Evil Next Door (4 page)

“This is a slam dunk,” Morgan recalled thinking, compared to other cases he had handled. “I knew from the very beginning that we were going to have the evidence needed to get a conviction.”

Lieutenant Morgan had to wait for the crime scene investigators to collect the forensic evidence, but he got down on his hands and knees and observed Stephanie’s injuries without touching anything. He couldn’t believe how pronounced the strangulation mark on her neck was. “I had never seen one that deep,” Morgan said, exhaling loudly.

While he was not a doctor, Morgan knew from his experience investigating homicides that it wasn’t necessary to make such a deep mark in someone’s neck in order to kill her, especially someone as petite as Stephanie. He immediately realized he was dealing with more than just a killer. He was dealing with a
monster.

He speculated that the killer had not only taken with him when he left the restraints from Stephanie’s ankles and wrists, but also whatever he’d used to strangle her. Morgan assumed this was because the killer was smart enough to know these things could be traced back to him. In the world of sexual deviants, a set of devices used to restrain and kill someone was known as “a kit.” Morgan assumed Stephanie’s killer had brought his kit to the apartment with him, and then had in turn taken it with him when he made his getaway.

It looked like the killer had entered through a window in Emily’s bedroom. He may even have hidden in the closet in Emily’s bedroom and waited for Stephanie to go to sleep so that he could attack her when she was most vulnerable.

Morgan noticed items from the windowsill—a small box, a plate, and a beer glass—had been placed in the closet. This made sense if the killer had in fact come in the window and intended to go out the same way. The knickknacks would have been in his way. It also made sense if he was lying in wait in the closet waiting for just the right moment to attack Stephanie.

Items that had been on Emily’s bed, including several stuffed animals, were also placed on the floor of the closet. A framed photograph that Emily later said had been laying on the bed when she left the apartment was now propped up on the floor at the edge of the closet facing the wall. This also made sense to Morgan if the killer had used Emily’s bed as a location to assault Stephanie at some point during the crime. He had removed everything in the room that could’ve possibly gotten in his way in preparation for the crime he was about to commit.

Morgan surmised that the killer had surprised Stephanie in her own bedroom and then had taken her into her roommate’s room because he wanted to be able to leave quickly through the same window he’d come in if someone happened to come back to the apartment. However, if he had been watching the apartment, the killer would have also known that Emily had rarely been there in recent months, and therefore it was unlikely she would come home and interrupt the crime in progress.

One thing didn’t make sense to Morgan. A phone from beneath the nightstand next to Emily’s bed was disconnected and had also been moved into the closet. This puzzled Morgan because it was a cordless phone, and removing the handset would have disabled the phone just as easily. There was no need to move the entire unit. It was one of the tedious details that didn’t seem to bother any of the other investigators, but Morgan simply couldn’t get it out of his head. It may have meant absolutely nothing, or it may have meant everything.

“That’s one of the jillions of questions that I had,” Morgan remembered, taking it all in that first night.

But his number one question was, “What kind of monster could do this to a young woman?” Morgan could see his retirement on the horizon just over the next hill. The last thing he needed was to get emotionally tied up in a new case that would churn in his gut day and night. He already had a few of those on his plate. Nevertheless, he made a promise to himself he would do everything he could to catch the killer, if it were the last thing he ever did as a cop.

“I remember everything about that night, honest to God I do,” said photographer Chad Flowers. “I don’t know why I remember that day so well, but I do.”

At the time, the eager television photographer was thirty years old and had just six years in the field under his belt. He was an aggressive photojournalist who had not yet been damaged by the cynicism most longtime employees in broadcasting usually suffer from.

On the evening of May 21, 2002, Flowers was working the night shift with WRAL’s crime reporter at the time, Len Besthoff. Besthoff was an equally eager journalist who had an affinity for the crime beat. It had taken time for the good ol’ boys in the Raleigh Police Department to get used to Len’s Boston brogue and Yankee ways, but he had developed a good relationship with the men and women in uniform, especially with Lieutenant Chris Morgan.

