Evil Next Door (3 page)

“She had mentioned to me a couple of times that it was a bad neighborhood and that she didn’t like being home alone,” Walter said in a 2002 interview with WRAL-TV. “And I knew that because when I went there for the weekends to see her I heard the stories.”

The one story that Stephanie couldn’t get out of her head was the one about the Peeping Tom at her window. Less than a month before this night, a neighbor had seen a man dressed in black, his head obscured by a hooded sweatshirt, crouching in the bushes outside Stephanie’s ground-floor bedroom. The neighbor said the mysterious man appeared to be looking into the window. Because the bushes surrounding the window were high, and the lighting on the outside of the apartment building was dim, the neighbor couldn’t give a good description of the man’s face. Still, she reported the incident to the management of the apartment complex, who in turn reported it to the Raleigh Police Department.

Walter had been visiting Stephanie from Greenville, celebrating her twenty-third birthday, the same April weekend that the Peeping Tom was spotted near her window. Walter remembered a neighbor calling and warning Stephanie to make sure her blinds were turned in such a way that no one could see into her apartment. Walter was a chivalrous southern man who was highly protective of his girlfriend, but at the time, he didn’t think anything of it. Later, he would remember with anger just what this incident foreshadowed and wished out loud that he could turn back time.

That same day the Peeping Tom was spotted, April 27, 2002, Stephanie wrote an e-mail to her aunt, Kaye, who lived in California telling her about the incident and how it made her want to move out of her apartment complex immediately:

Just a little more than a month, that’s what Stephanie kept saying. Hang in there. She would be out of this apartment soon. But whenever she returned from visiting her boyfriend, Walter, in South Carolina, Stephanie told him she had a lingering sadness that only seemed to worsen every time she left him. It was a combination of her love for him and her fear of returning to the apartment where she no longer felt safe.

Their most recent visit had been on the weekend of May 18 and 19, 2002. Stephanie returned home that night of Sunday, May 19, to an empty apartment. But she tried to put her concerns out of her mind, and instead prepare for the busy week ahead of her.

“When she went home that Sunday I remember thinking,
only one month left in that apartment,
” Walter said. “Every time that we left each other, she always cried.”

On Monday, May 20, Stephanie went to work as usual at IBM in Research Triangle Park, Raleigh’s business park, which housed major technology and pharmaceutical companies. That night, by all accounts, was also routine for Stephanie. As usual, she talked to Walter on the phone around 8:00 P.M. He was trying to figure out a way to get an application for an apartment to her. She told him the fax machine in her office was broken, but that in the morning she would try to find another fax machine in the building and call him or e-mail him with the number. It was an ordinary conversation about ordinary things. Neither knew it would be their last.

Stephanie also talked to one of her roommates, Emily Metro, on the phone that evening. Emily clicked in on the call waiting while Stephanie was on the line with Walter. Emily was planning to permanently move back to Salem, Virginia, where she was attending classes at Roanoke College, their alma mater. Emily was switching career paths from business to psychology and was back in school taking courses in her newly chosen field.

Stephanie’s other roommate, her stepsister, Dee Powell, was also planning a move of her own to Richmond, Virginia. The girls were collectively excited about their independent futures, but at the same time they were sad about splitting up. They didn’t know what they were going to do without being entwined in each other’s daily lives.

The next morning, on Tuesday, May 21, Walter Robinson waited for Stephanie to contact him regarding the apartment application he was trying to fax to her from Greenville. He sent her an e-mail at her office at IBM in Research Triangle Park around 11:00 A.M. When he didn’t hear back from her immediately, Walter assumed she must have gotten busy at work or had taken an early lunch. So he decided to go to lunch and try to reach her later. In the afternoon, he sent Stephanie another e-mail and called her cell phone. Still, he got no answer. That’s when he really started to worry. It wasn’t like Stephanie not to be reachable. She was one of the most reliable people Walter knew. His gut started to churn as he tried to figure out what could possibly be going on. He thought about jumping in the car and heading to North Carolina, but he was four hours away.

Walter then decided to call Stephanie’s roommate and stepsister, Deanna Powell. Dee agreed it wasn’t like Stephanie not to answer her phone or e-mails. She was a responsible girl, the kind of girl who was always where she was supposed to be and always did what she was supposed to do. Even throughout her workday, Stephanie maintained close contact with her family and friends. So when Dee, who was still out of town, couldn’t reach her stepsister either, she too became extremely worried.

Through a series of phone calls, Dee ultimately discovered that Stephanie had not shown up for work at IBM Tuesday morning. This was totally out of character. Stephanie was thrilled at the opportunity to be working as a subcontractor for IBM and would never have done anything to jeopardize her employment. Dee immediately knew something was wrong,
very
wrong.

“She didn’t show up for work, and of course work had called, and so I had tried to get in touch with her a couple different ways, and I sent a friend to go see if she was at home to check on her,” Dee said.

She called a male friend and asked him to go by the apartment. Stephanie’s car was parked outside the apartment, but the friend got no answer when he knocked on the door. When he relayed this information to Dee, she then did the only thing she could think of—she called the office at the Bridgeport Apartments and asked them to check up on Stephanie. She gave the management permission to go into their apartment with a pass key.

At the request of the female apartment manager, a maintenance employee unlocked the door to the apartment the girls shared. The manager entered tentatively. At first, she called out to see if anyone was home, even though she had already knocked loudly on the door. When no one answered, she walked slowly down the hallway toward the bedrooms. She peeked into the open doorway of Emily Metro’s bedroom and made a gruesome discovery. Twenty-three-year-old Stephanie Bennett was dead on the floor of the bedroom. And that wasn’t all. Stephanie was nude, and it looked like she had been tied up and raped. A deep purple mark on her neck was evidence Stephanie had been strangled. In her mouth was a pair of blue underwear.

