Too Young to Kill (20 page)

“Shut up!” Adrianne screamed. “All of you. Shut the
fuck
up!”

This brought out that different side of Sarah. She shot up from the couch and got right in Adrianne’s face.

Sarah was not smiling anymore.

“You dumb bitch!” Sarah yelled. “You fucking
dumb,
stupid bitch.
You
shut up!”

“Fuck you, Sarah,” Adrianne said.

The others were screaming, encouraging Sarah. Chanting. Laughing.

“Fight. Fight.”

“I’m going to kill you, bitch,” Sarah said through clenched teeth.

Adrianne was scared of Sarah, some claimed. “But she wasn’t standing down from her that day. She stood nose to nose with Sarah.”

“Why, Sarah?
Why
are you doing this to me?” Adrianne wanted to know. “I thought we were friends. Why?”

“I am going to beat your ass, bitch.” Sarah refused to answer Adrianne’s questions.

“Why?” Adrianne asked again.

“I am going to fucking kill you!” Sarah said.

Henry stepped in. “Come on. . . .” He grabbed Adrianne. “I’m going to get you a ride home.”

“I’ll kill you,” Sarah kept repeating, although she didn’t swing at Adrianne or attack her in any way. Sarah Kolb was, for the time being, all talk.

Adrianne wanted out of the house.

Sarah walked over to Adrianne as she left. She took out that knife she always carried and started to open and close it, over and over. Slowly. Threateningly.

“You shouldn’t fuck with me,” Sarah said in a low voice a number of times as she stared at the knife.

Adrianne cried.

Jill went to console Adrianne, but Sarah put up a stiff arm, like a traffic cop. “Don’t you talk to her.”

Jill backed off.

Henry drove Adrianne home. All the way there, she kept asking why they all hated her so much. What had she done?

“I’ll talk to them,” Henry said.

Before dropping Adrianne off, up the street from her house so no one would see him, he made plans to hang out with Adrianne again.

Later, when Sarah Kolb was asked about this period during her relationship with Adrianne, she brushed it off as nothing more than a girl beginning to see the true colors of someone she had wanted to be friends with and possibly date.

Turned out, Sarah explained, she didn’t like what she saw.

Sarah framed her argument with zero culpability in the fact that a group of teenagers was bullying a peer. Nor did she admit how she had set the entire situation up, for no other reason, apparently, than they were all bored with the drugs, drinking, and Juggalo life they had chosen.

Sarah said after she had left the house that first night, when Adrianne had taken off and slept with Kory Allison, she made several realizations.

“The conclusion was,” Sarah said in court, “that I didn’t want a future with Adrianne Reynolds.”

But yet she continued to call her—or have someone else do it—and harass the girl, which she left out when talking about this period under her lawyer’s questioning.

Sarah said she “had not formed a good opinion of” Adrianne after that first night. But Adrianne, even after the second time at the house (when she slept with Henry), kept calling her cell number.

“Every day,” Sarah said, referring to the calls, as if to imply it was the reason why she stayed engaged in the situation.

Adrianne could not walk away from a circumstance in which a group of kids who did not like her had given her no reason why. Adrianne needed answers. Which was why she continued to call Sarah.

At school, Adrianne also continued to pass Sarah notes.

“I refused to take the notes from her,” Sarah said.

This gave Sarah that power she craved. She had it over Cory Gregory, and now she knew she had it over Adrianne, too. Sarah was calling the shots. As long as Adrianne didn’t know why they hated her, Sarah knew Adrianne would keep crawling back.

38

By the middle of December 2004, living life under a cloud of doubt and question, Adrianne Reynolds still couldn’t figure out why her new friends were treating her so poorly.

Part of it, Cory Gregory later told NBC, was Sarah Kolb feeling threatened by Adrianne’s presence in the group. Sarah struggled to maintain a position of “I’m number one.” And it was clear to Sarah, Cory suggested, that Adrianne had the potential to take that role away from her. “After that first day at the party,” Cory added, “they fought every single day I seen them since. Sarah would make her cry.”

Adrianne, however, continued to reach out to other friends at Black Hawk Outreach and maintain relationships. She wasn’t entirely broken by Sarah’s taunting—either that or she never let on she was. On December 14, 2004, Adrianne passed notes with a classmate, ruminating about her dream of becoming a country singer. She saw herself working hard toward this goal. She would get over any “nerves” of being on stage, Adrianne said,
Because I want . . . I want people to like me.

On December 15, Adrianne wrote a note to Sarah:
How come you don’t talk to me?

Two weeks later, Adrianne was telling Sarah she had been going out of her way
not
to be her friend and it was upsetting.

But again, this only gave Sarah more power to control the situation.

By the end of December, Adrianne confided in her stepmother.

“I’m scared,” Adrianne told Jo.

“Scared?”

“Yeah. They’re all threatening me and bad-mouthing me at school.”

By this time, Sarah was talking to Adrianne again, if only sporadically, telling Adrianne, hoping to convince her, that the only way out of it all was to slit her wrists.

Commit suicide.

“It was Sarah running all of this,” Jo said later. “She was the one scaring Adrianne and threatening her more than anyone else.”

Even after all Sarah had done to Adrianne, Adrianne wanted to give her the benefit of being friends. She sent Sarah a note near Christmas, saying, in part:
I wanted a chance for us to start over again and to at least be friends. . . .

