“Where are you working?” Richardson asked.
“At Hardee’s in that intersection of Raeford Road and the bypass.”
The next day, Richardson and Nelligar went to Hardee’s. “I don’t know Patrick Cone,” the daytime manager said. Neither did the nighttime manager, who called other Hardee’s restaurants in town and found none that had hired a Patrick Cone.
Cone’s story nagged the lawyers and they began to wonder if Cone was sure about what he’d seen on Summer Hill Road in the middle of the night. Beaver drove to the Eastburn house, stood at the carport door, and looked out across the long, sloping front yard. His client’s purported walk down the driveway made no sense. If Cone was right, Hennis had killed three people, spent hours cleaning up the blood, then strolled down the center of the driveway, under a streetlight and onto Summer Hill Road, where he casually greeted a stranger. Why would a killer do that, Beaver asked, when he could walk in darkness through several front yards of oak and dogwood trees all the way back to the car? Cone’s story just didn’t fit the crime.
Beaver put himself in Cone’s shoes, videotaping as he walked down Summer Hill. When he got to the Eastburn driveway, he turned and attempted to film Nelligar’s car parked along the chain-link fence, where the Chevette was supposed to have been. But Nelligar’s car had disappeared behind branches hanging over the fence. Beaver looked up at the streetlight that would’ve lit Cone’s view of Hennis. It was covered by pine branches.
“We’ve got to reenact that night,” Beaver told Richardson. They hired the Fayetteville Observer’s Ken Cooke to take pictures of Richardson’s tall, blond brother-in-law walking down the Eastburn driveway in a dark jacket and toboggan.
Beaver and Cooke stood where Patrick Cone said he first saw Hennis some 187 feet from the Eastburn driveway. Richardson, Nelligar, and Lee Boughman, the Hennis model, waited in the driveway.
“All right, start walking,” Beaver yelled.
Then he waited. Maybe they hadn’t heard him.
“Have you started yet?”
Boughman was well into the street by now. “Didn’t you see me?”
The demonstration was a bust. They couldn’t see each other well enough to run the test and Cooke’s film was too dark to use. They were ready to end their failed experiment when David Hill, a neighbor who lived across the street and one lot down from the Eastburns’, approached them.
“What are y’all trying to prove?”
“We’re trying to see how Cone could’ve identified anybody out here,” Beaver said.
Hill shrugged. “I don’t know why everybody’s talking about that car he saw. There was a van out here that night.”
Hill’s daughter had seen a short, skinny guy with long, stringy blond hair beside a blue van. The man worried her enough that she told her father about him.
Hill told Beaver he’d walked toward the van, parked beside a wooded area directly across from the Eastburns’. A clean-shaven man with a crewcut climbed out the side door. Other voices came from inside.
“Y’all got a problem?” Hill asked.
“No, we just stopped to talk,” the man said.
Before Hill could get inside his home to call the sheriff’s department, the van cranked up and left.
Several weeks after the murders, Hill said he thought he saw the van for sale in the Winn-Dixie parking lot, right down Yadkin Road from Summer Hill. “Never saw that group out here before or since,” he told Beaver.
Beaver told Richardson they could check out Hill’s story later. They first had to figure out Patrick Cone’s walk home. The one person who could explain how he could’ve recognized a stranger on Summer Hill Road was Patrick Cone. Richardson had Nelligar resume his chase to find Cone.
They found him a few months later working again at Methodist College, truly regretting that he’d gotten involved in the case. He climbed in Nelligar’s Volvo wagon and rode with them out to Summer Hill.
Patrick Cone’s life until then had not been so complicated. As a child, he would sit beside his sister and brother on a sandy South Carolina creek bank and fish for crawdads. Nothing made him happier than fishing. He could lie back and think, disturbed only by an occasional tug on his line. Little was expected of him and he liked it that way.
Pat went to the Baptist church with his family in whatever military town John Cone’s Army career took him. The Cones also lived in Colorado and South Carolina, but North Carolina was Pat’s favorite. The fishing was better. His father had moved the family to Fayetteville in 1977 and retired from the Army.
