Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  Tim and Angela put their baby in their Chevette and headed downtown. In Fort Bragg, the memorial service for Katie and the girls was getting ready to begin at the Pope Air Force Base chapel. About 200 friends, family and military would attend the half-hour service. A friend of Gary’s would read from the book of Job. Watts wanted to go, but he needed to keep working the case. As he returned from lunch, Tim and Angela Hennis and their baby were sitting in the waiting room. Watts’s jaw dropped.

  My God, he’s a dead ringer for Cone’s composite, he thought. A blond, hulking, six-foot-four soldier sat before him, complete with mustache, sleepy eyes, and flared nose, just as Patrick Cone had insisted the day before.

  “Is he a suspect?” Angela asked after introductions.

  “No, he’s not,” Watts answered. “We just want to find out what information he has. He was one of the last people to see Mrs. Eastburn alive, and maybe he saw or heard something that will help us. Also, we’d like to get some physical samples from him for elimination purposes.”

  Watts escorted Hennis to his office, leaving Angela behind. Then he read Tim his Miranda rights and asked him to sign a waiver saying he didn’t want a lawyer present.

  “Before I do this, I need to know if I am a suspect,” Tim said.

  “It’s like I told you. You are not a suspect. We just need to talk to you because you were one of the last people to see Mrs. Eastburn alive.”

  Okay then, Hennis said, why am I waiving my rights? Just a routine procedure, Watts said. He measured Hennis’s body language, his folded arms, the way he distanced himself from him. Watts thought him to be hostile.

  During breaks in the questioning, Hennis joined Angela and Kristina in the waiting room. Newspaper and television reporters with cameras had learned the man with the dog had come forward. “Did you know Mrs. Eastburn?” one asked. “Are you under arrest?” Hennis tried to ignore them, but they kept asking. He said no comment and retreated to Watts’s office.

  Watts used these breaks to put together a photo lineup. He needed a photo of Hennis. “Bet he’s got a record,” Watts said to himself. He looked in the department’s mug shot file and found a two-year-old mug of Hennis stemming from a bounced check. So he spends money he doesn’t have, Watts thought. He found photos of five other blond males with mustaches to fill out the lineup.

  Then he took Hennis’s statement, an account of his actions from May 9 to May 12. Hennis talked as Watts clumsily typed along.

  Hennis said he had dropped his wife off at Selma, 90 minutes away, on Thursday, May 9, so she could be with her parents for Mother’s Day weekend. He said that because he had CQ duty on Friday and Sunday night, they would not be together anyway. CQ duty was a 24-hour shift at the barracks when somebody had to be in “charge of quarters” in case a supervisor was needed in the middle of the night.

  Hennis said he returned to Fayetteville without Angela and went to bed early, shortly after the woman who had given him the dog called to see if Dixie was working out. A normal workday on Friday, Hennis recalled, then CQ duty that night. He cleaned up around the house on Saturday, then CQ duty on Sunday. He picked up Angela on Monday.

  Home alone the night of the murders, Watts thought. He asked Hennis if he would mind going upstairs to the jail, where a nurse would take hair and blood samples. Hennis said sure. The television cameras followed.

  Upon entering the jail, they passed a sign that said “No weapons beyond this point.”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to have this up here,” Hennis said, pulling a folding buck knife from his pocket. Watts kept the knife, and marched Hennis to the nurse’s station, past prisoners in orange jumpsuits. He asked Hennis to give physical samples he thought would match those found inside 367 Summer Hill. Not only were there hair, blood, and fingerprints found at the house, but during the autopsy a medical examiner in Chapel Hill had retrieved a semen sample with a “large number of spermatozoa intact.”

  Hennis completed the standard “rape kit.” He combed and pulled his head and pubic hairs. He spat a sample of saliva. He allowed blood to be drawn.

  Hennis asked again if he were a suspect and Watts said no. The detective was stalling Hennis until an SBI fingerprint expert could drive 65 miles from Raleigh to get his fingerprints.

  While Hennis was being detained by Watts, Robert Bittle and the SBI’s Joel Morris brought Patrick Cone downtown to see the photo lineup. If Cone made a hit, Watts could lay to rest the whole MacDonald copycat theory picking up steam throughout the community. Sheriff Ottis Jones could make political hay. This wasn’t a botched Army investigation like the MacDonald case, he would say, but the work of detectives with the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department.

