EVIL NEXT DOOR-Amanda Lamb

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was found murdered in her apartment. Despite ample DNA evidence at the scene, investigators could find no matches in their criminal databases. Two years into the investigation, Detective Ken Copeland, known as the garbage Man for leaving no stone unturned in his search for evidence, and his partner Jackie Taylor, joined the case. After culling through the entire file with fresh eyes and re interviewing witnesses, they released a description of a suspect neighbors had seen nearby, a man who'd

once lived just next door to the murder scene. But the suspect refused to hand over a DNA sample, wiping down anything he touched and even planning decoy samples. This is a gripping story of how a team of aggressive detectives doggedly tracked down a killer under suspicion for a killing spree that that investigators believe might have spent years in cross state lines and brought closure to an innocent

young woman's grieving family. Evil next Door, The untold story of a killer Undone by DNA my very special guest, Amanda Lamb. Welcome to the program, Amanda.

to fruition. And this is one of those cases that really shocked Raleigh, North Carolina, where I'm a reporter, because it was a stranger murder. And as you know, Dan, probably from your research and your writing, that most people are killed by somebody they now, and in Raleigh, North Carolina, we don't have a lot of stranger murders. So this was really a needle in a haystack kind of a situation.

I mean, this young woman was going about her life doing what most of us do, working, going home at night. She had no high risk behavior, and yet she was raped, tortured, and murdered in her own home. And so she really was truly what we call an innocent victim. I mean, she was somebody that did nothing to encourage this behavior, and yet the worst possible thing happened to her. And I think that just based on that, it intrigued me.

And then as I researched the case and got to know her family and her friends, I learned more about her and she was just really a lovely young woman. She was somebody that could have been your daughter, your sister, your wife. She was just starting at her life. She had a lot of promise. She was kind, she was a hard worker. She really was somebody that I think anybody would have been proud to call their daughter, or their friend or their sister.

we have a lot of technology companies. We also have Duke University like Forest University and other schools that attract a lot of PhDs and people that are interested in research and teaching and other fields. And so Raleigh to Stephanie Bennett was really a big city. I mean, she was from a very small rural town in Virginia, and her family was actually nervous about her going to Raleigh. I mean, to them it might as well have been

New York City because it seemed so daunting. But she was a young woman who really wanted to be out on her own. She was a subcontractor for IBM, and it was a great professional opportunity for her to work in her fields and computers, and she had a serious boyfriend and had intended to get married, but before she did that, she really wanted to be out on her own. So she came to with two girls from college. One of them happened to be her best friend and stepsister

from a very young age. And the three girls did what a lot of young women in their twenties did. Then. It's something that I did, and it's something that you know, young women still do today. You get out of college, you find some roommates that you can afford to, you know, share an apartment with, and you start your career. And that's that's basically what she was doing here in Raleigh right now.

lot of apartment complexes. In fact, I think the tally from police at the time was that there were five thousand apartments within like a five mile vicinity, and so it was a place where a lot of young people lived. She lived in a first floor apartment, which I think in hindsight, you know, most people would say that's not very safe. But again, this was you know, ten years ago, and it just didn't seem like Raleigh, North Carolina, was a place that you needed to be worried about something

like this happening. And so, you know, I think that she was again just going about her life, doing the normal things that people would do, and yet she did have this cautious treat in her and at one point there was a report that somebody had been kind of peeping into windows in the apartment complex, and that made her uncomfortable, and so uncomfortable that she wrote an email to her aunt about it and talked about, you know, I think I'm going to give up my lease at

some point soon and move out. And she had wanted to be closer to her boyfriend, who was attending graduate school in South Carolina, about four hours away, and so she talked about moving to South Carolina and leaving that apartment complex.

And it was later discovered, and we're not sure how much Stephanie knew, but it was it was discovered that this peeping tom had actually been looking at her particular window. She did not see this, but another neighborhood reported it, and so that would naturally alarm anybody, and of course it alarmed her with good reason.

used to that. I mean again, she'd grown up in a small town, in a close knit community, and that wasn't her preference to be alone. So on this particular night, she was alone. She had spent the weekend visiting her boyfriend in South Carolina and come home, and she had gone to work on Monday morning, just like she always does.

