Evil Next Door (2 page)

I was stopped at my third red light before I remembered that I hadn’t eaten. I pictured the pot of steaming hot pasta on the counter in the kitchen at home. My stomach was rumbling. I pushed the thought out of my mind and tried to concentrate. I had been talking on my cell phone with the newsroom making sure everything was in place—the photographer, the live truck, and the reams of file tape we would need to give the audience background and context for the story that would air in less than an hour. I was thinking about everything I needed to do to make it happen as seamlessly as possible. Most important, I needed to call Stephanie Bennett’s father, Carmon Bennett, in Virginia and get his reaction to the arrest. I knew this wasn’t going to be an easy call. I had interviewed Carmon many times over the years throughout the investigation. This arrest, while it was something he had desperately hoped for, would also put a name and a face to the evil that had been done to his daughter. I couldn’t possibly imagine how that was going to make him feel. Knowing Carmon the way that I did, I figured he was likely to have a variety of emotions, ranging from relief to disgust. Carmon had taken on the mantle as the family spokesperson. Over the years, I had also spoken to Stephanie’s mother, Mollie Hodges, on several occasions, but Carmon was the one who always had the strength to talk to the media when Mollie’s emotions overwhelmed her.

I drove as fast as possible without being reckless, my thoughts jumping from Carmon and Mollie, to the newscast, to the suspect. I was consumed with curiosity about this man in police custody. What did he look like? Where had he been for the past three years? How had he evaded investigators for so long? How had they finally caught him? I hoped my questions would be answered, if not that night, then very soon.

The first hour after I arrived at the police station was a blur. I immediately phoned Stephanie’s father, and despite my reservations about making the call, I was instantly comforted by Carmon’s tone of palpable relief. I could practically see him smiling over the phone. Yet we both knew, even in that moment of shared relief, that there would be no closure for him, not then, not ever. His daughter was dead, and no arrest would bring her back. But in my heart, I hoped it might bring him a small slice of peace, something he and his family had been lacking for so many years.

Carmon told me he had been briefed by the investigators earlier that day and was told the suspect was a loner, an oddball, someone with whom his daughter surely hadn’t associated. It was clear his quest for answers was not over; in fact, it was a quest he had been on every single day since May 21, 2002, the day his daughter had been found raped and murdered in her North Raleigh apartment, the day his life changed forever.

But on the night of the arrest, Carmon changed a little from the broken man I had gotten to know over the years. His sorrow was now tempered by a measure of hopefulness. He shared with me that night that he prayed he might now learn
why
Stephanie had died. It was a question he had wrestled with since the day her life was so tragically taken.

“Tonight is a night of relief,” he said, his voice cracking under the weight of his emotions. I could tell that his normally stoic demeanor was being tested by this new development in the case. It was impossible for Carmon to hide his strong feelings now that someone was being held responsible for the death of his precious daughter. “We’re just happy to know this animal is off of the streets and this can’t happen to another young lady.”

After I hung up with Carmon, I began to rummage through the boxes of file tapes in the news van. The boxes contained everything I had amassed on the case over the past three years, from videos of cops and yellow crime scene tape, to smiling pictures of Stephanie, to tearful interviews with her family and friends. I knew that at any moment the suspect would be escorted from the police station to a waiting blue and white patrol car which would then whisk him off to the Wake County Jail, so I kept one eye on the front door of the building, and the other on the video screen in front of me as I rapidly shuttled through the boxes of tape.

At the same time, I had a growing anxiety about getting this major story just right. I wanted it to convey everything—the immense loss of a beautiful person, the hard work and dedication of the police, and the thrill of an arrest in what was thought to be a cold case—all in a minute and a half. This was always my quandary in television news, one I had wrestled with incessantly throughout my career: to touch the viewer and be thorough in a very short segment of time. On this night, I was not only under my usual pressure to do a good job, but I had the additional intense feeling that I owed it to Stephanie and her family to make the story everything it was meant to be.

I had seen Stephanie’s pictures and home videos a thousand times before—Stephanie with her shoulder-length brown hair, her big brown eyes, and her infectious smile looking directly into the camera lens. There was Stephanie in home video graduating from college, putting her arm around her proud father, who looked teary-eyed. There she was again on Christmas morning surrounded by her family, turning away from the video camera and making jokes about the photographer. There was Stephanie in still photos, embracing her college sweetheart, Walter Robinson, with their heads tilted in toward one another. They were shining examples of young, blushing, uncomplicated love. But tonight, as I scrolled through the home videos and looked at Stephanie’s pictures again, it was as if I were seeing her for the first time. Even with the deadline pressure looming over me, I slowed down the video and really looked at her, her movements, her expressions, and the light in her eyes as they darted playfully away from the camera. Suddenly, the normal sadness I felt when I viewed Stephanie’s image was slowly being replaced by a sense of peacefulness. I felt as if she were telling me that her spirit was finally free from the limbo it had been suspended in since her death.

But I had little time to ponder my own emotions about whether Stephanie was looking down from heaven at the events unfolding on earth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw photographers taking their spots around the front door of the police station, snapping on the bright lights on top of their television cameras, jockeying for the best position. Without missing a beat, I jumped out of the van and made a beeline for my photographers, Robert Meikle and Tom Normanly. One of them handed me a wireless microphone to be used for the proverbial shout-out to the defendant: “Did you kill her?” We only have twenty seconds or less to get questions in as the suspect is walked from the door of the police station to the waiting patrol car.

People in police custody rarely, if ever, respond to these questions, but there’s always a chance they might, so we keep on asking. But unlike the way these ambushes are dramatized on television—a gaggle of reporters acting like wild animals, pushing and shoving to get a better spot and screaming to be heard over the din of the crowd—in Raleigh, North Carolina, at least, the scene is actually a lot tamer, and we journalists are much more polite than you would think.

