Chapter Twenty-three

From his cell on Death Row, Tim Hennis could look out a window the width of his fist and see a guard tower. Inside, the guard overlooked a 15-foot chain-link fence, strands of razor wire curled along the top. Beyond the fence was a railroad bridge over Western Boulevard, a four-lane divided street that ran past the entrance of Raleigh’s Central Prison. On some days, prisoners convicted of lesser crimes would mow the grass on that overpass. Death Row prisoners were not allowed to mow grass.

If that was me, Tim Hennis thought, I’d run for that neighborhood on the other side and disappear.

When he was expecting Angela or his parents to visit, Hennis would watch Western Boulevard until their car pulled off the right-hand lane into the driveway to Central Prison, the home since 1884 of North Carolina’s worst criminals. He would run outside into the cell block, a common area for the 16 doomed prisoners in his group, and stand at a bigger window, about shoulder width. From there, he’d watch them park in the visitors’ parking lot and walk to a gate, where they’d sign in.

On September 19, 1986, almost 10 weeks after Hennis joined Death Row, visitors were not allowed. It was time for an execution. John Rook’s number was up, his punishment for abducting a twenty-five-year-old nurse as she walked home, beating her with a tire iron, raping her, cutting her with a fishing knife, and running over her in his car. The nurse had bled to death less than a mile from the execution chamber.

The day was unusually tense for Hennis and the other prisoners. The card games fizzled out for lack of interest, and no one argued about what to watch on TV. It was agreed that they would watch news updates on attempts to save Rook. After 11 o’clock lockup, each prisoner sat quietly alone in his cell.

In the basement, Rook ordered 12 hot dogs for his last meal and ate three of them with mustard, relish, catsup, coleslaw, and chili. Then he was wheeled in the execution chamber on a gurney until he was against a curtain. Behind it, three executioners stood ready with loaded needles. Rook scanned the room. On the other side of the window were the prosecutors and detectives who put him there. Rook’s lawyers watched from the row behind.

“Freedom, freedom at last, man,” Rook said. “It’s been a good one.”

At 2 A.M., the warden said it was time. The first injection put Rook to sleep; the second stopped his heart. The prosecutor complained it was too easy, like putting a dog to sleep.

Two floors above, Hennis’s cell block was quiet. The 16 prisoners sat wide awake contemplating Rook’s fate, and their own. Hennis looked outside as 200 people demonstrated across Western Boulevard, three-fourths of them protesting the death penalty. The other 50 worried him. They cheered and sang. “Na na na na, hey, hey-ey, goodbye.”

Hennis looked out his window. A black hearse pulled off Western Boulevard and turned into Central Prison. The driver headed for the basement.

Death Row was a glum place.

The cell was 7 feet across and 12½ feet deep. Layers of beige paint covered the walls, one coat smeared on top of another. The floor was gray cement. A cot was bolted into one wall, a steel toilet and sink anchored across from it.

The cell door had a window, not for a prisoner to see out, but for guards to see in. The wall opposite the door had a thick Plexiglas window, giving the prisoner a narrow view of the outside. Prisoners who missed fresh air heated ink pens with a match and used them to sear holes in the Plexiglas. Once in a while, a guard would catch one feeding pigeons through a hole. They would plug the hole and nail wire mesh over the window, almost eliminating the view.

On July 8, 1986, the state of North Carolina moved Tim Hennis into the F block and gave him Cell 208, one of eight cells upstairs. A guard handed him a pair of drab green pants and a white T-shirt with a blue collar and blue ring around each sleeve. Hennis would learn that the laundry cart would come around twice a week, but if he lucked into a pair of pants that were long enough to fit him, he’d be better off washing them with a bar of soap in the shower and keeping them until the guards caught him. Prisoners were not allowed to keep the same pair of pants.

They gave him a number: 10258IL. The number told guards right away that this prisoner was a white male, born in February 1958, in Illinois.

His lawyers had given him instructions: Don’t talk about the case. But Death Row prisoners are curious. They have ways of finding out. They talk to guards. They read the one newspaper allotted each cell block a day. Not long after Hennis hit Cell 208, everyone knew why he was there. Killing babies was dishonorable even here.

Each day began at 6 A.M., whether Hennis wanted it to or not. A guard poked his head inside his cell, making sure a living body was there.

Hennis had two choices for how he could spend his day. He could mingle with the others in the day room, a shared area on the other side of the cell doors. Three glistening steel tables were attached to the concrete floor. The tables were round to avoid sharp corners. Four steel seats connected to each table—Death Row prisoners would never be trusted around chairs they could pick up.

