Too Young to Kill (36 page)

“What I want you to pay is
very
close attention to . . . [the] very heavy continuous press coverage . . . where on the news, in the papers, everywhere, people are talking with each other. And there are things that are being recorded, sometimes attributed to certain people and sometimes not. So I want you to pay close attention to separating rumor, innuendo, opinion, and what purports to be news from what people actually
know
and what is actually
fact
.”

Hoffman was at the top of his game.

“I ask you to remember that you are dealing with teenagers,” Hoffman said awhile later. “Miss Kolb is here on trial as an
adult.
”

These were the same issues a state’s attorney generally addressed during his opening, with the hopes of heading off any arguments before they were allowed to fester.

Hoffman asked the jury to “pay close attention to what their relationships are, a lot of people will use the term ‘friends’ and I think one of the things you need to do is separate out as to who is actually whose friend. . . .”

He then spoke of how SA Terronez had haphazardly used the word “they” throughout his opening.

“I want you to pay close attention to what is actually attributed to a specific person, who did or said what. Not the ‘they.’ It is easy to say ‘they’ all went somewhere. Well, who did what, where?”

Hoffman pointed out the fact that every time Nate Gaudet talked to police about the case, he changed his story.

“It was different.... So pay close attention to Mr. Gaudet. I don’t know what he is going to say, but we have records of what he said in the past, so we can compare them.”

For the next ten minutes, Hoffman focused on the evidence—that is, the bludgeoning stick, the blood, the carpet in Sarah’s car, the “graphic evidence” of Adrianne’s skull. He encouraged the jury not to be taken in by what a
witness says
about the evidence, but only what DNA
analysis
of the items proves.

Good points. All of them.

In the end, Hoffman told the jury to listen carefully to the “charges,” what they were, and how they applied to his client. He asked the men and women of the jury to “separate in your minds . . . what happens that causes Adrianne’s death from what happens to her remains afterward, because that is the part that is going to be most graphically offensive to you.”

Jeff Terronez objected to this.

The judge said opening arguments were not intended to be closings.

It was the perfect segue for David Hoffman to conclude on what turned out to be an extremely powerful note: “I’ve said enough to you. You are going to hear the evidence, and you already know what Mr. Terronez and I say is
not
evidence. So we will start now.”

SA Jeff Terronez’s first few witnesses set up the feud between Sarah and Adrianne. Classmates of both girls talked about how Adrianne slept with Sarah’s friend at the party house that night in December, and then turned around and flung it in Sarah’s face, which upset Sarah.

One of the girls told jurors that Adrianne, who could be extremely rancorous herself, told Sarah in school some days after the party night in December 2004, “I met two of your friends, and I fucked them both!”

Then East Moline police officer Kevin Johnson took the stand and talked about how, on the day after Adrianne disappeared, he spoke with Sarah by phone. She was talkative and seemed more than willing to describe the relationship between herself, Adrianne, and Cory. There was even one part of the conversation, Johnson noted, when Sarah became concerned about Adrianne.

“She said,” Johnson testified, “that Adrianne said she was in love with Cory, and that she said [to her], ‘I don’t know how you can be in love with him, you barely know him.’ And then she told—Sarah told Adrianne that—that Sarah likes Cory, Cory likes Sarah, but Cory doesn’t like Adrianne.”

It came across as the soap opera Sarah had made it out to be.

“Did she say what conversation took place next? . . .” Terronez asked.

“Um, she told—she told Adrianne that she hated her and that she was a slut and she spreads like Jiffy.”

“That she spreads like
what
?”

“Like Jiffy.”

“Did she make any reference to what ‘spreading like Jiffy’ meant?”

“No, she didn’t. She had talked about how promiscuous Adrianne was with other guys, having sex with other guys.”

Johnson answered a few more questions about the phone call with Sarah. Terronez played the recording, and then Hoffman passed on asking the cop any questions.

Next up for Terronez was Sergeant Timothy Steines, a cop with the Rock Island Police Department. Steines had been brought into the case on January 25, 2005, by a request from the ISP and EMPD. He immediately dispatched half his unit, he said, to aid in the investigation. Steines was on the stand to verify that he brought along a team of officers to the Black Hawk State Historic Site on the night Cory Gregory led everyone down into that ravine where Adrianne’s head and arms were hidden in the manhole.

In a moment of reflection, the gallery realized why that ninety-pound steel manhole cover (they had seen it in the video) had been so easy for Steines to lift off and toss aside like a Frisbee. Steines was a six-foot three-inch, 235-pound monster of a man.

“Did you ever observe the contents inside that bag?” Terronez asked, encouraging the cop to describe what they had found inside the manhole.

“I did.”

“And what did you observe inside that bag?”

“There was a head and two arms.”

“And in what condition?”

“Badly burned and . . . in pieces.”

“They were severed?”

“Yes.”

Hoffman had only three or four questions for Steines, which were centered on the officer’s size and how many of his men—“around ten”—he brought out to the park on the night Cory Gregory led them to Adrianne’s head and arms.

Because of witnesses Tim Steines and ISP crime scene investigators John Hatfield and Thomas Merchie, SA Terronez was able to introduce the two videotapes recorded that night and the next morning as investigators recovered Adrianne’s body parts from the park and Sarah’s grandparents’ farm. If nothing else, the tapes proved that Cory had shown police where Adrianne’s body parts were hidden. And Hatfield, talking about his inspection of Sarah’s car, was able to explain that the trunk smelled of gasoline, the accelerant Cory had told the police he and Sarah had used to burn Adrianne’s remains, adding further credence to Cory’s statements.

