Chapter Fifteen

Toward the middle of December, Tim Hennis could see tinsel and bells clinging to downtown streetlights from his cell. Kristina’s first Christmas was approaching. Except for glimpses from his window, he hadn’t seen his daughter since May 15, or seven months of her ten-month life. Children under the age of sixteen can’t visit the Cumberland County Jail.

He had heard that Kristina could crawl and was close to walking.

“Get me out of here,” Hennis barked at his lawyers. The physical tests were in, Cone had recanted. Why was he still there? “I may never get out of here again,” he said. “This is a chance to get out and I want out. My daughter needs me. My wife needs me.”

Almost every defendant who spends time in jail passes this way. Get me a bond. It’s the bane of criminal defense law.

“I’m convinced a defendant will give up two years of his life to be out of jail on bond a week before he pleads guilty,” says Beaver. “I have no idea why.”

“And you’re a lousy lawyer if you can’t get a bond,” Richardson says. “You can go out and prove he’s innocent, but if you can’t get him bond, you’re a lousy lawyer. But the minute you get him out on bond, you’re a magician.”

Hennis wanted some of that magic, but his lawyers weren’t sure it was a good idea to demonstrate in a bond hearing how bad the state’s case was. But Hennis didn’t care what they had to do. He was the client and he wanted out in time for Christmas.

He didn’t want to spend another night in that cell, which was just deep enough to lie down and not much more than an arm-span’s width. A row of cells just like it made up a block, where inmates could roam after the cell doors were unlocked in the morning. For Hennis to roam, he had to step over five or six others accused of murder. The block, like nearly every jail in North Carolina, was overcrowded.

Hennis did not like or trust his blockmates. He dared not oversleep in the morning or doze off for naps for fear they would attack him. Thrown together in close quarters with people they didn’t like, the inmates fought like dogs. Hennis saw his future in them, if he didn’t get out soon.

The jumpsuits were baggy, the cell cold. His parents brought him long johns, socks, and extra underwear. In jail, a change of underwear was important. Got to keep clean, he thought. Don’t give up. Some of the ones around him had stopped trying long ago.

The air conditioner had broken that summer, so the guards opened the cell doors and let the inmates drag their mattresses into the hallway. The breaking and entering block kept the television blaring late into the night, a jailhouse party that raged a little too long for the murder wing.

“Shut that damn thing off,” was how it started. The B&E guys talked some trash, and it went back and forth. The lawyers had told Hennis not to run his mouth about the case one way or the other, but he wanted the B&E guys to shut up.

“Jail had gotten to me that day,” Hennis recalled. “Two or three of us said something nasty to them. It was one of those days when I was at wit’s end and I wanted quiet. By God, there’s nothing like quiet.”

The murder block inmates began to argue among themselves. Everett Randolph Huff, who’d killed his mother-in-law and buried his seven-month-old son alive, reported back to the cops that Hennis had said, “You ain’t the only one here for killing. I killed some, too, so don’t feel like you’re the only killer in here … You damn right, I killed some, but I ain’t going to the chair like you, because I got money and I’m going to walk.”

Huff never showed up on any witness list for trial, nor was his account corroborated by others. Criminals often try to cut a deal with a prosecutor, which was exactly why, during visits with his client, Beaver kept telling Hennis to keep quiet.

“Exercise” meant curls and sit-ups using the cell’s bars. A book cart rolled around once in a while. In no time, Hennis had read almost every book on it. Guards read the inmates’ mail and searched whatever came in from the outside. Even a tube of toothpaste was suspect. The tube could be half-emptied and stuffed with enough cocaine for several highs.

Inmates haggled over phone privileges, a frequent cause of fights. Only local calls were allowed. Hennis used his nightly phone time to call Angela and Kristina.

Angela visited as often as she could, and Tim’s parents flew up from Boca Raton every month.

“Nobody ever answers my questions,” he often said. “Why don’t Jerry and Billy come more often?… Why am I here?… They’re taking all this out of my life.”

After a few minutes of venting his anger, Tim would settle down, more for his parents than himself. “I’d put on an appearance, be happy, not let them know how dismal I felt,” Tim said. “I felt more of a need to cheer them up than be cheered up. But I was on pins and needles more than they were. They did get to go home.”

The jailers, not used to inmates having family support, came to appreciate the Hennis group. They knew Bob and Marylou by name and asked about Kristina. Sometimes the allotted 15-minute visits turned to 20 or 30.

In September, the jail’s captain pulled Bob aside. “You haven’t been able to get close to your son all this time, have you?” he asked.

“No, we haven’t,” Bob said. The captain set up a room and brought Hennis inside, free from shackles. “Go ahead, hug him. Do anything you want,” he said, turning his back for a moment.

After jail visits, Angela, Bob, and Marylou stood in front of the Law Enforcement Center and waved up to the fifth floor. Angela held up Kristina’s arm to wave to the shadow in the window she knew as Daddy. Marylou once snapped a photo of Angela waving at her husband.

