On December 3, 2009, there was that same hollow stare looking back at investigators as they studied several photographs taken from surveillance cameras set up inside two IHOP restaurants in Charlotte, North Carolina. Within all of the suspicion surrounding him and his potential role in the deaths of Randi and Heather, Danny Hembree decided to commit several armed robberies.
The behavior seemed so, well, stupid, especially in the scope of where Hembree’s life was then. Here was Danny fingered on those surveillance cameras and caught, essentially, red-handed. The images of a yet-to-be-identified Hembree were e-mailed around to scores of local law enforcement agencies to see if anyone recognized the man.
It was YCSO detective Eddie Strait who saw the images roll across his computer screen and immediately knew who it was: a familiar face to the YCSO.
They had Hembree right where they wanted him.
Backing up the notion that the image was no doubt Hembree, witness reports matched Hembree’s vehicle leaving the scene of both robberies.
An officer from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) created a photo lineup, in which Danny Hembree’s recent mug shot was included. They tracked down one of the witnesses from IHOP. At 7:15 P.M., on December 4, two Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers met with the witness and placed the lineup in front of him.
“That’s him,” the man said. “He’s the one.”
He was positive. The witness pointed to suspect number two in the lineup.
“He’s the one that robbed me. He had a silver pistol, like a silver revolver. I recognize his facial characteristics.”
They asked him if there was anything else.
“The eyes,” the witness said.
Indeed, there was no mistaking the eyes of the Devil.
The eyes belonged to Danny Hembree.
CHAPTER 50
The Gastonia Police Department picked Hembree up at his momma’s house and transported him to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Hembree was sleeping when he arrived at the CMPD garage and was greeted by fifteen-year-veteran armed-robbery CMPD detective Ryan Whetzel. It was 12:20 A.M.
After being woken and escorted out of the vehicle, Hembree said, “Where are we? Is this the jail or the detectives’ building?”
“The jail’s about a block away,” Whetzel explained. Hembree was handcuffed behind his back. He wore blue jeans. A checkered flannel shirt was flanked over his shoulders like a cape. “But we’re going in here because I need to talk to you about a few things.”
“I want you to know that I am invoking my constitutional rights and you need to walk me over to the jail.”
“I need to take you in here first before I can transport you over to the jail,” Whetzel said.
Hembree didn’t balk.
Whetzel and Hembree, along with a uniformed officer, exited the prisoner elevator on the second floor. Whetzel wanted to get Hembree into an interview suite, sit him down, and give him a few moments by himself to think about things. Whetzel had seen this scenario likely hundreds of times before: Some doper is busted for a robbery. After a few moments inside the box, he’s ready to give it up. Hembree could make this easy on himself and admit to the robberies. They had him nailed. With Hembree’s history of burglaries and robberies, he was facing serious time. Playing stupid and saying he didn’t do it would only make matters worse.
As they walked down the hallway toward the box, Hembree spoke without being asked. “I think I might just done changed my mind, depends on what you want to talk about. You know, and how nice y’all are.”
Clearly, Hembree had a plan. He was setting the hook.
“I’m real nice, Danny,” Whetzel said.
They were in the box. Hembree was a bit out of it, more sleepy than spent. He wasn’t as alert as he had been with Baker and Yeager the previous week. With his arms cuffed behind his back, that plaid shirt draped over him, he sat in one of four chairs around a small table. The room was about the size of a large closet.
“Well, if you’re nicer than the others,” Hembree blurted out before breaking into a rant, slurred as it was, about “those other boys.... You give them a shirt and badge and they get that God thing going. . . .”
What this comment was in reference to had never been established or discussed. Maybe it was the way Hembree had been picked up and handled that night. In any situation he found himself, Hembree was all about maintaining power and control. He had proven this during the Baker/Yeager interview. And here he was again taking control of the situation with Whetzel, merely seconds after sitting down. All of it recorded on video cameras set up around the room.
