The Killing Kind (10 page)

H
ensley and his colleagues kept a close eye on Danny Hembree as he sat on the couch inside Nick’s house on the evening of November 23. The YCSO, along with members of the GCPD Detective Unit (DU) and CSI, continued a search now focused specifically on a closet inside Nicole’s bedroom.

With the cause and manner of Heather’s death classified as undetermined throughout the time period before Randi’s body had been found, the YCSO didn’t know if Heather had been murdered. It had always been a pressing question: Had Heather been walking down the road, for example, had a seizure and suffocated to death? Had she tripped and fallen and couldn’t breathe?

“They certainly felt like she had been pushed down into that culvert or dumped there,” one law enforcement official explained. “But there was just no clear sign of murder.”

After Randi’s body was recovered, however, it was the beginning of what looked to be a pattern, and the course of the investigation into Heather’s death changed. Heather’s injuries and death were looked at now under different circumstances. Her death had context.

Hensley assisted another detective in writing up a property list invoice for Nick, noting all the items they had confiscated from his house, along with the jewelry taken from Nicole’s possession and inside her bedroom. The one item on Hensley’s mind as they concluded the search inside the house (there was still Danny Hembree’s vehicle in the driveway to go through) was that electrical cord. Or, rather,
cut
electrical cord.

Hensley couldn’t shake a feeling he had of why a person would hold on to an electrical cord that has been cut from a lamp or some other appliance. It didn’t make sense to save it. The item had no practical use. In his short career as a detective, Hensley prided himself on his instincts. He listened to his gut.

Hensley’s dad was transferred to Gaston County from Tennessee when Hensley was in high school. The family has lived there ever since.

“Look, I bleed orange,” Hensley said of his Tennessee roots.

It was 2004 when, Hensley said, “I decided to try the police thing out.” Hensley wanted to be one of the good guys, chasing all those bad guys he had heard so much about as a kid. He had law enforcement and public service coursing through his veins. Hensley’s uncle was the chief of police in a small Southern town and also fire chief, and his cousin made assistant chief of the Chattanooga Police Department. So serving the public had been in him all his life, Hensley felt while growing up.

The thing that had actually turned Hensley off from a career in law enforcement early on, and as he entered college, was his mother telling him, “You’re not going to be a police officer.”

“She had grown up around it, and was always right there with the family as they went through it. She tried to engrain it within me that I was going to do something else.”

The GCPD had jurisdiction over the county—responsibilities beyond the Gastonia Police Department (GPD)—serving the communities outside the bounds of the city. The GCPD DU focuses on major crimes: murder, organized crime, missing persons, sexual and serious assaults.

Hensley felt comfortable within the DU, having joined the team on July 16, 2008, after four years of patrol. And wouldn’t you know it, on that same day he was sworn in as a detective, he found himself working on the Lucy Johnson case.

“It’s really not anything like the glamour that you see on TV,” Hensley said with a respectful laugh. Asked if the DU was what he had expected, Hensley said, “I guess the answer’s ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ It’s what I expected, to a certain extent. I wanted to be involved in cases like [the Lucy Johnson case] and there I was. I had input. My opinions mattered. That’s where I wanted to be. That’s what I wanted to do and there I was doing it.”

Johnson, thirty-one at the time of her death, was pregnant. She had been shot in the head twice—that is, before the home in which she lived was set on fire. Her fiancé was later charged in the case but found not guilty.

This was Hensley’s inauguration into the DU. So, as he said, it didn’t take long for “the newness” to wear off. “I wasn’t the primary detective on [Lucy Johnson], but that’s what I walked into on my first day.”

All that experience, all that thought he had put into police work, it came back to Hensley on days such as the one he spent at Nick’s house, bagging and tagging a piece of cut electrical cord he had found extremely attention-grabbing.

“Would you come down to the Gastonia PD and have a chat with us?” Hensley asked Nicole. Hensley wanted Nicole to speak with the YCSO without Danny Hembree hovering over her. They wanted to lock Nicole down to a statement. The case was going somewhere. Hensley had been with the DU only a little over a year, but he knew when a case—he could feel it—was about to take a turn.

The cut cord.

Danny stood up from the couch after hearing what Hensley asked Nicole and walked over. He said: “You don’t have to go!” He wasn’t being loud or obnoxious, but was merely voicing his concerns.

