Chapter Seventeen

Bad blood between the district attorney’s office and Beaver that had simmered through the summer and fall was stirred by the suppression hearing. VanStory seethed as he read the affidavit sprung on his high school dropout witness. “Trial by ambush,” he called it. The defense was gaining on him and he didn’t like it. His open and shut case now had no physical evidence and a shaky Cone. Sentiment arose within the district attorney’s office to drop the case.

Ed Grannis instead had his staff try harder. Its mission would be beating Jerry Beaver’s client, and they would have to find more evidence.

The state brought in Haral Carlin, the best Cumberland County’s law enforcement had. The investigator assigned to the district attorney’s office was a tenacious wad of energy packed into a spry frame. He had a gift for wearing people down. Carlin only took over the troublesome cases, which now included the Hennis case.

Richardson knew all about Carlin. He saw his entry into the case was another disastrous result of the suppression hearing. Five years earlier, Carlin had taught Richardson how to win cases as a young prosecutor. Work the other side to exhaustion, Carlin preached. Make them interview everybody you’re interviewing. If someone hurts you on the stand, attack them. Find something, anything, from their past. Everybody had something to hide. The district attorney’s office won a lot of cases that way, and many Cumberland County defense lawyers couldn’t stand Carlin because of it.

But he and Richardson were good friends. Both had coped with alcoholic parents, and it had been Carlin who talked Richardson into helping his mom and dad through an “intervention,” a process where friends and family members confront a loved one about a drinking problem. Carlin had done the same with his father.

With Carlin heading the state’s investigation, Richardson knew his own case would have to get better. He would work just as hard as Carlin, setting off a scramble for more evidence by both sides in the final weeks before trial.

Carlin had every witness reinterviewed, beginning with the first suspect: Gary Eastburn. Could he have borrowed a plane on Maxwell Air Force Base and flown to Fayetteville and back?

Carlin learned that Eastburn was a control tower operator and couldn’t fly a plane. No planes left the base that night, and Eastburn was seen on base at 11 that night and 8 the next morning. Carlin moved on to other suspects.

Carlin eliminated any “Hennis look-alike” defense Beaver might try, ruling out several suspects he’d heard the defense would introduce. Julie Czerniak’s half-brother Tommy Presley, who looked like Hennis, had been in the western half of the state. He found an alibi for a blond soldier in Summer Hill who hired Julie as his baby-sitter and owned a white car. He did a rape kit on Dennis Mills, Julie’s soldier friend who, according to Beaver, “looks amazingly like Tim Hennis.” Carlin had determined that Mills had not been in Summer Hill on May 9, but Hennis’s lawyers persisted in chasing him as a suspect.

The blood test on Mills came back “PGM 1,” which was consistent with the semen sample. Carlin never asked the FBI to determine whether it was “plus one,” further matching the semen, or “minus one.” The state was through with lab comparisons of anyone other than Hennis.

Carlin turned his investigation to the defendant. If his lust had led him to murder a family, it must have led him elsewhere as well. He began a quest to show Hennis was a man on the prowl.

Three detectives visited Nancy Maeser’s fifteen-year-old daughter, pulling her out of school for the interview. “Has Hennis ever made any moves on you?” they asked. “Has he ever touched you? Has he ever kissed you in more than a brotherly way?”

No, no, and no. “He’s a good friend, someone I can talk to and tell my problems,” the young girl said.

The detectives didn’t believe it. They wanted to polygraph Nancy. “I always felt like they were trying to put words in my mouth,” she said. “They would change what I said. They accused me of lying and putting my daughter up to lying.”

The detectives tried the same questions with fifteen-year-old Tonya Wiggs. “He had never approached me in any way,” Tonya said. “Never. He wasn’t like that.”

Richardson returned to Summer Hill to knock on more doors. He worked his way down the street behind the Eastburns’ house, but no one was willing to talk to Hennis’s lawyer. Some even slammed the door in his face.

Richardson had just about run out of houses when he got to Chuck and Cheri Radtke’s house. The Radtkes invited Richardson in and offered him something to drink.

Cheri Radtke told him they’d moved there in February 1985. Chuck often traveled with the Army’s Special Forces and she worried while he was gone, often staying awake until daylight. On those nights she paid close attention to her neighborhood.

One night about 2 A.M., she heard a man and a woman arguing from the direction of the Eastburns’ house. Cheri couldn’t make out what the man was saying, but remembered the woman’s voice. “I can’t take this anymore,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore.”

Cheri Radtke was worried enough to call the sheriff’s department. Two nights later, Kathryn Eastburn and her children were murdered.

Richardson’s interest picked up. “Do you remember anything about the night of the murders?” he asked.