In another note, Adrianne asked,
Why do you hate me so much?

Then,
Why do you want me to die?

Sarah responded by continuing to barrage Adrianne with name-calling and insults, and by ignoring Adrianne. Sarah and several family members were celebrating her mother’s birthday at the local IHOP one night in late December. They were eating and talking when Sarah looked down and saw that her cell phone was buzzing.

It was Adrianne.

“Give me a minute,” Sarah told her dinner guests.

“What do you want?” she asked Adrianne.

Adrianne said she was hoping to talk about things. “Why are you hating on me?”

“I’ll call you back. I’m busy.”

Sarah never did.

39

Adrianne started to see a counselor at school in a group therapy setting. According to the counselor’s notes, Adrianne—being the talkative person she had always been—shared regularly with the group and had no trouble opening up about things. Equally apparent, however, was that she did not let the group know about the trouble she was having with Sarah and the rest of the Juggalo gang.

Adrianne had a sense of where her life was headed. In her journal, she drew a picture of a cross and wrote
die
on the right-hand side of the upper arm. Underneath it, she wrote:
Death awaits you,
and signed her name.

Her birth surname was Gary. In that same notebook /journal, she dedicated a page to “Gangsta Baby,” writing her name as
Adrianne Leigh Gary.
Then there was the saying she often scribbled:
Fly high or die.

A page later,
How come you don’t like me anymore?
she asked, referring, it appears, to Cory Gregory. She couldn’t understand why everyone was
playing head games
with her, especially Cory. What had she ever done to him?
It hurts.

The consummate doodler, Adrianne liked to draw pictures of crosses, roses, and hearts, with words inscribed, like tattoos.
Most guys aren’t worth it,
she sketched on a page of her journal, then drew a heart with an arrow—dripping blood—through it.

Most girls aren’t, either,
she wrote underneath.

On another page, Adrianne wrote out a numbers game she liked to play when she was bored. The words she used in the game were “Hard Sex” and “True Love.” She would determine the number of letters in the names of the people corresponding to those two-word phrases. Adrianne chose Brad Tobias and Cory Gregory. She added up the totals for each, and then multiplied those numbers to determine a percentage. That percentage of both words added together determined the compatibility of the two people. It sounded as confusing as it looked on the page, but it was something Adrianne liked to do. When she completed the game for Cory Gregory’s name, Adrianne came up with 92 percent, which meant, as sex partners, Adrianne and Cory, according to the numbers, fit together perfectly.

Whatever,
she wrote underneath the results.

The book was filled with the insecurities Adrianne felt. She wanted to be accepted:
Everybody ♥’s Adrianne (Pinkie),
she wrote on the top of one page.

Adrianne was insightful when writing short comments that sounded like sayings you might have heard before:

My life is my sacrifice.

Underneath that saying, she drew a pentagram with an upside-down cross inside it.

It’s wonderful, but confusing,
she doodled on a page, perhaps talking about her life as her friendships with Cory and Sarah were falling apart.

Adrianne wrote Sarah another letter. In all of her missives, Adrianne addressed the recipient at the top/center of the page. Giving Sarah a direct message, next to Sarah’s name, Adrianne drew a devil’s pitchfork heading into a heart. Sarah was her Lucifer, quite obviously, piercing those feelings of inadequacy pent up inside Adrianne. Yet, Adrianne always seemed to be willing to forgive.

Hey chick,
Adrianne began,
waz up? . . . Juss chillin’ in class.
She said she was hungry and tired and was wondering
how come you don’t talk to me? Honestly, this weekend, I am going to have to find something to do.
But she hadn’t yet figured out what to do as of yet.
Was just wondering why you haven’t wrote and what not.... See ya, hottie! P.S. Hit me back!

It had been almost two weeks since Cory Gregory sat on the edge of Nate Gaudet’s bed and said he wanted to kill Adrianne. In her journal, Adrianne dedicated a page to Cory:
PINKIE-N-CORY,
she sketched out in the middle. (“Pinkie” was another nickname for Adrianne.)
I love Cory Gregory,
she added,
because he’s respectful, cute, nice, honest, and the sweetest guy I’ve ever met, and I think I’m beginning to trust him.

On that same day, during group therapy, Adrianne’s counselor wrote a note detailing how Adrianne had
expressed a lot about violence . . . [and] shared with the class the experience her family has had with violence and why she thinks that happens.

The next week, closer now to Christmas, was consumed with doubt and wonder for Adrianne. Sarah Kolb would not speak to Adrianne, who was at her wit’s end over the situation. She’d reached out to Sarah time and again, and Sarah wanted nothing to do with her. Sarah failed to return her calls or write back.

Then Adrianne sat down one morning and wrote Sarah a long letter, this time laying everything out in the open. There was no way Adrianne could walk away from the relationship knowing that another person hated her guts. There was no doubt in Adrianne’s mind that Sarah did, in fact, despise her in a way Adrianne had not experienced.

Adrianne opened the letter by saying how she had been talking to Henry Orenstein and he had gotten the story from Cory Gregory that Sarah had set Adrianne up that first night she went over to the party house.

The cat was out of the bag.

Adrianne called the sex she had with Kory Allison the “excuse” Sarah had invented in order to break off the friendship they had started. Adrianne was calling Sarah Kolb on her little scheme, writing: