Too Young to Kill (23 page)

44

On January 17, 2005, Henry Orenstein got a call from Adrianne Reynolds, who sounded concerned, demanding to know what was going on at the party house.

“Hey,” Adrianne said, “Sarah called me. She said everyone at the house has chlamydia.” (Chlamydia is a sexually transmitted infection, common among those who sleep around. It is treatable with antibiotics.)

Adrianne was worried that maybe she had gotten it because she had slept with Henry Orenstein and Kory Allison.

“Don’t worry about it,” Henry assured her. “I’m clean.” It was basically Nate Gaudet who got it, he explained.

“I don’t believe you!” Adrianne snapped.

“Come on . . . ,” Henry said.

“No, no . . . I would believe Sarah over you
any
day!”

“You can fuck off then,” Henry said. “If you want to go and believe somebody who hates you, well, fuck it, go right ahead!”

Dial tone. End of the conversation.

And the friendship.

This would be the last time Henry Orenstein ever spoke to Adrianne Reynolds. She would be dead, dismembered, and buried (in two different places) within three days of this conversation.

John Beechamp worked with Adrianne at Checkers. Adrianne would approach John and complain about her hours. Checkers was not giving her enough.

“She was very cheerful, upbeat, liked to get to know people,” John remembered. “She liked to make friends. Just a regular sixteen-year-old.”

In many ways, Adrianne was ready to take on the world as one more curious teenager. John Beechamp had a girlfriend and three kids at home. He was twenty-six, a decade older. He saw part of himself in Adrianne: a rebellious, active teenager who needed to get past the next few years and realize adulthood was a hell of a lot simpler than those teen years, when it seemed no one understood how she felt.

John worked Saturdays; Adrianne generally didn’t. He asked her one afternoon, “You want to babysit for me some Saturday?”

“Sure,” Adrianne responded. She could use the extra money. But there was more to it than that. John was older. He had a family. Adrianne had always liked the idea of someone taking care of her. She didn’t care that John Beechamp was already spoken for.

“Why don’t we first have you come over to the house to meet my kids and girlfriend.”

Adrianne agreed.

“I’ll pick you up,” John offered.

It was January 19, 2005. Two days before Adrianne went missing.

“Can I bring a friend?” Adrianne asked. “His name’s Cory. He’s a guy I like.”

John didn’t care for a lot of people he didn’t know hanging around his house. He thought about it.

“I guess.”

“Can you pick him up for me?”

“Sure,” John said.

He later told police, “She had a crush on me.” Adrianne had written John Beechamp a letter disclosing her feelings. Addressing it to “babe,” she opened by saying how she was well aware of the difference in age:
But listen to what I have to say, ok?

Adrianne said how much she really liked Beechamp because he was so unlike the guys she dated. She could talk to Beechamp and relate to him in ways she couldn’t with the others.

Adrianne, however, was no dummy:
I know, for you,
she wrote,
I am jail bait.
She warned him not to lead her on by
flirting
and
asking for lap dances
while at work. It wasn’t
just about sex,
she made clear.
I’m fixing to be 17
soon and for the past few years
I’ve wanted a family and a guy who cares for me.

She mentioned future plans. If she wasn’t with a guy after she got her GED that June, she was taking off and moving back to Texas. This didn’t mean settling for some loser who would ultimately cheat on her; she wanted a man. She talked about being a legal adult in eighteen months and told John Beechamp that if they were to enter into a relationship now, she had no trouble
keep[ing] a secret that long. . . .

John later told police he tossed the letter in the garbage after reading it. He said he never flirted with Adrianne. He did, however, tell her that she looked nice, on occasion, in passing small talk, but only as a compliment. Adrianne, apparently, took the comments another way. He denied talking about having a sexual relationship with Adrianne, saying that sex was all anyone at Checkers ever talked about.

At six thirty, Wednesday night, January 19, John picked up Adrianne. Without telling her, he had begun to second-guess Adrianne’s babysitting skills. Was she going to have friends come over to his house while she was babysitting? Was she going to be partying and not watching his kids?

Maybe this was a bad idea.

