Evil Next Door Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE - Death of an Angel

  CHAPTER TWO - False Leads

  CHAPTER THREE - Stephanie

  CHAPTER FOUR - The Garbage Man

  CHAPTER FIVE - One Year and Counting

  CHAPTER SIX - Cold Case

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Finding the Needle

  CHAPTER EIGHT - A Friend of the Devil

  CHAPTER NINE - Catch Me if You Can

  CHAPTER TEN - If the DNA Fits

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Searching for Answers

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Organized Chaos

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Connecting the Dots

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Bittersweet Justice

  Epilogue

  Berkley titles by Amanda Lamb

  DEADLY DOSE:

  THE UNTOLD STORY OF A HOMICIDE INVESTIGATOR’S

  CRUSADE FOR TRUTH AND JUSTICE

  EVIL NEXT DOOR:

  THE UNTOLD STORY OF A KILLER UNDONE BY DNA

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  EVIL NEXT DOOR

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley mass-market edition / April 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Amanda Lamb.

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  Acknowledgments

  I would first like to thank profusely all of the people who helped facilitate and who did interviews with me for this project. This includes current members of the Raleigh Police Department—Jim Sughrue, Lieutenant Clem Perry, Sergeant Jackie Taylor, and Detective Ken Copeland—as well as retired members—investigator Chris Morgan and psychologist Michael Teague. I’d also like to thank prosecutor Susan Spurlin, SBI Agent Mark Boodee, Lansing Detective Joey Dionise, Joanne Reilly, Dr. Gordon LeGrand, and former WRAL reporters Len Besthoff and Melissa Buscher. A special thanks goes to Glenna Huismann for her candid and touching words about her daughter. Without all of your generous contributions of time, information, and insight, I would not have been able to write such an accurate and comprehensive version of this story.

  I thank Chad Flowers for his feedback and excellent photographs and Kelly Gardner for his expertise in helping me create usable photographs from WRAL’s archive. As always, I thank WRAL for giving me their blessing and the resources to pursue my “other” career while also allowing me to stay involved with my first passion, television reporting.

  I want to thank my mother, Madeline Lamb, for her stellar editing job, and my real editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, for patiently partnering with me to complete another true crime book we can both be proud of.

  As always, I thank my agent, Sharlene Martin, for believing in me and working hard with my best interest at heart and, of course, my family for their continued and unwavering support.

  Finally, I want to thank Carmon Bennett and Mollie Hodges for always being so gracious and kind to me over the years as I covered their tragedy and for sharing their memories of their beloved daughter Stephanie with me. I will never forget her.

  Prologue

  October 19, 2005

  In justice is all virtues found in sum.

  —ARISTOTLE

  “We’ve made an arrest in the Stephanie Bennett murder case,” my confidential source said to me as I stood in my kitchen on a Wednesday evening making dinner. The words rolled off of his tongue slowly, and he spoke with the unnatural cadence of a man who was trying to be painfully thorough in his delivery. Looking back on that moment, I have no doubt that he was trying to make sure he had my full attention. Still, I pressed the receiver closer to my ear to make sure I had heard him correctly. My brain was having trouble focusing on what he was saying because it was so unexpected and remarkable. Despite my excellent sources, I hadn’t had any inkling that an arrest was imminent.

  At first, I was so stunned by the news I almost dropped the phone into the boiling pot on the stove in front of me. The steam scalded my face as I leaned in to turn off the burner so I could think about what I had just heard. I had never been good at multitasking when it came to balancing work and even the most minor of domestic tasks. Work always won out. I had burned many a meal while answering an e-mail or a phone call.

  These words—that the police had finally made an arrest—were what I had been waiting to hear for more than three years. As a local television reporter for WRAL-TV, I had covered the Stephanie Bennett case from nearly the beginning, but tonight wasn’t just about getting a big scoop. Like so many other murder cases I had immersed myself in, this one had become personal. My first thoughts went immediately to the victim’s family and friends. My emotions surrounding the arrest had more to do with me wanting to see justice done for a young, innocent murder victim than with wanting to have the lead story on the 11:00 news.

  “He’s at the police station now being questioned,” my source said.

  “I need to go now, don’t I?” I said to him as I cradled the cordless phone in the crook of my neck against my shoulder. My hands were on autopilot as I poured the pasta into the strainer in the sink; my mind was racing three steps ahead of my body as I plotted all of the people I would need to call to make it on the air by 11:00. In order to do my job, I had to get in the zone—a place where emotions and distractions were prohibited. The news was on at the same time every night whether you were ready to present your story o
r not.

