“I’ll be there,” Danny responded.
Shorty was pacing, walking back and forth as Danny arrived. There was something on Shorty’s mind. He wasn’t happy.
Danny asked Shorty what he wanted.
“You killed them—didn’t you?” Shorty snapped. Inside each of his jacket pockets, Shorty had two knives. He gripped both knives with each hand as Danny approached him.
Shorty noticed that Danny Hembree “would not look” him in the eyes as Shorty accused him of killing the girls. Instead, he was staring at the ground, then at the cars going by, nearby buildings, lighting a cigarette. Anything else but the accuser in front of him.
There was some silence, followed by Danny shrugging it off.
“You killed them, didn’t you?” Shorty asked again. (Shorty wanted him to man up, so he could maybe stick him.)
Danny Hembree got back into his vehicle and took off.
Shorty watched him drive away. He had sent a message to Danny that he was watching him. Danny thought he was playing a game, laughing at everyone else; but there were others, Shorty had made it clear, friends of the girls, who would not be intimidated by Danny Hembree.
CHAPTER 36
Detective Matt Hensley headed out with two YCSO investigators to speak with a young guy who had called into the Crime Stoppers tip line with what felt like a promising lead. His name was Mark Bailey (pseudonym) and he told the Crime Stoppers operator that he had gotten into an altercation recently with someone he knew and the kid blurted out how he knew something about the “two girls that got killed.” The impression was that as they fought, the kid had killed twice already and was not afraid to do it again.
The YCSO called the number they had been given.
Mark answered.
“I never called that tip line,” he claimed.
They visited Mark at his home.
“I suspect someone called in, using my name,” Mark suggested.
Hensley checked out Mark’s caller ID and his phone history. Mark Bailey had made no calls to Crime Stoppers, either on his cell or landlines.
They asked Mark what he thought was going on.
“I bet it’s a neighbor of mine,” Mark said. “He’s trouble. I don’t like him.”
Mark gave Brad Kelp’s (pseudonym) address to the officers.
Hensley and his two colleagues went over to speak with Brad. His mother answered the door and said her son wasn’t home. “Come on in.”
They told the woman why they were there.
“Brad’s recently undergone a psychological evaluation,” she said. “I’ve had to have him admitted, since he’s threatened (and even attempted) suicide.”
The call to Crime Stoppers did not surprise Brad’s mother, she said.
“He needs to call us, ma’am,” Hensley indicated, handing her a business card.
Later that day, Brad went into the GCPD voluntarily. “I didn’t call a tip into Crime Stoppers,” Brad said. Then, after being asked if he knew anything about the recent girls being found dead, Brad explained how he and another friend had seen a young female one night wearing a hoodie and jeans near the time Heather went missing. The girl had been walking along a road in town. He thought it might be Heather.
“What’d she look like?”
“We never seen her face.”
Brad gave them his friend’s name and number.
After speaking with the friend, who knew Heather from high school, investigators realized it wasn’t Heather they had seen.
“Brad lies a lot,” that friend further explained. Brad was one of those guys who wanted to be involved. He couldn’t help himself.
“It was all nothing . . . and had nothing to do with anything,” Hensley said later, commenting on how they had spent a day tracking down dead leads.
Ninety percent or more of what cops uncover during those early days of a murder investigation leads nowhere. It’s part of the process of solving cases. You can’t get to your location without walking through the muck. This particular Crime Stoppers tip showed how fluid investigations of this nature become, even though you have a viable suspect looking good on paper.
The following morning, Hensley and two colleagues ran down another erroneous lead after sitting and watching the Catterton home from down the block. As they spied on the movements surrounding Nick’s house, they witnessed “several subjects in the backyard stripping wire.” As they looked on, it seemed as though it might lead somewhere.
So they followed the group to a scrap yard, where they turned in the wire for some chump change to go out and, most likely, buy drugs.
“Again, it had nothing to do with our murder investigation,” Hensley said.
CHAPTER 37
That first real break did come, however, on November 25. YCSO detectives Russ Yeager and Alex Wallace had Sommer Heffner come in for an interview. Matt Hensley was there, too, again monitoring from another room. The YCSO was still not handing over the investigation to the GCPD. For now, it was a dual effort, with the YCSO leading the way.
Sommer sat down and told her tale of the last night she spent with Heather—the last time, in fact, she had seen Heather alive. It was that night Danny Hembree picked Sommer and her boyfriend up while they were walking and drove them over to Heather’s. Heather was taking a bath, getting ready for the night.
This narrative gave investigators more ammo for their warrant, placing “Danny Boy,” as Sommer said Danny liked people to call him, and also referred to himself, as the last person to have been with Heather. Now they had a witness making the claim in a formal interview. This was a statement Sommer would sign.
Sommer went into detail about the night. As he listened, Hensley was particularly interested about one event that Sommer described. After convincing her boyfriend that she was going to have sex with Danny, and her boyfriend was going to have sex with Heather (the swapping part of the night), Sommer recounted how “angry” Danny Boy became when he couldn’t get an erection. A switch had flipped inside him when he couldn’t get it up, almost as if he blamed the girls for what the crack cocaine had done to him.