School bored Pat. He became the class clown and quit after his junior year at Fayetteville 71st High School. He later tried to follow his father’s footsteps in the Army, but didn’t pass the aptitude tests.
He came and went as he wished, with the understanding that, at 5 A.M., he was ready to go to work with his dad. Pat bragged he could go several days in a row without sleeping. When he was home, he spent much of his time on the phone, often until his father chased him off. He’d move to a pay phone at the top of Summer Hill Road and talk all night.
Most of his late hours were spent at the home of Stephanie Richards, a rising high school senior and the mother of an eighteen-month-old baby girl. Pat would hang out at Step’s house in Ponderosa, a neighborhood across from Summer Hill where all the streets have cowboy names.
Stephanie reluctantly talked to Nelligar a couple of times during the summer of 1985. She said Pat left around 1:30 or 2 A.M. the night the Eastburns were murdered. Pat had told police he had left at 3 A.M., but she knew it was earlier than that, she said, because she had time to wash a load of clothes, hang them out on the back porch, take a shower, watch part of a movie, and still get to bed before 3 A.M.
Pat’s other late-night hobby was hanging out at convenience stores, feeding quarters to the Pac-Man machine and killing time. A night clerk at the Short Stop said Cone would come in two or three times a week between 2:30 and 6 A.M.
“He’s worthless. He just jives and dances around,” he said, adding that Cone always seemed like he’d been drinking.
A night clerk at the Dodge Store on Yadkin Road said Cone “was not all there” and came into the store drunk. Richardson heard the same from Cone’s friends throughout the summer. As Nelligar parked his car along the chain-link fence, where the Chevette had been on the night of the murders, Richardson wondered how much Cone had drunk that fateful night.
Richardson turned on his video camera and asked Cone to walk up the street as he had the night of the murders. Cone stopped at the third streetlight. “You say you first noticed him right under here?” Richardson asked.
“Yeah.”
Cone resumed walking in the middle of the road. The man, he said, walked at a normal pace in the lane to Cone’s left. Richardson had Cone stop where he met the man in the road.
“I want you to position Bob where Hennis would’ve been, or, you know, where you say my client was at,” Richardson said, “and I want you to position yourself where you were at.”
Cone lined up Nelligar and the two passed each other while Richardson taped them. Richardson and Nelligar traded a knowing look. They had already measured distances along Summer Hill Road. For Cone and the man to have met where Cone said they did, the man would’ve walked about 63 paces to Cone’s 37.
“Okay, and what did you do then?” Richardson asked.
“I just kept on walkin’,” Cone said.
“Let’s walk.”
Cone walked past the Eastburn driveway and stopped under pine trees that divided the Eastburn and Seefeldt yards. He looked back toward the car.
Richardson pointed his camera in the same line of view Cone had. Pine branches blocked his view a few feet in front of him, and trees along the chain-link fence obscured the car. “Where was the man at this point?” Richardson said.
“Standing just on the other side of that mailbox, looking at me.” Cone pointed to the last mailbox before the car.
“What did you do next?�
�� Richardson asked, turning the video on Cone.
“I said, ‘Let me go’ and walked on up here,” Cone said, taking about seven more steps up into the Seefeldts’ yard. Cone turned back toward the car, bent over, and put his hands on his knees, his view of the car improved.
“I saw the taillights come on,” he said. The man had walked about 25 steps in the time Cone walked seven.
“He’d gone from that mailbox to the car?” Richardson asked. “That’s a pretty good distance.”
“Oh yeah.”
Richardson tried to keep the conversation going with the tape running. Cone volunteered that, two mornings after the murders, he was helping his father pick up garbage at Methodist College, a short walk across the street from where the stolen Eastburn bank card was being used at Branch Banking & Trust.
The video had been a success.
The trio started back to the office to show Beaver. Cone wanted to go home. It was confusing when he walked through it. Some of those distances didn’t look right. He sat in the backseat and thought about all that had gone down that summer—his coming forward that Mother’s Day night, agonizing over the photo lineup, getting polygraphed, and now being hassled by the man’s lawyers.
