Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  The remainder of the poem/song lyrics, whichever it was, went on to encompass a horror vibe that included the narrator drinking blood, driving stakes through Adrianne’s heart, realizing you can never begin again.

  In another short rambling, Adrianne wrote of always trying to be perfect, but nothing was with it. I don’t believe it makes me real, I thought it’d be easy, but no one believes me.

  One has to look at this—these two girls, both of whom are trying to figure out what their subconscious and conscious minds were telling them—and see the similarities between the writings: both pens scream for attention and a desperate need to fit in somewhere. Anywhere. This while maintaining an identity in a school where most of the students had none. Both Sarah and Adrianne had been blessed with looks, friends, and intelligence. Both were smart enough to express themselves through their art (namely, music, drawing, and writing). They had no trouble sitting down and putting their thoughts on paper.

  Yet, for some reason, their personalities clashed, and Sarah believed the only way to get back at Adrianne for what Sarah felt Adrianne had done (that betrayal of trust inside what was a core group of friends) was violence. Sarah’s way of handling life’s difficulties was to make a fist. When someone upset her, she attacked. Whereas Adrianne, when someone wounded her fragile spirit, worked at trying to get that person to love her or, at the least, like her again. It was that thought of someone not liking her that bothered Adrianne more than anything else.

  65

  Trials are prone to delays. Thus was the case for Sarah and Cory. On April 23, 2005, Sarah’s seventeenth birthday, Sarah was told she was being moved from the juvenile detention center she was being held at to the Rock Island County Jail, an adult facility, but not until she finished the school year. Sarah’s trial was scheduled for August 8; Cory’s set to begin a day later. Attorneys for both sides, however, were still not sold on the notion that those dates were going to work. It was too soon. Everyone had a right to a fair and speedy trial, but both sides needed time to prepare.

  Jo and Tony Reynolds wanted justice. If they had to wait a few extra months, so be it. That May, something interesting happened. Jo Reynolds sent Sarah’s mother, Kathryn Klauer, an e-mail with the subject line Adrianne.

  Tony and Jo felt the need to reach out. Tell Kathryn how bad they felt. Jo—more than Tony—wanted Sarah’s mother to know that there was pain all around, and that she understood how both families felt it.

  When Kathryn opened the e-mail, Jo said, she wanted Kathryn to know how sorry Jo and Tony were, and how bad they felt for Sarah’s family. Jo said she and Tony didn’t blame them for anything, adding how she was praying for both families to have the strength to get through what was going to be trying times ahead with the trials and media frenzy.

  Jo also stated the fact that—no matter how hard she tried—she could not get the thoughts of what had happened to Adrianne out of her mind. Ending the brief e-mail, Jo wanted Kathryn to know she didn’t hate her and didn’t want harsh words to come between them.

  Jo Reynolds sent her e-mail at 2:54 P.M. on May 24.

  An hour and a half later, Kathryn Klauer responded.

  She said she didn’t hate Jo and Tony, either. She would love to meet and have lunch and talk things through someday. Would Jo be interested?

  Then came a few suggestions, which told Jo and Tony where Sarah and her case were undoubtedly headed. Kathryn called Cory Gregory a “monster.” She stated that he killed Adrianne, and she mentioned that Cory had threatened to kill Sarah, too. Kathryn added, in all caps, that she hated Cory. She finished the e-mail with, Adrianne was a beautiful girl.

  Two hours later, Jo wrote back. She said she wouldn’t mind meeting sometime. Now was not going to work, however. She and Tony were having more bad days than good. All it took was a glance at Adrianne’s picture and the tears came. Sitting across from Kathryn now would be too much. The reason Jo had written to begin with was simply to say that she and Tony did not blame Kathryn or Sarah’s family for what Cory and Sarah had done.

  Take care, Jo signed off, hoping that would be the end of it.

  Just under two hours later, that familiar chime went off on Jo’s computer, and in came a long e-mail from Kathryn that told Jo and Tony many more things about Sarah’s defense. It was going to be hard, Jo now felt after reading the e-mail, to reach a hand across the aisle.

