Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  VanStory asked for a bench conference, and Judge Johnson and the lawyers stepped away from the crowd and into the Seefeldts’ yard.

  “I request that the jury one at a time be able to stand in the location where Mr. Cone is presently standing and look back up the road,” VanStory said.

  The prosecutor wanted the jurors to see how easy it was to see where the white Chevette had been parked. A sheriff’s van made it much easier.

  “Objection,” Beaver said.

  “Overruled,” Judge Johnson said. “This is the purpose of the jury view.”

  “Your Honor said there would be no experimentation regarding visibility. The purpose of coming here was limited to the location of physical objects and distances between them.”

  “Well, that is part of the distance. Do you want them to move the vehicle?”

  This was exactly what Beaver had feared. He and Richardson watched a deputy move the van. Then the 12 jurors and 3 alternates came one by one to stand where Patrick Cone had stood. Under the sunny skies of June 19, 1986, they could almost count the links in the chain fence. With the limbs along the fence cut back, nothing blocked their view all the way to Yadkin Road. “This trial’s a joke,” Beaver muttered.

  Beaver asked Cone if he hadn’t walked farther up the Seefeldts’ yard and bent over so he could see back down the road, as he’d done on the videotape. Cone denied it. Beaver had that much to look forward to. Once he got Cone back in the courtroom, he’d show the jury the videotape.

  Beaver had Cone march the jury to his old home on Northfield Court. On the way back, a juror nearly passed out in the heat. Beaver squeezed from Cone his old refrain that the white Chevette had hubcaps and that he’d seen it several times. Then the courtroom moved back indoors.

  Judge Johnson wouldn’t allow Beaver to show the videotape on cross-examination. The lawyers would have to wait until they presented their own evidence, when Nelligar could introduce the video from the stand.

  Instead, Beaver hammered at Cone for hours that afternoon and into the next day, and it didn’t work. Attacking Cone point by point on his story proved laborious and gave Cone more chances to repeat how sure he was.

  “Do you recall prior to making the tape-recorded statement, Mr. Richardson telling you that he wanted the truth from you?” Beaver asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And he told you that he wanted what you said to come from your heart. Do you recall that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And he said that it wouldn’t do any good for the defense to come into this court and have you say that you were tricked or pushed in any way into making that statement?”

  “Yes, I remember that, too.”

  “He told you all that prior to making this statement?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “He told you that he wanted the truth even if the truth was the person you saw was Mr. Hennis and you were sure about it. He wanted you to tell him the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you told him at that time what appears in that transcript, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did. But at that time, I didn’t feel like I had no choice, you know. I mean, him and Mr. Richardson, the other guy, were coming all around to my friends’ houses and everything. And what am I supposed to do, you know?

  “It’s like I know what I saw. I’m the only one who saw it. I was the only one out there at 3:30 that morning. I saw the car. I saw Mr. Hennis.”

  After three hours of questions, Beaver finished with him. Cone walked off the witness stand and, on the way to his seat, winked at Billy Richardson.

  The jury would never see the videotape of Cone walking on Summer Hill Road. By the time they presented their case, Beaver and Richardson believed the impact of the tape had been ruined by the jury view, where Cone was able to explain away all of his discrepancies ahead of time. Some friends told them they’d already beat up on Cone to the point where others were beginning to feel sorry for him.

  Bob Hennis didn’t care how sorry anyone felt for Patrick Cone. He told the lawyers he wanted the videotape shown to the jury. But they explained to him another reason why they wouldn’t bring it up—they didn’t want Nelligar to take the stand. VanStory could cross-examine him on all his attempts to question Patrick Cone and they feared Nelligar would be portrayed as a bully.

  Bob wanted his lawyers to push every issue they could, but he’d reluctantly agreed to let this one drop.

  VanStory put on a few more witnesses to back up Cone—his parents, his sister, and co-workers at Methodist College whom Pat had told about the man he saw—and closed the Cone phase of the trial, a remarkable success considering what he had to work with. His mood even turned light when he asked Pat’s father what he had told his son about getting involved in the case.

