Too Young to Kill (10 page)

The charges against her stepfather were dismissed.

This time, Adrianne stayed in Texas for about four months before things took a turn. Near October 2004, Carolyn called Tony. Adrianne had turned sixteen on September 12.

“I’m having problems with her again. She’s talkin’ ’bout running away and stuff. She said something about wanting to go live with a friend of hers.”

That wasn’t the half of it. Adrianne had driven her bike in the pouring rain a distance of nearly thirty miles to a boyfriend’s house, just so she could “get away from her mother,” the boy’s mother later said. Adrianne wanted to move in with the boy’s family. She was also best friends with his sister.

This wasn’t the only family she had expressed a desire to live with, near this period.

Again, no one wanted Adrianne.

It is clear from the reports Adrianne’s psychiatrist generated during these months that Carolyn and Adrianne had a love-hate relationship they both thrived on and needed. There was codependency on both their parts. When Adrianne was with her mother, there always came a time when she wanted nothing more than to leave. When she was away from Carolyn, Adrianne craved that internal motherly affection only Carolyn could give to her.

Tony rolled his eyes as Carolyn explained the latest dilemma.
Here we go again. . . .

Finally, after some conversation, Tony said, “Let me call her, Carolyn, and see what’s up.”

Adrianne sounded confused, frustrated, and fed up with life in general when Tony got her on the phone. Tony put on his stern father’s voice. “Hey, listen, you can’t just go stay with a friend of yours. You’re only sixteen! You can’t just go and do that.”

Part of what drove Adrianne’s desire to go live with anyone that would take her in, according to friends in Texas, was that Carolyn demanded she go back to live with Tony and Joanne. And Adrianne didn’t want to. She couldn’t stand to be away from her life in Texas.

But Adrianne never argued with Tony, he said. “She always showed me that respect. I told her it just wasn’t right for her to be goin’ an’ piling up in somebody else’s house.” As he spoke to Adrianne, it sounded to Tony that she was not getting along with Carolyn. “How ’bout you done come back up here to Illinois?” Tony asked. “I am not going to let you go live in no streets.” He pictured Adrianne hopping from friend to friend, staying a few days here, a few there. In that world, her life would fall apart quickly. There was a sense that she would be pregnant and on state assistance inside a few years.

Adrianne thought about it. How could she deny her father’s advice?

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

Was Adrianne serious, or was she telling her father what he wanted to hear?

A few days after Adrianne and Tony spoke, as plans were made for Adrianne to move back north to East Moline, Carolyn called.

“You can send her that plane ticket,” Carolyn said, “but Adrianne said that if you make her come back up there, she’s gonna get off the plane in Atlanta”—where she was scheduled to make a connecting flight—“and no one will ever see her again.”

“I understand,” Tony said. “You just put her on the plane.”

Tony knew Adrianne. He had no worries whatsoever that she was going to show up in East Moline. “She was just telling Carolyn that,” Tony recalled. “It was a game she played.”

Just to be certain, however, Tony phoned his daughter.

“Hey there, you listen to me. I am going to send you a plane ticket. You had better be honest with me. Are you comin’ all the way here?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s all I need to know, Adrianne.”

A couple of days after that telephone conversation, Adrianne arrived in East Moline, Illinois, on schedule, for a second time in a little over a year.

It was the fall of 2004. She was sixteen. Within three months, Adrianne Reynolds would turn up missing.

16

Sarah Kolb’s mother called the EMPD at some point during the first four days of Adrianne’s disappearance. Kathryn “Kathy” Klauer knew the cops had been asking her daughter questions, and Sarah had been the last person, along with Cory Gregory, to be with Adrianne.

Kathryn told police she had some information to share.

She didn’t say from whom, but the information she had been given was that Adrianne “was supposedly going to babysit . . . sometime this past week [end].”

Which, by itself, didn’t seem so suspicious.

“But what was odd,” Kathryn Klauer relayed to cops, “was that the male [she was doing the babysitting job for] is twenty-six years old. . . .”

Ten years Adrianne’s senior. Enough to worry any parent.

