Ben Stibbe felt a stab of terror when he saw the reflection of blue and red lights flashing behind him. “This is how it ends,” he thought, his heart thudding as the driver of the car pulled over to the side of the road.
Stibbe’s life was out of control, and he was almost relieved something was about to stop it. He was never going to get any higher. He could never again experience the momentary heights those first few hits of heroin once granted him. All he could do was struggle every second of every day not to slide into the bottomless void of sickness and terror that awaited him if he ever stopped shooting up.
People had died. Died because they wanted what he needed and he gave it to them, sometimes even introducing them to it, in order to help pay for his own high. It had gone on for years, and now the cops might put an end to the nightmarish sleepwalk that was his life.
“Give me the dope,” Stibbe said frantically to the others in the car. He would take the rap. But the driver and the other two passengers didn’t move. They just kept looking forward, strangely still, not saying anything. Why?
Ben was once a friend of Caitlin Schuette. He had dated her for a while and now she sat in the front seat and felt nothing but spite for him. But she needed dope, Ben assumed, and would put aside that hate to score a fix.
Ryan Hinkle, sitting next to Stibbe in the back seat, had gotten dope from him once before. But the guy coming along today as a driver was someone Stibbe didn’t know. He was young and clean cut, which wasn’t that out of the ordinary in Ozaukee County. Even the nerds were doing smack these days. Heroin was everywhere in places like Grafton and Cedarburg, as easy to come by as weed.
But when the officers carrying semiautomatic weapons pulled only him from the car and then forced him face down onto the shoulder of I-43, the realization struck hard. Caitlin had set him up. The clean-cut driver was a cop and he had witnessed the entire thing going down: Stibbe calling his hookup and ordering six $20 bags of heroin, the buy from a drug runner in the Walgreen’s parking lot on Hopkins Avenue on Milwaukee’s North Side, and Stibbe snorting the stuff in the back seat of the car.
Clearly, he was the sole target. Ben was taken to Milwaukee County Jail, where most of the interviews with detectives took place while he was still high from the dope he’d got up his nose before getting busted. Stibbe recalls nodding off during questioning and doesn’t even remember signing a statement. But there’s one part of his capture that he’ll never forget: a conversation that would turn the nightmare that was his life into something far more horrific.
As Ozaukee County District Attorney Sandy Williams entered the interview room, Stibbe was ready to take a deal on a possession charge and a year or two of prison. But Williams told him he would be charged with homicide. Four homicides.
Stibbe couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He hadn’t killed anyone. He’d never forced anyone to take drugs. He wasn’t making money.
But the charge was four counts of “first degree reckless homicide,” Williams explained, under the little-known and seldom-used Len Bias law. The law was named after the college basketball player and Boston Celtics draftee who died of an overdose in 1986, which led to a law targeting the provider of drugs that cause death.
Stibbe wondered why he was being singled out. Considering all the heroin and heroin users you could find in Ozaukee County, how did all it come crashing down only on him? He wasn’t high anymore – far from it – yet nothing seemed to make sense.
•••
Ben Stibbe grew up in Grafton and attended St. Paul Lutheran’s grade school and then Grafton High, where in 1999, he dropped out after two years.
“In my family, I was like the dog,” he says. “Like as long as you don’t bother us you’re OK. If I made a mess or something then my dad would kick my ass. Otherwise, I was ignored.”
Ben’s exposure to drugs came early. “My parents used to give me narcotics and liquor just to shut me up when I was little. If I was sick or something, my mom would just dope me up so she wouldn’t have to deal with me.”
Ben was drinking and smoking pot by the time he was 11, taking LSD and other psychedelics shortly thereafter, and shooting dope and using crack by age 16.
None of his teachers ever intervened, Ben recalls, even when he would show up to school with a black eye from his dad. He wasn’t a great student, and his teachers seemed to let him slide through each grade, until he slid out the door for good.
Barely in his teens, Ben left home several times, living homeless in parks as far away as San Francisco. Occasionally, living on the streets, he would hear that some kid he knew had OD’d and died, but he never saw death for himself.
No matter how wasted he got, Ben always maintained the self-reliance he developed as a lonely child. “I always had to keep thinking, keep walking, don’t pass out here, because something bad will happen to you,” he remembers.
