Evil Next Door Read online

  People in police custody rarely, if ever, respond to these questions, but there’s always a chance they might, so we keep on asking. But unlike the way these ambushes are dramatized on television—a gaggle of reporters acting like wild animals, pushing and shoving to get a better spot and screaming to be heard over the din of the crowd—in Raleigh, North Carolina, at least, the scene is actually a lot tamer, and we journalists are much more polite than you would think.

  I didn’t know what to expect that night when the glass front doors of the Raleigh Police Department were flung open, but the man I saw being led out by two detectives was unlike anything I could have imagined. He was just over six feet tall and looked to weigh around 140 pounds, making him appear emaciated. He had long, scraggly, light brown hair that hung in his face, obscuring his eyes. His hands were cuffed behind his back. I don’t know what I would’ve said a monster looks like, but this wasn’t it. This man looked weak, frail, and not physically capable of the heinous crimes he was accused of.

  Sergeant Clem Perry led the parade. He pushed open the doors and bore the first brunt of the blinding television camera lights and flashes from the still photographers. Perry moved directly through the crowd toward the waiting patrol car without acknowledging the chaos around him. Behind Perry, Detectives Jackie Taylor and Ken Copeland were on either side of the suspect, clasping his elbows tightly as they walked him to the police car. They too ignored the action around them, and looked determinedly straight ahead.

  The suspect’s body seemed almost spineless, as if he might just slink to the ground at any moment if the officers weren’t holding him up. He hung his head and closed his eyes; maybe to keep the lights off his face, or more likely, to keep our cameras from getting a good shot of his face. In either case, he was successful in preventing us from getting any real look at the man behind the mop of tangled hair hanging limply in front of his features, which only added to the horror-show quality of the moment. Who was this guy? Where did he come from? I couldn’t stop the questions bouncing around inside of my head.

  My pulse was racing as I gingerly elbowed through the gaggle of photographers to get as close as I could to the strange-looking man. I knew this would likely be my only shot at him. By the next day he would have a lawyer and wouldn’t speak until he was on trial in a courtroom, maybe not even then. Most people accused of serious crimes rarely talked to the press. I knew a good defense attorney would keep his client quiet.

  “Did you murder Stephanie Bennett?” a male reporter yelled from somewhere behind me in the crowd, beating me to the punch. As predicted, there was no answer. The prisoner was off the curb now, his elbows being swiftly guided by the two detectives to the car which was just about fifteen feet away. Our precious time for questions was running out.

  “Can you tell me how you knew Stephanie Bennett?” I yelled this time. Nothing. He was now just a few steps from the car. I had maybe five to eight seconds left. My gut told me this man was not going to say anything, but I knew there was no harm in trying. The payoff if he did crack and say something was too big to ignore.

  “Do you have anything to say?” I said even louder this time, hoping to rattle him into saying something, anything. Detective Copeland was now easing the suspect into the backseat of the patrol car, holding the man’s head down gently with his free hand so it would not hit the door frame as he entered. It was obvious, despite how he pretended not to see us, that Copeland was painfully aware that his every move was being videotaped and would be re-examined many times in the days to come.

  Copeland shut the door to the police car and moved around to the other side. He slid into the backseat next to the suspect, who was leaning back onto the headrest. The prisoner’s entire body had collapsed into the seat, and the gray leather seemed to envelop him as he sunk even deeper out of the view of our cameras. He looked like a balloon with a slow leak, deflating before our eyes.

  As the car pulled away, Detective Copeland stared directly at the man beneath the glare of our lights as if he were still trying to figure out the same thing we all were—why? It would be years before I would know what went through Ken Copeland’s mind that night as he escorted the man he believed killed Stephanie Bennett to the Wake County Jail. This is both Detective Ken Copeland’s story, and the story of everyone who helped find justice for Stephanie. It’s a story I believe was well worth waiting for.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Death of an Angel

  May 21, 2002

  He who does not punish evil, commands it be done.

  —LEONARDO DA VINCI

  Stephanie Bennett wasn’t thrilled about spending time alone in her Raleigh apartment, but her roommates were out of town and she had little choice. She had to go to work that week at IBM and figured she would be alone in the apartment for only a couple of nights.

  It was a very rare occasion for Stephanie to ever be alone. She’d moved to the Bridgeport Apartments in Raleigh, North Carolina, a year earlier, shortly after graduating from Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. While it was her first time away from Virginia, Stephanie was ready to be more or less on her own in North Carolina. She’d made the move with her stepsister, Deanna Powell, and her close friend from college, Emily Metro. It always seemed like at least two of the girls were at the apartment together. But during this particular week in May 2002, Dee, as Stephanie referred to her stepsister, had returned to their home-town of Rocky Mount, Virginia, to attend a funeral, and Emily was also back in Virginia, taking some additional classes at Roanoke College.

