Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  In Oakes’s notes on that interview, he’d remarked that Raupach was wearing black corduroys and black dress shoes on the night of May 9.

  “Do you recall the man told you that he had A positive blood?”

  “I do not recall that.”

  “What was the blood type of the cotton swabs examined by the serologist in this case, sir?”

  “I’d have to see the lab report … I remember, Mr. Beaver, in all fairness, that hers was of a type, either O or A, that would mask our accused.”

  “Do you recall Mr. Raupach telling you in your conversation that he had a number of knives?”

  “I do recall him mentioning knives.”

  “Did he describe them to you?”

  “Not in any great detail.”

  “Do you recall him telling you that he owned a black Members Only-type jacket that he wore often?”

  “He did describe—he said it wasn’t—it was a copy of that type jacket.”

  “A copy of a Members Only jacket?”

  “Yes.”

  Beaver asked VanStory if he remembered Gloria Mims, the woman who had looked out the window because her dog was barking on the night of May 9. She’d seen a big blond man in dark pants and white shirt walking toward the Eastburns’. During the first trial, VanStory had suggested to the jury that the man was Hennis.

  “Let me ask you a bit of a hypothetical question, if Your Honor will allow me … Had she testified that at about 11:30 P.M. she saw a tall white blond male walking down the street with a white shirt and dark pants on that she could not identify, but it was just after she’d seen a small white car parked across the street, and your investigation revealed that John Raupach had gotten off of work at 11:16 P.M. at the Ponderosa Winn-Dixie and walked home and would have walked up Summer Hill Road, you don’t think his identity would have been some exculpatory evidence in this case?”

  Colyer objected in vain.

  “I do not recall from her testimony which direction she said that the person was walking,” VanStory said.

  “Let’s assume one more thing in the hypothetical—that he’s walking from Yadkin Road up Summer Hill Road toward Mr. Raupach’s house.”

  “Had I put two and two together at the time, then I might have done that. Now, the timing of Raupach is, you know, what—first of all, any motions that were filed occurred many, many weeks before that. The state’s case, I don’t remember how long it took, but we were working 16, 18 hours a day. We were well into defense evidence before we heard about Raupach.”

  Beaver raised his voice. “Do you recall arguing this case to the jury that Gloria Mims saw Tim Hennis when he came over to the Eastburn house at 11:30 that night, parked his car, and walked to the Eastburn house to commit these murders?”

  “I may well have argued that.”

  “This is after you had met John Raupach and after you had determined that John Raupach had left the Winn-Dixie store at 11:16 P.M. on the night in question?”

  “My notes speak for themselves.”

  “I take it that’s a yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t consider this exculpatory evidence?”

  “No, sir, I did not.”

  Beaver pressed on. “Do you recall that during this entire trial the defense raised as the defense the misidentification of Patrick Cone and alleged that Mr. Cone had seen someone other than Timothy Hennis?”

  “Yes, sir, I do recall that.”

  “Do you recall you met a man who was approximately six-foot-three, within 20 or 30 pounds of Mr. Hennis, blondish-brown hair in a military style, who would, by your own admission, have been walking on that night, that evening?”

  “Mr. Beaver, the man I met did not resemble Hennis to me.”

  “To you?”

  “Nor did it resemble the composite to me.”

  “To you?”

  The intensity and volume picked up, like an argument that precedes a barroom brawl. “Do you recall cross-examining the Radtkes as to whether they had seen anyone before?” Beaver asked.

  “I’m sure I did.”

  “Trying to discredit their testimony?”

  “Absolutely. I was doing my job.”

  “And then after finding this man, never thought to tell anyone about it?”

  “Mr. Beaver, we chased more rabbits. I mean you—”

  “Mr. VanStory, would you answer my question?”

  Colyer objected.

  “If you would answer yes or no,” Beaver said.

  “He may answer it,” Judge Ellis said.

  “The answer is I did not tell you about John Raupach because I eliminated him as a suspect. The word from your—through you all was that a blue van was responsible. We chased the blue van. The blue van materialized to nothing.

  “We got names from Mr. Richardson, a guy named Presley. We chased down Presley. That materialized to nothing. We did everything within the power of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office to chase down every lead there was.”

  “Except those you didn’t want to tell the defense about, like Mr. Raupach?”

  “Except those, which after evaluating everything that we had on him, I determined not to be exculpatory.”

  Beaver kept after him. “You knew that through the Radtkes the defense tried to establish before the jury that there could be another person with similar physical characteristics and similar clothing to Mr. Hennis to walk that neighborhood at all odd hours?”

  “Mr. Beaver, I know through the cross-examination of Patrick Cone you wanted to place the blame on him.”

  Judge Ellis interceded. “Let’s don’t have an argument. He can answer the question.”

  Beaver had VanStory explain the crime prevention checklist, the Army document that said Tim Hennis closed the day room at 11:30 the night the bank card was used. The first time the defense lawyers had seen it was when VanStory introduced it on rebuttal evidence, when the first trial was almost over.

  VanStory said he didn’t know what the checklist was, how it was used, or when he got it. He said he didn’t remember why he saved it for rebuttal evidence.