John then picked up Cory, as Adrianne had suggested. But instead of taking them over to his house, he drove to a friend’s.

“We kind of just hung out,” he recalled. “Played some PlayStation.”

As far as John could tell, Cory seemed “all right, like a good guy.” He was into Insane Clown Posse and that whole Juggalo movement, John could tell by the way Cory talked and dressed. But that didn’t make him a bad dude. He and John talked about tattoos and ICP for a while.

“Random talk” was how John later framed the conversation.

As the night wore on, John noticed that Cory and Adrianne were kind of attached to each other. They held hands. Kissed. Laughed together. Acted like a couple.

“Hugged up on each other,” John told police. “They were cuddled up next to each other and very friendly. . . .”

The night concluded without any problems. John saw a different side of Adrianne. She seemed responsible.

“Can you babysit for me this Saturday?” he asked. Adrianne had reconvinced him throughout the night that she was the right person for the job.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.” Adrianne hopped out of the car and walked into her house.

John took off. As he drove, Cory announced, “I got my penis pierced.”

What a random thing to say.

“No shit.”

“Hell yeah!” Cory was proud of this achievement.

“You know Adrianne well?” John asked.

“She fucked a few of my friends,” Cory said. “She wrote me a letter telling me that I’m her boyfriend.”

“No kidding. . . .”

Cory said he wasn’t too interested in dating Adrianne, but he said, “Yeah . . . love to fuck her.”

“She told me she likes you,” John shared.

“Yeah?” Cory said.

“She doesn’t like that Sarah chick, though.”

45

He called them his “bitches,” Sarah later noted. Cory Gregory, even though she wasn’t interested, would carry on, Sarah claimed, about what he liked to do to the girls he dated. One of the bitches at this stage of Cory’s life was Adrianne. Cory was hanging out with Adrianne more than he was with anyone else. And Sarah Kolb did not like this. She felt slighted by it, in fact. As if Cory had gone and purposely defied her.

“
Dat
bitch is dippin’ in my Kool-Aid” was how Sarah put it more than once that week Adrianne went missing. Sarah was referring to Cory and a second rumor she heard about Adrianne wanting to get with Sean—a big no-no in Sarah’s rather short book of social rules.

In the eyes of his relatives, Cory Gregory had disengaged from being a normal part of the family unit seven months prior to that January. Cory was not by any means a straight-A student, polished and genteel, goal oriented and eager to take on the world as an adult. But he wasn’t the trash-talking, alcohol-abusing druggie he had turned into, family members claimed, after meeting and becoming obsessed with Sarah Kolb, who seemed to have a hold on Cory that no one could explain.

Katrina Gates, Cory’s half sister, the oldest of Cory’s siblings, was close to her brother up until that time when he stepped away from the family and into Sarah’s grasp. Katrina had moved out of the house when she was sixteen. Cory spent every other weekend with his sister, who had a daughter, Cory’s niece, similar in age.

“He didn’t have any time for his family anymore,” Katrina said, talking about that period after Cory met Sarah. “This was strange, because he used to spend [a lot of time] at my house. He was constantly here. He babysat all of my friends’ children and was just this funloving, outgoing boy who always had the cutest girlfriends.”

There was another side of Cory that Katrina began to see emerge, however.

“I kept hearing that he was doing drugs, you know, popping pills. And Cory didn’t keep it quiet.” He never tried to hide what he was doing. “He’d come over my house talking stupid all the time. Saying how he smoked weed, popped some pills, did X, acid . . . whatever.”

Cory’s sister believed the pain Cory was trying to numb with all of this behavior was rooted in the fact that he “grew up without my mom in the house.” Cory was eight when his parents divorced, an important age. This is where, psychologically speaking, Sarah fit into the mix. She filled that function as gatekeeper and authority figure for Cory, but also the feminine role, the comforter and caretaker. In Sarah, Cory found a female who could tell him what to do, when to do it, and he felt comfortable enough to accept what she said.

There were no boundary lines.

In junior high, Cory played football, had a lot of friends, and enjoyed the innocent things kids do when they’re teetering on the edge of being a teenager. It was in high school, his mother Teresa Gregory said, when Cory started to act differently.

