Too Young to Kill (9 page)

And it would get worse.

The only man she had ever called “Dad” soon disappeared from Adrianne’s life. Tony had stayed in Arkansas. He started running a bar. With that came a different mix of people Tony became involved with and hung around.

“I got busted for selling crystal meth,” Tony admitted, “and I went to prison. . . .”

From prison, at different times, Tony called Texas. “They all said Adrianne was doing fine.”

Probably more for Tony’s sake. The guy was in prison. Did he need to know that his daughter was getting into trouble? And Adrianne was getting seriously into drugs, alcohol, and boys about now.

Tony had learned his lesson in prison, he said, and made a plan to go straight when he was paroled. But things seemed helpless and hopeless there for a while—biding his time, day in, day out, climbing the concrete walls, staring at that shiny barbed wire that was keeping him from the outside world.

How the hell did I get myself into this?

Time, of course, does not wait for anyone.

Tony got out of prison, got his life on track. Yet, somewhere along the way, Adrianne’s life spiraled out of control.

“Whenever they [Adrianne and her mother] had a problem,” Tony said, “they called on me.”

He didn’t mind. Tony was that type of good-natured soul; he would give you the shirt off his back if he believed in his heart it was going to help. On the other hand, if he thought it would hurt, no matter how bad he wanted to, Tony pulled back.

Tony never heard—perhaps until it was too late—that Adrianne was having a difficult time with life in Texas as she grew out of her grammar school years and into a teen.

Carolyn soon married a man, David Franco. Now there was another stepparent in Adrianne’s life, a fourth try at realizing every kid’s dream of the perfect family. Carolyn later admitted that she and David worked “long hours” and were hardly ever home. There were extended periods of time when Adrianne was left home alone, unsupervised.

“Then all I heard about was Adrianne beginning to mess around with boys,” Tony recalled. “Adrianne was never much into the drug or drinking thing.” At least, that’s what Tony believed, he said. Adrianne’s psychology reports from this period prove differently: she was enmeshed in a life of alcohol, hard drug use, and promiscuous sex.

By this time, Tony had married Jo. She and Tony had been high-school sweethearts. After getting out of prison and putting his life together, Tony moved back to East Moline, Illinois, where he had grown up. Tony had graduated from high school in 1977, joined the army, and, as he put it, “I done stayed gone from Illinois for a good twenty years.

“Things happen for a reason,” Tony recalled, looking back.

Two weeks after he got out of prison, Tony went to visit an old boss.

“Some girl has been calling here, looking for you,” Tony’s old boss said.

“No kidding.” Tony had no idea who it might be.

“She left her name and number.”

Tony looked at the piece of paper.

Jo.

“I had not spoken to her since 1977,” Tony said. “We talked for like a month on the phone. I told her I done just gotten out of prison and I ain’t got nothing. She says, ‘I want you to come up here [her home]. I love ya—and always have. I want to help you start your life over.’”

Lots of people, Tony said, “they go to prison and they done keep messin’ up. It done learnt me my lesson, let me tell you that.”

Carolyn said later that during this period—those crucial years when Adrianne drifted off into a life of self-medicating—Tony never called for his daughter, sent a card, or reached out. Carolyn didn’t frame this accusation with anger or judgment; she simply said that—for whatever reason—Tony lost touch with his daughter.

Word came back from Texas to Tony and Jo (after Tony reconnected), as Adrianne hit her prime teen years, that she hated—utterly despised—going to school. For some reason, Adrianne had developed a profound detestation for anything having to do with school; she did everything she could to get out of it.

But then something else happened. Adrianne’s behavior went from out of control to borderline psychotic and criminal. More than just skipping school, she began acting out. Part of it centered around her voracious appetite for sex.

The questions became: Why? Where was this behavior rooted?

“In my opinion,” Tony said, “. . . she had accused her stepfather there of sexual assault, and I could tell Adrianne wanted to get away from there because of that.”

Adrianne’s stepfather was soon indicted by a grand jury, and he was formally charged with sexual assault and indecency with a child.

“I believed her one hundred percent,” Gregg County prosecutor Stacey Brownlee told reporter Barb Ickes years later. “I never doubted her story for one second.”

