Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  In January 1985, when Angela was eight months pregnant, the heating system broke at their apartment. The landlord wouldn’t fix it. On one particularly cold day, Hennis could take it no more. He went out and found a three-bedroom home to rent on Lombardy Drive and moved in that day.

  A month later, Kristina Marie Hennis was born.

  “I guess you’ve missed her, haven’t you?” Beaver asked Hennis in the jail’s visiting room.

  “That’s why you’ve got to get me out of here,” he pleaded.

  “Well, we’ve got to be able to explain that barrel first.” Beaver was adamant. “You’ve got to tell me every detail of that weekend.”

  Hennis remembered that Angela had found out her dad would be nearby in Selma on business on May 9 and devised a plan to get a ride home for the weekend because Tim had CQ duty. She asked Tim to take her and the baby to Selma so she could ride with her father to Jacksonville.

  “Mama, I don’t want to spend my first Mother’s Day alone,” she told Judy Koonce.

  Hennis had worked all that morning with Spec. 4 Joseph Pinto, reviewing him on his job qualifications. Pinto remembered them breaking as usual for lunch at 11:30. On the way home from lunch, Hennis stopped at Suzanne Barlow Realty to pay the rent.

  Once he got home, Angela told him she wanted the back bedroom cleaned. She was tired of him using it as a junk room. When they had moved in three months earlier, Tim had thrown his old Army manuals, shoeshine rags, and military paraphernalia in that room, and the mess had continued to pile up.

  “I want that stuff out of here by the time I get back,” Angela said. At the end of the lunch hour, she took Tim back to work so she could use the car to run errands. At home, Angela packed for the weekend and got Tim a change of clothes because he didn’t want to wear his uniform on the drive to Selma. She packed an orange Nike T-shirt, blue Levi’s, and deck shoes. He’d asked for his black jacket, but Angela left it at the bottom of the clothes hamper, where she’d found it covered with dog hairs and baby spit-up.

  Angela finished her errands early and showed up at the 600th Quartermaster about 3:30, an hour before Tim got off work. She introduced the baby to some of Tim’s co-workers.

  “Does anybody want stick candy from that place in Dunn?” Tim asked before he left. The route to Selma would take him past a PS&L store that sold cheap stick candy. A couple of soldiers took Hennis up on his offer, remembering another time he’d brought the unit some candy.

  Lloyd Koonce barely beat Tim and Angela to the Selma home of Glenn and Judy Wiggs, Kristina’s godparents and longtime family friends of the Koonces. Lloyd had worked all day and was ready to go home. Almost as soon as Tim and Angela pulled into the driveway, Angela climbed in the front seat of Lloyd’s U-Haul truck and wedged Kristina’s car seat in the middle. She and her dad took off for Jacksonville, stopping in Goldsboro for cashew chicken at the Oriental Jade restaurant.

  Tim stayed behind and gave stick candy to the Wiggs children. He left them watching Wheel of Fortune on TV and stopped at a Burger King in Fayetteville for supper. On the way home, he visited Nancy Maeser’s apartment and gave her daughter some stick candy.

  Hennis told Beaver that Nancy had asked him about his marriage, and he’d tried to get her to drop the subject.

  “There’s a lot of things I don’t discuss with people, and a lot of times family is one of them,” he said. “If I think it’s none of their business, I’ll make a comment to get them off the subject, rather than be totally rude and say, ‘Hey, that’s none of your business.’”

  When Hennis got home from Nancy’s, the phone was ringing.

  “Hi. This is the lady you got the dog from. How is Dixie doing?”

  “Dixie’s fine,” Tim told Katie Eastburn. “It’s working out well.”

  “Okay, good,” she said. “If there’s any problems, you still have my number.”

  Hennis hung up, convinced he’d heard from the lady with the dog for the last time.

  At 9:05, he called Angela. She wasn’t home yet from Selma. He left a message with her sister, Amanda.

  Only Tim Hennis can account for what he did the rest of the night.

  He said he went to Kroger to buy a two-liter bottle of soda. When he got home, he got started on the chores Angela had given him. He fished the jacket out of the hamper and set it aside to be taken to the dry cleaners. He sorted through some of his military junk in the back bedroom and went to bed.