After Sommer admitted watching Danny and Heather have sex, investigators asked about the sex itself and if there was anything significant she could offer. Was he a normal guy in that regard?
“As a matter of fact,” Sommer explained, “he liked rough sex. . . . I noticed him pulling Heather’s hair.”
“Pulling on her hair?”
“Yeah, but I ain’t never done seen him strangling her or anything like that.”
Sommer explained what happened as the night turned into the next morning. She recollected everything that occurred before and after they left Danny Boy’s mother’s house, including that fiasco with Danny locking her boyfriend out, as well as all of them ransacking the house in search of the money that he was certain his mother had stashed.
“We all went to the store to get more beer,” she said. That was when things got creepy.
After pulling up to the store, Danny told Heather’s boyfriend, George, to go in and get some beer, saying, “We’ll wait here for y’all.”
As George walked into the store, Danny took off.
Leaving George at the store alone, Danny drove to one of his dealers’ houses and “bought an eight ball of cocaine” (an eighth of an ounce), Sommer said.
When he got back into the car, he told Sommer, “You can come with us, or I will take you to [your boyfriend’s] house.”
By then, Sommer had spoken to George. He was home, and really pissed off.
“Take me to George’s!” Sommer demanded. She was upset that Danny had left George at the store by himself.
“Come with us and party,” Danny said. It was something he had wanted all night: to be alone with Heather and Sommer. When the night had started back at Nick’s, Danny had made it clear he didn’t want George around. But Sommer insisted she wouldn’t go unless George went, too. Danny gave in, but now he had the opportunity to get the girls alone.
Sommer told him to take her to George’s house right away.
“Stay with us,” Heather pleaded with Sommer as Sommer got out of the car at George’s.
Sommer hugged Heather. “I love you.” It had been a long night. She kissed her friend on the cheek. Heather looked scared.
Heather hugged her friend back, whispering in her ear, “Please come with us. . . . Please don’t leave me with him. Something doesn’t feel right.”
“Please, please, please, Heather, just come with me,” Sommer pleaded in turn. “Do not go with him. You can sleep here. We’ll get up in the morning and get something to eat. We’ll do something.”
George was seething, pacing in the driveway, still upset at Danny for leaving him behind. George had gone from being wasted (earlier at Danny’s mother’s) to sobering up some.
Danny Boy was enjoying himself, laughing at George.
“No,” Sommer said. “Heather, don’t go with him. Stay with us.”
Sommer knew Danny Hembree was mean-spirited and could not have cared less for Heather—all he wanted was for Heather to give him sex in exchange for the dope. Sommer knew this. She wanted nothing to do with the guy.
The pull of the drug was too much for Heather, however. He had a night’s worth of rock. If they paced themselves, the eight ball would take them well into the next day. He and Heather could stay high for a very long time.
(“She had smoked dope and had sex and been alone with Danny prior to this night,” Sommer told the YCSO. “She was in it strictly for the drugs.”)
“Stay with me and George,” Sommer pleaded once more.
Heather said she couldn’t.
“That was last time I done seen her,” Sommer explained.
Staying there at George’s, not giving in to the desire to smoke more rock, was a decision that probably saved Sommer Heffner’s life.
It was two days later when Sommer went over to the Catterton home in search of her friend. She knew something was up, because she had not heard from Heather.
“I just had that feeling that she was dead,” Sommer said through a barrage of tears.
She was surprised she had not seen Heather since that night with Danny and George. It was unlike Heather. She had just been released from jail. She and Sommer had not spent a lot of time together over the past several months. (“It was so unlike her not to go home and at least take a shower or get some sleep.”)
Sommer saw Nick. “Where is she?”
“She was never dropped off the other night,” Nick said. “She ain’t done come home.”
“Last time I seen her she was with Danny . . . and, uh, Nick, the last thing she said to me was that she was scared of going with him. It don’t sound right, Nick.”
A few days after this visit, Sommer went back to Nick’s. Stella was there.
“You see Heather?” Sommer asked.
“No, I was going to ask you the same thing,” Stella said.
“Last time I saw her, she was with Danny,” Sommer said.
Just then, Danny Hembree came walking out of the Catterton home.
“What did you do with Heather?” Sommer shouted at him as he came toward her.
Sommer knew. She could tell he was rustling his feathers, rubbing their noses in it without coming out and saying anything. It was in that smirk of his, the cocky walk.
“What the hell you talking about?” he snapped. “I dropped her off at the Mighty Dollar that night. I ain’t done seen her since.”
During the interview on November 24, with Hensley looking on, YCSO investigators asked Sommer, what did she think about Danny Hembree?
“When I done seen it in the papers where a body had been found, and they’s released what she was wearing, I knew it was Heather. And I immediately suspected Danny had something to do with it.”
“You seen Danny around lately, Sommer?”
“I spoke to him yesterday,” she said, meaning the day before the interview.
“He say anything?”
“Oh yeah. He done said that since he was the last one with Heather, and the last one to be seen with Randi, he’s the main suspect. And you cops think he’s a serial killer.”
“He say anything else?”
“He’s been telling people to keep quiet about what they know—especially Nicole.”
