Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  Bob Hennis would get results. By the time he stepped off the plane, he believed he would have Tim back on the street by afternoon, preparing to fight Cumberland County with everything he had.

  Angela hugged him tight at the airport, wanting to believe, as even grown children do, that parents can make everything all right.

  “Last night was terrible,” she said. “They were everywhere.”

  She told Bob how, after Tim left in handcuffs, the cops had plundered 2026 Lombardy Drive with a search warrant and a team of officers, including SBI lab techs armed with Luminol. The idea was to find the bloody weapons used to slay the Eastburns, the stolen metal lockbox, or bloody towels and rags used for the cleanup.

  The dogs went into a barking frenzy. Angela tried to let them outside, but couldn’t go until an SBI agent went with her. Agents ransacked the young couple’s home, looking under mattresses and inside drawers. Angela had stopped crying. Now she was mad.

  They worked their way down the hallway. “My baby’s asleep in that room,” she said. “She won’t sleep through y’all going through there. Could you please save her room for last and tell me when you’re going in there and I’ll get her out?”

  Yeah, okay. The phone rang. It was Tim, trying to tell Angela he was all right. When she got off the phone, a half-dozen cops were standing around Kristina’s bed.

  They found no knives or bloody towels, but in Tim and Angela’s bedroom, there were two black toboggan caps. In a spare bedroom, they found a bundle of thin parachute cord, handy for rigging parachutes—or tying wrists.

  They didn’t find a dark-colored jacket, the piece of clothing Patrick Cone first described.

  Brenda Dew picked up every shoe Hennis had in his closet and tested them with phenolphthalein, a substance more precise than Luminol because it reacts only to blood. She tested the knives in his house. She tested a pair of tan corduroys from a dresser drawer.

  They seized the white Chevette, supervising as Angela took Kristina’s stroller out. “It’s the only one I’ve got,” she told them. At the county garage, Agent Dew went through the car with Luminol, spraying around the clutter of fast-food wrappers, drink cans, and faded newspapers.

  Nowhere did she find blood. Other agents checked for fingerprints and hair inside the car. The only hair they found belonged to Dixie. They looked for fibers that might have rubbed off the cotton stuffing on Kara’s bed. They found none.

  Bob took Angela to lunch and then to the law office of H. Gerald Beaver, IBM’s pick among Fayetteville lawyers. The reception room seemed a little cold. Bob tapped the hardwood floors in the renovated home until Beaver’s secretary directed them down the hall to Jerry Beaver’s office. Beaver, in his trademark suspenders, leaned on a high-backed leather chair.

  “If we take this case, it’ll be absolute hell with our families,” Beaver started, his dark eyes glaring from a round face with carefully trimmed mustache. “We’ll spend too much time on it and we’re gonna get obsessed ourselves with what we’re going to put in this thing, and I’m not so sure we want to do that to our families.”

  Bob had learned a bit about lawyers in his last few years with IBM, negotiating contracts before IBM started new business ventures. Beaver was blunt. Bob liked that. He listened to some more and decided he liked Beaver’s confidence. He can get things done, Bob thought. He wanted him for his son’s case.

  Beaver had met Tim that morning, after Marylou called from Boca Raton. Beaver saw Tim as a large man with kind eyes, a puppy dog face, a man who seemed genuinely bewildered. He also saw a man whom the sheriff’s department already had a good case against for triple murder.

  “What about bond?” Bob asked.

  “No chance of that now. The crime was too heinous. They’ve got an eyewitness who puts Tim at the murder scene, who’s picked Tim out of a photo lineup and identified his car.”

  That was the first Bob and Angela had heard of Patrick Cone. Beaver went on. “This state, they’ve got all the people here, all the people up in Raleigh, and got all these other people and got millions of dollars and they’re going to try their best to kill your son.”

  Bob and Angela were silent, trying to let that soak in. The battle wouldn’t be just to get Tim out of jail, but to save his life.

  “Can we see him?”