And he thought about the pressure at home. So much pressure. His dad just didn’t believe him, cross-examining him every time he told the story differently. Tension grew until Pat could no longer discuss the case in front of him. Such a long way from fishing for crawdads in the backyard creek. Pat didn’t want to stay home anymore.
“I’m not sure that was the right guy.”
Richardson and Nelligar turned to look at Cone. “What was that, Pat?”
“I’m just saying I could’ve been mistaken.”
“How long have you felt that way?”
“I’ve been having these doubts for a while.”
Chapter Eleven
Patrick Cone gave Richardson reason to think he could win the trial. Now the lawyer needed to know if he could believe in his client. He took Nelligar with him to Fort Bragg to find out about the man whom the state said was capable of murder. How did he spend his days? What did his co-workers think of him? Were they threatened by him? The defense would learn that, instead of murderous rage, Sergeant Hennis was remembered as a family man who had built a dollhouse for his baby daughter the weekend he was accused of killing babies elsewhere.
Hennis’s 600th Quartermaster Company, a division of Fort Bragg’s 82nd Airborne, lacked the glamour the Army promised when it invited young men to Be All That They Could Be. The Airborne’s infantry jumped out of airplanes; the 600th Quartermaster made sure the parachutes worked for the infantry, a mundane job except when someone made a mistake, which could be fatal. Each wore a sharp knife at his side, as much a part of the uniform as dog tags. Sergeant Hennis sometimes carried two knives, in case one of his men forgot his, a prospect too common with the kids he worked with.
Sergeant Hennis’s job was to receive torn parachutes, make sure the repairs were done correctly, and ship them back out. The parachutes were heavy and the volume kept Hennis moving. But much of the work at the 600th was done by civilians who sewed torn parachutes or did paperwork. About 15 of them worked in Hennis’s company, including some older women who liked to bake cookies for the troops.
The soldiers in the 600th were mostly kids who’d found a place to spend the three-year hitch they’d volunteered to give the Army, a job taken at a time when they didn’t know what else to do. The Army was a regular paycheck, until they could think of something better. The hellions, the ones who wanted to fire weapons and see some action, joined the Special Forces, known as Green Berets, or the 82nd Airborne’s infantry. Five years earlier, when Tim Hennis signed up, he was one of those soldiers.
He had been twenty-two, divorced, in debt and stuck in Rochester, Minnesota. He had muddled through a couple of hourly jobs until he decided he needed to do something different. He walked into a recruiter’s office and saw some films of soldiers jumping out of airplanes. That, Hennis thought, would be one way of conquering my fear of heights. Before his test scores were in, he surprised the recruiter by volunteering for the 82nd Airborne.
His parents couldn’t believe it. This was the same son who, on a vacation in Arkansas years earlier, had been afraid to climb a fire tower.
“You mean you’re going to jump out of airplanes?” Marylou asked.
That’s what it meant. Within weeks, Hennis stood at the airplane’s door with Fort Benning, Georgia, sprawled out beneath him. If he didn’t jump, he knew someone would shove him. So he jumped. “The worst part is waiting for the chute to open. The second-worst is waiting to hit the ground.”
Jumping did little for his fear of heights. A few years later, Hennis met his family at Atlanta’s Westin-Peachtree Hotel. The landmark hotel has an elevator attached to the outside that climbs all 77 floors. By the time it reached the top, Hennis, dressed in his paratrooper’s uniform, had turned pale as a soda cracker, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead.
He transferred to Fort Bragg in 1981, where members of the Airborne were stars. “Special forces didn’t go out and get in trouble like the Airborne did,” Hennis said. “The jump school mentality. The rest of the world ain’t shit to you. Get out of our way, we can whip the world. I fell right into it.
“About 30 of us went out almost every night to the Dragon Club and got stinking drunk. We’d stay out till 1, then shine boots till 3:30 and get up at 5 for PT. But that wore out after about three months and I didn’t do that anymore.”
