Too Young to Kill (38 page)

After a ten-minute break, David Hoffman went right into his problem with Nate Gaudet’s testimony. He began by asking the teenage Juggalo about the videotaped interview he granted police on January 26, 2005, in relation to his testimony before a grand jury and two additional interviews with police. Hoffman had a problem with the synchronization of all three.

Or the lack thereof, rather.

First, though, Hoffman asked Nate about his drug-using habits during the same time frame—that Saturday and Sunday, January 22 and 23—when he was with Cory Gregory and Sarah Kolb, and the following week, while he was being questioned by police.

“Were you on drugs at the time?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you on Ecstasy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you using marijuana?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you, in fact, use it on Saturday
and
Sunday?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you use cocaine Saturday?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In fact, Mr. Gaudet, did you see things that weren’t there and hear things that weren’t said?”

“Not really on that day. I was just . . . Sometimes I will see shadows or something like that when I’m coming down off Ecstasy.”

Hoffman asked Nate to explain several comments he had made to police, some of which he had since rescinded and denied.

“Did you tell the police that you had no idea why you were going out [to the farm] with them that day? You thought [you were all] going out for some paintball exercise?”

“Yes, sir.”

“First you ever heard about this killing was on Sunday. Isn’t that what you told them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was that just a lie?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And why were you lying to them?”

“So I wouldn’t be caught.”

This type of back-and-forth went on for an hour or more. Nate admitted he lied to the police on several occasions to serve his own needs. Jurors had to consider that this boy was on three different drugs—two of which greatly affect the mind—and he had lied to police. What good was his testimony, taking all of this into account? Hoffman was suggesting. How reliable a witness was a drug-using liar? Could Nate’s testimony—the idea that the murder was Sarah’s idea from the get-go—truly be trusted as tangible enough to put a young girl away for no fewer than fifty years?

Finally David Hoffman, clearly frustrated by Nate’s tepid responses, said to the boy, “I guess it is a small point, but you say this drive around took place between noon and two o’clock, or noon and three. [But] the last time you testified (in front of the grand jury), it was four. You’ve read your testimony from the last time and you know that’s wrong, right? So you changed it?”

“I didn’t see the part in the testimony. I skimmed through it a little bit.”

“Okay, you changed it, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir, because—”

But Hoffman wouldn’t let him finish. “And it is because you
knew
she (Sarah) was at work from three to ten?”

“I thought she went to work at four.”

“I have no further questions.”

Jeff Terronez did his best to clean up what little integrity Nate Gaudet might have had; but in the end, the boy had lied and David Hoffman was able to get him to admit it.

Concluding the seventh full day of the trial, Jeff Terronez called several important witnesses, a few of whom gave the jury a reason—albeit small—to find Sarah Kolb guilty.

Pat Corbin, Nate’s grandmother, tearfully testified about finding the saw that Nate said he had used to cut up Adrianne’s corpse. Pat told jurors that after finding out Adrianne went missing, putting a few things Nate had done over the course of that weekend together in her mind, she had a “gut feeling” to take a stroll down into the basement, where she knew Nate had been earlier that day.

And bingo—there was that bloody saw.

Sarah Kolb’s older sister testified about how she had helped Sarah “hide a shovel and gardening tool,” along with Adrianne’s necklace, shortly after the murder.

A coworker at Showcase Cinemas in Davenport, Iowa, where Sarah worked, claimed Sarah offered to sell him her Prizm for $300 the day
after
the murder, but Sarah’s mother told her she could not get rid of the car.

All of this was circumstantial evidence, but evidence—nonetheless—that at least pointed toward Sarah’s guilt.

Two more witnesses concluded the day. Both offered little in advancing the state’s case.

On November 9, 2005, SA Jeff Terronez called the last three witnesses of his case, bringing the total somewhere near fifty.

First up was EMPD officer Josh Allen, who called Sarah Kolb on the day Adrianne Reynolds was reported as missing.

Terronez played the tape of the phone call, on which Sarah had set up that McDonald’s story that she stuck to all weekend.

The next two witnesses were females Sarah had met at the juvenile detention center she had been housed in after her arrest. Both admitted Sarah said Adrianne had died inside Sarah’s Prizm.

And that was the end of the SA’s case.

Reporters caught up with David Hoffman outside the courtroom as he smoked a cigarette. They asked him if his client was going to take the stand.

Hoffman said he didn’t know.

The truth of the matter was, if Sarah Kolb was going to point a guilty finger at her coconspirator, Cory Gregory, she was going to have to do that from the witness stand herself.

71

Germane to the argument of whether Sarah Kolb murdered Adrianne Reynolds by herself was who you chose to believe. The only way, Sarah knew, she could get her story across to the jury—
and maybe reach one
(which was all it took)—was to tell it herself.

Which was exactly what she did.

On the morning of November 10, 2005, after SA Jeff Terronez rested the state’s case, and David Hoffman began his defense with four witnesses—none of whom added anything to Sarah’s innocence—the judge took a lunch break.

Shortly after one o’clock, Sarah stood from the defense table in front of the judge’s bench as David Hoffman motioned that his next witness was the defendant herself.

Sarah’s auburn and black hair was now down to her bony shoulders. She wore a black shirt and sat in the witness chair with a steely look of
how dare you accuse me!
penetrating from her engaging blue eyes.

The word the media overused in terms of Sarah’s demeanor on the stand was “emotionless.” That stone of a woman, who had been the ringleader of a small group she ran with back in high school, was determined to tell the jury exactly
why
and
by whom
Adrianne Reynolds had been murdered. Sarah had a plan. No doubt about it. She was prepared to talk through what had happened inside her car on that day, but maybe more important to her case, what had led up to that moment in her Prizm when she and Adrianne got into an argument that quickly turned violent.

