Hang on .. I've got some more links to post .. Sarah's mother reportedly had an online deviant journal (apple not falling too far from the tree?) but the maintainer of the website said she won't post the link. Here's the story from that site with the links:
http://www.planethuff.com/darkside/archives/true_crime_general/
The story of the murder of 16-year-old Adrianne Reynolds is no "Rather-gate", and I'm no high-powered lawyer like the bloggers who showed up the news monolith that was CBS. This is a story that is much closer to everyone's everyday life, one that strikes at people's psyches with it's pathos and brutality. But read on to see why I say another point, however meaningless, has been scored for the Pajama Posse, the guys and girls out here in the rest of America watching the news intently and sometimes realizing there is more to the story, sometimes finding it.
I received the heads-up last night that the findings I'd made through some very helpful tips and published online in this entry, on January 27, 2005, were finally making it to local news broadcasts in the Quad Cities area, where Adrianne Reynolds was brutally murdered.
Yesterday evening, February 1st, 2005, WQAD, the Quad Cities ABC affiliate, published "their" findings about Sarah Kolb's online activities.
A choice quote from the article:
Well, lookee there. Though this blog is referenced nowhere in the article, I can't help but feel the writer was trying to give yours truly a little shout-out, because otherwise they are improperly creating a compound word by writing "darkside" instead of "dark side." Other than when I write out the URL for this blog I never make "dark side" into one word. A shout-out, or a freudian slip, maybe. Either way, I took the unusual measure of making a screenshot of the first paragraph from the article just in case someone got sneaky after reading this entry and went back and put a space between "dark" and "side".
If it were not for the fact that at least 3 separate television stations' domains appeared in my stats tracker yesterday, several hits apiece, I wouldn't be pointing this out; and it's not like I want a cookie and a pat on the head. Honestly, it's enough to know I scooped them on this aspect of the case, one that will become much more important now that Kolb and Cory Gregory, Adrianne's accused murderers, have pled not guilty to the charges. As far as I'm concerned, you can score one for me and the rest of the bloggers out there who have to deal with the "pajama" factor when we write about anything outside of what we did at work, who is pissing us off, what cute stuff our kids just did.
(::NOTE:: I expect, based on my stats for today, February 2, that you will soon be able to find an article detailing Kolb and Gregory's online activities, at www.qconline.com. Actually, the best newswriting I've seen about Adrianne's murder has been published by qconline, so keep checking the site for updates if you are following mainstream media coverage of this case.)
Lest we forget, though, the most important thing about this sordid tale of disenfranchised teens doing secret and awful things in the middle of a midwestern winter is this:
The victim. Adrianne Reynolds. In the photo above she looks younger than 16, a little unsure of everything. She came up from Texas to the Quad Cities, Milan, East Moline, etc, with her Texas drawl and surely some pain in her past trailing behind.
One friend of Adrianne's said she had a "wow" factor. She was shy at first, I'm told, but would open up as she got to know someone better. At the fast-food restaurant where Adrianne is said to have worked, she was hired because the manager found her personable, said she had a little spunk in her.
She was beginning a new chapter in her life in the Quad Cities, and eager to make friends. A portrait begins to emerge of someone not willing to sink into the murkier waters of her own life, whatever troubles she might have had - someone who was going to not just float, but swim.
Friends say her smile was amazing.
An adult who knew Adrianne from Adrianne's friendship with their children said the following in an e-mail, and it lodged inside this Dad's head, unwilling to fade;
"There was so much inside that little girl."
A little girl, with a great deal to give.
It's understandable to delve into the available evidence where Adrianne's killers are concerned. We want to know the enemy, for one thing. We want to remove our blinders and see the vacant face of teens who were too far gone by the time they crossed paths with Adrianne Reynolds.
Adrianne was that shy-looking, pretty girl in the photo above, and she still contained worlds. The peers who had already surrendered to the void, who had sunk back into the dark waters wherein she was struggling to swim, caught her in their undertow. As you hear more, read more online about her death, don't forget her face, the face of a little girl, whether she would have liked that said or not, who still had so much inside.
Other Dark Side entries about the murder of Adrianne Reynolds:
What The HELL Are These Little Girls Made Of? - first posted January 27, 2005.
Sarah-Boo II - first posted February 1, 2005.
Posted by Steve at 12:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 01, 2005
Sarah-Boo II
A new article up at qctimes.com relates that the male defendant in the Adrianne Reynolds case, Cory Gregory, says he was but a witness to events:
"...Police said Gregory told them he was 'merely a witness' who went with Kolb to her grandparents Mercer County farm and saw her pour gasoline on Reynolds’ body and try to burn the remains. He told authorities the two returned to Millersburg, Ill., two days later..."
