Richardson had satisfied his curiosity about Hennis’s character—there was nothing at Fort Bragg that would hurt his client. But he knew that in a courtroom, Hennis’ co-workers wouldn’t be allowed to talk about what a great guy he was. The lawyer wondered what kind of alibi witnesses they would make. He asked if they could remember what Hennis was doing the Friday night after the murders, while the Eastburns’ stolen bank card was being used across town.
Most of them remembered that Hennis had CQ duty, a chore every sergeant had to suffer twice a month. Every night somebody in the 600th had to stay awake in the orderly room on Smoke Bomb Hill all night, a 24-hour shift known as “charge of quarters.” In the late hours, the CQ was a surrogate company commander who made sure the barracks were locked and that somebody bailed drunk soldiers out of jail or told them a family member had died. More often than not, the CQ waged a battle against drowsiness.
The company’s sergeants could count on CQ duty one weeknight and one weekend night a month. Hennis drew CQ duty on Friday, May 10, and Sunday, May 12, the reason Angela decided to visit her parents in Jacksonville, two hours away.
When the bank card was discovered, Hennis’s CQ duty turned out to be a blessing. He should easily be accounted for. The card had been used at 10:52 Friday night across the street from Methodist College, nine miles from Smoke Bomb Hill. The state contended that Hennis risked arrest on three murders for a $150 trip to the bank, a theory Richardson questioned immediately.
Leaving CQ post at 11 on a Friday would be risky. Soldiers drink and fight on Friday nights, and 11 o’clock is prime time for rowdiness. The Army frowns mightily on CQs leaving post, with retribution up to an Article 15, which can cost one or two months’ pay and shoulder stripes. If a CQ wanted to sneak off on an unauthorized errand, he would likely do it during his dinner break or in the wee hours of the morning, not at 11.
To use a stolen Branch Banking & Trust bank card, a Fort Bragg soldier would likely use the branch at Westwood Shopping Plaza, just five miles down the All-American Expressway, a major four-lane highway leading into Fort Bragg. Hennis regularly took the All-American into work, passing the exit for the BB&T on his right side.
Branch Banking and Trust had six branches in Fayetteville in 1985, but only two had 24-hour machines. The other machine at Methodist College was out of the way from Fort Bragg. In fact, lifelong residents of Fayetteville have a hard time explaining how to get from Fort Bragg to Methodist College. No major roads connect the military base to the northeast part of town, which Nelligar illustrated several times on drives between the two points. The quickest route, a series of turns through neighborhoods, took 16 minutes if the traffic lights were forgiving. Assuming Hennis knew that route, he would’ve been gone at least 35 minutes during peak time of Friday night CQ duty.
“If he left base, it should be there in the CQ log,” Nelligar told Richardson, one of the many Army forms he could quote. The CQ records the night’s major events in his log, though some are better at it than others.
Hennis’s CQ log for May 10 showed he was not one of the better record keepers. His log indicated he checked the barracks at 9 o’clock. He didn’t make another entry until 1:30 A.M., when he checked the barracks again. Of all days to leave an embarrassing four-and-a-half-hour gap. Hennis should’ve at least recorded when he left for dinner.
“Well, find the crime prevention checklist,” Nelligar told Richardson.
“The what?”
The CQ also has to record the time he checked to make sure everything was locked for the night—the barracks, the mess hall, the day room—on the “crime prevention checklist,” a form separate from the CQ log. Richardson asked Tim at the jail if he’d filled out the checklist. Tim said he probably had filled out at least one of those forms.
Richardson asked Hennis’s supervisor for the checklist and was told it’d been filed with other records. The lawyer sifted through boxes and boxes of old crime prevention checklists at the 600th, nagging officers all over the company. The May 10 checklist was not at Fort Bragg. He rummaged through the same stack for two days, asking Nelligar to check behind him. He asked the detectives if they had found it.
“I’m gonna get it if it kills me,” he said. He got mad at the Army, at the legal system, even at Hennis, who hadn’t remembered a crime prevention checklist existed until his lawyer asked him. The Army assured Richardson the crime prevention checklist wouldn’t have been destroyed.
