Too Young to Kill (40 page)

“Yes, I was scared.”

“So under those circumstances, ma’am, when you were scared, you came up with a story that wasn’t quite truthful, correct?”

“Correct.”

“You’re here in front of this jury. In a matter of days, they’re going to be deciding whether you’re guilty or not guilty of first-degree murder. You heard a lot of testimony in this evidence. You’ve heard what people have had to say to this jury. Are you scared now?”

“Yes, I am. Is there a reason why I shouldn’t be?”

The judge intervened. “You don’t answer a question with asking a question, Miss Kolb.”

Sarah cracked a smile. Then: “It’s the truth,” she said.

“I am
not
going to instruct you again!” the judge warned.

Jeff Terronez and Sarah Kolb went back and forth for a time, heatedly discussing certain aspects of the case. Sarah was determined not to give Terronez an inch. She disagreed with him—as he did with her—on just about everything. It became tiresome. The facts of the case had spoken. Terronez had done a respectable job in that regard. But now, he was trying to force a square peg into a round hole—and it wasn’t budging. If his goal was to get Sarah to make an admission, or catch her lying,
good luck.

“You grabbed hold of her, didn’t you?” Terronez asked Sarah.

“Yes, I did.”

“Told her to stay away from all of you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then Cory took it upon himself to do what he did?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“You were there, ma’am. I am asking you.”

“Okay, yes.”

“Without any instruction, without any input from you?”

“Yes.”

“Even though all of these witnesses said that you had reason to hate her, you were just a bystander?”

“Yes.”

“Even though all these witnesses testified that you took part in it, you were a bystander?”

“Yes.”

“You said that
Cory
punched you in the nose and caused it to bleed in the car?”

“That’s correct.”

“And that you had to get a napkin and try to stop the bleeding.”

“Yes.”

Where was SA Jeff Terronez going? The gallery was waiting for a punch line that never seemed to come. In fact, after a few more questions, Terronez switched subjects entirely, asking Sarah about the dynamics of the relationship she had with Cory Gregory and how angry she was that Cory and Adrianne had entered into a friendship.

Sarah would not agree.

Then Terronez asked Sarah how she felt about Adrianne Reynolds having sex with Henry Orenstein and Kory Allison.

For what seemed like the umpteenth time, Sarah said she was “upset.”

So Terronez asked if Adrianne had called her a slut.

No.

Had Adrianne hit her?

No.

Had Cory held Adrianne’s arms down while Sarah choked her.

No.

“So when Nate Gaudet says you told him all those things—he is incorrect?”

“Yes, he is.”

Terronez’s big moment came when he asked Sarah to read the final journal entry she had made. She had written about being expelled
for spreading the fucking Jiffy
and calling Adrianne a
stupid bitch
and telling her to
back off my Kool-Aid.
Sarah had no choice but to finish reading the entry, telling jurors how she would
fucking kill her.

“That was written the day she died, correct?”

“Yes, it was.”

“So when all these people say that on the same day you told them you would kill her, or that you
wanted
to kill her, or that you were
going
to kill her, they’re
all
incorrect?”

“Yes,” Sarah repeated. “They’re all incorrect.”

“But you cannot deny that assertion from January twenty-first in your journal entry, correct?”

“Correct.”

“I have no further questions, Your Honor.”

David Hoffman stood and asked Sarah Kolb several questions on redirect that, in the scope of things, didn’t amount to squat. It felt as if Hoffman was fulfilling a duty rather than truly getting to something that could help Sarah.

All told, Sarah’s testimony did not go that bad. She stayed her ground. Never broke. And sounded as though she believed herself. The arguing she did back and forth with Jeff Terronez was more a reflection on the state’s attorney.

On recross, Terronez seemed to backpedal somewhat.

“Miss Kolb, prior to January twenty-first, Adrianne Reynolds had made you angry?”

“Yes, she did.”

“She made you angry again in the car when she talked about Sean?”

“Yes, she did.”

“She gave you a smug look and you felt insulted?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you did nothing about it?”

