Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  Another reporter asked about the state’s criticism that Tim was a little “too cool.”

  “Unfortunately, the Army teaches you to control your emotions and button your lips. You can’t talk back. One of the things you learn in the Army is to be quiet.”

  Tim looked out the window. April 19, 1989, was a perfect spring day in Wilmington. The dogwoods and azaleas were in full bloom. Someone had just cut grass near the courthouse. “It’s good to be able to see sunlight, smell flowers and grass,” Tim said.

  Captain Gary Eastburn stood in the hallway working on a piece of gum, a dry-eyed and patient interview. Photographers hovered nearby in case Hennis came out of his room and the two crossed paths, but they never did.

  “Coming back was a major interruption in my life,” Gary said. “I didn’t want to do it. I came back with the attitude of if we lose, it’s over.”

  “Do you still think they tried the right man?”

  “Yes, I think Hennis did this. The whole case rested on Patrick Cone. The jury either believed him or they didn’t.”

  “In 1986, you said you couldn’t forgive Hennis.”

  “That still holds.”

  As Gary gave interviews, many of the jurors took turns hugging him and telling him they were sorry. He calmly told them he didn’t agree with them but respected their decision.

  At the beginning, four of them hadn’t been able to bring themselves to turn Hennis loose. “What if he’s guilty and we let him go?” they said during deliberations.

  “Well, what if he’s innocent and we send him to the chamber?” others replied.

  One juror had a particularly hard time. “They have not proved him innocent,” she said.

  “That’s not the way you have to look at it,” another responded. “He’s innocent when he walks in the door.”

  “Yes, but they didn’t prove he was innocent.”

  Nobody wrestled with his guilt, but only his innocence. The state’s case was mentioned, but the jurors questioned every part of it. “Being a layperson and not a policeman,” foreman Charles Leighton said, “I just don’t understand how anybody could kill three people like that and not leave a trace of himself in the house.”

  They scoffed at Patrick Cone and barely talked about Lucille Cook. After three votes, the holdouts agreed they couldn’t convict anyone on that evidence, regardless of the circumstances of letting him go.

  Charlotte Kirby’s testimony was crucial, but the two factors that brought everyone around to voting not guilty were the neighborhood walker and the testimony suggesting that the baby-sitter was involved in drug deals.

  “Which would you think it to be more of, some drug-crazed person or a guy who got mad at his wife?” juror Ken Wells said. “They needed to answer those questions before we hang this guy.”

  None were totally convinced—they may never be. After the verdict was read, Mary Demko fought an urge to walk up to the defendant, grab him by the lapel, and say, “My God, you better be.” But the jurors felt good about their decision. Many agreed to be interviewed, a rarity in a capital murder case.

  “I hope they find out who did it,” juror Debbie McDowell said. “They shouldn’t try to pin it on him, because he didn’t do it.” The turning point in the trial, she said, “was when they brought the walker in. That raised enough doubt.”

  About a half-hour after the verdict. Tim was ready to check out of jail. He nodded to the bailiff and waited while she unlocked the door to his holding cell. “Shall we?” he asked.

  “Just one more time, Tim.”

  The Hennises waited for Tim to emerge from behind bars for good. Bob had his video camera rolling, trying to recapture the reunion of father and daughter.

  There was some apprehension. Kristina hadn’t hugged her daddy in three years and hadn’t seen him at all in several months. Would she remember him? How would she react to him? No one wanted something heartbreaking on a day like this.

  The jailer’s key rattled the lock and the door swung open. A shriek came from the room. “Daddy!” Kristina said.

  The four-year-old ran right up and hugged him, her head not quite reaching his waist. Tim Hennis bent over and picked up his daughter.

  When he got outside, Tim found a crowd of photographers, reporters, and, oddly, jurors. Some wanted a hug or handshake. Some just wanted to wish him good luck. One of them told Bob he’d picked up a dog through the classified ads a few weeks earlier and he and the woman had never exchanged names. “They kept making a big deal out of that,” the juror said. “I’d just done it.”