  Kathryn opened with words any mother in her position might be inclined to say, talking about how there was nothing but memories around her home and how quiet the house was these days without Sarah’s laughter and smile. The woman missed her daughter. It was disheartening to think Sarah could be locked up for the rest of her life. Kathryn said all she did lately was cry. Then she mentioned something about having evidence that would prove how easily it would have been for Kathryn to be in Jo’s shoes—meaning, surprisingly to Jo, that Sarah could have been murdered.

  As she read, Jo wondered what in the world Kathryn was talking about.

  Sarah, murdered?

  Further on, Kathryn explained that the true monster was Cory. He might have killed both their daughters, Kathryn insisted, on that day, but something stopped him.

  Huh?

  Kathryn said how Sarah had told her she was frightened of Cory killing her and then heading over to Sarah’s house to kill Kathryn.

  Sarah Kolb was casting quite the tale of woe out into the water here—and, apparently, she had her mother hook, line, and sinker.

  Sarah had told Kathryn that Cory knew how to get inside Sarah’s house without a key. He also knew Kathryn wore hearing aids and would have trouble hearing an intruder break into the house because Sarah had told Cory that Kathryn took the hearing devices out before she went to sleep every night. She said Cory could have killed her while she was sleeping. Sarah’s stepfather was at work on most nights until two or three in the morning. Cory knew that also.

  Oh, my goodness, Jo thought. What is this?

  But there was more.

  Kathryn explained next how Sarah had become terrified of Cory. She mentioned how the driver’s-side door to Sarah’s Prizm did not open from the inside, and once Sarah was in her car, she was at Cory Gregory’s mercy.

  She had no idea why Cory had killed Adrianne, and even Sarah, Kathryn added, could not come up with an explanation. Kathryn was certain Cory planned the murder and also planned to make Sarah his scapegoat. This was the main—and only—reason, Kathryn had surmised in her heart, that Cory had allowed Sarah to live.

  So he could set Sarah up for the murder of Adrianne Reynolds.

  Kathryn called Cory a sick person. She said her family would never forget Adrianne. It was so sad that Cory had killed her—and on Sarah’s grandmother’s birthday, to boot! How dare he maim that special day for the family.

  Before concluding, Kathryn said she and Sarah were planning on planting flowers in Kathryn’s yard at some point. They chose the colors—red, white, and pink—for a reason. The white flowers would symbolize Sarah’s innocence. That had to be first and foremost. The pinks, of course, were for Adrianne and her memory. And the red would symbolize the innocent blood that Cory unjustly spilled.

  Jo shook her head while reading.

  Nowhere in that final e-mail of the day between the two women was there any mention of Sarah taking responsibility for her role in Adrianne’s death. To Jo and Tony, the idea that Sarah Kolb was an innocent bystander was a slap in the face to the memory of their dead sixteen-year-old daughter.

  Who in the hell was Sarah Kolb kidding with her lies?

  66

  Cory Gregory was climbing the walls inside his prison cell as the month of June came to pass. He and Sarah had been incarcerated now for four months and some change. Cory was on suicide watch, according to a report filed by a corrections officer in early June. When this same CO checked on Cory during the day of June 3, 2005, she found him “acting a little strange.” He was “pacing back and forth in his cell . . . talking to himself.”

  Thi
s behavior was out of Cory’s normal routine, the CO said. The boy usually slept and read.

  Not much else.

  After reporting her concerns, the CO was advised to keep a close eye on Cory.

  Nothing came of it.

  A few days later, Cory was working out with a fellow inmate inside the gym. They started talking about Cory’s case.

  “Sarah,” Cory said, “began hitting Adrianne with the stick.”

  “No shit,” the inmate responded. Cory had already explained who the two girls were. Their background. “What’d you do, man?”

  “Adrianne done hit Sarah in the nose—bloodied it bad. Sarah was losing the fight.”

  “What did you do, Cory?”

  “Sarah asked me to help.”

  The inmate stopped what he was doing, “And? . . .”