“So where is it?” Richardson asked.
Finally, he gave up.
He and Nelligar would have to rely on witnesses—soldiers who, for one reason or another, would remember where Tim Hennis was on the night of Friday, May 10.
Sherry Whitney and Patricia Parces remembered Hennis putting together a two-story dollhouse for his daughter, the source of Tim and Angela’s argument in class on May 8. Tim and Angela went to a class every Wednesday to learn how to put the house together, picking up tips such as using a ballpoint pen to create the illusion of hardwood floors and gluing Kleenex to the ceiling for a textured look. Hennis’s job on May 10 was to glue tiny cedar chips onto the roof to make rows of shingles, a tedious task perfect for CQ duty.
“I thought it was kinda neat,” Whitney told Nelligar. So did Parces. The sight of Hennis trying to fit together tiny shingles on a dollhouse for his daughter warmed both of them.
“Nobody’s gonna kill two children and then spend all night doing that,” Richardson told Nelligar.
They found Jay Logan, Hennis’s assistant CQ runner. Logan rode with Hennis to the orderly room on Friday afternoon. He didn’t remember much about the night except that Hennis’s car had been messy. The best he could recall, Hennis finished dinner by 10:30 P.M. and hung around the rest of the night.
Next, they found a shy soldier named Kaarlo Ward, who had filled in for a friend as day-room orderly on May 10. Soldiers washed clothes, watched TV, or shot a few racks of pool in the day room, a place to hang out when they didn’t have anywhere to go. Most of them had places to go on Friday nights, leaving the day room empty. All Ward wanted to do was close up and get out of there, an urge he no longer could resist around 10:30.
“There’s nobody here. Can I close this place?” Ward asked.
“Wait around a few minutes and see if anyone comes around,” Hennis told him.
Ward called back at 10:45. “Nobody’s here,” he said.
“Okay,” Hennis said. “Yeah, sure, go ahead. I’ll be down there in a few minutes.”
Hennis had to inspect the day room after Ward finished cleaning it, a task that could take from 10 to 30 minutes, depending on whether the orderly had cleaned up as the night went along. Ward was one who would do that. He called back in about 20 minutes, saying he was ready for inspection.
Hennis walked over, inspected the room, and let Ward go. Ward guessed it was 11:30 by the time Hennis released him.
Richardson was certain Hennis would’ve filled out a crime prevention checklist at that time. But that blasted form had defeated him. He’d have to take the word of Ward, a young kid who didn’t wear a watch. The times, he said, were guesses. Ward said he showered, talked with some friends, and went to bed at 12:05, the only exact time he remembered.
David Guthrie locked himself out of his room Friday night, so he sat around the orderly room until his roommate got back from Virginia with a key. He passed the time chatting with Hennis. Guthrie tried to call his dad in New Orleans, but all of Fort Bragg’s circuits were busy. Weekend phone lines at the base were always at a premium. Guthrie kept trying until he got through at 11:45.
Guthrie remembered Ward calling several times about closing the day room. He’d called every 15 or 20 minutes until Hennis told him to start closing the room. Guthrie said he was with Hennis until about 11 P.M., when Ward called back, ready for inspection.
So much for Hennis using the bank card across town at 10:52, Richardson thought.
The card was used again at 8:56 Saturday morning, another $150 transact
ion at Methodist College. Hennis had finished his CQ shift at 8:30. His replacement, Manuel Fonseca, came to work at 8:25 and Hennis briefed him on what had to be done. The new commander wanted his floors stripped and office cleaned so he could move in, and the first sergeant had his usual list of chores, such as mowing the grass. After the briefing, Hennis signed over the duty roster to Fonseca and left at 8:45, Fonseca said. If he was right, all the Green Berets at Fort Bragg couldn’t have masterminded a plot to get Hennis to Methodist College by 8:56.
Richardson allowed himself to think that maybe his client was innocent. Now he wanted to hear Tim describe that weekend. No one from the 600th had spoken to Hennis since May 15, nor had they known that a bank card had been used. Richardson made it a point not to tell them. If Hennis’s story matched, the bank card could be ruled out. And the state was proceeding on the theory that the murderer used the bank card.