  “That was the first time we had ever seen that document, was it not, sir?” Beaver asked.

  “That I don’t know either, Mr. Beaver. I would assume that you, in your preparation of the defense, would try to get ahold of the military—”

  “Well, we wouldn’t get ahold of it if you had it, would we?” Beaver shouted. Colyer objected, and Beaver said he was finished with this witness.

  VanStory walked from the courtroom and returned to Fayetteville. He wouldn’t stick around for high-fives this time.

  The next morning, the hearing resumed with Jack Watts, the state’s lead detective throughout the case. Watts said that when he first visited Raupach, he took one of his book bags and a dark jacket.

  “How was it packaged, or how did you receive it?” Colyer asked.

  “When he gave it to me, I believe his mother had given us a paper bag. We put it in the bag. I put it in the trunk of my vehicle.”

  Beaver and Richardson were stunned.

  “What did you do with the jacket and the book bag that you had?” Colyer asked.

  “Didn’t do anything with it. Left it in the trunk of my vehicle.”

  “Did there come a time when you eventually gave it back?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “To whom did you give it?”

  “Mr. Raupach.”

  “Do you recall when you gave it back to him?”

  “It was a week or several weeks later.”

  That would have been sometime after Tim Hennis was on Death Row.

  Watts said the jacket and book bag had not been dry-cleaned, but was in the same paper bag Raupach’s mother put it in.

  “Did it ever come out of the trunk of your car during the period of time that you had it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you conduct any tests on it during the time that you had
it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you show it to either Mr. VanStory or Mr. Carlin?”

  “No, sir. I don’t believe they ever saw it. They were aware of it, but I don’t believe they ever saw it.”

  “Mr. Watts,” Beaver asked on cross-examination, “what, if any, regulation within the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department procedure or policy were you following when you placed the things that you seized from John Raupach in your trunk?”

  “I don’t know of any regulation or procedures that I was following, Mr. Beaver, regarding that particular—”

  “Do you know of any statutory authority whatsoever on the law of the state of North Carolina that authorizes that type of procedure?”

  Colyer objected. “He’s not a lawyer,” he said.

  “I’ll let him answer,” Judge Ellis said.

  “I don’t have an answer to that question,” Watts said. He said he took the items as “potential evidence” in case Raupach became a suspect.

  The lawyers had just as much trouble accepting the next part of the hearing. Detective Ron Oakes introduced another suspect the state had failed to mention.

  When Raupach’s name had come up three years before, Oakes had been investigating another Winn-Dixie employee, an assistant manager rumored to have come to work with scratches on his face in the spring of 1985.

  Richardson knew exactly who Oakes was talking about. He’d heard rumors of a man with scratches years before, but couldn’t find out anything about it. The weekend before the misconduct hearing, he’d sat up in bed studying the two Mr. X letters, looking for clues. Somebody was trying to leave a hint and it had troubled him that no one had found it.

  Strange marks appeared in the middle of words, dividing some letters and adding to others. Richardson had held up the first Mr. X letter, the one Hennis received right after he got to Death Row. The writer had combined the “U” and “R” in the word “Eastburns.” A stray mark split the “U,” turning it into a “W.” The same mark connected with the “R” to create an “H.” That mark curled up at the bottom, making a “J.” Richardson had spelled out W-H-J-R, the initials of the Winn-Dixie assistant manager Oakes had just mentioned. In another place, there appeared to be a “W” imposed over an “H” in the word “the” in the letter’s first line: “I did the crime.”

  In the second letter, the writer appeared to have drawn an “A” over the “H” in the word “THE.” Richardson interpreted it as an anagram spelling H-E-A-T-H, the suspect’s middle name. Oakes had not researched the letters. The state did not take them seriously. But he had interviewed WHJR’s boss, who described his employee as six-foot-one, 195 pounds with short blond hair.

  “I was advised (he) lived somewhere in Summer Hill, drove a 280-Z, silver-gray colored. He also had a Mustang, light gray, silver color, hatchback style, small, sporty …

  “He got the 280-Z in the August–September time frame. (The boss) advised that he came to work and had some scratches on his face and arms. Said he got mugged by some black guys.…

  “Can’t say when the scratches happened, but it seemed to him like it was about the time frame when the Eastburn murders or when the bodies were discovered.”

  The detective said he’d learned that WHJR’s sports car was repossessed because he never made a payment.

  Oakes said he’d talked to the man’s former girlfriend. “She can’t recall seeing any scratches on his face and arms, but didn’t see him a lot,” Oakes read from notes. “Was dating him in May. In May, he was looking for a new place. At one point in the conversation, she indicated that he said that he could see the house, referring to the Eastburn house, from his porch, and she indicated that he took her over to the house on one occasion, but she couldn’t see how he could see it.

  “She said that (the man) always kept to himself, put his age at twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, could call him a ‘mama’s boy.’”

  Oakes read a note from an interview with WHJR’s roommate, who delivered magazines and paperback books to convenience stores. The roommate drove a white van, which he kept parked in the backyard.

  During the first trial, Oakes had called WHJR. “He indicated to me that he never had scratches on face or arms and never got jumped by blacks,” he said.

