Caught in the Act

Although the police did not reveal everything that they’d learned about Adam Leroy Lane to the public, the media showed no such restraint. Journalists, conducting their own investigation and interviews with any witness who was willing to talk, reported everything they gathered, even if it was not 100 percent accurate. Not all of the information circulating in the newspapers and around the Internet was relevant to the case; some of it wasn’t even interesting, but even the most innocuous interview with a neighbor seemed to captivate the public, a kind of collective voyeurism that occurs when someone’s private life suddenly opens up for the world to inspect.

I found myself drawn to the coverage for more personal reasons, obviously. This, after all, was a man who could very easily have been responsible for seriously harming my daughter, even killing her. It was almost unfathomable to think that such a thing could have happened, but it almost did. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to hurt her, but this stranger had seemed willing to do just that. Others may have wanted to know, but I needed to know what had provoked this kind of rage in him.

The forty-two-year-old interstate truck driver had grown up in Yadkin County, a small farming community in northwestern North Carolina. I found out little about Lane’s childhood, other than that after his father died, his mother remarried, and at age sixteen Lane dropped out of high school. Certainly nothing startling turned up in his background that would have given any indication that he would grow up to commit such acts of random violence.

Lane’s current domestic life was the easiest to investigate, and both the police and the press conducted in-depth inquiries with those closest to him. He’d been married twice, the first time in 1988 (no children, and ending in divorce in 1994) and the second time in 2002. As of 2007, he had been living in a mobile home outside the Jonesville, North Carolina, town limits with his second wife, Regina Belle Davis, and three children, all girls. The two eldest were his stepdaughters, and the youngest was his only child. Regina was adamant that she did not believe that her husband could have been responsible for these crimes; at least, that was her public response to the allegations against him, though I found it hard to believe that deep down she didn’t have serious reservations about his innocence.

Some of Lane’s neighbors described him as quiet and a seemingly good father who “smiled a lot.” One stated that he had offered to assist her husband with odd jobs on several occasions. “We thought he was a perfectly nice guy,” said Wilda Gayle Spicer, who lived directly across from Lane and his family. Spicer observed that Lane was not home every weekend, but when he was, he usually parked his truck in the front yard.

“The last couple of times he came in,” the woman said, “he left his truck running day and night. That truck would run and run and run. He left in it a few times and would come back and leave it running.” She added that Lane and his wife were known to burn their trash in a barrel behind the mobile home, usually about once a week. She informed police that soon after Lane’s arrest, his wife was seen burning a lot of trash.

Lane would occasionally be seen playing with his daughters in the overgrown yard in front of the family’s single-wide trailer, where various dogs also scampered around untethered. A beach towel was hung in the front window for privacy in lieu of a curtain or a shade.

Other neighbors recalled peculiarities about Lane that seemed mundane but were reported as if they were the signs of the apocalypse. Besides a flaring temper simmering beneath an otherwise aloof demeanor, it was corroborated that Lane had perpetual face stubble and wore black all the time, and even in the summer, he usually wore long pants and long-sleeved shirts.

The insights that were perhaps most helpful in understanding Adam Lane came from Miriam Benge, Lane’s first wife, who’d filed for divorce in 1993. She did not seem surprised by anything he did. “He thought women were beneath him,” she said. Their rocky six-year marriage had been rife with verbal abuse, and about a year into their marriage, she claimed that he’d struck her in the head during an argument. “Old man, you ever hit me again, you’re a dead man,” she reportedly told him immediately afterward. According to her, he just laughed and said, “I can kill you and play off crazy as a bat and get away with it. They wouldn’t do a thing to me.”

Lane had been working hanging chickens in a slaughterhouse at the time the couple had first met, at a nightclub. They were married after a short courtship, but according to Benge, Lane was cheating on her within a year. She was aware of Lane’s collection of knives, which he never tried to hide. She also revealed that at one time her ex-husband had owned four Chinese throwing stars, which he would toss at the walls inside their rented single-wide trailer. This had always infuriated her, but after a while she stopped saying anything to him about it. She was afraid to. It wasn’t worth it. His explosive temper was perhaps his most dangerous weapon, and she didn’t want to risk it. Finally, Benge had enough, and her divorce petition was granted in 1994.

Adam Leroy Lane’s reputation as a woman-hater was not confined to his ex-wife. Several people who had worked with him came forward to say that Lane could be antisocial, argumentative and controlling, especially toward women.

“Adam seemed like he had a bad disposition against everything,” said Utt. “He wanted to argue over something, it seemed like, all the time. And when it came to women, he had a bad way with them. One day a waitress come over to him and said, ‘Have I done something to you?’ and I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, he’s that hateful of a bastard every day.’ ”

Lane’s mother, Betty Norman, who had been living about seven miles from her son, defended him when questioned about his legal problems. One article reported that Norman was a licensed nurse who was keeping more than fifty canaries and parakeets in her basement as part of a home business, and at the time of her son’s arrest, she had been working on fixing up a small outbuilding for another home business, Betty’s Quilted Handbags.