Inevitably, Stibbe would tire of the road and return home. Sometimes his father hadn’t even noticed he had been gone, says Ben.
But Ozaukee County cops paid plenty of attention. Stibbe had more than 50 contacts with police since turning 18, all for petty crimes like underage drinking and shoplifting. Ben’s use of drugs started so early, he never really developed into an adult with a conventional morality and code of conduct.
He enjoyed lots of drugs, but heroin was his true love. Opiates are the most powerful painkillers known to man, and heroin is the most powerful of all. Ben was self-medicating with it, numbing the pain of a loveless life and a bleak future even as the drug fed and encouraged further isolation.
Stibbe has the natural stature of a football player, 6 feet tall with a thick neck and a broad frame. But during the height of his addiction, he withered down to little more than skin, bones and brown dreadlocks. Eating wasn’t a priority and exercise was out of the question.
“The wind could blow me over,” says Stibbe. “I was shooting like two grams of coke or crack a day along with a gram of heroin. I ate like twice a week. I was lucky if I didn’t break my leg bumping into a table.”
Often it felt like he was watching his life like a movie, helpless to steer the plot. “There I’d be in an alley in the middle of the night, I didn’t even know where, trying to find a needle and it’s 20-below-zero in a blizzard and I’m sitting there with a lighter and a flashlight and a piece of rope I found in the alley around my thigh trying to hit my foot.” Just to get a fix.
Addiction is a disease with strong genetic links. An addict usually doesn’t have to look far up the family tree to find the problem. Ben and his mother, Teri Stibbe, are an extreme example. Up until his arrest, Ben was shooting dope with Teri behind her husband’s back. Teri was into heroin when Ben was little. She became reintroduced through Ben and ultimately developed a habit comparable to her son’s. Both came to rely on some major Milwaukee dealers.
•••
Timothy, Terrell and Torrence Milton were three brothers who got involved in heroin trafficking in Milwaukee in the 1990s. Early in his days as a drug user, probably in 2000, Ben connected to them. For the Miltons, he was a dream customer: young, suburban and desperate enough to risk buying dope for multiple people to feed his own habit.
The bulk of the Miltons’ customer base was middle-class, suburban, white kids. The dealers loved it that way. They were able to overcharge the naïve “rich” kids for smack and were sometimes able to convince dope-sick teenage girls to trade themselves sexually to guys at the dope house for a fix.
The heroin sold in Milwaukee is an off-white powder as opposed to the “black tar” common on the West Coast. It’s also incredibly pure – about 50 percent, up from about 5 percent a decade ago. The change came as the drugs were brought in from South America as opposed to Asia and Mexico. The high purity of today’s heroin allows users to snort it rather than shoot it up. This eliminated the stigma of using needles and attracted a whole new class of users.
The Miltons operated their business in dangerous North Side neighborhoods, but Ben didn’t mind the risk. Not only was it a thrill to buy drugs in the hood, but Ben relished his reputation for having the guts to do it. A lot of other whitebread junkies from Grafton and Cedarburg didn’t have the nerve to go there and had to rely on Ben for their dope. Stibbe became sort of a legendary bad boy in Ozaukee County, romanticized by some and looked upon with fear and disgust by others.
Ben’s daring supported his habit. Stibbe required the people who wanted smack to pay for his, too. He was also buying so much from the Miltons that they were giving him bulk discounts. Of course, he wasn’t passing the savings on to his “friends.” The extra cash went into his veins.
Ben didn’t have a job, and a heroin habit is expensive to maintain and inevitably grows. Stibbe injected upwards of $100 worth of dope every day. He had resorted to begging for change on the street more than once, but acting as a middleman had proven a consistent resource for his “medicine.”
Stibbe is smart, with a natural charm, which helped him play the junkie game, where manipulation is the key to success. He could play people without really thinking about what he was doing – manipulating them into assets.
Heroin addiction steals compassion and judgment, numbs emotions and places all considerations far below obtaining the drug. Heroin is used to convert children in parts of Africa into brutal guerillas that commit acts of genocide on their own people. Stibbe became an efficient drug-using and drug-purveying machine.