The manager ran out of the apartment and quickly called 911. The time was 3:33 P.M. on Tuesday afternoon, May 21, 2002. Murders like this were uncommon, and the Raleigh Police Department responded immediately with every available officer to the Bridgeport Apartments.

“Dee returned my phone call around 5:00 P.M. and told me [Stephanie] had been murdered,” Walter said, fighting back tears as he recalled the day to WRAL reporter Len Besthoff. “I remember exactly where I was. It seemed like everything stood still. My legs and everything went weak,
numb.
”

Other than the disturbing image of Stephanie’s tortured body, the rest of the scene was the opposite of chaos. Her body lay on the floor next to Emily’s bed, which was neatly made with a patchwork quilt and a blanket folded at the foot of the mattress. Almost everything else looked to be in order in the room, except for some leaves inside the room, beneath the window where it appeared the killer had entered. Only a few items had been moved. They had been placed carefully out of the way in the closet—a phone, some stuffed animals from the bed, and a few knickknacks from the windowsill.

In Stephanie’s bedroom, across the hallway from where she lay dead, her covers were pulled back and neatly piled on the floor at the foot of the bed. Her three pillows were in a U-shape as if she had snuggled them around her like a cocoon while she slept. There were multiple reminders that the young woman was in many ways still a girl: two teddy bears sat prominently on a dresser on either side of a jewelry box, and a Harry Potter novel with a bookmark in it lay on the night stand alongside a glass half full of iced tea, and a cordless telephone. It looked like Stephanie had been just settling in for a quiet evening in bed when someone brutally attacked her.

The killer had left an important calling card, one that would eventually identify him beyond any reasonable doubt—DNA. His semen had been left in multiple orifices of the young woman’s body. It was if he were saying to the investigators, “Catch me if you can.”

For Lieutenant Chris Morgan, the head of the Major Crimes Task Force in Raleigh, the afternoon had started out mundane. He was in the Information Technology Department having someone work on his computer when his cell phone rang. He hated computers almost as much as he hated cell phones. Morgan was an old-school cop who had forced himself to get used to the way the world was operating in the twenty-first century. But that didn’t mean he had to like it. It was one of the many reasons he was considering retirement. Police work had changed. It wasn’t what it used to be. Morgan missed the good old days when police work meant pounding the pavement and knocking on doors, not “Googling.” With his stockpiled sick time and vacation time, he was getting close to thirty years on the force and thus was eligible to take his retirement money and move on. At forty-nine, he was still young enough to do something else, although he still wasn’t sure what that something would be.

When Lieutenant Morgan answered his phone, the watch commander told him that a girl had been found dead at an apartment complex in North Raleigh, and it might be a good idea for Morgan to head over that way. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where murders usually happened. The watch commander knew the lieutenant well enough to realize that Morgan would want to be involved in the case from the beginning, especially if the crime was out of the ordinary. The watch commander was right. Morgan jumped in his car and headed in the direction of the Bridgeport Apartments.

Ultimately, Morgan was the first detective on the scene, primarily because everyone else had gotten lost. Luck had always been Morgan’s calling card. He spent a lot of his career on the police force stumbling into cases that then became his main obsessions.

Morgan, a veteran cop who truly lived and breathed his work, took murder cases personally. A big, imposing man with an even bigger personality, he was also known for wearing a white fedora. The first one he owned had been a present to himself when he solved his first murder case, and from there the tradition continued until he had a closetful of hats. Now he was known to the public as “the guy in the white hat.” But with the hat came a lot of responsibility. Sometimes, he thought, people imagined it had magic powers to steer him in the right direction. He hoped they were right.

The first uniformed officer who’d arrived had secured the scene in preparation for the detectives’ arrival. He walked Morgan into the apartment and pointed him down the hallway in the direction of Stephanie’s body. The patrol officer’s job was to keep the perimeter of the crime scene surrounded with yellow tape so that people could not come in and out and contaminate evidence.

Morgan had witnessed a lot of murder victims during his decades on the force, but seeing Stephanie Bennett was an image he will never forget. There was something so innocent and vulnerable about the young girl who had been raped, tortured, and discarded like trash on the floor of Emily Metro’s bedroom, that it made him sick to his stomach.

“Never saw anything like it, never want to see anything like it again as long as I live,” Morgan said definitively. “I could show you pictures of guts, gore, things that would turn your stomach and make you lose your lunch, but nothing, absolutely nothing that I’ve ever seen even came close to this.”

Stephanie’s nude body had been simply left lying on her back almost as if the killer meant to humiliate her in death. According to witnesses at the scene, her head was tilted to the side, her eyes swollen and closed, her arms and legs outstretched. It appeared that her hands had been tied at one time behind her back, and her ankles had been tied together. The restraints around her ankles and wrists were gone, but the red marks remained. The deepest and most obvious mark was a deep purple line around her neck where it looked like she had been strangled to death.

“It was just such a cold, detached crime scene, I started feeling cold myself even though it was a warm day in May,” Morgan said, shuddering as his mind transported him back to that moment. “It rocked my world,” he added after a long silence.

Morgan said he could literally see the dried semen around the victim’s body when he first entered the apartment, and while it made him sick to his stomach, it also made him hopeful this was a crime he would be able to solve. After spinning his wheels on several other high-profile unsolved cases, he was ready to put someone behind bars, especially someone who had taken the life of an innocent young woman not much older than his own twin daughters.