  “Yes, you need to go,” he said with almost boyish enthusiasm. Looking back on the conversation now, I appreciate the delicate way he shared the news. I was in a fog, and I needed someone to lead the way. My source knew the news would overwhelm me on so many levels that he was careful to make sure his message was clear and direct. At the same time, he wanted to make sure I got my butt in gear and made it down to the police station in time to get the whole story.

  The Raleigh Police Department had worked for three and a half years to solve this case. Many people thought there would never be an arrest. On darker days, I was one of those people who felt like there would never be a conclusion to one of Raleigh’s most horrific crimes. Now there was an arrest, an ending, an answer to all of the questions the media had relentlessly posed throughout the long investigation. It was surreal and, admittedly, slightly thrilling to see a high-profile cold case cleared after so many doubted it would ever be solved.

  I mumbled something to my two young daughters about having to go back to the office. My older daughter groaned, and my little one whined. She repeatedly asked me why, tugging on the edge of my untucked, wrinkled blouse that was about to be retucked for a second round of television that evening. They had seen me come home only to turn around and go out the door again too many nights. Being a television news reporter wasn’t a good gig for a mother. They reminded me of that on a daily basis.

  My husband, Grif, knew I had to go. He had seen my wide eyes and overheard bits and pieces of the conversation, enough to know something major was going on. “They arrested someone in the Stephanie Bennett murder,” I told him, still not believing the words even as they tumbled out of my mouth. Grif nodded. He knew enough about me and my passion for the cases I covered to realize that I would go. Instinctively, he had already picked up my car keys from the kitchen counter and grabbed my jacket from the back of a chair and handed them to me.

  As it did my daughters, my leaving annoyed him, but he wisely kept quiet. We had been here on more than one occasion in our eleven-year relationship. He understood, as he had so many times before, that news is almost never planned and is rarely convenient. It wasn’t that he liked it, but he had learned to tolerate it for the most part. It was the price he had paid for marrying someone in the news business.

  As a veteran crime reporter for the local CBS television station, I had had some exciting moments over the years when big cases finally came to a head. Sometimes these moments were in the form of an arrest; other times they occurred when a jury returned a guilty verdict after many hours of grueling deliberations. Still, there are few things that matched the exhilaration I felt upon hearing that someone had been arrested for the murder of Stephanie Bennett.

  Maybe it was because Stephanie was a young girl who had graduated from college and moved away from her home and family to start her life as an independent young woman. I had done the same thing in 1989 when I left my comfortable small town in Pennsylvania and moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in order to take my first job in television news. I remembered what a hopeful time that was, my life full of possibilities stretching out in front of me like an endless highway disappearing into the horizon. I was sure Stephanie had felt the same way.

  But through no fault of her own, Stephanie became the victim of one of the most vicious rapes and homicides the city of Raleigh had ever seen. Stephanie was a truly innocent victim who had done nothing to contribute to her own death. She didn’t engage in any risky behavior that would have put her in a dangerous situation; she was just a regular girl minding her own business. Her murder exemplified the kind of random violence we as a society pray doesn’t really exist. It creates a feeling of hopelessness when we realize how little we can do to truly prevent it.

  I was stopped at my third red light before I remembered that I hadn’t eaten. I pictured the pot of steaming hot pasta on the counter in the kitchen at home. My stomach was rumbling. I pushed the thought out of my mind and tried to concentrate. I had been talking on my cell phone with the newsroom making sure everything was in place—the photographer, the live truck, and the reams of file tape we would need to give the audience background and context for the story that would air in less than an hour. I was thinking about everything I needed to do to make it happen as seamlessly as possible. Most important, I needed to call Stephanie Bennett’s father, Carmon Bennett, in Virginia and get his reaction to the arrest. I knew this wasn’t going to be an easy call. I had interviewed Carmon many times over the years throughout the investigation. This arrest, while it was something he had desperately hoped for, would also put a name and a face to the evil that had been done to his daughter. I couldn’t possibly imagine how that was going to make him feel. Knowing Carmon the way that I did, I figured he was likely to have a variety of emotions, ranging from relief to disgust. Carmon had taken on the mantle as the family spokesperson. Over the years, I had also spoken to Stephanie’s mother, Mollie Hodges, on several occasions, but Carmon was the one who always had the strength to talk to the media when Mollie’s emotions overwhelmed her.