Despite the fact that Lane’s first wife, Miriam Benge, alleged that Lane had abused his mother—“He would cuss her, call her names, [beat] on her,” she claimed—Norman went on record saying that she did not think the boy she’d raised was capable of such violence. “Not my son,” she told the Associated Press by telephone. When People magazine called, she told them, “I don’t want to talk about my son.”

Benge had much more to say about this man. “They should give him the death penalty,” she told reporters. “No appeal, no parole, nothing. They’d be doing everybody on this green Earth a favor.”

As far as Lane’s work history, he had been regularly employed, either laboring or driving trucks, except during a period after he had undergone back surgery. He was regarded as a loner by his coworkers, someone who was not easy to get along with. Even at Jordan’s Country Restaurant, a North Carolina restaurant on Highway 67 catering to truckers, which Lane frequented, the employees noted Lane’s unpleasantness. With the cloying smell of grease and the NASCAR models that adorned the interior, the restaurant was much like any truck-stop diner in the south. Most nights Lane would come in alone during the third shift, even if he wasn’t working. A creature of habit, he would sit in the smoking area and order the same thing: a Mountain Dew and two hot dogs, “all the way,” which for him did not include onions. Sydney Hanson, the manager, would catch hell from Lane if she didn’t bring him his drink fast enough after he sat down.

Records indicate that Lane received his commercial driver’s license in May 1993, despite his regular operator’s license having twice been put on probation, in 1988 and 1992, for speeding violations.

In 1997, Lane began driving for Smith Brothers Trucking out of Ararat, Virginia, hauling household goods and furniture from North Carolina to California and returning with produce on the eastbound trip. He was driving about 5,500 miles over five days and making about $800 a trip. At that time, remembered Dude Smith, whose family owned the company, Lane was partial to western shirts and black cowboy hats. He described Lane as “a little shortfused,” and although the trucking company would typically pair up its drivers for the long coast-to-coast hauls, Lane was the only one who went solo. “He was a loner,” Smith confirmed. Other drivers who had gone out with him once would ask never to ride with him again.

Lane worked for Smith for about eighteen months. At the end of his tenure with the Virginia trucking company, they were hardly using him as a driver because of his attitude. They were hoping that he would quit.

Adam Leroy Lane had no previous criminal history to speak of, at least nothing that might have raised a red flag. In the few years prior to his arrest in Chelmsford, he had been guilty of speeding violations and writing bad checks. In 1992 he pleaded no contest to a trespassing charge, for which he paid a fine and agreed to stay away from the complainant (since deceased).

Until the summer of 2007, Lane’s most serious brush with the legal system involved an accidental death. On June 5, 1999, Lane was driving an eighteen-wheeler down North Carolina Highway 104 outside Mount Airy when eighty-one-year-old David Rigney, of Ararat, Virginia, suffered a heart attack while at the wheel of his minivan and crossed the yellow line in front of Lane’s rig. Lane could not avoid the oncoming vehicle and struck it head-on. Regina Davis and her daughter Jennifer were both passengers in Lane’s truck at the time and were treated for minor injuries. The driver of the minivan, however, was killed.

Soon after, Lane quit work because of back pain from the injuries he’d suffered in the accident. A Salisbury, North Carolina, neurosurgeon gave him a rating of 39 percent permanent disability. He underwent two rounds of surgery to insert screws and a metal rod into his spinal column and to fuse several bones. Because the deceased was uninsured, Lane sued his own employers, Smith Brothers, and its insurance carrier and was awarded more than $130,000 for temporary total disability and medical expenses. Lane initially received more than $60,000 from Smith Trucking, and in 2001 he sued them again for the remaining money that had been owed to him. In January 2002, he settled for an additional $40,000, less attorney fees, according to court records.

A few months after the 1999 accident, Lane fathered a child with his girlfriend Regina Davis, who was still married to another man at the time. A paternity test was administered and proved that Lane was, indeed, the father. By the time the girl was born, in June 2000, Lane and Davis were living together with Davis’s two older daughters in Hamptonville, and by 2006, the family had moved into the trailer near I-77.

During the summer of 2007, neighbors didn’t see Lane at home much at all. He had been driving for tree farmer Donald Burcham of Fancy Gap, Virginia, traveling up and down the eastern seaboard. He had been driving for Burcham for about six months, making on average about four stops per week.

“His personality was kind of impatient,” Burcham told reporters after Lane’s arrest. “I had to jump on him a few times for being short-tempered with some people. But there was never anything that would make you think he’d do something like this.”

The last time Burcham saw Lane was at noon on July 27, 2007, when Lane left Virginia with a load bound for York, Pennsylvania, with scheduled stops in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire.