Too Young to Kill (31 page)

This was important.

It proved Adrianne was dead when they torched her remains.

The doctor found many other significant factors as the morning progressed, including
minor hemorrhage within the scalp and a laceration over the left eyebrow without associated hemorrhage; no lethal blunt force, sharp force, or gunshot wound injury identified; evidence of dismemberment of the body
after [author’s emphasis]
initial thermal injury due to lack of thermal injury of the deep neck tissue and both cut surfaces of the upper arms.

Of course, no one had said it, but there was always the underlying possibility (not to mention concern) that, despite what Cory and Nate had told police, Adrianne had been dismembered while she was still alive, or shortly after her death, then set on fire. There were even rumors floating around the QC that Adrianne was alive and breathing when Cory and Sarah took her out of the trunk, so they beat her to death with a shovel.

The evidence seemed to show that none of this could be true. This one piece of evidence told the doctor that Adrianne was not alive when her body was cut up.

It was small, but when Adrianne’s family found out, they would be comforted by this news.

In what would make Tony Reynolds proud—if there was a silver lining under any of this horror—was that the toxicology report came back negative: Adrianne was clean. No drugs. No booze. The tox screen checked for every possible drug the teen could have ingested: amphetamines, antidepressants, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, cannabinoids (THC), cocaine, lidocaine, methadone, opiates, and several others.

Bowman concluded that the cause of Adrianne’s death was
undetermined.
She found
no evidence of lethal blunt force, sharp force or gunshot injury,
but noted there was
limited examination due to severe charring and dismemberment.
Probably most important to the investigation, thus far, was the fact that Dr. Bowman could not exclude several causes of death, including
asphyxia due to strangulation either manual or with a ligature, compressional asphyxia, smothering, or a combination of compression and smothering (burking).

There was little skin intact on Adrianne’s body parts that Bowman could find. Furthermore, for some reason, Adrianne’s neck has been cut in half, and her anterior lower neck was found to be absent.

Why?

The doctor felt the leftover tissue was in keeping with carnivore activity—an animal of some sort had eaten part of Adrianne’s neck.

There was no way for the doctor to find out if Adrianne had been sexually assaulted—beyond submitting a rape kit including swabs taken of her internal sexual organs, because her
vaginal and anal orifices cannot be visualized due to the severe thermal injury.
If she couldn’t get a good look at Adrianne’s vagina and anus, there was no way for the doctor to test for any trauma.

The doctor found some skin on Adrianne’s right hand; she uncovered a metal ring band on Adrianne’s right first finger, wide and red, the word “hottie” printed on it.

Dr. Bowman discovered a violent injury, which would have been made by a fairly hard blow above Adrianne’s left eyebrow and another behind her left ear. The skin had been separated, each injury about
4.5 cm in maximal length;
the skin break about
5.2 cm
long. There were
patchy areas of hemorrhage . . . noted on the scalp, but the underlying skull and brain show[ed] no trauma.

Someone had struck a blow to Adrianne’s head with an object of some sort, but there was not enough force behind it to penetrate and/or bruise her skull.

The person who struck Adrianne was weak.

Adrianne’s organs were mostly intact, except for her kidneys, which Nate Gaudet had cut in half when he dismembered her torso. Many of her remaining organs had been cooked, essentially, and were of no use to the doctor’s examination. Adrianne’s thymus, a
lymphoid organ situated in the center of the upper chest just behind the sternum,
was missing, once again due to
carnivore activity.
None of Adrianne’s bones showed breakage or trauma, except, obviously, where Nate had cut them in half.

Cory Gregory was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of “concealment of a homicidal death.” His bond set at a million dollars.

Cory would not be sleeping at his father’s house any longer.

The headline on top of the fold that day told a confused community mourning Adrianne’s untimely, shocking death, in the largest font a newspaper generally used, exactly what had happened to the sixteen-year-old:
MISSING TEEN DISMEMBERED
. The sub headline was more shocking:
Search has grisly end; classmate, 16, arrested.

