Free Evil Next Door by Amanda Lamb

Stephanie’s brain due to the strangulation. It caused her to go into “cardio respiratory arrest,” meaning her heart and breathing stopped as a result of the ligature being placed around her neck.
    The report also noted severe petechial hemorrhages, small broken capillary blood vessels in Stephanie’s eyes—a calling card of strangulation. And on the back of Stephanie’s neck was a crisscross mark indicating a garrote, a ligature with a stick inserted to twist the device around someone’s neck, was used to cut off her air supply. None of the details of the autopsy told the police or the public who killed Stephanie Bennett, but they did reinforce once again that Raleigh had a truly cold-blooded killer on its hands.

Crime Scene Revisited
    In the summer of 2002, Lieutenant Chris Morgan gave the media a tour of Stephanie’s empty apartment. WRAL reporter Len Besthoff and photographer Chad Flowers were invited to see the crime scene for themselves, as well as videotape the now-bare apartment.
    Morgan narrated the tour with a measured tone and, once again, a stoic face devoid of expression or emotion. He simply laid everything out and let the journalists read between the lines. He wore his usual white fedora, but tipped it back slightly so that the camera could catch a glimpse of his eyes as he spoke. In many ways he wasn’t actually speaking to the journalists, but to the killer who just might be watching the case unfold on the evening news.
    He told the reporters that nothing out of the ordinary seemed to have happened on the day before Stephanie’s murder. She’d come home from work on Monday, May 20, and followed her normal routine that evening. She’d had a conversation with her boyfriend, who was in South Carolina, before going to bed. Morgan said investigators believed the killer attacked her after she went to bed, and then took her into her roommate’s bedroom adjacent to her room where he raped and killed her.
    “Sometime during the night things went very bad, ” Morgan said. “We know [that] while Stephanie Bennett slept in her bedroom at the end of this hall,” he gestured dramatically to a door that was ajar, but made no effort to allow anyone to enter the room, “that the intruder came into the apartment, that she was attacked probably as she slept, and that events occurred that led to her death.”
    Other than the smudged black fingerprint powder lining the doorways and windows, and the blocks of carpet removed by crime scene investigators, it looked like any other apartment vacated by young tenants. It was a surreal combination of everyday life mixed in with the horror of what had occurred there.
    There were restaurant takeout menus strewn about the kitchen, an empty wine bottle in the sink, and a half-full container of eye drops on the counter—mundane items in a space where mundane had no place.
    “What truly struck me was the Chinese food menu still held on the fridge with a magnet,” Besthoff said. “It made me think about how just a few weeks ago this was just a normal apartment, with this nice young woman leading a normal life.”
    “It was an eerie reminder of how ordinary her life had been before she was brutally murdered,” said Flowers, who, after having witnessed his share of murder scenes, was often no longer moved. But this one was different. Stephanie was different. An entire city was in mourning for her and even hard-nosed journalists couldn’t help but be touched by her story.

Consent Is the Magic Word
    “The first six months of this were probably the hardest. We had so many theories, so many possibilities,” Lieutenant Chris Morgan said.
    Morgan had five detectives working under him in the Major Crimes Task Force; he could have used ten, fifteen, or even twenty. They had other murders to investigate, and with such a limited staff, they couldn’t devote every moment to the Stephanie Bennett case. It frustrated Morgan to no end, but he had to work with the resources he