The Killing Kind (26 page)

H
ensley was not giving up on the second victim, a man Johnson and Hembree said they shot. Hensley and another investigator dug in and searched for any reports resembling what Hembree and Johnson had described.

Nothing.

Yet, just as they were about to abandon the search, a name popped out.

The guy, an African American, lived an hour’s drive south, in South Carolina.

After the guy answered the door, Hensley explained why they were there, adding, “I’m interested in charging Mr. Hembree for the incident that occurred with you in 1981, if you’re willing to prosecute.”

“Sure,” the man said. “Come in.”

Hensley didn’t know it then, but charging Hembree was going to be a problem. Hembree had admitted to the crime during a 1997 interview with police while being questioned about another crime. The victim in the case agreed then with the prosecutor not to prosecute because Hembree was facing a long sentence on other charges. So for his admission, Hembree got a break on this particular case.

The crime still resonated with the victim, however. It was a brutal attack, much more violent and racially motivated than Hembree or Johnson had admitted.

The guy was working as a night auditor at the Holiday Inn. Two guys walked into the hotel and asked him to make change. As soon as he opened the cash register, one of the men drew a (real) weapon and demanded all the cash.

After he handed them the money, they “then ordered me to climb over the counter and come with them.”

They tied his arms around his back with his belt. Then they stuffed him into the trunk.

“They even made him sing old slave and gospel songs,” one law enforcement official later recalled. Hembree and Johnson denigrated his heritage and his ancestors, calling him the n-word the entire time.

As they drove down the road, the man recalled, he was locked up inside the dark trunk, bouncing around, thinking they were going to kill him. He began to pray out loud.

“Then I heard one of them shout, ‘Shut up back there, nigger.’ ” And the man instantly knew that what they had in mind was probably torturing him simply because of his skin color—that it was a racially motivated hate crime of the worst type.

“What are you going to do with me?” the man yelled.

“We’re taking you somewhere and leaving you,” one of them shouted back.

When they got to the woods, they took him out of the trunk and blindfolded him with a shirt. The man listened as they discussed what to do next.

One of them said, “Put him back in the trunk.”

“What’s wrong?” the man asked when he heard this.

“It’s too busy around here.... We’ll have to take you somewhere else.”

After arriving at that second location, they took him out of the trunk and walked him deep into the forest. Then Hembree took off the guy’s blindfold while stating: “Lay on the ground.”

“I recall him telling us, too,” Hensley noted, “that they, at first, were looking for a cliff to toss him off, but couldn’t find one.”

While on the ground, the man heard a shot fired and jumped up. As he did this, he realized the gun was now pointed in his face. He didn’t know it right away, but he had been hit in the shoulder.

So he turned and ran away into the darkness of the woods as fast as he could.

“I don’t know if they tripped over each other [as they chased] me, because I heard one of [them] tell the other to ‘get up and get him!’ ”

The man soon found a house. And the “friendly” neighbor made him wait outside as the cops were called in.

Matt Hensley presented both cases to Locke Bell. Hensley wanted Hembree and Johnson charged. This was serious violence. Justice needed to be meted out. The victims deserved their day in court.

“Put it in the [Hembree] file,” Bell said. If nothing more, they would fight to get both cases presented as evidence of Hembree’s absolute thirst for violence.

I
n April 2010, Hembree, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, shackled at the wrists and legs, his lawyers flanking him, officially pleaded not guilty to charges of murdering Randi Saldana and Heather Catterton. The proceeding was a formality; it was brief and all business. Trial dates were discussed. It would be a year, likely, before Hembree’s first trial began.

The previous week, Heather’s family gathered at her grave site. March 29, 2010, would have been Heather’s eighteenth birthday. Nicole was taking her little sister’s death especially hard these days. As she thought about their lives, which seemed so long ago now, Nicole couldn’t reconcile a time she thought she would ever be standing at Heather’s grave celebrating her little sis’s entry into adulthood. It just didn’t register. Heather’s death was crushing to her family as they reminisced and thought about how things could have been different, what they could have done. Was there a sign Danny Hembree had given? Could they have seen his violent side and stopped it?

Hindsight—the ultimate reality check.

P
reparing for trial, now scheduled to begin in October 2011, Hembree’s attorney Richard Beam received a letter dated September 18, 2011, from Dr. Donald Jason, a private-practicing forensic professional specializing in pathology, licensed in the state of North Carolina. Dr. Jason’s credentials were impressive. He was an associate professor at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem in the pathology department on the autopsy service, and a county medical examiner in Forsyth County, as well as a designated forensic pathologist in North Carolina. Having earned a bachelor’s in chemistry, he attended the New York University School of Medicine. He went to St. John’s University School of Law.