  Within an hour, Bob and Angela crammed into one of the visiting booths along the dingy white walls outside the entrance to the Cumberland County jail, along with the parents and wives of petty thieves and drug addicts. The walls dividing the booths made no pretense of blocking sound, but the glass separating the inmate and his visitors did a fairly good job. Bob and Angela would have to shout above the din of other shouters. Beaver told them not to say anything they wouldn’t want repeated in a courtroom.

  Tim Hennis lumbered in the room in the orange jumpsuit he’d correctly surmised he’d get to wear. His hands trembled, his face was ashen.

  “Tim, it’s serious,” Bob said. “We’re not gonna get a bond. There’s an eyewitness who says you were at the scene. He’s identified you and the car …”

  “Oh, geez.” Tim put his head in his hands. His father noticed he was shaking.

  Angela refused to break down in front of her husband. Everything would be all right, she told him. They’d do what they could.

  They stood up to leave, neither having asked the obvious question: Did he do it? They both believed he couldn’t have. They pressed their hands on the glass, Tim’s almost as big as his wife’s and father’s combined. He looked pitiful and lonely.

  “I love you,” they took turns saying. Bob Hennis had never heard his son say that before.

  Chapter Six

  The local prosecutors and Jerry Beaver went to college and law school in the same era and came to Cumberland County around the same time, where they stood on opposite sides on battle after battle in the courtroom. By the time Beaver considered whether to take the Hennis case, the rivalry with the district attorney’s office had evolved into contempt. In a case that would be career-making for either side, neither could stomach being on the losing end.

  Beaver was immediately reviled by the district attorney’s office. His hair was a little too long, his suits a little too flashy. He wore suspenders long before lawyers thought they had to wear them. His ties were too loud. The DA’s considered him a hot dog.

  Beaver railed against the smoky back-room approach to law, where defense lawyers stroke police officers and prosecutors, sacrificing constitutional points of law here and there but preserving goodwill for future clients. He didn’t care what the prosecutors thought about him, and his requests for favors sounded like commands to prosecutors. Beaver frequently had to go before a jury to get what he wanted.

  A plumber’s son growing up in the small town of Albemarle, North Carolina, Jerry had to grow up fast. While water skiing at age eleven, he watched his dad fall out of the boat. Jerry let go of the ski rope and tried to catch the boat, running in circles around the lake. The boat made one pass and Jerry grabbed its side in time to look over and see George Beaver dragging behind, tangled in the ski rope. Jerry slipped off the boat and it ran over him, ripping off his life jacket and gouging his back.

  Jerry caught the boat on the next pass and pulled his father to him, his head bleeding where the propeller had struck him. Jerry got him to an ambulance and on to the hospital. But when Jerry walked out of his hospital room, his sister told him their father was dead.

  “Everyone came up and told me I was the man in the family, and I tried to be,” Beaver recalls. “I tried to be grown-up entirely too quick and caused myself a lot of problems.”

  The youngest by far of three children, Beaver dealt with his mother’s bouts of depression alone. He lived in fear of returning home five minutes later than he should and setting off an hysterical episode. He hardened and developed an independent streak that for years has been construed as arrogance.

  Beaver helped pay his way through law school playing guitar in bar bands, then too
k a job at the public defender’s office in Fayetteville. Three months after he started, a new public defender was hired and three assistants quit. At age twenty-six, Beaver rocketed to top assistant in the office.

  Beaver left after two years and bounced around as minor partner in a couple of law firms, not doing the law he really wanted to practice. In 1979, with a wife and baby girl to support, he opened his own office on a one-way street leading away from Fort Bragg, far from the legal center of the county.

  No case was too small. He drove 30 miles to close Farmer’s Home Administration loans. He returned every call, no matter how late. He found that clients didn’t mind going to a law office nowhere near Fayetteville’s downtown. He started getting referrals, and the load grew heavier and Beaver needed partners. Tom Holt joined first and took over much of the office work. Billy Richardson, a twenty-seven-year-old prosecutor looking for a way out of the district attorney’s office, came on in 1982.

