Hembree expressed how unimpressed he was, adding, “I’m only concerned about this case!” He said he wanted more time and there were documents he said he had not seen. “Like I said, I don’t care nothing about what Mr. Bell has done with Mr. Beam in the past. I only care about what is done in my case. I don’t care if he has to work every night for the rest of the year, but I want to be treated fairly. And that’s what I’m asking the court to do, and I respectfully request that you set this verdict aside.”
The judge said no.
As the penalty phase moved forward, the state presented evidence first, putting up witness after witness describing how violent Hembree had been throughout his life. Each had his or her own story to tell regarding being beaten up or robbed by Hembree. The guy was ruthless and uncaring—a true sociopath, with no feeling or remorse. Over the years, he had robbed and beaten people, forced himself on females, raped and pillaged. There didn’t seem to be a time in his life when he had done anything good for anyone. He had no redeeming qualities. He had no sense of compassion for anyone. The burden on the state was to prove aggravating circumstances—and if there was ever a life modeling the epitome of that burden, Hembree’s was it. Witness after witness talked about being victimized by this man. He’d hurt people when he didn’t have to. He’d hurt people for fun. He’d hurt people for money and drugs and sex. Over two days, the state presented witnesses bolstering its claim that Danny Hembree was a repeat offender who committed the act of murder maliciously and deserved death. There was no doubt when the state finished that Hembree, if the death penalty is to be a punishment the state doled out for capital murder, was its poster child.
On November 14, Hembree’s defense began presenting witnesses to the contrary, many of whom came in and talked about how Hembree was mentally unstable, had issues all his life with depression and perhaps even brain damage. They testified to how he had been on a host of psychiatric medications throughout his life and was addicted to booze and drugs and should not be held responsible for his actions. He was a bad boy—very bad, indeed—but he did not deserve to die for impulses he had no control over. And no witness brought this home more than Hembree’s mother, Jacqueline Hembree.
Momma.
To maybe everyone else in the courtroom, Danny Hembree was a killer, a bastard, a rapist, a violent offender, a crack addict, and a drunkard. But to this woman, who had raised him, he was her son. No matter what he did, whom he killed, whom he hurt, despite his guilt or innocence, Danny Hembree was Momma’s boy. Nothing anybody said could take away the love she felt for her Danny Boy. She had given him life—and here she was now, trying to give him life once again.
Jurors got a firsthand account of Hembree’s father. Momma said they had lived in California and even Berlin, Germany, near the time of “the wall and everything.” It was chaotic. She was pregnant with Danny. Their lives revolved around where Mr. Hembree was stationed. Hembree’s father had been trained in infantry, but he worked in a tank unit.
All of this led up to a problem Momma had with her pregnancy. She was three months pregnant. Before they left South Carolina to embark on a new tour, she was told her “uterus was too low for the baby to develop and that I was going to lose him either with or without [an] operation.”
So Momma went into surgery while three months pregnant.
No one explained there could be side effects, because it was thought there would be no child.
Hembree survived, obviously, and the first year of his life was incredibly rough for Momma as she dealt with the boy’s issues: “Well, I’d say the first three months of his life, he cried all the time, and they just said it was colic.”
As he grew, Danny’s problems, Momma said, also grew: “He was [a] nervous child, and once he started school, we were told he was very intelligent, but he would disrupt the class sometimes, not by being mean or doing bad things, just he would get bored.... And then when he was about twelve, we took him to his pediatrician because he was very nervous and he would chew the skin around his fingernails, and we were very concerned about that. And we were told by his pediatrician to leave him alone—that he was going through this depression because he was the smallest child in his class and he hadn’t grown enough and caught up with the rest of the kids.”
Momma said that as Danny got older, the shaking and nervousness spun out of control.
“He could sit somewhere and his leg would shake and it would just constantly tremble. And we didn’t know why that was. And I had a doctor later to tell me that his insides shook like that—even his tongue.”
Hembree was fourteen when his behavioral problems started. Part of it was based on the hard life he and his brother had been put through with a military dad ruling the house with an iron fist.
“Well . . . my husband, he was very hard on those boys because that’s the way he was raised. He was raised in a family of seven children, and his father was a very strict disciplinarian. And had he known about Danny and [his brother’s] problems mentally at the time, I don’t think he would’ve reacted the way he did all the time.”
Momma said Danny and his brother developed severe mental issues based on how much their daddy drank and how badly he treated them. But there was also, she claimed, a strange dynamic between Danny and his sibling she had a hard time coming to terms with.
“[Danny’s brother] had a complete mental breakdown a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday. And . . . we had noticed . . . he had always followed Danny. He had never quite developed his own personality and Danny was his idol. He looked up to Danny. And it was after Danny got into trouble the first time is when [his brother] had the mental breakdown months later. And we found out that he—well, at first, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and it was a misdiagnosis. Once we changed doctors and . . . they changed it to the fact that he was a manic-depressive, with a bipolar disorder.”