  While Stephanie was a very independent young woman, she was particularly uneasy about spending time alone at the apartment because she’d heard that some bad things had been going on lately near her complex. For example, she was told that a woman had recently been raped while on a jogging trail at Lake Lynn, which bordered the property. Stephanie also learned that her neighbor had had her car stolen from the apartment complex parking lot. And the most personally upsetting news—there had been a Peeping Tom spotted peeking into a window; not just any window either, but Stephanie’s own window.

  Stephanie had just returned from a weekend in Greenville, South Carolina, where she was visiting her longtime boyfriend, Walter Robinson. Walter was in graduate school studying engineering at the University of South Carolina. Stephanie and Walter had met at Roanoke College, and after being together for four years, a long-distance relationship was not something either of them wanted. They wanted to be together and had mutually decided it was time to make that happen. So, Stephanie was getting ready to move to South Carolina in July. The couple had already looked at apartments and houses in preparation for the move. The young couple had the enthusiastic support of their parents, who also envisioned that the two would eventually get married.

  Stephanie was moving to be close to Walter, the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life, but she also wanted to get away from the Bridgeport Apartments. She was literally counting down the days until she could leave what had become a fearful environment for her, and to feel safe again in South Carolina with the man she loved.

  “She had mentioned to me a couple of times that it was a bad neighborhood and that she didn’t like being home alone,” Walter said in a 2002 interview with WRAL-TV. “And I knew that because when I went there for the weekends to see her I heard the stories.”

  The one story that Stephanie couldn’t get out of her head was the one about the Peeping Tom at her window. Less than a month before this night, a neighbor had seen a man dressed in black, his head obscured by a hooded sweatshirt, crouching in the bushes outside Stephanie’s ground-floor bedroom. The neighbor said the mysterious man appeared to be looking into the window. Because the bushes surrounding the window were high, and the lighting on the outside of the apartment building was dim, the neighbor couldn’t give a good description of the man’s face. Still, she reported the incident to the management of the apartment complex, who in turn reported it to the Raleigh Police Department.

  Walte
r had been visiting Stephanie from Greenville, celebrating her twenty-third birthday, the same April weekend that the Peeping Tom was spotted near her window. Walter remembered a neighbor calling and warning Stephanie to make sure her blinds were turned in such a way that no one could see into her apartment. Walter was a chivalrous southern man who was highly protective of his girlfriend, but at the time, he didn’t think anything of it. Later, he would remember with anger just what this incident foreshadowed and wished out loud that he could turn back time.

  That same day the Peeping Tom was spotted, April 27, 2002, Stephanie wrote an e-mail to her aunt, Kaye, who lived in California telling her about the incident and how it made her want to move out of her apartment complex immediately:Yesterday our neighbors told us all this bad stuff. The lady caught a peeping tom on Saturday night. She said she had seen him a couple of times, but just thought he was walking through the yard, but she said he was dressed in all black and had a black hood on and was just standing beside the bushes looking in the window. So they called the cops and the cops are now on the lookout for him, but the place where he stands and looks is right outside my window. Needless to say I didn’t sleep well last night. I shut my windows and woke up drenched in sweat so I had to turn the air on. Pretty scary. . . . We obviously aren’t in a safe place. I am so ready to get out of here.

  No Sweet Dreams

  Just a little more than a month, that’s what Stephanie kept saying. Hang in there. She would be out of this apartment soon. But whenever she returned from visiting her boyfriend, Walter, in South Carolina, Stephanie told him she had a lingering sadness that only seemed to worsen every time she left him. It was a combination of her love for him and her fear of returning to the apartment where she no longer felt safe.

  Their most recent visit had been on the weekend of May 18 and 19, 2002. Stephanie returned home that night of Sunday, May 19, to an empty apartment. But she tried to put her concerns out of her mind, and instead prepare for the busy week ahead of her.

  “When she went home that Sunday I remember thinking, only one month left in that apartment,” Walter said. “Every time that we left each other, she always cried.”

  On Monday, May 20, Stephanie went to work as usual at IBM in Research Triangle Park, Raleigh’s business park, which housed major technology and pharmaceutical companies. That night, by all accounts, was also routine for Stephanie. As usual, she talked to Walter on the phone around 8:00 P.M. He was trying to figure out a way to get an application for an apartment to her. She told him the fax machine in her office was broken, but that in the morning she would try to find another fax machine in the building and call him or e-mail him with the number. It was an ordinary conversation about ordinary things. Neither knew it would be their last.

  Stephanie also talked to one of her roommates, Emily Metro, on the phone that evening. Emily clicked in on the call waiting while Stephanie was on the line with Walter. Emily was planning to permanently move back to Salem, Virginia, where she was attending classes at Roanoke College, their alma mater. Emily was switching career paths from business to psychology and was back in school taking courses in her newly chosen field.

  Stephanie’s other roommate, her stepsister, Dee Powell, was also planning a move of her own to Richmond, Virginia. The girls were collectively excited about their independent futures, but at the same time they were sad about splitting up. They didn’t know what they were going to do without being entwined in each other’s daily lives.

