January is National Stalking Awareness Month, and while the majority of victims know their stalker personally, whether it’s an ex-partner, friend, family member or colleague, there are also instances where a person is attacked, or in the most extreme cases, murdered by someone they had no idea was stalking them. This is what happened in the case of Raleigh resident Stephanie Bennett.
In May 2002, residents at a North Raleigh apartment complex were shocked when they learned a 23-year-old young woman had been found dead in her unit. Stephanie Bennett had lived at the Bridgeport Apartments on Lake Lynn for a little more than a year, having moved to the area after graduating from Roanoke College in Virginia with a business degree.
She went to high school in Rocky Mount,Virginia, where her classmates voted her “Miss Personality” during her senior year. Her parents said that although she was outgoing, she also liked to read, swim, and spend time on the lake in any water-related activity. While she only lived 45 minutes away from her hometown, she valued her independence and was thriving on her own.
Stephanie lived in the apartment with her stepsister and best friend, Deanna Powell, who was also originally from Rocky Mount, Virginia. Tragically, Deanna’s father had unexpectedly died earlier that week, so she was out of town when Stephanie’s murder occurred. Stephanie was working at Spherion Technology, which did contract work for IBM. When she didn’t report to work on Tuesday, May 21, concerned co-workers called Stephanie’s family in Virginia, and then asked for a welfare check with the Raleigh Police Department.
A Neighbor Comes Forward
When he heard about the murder, a neighbor from the complex, 41-year-old Richard Eberhardt, told police that he’d seen a suspicious individual crouched behind some bushes about three weeks prior, looking into a window. The next day, he checked the area again and realized you could see directly into Stephanie’s apartment from that vantage point. He told Stephanie what he had seen and recommended she make sure her blinds were adjusted. He also told the News & Observer that Stephanie and her roommate Deanna Powell were both shy, but friendly young women who had never caused any issues in the complex.
According to Stephanie’s friends and family, she had a serious boyfriend and was planning to relocate to another town to be with him. He was not in the area at the time of her murder, and was quickly cleared as a suspect.
In the early stages of the investigation, police were tight-lipped on Stephanie’s manner of death, saying they wanted to preserve the integrity of the investigation. They did share that it was a homicide. They released a sketch of the man suspected to be the peeping tom outside of Stephanie and Deanna’s apartment in the weeks before the murder. He was described as being of medium build, and around six feet tall, wearing a hooded jacket in spite of the heat of the spring weather. Police also noted there had been a series of break-ins and sexual assaults in the northern and western areas of Raleigh in recent months, but weren’t sure if those were related to Stephanie’s death.
On June 8, 2002, the Raleigh Police Department announced they had questioned and released a man who was arrested in May on six counts of peeping and one count of resisting arrest. The man was named Christopher Campen and he had been caught looking into windows at the Governor’s Point Apartments, which were located on the opposite side of Lake Lynn where Stephanie lived. A test of his DNA did not match evidence the hair and fiber samples police had collected from Stephanie’s apartment.
The Autopsy Report Reveals Disturbing Details
In mid June, Stephanie Bennett’s autopsy report was released, detailing how the young woman was bound, sexually assaulted, and strangled, possibly with an electrical or telephone cord. Bruises all over her body indicated she had tried to fight off her attacker. Her killer also appeared to have stolen her JVC stereo from her bedroom. Police noted a screen was missing from one of her bedroom windows and was found on the ground outside the apartment. They theorized he may have entered and exited through that window. Police said they had compiled a list of people arrested in the prior 18 months on any sex charge, and were contacting those people. Lt. Chris Morgan, who was the head of Raleigh’s major crimes unit at the time, told the public that the killer would likely appear quite normal.
He went on to say, “The general profile is nothing like what you would imagine. It’s a person who would live day to day and appear very normal. This could well be a person who does not stand out at all.”
As the weeks went on with no arrests in Stephanie’s murder, many women in the community grew more fearful and stopped going out alone at night. Members of the police department met with a group of concerned citizens, mostly women, and offered safety tips. They told them to keep their heads up, look people in the eye as they passed them walking, and appear confident. They pointed out that walking with headphones on could put you at a greater risk. Lt. Morgan advised for them to drill pins into any lower-level windows so they couldn’t be entirely opened, as well as inserting lock-bars on sliding glass doors.