It was after the diagnosis that Danny met with doctors, Momma testified, and they said he had a chemical imbalance. All of it was the result of the operation she’d had while Danny was three months in her womb.
“[His doctor] told us that not only did Danny have a chemical imbalance in the brain, that he also had brain damage. And then he started asking me about his medical background. And then I told him about the surgery I had when I was three months pregnant. And he seemed to think that the anesthesia at the time could possibly have caused the brain damage.”
She talked about the medications Hembree was put on after the diagnosis, how he became an introvert, staying home a lot, afraid to go outside. Soon Danny stopped taking his meds, because he didn’t like how they made him feel.
One of the things Hembree enjoyed as he grew into a young adult was going to jail. He thrived in that environment, because it was structured and decisions were made for him, Momma explained. He was told what to do and when to do it. He needed that. When Momma visited him, she noticed Danny was “quieter, calmer, more caring for our feelings, more interested in his family and what we felt, and how we were getting along, versus when he was out. [Then] it was like we became secondary to him versus his pleasures. When he was incarcerated, he cared deeply about his children.”
When Hembree was released in January 2009, Momma recalled, he got out of jail and lived with her, but his life had changed.
“He came home to be with me because, you know, I’m by myself now. And he stayed there with me a couple of months constantly. And then he started meeting up with these people that were into drugs and alcohol and sex. And he more or less moved out.... I think it was in like August, or the latter part of July, he went to stay with the Cattertons.”
Momma said that she could tell he was not taking his medication during this period. This led her to tell a story about little Danny, as a baby, getting a diaper stuck to his face. He couldn’t breathe for a period of time. Momma believed the lack of oxygen to his brain exacerbated his problems further.
In the end, calling Momma was a good play by the defense to try and humanize a ma
n who had been looked at and seen as a monster.
The next day, Hembree’s son and sister testified, reinforcing Momma’s claims that Hembree was severely incapacitated and inhibited by his mental difficulties and had taken medications all his life for psychiatric issues. It was solid, serious testimony from people who knew Hembree personally, aside from his street life of drugs.
Did any of this testimony negate the fact that Hembree knew what he was doing when he killed both women?
The jury was going to have to decide.
Closing arguments came and went, and the judge gave his instructions.
CHAPTER 116
On November 18, after a day of deliberations, the jury came back. After a series of questions, the judge addressed the jury foreperson regarding Hembree’s mental state and relationships with his family and the aggravating factors surrounding the murder of Heather Catterton. The jury’s decision was announced in the form of a question to the foreperson: “Is it the recommendation of the jury . . . [to] recommend that the defendant, Danny Robbie Hembree Jr., be sentenced to death—is that the unanimous decision of the jury?”
“Yes, sir,” the foreperson said.
Danny Hembree’s hubris and narcissism were never more evident than after being asked at the end of the death penalty proceedings if he had anything to say.
“Yes, sir, there is,” Hembree insisted. “This verdict here is what the Catterton family was asking for, and I hope that it can bring some closure and start the healing process for them.... And I would like to read these four verses. It’s the lyrics of a [Johnny Cash] song that I modified into a poem.... It says everything that I’d like to say.” And with that, Hembree talked about how prison had been “a living hell” for him and how he hated “every inch” of a system that had “cut me and have scarred me through and through.” He said after every bid, he walked out “a wiser, weaker man.” He blamed politicians for the conditions and how no prisoner is rehabilitated. He said prison had “bent” his “heart and mind ” and the “stone walls turn my blood a little cold.” He asked for Prison (as a proper noun) to “rot and burn in hell,” repeating how the four-wall institution he had lived in throughout much of his life was “a living hell.”
Perhaps it was the power of suggestion, but moving back into that Hollywood metaphor Hembree’s attorneys had brought up earlier, the judge’s final words seemed to have been pulled straight from the script of one of those blockbuster legal thrillers: “The prisoner, Danny Robbie Hembree Jr., having been convicted of murder in the first degree by unanimous verdict of the jury . . . having unanimously recommended the punishment of death, is therefore ordered and . . . sentenced to death. And the sheriff of Gaston County, North Carolina, in whose custody the said defendant now is, should forthwith deliver said prisoner . . . to the warden of the state’s penitentiary . . . and the said warden shall cause the said prisoner . . . to be put to death as by law provided.” Judge Beal paused a moment, taking a breath before delivering his final words: “May God have mercy on his soul.”
Danny Hembree, who did not react in any way to the verdict, was on his way to death row, where he would mount one of his most revolting manipulative moves ever.
CHAPTER 117
It took Hembree two months to stir up controversy and piss off everyone. It was almost humorous how much noise a guy facing death, locked up for basically twenty-three hours a day, could make from that space. But Hembree managed to rattle the media and public’s cage from the confines of death row.
This latest outburst of disrespect came in the form of a letter addressed to the local Gastonia newspaper, the Gaston Gazette. It was taunting and sarcastic and shocking. In the one-page missive, Hembree called himself a “gentleman of leisure” while on death row, enjoying “color TV” with air-conditioning, while taking “naps at will.” He bragged about eating “three well-balanced, hot meals” a day and being housed in a building with a “55 million dollar hospital,” providing him with “round the clock free medical care.”
