Innocent Victims
Page 7
Richardson and Nelligar tracked down Smith, whose brief union with Julie Czerniak gave him hours’ worth of stories.
“She’s big in mass murders,” Smith said. “She watches all them movies about it. She talked about that Lizzie Borden, how that was the way to commit a murder—in the nude. That way the blood would wash off the skin and there’d be no evidence to find.”
Nelligar squirmed, uncomfortable with having to spend investigation time in Keith Smith’s living room. The informant was all chest and no neck, and he spoke in a soft drawl that forced others to lean forward. But nothing else about him was soft. He reveled a little too much, for Nelligar’s taste, in mixing with the drug culture, turning in people who thought he was a friend.
Smith’s niche was getting young girls to run their mouths about where and how to get drugs. His supervisors at the narcotics unit said he was a pain to work with. They said he had a bad habit of embellishing stories, but he could flat out set up a drug deal.
“I’d drain you, then I’d bust you,” Smith said.
Smith remembered Julie setting up a number of buys for him, but when the marijuana or cocaine was supposed to change hands, the deal would fall through. Only one deal came off. Smith said Julie bought a couple of ounces of pot from a soldier named “Ox,” a burly guy wearing a red bandanna and a football jersey. Smith said a blue van with no license plate was often parked in Ox’s yard, and he always saw Ox with the same friend—a skinny guy with shoulder-length hair who drove a Vega.
“Okay. Who is Ox?” Richardson asked Smith, leaning forward. Julie’s drug connection could very well solve the case.
“I don’t know. Ox went underground before we arrested him.”
Julie denied knowing who or what an “Ox” was, and said she never talked about mass murders or Lizzie Borden with Smith or anyone. But she didn’t deny introducing Smith to a car dealer named “Bob” at Fayetteville Auto Sales, a used car lot with a trailer at the top of Summer Hill Road. Julie and her friends drank Wild Turkey and Jack Daniels with the car salesmen. Julie tried to buy an “8-ball” of cocaine worth $250, Smith said, to finish setting up Bob for arrest. While Smith and another agent waited below the car lot on Summer Hill Road, the manager came out and asked them to move along. “We throwed out badges in his face and told him we were sitting there waiting on a buy,” Smith said.
Julie came back to the car with no money and no drugs. She told him the deal would go down that weekend while she baby-sat at the Eastburns, Smith said. But Julie’s mother put an end to her daughter’s involvement with drug informants. Smith and his agent were out the $250 they’d given Julie to make the deal.
By the time Richardson and Nelligar had finished their interviews with Julie and Keith Smith, their heads were spinning. Neither was sure what to make of it all, or even if it connected to the murders. But they knew for certain that Julie Czerniak was a ball of fire who liked to talk.
“Her friends say you can’t take too much of what she says seriously,” Richardson told Beaver. “But she’s got connections to the drug world. I wonder if anybody ever found out she was setting them up.”
Chapter Nine
William VanStory was not nearly as interested in Julie Czerniak, her letters to Jeffrey MacDonald, or her ties to the drug world. From the moment Jack Watts banged on Tim Hennis’s door, the state’s list of suspects was reduced to one. While VanStory waited for the SBI lab to link semen, hair, and fingerprints to his suspect, the circumstantial evidence against Hennis continued to mount.
Gloria Mims, a neighbor in Summer Hill, reported that she’d seen a tall, blond man walking toward the Eastburn home late on May 9. Gloria, who’d moved to the neighborhood just six days before, told VanStory that, like Patrick Cone, she had seen a white Chevette parked along a chain-link fence across the street from her house.
Ms. Mims had called her boss at the textile mill at 11:15 P.M. to see if she was needed for the third shift. When she started toward her bedroom, her dog began barking frantically. Ms. Mims looked out her living room window and watched a man walk up Summer Hill Road.
VanStory showed her photos of Hennis, but she said the man she saw had longer hair. Gloria Mims couldn’t say for sure that it was Hennis. But VanStory thought the coincidence was too great—she and Cone must have seen the same man. He theorized that Hennis had returned to his car to get something for his cleanup before heading back to the Eastburns.
