Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  “It was like a big ol’ shotgun blast in the middle of the courtroom,” Hennis said. “The jailers were shocked. Watts and Bittle were there that day, and they had guards all over the hallway. It was like a bomb out of the middle of nowhere, like ‘What do you mean you’ve retained H. Gerald Beaver?’”

  Hennis signed a “waiver of counsel,” which meant he forfeited his right to a court-appointed lawyer. Bond was denied. Then a deputy led Hennis away.

  Richardson walked past a court reporter who watched through a window. “Y’all sure are gluttons for punishment,” she said.

  The lawyers’ first order of business would be to talk to William VanStory IV, the prosecutor who’d been assigned to the case. They wanted to find out what they could about the case against their client.

  “Guys, you’re not getting full discovery,” VanStory told the two lawyers, referring to the information each side gathers on a case. The state is required to provide reports of expert witnesses and any evidence that could help the defendant. Typically, prosecutors in Cumberland County gave defense lawyers the statements of witnesses and anything else they have. The idea was for suspects to watch evidence pile up against them and plead guilty, the purpose of “open file” discovery.

  VanStory wasn’t ready to open up this time. He was not the top assistant district attorney in the 12th Judicial District, nor the one with the most experience, but he had been to 367 Summer Hill while the bodies were still there. He had shared the detectives’ disgust, anger, and desire to watch someone pay. He wanted the case and had lobbied hard to get it. When Tim Hennis had been taken to the Law Enforcement Center at 1 A.M. in handcuffs, VanStory was there. He hadn’t liked the soldier from the moment he shielded his face from the TV cameras when Watts brought him in.

  The Hennis case would be for him what the MacDonald case had been for an untested federal prosecutor named Jim Blackburn, who became U.S. Attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina within a year of Jeffrey MacDonald’s conviction. Blackburn’s name was enjoying its peak on nightstands and coffee tables around the world in Fatal Vision. Courthouse observers said VanStory lacked Richardson’s work ethic and Beaver’s ability to maneuver through legal strategy, but made up for it with presence. His six-foot-four frame launched a booming voice from behind a red beard, a voice that filled a room and commanded a jury’s attention. Juries are said to relate better to large men, and VanStory had the theatrical flair to take advantage of his imposing size.

  VanStory was ready for a big case. He was from a family with old money, prominent in Fayetteville’s social circles. A lot was expected of him. In the 1950s, his grandfather, William VanStory II, made a fortune selling the family farm to developers, who turned it into a fancy subdivision called VanStory Hills. William VanStory III owned one of the area’s largest insurance agencies. The youngest VanStory could prove himself as his namesakes had by getting this soldier convicted for killing a woman and two small girls.

  VanStory knew the job before him and was ready to play hard. He would turn over only what he had to under the law. Hennis would get no favors. Nor would his lawyers. This time, Jerry Beaver would not wriggle his client free on a technicality he developed through discovery material. VanStory would see to it.

  “I want inside the house,” Beaver told him. At the appropriate time, VanStory said.

  “Have you got prints?” Beaver asked.

  “You can count on it,” VanStory said.

  “Any evidence of sexual assault?”

  “You can count on it.”

  “Hair?”

  “Yeah, we believe so.”

  VanStory said there was blood all over the house.

  Beaver and Richardson walked across the compound to the Law Enforcement Center and rode up to the fourth floor jail.

  “We need to know now,” Beaver told Hennis. “They’re going to run their tests on the fingerprints. There was blood all over the house. If you were there, that blood’s bound to be on your shoes, or some trace is going to turn up somewhere. There’s sperm there that’s going to come back. You can’t hide sperm. It’s going to come out. Let’s go work something out before all this stuff comes back.”

  Hennis didn’t flinch. “Don’t worry about it. There ain’t nothing gonna come back with me on it, because I wasn’t in that house. I did not do it and I’m not pleading guilty to something I didn’t do.”

  Richardson realized he’d have to start cracking. When a client says that, the lawyer owes him his best, regardless of whether he believes him.

