Evil Next Door (17 page)

Lynch told the media the police department had set up a forty-eight-hour tip line to see if they could once again gain some momentum in the case. He said it would be manned continuously by detectives working on the case from 7:00 Saturday night to 7:00 Monday night. After that, it would be connected to a voice mail where callers could leave a confidential message.

The journalists prodded Lynch, asking him if the case wasn’t in fact cold after being unsolved for three years. He repeatedly told the crowd in several different ways that it wasn’t cold. They were still working it every day. They would not give up.

“If we sat around speculating on when we were going to call it quits with this case, we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing. We just keep on going. We work the case to its logical conclusion, and that will be the arrest of the suspect,” Lynch said. “The case is solvable.”

Whether he actually believed what he was saying or not, Lynch came across as a man who meant business.

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there’s a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

—DOROTHY THOMPSON

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The third-anniversary press conference got results.

“We received dozens of calls,
interesting
calls,” Lieutenant John Lynch said like a man who had a secret. “Each one of the tips that’s coming in is being treated seriously. Investigators are following up on each and every one of these.”

On the record, Lynch wasn’t about to show his hand, but behind the scenes things were cooking.

Detective Ken Copeland said of the dozens of calls they received, some of them were very relevant to the case. The press conference had done what it was designed to do—give investigators new leads that they could run with.

One caller named Sidney Hoff, who’d lived in the Dominion Apartments at the time Stephanie Bennett was murdered, remembered a man fitting the specific description police gave at the press conference. Hoff lived above the man and said he was very skinny with long hair and walked a large dog around the apartment complex at all hours of the night. Hoff said he didn’t know the man’s name, but described him as being “very strange.”

“He was very reclusive. He wouldn’t talk to anyone or make eye contact, and he walked a big black dog, usually wore a sweatshirt with a hood over it,” Hoff said during an interview with WRAL. “When you actually tried to say, ‘Hi,’ he would flinch away, look down, look the other way.”

The clincher for investigators was when Hoff described the man’s car to them. It matched the description of the car parked in front of Drew Planten’s new place at the Birchleaf Apartments exactly. A raggedy old rust bucket that looked like it was about to fall apart any minute. There couldn’t possibly be another clunker just like the one he and Taylor had observed in the parking lot of Planten’s apartment, Copeland thought.

“His car was one-of-a-kind—an old Chevy Camaro, rusted out, looked like it wouldn’t even run,” Hoff said.

Another caller, a woman who lived in the building next to Stephanie’s, remembered something she had overheard soon after the murder. She had spoken to police on several occasions in the months following the murder, but had neglected to share this information. She said she just now realized it might be important.

“I was spoken to in the original investigation. I’m sorry I did not tell you this, it’s been on my mind for a while,” the woman told Copeland over the phone.

The woman said soon after the murder she saw a tall, skinny man matching the police department’s description of the suspect walking in the breezeway at the Bridgeport Apartments where she lived. She said the man was “frail, sickly looking” and was walking with a young boy. They were speaking to one another in hushed tones as if they were afraid someone might be listening to what they were saying.

She told police she overheard the boy say to the man, “I told them that I didn’t do it. I had
nothing
to do with it.” Then she told police she overheard the man say, “Be quiet, and don’t say
anything
else.”

Psychologist Michael Teague recalled the young boy that had been interviewed early on in the investigation about the women’s underwear strewn on the bush near Stephanie’s building. At the time, the boy reluctantly admitted to stealing the underwear from the laundry room at the apartment complex and dumping it on the shrubbery, but said he had no connection to the murder. The boy lived next door to Stephanie and his bedroom shared a wall with hers.

Despite the boy’s denials about being involved, now armed with this new information, Teague couldn’t help but think the boy walking in the breezeway with the suspect was most likely the same boy who had admitted to dumping the underwear on the bush, the same boy who lived right next door to Stephanie. It appeared that the boy might have been friends with this strange man who matched Planten’s description. Teague started to wonder if the boy
had
been there when Stephanie was murdered. He also considered the gruesome theory that maybe the boy had even documented the crime for the killer with a video camera.

“It’s the old pervert training the young pervert,” Teague said of this theory.

Teague said sexual deviants liked to groom young boys and get reinforcement for what they did. In this case, if the boy had been there, Teague felt like he would have been too scared not to do whatever the killer asked him to do.

“This is a way for the killer to say, ‘Look at what I’m doing. I’m the big guy,’ ” said Teague. “This wanting to show somebody, share it with somebody, it is part of what we called the dependant-personality traits.”

Teague also considered that if the boy was involved, he was probably so horrified by what he had seen that he felt a need to “cleanse” himself by getting rid of the underwear because it was evidence of his own sexual deviance.

“He flips out. He can’t handle it,” Teague theorized.

Teague’s close friend and colleague, Lieutenant Chris Morgan, never shared Teague’s conjecture about the boy’s possible connection to Stephanie’s murder. Morgan was willing to consider that possibly the boy knew the killer and had some weird, inappropriate friendship with him, but even that didn’t automatically mean the boy knew about the murder or had been involved in it. Morgan was part of the original team who had repeatedly interviewed the boy and his mother regarding the underwear found in the shrubbery. Morgan never got a strong sense about the boy’s involvement, or found any evidence indicating he took part in the murder, though of course he also couldn’t completely rule it out. Like so many facets of a complex murder investigation, some things will always remain a mystery.

Detectives Copeland and Taylor didn’t buy Teague’s theory about the boy’s potential involvement in the murder either, but they were intrigued by what the woman had overheard. They were more interested in confirming the identity of the man—to see if it was in fact Drew Planten—and far less concerned with rehashing the boy’s possible connection to the case.

