The Killing Kind

by M. William Phelps

  One of the last things Hembree told the YCSO before they handed him over to Hensley and Sumner was “Y’all would have never figured it out.” Hembree took pride in the fact that he had gotten away with the murders; it was important to him that he admitted to killing the girls—and that cops didn’t figure out he was the killing kind.

  Even as he went down in flames, Danny Hembree maintained that balance of power.

  He liked playing the role of the serial killer, a family member of Hembree’s later wrote to me in an e-mail. I believe Danny wants [the publicity]. It scratches [an] itch. No, you should not believe him. If anything was true . . . [it’s] that he is a liar.

  “We deal with bad guys on a daily basis,” Hensley commented. “Mr. Hembree proved to be a different breed altogether.”

  Law enforcement was spot-on with its assessment of Danny Hembree. Because what no investigator knew then was that Hembree wasn’t finished giving up bodies.

  There would be more.

  CHAPTER 55

  Danny Hembree was sleeping when Hensley and Sumner woke him at 6:39 A.M. on December 5.

  Ryan Whetzel met them outside the door. “He’s been sleeping for several hours. I recorded the interview. I’ll get you a copy as soon as I can. The tech guy, who does that, only comes in one day a week.”

  “Thanks. You can’t get me that right now?”

  “No.”

  Thus, Hensley and Sumner were not going to be able to have a look at Hembree’s confession before they interviewed him. And they had no time to wait for the DVD.

  This made Hensley a bit uncomfortable.

  “I would have liked to have known what he had told them exactly,” Hensley said. “So I could design my questioning around what he’d already said. But sometimes you don’t have all the luxuries you want and you have to make do with what you have.”

  “He’s fine with y’all coming to get him—he knows,” Whetzel said.

  Quite contrary to what some close to Hembree later said about him lapping up the media attention that becoming known as a serial killer would yield, one of the first things Hembree said to Hensley upon greeting him was “I’ll tell y’all everything, but no media. Y’all keep the media away.”

  “He was firm about this,” Hensley remembered. “He did not want a camera in his face.”

  After Hembree used the restroom, he asked Hensley to loosen his handcuffs. “They’s hurting me.”

  Hensley didn’t see a problem. Hembree realized he controlled the what, where, when, why, and how. As long as he talked, everything was going to be done on his terms.

  “He started making demands,” Hensley said. “We had to give him what he wanted. We had no reason not to make him comfortable, because we’re anticipating that he’s going to tell us he killed these girls, but, more importantly, maybe give us corroborating information.”

  Hensley had heard Hembree only wanted to discuss the murders with Gaston County. Hensley wanted to know if this was true. Had Hembree actually felt that way?

  “Yup,” he confirmed. They walked out of the building. “It was never theirs in the first place.”

  Hembree rode by himself behind a cage in a patrol car, while Hensley and Sumner followed. The game plan they discussed along the way was simple: Allow Hembree the comforts he desired, as long as he talked.

  They arrived at 7:39 A.M., according to Hensley’s report. The next few days would be well documented by videotape, audio recordings, and written reports detailing every move Danny Hembree made, along with everything he said.

  “Can I have some coffee?” Hembree asked. He sat down in what was now a familiar chair inside the box at the GCPD.

  “You want us to get you something to eat?” Hensley asked.

  Hembree wanted to wait on the food.

  By 7:50 A.M., Hembree was Mirandized.

  Hensley sat back, relaxed. “Well, man, what do you want to tell us? Is there something in particular?”

  Hembree broke into the same story of seeing and talking to Heather that night while she was in the bathtub. He explained what happened on October 17 in detail, same as he had to the YCSO, backing up, pretty much, what Sommer Heffner and her boyfriend had told police. But it was that time period after Hembree dropped Sommer off at her boyfriend’s house and he took off with Heather alone that Hensley and Sumner were interested in. What took place between the time Hembree was alone with Heather and ten days later, when Heather’s body was found in that South Carolina ditch? That was the question.

