Evil Next Door

by Amanda Lamb

  “There’s somebody somewhere that knows who did this. To me—he’s had to talk to somebody,” Mollie said firmly through pursed lips. “How do you walk down the street every day knowing you’ve done what you’ve done without talking to somebody?”

  Like Carmon Bennett, Mollie Hodges wouldn’t rest until she saw justice done for her precious daughter, no matter how long it took.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cold Case

  April 2004

  Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

  —ERICH FROMM

  To the public, the Stephanie Bennett case may have looked cold by April 2004, as the second anniversary of Stephanie’s murder approached, but to Detective Ken Copeland, it was an opportunity to prove everyone wrong. There was nothing he wanted more than to solve the case.

  Copeland had recently been assigned to the Major Crimes Task Force—the unit that handled all homicides in the city of Raleigh. Previously, he had been on the fringes of the Bennett investigation as part of the Special Victims Unit. When Lieutenant Chris Morgan had first asked Copeland to assist the homicide detectives, Copeland had worked on the cold case in between his regular duties. But now, Copeland was officially assigned to the case as a homicide detective, his dream job, and he was ready to hit the ground running.

  As a patrol officer, Copeland had responded to many homicides in uniform. At that time, his job was to help maintain the crime scene by putting up yellow tape and securing the boundaries so that no one could enter except the detectives. He was literally on the outside looking in, standing on the edge of the yellow crime scene tape, watching the detectives go about their business, waiting for the day when he would be the one inside the perimeter of the yellow tape calling the shots.

  “I always wanted to be the one putting the clues together on the other side. I am now that person,” Copeland said with pride.

  Copeland also had a new secret weapon to help him in the Bennett case—Detective Jackie Taylor. Taylor had transferred from Raleigh’s District 21 to join the Major Crimes Task Force at the Raleigh Police Department’s downtown headquarters. At forty-two years old, Taylor had become the self-proclaimed “mother” over the homicide unit. But there was nothing motherly about her skills as a cop. She was tough as nails.

  Taylor was raised with her brother and sister in West Virginia by a single mother after her father died in a coal mining accident when she was just a little girl. She had watched her mother struggle to give her and her siblings the best life she possibly could. This made Taylor into a strong woman who wanted to build a strong future for herself.

  Taylor came to Raleigh in the early 1980s with a roommate, not unlike Stephanie Bennett, to begin her life there. After a stint working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, another friend gave her an application for the Raleigh Police Department, and that was it. Taylor was hooked. She had found her calling in the most unlikely place—law enforcement.

  Bright and personable, Taylor moved up through the ranks of the predominantly male police force with no glass ceiling in sight. After being hired as a patrol officer in 1986, she eventually became an officer in the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Unit, and then a detective in 1999, the same day Copeland, her future partner, was also promoted to detective. She had worked in the Commercial Burglary Unit until she was transferred to the Major Crimes Task Force in 2004. That’s where Taylor found her niche—problem solving, figuring things out, getting people to tell her things.

  Taylor became legendary for her interviewing skills. Witnesses, and sometimes even suspects, seemed to open up to her in ways they wouldn’t normally for other detectives.

  “She is the best in the interview room,” Copeland said of his partner. “Her famous line is, ‘What would your mama think?’ ”

  With her short, blond, no-nonsense haircut, kind face, and easygoing southern drawl, Taylor had a way of putting people at ease. As the mother of two children, including a daughter, she felt compelled to seek justice for Stephanie and her family. This was exactly the kind of partner Copeland needed to help him solve the case. They balanced each other out and finished each other’s sentences like an old married couple.

  Taylor and Copeland had worked on a rash of burglaries together when they first became detectives. Right away, the two developed a special rapport. They watched each other’s backs. They also laughed a lot, especially after a draining thirty-six-hour shift.

  “She would speak what I was thinking and vice versa. It was kind of spooky,” Copeland said with a grin.

  As a team, along with Clem Perry’s guidance as the sergeant in charge of the task force, Detective Ken Copeland felt like they finally had a shot at finding Stephanie Bennett’s killer.

  Wading In

  The sheer volume of information that had been collected in the Stephanie Bennett case and put into large three-ring binders was enough to send any good detective running in the other direction.

  “It was overwhelming,” said Sergeant Perry, who was supervising Taylor and Copeland. Perry’s biggest fear was that with so many leads still coming in, they would miss the one lead they desperately needed to solve the case. “If we overlooked just one of these lead sheets we’re going to miss the guy. You would always wonder going home in the afternoon, is that the one that’s going to break this case open?”

  Perry also worried that the pattern of eliminating suspects, while a good philosophy, never allowed them to focus in on any potential suspects. Perry knew the elimination process was taking its toll on investigators working the case.

  “It was very discouraging day in and day out to come to work, go out and swab three people, and when you left you got the feeling they had nothing to do with it,” Copeland said.

  Taylor and Copeland decided it was time to take a look at the case with fresh eyes. They had a way of working together, picking up on what the other one missed, that made a new perspective on the case possible. They went back to the beginning.