The quote that stirred the most public outrage as the letter went viral had Hembree taunting his death sentence: Kill me if you can, suckers!
Hembree knew there hadn’t been an execution in North Carolina since 2006 and asked the public if [it was] aware that the chances of my lawful murder taking place in the next twenty years if ever are very slim?
“He’s sitting down there, looking at the law and laughing,” Locke Bell told the same newspaper. “He’s been sentenced to death. He shouldn’t be watching color TV.”
Nick Catterton was in tears as he read the letter. He felt Hembree was spitting on his daughter’s grave.
Kathy Ledbetter, Hembree’s sister, came out and apologized the following day, saying she was sorry. The letter, Kathy suggested, was just another sign that her brother was mentally unstable.
Others said Hembree was out of control.
The discussion turned global as the Daily Mail and other British media covered it.
People were outraged.
CHAPTER 118
In March 2012, just before jury selection began on the second trial, Danny Hembree wrote Stephanie Hamlin a letter. He said he was “concerned” about her “health,” because in his view she had gained some weight recently (she hadn’t). He told the ADA she should get herself a gym membership and start working out.
Hamlin laughed at Hembree’s stupid, desperate attempt to get to her.
By March 13, both sides were at it again. Bell, Hamlin, Judge Beal, Beam, and Ratchford tried the same case, mostly, with the same witnesses. It had a déjà vu feel to it. The only difference for the state was they presented Randi’s murder first and backed it up with Heather’s. The reason they went forward with prosecuting Hembree for Randi’s murder, a source in law enforcement explained, was as an insurance policy (“a backup sentence”) should anything happen with the automatic appeal initiated in the first death penalty verdict. The state wanted a second guilty verdict to fall back on, should Hembree find a way out of the first.
One of the more dramatic moments for the state during the second trial came when Shellie Nations, Randi’s sister, testified. When Shellie saw Randi’s boots, which had been placed on the stand before her, she lost it, saying later that all she could think of while staring at her sister’s shoes was “the final steps my sister took.... It really broke me down.”
“This case was a slam dunk,” Hamlin said. “It was a stress-free trial for us because we knew the evidence so well. We knew what to expect.”
Cruise control.
That is, until Hembree took the stand.
The defense put up Hembree first, after the state concluded its case. It was a tactical move. In order to prove Hembree was a liar and had made false confessions, his lawyers needed him to explain it.
So Hembree sat and told that same tale he had back during the first trial.
When it came time for cross-examination, however, Locke Bell told ADA Hamlin, “You had a crack at him already—I want my shot.”
“No problem,” Hamlin said.
Which was when Danny Robbie Hembree decided to cause mayhem.
CHAPTER 119
Prior to Hembree’s defense presenting its case, ADA Hamlin shared with the court that she had received a letter from the attorney general’s (AG’s) office regarding Danny Hembree. It was serious stuff. The AG informed Hamlin that an anonymous, typed letter had been sent to its office indicating she and Hembree had had an affair. The letter writer knew things about Hamlin and her husband’s personal lives. Details not many others could have known. Things only someone close to them would know. The letter explained that prior to Heather’s death, Hamlin and Hembree had had sex; after Hembree hooked up with Nicole, and Heather wound up dead, Hamlin decided to prosecute Hembree because she was jealous.
“The AG’s office didn’t take it seriously enough to open an official inquiry,” a source told me. “They laughed it off, apparently. I guess they checked it out, but nothing came of it, basicall
y.”
The judge called a hearing to discuss the matter and figure out if the court needed to conduct its own investigation and remove ADA Hamlin from the case.
The jury was sent out. There was talk among the lawyers and judge whether everyone should be heard on the record and allowed to argue each side of the matter. Beam and Ratchford took a moment and spoke to Hembree privately about it.
When they returned, Beam explained there was no reason to be heard. He said he couldn’t discuss their reasoning because of attorney-client privilege, but the bottom line was that none of them deemed the letter valid.
“In the end, either Hembree typed the letter himself or had someone else do it,” a source close to both sides told me. “But he knew it to be a false document.”
The judge was convinced the letter was bogus. He warned the courtroom that nobody was to mention the letter—in any way—during the trial.
So Hembree sat on the stand once again. The trial had been going on for two weeks by then. Hembree was being buried by the prosecution.
On April 2, 2012, while Locke Bell was cross-examining Hembree, he approached the convicted killer with a question about that letter he had written to the local newspaper while on death row—the letter in which Hembree mocked the system.
Hembree said, “What I’m wondering about, are you gonna show the letter about the sexual relationship between me and Stephanie that the attorney general sent in here the other day . . . ?”
With his arms folded, standing in front of the witness, Locke Bell dropped his head and smiled. He knew what Hembree had just done.
The Killing Kind Page 34