“Before law school, I had done internship and residency in pathology and then served two years in the United States Navy as chief of pathology at several naval hospitals in New England,” he said in court, “and then after I left the Navy, I went to law school on the GI Bill and also went to work for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City on their staff.”

Jason’s letter focused on the “cause” of Heather’s death specifically. Here was Hembree’s specialist giving his opinion regarding how Heather had died. After all, if she wasn’t murdered, how could the state argue that in front of a jury?

It seemed to be a reach, considering that Hembree had admitted to strangling Heather and suffocating her with a plastic bag.

Dr. Jason reviewed all of the reports surrounding Heather’s death, some thirty pages of documents, on top of 118 photographs. He read through Hembree’s “discussion,” as he put it in his letter, with police on December 5, 2009.

How “discussion” was spun from “admission” or “confession,” the doctor never said.

Beam was most interested in a paragraph halfway down page one:
Cause of Death,
it read. It was Jason’s professional opinion with “reasonable medical certainty” that Heather’s death
[could not] be determined scientifically from the findings of the autopsy, including toxicological analysis.

So the doctor was saying there was no way, based on the autopsy results from the state pathologist, to determine how Heather had died. He was putting into question the findings of the state and taking them to task for determining that Heather was murdered when the results of the autopsy did not, in his opinion, back up that assumption.

Jason went on to note the “basis” for such a contrary opinion. He used the state’s pathologist’s own words in her original autopsy report against her, noting how he “agreed” with the state’s contention that the cause and manner of death are “undetermined.” In Jason’s view, the “only positive finding at autopsy,” which was related to “the cause of death,” was the existence of cocaine in Heather’s bloodstream. He was certain the level of cocaine in Heather’s blood at the time of her death was actually higher than the original autopsy had reported.

Why?

There is no definite lethal level of cocaine in the blood at autopsy due to chemical transformation,
Dr. Jason claimed. It all depended, the doctor explained,
[on the] manner in which the drug is taken, the worst being smoking crack cocaine.

He pulled back on the reins before actually blaming Heather’s death on her cocaine use, stopping just short of saying she died from an overdose:
It is not possible to state with certainty that the cause of death . . . was cocaine toxicity [and it is] also not possible to rule it out with certainty.

The doctor concluded that Heather could have died from a “variety of other means.” He described Heather’s “scrapes and bruises” as “minimal.” He was sure none of them could
either account for the death or indicate the mechanism of the death.

Dr. Jason said he’d studied everything. Given the “absence” of any major injuries or traumas to her body, the only conclusion he could draw was “cocaine toxicity” as the “most likely cause.” As a well-established pathologist, with an impressive résumé, he told Hembree’s lawyers it was his opinion that Heather, at age seventeen, overdosed on crack cocaine.

The idea that Hembree’s defense team had found a doctor to claim Heather died of a drug overdose did not surprise investigators.

“You know, this was the only case that they had,” Michel Sumner commented, “and, well, it was not a bad one. The fact that Mr. Hembree is a pathological liar—what is a lie and what isn’t a lie?—and you have some doctor-for-hire telling them what they want to hear.... I thought it was a good defense.” However, “We felt we had a great case with the evidence. But, of course, when you get to court, that is another thing entirely—a whole ’nother ball game.”

Indeed.

W
ith a death penalty case, jury selection was going to take forever and become the key to get what each side wanted out of the trial. Every detail and motion and argument surrounding a capital case is drawn out. Lawyers and judges always err on the side of caution, which takes time. Many lawyers say the voir dire process is the most important part of any murder trial: choosing the right group of people to hear the case.

On October 3, 2011, that process began in the
State of North Carolina
v.
Danny Robbie Hembree Jr.
The Honorable Judge Beverly “Bev” Beal presided; Locke Bell and Stephanie Hamlin argued for the state; Richard Beam and Brent Ratchford were there to try and save Hembree’s life.

At exactly 10:00
A.M.
in Courtroom 4D, things got going. It was set to be a battle royale—what, with both sides not even agreeing Heather had been murdered. The most volatile creature in it all, of course, was sitting and enjoying this moment—
his
moment in the spotlight. Hembree had been waiting for this day. This was where Hembree was not necessarily in his element, as the cliché might reckon, but was ready and willing to use any means necessary to disrupt, manipulate, strong-arm, and make a mockery of the proceedings. He was game to turn Lady Justice’s stage into a jester’s court. As he sat, Hembree was plotting and planning one hell of a ride for everyone, making sure to turn the spotlight on him and keep it there.