  Chapter Seven

  Before Richardson could interview his first witness, the detectives had already solved two of the missing links in their case. They had a motive and they had the black jacket, formidable evidence to go with the eyewitness and barrel fire. Jack Watts practically had the case ready for trial before Tim Hennis had spent his first weekend in jail.

  Both new leads came from citizens who read their May 16 newspaper with Tim Hennis’s arrest stripped across the front page. Thinking she would give Tim Hennis an alibi for May 9, Nancy Maeser visited the detectives’ office the next day.

  She introduced herself to Robert Bittle as the suspect’s former girlfriend. Bittle invited her to sit down.

  “He was at my house that night,” she told him, “and I don’t see any way he could do what he was charged with, because he loved children.”

  Bittle asked the thirty-six-year-old mother to dictate a written statement.

  “Tim dropped in unexpectedly,” she said. “I was upset because I had just washed my hair and had my robe on … After the television program Family Ties went off at 9 o’clock, he went out to his car and brought in some old-fashioned stick candy. That’s when he told me that he had CQ duty the next day and had to go let the dogs out. He left between nine and 9:30.”

  Bittle didn’t consider that an alibi at all. Hennis still had plenty of time to ride over to Kathryn Eastburn’s house, start a conversation about the dog, and rape and kill her.

  Bittle asked Nancy to tell him a little more about her and Tim Hennis, but she was reluctant. The last thing she wanted was for their friendship to be twisted and used against him. But this man’s a police officer, she thought. I can’t just not answer his questions.

  “How did you know Hennis?” Bittle asked.

  She told him that she and Hennis met four years earlier at the Dragon Club, a country and western dance club on Fort Bragg with a huge dance floor. From a balcony that circled the dance floor, Tim Hennis liked to stand and watch people. One day he asked her to dance.

  Nancy liked Tim, and they dated for a few months. Sometimes he would jokingly ask her to marry him. But she soon began to wonder if he was joking. Tim was always at her apartment.

  “I never asked him to move in, but I got the feeling he was starting to live there,” she recalled. “I’d come home from work and he was there. I don’t know if he really had a place, lived in a house or in the barracks, I don’t know. But at that point, I knew it wasn’t going to last.”

  They remained friends for a while—Tim even babysat Nancy’s fifteen-year-old daughter while she went out. But they eventually lost touch until one night Nancy ran into him at the Dragon Club. They talked briefly about his new wife and baby girl. He was tickled about his daughter, but complained about his marriage.

  After the Dragon Club closed, Nancy and some friends went to breakfast. When she got to her apartment at 3:30 A.M., Hennis was parked in front, asleep in his white Chevette.

  Nancy said she woke Tim up and asked him what he was doing there.

  “I just wanted to make sure she got home all right,” he said.

  “I’d invite you inside,” Nancy told him, “but my daughter’s having a slumber party and they’re all over the floor.”

  A few weeks later, Hennis visited Nancy again. They sat on her porch, drank beer, and talked about their marriages. Nancy’s husband had been in Germany since a week after they were married. Tim told her he thought his marr
iage was dull. They gave each other advice on how to make it work, talking into the wee hours. Tim brought up that Angela was out of town.

  “Did anything happen?” Bittle asked.

  “Well, he just asked if I wanted to go back to his house.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said, ‘Tim, that’s just what you and I need.’ It was just a passive pass.” She said Hennis left around 2 A.M.

  “What about the night of the murders?” Bittle asked.

  Nancy said she had showered early because she had to be at work by 5 A.M. the next day as early morning stocker at Winn-Dixie supermarket. Wearing a bathrobe, her hair bunched up in a towel, she was taking dinner out of the oven when Hennis knocked.

  They sat on the couch and watched TV while Nancy and her daughter ate dinner. Nancy reached over and tapped Tim’s wedding ring. “How are things going?,” she asked.

  “She left me again.”

  “Things are that bad?”

  “Yeah.”