A more conclusive sighting of Hennis near Summer Hill occurred the day before he was arrested. Deputy Michael Tolbert had staked out Fort Bragg’s entrance from Yadkin Road, a half mile from Summer Hill and charted all white Chevettes driving on or off the base. Around 4:30, Tolbert noticed one with Alabama tags. The driver circled a parking lot across from the entrance to Summer Hill, then headed back toward Fort Bragg. As he passed Tolbert, he slowed to a crawl.
The deputy told VanStory that Tim Hennis had glared at him as he drove by. VanStory was elated—the criminal always returns to the scene, he thought.
Hennis had another encounter with a deputy the next morning, 20 hours before his arrest. Deputy Glenwood McLaurin, with orders to check all white Chevettes, stopped Hennis just inside Fort Bragg at 5:30 A.M. on the sergeant’s way to work. The deputy asked for Hennis’s home and work address, his home and work number, and his Social Security number. VanStory considered it odd that the husky blond soldier never asked why he was being questioned.
“What’s he got in his background?” VanStory asked his detectives. “Maybe we can get something good there, too.”
Watts quickly learned that Hennis handled money poorly. Nancy Maeser, the former girlfriend, told him that Hennis was always broke. His rap sheet revealed four convictions for writing bad checks in Minnesota and one in Fayetteville. A Minnesota prosecutor once charged him with felony theft by check, a sign that the local cops had tired of the bouncing checks, though the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor.
Hennis’s bank statement for April and May confirmed he was living from one paycheck to the next. His April 25 checking balance was minus $3.18. In early May, the manager of Suzanne Barlow Realty sent Hennis a letter threatening eviction because his $310 May rent had not been paid. During his lunch break the day of the murders, Hennis paid his rent, including a $31 late fee.
“Can you hold the check a couple of days?” he asked. The check cleared a few days later, after Hennis got paid.
So he’s not above breaking the rules for a few dollars, VanStory thought. He told Watts to work on a link between Hennis and Kathryn Eastburn’s stolen 24-hour bank card, a piece of missing evidence that had been used twice since the murders. The first time was at 10:52 P.M. on Friday, May 10, the night after the murders. The card was used again the next morning at 8:56. Each time someone took $150, about the amount Hennis needed for rent.
Watts was quick to point out that after Hennis’s backyard fire, the card was never used again. He found the four bank customers who had used their card before and after the stolen Eastburn card, but no one remembered seeing a person matching Tim Hennis’s description.
VanStory knew Hennis’s money woes wouldn’t be enough to convict him, so he sent detectives to visit Hennis’s hangouts. “There’s got to be skeletons out there,” he said.
Watts uncovered an incident at Bennigan’s, where Hennis worked part-time in the kitchen. He’d lost his temper, backing an employee against a wall in a dispute over cleanup. Watts also got a report that Tim and Angela Hennis fought the day before the murders while they were in a hobby class learning to build a dollhouse for Kristina. Embarrassed classmates, the report said, had stopped and stared at the bickering couple.
Watts kept digging. He checked Hennis’s military record and learned that the soldier had been kicked out of helicopter flight school for lying to a captain. Hennis apparently had taken it poorly and fought the decision to no avail. Maybe Hennis had a thing for officers, VanStory reasoned. Maybe he took out his revenge on Captain Gary Eastburn’s family.
A 24-year-old Rochester, Minnesota, woman had read of Hennis’s arrest on triple-murder charges in the local Post-Bulletin. “Ex-Rochester man charged for rape, triple slaying in N.C.,” the headline said. A mug shot from a worthless check arrest at the Olmsted County Sheriff’s Department ran with the story.
The woman called Rochester’s Rape Crisis Line. “That guy raped me,” she said.
Thirteen years earlier, the woman, then eleven, had been riding her bicycle home when two boys stopped her. One of them, an eighth- or ninth-grader, pulled her off the bike and raped her. Tim Hennis lived across town at the time. The woman filed a report, but no arrests were made.