Whetzel tried shackling Hembree’s legs around the chair, but it wouldn’t work.
Hembree let out a big yawn.
Whetzel uncuffed his suspect, who let out a sigh as the cuffs came off. Hembree then dropped his head and hugged himself, as if he was cold.
“I’ll be back in a minute, all right?” Whetzel said.
Hembree didn’t respond.
Whetzel said it again, louder.
Hembree looked up. “Yeah, man. . . .” Then he dropped his head.
Whatever Hembree was going to talk about, Whetzel wanted it recorded under the support of a formal interview. If Hembree was going to admit the robberies, they needed it on record.
Hembree, of course, had other things on his mind. But for right now, as he waited for Whetzel, he put his head down on the desk in front of him and slept.
CHAPTER 51
Danny Hembree was sound asleep when Ryan Whetzel returned to the box at 12:32 A.M. It was now December 5.
“All right, Danny . . . ,” Whetzel said. He had a pad and several sheets of paper.
Hembree didn’t move. He had his head resting on his folded arms on top of the desk, like a kid sleeping during detention.
“Danny!” Whetzel said louder, knocking on the table.
Nothing.
“Danny!”
Pause.
“Danny!”
Pause again.
“Danny!” Whetzel screamed.
Finally, after Whetzel yelled for a fourth time while grabbing Hembree by the arm, Danny snapped out of it. He rubbed the sleep off his face with one hand. Then he acclimated himself to his surroundings, as if realizing all over again where he was.
“Can you wake up for me, buddy?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Hembree said.
“You want to talk . . . and get all your eggs in one basket? Let’s get it over with . . . ,” Whetzel said. It was clear Whetzel wanted to do this the easy way. He didn’t want to play games with Hembree by sitting there for six hours in a standoff.
Whetzel had Hembree sign a Miranda warning form, indicating that Hembree had been read and clearly understood his rights. Then the cop said he wasn’t going to waste time. He wanted to know if Hembree was willing to put his cards on the table now.
“You know what we want to talk about?” Whetzel said.
“Yup,” Hembree answered. “Them robberies . . .”
“Okay . . . which one would you like to talk about first?”
Hembree leaned back in his chair and took in a deep breath. “Y’all get them from York County up here, and y’all get me something to eat, and let’s talk about those murders.... I’ll tell y’all about them two girls.”
CHAPTER 52
Detective Ryan Whetzel sat stunned. After taking in what Hembree had just announced, Whetzel said the only thing he could think of at the time: “Okay. . . .”
Hembree stared at Whetzel. The felon’s shirt was pulled up over his head like a hijab. His arms were folded in front of himself. He leaned back in the chair.
Control.
“Hang tight,” Whetzel told him.
Hembree stared at the cop.
Because he had not gotten any response from Hembree, Whetzel said: “You gonna wake back up now?”
“Sure,” Hembree responded immediately. “Look, I’m just tired, not under the influence.”
Whetzel thought Hembree had passed back out. After establishing that Hembree was wide-awake and alert (and staring blankly at him), Whetzel said it would take time to get that meal.
Full of surprises on this night, Hembree blurted out: “Actually, York County . . . theys wasn’t killed there—theys was just dumped there. Theys was killed in Gastonia.”
Whetzel again seemed shocked. “O . . . kay,” he said slowly.
Whetzel left Hembree in the box for a few hours while he got hold of two York County detectives. All three went in and sat down with Hembree, who seemed more with it now that he’d had a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
“You requested York County,” one of the investigators said, “well, we’re here.”
“Them girls wasn’t killed in no York County,” Hembree said. At times, when he spoke, Hembree hammered the tip of a finger angrily into the tabletop.
“No?”
“Nope! I’s just dumped them there.”
The way he used the word “dumped”—there was no doubt that these girls were mere garbage to Danny Hembree.
“Where did it happen at?”