Sarah was seventeen, a child in the court of public opinion, an adult in the eyes of the law. David Hoffman had her talk about how she met Adrianne. The two girls shared some likes, Sarah said—specifically, Sarah was attracted to Adrianne sexually and they were both interested in dating each other.

“Did you ever have sex with Adrianne Reynolds?”

“No, I did not,” Sarah admitted.

Sarah went into how Adrianne had sought out one of her “friends”—Kory Allison—at the party house and had sex with him. She mentioned nothing about setting her up with a test. The way Sarah framed it, one would think Adrianne walked into the house and set her sights on Kory.

“Okay, at that time, did it make you angry?” Hoffman asked, giving his client the opportunity to tell the jury that it really didn’t matter whom Adrianne had sex with. All it did was show Sarah the type of person Adrianne was, which was somebody Sarah did not want to be around.

“I wasn’t angry. I was upset.”

Adrianne had violated one of the core values that Sarah had proclaimed to be at the heart of any of the friendships she had: loyalty.

Sarah said she saw Adrianne as a slut. In fact, the more she learned about Adrianne’s promiscuity, Sarah added, the more she realized she did not want to date or even hang out with her.

But Adrianne persisted. She needed to know why Sarah didn’t want to be her friend. Sarah said Adrianne called her five to ten times per day, badgering her about why the friendship had ended. She kept asking Sarah why she was so pissed off at her. There was one day, Sarah testified, when Adrianne had one of her stepbrothers call Sarah and leave a nasty voice mail.

“Were the telephone calls irritating?”

“Yes, very.”

Sarah talked about dating Cory for one week in May 2004, when they first met, before Adrianne even came into the picture. Sarah had to break it off, though.

“Why?” Hoffman asked.

“Because [Cory] intended to want something I didn’t want. He wanted to have sex with me, and I didn’t want to have sex with him.”

Sarah said that she frankly wasn’t attracted to Cory “in that way.” They were more like buddies.

“Did you care who he had sex with?”

“No.”

This line of questioning opened up an onslaught of Cory Gregory bashing. Sarah said Cory often talked about his sexual exploits and it “grossed [her] out.” She didn’t appreciate how he referred to his “dates” as “bitches.” It was degrading to females, some of whom Sarah had found attractive and interesting. Sarah stuck up for the underdog, especially if there was something in it for her emotionally.

Sarah said Cory often lied to her. And that “friends don’t lie.... They’re not supposed to, anyway.”

One of the lies that Cory often told, Sarah soon found out, was that he had not started to hang around with Adrianne. He lied to Sarah about his relationship with Adrianne, she said, because he thought she’d be upset that he was becoming involved with someone she didn’t like.

To that, Sarah said she was not angry or upset that Cory was hanging out with Adrianne, but she was mad because he had lied to her about it.

“There was no reason,” Sarah added, for her to be mad about Cory and Adrianne getting together. “I mean, if he had just said, you know, ‘I’m going to go,’ you know—excuse me—‘get a piece of ass from Adrianne, ’ I would have said, ‘Okay.’ But the fact that he actually
lied
to me about it, that’s what bothered me.”

Sarah talked about how Sean McKittrick became integrated into her tight-knit group of friends, and that she began to realize that Sean was a “mooch,” a slacker among slackers, who didn’t want to do anything with his life. Yet, before any of that happened, Sarah got word from a mutual friend that Adrianne was running around telling people she was going steal Sean away from Sarah as revenge.

“. . . Did [Brad Tobias] tell you anything about Adrianne’s interest in your boyfriend, Sean McKittrick?”

“Yes.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He said Adrianne was going to supposedly try to get Sean to break up with me to date her.”

“Okay. Did that make you angry?”

“That made me
very
angry.”

“Okay. So at that point you were angry with Adrianne Reynolds.”

“I was pissed!”

“And why?”

“Because he was my
boyfriend.
She could have had anybody she wanted, but she had to be messing with
my
boyfriend.”

That Kool-Aid Sarah Kolb was talking about. Many had presumed she was referring to Cory Gregory when she wrote in her journal about Adrianne Reynolds “dipping” into her Kool-Aid.

This was the reason, Sarah explained, why she had written that note in her journal. The feeling she espoused to the jury—which was probably true—was how many teenagers out in the world on any given day say, “I’ll kill you!” It’s a euphemism for being pissed off at one’s peers.

Sarah testified about meeting Adrianne for a smoke outside on the morning of January 21, 2005. They talked. She claimed Adrianne confided in her that she didn’t have any girlfriends and all that the guys she knew wanted to do was use her for sex. She pleaded with Sarah for a renewed friendship. Sarah felt for Adrianne, she said. So she invited her to lunch at Taco Bell—and Adrianne accepted.

On the way to Taco Bell, according to Sarah’s version, she asked Adrianne several times if she was okay, if everything was cool between them.

Adrianne said she was feeling better about the relationship.

They had made up.

As Sarah parked, she and Adrianne talked. Sarah asked Adrianne if what the others had been saying about her liking Sean was true.

“I think he’s hot—I like him,” Adrianne said.

“She really had a smug look on her face, like she thought it was funny, like she was kind of trying to make me mad,” Sarah told jurors, describing the conversation.

This statement didn’t make much sense in the context of the day. Sarah herself had just finished telling jurors how Adrianne was crying and begging, essentially, for them to be friends again. Why would Adrianne take a complete turn and say something she knew would make Sarah mad? On top of that, Sean and Cory did not report Sarah and Adrianne having this conversation.