He was extremely protective of his connection’s phone number. Stibbe almost never gave it away and was careful to erase the number from any cell phones he used to call in an order. That number was worth around $60,000 a year to him.
Ben did share the number with his mom, though, and Teri Stibbe developed her own relationship with the Miltons. She bought so much dope that the Miltons would actually make home deliveries to her in Grafton. Teri often went to Milwaukee herself to score dope, however, sometimes bringing along Ben’s 9-year-old brother.
•••
Ben Stibbe tried to get clean a number of times, but always failed. In 2001, he walked into the Milwaukee branch of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and offered to act as an informant against the Miltons. Stibbe says he wanted to stop them from hurting more people.
“They were shooting people and pimping out little girls,” he says.
DEA agents gave Stibbe marked bills to purchase drugs from the Miltons, who were already under investigation. Ben did it and turned over the drugs to the DEA for evidence.
In 2002, based on evidence from a wide range of sources, Timothy, Terrell and Torrence Milton, along with three other associates, were arrested and convicted for delivery of a controlled substance – heroin. Timothy, the gang’s leader, received the lightest sentence of the three brothers: 20 months in prison. He continued to run a scaled-back version of the business while in prison through trusted associates.
By 2005, everyone was back on the street and the Milton organization was bigger than ever, with a client base made up of primarily white, suburban youth.
Timothy Milton drove to Chicago every few days to purchase heroin, often in rented vehicles. He would typically buy 100 grams for $20,000. Once back in Milwaukee, he repackaged it into 0.2-gram bags called dubs, to be sold for $20 a piece. He made $40,000 profit for every 100 grams he purchased.
After helping authorities nab the Miltons, Stibbe expected the authorities to get him help with his drug problem. “I was ready to go to rehab,” says Stibbe. “I had this crazy notion they were going to put me in the witness protection program or something and help me clean up … give me a new life.”
But Stibbe was a small concern in the grand scheme of things.
“They said ‘thanks,’ then kicked me out of the building,” he says.
James Bohn, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA’s Milwaukee office, acknowledges Stibbe’s cooperation, but says “we don’t make deals with informants.”
The day after making the undercover buy for the DEA, Ben returned to the same drug house and purchased dope for himself.
If he’d gotten the help he wanted from authorities in 2001, would Stibbe have turned his life around? One thing is certain: Without the assistance, he continued down an ever-darkening path leading to multiple deaths.
•••
Dec. 11, 2002, was a wintry, cold day. But Ben Stibbe was warm inside with no plans to leave. He had stolen a bunch of OxyContin from his dad, who took them for a back injury, and was set with enough drugs for two or three days. He was relaxing on the couch in the basement of his parent’s house in Grafton, enjoying his high when the doorbell rang.
At the door was 43-year-old Lynn Smaxwill, a family friend and sometime drug user. Ben told her about the Oxys. Stibbe knew his dad would be seriously ticked when he discovered the missing pills, so Ben was relieved when Smaxwill invited him to stay at her place for the price of a few pills.
Smaxwill had buried her husband just hours before showing up at the Stibbe household, but didn’t seem overly distraught, Ben thought. The husband had abused her. Once, Ben and his father had to forcefully remove him from her residence after he roughed her up.
The OxyContin was a nice buzz, but wasn’t enough to satisfy Smaxwill. At around 6 p.m. that night, she asked Stibbe and her stepson, Christopher Stoller, who was staying at her house for his father’s funeral, to go to Milwaukee to pick up some dope. She would buy for Ben, too.
“I didn’t want to go,” says Stibbe. “I had enough Oxys to keep from getting sick for a while, but I didn’t want to rock the boat and agreed to go.”
Smaxwill gave Stibbe and Stoller the keys to her car and her ATM card. The two men stopped at a bank and withdrew $180 from Lynn’s bank account. Then they drove the route Ben could navigate in his sleep to an alley near Teutonia and Capitol. Ben told Stoller to stay with the car and to drive away if anyone approached.
After a while, Stibbe returned to the car and handed Stoller a cellophane cigarette wrapper with a little marijuana in it, a gift for driving him to Milwaukee. The two men were well on their way back to Grafton with around 20 bags of heroin and some weed when Lynn called Stoller’s cell phone. She asked to speak to Ben.