“I killed them at Momma’s. . . . I killed Heather downstairs in the laundry room, and I killed Randi in my den. You’ll find their blood all over the couch.”
“At your momma’s?”
“Yup.”
“Does your mom know?”
“Nope.”
“Anybody else know?”
“Nope.”
Hembree talked about killing two women as though he was describing a trip to the supermarket. Casual. Detached. No emotion. It was as if he was excited to get the opportunity to talk about it finally. To relive it. Their lives, clearly, had no value to him. There was no remorse. No tears or even a faint, phlegmy scratch to his voice. It was all business for Hembree. Here was a killer talking about his work.
Hembree talked about killing Randi in particular and how the YCSO could go downstairs in his mother’s house and find “where she bled and I tried to clean it up. . . .”
“Was that blood from her nose?” one of them asked.
Hembree coughed into his fist and folded his arms. “Yeah, uh . . . I punched her in the nose after she was dead. I didn’t figure she’d bleed or nothing.”
He remembered the exact time he killed Heather. “It was four-thirty on the eighteenth. And I dumped her body . . . that Sunday. . . .”
After a bit of discussion over where he killed Heather, one of the investigators asked, “What brought that on?”
“I killed Heather ’cause, um, I don’t know—I just did. I just wanted to. And I killed Randi for the same reason. I just wanted to.”
He said he used a bag on Heather. “And it took a long time.”
Next he told the group how he, Sommer, and Heather, on that night, “had sex six or seven times.” Moments after that, he said: “She (Heather) was a whore and she wouldn’t quit. And she was having to sell her body to the niggers every now and then . . . and I just, uh, I released her from that. I wasn’t mad at her or nothing. She’s just better off.”
Then came what every investigator working the case had suspected as the weeks passed and Hembree was still walking the streets. Who was his next victim?
Hembree took a breath. He scratched his nose with the back of his hand. In a voice full of grandiosity and arrogance, he said, “I was gonna get her momma this week!”
Stella Funderburk didn’t know it, but she was lucky to be alive.
CHAPTER 53
It was 3:30 A.M. Matt Hensley was sound asleep when a ringing cell phone woke him.
Hensley opened his eyes and stared at the caller ID.
York County?
“You talk about waking up quick,” Hensley said later.
Indeed. There would be only one reason why the YCSO was waking him up in the middle of the night.
A break in the case.
YCSO detective Eddie Strait was on the other end. He had some news about a suspect Hensley would be interested in. “Eddie Strait here. We have Danny Hembree in custody at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD for armed robbery. And he’s confessed to both murders.”
“What?” Hensley responded.
This was certainly not a fist-pumping moment. It was much too early in the morning for that. But what Strait told Hensley next made Hensley sit up and take immediate notice.
“Hembree said he wanted someone to come speak to him about the murders before he said anything about the armed robberies.”
Hembree was so schooled in the law, having been arrested and jailed for so long, he knew a Gastonia investigator would ultimately need to hear his confession before the legal ball rolled.
“Russ Yeager and myself have just finished speaking with Mr. Hembree and he’s confessed to killing Heather Catterton and Randi Saldana.”
Hensley couldn’t believe it. The guy wouldn’t talk about an armed robbery, but he had confessed to killing two women?
“Said he killed both at his mother’s house and dumped their bodies in York County.”
“He say how?”
“He claimed to have suffocated Heather, strangled Randi.”
Strait gave Hensley a few additional details and said they were on their way to a restaurant in York County where Hembree said he tossed some evidence in a Dumpster.
The case was unofficially in the hands of the GCPD. Hensley needed to secure murder warrants for Hembree on both girls so he could make the trek over to Charlotte and get Hembree picked up. The last thing they needed now was for Hembree to go before the magistrate in another county. If that happened, it’d be a legal battle, which could take days or weeks, before they’d be able to get him back to Gaston County to answer for the murders. By then, Hembree would be lawyered up and likely not want to talk anymore.