And that night, she'd come home from work and had a conversation with one of the roommates, Emily, on the phone, and she'd also had a conversation with her boyfriend on the phone, and they had talked about her getting an apartment in South Carolina, and he said that he needed some information from her and that she needed to fax it so that he could take it to the apartment complex to fill out the application, and so she told him that night that she would try to do that

from her office the next day. So this was again an unusual thing for her to be alone in her apartment that night, and for all intentsive purposes, though it appeared like any other night in the beginning.

we're talking ten years ago. People didn't have blackberries, and they weren't immediately you know, they weren't as readily able to get up with somebody by email as people are today. But it was still a time. I mean, she worked at IBM. She was on the computer all the time. So eventually they discovered that she hadn't shown up for work. The stepsister did, and the stepsister then started calling around. She even had a friend go by the apartment and

you know, looked to see if somebody was home. Of course, nobody came to the door. And so at that point, the stepsister then contacts the management of the apartment complex and gives them permission to go into the apartment to unlock the door, because she was on the lease and she was able to give them that permission.

had been tied up. And so it was just, you know, as you can imagine for somebody that doesn't know somebody even it was just an awful, awful scene to witness that, and of course it was very difficult and emotional for that manager to see that, and then she immediately called the police.

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on the other hand he's quoting Shakespeare. Just a very intelligent guy, a guy that had a lot of street smarts, you know, just sometimes went with his gut, and that's not always popular in today's world where we want everything nailed down with facts and DNA and specific scientific evidence, and Chris was more kind of an off the cuff kind of guy. Most of the time he was right.

He wasn't always right, and he would be the first person to admit that, but quite a character and just passionate about the cases that he covered, to the point where again he would admit he just got very very close to the victims' families and to the victims themselves. I mean, Chris was a guy that you walked into his office and he had pictures of the victims up on the bulletin board behind his desk, And when I would ask him why he did that, he said, because

I wouldn't always remember who I'm working for. And at the end of the day, that's who he was. He was somebody that just would do anything, you know, go to the mat for these victims and their memories and try to do whatever he could to solve these cases. And at the time that he responded to this scene, Chris had twin daughters that were in their late teens, and so you can imagine this was just devastating for him because all he could think about was you know

this could be my daughter. I mean, Stephanie was in her early twenties, twenty three years old, and it was just he said, it was actually the worst thing he's ever seen. Which it's interesting because again, you, as a journalist and someone who's covered these cases before, knows that there are a lot of crime scenes that are very bloody and very very hard to even imagine somebody doing that to another human being, and this was not one

of those scenes. This was not a bloody scene, but it was it was just heart wrenching to see this young woman who had been just so violated and tortured up until the moment she died.

you know, absolute torture is what it is. And this was somebody that Chris immediately thought, this is not somebody who knows this woman. And this because it didn't appear to be a disorganized crime or crime of passion. This seems to be something that was well planned, well organized by somebody that knew exactly what they were doing. And again, very frightening to think about that kind of a person in a place like Raleigh, North Carolina that rarely ever has a.

was doing and brought his implements with him. There was nothing left at the scene, and that was the other thing. So the restraints were gone from the ankles and from her wrists, and the implement that was used to strangle her was also gone. So this was somebody who pre planned this very carefully.

to exactly what happened with that window. But they found things under the window, some pine needles that could have come off the bush on the outside of the window where he came in. They also found some things that had been on the window sill that had been moved, and so the thought was that he had to move

them in order not to knock them over. The belief is that he probably had been watching the apartment and knew that she was alone that night, and so therefore he could even maybe if the window was slightly a jar, heard her talking on the phone about being home alone, and been monitoring that. The thought is that he could have come in while she was still awake and then

waited until she went to sleep. Before he went into her room, the covers of her bed were pulled back very neatly and folded very neatly on the floor, So investigators believed that she was in fact asleep when he did enter her room, and that he then pulled back the covers and restrained her somehow she slept with pillows kind of around her in the U shape, and the pillows were found in that shape. So there was a half a glass of iced tea next to the bed.