“Please don’t do that,” Angela said. “That’s not a memory I want.”

The seven months before Christmas were filled with memories Angela didn’t want. Twenty-one years old and raising a baby daughter, she’d never lived alone until her husband was led out of the house in handcuffs.

Angela Koonce was used to having people around. She was the oldest of five girls, all with names beginning with “A.” Judy and Lloyd Koonce finally gave up on a son after having twin girls 15 years after Angela was born.

Lloyd managed a men’s clothing store in Jacksonville, two hours east of Fayetteville next to a Marine base. Judy was a seamstress, sewing her children’s clothes and the drapes in her house. She was a talker, filling in lags of conversation with quick, amiable chatter, whispering words too indelicate to say aloud.

Their oldest daughter, dimpled and freckled, picked up her mother’s ability to light up a room. Angela learned to raise children early, often having to watch her sisters eight, fourteen, and fifteen years younger. She tried college a year at Meredith, a women’s school in Raleigh, but it was too far from family. She moved to Fayetteville, near both sets of grandparents and several aunts and uncles, and picked up a job hostessing at Bennigan’s, where she met a tall, blond short-order cook moonlighting from his Army job.

“When are we going to go out?” Tim Hennis would ask.

“When are you going to ask me?”

Southern girls didn’t consider that a proper invitation, and Angela Koonce was a proper Southern girl cut from the steel magnolia mold. A woman who knew better than to wear white pumps after Labor Day. A woman who kept a pitcher of iced tea in the fridge. A woman who didn’t date until a gentleman asked politely.

Tim Hennis finally asked Angela to a party. Three and a half months later, they eloped. “I don’t know why we did it,” Angela said. “I guess it was a romantic thing to do.”

Beginning on May 16, 1985, the state of North Carolina found out Angela Hennis was a woman who’d stick by her man. The detectives were bewildered that Angela clung to her accused husband. They weren’t the only ones.

“People would ask me if I believed in him,” she said. “Why would I put myself through this misery if I didn’t believe in him? If I had the slightest doubt, my daddy would have been there to get me so fast it’d make your head swim. It wasn’t like I was trapped in Fayetteville. I had two grandparents nearby in either direction. And there’s not a judge in the world who wouldn’t have granted me an immediate divorce and permanent full custody of my child.”

Angela did want to move out of 2026 Lombardy Drive to some address that hadn’t been in the newspaper. She went to a trailer park, picked out a mobile home, and moved in Kristina’s bedroom furniture. That night her parents came to Fayetteville to help her move in. Lloyd and Judy drove over to the trailer while Angela packed up at her house.

Angela hadn’t had the power hooked up, so Lloyd turned on a flashlight after he stepped inside. The ceiling moved when the light hit it. Lloyd Koonce had never seen so many cockroaches. “She can move in if she wants to,” Judy said, “but the baby’s not going to live here.”

Judy and Lloyd found her a town-house apartment. “Angela didn’t know how to look for something,” Lloyd said. “She didn’t know any better than to rent the trailer closest to the Dumpster.”

Angela began to learn about living alone. After a few nights, she conquered her fear of going downstairs after dark.

Shortly after the arrest, Judy took her daughter to the Department of Social Services and signed Angela up for welfare. After Angela was told it’d be several weeks before anything could be done, she noticed her Episcopal minister’s name on the letterhead as head of Social Services’ Board of Directors. The next morning, Angela had a check waiting.

The payments weren’t much, but they helped. Every month, Angela got in her Chevette, milky streaks of Luminol still waiting to react with blood, and stood in line to pick up free cheese. Her in-laws paid her rent, her parents bought her groceries. It wasn’t exactly what she had in mind when she eloped with Tim Hennis.

“It probably was a little embarrassing,” she said, “but there wasn’t much choice.”

By December, Angela had been without her husband long enough. She wanted him home for Christmas.

“Okay, we’ll do a bond hearing,” Beaver said, “but we’re not giving away any of what we’ve found. We’ll only mention the physical tests.”

The best time to do a bond hearing is just before Christmas, when judges are the most charitable. Beaver got another hearing before Judge D. B. Herring set for December 11, too quickly for Bob and Marylou to come up from Florida. Angela sat with Tim as Beaver and Richardson shredded the state’s case, armed with lab reports.

“He is presumed to be innocent and the evidence strengthens that presumption,” Beaver argued. “This man, too, has a life, and he has a child whose first Christmas is coming up.”

VanStory countered with the barrel fire, the linchpin of his case. The lab reports, he said, were inconclusive. They weren’t incriminating, but they didn’t eliminate Hennis.

Judge Herring didn’t buy it. He set bond at $100,000.