Sleeping in the woods also got old, as did digging holes big enough to hide vehicles. A year later, the Army announced it had a shortage of parachute riggers. Hennis and more than 100 others jumped at the chance to transfer out of the infantry.
But they couldn’t transfer out of having to make those hated battalion runs. Rows and rows of 400 sweaty soldiers would run in formation, trying not to trip over each other, chanting whatever crossed the mind of the gung-ho soldier who felt like leading them.
To the troops in the 82nd Airborne, the cadence was a chance to brag.
Mama, mama, look at me,
Look what Airborne done to me.
Make me run, make me sweat
but we’re too tough to lay down yet
Four hundred voices repeated it on command, over the thud of 800 feet hitting the pavement.
Four miles of this. The Army at its 6 A.M. worst.
The 600th Quartermaster ran every Friday, once a month joining several other companies for a battalion run. Sergeant Timothy Hennis, the leader of a nineman squad, thought the company runs were bad enough—the six-foot-four Hennis struggling to chop his steps to keep from trampling the GI in front of him—but the battalion runs were much worse. With more soldiers, the “accordion effect” was more severe. Shorter soldiers in front would tire and slow down, causing the ones behind to pile up. Then they would catch a second wind and take off again, the taller ones in the back having to sprint to catch up. For soldiers like Hennis, the accordion’s ripples could turn a four-mile run into an odyssey of sprints and stops.
Hennis avoided it by running road guard. In exchange for wearing an orange vest and carrying a flashlight, a handful of soldiers would run ahead of formation to stop traffic, wait at an intersection until the battalion passed, then run on their own until the next intersection.
Road guards could turn around, run backward, take long strides, and laugh when the others jammed together. Road guards didn’t have to sing. Road guards could run beside each other, talking about who they met at the Dragon Club the night before or how much they hated battalion runs.
Hennis made formation at 5:30 A.M. on May 10 and ran road guard 30 minutes later, two and a half hours after he’d supposedly passed Patrick Cone on Summer Hill Road. He was his usual Hennis self, cruising with ease through the four miles, dancing outside the formation as only a road guard could.
Hennis ran without effort, carrying no burdens from the murderous
ordeal he’d be accused of six days later. No one in his battalion saw scratches on his arms or legs. His performance on the run had nearly been forgotten until his arrest six days later, when every soldier in the 600th Quartermaster reviewed the sergeant’s attitude and demeanor.
A month later, Richardson and Nelligar sought those soldiers as witnesses. With Nelligar giving directions, Richardson negotiated Fort Bragg’s streets lined with tanks, barracks, and open fields suitable for bombing, the reason the government had built Fort Bragg 67 years earlier. A colonel searching for a place to test artillery had stopped for a Coca-Cola near Fayetteville and discovered miles and miles of scrub pines clinging to sandy ridges. Fort Bragg, named for a Confederate general, was born, and even in 1985, the rumblings of exploding shells rattled glasses and shook walls throughout Fayetteville.
Richardson and Nelligar had no idea what to expect from Hennis’s co-workers, but they had to find out. “If he’s screwy or weird, if he chases skirt, these people will know it,” Nelligar told Richardson. “Army people love to gossip. If he’s doing anything like that, word will get out.”
They found nothing of the sort.
“One of the best squad leaders I ever had,” said SP4 Minshin Maw-Naing. “He appears to be a good family man,” said Sergeant Carl Lee. “A quiet and easygoing soldier. He gets along with everybody,” chipped in CW2 Larry Deal.
“No one can believe he done it,” SP4 Sherry Whitney said, adding that Hennis had been made a “scapegoat.”
SP4 Marcelle Boyer, a clerk in Hennis’s shop, said she’d pulled assistant CQ duty for Hennis, which meant she had to sleep in the orderly room with him. He didn’t make any passes, she said. Angela called three times a day, Boyer said. Sergeant Hennis would take the calls at her desk. Boyer overheard the one about Angela spending Mother’s Day at her parents, a plan that apparently was fine with Hennis. “He’s really gentle,” Boyer said. “I’ve never seen him blow up.”
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