The photos accompanying the headline were of Sarah, handcuffed, wearing a white turtleneck, baggy blue jeans, a sobering look of despair on her pale white face. She was being led from one building to another by sheriff’s deputies. Although Sarah was sixteen, she would be turning seventeen on April 23 of that year. For now, she would be held as a juvenile. But she would be transferred to an adult facility—and charged as an adult—in a matter of months.

To the left of that photo was the familiar picture of Adrianne with her bob cut, a smaller headline underneath Adrianne’s unforgettable smile, a caption spelling out the person she was:
Adrianne “cared about everything.”

Sarah, who had been booked on first-degree murder charges, was being held on a $1 million bond at the Mary Davis Home, a detention center. She was the only suspect named publicly, thus far. “Other suspects” were involved in the crime, accompanying articles in the newspaper promised, but were being left “unnamed” at this time. The reason, many in the know assumed, was that Sean McKittrick, Nate Gaudet, and Cory Gregory were talking to police. And there were still questions left to be answered regarding who would be charged with which crimes.

Cory was in Rock Island County Jail, talking not only to the police, but his cellies—digging himself a deeper hole. The jail staff had been told to “keep an eye” on Cory as the early-evening TV news came on at five o’clock the night after Sarah was arrested. Why they did this was never discussed in the report detailing what happened next, but it’s safe to conclude that, for prosecutors and cops, they were still not on board with the idea that Cory was an innocent bystander and Sarah acted alone. It was that one comment a few witnesses had shared with police.

The belt.

Authorities knew Cory had lied about Nate’s role—he had never mentioned Nate’s name to the police. Rock Island County state’s attorney (SA) Jeff Terronez, taking charge of the case, wanted to get a feel for Cory’s reaction to Sarah’s rather public arrest. See what he said about his interview with police and the arrest of the girl he had proclaimed his undying love for.

Corrections officer (CO) Erin Taylor was at her guard station inside the jail when she called into Cory’s cell via intercom to ask Cory to clean up. When Taylor hit the intercom button, opening up a direct line between the two of them, before she spoke, Taylor overheard a conversation Cory had with his cellmate.

“Do you know that Reynolds girl?” Cory asked.

“Nope.”

“Yeah, well, I killed her.”

His cellie said nothing.

“Hey, Gregory,” Taylor said over the intercom, “you want to clean your cell?”

“Yeah,” Cory answered.

Cory was in a holding cell later on that same night when he opened his mouth again. It seemed he couldn’t shut up about what had happened. Or maybe Cory was trying to put a reputation for himself in play within the limits of prison culture? Cory was a small boy in a large man’s world. He was going to be spending a long time inside the system; he had better set himself up now as someone to fear.

Or pay later.

Cory talked about how the girl “he was with,” a prisoner in his holding cell later told police, strangled another girl. Then, still not mentioning Nate (and now outright defending him), Cory said Sarah cut up Adrianne’s body.

“I was there,” he told the guy, “but I had
nothing
to do with the murder.”

He told another cellmate Sarah had killed Adrianne, but he panicked. After realizing Adrianne was dead, Cory said, he and Sarah froze Adrianne’s body (outside in the cold weather) for two days after the murder, then cut her up.

“There was not a lot of blood,” Cory added, “due to the body being frozen.”

More newspaper reports were published late the following afternoon:
SECOND TEEN CHARGED IN REYNOLDS SLAYING
. Cory Gregory was now part of what was becoming a high-profile murder case inside the QC. One of the articles explained how “other suspects” could be arrested in the days to follow.

Meanwhile, Sean McKittrick’s father called the EMPD. He said his son had some things to say about the murder and he wanted to bring him in to talk it through.

McKittrick, with his dad, gave the ISP a videotaped interview, explaining every piece of the murder puzzle Sean knew, sparing no detail.

Then the floodgates—helped by the local news coverage—opened for investigators: witnesses, one after the other, came forward.

Jo and Tony Reynolds were overwhelmed. The idea that Adrianne had been cut into pieces—and all of these kids talking to the cops had known something about the crime—was too much for them to bear.

“It was devastating,” Jo said later. “When the police came at two in the morning [that Wednesday night], all they told us was ‘We found Adrianne’s body in a park.’ The next day, we listened to the police conference on television and that’s when we found out her body was dismembered.”