  Hensley and Sumner waited.

  Hembree took a breath and explained in detail how he killed Heather Marie Catterton.

  CHAPTER 56

  Hembree pulled up to his mother’s house around 4:30 A.M. on October 18. He had already decided Heather was going to die. He wasn’t “mad at her,” he claimed. Nor was he angry. He wasn’t in some sort of violent rage, pissed off that Heather would not do what he said. He wasn’t obsessed with Heather. Nor did he have some secret fantasy focused on her—at least, none that he admitted. Hembree said he loved Nicole. Heather’s death had nothing to do with any sexual gratification or sexual fantasy. Instead, Hembree decided, he was going to save Heather from a life of hell that he knew was ahead. It was a life on the streets, Hembree claimed, that had started back when Heather was twelve years old.

  Hembree’s extreme racist slant on life in general was evident as he talked about how, because Heather was “never going to stop fucking niggers,” he needed to swoop in and rescue her. He could not allow her to continue with the lifestyle she had chosen for herself. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t what she wanted deep down inside.

  Hembree believed he was doing Heather and her family a favor.

  Inside the house, they hung out in Hembree’s den, a part of the house near his bedroom that Hembree and his mother had designated for him alone. Hembree had sex with Heather, he claimed. When they finished, he thought: She’s too heavy to carry down the stairs—how am I going to get her into the basement? He didn’t want to kill Heather in his bedroom or in the den. He decided the best place was downstairs in the basement. He had planned on storing Heather downstairs after he killed her, anyway, but never said why.

  “Hey, Heather,” Hembree said after sex, “we’ve got us some lighters downstairs in a cabinet inside the washroom. Can you go and fetch me one?”

  Heather got up and walked down into the basement. All she had on, Hembree said, was that Hollister hoodie and toe socks. The rest of her clothes were on the floor in his bedroom.

  Hembree’s mother was not home. She had gone away for a few days.

  With Heather downstairs, Hembree got up. Without saying anything, he approached Heather from behind. She had a flashlight in her hand and was searching a dusty shelf in the basement, looking for a lighter.

  With “some kind of cord” (he could not recall what it was exactly), Hembree walked up behind Heather without speaking and, placing the cord around her neck, pulled it tight, choking her.

  Heather reacted by thrashing her arms and swinging the flashlight and smashing Hembree in the head. (“It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, though,” Hembree felt the need to add as he told this story.)

  Heather tried pulling at the cord with her hands as she struggled for air.

  Hembree wrestled her down to the concrete floor.

  Within a few moments, Heather stopped fighting.

  But she was not dead.

  Hembree let go of the cord and placed both his hands on her nose and mouth and pushed down tightly. He was simultaneously trying to cut off her air and hold her down.

  As one final reaction, Heather’s legs kicked and her body convulsed. She was fighting for her life, instinctively. The way Hembree talked about this moment, he described it as calm and not at all violent. As he talked about it, with his hands handcuffed, Hembree acted out the “process”—the perfect word choice—of murdering Heather, saying coldly that it wasn’t “easy.”

  “She just wouldn’t die. . . .”


  Cutting off Heather’s air supply—effectively suffocating her to death—took “ten to fifteen minutes,” Hembree explained. He even placed his bare foot on her neck at one point to hold her down. “And she still wouldn’t die. . . . I mean, I didn’t want to hurt her or nothing—I just wanted her to go to sleep.”

  If Hembree’s description of the murder is true, Heather suffered horribly—all while staring into the eyes of the man taking her life.

  Because it was so difficult to suffocate Heather with his bare hands, Hembree grabbed a plastic shopping bag nearby and placed it over her head, pulling it tightly around her neck as he held her down.

  This method seemed to work better; but, still, Heather wouldn’t die.

  So as he struggled to suffocate Heather with that plastic bag, her legs and arms still flailing wildly, Hembree hauled off and slammed the middle of Heather’s chest with a hammer fist, hoping to stop her heart.

