Evil Next Door (6 page)

“I told her that tired detectives make poor decisions, and they miss things,” Morgan said as he recalled trying to keep his growing anger at the chief’s inquisition in check.

Morgan explained the crime scene had essentially been frozen, and that nothing had been touched during the few hours they were gone. The uniformed officers had guarded the scene since the detectives had left at 4:00 and no one had been permitted to go back inside the yellow tape until Perlov had arrived.

About that time, a blue and white Raleigh Police Department patrol car pulled up, and a young officer climbed out of the passenger seat. He yelled over to Morgan, who was still deep in conversation with Perlov. He apologized for interrupting, but wondered if they had found a set of car keys because his were missing, and he suspected they had fallen out of his jacket pocket in the parking lot shortly before he got off of his shift at 7:00 A.M.

“[Chief Perlov] looked at me with another stare of disgust,” Morgan recalled as he smugly reached down, picked up the keys, and tossed them to the grateful young officer.

The chief then asked Morgan to take her into the apartment. He cautioned Perlov that the crime scene had not been fully processed yet, and she should be careful not to touch anything. Somehow, Morgan knew his stern admonition would likely goad her into touching something, and he was right. The first thing the chief went for, he said, was the base of a cordless phone in the den. The receiver had been found on Stephanie’s bedside table. There was a red light indicating that at least one message had been left on the machine. Perlov wanted to know if the investigators had checked the messages. Morgan told her they had not checked the messages yet because they still needed to dust for fingerprints on the base of the phone before anyone else touched it.

“Well, the key to this case might be right here on this answering machine,” the chief theorized. Morgan said Perlov then took her hand out of her pocket and started reaching down toward the phone.

“Chief, that hasn’t been processed yet,” Morgan recalled saying anxiously. She kept reaching. “Chief, please don’t touch that. It hasn’t been processed yet.” The chief moved closer to the phone, as did Morgan, to block her.

Morgan felt like the chances of fingerprint evidence on the phone being relevant to the case were pretty minimal. Still, he had a dead girl at the medical examiner’s office that he was obligated to find justice for. He wasn’t going to take any chances that potential evidence might be contaminated, not even by the chief of police.

He said Perlov looked at him and must have seen the rage in the eyes of a “tired old fat man” and decided touching the phone wasn’t worth setting off the firestorm that would surely follow. Whatever the reason, ultimately she backed away, and so did he. They both had bigger fish to fry. Their petty differences would not derail their common goal of
catching a killer.

In the early stages of an investigation
everything
is considered evidence. Nothing is ignored because until a working theory of the case is developed, anything might ultimately have something to do with the crime.

Investigators kept circling back to their puzzling discovery of the underpants on the bush not far from Stephanie’s apartment. It looked like someone had been running by and had tossed a bagful of underwear in the air. The empty red duffel bag lay in the dirt near the bush. What were the chances that women’s underwear just happened to end up on shrubbery the same night a woman is raped and murdered in a nearby apartment?

“That caused us all kinds of concern. What does this have to do with anything?” Morgan recalled his thoughts at the time.

Investigators discovered that the local hotel chain had given out as many as six thousand of those particular duffel bags to guests as a promotion in the past year. They also discovered that a flood at one of the hotels had soiled about a thousand of the bags. The damaged bags had in turn been offered to any employee who wanted them; the rest were thrown away. With the sheer number of bags given out, it was simply impossible for investigators to track where this particular one had come from.

Officers quickly determined that an adolescent boy who lived in the apartment right next to Stephanie’s was responsible for leaving the underwear on the bush. Initially, the thirteen-year-old boy told investigators he found the underwear in a Dumpster in the apartment complex parking lot. But after more questioning, the boy admitted to having stolen the underwear from the apartment complex laundry room. In a strange twist, the boy’s bedroom was found to share a wall with Stephanie’s, but there was no indication that any of the underwear had belonged to Stephanie Bennett or either of her roommates. The boy swore in multiple interviews he had nothing to do with the murder. While Morgan thought the boy was a “budding pervert,” he believed him. He didn’t think the kid was capable of committing such a serious crime. But this left the never-ending question in Morgan’s mind—who
was?

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

—CICERO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On May 27, 2002, the Raleigh Police Department released to the public a sketch of a man seen in the vicinity of Stephanie Bennett’s apartment. They didn’t refer to him as a suspect in the murder, but simply as a man whom they “wanted to talk to.” The person pictured in the composite was thin with short brown hair, narrow features, and glasses. The sketch, like most composites, was so nondescript it was almost comical. It could have been any young white man.

To be fair, the first composite in a case often looks a little cartoonish, because people have tenuous memories at best when it comes to recalling someone’s exact features. Ten people could see the same person and describe him in ten slightly different ways, depending on their vantage point, how long they had observed the person, and what built-in biases they brought to the table.

This picture of a man, drawn in charcoal on a stark white background, looked more like the guy who might mow your lawn or change the oil in your car than a cold-blooded killer. But there is almost always some minute detail, some key feature witnesses subliminally pick up on, that makes its way into a composite sketch, something that seems to inevitably ring true about the initial image. Years later, if that rudimentary drawing were to be put next to the person police ultimately arrested, there would arguably be some minor resemblance.

As a rule, Sergeant Clem Perry didn’t like composites. He worried they might be too restrictive and keep the public from considering other possibilities. But in this case, as in many others in which the suspect was elusive, he felt that it was a necessary evil.

“It was the right thing to do. It’s all we had,” Perry said, outstretching his arms and opening his palms to the ceiling. He recalled how detectives were already fresh out of leads and going nowhere fast. They needed something,
anything,
to give them some traction in the case.

