Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  “I’m a hunter, and a lot of times I equate things to hunting,” he told the jury. “And the way I envisioned this, as I was thinking about it yesterday, was that you, the jury, went on a hunting trip, hunting for a killer.”

  Beaver objected, but VanStory went on. He reminded the jury that the trial was about a mother and her three children.

  “I want you to think about the homecoming she had planned when Gary got back from school down South. I want you to think about how they anxiously awaited and looked forward to and planned that trip to England together. But now she’s gone, gone forever, cut and slashed into eternity by that man sitting over there with his two lawyers, after being tied up and raped by that man sitting over there with his two lawyers.”

  No more dyeing of Easter eggs for Kara and Erin, he said. No more gatherings at the Christmas tree. No welcome-home hug for Gary Eastburn. No teenage slumber parties for Kara and Erin. No first kiss. No prom. All dead because of Tim Hennis’s lust.

  “I submit to you, you shouldn’t shed a tear for the defendant, because he’s not worth the salt contained therein.”

  VanStory held up one more awful picture. “Folks, just think about how Timothy Hennis, he and he alone, transformed things of beauty, things of beauty—a young mother, two young children—into things so wretched, so vile, and so ugly that some of you had to turn your heads when it was first presented to you here on the slide screen across the room. That’s what you’re dealing with.”

  VanStory glared at Hennis, who glared back. “He’s responsible for his acts and he’s responsible for his punishment. Come back in this courtroom and say, ‘Timothy Hennis, if a man like you has a soul, God have mercy on it.’”

  VanStory pointed at Hennis one last time and sat down.

  Beaver and Richardson tried to argue that a jury that couldn’t make up its mind in 12½ hours over three days must have some doubt. But Judge Johnson wouldn’t allow it. Instead, the lawyers relied on sermons, old sayings, and anecdotes in begging for Hennis’s life.

  “Do not become the thing you hate,” Richardson argued.

  After deliberating for three hours, the jury returned three death verdicts. Judge Johnson dismissed the jurors and prepared to read the sentence he was bound by law to give.

  “Would you like to say anything on behalf of Mr. Hennis at this time?”

  “Not at this time. No, sir,” Beaver said.

  “Mr. Hennis, would you like to say anything in respect to judgment in this case? I am bound by the court’s—the jury’s recommendations, but if you would like to say anything, I’d be glad to hear from you.”

  Several wild thoughts shot into Hennis’s head. What would they do if I jumped up on this table and shouted to the rooftops? He wanted to lash out, using words he learned in the Army, at VanStory until the bailiffs heard enough and dragged him away.

  He settled on a less provocative thought. “The only thing I can say, Your Honor, is that I am not guilty, as I have always been.”

  The judge started with a life sentence for the rape. Then he read the first murder sentence. “It is therefore ordered and adjudged that the same Timothy Baily Hennis be and is hereby sentenced to death. And the Sheriff of Cumberland County, North Carolina, in whose custody the said defendant now is, shall forthwith deliver said prisoner Timothy Baily Hennis to the warden of the state’s penitentiary at Raleigh, North Carolina, who the said warden on the twelfth day of September 1986, shall cause said prisoner, Timothy Baily Hennis, to be put to death as by law provided. May God have mercy on his soul.”

  Nothing had prepared Hennis for hearing the judge read aloud the day he would die.

  “Make no doubts about it, it is not an easy thing to take,” he said. “I had a sinking feeling in my heart and chest. It dropped to my stomach and dropped south from there. It’s like, ‘He’s not saying that, is he? They’re not going to take me out of here and do everything they can to kill me?’”

  On the way out of the courtroom, Hennis waved to his wife. Richardson had to explain to a devastated Marylou Hennis that automatic appeals would push the execution date back many years. She’d assumed her son would be executed in two months.

  Minutes later, the family met briefly with Tim before the deputies took him away for good. “Keep your chin up,” Tim kept telling them. “It’s going to be all right.”

  On his way to a prison van, his hands and legs shackled and a chain around his waist, Hennis smiled once more at his family, moments before he would take one of seven possible routes to Central Prison. For security reasons, the authorities kept the actual route a secret.