  Oakes said he’d also spoken to Winn-Dixie’s personnel director. A few months after the Eastburn murders, WHJR had asked for a transfer to Raleigh, the personnel man told Oakes. By June 1986, he’d been fired for stealing $500 from the store.

  Oakes’s investigation stopped there. WHJR was dropped as a suspect.

  A bailiff stuck his head in the door, interrupting the hearing after just two hours. “The jury has a verdict,” he said.

  Tim Hennis folded his arms and pushed away from his table.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “This is too quick,” Hennis whispered to Richardson. “I’m not ready for this.”

  Neither was Richardson. His stomach knotted and he prayed.

  Beaver wasn’t ready, either. He wanted a chance to cross-examine Ron Oakes about WHJR. The misconduct hearing had just started to get really good. Beaver had begun to think the state was going to solve the case right there on the witness stand.

  As the jurors filed in, courthouse clerks and lawyers scrambled to fill empty seats in Courtroom 401. Even veterans of hundreds of verdicts appreciated the drama of a decision in a case like Hennis’.

  The Hennis family held hands on the front row. Judge Ellis warned everyone that he would not tolerate an outburst after the verdict was read.

  Linda Priest, the clerk who cheerfully read Hennis’s guilt and death verdicts three years earlier, stood up and asked foreman Charles Leighton to stand.

  She began reading, fighting back tears.

  “Mr. Foreman, in the case of State of North Carolina versus Timothy Baily Hennis, 85CRS22175, the jury has unanimously returned as its verdict that the Defendant is not guilty of first-degree murder as to Kara Sue Eastburn.” The next sound was Angela gasping and bursting into tears.

  “Is that the verdict of the jury?” Linda Priest asked.

  “Yes, it is,” the foreman said.

  Tim Hennis slumped into his chair, resting his head on clenched fists. It was over.

  It had been 1,435 days since Jack Watts pounded on his door at 1 A.M. and led him away in handcuffs. Now, it was over. His wife had sought welfare, his mother had aged beyond her years, his father had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and his baby had grown into a little girl without him. He’d slept with murderers longer than he’d slept with his wife.

  As Linda Priest read the rest of the verdicts, Tim cried softly, holding hands with Beaver and Adele Delph, the secretary who’d sat next to him. Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty.

  Billy Richardson turned and found Bob Hennis, smiling and weeping at the same time. Of all the people he felt sorry for, Richardson felt sorriest for Bob. The young lawyer broke down. He looked in the back of the courtroom and found T. V. O’Malley, the investigator he’d come to trust with the most important case of his life, and gave him a thumbs-up sign. O’Malley got up and left the courtroom before he cried like the rest of them. It was the lawyers’ moment. They had proved something to themselves after three years of doubt.

  Gary Eastburn arched his back and let out a long, slow sigh. It was over for him, too. He had nothing left to give—everything had already been taken.

  Juror Mary Demko looked over at him and felt bad. She thought about how he had to live with this, not knowing what really happened or who did it.

  Judge Ellis told the lawyers to approach.

  “I guess we can stop this hearing?” he whispered.

  “No, I want to go on,” Beaver said.

  Richardson clamped Beaver’s arm. “What are you talking about?”

  “Goddamn it, I want to go on. This is awful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “What’s he gonna do now, Jerry, slap them on the wrist? It’s over.”
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  “He ought to throw them in jail. Tim spent three years on Death Row because of those sons of bitches.”

  Richardson reminded his partner there would be other cases with the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department and district attorney. “Let it drop,” he said.

  Beaver reluctantly let go of it. A not-guilty verdict would have to be good enough. Judge Ellis quietly dismissed the misconduct hearing.

  “Mr. Hennis,” the judge said, “you’re free to go.”

  His sister, Beth, was the first to hug him, the first time she’d touched him since he’d been condemned to die. Angela turned to her mother. “Go get Kristina,” she said. “She needs to be here.”

  Hennis made his way to an empty jury room behind the courtroom. His parents came by and he hugged both. In four years, he and his father had learned how to hug.

  Then Angela came inside. Tim looked at her and they embraced. This time they wouldn’t have to let go.

  Marylou walked back into the hall and hugged Gary Eastburn as hard as she could. Neither one said anything, causing Marylou to wonder if she was doing the right thing. After she let go, she finally said the only thing she could think of. “Good luck, Gary.”

  A bailiff stepped inside Tim’s room.

  “Tim, we need to take you back to the jail so you can get your stuff,” she said. “But the judge told me to tell you that we’ll go only when you’re ready to go.”

  Then she smiled, the first time a cop had smiled at Tim Hennis in some time.

  Soon the reporters came, but Tim didn’t have many answers for them. They wanted him to put it all in perspective, but it’d be years before he could do that.

  “It was very hard to deal with. I missed my wife and daughter, especially my daughter,” he told them. “There were important years for her that I missed.”

  Bob had brought his video camera from his car, trying to get as much of Tim and Angela on film as he could.

  “How does it feel to have everyone say you’re guilty?” a reporter asked.

  “I just don’t know if I can put it into words right now,” Tim said. “I’m just thankful to the jury. Thankful and glad.”