Evil Next Door (7 page)

Boodee wasn’t cavalier about his job; quite the opposite. But he was quite sure that anyone who willingly gave a DNA sample was probably innocent, and so running the samples at times seemed like a futile and tedious process. “You’re never going to get people who volunteer to give their sample and think they’re going to fool the system,” said Boodee.

Yet he knew for legal reasons it had to be done. Investigators could not definitely rule people out unless they had been tested and eliminated as a match to the killer’s DNA. So Boodee kept eliminating suspects and kept hoping one day investigators would come to him and say,
this is the one.
He was sure it would eventually happen; he just had no idea how long it would take.

Investigators determined that Walter Robinson, Stephanie’s boyfriend, had been the last person to talk to her before she died. They’d spoken on the telephone at around 8:00 on the evening of Monday, May 20. At the time, Walter was in Greenville, South Carolina, about 270 miles southwest of Raleigh. Investigators quickly determined he was too far away to have come to Raleigh and committed the murder. Nevertheless, like Stephanie’s other friends and relatives, Walter willingly submitted to a DNA test. As a result, he was quickly eliminated as a potential suspect in the case. Walter’s eager cooperation fit in with Agent Mark Boodee’s theory that innocent people had nothing to hide and were more than willing to provide DNA samples.

After eliminating people in Stephanie’s family and tight-knit circle of friends, investigators started looking more closely at the bigger pool of suspects in and around the Lake Lynn apartment complexes. Dozens of Raleigh police detectives in plain clothes were sent out to troll the area undercover at various hours of the day and night to see if they ran into anyone who looked suspicious. The goal was for the officers to be able to observe people when they didn’t think they were being watched, to catch them off guard.

On June 3, 2002, an officer at the Governor’s Point Apartment complex, which was just across the lake from the Bridgeport Apartments, saw a man peeking into a window. The officer kept his distance and observed the man to see if he might try to break into the apartment. A few minutes passed, and the man then moved to another window. That’s when the officer noticed that the man had pulled down his pants and was masturbating. Within a few minutes, a group of Raleigh police officers surrounded the Peeping Tom, took him to the ground, and arrested him.

Investigators interviewed the three women who lived in the apartment where the man had been peeping and discovered at least two of them had been getting in or out of the shower during the time the suspect was looking into their bathroom window.

The man police arrested was thirty-four-year-old Christopher Lee Campen. He was charged with “secret peeping,” a misdemeanor crime that police often considered a gateway crime to more serious sex crimes like rape. The arrest seemed to be the first promising lead in the Bennett case. Campen had a long criminal record for minor charges including peeping and stalking. He was convicted of misdemeanor stalking in 1998. Everything seemed to fit the working profile of the killer in Stephanie Bennett’s case.

“There was a moment of
this could be the guy,
” Sergeant Clem Perry said, recalling his hopefulness at the time Campen was arrested.

“We looked at him hard,” Morgan agreed.

But unlike Perry, Morgan had a gut feeling that this was not going to be their guy. He didn’t think Campen had the wherewithal to commit such a heinous and highly organized crime; it just didn’t fit with his track record of being charged with minor crimes for so many years, crimes that never escalated into more violent acts.

It turned out that Morgan’s gut feeling was right. Within days, DNA tests cleared Campen of any involvement in Stephanie’s murder. The investigators’ promising lead had vanished almost as quickly as it had surfaced. But this first squashed lead didn’t deter them from aggressively exploring other potential connections to the Bennett case.

Investigators thought they had another possible lead when a man in Florida, who was wanted in connection with the kidnapping and rape of a girl in Columbia, South Carolina, committed suicide. He had also been a primary suspect in the murders of three girls near Fredericksburg, Virginia. But once again, the magic of science eliminated this lead when the man’s DNA failed to match that of Stephanie Bennett’s killer.

DNA from the Bennett murder scene was also continually run through the state’s DNA database, which contained roughly sixty-five thousand samples at the time, and through the national database called VICAP (for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program). But no matter how many times they ran it, the answer was the same every time—
no match.

It was as if the killer were invisible, a ghost, someone who didn’t really exist. In a sense he was taunting the investigators. Their strongest piece of evidence, DNA, was ruling out almost everyone and pointing to no one.

Initially, investigators discovered Stephanie Bennett’s murderer took eight dollars from her wallet, a boom box, and a laundry basket from her bedroom. At least that’s what they
knew
he took. It was possible other items were missing that had not been identified.

Police learned, with the help of Stephanie’s roommates, that a small portable stereo was missing from a console in her room. It had been a gift from one of her mother’s boyfriends. Police described it as a 1995 compact JVC MXC- 220 stereo system with both dual cassette decks and a three-compact disc changer. The stereo had sat in a small open cabinet against the wall beneath a portable television set near Stephanie’s bed. Investigators circulated pictures of the stereo with a detailed description to the media and the public hoping it would generate some new leads in the case.

Investigators knew the five-year-old laundry basket was taken from Stephanie’s apartment because the killer had dumped out her clothing onto the floor in the very spot her roommates confirmed the basket always sat. Detectives spent weeks trying to figure this one out.

“Why take a damn laundry basket you can buy at any Wal-Mart?” Morgan said.

Ultimately, the supposition was that the killer used the laundry basket to carry the stereo as he made his escape from Stephanie’s apartment. The basket also gave him the additional benefit of looking like he was simply heading for the apartment complex laundry room if someone spotted him walking around the parking lot early in the morning.

But at the end of the day, the stereo and the laundry basket looked like every other stereo and laundry basket in any young person’s apartment in Raleigh. Police were going to be hard-pressed to find them unless they developed a solid suspect. Only one person knew where Stephanie’s belongings were, and
he
wasn’t talking.