CHAPTER 38
Hensley and the YCSO had an idea. Sommer claimed to have been inside the Bi-Lo in Gastonia, a grocery store, on the night Heather was last seen. If they had cashed in those pennies, as Sommer said, Hensley knew video surveillance from the store would corroborate Sommer’s account. Not only would it tell them how truthful she was being, but they might be able to get a bead on Heather’s movements before her death. And with any luck, they could put Heather with Danny Hembree on tape on the night she disappeared.
More narrative ammo for an arrest warrant.
After watching the Sommer Heffner interview for a second time, Matt Hensley thought Sommer could be a turning point in the investigation.
“For me, that’s where I found an opportunity to kind of take charge on something,” Hensley said later, “and that’s when I kind of really involved myself in this.”
Hensley focused on the coins and how Sommer had talked about going to that supermarket and exchanging the pennies for cash in one of those Coinstar machines.
The other part of Sommer’s interview that interested Hensley was how she talked about the trailers she had visited with Danny Hembree, her boyfriend, and Heather. That one particular abandoned trailer especially piqued his interest.
Crime scene, Hensley considered.
“Hembree’s cutting off pieces of rock for them to smoke inside that trailer,” Hensley said. “He’s having sex with them. . . .”
That trailer seemed like a good place to murder someone. Had Danny taken Heather back there after he left Sommer at her boyfriend’s? After smoking that eight ball, trying to have sex, but not being able to get an erection, had he blamed Heather for his sexual dysfunction? Had she made fun of him? Hensley could picture Heather saying something to Danny, and then him blowing his top, lashing out in a fit of rage.
It was just a theory.
Hensley and another investigator got hold of the Bi-Lo’s manager and asked about the video.
“We do,” the manager said.
Hensley and his colleague went to Bi-Lo’s to have a look and, lo and behold, there was George standing at the Coinstar machine, feeding a bucket of pennies into the mouth of it. George looked wired, on edge, in a hurry.
Sommer’s credibility factor shot up the moment they saw this.
As they watched the video, something else caught their eye. At one point, two girls walked into the supermarket past George, toward the restroom. Both came out of the restroom not long after and stopped to talk to George.
Heather and Sommer.
Bingo!
The last images of Heather before she disappeared and wound up dead in a South Carolina culvert.
“We need to seize the video,” Hensley told the manager.
“We have footage of the parking lot area, too,” the manager said.
Even better.
“I viewed that footage,” Hensley said, “which was poor quality. I didn’t see Hembree or his vehicle.”
When Hensley got the videos downtown and had a better look, he noted the times: At 8:22 P.M., George entered the store and walked to the Coinstar machine. By 8:34, Heather and Sommer went to use the restroom. Two minutes later, they exited the restroom and walked up to George. Then, at 8:37, Heather and Sommer exited the store as George continued to feed the coins into the machine. Nine minutes after that, at 8:46 P.M., George presented the cashier with his receipt for the cash and exited the store.
But here was the most crushing part of this video: As Heather walked out, it was clear she was wearing a gray Hollister sweatshirt, blue jeans, and those white tennis shoes. These were the same clothes she died in.
This video, Hensley knew, was probably taken hou
rs before Heather was murdered.
Hensley asked himself, What happened in those hours after they left this store and partied, and Hembree dropped Sommer off at George’s, and the moment someone tossed Heather in that ditch?
CHAPTER 39
Any good cop listens to his gut. To a certain extent, he might even rely on it. Yet, within that investigatory DNA we could argue great cops are born with, he never allows his instinct to overshadow where the evidence leads him. Being in his late twenties, with just over a year behind the gold shield, Detective Matt Hensley had a lot to prove, perhaps. Still, within just a short time, Hensley had developed a sixth sense for major crimes. There are some guys who take to the job so naturally they find themselves getting up every morning and going to work with a feeling that catching bad guys is the reason they were put on this earth. For Hensley, it was more than just his calling; it was something he had to do.
“Detective Hensley is one of a kind,” said Gaston County assistant district attorney (ADA) Stephanie Hamlin, who has worked side by side with Hensley on many cases (and would soon step into the current investigation involving the murders of Randi and Heather). “He is able to get people to open up and talk to him.”
Some in the district attorney’s (DA) office call Matt Hensley the “perv whisperer,” a strange nickname that might sound a bit unusual to the outside world. However, when you have a guy like Hensley with a reputation and “such great success in getting sex offenders to confess to him,” Hamlin added, you reward him with a moniker.
“Hensley is a very hard worker and perfectionist,” Hamlin offered, “but never talks down to others and always approaches his work with an open mind. He is always willing to lend a hand to anyone who needs help.”
Some might claim Hamlin has a biased opinion, but you ask people in Hensley’s circle about him and you’ll hear different versions of Hamlin’s statement.
That abandoned trailer gnawed at Hensley after he viewed the Coinstar video a few times and took in all of what Sommer had to say. The way Sommer explained it was that she and Heather, while inside the trailer with Danny and George, “put on a show,” and the trailer seemed to be a fairly significant place to their older friend. He was familiar with it. He felt comfortable there.
The Killing Kind Page 12