Evil Next Door (24 page)

“That’s when the stress started,” Taylor said.

At first, the group decided they needed to do some more follow-up investigation before they made an arrest, just to be thorough. But then they came to the consensus that they couldn’t sit on this information for long. If it leaked, they might lose Planten forever. This was a risk they were not willing to take.

“We decided right then and there to go ahead and get an arrest warrant,” Perry said.

Perry and Taylor headed to the Wake County District Attorney’s Office. Luckily, given the new information, prosecutor Susan Spurlin gave them her blessing to move forward as they’d hoped she would. She helped them prepare the arrest warrant. Chief Resident Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens then signed the warrant, making it official. Everything was on go. Now all they had to do was to plan Drew Planten’s takedown.

At the same time they got the arrest warrant, investigators also prepared search warrants with Spurlin and had Stephens sign off on them as well. They wanted to be ready to search Planten’s belongings for more evidence as soon as he was in handcuffs. The warrants gave them the legal authority to search his apartment, his car, his work space, and to take a DNA sample directly from him. They would need a DNA sample taken in a controlled scientific setting to use at trial. The initial sample from the fertilizer lab was simply used to establish the probable cause needed to make an arrest. But the sample taken in a controlled environment, as directed by the search warrant, would be the one used in court to link Planten beyond a reasonable doubt to Stephanie Bennett’s murder.

With the arrest warrant in hand, Detective Ken Copeland, Detective Randy Miller, and Officer David Green loaded into an unmarked van and headed to Planten’s laboratory. Copeland’s heart was beating out of his chest. He couldn’t believe this day had finally come. They had succeeded. He couldn’t wait to see the look on Planten’s face when he told him he was under arrest.

The building was surrounded by officers in preparation for Planten’s exit from any door that he might choose to leave through. They were taking no chances in case he saw them and decided to run. One way or another, Planten was going to leave work that day in handcuffs.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005, was cleanup day at the state fertilizer laboratory. Large Dumpsters were placed outside the building, and employees spent the day going through drawers, closets, and storage areas throwing out what they didn’t need. They also took stock of their inventory and took notes on what supplies needed to be replenished.

Reilly had grown fond of Drew Planten in a motherly way despite everything that was going on behind the scenes. The more time she spent with him, the more she pitied him and worried about him. She was torn between a sense of guilt about what she had done behind Planten’s back, and an overriding need to help investigators find justice for Stephanie Bennett. Still, in her heart, she felt that if she cleared him, all would eventually be forgiven or, even better, Planten might never have to know what she had done. The police would simply walk away when the DNA didn’t match.

On cleanup day, Reilly chose to work side by side with Planten. She knew the DNA test could be completed at any moment, and that police might swoop in and arrest him. They had not shared with her what the plan would be if Planten’s DNA matched the killer’s. But she figured they would act quickly. She realized that this might be her last day with Planten.

Together, Planten and Reilly went through the inventory of chemicals in the laboratory, cataloging what they had and what they were running low on. They chatted casually. Ironically, Planten seemed to trust Reilly more than his other co-workers. He was still painfully shy, but with her, he shared a small amount of personal information that he didn’t with anyone else.

Around 4:20 P.M., just as Reilly went back to her office and was getting ready to leave for the day, Major Dennis Lane of the Raleigh Police Department called her on her cell phone. Lane was in charge of all of the investigators in the Raleigh Police Department. A thirty-year veteran of the police force, he very rarely got involved directly in cases, but this one was different. This was the case everyone in the department wanted to solve, including Lane. Perry, Taylor, and Copeland had been briefing him on the case since his promotion. It was after the detectives paid Planten a visit at his apartment that Lane felt like they were truly onto something.

“When they told me about that visit it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. To me at that point there wasn’t a doubt that we were headed in the right direction,” Lane said.

So on the day of Planten’s planned arrest, Lane decided he would be the one to contact Reilly. When he called her, he asked her in a very serious tone if Planten was still at work. Without hesitation, she put the phone down and went into Planten’s lab where she spotted him in his usual spot on his stool hunched over his desk. She got back on the phone and reported this to Lane.

When Reilly returned to the phone, Lane told her the building was surrounded by police officers.

“I guess the DNA was a match?” Reilly asked solemnly even though the fact that the building was surrounded had given her the answer already.

“It was a
perfect
match,” Lane told her. He didn’t want Reilly to panic, nor did he want Planten to run. He knew he was walking a delicate tightrope act. He also had a responsibility to protect anyone in the building, including Reilly, from a man whom detectives now believed was a cold-blooded killer.

Lane asked Reilly what door Planten usually used to exit the building. She told him Planten left through the back door and would be riding his bike home again because his clunker of a car was still out of commission. Lane then asked Reilly to call him and let him know the moment Planten was leaving the office. The last thing Lane wanted was for them to exit the building together. There would be many guns drawn on Planten as he left work that day; Lane didn’t want any citizens anywhere near the action, including Reilly. Because they were unsure of what Planten might do, the officers had to take every possible precaution to protect themselves from this man no matter how fragile he appeared to be.

Reilly’s heart started racing after she hung up the phone with Lane. An overwhelming feeling of deep sadness came over her. Her months of trying to do the right thing, hoping the test would confirm her belief Planten was
not
the person responsible for this heinous crime would now end with his arrest. It was a scenario she hadn’t planned for in her mind or in her heart, but she also knew there was no denying the absolute credibility of a DNA match. Like a good soldier, she would follow through with the major’s orders.

“Here I am running around, trying to be invisible, trying to watch when he’s going home, and hoping my cell phone won’t bug out on me down in the basement,” Reilly recalled hysterically.

