Too Young to Kill (14 page)

Cory’s teacher later told police that on this day, Cory “was very quiet and sat alone. He isolated himself from the other students. He wore dark clothing, but no jewelry or piercings.”

Sarah said she hoped Cory failed his test on that first day. She did not want him in her class, she said.
I’ll snap!
she wrote. She felt so strongly about this, she claimed she would drop out of school before sitting in the same class as Cory.

To his face, however, Sarah was one of the best friends Cory thought he ever had. He and Sarah became inseparable.

A day later, November 23, Adrianne Reynolds was on the scene, combing the halls and classrooms of Black Hawk Outreach, looking to hook up with a new set of friends. She dropped by Sarah’s desk soon after beginning classes, flipped open Sarah’s journal, and left this girl, whom she found attractive and interesting, her phone number and an introductory note:

Hey, girl, what’s up? Not shit here. Just chillin. We need to hang out one of these days and get drunk over the weekend.... But you should call me sometime. . . . Love ya!

Sarah Kolb had a new friend. A girl she found appetizingly striking and new to the neighborhood.

Fresh meat.

Just maybe everything Sarah had been waiting for.

Still, Sarah played hard to get.

Sara [
sic
] hasn’t said anything to me at all: a hi, or anything like that,
Adrianne wrote in a notebook she passed back and forth between her and the other students in her class.

The boy she wrote to suggested Sarah might be shy.

She don’t seem like the shy type,
Adrianne responded.

Her friend wrote back that Sarah
sayz she’s 17
but looked more
like 15.

If Sarah likes me,
Adrianne wrote, having been told that Sarah was bisexual and on the prowl, hoping to hook up with her,
then she needs to start talking to me because I already made the first move....

By the end of November, Sarah was over her girlfriend and trying to get with another girl in school, who seemed to be nothing more than a pain in her ass.

I really don’t think about [my old girlfriend] anymore . . . ,
Sarah wrote.

But this new friend couldn’t understand that and apparently didn’t believe her. The journal entry made two things clear about Sarah’s life: One, she seemed to always find a group of people to hang around with who seemed to thrive on a daily dose of drama and chaos. Two, as much as she said she hated these same types of people, Sarah kept going back to them.

In response to Adrianne, Sarah wrote a letter Adrianne received the following Monday. In it, Sarah asked Adrianne about her weekend, saying hers was “okay, I guess.” She shared her work schedule and said she was hard to get ahold of on the telephone, but encouraged Adrianne to keep trying, because she would always return her call. She offered to do something with Adrianne that coming weekend, adding how she wanted to get to know Adrianne better by talking a little more. By the end of the note, Sarah apologized for not saying much during hallway breaks, concluding that the reason was—just as Adrianne’s friend had predicted—her shyness.

Some days later, in her journal, Sarah talked about maybe getting “in the hot tub” with her new friend (not Adrianne), but decided against it because she had to leave the house sooner than she had anticipated (she chickened out).

She had just gotten her left eyebrow and tongue pierced, she wrote.

A day after, she talked of a dream she had about this new girl she was pursuing.
It was so real. . . .
Now she couldn’t stop thinking about this girl and
had
to have her. From one obsession to the next. Sarah wanted to walk up to the girl in the hallway and plant one on her.
I want her to let me love her,
Sarah wrote. Yet, she convinced herself by the end of the journal entry that it was not going to happen because the girl had just turned eighteen, and no eighteen-year-old, Sarah surmised, wanted anything to do with a sixteen-year-old whacked-out freak of nature. With all that said, she decided she
had to let her go.
She couldn’t do
it
anymore.”

For Sarah, she had made up her mind: no more pretending to be someone else—which was right where Adrianne fell into Sarah’s new view of herself.

She wrote Adrianne a two-page letter asking all sorts of personal questions that might be asked on a first date: Where you from? What’s your favorite this and that?

From there, she went on to tell Adrianne about herself.

