Drew Planten’s arrest also confirmed a lot of people’s thoughts about what someone who would do something like this might look like. In his mug shot, on video, and in newspaper photographs, he did in fact look like the bogeyman. But there were still more surprises to come, such as the secrets that the bogeyman’s apartment held.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Organized Chaos
October 20, 2005
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
—EARL WARREN
The day after Drew Planten’s arrest, investigators executed the search warrants for his apartment, his 1976 Chevrolet Camaro, his financial records, his state personnel files, his computers, and his person. The warrant for his person allowed investigators to get a fresh DNA sample from Planten in a controlled environment. This would allow them to double-check the match. The new DNA sample obtained through this warrant would be used in court to prove there was no doubt that Planten was the one who had been in Stephanie Bennett’s apartment the night she was murdered.
Investigators approached his apartment on Buck Jones Road with extreme caution. His dog had already been removed and taken to a shelter, so that was not the issue. The issue was whether Planten had booby-trapped the apartment. Based on how careful Planten had been not to leave his DNA anywhere, they now assumed that Planten had in fact realized that they’d been following him. Because of this, police were concerned he might have left them a little surprise in the apartment in the increasingly likely event that someone searched it. Given this concern, the Raleigh Police Department’s bomb squad went into the apartment first to make sure that Planten had not left anything dangerous that could harm the officers who were about to conduct the search. They found nothing. Once the bomb squad deemed the apartment safe, the detectives got down to business.
“The first day, it was overwhelming,” Detective Jackie Taylor said.
Officers from the Raleigh Police Department and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation were divided into teams with assignments to search and catalog items in specific locations within the apartment. Taylor remembers that the small apartment was so full of stuff and people, it was almost impossible to get any real work done.
Because of his continued involvement in the case, SBI Agent Mark Boodee was also invited to help with the search. As an agent who spent most of his time in the laboratory analyzing DNA samples, Boodee jumped at the chance to work in the field and to maybe learn a little more about Planten.
Boodee described his initial impression of the apartment as a “crappy bachelor pad.” “That was like no other place I’d ever seen before,” he said, shaking his head. There was nothing on the walls, and old beat-up furniture filled the den. There appeared to be nothing of real value in the apartment other than a television and a VCR. Surrounding this rather depressing setting were boxes of assorted items including magazines, clothes, shoes, and video games, crammed into just about every possible nook and cranny.
One of the first pieces of evidence investigators found was the laundry basket that had been taken from Stephanie Bennett’s apartment.
The laundry basket was a significant find because along with Planten’s DNA, it made the connection between him and Stephanie even more tangible. There was no logical, innocent reason for Stephanie’s laundry basket to be in Planten’s apartment.
The last time this basket had been seen, it had been full of laundry and sitting on the floor of Stephanie’s bedroom. The laundry had been found in a pile on the floor, and detectives had theorized that the killer had probably dumped the laundry out in order to use the basket to carry and conceal Stephanie’s portable stereo as he left the apartment. The stereo, however, was not found in Planten’s apartment.
The investigators did find, however, newspaper clippings about Stephanie’s murder from the local paper, the
News and Observer.
This, investigators considered, was evidence that Planten had gloated privately about what he had done and what kind of attention his evil deeds were getting in the media.
Investigators also found guns, nice guns, expensive guns. The arsenal included nine handguns and two shotguns, and a stockpile of ammunition. And there were knives,
lots
of knives. Forty knives, one sword, and a machete were discovered in Planten’s apartment. They also found unusual items that might be used in the commission of crimes, such as a lock-pick set, duct tape, and handcuffs.
Planten had cut a path through his towers of stuff in order to get into his bedroom. There were cardboard boxes stacked shoulder-high all around his bed, filled with items such as brand new, apparently never worn clothing with the tags still attached.
There was plenty of evidence of hoarding—seventy-six pairs of men’s shoes, twenty-five jars of spaghetti sauce, and hundreds of video games. The shoes, mostly sneakers, were stacked in their original boxes in the bedroom closet. Like the clothing, most of the shoes had never been worn. At least half of the three hundred or so video games were still in the wrappers. Many of those were crammed into the kitchen cabinet above the microwave.
There was a mountain of evidence illustrating what appeared to be Planten’s sexual deviance—pornographic videos, photographs, books, magazines, and sex toys.
“He had tons of porn, like I’d never seen before. Like he’d have three copies of the same
Penthouse
still in the plastic,” Agent Boodee recalled. “He had milk crates full of porn, magazines, stacked from the floor to the ceiling.” The material was not all recent. Detective Copeland said Planten had classic editions of
Playboy
dating back to the 1970s stacked up neatly in the corner of his room, still in their original plastic wrapping. They had never been opened or read.
“There was underwear, tampons,
used
tampons,” said Copeland as he recalled some of the more disturbing items belonging to women found in Planten’s apartment.
Prosecutor Susan Spurlin joined in the search as well. As someone who had handled many high-profile murder cases, she knew it was important for her to get the best understanding she could of the suspect—something she couldn’t get from simply reading the case file. She needed to see how Drew Planten lived firsthand. She wanted to gain insight into who this man was so that she would be able to relay the full picture to the jury.
“I was hoping that somewhere there would be an answer to the question, ‘Why?’ ” said Spurlin. “At that point there is so much to learn. Just because officers make an arrest, doesn’t mean it’s over.”
Spurlin was amazed by how many items Planten had been able to stuff into the tiny little apartment. She was also confused as to why someone would choose to have so many duplicate items with very little real monetary or practical value.
“There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason,” Spurlin said, throwing her arms in the air.