The above information is interesting because I received an e-mail on 1/29/05 that stated the following:
"...I've heard that the reason Sarah supposedly killed Adrianne was over a guy, supposedly Sarah's boyfriend. The farm where they took the body to burn it belongs to Sarah's step-grandfather and Sarah asked him last Friday if she could take a guy up there and 'show him around.'..."
I'm keeping the identity of the person who e-mailed me to myself for their peace of mind, and for all I know their safety. What was really interesting is what happened after I went ahead and did a second entry for this blog, titled "Sarah Kolb Part II - About the Accused, ONLY.", based on some of the info I'd received from the e-mail correspondent.
Almost immediately someone calling themselves "Concerned" and giving a fake hotmail address posted the following to my comments for that entry; "The info you were given in your update is wrong. I don't know who's giving you your new info, but it is incorrect."
In irritation I took that entry down. It has since become outdated, but I did use portions of it in my final revision of the first entry about this crime, "What the HELL Are These Little Girls Made Of?"
I did this because the same person had made a comment on the first version of that entry, one where I'd posted a link to a blog by someone with the same name as the accused, Kolb. They seemed sure enough that the first blog linked, a Livejournal, was not kept by Sarah Ann Kolb of Milan, Illinois, that I went ahead and made the first of what ended up being 4 major revisions of the entry in question, removing all reference to the Livejournal. The truth was that while there were more coincidences relevant to that journal than the name, there were enough differences that I was rather glad to pull the links, and regretted having rushed them "to print."
"Concerned" posted one more comment, stating they didn't think that Sarah Kolb's mother had a deviant art journal. This I was able to refute, as I was certain about Sarah's two deviant art journals - the older one, squid-hater121.deviantart.com, had photos of Sarah, and the Sarah-Boo site had links to another site that had a photo of "Sarah-Boo", (possibly Cory Gregory's) and it was obviously Kolb. "Sarah-Boo" had posted a comment to the mom's journal as well that made it obvious she was writing to a caretaker.
"Concerned" was at least partly wrong in saying my second entry's info was incorrect, as the initial attempts to dispose of Adrianne's body did indeed occur at the farm of a relative of Sarah Kolb's. This and their not knowing that Sarah's mom had a deviant art site has led me to question their motivations for commenting and their own knowledge, and no further comments from that person or the IP they use will be accepted.
A third person has been arrested, one Nathan Gaudet, age 16, of Moline, Illinois. This article posted at WQAD.com gives the following horrific account of Gaudet's involvement in the attempts to conceal Adrianne's murder:
"...Investigators say the pair (Kolb and Gregory ~ S.H.) tried to burn the body with gasoline at a farm in Mercer County for six hours but failed, and then enlisted the help of a third teen, Nate Gaudet, 16, to help saw off her head and arms, and cut her torso in half. Her legs had come off when the body partially burned.
Arrested Monday and charged as a juvenile, Gaudet was named as a key witness in Tuesday's revealing preliminary hearings for Sarah Kolb and Cory Gregory..."
Other new info in the article above indicates that Cory Gregory was no innocent bystander:
"...Investigators today testified that Sarah Kolb choked and beat Adrianne Reynolds, while Corey Gregory held her arms, then strangled her with a belt..."
Sarah and Corey killed Adrianne, then made their inept attempts to burn her body. After they spent about six hours trying this they gave up. Two days later they returned with Gaudet, and proceeded to dismember and hide Adrianne's remains. Gaudet was turned in when a parent found a bloody saw in one of his bags.
All of them really still just children. It's pretty damn cold in that area of Iowa/Illinois right now. Wintry, snowy and damp. Gray. For a week or so, 3 psychopathic children tried to conceal the terrible death of another under those wide midwestern skies. It goes beyond sad; there's an emptiness that yawns at the heart of this story which is more awful and heavy than the sadness.
A portrait of Sarah Kolb is emerging as a manipulative and controlling personality with a penchant for, even attraction to violence. What little you can glean from the deviant art sites seems to say this. Had this never happened and I'd found those sites anyway I'd still have found her comments to others disturbing. The post in her mother's journal for instance indicates that Sarah had run away from home around the time it was made - November 29, 2003. Her mom, as I relayed in my first entry about this crime, gushes, thanking those who "helped (her) find Sarah", and how Sarah will "always be her baby."
Then, in a comment made only 6 hours later Sarah, the daughter who had apparently just caused her mother enough worry that the relief in mom's writing was palpable, wrote, "If you love me, let me go to Deftones tomorrow."
She was an unbalanced and violence-prone child. The final photo by another deviant art user that Sarah had selected at her squid-hater121 site as a favorite was this one, by ~black-r0se.
I chose not to post a copy of it here, but if you don't follow the link a description should suffice. The photo by ~black-r0se is an artistic black and white shot of a slender feminine hand, carefully rumpled bedsheets, and a very large, wicked-looking butcher knife.