“Take the next exit,” said Stibbe, hanging up the phone. Lynn wanted coke.
So they headed back to their Milwaukee connection. After scoring some crack (about a half-dozen rocks), they turned back toward Grafton. Ben couldn’t wait to get high and shot up in the car.
Ben’s mom showed up at Smaxwill’s house shortly after the two men returned from Milwaukee. Mother and son got high along with Smaxwill, trying to hide it from her 12-year-old son, Allan. Teri Stibbe returned home after her fix, but Smaxwill and Ben continued to indulge in more chemicals until Ben passed out on the basement couch.
Early the next morning, Allan frantically roused Stoller. The 12-year-old couldn’t wake his mom. Stoller raced up the stairs and into Lynn Smaxwill’s bedroom. She had no pulse and wasn’t breathing. In a panic, Stoller went down to wake up Stibbe.
Ben’s mind was still in a narcotic fog, but the gravity of the situation pulled him out of it. Stibbe told Stoller to stay downstairs with his distraught stepbrother while he checked it out. When he saw Smaxwill, it was clear she’d been dead for some time. Some of the foam from her mouth – opiate overdoses typically cause respiratory failure, and the lungs fill with a fluid that froths from the mouth – had dried to a crust on her chin. And her skin was almost opaque.
Ben called his mother. Teri Stibbe showed up a few minutes later and told the boys to get rid of all the drug paraphernalia. When the house was clean, they called 911.
Lynn Smaxwill was pronounced dead at the scene. An autopsy by Milwaukee County Medical Examiner Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen concluded that Smaxwill died of a mixed-drug overdose. Heroin, cocaine and benzodiazepines (a class of sedative drugs that include Valium and Xanex) were found in her system. Police questioned Ben but released him.
The very next day, Ben helped another woman named Nicole Ninaus score heroin in Milwaukee. For a fee, of course.
•••
Nearly three years streaked by in a blur for Ben Stibbe – a thousand days of scoring and shooting passed with the insignificance of seconds. Dope had spread like a medieval plague around Ozaukee County and teens you’d never suspect – “clean-cut, honor roll-looking kids,” as Ben describes them – had taken to snorting like rodeo bulls.
Ben can’t even be sure of the year it happened, but Caitlin Schuette remembers. The two met in 2004 and fell into a love triangle with heroin as the third and most adored partner. Caitlin was 15 (soon to be 16) and Ben was 22 when they first hooked up. Under the law this was rape, but Caitlin was experienced far beyond her years, Stibbe says.
Caitlin had a similar drug history: drinking at 13, pot, cocaine and hallucinogens at 14, heroin and crack at 15. According to Caitlin, she got her first heroin from Ben after a mutual friend introduced them; according to Ben, Caitlin was already using when they met. She knew his reputation before she knew him – “everyone did,” says Schuette.
Caitlin was attracted to his dark image. Both are 6 feet tall and big-boned, but slim. Caitlin has a softness to her voice that projects vulnerability, which played perfectly to Ben’s confidence and need to be
relied upon. They became inseparable after their first night together and started using every day. Caitlin’s parents gave her plenty of money, and she constantly bought smack for Ben – and sometimes Teri.
Ben was protective of Caitlin. She was both a lover and an asset to him, and making sure nothing bad happened to her (aside from becoming hopelessly strung out) gave him a little self-worth.
But a year after getting involved with Ben, on Aug. 10, 2005, Caitlin suddenly had enough of feeling used. Teri Stibbe had abandoned the couple in Milwaukee after Caitlin refused to buy her dope, and she and Ben were walking the city streets begging for money and sick from withdrawal.
“Fuck you! I’ve had it! I’m done!” she screamed at Ben.
Caitlin suddenly hated him. She would grow to hate him more and more. Friends of hers were soon to die and she would hold Ben responsible.
As for Stibbe, his addiction led him to increasingly self-destructive actions. “I was trying to die,” he says. He was shot twice in Milwaukee’s central city while searching for dope. More than once, he played Russian roulette with a loaded revolver. He clogged syringes, trying to pack them so full of heroin and cocaine it would kill him. But he always made it back, no matter how much he injected. “His tolerance was superhuman,” says Ben’s attorney, Anthony Cotton.
