Too Young to Kill (30 page)

By noon, they had recovered half of Adrianne’s burned and charred torso from the hole, along with the other half, and one of her legs. They laid the body parts out on what looked to be a dark blue body bag unzipped and spread open. It was a strangely sad and peculiar staged scene of what looked to be props from a Hollywood movie set. Adrianne’s right leg, its foot and toes entirely intact and clearly distinguishable, was the most chilling, recognizable body part of the lot. Here was this teen’s leg and foot, dismembered at about the middle of the thigh, sitting next to two chunks of blackened flesh, with very little skin left—all that was left, besides a severed head and arms, of a young life.

As the cameraman zoomed in and out, focusing for a period of time on each individual body part, a horrific understanding arose from the images juxtaposed against other parts that seemed entirely foreign. It was clear, for example, exactly where Nate Gaudet—a name cops had not yet heard as being connected to this case—had sawed off the bone on Adrianne’s torso/hip. This video, with all of its low-tech, grainy, shocking imagery, depicted the horror these kids had perpetrated. When a jury had the chance to view the video, it was going to be all over for Sarah and Cory.

With Adrianne’s body recovered and Cory in custody (still talking), it was time to bring in Sarah Kolb.

Over a twenty-four-hour period, the investigation had yielded several new developments. The EMPD had obtained a search warrant for Sarah Kolb’s car and had found
1 strand of hair from the passenger side
and
1 piece of fabric from the front passenger side seat—[along with a] possible blood stain.
Investigators had spoken to twelve more witnesses who knew Sarah from Black Hawk Outreach, each giving cops one more piece to fit into a puzzle that was beginning to form the clear picture of an arrest warrant with Sarah’s name on the top.

Investigators had interviewed Brian Engle, Sarah’s grandfather, for a second time, on January 26, 2005.

“I spoke to Sarah,” he said. The conversation had taken place earlier on that same day.

“And? . . .”

Brian didn’t seem as though he wanted to talk. He said begrudgingly, “Well, she told me she is going to ‘take care of it’ all.” She was crying, he added. It appeared Sarah was in the process of coming forward and speaking about her role in the tragedy. “She and her mom are looking for a new attorney.” The first attorney they had spoken to did not want to take the case.

“Can you tell us anything else, Mr. Engle?”

The guy knew more. Cops were certain of it.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t want my daughter to hate me. Whatever Sarah has to say will come from Sarah. She is meeting with a new attorney soon and will be going to the police station. You’ll know soon enough.”

“Has she ever told you anything about this?”

“No. Never. She has never said anything incriminating. And even if she did,” the farmer added, “I would not tell you guys.”

“It’s vitally important for you to continue to cooperate with us. As the head of your household,” the investigator said meaningfully, trying to twist the grandfather’s arm a bit, “you should not be putting yourself in jeopardy by withholding evidence or information. Whatever Sarah did should rest on
her
shoulders.”

Brian thought about the cop’s quasi-threatening statement.

“I’ll call you if anything new comes up.”

59

Jill Hiers took a call from Pat Corbin, Nate Gaudet’s grandmother, several days after Adrianne disappeared, she explained to the ISP, when two troopers interviewed her on January 26, 2005.

“Nate’s mother was also on the call,” Jill told police.

Both Nate’s grandmother and mother, Jill told police, told her during that phone call that “Sarah killed that girl.”

Jill explained how odd Nate had been acting and how he was wearing that trench coat on January 23, the day she picked him up at his grandmother’s house. In not so many words, Jill tried to ask the women during the call if perhaps Nate was also involved in Adrianne’s murder.

They didn’t want to hear anything about it.

Jill told the women she was calling Nate at work and asking him point-blank what the hell was going on.

The call ended.

Nate had an eerie ringtone. He looked down at his cell, that strange music playing, and saw that it was Jill calling him.

“What?”

“Tell me what happened,” Jill stated.

“Sarah did it!” Nate said. “Cory didn’t.”

“How . . . what . . . You have to tell the police what you know.”

“Sarah killed Adrianne. She was mad and jealous of her. Adrianne had a thing for Cory and Sean.”

“What happened?”

“Sarah reached into the backseat and began choking Adrianne by the neck . . . and then . . . well, then Cory finished her off with a belt.”

Nate went on to say Sarah and Cory were the only two in the car when this occurred. He told Jill that Sean had exited the vehicle and walked back to school by then. Sean McKittrick was not involved.

Jill couldn’t believe what Nate was telling her.

“Sarah carried her out of the car,” Nate continued, “put her in the trunk, and then took her out and burned her.”

Jill had a feeling there was more. She implored Nate to keep talking.

“Last Sunday,” Nate explained, “Sarah and Cory called me to see if I wanted to go paintballing with them. They told me to bring a saw to cut some wood for targets. They were playing mind games with me. When we arrived to where we were supposed to be playing paintball, I saw something covered in a tarp. Cory and Sarah kept asking me, ‘Do you believe we could kill someone? Do you think you could kill someone?’”

“Nate . . . ,” Jill said. “You
have
to go to the police.”

“There’s more. Sarah asked me, ‘Do you think we have a body under there? Do you believe us if we told you there was a dead body under there?’ Then I saw the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my life. They removed the tarp and no one spoke. She was burned! We lit her on fire again.”

As they stood watching the fire sizzle out, Nate explained to Jill, “I asked them, ‘Is this why you wanted me to bring the saw?’ And they just kept telling me to ‘do it, do it, do it.’”

Nate did not need to be told; he knew what Sarah and Cory meant by “do it.”

Cut Adrianne into pieces.

“Why did you do this, Nate?” Jill asked. She was appalled. Scared. Worried. Confused. Her boyfriend, she had just realized, had dismembered another human being.

“They told me to” was all Nate could say.