Flowers and Besthoff were taking a dinner break around 6:15 P.M. at an Italian buffet in the nearby city of Durham when the newsroom called to tell them there had been a murder in Raleigh. They shoveled a few more bites of food into their mouths, and then hustled outside to the news car to make the twenty-minute drive to the crime scene at the Bridgeport Apartments.

Both men had covered dozens of murders, and there was no expectation that this one would be anything out of the ordinary. After a while, even murders seemed somewhat mundane to journalists who covered crime on a daily basis. But they also knew that time mattered. They had to get over to the scene and get a story in time for the 10:00 P.M. newscast. So their urgency was driven more by deadline pressure than excitement about the story.

When they arrived at the scene, they were greeted by chaos—a crowd of police officers moving in every possible direction. Flowers staked out a position with his camera and tripod at the edge of the yellow crime scene tape, while Besthoff circulated through the crowd of officers trying to get information. Two things were immediately clear: This was no routine case, and it was going to be a very long night.

Besthoff remembered how unusually tight-lipped all the cops at the apartment complex were that night. No one was giving him anything. Usually, someone would at least throw him a bone off-the-record, knowing that he would keep the information close to the vest until it was confirmed through the proper channels. Not tonight. Besthoff was getting nothing, and that meant something.

Even his good buddy Lieutenant Morgan was staying almost entirely mum. “He told me without going into details, ‘This is a bad one,’ a remark he would make on the really horrific crimes he investigated,” Besthoff recalled his conversation with Morgan.

“And we didn’t even know the gravity of the situation yet,” Flowers added.

Lieutenant Morgan called in every available detective. Investigators descended on the apartment complex and fanned out in an effort to talk to potential witnesses while their memories were fresh. Crimes like this didn’t happen in Raleigh, North Carolina. Morgan knew the case was going to get a lot of attention from the cops and from the media.

Yellow tape was strung up like Christmas lights around every possible perimeter of the crime scene to keep people out. A sea of cops in blue periodically gathered in clumps to debrief and then scattered again looking for evidence and more people to interview.

Investigators with the City County Bureau of Identification, known as CCBI, the forensic crime scene investigators for the city of Raleigh, concentrated on a narrow wooded area about fifty yards from the apartment. The thin swatch of woods separated the Bridgeport Apartments from the adjacent Dominion on Lake Lynn Apartments. Police talked to neighbors and passed out fliers telling everyone to be cautious, to lock their doors and windows, and to be on the lookout for anyone suspicious.

One thing suspicious had been found not far from Stephanie’s apartment. No one knew what it meant yet, but it was on Morgan’s radar screen. Investigators had found a bush not far from Stephanie’s bedroom window covered with about a dozen pairs of women’s cotton thong underwear. It looked like someone had quite literally thrown the underwear up in the air, and a few pairs had landed on the bush, some on a utility meter attached to the building, and others on the ground beneath the bush. Also on the ground was a red duffel bag with a hotel logo written on it in white bold letters. Because Stephanie’s murder was clearly a sex crime, this bizarre scene could not be simply written off by investigators as a mere coincidence. It was just one of the many strange pieces of evidence that would be filed away only to be sorted out later. At the moment, the investigators’ primary job was to speak to as many people in the area as possible.

Sergeant Clem Perry had been one of the first officers on the scene, after Lieutenant Morgan. He was part of the police department’s robbery squad, but everyone was on deck for this case, even if they did not work in homicide. Thirty-three-year-old Perry had been with the Raleigh Police Department since 1991. He had a boyish face that made him look more like a paperboy than a police officer. But Perry was every ounce a cop. He couldn’t remember a time when he wanted to be anything other than a cop. It had been in his blood since childhood, when he’d spent days hanging out with his father, a firefighter, at the fire station, which was frequented by local police officers.

