Drew Planten rarely talked at work, a state chemistry lab where for the past five years he tested the quality of commercial fertilizer. He has talked even less since his arrest Wednesday on the charge of murdering his former neighbor Stephanie Bennett.

Authorities said Thursday that Planten hadn't uttered a word in almost 24 hours. He wouldn't answer questions, wouldn't look up for his police photo and wouldn't talk to his lawyer. He wouldn't even walk into a jailhouse courtroom.

So, deputies strapped Planten, 35, to a gurney chair on wheels and rolled him before Wake County District Court Judge Anne Salisbury in a jailhouse courtroom.

"Are you Mr. Planten, sir?" Salisbury asked him.

He wouldn't answer her, either.

Instead, the string-bean-thin murder suspect in orange and white jail garb and bare feet slumped in silence, his wrists and ankles strapped down. Wisps of long, thin hair swayed with each breath in front of his blank, drawn, downcast face.

"He's been this way since he's been in our custody," Wake Sheriff Donnie Harrison said.

Planten was arrested while leaving his lab off Reedy Creek Road about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday.

The reclusive chemist had moved two years ago out of North Raleigh's Dominion on Lake Lynn apartment complex, which is next to the Bridgeport Apartments, where Bennett lived and died.

Planten moved to a cheaper unit in the Birchtree Apartments off Buck Jones Road in West Raleigh.

A New Jersey native who grew up in Michigan, Planten drove a rusty gray Camaro and often walked his Rottweiler, Zane, at night. He rarely talked with neighbors, several said.

"He looked like a loner," said one, store cashier Ebony Stephenson, 25. "If you looked at him, he would look down. I only saw him come out at nighttime to walk that dog."

Neighbor Norbert Kadima, 38, an N.C. State University statistics student who lives upstairs in the same building, said that when he'd say hello to Planten, he only waved, if that.

"He was minding his own business and did not talk," Kadima said. "He never spoke to me."

Two former neighbors recall more disturbing encounters.

Dana Allen, 26, who lives with her husband, Brian, in the Dominion apartment complex, said she first encountered Planten one night in the summer of 2004 while she was unloading groceries from the back seat of her car.

"I turned around and he was standing right behind me," Allen said Thursday.

Planten had his hand on her car door and was only a few feet away, she recalled. He tried making conversation, she said, and she became alarmed when he repeatedly asked whether she lived with someone.

Allen said she told Planten she lived with her husband.

"He made me so uncomfortable," she said.

Planten later called out to her several times and tried to strike up a conversation, Allen said, but each time she avoided him.

"I felt like there was something wrong with him," she said.

He's shy, mom says

Planten's mother, Sarah Chandler of Charlotte, Mich., says her son loved science and animals but rarely mentioned work or his social life. He had few friends and no girlfriends as far as she knew.

"He's just very shy," she said in a phone interview Thursday. "He probably talked to me more than anybody else. I'd be surprised if he ever dated anybody, because he's so quiet."

Yet, if police are right, something inside Drew Planten burned until it overtook him one night more than three years ago, when Bennett, 23, was assaulted and strangled early on May 21, 2002.

After his court appearance Thursday afternoon, Planten was taken from Wake County's jail, where he had been on suicide watch, to nearby Central Prison, where a psychiatric examination was planned.

Next page >