Looming high over the tables was a color TV, protected by a sheet of Plexiglas. The TV came on at 9:30 A.M. on weekdays and 11 A.M. on weekends and ran till 11 at night, the sound bouncing off the concrete and steel until it echoed in every cell. Hennis had his parents ship him some earplugs.

“I wore them at night to sleep with and during the day when they were making too much noise,” he said. “I probably got the most ear damage in Central, even though I’ve been around Army guns and howitzers.”

A guard monitored Death Row prisoners a few feet away from a booth that overlooked two cell blocks. Thick sheets of Plexiglas separated him from the prisoners, but he could still hear most of what they said, unless a couple of them went in someone’s cell. Prisoners weren’t supposed to do that; the rule was just one to a cell.

When a prisoner stepped in a shower stall at the end of a row of cells, the guard could see his head through a window in the shower wall. The other prisoners, if they desired, could walk around to the front and watch the entire show. No shower curtains on Death Row.

Hennis’s other daily option was to ask the guard to shut his cell door—prisoners couldn’t open and shut their own doors. Once the door was shut, he could take masking tape used to mark laundry and attach a couple of trash bags over the outside window. The door window could be blocked with envelopes. Another trash bag would cover the light panels near the ceiling. Then he’d have achieved his goal: total darkness.

“Some days you felt like you wouldn’t get out,” Hennis said. “There were days when that happened. I’d call it quits for the day, shut my damn door, go on to bed, get undressed, and call it a day.”

If the guards caught him, the garbage bags came down.

Breakfast was served at 7:30. The guards shut off corridors leading to the rest of the prison population, a group that included 10 other classes of prisoners, ranging from those serving life sentences to those awaiting trial. Death Row prisoners, under state law, were not allowed to mix with the others. “The food sucked,” Hennis said, placing it one notch above the Cumberland County jail.

The next “event” was lunch around noon. The prisoner had to occupy three hours between meals, the day’s first struggle to find something to do. Many of them played cards, gambling for cigarettes from the vending machines—cigarettes from the outside weren’t allowed—while the guards weren’t watching. Hennis rarely joined them because he didn’t smoke.

Sometimes he played dominoes or Monopoly with the others, sometimes he put together jigsaw puzzles alone. Sometimes he just sat there. “The tedium, being bored, was the worst part,” Hennis said. “You get tired of the people.”

Hennis often passed the time writing letters. Death Row prisoners are among the best letter writers in the world.

He wrote his wife every day, ending his sentences in exclamation points. Most days he also wrote his parents, signing the letters, “Love, your son, Tim.” He used to just say, “Tim.”

“Almost like he wanted to remind us he was our son so we wouldn’t forget about him,” Bob Hennis said.

The day’s highlight was the mail cart’s arrival. Marylou and Angela wrote every day. Some days the lawyers responded to the two or three letters Hennis wrote them each week.

But none of the letters would top the one Tim got a couple of days after arriving on Death Row with a Fayetteville postmark dated July 8, the day of his death sentence. It had been addressed in scrawled block letters, as if someone was disguising his handwriting. Hennis had the guard close his cell door so he could open the letter in private.

Dear Mr. Hennis,

I did the crime,

I murdered the

Eastburns.

Sorry you’re doin

the time.

I’ll be safely out of

North Carolina when you

read this. Thanks,

Mr. X

For the rest of the day, Hennis bounded all over the day room. His lawyers told him it was probably a joke. But Hennis thought it was important. All his lawyers had to do was find Mr. X. He tucked the letter away and gave it to Angela during her next visit. She carried it back to Fayetteville, where Beaver filed it away as a crank letter.

Mr. X wouldn’t write again, and Hennis’s excitement trailed off. The numbing routine of Central Prison resumed.

Hennis finished a book about every three days. He read science fiction and survivalist books. He read the Star Trek series. And like most every Death Row prisoner, Hennis dabbled in jailhouse law, researching cases in the prison’s law library he thought would help his appeal. He recommended appeal tactics in letters to Beaver.

While working on his appeal, he made a discovery about Death Row. No one there was guilty. “None of them did it,” he said. “Well, occasionally you’d have someone say he did it and talk about it. But they talked about the law a lot, discussing different cases. They’d see what someone was using and ask if it could work for them. Then they’d write their lawyer a letter.”

