Too Young to Kill (18 page)

In her heart, Sarah needed to know that Adrianne Reynolds was not trying to infiltrate the group, per se, and take her place. So Sarah devised that test for Adrianne—which was now, with that request she had made to Henry Orenstein and Kory Allison, under way.

They sat around inside the party house as the evening turned to night. Outside, it was cold enough to see a person’s breath like smoke. Inside, the booze and drugs kept everyone warm. The chosen poison of the night was “Jack.” Jack Daniel’s whiskey. And, of course, lots of pot and other drugs they had on hand. For Sarah and Cory, they stuck to drinks and a gram of cocaine they snorted throughout the evening.

Adrianne was in the kitchen at one point with Cory. They talked.

In the living room, Sarah turned to Kory Allison and bumped him on the shoulder. “Go in there and talk to her. She’s lookin’ to hook up!”

They laughed.

Kory Allison got up and walked into the kitchen.

“Hey,” Cory Gregory said to the other Kory. “What up? What up?”

Kory, with a K, nodded.

“This is Adrianne,” Cory said, introducing her. Adrianne smiled her little Texas charm. Kory nodded as if he could care less.

Whatever,
Kory thought at that moment. He wasn’t really interested in playing one of Sarah’s games, he later said.

Then as Adrianne started to talk, Kory noticed something that interested him, and he perked up.

“She had a Southern accent.”

They talked; then everyone went back out into the living room.

Nate Gaudet’s girlfriend, Jill Hiers, showed up at some point. Jill did not like Sarah all that much, she later told police, and thought Sarah was “creepy because she’s a lesbian.” Jill had no love for Cory, either, saying she believed him to be “disturbing.”

“He had a lot of piercings,” Jill later explained. “He is very sexual and always talked about killing.”

Jill was well aware that Sarah had brought Adrianne to the house to “test” her, as Jill later put it. “Sarah wanted to see how many guys in the house she could get Adrianne to sleep with. But we all knew Adrianne was looking to hook up with Sarah. Sarah was just interested in hurting someone. She was never interested in Adrianne, because she felt that Adrianne would cheat on her with boys.”

While they were sitting around, Sarah, now feeling the Jack numbing her, got up and walked over to Jill.

“Shut up!” Sarah said for no reason. “Don’t talk anymore!”

Jill looked at her. “Sit down. . . .”

Sarah sat next to Jill. She said, “Hey, watch Adrianne.” Adrianne was walking around the room, Jill later explained, “being the center of attention.” Sarah did not like this at all. Everyone was paying more attention to Adrianne, who seemed to suck it up.

And this, Jill explained, “got Sarah
very
angry.”

Later that same night, Nate Gaudet and Jill Hiers, who sometimes shared a room together at the party house, sat on Nate’s bed.

Cory walked into the room.

“How ’bout we pull a train on Adrianne?” Cory said. He laughed. “She’d probably be into it.” There was one instance earlier when Adrianne, someone in the group later said, walked around the room, pointed at each boy, and said, “I want to have sex with you, and with you, and with you. . . .”

This enraged Sarah.

“I’m serious,” Cory told Nate.

Nate and Jill got up and left the room.

Meanwhile, Adrianne sat next to Henry Orenstein in the living room.

“I have a headache,” Adrianne said, leaning on Henry’s shoulder.

The pain was intense. Throbbing.

Henry had a room in the basement of the house. “Go down there,” he said, “and lay down. Chill out.”

Adrianne waited for about an hour, but the headache wouldn’t go away.

“I’m goin’ to lie down now,” she said.

“Cool,” Henry responded. He took it as an indication, which Sarah had made clear earlier that night in the attic when they first met Adrianne, that Adrianne was going down into the bedroom to “get herself ready.” A wink-wink, in other words. An invitation for one of the guys in the house to go downstairs and have sex with her.

It was understood throughout the house that although Sarah had brought Adrianne, and there might be some sort of a lesbian connection between the two of them, Sarah wanted to hook Adrianne up with Kory or Henry for the only purpose of seeing if Adrianne would have sex with either one, or both. Nothing more than that. Sarah later claimed that she did this only because Adrianne had made it clear to her that she wanted to “get laid.”

Sarah didn’t quite see the visit to the house in the same way when she later explained it in court. She called it a meet-and-greet with the gang.

“It was just to hang out, just to talk to everyone that was there,” Sarah said, playing down the entire night.

Henry Orenstein realized Adrianne had been downstairs in his bedroom, trying to get rid of that headache, for about an hour. He looked at Kory. Nudged him.

“Hey . . . there’s a CD downstairs in my room I want you to grab.” Henry explained which CD he wanted. “On the nightstand next to my bed.” He told Kory to hurry up. “Go get it now.”

Kory didn’t take the hint. He went up and down the stairs three times.

“Dude, I cannot find that CD,” he said.

Everyone laughed.

“What the fuck! Try looking
in
the bed,” Henry suggested. He smiled. Winked. “See if you see anything in the bed that interests you.”

Sarah had been sitting, listening, watching this take place, everyone later agreed.

Kory went back downstairs.

“Umm, when I went back down there,” Kory later said, “and noticed that she was coming up the stairs, I kind of put it together what everyone was kind of trying to do.”

This time, once that basement door closed behind Kory, he did not return right away. Everyone, including Sarah Kolb, sat in the living room, laughing and getting their drunk on, knowing what was going on in the basement.

