Too Young to Kill (32 page)

The Prizm inspection took place inside the East Moline City Maintenance building on Tenth Street. EMPD detective Jeff Ramsey was there waiting for the two CSI techs; he filled both men in on what they had thus far.

Mud was uncovered inside the trunk of Sarah’s car, an area of the vehicle that smelled potently of gasoline. The interior of the car was filthy: clothing, books, fast-food containers, food wrappers, and personal items scattered all over the floorboards. Searching through this mess, Hatfield sprayed luminol on the seats, carpet, floorboards, dashboard, and windows; then he took a “forensic light” and ran it over the same areas to see what he could find.

The search yielded very little blood or trace evidence—only that one swath of carpet, which was reported earlier.

Terronez got his hands on a report regarding the contents of the black garbage bag found at Black Hawk State Historic Site, which had been looked at under close forensic examination in the lab. Investigators were confident that they found many different things that could ultimately help Jeff Terronez and the state’s attorney’s office. Yet, the most incredible piece of evidence to come out of that bag was Adrianne’s body parts themselves, along with the way in which they had been uncovered.

Surreal did not begin to describe how gruesome this part of the investigation became.
Examining the contents of the bag,
a report filed by the ISP indicated,
revealed the victim’s severed head and two severed arms, with hands attached to the arms. The skin of the victim appeared to have been burned. A melted blue, plastic-like material was observed on the remains. A red ring on the victim’s right index finger and several earrings in the victim’s ears were also observed. A small chain-like bracelet was observed on the victim’s right wrist.

Terronez had to realize that once a jury got a chance to hear this evidence, with nothing else added to it, the appalling reality alone was going to be hard for them not to feel for the family and convict Adrianne’s murderer or murderers. The key was to build a circumstantial case around the results of this horrifying crime and the forensic and pathological evidence. The idea was to lead jurors in the direction of the horrendous events by building up the blocks of the relationship among Cory, Sarah, and Adrianne.

A major part of the court case was proving that the ringleader and true motivator behind Adrianne’s murder was Sarah Kolb. Still, Terronez needed Cory Gregory to convict Sarah; and, conversely, Sarah to convict Cory.

Or did he?

The RICSAO had Nate Gaudet, who was in no position to bargain. Nate’s testimony would prove pivotal and, probably, the most important in terms of the after-the-fact argument. But the real mystery was the relationship between Cory and Sarah. How would those two respond to each other in court?

As the investigation continued into the weekend of January 30, 2005, a key piece of evidence emerged. It was the work of a concerned citizen, a guy whose daughter had told him something he thought might have the potential to solve the case.

Bill Hodges (pseudonym) called the EMPD and explained that his daughter had handed him a composition book. “A female friend of hers at school,” Hodges said, “gave her the book and told her to get rid of it.”

Hodges met with a cop inside the parking lot of a local McDonald’s. It was 1:40
P.M.
when Hodges stepped into the cop’s cruiser and explained that his daughter had just called him. “She was very upset” because she had Sarah Kolb’s notebook/journal from school, which another girl, Jennifer Fox (pseudonym), had placed in her book bag and told her to get rid of immediately. Hodges’s daughter was afraid she was somehow now involved.

She wasn’t, of course, but the EMPD needed that notebook. The cop asked if Hodges knew the contents.

“My daughter asked the girl what was in the book,” Hodges said. “[Jennifer] replied, ‘It’s Sarah’s diary, and it says things in it bad about Sarah killing Adrianne.’ My daughter told me that this girl wanted her to destroy the book.” There was even some indication, Hodges added, that kids at school had made threats against his daughter, saying that if she didn’t do what she was told, she would end up like Adrianne.

“Where is the book?”

“I have it . . . and I didn’t understand the significance of the book until I read it myself.”

According to a police report detailing this tip, Jennifer “approached” Hodges’s daughter on January 31 and asked her if she had destroyed the book.

“No,” Hodges’s daughter told Jennifer. “I gave it to my father.”

Jennifer “Jenn” Fox, a classmate of Sarah’s, had a slightly different story to tell. Sarah had given Jennifer rides home from school on occasion, with Sean McKittrick and Cory Gregory tagging along.