•••
It was late afternoon on Oct. 16, 2005. Teri Stibbe pulled her husband’s red Ford Taurus into a parking spot in front of Sendik’s grocery store in Grafton. She was driving Ben and a man named Jonathon Selensky. Selensky and a friend named Matt Kobiske would be paying for the afternoon’s fix in exchange for Ben’s hookup services. Ben went into Sendik’s to get Kobiske.
“I hope this one’s smart enough not to overdose like the last one,” said Teri.
Just a week before, a 20-year-old named Aaron Dempsey had overdosed while he was with Teri Stibbe. Teri dropped Dempsey off at St. Joseph’s hospital where he was treated.
Selensky was still a junkie in training. He had only been using a few weeks, but was already injecting it. Actually, Ben did it for him.
“That’s how Ben operated,” says Caitlin. “He would take one person at a time and turn them into an addict. Then he would move onto the next person.”
Kobiske had been around the block with heroin and, according to Caitlin, was trying to stay away from it. But he had run into Ben, and the very sight of him caused cravings.
“Matt begged me for Ben’s number. He gave me some BS story why he wanted to contact him, but I knew exactly what he was after. At first I resisted, but he was my friend and I didn’t want him to be mad at me, so I gave in. I’ll regret that forever,” says Caitlin.
When the foursome reached Milwaukee, Ben made the call from a pay phone. The dealer wanted to meet at the Checker Auto Parts near 27th and Burleigh. Once there, Ben got into the back seat of the runner’s car and made the deal. He returned with the dope and passed a dub to each person in the car.
The group returned to the Stibbe residence. Teri stayed upstairs while the boys went down to the basement and got high. Matt saved about a quarter of his bag for later. Another of Ben’s “friends,” Ray Norene, whom Ben had also introduced to heroin back in 2001, arrived just after the group had finished using. Suddenly, Matt became very upset, saying the remaining dope he had saved in some cellophane was missing.
They all acted concerned for Matt’s missing stash and no piece of furniture was left uncombed, but Kobiske was certain someone stole it. A junkie will steal someone’s dope and then help him look for it. “Ray probably took it,” says Stibbe.
Enraged, Kobiske punched a wall and busted up his hand. Teri Stibbe bandaged him up, but insisted he leave the house. Investigators believe Kobiske was driven home at this point, but Ben contends that something entirely different happened.
As Stibbe recalls it, he and a friend drove to Milwaukee to get more dope. They made it to the city, but much to their surprise, Kobiske had apparently followed them.
“Let me get some,” Kobiske said running up to Ben and the drug runner as they were making the deal.
“I was pissed. It made me look like shit in front of the dealer,” says Stibbe. Stibbe says he didn’t want to be around Kobiske after the scene he caused at his parents’ house and that Kobiske knew his only chance for more dope was to tail him to Milwaukee.
It worked. The dealer gave Kobiske what he was after. Ben says that was the last time he saw him.
Kobiske’s mother found him dead around 12:30 p.m. the next day. His death was ruled a mixed-drug intoxication overdose by the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office. Heroin, diazepam (Valium) and codeine were found in his system.
•••
Less than a week later, at around 7:15 p.m., Ben Stibbe received a call from his older cousin Rick Giese. Giese had been watching a Badger football game with his friend, 47-year-old James Helm, in a Grafton bar. The two were trashed and wanted to keep the party going with some crack. Ben agreed to help them out. They picked Ben up at home.
Stibbe drove with them to Milwaukee, hooked them up, and bought some heroin for himself with their money. Giese and Helm began smoking the crack on the way home. Stibbe shot up in the back seat. The men began complaining about the quality of the crack and were getting ugly. Helm was getting jacked up, but wanted more. He wanted some of Ben’s heroin.
“The guy was freaking out,” says Stibbe. Ben didn’t want to part with his precious dope, but was willing to do whatever it took to get out of the car. They parked in Stibbe’s driveway. Helm reached his arm over the seat and Ben shot him up. Within seconds, Helm became sedate, nodding off in his seat. A few moments later, he left the car to urinate and fell down. Stibbe and Giese picked him up and helped him back into the car.
