by Amanda Lamb
Throughout the investigation, Lansing detectives tried to keep Rebecca’s story in the media so the public wouldn’t forget about her. On the anniversary of her death every year they would remind people about the case in the unlikely hope that someone might come forward with new information. That’s the way it went for six long years.
“We never closed it,” Dionise said as he remembered how the files sat on one of his detective’s desk for six years. The files were never actually put away into the file cabinet where they belonged—it was as if that simple, ordinary act might have been a sign that investigators were giving up. Dionise refused to take that step. He would see the files sitting on the corner of the desk and say to himself—Someday that one will be solved. His heart told him that putting away the files was like filing away Rebecca Huismann’s memory into a dark hole where it would never again be found. His head told him that he was crazy, but as long as tips came in, in his heart, he felt like he could reconcile keeping the case active.
“People would still call, and we would investigate every lead,” Dionise said proudly.
But the best lead Lansing detectives got was from the Raleigh Police Department on a brisk fall day in October 2005. When Sergeant Clem Perry and Detective Joey Dionise finished talking, it was clear to both cops that Drew Planten may have killed Rebecca Huismann. Six years, six long years. Dionise almost couldn’t believe it. But then Perry dropped the bombshell, the information that sealed the deal for Dionise.
“Well, we recovered a .45 caliber pistol,” Perry told Dionise.
“Look, I think we’re coming out there,” Dionise said excitedly.
Dionise immediately hung up the phone and called one of his detectives with the news. He couldn’t keep it to himself. Even though Dionise didn’t have the evidence in his hands yet, he had always believed the gun would be the key to solving the case. His mind drifted back to the files on the corner of the desk. He had never given up on Rebecca Huismann, and with good reason. Despite what others may have thought, the case was solvable. He always believed that.
“It looks good,” Dionise said to his detective on the phone after hanging up with Perry. “It looks real good. We’re going to Raleigh.”
Rebecca Huismann
“The state police were waiting for me when I got home from school that day,” Glenna Huismann, a teacher and Rebecca Huismann’s mother, said as she remembered the day her daughter was killed—October 19, 1999. “What happened to her, us, only happens to other people you don’t know. You never think it could happen to you.”
Glenna said her daughter was a vivacious, outgoing young woman who dreamed about traveling the world and taking part in wild adventures. She wanted to bungee jump and see the pyramids in Egypt. Rebecca wanted to do it all. She had big plans for a big life. She was working to save money in order to go back to school at Lansing Community College to study acting. She had recently become engaged to her boyfriend, Ernie, and was planning to get married in 2000.
Rebecca was also very creative and talented. She loved to sing, write, sew, take photographs, and paint. Glenna remembered her daughter making Halloween costumes, sewing Native American costumes for a friend, and designing a school sweatshirt. She also wrote poetry and created paintings that were so good she used them to barter for things like having work done on her car.
As far as dancing at the men’s club, Glenna said, “it was not [Rebecca’s] life’s ambition,” and Glenna always felt very sad that the media in Lansing could never get beyond this label in order to show the world who Rebecca really was. In her mind, her daughter was the sum of many wonderful things and being a dancer at a men’s club barely registered on the Richter scale of Rebecca’s life.
Glenna said her daughter was also someone who, not unlike Stephanie Bennett, was fiercely loyal to her family and friends. Also like Stephanie, Rebecca seemed to bring out the best in others and make any room she entered a brighter place.
“Rebecca was funny,” Glenna said. “She could make you laugh and sometimes just shake your head. She laughed a lot, got crazy. [Rebecca] could be gutsy.”
Throughout the six-year investigation, Glenna and Rebecca’s father, Bernard, kept hoping there would be a break in the case, and an arrest would be made.
“We were discouraged sometimes, but we never lost hope. We prayed a lot,” Glenna said.
Full Circle
Agent Mark Boodee was asked to analyze some of the items investigators had taken out of Planten’s apartment. There were two laundry baskets—one they believed belonged to Stephanie Bennett and one other—two used tampons, several pairs of women’s underwear, multiple bras, and a pair of pantyhose.
Boodee reported back that Stephanie’s DNA was found on the pair of pantyhose and on a pair of black cotton thong underwear taken from Planten’s apartment. This concrete evidence was just more confirmation for him and the investigators that Planten had not only committed the crime, but had taken trophies as mementos of what he had done. Even though Planten’s DNA was thought to be slam dunk evidence all by itself, every additional item that linked Planten to Stephanie made the case that much stronger. Again, like the laundry basket, there was no good reason for Planten to have Stephanie’s underwear or her pantyhose in his apartment.
After analyzing the evidence collected from Planten’s apartment, Boodee’s work was done until it was time to prepare for trial. He would no doubt be called to testify in court about his DNA analysis throughout the investigation. He felt good about what he and the detectives had accomplished, even though it had taken more than three years to solve the case.