Richardson called Beaver and told him to visit Tim immediately. The jailers at the Cumberland County jail grumbled at Beaver’s arrival, well past the 10 P.M. lockup time.
“Can’t this wait?” one of them griped. No, it couldn’t. At last, something was going right on Hennis’s behalf. One of the jailers told Hennis to wake up. He had a visitor waiting for him.
“Get him to tell you what happened that night,” Richardson said.
Hennis listed the events of May 10 and Beaver repeated them to Richardson over the phone. Richardson was proud of his client. Only Logan was off with his time on when Hennis went to dinner—apparently Hennis had gone earlier that evening. The rest of Hennis’s story—the dollhouse, the lost keys, closing the day room—matched what the others had said.
Beaver hung up and went home to call Bob Hennis.
“Bob, you asked us to find out, and I want to tell you, in my opinion, your son is not guilty.”
That was what Bob had paid $100,000 to hear. He’d believed all along, but now his lawyers were telling him they believed it, too. He and Marylou went to sleep thinking the whole thing would be over. Soon.
Chapter Twelve
Bob and Marylou never doubted their son. From the moment he’d called to say he’d been arrested, their only thought was getting him out of jail. Tim wasn’t a triple murderer. The closest Bob came to questioning him was during a visit to the Fayetteville jail. “Tim, I know we’re close,” Bob said. “But if there’s something, tell the lawyers at least. Please.”
Tim did just that. He answered Beaver’s questions about his childhood, his marriages, and his backyard barrel fire. Through interviews with Tim and his parents, Beaver put together a profile that told him Tim Hennis wasn’t the beast Fayetteville thought he was. If he had turned murderous, Hennis certainly couldn’t blame it on the way he was raised.
When Tim was two and a half years old, his natural parents in Sandwich, Illinois, divorced, and neither could afford to keep him. Their Episcopal church remembered that Bob and Marylou Hennis could not have children of their own and wanted to adopt. The church arranged for them to meet Tim. The only question Bob and Marylou asked was if he was healthy.
Tim was a good kid. While Andy and Beth were getting in trouble for pulling pranks, Tim stayed clean, even straightening up his room without being asked. His friends in the Institute Hills neighborhood were not the type to get wild. “I was the goody two-shoes,” Tim told Beaver.
He loved to sleep, a quality that worried his mother. In junior high, Tim would come home from school and take two-hour naps. Marylou took him to the doctor to make sure nothing was wrong with her boy.
“Don’t you know corn grows tall at night?” the doctor said.
Tim had the height to prove it. “He was never self-conscious about it,” his father said. “In fact, I think he kind of liked it.”
When he wasn’t sleeping or in school, Tim liked to read and watch old movies on television. He’d stay up for hours watching John Wayne westerns or Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields comedies. A poster of Fields hung in his tidy room. His parents would often lie awake in bed, listening to their son laugh loudly at those old black-and-white movies.
“Of our three children, Tim’s childhood went the smoothest,” his father recalled. “If you were signing up for a child to raise—well, he was easy.”
His first job was baby-sitting. Fifteen-year-old Tim looked after a family of three children, ages 6, 4, and 18 months.
“Young children were crazy about Tim,” Marylou said. “Little children always liked him.”
But he was a typical teen-age boy. He had girlfriends throughout high school and once even crashed his dad’s boat into a dock because he was too busy waving at girls in bikinis to watch where he was going. As is often the case with a first child, Bob and Marylou resisted letting Tim stay out as late as he’d like, until one day he made an announcement.
“He laid down the law with me once,” Marylou said. “He said these were the things he was going to do, because everybody else got to do them.
“It kind of took me by surprise because usually he never questioned anything we said, but it was a good way for him to be, to finally assert himself.”
During his senior year, Tim applied to Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Once accepted, he decided on a major—architecture—and selected a fraternity. But just weeks before orientation, he backed out because he couldn’t bear to leave his girlfriend behind in Rochester. He rented an apartment, managed at a Godfather’s Pizza store, and worked the night shift at a hotel.
A year later, he decided to try school again, reenrolling at Iowa State to study architecture. Two semesters later, he quit to get married.