At that time of day, few people were left in the building. Reilly could hear flushing in the men’s bathroom and assumed Planten was in there. She called Lane back and told him Planten was in the restroom, and she thought he would be out momentarily. She tried to look busy at her desk. When she heard the bathroom door swing open and shut, she got up to look for Planten. She couldn’t find him anywhere. It was like he had simply vanished.

“I couldn’t find him,” Reilly said. She peeked into the back hallway and saw that his bike was still there. “I know
he knew.
He had to have known.”

Reilly got fed up after a while thinking Planten had to be hiding from her. There was nothing more she could do to make him come out. She was also admittedly a little concerned about being alone with him in the building knowing that he was now officially accused of murder. She was weary. She was
done.
So, at a few minutes before 5:00 P.M., she decided the police would have to take it from here. She ignored police orders, left the building without calling Major Lane, and went directly to her car.

Reilly scanned the parking lot for police as she left and saw no sign of them which she thought was strange, but decided they must be keeping a low profile. No sooner had she gotten into her car when her cell phone rang again. It was Major Lane telling her to go back into the building and find Planten. A million thoughts went through her mind:
Drive away; let them handle it; it’s not your problem anymore.
But then something else went through her mind, a picture of Stephanie Bennett from the news flashed in her head. Stephanie’s beautiful, innocent smile edged its way into Joanne Reilly’s conscience. She knew what she had to do. She had come too far to let Stephanie’s family down now. She had to do the right thing. Reluctantly, she got back out of her car and headed for the building wondering just how all of this was going to end. She hoped not with a gunfight and hoped not with her in between Planten and the police.

“As I did, he was coming out, and I held open the door while he maneuvered his bike through it,” Reilly said, her voice cracking with emotion as she replayed the moment in her mind. She tried to act casual as Planten nodded good night to her in their brief passing. She tried not to look back because she knew she wouldn’t like what she was about to see. Suddenly, she heard commotion behind her, loud voices, the clanking sound of the metal bike hitting the sidewalk. She stopped and forced herself to look back. “I turned and looked over, and they had his head down on the ground with his hair spilling over his face and guns pointed at him.”

As hard as she has tried, Joanne Reilly has never been able to erase this image from her mind. She barely glanced at Planten on the ground before turning away, but it was enough of a look for the moment to be indelibly etched in her consciousness forever. It was a bittersweet moment, one of justice, but at the same time, one of loss,
her
loss. She lost the person she had come to believe Planten was—a meek, sensitive introvert who just wanted everyone to leave him alone. Yet, at the same time, she gained the satisfaction that in some small way she had helped police get a cold-blooded killer off the streets.

Detective Ken Copeland remembered the moment vividly as well, but his recollection included no regrets. Only one feeling arose in his mind about that day: victory.

As Drew Planten walked down the sidewalk away from the front door of the fertilizer laboratory, Copeland and his crew jumped out from their hiding place, an old beat-up van, and took him down to the ground. He let go of the bike, and it fell to the ground as investigators handcuffed him behind his back. It was seamless.

“We just pulled right up beside him in the covert van, slid the door open, jumped out and grabbed him,” Copeland said, shuddering as he remembered the adrenaline rush.

Copeland patted Planten down and, to his surprise, found a loaded handgun in his right cargo pants pocket. Both buttons on the pocket were fastened, but the detectives felt sure that if Planten had had any advance notice they were coming, things might have turned out differently.

“I think if we had walked across the parking lot things might have gotten ugly,” Copeland said, shaking his head.

Lane agreed that the gun was a red flag. In his mind Planten had a plan—suicide by cop.

“We got on him so quick he couldn’t get to his gun,” Lane said. “But, if he could have gotten his hand in that pocket to his gun on the day that we arrested him, we would have had to shoot him. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

The detectives were assisted in the takedown by the Raleigh Police Department’s Fugitive Task Force. Per department protocol, the team was told only that they were going to participate in a “high-risk arrest.” They were not told what the suspect was accused of doing or to what case he was connected.

“Drew, you are under the arrest for the murder of Stephanie Bennett,” Detective Ken Copeland said in a booming voice after he picked the handcuffed Planten up from the sidewalk and brushed him off.

With those words, the members of the Fugitive Task Force went wild and started cheering. They hadn’t known what Planten was being arrested for, and to hear it was the Bennett case blew their minds. This was one of those cases that was
personal
to the Raleigh officers. Almost everyone in the department had worked on the case at one point or another, and if they hadn’t, they surely knew enough about it to know that this was a big day.

The detectives gingerly placed Planten into the backseat of a waiting police car. Throughout the entire arrest, Planten didn’t say a word. He just stared past the officers as if his mind were on a completely different planet. Copeland told Officer Allen Place, who sat in the backseat of the police car with Planten, to observe him throughout the ride to the police station. He told Place not to carry on a conversation with Planten per se, but to write down anything Planten said. Yet true to his original form, Planten said nothing at all on the way back to the station. It appeared that he wasn’t just shutting out the detectives; he was shutting out the world.

Another major step: Sergeant Clem Perry needed to call Carmon Bennett and share the news with him. Perry and Copeland had become the points of contact for the family after Lieutenant Chris Morgan retired. Throughout the investigation, Perry had dreaded having to call Carmon month after month to say the same thing, “We’re working on it, but we don’t have anything.” Perry said that before every call that he would try to come up with different ways to say “we don’t have anything.” This well-intentioned mission to keep Carmon hopeful left Perry feeling exhausted and disingenuous.

On occasion, Carmon would call the detectives and mention how he noticed that they had solved another murder case in Raleigh, yet his daughter’s case remained unsolved.

“I’ve seen on TV that you guys have had another murder and you’ve made an arrest,” Carmon would say.

“It was just so difficult. I’d look at Ken sometimes and say, ‘Ken, what are we going to tell him?’ ” said Perry.