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Father had warned daughter murder suspect was trouble
By Barb Ickes

http://www.qctimes.com/print.php?story_id=1044616

Tony Reynolds told his daughter, Adrianne, that he didn’t want her hanging around with Sarah Kolb.

It appears now that a father’s instinct was correct: Kolb was bad news.

In fact, Tony’s wife, Joann, said Kolb once pulled a knife on 16-year-old Adrianne. But Kolb’s sister stepped in, she said, and the confrontation ended.

Police now believe there was another confrontation and, this time, no one stepped in to protect Adrianne.

At 2 a.m. Wednesday, the phone rang at the Reynolds’ house.

“It was the police telling us they were at our door,” Joann Reynolds recalled Saturday.

“I was just hoping they were going to say they found Adrianne and she was at the hospital or something,” the girl’s father said.

But the news was worse. Much worse.

Though police delivered the shattering news that Adrianne was dead, they did not share everything they knew.

“The way we found out about the dismemberment was on the TV news,” Joann said.

“I guess I didn’t want to believe it,” Tony added.

The couple is still trying to believe it. Tony and Joann sat close to each other on their living room couch Saturday, surrounded by family and friends. They talked about the little girl who was born in Arkansas and moved to Texas when she was about 6 years old.

Joann remembered watching her stepdaughter singing to karaoke in the family’s basement recently and recalled how Adrianne was embarrassed to realize someone was watching her “dancing around and carrying on.”

Adrianne’s dream was to be a country singer and her father was one of her biggest fans.

“I remember her standing in here, singing ‘Amazing Grace,’ and,” he said, stopping in mid-sentence because of the pain that rose into his throat. “When she’d start singing, you might as well throw me a roll of paper towels.”

Joann’s brother, Mike McCollum, who has been at his sister and brother-in-law’s side throughout this ordeal, added, “When she sang, you could just feel it.”

And Tony closed his eyes, as if trying to hear his daughter’s voice once again.

It feels impossible that he will not.

Adrianne, Sarah and Cory

Tony and Joann Reynolds are as angry as anyone might guess. They want Kolb and Gregory put to death. And they absolutely cannot understand how two people so young could do what police say they did to Adrianne.

“Adrianne told me that she had to hide her friendship with Cory from Sarah,” Joann said. “He went baby-sitting with her once, which we didn’t know.”

When his daughter failed to show up for work at 5 p.m. Jan. 21, Tony drove to Cory’s house to look for her. The couple also called Sarah Kolb on the phone.

“Sarah was so convincing when we talked to her that night,” Joann said. “I believed her when she said they had dropped Adrianne off at McDonald’s.

“We were told that Sarah was supposed to go to her grandmother’s house in Aledo that night.”

Police since have said that Kolb did go to Mercer County that night — to dismember Adrianne’s body after she and Gregory murdered her.

While it may be puzzling why Adrianne would continue to befriend a girl who had threatened her with a knife, her father said the answer is simple: “She wanted to be liked.”

When she enrolled at Black Hawk Outreach Center in late November to work on her GED, or general equivalency diploma, Adrianne didn’t know many kids in the Quad-Cities. She’d only been living in East Moline for about a week and was eager to make friends.

She wasn’t like many of the others who favored the “Goth” look, which is mostly black clothes, black nail polish and music with hardcore lyrics.

“Adrianne’s favorite color was pink — not black,” her father said.

And she also was very close to her dad.

“She told me everything — some things I didn’t want to know,” he said.

His brother-in-law, McCollum, added, “You could tell she really loved her daddy.”

What comes next

Tony and Joann Reynolds know the next few days will bring more bitter struggles. They have to get through the funeral. Adrianne’s body was cremated, her father said, and the ashes divided between him and his former wife, Adrianne’s mother.

“I felt a little better last night when I knew she was back here and not being prodded and stuck at an autopsy,” Tony said. “I’m a truck driver and, when she first went missing, I would look into every car that went past.

“I’ll probably do the same thing for a while, I guess.”

For Joann, nighttime is the worst.

“When I go to bed at night and close my eyes, I picture how it happened — what they did to her — and I can’t sleep,” she said.

Mercifully, the couple is likely to have a year of coping with Adrianne’s violent death before the trial comes. But they will be there in the courtroom to see Kolb and Gregory stand trial.

“I wish they’d get what she got — the death penalty,” Joann said. “They were her judge and jury. They deserve to die.”

For now, the memorial services, the anonymous notes and flowers that have been dropped off at the house and a candlelight vigil that was planned by classmates bring some measure of comfort to the still-shocked and grieving parents.

“All she ever wanted was to have friends,” Joann said.

“If the kids want to do things for her, that’s nice,” Tony added, the tears sneaking back into his eyes. “The more she was loved — it makes me feel better.”

There is just one unfulfilled wish they would like to carry out. The Reynolds are waiting for a tape recording to arrive in the mail from Texas. It is a recording of Adrianne singing.

“Her wish was to sing on television, so we’re going to try to get it played on TV,” Tony said. “She also wanted to learn to play the guitar.

“She got a guitar for Christmas,” he said. “She must’ve been playing it quite a bit, because we noticed a string is broken.”