  Though he was six-foot-one, Richardson had the look of someone who stopped aging at fourteen. People warmed to him immediately, suppressing an urge to ruffle his blond hair like an overgrown kid. He was painfully earnest. Far from the glib, cerebral Beaver, Richardson relied on instinct and whether something set well in his gut. “Cub Scout eagerness and Eagle Scout skill,” a reporter covering the Hennis case wrote.

  Few would guess he suffered through a painful childhood. By day, his parents taught him the soundest of values; his mother was a social worker and his father vice president of a bank. By night they were alcoholics, verbally abusive to their son.

  As Billy grew older, his parents’ drinking got worse, making him bitter and angry. His self-confidence further shattered when, as a junior in high school, he had to admit he had a reading problem. Like most students—and teachers—at Terry Sanford High, he’d never heard of dyslexia. But he found an English teacher who had. Betty Herring taught Billy to take his finger and move across the page, left to right, line by line, until he overcame his reading problem.

  Billy and a group of friends set out to change the world. He joined the Fayetteville-Cumberland County Youth Council. Instead of drinking and smoking dope, Billy helped the Youth Council win a national recycling award and lead voter registration drives. He was elected senior class president.

  During his freshman year at UNC, he walked around campus witnessing for Jesus Christ. In his senior year at Carolina he was elected student body president. He married high school sweetheart Barbara Boughman during law school.

  Richardson wanted trial experience, so after law school he took a job with the Cumberland County district attorney’s office, often a training ground for young lawyers. He made an ungainly impression—teenage looks and a slow drawl. One of the top assistants told District Attorney Ed Grannis that Richardson wouldn’t ever be able to plead in front of a jury.

  Beaver noticed when the young prosecutor started winning cases no one thought he could. Richardson won by outworking the other side, practicing on foot, in people’s living rooms and garages. Beaver spent too much time practicing law from behind his desk, as most prominent lawyers do. “Show dogs and workhorses,” Beaver commented. His firm needed more of the latter. Richardson was made partner.

  They took over the criminal end of the practice and immediately started aggravating the district attorney’s office. They had a case dismissed because the prosecutors took too long to call it to trial. When the DA’s office retaliated by calling 12 of their drug trials in two weeks, they won eight. Beaver helped an out-of-town lawyer sue Grannis, interrupting a backyard barbecue at the district attorney’s house to serve the suit.

  In the months leading up to the Eastburn murders, Beaver and Richardson alienated local law enforcement further. They represented a drug dealer named Henry Zebulon Spell who had been kneed in the groin by a Fayetteville policeman, rendering him sterile. The lawyers argued that the incident was part of a long series of police beatings, and the publicity embarrassed law enforcement all over the county. During his final argument, Beaver balanced a ripe grape on the jury rail and smashed it with his fist, graphically illustrating his client’s injury. The jury awarded $900,000, an amount that would come directly from tax dollars. The taxpayers were outraged—not so much by the brutality, but by the cost.

  The firm’s partners were aware the Hennis case would only add to the firm’s controversial and mostly unpopular image. They gathered the day after Hennis’s arrest to debate whether to take the case.

  “It’s an all or nothing case,” Beaver said. “There will be no life imprisonment in this case. If he’s convicted, he’ll get the death penalty. We might as well accept there’s a good chance we would watch the man be executed.” To win the case, Beaver said, the defense would have to prove Hennis was at least as likely to be not guilty as guilty. In a murder this heinous, the “reasonable doubt” standard wouldn’t be enough. The community would want someone convicted.

  None of the partners thought Hennis was innocent. Tom Holt had talked to his wife, who had serious reservations about her husband’s firm representing a baby killer. She wasn’t alone. “We’re already controversial enough,” Holt said. “The last thing we need is controversy.”

  “We’re lawyers,” Richardson said. “We’re not supposed to be concerned about what the public says. We’re supposed to do what’s right.”

  “I don’t know why we’re having this conversation,” one of the partners said, “because you and Billy are going to do whatever you want anyway.”