The Radtkes did remember. Cheri told him they’d left their home around 3 A.M. to take Chuck to an Army school in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Their route out of the neighborhood took them past the Eastburn home about the time Patrick Cone said he was walking home. Cheri had checked the weather to see if she needed to pack her hot curlers. The weather was foggy and misty, definitely hot-curler weather. On the way out of the neighborhood, she distinctly remembered that a white car wasn’t parked by the fence.

Richardson thanked her and started to leave. If nothing else, he could use her to discredit Cone’s version of the weather. On the front porch, he asked Cheri to call him if she thought of anything else.

“Well, that Cone fellow said he saw this man walking down the street,” she said. “I’ve seen a man, too.”

“Tell me about it,” Richardson said, trying to hide his excitement.

Cheri said that a few weeks before the murders, she awoke around 4 A.M. and made her husband walk with her to get a pack of cigarettes. On the walk home along Summer Hill Road, they saw a man coming toward them. He stood about six feet, wore a black jacket and black hat, and had a bag slung over his shoulder.

In January, seven months after Hennis’s arrest, Cheri saw the man again, this time on a 4 A.M. drive for cigarettes. The man was dressed in the same manner.

Cheri told Richardson she didn’t know who the man was, but as Richardson drove home he vowed to find out. Find the walker, win the case. Find the walker, win the case. The thought haunted Richardson from then on. He began a stakeout on March 3. Five nights a week at 2 A.M., Richardson would kiss his wife good-bye and leave her alone with two-and-a-half-year-old Matt and three-week-old Caroline. He would pick up Nelligar and head for Summer Hill Road, where they would sit for four hours waiting for the walker.

Hour upon hour they stared at that unmarked, residential road. Very little moved in Summer Hill at this hour. One night, someone threw a bottle at them. Another night, they tried to explain to a deputy why they were there, without telling him too much. The only regular visitor was the paper carrier for the Raleigh News and Observer. Richardson flagged the man down and asked him if he had the paper route in May. He did not.

Nelligar was tired, unhappy, and sorry he’d ever taken the case. Almost a month later, with no walker in sight, Richardson called it off.

His only lead was to find the Raleigh newspaper carrier in May. He called the News and Observer and persuaded the front office to give him Charlotte Kirby’s name. Her address was listed in the city directory.

Charlotte Kirby was not glad to see him, shifting from one foot to another as she talked, her eyes darting away. For some reason, she remembered May 9, now almost a year later. “It was drizzly that night,” she said. “I had to bag the papers.”

“Did you see anything unusual?” Richardson asked. There had to be a reason she remembered.

Charlotte looked away. “Yeah, I did.”

“You got to help me. What was it?”

“There was a van parked right down from the Eastburn house.”

She saw the light-colored van parked on the Eastburns’ side of the street at 1:45, on her way to deliver a News and Observer to the only subscriber on Summer Hill Road. She said if she hadn’t swerved at the last minute, she’d have hit it.

“Did you see anybody?”

Charlotte Kirby thought about it and said no. “I’ll testify anonymously,” she said, “either in the judge’s chambers or on tape, but I will not show my face in the courtroom.”

“I don’t think we can do it that way,” Richardson said, losing patience with her. He promised to ask Judge Johnson, but knew VanStory would oppose anonymous testimony and the judge would agree with him.

He wasn’t sure how much Charlotte Kirby would help, anyway. Richardson’s frustration mounted with each new lead pointing him in a different direction. David Hill saw a dark blue van across from the Eastburn house, then became confused about which night he saw it. Julie remembered a blue van following her the day after Mother’s Day. Charlotte Kirby saw a light-colored van. Richardson wasn’t sure if he was dealing with one or two vans in the neighborhood.

He was just as confused about the white car. Neither Charlotte Kirby nor Cheri Radtke had seen a white car, and Richardson met two other Summer Hill residents who clearly remembered not seeing a white car. But there were plenty of witnesses who had seen a car out there at some point. Allison Mims, Gloria Mims’ eighteen-year-old daughter, had seen a white car before dark. Interesting, Richardson thought. Tim Hennis would’ve been in Selma, 90 minutes away, before dark.

Before his investigation wound down, a familiar source checked in. Julie Czerniak called to interrupt Richardson’s Sunday with his wife and children.

“I got something I desperately need to tell you,” she said.

“Can’t it wait?”

“No, I’ve got to tell you this. It’s got to do with the case. I really have to talk to you.”

Richardson rounded up Nelligar and headed to a house where Julie was baby-sitting.

“You kept asking me, ‘You sure you didn’t have anybody over there?’” Julie said, “and I got to thinking about it and I thought I should tell you that Brad had been over there. And he does have a little white Rabbit convertible, but when Patrick said he’d seen a car over the summer over there …”

“Uh-huh.”

