Authors: M. William Phelps
The area of Brodersen’s focus was secluded, about a half mile off the main drag (135th Street), set atop a steep grade near a couple of abandoned vehicles. What farm worth its salt doesn’t harbor the rusted carcasses of a couple of old cars and trucks perched up on cinder blocks, weeds growing crazily around, the windows smashed out, varmints of every type living inside.
Around where Brodersen and the Engles walked, there were several brush piles
concealed within several acres of thick timbers,
Brodersen’s report noted.
This was the sticks, as they say back East. Acres upon acres of what some call “God’s country.”
Woods surrounded by flatland.
By now, Brian Engle had told Special Agent Brodersen that Sarah was with Cory Gregory on that night he saw her car on the farm.
Interesting.
As they walked, Brodersen asked Brian, “Do you think maybe Sarah and Cory were ‘parking’ out here?” He meant like on lovers’ lane, getting their groove on.
Brian Engle quickly shook his head no. “Not a chance.”
“Why not?”
“They’re both gay!”
“Okay.”
“They were probably smoking.”
“This is quite a distance from the road and your farmhouse to sneak a smoke.”
It was near 4:00
P.M.
by the time Brodersen was told that the Mercer County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), along with other agents from the ISP, were going to be part of the search. The troops were on their way.
As Brodersen and Brian walked, Brodersen asked Brian to go through one more time how he saw Sarah and Cory, using the landscape they were standing on as a model to explain that night.
Brian talked about how he was feeding his cattle near 7:00
P.M.
when he noticed a car parked across the field.
He pointed.
Then, he explained, he got into his pickup, shut off the lights, and began driving toward the car.
“When I got to it, I saw this small red car speed off with its lights out. I followed the car north on 135th Street and was able to copy the license plate number.”
He went back to feeding the cattle, telling himself that he’d call the police if he found anything missing or any part of the farm vandalized.
After feeding his cows, Brian returned home to find the same red car parked in his driveway. The license plate matched his notes.
Sarah!
Brian got out of his truck and tossed his hat on the seat. He walked inside the farmhouse.
Cory and Sarah were sitting there.
As soon as Brian opened the door, Sarah said, “Grandpa, you scared the hell out of me!”
“Why did you run off?”
“I was scared,” Sarah said.
“I wrote your plate down and gave it to the cops.”
Grandpa Engle was playing a game with his granddaughter. He had never done that.
Cory looked at Sarah, and Sarah at Cory. “Her mouth dropped,” Brian said later.
He then left the room.
“This was the first time,” Brian told Brodersen, “that I ever recall Sarah coming out here to visit us
without
her mother.”
As they waited for the other investigators, Brodersen and Brian continued talking about Sarah and the past weekend. Brian explained that his wife, Mary, had told him she thought Sarah was “the last person to be seen with the missing girl,” Adrianne something. In almost the same breath, Mary had said, “Brian, Sarah is in trouble.”
Brian said he had become concerned, after adding up all of the circumstances, and then went to check on his safe, where he kept his guns. He noticed the dial had been turned, but that no one had gotten inside.
“She’s made a lot of positive changes in the last three months,” Brian Engle said of his granddaughter. “Sarah had removed all of her body jewelry, colored her hair back to its natural color, and she even started bathing again. She’s always been weird.”
As the interview concluded, the search team arrived.
21
Somehow, perhaps by God’s grace, or maybe pure emotional exhaustion, Jo and Tony managed to go downstairs, crawl into bed, and fall asleep on the night of January 25, 2005. They didn’t know it, of course, but that search out at the Engle farm had yielded some answers—and more questions—into the investigation surrounding Adrianne’s disappearance.
At 2:00
A.M.
, now January 26, the Wednesday after Adrianne vanished, Jo rustled around in bed, trying to find a few winks. Tony was sound asleep next to her. Then Jo thought she heard the telephone upstairs in the kitchen ringing.
So she got up to make sure.
And as she did, there was that sinking, sick feeling: nobody calls in the middle of the night with good news.
Yet, in this case, it just might be that Adrianne was ready to come home.
Jo put on her bathrobe and hurried upstairs.
Maybe they found her.
“Hey . . . we’re at your front door.”