  “There was one person who lived out there that was brought to the police department’s attention, and that was the Peeping Tom,” Copeland said. But they didn’t have a name. “They call him ‘Tom.’ ”

  The way the detectives saw the case, they had had the DNA since day one, but it hadn’t gotten them anywhere. It was the perfect evidence, but it wasn’t doing them any good until they pinpointed a suspect.

  “Having great evidence is only as good as the suspect you have to go with it,” said Taylor. “We didn’t have one.”

  With Copeland’s background in handling sex crimes, he knew it was unusual that their suspect could not be tied to any other similar crimes anywhere else in the country before Stephanie’s murder. He also found it unusual that the killer’s DNA was not connected to any cases that had occurred since Stephanie’s murder. Copeland was baffled; in his experience people like Stephanie’s killer didn’t just do this kind of thing one time.

  “We thought someone that could plan, actually commit it with such brutality, that surely he had done this somewhere else before,” Copeland said.

  The Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS, was used to cross-reference offenders in violent crimes throughout the country. It included DNA from known offenders, and it also included DNA from crimes for which the identity of the attacker was unknown. That DNA could be used to link crimes together, even without the identity of the suspect. The DNA from Stephanie’s apartment wasn’t linked to any of these cases.

  Copeland and Taylor were open to anything. They decided to go back to one of the now-retired original detectives on the case, Sandy Culpepper, and ask her if she had any notes that might help. Unlike the voluminous case files at the Raleigh Police Department, Culpepper gave her colleagues a more streamlined version of the case, including a timeline created by another detective, Norman Grodai. The timeline indicated there were interviews with six people after the murder who had spoken specifically about the Peeping Tom. This caught Copeland and Taylor’s eye. Although the Peepi
ng Tom had long ago been abandoned as the prime suspect, the detectives just couldn’t shake the feeling they needed to re-visit this theory.

  “What is the likelihood that you got one person peeping on this girl, and then somebody else is going to come in and murder her?” Taylor said. “You have to be reasonable.”

  Based on his experience in the Special Victims Unit, Copeland said, “Most sex crimes are progressive. You start as a Peeping Tom, or you start as exposing yourself, and eventually you work your way up to those things that happened to Stephanie.”

  The detectives picked Culpepper’s brain, trying to glean any bit of information that might help them get some leverage in the case. She helped them zero back in on the Peeping Tom from what she had learned in the early stages of the investigation.

  As a result, Copeland and Taylor started looking at every Peeping Tom case in the area. They also again went back to looking at every minor sex crime as Copeland had done when he worked on the Bennett case as part of the Special Victims Unit. No case with a sexual component was too insignificant to consider as having a possible connection to the Stephanie Bennett homicide. On one occasion, they even followed up on a burglary case at an adult gift store, thinking the burglar might have been after more than just cash.

  To the surprise of many of the petty criminals they arrested for minor sex crimes, the detectives would bring them down to the main police station and ask them point-blank if they had anything to do with Stephanie Bennett’s murder.

  “They would say, ‘I ain’t got nothing to do with that,’ ” Copeland said. They would then gladly submit to a DNA test in order to positively eliminate themselves as suspects in Stephanie’s murder. After this experience, they were usually only too happy to cop to the original misdemeanor they’d been charged with.

  One warm evening in the late spring of 2004, the detectives went back to the Bridgeport Apartments and stood in the parking lot in the darkness. They wanted to see what kind of view a Peeping Tom would have from this location. They couldn’t believe what they could see from their very public vantage point. Windows were open everywhere they looked. Blinds and shades were also open, offering wide glimpses directly into many people’s apartments. Women sat alone on couches in their nightgowns watching television in plain view of anyone standing outside under the cloak of darkness.

  “We went, ‘Oh my goodness, this is unbelievable,’ ” Perry said.

  “It was a target-rich environment for anyone who had some sexual perversions,” Copeland said.

  Taylor and Copeland decided it was time to get busy and find this monster before he hurt somebody else. They divided up the group of six people from Culpepper’s file who had spoken about the Peeping Tom and went back and re-interviewed them. Those six people gave them the names of others to talk to. Those people in turn gave them more names. Suddenly, the case was going from freezing cold to very warm.

  Two Years

  “This was the murder of a totally innocent person which made it stand out in my mind above the others,” WRAL photographer Chad Flowers said as he recalled when heading to Virginia to interview Stephanie Bennett’s parents two years after her murder. “Even though I don’t usually get emotionally involved in the cases I cover, this one got to me.”

  Carmon Bennett’s home in Rocky Mount, Virginia, had the living room set up as a shrine to Stephanie. Pictures of her were peeking out from almost every space.

  “Every one of them showed a smiling, happy Stephanie,” Flowers said, remembering the discomfort he felt every time he walked through the Bennett house, on the way to the sunroom in the back where Carmon preferred to conduct interviews.

  On the kitchen table sat a vase of purple tulips, Stephanie’s favorite flowers. The Bennetts always kept tulips on their table in her honor. In front of the vase was a framed picture of Stephanie in a red sweater, looking down. Stephanie had been a demure, humble young woman who shied away from attention, but attracted it nevertheless, because of her exceptionally beautiful qualities.