Stibbe went inside his house. Giese drove to the house of friend Dale Volkman and picked him up. They took Helm back to his house, but couldn’t get him out of the car. They tried to recruit a neighbor to help, but no one was home. The two men went to a bar and had a beer, letting Helm rest. Then they went back to Helm’s house, but his girlfriend yelled at the men to leave.
She recruited help to move Helm into the residence. When Helm would not respond, she called the police. Attempts by officers to revive him were unsuccessful and he was pronounced dead at St. Mary’s Hospital near midnight. Another mixed-drug overdose.
•••
Angela Raettig seemed like a new girl as she pulled up in front of her boyfriend Ryan Hinkle’s apartment on Nov. 29, 2005. Just two months prior, the 17-year-old’s future looked bleak. She was hooked on heroin. Angela’s mother Bonnie Raettig couldn’t believe this had happened to her daughter.
“I never thought I’d hear that word heroin in Cedarburg, let alone my house,” Bonnie says. Bonnie had been locked in a struggle with Angela since she caught her daughter with marijuana and the amphetamine Adderal in January 2005. After that day Bonnie watched Angela like a hawk. But despite all of her efforts – drug tests, searches, enlisting the help of social services – Bonnie couldn’t best the demons driving Angela to use any drug she could find.
By the time she admitted to using smack, Angela was severely addicted, both physically and psychologically. Even the rituals surrounding drug use had become compulsions. Bonnie caught Angela sticking herself with an empty hypodermic needle. She told her mother she “just had to feel that pinprick again.”
Hinkle and Caitlin Schuette were anxiously waiting for Angela when she pulled up around 3 p.m. She had just come from her driver’s test and was radiant with her success. She had stayed away from drugs for a few months and her mother had allowed her to test for her license as a reward. Angela could go wherever she wanted now.
Angela had made plans a couple days prior with Ryan and her friend Caitlin. She was going to reunite with the “lover” she passionately described in poetry. She was going to use heroin again.
Both Caitlin and Angela had been using heroin at the same time, but had never used it together. It was popular in Cedarburg. Despite – or perhaps because of – the seemingly idyllic small-town atmosphere, the antique shops and quaint park benches, fudge and knitting stores, heroin had gotten a grip on the youth culture. Chatting at a party one night, Angela and Caitlin realized they had both been users. Soon, they were making plans to do it again. “One last time,” they agreed.
Ryan Hinkle, too, had begun using heroin, and also apart from the other two. He told Angela he had cleaned up, but was really still getting high, says Caitlin. Ryan had his own drug connection, but had fallen out with her.
“I could call Ben,” Caitlin joked. She didn’t want anything to do with him and Matt Kobiske’s death only increased that resolve. They were out of ideas, though, and Ryan and Angela begged Caitlin to do it. She refused.
“You can if you want to,” said Caitlin.
“Fine. Dial the number and hand me the phone,” replied Angela.
Caitlin did it. When Ben answered, Angela tried to explain that she was Caitlin’s friend and wanted him to help them score. Ben didn’t trust her and was about to hang up when Angela passed Caitlin the phone. Ben told Caitlin he would do it, but his normal fee would apply.
They picked Ben up at his parents’ house. Ryan sat in the back seat so Caitlin
wouldn’t have to ride next to Stibbe. The ride to Milwaukee was tense. Every time Ben said something, Caitlin turned up the radio.
“You guys want the good shit or the really good shit that Aaron [Dempsey] OD’d on?” asked Ben. They chose the normal stuff. Ben called his hookup en route and was instructed to meet at a KFC on Fond du Lac Avenue. The runner showed up 15 minutes after they arrived. Ben handed Caitlin three dubs and kept one for himself.
After dropping Ben off, Caitlin, Angela and Ryan returned to Hinkle’s tiny apartment in downtown Cedarburg. Ryan and Caitlin took turns preparing the syringe and Hinkle injected each of them in a rotation: himself, Caitlin, then Angela. Eventually, there was only a small amount of dope left. They were all good and high, but Angela wanted the last little bit.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Caitlin.
“Why?” asked Angela “I want it! Do you think I’m going to die or something?”
“No, of course not. You can do what you want,” said Caitlin.
