Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  His case was indeed pulled to the side. Cone was not taken before a judge to be advised of his right to a lawyer. No one asked T. P. Riley about testifying. The case was not sent before a grand jury or set for trial.

  As he prepared for trial, Richardson uncovered a piece of Cone’s private life through the flukish discovery of a missing wallet on a sidewalk. He’d heard through the sheriff’s department that a woman named Emily Byers had found a letter inside the wallet.

  Emily Byers told Richardson her fourteen-year-old daughter had rummaged through the wallet, found the letter, and read it aloud. It terrified them. The writer and her boyfriend, the owner of the wallet, were discussing a secret they shared about the Hennis case.

  Emily had called the sheriff’s department and read part of the letter over the phone. Within an hour, a deputy arrived and took the wallet with him, the letter still inside. Nothing more came of it.

  Richardson took O’Malley with him to the sheriff’s department to check on that wallet, arriving at midnight to bump into as few people as possible. They headed for the records division, looking for a report of a missing wallet in Montclair. The young deputy on duty thought nothing of it.

  They found a report number 8614764. A deputy had returned the wallet to Sean Buckner of 628 Rockspring Road.

  Sean Buckner’s mother, it turned out, cleaned offices for Beaver, Thompson, Holt, and Richardson, P.A. She told Richardson her son was one of Pat Cone’s best friends.

  Sean Buckner was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana. Richardson called him, thinking he could find out what Buckner knew with a simple phone call, but Buckner would have nothing to do with him.

  Two weeks before the trial started, Richardson and O’Malley flew to Shreveport and surprised Sean Buckner in his dorm room. The young cadet left the room to call his fiancée. Then he called his mother. He played games with the lawyers, asking who they worked for and accusing them of secretly taping his conversation. He finally started to talk, but quit and said he wanted to call Pat first.

  A quick-thinking O’Malley went to work.

  “Hey, Sean,” he said, pulling a portable phone from his briefcase, “why don’t we set up a conference call with you, Lori, and Pat on the line at the same time.”

  “All right,” Sean said.

  O’Malley went to his car and plugged in his phone.

  “Cindi, you got to help me,” he told his wife. “Get their phone numbers.”

  Sean came downstairs to the car and O’Malley handed him the phone. Thinking he was talking to the operator, Sean gave Cindi the phone number for Lori Green. Then Cindi listened in on the call.

  “Do you know how bad Pat wants to get out of this?” Sean asked Lori.

  “All Pat has to say is he doesn’t remember,” she said.

  “What if they get him for perjury?”

  Sean and Lori never did reach Pat, and by the next afternoon Sean Buckner was fed up with him. Richardson and O’Malley stopped by Sean’s room again.

  “Will you give us a statement?” Richardson asked.

  Sean Buckner agreed to talk. He didn’t tell everything at first, but it was a start.

  On the way back to the Shreveport airport, Richardson called Beaver.

  “Jerry,” he said, “we can win this case.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  On the way to Wilmington’s jail, a New Hanover County deputy pulled over at a gas station, left the van running, and walked around to the back, where Tim Hennis sat shackled, behind a mesh screen. “I’m going to use the bathroom. You need to go?”

  Hennis had to think about that one. Does he mean I can get out and walk around? That I can walk up to the counter and borrow the men’s room key? Walk up and down the aisles and check out this week’s magazine covers? Nobody had made this kind of offer in almost three years, since two armed guards watched his every breath on the way to Central Prison.

  “Well, you wanna go?” the deputy asked.

  “No, I don’t think I’ll try to walk through there in handcuffs and ankle chains. But thanks.”

  Wilmington was going to be much different. The community felt no outrage against Tim Hennis. Not even 10 people walking its downtown riverfront could name the defendant or victims in the case. Mention a triple murder from Fayetteville and the response would be, “Well, that’s Fayetteville.”