The accusations by Adrianne opened up an investigation into what was going on inside Adrianne’s home, which led to additional allegations of neglect and abuse. Terry Roach, a sergeant with the White Oak, Texas, Police Department (WOPD) handling the case, found many problems with the way in which Adrianne was being raised. For one, Carolyn Franco had been indicted on charges of threatening to burn down the house of a woman in Texas, charges that stemmed from the sexual molestation allegations Adrianne had made against her stepfather. The woman Carolyn threatened had supposedly tape-recorded Carolyn in the act.

“There’s just so much hatred on those tapes,” Prosecutor Brownlee told Ickes. “You listen to it for a while and you just want to throw up.”

The one thing that wasn’t on the tapes, according to Carolyn, was that spurious threat Carolyn had allegedly made of burning down the woman’s house.

So the charges were dropped.

“You have to understand Adrianne at this time,” Carolyn later told me. “She’s lying about everything. She called the state and told them I was beating on her. Then turned around and admitted she had lied because she was mad at me. The night before she had [said she was sexually abused], she had gotten into trouble. There was a birthday party she was supposed to be going to. She got a little smart mouth with me, and David (Franco) told her she was grounded and she couldn’t go. She got really angry at him, screaming, yelling, and really belligerent, and turned around the next day and told this (sexual assault) story. She had a history of making things up when she was mad at people.”

But it was the detail in the accusations themselves that made many believe Adrianne.

“I didn’t automatically
not
believe her,” Carolyn added. “I was in shock. When they told me what the accusations was, I totally fell out. I could not even put my mind around it. She and [David] had always been real close. He had always . . . Well, he had grown up without a dad, and he knew how she felt. You have to understand. When my mom and Tony split up, and Tony went to prison, he stayed in contact with Adrianne. He said he was going to live closer to Adrianne when he was paroled. But when he got out, that was the last time we heard from him. . . . He never called her. He never sent a birthday card. When things started to happen with Adrianne, we had to find Tony on the Internet.”

With her life heading in a complete downward spiral in Texas, near the fall of 2003, it was decided that Adrianne should move to East Moline and live with her father and his new wife for a while. Jo took the call from Carolyn.

“Adrianne’s been taken out of our home,” Carolyn explained. “Could you two take her?”

The state had stepped in and was ready to take Adrianne away from Carolyn for good.

Not thrilled about the idea of having Adrianne come to live in Illinois with them, Jo said she’d talk to Tony about it.

The next day, Jo called the Department of Family Services in Texas to inquire about Adrianne. They told Jo that Adrianne had made a sexual molestation accusation against her stepfather, and said Carolyn had “threatened to kill her [Adrianne].” So the state had stepped in and had taken Adrianne out of the home and placed her in foster care while the investigation was going on.

That night, Jo talked it over with Tony.

“I don’t want Adrianne here,” Jo said. There had been an indication that Adrianne had lied about “the whole thing,” Jo explained. “I had two grown boys living at home and going to college. Tony was still on parole. What if she accused one of my boys of something? If she accused them, I would have left Tony. It would have destroyed my marriage.”

Tony was firm, though. “I adopted Adrianne. I
have
to take her.”

Jo relented.

Maybe Tony and Jo, in offering Adrianne a stable environment, could straighten her out. It was late 2003. Adrianne had just turned fourteen. Jo had planned a trip to Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit Tony’s sisters. She called and told Carolyn she’d meet up with her and Adrianne there.

It was a quiet ride back to Illinois. Yet, Adrianne was holding on to some rather shocking news.

“I think I’m pregnant,” Adrianne said when she arrived.

Tony had been in the hospital on the night Adrianne was born. She was such a tiny baby, purple, red, shiny, and underweight. Tony had dubbed her Lil’ Bit that night. How time could change your life. Here was his precious Lil’ Bit, showing up with her bags, a trail of sexual abuse, drinking, drugging, and more problems at home than most kids endured in a lifetime, telling the only man she knew as a father that she was pregnant. Such a damn vicious circle, an unbroken cycle: Adrianne’s mother had Adrianne when she was sixteen. Now Adrianne, just shy of that same age, was apparently following in her biological mother’s footsteps.