  “I grabbed that bitch by the neck and began choking her! I pulled her into the backseat with me and choked her until she was blue.”

  “Shit, man. . . .”

  “Yeah, then my friend Steve (Cory was still protecting Nate), he came out to the farm, where we tried burning her body—and Steve cut her up.”

  “Did you cut her, too?”

  “No, no, man. I held her body parts down while Steve cut her up.”

  Cory was in his cell on June 15, pacing again. This time, however, he had stripped himself naked. The CO monitoring his behavior found this to be odd because “in all my dealings with him, [Cory] has never exposed himself.”

  “You okay in there?” the CO asked.

  “Yeah!” Cory snapped . . . pacing.

  A while later, the CO went back, found Cory doing the same thing, and asked him again if he was all right.

  “Yeah! Why?”

  “You’re doin’ a lot of pacing, Gregory. It’s not like you.”

  “Well, you’re just probably used to me sleeping all day, aren’t you?”

  The CO noticed Cory’s wrists; both had long, “horizontal scars.”

  “That happen lately or before you came in here, Gregory?”

  Cory looked down at the scars. “They’re old.”

  As the August trial dates for both defendants neared, Sarah’s attorney motioned for a continuance and the judge allowed it, setting a new trial date for Sarah on Halloween, October 31, 2005. This would be the final delay, the judge promised.

  The state, on the other hand, had made an oral motion on July 20, 2005, to continue Cory’s case until Sarah’s concluded. They were still lining up witnesses and investigating, and there was also an indication on Cory’s part that he might be willing to plead out his case.

  The state was interested in hearing what he had to say.

  Cory’s new trial date was set for November 7, 2005.

  The judge set a plea date in Sarah’s case for October 24, seven days before her trial was slated to begin. That would allow Sarah to consider the facts of the case, the evidence building against her, and give her some time to think about her future. If she wanted to accept a guilty plea and cut a deal, that was the day to do it.

  Meanwhile, Sarah was having a hard time adjusting to life inside an adult prison population that was seemingly putting her to the test.

  On August 8, 2005, near 9:30 P.M., a CO inside the Rock Island County Jail noticed Sarah sitting on her bunk, her head hung down, shoulders drooped, tears rolling off her cheeks. She was “visibly upset,” the CO later explained.

  “You okay, Kolb?”

  Sarah shook her head. No, she wasn’t.

  “What’s up? What’s going on?”

  Sarah looked over toward a neighboring inmate’s cell and motioned with a head nod that she didn’t want to say anything out loud.

  “You need to speak to me about anything, Kolb, in private?”

  Sarah nodded. Yes, she did.

  “Get dressed. I’m going to finish my bed check and then come back for you.”

  The CO spoke to the nurse on call and asked her to hang around. Inmate Sarah Kolb was being brought in for a little powwow. The CO wanted the nurse there.

  Sarah was then walked down into the medical unit, where she could speak to the CO and nurse in private.

  “What’s up, Kolb?” the CO asked. “I’m concerned about you.”

  Sarah didn’t look so good.

  “[Tisha] (pseudonym) is severely tormenting me . . . calling me a murderer and calling people on the phone during my hour and talking about me loud enough to taunt me.”

  Sarah, it appeared, was getting a taste of her own bullying. How ironic that she didn’t much like it.

  “What else, Kolb?”

  “Well, [she] threatened me. She said, ‘I’ll take care of this during a visit someday, or in the hall on the way to a visit.’ This is very disturbing to me.” Sarah started to cry again. “I think she’s even been inside my cell, reading some of my papers associated with my case.”

  “How so?”

  “I came back from an attorney visit one day last week and found my cell open—[she] was out [in the corridor] cleaning.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. . . .”

  “No, but [she] asked me questions later on that day about my case that only someone who read that stuff would know.”

  “So what?”

  The report of the conversation indicated that Sarah claimed that Tisha later . . . mentioned a codename and something about a purse or a bag, and the only other people who knew about those items were her attorney and Cory Gregory. Sarah was greatly concerned about this.