“Honestly,” Jenn said later, “Sarah was so nice. I couldn’t even believe what happened. She was the sweetest girl ever! This thing blindsided me. I didn’t believe it until she was [later prosecuted].”

One of the reasons why Sarah had insisted on giving Jenn rides was because Sarah told Jenn it was “too dangerous” for her “to walk home from school” by herself. It’s also safe to say that Sarah might have been trying to get with Jenn.

Still, there was some genuine friendship and concern there on Sarah’s part, Jenn insisted.

“She knew that I liked girls,” Jenn said, “but I don’t think that was ever the issue here with us. She never pressed anything toward me that way. She never hit on me, or anything.”

Sarah hated that Jenn rode the bus home; but, more interesting, Sarah equally hated that the guy Jenn was with would, in her words, “make her” ride the bus. Sarah, it is clear, had this strange love-hate feeling where guys were concerned: she didn’t think many guys valued the affections of a female, and she did everything in her power to see that she took care of the girls she liked, either romantically or on a friendship level.

Sarah was always quiet about her family history in front of Jenn. The reputation Sarah had, according to Jenn, was that of a tough girl. Jenn described inside the school was not a lot different than how others spoke about it: the school was made up of “misfits,” she said. “You had your little groups—the Mexican group, who spoke Spanish in class all the time. Then you have the blacks. Then you had the freaky kids, those Juggalos, and then there were a few of us who didn’t fit in anywhere.

“Very segregated,” Jenn commented. “You messed with one, you messed with all of them.”

When Jenn heard about Sarah’s arrest, she thought of the journals they were asked to write in every morning and figured the journal would hurt her friend. She didn’t take the notebook to cause trouble, but more out of her loyalty to Sarah and belief in her innocence. Jenn knew where Sarah’s journal was all the time, because Sarah was always asking her to put it away.

“So I went in there, took it out, looked at it, and realized it said something about how Adrianne was messing with Cory and that was her ‘Kool-Aid,’ and that she shouldn’t be messing with him and that she was going to kill her for it.”

But after reading it, Jenn took it a different way. Sarah was pissed off, she thought, that this girl wanted to “get with” Cory. How many kids in school say “I’ll kill you” or “I’ll kill her,” and so on, every day?

“I didn’t take it as though she was going to ‘kill her.’ I believed Sarah was going to beat her up.”

As Jenn was reading the journal, a friend looking over her shoulder said, “You should rip that page out!”

“I ain’t ripping out nuttin’,” Jenn remarked.

“Take it home then. . . .”

I’ll take it home,
Jenn thought,
and if they ask for it, I’ll give it to them.

After police spoke to Hodges, three detectives knocked on Jenn’s door.

“We heard you have a journal,” one of them said.

“Ah, like, yeah.”

They wanted to come in.

“And proceeded to ask me a zillion questions about Sarah and if I was there [when Adrianne was killed]. They wanted to know why I wasn’t at school that day [Adrianne was murdered].”

Jenn told them she wasn’t at school because she didn’t feel like going.

“One of the detectives had been [talking to me] weeks before about some other stuff.”

They kept, Jenn insisted, “trying to drill me, and I didn’t know anything.”

Jenn did not even know Adrianne. “And Sarah,” she said, “never talked about her to me.”

The detectives explained that the RICSAO would be in touch. Jenn would have to testify if Sarah’s and Cory’s cases went to trial.

62

Joanne Reynolds did not want to go, but Tony insisted. Anything, Tony felt, but sit around the house and ask himself why, stare out the windows and wonder, think about what he did wrong, see Adrianne’s face and feel her presence anywhere he turned inside the house.

So they piled into Tony’s vehicle and headed out.

It was Saturday night, January 29, now a week and a day after Adrianne’s murder. There was a candlelight vigil inside Black Hawk State Historic Site, close to the spot where Adrianne’s head and arms were recovered. It was, of course, slated to be a moment of reflection. Emotions in the QC were raw. Teens didn’t know how to feel. Members of this otherwise calm farming community in Middle America had committed a ghastly act of evil, and people were trying to figure how this could have happened and why. It wasn’t as though some random killer had stumbled into the QC, picked Adrianne, and took her life. She was murdered by her peers. Shocking. Alarming. Sure. But more than any of that, the murder was a brutal reality check, letting the community know that times had changed, innocence was gone.