There were 124 jury candidates present on the first day. In addition, the media presence in the courtroom was intense, all of whom were ready to report every tick of the clock. Everyone was under the impression that the trial was going to last longer than your average murder case. Death penalty cases were intricate, lengthy processes with more sidebars and arguments than most other felony trials. If Danny Hembree was found guilty, there would be the equivalent to a second trial for sentencing as witnesses were presented, arguing for and against death. The days would be long, exhausting, and emotionally taxing. Testimony was going to be graphic and technical.

Thus, after a long speech by Judge Beal to the jury candidates, it was off and running with questions. Those questions took ten business days, with a few breaks and a weekend in between, in order to whittle down that pool to fifteen jurors whom everyone was happy with: seven males, five females, with two additional females and one male as alternates.

On October 18 (two years to the day Heather was never seen alive again), a calm and pleasant fall Tuesday morning in Gaston County (the temperature would actually hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit by midday), opening statements began with DA Locke Bell attacking Hembree’s character, letting jurors know what type of cold human being he was.

“February 2009!” Bell shouted, pacing the room in front of the jury. “Danny Hembree met Heather Catterton’s mother at a local hotel. The mother brought along her sixteen-year-old daughter, Heather Catterton. . . . You will
hear
that that night he
bought
her . . . and had sex with her in that motel room. That was in February. . . .”

Hembree sat, content. His hair, now mostly dark gray with patches of white, was well groomed and cut, fluffed up nicely as though he’d been to a salon. He wore a button-down tan dress shirt and Buddy Holly–style wired-rimmed glasses. He paid careful attention to everything going on around him.

Locke Bell spent the next few moments describing the night Hembree convinced Heather and Sommer to party. He talked about how Hembree manipulated the situation so that he could get rid of Sommer and her boyfriend, leaving him all alone with Heather.

“And you will hear how he got her to go down into the basement . . . dressed in a pair of socks and a little sweater that she put over her because she was cold.” He paused, leaving jurors momentarily with that image of a teenager, cold, young, naïve, walking into a dark, musty basement toward her death. “You will hear that as she went into the basement, holding a flashlight, the defendant took a piece of wire . . . and wrapped it around her
neck
and pulled her to the floor. And then you will hear how he took his hand with a plastic . . . bag”—here Bell mimed Hembree’s kill method—“and she fought for . . . fifteen minutes before she was dead.”

It went quiet in the courtroom. These chilling words caused everyone present to listen with rapt attention.

The seasoned DA turned his focus toward Randi next. He spoke of the fight Hembree initiated with Nicole so he could get Randi alone. As he outlined this situation with Randi, so close to explaining how Hembree had managed to get rid of Sommer and her boyfriend just two weeks prior, it was clear this was one of Hembree’s key MOs. He wasn’t the type of killer to sneak up on a stranger and force her into an alley. He wasn’t the type to stalk prostitutes—although he loved paying for sex—along rainy, slick downtown streets under the cloak of darkness, trolling along like the Green River Killer. He wasn’t the type to follow a woman home from her job and attack her in a parking garage, or manipulate college girls by feigning injury. Hembree was a killer who found a situation he felt comfortable in, a victim he felt comfortable with, and then used the situation to his advantage. He would get his chosen victim alone, thus giving him the opportunity to act out whatever twisted and perverted fantasy he had on that day. When it came down to it, Danny Hembree was a killer without a conscience—a predator who thought about, planned, and plotted each murder with meticulous attention to his sickening needs.

Then, after a bit of detail regarding how Randi was murdered and her body set afire, Bell said, “You will hear from a lot of witnesses. You will see photographs. And you will get to see on video and hear Danny Hembree talking about it. At the end of this case, we will come back and ask you to find the defendant guilty of first-degree murder of Heather Catterton.”

The DA spent exactly ten minutes outlining the state’s case because the nuts and bolts of this prosecution were simple: Hembree
admitted
killing Heather. The evidence backed up his claims. And the state of North Carolina had that evidence ready to lay out, piece by piece, witness by witness. DA Bell standing, bantering on and on in some long-winded opening, making promises and pointing out pieces of evidence, would not convince a jury of anything. The case the state had made, Bell knew, would.