Sexual deviance and control, not robbery, were shaping up to be the primary motives in the case. But still, trying to identify what might have been taken from the apartment was important, because the killer most likely held on to these items as souvenirs of the crime. Psychologists call the items taken from a murder scene for this purpose “trophies.” They are seen by the murderer as prizes or awards for what he has done. They are tangible items he can take out and look at when he wants to think back on what he accomplished. Psychologists say just seeing and touching these things may give the killer further sexual satisfaction.

The media was let in on everything except the laundry basket—that detail was held back. It was the investigators’ ace in the hole, something only the killer knew about, something that might ultimately trip him up. They figured if the killer didn’t think the police knew it was missing, he’d be more likely to hold on to it. If they caught him, and found the laundry basket in his possession, it would only make their case stronger.

Cause of death—strangulation.

On June 20, 2002, Stephanie Bennett’s autopsy went public. The gruesome details terrified the community and reignited the pressure on the police department to catch the killer.

The report from Dr. Gordon LeGrand at the Wake County Medical Examiner’s Office was much more specific than the sketchy details that had been previously released to the public by police. Even the sterility of the medical terminology couldn’t lessen the impact the report would have on the public.

“This one I remember more than others,” LeGrand said. In all of his years performing autopsies, LeGrand said he always remembered the women and the children the most. They were always the saddest cases that touched him more deeply than others. “Here was somebody living in an apartment, going about her life and there is a psychotic deviant lurking around.”

First, the autopsy report set the scene—it stated that Stephanie had been found nude, lying on her back in the bedroom adjacent to her own. She had a pair of pale blue women’s underwear stuck in her mouth. The underwear had apparently been used as a gag to prevent her from screaming during the attack.

The report went on to describe the state of the body. There was a thirteen-inch ligature mark around Stephanie’s neck. Her wrists and ankles also had marks on them consistent with the use of restraints. The doctor stated the double red lines on Stephanie’s wrists
might
be from handcuffs, although he couldn’t say for sure. The only real injury on Stephanie Bennett’s body was a pronounced bruise above her right eye, but LeGrand also noted some minor evidence of self-defense, small scratches here and there. There was also clear evidence of sexual assault including dried semen on the body.

“In all likelihood, he surprised her and got her before she could do much,” LeGrand said.

There were key details in the report that gave investigators clues as to how the crime was committed. They used these details to create a theory of what happened that night in Stephanie’s apartment—a theory they hoped would help them eventually zero in on a suspect.

Because the maintenance employee believed the front door to the apartment was dead-bolted when he entered the day Stephanie’s body was found, investigators assumed the killer most likely came through the window in Emily’s bedroom. A window screen was missing from the window and placed on the ground outside, and while the window was closed when police arrived, it was not locked.

Lieutenant Morgan believed that on the night she was attacked, Stephanie—who would’ve probably still been tired from her weekend trip to Greenville to visit Walter Robinson—was probably sound asleep when the killer entered through Emily’s bedroom window.

Investigators considered whether the killer had come to the front door and was let in by Stephanie, after which he dead-bolted the door again, but after much examination, it didn’t seem plausible. In this scenario, the killer would have had to have been someone Stephanie knew well for her to open the door to him. By all accounts, she was a very careful girl who always locked the door and would never have opened it to a stranger, especially not at night when she was already concerned about safety at the apartment complex.

Investigators also considered whether the killer could have forced his way in through the front door. But, again, this seemed unlikely and too risky for someone trying to keep a low profile in an apartment complex where young people came and went at all hours of the night and could have spotted him easily beneath the light of the front door. Another theory involved the killer picking the lock on the front door, and then staging it to look as if he had come in the window. But it was hard for anyone to imagine why he would go to all of the trouble to do this. So the window, which was cloaked in darkness and hidden from the parking lot by overgrown bushes, continued to be the logical point of entry.

In addition, there was physical evidence supporting the theory that the killer came through Emily’s window. An empty blue hamper just below that window inside the apartment held a handful of pine needles and leaves from the bush just outside the apartment. Lieutenant Morgan thought they could easily have fallen off of the killer’s clothing as he crawled through the window.

No one knew for sure what time the killer entered the apartment or how long he was in there before he attacked Stephanie. But based on the fact that some of the items from Emily’s bedroom were found to have been moved into her closet, one hypothesis was that he climbed in the window when Stephanie was still awake, and then hid in Emily’s closet until Stephanie fell asleep.

In that scenario, after Stephanie went to bed, the killer would have waited to make sure she was in a deep sleep before leaving the safety of the closet. Morgan imagined the man probably then crept quietly across the hallway, so as not to disturb his sleeping victim. Like a cat pouncing on his prey, the killer then jumped onto the bed where Stephanie slept, startling her into sudden wakefulness. For a moment, she would’ve resisted the evil force bearing down on her; Morgan believed the bruise on her face might have come from the killer hitting Stephanie in the eye in order to scare and subdue her while he was restraining her arms and legs. He probably had a gun, a gun that he would’ve held to her head in order to terrify her into immediate submission.

Once Stephanie was tied up and no longer posed a threat to her attacker, Morgan assumed the killer then took her tousled covers and piled them neatly on the floor at the foot of her bed where investigators later discovered them. This chilling detail alone always gave Morgan a reason to pause and wonder what kind of meticulous freak show of a person they were dealing with. Morgan felt like the killer had a playbook that he was going by, a set of rules and rituals he needed to follow in order to feel like he was truly in control of the situation. This particular detail regarding Stephanie’s bed covers further convinced him they were not dealing with an ordinary murderer, but someone who methodically planned and carried out an organized pattern of evil.