“When he went down there that last time, Adrianne was awake and . . . they took their thing from there,” Henry explained.

While they were “doing it,” Cory Gregory walked down the stairs to share some news with Kory.

“Your baby’s mom is here, Kory.”

“Shit.”

Adrianne and Kory were in the middle of having intercourse, but now it was over.

Forced to finish, Adrianne came up the stairs and walked into the living room. Sarah, Cory, Henry Orenstein, and others were waiting.

After explaining how she had just had sex with Kory, Adrianne said her curfew was almost up. She had to leave.

Cory, Sarah, and Adrianne walked out of the house together.

There was very little conversation on the way home about what had taken place at the party house, according to Sarah. But Sarah wasn’t happy about what had happened—Adrianne sleeping with Kory. It “upset” her, Sarah later claimed.

She never mentioned anything about a test Adrianne might have failed.

Still, everyone in the house on that night later testified that Sarah had, for one, instigated the sexual liaison between Kory and Adrianne; and two, she never showed any sign of being the least bit disturbed by it after it had taken place.

After Cory Gregory returned to the party house later that same night, after he and Sarah dropped Adrianne off, he sat with Nate Gaudet and another girl who sometimes lived at the house. They talked. Cory often blurted out bizarre things for no reason.

According to the girl who was there, “out of nowhere,” Cory said, “he’d like to kill Adrianne.”

He never said how or why.

Nate and the girl looked at him.

“What?” Nate asked.

“Why would you want to kill her, Cory?” the girl asked.

“Why
not
?” Cory said. “I could get away with it, and no one would know.”

What could they say?

“I’d like to kill her, yeah,” Cory said again.

Teresa Gregory’s second husband, Cory’s stepdad, owned a piece of property outside East Moline. The house had forty acres surrounding it, and at one time had been a working farm.

Continuing talking to Nate and the girl, Cory concluded, “I’d burn her body and bury her remains on my mom’s farm. . . .”

35

Patricia Druckenmiller had been teaching at Black Hawk Outreach since August 2004. Sarah Kolb was one of Druckenmiller’s students, who later explained how there were a few different programs the kids could take at Black Hawk. One was on the ground floor, where Druckenmiller’s classroom was located. It was, more or less, a high-school completion program. There were ninth-grade through twelfth-grade classrooms and a GED program on the same floor. The upstairs classrooms were an extended variety, with older students and some bonus classes and additional GED programs.

Sarah took what was called independent study, history, and English, to be exact, from Druckenmiller. Sarah was one of the first students Druckenmiller met after going to work at Black Hawk that year.

During the first five minutes of every class, Druckenmiller made the kids open their journals and do what she called “free writing.”

“There was only one rule,” Druckenmiller had told her students. “You just have to keep your pencil moving, and really you shouldn’t do any editing or any looking back at it.... So the kids understood,” she added, “that I did
not
look at these, so they could write anything they wanted, and, you know, it was . . . They were not graded. . . .”

This was one way to get their young minds moving, allowing them a place where they could express who they were, knowing that no one was going to judge them.

Druckenmiller recalled how Sarah did not have to be pushed into completing this exercise every morning, as did many of the other children.

“I remember not having to remind her.”

At the end of the five-minute session, the journals were placed in a stack with the students’ notebooks, wherever the kid happened to be sitting. Each student had a “little drawer . . . assigned to him or her, and they would put their stuff in the drawer.”

Each drawer had a name tag on the front.

Keeping all of their work inside the classroom was something many of the teachers, including Druckenmiller, mandated. If you did that, the kids could not come in the next day and say, “I forgot my journal. . . . I lost my textbook. . . . The dog ate it.”

Rather, it was always there.

That journal, for Sarah, became more than just a way of interpreting her feelings. It was an outlet. For her aggression. For that pent-up anxiety drumming through her veins. For anything she wanted to vomit from her confused mind onto the page. Every morning, Sarah went to that paper and unleashed the demons. Only now, as her anger for Adrianne grew to a level she perhaps could not have foreseen, Sarah turned to the journal not to talk about how much she wanted to get with Adrianne, but how much she was beginning to despise this new girl from Texas, who, she felt, was trying to take her place.

It didn’t matter, one person from the group said, if they were hungover or not. When morning came, those who had jobs went to work, and those who had school got up and went to class.

The day following the night Adrianne had had sex with Kory Allison, she and Sarah spoke in school, according to what Sarah later told police.

Sarah said she was upset over the fact that Adrianne had slept with Kory.

Adrianne couldn’t understand why. After all, she was under the impression Sarah had given her blessing.

“It will never happen again,” Sarah claimed Adrianne pleaded with her that day.

“I don’t want to talk to you about it,” Sarah told Adrianne. Then she walked away.

Two of Sarah’s friends, including Cory Gregory, then relayed a message to Sarah that Adrianne wanted to extend her apologies even more; she was truly sorry, and “she still wanted the [lesbian] relationship between them to work out.”

Adrianne didn’t know she had flunked a test Sarah had devised. One of the main reasons for bringing Adrianne over to the party house and exposing her to the “horndogs” who lived in the house, Sarah later told a friend, was “to see if Adrianne was really gay. Sarah was sexually attracted to Adrianne, but she needed to test her.”