Nicole seemed torn. Hensley could tell she wanted to go, but she also wanted to be loyal to her boyfriend.

Danny sat back down. Hensley chatted with Nicole a bit more.

“Look, go ahead,” Danny finally said with a smile from the couch, apparently giving Nicole “permission” to go down to the station house and give a statement.

“He seemed to change his mind and approve,” Hensley later commented.

One of the detectives standing in front of Danny asked him if he would give them consent to search his vehicle. A search warrant was one thing, but getting people to consent verbally on top of the warrant is ironclad.

He shifted in his seat. Took a pull from a cigarette. Exhaled the smoke overdramatically. The guy was haughty and smug, obviously reveling in this one particular moment.

Control: Danny Hembree thrived on it.

“Sure, go ahead,” he said after a beat. “Y’all can look inside my car.”

D
anny Hembree was your quintessential loner type, wandering through life concerned with only himself and his needs. He later claimed that during the period of his life when Heather was murdered and Randi’s body was found, he had “four or five” different residences where he’d spend his nights. In fact, he drifted from place to place. He had not worked a steady job (nine to five, clocking in and out) in many years. For money, he said, he would “go out and look for a house that had some damage done to a roof or porch or something, go talk to the people, offer my services, give them a reasonable price, and do the job for them.”

By August 2009, he had found somewhat steady work in Charlotte at an apartment complex. They’d hand him what he called a “punch list” of things to fix—leaky ceiling, electrical wiring, a cracked window, caved-in piece of Sheetrock—and he’d go on, checking off each job from the list as he did it.

One of the reasons why Danny had trouble keeping a full-time job, he claimed, was because of substance abuse issues that had plagued him his entire teen and adult life.

“Just about anything you could get high on or drunk,” he once said. “Alcohol was my drug of choice, but crack cocaine, Ecstasy . . . I mean,
anything. . . .
”

Danny claimed that throughout his life he had been prescribed “hundreds” of prescriptions and had, at one time or another, taken every psychiatric and narcotic drug made. During those months leading up to the fall of 2009, however, he was supposed to be taking Neurontin and Ultram. When prescribed with other drugs, Neurontin is used to treat seizures associated with epilepsy in adults. Ultram is a narcotic-like pain reliever.

Danny said he was prescribed the drugs—both of them—“for neuropathy” in his feet and joint pain.

According to Danny, his first brush with any mental-health medication came when he was “thirteen or fourteen years old.” As far as his drinking, he said he’d buy a twelve-pack of beer and a fifth of liquor every day and drink “until it was time to go to work.”

During this time when he was drinking enough booze to pickle a leather shoe, he took a call one night. It was August 2009, though he did not recall the exact date. It was a friend of his.

“Nicole had a run-in with her boyfriend’s mother and she’s standing outside her trailer,” the guy said. “Can you go over and get her?”

Danny had heard of Nicole Catterton. He knew the family. He’d dated Nicole’s mother, Stella.

“Yup,” he said. “But I don’t have a car.”

Danny arranged for a friend to come and get him. When they arrived where Nicole was waiting, he saw she had a “trash bag” with all of her belongings inside. She was leaving her boyfriend.

They dropped Nicole off at Nick’s.

A week or so later, Danny was driving north on the 321, not far from the Catterton home. He had his cousin and his cousin’s son with him. Driving down that busy road, he spied Nicole walking.

“Hey, hey,” he told his cousin. “I’m pulling over here.”

Parking in front of where Nicole walked, he blew the horn.

Nicole waved at him.

Later, in court, Danny claimed that his “cousin’s son wanted to be with her.”

So they brought Nicole to that abandoned trailer and left Nicole and the boy there for “a date.”

Nicole began staying at Danny’s friend’s house after that. A woman friend of Danny’s, whom he had known for thirty-five years, then took Nicole in. Danny went over one night and partied with her and the others.

As he was ready to leave, he claimed, Nicole grabbed him by the shirt. “No, I want you to stay.”

“I ain’t got me no way home,” he responded.

“Come on, spend the night.”

He thought it over. “That’s cool.”

Later, Danny Hembree said: “I spent the night with her, and we stayed in her bed. And from that point . . . I was pretty much with Nicole.”

A
s investigators piled out of Nick’s house, Danny Hembree stepped outside. He walked over to where Detectives Chris McAuley and Myron Shelor stood. McAuley wore a wire and recorded parts of the search. Hensley and the others were over by Danny’s vehicle, preparing to go in and have a look. It was explained to Danny that it wasn’t going to take long.