  “Can you identify any of those pictures?” Bittle asked Cone inside Morris’s car.

  Cone knew whoever he fingered would be branded a triple murderer and stand trial for his life. He didn’t know it was going to be this hard. It had been dark that night. He had passed him briefly. Why had he gotten involved?

  He remembered telling his dad how he had volunteered to become an eyewitness. “Son,” his father said, “you’re gonna regret the day you ever got involved in that case.”

  Cone looked at the six pictures. Then he stared out the window and prayed. The pictures again. Out the window. He prayed harder.

  This went on for quite some time. Finally, Cone made his choice.

  “Number five has his nose, but it’s number two.”

  Bittle asked him to cover the foreheads of the suspects as if they were wearing a toboggan cap.

  Number two again, Cone said.

  “I’m certain that’s the man.” He was looking at a photo of Tim Hennis.

  Morris cruised through the law enforcement center’s parking lot. Bittle asked Cone if he recognized any of the cars.

  “That’s it over there,” he said, pointing to Hennis’s Chevette.

  Bittle raced inside, called Watts, and blurted, “We’ve got a hit.” Cone knew he had pleased the officers. They took him home and thanked him again for his time.

  Watts labored through the rest of his interview with Tim Hennis, triple murderer. Ricky Navarro of the SBI in Raleigh finally arrived and took his fingerprints. Watts said he was finished and showed Hennis outside, six hours after he had waived his rights.

  “Get that camera out of my face,” Hennis growled as he and Angela pushed Kristina’s stroller across the lot. Hennis covered his face. A reporter asked Watts if this was a suspect and Watts’s answer changed to “no comment.”

  He showed Hennis to his car, the white Chevette that Cone had spotted, and watched while he folded up Kristina’s stroller and put it in the back. Then Watts bid Hennis a cordial good-bye.

  Tim climbed in and drove off. What a weird one, Hennis thought. He was angry and felt like he and Angela had not been treated well. He couldn’t wait to get home and call his father.

  “You wouldn’t believe what happened. We got a dog from a lady and she was murdered,” he told Bob Hennis in Boca Raton, Florida. Tim said he’d given Watts everything he could about the lady.

  “Hey, the whole thing will blow over,” Bob told him. He and his wife, Marylou, went to bed thinking little of it.

  Tim and Angela didn’t bother watching the 11 o’clock news, where they would’ve seen themselves shielding from the camera, trying to get Kristina out of there. The anchor said he wasn’t a suspect.

  They went to bed, trying to put the experience behind them.

  Across town, at the district attorney’s office, three parties were invited to a law enforcement skull session. The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department, represented by Sheriff Jones, Watts, and others, wanted to arrest Tim Hennis immediately and announce the case had been solved. The department had been unusually eager for an arrest to get this unsolved crime out of the newspaper.

  The district attorney’s office was represented by William VanStory IV, the assistant who would get the case. His recommendation was to wait. The SBI’s
senior agent in Fayetteville joined VanStory’s vote.

  Sheriff Jones prevailed, though. As the county sheriff, he arrested who he wanted. If the guy’s a murderer, he argued, why not get him off the streets before sunrise?

  After the arrest, the prosecutors could do what they wanted with the case. Sheriff Jones would have done his job by then.

  Watts got warrants from a magistrate and, at 1 A.M., he and Ottis Jones drove to Lombardy Drive, backed by a half dozen other deputies and SBI agents.

  “Somebody’s beating on our damn door,” Angela said, trying to rouse her husband. Tim awoke, irritated and undressed. He’d been sound asleep.

  “Who’s there?” he growled.

  “This is the police. We have a warrant for your arrest. Come on out. Open the door.”

  Tim ran back to his bedroom and put on an orange Nike T-shirt and Levi’s. When he opened the door, the cops had their guns drawn. Angela burst into tears.

  “Get my dad on the phone. Quick,” Tim told her. Angela dialed, then handed Tim the phone.

  “Mom, you better get Dad. They’re arresting me.”