She was reading a Harry Potter book that was left open on the nightstand, and so again she had a night just like any other night where she did what a lot of us do. We get into bed, we read a book, we have a drink next to the bed, and we go to sleep, and then of course was awoken to this awful scene. She had one slight defensive mark above her eye and also a few scratches around

her knee area. And they think that maybe that's Tho's occurred when he initially startled her in her bed before he restrained her, and then of course she was no longer able to fight back.

that your DNA immediately goes into this database. And so if we had had that law, it really wouldn't have mattered. We didn't have it at the time, but it wouldn't have mattered because he had never been convicted of a crime and he knew that. He knew that. So they were very frustrated. It was a needle in a haystack situation, and they started just basically going through these apartment complexes.

Every single man anywhere in that vicinity was asked to do a mouth swab, was a Q tip, which they would then test at our State Bureau Investigation lab to see if the DNA was a match. And so it was just this constant process of elimination, but really with no end in sight, because it could have been anybody. I mean, the suspect was any man that had any access to that apartment complex, which again could have been anybody.

have all those details. But there was an earlier composite of the of the Peeping Tom, and for some reason they started to move away from that, which was a fatal mistake because it eventually the investigation lagged for several years, languished really until these investigators came on and started to

read look at that theory. And it makes sense because the bottom line is not all Peeping Tom's rape, but all rapists are Peeping Tom's at some point, is what you will hear from any kind of forensic investigators and in this case. They did revisit this, but it took about two years to go back to the peeping tom And when they did and they started talking to more people,

they got a better description. And that description included tall, lanky sunglasses, walking, a big dog, hooded sweatshirt, I mean, pretty specific stuff to the point where they were able to start to zero in on who this person might be.

looking at every single thing, not throwing anything away. And in fact, he dubbed Ken the garbage man, because Ken picked up every scrap of evidence or every scrap of potential evidence and looked at it. Things that Chris would have said, I'm moving on, I'm not looking at that. That's the kind of stuff Ken looked at. Ken was a former marine. He's a Native American, first person in his family to go to college. Ken had really risen up through the ranks of the Raleigh Police Department and

made his family very proud. But a very humble guy and a guy that was very easy to talk to for the average person, and that also bode well, you know, for being an investigator because he was able to get people to open up to him. Jackie was a female investigator, kind of an anomaly in the Raleigh Police Department at the time and was kind of a mother hen to

the other detectives. But again, her special strengths was interrogating slash investigating people or interviewing people because she was a woman who had this kind of motherly nurturing way about her and people would open up to her. So they

were a great combination. They were a great team with the way that they approached the case, and they went back through thousands of pages of documents that had been amassed over this two year period and tips and leads, and they just started looking through all this stuff and they came back to the peeping tom. They just said,

this is what makes sense. And they started to piece together the descriptions and they started to reinterview some people, and their big break actually came from just doing good old fashioned police work knocking on doors, and they ended up at the apartment complex, not where Stephanie lived, but apartment complex about fifty yards through the woods from where Stephanie lived, and they got the tip that really led them in the right direction.

always do, you know. They chatted, They drank tea, they ate cookies, they hung out.

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they had a name. All of a sudden, they had this name to go with this this description, and it was the turning point in the case to get that name, and then they were able to again corroborate some of this information. But they went to another apartment of a woman that had lived there for a long time, and they said to her, do you know this man? Have you heard this man? And she said, well, that's the man that killed that girl. And he said, oh my gosh,

well you know, how long have you thought this? And she said, I know, we were talking about it. You know, I don't remember when, but the crime scene takes was still up, so you know, basically, right after this murder happened, neighbors were talking about the sky and somehow, even in all the interviews that they did, in all the canvassing that they did of that neighborhood, that name never came

up in the early stages of the investigation. And it was two years later, a lot more than two years actually, by the time that you know, Jackie and Ken got to that name.

