Chapter Thirty-two

“Good morning, members of the jury,” Richardson began in his final argument. “As the youngest, I’m always the one who gets to go first.”

Richardson argued the best way he knew, not with clever turns of phrases or eloquence, but bare emotion. He was nervous, tripping all over the word “recantation,” but made no apologies for it. His sincerity and anger were real.

“The first problem with this evidence is that it never, ever shows that Tim Hennis was in the Eastburn home at the time of these murders,” he said. “The physical evidence in this case doesn’t even remotely link him to the case.

“The major problem with this case is what you have is a wholly circumstantial case, which is only as strong as its weakest link or circumstance and requires you to stick supposition upon supposition upon supposition to even speculate that Tim is guilty. That’s assuming everything that the state tells you is true. And, people, that is a mighty, mighty big assumption.”

He dissected the state’s case point by point, finally reaching Patrick Cone.

“People, doggone it, you don’t take somebody at face value when you make an important decision. Would you take a person at face value in doing a business deal when you didn’t know the person before they talked to you?

“You have never met Pat Cone before. Let’s say this is a person who is in an important business deal. You’ve never met the person. They say I want to sell you a piece of land in Florida. You have to pull your life savings out to buy that land.

“Are you going to take that man at face value when he says it is a prime residential development? You’re going to check it out.… You’re going to do everything in the world to ensure that you’ve made a right decision, everything. Then you’re going to follow what your gut tells you.

“You’re going to say if I can’t trust that man to tell me the truth about one thing, then how in the world can I trust him to tell me the truth about something involving a man’s life? That’s what you’re going to say. Then why make an exception here?”

Richardson brought up the state’s conduct with Pat Cone.

“Isn’t it funny how Pat Cone gets stopped, his license is revoked, he’s drinking, and what do the officers do in this case? Pat, you shouldn’t be driving anymore. Let your buddy drive.

“I asked him, ‘Pat, why did they tell you not to drive?’ He said, ‘I had too much to drink that night.’ He was drunk as a coot, and they let him go. That’s the state’s conduct. That’s the state saying trust me, convict this man. That’s their conduct.”

Richardson took on Lucille Cook with a tactic he borrowed from Joe Freeman Britt, a state prosecutor who had put more prisoners on Death Row than any prosecutor in the nation. Britt had once prosecuted a rapist who strangled an eleven-year-old girl by shoving her panties down her throat. The pathologist testified it took her five minutes to die. During his final argument, Britt stopped and sat down for five long, agonizing minutes of silence. He got a death verdict.

“Three minutes and 35 seconds,” Richardson argued. “Her testimony went from the first hearing in June from ‘Well, I was in a big hurry and I waited for him to get in his car. I was there maybe a minute,’ to ‘Well, I waited for him to start his car, and for some reason he just didn’t get his car going real fast, so I had to wait for him and wait for him and it took about two minutes.’

“Three minutes and 35 seconds,” he said, motioning to Beaver, who walked out the courtroom’s side door and flung it open. The door hit a metal trash can on the other side, causing a deafening clang.

Richardson looked at his watch.

“What are my lawyers doing?” Tim Hennis asked himself.

The plan was to dramatize how long three and a half minutes could take. Richardson began pacing around the courtroom. Fidgety jurors did one imaginary bank machine transaction after another. When is he going to talk again? They put the card in the machine again and punched more numbers. It couldn’t take this long. Shouldn’t he be saying something by now?

The silence finally ended with Beaver coming through the back doors. Richardson stepped back before the jury.

“I guess now I can get in my car.”

Richardson knew he’d have to counter VanStory’s circle argument from the first trial, when the prosecutor had methodically eliminated everyone but Hennis. To do that, he borrowed a theme from George Bush’s 1988 acceptance speech at the Republican convention. The Democrats, Bush had said, had decided to play in his ball park on the issue of competence. Although he hardly admired Bush, Richardson appreciated the effect of his speech. He decided his “ball park” would be coincidences.

“They will say isn’t it a coincidence that a blond-haired man with a mustache got into a white car. They are going to play. Let’s get up there and play ball. I’ll get up and play. Let me take my swing. Let’s talk coincidence.

