Evil Next Door

by Amanda Lamb

  Spurlin was wading her way through the thousands of pages contained in the case file that investigators had been compiling for three and a half years. Not only did she need to bring herself up to speed on the case, but she needed to make sure she wasn’t missing anything that might come back to bite her at trial.

  “More than I’ve had in any other murder case,” Spurlin said of the sheer number of pages she had to go through and read. “It was an enormous amount of material.”

  As part of the trial process known as “discovery,” Spurlin’s office was copying the voluminous case file and sending every single page to Drew Planten’s attorney, Kirk Osborne. A great deal of the paperwork dealt with dead-end leads that had nothing to do with Planten, but Spurlin felt like she still had to familiarize herself with all of it. It was part of her strategy to be able to anticipate anything and everything the defense might bring up at trial as a red herring to distract the jury.

  “In any capital murder you want to know as much about the defendant as you can possibly know. The jury might only know information about the size of a quarter, but I think a prosecutor needs to know information that would almost fill this room,” Spurlin said, gesturing with both arms around her modest, square office with its gray walls and two-story-high ceilings.

  Spurlin was getting into “the zone,” as her husband liked to call it. She was intently buckling down and immersing herself in the Bennett case. During those times, she slept with a legal pad by her bed so that if something about the case came to her in the middle of the night, she could sit up and write it down immediately so that it would not be lost.

  On Spurlin’s wall in her courthouse office was a picture of Stephanie Bennett in happier times, joking around in a red sash and a big purple felt hat like the Cat in the Hat wore. In the photograph, Stephanie also wore a blue tank top and her now-familiar all-American-girl smile. Spurlin wanted a constant reminder of who she was really working for. Seeing Stephanie so joyful and full of life in the photograph gave her all the motivation she needed to continue pursuing the case day in and day out.

  Carmon Bennett had given the picture to Spurlin when she’d traveled to Virginia to meet the family for the first time. Spurlin felt like it was a critical part of the process for the victim’s family to meet her and to know she cared deeply about Stephanie and the case. Beneath her professional cool exterior, Spurlin always had a soft spot in her heart for victims’ families and what they had gone through. She knew that she couldn’t ever walk in their shoes, but, with their help, at least she might be able to understand a little bit of what they were experiencing.

  “It was to say, ‘Hello, I know that I’m walking into your life, and I’m taking on a very important role in the prosecution of the death of your daughter,’ ” said Spurlin of her trip to the Bennett home in Virginia. “This is who I am. I like to meet them. I like them to put a face with a name.”

  It was early December 2005 when Spurlin and her partner Rebecca Holt headed to Rocky Mount to meet with Stephanie’s family. Holt was no stranger to high-profile murder cases herself. Her most recent case had involved Ann Miller, who’d ultimately pleaded guilty to poisoning her husband, Eric Miller, with arsenic. She had worked on the case with Lieutenant Chris Morgan. With the culmination of that case, Holt now had the time to fully assist Spurlin with the Bennett case, and there was no one else Spurlin would’ve rather had on her team.

  Spurlin also took Morgan with her to the Bennetts’. She knew how close Morgan had become to the family in the first two years of the investigation and felt like the Bennetts might be more open to her introduction if it came through Morgan. Spurlin wanted their relationship to start out on the right foot.

  Morgan was glad to help Spurlin get to know Stephanie’s family. He felt it was the least he could do; the fact that he hadn’t been able to solve the case himself still gnawed at him almost daily, but he was able to put his pride aside for the sake of the justice he had been seeking all along.

  Morgan recalled that Stephanie’s father was more enthusiastic than Morgan had ever seen him before on that early December visit with Spurlin and Holt in Virginia. Morgan said Carmon was uncharacteristically raring to go, ready to do whatever he had to do to make sure that Drew Planten not only got convicted but also received the death penalty. It was very clear where Carmon stood on the topic of capital punishment, especially when it came to the man police said murdered his daughter.

  “He was ready to go out and fight another battle,” Morgan said about Carmon that day. Morgan figured his excitement was the result of three-plus years of holding all of his fury inside. Now he was like a champagne bottle whose cork had been popped, overflowing with renewed vigor and confidence in the justice system that had finally rewarded him for his patience. He was ready to slay the dragon.

  After chatting for a while, prosecutors Spurlin and Holt asked Carmon and Jennifer if they could take a peek into Stephanie’s bedroom in an effort to get to know the victim a little bit better. Anything personal they gleaned from seeing her room, even the tiniest detail, might help them paint a more personal picture of Stephanie for the jury. “That bedroom was very much like it had been in 2002. It was us wanting to get to know Stephanie,” said Spurlin solemnly. “It was important for me to somehow connect with the victim.”

  The blue and white flowery room with its teddy bears, smiling photographs, and proudly displayed diplomas told Spurlin quite a lot. What Spurlin learned about Stephanie that day was that she was the kind of girl almost anybody would want as a daughter, sister, or friend. Spurlin knew it would be up to her to relay to the jury what a tremendous loss this death was to so many people, but she had to do it in the calm, measured tone the courtroom required of her.