The detectives brought the woman who had overheard the conversation down to police headquarters. They asked her to look at a lineup of pictures to see if she could recognize the man she saw walking in the breezeway that day with the young boy. They held their breaths as she gazed at the single sheet of paper that held photographs of several suspects who all shared similar physical characteristics. One of the pictures was of Drew Planten. It didn’t take long for her to come to a definite conclusion.

“She picked him out,” Copeland said excitedly. “She said, ‘That’s the man that I saw walking through the breezeway.’ ”

Suddenly everything was coming into focus for the detectives.

“We’re going to
find
him,” Taylor said at that moment vowing to do whatever she had to do to get a face-to-face meeting with Drew Planten once and for all.

Fed up by multiple failed attempts to interview Drew Planten at his apartment, the detectives asked the manager of the apartment complex for the location of Planten’s job.

On Tuesday, May 24, 2005, Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor made an unannounced visit to the state fertilizer lab on Reedy Creek Road in Raleigh where Planten was employed as a chemist.

The detectives flashed their badges and asked the receptionist to tell Mr. Planten that he had visitors in the lobby. Taylor sat down for a moment, and when she looked up she saw a painfully thin man through the glass coming down the stairs toward her.
Bingo,
she thought,
he’s just like they described him.

“He came walking down the stairs, walking just like they always said he walked, his head down, not looking at anybody,” Taylor said, remembering the first time she ever laid eyes on Planten.

Planten sheepishly introduced himself without making eye contact and reached out awkwardly to shake Copeland’s hand.

“The first thing I noticed when he shook my hand, [was that] he had a death grip, and I mean a
death grip,
” Copeland emphasized. “He was strong.”

Coming from a former Marine who looked like he could break most average men in half, Copeland’s description of Planten’s handshake became something of legend around the Raleigh Police Department. The handshake was in direct opposition to Planten’s frail appearance. He looked like he could barely walk down the stairs without passing out, let alone squeeze someone’s hand like a vise.

“He looked like he would fall apart if you touched him,” Taylor said, shaking her head as she remembered that day.

The detectives told Planten they were investigating the murder of Stephanie Bennett and asked him if he had heard anything about the case. He said, “No,” which was the first of many red flags for Copeland and Taylor in their dealings with Planten. It would have been virtually impossible to have lived in the Dominion or Bridgeport Apartments in May 2002 and not know
something
about the case, especially given the extensive media coverage over the past three years. After a few minutes of denial, Planten finally told the detectives he thought he might vaguely remember the case.

“We’d like to sit down and talk to you about it. Do you have some time when you could come down to the police department?” Copeland said to Planten.

“I’m not coming to the police department,” Planten fired back.

The detectives then asked Planten if he wouldn’t come to the police department, would he be willing to speak to them at his apartment. He told them they would have to make an appointment to see him. The word
appointment
struck them as odd. Planten didn’t appear to be the kind of guy who had a busy social schedule. But nonetheless, the detectives played along and made an appointment to meet with Planten the following Thursday at his apartment after work.

“He was very hard to talk to. You had to pull stuff out of him. It wasn’t like you were carrying on a conversation with a normal person,” said Taylor, remembering how difficult it was just to make a simple plan to meet with Planten.

Planten answered the detectives’ handful of questions with very short or one-word responses. Right away, they decided he was “odd,” but not necessarily their murder suspect. Taylor and Copeland had dealt with a lot of odd people throughout the investigation; they didn’t immediately think being odd qualified someone as a killer. But as they said their good-byes and turned to leave, something strange happened—
red flag number two.

“He started shaking uncontrollably from head to toe like he was freezing cold,” Copeland remembered.

“Are you okay?” Taylor asked him.

“I’ll see you Thursday,” Planten responded, ignoring her question and turning away.

As they walked away from the building, Taylor and Copeland could barely contain their hopefulness that maybe they were finally onto something. Once again, neither of them spoke. They just looked at each other and knew exactly what the other one was thinking.

“We looked at each other and we were like—I think we found him,” Taylor said.

“I think we found him,” Copeland echoed.

Before Jackie Taylor and Ken Copeland went to Planten’s apartment, they let everyone in their unit know what was going on. Sergeant Clem Perry and several other officers decided they would take a position close to the apartment complex and be ready to head toward Planten’s apartment in case something went wrong and the detectives needed backup. While Planten seemed meek, not at all like someone who might pull a gun on a cop, Perry wasn’t going to take any chances with his detectives’ safety.

When Taylor and Copeland arrived at the apartment on Thursday, May 26, 2005, and knocked, to their great surprise he promptly answered the door. It was the same door they had knocked on so many times in the previous few weeks and never gotten an answer. But on this occasion, it was clear that Drew Planten was expecting them. He was ready to speak to the detectives as long as he could maintain control of the situation.

Taylor remembered how Planten immediately took charge of their encounter. “I walked right into the living room, [and] he stopped me,” Taylor said.

“Oh no, no, stop right there,” Planten told her. “We’ll have this conversation right here.”

Her radar went up at that very moment. What was he trying so hard to hide in the apartment? What did he not want them to see? Did it have something to do with Stephanie’s murder?

Planten ushered the detectives to a small table up against the wall in the cramped kitchen surrounded by two matching chairs and a lawn chair which was just a few steps from the front door. Planten sat down at one end of the table and the detectives took the other two seats. Glancing around, Taylor and Copeland noticed that the apartment appeared to be neat and organized, not your typical bachelor pad. It looked like Planten had cleaned up for his company.