I didn’t know what to expect that night when the glass front doors of the Raleigh Police Department were flung open, but the man I saw being led out by two detectives was unlike anything I could have imagined. He was just over six feet tall and looked to weigh around 140 pounds, making him appear emaciated. He had long, scraggly, light brown hair that hung in his face, obscuring his eyes. His hands were cuffed behind his back. I don’t know what I would’ve said a monster looks like, but this wasn’t it. This man looked weak, frail, and not physically capable of the heinous crimes he was accused of.

Sergeant Clem Perry led the parade. He pushed open the doors and bore the first brunt of the blinding television camera lights and flashes from the still photographers. Perry moved directly through the crowd toward the waiting patrol car without acknowledging the chaos around him. Behind Perry, Detectives Jackie Taylor and Ken Copeland were on either side of the suspect, clasping his elbows tightly as they walked him to the police car. They too ignored the action around them, and looked determinedly straight ahead.

The suspect’s body seemed almost spineless, as if he might just slink to the ground at any moment if the officers weren’t holding him up. He hung his head and closed his eyes; maybe to keep the lights off his face, or more likely, to keep our cameras from getting a good shot of his face. In either case, he was successful in preventing us from getting any real look at the man behind the mop of tangled hair hanging limply in front of his features, which only added to the horror-show quality of the moment.
Who was this guy? Where did he come from?
I couldn’t stop the questions bouncing around inside of my head.

My pulse was racing as I gingerly elbowed through the gaggle of photographers to get as close as I could to the strange-looking man. I knew this would likely be my only shot at him. By the next day he would have a lawyer and wouldn’t speak until he was on trial in a courtroom, maybe not even then. Most people accused of serious crimes rarely talked to the press. I knew a good defense attorney would keep his client quiet.

“Did you murder Stephanie Bennett?” a male reporter yelled from somewhere behind me in the crowd, beating me to the punch. As predicted, there was no answer. The prisoner was off the curb now, his elbows being swiftly guided by the two detectives to the car which was just about fifteen feet away. Our precious time for questions was running out.

“Can you tell me how you knew Stephanie Bennett?” I yelled this time. Nothing. He was now just a few steps from the car. I had maybe five to eight seconds left. My gut told me this man was not going to say anything, but I knew there was no harm in trying. The payoff if he did crack and say something was too big to ignore.

“Do you have anything to say?” I said even louder this time, hoping to rattle him into saying something,
anything.
Detective Copeland was now easing the suspect into the backseat of the patrol car, holding the man’s head down gently with his free hand so it would not hit the door frame as he entered. It was obvious, despite how he pretended not to see us, that Copeland was painfully aware that his every move was being videotaped and would be re-examined many times in the days to come.

Copeland shut the door to the police car and moved around to the other side. He slid into the backseat next to the suspect, who was leaning back onto the headrest. The prisoner’s entire body had collapsed into the seat, and the gray leather seemed to envelop him as he sunk even deeper out of the view of our cameras. He looked like a balloon with a slow leak, deflating before our eyes.

As the car pulled away, Detective Copeland stared directly at the man beneath the glare of our lights as if he were still trying to figure out the same thing we all were—
why?
It would be years before I would know what went through Ken Copeland’s mind that night as he escorted the man he believed killed Stephanie Bennett to the Wake County Jail. This is both Detective Ken Copeland’s story, and the story of everyone who helped find justice for Stephanie. It’s a story I believe was well worth waiting for.

He who does not punish evil, commands it be done.

—LEONARDO DA VINCI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stephanie Bennett wasn’t thrilled about spending time alone in her Raleigh apartment, but her roommates were out of town and she had little choice. She had to go to work that week at IBM and figured she would be alone in the apartment for only a couple of nights.

It was a very rare occasion for Stephanie to ever be alone. She’d moved to the Bridgeport Apartments in Raleigh, North Carolina, a year earlier, shortly after graduating from Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. While it was her first time away from Virginia, Stephanie was ready to be more or less on her own in North Carolina. She’d made the move with her stepsister, Deanna Powell, and her close friend from college, Emily Metro. It always seemed like at least two of the girls were at the apartment together. But during this particular week in May 2002, Dee, as Stephanie referred to her stepsister, had returned to their home-town of Rocky Mount, Virginia, to attend a funeral, and Emily was also back in Virginia, taking some additional classes at Roanoke College.

While Stephanie was a very independent young woman, she was particularly uneasy about spending time alone at the apartment because she’d heard that some bad things had been going on lately near her complex. For example, she was told that a woman had recently been raped while on a jogging trail at Lake Lynn, which bordered the property. Stephanie also learned that her neighbor had had her car stolen from the apartment complex parking lot. And the most personally upsetting news—there had been a Peeping Tom spotted peeking into a window; not just any window either, but Stephanie’s
own
window.

Stephanie had just returned from a weekend in Greenville, South Carolina, where she was visiting her longtime boyfriend, Walter Robinson. Walter was in graduate school studying engineering at the University of South Carolina. Stephanie and Walter had met at Roanoke College, and after being together for four years, a long-distance relationship was not something either of them wanted. They wanted to be together and had mutually decided it was time to make that happen. So, Stephanie was getting ready to move to South Carolina in July. The couple had already looked at apartments and houses in preparation for the move. The young couple had the enthusiastic support of their parents, who also envisioned that the two would eventually get married.

Stephanie was moving to be close to Walter, the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life, but she also wanted to get away from the Bridgeport Apartments. She was literally counting down the days until she could leave what had become a fearful environment for her, and to feel safe again in South Carolina with the man she loved.