  Outside the courthouse, Gary Eastburn told reporters he hated Tim Hennis. “It’s like he stole the king’s prize jewels, irreplaceable objects,” he said. “Maybe it’s un-Christian. I can never forgive him.”

  Beaver and Richardson had to face the same reporters. They walked toward them outside the courthouse, defeated and beaten down by the most devastating loss either would suffer in a courtroom. Beaver slung his jacket over his shoulder and bunched his face into a snarl.

  “Three consecutive death sentences and a life sentence,” he muttered to Richardson. “Thank God that man had a lawyer.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  From his cell on Death Row, Tim Hennis could look out a window the width of his fist and see a guard tower. Inside, the guard overlooked a 15-foot chain-link fence, strands of razor wire curled along the top. Beyond the fence was a railroad bridge over Western Boulevard, a four-lane divided street that ran past the entrance of Raleigh’s Central Prison. On some days, prisoners convicted of lesser crimes would mow the grass on that overpass. Death Row prisoners were not allowed to mow grass.

  If that was me, Tim Hennis thought, I’d run for that neighborhood on the other side and disappear.

  When he was expecting Angela or his parents to visit, Hennis would watch Western Boulevard until their car pulled off the right-hand lane into the driveway to Central Prison, the home since 1884 of North Carolina’s worst criminals. He would run outside into the cell block, a common area for the 16 doomed prisoners in his group, and stand at a bigger window, about shoulder width. From there, he’d watch them park in the visitors’ parking lot and walk to a gate, where they’d sign in.

  On September 19, 1986, almost 10 weeks after Hennis joined Death Row, visitors were not allowed. It was time for an execution. John Rook’s number was up, his punishment for abducting a twenty-five-year-old nurse as she walked home, beating her with a tire iron, raping her, cutting her with a fishing knife, and running over her in his car. The nurse had bled to death less than a mile from the execution chamber.

  The day was unusually tense for Hennis and the other prisoners. The card games fizzled out for lack of interest, and no one argued about what to watch on TV. It was agreed that they would watch news updates on attempts to save Rook. After 11 o’clock lockup, each prisoner sat quietly alone in his cell.

  In the basement, Rook ordered 12 hot dogs for his last meal and ate three of them with mustard, relish, catsup, coleslaw, and chili. Then he was wheeled in the execution chamber on a gurney until he was against a curtain. Behind it, three executioners stood ready with loaded needles. Rook scanned the room. On the other side of the window were the prosecutors and detectives who put him there. Rook’s lawyers watched from the row behind.

  “Freedom, freedom at last, man,” Rook said. “It’s been a good one.”

  At 2 A.M., the warden said it was time. The first injection put Rook to sleep; the second stopped his heart. The prosecutor complained it was too easy, like putting a dog to sleep.

  Two floors above, Hennis’s cell block was quiet. The 16 prisoners sat wide awake contemplating Rook’s fate, and their own. Hennis looked outside as 200 people demonstrated across Western Boulevard, three-fourths of them protesting the death penalty. The other 50 worried him. They cheered and sang. “Na na na na, hey, hey-ey, goodbye.”

  Hennis looked out his window. A black hearse pulled off West
ern Boulevard and turned into Central Prison. The driver headed for the basement.

  Death Row was a glum place.

  The cell was 7 feet across and 12½ feet deep. Layers of beige paint covered the walls, one coat smeared on top of another. The floor was gray cement. A cot was bolted into one wall, a steel toilet and sink anchored across from it.

  The cell door had a window, not for a prisoner to see out, but for guards to see in. The wall opposite the door had a thick Plexiglas window, giving the prisoner a narrow view of the outside. Prisoners who missed fresh air heated ink pens with a match and used them to sear holes in the Plexiglas. Once in a while, a guard would catch one feeding pigeons through a hole. They would plug the hole and nail wire mesh over the window, almost eliminating the view.