It was the police. They were calling from a cell phone outside on the front stoop, a little over twenty yards from where Jo was standing, holding the phone, inside her kitchen.
Jo hung up. She stood for a moment in the kitchen, taking in the silence of the night. Bracing herself, she headed for the front door.
22
There is no silver lining in the news that a child has been found murdered. There is no way to sugarcoat what are the most disturbing and painful words a parent will ever hear. There is no way to prepare for the unbelievable truth that a sixteen-year-old child, a precious little
girl
who never seemed to find a home, will not walk through the door again. Her family will never hear her voice. See her smile. Watch the rise and fall of her chest, listening to that cute nose whistle, as she sleeps.
A cop can only hope to catch the monsters responsible and bring
that
news to the family, too, at some point, but not right now.
After Jo opened the door, she stared at the two detectives standing before her. There was a gaze of despair and dread on their faces.
Right then, Jo knew Adrianne was gone. Nobody had to tell her. It was in the stillness of the early-morning hour.
She felt sick to her stomach.
“Is everyone here?” one of the detectives asked. “Are your sons home?”
There was a glimmer of hope there for a brief moment.
What, are they now going to accuse my sons of doing something to Adrianne?
“I wanted to run . . . ,” Jo recalled. “Just run as far away as I could get.”
Hug herself. Crawl into a corner. Hide from the world.
Tony was downstairs, still sleeping. He had no idea what was going on.
“Come in,” Jo said. She started to shake. “Yes . . . yes . . . everyone is here. What’s going on?”
Heading toward the back door of the Reynolds home, a breezeway led outside. Jo brought them into that area of the house.
“Tony’s still downstairs sleeping,” Jo said as they entered the small foyer. Then she stepped out of the enclosure and yelled, “Tony! Tony! Tony!” Her voice cracking, a pain, buried deep, emerging. “The police are here, Tony. Oh, my goodness.”
Tony came running up the stairs in his shorts. Sleep crust still in his eyes.
“What—what is it?”
Tony was told to sit down.
“And as the detective was saying the words—that they had found Adrianne—I am telling myself that this really isn’t happening,” Jo recalled.
“In a park . . . ,” the cop said, his best game face on.
Tony broke down. Bawled. Dropped his head into his hands.
Which kept Jo busy. She was determined to calm Tony down. Comfort him.
I cannot believe this.... This cannot be true.
“What happened? What happened?” Tony said out loud.
“Look, we found her body in a park and we arrested a girl.”
Sarah.
“We don’t want you to try to take the law into your own hands. We’re going to see that justice is done.”
Tony collected himself, best he could. A thousand questions, like inaudible whispers in his head, taking the place of any serenity he had left.
Jo called her brother.
A police chaplain arrived.
The detectives left the house. They had work to do. There was a bit of information they had not shared with Jo and Tony at this time, for whatever reason. It was the manner in which Adrianne had been murdered, and, more gruesomely, what her killer (or killers, they didn’t say) had done to her
after
she had died.
She had been found in a park, the cops had said.
Not a farm. But a park.
How in the hell did Adrianne end up in a park?
At eleven o’clock that same morning, law enforcement held a press conference. Jo and Tony watched from their living room. It would be nice to get a few details about what had happened to Tony’s baby girl. Thus far, the cops had been tight-lipped.
Friends, family, and even strangers stopped by the house to offer support. Jo and Tony had not slept all night. They were tired, upset, in a state of shock.
Definitely not prepared to hear what was coming next.
Carolyn Franco, Adrianne’s biological mother, had made the trip up from Texas and was at the house, too.
It was the headline that startled them.
When the announcer said it, it was as if it didn’t register.
According to what the news conference reported, Adrianne’s murder was a buildup, beginning back during those three-plus months between the time Adrianne arrived in East Moline from Texas for the second time and the day she went missing. During this brief period, the complete story of how she had turned up dead, and—as that headline had so soberly broadcast—was
dismembered
into pieces and left in that park and another part of the state, unfolded in a way that is maybe all too common these days. A tragedy began for Adrianne Reynolds on the day she first walked into Black Hawk Outreach and met up with a group of kids with whom she never truly fit in.