  A few minutes later, after Family Ties went off, Hennis left, saying he had to go home and let the dogs out.

  “He never made a pass at me that night,” Nancy told Bittle.

  “No? Maybe he didn’t get what he wanted and went looking somewhere else.”

  Hennis had not mentioned dropping by an old girlfriend’s when he gave his statement the previous Wednesday afternoon. The detective wanted to know more about Hennis’s sexual habits. He fired off a series of personal questions about the kind of sex he liked. Did he like oral sex? Did he use sexual aids?

  An embarrassed Nancy said he was a “Southern gentleman” who, if anything, was shy and wouldn’t come on strong unless encouraged. He’d never hurt her. “He was a cuddler,” she said.

  “Do you know if he owned a black jacket?” Bittle asked.

  “I think he had one, but he didn’t wear it that night. Tim was warm-natured. He hardly ever wore a jacket.”

  Nancy got up to leave, satisfied she’d done the right thing. Bittle told Watts their defendant did own a black jacket, even though they hadn’t been able to find it during the search of Hennis’s house.

  The next day, Detective Watts found the jacket.

  Watts got a tip from a retired deputy and went to the home of Jean Verne, who ran Gene’s Dry Cleaners. He waited for her to get home.

  “Ma’am, I understand you have something to tell us about a black jacket belonging to Tim Hennis,” he said.

  In the news account of Hennis’s arrest, Jean Verne had read about the affidavit of Patrick Cone. Black jacket, Cone kept saying. The big dude had a black jacket.

  She’d stared at the photo on page one. I know that guy. She’d thought about it some more. Then she realized the jacket was at her dry cleaners. A black Members Only jacket, neatly pressed and hanging inside a plastic bag.

  Tim Hennis had brought it in Friday, May 10, the day after the murders. She’d remembered him coming in around mid-morning. Jean said she knew Hennis because he always brought in his and Angela’s dry-cleaning.

  “Sorry I haven’t picked this up sooner,” Hennis had told her, claiming the previous week’s clothes. “The baby’s been sick. I haven’t been able to get down here.”

  He handed her a wadded jacket with long hairs all over it. “I see you got a cat,” she told him.

  “No, it’s a dog.”

  Jean said he could pick it up in a few days and he left.

  “Did you see any bloodstains on it?” Watts asked.

  Jean Verne thought about it. All she had seen were dog hairs. She hadn’t noticed any blood.

  Chapter Eight

  As Fayetteville residents continued to embrace the prosecution of Tim Hennis, they scorned his lawyers. Billy Richardson ushered at church the Sunday following Hennis’s arrest and discovered his offering consisted mostly of cold glares. “How could you represent that murderer?” someone asked on the way out.

  The next day, he and Beaver began their case. They decided Beaver would look into Hennis’s past and handle the legal issues. Richardson would look into the crime itself, hoping to prove that someone other than Tim Hennis had committed it.

  Richardson first hired an investigator. Bob Nelligar had approached him after the cool reception at church that Sunday and said he needed a job. Retired from investigating criminal cases for the Army, Nelligar was still in his mid-forties and needed the work. The lawyers figured Nelligar’s greatest asset would be his past, since the Hennis case was bound to turn to Fort Bragg eventually. Nelligar knew the base and how the Army worked. He spoke military, and Richardson and Beaver didn’t. The lawyers weren’t sure how well he kept secrets and worried that civilians would find him abrasive. But they’d give it a shot.

  Nelligar’s first assignment was Julie Czerniak. The harassing phone calls and the link to MacDonald couldn’t have all been a coincidence, Richardson told him. Nelligar was instructed to find the young babysitter and see if she’d talk. But instead Nelligar found that Julie’s father, worried about the sudden publicity, had sent her to stay with her brother in another state until the case settled down. He knew his daughter had a way of getting into the middle of everything. He didn’t want that to happen this time.

  Julie had lived her whole life in Fayetteville, born at Womack Army Hospital six days after the MacDonald murders in 1970. She briefly shared the same building with Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who was being treated for a punctured lung he blamed on four intruders he said killed his family.