  I drove as fast as possible without being reckless, my thoughts jumping from Carmon and Mollie, to the newscast, to the suspect. I was consumed with curiosity about this man in police custody. What did he look like? Where had he been for the past three years? How had he evaded investigators for so long? How had they finally caught him? I hoped my questions would be answered, if not that night, then very soon.

  The first hour after I arrived at the police station was a blur. I immediately phoned Stephanie’s father, and despite my reservations about making the call, I was instantly comforted by Carmon’s tone of palpable relief. I could practically see him smiling over the phone. Yet we both knew, even in that moment of shared relief, that there would be no closure for him, not then, not ever. His daughter was dead, and no arrest would bring her back. But in my heart, I hoped it might bring him a small slice of peace, something he and his family had been lacking for so many years.

  Carmon told me he had been briefed by the investigators earlier that day and was told the suspect was a loner, an oddball, someone with whom his daughter surely hadn’t associated. It was clear his quest for answers was not over; in fact, it was a quest he had been on every single day since May 21, 2002, the day his daughter had been found raped and murdered in her North Raleigh apartment, the day his life changed forever.

  But on the night of the arrest, Carmon changed a little from the broken man I had gotten to know over the years. His sorrow was now tempered by a measure of hopefulness. He shared with me that night that he prayed he might now learn why Stephanie had died. It was a question he had wrestled with since the day her life was so tragically taken.

  “Tonight is a night of relief,” he said, his voice cracking under the weight of his emotions. I could tell that his normally stoic demeanor was being tested by this new development in the case. It was impossible for Carmon to hide his strong feelings now that someone was being held responsible for the death of his precious daughter. “We’re just happy to know this animal is off of the streets and this can’t happen to another young lady.”

  After I hung up with Carmon, I began to rummage through the boxes of file tapes in the news van. The boxes contained everything I had amassed on the case over the past three years, from videos of cops and yellow crime scene tape, to smiling pictures of Stephanie, to tearful interviews with her family and friends. I knew that at any moment the suspect would be escorted from the police station to a waiting blue and white patrol car which would then whisk him off to the Wake County Jail, so I kept one eye on the front door of the building, and the other on the video screen in front of me as I rapidly shuttled through the boxes of tape.

  At the same time, I had a growing anxiety about getting this major story just right. I wanted it to convey everything—the immense loss of a beautiful person, the hard work and dedication of the police, and the thrill of an arrest in what was thought to be a cold case—all in a minute and a half. This wa
s always my quandary in television news, one I had wrestled with incessantly throughout my career: to touch the viewer and be thorough in a very short segment of time. On this night, I was not only under my usual pressure to do a good job, but I had the additional intense feeling that I owed it to Stephanie and her family to make the story everything it was meant to be.

  I had seen Stephanie’s pictures and home videos a thousand times before—Stephanie with her shoulder-length brown hair, her big brown eyes, and her infectious smile looking directly into the camera lens. There was Stephanie in home video graduating from college, putting her arm around her proud father, who looked teary-eyed. There she was again on Christmas morning surrounded by her family, turning away from the video camera and making jokes about the photographer. There was Stephanie in still photos, embracing her college sweetheart, Walter Robinson, with their heads tilted in toward one another. They were shining examples of young, blushing, uncomplicated love. But tonight, as I scrolled through the home videos and looked at Stephanie’s pictures again, it was as if I were seeing her for the first time. Even with the deadline pressure looming over me, I slowed down the video and really looked at her, her movements, her expressions, and the light in her eyes as they darted playfully away from the camera. Suddenly, the normal sadness I felt when I viewed Stephanie’s image was slowly being replaced by a sense of peacefulness. I felt as if she were telling me that her spirit was finally free from the limbo it had been suspended in since her death.

  But I had little time to ponder my own emotions about whether Stephanie was looking down from heaven at the events unfolding on earth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw photographers taking their spots around the front door of the police station, snapping on the bright lights on top of their television cameras, jockeying for the best position. Without missing a beat, I jumped out of the van and made a beeline for my photographers, Robert Meikle and Tom Normanly. One of them handed me a wireless microphone to be used for the proverbial shout-out to the defendant: “Did you kill her?” We only have twenty seconds or less to get questions in as the suspect is walked from the door of the police station to the waiting patrol car.