  “I keep notes in my cell and these notes,” Sarah explained to the nurse and CO, “contain information on my case that could prove to be incriminating for me.”

  Inmates were always looking for material to barter. If they found out something about a major case going to trial, they could use it to chip away at their own time. Was Tisha trading info about Sarah for time off her own sentence?

  “What are you worried about, Kolb?”

  “[She] threatened to go to the state’s attorney with the information. I need you to move her away from me. I cannot take it anymore! I don’t know what I am going to do.”

  “Are you suicidal, Kolb?” the CO asked.

  “No. I would never hurt myself.”

  “Okay.”

  “But under this type of pressure and anger,” Sarah warned, “I might do something to hurt someone else. This is why I should never be put in a cell block with other girls.”

  “I don’t think there’s much we can do for you, Kolb, but I will speak with the shift commander.”

  The CO checked. Tisha was not going to be moved from the block, but she was placed in a cell at the end of the corridor, away from Sarah, so they would not be neighbors any longer.

  The two were listed as enemies, the report concluded, and a note was posted . . . to keep the two separate at all times.

  This would not be the end of it, however. And Sarah wasn’t telling the entire truth of the matter.

  67

  A mental-health evaluation was ordered on Sarah Kolb after that little problem she had with Tisha. There was, after all, another side to this story—namely, Tisha’s.

  That “code name” Sarah had mentioned to the CO and nurse was chosen by Cory and Sarah as a mission title for killing Adrianne, and the “purse” or “bag” was actually a backpack only Cory and Sarah knew the whereabouts of. What was in the backpack was anybody’s guess.

  The nurse who evaluated Sarah pulled her aside a day after Sarah had reported Tisha. Confronting Sarah, the nurse said, “You told her, didn’t you?” The nurse was referring to what Sarah and Tisha, who were close friends at one time, had discussed when they used to hang around together.

  Sarah looked defeated. She stared at the nurse, whispered, “Yes. This is why I am so scared.”

  Tisha was running around telling everyone that Sarah had admitted murdering Adrianne, and Tisha was planning on going to the state’s attorney with the info.

  Continuing, Sarah said, “Tisha and I were a lot alike six
months ago. I did not appreciate what I had. I wanted the best car, the best clothes. I was always jealous because I thought other people had more than I had. I was so jealous that I wanted what everyone else had.”

  A day later, two COs and the nurse caught up with Sarah and spoke with her again. Tisha was still taunting her, Sarah said. It was beginning to break her down. She was on the verge of losing it.

  “You don’t know what that’s like,” Sarah explained. “Being called a murderer . . . is something that I am going to have to live with for the rest of my life, and I don’t need anybody throwing it in my face constantly. I am going to hurt somebody else! That’s what I do. I have a temper.”

  They brought Tisha in later that same day.

  “This all stems from an argument we had over cleaning,” Tisha insisted. “I used to be close with Sarah. Sarah confided in me. Yeah, she told me everything. She’s scared now? Hell, she should have been scared when she was telling me her whole story.”

  The girls were finally split up. Tisha ultimately met with investigators.

  Nate Gaudet had given cops a second interview in March. Enough time had elapsed by then for Nate to come to terms—in some sense—with what he had done. The memories were still fresh enough in Nate’s mind for investigators to double-check and figure out if he was telling the truth. By now, it was clear to Nate that he was going to be spending some time in prison, but not anywhere near the amount his cohorts faced.

  “Sarah,” Nate explained, “. . . started punching Adrianne in the face, and then Adrianne broke Sarah’s nose, so Sarah had Cory hold Adrianne’s arms while Sarah choked her to death . . . and beat her with a wooden stick.”

  Nate further explained how Adrianne’s corpse “started to stink,” so they put her in the trunk and drove out to Big Island, eventually ending up at Sarah’s grandfather’s farm.

  There was no question that when Cory and Sarah picked Nate up that weekend at his grandmother’s house, they asked him to go back into the house and grab a saw, and Nate knew exactly what that saw was going to be used for. He did not have to be persuaded or threatened, he claimed.