“It was a long and winding road. It started off with a bang,” Boodee said, remembering the excitement of that initial weekend after the murder when he first created a DNA profile for the killer. Then it seemed to him as though the investigation ground to a screeching halt as the investigative team spun their wheels through hundreds of elimination samples. “And then it was the sprint to the finish in the end. It was a career case. It was one of those cases you look back and hang your hat on and say, this is all that I ever hoped for when I wanted to get into forensic DNA analysis.”
Shattered Beliefs
Joanne Reilly was having a hard time processing what had just happened to Drew Planten. Even with all of his bizarre behavior, Reilly had been so sure that Planten wasn’t a killer. In the process of helping police, she had come to know and like Planten in a motherly way. She worried about his self-imposed isolation from others and his lack of eating. She saw him as an outsider, someone who simply needed some affirmation from others to blossom and spring out of his shell. Reilly had felt like she was just the right person to make this transformation happen. Every time Planten would do something strange, it would make her question his innocence, but she was still unconvinced of his guilt until the bitter end.
“I was so stupid, I didn’t think he did it until the major called me and said that the DNA was a match, and that they had the building surrounded,” Reilly said. “I thought I knew him, but I didn’t. That just totally shook up my feelings of being able to assess people correctly.”
At the same time, Reilly felt like she had helped achieve justice for Stephanie, and for that feeling, she was grateful.
In her last e-mail to the detectives on October 20, 2005, at 8:05 P.M., Reilly was still trying to sort out the shock of the whole ordeal:Hi Ken, Jackie and Clem, I just wanted to say that I am in awe of you three and everyone else I met during the investigation. I applaud you highly. You should all receive promotions out of this.
Reilly went on to say that she would like to get together with the detectives again at some point to find out what her responsibilities would be as far as going to court and testifying in the case.
I also want to repeat what I told you yesterday Ken. I not only will testify, I want to testify against Drew if it will help your case. I keep seeing in the news that RPD is not revealing the source of the matching DNA. Thank you, but I participated in this fully expecting
to be “outed” at some point if the DNA was a match. Please let me know what you plan to do.
But even in her willingness to testify against Planten, there was still a part of Reilly, the mother in her, that worried about Planten’s state of mind in prison. She had seen him strapped to the wheelchair on the television news in his first court appearance and heard the reporter say that he appeared to be catatonic and was refusing to eat. Reilly couldn’t get the image of him being wheeled into the courtroom out of her mind. It was literally haunting her. To Reilly, in the video, Planten looked like “a monster,” not like the quiet, gentle man with whom she had worked side by side with for months. Part of her couldn’t help but feel that what had happened to him was all her fault, even if logically she knew it was the choices he made that put him there.
We are worried about Drew trying to starve himself to death. He is a very disciplined and focused man as you know and I’m sure he would have no problem doing just that.
Finally, Reilly asked the detectives to allow the fertilizer laboratory to re-open again. The lab itself was still surrounded with yellow police tape and being treated as a crime scene. Reilly felt like the employees needed to get back to work for practical purposes, but also for everyone’s sanity, so that they could put the tragedy behind them. Reilly went on to say that her staff would make Planten’s locker at the lab available to investigators, although there was a strong suspicion his backpack that he always kept with him would not be in there. Because it might have contained evidence, and Planten knew police were onto him. Detectives guessed that he’d thrown his backpack away in one of the many Dumpsters bound for the landfill on lab cleanup day.
Reilly finished her lengthy e-mail the same way she’d started—with the highest praise for the investigators.
I am going to try to get some sleep tonight. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. You all take care. We are all so proud of you.-Joanne
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Connecting the Dots
November 2005
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—JAMES THURBER
“Was that something else that I considered thinking about this case, that it might be more than Stephanie Bennett? Sure,” prosecutor Susan Spurlin said. After she spoke with investigators from Michigan about Planten’s possible connection to the Rebecca Huismann case, she realized they might just be dealing with the tip of the iceberg as far as the number of victims went.
Lansing Detective Joey Dionise came to Raleigh to see for himself what the North Carolina investigators had on Drew Planten. He was shown what appeared to be stolen mail from Rebecca’s mailbox, a newspaper clipping about her murder, and a video game box that also appeared to have come from Rebecca’s house in Michigan. Dionise was wildly impressed that the Raleigh detectives had uncovered these critical pieces of evidence hidden beneath the overwhelming amount of junk in Planten’s apartment.
During the search, Raleigh investigators had also found two .45-caliber handguns in the apartment. One gun, a Glock, was quickly ruled out by the Michigan State Crime Lab. Based on what they already knew about the make and model of the weapon used to kill Rebecca Huismann, analysts said this was definitely not the murder weapon. However, the other gun looked like a more promising potential match. Dionise took the second gun back to Lansing with him and personally hand-delivered it to the analysts at the crime lab.
Agents with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation crime lab conferred with Michigan agents regarding the weapon. It was tested in North Carolina first, before being sent back with Dionise to Michigan for more testing. After ballistics testing, agents in both states very quickly determined after that, without a doubt, the handgun found in Planten’s apartment in Raleigh was the gun that killed Rebecca Huismann in Lansing, Michigan, in 1999.