  From across the street, Richardson watched his client carry his daughter in his arms as jurors, photographers, and Beaver tagged along. It felt good. Tim Hennis was wearing his ring.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  To avoid being considered AWOL, Tim had to report to a military base within 24 hours of his acquittal.

  “I’m not going to Fort Bragg,” he told Angela. Tim wasn’t even sure he wanted to stay in the Army.

  “What are you going to do in a job interview when they ask where’ve you been the last four years?” Bob asked him. “Imagine trying to explain that. I’m not sure you could get a job.”

  His dad was right. Camp Lejeune, just outside of Jacksonville, would do. Tim and Angela went to her parents’ house that night, where Angela’s four sisters swarmed over Tim, and he reported for duty in the morning.

  Camp Lejeune didn’t know what to do with Sergeant Hennis. An officer called Fort Knox, Kentucky, where all his Army records had been sent. The Army decided Kentucky would be Tim’s new home until it figured out what to do with him. Tim and Angela packed up their car and left just two days after he won his freedom. Kristina cried most of the way. She missed her “sisters” in the Koonce home.

  On Interstate 40, they passed the exit Angela had taken to visit Tim at Central Prison all those years. “Daddy’s house,” Kristina said, pointing at the sign.

  A few miles back on I-40 were Bob and Marylou. Tim knew his parents were on their way to visit friends in Charlotte, but he didn’t know they’d follow him most of the way through North Carolina. “I couldn’t stand it,” Marylou said. “We knew taking that route, if he had an accident, we would come behind him. I just had to follow them.”

  The next day, Tim and Angela reported to the Personnel Control Facility at Fort Knox, the home of his Army records the past three years. Hennis drove inside the gate of a 15-foot-high chain-link fence with razor wire on top, much like the one that surrounded Central Prison. A guard was escorting an AWOL soldier in handcuffs.

  Hennis went inside to check in. “I think I’m supposed to report here,” he said.

  “That’s not the way you address me, soldier,” an officer said. Then he looked at Angela and Kristina. “Why did you bring them to Fort Knox?”

  “No, no, no, no,” Tim said. “You’ve got me confused with somebody else. I’m not AWOL. You ain’t treating me like these other people here.”

  The officer told Tim he’d spend the night inside that fence in a locked building, like any other AWOL soldier.

  “I’m not gonna do what you’re talking about,” Tim said. “We need to get somebody higher up, or we’re going to have a big problem.”

  “We’ll pay for a hotel before he sleeps here,” Angela said. She got to a phone and called Jerry Beaver, who called a friend at Fort Bragg, who in turn called Tim’s company commander at Fort Knox.

  “By God, he’s not going to sleep in a place where there’s a fence around it,” the commander said.

  The Army found Tim and his exhausted family a place to stay outside the fence, but still didn’t know what to do with the sergeant. Hennis was finally put to work at Fort Knox as a prison guard. Within a week of being released from prison, Hennis was slapping handcuffs on others.

  He didn’t judge his prisoners one way or the other. “I gave up that judging business in 1985,” he said. “I look at things different. I’m slow to think someone is guilty.”

  A f
ew days later, A Current Affair paid $3,000 to interview them. His was the night’s top story, ahead of one about a wife who forgave her husband for running over her in his truck and another about community outrage over dirty dancing in Columbus, Georgia.

  The segment began with Tim Hennis stalking a young girl. While he and Angela counted to 10, Kristina hid behind a tree. Her parents pretended to have no idea where she was, until Tim rounded a tree and growled, scooping up Kristina. She laughed with glee.

  “Tim Hennis is a man in a hurry to recapture his past,” the report stated.

  Hennis was also eager to have the state of North Carolina pay for the four years he’d missed. He wanted to sue the state and VanStory. Beaver and Richardson couldn’t take the case because they would be witnesses. They asked other lawyers in the state about it, but those lawyers wanted to be paid at an hourly rate, win or lose. No one would take the case for a percentage of the winnings.