Investigators had interviewed dozens of people who lived in Stephanie’s apartment complex or in nearby apartment complexes. They had gotten a description from a neighbor of the Peeping Tom seen near Stephanie’s apartment on April 27, just a few weeks before her murder. This was the man on whom they based the composite. But despite the fact that he seemed like the most obvious suspect, not everyone was on board with the theory that the Peeping Tom was the killer.

“There were a lot of discussions about the Peeping Tom as a suspect, some rather heated discussions,” Perry recalled.

Perry said investigators spent countless hours just talking to people in the area, hoping someone would give them a shred of information, a tidbit, anything that might lead them in the right direction. They knocked on hundreds of doors and spoke to anyone who answered while they canvassed the majority of the apartments encircling Lake Lynn.

Detectives were specifically looking for people with criminal records, people who had been seen walking around late at night, people with what Lieutenant Morgan called “obvious red flags.” What Morgan couldn’t have known at the time was that one of those people wasn’t waving any red flags, but still had something very big to hide.

It was clear from the beginning, based on the amount of semen the killer had left at the scene, that the case would ultimately hinge on DNA. The technology of DNA had recently gone from somewhat unreliable to undeniably accurate in just a decade.

Assistant Special Agent Mark Boodee with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) was on the cutting edge of this breakthrough science. After graduating from the University of Virginia, he started working for a private company in Maryland in 1989 called Selmark Diagnostics doing forensic DNA analysis.

“I was doing DNA analysis even before the FBI had DNA analysis,” Boodee said proudly.

Not long after his stint in Maryland, Boodee was recruited by the North Carolina SBI to help them set up their DNA analysis program. He was excited to be given almost free rein in creating the brand-new laboratory that would turn out to be a model for DNA analysis across the country.

On May 24, Boodee agreed to work over Memorial Day weekend to analyze vaginal, rectal, and oral swabs from Stephanie Bennett. Boodee was a dedicated scientist who believed passionately in DNA analysis, and he welcomed the opportunity to use the process to solve a major crime.

“The victim’s DNA is mixed up with the suspect’s DNA and your job is to try to get out as much of the victim’s DNA in order to be left with the suspect’s profile so you can use that for comparison purposes,” Boodee explained.

Boodee was able to create a solid profile of the killer’s DNA. Any suspect’s DNA brought to him by police would then be analyzed against this profile throughout the investigation to see if it matched.

He then compared the killer’s DNA profile to four DNA samples that the detectives had already submitted in the initial stages of the investigation. Several of the samples came from Stephanie’s family members, whom police needed to eliminate as suspects before they could begin looking at people outside of her inner circle. Another sample, according to Morgan, came from a rape suspect in a separate case in Alabama in which the attacker had tied up his victim with her own underwear. Because of the use of the underwear and restraints, investigators felt there might be the chance of a connection between the Alabama case and Stephanie’s murder.

Morgan got a call from Boodee at about 10:00 that Saturday night, telling him that the Alabama suspect was not their guy. He was disappointed but, at the same time, was impressed with Boodee’s work ethic and glad he was the SBI agent assigned to the case.

“I was just flabbergasted because I never knew anyone at the SBI worked on weekends,” Morgan said with a chuckle.

Investigators continued to send DNA samples to Boodee from practically everyone they interviewed. Morgan kept the swabs used for collecting DNA—long sticks with cotton on the tips—in a jar on the corner of his desk, and told his detectives to take a handful every time they went back out to the Lake Lynn area. They were the same kind of swabs doctors used to test patients for strep throat. It was a simple, quick, and painless process for the officers to take a quick sample of saliva from the inside of someone’s cheeks.

“I’d say, ‘You got your swabs? Don’t come back here with less than five swabs,’ ” Morgan recalled his perpetual command to his officers.

On one occasion, detectives were having a hard time getting three young men who lived in an apartment above Stephanie to give DNA samples. Several different detectives had approached them, and each time, they had refused to cooperate. Morgan decided to put his most tenacious detective, Mary Blalock, on the mission.

“Mary Blalock is a woman who knows how to
get things done
,” Morgan said slapping his open hand on his desk. “If I had a difficult job I needed to have done, I knew I could go to Mary.”

Morgan told Blalock she had to get samples from these three men. They were the only holdouts in Stephanie’s building. They had told the other detectives who had tried and failed that “they didn’t believe in giving DNA samples,” to which Morgan naturally responded with a stream of obscenities.

Two hours later, Blalock returned to the police station and threw three envelopes on Morgan’s desk. Each one contained a swab from one of the three men who lived above Stephanie. Blalock’s young, eager partner, Amy Russo, related to Morgan how Blalock got the samples.

“She walked right up to [one] boy and told him to open his goddamn mouth. She stuck the stick in his mouth and told him to spit on it. She put the stick in the bag and went to the next one,” Russo told Morgan as she recalled Blalock’s heroic efforts.

The samples Blalock took, like all of the other samples, were sent to Boodee to analyze. Like all of the samples before them, they didn’t match the killer’s DNA.

“Initially they came in groups of five, and then they started coming in groups of twenty or thirty,” Boodee said with a weary smile, remembering the massive amount of work he did on the case.

“A lot of them would just sit on the shelf because we wouldn’t analyze them right away because we had a lot of other active cases,” Boodee pointed out as he remembered the juggling act required to keep up with all of his work at the time. “They would pile up;
months’
worth of these suspects would pile up.”

Eventually, Boodee asked investigators to submit the DNA samples in groups of ten to make it easier to test them and record the data without overwhelming the laboratory. The state lab had never before had a case with so many DNA samples that needed to be tested. It was a learning experience for everyone involved, including Boodee who until then thought he had seen it all.