  “I said, ‘Son, you’ll curse the day you got involved in this.’ And I was right.”

  The crowd, especially the state’s detectives and law officers, got a big laugh out of that.

  Then the trial really started to get ugly for Hennis. Nancy Maeser hurt. The former girlfriend presented the state its motive. Angela Hennis glared at her and her husband tried not to look. Judge Johnson mercifully kept Nancy from testifying about Hennis’s two previous visits to her home, once when he followed her home from the Dragon Club and once when he and Nancy sat on her porch.

  Deputy Mike Tolbert left a lasting image of a glaring Tim Hennis turning around near the crime scene and staring him down. Glenwood McLaurin repeated how he’d stopped Hennis on the sergeant’s way to work early on May 15 and asked for his address and phone number. Hennis had not asked any questions, he said.

  Hennis’s neighbors had the wicked flames leaping out of the barrel as early as 9 or 9:30 that morning and continuing late into the afternoon.

  VanStory gave Beaver and Richardson a chance to end the case. He made a plea-bargain offer, which the lawyers passed along to their client.

  Hennis could plead guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, for which he would receive two consecutive life sentences. He’d probably live long enough to get out of prison.

  “That’s a good offer,” Richardson told him. “You don’t have to be ashamed of taking that.”

  Hennis thought about it briefly. “I’m not pleading guilty to something I didn’t do,” he said.

  “It may save your life,” Richardson countered.

  “I’m not pleading guilty to something I didn’t do.”

  Then Hennis thought about it some more. What was the state saying about his case? “What the hell happened to the rape count and the other murder count? Did we just sweep a body under the carpet and ignore it? What kind of baloney is this?”

  “You’re right,” Beaver said. “But it’s better than getting executed.”

  “Well, don’t look at me. I ain’t taking it.”

  Hennis wanted his lawyers to leak it to the press: The state would take two second-degree murder pleas. Something about it aggravated him. He was staring at a death chamber on a case the state thought was worth no more than this.

  Whose murder, he asked, were they prepared to dismiss?

  VanStory moved forward with his case, determined to make Tim Hennis wish he’d taken the chance to plead for his life. On the morning of the eighth day of his case, he was joined in the courtroom by fellow assistant John Dickson, office administrator Ann Hatch, and other members of the DA’s office who, until then, had nothing to do with the trial.

  “Look who’s in the courtroom this morning,” Richardson told Beaver. “Something’s coming. They want to be here to see it.”

  Beaver and Richardson did not. “Well, have you got the bomb ready?” Beaver asked Carlin. The investigator ignored him.

  Soon, Gary Eastburn returned to the stand and started talking about things missing from his house. Things like towels, the “His” pillowcase from a His and Hers set, a metal lockbox, and Katie’s wallet. Then came Susan Moore, head of automatic teller services for Branch Ban
king & Trust.

  “It’s one of them damn card people,” Richardson whispered to Beaver.

  “It couldn’t be. We got interviews from all of ’em and they didn’t see anything.”

  “It is. One of them changed.”

  “Does a Miss Lucille M. Cook have an account at BB&T?” VanStory asked the witness.

  Nelligar slumped in his chair.

  “Damn it,” he said under his breath. Richardson turned sharply to him. “Didn’t you reinterview everybody?” he asked.

  “Billy, I lost her number. But she didn’t remember anything.”

  Any moment now, Beaver thought, VanStory is going to walk over and show me a picture of Tim taken from a hidden bank camera. The inside of Richardson’s mouth dried up. He wanted to turn and ask his client about Lucille Cook, but, for the first time in a long while, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  Haral Carlin beamed as he watched the defense lawyers squirm. Finding Cook had been his best moment in putting the trial together. The appearance of the Lucille Cooks of the world was why lawyers feared Carlin.

