Bizarre details of teen slaying trickle out

Gregg and Shelley Wills stopped to shop at the Lowes Foods in Apex early in the evening of Dec. 2. When the couple came out, they noticed two teenagers, a boy and girl, seated in a silver Toyota 4Runner parked in front of their car.

The teens were agitated, talking heatedly. The Willses recognized them. One was their neighbor Ryan Patrick Hare, 18. And the girl was a friend who often visited him at home, Allegra Dahlquist, 17.

The Willses dismissed the scene as simple teenage drama. But police documents indicate that the two young people would have been wrestling with enormous and urgent pressure. Two or three days before, police say, Hare and Dahlquist along with two other teenagers killed their friend Matthew Silliman, an Eagle Scout whose personality had recently turned toward depression and self-destruction.

A few hours after Hare and Dahlquist argued, authorities discovered the body of Silliman at 9:33 p.m. Authorities had been looking for him since he left his Apex home and disappeared two days before Thanksgiving. His parents reported him missing and worried that he had left behind medication.

According to a search warrant, some suspects have told investigators they beat Silliman on the head with a hammer and suffocated him with duct tape wrapped over his face. Search warrants said his body was discovered in a plastic bag on the bathroom floor of a vacant mobile home owned by Dahlquist's family and used by her and her friends as a hangout.

Four 'friends' accused

The next day, Wake sheriff's deputies arrested Hare, Dahlquist and two others, Aadil Khan, 17, and Drew Logan Shaw, 16. All four were listed as friends on Silliman's Facebook page. All four were charged with murder.

The arrests hardly brought to light what had happened to Silliman. Instead, the four teens, none of whom had ever been jailed, have spent the past two weeks held without bail in the Wake County jail. The suspects have not spoken publicly. Their families and their lawyers have largely declined to comment.

Search warrants say that before Silliman was killed the suspects read him his fate in tarot cards. Investigators seized an empty bottle of hydrocodone and two bottles of diazepam, or Valium, at the mobile home.

A couple of weeks before he was killed, Silliman told a classmate at Apex High School that he felt in danger.

"He said he was watching out for himself because some people had it in for him," said Charlie Adams, 16, a junior on the school lacrosse team.

Although much about Silliman's killing remains unknown, one aspect seems clear. A strange and stunning case will become more so once the suspects or their lawyers start to explain what happened to Silliman and who is to blame.

Dahlquist's attorney, Joe Cheshire, declined last week to offer details about the circumstances that led to Silliman's death. But he called the homicide "complex" and "intricate."

"I haven't made up in my own mind the relative responsibility of my own client," Cheshire said. "The range of those involved in this is so great, it would probably be irresponsible to say this person is guilty or innocent."

Robert Padovano, a Cary lawyer who represents Hare, said the sheriff and district attorney's office have provided him with little information because it's an ongoing criminal investigation.

"Right now there are more questions than answers on the defense's part," Padovano said.

The lawyer visited his client Friday at the Wake County jail.

"He's doing better than I would be doing," Padovano said. "He's 18, and it's his first time in jail."