Bob and Marylou sent him money to join book clubs. A prisoner could get books only if they came straight from publishing companies, which could be trusted not to send cocaine or weapons inside. Family members and friends were not granted that trust. Bob and Marylou once sent Tim an ink pen, only to have it returned. Prison officials said the metal filler could be made into a handcuff key.

Hennis made a few friends, sometimes breaking the rarely enforced rule against visiting other cells just so he could have a quiet conversation. He tried to stay away from other prisoners, though it could be difficult within the cell block.

“Some of them were crazy,” Hennis said. “Some others were on the edge. The slightest thing set them off, always walking a fine line between violence and nonviolence.” They rarely picked on the six-foot-four Hennis, still lean and muscular from all those battalion runs.

“I could lose my temper, too, but I would back down,” he said. “All around you was concrete and steel, you could only get hurt if you fought. And it’d look bad on your record. I didn’t need that if we won the appeal.”

The lure of an appeal stopped most of them. No matter how rough the murderers talked, little came from it. Death Row prisoners were the best behaved at the prison.

Dinner was served around 5:15. For the rest of the night, the TV blared with sitcoms or a ball game. If the game ran past 11, the guard let them watch until it was over.

Hennis had no interest in sports. “Can’t you shut that damn thing off?” he’d ask the guard. He wanted the TV to stop bouncing off his cell walls so he could put another day behind him.

“I hated that worse than anything, because I looked forward to the TV going off. Peace and quiet.”

But the quiet would not last all night. A guard came around at the top of every hour, and, unless sound asleep, Hennis could hear an electronic steel door sliding open in the hallway, allowing the guard inside Death Row.

Grrrrrooooan. Clang.

The guard’s hard-soled shoes crackled on the concrete floor. As he walked past the monitoring booth, he spoke to the guard on duty. “How’s it goin’?”

The sound of shoe hitting stair echoed through the cell block until the guard climbed the last one. The footsteps started again, growing louder and louder until they stopped by the first cell.

Hennis could look toward his door window, lit by a night light outside, and see the guard’s face pressed against it. Then it disappeared. A couple more footsteps, then another stop. Two more, another stop. All the way down the row of eight upstairs cells, the footsteps growing fainter after each stop.

The last check was at 6 A.M., when a guard peered in one more time and the doors unlocked to begin another day.

Twice a week, Death Row prisoners were allowed outside for an hour’s exercise on a fenced-in basketball court. There the prisoner had three options: play basketball, run around for no particular reason, or sit and breathe the fresh air.

Hennis started out playing basketball and he wasn’t bad. One year in high school, he had gone out for the team, but quit after a few practices. As a teenager, he never took authority well, one reason his announcement that he’d joined the Army shocked his parents. Still, at six-foot-four, he could be a formidable presence, but he couldn’t match the intensity of Death Row prisoners playing for keeps.

“I gave up on that because they just got too worked up over it,” he said. “They had fights start over basketball games. It wasn’t worth my effort.”

But he couldn’t let his body waste away on Death Row. To keep exercising was to remain optimistic. He often did push-ups and sit-ups in his cell, pushing himself to keep trying. Gotta keep trim. Can’t give up. I will not be like the others. One more. Just one more. C’mon, body, give me one more. I’m outta here one day, and I’m going to be ready.

It’d last a few days before the bags went back over the windows and lights. To hell with it. What damn difference does it make?

Some prisoners bailed out on Thorazine. Four doses a day kept them docile and sleepy day and night. Hennis watched them revive long enough for supper and glide back to bed, wondering if he’d get like that. He never took drugs to calm down, fearing how it would look if he ever got another trial.

One of the few other choices a Death Row prisoner could make was how he would die. The state offered the electric chair and lethal injection.

Hennis had decided on lethal injection shortly after moving into Cell 208, but he rarely thought about it. He’d read enough case law to know it’d be years before anything would happen. “I worried a short time, then I dismissed it. Get rid of it, flush it, it’s garbage.”

Bob and Marylou weren’t as convinced death was that far from their son’s thoughts. “The first six months or so, I don’t think he cared,” Bob Hennis said. “He thought he would meet his maker.”

Tim’s parents were almost as despondent. Though their Boca Raton home lacked bars and electric doors that clanged shut, the life Bob and Marylou shut themselves in was almost as confining.

“I think we slept the first year after it was over, our bodies were so worn out,” Marylou said. “The only time I didn’t think about it was at work, but the minute I’d get in the car and go home, I’d start thinking about it again.”