the information from the Department of Motor Vehicles. They didn't think the picture looked like the composite, but they thought, you know, we're still going to check this out, and they were doing it in between all of their other murder cases that continued to go on. So they finally got some information about where he worked, and it turns out he was a scientist who worked for the Agriculture Department for the State of North Carolina in one of

their laboratories. So they decided they would confront him at work, and they went to his office and they asked for him, and Jackie specifically remembers him coming down the stairs at the office and there was a glass partition and she was looking at him and she said it was uncanny. It was exactly how they described him. I mean, he had this gaunt look about him. He was just this tall, lanky man, long kind of straggly hair and looking down

at the ground. And when he came up to them, he you know, put his hand out to shake his hand once they introduced himself, and Ken said, on one hand, he looked like you could just knock him over with a feather, that he was just so frail. But on the other hand, he said, his handshake was like a death grip. It was like a vice. It was so strong. And Ken, you know, again, this big guy, he's a marine. He looks like a marine, you know, big muscular guy. And so for Ken to say that his handshake was

that strong really meant something. And right away they felt like they had to look into the guy, that something was not right, that everything about him seemed very strange, and that they were possibly standing there talking to the person who had killed Stephanie Bennett.

open to domestic violence shelter. Drew Planton was always a very reclusive, shy, antisocial young man, very bright, did well in school, but really didn't have many other interests and no friends to speak of outside of school, and he'd done a couple of odd jobs in Michigan, but nothing really stuck, and then he eventually had interviewed for this chemist position over the phone in Raleigh and gotten the job.

And so he had left Michigan in the late nineties and gone to Raleigh, which was a completely foreign territory for him from the area around Landsting, Michigan where he grew up. But his mother felt like, you know, this was a good opportunity for him to kind of start his life. And he had some connections to Raleigh. He had a brother that had gotten married there, and he had another brother in the western part of the state,

so there were some connections to North Carolina. But again, even once he moved to North Carolina, there's no indication that he had any friends or any social life, or really any connection with anybody outside of the workplace. And

even in the workplace, he was very reclusive. After that first meeting with the detectives, they asked if they could meet him at his apartment and have an interview, and he agreed to do that, and that in itself was just another kind of a red flag for Jackie and Ken because when they got to the apartment, he let them in, but just very just a few feet in the door it was clear he didn't want them to

look around. It was also clear that he had prepared very carefully for the interview and that he was not going to give up any information that he didn't have to give up. I mean again, his mother's a lawyer, and they knew that about him. And during the interview there were a few things that were inconsistent with what they knew to be true, and they immediately started to be suspicious about him. He said, for example, that he never wore glasses, but the DMV records showed that he

had a restricted license. He said that he had never smoked, there was evidence that he had smoked, and there we was just many little things. But ultimately at the end of that interview, they said, will you give us a DMA sample? And they said, we know your mother's a lawyer. You can think about it for a couple of days and let us know. And the deadline that they gave him, they waited for that email to come. Ken said, it was like watching, you know, a pot of water boiler,

waiting for that to boil. And he stood around his computer and at precisely five o'clock on the deadline day, he sent them one line that said, I will not give you my DNA, and so at that point it was game.

One of the things that Ken did was he made a connection with a woman who worked in the laboratory, who was supervising the laboratory where Drew Plainton worked, and her name was Joanne Riley. And Joanne became in some

ways almost a you know, a detective. She was somebody that clearly wanted to help the police, but she was also somebody who clearly believed that Drew Plant was a sweet young man who was misunderstood, and she had a very motherly kind of relationship with him, or developed a motherly relationship with him over the course of the investigation, and she really felt like she would be helping to clear his name by helping the police get DNA. And they had all sorts of scenarios that they went through

to try to do this. I mean, she had a day where she gave everybody popsicles, and then she went to take his popsicle sticks from his drawer because he kept all of his trash. Again, this is the scientist knowing that the DNA leaves the trail, and so he's throwing things away. He's not throwing anything away, he's washing things down, I mean to the point where they said he even cut up his trash and flushed it down

the toilet. And so she went to retrieve these popsicle sticks, and he came into the lab and she heard him come in, and she was terrified because she was starting to believe, well, maybe I'm wrong, maybe he could be guilty. And she took those popsicle sticks and put them in the waistband of her pants so that he would not see her, and it ended up that they were never

able to get DNA from that source. But there were several other incidents and ultimately Joanne's help was a big part of them, of them getting some DNA that led them in the right.

