Too Young to Kill (39 page)

Sarah said the comment “freaked” her out. So she snapped at Adrianne, lashing out verbally, “Stay the fuck away from me! Stay the fuck away from Sean! And stay the fuck away from Cory!”

“Were you angry?” Hoffman asked.

“
Very
angry.”

Sarah admitted that she grabbed Adrianne by the hair. When she did that, Adrianne “curled up into a fetal position.” She cried. As tears streamed down Adrianne’s cheeks, Sarah explained, Sarah “felt small” and “let her go.”

She said Adrianne never struck her.

They talked some more, Sarah testified. Sean had left the car by this point. Cory was still in the backseat, not saying anything.

Then Adrianne began talking about Cory and an older guy—the man Adrianne worked with at Checkers, whom she was going to babysit for that weekend—who were both pressuring her to have sex with them that previous Wednesday. This was when, Sarah claimed, Cory reached around from the backseat and grabbed Adrianne by the neck.

If Sarah was to be believed, Cory lost all sense of himself.

He snapped.

“He put his arms around the seat,” Sarah told jurors, “. . . and he was just kind of grabbing onto her, holding her.”

David Hoffman asked where Cory Gregory had grabbed Adrianne Reynolds.

“Just like this”—Sarah showed jurors what she meant—“kind of around the neck.”

As Adrianne tried to get out of the car, Sarah said, Cory yanked her into the backseat.

Sarah said she yelled at Cory: “What the fuck are you doing?”

She was startled by Cory’s outburst and rage; he was choking Adrianne.

Next, Sarah said, she turned around in her seat and looked at the two of them. They were struggling. Fighting for position. Adrianne was kicking and trying to get her breath.

“When I looked in the back, he had that stick that everyone is talking about up against her throat and she was, she had her hands . . . trying to push away from it. And I started yelling at him and screaming, ‘Knock it off,’ and ‘Quit it,’ and little things like that, because I didn’t think, you know, I didn’t think he was going to kill her. I just thought that he was trying to beat her up or something. So I said, ‘Knock it off! Quit it!’ . . .”

Hoffman asked Sarah to talk about what Cory was saying while he was allegedly choking Adrianne to death with the stick.

“He was telling me, you know, that this has to happen, and that she is not one of us, and that she is trying to separate us, and she wants to make [me] hate [him], and she, you know, she just doesn’t belong here, and it’s better off this way.”

Sarah claimed she told Cory—while he was supposedly choking Adrianne to death with the stick—that she was going to call the police if he didn’t stop.

“What did he do?” Hoffman pressed.

“He hit me.”

“Where?”

“In my face.”

And so, according to Sarah, this was how she got that bloody nose.

From Cory’s hand.

Sarah said she watched as Adrianne Reynolds took her last breath. She said she saw Adrianne “releasing air from her body.”

Dying, in other words. Sarah Kolb was looking into her backseat at Adrianne Reynolds as she gasped for one final breath.

“‘She’s dead . . . ,’” Cory kept saying, Sarah explained, “in a matter-of-fact tone.”

Sarah said she didn’t think what had happened was real. It was all like a dream.

“I was in shock.... He just killed somebody in my backseat.”

There was some discussion at that point if, in fact, Adrianne was actually dead, or passed out.

So Cory, Sarah explained, said, “Well, if that’s what you think, I’ll take care of it!”

This was when he grabbed the belt—“I don’t know from where”—and he “wrapped it around her neck . . . and fastened it . . . like a noose.”

Cory covered Adrianne up with a coat and stepped out of the car.

Sitting in the front seat a moment later, Cory turned to Sarah and, after grabbing the belt and holding on to it, said, “‘Drive,’” she claimed.

When Cory got out of the car near her house in Milan, Sarah said, she phoned her sister for advice. But her sister did not answer the call.

Cory returned after walking into Sarah’s garage to check if anyone was there.

“Keep driving,” he said. “Your stepfather is still home.”

From here, Sarah maintained, heading off to Big Island was Cory Gregory’s idea, as was putting Adrianne in the trunk.

Sarah was obeying Cory because, she said, she was scared of him.