Cops already had heard that Adrianne had a “crush” on this same guy, with whom she worked at Checkers.

Could they have run away together?

The EMPD called the AirTran airways at Quad City International Airport. Adrianne had flown AirTran in the past. They wanted to see if that guy (or Adrianne) had taken a flight via AirTran at any time recently.

“Last time she flew with us,” a ticket manager said, “was in the fall of 2003. She flew from Dallas to Moline.”

After calling additional airlines, it was clear that if Adrianne had flown out of the QC alone or with the guy at Checkers she’d had a crush on, she had not left from Quad City International Airport.

Another lead.

Another dead end.

17

The EMPD located three boys Adrianne had had close contact with over the past month. The idea was that any one of them could have helped her run away. Without money, a change of clothes, or a ride, Adrianne would have needed help. As much as Tony and Jo didn’t want to think she had taken off, there was still the possibility that Adrianne had disappeared because that was what she wanted to do.

“I have not seen or heard from her,” said one male student, a kid from school Adrianne hung around with frequently.

“Harboring a runaway,” the cop warned, “is a crime.”

The boy said he understood.

Another friend said he had not seen or spoken to Adrianne in two weeks, adding, “She does like to fool around, though. Party a lot. Use drugs.”

“That all?”

“She has problems with depression.”

Finally they got ahold of that twenty-six-year-old guy Adrianne had worked with at Checkers—the man she supposedly had a crush on.

“Sure,” he said, “she was supposed to babysit for my kids.” He explained that Adrianne was scheduled to watch the kids on that Saturday, the day after she went missing. “I have not seen or heard from her lately, however.”

And so whatever stone the EMPD turned over, it appeared another obstacle or unanswered question rose from out of the dirt. As much as the EMPD was in need of leads, however, and still asking questions of many people, a blurry picture of what had happened to Adrianne Reynolds was slowly coming into focus.

Late Sunday evening, January 23, 2004, Nate Gaudet called Jill Hiers.

“Pick me up,” Nate said to his girlfriend. “I’m at Cory’s.”

Jill said she couldn’t.

During several phone calls, Nate pleaded, “I need a ride!”

He sounded desperate.

Jill got a feeling something was up.

After she pulled up to Cory’s house, Jill watched Nate walk out. He was wearing that trench coat and carrying a black-and-red book bag. He looked withdrawn. Out of it. Depressed. Solemn.

In another world.

Nate placed the book bag in the backseat and told Jill to drive.

“Take me to my grandmother’s house,” Nate explained on the way. Nate’s grandparents’ house was out in the country. He lived there, when he wasn’t staying at the party house in Rock Island.

When they got to the house, Nate told Jill to wait downstairs in the kitchen for him after they walked in. He needed to do something in the basement.

“I’ll be right back.”

Nate grabbed the book bag and headed toward the house.

Jill followed.

When they arrived at the back door, Nate let Jill enter first.

Inside, Nate headed down into the basement, reminding Jill one more time to wait.

Inside the kitchen, just off to the left of the back door, Nate’s mother and grandmother sat at the kitchen table with Nate’s ten-year-old sister and played Scrabble.

Jill walked over.

When Nate returned, he stood next to his girlfriend.

“You two want to play?” Nate’s mother asked them.

“No,” they both said.

“I hate those things,” Nate’s mother said, pointing out Nate’s strange and scary contact lenses.

Jill said, “I know—me, too.”

Nate took off into his room without saying anything more.

Jill leaned down and whispered into Nate’s mother’s ear: “He’s high.”

Then she walked into Nate’s bedroom.

What in the heck was going on with Nate all of a sudden? Jill wondered. What was he up to? He had been acting strange all weekend, Jill noticed. They had been fighting more than usual.

Nate was on the bed. He appeared to be crying, Jill realized.

“What the fuck is going on?” she asked.

Nate wouldn’t say.

“He just became very emotional,” Jill later told police.

The EMPD called Carolyn Franco, down in Texas, on Monday morning. They wanted to know if she had any news to share, or if she could shed some light on the situation.

“I haven’t seen or heard from her,” Carolyn said. “Something must have happened to Adrianne. . . .”