eats some banana pudding with it. Then he sticks the fork in his glass of water, wipes it down, and they leave the lunch and well, the police take that fork, thinking, you know, there may be nothing here, but we're going to get it tested. They take it to the SBI lab, and the scientists from the lab calls and says, I've got good and bad news. The good news is there are six chromsonal markers out of the sixteen needed to connect this DNA with the killer's DNA, and that's a

great start. Won't hold up in court, but you're going in the right direction. The bad news was there was also other DNA on the fork, which meant the fork kidnapped properly washed by the restaurant. But long story short, that put them in the direction of knowing they had to get DNA from the lab because they knew for sure that was a place where his DNA would be found again. Even though he's cleaning up, he's wiping down services, he's literally picking his hair up off the ground when

he brushes his hair if he leaves the strand. So they finally got the DA to agree to go into the lab and be able to take these gloves, and they replace the gloves with another set, and they tested the clubs and it was a match. And so at that point they decided we could wait or we could just go for it, because waiting again could cause these other scenarios of somebody getting hurt, or him hurting himself,

or him running. And another little side bar to this is that they also tested his brother's DNA in the western part of the state because his brother had been charged with basically a peeping crime. He had set up a camera in a woman's bathroom in the architectural firm where he worked, so he had a history of sex crimes. And no two people's DNA are exactly alike, but brothers siblings are closer than any others. And so their thought was, we need to check his DNA to make sure it's

not him. That he hadn't come and visited, so his DNA was not a match, and Drew Planton's DNA was a perfect match.

wait because we can't afford to wait. And Mark Boudet is this SBI agent who's done all of this elimination testing for years and now finally he's got the match, and so you know, there's just a lot of relief, excitement. You know, we're going in the right direction. And they surround the the agriculture lab and they called Joanne and they tell Joanne what's going on, and of course Joanne is, you know, upset. It's a match. It's a match, they

tell her. But she knows at this point that she's you know, they've got it, and she's got to move forward and help the police and they tell her to find him in the building, and he's now kind of disappeared. It's after work hours, and she started to get nervous, thinking, I'm alone in the building with a killer, and so she comes out and they call her and they tell

her to go back in. And now she's really upset because she really doesn't want to do this, and she starts to go back in the building and he's coming out and she holds the door open for him, and he's bringing his bike because at this point his car was not working. And the Ken Copeland was in the van, like a surveillance van with the SWAT team, and they weren't told who the arrest was or what it was about. All they were told is this is the person. You

have to take them down. They may be armed, and so they bring him down to the ground and Ken says, you are under the arrest for the murder of Stephanie Renee Bennett. And these guys in flack jackets with helmets and you know, large semi automatic weapons are cheering and hugging and crying. Because this was such an emotional case for members of the Raleigh Police Department who had followed

this for so long, and he was armed. They found a gun in his cargo pants, and they believed that Hadid had an opportunity to get to that gun, it would have been suicide by cop because he did not want to be taken down. He wanted to be killed, or it would have killed himself before he would have been taken into custody, you know, for what was about to come next. He knew was not going to be good. There was not going to be a good outcome.

was to be the center of attention. And so doctor Tigue witnessed the if you will, the interview that night where they had him in the interview room and Jackie and Ken and alternately came in and out, and Drew Planton never said a word. He was restrained and he was sitting in the room and he never said a word. He sat there and basically went into what appeared to

be a completely unresponsive catatonic state. Now doctor Teague believed that it was he was making it up, that he had resigned himself to the fact that again nothing good was going to come of this, and that he had just decided to shut down. But it was, you know, up for debate as to whether he was literally, you know, in a catatonic state, or whether he had just decided I'm not going to talk and I'm going to act as though I can't communicate. But he was not communicating

at all, and never did. He went to court the next day. They had to wheel him in. He was tethered to a wheelchair, and they said the reason for that was that, you know, he was not He wouldn't walk, he wouldn't go to the bathroom, he wouldn't eat, he

was just acting completely unresponsive. And from there they sent him to the prison because they said they couldn't keep him in the jail, send him to the prison that had mental health facilities, which was just down the street, which was ultimately also the place that, had he been convicted or received the death penalty, it was the prison that he would have ended up in any way. So he went there almost immediately after his arrest.

had fetishes for many different things. Shoes was one of the things that they think that he was obsessed with for some reason, kind of shoes. Again, never opened up. A lot of items belonging to women. He had lists of other women, map quest directions to their homes, articles ripped out of the paper from the different murders, well Stephanie's murder specifically. But then they found something really interesting, which was they found a check and some items taken

from a girl's house in Michigan. And they started to run all these names through their computers. And again, this is ten years ago. It wasn't quite as easy to google somebody, but they were getting hits from some of their law enforcement databases. And one of these women, it turned out, had been killed. A woman by the name Rebecca, had been killed in Michigan, had been murdered six years prior, and so all of a sudden they started to see this picture of this may not be the only incident.