  Chapter Five

  Bob Hennis shifted in his seat as the Piedmont jet took off. He shut his eyes and tried, as always, to sleep off another flight. What am I getting into now? he wondered.

  His oldest child and only living son was behind bars in Fayetteville, charged with murdering a young woman and two children. Bob had heard the tremor in Tim’s voice, a bad sign. Tim never showed his feelings.

  Seven hours earlier, the phone call had shattered another peaceful south Florida night at his and Marylou’s home, the culmination of all he’d worked for in 31 years with IBM. The house had four sets of French doors leading onto a series of decks and patios beside a swimming pool. The doors leading from their bedroom to a deck outside were open the night of May 15, allowing a gentle breeze inside. Marylou groped around and found the phone first.

  She was too groggy to make sense of what she was hearing.

  “Give me your Social Security number,” she muttered.

  “Mom, you have it,” Tim said. This was not the response Tim had expected. But Marylou woke just as Tim vanished from the phone line, replaced by Angela’s hysterical “They’re arresting him, they’re arresting him.”

  “It’s going to be all right,” Bob said from another extension. “They won’t hurt Tim. Is he calm?”

  To his surprise, the next voice he heard was Tim’s.

  “Dad, they’re all over the house. They’ve arrested me.” Then the voice stopped. Tim’s brief phone privilege had ended. Detective Jack Watts and Sheriff Ottis Jones herded him, hands cuffed behind, to an unmarked car parked in the driveway, leaving a sobbing Angela in the house. A newspaper photographer fired away from the yard. Watts led Hennis to the backseat and he ducked inside, not realizing how hard it is to get inside a car without using his hands.

  Hennis leaned his head back on the seat, determined to say nothing—no denials, no apologies, no pleas, no questions. He had answered their questions earlier that day. His next comment would be to a lawyer.

  But the cops peppered him anyway. “You want to talk to us now?” one asked. “Got anything to say? You want to confess?”

  Hennis bit his lip. He wanted them to shut up and leave him alone. “I hope you guys know what you’re doing,” he said.

  At the Law Enforcement Center, three television cameras, newspaper photographers, and several reporters all having gotten the same tip from the sheriff’s department, waited for Detective Bittle to pull into the parking lot.

  Hennis slid across the seat to get out. As soon as he stood up, a camera’s flash lit him up. Don’t they know it’s one in the morning? Hennis bowed his head and bent over until he almost fell forward, as if trying to curl his six-foot-four frame into a tiny ball that wouldn’t show up on film.

  “He gave the air of being, well, guilty,” said Fayetteville newspaper reporter Pat Reese, who had also watched Jeffrey MacDonald’s arrest. The footage of Hennis shrinking from the cameras would be played over and over on local television.

  Watts guided Hennis to his office, where he’d already spent six hours, and backed him up against a window.

  “We know your story was a lie,” a policeman said. “You got anything to say?”

  A furious Hennis couldn’t resist a snide remark. “Looks like I’m going to get to wear one of those little orange jumpsuits,” he said.

  The triple-murder suspect got to a phone in the booking room and called his parents collect.

  “Just a bunch of police and stupid reporters,” Tim said, his voice vibrating. Marylou assured him his father would be on the next plane.

  “I’ll be all right until he gets here, so don’t worry,” Tim said. “Don’t worry, Mom.”

  The phone line went dead.

  An indignant Bob Hennis set out to fix this. Police would not treat his son this way. He booked the first flight to Fayetteville and roused an IBM lawyer friend out of bed. Before the friend could call back with the name of a good Fayetteville lawyer, Bob was on his way to the airport.

  Why is this happening to my family?

  Bob and Marylou Hennis adopted all three of their children within three years, raising them in a wholesome northern Minnesota home on five acres. They lived next to city-owned ski slopes, horse pastures, and hunting grounds. Tim was two and a half years old when they adopted him in Illinois. His brother, Andy, three years younger, and his sister, Beth, four and a half years younger, were adopted within two more years. Then IBM transferred Bob to Rochester, Minnesota.

  The kids had everything growing up: a pool table and Ping-Pong table in the basement and a heated swimming pool in the backyard. Beth kept horses out back and occasionally snuck one into the house. On Sundays, the family attended an Episcopal church and sometimes visited their cousins in Minneapolis, 100 miles to the north.

