Evil Next Door (33 page)

“An officer who was doing routine rounds at Central Prison noticed inmate Planten in his cell, unresponsive, entered the cell and it appeared he was in the process of a suicide attempt,” said Keith Acree, the spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Correction. “He was taken quickly to the emergency room here at Central Prison Hospital where the medical staff attempted to resuscitate him. They were not able to. He was pronounced dead at 2:37.”

On Monday, January 2, 2006, Drew Planten was found hanging in his cell from a bedsheet with a plastic bag over his head. After years of investigation, the case had come to a final, screeching halt. Planten had been kept in an isolated prison cell where he spent twenty-three hours a day confined in the state’s maximum security prison, yet it seemed as though, even there, he’d still been running the show. He had managed to take charge of his destiny from the bowels of one of the most secure correctional institutions in the state.

Acree stood just outside the entrance of Central Prison that bitter winter night, the darkness behind him illuminated only by the lights from the television cameras, and spoke to reporters. He said that Planten had been allowed out of his cell for one hour of recreation a day. Citing privacy issues, Acree refused to comment directly on Planten’s mental health status or his treatment, but said he had improved tremendously compared to the seemingly catatonic man who had been sent to them from the Wake County Jail on October 20, 2005.

“He had been cooperative and responsive with our staff. When he first arrived here in October, he was silent and would not speak to staff and was uncooperative, but that only lasted a few days, and he had been very cooperative in recent months,” Acree said. “If an inmate is desperate to kill himself it’s very difficult to keep him from doing that despite any extraordinary measures we might take.”

Acree went on to say the State Bureau of Investigation was called in to investigate the suicide. Its agents would make a final report as to whether or not the prison was negligent in any way when it came to Planten’s ability to take his own life.

Morgan got the call at home from Sergeant Perry that afternoon. He was sitting in his worn leather recliner in his den—his man cave—a room that had been added onto the side of his modest ranch home and that both housed his stuff and gave him a place to hide from his family and watch sports on one of the many television sets crammed into the tiny room.

Perry got right to the point. “I need Susan Spurlin’s home number,” he told Morgan. “Planten just hung himself in Central Prison.”

Morgan gave Perry the number and asked him if he had called Carmon Bennett yet. Perry had not. Out of deference to their long-standing relationship, Morgan agreed to take the heat off of Perry and call Carmon himself. It was the least he could do to be the one to break the news to Carmon that his daughter’s accused killer would never be brought to justice. It was yet another step in the healing process for Morgan, who wanted to continue trying to do whatever he could for the Bennett family.

As soon as he got off of the phone with Perry, Morgan decided to call Carmon right away. He didn’t want him to hear about Planten’s suicide from some other source. Morgan knew it was only a matter of hours before the news traveled to Rocky Mount either via the Internet, or through a phone call from someone in Raleigh who saw it on the news.

“I knew he was going to be upset,” Morgan said. And he was right.

“What does this mean?” Carmon asked Morgan after he told him what had happened.

“It means he’s guilty, and he killed himself,” Morgan replied with his honest opinion.

“You mean there’s not going to be a trial?” Carmon asked.

“No, Carmon, it’s the end,” Morgan said regretfully.

Perry called prosecutor Spurlin at home. For state employees, Monday, January 2, 2006, was considered a holiday since New Year’s Day had fallen on a Sunday. He hated to bother her at home, but Perry knew it was only a matter of time before the story hit the news, and she needed to hear it from him, not from television or the web.

“I was shocked, but not so surprised that that would have been Drew Planten’s choice,” Spurlin said, acknowledging she had suspected he was suicidal after he was arrested and found to have a loaded weapon in his pants. “But I was very surprised that it had happened, that he had been able to end it that way. And I think he truly wanted to end it on his terms,” she added bitterly.

When Spurlin hung up the phone with Perry, she sat for a few minutes, shell-shocked and unable to process what she had just learned. She decided to call her boss, District Attorney Colon Willoughby, and vent about the situation. She knew that he, of all people, would understand her deep frustration over what had happened.

“My feelings were so mixed about what [Planten’s death] meant. On the one hand, that outcome is what the state would be seeking following a trial,” said Spurlin, referring to her belief that Planten would have received the death penalty if convicted. “This way, the victim’s family didn’t go through the pain of having to relive the death of Stephanie Bennett. But at the same time, I felt like I’d really been robbed.”

Spurlin told Willoughby over the phone about her anger and about the fact that not having a trial meant neither she nor the investigators nor the family would ever have the answers they longed for in this case. Spurlin had desperately wanted just one crack at Planten on the witness stand in a courtroom.

“I always kind of dreamed that I might have the opportunity to cross-examine him,” Spurlin said, even though she knew it was highly unlikely Planten’s attorneys would have ever let him take the stand.

Even if that opportunity had not presented itself, surely Planten’s mental health would have come into question at some point in the trial preparation. Experts from both sides would have tested and interviewed Planten and submitted reports to the court regarding his mental health status. This in itself might have helped provide clues to the lingering question of why. It was so rare for investigators to get a glimpse into the mind of a killer who preyed on strangers. The chance to study a person like this would have been a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The detectives who had worked so hard to make the case were just as upset as Spurlin by the news. Perry was the one who called them and filled them in on the situation.

“We felt robbed,” Detective Jackie Taylor said of Planten’s suicide. “You worked
so hard,
and you can’t describe it.”

Both Taylor and Detective Ken Copeland had hoped they would learn more about Planten through the trial process, about whether he had been involved in other crimes and, if so, what his motivations had been. Many people told the detectives that Planten’s suicide was a good outcome; the taxpayers would not have to pay for a long, drawn-out trial, and the victim’s family would in turn not have to go through the painful process of hearing all of the gruesome details of Stephanie’s death. But Taylor and Copeland both rejected this twisted idea of justice.

