t until Copeland and Taylor re-interviewed these people that they discovered there was a connection between the peeper, who could’ve had his long hair tucked into his hooded sweatshirt, and the dog walker.

The detectives used a computer program to shorten Planten’s hair in the photograph and compare it with the original composite. But as many times as Copeland put the pictures side by side, he simply couldn’t tell if it was the same person. One minute he was sure it was the same man. The next minute he was sure it was not. He wanted the pictures to match so badly that he suspected his eyes were playing tricks on him on the days when they appeared to be similar.

“It didn’t excite us a lot when we saw his picture. We’d been disappointed on so many things,” Copeland said wearily.

Meanwhile, several other cases cropped up that seemed to have potential connections to the Bennett case. There was a sex offender from whom they had previously taken a DNA sample who then killed himself in a field in Johnston County just outside of Raleigh. At the time of his suicide his DNA sample had yet to be tested. After his suicide, they put a rush on the test. Unfortunately, it came back with the same answer they had seen so many times before—no match.

Then there was a man who had moved out of Stephanie’s apartment building around the time she was killed. Copeland said the man left behind a bunch of sex toys. They tracked him all the way to the Philippines and were able to get a DNA sample from him. The sex toys and the timing of his move were big red flags. But once again—no match.