Ryan put the last of the dope in Angela’s arm, then the three of them lay back on the floor and enjoyed the ride. Soon, however, Ryan and Caitlin became alarmed by Angela’s irregular, heavy breathing.
“Are you OK?” Caitlin asked. There was no reply. Caitlin told Ryan they should take her to the hospital, but he was on probation for possessing heroin and didn’t want to risk getting busted. Caitlin put Angela’s head on her lap and talked softly to her, begging her to say something. “We’re going to take you to the hospital,” Caitlin told her friend.
“No!” Angela said suddenly with surprising conviction.
Relieved by the response, Ryan and Caitlin helped Angela up and took her outside for air. They took a drive and slowly Angela became more alert and responsive. Ryan dropped Caitlin off at his apartment and then drove Angela home.
Caitlin’s father arrived to pick her up at Ryan’s apartment. As Caitlin was walking to the car, her phone rang. It was Angela. She ignored the call.
•••
A little before 6 a.m. the next morning, Bonnie Raettig entered Angela’s room to wake her up. She was not breathing. Frantically, she called a physician neighbor. The doctor hurried over and began CPR while Bonnie called 911. There was nothing anyone could do. Seventeen-year-old Angela Raettig was pronounced dead at Ozaukee St. Mary’s hospital.
Caitlin Schuette’s father woke her up from a deep sleep not long after the Ozaukee County coroner wrote 6:58 as the time on Angela Raettig’s death certificate.
“There’s someone here to talk to you,” said Steve Schuette.
In the kitchen, Detective Jeff Vahsholtz of the Cedarburg Police Department was waiting. He had learned, through Bonnie Raettig, that Caitlin was with Angela the night before.
“I didn’t do anything,” said Caitlin before the detective said a word.
Vahsholtz asked Caitlin what she and Angela had been up to the night before. Caitlin told him they had smoked some pot and just hung out.
“Angela is dead,” said Vahsholtz. Caitlin went to pieces, crying hysterically.
She ultimately gave detectives several different accounts of what had happened, but eventually admitted to buying heroin in Milwaukee through Ben Stibbe and using it with Angela. Caitlin was already under court-ordered juvenile supervision for a possession of THC charge, and her confession was enough to place her in the Washington County Juvenile Detention Center for a few days.
Detectives continued to interview Caitlin. They were sure that Ryan Hinkle was using with the girls, but Caitlin wouldn’t admit it and neither would Hinkle. Weary of Caitlin’s refusal to finger Hinkle, a detective dropped a bombshell.
“You could be charged with reckless homicide, facing 40 years,” he said.
That’s ludicrous, she thought to herself. They couldn’t do that. She didn’t kill
Angela.
But Caitlin didn’t think twice when detectives asked her to help set up Ben Stibbe for a buy in Milwaukee. Her life was a mess. She felt horrible about Angela. All of her regrets, pain and sadness focused into a laser-like hatred for Stibbe. She would gladly help bring him down. If she didn’t, more people would die. Ryan Hinkle, hoping to clear his name, agreed to help, too.
The two were wired with surveillance equipment and paired with a young officer who would act as another Ozaukee County junkie and do the driving. It went perfectly.
•••
Ben could feel the whisper of withdrawal as he sat in his cell at the Milwaukee County Jail. It started with a distant hint of anxiety, the body’s first call for more opiates. From there, maybe six or seven hours after snorting the dope, came a runny nose, incessant yawning and sneezing, and a more pronounced anxiety coupled with an intense craving. His body wasn’t playing around at this point. It knew what it wanted. Within hours, every muscle and joint in his body ached, sleep was impossible, and nausea and diarrhea set in. His skin had turned to goose flesh, hot and cold, and he was shaking with an anxiety that penetrated every fiber of his being. The textbooks say “flu-like symptoms” are what you suffer, but that’s not quite right. It wasn’t just Stibbe’s body that was sick, but his mind. His spirit.
Ben was at the peak of withdrawal and could barely leave the toilet when he was taken to the interview room to meet with Ozaukee County DA Sandy Williams. This was when he first learned about Angela Raettig’s death. That made four OD deaths for people he’d helped get heroin.
Williams wanted Stibbe to plead guilty to four homicides in exchange for a recommendation to the court for a 40-year prison sentence. If he refused, he would face 40 years on each count.