  On April 16, Lucille Cook had come home from work at the 18th Airborne Corps on Fort Bragg, where the middle-aged woman worked as a secretary. She found a card in her door asking her to call a man named Haral. So she did. Carlin, VanStory, and Oakes showed up at her job the next day.

  Something in the last few months had jarred Lucille Cook’s memory.

  She’d read about the grisly Eastburn murders and they frightened her. When Watts had first visited, Mrs. Cook learned she’d used her bank card at 8:59 on Saturday, May 11, within three minutes of a triple murderer. That was disquieting.

  She told Watts she hadn’t seen a thing at the bank.

  For the next 10 months, the case against Hennis chugged along without Lucille Cook. Newspapers reported the physical tests didn’t match. Hennis got out on bond. Patrick Cone signed an affidavit saying he had doubts.

  “Jim,” she told her husband one day, “I hate to tell you, but I remember the morning at the bank.”

  “I believe you ought not tell me,” he said. “Just keep it to yourself.”

  Mrs. Cook left it at that for up to two months, until she found the note from Haral Carlin in her door.

  She told Carlin that on her way to exercise class that Saturday morning she’d stopped at her neighborhood BB&T before she went to the grocery store. She was in a hurry to finish her shopping and get to her exercise class on time.

  She remembered a tall, well-built blond man in his twenties. He wore battle dress pants and a white T-shirt. She got a good look at him when he left the teller machine and went back to his car, either a white or beige small two-door car.

  Detective Ron Oakes handed her seven photographs. She stopped at photo number five.

  “This is him, but I’m worried that I remember him from the newspaper and not from seeing him at the bank,” she said of Hennis’s mug.

  Carlin asked her if she could testify around mid-June as a state’s witness. Lucille and Jim Cook had a vacation that week, but Carlin talked them into changing plans.

  Beaver asked for a chambers hearing. “Does she have any—have you asked her for any explanation of why she’s made this change?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” VanStory said.

  “Can I ask you what she says about that?”

  “I’d rather she say it from the stand.”

  “Just didn’t want to get involved?”

  “That’s a good portion of it.”

  “Scared?” Beaver paused. “Scared? I mean …”

  “Well,” Carlin said, “she’s going to be up there. Just ask her.”

  “We’re wide open,” Beaver said, the angriest he’d ever been at Haral Carlin.

  “Fellows,” Richardson said, “we have not played one game with you in this whole trial. You can at least tell us what she’s going to say there.”

  VanStory and Carlin looked at each other. Judge Johnson, as surprised as anyone, shrugged his shoulders. The defense had interviewed Lucille Cook, so she wasn’t a surprise witness. All Beaver’s requests for discovery before then had pertained to witnesses who’d seen a tall, blond man near Summer Hill Road. VanStory had violated no laws by hiding Lucille Cook.

  “You pretty much hit the nail on the head,” VanStory told Beaver. “She did not want to get involved.”

  The power of Lucille Cook’s testimony stemmed from the details she claimed to remember. When VanStory asked if there was anything particular about the man’s hair, she responded, “Uh, well, I noticed his hair falling down. I was in my car. And as he was preparing to leave, he was leaning over the steering wheel like this, and his hair was falling down over his, like this, like several strands of hair.”

  Jurors’ eyes averted to the wispy-haired Hennis, noting his struggles throughout the trial to keep his thinning hair combed to one side.

  Hennis’s reaction to Lucille Cook’s comment is disputed. His lawyers say he sat there and took it. The prosecutors say Hennis at that moment ran his hand through his hair, combing it away from in front of his face, the way Lucille Cook said she’d seen it.

  “Ma’am, I’ll ask you to look upon this defendant, Timothy Hennis,” VanStory said, “and ask do you recognize him?”

  Hennis looked up from the defense table, right at Lucille Cook. She leaned forward over the witness rail, as if to scrutinize him one more time.

  “He looks like the person I saw at the bank.”