  That night, the lawyers met again with Bob and Angela Hennis. They had more bad news. A neighbor had called the sheriff’s department to report Tim’s unusual activity the day before the bodies were found. The neighbor had seen Tim drag a 55-gallon barrel from the corner of his lot, across his treeless backyard, to a spot next to the house. By 9:30 A.M., smoke poured from the barrel. Minutes later, flames shot high into the air, lapping the eaves of the house. Hennis stood over it, pouring in lighter fluid to encourage the fire. He stirred it with a stick, then again later that morning. Late in the afternoon, Hennis started the fire again.

  “He was out doing the same thing,” said another neighbor who watched him all afternoon. “A stirrin’ with a stick and squirting lighter fluid in a barrel.”

  Beaver told Bob and Angela the state would argue the barrel fire explained why no bloody clothes, towels, or rags were found inside Hennis’s home. The lawyers knew lab experts had success matching burn remains to known documents. Something in that barrel would likely convict their client.

  “So what do I do with that barrel?” Bob asked.

  “Don’t you touch it,” Beaver said. “Just leave it be.”

  Richardson took Angela into his office, leaving Bob to chat with Beaver in his.

  “No one can believe anyone they know could commit these crimes,” Beaver said, preparing Bob for what had the look of an unavoidable reality.

  “I want you to find out who did it, no matter who did it,” Bob said. “Or I want you to find out he absolutely didn’t do it. I want only one thing—the truth.”

  “Even if Tim did it?”

  “Even if he did it.”

  Beaver was taken aback. He didn’t expect that from the defendant’s father.

  “Only one thing more. If we find out he’s guilty, will you still want to support him? We don’t want the death penalty.”

  “That’s fine,” Bob said. “But you won’t find that. He’s not guilty.”

  “The fee would be $100,000. Can you handle that?”

  Bob stared down at his shoes. He’d saved $23,000 for a boat downpayment, but he’d have to raise much more. He knew he’d have to sell his dream house in Boca Raton.

  “We’ll have to make a few arrangements,” Bob finally said.

  The next morning, Beaver was working with Public Defender Mary Anne Tally in her office and wasn’t ready for Tim Hennis’s first court appearance. “Get up there and stand with him,” he ordered Richardson.

  Billy Richard
son had talked to Hennis and didn’t like him. Though Hennis was just two years younger than the twenty-nine-year-old lawyer, Richardson found little common ground with him. He thought his client was cold, aloof, and guilty.

  He’d wanted the trial because he thought it would be good experience, something every trial lawyer should do. But neither this crime nor this defendant enthused him. He knew when he walked into the courtroom, he would be forever linked to Timothy Hennis, suspected child killer.

  The “first appearance” is a hearing within 96 hours of arrest when a defendant is formally informed of the charges against him and asked about his plans for representation. A long one lasts two minutes.

  As bailiffs led a handcuffed Hennis down a back corridor to the courtroom, a Fayetteville Observer photographer caught him standing erect and defiant. His eyes were at their sleepiest, his chin up, as if trying to appear nonchalant. “His irritated look,” Bob Hennis called it. For the next year editors would crop that picture down to Hennis’s face and use it in stories updating the case.

  Courthouse clerks and lawyers pressed their noses to courtroom windows, trying to get a glimpse of what a child killer looked like.

  “Mr. Hennis, you’re charged with three counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree rape,” Judge Lacy S. Hair said. “Do you understand the charges against you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The defendant stood ramrod straight.

  “Are you aware that, if found guilty, you could get the death penalty?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you intend to hire your own lawyer or would you like the court to appoint you one?”

  Richardson stepped forward. “Mr. Hennis’s father has retained Mr. Beaver and me.”

  No one thought a buck sergeant living in Lafayette Village, a series of look-alike brick boxes, would have his own lawyer. The expectation was that the man who paid $310 rent and had trouble keeping his checkbook balanced would rely on an already overworked public defender’s office.