“I grabbed her by the hair.”

“And that was [the] extent of it?”

“I . . . uh . . . yelled at her.”

“Nothing more physical?”

“No.”

“Cory took over from there?”

“After Sean got out of the car, after I had let go of her, yes.”

“No further questions. . . .”

74

Court was closed on Friday, November 11, 2005, for Veterans Day, and the subsequent weekend, but everyone reconvened on Monday, November 14. Before David Hoffman rested his case, the state called a rebuttal witness.

Cory Gregory’s neighbor.

The girl had testified on the previous Thursday, after Sarah Kolb had concluded her direct and cross. Cory’s neighbor claimed that on the night Adrianne Reynolds was murdered, she saw Sarah and Cory together.

“Sarah was sitting on Cory’s lap,” Laura Lamar told jurors, “and [she] had her arm around him.”

A brilliant move on SA Jeff Terronez’s part.

Even more damaging to Sarah’s testimony was that Lamar explained how Cory was “really quiet. . . .” Whereas Sarah appeared bubbly, definitely not “nervous,” or “on edge.”

This was hardly the behavior of a girl who was scared to death that the boy who had just killed someone was going to kill her and her family.

Sarah was back on the stand that Monday, November 14, refuting Laura Lamar’s testimony, saying Laura was drunk, seeing things. It never happened the way she had framed it and, Sarah’s attorney seemed to presume with his questioning, Miss Lamar had perhaps mixed up her days and thought she saw Cory and Sarah on
Friday
night, when it was actually Thursday.

During his final rebuttal, SA Terronez contested Sarah’s drunken neighbor claim, saying that in order to believe Sarah Kolb, one would have to agree that every witness lied. Terronez jokingly mentioned something about a gathering that was going to be held at a local club in Sarah’s honor: “The let’s-all-get-together-and-frame-Sarah-Kolb party.”

Some found this funny; others thought it to be over-the-top.

In any event, both attorneys gave closing arguments, which turned out to be uneventful and unmoving. The idea in closing out a case is to wrap it up nicely in a bow, giving jurors several reasons to take a definite side. Neither lawyer was able to do this convincingly. There was much backpedaling and
don’t believe this, believe that
sort of rhetoric, words that sounded more condescending and pleading than anything that might remotely sway jurors one way or the other.

Judge James Teros gave the jury its long list of instructions on Tuesday, November 15, first thing in the morning, and the jury hit the carpet soon after to begin deliberating.

They spent the entire day discussing the case.

By 4:32
P.M.
, one hour and twenty-eight minutes before the close of deliberations for the day, the first sign of trouble for the state came in the form of a question. Jurors said they were having “trouble” defining the term “intent.”

Judge Teros provided the legal definition. Intent is pretty straightforward. Any legal dictionary will give various forms of the same meaning:
The determination or resolve to do a certain thing, or the state of mind with which something is done.
³

The fact that the jury was asking was not a good sign for Jeff Terronez. It meant the jury was considering the fact that Sarah might have been involved, but in a lesser degree. Gerald and Kathleen Hill, coauthors of some twenty-five books, including
The People’s Law Dictionary, Real Life Dictionary of the Law,
and
Encyclopedia of Federal Agencies and Commissions,
astutely define “intent” in terms any layperson can understand, calling it the
mental desire and will to act in a particular way, including wishing not to participate. Intent is a crucial element in determining if certain acts were criminal.

Still, all of this seemed a waste of time. The jury did not have the option to find Sarah Kolb guilty of a lesser charge. In Terronez’s words to the press later that day, jurors faced an “all or nothing” verdict when making a decision. Where the term intent came into play, some speculated, was in the description of the two counts of first-degree murder with which Sarah had been charged. One charge was written to include the notion that Sarah Kolb “intended to kill” Adrianne Reynolds; while the additional charge stated that Sarah’s actions on that day inside her car corresponded with a “strong probability of death.”

Things got even worse for Terronez on Wednesday, November 16, when the jury came in and asked the judge what “presumption of innocence” meant.