Routine first-degree murder suspects can expect a bond—if they get one—of around $500,000, or some figure high enough to amount to no bond at all. To get $100,000 in a murder case involving a mother and two young children was unheard of. The rape by itself could be expected to bring about $100,000.

Beaver bumped into Judge Herring on the night of the bond hearing.

“I hope you’re right and I didn’t make a mistake,” the judge said. “But with those physical tests, I just couldn’t hold him.”

Angela had lined up a place to live and a job, both necessary for Tim to get a bond. The town house in Hope Mills would do fine, and the Army reluctantly took Sergeant Hennis back, bound by its own regulations. He hadn’t been convicted of anything yet.

Only members of the 600th Quartermaster supported Hennis. The Army itself would just as soon have dropped him. Soldiers were directed to have no contact with him. But the Army couldn’t even keep Hennis from reenlisting. All the Army could do was deny Hennis his old job back. If he was bitter, the Army said, he could sabotage parachutes. Better to keep him away from life-and-death decisions. Hennis took a desk job.

The next hurdle was for Bob and Marylou to raise $100,000. They’d already sold one house three weeks after the arrest, the profits going to Jerry Beaver for the case. Bob took out a home equity loan on the smaller house he’d bought, then offered the house itself toward the bond.

“Don’t do that,” their lawyer in Boca Raton said. “You’re crazy to do that. If he skips bail, you’ll lose it.” Bob and Marylou ignored him. The lawyer had Bob sign a voucher saying he was doing this on his own and not on the advice of his attorney.

Angela’s parents put up their house in Jacksonville’s Sherwood Forest subdivision. They still needed some Cumberland County property, so Angela’s grandparents put up their home. Three families, two of them on Angela’s side, put up everything they owned to get Tim home for Christmas.

On December 16, they went to pick him up. Newspaper and television cameras recorded every step as Tim, pale from seven months indoors, and his family walked out of the law enforcement center and to Beaver’s car, “no comment” snarls on every face.

Back at the apartment, they sat in the living room while Angela went to get Kristina from upstairs. Everyone wanted to see the looks on father’s and daughter’s face when they reunited, though they worried she wouldn’t know him.

“Kristina, who’s that?” Angela asked.

She wobbled right to him.

Christmas was as normal as possible. Bob and Marylou gave Tim money to buy Angela a watch.

The sight of Hennis on the street in his coat and tie galled the detectives. Four of them showed up at 2026 Lombardy Drive with metal detectors, surprising the new tenants. They went all over the attic and backyard, finding nothing.

The same sight galled Gary Eastburn. He visited Fayetteville that winter and went shopping with an Air Force friend, looking up in time to see the Hennis family walking through the mall—Angela, Tim, and Kristina, riding on her dad’s shoulders.

Gary believed Hennis was the guy from the moment Detective Watts told him an arrest had been made. In those early weeks, it was some small consolation to think the killer was accounted for.

He froze at the sight of the Hennis family.

Angela saw him, nodded, and moved on, not wanting to make the moment more uncomfortable than it already was.

It was too late. Gary wished he’d stayed in Wichita, his home since leaving Fayetteville.

The Air Force had given him a “hardship assignment” to pick where he wanted to go. Wichita was the closest base to his childhood home 180 miles away. England no longer interested him. The Air Force didn’t either, but it was a job. Jana could see her grandparents almost every other week. Sometimes Gary’s mother would ask to keep her for a week.

“If Jana cried to go with Daddy, she went,” Billie Brown said. “Gary would say, ‘Mom, it’s up to Jana. If she wants to stay she can stay. If she wants to go, she can go.’”

Gary didn’t want to poison Jana with anger, but it was hard. He tried to focus on the good times. Within days of the murders, Gary was showing friends at work wallet photos of his girls, as any proud father might, never talking as if they were gone.

Some days his mind would drift, thinking about that week they took to visit friends in Washington, D.C., and riding back on I-95, a bright autumn day with the leaves in full color. The trip went perfectly—even Erin getting sick in the backseat couldn’t ruin it. It was as pleasant a memory as any he had, though always darkened by one of Katie running from a man with a knife to her bedroom until trapped.

Jana stopped developing for about seven months after the murders, her vocabulary frozen at just a few words. Sometimes she’d say, “Mama’s at the store,” or point to a school bus and say, “Kara’s bus.” But almost overnight, she snapped out of it and began talking and developing normally for a child her age.

She eventually forgot who her mother was. Gary and her grandparents showed her pictures but stopped when Jana remembered only the pictures, not the sisters and mother. “I know you’re not my mother,” Jana told Katie’s mother, “but can I call you that?”

But as far as her dad could tell, the events of May 9 had not permanently scarred her. He didn’t even mind taking Jana back to Fayetteville, no longer afraid past events there would haunt her. But then he bumped into the Hennises. He watched as Tim Hennis bounced Kristina on his shoulders. Gary envied a family that was together. His had been taken.