By the end of the conversation, Nate told Jill that “Cory and Sarah had planned the whole thing at school” on the morning of the murder.

Premeditation all the way.

On the afternoon of January 26, Sarah Kolb was arrested and charged with Adrianne Reynolds’s murder.

Then Sean McKittrick was hauled in. Booked. And questioned.

The local media went into a frenzied state. Reports buzzed that four teens had been arrested for murdering and dismembering a peer.

Detective Brian Foltz took a call late that afternoon from Tom Kolb, Sarah’s father—that is, Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Kolb. The guy was a law enforcement officer in Idaho. He said his ex-wife, Sarah’s mother, had called to tell him what was going on. It was the first he had heard his daughter was in custody and under arrest.

“Why has my daughter been arrested?” Deputy Kolb wanted to know.

Foltz explained the murder charges. “I cannot discuss any details of the case, however.”

Tom Kolb left his phone number.

ISP case agent Mike Scheckel stopped by Nate Gaudet’s place of work and approached the gawky, skinny Juggalo as the sun set that same night. The state police acted on a tip from one of Nate’s family members, who found “a bloody saw” in the basement of her house.

Nate looked nervous, twitchy. Ready to crack.

“I need to talk to you, Nate.”

“Yeah.”

“Your mother and grandmother asked me to come and get you, take you back to your grandmother’s house so I can interview you.”

Nate dropped his shoulders, looked toward the ground. (“I knew I was going to jail,” he later said when describing this moment.)

“You know why I need to speak with you, Nate?” Scheckel asked.

“Yes, I do,” Nate answered.

Nate wore that dark-colored, wool winter cap and a black T-shirt. He sat slouched deep into the cushion of his grandmother’s couch in the living room; old-school walnut paneling comprised the backdrop. Nate had his hands folded in front of him. He stared into the camera as though he was getting ready to talk about himself for a singles video.

Yet the look on Nate’s face told another story. This kid was scared shitless. A boy in a man’s world. The jig was up.

Nate knew it.

For the first several minutes of the interview (with two investigators who did not know Sarah and Cory’s names until Nate told them), Nate Gaudet talked about how he met Sarah through Cory and how they started to hang out together. He said he did not know Adrianne well and had only been enrolled at Black Hawk four days when she disappeared.

“Who strangled [Adrianne Reynolds]?” was the question of the hour. Did Nate know who—Cory, Sarah, or both—carried out the murder? This was the central focus for cops. They had two different versions of what had happened.

“Sarah strangled her,” Nate said.

“How did she strangle her?”

“With her hands.”

“She use anything else?”

“On the way, they put a belt around her neck.”

“Who put the belt around her neck?”

“Cory.”

“What did that belt look like?”

“Black, with holes in it.”

“Did you see the belt?”

“Yup.”

“Where was it?”

“In [Sarah’s] car.”

“Okay, what happened next?”

“Me and Cory,” Nate said, using his hands to explain, pointing down at his palm at times, gesturing and waving his hands in the air at others, “chopped up the body.”

“Chopped it up? With what?”

“A saw.”

“Did you ‘chop’ it, or did you ‘saw’ it?”

“Sawed the bone,” Nate remarked with a patronizing tone, as if to say,
Come on, dude, how does one chop a bone with a saw?

“What parts of the body did you saw?”

“The head and the arms.”

“What parts of the body did Cory saw?”

“The legs.”

Nate answered several questions about Sarah and Cory and the day he spent with them. He gave all the names of those inside the party house who knew Sarah and Cory. Then one of the investigators asked, “When did you cut the body up?”

“Saturday,” Nate said. As he turned his head and the investigator asked him to be more specific about times and what had happened, a loud wail came from the background. It was a woman’s cry, presumably Nate’s mother or grandmother, who, for the first time, had learned what Nate had done. As Nate described in more graphic detail the time and place of the dismemberment, the woman continued to weep in animated, loud tones. Listening to this, one gets a sense of how many people this gruesome crime was in the midst of affecting—a ripple effect that would continue to grow as the days, months, and years passed.

“So you cut the body up on Saturday,” the detective said over a tremendous moan, with the woman now adding between sobs, “Oh, my God. . . . Oh, my God. . . . No . . . no.... Oh, my God.”

The investigators wanted to know why Sarah chose to bury Adrianne’s head and arms in the park.

“I don’t know.”

“Why’d you decide to help them?”

Nate did not hesitate to answer this question: “’Cause they’re my friends. . . .”

It was, in the scope of what these kids had done, a cold response drowned out by a wailing woman, crying hysterically, while chanting loudly, “Oh, my God. . . . Oh, my God. . . . No, no. . . .” Police officers had just asked a seventeen-year-old boy why he dismembered a teen peer he barely knew with a hacksaw, and the only answer he could come up with was “’Cause they’re my friends.”

60

It was thirteen degrees on the morning of January 27, 2005, when Dr. Jessica Bowman got into her car and drove to work. The sun shined bright on this day, but the air was bitterly crisp and cold, the high for the day predicted to be no more than twenty-six degrees.

There were two red body bags wrapped in white sheets waiting in the cooler inside Bowman’s autopsy suite—both contained the remains of Adrianne Reynolds. The autopsy of Adrianne’s body parts was performed at the Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, Illinois, a three-hour drive south of the QC. Bowman began the autopsy at 10:30
A.M.
Beyond her normal duties of logging an official report for the state, the pathologist was in search of a cause of death, which would give law enforcement the advantage when continuing to talk to Cory, Sarah, Sean, and now Nate Gaudet. If they knew
how
Adrianne was murdered, that information could help in determining
who
committed the crime.

Bowman, with medical licenses in five different states, was able to cut open and explore the inside of Adrianne’s lungs, where she uncovered no sign of “soot in the airways.”