“Across the street …”

“Uh-huh.”

“That was Brad’s.”

So Julie did have boys at the Eastburn home, something she’d denied from the start of the case. Brad had been there twice, she said. Once while he was there, Julie had rocked too vigorously in Katie Eastburn’s rocking chair and knocked a plate off the wall, smashing it into pieces.

“When Mrs. Eastburn came home I cried,” she told Richardson, “and I told her, ‘I’m sorry I broke your plate,’ and she said, ‘Don’t worry. We bought it at a yard sale. No big deal.’ She told me from the beginning that I could have anyone over there.”

Gary Eastburn disputed Julie’s claim and said his wife would never have agreed to such a thing. The interview was vintage Julie, pointing the lawyers in directions other than Hennis. If she said these things in court, she could help them.

“I hope they call her, because we damn sure won’t,” Richardson told Nelligar as they drove off. “Lord knows what she’d say up there.”

“That’s a loose cannon you wouldn’t want up there on your watch.”

Nelligar had already talked to Jack Watts about the same subject. Both sides would be crazy, Watts had said, to put the baby-sitter on the stand.

But Richardson checked out Julie’s boyfriend anyway, just in case. He went to Little Rock, Arkansas, to confront Brad Bokkean at his Air Force dorm room. Brad said he hadn’t been the only guy Julie took to the Eastburns’. He’d left Summer Hill by April, he said. Richardson recognized that at five-foot-five with brown hair, long in the back, this boy definitely was not the man Patrick Cone saw.

All Richardson got out of the trip was a comment that Julie had made to Brad. She’d told him the state had a witness who would “blow Hennis out of the water.” Richardson had Nelligar spend the rest of his investigation trying to find who that might be.

Beaver tried to find out through a routine discovery motion. He asked VanStory for a list of all witnesses who’d seen a tall, blond man around May 9 on Summer Hill Road. One name on the list, Margaret Tillison, was new to the defense.

Margaret Tillison had been particularly disturbed by the Eastburn murders. In the weeks after the bodies were found, the middle-aged woman asked her mother to stay with her during the day while her husband worked. Margaret didn’t hide her relief when Hennis was arrested or her dismay when Cone wobbled.

On the afternoon of May 9, Summer Hill was still a safe place for Mrs. Tillison to make corn bread alone at home. About 11:30 A.M., she ran out of cornmeal and jumped in her car to go to Winn-Dixie. On the way out, she saw a small white car parked in a cul-de-sac across from the Eastburns’.

Her first reaction was that her son had parked there for some reason. Mrs. Tillison slowed down to say something, but realized it wasn’t her son. A blond-haired man with a mustache and a red T-shirt, hair parted to one side, had poked his head out the window. He was still there when she returned from the store.

After VanStory handed over her name, Richardson talked to her and decided she couldn’t hurt his case. Margaret Tillison couldn’t say the man was Hennis, and Hennis was not allowed to wear a red T-shirt on base. He showed her a picture of Tommy Presley, Julie’s half-brother, and a startled Mrs. Tillison allowed that could’ve been who she saw. Then she backed away from that, saying she knew Presley as a child and he wouldn’t be involved in something so bad. Richardson didn’t care who she thought it was. Whatever she had seen, it had taken her nearly a year to report it.

Beaver and Richardson also learned of one other witness who’d been interviewed. The state had turned the investigation back to the house and the one witness who had been there during the murders.

Jana Eastburn had learned to talk. In December and again in February, detectives asked Gary Eastburn if they could have someone interview her and, reluctantly, he agreed. Anything to help with the case.

Dr. Helen Brantley in Chapel Hill conducted five videotaped interviews, armed with five 8 × 10 color photographs, including one of Tim Hennis. Dr. Brantley asked Jana, now two and a half, where her mother was, and the child said, “Mommy’s at work.” At a later interview, she showed Jana pictures of her mother and sisters, and Jana wiped her eyes and kissed the picture of her mother. Dr. Brantley tried to get Jana to talk about her family, but she couldn’t.

The doctor then showed her the 8 × 10 photographs. To the second one, Jana said, “I don’t like him.” To the fourth, she said, “He has little eyes.” She didn’t appear to recognize anyone.

Jana reviewed pictures of the house at the third interview and became upset and agitated. At one point she ran to a corner of the room, pulled a bean bag chair over her, and said, “Hide from the burglar so he doesn’t get us.” She talked about hiding in bed and pulling covers over her. “He’s going to come get me,” she told the doctor.

The next day, Jana, still upset from the interview the previous day, looked at the photographs of the suspects again. She growled at the second picture.

