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On May 21, 2002, Stephanie Bennett, 23, was found dead in her North Raleigh apartment. An autopsy later revealed the Rocky Mount, Va., native had been raped and strangled. Investigators interviewed thousands of witnesses and followed hundreds of leads, but never turned up any suspects in Bennett's death.
More than three years later, however, on Oct. 19, 2005, Raleigh police arrested a suspect in Bennett's death, Drew Planten, 35, an employee for the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. They said DNA found at the scene had been linked with Planten.
On Jan. 2, 2006, Planten was found unresponsive in his jail cell at Raleigh's Central Prison, apparently from a suicide.
Drew Planten, who was arrested in October 2005 in the 2002 rape and homicide of a Raleigh woman, hanged himself in his prison cell at Central Prison in Raleigh on Jan. 2, 2006.
A 2002 murder victim's father has refiled a lawsuit against the company that owned the apartment where she was killed.
The father of a woman killed in her north Raleigh apartment in 2002 on Monday dropped his lawsuit against the apartment complex.
Stephanie Bennett's killer likely entered a window that was installed incorrectly and then attacked her in her sleep, an attorney said Tuesday during opening statements in a civil trial surrounding the 2002 slaying.
The father of a murdered woman will finally have his day in court, although the case will be in a civil court instead of a criminal one.
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