“That’s the gun, the one that killed her,” Sergeant Rein-hart Pope of the Michigan crime lab told Dionise excitedly over the phone.
Suddenly, Dionise’s cold case was hot again. He now had the murder weapon and a suspect. As a result, he wanted to learn everything he could about Planten’s movements in Michigan. So, Dionise called the original homicide task force back together again and shared this new and compelling information about Rebecca’s case. Between all of the agencies, Dionise figured they had enough resources to help him build a strong enough case to take to Ingham County District Attorney Stuart Dunnings.
Dionise also decided it was time to speak with Rebecca’s parents again. He knew it was only a matter of time before the information got out, and the last thing he wanted was for these grieving parents to be blindsided. Dionise met with Glenna Huismann, and filled her in on the latest developments. He said the first question out of her mouth was the same thing she had wanted to know six years earlier, “Why?” Dionise cautioned her not to get her hopes up yet and to keep the information quiet until they were sure the district attorney would agree to charge Planten with Rebecca’s murder.
“[Our] prayers were answered when Planten was arrested. Sometimes God puts his own stamps on things. Planten was arrested on the six year anniversary of Rebecca’s death,” Glenna said. But she heeded Dionise’s warning not to get too excited until the charge in Michigan was imminent. “We were hopeful. Of course. Things happened fast after that. All the dots were connected.”
Planten had no criminal record in Michigan to speak of except for a few minor traffic tickets. For most of the time he had lived there, he stayed with his mother in Charlotte. But he had attended Michigan State University in Lansing and, at one point, had lived briefly within a few miles of Rebecca’s house.
While investigators determined that Planten wasn’t a patron at the men’s club where Rebecca Huismann worked as a dancer, a man matching his description had been seen walking his dog in her neighborhood early in the morning more than once in the weeks leading up to her murder. Further investigation showed that on one occasion an officer had approached the man and asked him what he was doing out so late and if he lived nearby. The “officer contact,” as police referred to these reports, with the dog walker included his name and had been logged into the Lansing Police Department’s system. It was Drew Planten. This was part of their routine procedure of keeping track of everyone who was approached by patrol officers for any reason. At the time, Planten didn’t live in the area and told police he was just visiting friends in the neighborhood. This confirmed sighting of Planten in Rebecca’s neighborhood around the time of her killing, along with the gun found in his apartment, was enough to convince Dionise they had the right guy.
“He was lying in wait, a stalker,” said Dionise of the picture that was starting to develop in his head about Planten. “He still didn’t stand out as a killer. But we knew he was the one. What made him go to this extreme?”
Motive in the Rebecca Huismann case was the thing that confounded Dionise more than anything. Unlike the Stephanie Bennett case, this attack involved no sexual assault. It was down and dirty, almost like a professional hit, but that didn’t make any sense either. Investigators couldn’t find anyone with any reason to want Rebecca dead. The only thing Dionise could come up with was that Planten may have become obsessed with the young woman.
“He wanted her. He knew she had a boyfriend. He knew he couldn’t have her,” Dionise said. “If he couldn’t have her, nobody could have her.”
Psychologist Michael Teague agreed with Detective Dionise that the killer was probably obsessed with Rebecca. What he couldn’t get past was the fact that Planten had apparently shot her before he got a chance to abduct and rape her.
“I think when he shot the girl in Michigan, that was an aborted act of something,” Teague said. “I don’t think he meant to do it. I don’t know if he was trying to kidnap her, but I don’t think the shooting was in his plan.”
When Dionise visited the detectives in Raleigh, he tried to make an appointment to speak with Drew Planten at Central Prison. He hoped that Planten would realize he
was cooked and would simply confess to Rebecca’s murder. Dionise’s fantasy, however, was short-lived. Predictably, Planten sent word through his attorney that he refused to meet with or talk to the Michigan investigators.
When Dionise returned to Michigan from Raleigh, he sent detectives to Planten’s mother’s home in Charlotte to try to speak with her about her son. But they reported back to him that Sarah Chandler told the investigators in no uncertain terms to “leave us alone.”
Even without talking to Planten or his family, Dionise believed he had enough evidence with the gun and the other items found in Planten’s apartment to make the case against him. Dionise felt like “it was a great circumstantial case.” He was delighted when Stuart Dunnings agreed with him.
“He was going to be charged with murder for Rebecca’s death,” Dionise said confidently.
Wake County Assistant District Attorney Susan Spurlin was also talking to Dunnings. With Planten about to be charged with another count of first-degree murder, the question of who had primary jurisdiction had to be decided. In other words—who would try him first? Given the fact that Raleigh police had made their case first, Spurlin argued strongly that the first trial needed to be in North Carolina. There was also the additional issue that North Carolina had the death penalty, and Michigan did not. If Planten was convicted and received the death penalty in North Carolina, there would be no need for Michigan authorities to try him there.