  Wilmington, tucked in the state’s southeast corner between the Atlantic Ocean and Cape Fear River, boasts an historic district of 200-year-old neighborhoods with brick streets shaded by Spanish moss and a thriving movie industry. It was not uncommon to bump into stars such as Barbra Streisand or Dustin Hoffman. But other than the occasional visiting movie star, the city of 55,000 is known for favorite son Michael Jordan, the occasional hurricane, and not much else, which is how most people like it. The downtown stoplights still blink red by 10 o’clock.

  Beaver and Richardson couldn’t wait to get to Wilmington. The night before the trial began, they packed up their notebooks, interview notes, law books, and ghosts from the first trial. Though neither spoke a word, they both wondered if they had left that trial behind. They wondered if they were capable of winning this one. And they wondered if this would ever be over. When they arrived in Wilmington, it seemed as though Fayetteville was more than just a two-hour drive away.

  For Bob and Marylou Hennis, the journey had been longer. While the lawyers unpacked on their ninth-floor oceanfront condominium, the Hennises moved into half of a beach cottage a block from the beach. Angela and Kristina took one bedroom and Bob and Marylou took another.

  They threw a birthday party for Kristina, who turned four the day her daddy’s second murder trial began. After cake and ice cream, Kristina opened her presents—a carload of toys and a dress to wear at the nursery school where she’d be staying while her mother and grandparents were at court. Bob and Marylou took pictures all through the party. Kristina loved to pose for the camera.

  Kristina didn’t ask why her father wasn’t there. She’d gotten used to his absence.

  At the New Hanover County Jail, Tim Hennis’s day began with morning wake-up, the same as it had most of the last four years. After breakfast, he prepared for court. Angela came by and brought him one of the half-dozen suits he’d wear at the trial. The bailiffs let her walk right up to her husband and give him his suit.

  “Here, Tim. You’ll look good in this,” she said, clasping her hand over his. “Try this tie with it.”

  The Plexiglas had separated them for so long. She snuck in a hug, holding her husband for the first time since he boarded the van for Central Prison almost three years earlier. They didn’t want to let go.

  “I wish we could walk out and never look back,” Angela told him.

  “It won’t be long, Buddy,” he reassured her as the handcuffs clicked into place.

  “Sorry,” the bailiff said, “we’ve got to do this.”

  They led Hennis through a tunnel under Fourth Street that ended underneath the courthouse, a gray concrete building that would’ve reminded him of the Cumberland County Courthouse had he been able to see it. A private elevator stopped at the fourth floor, and the bailiffs led Hennis through a holding area for other inmates awaiting trial.

  They took him into a back hall and through the side door of Courtroom 401, a room much the same as the one where he lost the first trial, except this one was smaller and less austere. The room was carpeted and seated fewer than 50 people, and there was no movie screen.

  Hennis was still cuffed when he entered the room. Bob Hennis grabbed Beaver.

  “Make it stop,” he said. “Put a stop to it. Nobody should see him like that.”

  Beaver took it before Judge Clark. From then on, the cuffs would come off in the hallway.

  Hennis took his seat at the far right of the defense table. Beaver sat at the far left, next to Richardson. Between Richardson and Hennis sat Adele Delph, Richardson’s twenty-seven-year-old secretary. “Good morning, Tim,” she said.


  The presence of Adele, with her friendly smile and attractive dark features, was no accident. Hennis’s demeanor had helped him lose one trial. Beaver and Richardson wouldn’t let that happen again. They knew a little anger on the six-foot-four Army sergeant’s face went a long way. The jury would see that Adele was not afraid of their client.

  Jury selection took another two weeks. Beaver and Richardson followed the rules they’d thrown out in the first trial and picked a jury they liked. Then it was time for opening statements.

  Dickson gave a “road map” of the case, a standard prosecutor’s opening. There was nothing flashy or fiery about it.

  “One man and one man only is responsible for the deaths of Katie and the girls, and that man is the defendant,” he said. He pointed to Hennis and sat down. It wasn’t anything like William VanStory’s powerful opening that ended with him shaking his finger in Hennis’s face. With that speech, VanStory had seized momentum he never lost.