  According to Hembree’s recollection, this worked.

  Heather, just a child, was now dead.

  Confident his victim had breathed her last, Hembree walked upstairs. He sat down in front of the television and watched TV.

  Feeling famished, he then made himself a sandwich.

  CHAPTER 57

  Danny Hembree would not stop talking. He enjoyed this moment of giving to the GCPD what it wanted from the beginning.

  Answers.

  What Hembree would say next regarding Randi Saldana’s murder, however, was something no one had heard.

  “I killed Randi for drugs.”

  Hensley asked Hembree what he meant.

  “Stella and [her sister] and Shorty gave me an eight ball and a couple of girls and asked me to kill Randi.”

  Thus, according to Hembree’s version, Randi’s murder was a conspiracy.

  Hembree explained. He said when he and Nicole and Randi went over to Nick’s house that night and got caught smoking crack inside Nicole’s bedroom, it had been Stella’s plan.

  “Stella acted like she got mad at Randi for not giving her [something],” Hembree said. As for Stella telling Nick on them, “This was Stella’s way to remove her from the situation [and] put me and Randi alone so I could later kill her.”

  From Nick’s, Hembree said, they all drove to Shorty’s, where Randi and Nicole exchanged jewelry. Then he and Randi staged that scene. Nicole got pissed. Randi left.

  “I never gave Nicole any of Randi’s jewelry.”

  From here, Hembree gave Hensley and Sumner a meticulous, chilling account of Randi’s murder.

  CHAPTER 58

  Hembree drove up on Randi as she walked down the street away from Shorty’s. According to him, he didn’t need to ask her to get in. Back at Shorty’s, they’d planned to go hang out and smoke some drugs.

  As they drove, Hembree said he knew immediately he was going to kill Randi. But instead of taking Randi to his mother’s house (Momma was home), Hembree drove Randi out to that abandoned trailer. He gave no purpose for taking Randi there as opposed to his mother’s house, other than Momma being home.

  By nature, serial killers rely on comfort zones they feel safe in, either as a dump site or a kill space. This trailer was a place where Hembree felt he was able to control his girls and whatever situation came up. If Sommer’s boyfriend, George, was not with Heather, Sommer, and Danny as they partied inside the trailer, the possibility existed that Hembree would have murdered Sommer and Heather that night there.

  “Serials always want to be in their comfort zones—which means places they feel safe and have less chance of being caught,” John Kelly later commented. “Inside an abandoned trailer, Mr. Hembree could pretty much do what he wanted.”

  Indeed, Hembree was master of that domain.

  With Randi walking into the trailer beside him, Hembree reveled in that feeling of power he craved so much. Now all he needed was a trigger—something to convince himself it was the right time to take Randi’s life.

  At one point, Randi “had made some statement about Heather’s death” that riled Hembree. There was that impetus, putting him in the mood. He didn’t recall exactly what Randi had said, but the implication was that Randi had either asked him if he killed Heather, or accused him of the crime. There were other triggers within this moment that Hembree later talked about, but this one had stirred Hembree’s thirst for blood the most.

  Once inside the trailer, he did not waste time. As soon as Randi turned her back, he grabbed her by the neck with two hands and “choked her out.” Randi was so scared, Hembree claimed, “she done pissed herself.”

  “What are you doing?” Randi managed to say as Hembree lunged at her.

  Choking her unconscious, Hembree knew Randi wasn’t dead. So he sat and stared at her.

  When Randi “came to,” she said, “Why’d you do that?” She was coughing and gagging, trying to catch her breath. She was spitting mucus on the floor.

  “What you said about Heather. You disrespected me.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. Get me out of here,” Randi demanded. “I don’t want to be trapped inside here with no killer.”

  “Look, everybody got me down as a suspect who done killed Heather,” Hembree said.