On the night of Stephanie’s murder, Sergeant Perry brought several of his detectives from the Robbery Unit with him. They joined the other investigators in canvassing the neighborhood. All of the detectives knew that the more time that passed after the murder, the more likely witnesses would disappear or forget details that might be important to solving the case. They had to get to as many people in the apartment complex as they could, as fast as possible.

A few hours after police secured the crime scene, Carmon Bennett, Stephanie’s father, and her stepmother, Jennifer, arrived at the apartment complex. Jennifer’s daughter, Dee, Stephanie’s roommate, had told them how neither she nor Walter had been able to get in touch with Stephanie. Walter had also called the Bennetts during the day and shared his concerns. When Dee finally heard back from the manager after authorizing her to go into the apartment that the body of a woman had been found inside, she broke the news to her mother and stepfather. Carmon and Jennifer jumped into their car immediately upon hearing this and headed straight for Raleigh to see for themselves exactly what was going on.

When they got to the apartment complex, they frantically hopped out of their car and took a spot right at the edge of the crime scene tape waiting for officers to come by so they could flag them down for information. Photographer Chad Flowers remembers seeing the agitated middle-aged couple with pained expressions on their faces. With one look he knew, he just
knew,
that they had to be the victim’s parents. His heart went out to the couple.

After a few minutes of leaning across the yellow crime scene tape and waving his hands, Carmon was finally able to get an officer’s attention. The officer then in turn relayed the message to Morgan that the victim’s family had arrived from Virginia and wanted to know what was going on. Lieutenant Morgan was tied up in the evidence-gathering phase of the case, and the last thing he needed to complicate things was a grieving father. So, Morgan asked Sergeant Perry to deal with the daunting task of handling Stephanie’s loved ones. He asked Perry to talk to Stephanie’s father and try to keep him calm, despite what was turning out to be a very bad night for him and his family.

From the bottom of the hill where Stephanie’s apartment was, Perry could see the Bennetts standing at the edge of the tape near the apartment complex clubhouse. Perry was told the couple had come to the scene from their home in Rocky Mount, Virginia, as soon as they heard something might have happened to their daughter. Perry was terrified to walk up the hill and speak to the man whose daughter was lying dead just a few yards away, but he knew it was something that had to be done.

“When Carmon first got there, he was frantic to go down there and go in the apartment,” Morgan recalled. Not only would that have contaminated the crime scene, Morgan was not about to let a father see his daughter that way. Morgan knew Carmon would never be able to get the gruesome image out of his mind. Morgan vowed not to permit him to see his daughter until she was delivered to the funeral home after an autopsy was performed by the medical examiner.

Officers had found Stephanie’s purse on a table near the door in the front hallway of the apartment. They compared the driver’s license photograph to the victim’s face and were able to make a preliminary positive identification. It wasn’t as scientific as an autopsy, which is the official way bodies are identified, but until they could get the final word from the medical examiner, it would have to do.

As soon as Morgan saw the name and picture of the smiling, attractive brunette on the North Carolina driver’s license, “I knew it was his daughter,” he said.

Besides an army of detectives, Morgan had also called his colleague and old friend, Michael Teague, the Raleigh Police Department’s forensic psychologist, to come to the scene and help figure out what kind of monster might have done this. Teague, whom many of the cops referred to as “Doc,” had worked closely with Morgan on many homicide cases and often assisted in creating a possible profile of a killer, as well as lending a hand when he could in dealing with victims’ families.

Almost as soon as Teague arrived on scene, Morgan motioned to where Sergeant Clem Perry was standing with Stephanie’s father and asked Teague to go and assist Perry in handling the delicate situation. As the gray-haired, affable-looking psychologist walked over, Carmon Bennett turned his attention to Teague, who looked to Carmon like someone who might be more in the know than the fresh-faced young cop in front of him.

“Who is in that room?” Carmon asked Teague.