“I’d always been determined to have a family,” Tim told Beaver. “That’s the way we were raised. All I wanted to do was settle down, have a nice job, and raise a family the way Mom and Dad did.”
But Tim wasn’t a faithful husband and the marriage failed before kids came. To the consternation of his family, he and his ex-wife lived together as roommates until Tim could figure out what he wanted to do.
Finally he decided to try a new life near the Rocky Mountain ski slopes of Boulder, Colorado. Tim shipped nearly everything he owned to a storage warehouse, but before he left for Colorado, he dropped by the Army recruiter’s office and impulsively signed up. The owner of his storage space later sold his possessions to pay back rent.
Sergeant Hennis did well in the Army. In a 1985 review written after Hennis had been arrested on murder charges, Staff Sergeant Robert Caldwell wrote that the soldier “far exceeds his peers in all areas of military performance. As squad leader, Sergeant Hennis always puts the welfare of the troops and the accomplishment of the mission above his own needs … Sgt. Hennis is willing to assume responsibilities normally performed by personnel of higher rank and accomplish the duties with commendable results. He serves as a sterling example for all to emulate.”
When Hennis lived in barracks, his room was the cleanest in the building. As squad leader, he had few problems with his men, sticking up for them when needed. He was assertive and did tasks without having to be told. He was even allowed to oversee soldiers before his promotion to E-5 Sergeant, the first recognized level for supervisory status.
First Sergeant Benjamin Williams noted on the same review that Hennis had helped increase efficiency at the 600th Quartermaster shop by 80 percent and had cut inventory time in half. “Sergeant Hennis is an outstanding Noncommissioned Officer and his professional bearing and technical ability have made him an invaluable asset to this unit and the United States Army.”
Sergeant Hennis scored 125 points on his review, a perfect score. “Sergeant Hennis has unlimited potential,” the review stated. “He should be promoted today … and made a Platoon Sergeant so the Army can benefit from his ability.”
But the Army bored him. He didn’t make as much money as he wanted, so he moonlighted as a cook at Bennigan’s. When he wasn’t working, he loved to tinker at home. He’d work on his car, help a neighbor change her flat tire, or shoot hoops with the neigh
borhood kids.
At Bennigan’s, Tim met Angela Koonce, one of the restaurant hostesses, and they started dating. His extra job didn’t mean as much to him. One night around closing time, one of the kitchen helpers balked at mopping the floor. Hennis told him everybody had to help clean up.
An argument began. Hennis backed the kitchen helper against a wall.
“Look here, if the rest of us are going to have to clean up, so are you,” he said.
The young man’s eyes widened. Hennis loomed over him. Co-workers gathered around, unsure what they would do if the Fort Bragg paratrooper threw a punch.
The manager didn’t do anything.
Hennis quit and walked out of the restaurant, unaware a prosecutor would later use the incident as an example of his murderous anger.
Hennis didn’t want to rig parachutes the rest of his Army hitch. By the summer of 1984, he’d eloped with Angela and wanted to start a family. Not only did he find a way out of rigging, but he found something he could turn into a career. He was accepted into warrant officer school, where he would learn to fly helicopters.
“He was so excited,” Marylou told Beaver. “It was really a big opportunity for him.”
Tim took Angela with him for the 10-week course at Fort Rucker, a base in southern Alabama. He sold his ’74 Chevy pickup truck and bought an ’81 Chevette for $3,000.
Tim flew solo in a helicopter. Angela, about three months pregnant, joined the Brown Flight Wives, a group of Army wives, and helped arrange parties for the soldiers. The young couple’s life together was starting to take off.
But he still hadn’t learned to manage his money. He bounced some checks in Alabama and, sometime later, a captain asked him if he had some bad checks out. Hennis said no, his family had covered the debt for him.
That didn’t fly with the captain. His records showed that the checks hadn’t been paid. He said Hennis was lying and kicked him out for an “honor code violation.”
Tim and Angela headed back to North Carolina, furious with the way he’d been treated. Back in Fort Bragg, he was assigned to the 600th Quartermaster Company, where he rigged parachutes again.
Innocent Victims Page 9