The first nights were the worst. Bob and Marylou skipped work, unable to make a go of it. A group of friends brought over supper in the Southern tradition of donating food to grieving families. At night they’d wrestle with the sheets into the wee hours until their bodies gave up and collapsed.

When they woke up, their first thought was “Is today the day it ends?”

Beth saw the toll it was taking on her parents: They were getting older. When she and her brothers were growing up, Bob and Marylou could fix anything, from wrapping a broken finger to curing a broken date. Beth and Tim figured their parents could fix this mess, but after watching them pour nearly every bit of themselves into Tim’s defense, she realized her parents were mortal. They couldn’t fix everything. Tim sat on Death Row and it was killing Bob and Marylou.

“There was a lot of forgetfulness, a lot of ‘Where did I put this?’” Beth said. “After he was convicted, I could swear I was gonna lose one of them before I would lose Tim.”

Not only was the case draining, but it had become expensive. Bob and Marylou could no longer afford to fly to North Carolina to visit Tim. Three weeks after the conviction, they packed up the Nissan and hit northbound I-95 for a 16-hour drive they’d make about every month.

At a gate in front of Raleigh’s Central Prison, they showed a guard their driver’s licenses to prove who they were. Once inside the prison walls, they faced a guard behind a Plexiglas window. “We’re here to visit Tim Hennis.” A metal drawer shot out of the wall.

“Gotta see some identification,” the guard said.

Bob and Marylou pulled out their driver’s licenses again and put them in the drawer. The guard nodded. A metal door groaned open and the guard motioned them inside.

The visiting booth on Bob and Marylou’s side had padded stools. On the other side of a metal wall, a guard let Tim inside a room and removed his cuffs. Tim sat on a plain metal stool. A window about a foot high gave him a view of his parents.

“At first he complained as soon as we got there,” Bob said. “He carried on. He just had to unload on somebody. That’s why we felt we had to go so often.”

Hennis was allowed one visit a week. As out-of-state visitors, Bob and Marylou were allowed three hours a week, twice as much as Angela could have. But his parents figured out ways to get even more time. “We’d go up on Friday, stay over and catch a visit on Tuesday,” Bob said. “We learned to call Saturday morning and see if everyone came who was supposed to. A lot of people wouldn’t use all their time. That way we’d get three days—Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday.”

Angela could no longer bear Fayetteville without Tim. She moved back in with her parents in Jacksonville and got a job selling jewelry at JC Penney’s. Kristina became the sixth Koonce daughter, obeying Lloyd Koonce around the house as her aunts did. She heard the others call him Daddy, so she called him Daddy.

Her father was known at the Koonce home as Timothy. Kristina liked that, so she began calling him “Timphany Daddy.”

Angela worked weekends and went to see her husband on her days off during the week. She couldn’t trust the Chevette to make those trips, so her parents made the downpayment on a new Plymouth Horizon and Tim’s parents picked up the payments. As the car moved up Western Boulevard, Central Prison came into view.

“Daddy’s house,” Kristina would say.

Unlike the county jail, Kristina was allowed to visit at Central Prison. She and her dad played hand games at first, Kristina holding her tiny palm against the glass and tracing her father’s massive hand on the other side. Sometimes Tim showed her pictures he’d drawn.

When Kristina got sleepy, Angela would put her down for a nap on a counter in front of the window. Other times, Kristina got frustrated. She’d learned to run and talk and wanted to show her father what she could do. But that sheet of Plexiglas was always in the way. “Why can’t he come on the other side and play?” she’d ask Angela.

Then she’d bang her hand on the Plexiglas. “Open this, open this, Daddy. Open this.”

“I can’t.”

“Open this.”

“I can’t.”

Huge tears would roll down her cheeks. Tim would walk away, unable to stand it. Some days he’d kick the wall in front of him. “I’m missing her growing up,” he said, growing angrier with William VanStory each day.

After a few of those visits, Tim made an offer to his wife. “You don’t need to be going through this mess,” he said. “Why don’t you just go. Go on. Get on with your life, get a divorce, and get on with your life. I’ll just duke this out by myself.

“Kristina doesn’t need to be coming up here every weekend seeing me locked up, banging on the glass saying ‘Daddy, open this.’ You don’t need the hassles, the financial burdens, and the mental anguish of seeing me locked up. You need to forget about this like a bad chapter in your life. Write it off and go do something else. If I ever get out, I won’t fight for custody, I won’t cause you any problems, I won’t ask for anything.”

“You’re being a jerk,” Angela shot back. “I’m not going anywhere.”