  Morning Comes

  The next morning, on Tuesday, May 21, Walter Robinson waited for Stephanie to contact him regarding the apartment application he was trying to fax to her from Greenville. He sent her an e-mail at her office at IBM in Research Triangle Park around 11:00 A.M. When he didn’t hear back from her immediately, Walter assumed she must have gotten busy at work or had taken an early lunch. So he decided to go to lunch and try to reach her later. In the afternoon, he sent Stephanie another e-mail and called her cell phone. Still, he got no answer. That’s when he really started to worry. It wasn’t like Stephanie not to be reachable. She was one of the most reliable people Walter knew. His gut started to churn as he tried to figure out what could possibly be going on. He thought about jumping in the car and heading to North Carolina, but he was four hours away.

  Walter then decided to call Stephanie’s roommate and stepsister, Deanna Powell. Dee agreed it wasn’t like Stephanie not to answer her phone or e-mails. She was a responsible girl, the kind of girl who was always where she was supposed to be and always did what she was supposed to do. Even throughout her workday, Stephanie maintained close contact with her family and friends. So when Dee, who was still out of town, couldn’t reach her stepsister either, she too became extremely worried.

  Through a series of phone calls, Dee ultimately discovered that Stephanie had not shown up for work at IBM Tuesday morning. This was totally out of character. Stephanie was thrilled at the opportunity to be working as a subcontractor for IBM and would never have done anything to jeopardize her employment. Dee immediately knew something was wrong, very wrong.

  “She didn’t show up for work, and of course work had called, and so I had tried to get in touch with her a couple different ways, and I sent a friend to go see if she was at home to check on her,” Dee said.

  She called a male friend and asked him to go by the apartment. Stephanie’s car was parked outside the apartment, but the friend got no answer when he knocked on the door. When he relayed this information to Dee, she then did the only thing she could think of—she called the office at the Bridgeport Apartments and asked them to check up on Stephanie. She gave the management permission to go into their apartment with a pass key.

  At the request of the female apartment manager, a maintenance employee unlocked the door to the apartment the girls shared. The manager entered tentatively. At first, she called out to see if anyone was home, even though she had already knocked loudly on the door. When no one answered, she walked slowly down the hallway toward the bedrooms. She peeked into the open doorway of Emily Metro’s bedroom and made a gruesome discovery. Twenty-three-year-old Stephanie Bennett was dead on the floor of the bedroom. And that wasn’t all. Stephanie was nude, and it looked like she had been tied up and raped. A deep purple mark on her neck was evidence Stephanie had been strangled. In her mouth was a pair of blue underwear.

  The manager ran out of the apartment and quickly called 911. The time was 3:33 P.M. on Tuesday afternoon, May 21, 2002. Murders like this were uncommon, and the Raleigh Police Department responded immediately with every available officer to the Bridgeport Apartments.

  “Dee returned my phone call around 5:00 P.M. and told me [Stephanie] had been murdered,” Walter said, fighting back tears as he recalled the day to WRAL reporter Len Besthoff. “I remember exactly where I was. It seemed like everything stood still. My legs and everything went weak, numb.”

  Other than the disturbing image of Stephanie’s tortured body, the rest of the scene was the opposite of chaos. Her body lay on the floor next to Emily’s bed, which was neatly made with a patchwork quilt and a blanket folded at the foot of the mattress. Almost everything else looked to be in order in the room, except for some leaves inside the room, beneath the window where it appeared the killer had entered. Only a few items had been moved. They had been placed carefully out of the way in the closet—a phone, some stuffed animals from the bed, and a few knickknacks from the windowsill.

  In Stephanie’s bedroom, across the hallway from where she lay dead, her covers were pulled back and neatly piled on the floor at the foot of the bed. Her three pillows were in a U-shape as if she had snuggled them around her like a cocoon while she slept. There were multiple reminders that the young woman was in many ways still a girl: two teddy bears sat prominently on a dresser on either side of a jewelry box, and a Harry Potter novel with a bookmark in it lay on the night stand alongside a glass half full of iced tea, and a cordless telephone. It looked like Stephanie had been just settling in for
a quiet evening in bed when someone brutally attacked her.

  The killer had left an important calling card, one that would eventually identify him beyond any reasonable doubt—DNA. His semen had been left in multiple orifices of the young woman’s body. It was if he were saying to the investigators, “Catch me if you can.”

  Body of Evidence

  For Lieutenant Chris Morgan, the head of the Major Crimes Task Force in Raleigh, the afternoon had started out mundane. He was in the Information Technology Department having someone work on his computer when his cell phone rang. He hated computers almost as much as he hated cell phones. Morgan was an old-school cop who had forced himself to get used to the way the world was operating in the twenty-first century. But that didn’t mean he had to like it. It was one of the many reasons he was considering retirement. Police work had changed. It wasn’t what it used to be. Morgan missed the good old days when police work meant pounding the pavement and knocking on doors, not “Googling.” With his stockpiled sick time and vacation time, he was getting close to thirty years on the force and thus was eligible to take his retirement money and move on. At forty-nine, he was still young enough to do something else, although he still wasn’t sure what that something would be.