  At 5:30 the next morning, he and Pinto were complaining about how much they hated battalion runs.

  That night, CQ duty was a drag as usual. Gluing shingles on the dollhouse proved to be a bigger pain than Hennis bargained for. Guthrie’s losing his keys at least gave him some company.

  Toward the end of his shift, Hennis took a two-hour nap. When he got home Saturday morning, he dragged a trash barrel from the corner of his yard to within a few feet of the house. He threw in old Army manuals and rags from the back bedroom, poured in some lighter fluid, and lit a match.

  “Why didn’t you just let the city pick it up with the other garbage?” Beaver asked. Hennis said he didn’t want that stuff piled up on his front curb.

  Hennis spent the rest of the day trying to repair his ailing Chevette. It had left him stranded at lunch until some bystanders helped him push the car downhill to jump start it. He then headed straight to Lauder Koonce’s house. Angela’s grandfather knew cars.

  “Looks like your battery’s gone bad,” Grandpa Koonce said. He hooked up the Chevette to a battery charger.

  Aunt Jean came by and asked her father for help loading furniture in her camper truck for a move to South Carolina. Tim was ready to go home and sack out, but he knew a man Grandpa Koonce’s age didn’t need to be moving furniture. So he volunteered to help, leaving his car running in the driveway while he spent two hours loading furniture.

  When he got home, he stoked the fire again, pouring in more lighter fluid. By now it was late afternoon and Hennis settled in for an evening alone. He had CQ duty in the morning. The battery charger spent the night on the Chevette, trying to pump some life in the four-year-old car.

  Nevertheless, by Mother’s Day morning, the Chevette was dead. Richard Forgash, a friend from the 600th, gave Hennis a ride to work.

  Hennis showed up an hour late for CQ duty, then called his mother collect for Mother’s Day. Then he called Angela, who reminded him that he should’ve called her first.

  During his dinner break on CQ duty, Hennis got a ride back home to check on his car. To his amazement, it cranked right up. But by Monday morning, after his 24-hour shift ended, the car had died again. Forgash towed it home, and Hennis called Grandpa Koonce.

  The problem, they decided, was the starter. Hennis, Forgash, and Angela’s grandfather rode around to auto parts stores looking for a starter. They found one at Advance Auto, but it was the wrong model. So they kept looking. Angela was expecting him in Jacksonville. Hennis cursed himself for putting on the wrong starter. He looked at his watch and knew he’d never make it to Jacksonville on time.

  It was late afternoon by the time Hennis found a starter that would work. He drove as fast as he could, frustrated about having to stop at every little one-stoplight town along the way. He picked up his wife and baby and got back home around 11:30, heading straight to bed.

  Two nights later, he was arrested.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hennis’s version of events checked out well enough, but the lawyers knew none of it mattered if the lab reports linked him to the house. Beaver and Richardson had dreaded this part of the case from the beginning. VanStory was so sure something would match, and, privately, Beaver suspected the prosecutor was right.

  The first report, an analysis of the semen, arrived late in the summer. Richardson cringed as Beaver tore inside the envelope, both as nervous as law school graduates finding out if they passed the bar.

  “What does it say, Jerry?”

  Beaver stared at the page a little longer. “I’m not sure,�
�� he said, “but it looks like they’re saying the semen wasn’t Tim’s.”

  The SBI had determined the semen had blood type A, the same blood type as Kathryn Eastburn. Hennis had type O blood. Beaver called the SBI lab to ask if the test ruled out his client, but was told the outcome was “inconclusive.” Type O blood could’ve been “masked” by the victim’s type A, giving the sample the same blood type as the victim. The lab was awaiting test results from the FBI lab in Washington that would determine a blood “sub-type,” the most precise analysis of blood at the time.

  Hennis did not buy “masking.” He’d been in jail 61 days, about 60 more than he had expected to be. If it wasn’t his blood, he said, he wanted out of the Cumberland County jail.