  Hennis didn’t have the money for a lawsuit, and Bob Hennis had spent all he could. Beaver and Richardson told Tim what he could expect in a civil trial: The state would try to prove its officers acted in good faith. The officers’ defense would be to show why they had the right guy.

  “Tim, they’ll just put you back on trial for murder,” Beaver said. Hennis had been on that road before and chose not to go down it again.

  “It wasn’t an easy decision to make,” he said. “For four years I lived with the thought of taking VanStory to court and winning big, just so it would cost him personally. That was the only reason I wanted to do it. But the price was way too high to pay.”

  Hennis recovered some of what he’d lost through the Army, which awarded him almost three-and-a-half-years’ worth of back pay. The Army didn’t have much choice under its own regulations.

  Hennis shepherded AWOL soldiers around Fort Knox for two months, then took a 60-day leave. He took the family to Boca Raton, where a family friend noticed that he clung to Angela.

  After he returned to Fort Knox, the Army tried to transfer him to Korea. An officer stepped in, saying this soldier had been through enough. Hennis stayed in the United States and went to a two-month school in Fort Lee, Virginia. Angela and Kristina moved back in with the Koonces in Jacksonville, four hours away.

  He was then transferred to Fort Drum, New York, a frozen outpost 30 miles from the Canadian border about one-tenth the size of Fort Bragg. He was promoted to E-6 sergeant. Three months after he moved the family to Fort Drum, Sergeant Hennis was among the first wave of Desert Storm soldiers to land in Saudi Arabia, the same sandy deserts William VanStory had once said were as foreign to him as the courtroom was to Patrick Cone.

  Angela was hopping mad. She’d just gotten her husband back. War might as well have been another trial, with another possible death verdict.

  “I just thought it was my job,” Hennis said. “I was in the Army, I had reenlisted and I had to do what they said to. I wasn’t afraid of dying. I’d already faced that monster. He’d already been faced and conquered. If I died, I died.”

  Hennis was in charge of a 40-man supply platoon. At night, he could stand at a ridge and see the flash of fighting below. His unit later moved across northern Iraq, crossing the Tigris-Euphrates River, an experience he called “my camping trip in Iraq.”

  He called his parents one day from a supply unit. Later that day they watched television coverage of a bombing raid on a supply unit. The footage showed American soldiers being carried out on stretchers. Beth called her mother. “Oh, Mom, I’m sure I just saw them carry Tim out on a stretcher,” she said. “I couldn’t tell if he was alive.”

  Bob and Marylou called Angela’s parents in Jacksonville. Maybe television stations in a military town would show the footage again. Judy and Lloyd Koonce arranged to tape the local news.

  There was no footage of soldiers carried from a supply unit. Bob and Marylou called Angela. “Oh, y’all should’ve called a lot sooner,” she said. “He was nowhere near that site.”

  Sergeant Hennis returned to victory parades in the United States in April 1991, two years after he’d been acquitted of triple murder.

  There’s no measuring the years of anguish that Bob and Marylou suffered. Instead of a comfortable IBM retirement, Bob worries about house payments. Before 1985, he’d never envisioned making house payments after his sixtieth birthday. To save money, he’s considered moving to the South Carolina mountains, but no farther north than that. Tim will not allow them to have a North Carolina address.

  For a year after the verdict, Marylou slept whenever she could, a sleep that couldn’t erase four years of mental exhaustion. She complains she no longer has the concentration she once had.

  After devoting so much energy to the case for four years, Bob has struggled to find a way to rechannel that energy. A part-time job helps, but he’d wanted to finish his career at IBM. He also has struggled with his frustration that the killer hasn’t been caught, a frustration he finally came to grips with long after the case left him older and poorer.

  Tim Hennis is not one to sit down and tell you private battles he may or may not have fought trying to assimilate back into society. The same phlegmatic nature that served him so poorly the night he was arrested—I guess I’ll get to wear one of those orange jumpsuits—keeps him from dwelling on the past. He and Angela rarely discuss those awful years apart.

  The biggest difference is his relationship with his daughter. After he first got out, when he would tell Kristina to do something, she’d look to Angela to confirm if she really had to do what he said.

