Free Evil Next Door by Amanda Lamb Page A

was given.
    “Morgan told me he had few leads,” WRAL reporter Besthoff remembered. “You could tell right off the bat he had his concerns this was going to go cold quickly.”
    In December 2002, one of the department’s rising young stars, Sergeant Clem Perry, was transferred from the robbery squad to the Major Crimes Task Force. Morgan was confident Perry would be a huge asset to the Bennett case. Perry had been in on the case as a peripheral player from that very first night when his squad was called to the Bridgeport Apartments to assist the homicide detectives, but now he would be in the thick of things. It was exactly where he wanted to be, working to solve a case that mattered to so many people.
    Once on board, Perry and the other detectives on the task force continued to visit Stephanie’s apartment complex. In early 2003, they handed out more fliers and interviewed more tenants. They even conducted traffic checkpoints around the perimeter of the complex—they would stop drivers in the area, hand them a flier, and ask them if they had any information regarding the case. Perry was amazed to discover not everyone was familiar with the Bennett homicide even after they had spent so much time canvassing the neighborhood. With all of the legwork they had done already and all of the media coverage of the case, he could not imagine anyone not being aware of the murder. He wondered what cave they must have been living in if they proclaimed not to know anything about it.
    Sergeant Perry still couldn’t get the memory of Stephanie’s father, Carmon Bennett, out of his mind from the night Stephanie’s body was identified. Perry had been the first real contact Carmon had had with the Raleigh Police Department, and he hoped the grieving father wouldn’t always remember him as the man who kept him from crossing the yellow crime scene tape and prevented him from seeing his dead daughter. His heart had ached for Carmon that night. It still did.
    As a robbery detective, Perry had always believed that an armed robbery was just a murder that didn’t happen. Whenever there was a firearm involved in a crime, there was a chance someone might die. But now he was a homicide detective and thinking about people dying was no longer a what if, but a reality. Maybe it was because it was his first murder case. Maybe it was because he was young and ambitious. Maybe it was just because it was Stephanie—but somehow, somewhere along the line, the case became personal to Perry. He suddenly realized the gravity of what he was charged with. He and his colleagues were responsible for getting a random killer off the streets, someone who could strike again if they didn’t act quickly. It was all he could think about.
    “There was a sense of urgency,” Perry said. “It was a sexual homicide of a young girl.”
    Perry grew up in Louisburg, North Carolina, about thirty miles northeast of Raleigh in a family he described as “the Cleavers.” But despite his all-American upbringing, Perry was not sheltered. His father was a career firefighter, and Perry grew up at the firehouse hearing the firefighters’ stories and interacting with the local cops who often stopped by the station. From a young age, Perry knew he wanted to be a police officer; all he’d ever wanted to do was to help people.
    Perry said the parents of young women who lived in Stephanie’s neighborhood were calling his unit wanting to know if their children were safe. The pressure to solve the case was increased immensely by the concern in the community that a deadly sexual predator was roaming the streets. He thought about how he would feel if he had a daughter living in the apartment complex where a young woman was killed. It wasn’t a good feeling.
    “There was a great deal of tension on everybody,” Perry said with a furrowed brow.
    Investigators had already collected a mountain of information in the case. They had compiled “lead books,” which included hundreds of