Psychologist Teague saw the hoarding component of Planten’s lifestyle as part of his “obsessive-compulsive personality.” Teague said this trait fit right in with the rest of Planten’s psychological profile.
According to a paper published in the December 2003 issue of
Clinical Psychology Review,
Compulsive hoarding (or pathological hoarding) is the acquisition of, and failure to use or discard, such a large number of seemingly useless possessions that it causes significant clutter and impairment to basic living activities such as mobility, cooking, cleaning, showering or sleeping.
No one who saw the apartment could imagine how anyone could have functioned in such a small space with so much clutter. It was so tight, it looked like the stuff would literally keep closing in on a person until he eventually disappeared, which may have been exactly what Planten wanted to happen.
“If he had one of something, he had ten,” Taylor said. “It was an organized mess.”
Teague also believed what he perceived as the killer’s obsessive-compulsive behavior may have manifested itself in the
way
Stephanie was sexually assaulted. He believed the crime probably followed a detailed, ritualistic pattern involving specific sexual acts performed in a rigid order—that it was less about lust, and more about following certain steps.
Probably the most disturbing thing investigators found in the apartment were the references to other women who detectives thought might have been intended as future victims. Investigators found directions printed to the home of a woman who lived in Kenly, about thirty miles from Raleigh. At one time she had worked with Planten at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture.
During a separate search of Planten’s work space at the fertilizer laboratory on Reedy Creek Road, investigators found a document bearing the name of a woman who had moved to the Dominion Apartments and into the same building as Planten just after Stephanie’s murder. Police also found a two-page list of other women’s names.
“Any female name we found, we set it aside to research,” Copeland said. “ ‘Who she was; was she dead?’ ” Police ultimately contacted every woman referenced in Planten’s apartment that they could find.
One thing they learned from researching the women on whom Planten seemed to focus was that he appeared to have a type.
“He had a thing for very, very petite, skinny women,” Copeland said. “If you were not the perfect girl, he considered you fat, and he would not have anything to do with you.”
There was no doubt in the detectives’ minds that Planten had been stalking other women—and maybe even preparing to rape and kill them, as they believed he had done to Stephanie.
By the Grace of God
There was one particular woman named Angela Smith
1
who had rented an apartment on the third floor of Planten’s building when he was still living at Dominion after Stephanie’s murder. Investigators discovered a videotape taken of her at a party with friends.
When Smith had decided to move into the Dominion Apartments in the fall of 2002, her mother’s friend had called her and told her there had been a murder in the area just a few months earlier and that she was concerned about Smith’s safety.
“That means the rents are going to be low,” Smith recalled telling her mother’s dear friend flippantly. “Bad things happen.”
Smith was not the type of woman to let anything scare her. She had even taken a self-defense class and felt like there was very little she couldn’t handle. So, despite the warnings from her mother’s friend, she took the apartment.
She loved being on the third floor because it seemed like a safe location for a young woman living alone, but she had a new puppy, and she didn’t love traipsing up and down the stairs with him. It seemed like she was always running up and down those damn stairs at all hours of the day or night. In her tired stupor, she would often pass her first-floor neighbor walking his dog. That neighbor was Drew Planten.
Smith had noticed Planten immediately after moving in because of his strange appearance and extreme antisocial behavior.
“He was just kind of a very creepy looking guy,” Smith said. “He’d never make eye contact with you. He never said hello. He was just kind of an oddball. He was very quiet. He had this beat up old car.” She told her friends he made her feel uncomfortable. Smith was a cautious young woman who always paid attention to her surroundings. One thing she didn’t always pay attention to, however, was locking her door when she stepped out to walk her dog.
When Raleigh Police contacted Smith after searching Planten’s apartment, they told her that Planten had stolen items from her apartment at Dominion. By this time she had moved in with her fiancé and was living in Hickory, North Carolina, a town about 175 miles west of Raleigh. The investigators explained they had found the videotape, as well as some photographs of Smith and some mail belonging to her. They told her that Planten, the man who was in possession of her belongings, had been arrested for Stephanie Bennett’s murder.
“Your heart just kind of skips a beat,” Smith said of her feelings the day she first spoke to police. “You’re just freaked out. Just felt thankful. I just felt really lucky that none of it had ever happened to me. Obviously, he had the ability and was the kind of guy who could go that far and do really horrible things, and for whatever reason, he didn’t do that to
me.
”
The videotape, Smith explained, was actually a tape full of high school memories made by her friends. She had always kept it in the trunk at the end of her bed. The photographs came from an album that she had kept in a chest in her bedroom. She knew the tape was still in the trunk because she had looked at it recently. Detectives then concluded Planten must have somehow gotten into Smith’s apartment, stolen the tape, copied it, and then returned the original to its original location so that she would not know it had been taken.
As for the photographs, at one point, she
had
noticed there were gaps in the album, missing pictures here and there, but she thought maybe she had removed some of the pictures at one point to make a collage and simply forgotten about it. Detectives told Smith they believed Planten had also taken some of her items from the trash, like her mail and even her used tampons.
Smith’s fiancé’s quiet strength and support helped her get through the ordeal. Her parents, who lived in the Washington, D.C., area, were understandably very upset after they learned that a killer may have been stalking their daughter.
“It was just a scary thing for everybody to realize that—to even go into the realm of what could have happened,” Smith said.
Smith had lived at the Dominion Apartments for three years, and she remembered police officers passing out fliers in the neighborhood, looking for more information to help them solve the Stephanie Bennett case. She remembered stories on the news on the yearly anniversaries of Stephanie’s murder. All she could think about after finding out that Planten had been in her apartment was,
Why not me?