“Sarah Boo” was one of her nicknames. Her favorite color was purple. She loved Chinese food and “Sketti-O’s and pizza w/beer.” Metal was the music Sarah adored: Coal Chamber and Otep were the two hard-core metal bands on the top of her list. She called herself “very open-minded” and “love [d] cheese,” ending,
Please write back.

Not long after, Sarah invited Adrianne on a date. She said she had an eighteen-year-old friend who was dating a fourteen-year-old girl (who basically lived at his apartment); and his roommate, a nineteen-year-old, was dating a fifteen-year-old. The apartment was near Adrianne’s house. Sarah said she was planning on going over there to hang out:
We’re prolly just gonna Drink a little and watch movies....
It was a Friday night, Sarah explained, her only day off all weekend, and she really wanted Adrianne to go with her.

26

The music was concert loud, thumping through the walls, blaring underneath the door. It was a week after Thanksgiving. Adrianne was at home in her room, singing along to “A Moment Like This” by Kelly Clarkson, her favorite tune to mimic these days. She had sung it at a talent show. Now she was planning to audition for America’s most fashionable popularity contest,
American Idol.

When Adrianne was alone, singing, those in the house “couldn’t tell if it was her or the radio,” Jo recalled. “Her dream was to make it on
American Idol.
”

Singing along to Kelly Clarkson’s megahit, driving the house crazy, was probably the best practice for Adrianne. Millions of kids dream of auditioning but don’t even come close to obtaining that yellow—“I’m going to Hollywood”—ticket, but Adrianne, her family claimed, had a serious shot at making it on the show. She was gifted. A video of Adrianne trying out for a talent show backs up this claim.

Funny, how when those familiar sounds are no longer ringing throughout the household, the silence is more piercing. More deafening and cumbersome. Those around her would have given their lives to hear Adrianne sing one more song.

“Amazing Grace” was another one of Adrianne’s songs of choice when she wanted to belt something out without musical accompaniment. It was, in a peculiar way, a strange selection for the child, considering Adrianne had lost her faith before her death.

“I’ve given up on God,” she told Jo.

“Why?”

“Look at my life.”

Adrianne didn’t think a compassionate God would allow her to live the way she had been for the past sixteen years. She didn’t see the value in believing that it was human behavior saddling her. She could, if she chose to, view each day anew and start over.

“Adrianne had been passed around a lot,” one family member said. “From place to place. Home to home.”

“When she first moved in with us,” Jo remembered, a modicum of pain and remorse in her voice, “I was doing everything I could to get her to go back to Texas. And after she went missing, well, I would have given up everything I own and have to have her back—only if God would just allow Tony to have her back.”

As much as she fought with Jo and Tony, Adrianne knew when she had messed up. In a letter she wrote to Tony, she said,
I know I’ve said it a million times, but this time I mean it. I’m sorry for saying I hate you. . . . I just get angry when you get angry with me, and that’s my fault.
She went on to add that whether she liked it or not,
from now on I am going to complete my homework.
Further along, she promised not to curse or yell in the house anymore.

I love you and I hope you love me too!
the letter concluded.

From the view of her family, Adrianne wasn’t different from many kids her own age. Struggling to break through that teen angst and attitude she often had, her bright smile shined. She had a Texan’s heart, through and through, tough as a longhorn steer, but when it came to academics, she was uninterested. Adrianne had dreams and goals, like any other kid. She talked about being a fashion designer and backed it up with sketches and doodling: trendy hats, necklaces, shoes, shirts, pants. She had a knack for designing clothes and accessories with a retro 1920s feel, but a style still grounded in today’s more contemporary and casual fashions. If she worked at it, Adrianne could have had a future in design.

When she lived with Tony and Jo during 2003 (into the winter and spring of 2004), Adrianne went to a public school. Twice, she got kicked out. Both times for fighting.

“She was tough,” Tony remembered. “She wasn’t gonna take any shit from no one.”

Because she had such an obvious Texas accent (an unmistakable, deep Southwestern
y’all
type of drawl was more like it), Adrianne got picked on. More sincerely, kids called her Tex or Texas, but there were those who mocked her tongue. It was hard for Adrianne to find her place then; she wasn’t going to back down from being called names. Bullying often led to fisticuffs.