“I just saw him kill somebody.”

Sarah then headed out to the Engle farm. Once again, under Cory’s direction, she said.

From this point forward, Sarah maintained, Cory Gregory told her what to do and when to do it. She was dismayed by the sight of Adrianne Reynolds’s glossy eyes staring at them as they went about the business of dragging her corpse from the trunk to an area of the farm where they then began trying to burn her body. The pronoun Sarah used most during this portion of her testimony became obvious.

He
wrapped her in the blue tarp.

He
tried to burn her.

He
said not to tell anyone.

He. He. He.

Sarah Kolb portrayed herself as a scared, insubstantial teen who had just witnessed a murder and was now involved in the cover-up with a stronger, controlling boy. None of these events had she willingly participated in.

72

Sarah Kolb told jurors as she continued on the afternoon of November 10, 2005, that Cory Gregory threatened her.

“His exact words were, ‘If you tell anybody, if you do anything, I will fucking kill you. I will fucking kill your mom. I will fucking kill your dad. I will fucking kill your sister. I will fucking kill [your nephew]. . . . I will fucking kill your cats.’”

Sarah had named one of her cats Psycho.

The problem with Sarah’s version was that none of the testimony by other witnesses backed her up. Sarah had had several chances to turn Cory in, call someone, go to the police station, fold into her mother’s arms and plead for help.

She never did any of that.

This idea that Cory Gregory was going to murder everyone in her family (and her cats) was absurd. Cory Gregory, if one went back and looked at his behavior after this murder (some of which was caught on videotape), was in no position to hurt anyone. The kid was devastated and destroyed. He could not eat, sleep, speak, or even stand up for long periods of time. Much less take out an entire family.

In any event, Sarah continued to spin her tale of woe.

She was so afraid of Cory, in fact, that she stayed at his house that night Adrianne Reynolds was murdered.

Her reason for this, Sarah Kolb claimed: “Because he told me I had to.”

The following day, Saturday, Sarah went to work. She didn’t tell anyone at work that some lunatic had killed a girl inside her car and was threatening to kill her and her family. Instead, she told coworkers—well, actually, she bragged about—how she had smashed Adrianne in the face and busted a few of her teeth, which was a lie.

Sarah admitted that Cory had told Nate Gaudet after they had picked him up that day how
she
had strangled Adrianne, but she was, of course, too afraid of Cory to correct him or butt into the conversation he was having with Nate as she drove.

If she wanted the jury to believe her erroneous, concocted story, Sarah needed to explain the McDonald’s connection. So she blamed that on Cory, too. But she involved Sean McKittrick, saying, “[Cory] told Sean that Adrianne and I had got in a fight and that she hit me and I hit her back, that she broke my nose and that we made up and dropped her off at McDonald’s.”

Cory told Sarah she needed to stick to this story. Or—you guessed it—she and her family were as good as dead.

As Sunday came, and Sarah was back at home, she believed she was too deeply involved by then to go back and explain to anyone that Cory had killed Adrianne. Plus, she added, she was still in fear of Cory sneaking into her house and killing everyone.

Regarding the dismemberment of Adrianne’s body, Sarah claimed she watched it from the top of a hill, looking down, and that Cory had threatened Nate, telling him he was involved to the point of no turning back.

Nate, of course, did not agree with this.

Sarah took things a step further with regard to Nate and Cory cutting up Adrianne’s body into pieces. She claimed Nate and Cory, while they were completing this incredibly horrific act, cracked jokes.

“It grossed me out,” Sarah said. She meant this literally. The jokes were so “disgusting” that she became physically ill while they were laughing at what was the most awful thing she had ever witnessed in her sixteen years.

Throughout midafternoon, Sarah proceeded to tell jurors that she never spoke to anyone about the case besides Nate and Cory. She never talked to her coworkers about anything.

Apparently, all those people who testified were making up things.

The problem with this argument was that unless Sarah had said something to her coworkers that weekend, there was no way any of them could have known the facts they brought forth. It was absurd to believe Sarah did not talk about the fight she had had with Adrianne.