This guy may be a serial killer. And so they immediately contacted the Lansing, Michigan police and started trying to connect these cases. And they found a gun in the apartment in Raleigh with a ballistics that matched this basically what had become a cold case, Rebecca Husman's case in Michigan six years prior. And in fact, that detective said that he never put those files away. He said they sat on the corner of his desk and got dusty because he always knew that someday the case would be

would be solved. And it was a woman, a young woman. She was a dancer at a local bar, and she was shot as she was getting out of her car

at her apartment complex early one morning. Completely different m But there were other cases in the Michigan area that were similar to Stephanie's case, and they had a task force looking at all of the cases and they were never able to connect Drew Plant into those cases, but they always believed that there were other women and that Rebecca and Stephanie were just the two that they could prove. At that point, was.

of him in the neighborhood where she was killed. The district attorney said that absolutely he was in line to be charged for that case and would have been charged for that case, but that was not to be because he, you know, he was in the prison, he started to talk, he started to get more privileges, he started to talk to the psychiatrist, and so he started to get more freedom in the prison and he was no longer under a suicide watch, and ultimately he took his own life.

He hung himself in his jail cell with a sheet, and it happened basically, he was arrested in October, and this happened just a day after New Year's in two thousand and six, and so the case was just over.

It just ended, and it was quite a bittersweet ending for a lot of people because for Stephanie's family, they felt like they never got any answers, and for the investigators, they felt like they had worked so hard to bring him to justice and yet they too would never get any answers as to why somebody would do this and why Stephanie, and maybe get some answers that would help them prevent something like this from happening.

him to come off the suicide watch. But again kind of going back to doctor Tiege's theory, this guy was very bright and his ultimate form of control was making sure that even to the very end, that he was

calling the shots. And that's exactly what he did when he took his own life because he was able to stay out of the courtroom, never put himself through that, and also never give up any information that might have made some difference in terms of again preventing this from happening in the future and maybe giving Stephanie's family a little bit of peace. I hate the word closure. I

don't ever use it because it doesn't ever happen. And they are people who are still very much grieving their daughter, the loss of their beautiful daughter, as do every family that does, every family that loses a loved one. But they did want answers. They wanted they wanted to know what this guy, you know, what made him tick, and they wanted to know more about what happened, and maybe they would have found out. Maybe they wouldn't have. I mean, if he didn't talk, I don't know that they ever

would have gotten those answers. But I think that there was just a real or a bittersweet feeling as to how the whole thing ended.

again find out some answers. And so it was just kind of the end, and I think that it made it very difficult for them to move beyond the situation because it just ended so abruptly. Like I said, Carmen Bennett had also filed this lawsuit against the apartment complex, really, I think in an effort to do something to be able to have some kind of justice for his daughter,

you know. But again, they were very happy that the system had worked from a law enforcement standpoint and that this very dangerous person was off the street and would

no longer be able to hurt anybody else. And you know, I think that there was still some thought that had had this gone on, had the investigation continued, that again they might have been able to solve a few other cases other than just Rebecca Huseman and Stephanie Bennett's, because it's very unusual for somebody to go that long period of time and you know, not kill in between, especially somebody that was as methodical and organized as he was.

shot because they believe maybe he panicked. But again, there was this time period in between the two and there was evidence that he had runted cars, that he'd gone out of town for the weekend, that he had done things that were very uncharacteristic of somebody who really didn't

have any friends or any connections with other people. And so, as you know, there were small towns all over the United States where people are murdered and they are maybe drug addicts or prostitutes, they're homeless, and the investigations go nowhere, and their DNA is never put into a database, and because they don't have the resources or the technology in the particular town and so there may be other cases that we'll never know about, and I think that was

really one of the major things that at least law enforcement and the district attorney were upset about that they were never able to pursue helping solve some of those other cases down the line.