“That’s not how we felt at all,” Taylor said, remembering the resentment she felt after realizing Planten was still calling the shots even from a prison cell.

Copeland believed the suicide was Planten’s ultimate and final act of control. “Drew’s biggest fear, his biggest punishment, was people sitting there and staring at him, people looking at him,” Copeland said. And now he would never have to deal with that again, Copeland thought. Planten had escaped as triumphantly as if he had scaled the prison walls.

That first night, the night of Planten’s arrest, he had closed his eyes at the police station and refused to speak. Copeland felt like that was the beginning of Planten’s complete withdrawal from the world, a foreshadowing of what was to come. He wanted to block everything and everyone out for good.

“I think his whole thing was, ‘If I close my eyes this will go away,’ ” Copeland said, trying to imagine what Planten was thinking that night.

“I don’t think he was catatonic. I don’t think he was having a mental breakdown. He was withdrawing into himself, which was his security,” Taylor said.

Raleigh detectives knew they also had to tell Lansing police about what had happened. Perry volunteered to call Detective Joey Dionise. Dionise remembered getting that “dreary call” from Perry just as everything seemed to finally be coming together with the Huismann case.

“Over in a minute,” Dionise said heatedly. “I just said to myself, ‘Oh shit, you’re never going to know why he killed her because he’s dead.’ ”

Dionise in turn knew he had to tell Rebecca’s parents, Glenna and Bernard Huismann. They actually took the news better than he expected they would.

“I was relieved there would be no trial,” Glenna said. “Planten had refused to talk to anyone. I guess the answer is he was a very sick man.”

While the cops were feeling cheated about Planten’s suicide, Joanne Reilly, Planten’s former supervisor, who had helped police get his DNA, was deeply saddened by the news. It was still hard for her to reconcile what Planten had been accused of doing with the young man she had come to know and like. Her motherly instincts had always been to protect Planten—they were hard to turn off even after she found out he was the prime suspect in Stephanie’s murder.

“I grieved the person I knew,” Reilly said, breaking into tears. “I wanted to write to his mom, but I never did. I just would tell her that I was so sorry that her son had died and that he was a nice person to me and always did a good job.”

Planten would never be convicted by a jury, or sentenced by a judge to life in prison, or the death penalty. Instead, he died as the man
accused
of killing Stephanie Bennett, although to this day investigators still say the perfect DNA match cast him in their minds beyond a shadow of a doubt as the man who took Stephanie’s life.

“There were some questions that could have been answered, but now they never will be,” Carmon Bennett said in a phone interview with WRAL after Planten’s suicide. “There’s one thing about this—the hands that took my daughter’s life took his life. Maybe there’s some consolation there.”

But for Carmon, there was no real consolation in the way things had ended. It had been a long, painful journey, and one that ended without even Planten’s explanations as a reward.

Michael Teague and Chris Morgan were interviewed while their reactions were still raw and before they had time to fully process what had happened.

Teague spoke about how he had sensed the first night in the interview room at the Raleigh Police Department that Planten had suicidal tendencies. He said the fact that Planten
appeared
to be doing better at Central Prison was probably part ruse and part relief. Teague believed Planten’s improved demeanor came partially from the fact that he had made peace with his decision to end his life and was just waiting for the right time to do it.

“I think he really realized that everything was going to come out, and this was going to be really bad for him, bad for his family. And he thinks just right then, he probably decided that he was going to commit suicide, and it probably took him this long to work up all the ability to do that,” Teague said.

Morgan’s angst over the suicide was less about the fact that it had happened and more about the fact that Planten could have potentially helped investigators understand the criminal mind like no other suspect ever had.

“I’ll always wonder if Planten could have told us why people do these things,” Morgan said. “Would he have ever told us? I don’t know, but now it’s not a possibility.”

Probably the most frustrating thing for Morgan was that after playing cat and mouse with investigators for three and a half years, this man was still in charge of his fate even from a prison cell where he seemingly had no freedom.

“There’s nobody to try. There’s nobody to answer the questions. The disturbing thing about it is he’s had this control over everything the whole time. He controlled his own destiny,” Morgan said shaking his head.

“I remember being sort of conflicted,” Angela Smith, the woman police believed Planten had stalked after Stephanie’s murder, said upon hearing of his suicide. “You never want to be happy that someone has died, let alone committed suicide. But at the same time it was a relief—not just that I would not have to face him in a courtroom—but that I was never going to have to worry about him getting out on bail. I would never have to worry about him escaping from prison,” she said frankly. “It was over, and that was it. And that felt really good.”

In the days after Planten’s suicide, police contacted everyone involved in the case and let them know they would not be needed to testify. There would be no trial. Planten had chosen his own version of the death penalty.

Privately, the investigators, prosecutors, and family members stewed, but publicly, they all put on their game faces and tried to spin the ending as a blessing, something southerners are especially good at.

“It’s over,” prosecutor Susan Spurlin said, looking weary behind her desk in her bleak courthouse office that she thankfully spent little time in. “The outcome is probably a good outcome. The Bennetts don’t have to go through a trial,” she said, sounding unconvinced of her own words.

While most prosecutors say little about a suspect’s guilt before he is convicted, Spurlin had had no compunction about condemning the man whose DNA was found all over Stephanie Bennett, and whose gun had killed Rebecca Huismann.

“We know beyond any doubt that he’s killed two people. They are looking at him as a suspect in other homicides. But yes, the world is a safer place,” Spurlin said with confidence.

Perry held a press conference outside the Raleigh Police Department to talk about where the investigation would go from there.