“It was a bigger school,” Teresa Gregory recalled. “So he kind of got in with a group. They don’t know where they’re going in life or who they are—and it’s easy for a kid to fall into a group that feels the same as you do.”

Teresa soon realized Cory was smoking pot.

“I’d had a lot of problems in my life when I was younger and I didn’t want Cory to go down that road, so we would talk, you know. But there’s going to be things kids hide from their parents. No matter how much I’d like to say he told me everything, I know that is not true.”

Cory’s mother said she could tout Cory’s goodness all day long, and tell stories about the great things he did in his life. “But there are always going to be people who don’t like him—especially in this town (the QC). There are people who love Cory to death, and there are people who are going to have bad things to say about him.”

When Sarah came into the picture, Teresa said, Cory changed, not just his behavior, but his identity, and who he was on just about every level.

“If he didn’t do exactly what she said,” Teresa added, “she’d get mad and tell him she wasn’t going to be his friend anymore.”

Peer pressure. A drug in and of itself.

To illustrate how much of a pull Sarah Kolb had on her son, Teresa explained how Cory’s grandfather had once given him a little truck, which Cory adored. He drove all around town in it. When Sarah heard about this and saw Cory driving, she felt that his newfound independence would eventually come between them.

“You don’t need me anymore,” Sarah said. Cory and Sarah had always bombed around town together in Sarah’s red Prizm.

“What . . . no,” Cory answered.

“Well,” Teresa recalled, “. . . he parked that truck and
never
drove it again.”

When Sarah went to work, she expected Cory (and Sean, too, later on when he came into the picture) to wait for her inside the mall where the cinema was located until she got off her shift.

The other major thing that truly hurt Cory, his mother said, was that Cory had introduced Sean to Sarah. Then they started dating.

Katrina Gates said her brother had told her all sorts of “stupid things” she did not want to hear. One of them was that he had feelings for other males.

“Yeah,” she said, “he told me he was bisexual.”

He also told his sister he “was really into gory movies.”

The bloodier, the better.

Katrina began to realize how much of a hold Sarah had on Cory. He’d be at his sister’s house, check the time, and say, “I gotta go.... Sarah’s getting off work soon. I
have
to be there.”

“His whole world suddenly centered around Sarah. He thrived on wanting Sarah to think so highly of him, for some reason. I don’t understand why he wanted to impress her so much.”

Sarah was “quiet,” Katrina noticed, to the point that it “creeped me out.

“From the first time I met her, I didn’t care for her. You could tell that she totally controlled Cory.”

If Cory said something to his sister about where they were going, for example, and Sarah overheard, she would “glare at him,” Katrina noticed, “as if to say, ‘They are not supposed to know anything about us.’”

By January 19, 2005, the Wednesday before Adrianne went missing, Sarah had grown tired of Sean McKittrick. She wrote in her journal that she was
breaking up w/Sean soon.

Sarah gave no reason or specific episode that sparked these feelings.

What had enraged Sarah into homicidal fever, however, was a letter Adrianne had written, describing how she was still friends with Cory, and that she would still be hanging out at the party house whenever she felt like it, despite a direct order from Sarah that she was not to show up there again.

At school, Sarah heard Adrianne had passed Cory a few notes. So she devised a plan to get Adrianne into her car so she could take her out to lunch—the ruse—on that Friday afternoon, January 21, 2005. Sarah wanted to confront Adrianne about everything: Adrianne’s supposed crush on Sean, her relationship with Cory, and her place in the group.

Sarah’s only plan on that day, she later claimed, was to beat Adrianne up; give her a good old-fashioned ass whupping for all she had done, with the hope of sending her away from the group.

In her journal, on the day Adrianne disappeared, Sarah noted her disdain for Adrianne, writing that she (Sarah) might be getting expelled for what she had been doing to cause Adrianne trouble, which only infuriated Sarah more—the idea that Adrianne had ratted her out to school authorities.

Stupid bitch needs to back off my Kool-Aid!
Sarah wrote.