  Beaver wanted that momentum this time. Making speeches before the jury was his strength, and he still remembered his partner’s nervous opening statement in the first trial. Bob Hennis remembered it as well, telling Beaver he expected him to make the opening.

  But Richardson argued that the opening statement was rightly his. He’d put together the case while Beaver prepared to argue another one before the U.S. Supreme Court. All those 16-hour days of endless interviews were supposed to lead to this opening argument.

  “I’m sorry, Billy, but I feel strongly about this,” Beaver told him. Richardson protested, but when it came time to make the opening, Beaver stood up and approached the podium.

  “The evidence will show Tim Hennis did not rape and kill Kathryn Eastburn and did not kill Kara and Erin Eastburn,” he began. “The evidence will show that throughout the week preceding his arrest, the defendant acted in a manner inconsistent with guilt.…

  “The sheriff’s department asks for the person who purchased the dog to come forward and within an hour, Tim Hennis walks into the Cumberland County Law Enforcement Center with his wife and child and says, ‘I am that person.’

  “He signs a written waiver of rights and gives a statement. More important, he consents to allow physical evidence to be taken from his person. From 1 to 7 o’clock they pull pubic and head hair from him, take his fingerprints, and stick him with needles.

  “But rather than taking the physical evidence and matching it with the evidence at the crime scene, Cumberland County law enforcement officials jump the gun, summon the press, and declare the case to be solved. But it wasn’t.”

  Beaver said he would prove Patrick Cone to be a “liar and a thief” and said Lucille Cook was part of “Hennis hysteria” that gripped the community. But lack of physical evidence was the theme he stressed throughout.

  “This physical evidence designates Tim’s innocence. Physical evidence does not lie. Physical evidence does not have lapses of memory. Physical evidence is not mistaken. Physical evidence cannot be pressured into testifying.”

  Richardson nodded in satisfaction. His senior partner had accomplished his mission. The jury understood what the lawyers thought was important. Beaver settled in for the start of the state’s case, sharing the same thought with Richardson: What are they going to drop on us this time?

  The state’s third witness shook them. Colyer called Ilsa Peabody, the neighbor who lived behind Katie Eastburn and, three years earlier, had told Richardson she’d seen nothing.

  “Did you have occasion to make any observations about any activities at the Eastburns’ backyard that week?” Colyer asked Mrs. Peabody.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Would you tell us what you saw, please, ma’am?”

  “On Wednesday I was sitting at the kitchen table and looking, you know, out the window. I observed a white male standing in the backyard of the Eastburns’ house.”

  Mrs. Peabody said the man wore cutoff jeans and a red shirt. He and Katie Eastburn and her children were talking and playing with the dog around lunchtime, she said.

  “The first time I seen the person, I thought it was Mr. Eastburn, so I really didn’t pay that much attention to the person, because I didn’t know Mr. Eastburn. And when I saw the picture in the newspaper, I remembered, you know, it was the same guy that was standing in the backyard.”

  Hennis glared at Mrs. Peabody. What was she talking about? From all accounts, Dixie had left the house on Tuesday, May 7, with Hennis. Katie wrote about it in letters to her family that night and told the Seefeldts on Thursday that the dog had left two nights earlier. For Mrs. Peabody to be right, Hennis would’ve had to drive home on his lunch break, change from his uniform into cutoff jeans, and haul Dixie back to the Eastburns’.

  “This was on Wednesday?” Beaver asked.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “You’re absolutely positive it was on Wednesday?”

  “Yes.”

  Beaver asked her three more times. Mrs. Peabody said she was sure.

  “She’ll end up helping us,” Beaver told his partner. If anything, he said, she’d suggested that someone else was at the Eastburn home that week wearing a red shirt, the same description Margaret Tillison had given. Possibly someone else had considered adopting Dixie.