  Beaver reluctantly arranged a bond hearing for his client, knowing triple-murder suspects aren’t easily released. Bob, Marylou, and Beth rounded up a stack of letters supporting Tim and flew up from Florida. Angela’s family drove in from Jacksonville. They were excited about their chances. If they couldn’t get the charges dropped, at least they could get Tim out on bond. On the witness stand, Bob gave a brief family history, crying when he talked about Andy. VanStory asked him about Tim getting booted out of flight school for “personal finances and integrity,” and Bob admitted he didn’t know much about it. But he said he could vouch for his son’s court appearance.

  “He knows I would be the first one to make sure he is here,” Bob told the judge.

  Beaver then argued the lab test. “From our point of view, at worst it shows he did not have sexual relations with her, and at best it shows someone did and it was not him,” he said.

  “I guess Beaver is now an expert serologist,” VanStory said, “but those who are paid in the field say that he has not been eliminated as a possible donor of the semen.” He reminded the judge about Hennis’s raging fire in his backyard.

  Judge D. B. Herring, whose wife had once helped Billy Richardson overcome dyslexia as a high school teacher, denied bond. Beaver and Richardson knew that was coming, but the family had to find out. The hearing did nothing more than show the Hennises what little sympathy they could expect in the courtroom. Bob and Marylou returned to Boca Raton, realizing there’d be many more trips back to North Carolina. Beaver and Richardson went back to their office and back to the case.

  The fingerprint tests were next. Beaver read the results aloud. There was nothing confusing this time. Not only did no prints belong to Tim Hennis, but four fingerprints and one palm print from inside the Eastburn house hadn’t been matched to anybody. Within seconds, the lawyers were giddy.

  The unidentified fingerprints were found:

  •On the center front edge of the clothes dryer in the utility room.

  •Just above the deadbolt lock on the front door in the living room.

  •Above the door leading into the master bedroom, about seven feet from the floor.

  •On the top dresser drawer in the master bedroom, where Katie had kept a $274 check that had been stolen.

  The palm print was found on the door frame leading from the hallway into the family room, about seven feet from the floor. Investigators had discovered a bloody smudge next to it.

  The crime-scene techs had gone to arduous lengths to find stray hairs in the house, vacuuming all the rooms and collecting the drains from the washing machine and sink and the lint trap from the dryer. Troy Hamlin compared about 200 hairs to Hennis, Captain Eastburn, and the victims. His report was next.

  None of the hairs belonged to Hennis. Hamlin was unable to identify four. They were found:

  •On the body bag sheet wrapped around Erin.

  •On the top sheet in the master bedroom.

  •On the carpet in the master bedroom.

  •Inside a Cheer detergent box. This hair was gray and considered irrelevant.

  The black jacket was taken from its dry-cleaner’s bag and tested for blood. The SBI found none.

  Beaver looked at photos of the Luminol footprints leading to the back bedroom. A trail of 11 evenly paced left shoeprints led from the carport door to the utility room, through the dining room and into the back hallway before stopping at the edge of Kathryn Eastburn’s bedroom. But no shoeprints led from the bedroom. How had someone made footprints going in only one direction?

  A 6-inch ruler had been placed beside the footprints for reference. Beaver could extrapolate well enough to see the prints were about 9½ inches long. His client’s foot measured 11½ inches. Beaver considered hiring a footprint expert to testify the prints weren’t made by Tim Hennis, but decided not to. “Anybody could tell that,” he said. “Why insult the jurors’ intelligence?”

  The FBI determined a blood sub-type called “PGM,” or phosphoglucomutase, from the semen. In 1985, that test was the best the FBI could do in identifying bodily fluids. DNA testing, which matches semen samples to a suspect’s genes, was years away from being known as the best identification test used in criminal court.

  The PGM results again pointed away from Hennis. The semen sample had a PGM of “plus one,” the same as Kathryn Eastburn. Tim Hennis had a PGM of “one minus, two minus,” a rare PGM carried by just 3 people in every 200. The autopsy report on Kathryn Eastburn had noted “the pubic hair is somewhat matted and there is abundant whitish creamy fluid present in the vaginal opening.” The defense believed this fluid was semen and that, had it been Hennis’s, surely his rare PGM type would have been found.