The Minnesota girl agreed to travel to Fayetteville and testify against Hennis if VanStory could figure out a way to get her on the stand. A standard evidence rule bars a prosecutor from introducing other crimes the defendant may or may not have been responsible for. But if Hennis testifies, VanStory thought, his credibility will become an issue. Then the Minnesota girl on rebuttal evidence can refute any character Hennis professes to have. VanStory could envision the cross-examination: “Did you, Mr. Hennis, in 1972, rape this woman?” Just raising the question would be devastating.
Beaver wouldn’t give VanStory the chance. When he first heard about the girl, he asked a lawyer in Minnesota to check it out. He then confronted Hennis, who said it had to be a bluff by the state. The Minnesota lawyer was no help—juvenile cases are not open to the public.
Bob Hennis wanted to fly Richardson to Minnesota to find out how that rumor started, but Beaver wasn’t interested and insisted they concentrate on the evidence building around them in Fayetteville. His intrigue with the house, still guarded by crime-scene tape six weeks later, had not waned. The SBI experts aren’t finished, VanStory kept saying.
“Well, I can’t wait,” Beaver told him. “I need in the house.”
“I can’t wait for them to come back, either,” VanStory told him. “They’ve even got sperm with the tails intact.”
In late June, Nelligar drove by the Eastburns’ and saw cars in the driveway and on the street. The crime-scene tape was gone and Gary and his friends were packing up.
Gary had decided to clean the house to keep from losing his $400 security deposit. He understood that his real estate agent, David Lain, would collect from his insurance company and pay Gary back. Even as Nelligar drove by, a distraught Gary was painting over black fingerprint powder, replacing drain traps from the master bathroom sink and washing machine, and putting up wallpaper in the bathroom. Before the summer was over, he would learn Lain’s insurance company would not pay. Gary would be stuck with the $2,000 bill.
A frantic Nelligar left Summer Hill and headed to Beaver’s office. “Somebody’s packing boxes at the Eastburn house,” he yelled.
That couldn’t be. They said they would hold the house for us. A raging Beaver flew into VanStory’s office. “Have you released the house?” he demanded.
“Not to my knowledge,” VanStory said. “But I’ll find out.”
Within an hour, he had an answer. It was an accident, he said. The grand jury had met that day and returned murder and rape indictments against Timothy B. Hennis. With indictments in hand, Watts figured he was finished with the house. He told Eastburn he could go ahead and pack for his move to Wichita, Kansas, his next Air Force assignment.
Beaver didn’t see anything accidental about the house release. The moment the grand jury had returned the indictments, he argued, his client had a constitutional right to the crime scene. From the moment the case began, Beaver had intended to hire his own forensic experts to go through the house. VanStory, not accustomed to defense lawyers sending their own forensic experts inside the crime scene, didn’t see why releasing the scene was such a big deal. He’d make the SBI’s reports available to Beaver and that would have to be good enough.
But Beaver persisted. “You said you’d let me in that house and I want in,” he told VanStory. The prosecutor, weary of Beaver’s demands, said he’d meet the defense team at 367 Summer Hill the next morning.
But it was too late. When Beaver, Richardson, and Nelligar arrived at 8 o’clock, Beaver’s fears were confirmed. The house was a disaster. Boxes of Gary Eastburn’s belongings were piled high all over the house. Someone had already started cleaning the walls. Bottles of cleaning solutions lined the hearth. How, Beaver fumed, would a forensic expert ever find useful evidence in this house?
“I can’t believe this,” Beaver muttered.
Beaver fiddled with the lights on his video camera, trying to film what was left of the crime scene. VanStory silently walked beside him, indifferent to Beaver’s rage. As the group prepared to leave, movers pulled into the driveway. “Put a stop to it,” Beaver told VanStory. “We’re going to argue this before a judge.” VanStory sent the movers home, even though Gary would have to pay them $300 just for showing up.
Beaver filed a motion immediately before Judge E. Lynn Johnson of Cumberland County, asking him to freeze the house long enough to get experts inside.
VanStory argued the house had already been given to Gary Eastburn and was out of the state’s control. The judge agreed and the movers cleaned out the house the next day.
VanStory had won his first clash with Beaver in the Hennis case.