At the last interview, Dr. Brantley asked Jana to put together her memories of May 9 and shouted to jog her memory. Jana recalled hearing loud noises from Erin’s bed—the room where Kara was killed. Then she heard a voice:

“Shh, be quiet. I can’t kill anymore.”

Jana then said, “Mommy’s all gone.”

Dr. Brantley concluded that either her mother or one of her sisters walked into Jana’s room during the mayhem and told her to “Be quiet. Hide from the burglar.” Her inability to remember anything her mother said suggested that either Katie Eastburn was killed quickly, that Katie tried not to awaken her baby daughter, or that whatever Jana heard was too terrible to recall.

Dr. Brantley put a stop to the interviews.

Jana’s identification of the pictures proved useless. The doctor admitted she had gotten the order confused during the interviews and couldn’t remember which ones Jana picked. Dr. Brantley, who did not know which photograph was Tim Hennis, said Jana had not picked the same photograph all three times.

The trial was set for May 27, 1986, more than a year after the murders. Beaver thought about asking for a change of venue outside Cumberland County and even paid for a phone survey of 100 registered voters to get an idea of the community’s attitude toward his client.

Ninety-six had heard of the Hennis case, probably more than could remember who shot Kennedy. Sixty of them said there was a good chance pretrial publicity would influence the case, but only 35 said that pretrial publicity had hurt Hennis. Eighty-two said they had no opinion on Hennis’s guilt or innocence.

Beaver decided those numbers didn’t merit moving the case. He kept it in Fayetteville as a bargaining chip for other trial favors, such as the right to question jurors individually on their feelings about the death penalty.

His next decision was whether to let his client get on the witness stand.

The first impulse for a lawyer in such a case is: “Of course he takes the stand.” But Beaver wasn’t sure this time. He likened Hennis’s appearance to a storm trooper.

“I’d been interviewing him day after day after day, telling him to do something as simple as change his appearance in the courtroom, not slouch, not snarl, not look angry, and not look haughty,” Beaver recalled. “He couldn’t follow that direction. If he couldn’t follow that, how could I figure out what in the world to do with him on the witness stand?”

While out on bond, Hennis controlled himself at work and in his everyday affairs. Being out on bond was enjoyable. No one gave him a hard time and some strangers even gave him a thumbs-up sign at stoplights. His bond restrictions caused only minor annoyances. When Angela went to visit her Aunt Ruth barely two miles into the next county, Hennis had to stay home. He once drove toward Raeford to have his car worked on and had to whip out a map to make sure he wasn’t crossing the line. The garage was a half mile inside the county. He always kept a look over his shoulder, expecting a cop to be following him around, waiting for him to jump bail. But he never saw one.

But controlling himself in the courtroom would be another matter. Hennis knew William VanStory IV would get to him. “We knew who would be cross-examining me,” he said, “and I damn sure would’ve come out of the chair at him. VanStory probably would have said something to me that I would’ve taken wrong, and I probably would have come right out of that chair, over the top and come swinging at him. Without a doubt I’d have tried it, he’d have pissed me off and the cops wouldn’t have gotten there fast enough. It was better I didn’t testify.

“He was just waiting, like a hungry lion looking at a zookeeper waiting for meat to be thrown over the cage.”

Beaver told Tim and Angela they could win anyway. “Just be cautiously optimistic,” he told them. The phrase amused them. Cautiously optimistic. Tim Hennis didn’t think he needed to testify.

In early May, the lawyers and the family plotted final strategy. All agreed that the physical evidence would carry them, along with Cone’s inability to stick to a consistent story.

A conflict arose over what to do with the vans, neighborhood voices, Hennis look-alikes, and Julie. Richardson wanted to throw it all out there and see if the jury chased it. Put Charlotte Kirby, the newspaper carrier, on the stand, he said, and see if she’d say more than she’d been saying. Bob wanted the MacDonald connection brought up.

Beaver wouldn’t have any of it. “We don’t know what they’ve got,” he said. What if the defense threw out a rabbit and the state had an answer? What if the state could explain the van Charlotte Kirby saw? The one thing the lawyers couldn’t do was pretend they knew who did this, Beaver said. They didn’t know, and the jurors would resent them for it.

A week before the trial started, Beaver walked into Courtroom 3C and learned a little about the state’s strategy. A viewing screen had been nailed to the wall across from the jury box, as if someone expected to watch a drive-in movie in court. A county work crew had built it above a row of chairs, stretching 5½ feet high until it reached the ceiling and 13½ feet across. Judge E. Lynn Johnson had approved its construction without consulting the defense.

Beaver had no doubt how it would be used. He hadn’t thought the state of North Carolina would go that far.