The police had “dashed”—Jo’s word—over to Tony and Jo’s East Moline house on Thursday to tell them Adrianne’s corpse had been burned, and that a few of her body parts were still missing, but they had recovered most of her torso, a leg, her head, and arms. They suggested (again, according to Jo and Tony) that after the autopsy, the best thing to do was to have Adrianne cremated. Much of her body had been badly burned. It seemed like the only proper thing left to do.

Complete the process Sarah and Cory had started.

“I’m not sure how I really feel about cremation,” Jo explained, “but it seemed to be the only answer.”

This sparked a riff between Tony Reynolds and Carolyn Franco, Adrianne’s birth mother. Carolyn wanted Adrianne’s body shipped back to Texas, but Tony wasn’t about to let his only child leave his side again. Tony felt if he let Adrianne’s body go, he had nothing to bury, so they proposed to Carolyn that they split Adrianne’s ashes and have her buried in both places.

“Carolyn really wasn’t for it,” Jo remembered, “but agreed.”

Adrianne’s ashes would be buried in Moline next to Tony’s younger sister.

“We ultimately had a private burial,” Jo explained. “We bought Adrianne a pretty pink cremation box. It had a pink rose on it. The burial was just our close family and a few close friends.”

Within a few days, however, remembering Adrianne Reynolds would be a public affair, and would include, incredibly, several unexpected—and unlikely—mourners.

PART V

PINKIE’S TIME

61

Rock Island County SA Jeff Terronez was thirty-four years old when Adrianne Reynolds’s murder was brought to his attention. Terronez’s office was in charge of making sure those responsible were charged and prosecuted to the full extent—the QC community would expect nothing less.

Terronez had been on the job eight weeks when this gruesome case of teen-on-teen violence took top priority for him. In the moments after Adrianne’s remains had been recovered from Black Hawk State Historic Site, and Terronez was informed, the SA later told
Quad-City Times
reporter Barb Ickes, he went home “in the wee hours” of that night and, carefully and quietly, opened the door to his daughter’s bedroom, where he stood for a moment and watched her sleep. Then he “pulled [her] out of bed” and “rocked her in the rocking chair.”

Considering the depravity of the crimes, it’s safe to say Jeff Terronez wasn’t the only father in the QC appreciating his daughter a little more during those days. The case had been tough on all of those in law enforcement who were involved. This type of murder, with young people involved, pulled at the heartstrings; many of the cops investigating the case had kids the same age, and they could not help but consider the what-if questions associated with staring an evil of this magnitude in the face.

Even with all of the sorrow and wonder floating about the QC over Adrianne’s murder, Tony Reynolds still had his detractors.

“Where was this guy all of her life?” asked one QC resident close to the case. “For sixteen years, this guy did nothing for his kid. Then she’s murdered, and he’s all over the news and in the papers getting his ‘fifteen minutes.’”

The newspapers were calling Adrianne’s homicide “the biggest” murder case to hit the county in over a decade, and perhaps it was; but Terronez, not yet a polished public official who could rattle off sound bites on the cuff, had little to say about the case he was building against Adrianne’s murderers.

One of the problems Terronez faced was figuring out who actually killed Adrianne, while looking at the fight inside Sarah’s car that had erupted between the two teens. Sarah wasn’t talking. Cory was telling different stories—some of what he had to say just did not add up.

Still, quite surprisingly, the way Terronez framed his case publicly, observers would think it was a slam dunk: “The evidence . . . will show that during that lunch period, in the Taco Bell parking lot, Sarah Kolb began an attack on Adrianne Reynolds . . . [and] Adrianne Reynolds was murdered.”

By whom, exactly, Terronez wasn’t saying at this early stage. His team was still in the process of collecting evidence.

Part of the case, in the form of a report Terronez had received, centered on one of the crime scenes: Sarah’s red 1991 Geo Prizm. ISP crime scene investigation (CSI) techs John Hatfield and Thomas Merchie had taken over a request by the EMPD to go through Sarah’s car, millimeter by millimeter, and see what they could come up with. The inside of the Prizm had a story to tell, a story that could then be matched up against what Cory Gregory was saying.