Many teens court and deal with violence. I certainly did. Your emotions are like a freight train, rarely in your control. For some artistic expressions of it are enough. Creating their own or seeing others - slasher movies, death metal - for others there is not enough juice in the music and the imagery...eventually they want to get their own hands bloody. It's clear that the image locked in our collective unconscious of this last sort of teen being a typically white, intelligent, middle-class boy who has been bullied and outcast is going to change. It's the funhouse-mirror reflection of the equality western society has sought for women for so long now. Women, young and older, not only as equals in the workplace and the home, but also in the abbatoirs of our nightmares, also staring cold-eyed from mugshots, from behind death-row bars.
My daughter, age 3, dressed in a lavender hoodie and flowered jeans, just came rushing in, all blue eyes and flying red hair, to breathlessly inform me that there was a dragon on TV. The sadness of the brave new world that brings cold-eyed girl killers like the accused, Sarah Ann Kolb, is that they were someone's 3 year-old baby girls once. Sarah's alleged victim, Adrianne Reynolds, was too. And one wishes that the dragons had never come off the screens, into one girl's soul, ending another girl's life.
Posted by Steve at 12:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 27, 2005
What the Hell Are THESE Little Girls Made of?
"...This is the story of a murderer
A cold blooded killer, a ruthless, harmless, slaughterer..."
~ Insane Clown Posse, "I Didn't Mean to Kill Him", from Forgotten Freshness Vol. 1, 1998.
You will recall Rachelle Ann Monica Waterman, aka smchyrocky (link goes to my entry about smchyrocky), the 16-year-old from Alaska who plotted the brutal murder of her mom with two 24-year-old former boyfriends.
Now, meet Sarah Ann Kolb.
A quote from the article linked in her name (A different Free Republic article is linked in the photo):
"...Handcuffed and surrounded by court security guards, Sarah Kolb was ushered into the court room in Rock Island this afternoon to face first degree murder charges in the death of Adrianne Reynolds..."
It appears Kolb bludgeoned and choked Adrianne Reynolds to death, then dismembered her body and spread it over two counties. The murder took place in a Taco Bell parking lot, and the attempt to dispose of Adrianne's remains may have taken place in part on the property of one of Kolb's relatives.
Like Rachelle Waterman, Kolb is 16, and like Waterman, Kolb may have had two male accomplices. At least one other person, Cory Gregory, age 17, has been arrested at this writing.
As in the case of smchyrocky, there are links to be found on the internet to Sarah Kolb, as well...sarah-boo.deviantart.com/. It's worth a glance.
After examining the site I was able to find things like this telling photo of "Sarah-Boo", posted on another deviant art page...
...Click the photo to go the deviant art journal where it was posted - the url; mostasteless26.deviantart.com/. mostasteless26 says his name is cory. I can tell that the photo above is the same Sarah Ann Kolb, but can't quite tell from his own photo if "cory" is Cory Gregory. The odds are good, I'd think.
Sarah, being a product of her generation, inevitably left more tracks online. I present to you The Quad City Ninjettes. And Sarah-Boo's lovely contribution to the page is reproduced for the time when geocities inevitably dumps it or something:
I find when reading certain message boards - about the BTK Strangler, for example - that there's a class of kid out there who becomes enamored of any symbol of power, such as serial killers. Often these kids are perfectly harmless, and they outgrow this seeming admiration of psychopaths. Perhaps it morphs into an interest in true crime, perhaps it receives expression in some kind of graphic writing or art. But above Sarah-Boo reveals that she can actually think up a phrase like, "Gouging your eyes out with a mother fucking spork..." - and maybe it's just that I'm seeing those words differently because of Adrianne Reynolds' murder...but I doubt it.
Further research revealed that Sarah Ann Kolb had another deviant art site from which she was banned -
http://squid-hater121.deviantart.com/. I say banned because her "status" on the page is "banned deviant." That "banned" might be because of comments like the one she left here:
"...I'd cry too if I looked like you. Keep your ugly d**e c**t out of my life and stop lying your ass off and saying I said bad things about certain people. And while you're at it, stop being a bitch whore in general! You might find being a good person has it's rewards..."
That last sentence just had to be emphasized for contrast with the words preceding it. And to emphasize, I guess, the irony of the fact that the writer is now accused of brutally murdering, burning, and dismembering an innocent girl who only wanted, by all accounts, to be friends with her.
Much has been made in some of the Quad Cities (Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa and Moline/East Moline and Rock Island in Illinois) press about Gregory, Kolb, and Reynolds' being fans of the bizarre rap group Insane Clown Posse. In this article in The Quad Cities Online, published 1/30/05, a memorial service held by local juggalos and jugalettes for Adrianne Reynolds (male and female devotees to ICP, respectively) is described. The article would be funny in some respects were the subject not so awful:
"...(S)ome at the vigil said Ms. Kolb was not a Juggalette, although others said she and Mr. Gregory were part of the group.