Jo was generally the one to fetch Adrianne at school after the fights. She even defended Adrianne to school officials once, saying that the girls had jumped Adrianne and she had a right to defend herself.

Looking back, Jo admitted that she had never said those indelible words—“I love you”—to Adrianne, which is something Jo regrets. Yet, by Jo’s actions as a stepparent, it was obvious that she showed Adrianne love in taking care of her and giving her a home. Even by disciplining her. Telling her what to do. Not allowing Adrianne to treat her like she was a peer. Jo might have seemed like the clichéd wicked stepmom Disney portrays, with warts and all. However, in her own way, Jo was loving Adrianne, and Adrianne was accepting that love by fighting her. Any kid will rebel against discipline if he or she has never been subjected to it. Yet, all kids
crave
obedience or order. They view it as a sign of love. Studies claim that the more time you spend with a child, the less discipline you’ll need to expose her to. Jo, Tony, and Adrianne were somewhere in between all of this, trying to work it out—rather, trying to figure out how to make it work for them.

“We really had to keep on Adrianne’s back about school,” Jo added. “She hated it. I mean it—she
hated
school.”

As an over-the-road truck driver, a job that took him away for ten, sometimes fifteen hours per day, and put him three or four hours away from home at any time, Tony wasn’t around much. So it was left up to Jo to hold down the fort. She didn’t mind. She was there to help Adrianne, but she would not allow Adrianne to be rude, insubordinate, or step on anyone. She wanted Adrianne’s respect. And, quite honestly, she deserved it.

There were times, few as they had been, when Jo and Adrianne had bonded like mother and daughter, a place they were heading toward more frequently at the time of Adrianne’s murder. One day, they were driving to the school to go see a teacher. A car full of boys drove by.

“Oh, he’s so hot,” Adrianne remarked.

Jo would find a not-so-hot man in another car and say, “He’s hot!”

Then they’d laugh.

Leaving the school that day, when they got back into the car, Jo turned to Adrianne and said, “You can get into trouble anytime you want.”

“What?” Adrianne asked, confused.

“That teacher of yours is
hot
!”

They had a moment. Together. Jo explained that fighting was no way to respond to bullying or insults by the other kids. There were other—adult—ways to deal with it. Adrianne understood, but anger, festering inside her for all the things she felt had been done to her, was dominant. She needed help.

There were other times when Adrianne talked about joining the marines and leaving everyone, busting out on her own in the military. Then, almost in the same breath, she’d mention a boy back in Texas she loved and planned to marry one day. So, like any child trying to find his or her place in the world, Adrianne Reynolds was confused.

According to how Jo and Tony saw the situation, part of Adrianne’s deep scorn for education was born from not being pushed to succeed. After Adrianne gave up on eighth grade back in Texas, Jo said, she went to work for someone in the family “running a hot dog stand.” The family told the school system, Jo added, that they were homeschooling Adrianne at the time.

But they weren’t, Tony said. They were working together.

Carolyn Franco disagreed with this.

“She
did
work with me at the business,” Carolyn told me, “but we were trying to do homeschooling. The problem was financially, homeschooling cost so much, so I was doing my best to keep her up. I had only pulled her out of school at that point because she was refusing to go.”

Carolyn said her goal was to save the $500 she claimed it cost to enroll her in homeschooling, but while she was saving the money, there was no way she could leave Adrianne alone at home, so Carolyn ended up bringing Adrianne to work with her.

“It wasn’t a matter of her working in the family business,” Carolyn said. “It was a matter of, if she wasn’t going to go to school, she wasn’t just going to sit around the house and watch TV and sleep half the day.”

No one seemed to mind that Adrianne didn’t have an eighth-grade education. This was one of the reasons, when Adrianne moved back into her father’s house and began to get comfortable at Black Hawk Outreach as winter 2004 to 2005 settled on the QC, she had no credits for high school, both Tony and Jo thought.

Adrianne had never gone.