He said, “Go ahead, take your time.”

Mr. Calm, Cool, and Collected.

Standing with McAuley and Shelor, Danny seemed to be relaxed and rather willing to chitchat. They began their conversation talking about cars.

“I’m thinking about rebuilding the suspension on one of mine,” McAuley said.

Danny mentioned a bit of work he needed to do to his car, but then he changed the subject, bringing it back to him, of course, and his latest dilemma.

“I was working, but y’all made a call over there, and because of that, I got fired.”

“Oh, geez. Why’d they tell you they fired you?” McAuley asked.

Danny spoke of a phone call that cops had made to his boss. “And he told me he didn’t need that shit over there.”

“Where’d y’all work?”

Danny said he was a contractor, a handyman. He fixed things. He added, “Fourteen dollars an hour,” with a tone that indicated this was a lot of money to a guy like him.

“You did plumbing, carpentry, things like that?” McAuley asked. Cars whizzed by Nick’s house—the common noise of life—as they continued talking. The sound of their voices was drowned out from time to time by the fast-moving traffic and roar of engines. Neither man spoke louder than he needed.

As several dogs barked in the background, Danny said: “Oh yeah. You know, [my boss] had a granddaughter seventeen years old and, you know, well, I used to be with Heather . . . and I think he had a problem with all that. It ain’t none of his business, though. Hell, I’m forty-eight years old.” (Hembree rounded up; he wouldn’t turn forty-eight for another month, on December 19.)

Radio static and sporadic dispatch calls from a police car in the background gave the scene a feeling of gravity. Several cops and a suspect in two murders might have been standing around and shooting the shit like old bar buddies, but these cops were paying close attention to everything Danny had to say, analyzing him and everything about his demeanor. They were on top of their game here, despite sounding as if it was a routine search.

Danny Hembree gave the impression that he was angry with law enforcement riding him over the past week or so.

“I can understand,” said one detective, “you’ve had the
poe-lease
crawling up your ass lately.”

“Oh yeah,” Danny said, taking the bait, “they’s been harassing me.”

“These guys,” said McAuley, referring to the YCSO, “they’ve been up, what, every day for four or five weeks now working on these cases.”

“Well, you know,” Danny said, “I understand.”

“We appreciate y’all helping us out, you know. It makes things so much easier.” McAuley was speaking of Danny Hembree not putting up a stink about searching his vehicle.

“I know, I know,” Danny said. “Nick, he needs some closure on this thing.” He paused. Then, hoping they’d bite, he said: “That damn Stella.”

“Why do you say ‘damn Stella,’ Danny?”

“ ’Cause she’s the one who done gotten Heather into all that.”

They talked about Nick next. How he was doing. Danny seemed to care for Nick and his well-being, however superficial it came across. Then, for a time, they talked about local Gastonians they both knew, the bars in the area, and what was happening currently within the drug culture. What types of drugs were kicking around and who was selling them. Danny mentioned how he’d picked up some girl at a local dive one night recently and she tried to push “some Oxy” on him. So he pulled his car over and “kicked her ass out” of his vehicle. He laughed while telling this story.

There was an obvious cockiness about Danny Hembree as he talked about other people—especially females. You could tell the guy looked down on women in general. And if they did things—sexual favors—for dope or a ride or some pocket money, he thought even less of them. It was as if he was better than all of the people he ran with—even Heather, Nicole, Stella, and Nick. He sounded as though he was doing all of them a favor by being their friend.

Danny brought up Nicole and explained how she had been doing well in certain areas of her life.

“That’s so great to hear,” McAuley said. “She’s a real good girl.”

“I know, I know,” Danny said. He paused. Then: “Boy, these five minutes is sure taking a long time.” He was talking about the search of his car—which was only just now about to get started.

“Yeah, well,” McAuley said.

Nick came outside.

“We’re gonna be done soon,” the detective told Nick.

“Okay.”

Two investigators, Hensley one of them, stood by Danny Hembree’s vehicle. Hensley asked the YCSO investigator helping with the search, “Do we know what we’re looking for in here?”

“Rings, necklaces, jewelry,” the cop said. “Stuff like that.”

“Got it. Might as well get in there and start digging,” Hensley announced.