  “They can’t argue masking this time,” Beaver said.

  Even the barrel helped the defense. The SBI’s Durwood Matheny had analyzed four Mason jars full of ashes scraped from inside the barrel and came up with 14 pages of charred remains, the largest the size of a 50-cent piece. He compared them with replicas of 105 documents Gary Eastburn could remember being in the lockbox—papers such as birth certificates, his and Katie’s will, and the children’s passports. Some of the documents were several pages, giving Matheny several hundred pages to compare.

  Matheny got two lab techs to check behind him. His report said that a comparison of known documents to the ashes met “with negative results.”

  But the charred fabric inside the barrel gave Beaver reason to worry again. The SBI’s John Bendure had found burned terry cloth, simple woven fabric, and melted plastic, items Beaver knew VanStory would link to towels and pillow cases Eastburn had discovered missing, and 24-hour bank cards. But more discouraging was a dime-sized piece of burned corduroy that Bendure compared with ribbed bloody impressions on the master bedroom sheet. In his report, Bendure said he couldn’t eliminate the corduroy as the source of those impressions.

  Beaver called the SBI lab for an explanation. “It’s a weak identification based on a failure to eliminate rather than inclusion of the substance,” Bendure said.

  Everyone who had seen Hennis on May 9 had said he was wearing jeans. If VanStory was going to claim that the corduroy linked Hennis to the murders, he would have to argue that Hennis changed clothes before going to Kathryn Eastburn’s house. Also, Angela told Beaver the police had found her husband’s only pair of corduroys folded in a bedroom drawer.

  Beaver was satisfied. Among items not found in the barrel were snaps, zippers, metal lockboxes, or knives. Beaver convinced himself the corduroy patch wouldn’t matter—until a reporter asked him to comment on the “positive” link from the barrel to the Eastburn house.

  Beaver granted his only pretrial interview.

  “Out of in excess of 150 items submitted, the fact that only one item might be consistent with something found in that house or ‘another piece of material with the same fabric structure’ is of little, if any, relevance,” he said. It was “beyond human comprehension” that Hennis could be suspected of burning the stolen Eastburn material when Matheny could find no ashes to match the documents. “It’s obvious the things that were burned in the trash barrel were just that, trash, and clearly were not items taken from the Eastburn residence.”

  The physical evidence, which the defense at one time had
feared more than any other part of the case, had been reduced to a dime-sized piece of corduroy. Beaver figured he could even explain that away. He’d hired the perfect forensic expert, the hero of the Jeffrey MacDonald case.

  Chapter Fourteen

  After losing his battle to get inside the Eastburn house, Beaver made a show of renting 367 Summer Hill for three weeks for $297, the first time he’d ever had to buy a crime scene. But the lawyer still held out hope that something had been overlooked, so he hired Paul Stombaugh to find it. He wanted Stombaugh to spend some time at the house, examine the physical evidence, and figure out what might have happened on the night of the murders.

  Beaver didn’t like the idea of relying on expert witnesses, often saying they weren’t “worth the gunpowder it’d take to blow them up.” But for a MacDonald copycat murder, he thought hiring Stombaugh was clever.

  “What better way to prove Hennis innocent than to hire Paul Stombaugh to show no physical evidence?” Beaver said. “How could the state attack Stombaugh?”

  Fifty-eight-year-old Paul Stombaugh had a reputation lawyers coveted. Stombaugh had testified before the Warren Commission on Kennedy’s assassination and worked on Martin Luther King’s murder. After 25 years with the FBI, the last 16 at the crime lab in Washington, D.C., he left in 1976 as head of the chemistry division, having testified in 48 states on hair, fiber, bloodstain, and fabric analysis.

  Stombaugh moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where he worked for the local police department. In a few years, he could quietly retire as one of the nation’s most famous forensic chemists. The last thing he needed was a call from a Fayetteville lawyer asking him to submerge himself after-hours and on weekends on another “MacDonald” case.

  “I’ll go out and look around,” Stombaugh finally told Beaver, “but whatever I find, I’m gonna give to both sides. If it’s going to hurt your boy, fine. All I want to know is the truth on it.”