As it was, Tony had not seen Adrianne for several years.

Now this.

Thanks a lot,
Tony thought, adding,
They send me this fourteen-year-old pregnant girl. Unbelievable.

15

After she got settled in East Moline, Adrianne went for a checkup.

Turned out she wasn’t pregnant, after all.

“Thank God,” Tony said. One less thing to deal with.

Still, he called Adrianne’s mother.

“Why in the heck don’t you have this kid on birth control?”

It was clear that although she was not going to have a baby, Adrianne was having casual sex whenever she felt like it.

“I can’t make her do nothing,” Carolyn told Tony.

“Well, shoot, I can.”

Tony went to Adrianne. “You’ve got two choices. You can go on the shot, I ain’t gonna remind you to take a pill every day. Or you can stay home.” Tony meant in the house. All the time. Adrianne, in refusing birth control, would confine herself to the four walls of Tony and Jo’s ranch. She would not be able to go out.

At all.

What a choice.

“She didn’t argue none,” Tony recalled. “And that was the end of that ‘I think I’m pregnant’ problem, you know.”

Meanwhile, Jo stood behind the scenes, scared Adrianne might one day accuse one of her twins of the same thing that she had alleged against her stepfather back in Texas. As Jo saw it, Adrianne was volatile. Unpredictable and on the edge, always, of being one step away from making that major mistake in her life no one could fix.

Eggshells.

Broken glass.

Jo wanted no part of it.

Tony and Jo enrolled Adrianne at Glenview Middle School.

“Adrianne hated homework,” Jo explained. “We went to her first parent/teacher conference and found out she was getting straight zeroes. She wasn’t doing her homework. So we bought her an assignment book and her teachers wrote out her homework.”

Every night was a battle. Tony and Jo made Adrianne sit down and do her homework in front of them. Adrianne had to read a certain amount of pages per night in this one particular book. There was a night when Jo took out the book and placed it on the counter. Tony, the strict disciplinarian who cut no corners when speaking to his daughter, said, “Read!”

“I don’t want to do my fucking homework,” Adrianne shot back.

A fight between the two brazen personalities—dad and daughter—broke out. Soon Adrianne and Tony were in each other’s faces.

Jo was able to restrain Adrianne on her bed, telling Tony, “Get out of here.... Just stop yelling at her.”

Chaos.

Exactly what Jo was afraid of.

Looking back on it all, Jo recalled, “I wanted Adrianne to go home so bad. I would try thinking of all kinds of ways to get her to go back.”

Things got a bit better, however, before they got a whole bunch worse.

By May, and into June 2004, Jo and Tony, working with Adrianne, were able to get her grades up to D’s.

There was one afternoon when Jo went to the school to check on Adrianne’s progress. She and Adrianne met inside the principal’s office.

“Her math grade is a D,” the principal said.

Adrianne and Jo looked at each other. Hugged. Jumped up and down.

Not long after, Adrianne graduated middle school.

Still, with all the growth she had made, Adrianne had a strong desire to go back to Texas. She came out one day and said, “I want to go home. I miss my friends.” There was pain in her voice—certainly for the loss of those friendships in Texas that meant something to her—but also for facing the feeling of not being wanted. Adrianne had been shuffled around all her life, from one parent to the next, then into foster care. It’s safe to say that she had an internal alarm system, one that picked up on Jo not entirely wanting her there. She could sense Jo’s trepidation and resentment and wanted no part of it.

Tony called Carolyn.

“Adrianne don’t like it here. We’re sending her back.”

Carolyn said, “Yes. Absolutely.”

Adrianne went back to Texas.

“She was so confused by her family,” Prosecutor Brownlee later told Barb Ickes, talking about Adrianne’s life in Texas. “They were putting so much pressure on her.”

Adrianne walked back into her life in Texas and recanted her story of the sexual abuse allegations. She said it never happened, that she made it all up.

Despite Adrianne having pulled back on the allegations against her stepfather, Brownlee pursued the case, anyway. Her problem, though, was that without a witness, she had no case. After moving back home, Adrianne took it a step further and wrote a letter to the judge overseeing the case, part of which read:
I have told an outrageous story that is not true. I didn’t think it would go this far.