Not all of the homicides were tidy cases, and Ben might have beaten some of them. But a conviction on at least one seemed certain. That was 40 years right there.
As Stibbe pondered this over the next few days, the acute withdrawal symptoms began to let up. But after that came weeks of insomnia and wild swings in emotions.
“I was tired of fighting and just gave up,” he says. “Like always in my life, no one was going to help me.”
•••
On Sept. 11, 2006, a federal indictment charged 13 people, including Ben and Teri Stibbe, with conspiring to traffic the heroin that led to four deaths in Ozaukee County. Their co-conspirators were mostly members of the Milton drug trafficking operation.
Authorities already knew the Miltons were responsible for much of the heroin in Ozaukee County, but were able to seal their case after Eric “Psycho” Murphy, the runner on two of Caitlin’s controlled buys, was arrested and began cooperating.
Once in custody, many of the Milton associates traded information on their higher-ups for reduced sentences. The information led to members of a large-scale heroin organization in Chicago. No one attached to the Milton organization has received more than 10 years of incarceration. (At press time, Timothy Milton hadn’t been sentenced.)
Meanwhile, state authorities were also pursuing charges. Caitlin, under a deal she made with Williams, pleaded no contest to first-degree reckless homicide. She was sentenced to two years imprisonment and eight years of extended supervision. Ryan Hinkle was found guilty of reckless homicide for injecting Angela Raettig with the heroin that killed her. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment and 10 years extended supervision.
Benjamin Stibbe was sentenced on what would have been Angela Raettig’s birthday. On Sept. 13, 2006, he was given 18 years in prison – one year of jail for every year of her life. Stibbe himself was then 24 years old.
A little over a year later, on Nov. 15, 2007, Ben was sentenced for the other three deaths: Smaxwill, Kobiske and Helm. He made a deal with Williams for 20 years to be served concurrently with the 18-year sentence, meaning just two more years of net jail time. Judge Paul Malloy ignored the deal and gave him 25 years.
Finally, on March 26, 2008, Stibbe was sentenced on federal charges by Judge Charles Clevert to 25 years imprisonment, to be served concurrently with the state sentence. Stibbe was sent to a maximum security prison in Green Bay.
Teri Stibbe, who got her son started on drugs, has yet to be sentenced under her federal indictment. Her lawyers have so far kept her free.
Why was Benjamin Stibbe singled out for the harshest sentence? The Len Bias law under which he was charged was intended “to hold large-scale distributors responsible,” says Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm. It was the Miltons who fell into this category.
Under state statutes, judges are also instructed to take into account when the accused is a drug addict and tailor sentences “in a manner most likely to produce rehabilitation.” Was Stibbe’s addiction taken into account?
Williams did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, so the DA’s rationale for how she handled Stibbe can only be deduced. “There was clearly a strong deterrence message in these sentences,” Milwaukee County DA John Chisholm observes.
If so, the message hasn’t been received. “I have not had anyone [arrested for heroin] tell me they were deterred by the sentences,” says Detective Jeff Taylor of the Ozaukee County Sheriff’s Department. “Heroin is still quite widespread.”
Ben saw himself as a bumbling screwup driven by drug addiction rather than a villainous mastermind who engineered four deaths.
But the feeling of many in Grafton and Cedarburg was probably captured at Caitlin’s sentencing, when her attorney Gerald Boyle put all the blame on Stibbe. He was “worthless,” Boyle declared. “They call him a man. He certainly isn’t a man.”
A plague of heroin had swept across Ozaukee County, after all, disrupting the decorous sparkle of towns like Cedarburg and spreading untold sorrow and fear. No one, not even the defense attorneys, dared mention that those who died had willingly chosen to use a dangerous drug. Blame would be found amongst the living, and the role of Ben Stibbe was viewed with unforgiving clarity. As Boyle would denounce him, “this guy wants to be superstar of Ozaukee County because he’s got the connection in the inner city, and he puts all these people’s lives in jeopardy, and it’s just pathetic.”
Pathetic. Even Ben Stibbe would agree with that.
Mario Quadracci is an associate editor at Milwaukee Magazine. Write to him at mario.quadracci@milwaukeemagazine.com.