Among the approximately one hundred mourners standing, holding photos of Adrianne, were about fifty members of the Quad City Juggalos. The local newspapers reported that Adrianne—along with Cory and Sarah—were “members” of the group, but Adrianne was certainly no Juggalette. The vigil, in fact, had been organized by the local Juggalos, specifically a twenty-five-year-old guy who, the newspaper reported, “never knew Ms. Reynolds.” The man told reporters that although he had never met Adrianne, he considered her “family” because she was a Juggalette.

Tony and Jo believed the Juggalos were “supportive” during their time of mourning. They respected that some of them were reaching out to extend a hand of love. They were saying, with this vigil, that they were sorry. This wasn’t a crime perpetrated by what Juggalos represented. It was important to them to get that sentiment across to Jo, Tony, and the media.

Jo and Tony walked out into the snow-covered area where everyone was gathered. As she stood in silence, Jo looked on the ground and found “some burned-up papers,” and not knowing all the facts of the case, she believed that on the spot where she and Tony now stood mourning Adrianne was the actual crime scene where Adrianne’s body was burned.

Jo felt sick.

“This was all like a puzzle,” Jo recalled, talking about those early days when police weren’t telling them much. “We found out a little at a time.”

Jo and Tony had received a letter from an unnamed Juggalo who wanted to say how sorry he was about what had happened. He said he liked Adrianne, had dated her, and cared about her as a person. The Juggalo wrote that Adrianne was a
sweet girl who did not deserve any of this.
He said he wished he
could have been more of a friend to her,
apologized for her death, said he was praying for her family, and knew Adrianne
was in heaven with the other angels.

The letter was signed
anon.

“Who sent us the letter?” Jo asked as she and Tony stood among the crowd of mourners, candles burning.

No one answered at first.

“I did,” said a teen, who stepped forward out of the crowd.

It was Henry Orenstein.

“Thank you for your letter,” Jo said.

“I am a Juggalo,” Henry said. “But I never wanted Adrianne to die. I liked her a lot.”

Everyone had white candles. Tony and Jo held pink candles in honor of Adrianne’s favorite color.

The QC Juggalos opined to the
Dispatch
newspaper that “they joined the group [became Juggalos] because they didn’t fit in anywhere else.”

There they stood at the vigil, wearing Insane Clown Posse T-shirts and hockey and football jerseys, very few of whom donned greasepaint on this night, staring down at an excess of candles on the ground, which burned a bright orange glow in their faces. The self-pronounced spokesperson for the Juggalos made an interesting point in speaking to
Dispatch
reporter Kristina Gleeson, explaining that in high school there were groups of kids, the jocks, geeks, preppies, druggies, etc., but those “left over” were the Juggalos.

Part of the idea in having the vigil, the Juggalo spokesperson told Gleeson, was to let those kids in the community know that if “they hear someone say they’re going to hurt someone else, they need to tell an outsider.”

It was a gesture across the aisle, a way for this group to say:
Don’t judge us
all
by the actions of a few.

Some of the Juggalos at the vigil insisted that Insane Clown Posse’s songs inspired them to put their salvation in God, citing an Insane Clown Posse lyric that spoke of God’s calling as a “carnival” and that “all Juggalos” needed to “find Him.”

In all fairness to reality, however, it would be hard to bookend this type of argument around a band whose core “artistic” function (if you’ll allow me the gross use of the term in accordance with ICP) as “artists”—again, using
this
term very loosely—is to pen songs about killing and maiming and drinking and sex. One need only to Google the lyrics for a song called “Cotton Candy” to be schooled in the idea that no matter what the Juggalo movement says about Insane Clown Posse’s integrity as songwriters, it becomes clear that God is as far removed from this band’s set of inherent values as is any moral fiber whatsoever.

At the end of the vigil, mourners stuck their candles in the snow like on top of a birthday cake and left the park in silence.