  On July 8, 1986, the state of North Carolina moved Tim Hennis into the F block and gave him Cell 208, one of eight cells upstairs. A guard handed him a pair of drab green pants and a white T-shirt with a blue collar and blue ring around each sleeve. Hennis would learn that the laundry cart would come around twice a week, but if he lucked into a pair of pants that were long enough to fit him, he’d be better off washing them with a bar of soap in the shower and keeping them until the guards caught him. Prisoners were not allowed to keep the same pair of pants.

  They gave him a number: 10258IL. The number told guards right away that this prisoner was a white male, born in February 1958, in Illinois.

  His lawyers had given him instructions: Don’t talk about the case. But Death Row prisoners are curious. They have ways of finding out. They talk to guards. They read the one newspaper allotted each cell block a day. Not long after Hennis hit Cell 208, everyone knew why he was there. Killing babies was dishonorable even here.

  Each day began at 6 A.M., whether Hennis wanted it to or not. A guard poked his head inside his cell, making sure a living body was there.

  Hennis had two choices for how he could spend his day. He could mingle with the others in the day room, a shared area on the other side of the cell doors. Three glistening steel tables were attached to the concrete floor. The tables were round to avoid sharp corners. Four steel seats connected to each table—Death Row prisoners would never be trusted around chairs they could pick up.

  Looming high over the tables was a color TV, protected by a sheet of Plexiglas. The TV came on at 9:30 A.M. on weekdays and 11 A.M. on weekends and ran till 11 at night, the sound bouncing off the concrete and steel until it echoed in every cell. Hennis had his parents ship him some earplugs.

  “I wore them at night to sleep with and during the day when they were making too much noise,” he said. “I probably got the most ear damage in Central, even though I’ve been around Army guns and howitzers.”

  A guard monitored Death Row prisoners a few feet away from a booth that overlooked two cell blocks. Thick sheets of Plexiglas separated him from the prisoners, but he could still hear most of what they said, unless a couple of them went in someone’s cell. Prisoners weren’t supposed to do that; the rule was just one to a cell.

  When a prisoner stepped in a shower stall at the end of a row of cells, the guard could see his head through a window in the shower wall. The other prisoners, if they desired, could walk around to the front and watch the entire show. No shower curtains on Death Row.

  Hennis’s other daily option was to ask the guard to shut his cell door—prisoners couldn’t open and shut their own doors. Once the door was shut, he could take masking tape used to mark laundry and attach a couple of trash bags over the outside window. The door window could be blocked with envelopes. Another trash bag would cover the light panels near the ceiling. Then he’d have achieved his goal: total darkness.

  “Some days you felt like you wouldn’t get out,” Hennis said. “There were days when that happened. I’d call it quits for the day, shut my damn door, go on to bed, get undressed, and call it a day.”

  If the guards caught him, the garbage bags came down.

  Breakfast was served at 7:30. The guards shut off corridors leading to the rest of the prison population, a group that included 10 other classes of prisoners, ranging from those serving life sentences to those awaiting trial. Death Row prisoners, under state law, were not allowed to mix with the others. “The food sucked,” Hennis said, placing it one notch above the Cumberland County jail.

  The next “event” was lunch around noon. The prisoner had to occupy three hours between meals, the day’s first struggle to find something to do. Many of them played cards, gambling for cigarettes from the vending machines—cigarettes from the outside weren’t allowed—while the guards weren’t watching. Hennis rarely joined them because he didn’t smoke.

  Sometimes he played dominoes or Monopoly with the others, sometimes he put together jigsaw puzzles alone. Sometimes he just sat there. “The tedium, being bored, was the worst part,” Hennis said. “You get tired of the people.”

  Hennis often passed the time writing letters. Death Row prisoners are among the best letter writers in the world.

  He wrote his wife every day, ending his sentences in exclamation points. Most days he also wrote his parents, signing the letters, “Love, your son, Tim.” He used to just say, “Tim.”

  “Almost like he wanted to remind us he was our son so we wouldn’t forget about him,” Bob Hennis said.

  The day’s highlight was the mail cart’s arrival. Marylou and Angela wrote every day. Some days the lawyers responded to the two or three letters Hennis wrote them each week.