  But the Hennis family was at its best on weekend camping trips. They started in one big tent and, as Bob moved up at IBM, graduated to a trailer with a color TV and hot water. But his family didn’t think that was real camping, so Bob sold the trailer and bought some more tents.

  “We became a team,” Beth says. “We all did things together.”

  Bob passed on his love of hunting and tracking to his sons. Ginger, the family English setter, tracked pheasants and Tim and Andy shot them, practicing their aim in a homemade gallery Bob built in the basement.

  Bob got on his hands and knees and showed his sons how to find their way in the deep woods. He pointed out animal tracks. He used the movement of the sun to chart where they were. The three of them would wade far off into the woods, and Bob would challenge them to find the campsite. He and Andy once laughed at sixteen-year-old Tim as he came barreling back to camp through the thicket and limbs, some ten feet off the path Bob had made.

  “Gee, Dad, I knew I was close, but I just couldn’t find it,” he said.

  Bob never knew Tim to stray too far from the path, but his quiet oldest son had his faults. He could not manage money, for one. Even with two jobs—a cook at a pizza joint and night manager at a hotel—he would bounce checks all over Rochester. Bob grew tired of bailing him out.

  His parents had few complaints otherwise. Bob quit spanking Tim early on because he took it so poorly. “He’d be in that turned-off mode, like you’d turned him off with a switch, until the first swat, and he’d cry like you killed him,” his dad says. “He was a sensitive boy. That’s why I learned to lay off.”

  Andy was one who needed the spankings. But his parents couldn’t stay mad at him. They adored Andy. He could charm his way out of anything. His parents still shake their head and smile about it. “The apple of our eye. Happy ol’ Andy, a happy-go-lucky kid,” Bob remembers.

  By 1982, Bob and Marylou had done their job. Tim was in the Army, Andy was engaged, and Beth was almost out of school. IBM transferred Bob from Atlanta to Boca Raton, where he’d retire and bounce grandchildren on his knees. He moved down
to Florida in June, with Marylou, Andy, and Beth packing up in Atlanta to join him. Andy couldn’t wait to move to Florida.

  Andy rode home on June 23 across the Georgia countryside on his motorcycle, one he’d promised to sell after his marriage. He exited off I-285, the loop around Atlanta. A red light stopped him. He was waiting behind a line of cars for the light to turn when a drunken driver hit him from behind. Andy was knocked into the next lane and a tractor-trailer killed him.

  Bob and Marylou grieved alone at home, pulling the shades on their active lives. Beth moved to Colorado with her boyfriend. Tim stayed in the Army, transferring from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Fort Bragg. His parents were unaware of how he dealt with his little brother’s death. The only sign Tim gave was punching a hole in a wall after Andy’s funeral.

  That Christmas, Tim visited his parents and brought Angela, whom he introduced as his wife. He said they’d driven south across the North Carolina state line and eloped in Dillon, a marriage mill in South Carolina.

  When Angela became pregnant a couple of years later, Tim asked his parents if they could use Andy’s name if they had a boy. Instead, Kristina Hennis was born on February 27, 1985. On Easter weekend in April, Bob and Marylou flew to Fayetteville for Kristina’s christening, meeting Angela’s parents for the first time. Tim swung Angela’s four younger sisters around until they were dizzy. He gave piggyback rides on his shoulder, the favorite daddy and uncle in the room.

  Tim had settled on what to make of himself, his parents thought. He’d be a father.

  A month later, Bob and Marylou nearly bought a 36-foot boat in Miami, evidence that at last they were ready to move past Andy’s death. The boat had termite damage and didn’t pass inspection, so the deal was off.

  The next night, Tim called with news of his arrest.

  On the plane to Fayetteville, Bob rallied and became IBM Bob again, the can-do exec who in his 31 years there had patented computer designs and become manager of IBM Automotive Systems, a part of IBM devoted to marrying General Motors to the computer. About 200 IBM workers called fifty-seven-year-old Bob Hennis their boss. He preached the full litany of IBM’s motivational speeches, harping on positive reinforcement as the way to get things done.