In early July of 2002, a female student at N.C. State University reported that an intruder entered her bedroom in the early morning hour, threw something over her head, and proceeded to assault her. She fought back, and finally the intruder gave up and left the apartment. She was able to catch a glimpse of his face before he fled. Her apartment was near the Centennial Campus of the university, and it appeared the intruder entered through an unlocked sliding glass door. He was described as a white male between 25 and 30, around six foot two, and weighing around 185 pounds. He had a muscular build, short hear, and was wearing a sleeveless muscle shirt and long, dark pants. The police reported they were looking for the suspect and said any possible connection to Stephanie Bennett’s murder would be explored.
An Arrest Finally Made
Two years passed and Stephanie’s murder remained unsolved. Then, in November 2004, two new detectives, Detectives Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor, decided to take another look at the case, and they essentially started from scratch. They first returned to the Lake Lynn area and reinterviewed the people in the apartment complex who had been questioned in May of 2002, focusing on the peeping tom angle. A number of tips led them to Snipe Creek Lane in the Dominion at Lake Lynn apartments, which was a complex not far from Stephanie Bennett’s.
There, they learned a man fitting the initial description of the person looking into Stephanie’s window would often be seen walking a large Rottweiler and wearing a hooded sweatshirt. They narrowed down their list of suspects until they got to one name, 35-year-old Drew Planten. They could not cross him off their list, and according to an episode of “Forensic Files,” they tailed him to try and get DNA from any items he discarded in public. He seemed to know he was being followed, and at one restaurant, ordered only finger foods, asked for a straw with his drink, and took the straw with him when he left.
The detectives approached his employer and asked if they could obtain items he used at work in order to obtain a DNA sample. The employer agreed. The DNA collected turned out to be a match with the DNA they had from Stephanie’s body, and he was arrested on October 19, 2005. Two years earlier, Planten had moved from the Dominion at Lake Lynn Apartments to another complex in West Raleigh.
Planten had a job working in in a lab at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, where he tested the quality of commercial fertilizer. His co-workers described him as quiet but were stunned after he was arrested. When he was arrested, he refused to speak to police, and would not look up for his police photo. He wouldn’t speak with his attorney. Police strapped him to a gurney chair on wheels for his arraignment.
Who Was Drew Planten?
Planten was described by co-workers and those he came in contact with as a loner who drove an old Camaro and walked his Rottweiler, Zane, at night. He did not speak with most of his neighbors. He had moved to Raleigh from Michigan for his job at the state lab in 2000. He had an older brother who also lived in North Carolina, by that time. An interesting fact is that in 2003, his brother was charged with four counts of “secret peeping” after he was caught videotaping women in a workplace restroom. Investigators believed he placed video surveillance in the restroom of an engineering firm on Patton Avenue.
However, one female neighbor did say she had a disturbing encounter with Planten. She told the News and Observer that one night she was unloading groceries from her car when she turned around and saw the man standing silently behind her. He had his hand on her car door and asked her if she lived with someone. She told him she lived in the apartment with her husband, but he tried several other times to strike up a conversation with her when he saw her at the complex.
At the time of Stephanie’s murder, Planten lived nearby and could access her apartment through a short, wooded path.
Planten’s mother, Sarah Chandler, who still lived in Michigan at the time of his arrest, told people he was a painfully shy young man who, growing up, had enjoyed science and animals, but had few friends. He commuted to school at Michigan State University and earned a degree in zoology. Planten had trouble finding work until he was offered the job with the agricultural department. He seemed to know police were closing in on him, because he drew up a will before his arrest and asked if his mother would take care of his dog if something happened to him.
Wake County prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty against Drew Planten for the murder and rape of Stephanie Bennett.
During a search of his apartment, investigators found an extensive collection of pornography, 12 firearms, handcuffs, and dozens of knives. They also found evidence that led them to believe Planten was stalking another potential victim nearby. He had bank statements and documents from Stephanie’s college loan in his apartment, along with newspaper clippings about her murder.
Even more shocking, they discovered documents that mentioned a Michigan woman named Rebecca Huismann. In 1999, the young woman was working two jobs to earn money for college and pay for her upcoming wedding. One of those jobs was at an adult nightclub where she was a topless dancer. Her family said she didn’t enjoy the work and was only doing it to make some extra money. But she always had a club employee walk her to the parking lot. On the night she was killed, she drove home around 2 a.m., and when her finance woke up at 6 a.m. and learned she wasn’t in the apartment, he found her deceased in the parking lot near her car. She had been shot. Her fiance was cleared as a suspect and no one had any idea who would have wanted Rebecca Huismann dead.