She said she never told any of her cellmates about the case. It never came up, in fact.

They, too, like all the others, were liars.

In the end, Sarah was “shocked” by Adrianne’s death, she said.

“How do you feel about women being hit?” Hoffman asked.

“It’s not right.”

“Is this a special thing to you?”

“Yes!”

After David Hoffman looked down at his notes, checking to see if he had asked his client everything he needed, he turned Sarah over to SA Jeff Terronez.

If one was to believe Sarah Kolb’s direct testimony, a person would have to draw the conclusion that she wasn’t complicit in anything that had happened to Adrianne Reynolds on the day she was murdered.

73

If Jeff Terronez was ever going to prove to the voters who put him in office that he was the right man for the job, this was the prosecutor’s chance. There is a certain white-glove touch and polished manner that prosecutors need to adhere to when questioning a murder defendant. This, seasoned prosecutors say, comes with experience. An attorney doesn’t want to try to drop the hammer on every single lie he believes the defendant has told. Instead, he picks his most powerful arguments and keys on these, without, of course, running the risk of passing up a golden opportunity to prove to jurors that they are being taken for a ride by an unremitting liar.

Terronez began with Nate Gaudet. He asked Sarah Kolb, who seemed oddly cool, calm, and collected, several questions about Nate driving around with her and Cory Gregory on the day they dismembered Adrianne’s dead body. Terronez wanted to know if Nate was “correct” in testifying about what had happened on that day.

Sarah answered yes to just about every question Terronez posed. It got to the point where some in the gallery wondered where Terronez was heading with so many questions to which Sarah repeatedly said yes.

What the state’s attorney tried to do, it soon became clear, was ask Sarah if every one of the witnesses he had put on the stand had effectively lied about what she had told each one of them, or her behavior during that weekend. The SA’s suggestion in asking Sarah all of these questions related to previous testimony was designed to point out, without saying it, that in order for Sarah Kolb to be telling the truth, all material witnesses the state had put on before her had lied or perjured themselves.

This was laughable. There was not a chance. Two people who don’t know each other—any fool knows—cannot tell the same lie.

It is impossible.

Terronez brought out the fact that Sarah had even spoken to the police twice that weekend. During those calls, one of which the jury had heard, Sarah sounded fine. She never mentioned how scared she was of being Cory’s next victim.

And then there was that little problem of Sarah lying to the police when she didn’t have to.

“. . . So all of these people that have testified that you told them that you either struck or strangled Adrianne Reynolds,” Terronez stated at the conclusion of his long list of facetious questions, “they are
all
incorrect? Is that your testimony?”

Sarah didn’t bat an eye. She leaned in: “They were
all
incorrect.”

A few questions later, Terronez, in a patronizing tone, said, “Everybody is out to get you, aren’t they, Miss Kolb?”

“That’s not what I said. . . .”

For the next five minutes, Terronez went through the same list of questions again, asking Sarah if each witness was correct or incorrect.

The SA had made his point. It was time to move on. Emotion cannot play a role in a good, well-though-tout direct examination.

Terronez seemed to get on track and chipped away at Sarah’s argument of being held hostage by Cory Gregory that weekend. He asked Sarah how tall Cory was and how much he weighed.

She said she had no idea, sassily snapping: “You would have to ask him!”

Terronez asked Sarah if she knew of any weapons her grandfather kept inside his house, where she and Cory had ended up that night after being chased off the farm by the same man.

Again, in an irritable inflection, Sarah Kolb said, “I don’t live there.”

Terronez wanted to know why Sarah never ran to her car and took off as Cory was lighting Adrianne on fire. Sarah had the keys. She could have left Cory out there to fend for himself. Drove home (or to the police station). Warned everyone in her household that a madman had killed Adrianne and was coming for them next.

“Because I just watched him kill somebody, and I was afraid to run,” she answered. “I was afraid to do
anything
other than listen to him and do what he told me to do.”

Terronez had Sarah tell the jury how much time she spent alone that weekend. In doing so, she made the point that she had every opportunity to go to the police, but she was too afraid.

“Were you scared?” Terronez asked.