  During the interview, Carmon sat on a faded green couch. The rolling hills stretched out in front of him endlessly, disappearing into the horizon. He wore his traditional southern businessman uniform—a yellow golf shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. He propped one leg across the other one in what might have been interpreted as a casual move, but his serious face and weary eyes told a different story. He answered each question, but provided little or no elaboration.

  “The main thing is just why? She was so undeserving of this,” Carmon said as the two-year anniversary of his daughter’s murder approached. “She had a life in front of her, and it’s just tragically taken away for someone’s sickness.” One day Carmon Bennett was living a happy, quiet life in Virginia, building houses, proud of the life he had built and the children he had raised. Then suddenly, his daughter was murdered, and the life he knew was gone forever. “It’s just a very tough situation to be in, and one that you never dreamed you would be in,” Carmon said wearily as he reiterated a statement he had probably made dozens of times before.

  No matter how this family tried to fill their lives after Stephanie’s death, they would always be incomplete. They could put the pain aside for brief moments and enjoy life, but the grief was too palpable for them to ignore for any real amount of time. It weighed them down to the point that even the simplest tasks, like eating, making a telephone call, or driving, became a chore.

  “Time has healed some of the wounds, not totally, I don’t think it ever will,” Carmon said. Stephanie’s birthday, April 30, was just a few days away. She would have been twenty-five years old. “I just hope that another family doesn’t have to go through and suffer what we have.”

  Stephanie’s mother felt similarly. “People tell me all the time that time will take care of it. For me time has not helped any. Each day just gets a little harder,” Mollie Hodges said, dabbing the corners of her eyes with a tissue as she talked about the case to WRAL just before the second anniversary of Stephanie’s murder.

  Although two years had passed, in a single second Mollie could be transported back to the day she learned her only daughter had been murdered.

  “It’s a nightmare. It’s a total nightmare. When I got the call that Stephanie hadn’t reported for work that day the most awful feeling just went through me,” Mollie said. “It just tears the deepest hole in your heart, and it’s a hole that will never be filled.

  “There won’t be any telephone calls saying, ‘Happy Birthday, Stephanie,’ ” Mollie said with more bitterness than sorrow this time. “No presents, no birthday cake, no party—all I’ll get to do is visit her grave and wish her a happy birthday.”

  Stephanie had been laid to rest between Carmon’s brother and cousin in Franklin Memorial Park. She was buried beneath a flat bronze marker that held only her name, “Stephanie R. Bennett,” and the dates she’d lived, “April 30, 1979-May 21, 2002.” There was nothing else to say on a grave marker about a young life cut tragically short.

  While the markers were all flat and flush with the ground, Stephanie’s stood out because there was a small white stone statue of a praying angel next to her grave. It was a fitting tribute to a girl who by all accounts had expressed angel-like qualities in the way she had lived her life.

  Mollie hadn’t moved on as some people had expected her to. But those people obviously didn’t know what it was like to lose a child. Sure, she got up and went to work every day and went through all of the motions of daily life, but she was a woman with a major void in her life who couldn’t find anything to fill it with. There were moments she could put the pain aside and appear normal when she really needed to, but in reality, Mollie was permanently wounded.

  “To lose your child,” she said, “It’s just unexplainable.”

  Mollie’s biggest concern was that the killer was still out there and could harm someone else. She said it was a thought that made it difficult for her to sleep at night. Her head never hit the pillow without praying to God no one else
would be killed by this evil man.

  “Don’t think that it can’t happen to your daughter, your sister, or your mother or whoever because we never thought it would happen to us either, but it did, and he’s still out there, and it bothers me a lot just knowing that he is and he could strike anybody anytime again,” Mollie said. “It’s hard every day thinking this person, this mean person that did what he did to Stephanie is still out roaming the streets.”

  Morgan on Deck

  “Chris Morgan is wonderful. He assured me he would find [the killer] and would not give up until he did,” Mollie said. “I’ve put my faith in Chris Morgan. I’ve put my faith in God. I pray every night that we find him.”

  Once again a victim’s family was relying on Lieutenant Morgan to solve the case for them. It was a big responsibility, and one he took seriously. But he always feared he would not be able to come through for them. The Bennett case was one of those cases that no matter how hard he tried he sensed might not be solved before he retired. His plans had been to leave in the spring of 2004, but the date was pushed to the summer because he was just finishing up another high-profile case in which a woman named Ann Miller was suspected of poisoning her husband with arsenic. That case was close to being solved. They knew who did it; they just needed the final piece of evidence. In Morgan’s mind, the Bennett case wasn’t even close. His gut told him to hang in there and postpone his retirement yet again, but he wasn’t sure it would make a difference.

  “You’ve done everything you can do in this case. It’s been suggested to us that we wait until we get a phone call. We’re not content to do that. We don’t believe it’s fair to the victim, or the victim’s family, or to other people who might be victimized by the perpetrator in this case,” Morgan said on the second anniversary of Stephanie’s murder.