Tim Hennis, locked away in jail, never got over it. A wave of anger directed at William VanStory welled up inside him. “Stupid son of a bitch,” he raved. His attitude deteriorated from that point. The likable guy with the puppy dog face disappeared.
Chapter Ten
The case’s next major battle would be Patrick Cone, the eyewitness who said he’d passed Hennis in the street. If Cone was right, Hennis’s lawyers could start preparing arguments for mercy. If he was wrong, why had he bothered to come forward? Billy Richardson wrestled with that question in June and found some surprising answers.
Defense lawyers don’t usually deal with state’s witnesses before trial, but nothing says they can’t. Richardson ordered Nelligar to find Cone, but he quickly discovered it wasn’t going to be easy. Patrick had quit his job cleaning dorms for his dad at Methodist College and that his parents’ house was a place for Patrick to pick up some meals, but not to lay his head.
“I don’t expect Pat around till his money runs out next week,” his father, John Cone, told Nelligar.
“He’s fishing with his uncle in Raeford,” his mother, Betty Cone, said the next day.
“He’s at his grandmother’s in Fayetteville,” Cone’s younger sister said a few days later.
“I’ve got no control over him,” Betty Cone said almost a week later. “I’ve told him y’all are looking for him. Don’t guess he wants to talk to you.”
On June 20, Nelligar got lucky. The friend Pat had actually been hanging out with for weeks had been busted on charges of stealing a stereo. Nelligar caught Pat at home, where he had stopped to change clothes and clean up before going back out. “Why ya’ been hiding out, Pat?” Nelligar asked.
“Protection, man, protection,” Cone said. “My mom and dad couldn’t protect me, you know what I’m saying? The police couldn’t protect me. They couldn’t even protect the people that got killed. How they gonna protect me? So I went to where, if anything did happen, I’d have some backup.”
Nelligar persuaded him to ride to Richardson’s law office, a paneled room with diplomas on the walls, family pictures on the desk, and a basketball hoop in the corner. Cone settled uneasily into an armchair across from Richardson and told his story to the defense for the first time.
Some of the details struck Richardson as odd. Cone insisted the white Chevette made a U-turn before leaving the neighborhood, as if the driver wanted to chase him down. Then the car made another U-turn before heading out of Summer Hil
l. Richardson had not heard the detectives talk about the driver turning to stalk Cone before leaving.
Richardson asked him about the photo lineup. Beaver and Richardson knew the case hinged on the lineup, and they thought it had been unfair. Cone had told the police from the beginning that the man he saw had a military haircut and wore a black jacket. In the lineup of six photos Watts had prepared, Tim Hennis was one of only two men with a short haircut and the only one wearing a black jacket.
Though he said five of the photos “looked nothing like this guy I seen out there that night,” Cone said it took him more than 30 minutes to pick photo number two from the center of the page. Richardson asked him how he finally selected Hennis.
“I’m only a human being and I said ‘God,’ and then I said to myself, ‘God, oh please don’t let me pick nobody wrong ’cause you know I don’t want to put nobody in jail, ’cause I don’t want to go to jail.’ So I looked through there and said, ‘Damn, this guy number two, boy, you know, he looks just like the guy that I seen that night.’ But see, I wasn’t sure so I asked God if he’s in this lineup let me get him. And my mind said number two and I locked on it and said, ‘This is the guy right here.’”
“You’re sure it was him or you’re sure it looked like him?” Richardson asked.
“No, I was sure it was him.”
Richardson asked twice more if Cone was certain it was Hennis. Cone said he was.
He was just as certain that he’d seen that white car in the neighborhood as many as seven times before, each time parked along a dead-end street across from the Eastburns’.
Cone said he and four friends saw it as early as the previous fall when they were walking to a pickup basketball game. “It was parked there then,” Cone said. “And they said, ‘Hey man, we ought to, you know, take his hubcap’ or something like that and I wanted to play ball and that was that.”
Cone said he was certain Hennis drove away in the same car early on May 10. But Hennis had been in flight school in Alabama in the fall, and his car never had hubcaps.