“What would make you say that?”

Carolyn reiterated what Tony had been saying all along: Adrianne had never picked up her paycheck. She had no clothing with her. She would have never left home without a change of clothes. And certainly not without her paycheck. Adrianne knew the value of money on the streets.

“Anything else?”

“Adrianne had a drug/alcohol problem when she was twelve,” Carolyn said. “She was unhappy in Illinois. That I know.”

What Tony and Jo were not being told—as Monday evening, January 24, 2005, fell over the Quad Cities—was that as much as the EMPD had kept quiet about what they were doing behind the scenes, they were working diligently and, together with the Illinois State Police (ISP), had started to make some progress.

What was shaping up, however, was not the news Tony had wanted to hear.

Jo called one of the officers she had been in contact with throughout the weekend. “Can you tell us
anything
?”

“Yeah, we’re trying to get a search warrant for Sarah Kolb’s car, but the state’s attorney’s office won’t give it to us.”

What? A search warrant for Sarah’s . . . ?

This sent the butterflies in Jo’s stomach into a frenzy.

Why a search warrant? What are they looking for?

“Why?” Jo pressed.

“Well, we know there was a fight in Sarah’s car.” According to Jo, the cop explained that they had interviewed Sean McKittrick, who had claimed to be Sarah’s boyfriend. He also said he was in the car with Adrianne, Sarah, and Cory Gregory on that early afternoon when Adrianne disappeared. Sean had reported that when Sarah and Adrianne started yelling back and forth and fighting, he got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked back to school.

They had interviewed every McDonald’s employee working on that Friday afternoon, and not one person had reported seeing Adrianne or Sarah’s red car. Not that any of them would recall such a thing all that easily, suffice it to say, as busy as McDonald’s was on any given day. But if Adrianne had had her teeth knocked out and was bleeding, as Sarah herself had proclaimed, the theory was that she would have gone into the restaurant to clean up before walking home. Or risk waltzing into her house with blood all over her face and several teeth missing.

Tony had also heard—which he had passed along to the EMPD earlier—that Sarah and Cory had devised some “plan on being nice to Adrianne to get her into Sarah’s car.” The EMPD, in turn, had located the source of the information and interviewed the girl.

Turned out she was a neighbor of Cory’s who sometimes hung around with the Juggalo crowd. She told police that Sean McKittrick had knocked on her door late Friday afternoon, January 21, and asked to come in. He appeared upset and pissed off. He explained how he had jumped out of Sarah’s car in a huff at the local Taco Bell because Sarah and Adrianne were fighting, and he kept telling them to stop, but neither would listen.

“Sean told me,” the source further explained to police, “that Sarah and Cory tricked Adrianne into getting into Sarah’s car with them. They took her to the Taco Bell . . . [and] they argued . . . and Sarah grabbed Adrianne by the hair. Sean said he told her to stop it, but Sarah told him to get out if he didn’t like it. He called Sarah from my house to ask her if everything was okay. Sarah told him she and Adrianne had made up.”

A detective found Sean. Spoke to him. He backed up what this new source claimed. Without being given any details, Sean told the same story, in fact.

That night, just to be sure, the EMPD gave Sean a polygraph.

Confusing matters, however, he failed part of it.

The EMPD knew something was up—the Taco Bell/ McDonald’s story was not adding up. Investigators had a feeling Sarah was lying about a few things, which prompted the question: why would Sarah Kolb lie if she
didn’t
have anything to hide?

On that afternoon, the EMPD was able to get Sarah, with her mother, to come into the EMPD station house for an interview. But there was someone else with them, a man whose presence put another spin on the investigation. Sarah Kolb was now lawyered up. His name, Bob Rillie.

Why did Sarah Kolb need a lawyer?

“We agree to this interview,” Rillie said, eyeing both investigators, “only if no questions are asked about the fight—or a direct question asking if Sarah killed Adrianne.”

The detectives running the interview looked at each other.

A video camera recorded the interview. Sarah sat and told the same story she had over the past few days, adding how she knew a girl who worked at McDonald’s and was there that day, and had also “possibly seen Adrianne enter the restaurant.”