  Judge Johnson offered the defense an overnight recess to counter Mrs. Cook, and the flustered lawyers debated on whether to take it. They could get more information on Mrs. Cook overnight, but the jury would have 24 hours to dwell on the state’s version of her story. Or they could bore ahead into cross-examination and risk looking unprepared.

  Beaver chose the latter option.

  “In some time around late February or March of this year, you remembered it?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. I did.”

  “Okay. Just out of nowhere, nothing to jog your memory that you recall?”

  “I don’t know what caused it, but I did remember it.”

  When Lucille Cook walked off the stand, several jurors folded their arms and glared at Tim Hennis and his lawyers, who until then had given them hope in the defendant. Now that hope was gone.

  Richardson wandered into a bathroom feeling very small. He leaned against a urinal and threw up.

  VanStory, fresh from his coup, came in behind him. “Sorry about that, Billy, but now you know how I felt with Patrick Cone, except I was smart enough to play my card at the right time.”

  Before VanStory closed his case, he wanted his exhibits passed to the jury one more time. In a chambers hearing, Beaver again objected and argued against repetition of the photographs.

  “We object to the repetition of his argument,” VanStory said. The prosecutor and judge laughed out loud.

  A bailiff started handing state’s exhibits one at a time to the nearest juror, who passed them on to begin a grim assembly line of nearly 90 exhibits that lasted an hour. The autopsy slides were converted to 8 × 10 color photographs the jurors could hold.

  “They might as well paste those pictures all over my body and have me walk around in them, like a billboard,” a weary Hennis said to himself.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  After the devastation of Lucille Cook, it was Billy Richardson’s job to regain those jurors who’d folded their arms the day before. His case would rely on forensic experts and “neighborhood walkers” to raise reasonable doubt, but with Cook fresh in the jurors’ minds, the Army witnesses who could place Hennis at work when the bank card was used became crucial.

  Before Richardson started, Beaver quoted him another of F. Lee Bailey’s sayings: An alibi defense is worthless unless the defendant is sipping tea with the Pope. Bailey turned out to be right. Hennis’s CQ duty wasn’t good enough.

  Kaarlo Ward, the day-room orderly who wanted to close up early, was beat up on the witne
ss stand because he didn’t wear a watch. He guessed he closed the day room at 11:30, but had nothing to back him up.

  “What I’d give for that crime prevention checklist,” Richardson told Nelligar. He still hadn’t found it.

  The rest of the dozen Army witnesses fared little better than Ward, coming across as timid and fragile and unable to agree on the time. They sounded like a group of kids just trying to help their squad leader.

  “You know how that works,” juror Frederick Powell said. “They’ll tell anything to protect their buddy.”

  Bob Hennis blamed his lawyer for their performance. “There was a big clock there in the orderly room,” he said to Marylou. “Everybody could see it. Why doesn’t Billy have them say that?” He approached Beaver during a break. “We need to seriously consider what we’re doing here,” he said. “Billy’s too timid. I’m not sure he needs to be on the case.”

  “Billy can do a good job,” Beaver said. “He’ll be fine.”

  Richardson shifted his strategy to the neighborhood and Cheri Radtke, the only “rabbit” they would ask the jury to chase. Richardson asked Cheri to describe the neighborhood walker.

  “He was approximately six foot,” she told the jury. “Weighed maybe 160, 170 pounds. Had a dark jacket on. A black watch cap, you know, regular Army issue watch cap, and a bag over his arm.”

  She was a good witness, maybe Richardson’s best. But her testimony was also frustrating, because Richardson couldn’t produce the man she was talking about.

  VanStory crossed her with Carlin-like vigor. “Did you ever relay this information to any law enforcement officers?”

  “We have a roommate, and I talked to him about it, and then I called the sheriff’s department. And I talked to a lady and then I called the second time and I talked to a man. But I don’t know who they were. And no one ever came out and talked to me.”

  “And when was that?” he asked.

  “The lady I talked to, was either Monday or Tuesday after the murder happened.”

  VanStory stopped asking her questions and let her go.