  “If I had any emotion that I felt about her, any tears that I might have cried about Carmon’s loss, the loss of so many people with her death, were emotions that I would experience and I would have to set aside,” said Spurlin. “I can’t take those kinds of emotions into the courtroom because it would definitely interfere with my effectiveness.”

  At this point in the investigation Spurlin had not yet looked at the crime scene pictures or the autopsy photographs of Stephanie’s body. The joke around the office was that Spurlin “didn’t do pictures.” She usually waited until she was close to trial to finally pull out the pictures because they were so difficult for her to look at no matter how many cases she had prosecuted.

  Spurlin didn’t need the photographs in front of her to prepare her case. She needed instead to get inside the victim’s head and try to understand what happened on May 21, 2002. After poring over all of the evidence, there was one chilling detail that stood out in her mind—a detail she needed to relay to the jury above everything else. Surely, at some point during the attack, it had to have become very clear to Stephanie that this man was not about to let her go. No matter what she did to keep calm and acquiesce to his demands, she was not going to walk away from this alive. Stephanie Bennett knew she was going to die.

  “Just imagine that,” Spurlin said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bittersweet Justice

  January 2, 2006

  It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

  —GANDHI

  The Christmas season had always been Stephanie Bennett’s favorite time of year. While her loss was always felt more intensely by her family and friends as the holidays neared, 2005 was the first time since her murder that anyone who loved Stephanie had come close to finding some kind of peace. The single electric candle in the window in her father’s Virginia home seemed to shine a little brighter this year. While the trial and its difficult details loomed in the distance, the knowledge that Stephanie’s suspected killer was behind bars let everyone breathe a little bit easier. Smiles had returned even to Carmon Bennett’s face. Joy had become a rare thing in the Bennett house since Stephanie’s death.

  The
investigators were now concentrating on new murder cases, but their victory in solving a three-plus-year-old unsolved case was the best Christmas present anyone in police work could have imagined. They knew they couldn’t rest on their laurels forever, but even if they knew the glory would be fleeting, for the time being it was nice to bask in their accomplishment.

  For a brief moment, all was right with the world in Raleigh, North Carolina. A feeling of safety had returned to the community and there was an overwhelming sense that justice might be more than a vague concept bantered around in a law school classroom, a tangible phenomenon within reach.

  In Control

  “An officer who was doing routine rounds at Central Prison noticed inmate Planten in his cell, unresponsive, entered the cell and it appeared he was in the process of a suicide attempt,” said Keith Acree, the spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Correction. “He was taken quickly to the emergency room here at Central Prison Hospital where the medical staff attempted to resuscitate him. They were not able to. He was pronounced dead at 2:37.”

  On Monday, January 2, 2006, Drew Planten was found hanging in his cell from a bedsheet with a plastic bag over his head. After years of investigation, the case had come to a final, screeching halt. Planten had been kept in an isolated prison cell where he spent twenty-three hours a day confined in the state’s maximum security prison, yet it seemed as though, even there, he’d still been running the show. He had managed to take charge of his destiny from the bowels of one of the most secure correctional institutions in the state.

  Acree stood just outside the entrance of Central Prison that bitter winter night, the darkness behind him illuminated only by the lights from the television cameras, and spoke to reporters. He said that Planten had been allowed out of his cell for one hour of recreation a day. Citing privacy issues, Acree refused to comment directly on Planten’s mental health status or his treatment, but said he had improved tremendously compared to the seemingly catatonic man who had been sent to them from the Wake County Jail on October 20, 2005.

  “He had been cooperative and responsive with our staff. When he first arrived here in October, he was silent and would not speak to staff and was uncooperative, but that only lasted a few days, and he had been very cooperative in recent months,” Acree said. “If an inmate is desperate to kill himself it’s very difficult to keep him from doing that despite any extraordinary measures we might take.”

  Acree went on to say the State Bureau of Investigation was called in to investigate the suicide. Its agents would make a final report as to whether or not the prison was negligent in any way when it came to Planten’s ability to take his own life.

  Derailment

  Morgan got the call at home from Sergeant Perry that afternoon. He was sitting in his worn leather recliner in his den—his man cave—a room that had been added onto the side of his modest ranch home and that both housed his stuff and gave him a place to hide from his family and watch sports on one of the many television sets crammed into the tiny room.

  Perry got right to the point. “I need Susan Spurlin’s home number,” he told Morgan. “Planten just hung himself in Central Prison.”

  Morgan gave Perry the number and asked him if he had called Carmon Bennett yet. Perry had not. Out of deference to their long-standing relationship, Morgan agreed to take the heat off of Perry and call Carmon himself. It was the least he could do to be the one to break the news to Carmon that his daughter’s accused killer would never be brought to justice. It was yet another step in the healing process for Morgan, who wanted to continue trying to do whatever he could for the Bennett family.

  As soon as he got off of the phone with Perry, Morgan decided to call Carmon right away. He didn’t want him to hear about Planten’s suicide from some other source. Morgan knew it was only a matter of hours before the news traveled to Rocky Mount either via the Internet, or through a phone call from someone in Raleigh who saw it on the news.