Group members said they aren't a cult or religious group.
'We believe in heaven and hell,' said Cat Waldo, 20, of Silvis, speaking while a fellow Juggalo held his arm around her.
'If we were bad people, we wouldn't be here. We hurt just like a family would,' Mr. McMillin said..."
A cult, or religious group? It's hard to not flash back to middle America's fears of the "dirty hippies" of the 60's and early 70's. Juggalos and Jugalettes are just like any other ardent fans of fringe music groups - little except tie-dye and peace symbols separates them from Deadheads that way.
Though to be fair, The Grateful Dead never wrote lyrics quite like this:
"...I walked into the church dressed up as an altar boy
i seen a preacher,
he said little boy imma Teacher,
put his hand on my shoulder
felt the claw of the beast,
i never thought it'd be so Fuckin easy murdering a priest..."
~ ICP, "Crooked Preacha Killas", from Hell's Pit, 2004.
Looking to ICP fandom won't answer the inevitable, the huge WHY of this crime. If the answer is to be found anywhere, it's in fiction from an earlier era, in my opinion.
In William March's novel, The Bad Seed, we meet Rhoda Penmark. Rhoda is a lovely child, not yet in her teens. She makes good grades and cleans up her room, her mother and most adults are enamored of her. She's very cute, with her blonde pigtails and little gap between her teeth.Rhoda just happens to kill everyone who crosses her in clever and subtle ways. Some lines from the movie version, directed by Mervyn Leroy, made in 1956:
Christine Penmark: Rhoda, what happened to old Mrs. Post in Wichita?
Rhoda Penmark: There was some ice on the stairs and I slipped and fell into her, that was all.
Christine Penmark: Was that all, Rhoda?
Rhoda Penmark: No, I slipped on purpose.
While researching this final version of this entry I happened on to a deviant art journal created by Sarah Kolb's mom, and was struck by this. I will not link it to preserve whatever shred of privacy the Kolb family may have left, but if her mother had access to the site and knew even one of Sarah's screen names, she surely knew she could read anything Sarah said to anyone else, including comments like the "good person" quote above. If she's a halfway normal mother, she probably did.
It's hard to not ask how she could not see the stirrings of something very ugly and dark in her daughter, but I am a parent too. That makes it all the more frightening, perhaps. And to imply blame towards Sarah's parents takes it off her, and refutes the whole idea of the bad seed - that some people are just born that way. The only worth in understanding them is being able to spot others of their kind. Besides, even if any adults in Sarah Kolb's life spotted the stirrings of something awful, deeper and far more pathological than normal teen angst, another line from the movie version of Bad Seed is also too often true in spirit:
Christine Penmark: She killed him, but she's my little girl and I love her.
As I stated, I will not link Kolb's mother's journal, but I will quote in closing an entry she wrote, as reading it after seeing that quote from The Bad Seed is rather powerful...
"... I want to thank everyone who helped me find Sarah. She is back home safe and sound. Again thank you!
Sarah and E_____ (Sarah's sister ~ S.H.) are my shining stars of my universe. I love them both dearly, but Sarah will always be my baby.
They are more precious to me than life itself. Nothing in this world could ever take their place..."
In the comments, "Sarah-Boo" wrote: "...If you love me, let me go to Deftones tomorrow..." - and perhaps that's as telling as anything else about the way this girl's mind works.
Below are some links to news stories about this crime...I'll keep them updated periodically.
Adrianne Reynolds Goes Missing - WHBF, 1/25/05.
An Arrest is Made - Quad City Times, Iowa, 1/26/05.
Kolb charged in "dismemberment of another teen" - WFIE TV, Indiana, 1/27/05.
Kolb to be tried as an adult - Canton Daily Ledger, Canton, Illinois, 1/27/05.
Google Search, "Kolb"+"Reynolds".
Then there's Sean McKitrick, 17, Sarah Kolb's boyfriend. A truly chivalrous young man. From the Quad City Times online, 1/29/05:
"...McKitrick said he saw Reynolds’ efforts toward establishing a friendship with Kolb unravel in the restaurant parking lot.
'Sarah and Adrianne got in an argument,' he said. '(Sarah) started it.'
'She started pulling Adrianne’s hair,' he added. 'That was when I decided to leave the car. I didn’t want to be around.'
When he complained about her behavior, he said, Kolb told him he was welcome to leave. He got out of Kolb’s red Geo Metro and walked back to the school while the other three teens stayed in the car, he said..."
Real chivalrous fella, that Sean.