69

The following day, November 3, began with the technical side of Terronez’s case. It seemed the SA was following a playbook written by those prosecutors before him. On the previous day, Terronez had set up the relationship between Adrianne and Sarah; then he progressed into the search for Adrianne’s remains, how Sarah became involved, and ended the day with videotape images of Adrianne’s charred body parts. This morning, by calling Dr. Jessica Bowman, the pathologist who had inspected what was left of Adrianne’s corpse, Terronez was going to give the jury the results of the murder the state claimed Sarah Kolb and Cory Gregory had committed.

Bowman would also inject the trial with its first bit of shock and awe.

Assistant State’s Attorney (ASA) Peter N. Ishibashi questioned the doctor, who quickly rattled off her long list of credentials.

Ishibashi then asked Dr. Bowman to explain—of all things!—what an autopsy was in respect to finding out how a human being had died.

It seemed a bit unnecessary.

From there, Bowman talked her way through examining Adrianne’s body parts, slowly detailing every graphic cut, char, muscle tissue size and weight, along with the condition of Adrianne’s scalp, leg, arms, head, and torso.

After saying that she could not give the jury an “exact cause of death,” Bowman surprised some in the room when she said she had come to a “different diagnosis . . . based upon what I saw. And the differential diagnosis includes strangulation, either manual or with a ligature, compressional asphyxia, and that would be when somebody would sit on the body, preventing the chest wall from moving up and air from getting into the lungs.”

The doctor was saying Adrianne was, in effect, smothered to death.

Bowman next talked about “blunt-force trauma,” admitting that there was “no evidence of lethal blunt-force trauma.”

ASA Ishibashi had the doctor explain the term “asphyxia.”

Then, several questions later, he asked Dr. Bowman if there was away to tell if Adrianne was alive when Cory and Sarah lit her on fire.

“There was no evidence to suggest she was alive at the time of burning.”

Smartly, Ishibashi ended there. The worst thing a prosecutorial team can do is keep one of its experts on the stand, talking technical terms nobody really cared much about. The plan should be put a specialist up there, get her to give the money sound bites, and then quickly get her off the stand. Any more than that and the team is belaboring the technical facts of its case, which juries, by and large, do not want to hear.

David Hoffman went right for an opening he had apparently felt the state left him, asking Dr. Bowman if she had noticed any “missing teeth” on Adrianne’s skull.

“No missing teeth,” the doctor testified.

Thus, if Sarah had beaten Adrianne with her broom handle stick, as witnesses would soon testify, why were her teeth intact?

Then Hoffman was able to get the doctor to admit that strangulation generally involved a “choke hold,” and not necessarily smothering, and that it would, in fact, be “easier” to choke someone to death rather than smother.

“It would be much more likely with a choke hold,” Bowman agreed.

“I have nothing further,” Hoffman concluded.

The media had watched and photographed him walking into the Justice Center. He looked scared and ghost white; his dark black hair was cut respectfully short.

SA Jeff Terronez called Sean McKittrick. The Juggalo was obviously nervous; he walked in with a fidgety way about him, and it was clear Sean did not want to be there. Sauntering by Sarah Kolb’s table in front of the bench, Sarah’s former boyfriend didn’t take his eyes off the floor.

He sat in the witness chair.

Sarah stared at Sean as the bailiff adjusted the microphone to his height.

The former boyfriend of the accused was now eighteen years old. Sean had a way about him: congenial, yet hard. Court viewers got the feeling that the kid had been through a lot in his short life and would rather forget about it and move on.

He pointed Sarah out for the jury. She wore a long-sleeved, buttoned-up shirt, and held steady a look of despair and disdain on her ashen face.

Sarah was a fighter. That much was clear in her manner.

As he spoke about how he met Cory and Sarah, Sean McKittrick seemed to drift off. He was hard to hear.

The lawyers and the judge told him to speak up.

Within a few minutes, Sean walked jurors into the party house and introduced them to Nate Gaudet and several other Juggalos who hung out at the house. Then the SA had him talk about the relationship between Adrianne and Sarah. Sean had a backseat view of the tumultuous period between Adrianne and Sarah. He had witnessed Sarah’s hate for Adrianne through Sarah’s point of view, beginning at the first of the year, when Sarah and Cory picked up Sean in Cedar Rapids and brought him back to the QC. As far as his relationship with Sarah, Sean McKittrick said, he saw it slipping “at a down slope” by the time Adrianne was murdered, “and I noticed that it was not going to last, so that time (January 21, 2005), I would say it was over.”

Terronez had Sean explain the setup at school. Class times. When the students had breaks. Where Sean and his crew hung out.

Sarah’s name kept popping up as the leader, the one person they all went to for rides and advice.

Quite surprising, Sean said Sarah had never spoken to him about Adrianne, which made one consider the question: if Adrianne was so much the focal point of Sarah’s wrath, why wasn’t she discussing the girl with her boyfriend, arguably her closest confidant?

Sean categorized the relationship Cory and Sarah had as “odd.”

After a few more questions about Cory and Sarah’s relationship, Terronez had Sean get into the reason why he was there: Taco Bell.

First Sean jumped down off the stand and talked jurors through several maps and photographs of the Taco Bell parking lot that Terronez had set up.

Sean said when Sarah grabbed Adrianne by the hair, his “attention” was piqued.

“How did she have hold of her hair, sir?” Terronez wanted to know.

“By the back of her head.”

It was clear the attack was unprovoked. Adrianne had never said anything, nor had she hit Sarah before Sarah grabbed her by the back of the head and warned her to stay away from Sean and Cory.

And that was about the extent of Sean’s role in all of this. When Sarah failed to heed his call to stop bullying Adrianne, Sean bailed out of the car and went back to school.