“I need a few hours,” Hensley told Strait.
Strait spoke to his superior. When he came back on the line, he said they’d wait.
CHAPTER 54
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD is a whitewashed, stone-and-marble building, with perfectly groomed maple trees, red bark mulch at the trunk base, greeting visitors as they take the four steps up in through the front doors. The state flag stands proud and nearly as high as the building to the right of an old-school noir-style streetlamp. A block away, heading northwest on East Trade Street, is the Time Warner Cable Arena, the glitz and fine hospitality of the Ritz-Carlton hotel just beyond that.
With his partner, Michel Sumner, Matt Hensley parked his Crown Vic and headed into the building to meet Yeager and Strait. It was shortly after five in the morning. Hensley had obtained the two murder warrants he needed. As Hensley did that, a colleague, 0GCPD CSI detective Chris McAuley, secured a search warrant for Hembree’s mother’s house.
After Hensley and Sumner sat down with Yeager and Strait, they explained what Hembree had admitted to. It became obvious there was certain to be more evidence at Hembree’s mother’s house than just a shoe and some blood.
“He said he kept Heather in the closet for a week,” Strait explained.
“Damn, a week.”
“Randi he kept for ‘a few days.’ ”
Hembree said he dumped Heather’s clothing off Crowders Creek Road by the bridge, her shoes down the road. He placed Randi’s clothes in that Dumpster.
“He say why he killed them?” This bothered Hensley. What was Hembree’s motive?
“He said he killed Heather because he wanted to ‘free her from her lifestyle.’ ”
“Randi?”
“Said he didn’t like her.”
It was more than that. During the initial interview Hembree gave on December 5, when he first admitted killing both girls, he said (without being asked), “Randi was just a whore who fucked niggers, and I just didn’t like her.”
As Hembree had said during that initial interview, he helped Randi sneak into Momma’s house through a window. They hung out in his bedroom. “I went in there.... She was in there about ten minutes. She thought I was going to
give her some crack, but I didn’t. I just killed her.”
Hembree said that while he was at someone’s apartment the night before his recent arrest, December 4, “Shorty was supposed to come over there . . . and I was gonna kill him, too.... Heather hated Randi. They fought over the same nigger, Shorty. . . . He fucks all them young white girls, and he’s fiftysomething. He gave them crack.”
Taking his deep-seated racist commitment a step further, part of his hatred for Randi, he clarified, was centered on “when she was around a nigger, she tried to talk like a nigger. . . .”
Hembree despised this about Randi. It disgusted him.
After he murdered Heather, Hembree put her in the closet. His comment was chilling: “I then went upstairs, watched me some TV, and made me something to eat.”
Detective Michel Sumner and Matt Hensley worked cases together. Sumner, nearly a decade older than Hensley, had joined the DU a few months after Hensley. Sumner’s background was in sales; he had aspirations once of becoming a pharmaceutical-sales rep. But after interviewing with several major companies, he realized he lacked the core component of the job: sales experience. Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Sumner moved around the state as a child and landed in the Gastonia region as a teen, attending high school and subsequently Belmont Abbey College in Charlotte. Within his path of choosing a career, Sumner later said, “Not once, ever, did I consider law enforcement.” But 9/11 happened. Sumner wanted to make a difference. He was determined to become a federal agent. “And in order to become a federal agent,” he said, “I thought local law enforcement would be the right direction or the right step to go into that field.”
What Sumner didn’t realize until Hembree became part of his life was how much he would rely on that background in sales in order to get suspects to talk, and keep talking.
The plan was to pick Hembree up and get him down to the GCPD and allow him to say whatever he needed to say. As a cop, if you have a suspect talking, you let him ramble for as long as he’ll continue. There’s no telling what tomorrow will bring—especially when dealing with such an unpredictable, volatile guy like Danny Hembree.
The Killing Kind Page 17