  Joe Nunnery, already a thorn to Richardson’s reinvestigation, was next. The owner of the car lot at the top of Summer Hill Road had told police a month before the trial that he’d seen a tall, blond man parked across the street from his lot around the time of the murders. The man had sat in a white car for four hours and stared, Nunnery told the detectives.

  When Richardson and O’Malley learned of this statement, they talked to Nunnery, who assured them he couldn’t say the man he saw was Hennis. In fact, Nunnery had joked with a car salesman that the man was an undercover drug agent. But as Nunnery took the stand, Richardson knew the car salesman had changed his mind.

  Nunnery testified that the man sitting in the car wasn’t a narc, but Tim Hennis.

  “Was he a stout person?” Beaver asked.

  “Yes.”

  “A big built stout person with blond hair?”

  “Yes, sir. Broad shoulders, I guess I would say, if you want to rephrase it.”

  “And then I think you used the words ‘sandy blond hair’?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  What Nunnery didn’t know was that the defense had figured out who he’d seen. Around the time of the murders, Keith Smith, who was a narc, had sat across the street from his car lot for four hours, waiting for one of Nunnery’s salesmen to pay him money owed for a drug deal. Nunnery had unwittingly given an accurate description of Smith from the witness stand.

  “I hope you got this Smith guy in hand,” Bob Hennis told the lawyers after court ended. “We’re in trouble if he won’t talk.”

  Richardson told him not to worry. His concern was with Patrick Cone, whose turn was coming soon. That night, Richardson studied his notes on Cone.

  “You going to stay up all night?” Beaver asked.

  “Got to get ready for Patrick.”

  Cone was Richardson’s witness this time. Much of the cross-examination would deal with Cone’s behavior since the first trial, a subject Richardson knew the most about.

  “What makes you think they’ll call him tomorrow?” Beaver asked. “Wasn’t he way down the list in the first trial?”

  “I have a feeling Dickson’s gonna put him up there.”

  The death of Margaret Tillison had left the state without punch at the start of its case. Her testimony would be read into the record, but nothing could replace a well-dressed Mrs. Tillison leaning over the stand to point at Tim Hennis. Without her, Dickson needed a strong witness at the beginning of the case.

  The two best candidates were Patrick Cone and Lucille Cook. Richardson guessed Dickson would save Mrs. Cook for the end, just like in the first trial. He studied into the night, gulping down coffee and cramming for his biggest exam since the state bar.

  “Billy, you feel l
ike you’re up to this?” Beaver asked. “Are you sure you’re ready?”

  He must’ve asked six times. Richardson, already fragile with doubt, was hurt. But he kept quiet, poring over his notes.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said.

  Richardson guessed right. Dickson brought out his big guns the next day. Nancy Maeser told a new jury how Hennis had been to see her the night of the murders. Cone was next, and he told his story again.

  This time on his May 10 walk home, Cone said he passed the man, walked to the streetlight at the bottom of the Eastburns’ driveway, and turned to watch him get in the car and drive off. At the first trial he’d said he didn’t see the man get in the car.

  Cone did not mention bending over at the pine trees to get a better look or walking up in the Seefeldts’ yard. He said he spent a minute and a half or two minutes with the photo lineup before finding the man he saw.

  “Would you point him out for the jury, please?” Dickson asked.

  “This man right here.”

  “Can you describe what he’s wearing right now and where he’s seated, sir?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s sitting beside this gentleman over here with the loud pink tie on. He has a gray pinstripe suit on, funny-colored tie, pinstripe shirt.”

  “Your Honor,” Dickson said, “for the record, I would ask that the record reflect that he has identified the defendant in this case.”

  “All right. The record will so show.”

  Dickson loved it. Not only did he get an identification of Hennis, but a fashion dig at Beaver as well.

  Dickson brought up Cone’s meetings with Billy Richardson. “During those talks, Mr. Cone, did you ever tell them that you might have some doubt about your identification?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have any doubt about your identification, sir?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why did you tell them that?”

  “Because they was bothering me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were always asking questions about me—staying out in front of my friends’ house and things like that.”