  “I’m sorry,” Randi replied. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  Randi must have known by then that Hembree was capable of murder, after he choked her unconscious solely because she had mentioned Heather.

  “Look, you want me to just take you back up the road,” Hembree suggested. “Or do you want to go over to Momma’s house?”

  “It’s cold in here . . . ,” Randi said, hugging herself. She had dirt all over her from being on the floor. Her short-cropped hair was matted in the back. She had marks on her face. Her neck was sore. Her pants were soaked in her own urine.

  After a brief moment, Randi said, “Take me to your momma’s.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can I take a shower when we get back there?”

  “Yeah. But we gotta wait until Momma goes to sleep so I can sneak you in.”

  When they got to Hembree’s mother’s house, Danny parked his car and told Randi to be quiet. He needed to sneak her in through a window on the side of the house. He gave police no reason why.

  They tiptoed through the yard like burglars, brittle leaves crunching underfoot. Then they made it over to Hembree’s bedroom window.

  “Shhh,” Hembree said, a finger to his lips. Tree branches cracked and popped like burning firewood as they moved around. In the deep darkness of the night, far away, a dog yelped. Beyond that, it was quiet. Suburban serenity. All of Hembree’s neighbors were sound asleep.

  Hembree pushed open his window, helped Randi get up onto the edge of the windowpane, and pushed her on the ass, heaving her into his room.

  He then climbed in behind her, so he claimed. And as he mentioned this fact during the interview, something happened. Hembree stopped himself. He stared at the table. He collected his thoughts for a brief moment as he took that carefully constructed pause (perhaps realizing that this part of the story didn’t gel), and then blurted out, almost as a correction, “I climbed back out [the window] and went in [through the back door] and told Momma I was home.”

  He then walked from his mother’s room down the hallway into the den just outside his room. Randi was sitting on the couch.

  Hembree turned on the TV in the den. Momma was reading in bed, maybe thirty feet away.

  “Momma never comes down there, because she know I like to watch porn and shit,” he told Hensley and Sumner.

  After watching television for “ten minutes,” while sitting on the couch next to Randi, Hembree presumed Momma was sleeping. Without saying a word, he reached over and, without warning or fanfare, strangled Randi down to the floor.

  He gave no explanation regarding what he was thinking at the time. All Hembree could recall from this chilling moment was “She went pretty fast. A lot faster than Heather did.”

  Hembree didn’t know, however, if Randi was ali
ve or dead moments later when he cocked his fist back and punched her as hard as he could, right above her nose, between her eyes.

  This injury caused a tremendous amount of blood, which now spilled all over the couch. The floor. All over Randi.

  Shit . . . , Hembree thought.

  He looked for a comforter or blanket, found one, and placed it over Randi.

  Then he went into his bedroom and rested for “two or three hours,” or until he was certain Momma was sleeping deeply. During the ordeal, Hembree later claimed, Momma never left her room.

  When he went back for Randi, he stripped off her clothes, rolled her up in the blanket, hoisted her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and walked her through the house. As he got to the kitchen, he realized she was still bleeding and had left a trail of blood throughout the house from the den to the kitchen.

  Son of a bitch.

  After Hembree had murdered Heather and gotten himself something to eat, he went back and checked on Heather to make sure she was dead. Downstairs in the basement of his mother’s house was a closet. Hembree had placed Heather in the closet and left her there. It was days before he removed Heather from the closet and dumped her in that South Carolina ditch. Considering that it had worked for him once already—serial killers always fall back on the comfort of routine—he dragged Randi down the same basement stairs after, he said, cleaning up the “damn mess she made” (blaming the victim, of course!).

  Then he stuffed Randi in the same closet.

  She stayed there for several days.

  “Danny, what’s all that blood on the couch in your den?” Hembree’s mother asked him a day after he murdered Randi. Hembree had tried best he could to clean it up, but there were stains on the couch itself, two of the cushions, a pillow, and the rug. None of the stains would come out.