“Coincidence: Cone can’t get his story straight. Is that a coincidence, or is it a fact that he doesn’t know what he saw?…

“Coincidence: Mrs. Cook’s memory comes back in February after the February hearing, where all over the press is about Cone’s doubt and after they repeatedly went out and suggested the answer to it. Coincidence.

“Coincidence: The crime log checklist puts down there that day room was closed at 11:30. Coincidence, isn’t it?…

“Tim says take my blood. Take my hair. Take my prints. I don’t have anything to hide. Any coincidence? Nothing matches, nothing.

“Coincidence: They had Tim all over the place where he can’t be. That’s hysteria. That’s people thinking they see something when they don’t. It doesn’t fit.

“Coincidence: Charlotte Kirby pops up.… You looked into that woman’s eyes. You saw that fear. You saw that sincerity. And you know what? This isn’t like Lucille Cook. This isn’t like Lucille Cook at all. Mrs. Cook says her memory came back to her.

“This woman says I saw him and I told my best friend. I told my best friend they made a terrible mistake. Hennis is not the man.”

Bob and Marylou were proud of Richardson. He’d come so far in three years.

“You know, this isn’t a close case at all,” he continued. “This is overwhelming evidence the man is innocent. It all fits. You have a walker out there that fits that description. You’ve got a man under the thumb of the state. You have people coming up with strange memories ten months later.…

“Then you have physical evidence crying to you, just absolutely crying to you that he’s not the man. You’ve got a pubic hair in there that ain’t him. You have head hairs in there that ain’t him. You have fingerprints in there that ain’t him.

“You know, you have all those other reports. They say, well, they are inconclusive. Doggone it, when do the inconclusive, plus inconclusive, plus inconclusive start adding up to be conclusive? When are one of those things going to hit? If he is the man, they would hit. One of them would hit. But they don’t hit. They don’t hit because he is not the man.

“None of this fits. They are putting a doggone square peg into a round hole, and it doesn’t fit and it stinks. This man has been charged long enough. It is time he’s acquitted. It is time that he’s acquitted. I’m going to sit down now. I’m going to leave it in your hands. I pray you make the right decision.”

With VanStory’s circle argument broken, Billy Richardson sat down. He’d spoken his last word in a courtroom on behalf of Tim Hennis. As Beaver began, Richardson sat with clenched hands, his stomach hurting and eyes watering. He wanted Beaver and the prosecutors to hurry up and get it over with.

Beaver asked the jurors if he’d fulfilled the promises he’d made in his opening statement—that he would show Patrick Cone to be a liar and a thief, and that the physical evidence wouldn’t match Tim. Beaver suggested Lucille Cook had fallen prey to the “Hennis hysteria” he mentioned in his opening argument.

He said Brenda Dew’s statements about the Members Only jacket “were nothing more than lies, and they were nothing less than lies. They were pure lies told to you by the state, a lie by a forensic serologist. I defied her to get on that stand and tell you otherwise, and she sure didn’t.”

He asked the jury to consider whether someone else could have been at the Eastburn home the night of the murders. Why would Katie Eastburn, he asked, leave her five-year-old child alone in the house for 30 minutes to pick up milk and orange juice next door?

Beaver moved onto his favorite subject—reckless prosecution.

“These people didn’t pick Tim Hennis out of the blue and say we are going to go after this guy, but they find the suspect, convince themselves that he is guilty, and then begin to build their case against him. They shape and mold and push it any way they can to make it, because they can’t afford to back down. The political ramifications of the community knowing they made a mistake on something like this are incredible.

“So they push and push. They are convinced. Half the state’s case here is built upon your trust that they would not prosecute a man they didn’t think was guilty.”

The prosecutors knew they’d have to give the jury a crash course on the state’s case. Other than a smattering of rebuttal evidence, the jury had not heard from the state in nearly a month. Cal Colyer argued first, standing composed and dignified behind the podium, not a man ready to turn on the defendant and shout “baby killer” in his face. Hennis had dreaded that more than anything about the state’s arguments, but with Colyer and Dickson, he didn’t have to worry.