Planten had two .45-caliber guns in his possession, and Michigan investigators obtained them and reopened Rebecca’s unsolved case. Ballistics testing later matched the bullet that killed Rebecca with Planten’s gun. It didn’t appear Planten knew Rebecca personally. Was she another woman he had stalked and followed home that night? Had he approached her at her car, and when she rejected him, he shot her? That question remains unanswered, but if he hadn’t been arrested in Stephanie Bennett’s murder Rebecca’s loved ones might still be waiting for an answer to who killed her.
When Planten first arrived at Central Prison, he received four infractions for not cooperating with prison officers. He received 60 days of disciplinary punishment, which meant he was isolated in his cell for 23 hours a day, with one hour a day free for recreation and a shower. At the end of October, 2005, prison officials removed Planten from suicide watch. A prison psychiatrist and other mental health employees believes he was no longer a suicide risk. On January 2, 2006, Drew Planten took his life while incarcerated at Central Prison. He left no note behind.
His mother, Sarah Chandler later sued the state of North Carolina, claiming it failed to protect her son while he was being incarcerated. A State Bureau of Investigation inquiry found no evidence of foul play and determined correctional officers could not have stopped him. Chandler disagreed. She said her son had suffered an acute stress reaction after his arrest, was catatonic, and placed in solitary confinement. She alleged his condition deteriorated because he did not get consistent mental health counseling. The state immediately filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, but I was unable to determine what the final outcome was. Sarah Chandler died in Michigan in 2023.
In 2004, Stephanie’s father, Carmon Bennett, initially sued the owner of Stephanie’s apartment complex in the years following her murder. He claimed Equity Residential—based out of Chicago, failed to inform residents of a peeping tom on the property, his daughter’s window had failed to lock properly, lighting around the building was inadequate and the shrubbery was too high around the windows. He eventually dropped the civil suit.
After her death, Stephanie’s family established a scholarship fund in her memory, offering students at Franklin County High School with plans to attend Roanoke College, the opportunity to receive a $7,500 scholarship.
One of the things that struck me as I was researching this case was how many articles were published about Drew Planten. His mother was an attorney, and I believe she strategically participated in interviews with the press in the hopes of swaying the public opinion of her son. The bottom line is, there was physical evidence found in his apartment that Drew Planten murdered Stephanie Bennett and Rebecca Huismann. He would most likely have been found guilty of his crimes. I wish there had been more articles about Stephanie Bennett, and what kind of a person she was, rather than the focus on Drew Planten’s abusive biological father, his parents divorce, and the fact that he refused to speak to anyone after his arrest
Stalking impacts 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men in the United States. If you are a visit of stalking and fear you are in imminent danger, please call 911 immediately. To learn about other resources available to you, visit Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center, or SPARC, at stalkingawareness.org.
Show Sources:
Raleigh News and Observer
May 23, 2003
A new start ends in death
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The News and Observer
May 24, 2004
Police follow clues in slaying
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The News and Observer
May 25, 2002
Police seek man for questioning
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The News and Observer
May 30, 2002
Police profiler sketches the mind behind crime
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The News and Observer
May 30, 2002
Welcome growls of vigilance
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The News and Observer
June 8, 2002
Peeping suspect cleared in killing
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The News and Observer
June 21, 2002
Report details brutal slaying of woman
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The News and Observer
June 25, 2002
Be wary, careful
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The News and Observer
July 8, 2002
Attacker scared off by woman’s struggling
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The News and Observer
October 21, 2005
Starting over led to arrest
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The News and Observer
October 22, 2005
Police mum on suspect’s DNA
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The News and Observer
November 13, 2005
Suspect’s mother fled with sons to end abuse
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The News and Observer
Suspect in 2002 killing commits suicide
January 3, 2006
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The News and Observer
January 4, 2006
Prison took Planten off suicide alert
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The News and Observer
May 8, 2007
Bennett’s father refiles lawsuit against landlord
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The News and Observer
May 9, 2008
Planten’s mother seeks damages
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Bennett Family Talks About Lost Loved One