PART II
“LIKE SLAUGHTERING SHEEP”
23
When Sarah Kolb was a freshman at Rock Island High School in 2002, she dated a junior, Danielle Mayor (pseudonym). The relationship was a bit rocky and tenuous because Danielle’s mother did not like Sarah and did not want her daughter hanging with her, much less dating.
Sarah’s reaction to Danielle after being confronted with this news said a lot about where her life was headed: “I cannot hang out with someone who can’t stand up for themselves.”
Before they broke up, while standing in the parking lot of the school one afternoon, Sarah talked about one of her favorite subjects.
Death.
“I wonder,” Sarah said, according to what Danielle later told police, “what it would be like to murder someone, cut them up, bury their body in a park—and get away with it!”
Danielle didn’t know how to react to such a statement. She was “freaked out,” a report of the conversation explained, and probably glad to have Sarah out of her life not long after.
Asked to describe Sarah, Danielle gave cops one word: “Angry.”
Sarah could snap at the simplest suggestion or comment. In 2003, a friend e-mailed Sarah and asked if she was “having sex” with another girl at school. Sarah was openly bisexual by then; there was no question about her sexuality or who she dated.
Sarah wrote back, threatening the girl, saying: You have it coming, bitch.... [I am going to] fucking cut your throat.
A short time later, another girl texted Sarah and asked the same question about the same girl, who was now in college and much older than the fifteen-year-old Sarah.
Sarah sent a message back, warning: I’m gonna climb in your window, slit your throat, and cut you to pieces.
When Sarah saw the same girl at school a day later, she grabbed her by the arm in the hallway. “Bitch, I’m going to kill you!”
Asked later about these incidents, the girl said, “Sarah had a split personality.... One minute, she could be normal. Furious the next.”
Melissa Duggan (pseudonym) dated Sarah for a time during an early stretch of 2004. Sarah was impulsive when it came to reacting to what people said to her, Melissa later said.
“She could be verbally mean.” Of course, it generally came on after Sarah didn’t get her way. There was one night when Sarah told Melissa, “I want to marry you.”
Melissa didn’t know how to respond.
“I hate you. . . . I’ll kill you,” Sarah snapped after not getting the answer she desired.
Melissa’s mother had cancer. “I hope you get cancer and die with your mother,” Sarah said another time.
Then she apologized.
Then she said something else offensive and meanspirited.
Back and forth. That was Sarah.
Alive. Dead.
According to a former coworker, Sarah had a fascination with dead bodies. There was one day when, while at work, Sarah went on about how being around the dead did not bother her. She had been desensitized to death.
“Why?” asked her coworker. How could Sarah know what it was like to be near a dead person?
“I saw [a relative] hang himself,” Sarah explained.
As Sarah met and started hanging with the Juggalo crowd, she found a way to channel all of this bottled-up negative energy, which was perhaps one reason why she felt so at home inside the Juggalo world of darkness, blood and guts, and filthy, vile music. Sarah’s mother had once filed a runaway report with the Milan Police Department (MPD), fearing that Sarah had taken off. When she went missing, Sarah could often be located in a park somewhere close by, hanging out, or walking in the woods. This was a time when Sarah had both her nostrils pierced with loop earrings, her hair dyed a dark ink black. She liked to wear bandanas around her head then, and also long trench coats she had decorated (or defiled, depending on who was asked).
Another popular Juggalo location Sarah gravitated toward with the QC Juggalo crowd was the Singing Bird Lodge, a center where families and park dwellers had cookouts and get-togethers, located inside the Black Hawk Forest Nature Preserve in South Rock Island Township, just outside Rock Island. Police reports from the summer of 2004, not long after Sarah met and attached herself to Cory Gregory, described several instances where
20 to 30 JUVS in their teens . . . all dressed in black and [with] their faces painted
were reportedly causing problems inside the park and near the shelter. Most of the time, they were throwing rocks, screaming, and acting crazy, as kids, in groups, sometimes do. But there were other times when park patrons reported sightings of kids in large numbers surfing on the hoods of cars driving through the park’s grassy areas and cars driving in circles in the grass, tearing up the park’s lawn. Sometimes the kids were caught walking around the park in packs:
hitting garbage cans with bats and setting them on fire,
said one report.