Instead, Colyer quoted Beaver’s idol, F. Lee Bailey.

“When your case is weak, or when things aren’t going your way, you attack in the courtroom. You attack the police, attack the investigators, attack the prosecutors, attack the witnesses. What you saw here was reminiscent of what the defendant did inside 367 Summer Hill Road in the early morning hours of May 10—attack, slash, rip, and tear apart.”

Colyer tried to restore lost pieces of the state’s case. He said Hazel Pratt saw smoke coming out of Tim Hennis’s barrel at 9 A.M. on Saturday morning, but she didn’t see Hennis. So that was no evidence Hennis was home.

He said Hennis removed his jacket for the assault but “had his hat on and that’s why he didn’t leave hairs.”

He said Hennis was more adept at using a bank card than Cone. “Which one of the two of these men can do the three transactions in this case in the amount of time in which they were made?” Colyer asked. “Someone who tries to put in an expired MasterCard or someone who used a teller card routinely?” He didn’t explain why, if Hennis were so skilled at using a bank card, it took him three minutes to withdraw $150.

He said the foreign pubic hair might have been stuck to somebody’s shoe, a refrain from the first trial.

He said the military witnesses covered up for a “friend they couldn’t imagine having done this.” He said Hennis’s testimony was too casual, too controlled, and too unemotional.

He addressed Richardson’s argument that Hennis had not acted guilty the week after the murders. “Innocent people don’t need to act,” he said. “If you are a guilty party, what better way to protect your innocence time after time after time than to act as normal as possible?”

Colyer closed by mocking one of Hennis’s friends who’d called him “Timmy” during his testimony. He picked up the composite drawing and waved it before the jury.

“That composite, folks, is worth a thousand words,” he shouted. “Pat Cone didn’t forget Timmy. This composite is Timmy. Ladies and gentlemen, don’t you forget Timmy, either.”

John Dickson had the last word against Hennis.

“You will hear no apology for the case the state of North Carolina presented,” he solemnly began. “There will be no apology for calling Patrick Cone and Lucille Cook to the stand. Patrick Cone and Lucille Cook did not choose to be a witness in this case. That choice was made for them by someone else, and that man is sitting right over there—the man who killed Katie, Kara, and Erin.”

Dickson pointed at Hennis, the extent of his theatrics. He relied more on sarcasm. “He says Katie Eastburn called him that night. Can you imagine how that phone call must have gone? ‘Hello, I’m the lady who gave a man a dog. Are you the man I gave it to?’”

He defended Cone and Cook, asking what they had to gain by testifying. “I can only hope if something happens to me, you, or your loved ones, that there’s a Patrick Cone walking down the street or a Lucille Cook who will say she saw someone who looked like him.”

He reserved the most vitriol for the defense lawyers, calling their case a “magic show with smoke and mirrors.”

“Every time you turn around here comes another one and they’re all wearing toboggans,” he said. “Smoke and mirrors. They’re pulling rabbits out of a hat. I submit to you, the defense put rabbits in the courtroom floor and asked you to chase them.”

Dickson closed by referring to Beaver’s comment about Katie leaving the house to borrow milk and orange juice. To Dickson, this comment was a suggestion that Katie had a man at the house watching Kara. “That was one of the lowest blows I’ve ever heard in a court of law,” he said, his voice dropping to an indignant whisper. “She’s certainly not here to defend herself and we have this defendant here to thank for that.

“The defendant decided the course that Katie Eastburn’s life will take, Kara’s life will take, and Erin’s life will take. Don’t forget why you are here.”

Dickson sat down in a huff.

Beaver was perplexed. He’d wanted to infer that Katie would have called a baby-sitter or somebody to watch Kara while she was gone. But Captain Gary Eastburn was among those who believed Dickson’s interpretation. Already miffed that the defense had suggested drugs were coming through his house, he took Beaver’s comment as a dagger to the heart. When Beaver approached later to try to clear up any misunderstanding, Gary said, “I’d just as soon not even talk to you.”

Judge Ellis recessed court for the day and the lawyers prepared for another trial. The state of North Carolina had some explaining to do.