  But none of the letters would top the one Tim got a couple of days after arriving on Death Row with a Fayetteville postmark dated July 8, the day of his death sentence. It had been addressed in scrawled block letters, as if someone was disguising his handwriting. Hennis had the guard close his cell door so he could open the letter in private.

  Dear Mr. Hennis,

  I did the crime,

  I murdered the

  Eastburns.

  Sorry you’re doin

  the time.

  I’ll be safely out of

  North Carolina when you

  read this. Thanks,

  Mr. X

  For the rest of the day, Hennis bounded all over the day room. His lawyers told him it was probably a joke. But Hennis thought it was important. All his lawyers had to do was find Mr. X. He tucked the letter away and gave it to Angela during her next visit. She carried it back to Fayetteville, where Beaver filed it away as a crank letter.

  Mr. X wouldn’t write again, and Hennis’s excitement trailed off. The numbing routine of Central Prison resumed.

  Hennis finished a book about every three days. He read science fiction and survivalist books. He read the Star Trek series. And like most every Death Row prisoner, Hennis dabbled in jailhouse law, researching cases in the prison’s law library he thought would help his appeal. He recommended appeal tactics in letters to Beaver.

  While working on his appeal, he made a discovery about Death Row. No one there was guilty. “None of them did it,” he said. “Well, occasionally you’d have someone say he did it and talk about it. But they talked about the law a lot, discussing different cases. They’d see what someone was using and ask if it could work for them. Then they’d write their lawyer a letter.”

  Bob and Marylou sent him money to join book clubs. A prisoner could get books only if they came straight from publishing companies, which could be trusted not to send cocaine or weapons inside. Family members and friends were not granted that trust. Bob and Marylou once sent Tim an ink pen, only to have it returned. Prison officials said the metal filler could be made into a handcuff key.

  Hennis made a few friends, sometimes breaking the rarely enforced rule against visiting other cells just so he could have a quiet conversation. He tried to stay away from other prisoners, though it could be difficult within the cell block.

  “Some of them were crazy,” Hennis said. “Some others were on the edge. The slightest thing set them off, always walking a fine line between violence and nonviolence.” The
y rarely picked on the six-foot-four Hennis, still lean and muscular from all those battalion runs.

  “I could lose my temper, too, but I would back down,” he said. “All around you was concrete and steel, you could only get hurt if you fought. And it’d look bad on your record. I didn’t need that if we won the appeal.”

  The lure of an appeal stopped most of them. No matter how rough the murderers talked, little came from it. Death Row prisoners were the best behaved at the prison.

  Dinner was served around 5:15. For the rest of the night, the TV blared with sitcoms or a ball game. If the game ran past 11, the guard let them watch until it was over.

  Hennis had no interest in sports. “Can’t you shut that damn thing off?” he’d ask the guard. He wanted the TV to stop bouncing off his cell walls so he could put another day behind him.

  “I hated that worse than anything, because I looked forward to the TV going off. Peace and quiet.”

  But the quiet would not last all night. A guard came around at the top of every hour, and, unless sound asleep, Hennis could hear an electronic steel door sliding open in the hallway, allowing the guard inside Death Row.

  Grrrrrooooan. Clang.

  The guard’s hard-soled shoes crackled on the concrete floor. As he walked past the monitoring booth, he spoke to the guard on duty. “How’s it goin’?”

  The sound of shoe hitting stair echoed through the cell block until the guard climbed the last one. The footsteps started again, growing louder and louder until they stopped by the first cell.

  Hennis could look toward his door window, lit by a night light outside, and see the guard’s face pressed against it. Then it disappeared. A couple more footsteps, then another stop. Two more, another stop. All the way down the row of eight upstairs cells, the footsteps growing fainter after each stop.

  The last check was at 6 A.M., when a guard peered in one more time and the doors unlocked to begin another day.

  Twice a week, Death Row prisoners were allowed outside for an hour’s exercise on a fenced-in basketball court. There the prisoner had three options: play basketball, run around for no particular reason, or sit and breathe the fresh air.