  Julie was raised in a loud family that fought frequently, sometimes in public. Her dad, a Vietnam vet, drank and took out his problems on his family. Julie, needing love and attention, tried to nurture and protect him, taking his side in fights with her mother.

  Julie grew up quickly. A neighbor recalled seeing her in third grade, smoking a cigarette in the back of a car. An elementary schoolteacher said Julie was vindictive and would lie her way out of trouble. The teacher remembered Julie sticking kids with pencils. “She was somebody who needed a lot of help, a lot of love, a lot of attention,” said Pat Dunning, a girlfriend’s mother. “She was doing these things to get attention and no one was paying any attention to her.”

  At Westover Junior High, Julie and her friends discovered drugs and sex, a wild time that reached its heyday with Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” in the spring and summer of 1985. Julie wore stockings, wacky earrings, and bracelets up to her elbows, Westover’s own Material Girl. “She was the perfect Madonna,” said Christy Dunning, who’d known her since second grade. “She was out for the thrills of life, anything she could get into.”

  Before working for the Eastburns, Julie was fired from at least two baby-sitting jobs for bringing boyfriends into the house. But not everyone was aware of her reputation. A neighbor had recommended her to the Eastburns, saying she’d been good with her children. Katie and Gary found Julie the same with their girls, who loved her like an older sister. Katie sometimes had Julie over for dinner because the girls were more likely to eat their food instead of play with it if Julie was there. The last night she baby-sat, she helped Kara and Erin draw stick figures on a Mother’s Day card Katie never saw.

  In February 1985, Julie was caught with marijuana in her purse at school and expelled to Ashley School, a special school for students with physical or emotional handicaps and discipline problems. Julie spent the last four months of the year at Ashley, a fact she hid from Katie Eastburn for fear she’d be fired. In those months, Julie’s circle of friends changed to louder and more boisterous teens. She’d tell them outlandish tales to get attention.

  “Julie was one to overdramatize everything,” Christy said. “With Julie, you learn to blow things off after a while.”

  A week after Hennis’s arrest, Julie returned to town with another story to tell. Her father had hoped the publicity of the case had faded enough for his daughter to stay out of it. Instead, she walked up to Angela Hennis’s door, introduced herself, and agreed to ride to Billy Richardson’s office, where s
he made some remarkable statements.

  No less than 20 harassing phone calls had interrupted her baby-sitting at the Eastburns in the prior three months. The caller usually hung up, “except once he asked how big my tits were,” Julie said. Mrs. Eastburn had warned her about these calls, telling her to just hang up.

  Julie said that her two stepbrothers resembled Hennis, a statement she supported with a wallet photo of one of them. She said she’d remembered seeing the Eastburns’ front door swinging open the morning after the murders. Her mother guessed Mrs. Eastburn had probably gone inside after getting Kara on the school bus. It was a ritual for Katie, Erin, and Jana to wait on the porch each morning until Kara boarded the bus across the street. But the door had been locked when police arrived on Mother’s Day. If Julie was right, someone had been in the house the day after the murders.

  Julie told them that the day after Mother’s Day, a blue van had followed her home from Womack Hospital, where she’d been visiting Jana. The driver had stopped and glared at her at a stoplight, she said, and had followed her into the Summer Hill subdivision, driving several loops around the neighborhood before finally leaving her alone.

  After an hour and a half, Julie left the lawyers’ office. But Richardson wasn’t through with her. The next day, he went to her house in Summer Hill to follow up on the interview. Beaver had already decided his younger and more easygoing partner might have a better chance of getting Julie to open up.

  Beaver was right. Julie and Billy Richardson hit it off from the start. Toward the end of another hour and a half interview, Julie told Richardson about Keith Smith, a prize narc for the City-County Bureau of Narcotics.

  In the weeks before the murders, Smith had been using Julie to set up drug busts.

  “I’m a professional informant,” Julie told Richardson. “Do you know how much money you can make off this?”