  “He’s your father,” Angela would say.

  To this day, Tim Hennis hates to punish Kristina and can’t resist buying her whatever she wants, still trying to make up for lost time. But he can make up only for so much. “I’ll never ever forgive VanStory, or the state of North Carolina, for that,” he says.

  He’ll be up for promotion to E-7 and reenlistment in 1993. He’s not sure what he’ll do. He no longer fears accounting for 1985 to 1989 in a civilian job interview, but he doesn’t know what job he’d apply for. He might stay in the Army and learn to manage a commissary. Or he might pursue his and Angela’s longtime dream of running an antique store.

  One decision he has made is that his family will come first. He and Angela rarely go out at night, unless it’s for Kristina. When Kristina joined the Girl Scouts, Tim offered to drive a van for field trips. Before he could do that, he had to be officially certified as a Girl Scout volunteer, so he became one. From “baby-killer” to Girl Scout volunteer in six years.

  On January 28, 1992, Tim and Angela had a second child, Andrew Allen Hennis, named after Tim’s late brother. Tim changes his diapers, rocks him to sleep, and pokes his stomach until Andrew giggles. He can’t wait to hear his first words, teach him to play catch, and fix him a bowl of ice cream covered with sprinkles.

  He wouldn’t miss this one for anything.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The day after the trial ended, the morning newspapers led with Tim Hennis’s acquittal, the story of the first defendant in North Carolina to get off Death Row by winning a jury verdict. The misconduct hearing rated only a brief mention.

  District Attorney Ed Grannis indicated the case was over. “The conversations I have had with the sheriff’s department from day one is that they thought that this is the individual that should be brought to trial,” Grannis said. “The sheriff’s position was that this is the suspect that should be tried. There was no indication of any other suspect that should be brought to trial.”

  But Lorry Wilkie of the Fayetteville Times discovered a defense affidavit filed in support of the misconduct allegation. The affidavit described the WHJR theory and the Mr. X letters. She wrote an article that included a photograph of the two Mr. X letters, giving every newspaper reader in Cumberland County a chance to see the strange markings on them.

  By the next morning, Grannis and Cumberland County Sheriff Morris Bedsole, who’d replaced the late Ottis Jones, had asked t
he SBI to reinvestigate the case. “There were some questions from people in the community saying maybe it ought to be looked at,” Sheriff Bedsole said.

  Agents Jerome Ratley and V. L. Allen, two members of MUST, the SBI’s special unsolved murder team, met with Beaver, Richardson, and O’Malley in the law firm’s conference room. One of the agents pulled up to the mahogany table and leaned forward.

  “Well, you got this guy off, now we got to go around and see if there’s some possible way he didn’t do it,” he said.

  Richardson folded his arms. After a long pause, he said, “I need to know what you’ve got on the case.”

  The agents wouldn’t budge.

  “I guess we ain’t got anything to say to you,” Beaver said.

  The meeting broke up without anything being accomplished. The SBI later asked Beaver and Richardson if Tim Hennis would take a polygraph. Richardson talked to O’Malley, then the president of the North Carolina Polygraph Association. “Absolutely, categorically, no,” O’Malley said.

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. They’re still looking for Tim to be guilty. If he passes, it won’t change their opinion. Two, the man’s been in prison for a crime he didn’t commit for four years. There’s a tremendous emotional involvement surrounding that situation, and unless an examiner is absolutely competent and is convicted to giving the man a fair shake, he won’t pass a polygraph.”

  About three months later, Henry Poole, the head of the MUST team, invited Beaver and Richardson to the SBI’s Fayetteville office. “I’m SBI through and through,” Poole said. “Looks to me like your guy is guilty. Are you going to give us anything to show he’s not?”

  “Yeah, I’ll give you a jury verdict that says he’s not guilty, and they’ve heard more evidence than you ever will,” Richardson said.

  The SBI was through with the lawyers and turned instead to the trial witnesses. Among the first the agents interviewed was Charlotte Kirby, who was still trying to put her marriage back together after keeping her horrible secret from her husband for so long.