  “I knew he was going to be upset,” Morgan said. And he was right.

  “What does this mean?” Carmon asked Morgan after he told him what had happened.

  “It means he’s guilty, and he killed himself,” Morgan replied with his honest opinion.

  “You mean there’s not going to be a trial?” Carmon asked.

  “No, Carmon, it’s the end,” Morgan said regretfully.

  The End of the Line

  Perry called prosecutor Spurlin at home. For state employees, Monday, January 2, 2006, was considered a holiday since New Year’s Day had fallen on a Sunday. He hated to bother her at home, but Perry knew it was only a matter of time before the story hit the news, and she needed to hear it from him, not from television or the web.

  “I was shocked, but not so surprised that that would have been Drew Planten’s choice,” Spurlin said, acknowledging she had suspected he was suicidal after he was arrested and found to have a loaded weapon in his pants. “But I was very surprised that it had happened, that he had been able to end it that way. And I think he truly wanted to end it on his terms,” she added bitterly.

  When Spurlin hung up the phone with Perry, she sat for a few minutes, shell-shocked and unable to process what she had just learned. She decided to call her boss, District Attorney Colon Willoughby, and vent about the situation. She knew that he, of all people, would understand her deep frustration over what had happened.

  “My feelings were so mixed about what [Planten’s death] meant. On the one hand, that outcome is what the state would be seeking following a trial,” said Spurlin, referring to her belief that Planten would have received the death penalty if convicted. “This way, the victim’s family didn’t go through the pain of having to relive the death of Stephanie Bennett. But at the same time, I felt like I’d really been robbed.”

  Spurlin told Willoughby over the phone about her anger and about the fact that not having a trial meant neither she nor the investigators nor the family would ever have the answers they longed for in this case. Spurlin had desperately wanted just one crack at Planten on the witness stand in a courtroom.

  “I always kind of dreamed that I might have the opportunity to cross-examine him,” Spurlin said, even though she knew it was highly unlikely Planten’s attorneys would have ever let him take the stand.

  Even if that opportunity had not presented itself, surely Planten’s mental health would have come into question at some point in the trial preparation. Experts from both sides would have tested and interviewed Planten and submitted reports to the court regarding his mental health status. This in itself might have helped provide clues to the lingering question of why. It was so rare for investigators to get a glimpse into the mind of a killer who preyed on strangers. The chance to study a person like this would have been a once in a lifetime opportunity.

  The detectives who had worked so hard to make the case were just as upset as Spurlin by the news. Perry was the one who called them and filled them in on the situation.

  “We felt robbed,” Detective Jackie Taylor said of Planten’s suicide. “You worked so hard, and you can’t describe it.”

  Both Taylor and Detective Ken Copeland had hoped they would learn more about Planten through the trial process, about whether he had been involved in other crimes and, if so, what his motivations had been. Many people told the detectives that Planten’s suicide was a good outcome; the taxpayers would not have to pay for a long, drawn-out trial, and the victim’s family would in turn not have to go through the painful process of hearing all of the gruesome details of Stephanie’s death. But Taylor and Copeland both rejected this twisted idea of justice.

  “That’s not how we felt at all,” Taylor said, remembering the resentment she felt after realizing Planten was still calling the shots even from a prison cell.

  Copeland believed the suicide was Planten’s ultimate and final act of control. “Drew’s biggest fear, his biggest punishment, was people sitting there and staring at him, people looking at him,” Copeland said. And now he wo
uld never have to deal with that again, Copeland thought. Planten had escaped as triumphantly as if he had scaled the prison walls.

  That first night, the night of Planten’s arrest, he had closed his eyes at the police station and refused to speak. Copeland felt like that was the beginning of Planten’s complete withdrawal from the world, a foreshadowing of what was to come. He wanted to block everything and everyone out for good.

  “I think his whole thing was, ‘If I close my eyes this will go away,’ ” Copeland said, trying to imagine what Planten was thinking that night.

  “I don’t think he was catatonic. I don’t think he was having a mental breakdown. He was withdrawing into himself, which was his security,” Taylor said.

  Raleigh detectives knew they also had to tell Lansing police about what had happened. Perry volunteered to call Detective Joey Dionise. Dionise remembered getting that “dreary call” from Perry just as everything seemed to finally be coming together with the Huismann case.

  “Over in a minute,” Dionise said heatedly. “I just said to myself, ‘Oh shit, you’re never going to know why he killed her because he’s dead.’ ”

  Dionise in turn knew he had to tell Rebecca’s parents, Glenna and Bernard Huismann. They actually took the news better than he expected they would.

  “I was relieved there would be no trial,” Glenna said. “Planten had refused to talk to anyone. I guess the answer is he was a very sick man.”

  While the cops were feeling cheated about Planten’s suicide, Joanne Reilly, Planten’s former supervisor, who had helped police get his DNA, was deeply saddened by the news. It was still hard for her to reconcile what Planten had been accused of doing with the young man she had come to know and like. Her motherly instincts had always been to protect Planten—they were hard to turn off even after she found out he was the prime suspect in Stephanie’s murder.