The words seemed simplistic and self-explanatory; yet when broken down into what they meant in actual terms of the law, things got a bit fuzzy. Basically, the presumption of innocence, again, according to Gerald and Kathleen Hill,
requires the prosecution to prove its case against the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt.

In asking about this, was the jury saying the state did not accomplish that task?

It seemed so.

The jury ordered lunch after the judge read the definition.

At 3:40
P.M.
, with a total of sixteen hours of deliberations in the books, Judge James Teros did something no judge wanted to do.

Declare a mistrial.

The jury was unable to come to a verdict based on the charges.

Tony and Jo Reynolds, who had stayed fairly quiet throughout the trial, erupted into tears. Jo was wearing a T-shirt with Adrianne’s photo; Tony was dressed in a leather jacket over button-up shirt and tie. On the front steps, outside the court, they held a photo of Adrianne. Tony looked beaten, his eyes and cheeks swelled from tears, his face sagging.

Tony’s only response, which he repeated over and over as he walked away, was “I can’t believe it! I just cannot believe this. . . .”

Turned out there was one guy, Mark Hurty, the foreman, who couldn’t vote guilty.

Hurty told the press that although he firmly believed Sarah was
not
innocent, the state did
not
prove its case.

“I have nothing but sympathy for the family of Adrianne Reynolds,” Hurty told reporters. “My heart breaks for them.”

What upset many was that Hurty had told the media he did not “have a clear understanding” of the judge’s instructions.

Although Sarah Kolb wasn’t a free woman, a hurdle heading toward that destination had been cleared.

SA Terronez would have to go back to the drawing board now and do it all over again.

“Jeff did not want to speculate about the reason for the hung jury,” someone in Terronez’s office told me when I asked Terronez for a comment regarding the mistrial.

“I thought Jeff Terronez did a good job,” Jo Reynolds said, speaking for her and Tony. “He explained a lot of things to us. The day we found out, Jeff and his assistant came to our house and explained how victims of violence would help with funeral expenses and other expenses we had. I used to show up at Jeff’s office when I felt a meltdown coming, and he would take me in his office and I would cry and he would pump me up again until my next meltdown. Jeff was very caring to our needs. We felt [the SA’s office] did a good job. The evidence was there. It was just one [juror who] wouldn’t commit.”

The court scheduled Sarah Kolb’s retrial for February 2006 during a special hearing in late November, a week after the QC had had time to consider what had happened. The community was outraged by the mistrial and couldn’t understand how the jury had failed to reach a verdict. Talk radio got busy discussing the case. Message boards on local Internet chat rooms lit up with vile and vulgar posts directed toward the juror and Sarah. Those who loved Adrianne were left in a fog of discontent, shaking their heads, wondering what in the name of justice had gone wrong.

One juror spoke out to a local paper about holdout Mark Hurty, saying Hurty was the only one on the jury not to agree with a guilty verdict. Near
chaos ensued, Times Dispatch
reporter Brian Krans wrote,
as 11 people tried to change the foreman’s mind....

That one juror who spoke out said that by the time a mistrial had been declared, she had “had it” with the entire process
and
Mark Hurty.

“If we could have fired him, we would have,” juror Jeanette Roman told the newspaper.

75

Cory Gregory came out swinging on November 28, 2005. The talk around the QC was that the prosecution needed Cory to win its second try against Sarah Kolb. Well, Cory was now prepared to start talking—if only a little—as Christmas, 2005 approached. The first thing he did was grant Chris Minor, a reporter for WQAD News Channel 8, an interview on camera. During that interview, Cory proceeded to say, with his attorney present, that he had lied about his role in the murder of Adrianne Reynolds, but he was now ready to come clean.

Cory was pissed that Sarah had thrown him under a bus. He wanted to set the record straight and make it clear that Sarah had “made the entire story up” while on the witness stand.

He did not kill Adrianne. He had no reason to.

This was true. Cory did not have a motive other than he had told friends before the murder that he wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.