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 the 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.

The agents told her she couldn’t have been on Summer Hill Road by 1:45. They questioned how she could see the man in foggy, misty weather. They tried to get her to say the threatening calls didn’t start until after Billy Richardson contacted her in March 1986, and suggested to her it was Saturday morning she saw the man and not Friday—as if a man leaving the Eastburn house the night before Mother’s Day wouldn’t have been significant.

Charlotte told them everything she had to say was in the transcript of her court testimony. If they still had questions, she said, they could look there.

By the time they left, she was in tears. “They had it set in their own minds what they wanted to hear, and that’s all they were going to hear no matter what I had to say,” she said. “I don’t think they believed it. Any of it.”

The SBI questioned Julie Czerniak, who passed a polygraph and gave the SBI pubic hair samples. After four years, the state had yet to test whether the babysitter could have been the source of the unknown pubic hair in the Eastburn living room. Her hair didn’t match, and Julie was at last finished with the investigation of the Eastburn murders. She later married a soldier in the 82nd Airborne and left Fayetteville when he was transferred.

“I’m someone totally different from what I was then,” she said six years after the murders. “I was young. In a way, I wanted to be in the limelight. I’d never been on TV, and it was kind of neat. But older people helped me realize what I was doing. Now I think, ‘God, I would’ve done it so differently.’”

The SBI polygraphed John Raupach and took hair and fingerprint samples from him, telling him, “We don’t think you’re guilty, but we have to do this.” Raupach passed the polygraph and none of his samples matched. He dropped out of school and moved back to Summer Hill.

The SBI found Patrick Cone in jail. Five weeks after Hennis was acquitted, Cone had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor possession of stolen property in the case in which he’d been accused of trying to use a stolen credit card. He received a suspended sentence, but when he later was caught driving with a suspended license and no insurance, he received a seven-day sentence.

The SBI asked him the same questions as before and polygraphed him on whether he’d used the stolen Eastburn bank card. Cone said he passed; the SBI won’t release the result. The SBI then left him alone.

Cone works in a Fayetteville restaurant and stands by his story that he saw Tim Hennis early on May 10, 1985, on Summer Hill Road.

“I kinda figure in the end, you know what I’m saying, he’ll get what he deserves,” he said. “Everybody got to go through the Man. He’ll get his. I still think he might come to my house sometime, but I don’t too much worry about that. I don’t want him coming to my house, but if he does, he’s got problems, for real. Then justice will be served. If he comes by here, he ain’t gonna leave here.”

Since finishing his jail sentence, Cone has stayed out of trouble.

The SBI reopened the investigation of WHJR. Oakes’s testimony at the misconduct hearing had revealed that WHJR’s co-workers recalled seeing scratches on his face, that his roommate drove a white van similar to the one Charlotte Kirby had described, and that he had money problems in the summer of 1985. WHJR bought a $19,000 sports car which was repossessed before he made the first payment. At the end of the summer, WHJR suddenly asked for a transfer to Raleigh, where he was fired after admitting he stole $500.

Oakes had talked to WHJR’s former girlfriend, who remembered him breaking up with her because he’d gotten another woman pregnant. The girlfriend said she couldn’t understand it—WHJR had never made a sexual advance on her.

The girlfriend also remembered telling Oakes that WHJR didn’t go to work the night of May 9. He was supposed to ride with her to go bowling that night. When she got to his home and knocked on his door, no one answered. She continued on to the bowling alley and kept calling as late as 10:30 before giving up and finding another ride home. WHJR later told her he’d fallen asleep on the couch and couldn’t hear her knocking or the phone ringing.

The girlfriend said she’d recorded the events of May 9 in a diary she kept at that time, which she said she turned over to the police and never got back. Detective Ron Oakes denies he ever received a diary from the girlfriend.

By the time the SBI interviewed WHJR, he had taken a job as a long-haul trucker, a fact that would bring Billy Richardson back to the Mr. X letters. “I’m passing through Fayetteville on my way to New Jersey,” the second one reads. By then WHJR had moved at least six times since leaving Fayetteville. The bank that loaned him money for the sports car couldn’t find him to serve a lawsuit on him, trying four different addresses over three years. Finally, the court would enter a default judgment against WHJR.

On June 22, 1989, agents Ratley and Allen visited him at his Raleigh home. Asked to explain rumors of scratches on his face, WHJR said he’d been riding his bike on Yadkin Road when a black man tried to steal it. He said the man threw a brick at him and hit his back, knocking him down and causing scratches on his back and face. He said he and his roommate later looked for the man to no avail.

Three years earlier, WHJR had told Oakes that he never had scratches on his face.

The agents talked to WHJR’s former girlfriend, who told them that her boyfriend had scratches on his face around the time of the murders, an apparent contradiction to what she’d told Oakes three years before. But she later said she’s confirmed those scratches to anyone who’s ever asked. She described three long scratches, as if made by a cat or a woman’s fingernails. WHJR told her two or three black guys jumped him and beat him up, she said.

The SBI didn’t seem interested, she said.

“They were going through the motions. They sat there and told me they didn’t know why they let Hennis out of prison, because he did it. I thought, ‘Why are you talking to me?’ They asked me the same things as before and said, ‘I know you’ve said this before, but we’ve got to write it down.’”

Agents Ratley and Allen approached WHJR about taking a polygraph and giving hair, blood and fingerprint samples. WHJR agreed at first but later told the agents he would not be humiliated by the SBI.

The agents went to WHJR’s home to ask again. He told them to “leave my fucking house right now.” To this date, he is the only person questioned about the case to refuse to give samples.

The SBI left, and WHJR was again dropped as a suspect.

Officially speaking, the Eastburn case is still open. But the SBI has thrown up its hands.

Cumberland County’s law enforcement officers have put the Hennis case behind them as well. Grannis, Dickson, and Colyer are still with the district attorney’s office, Watts is a major in the sheriff’s department, and Bittle is the DA’s investigator. Haral Carlin graduated from law school and joined Beaver, Thompson, Holt and Richardson, P.A., the law firm he fought so vehemently against in the first trial. The former investigator still believes in Hennis’s guilt.

So does William VanStory, who married the woman who once accused him of assault. She won the title “Mrs. North Carolina,” and VanStory continues to practice criminal defense law in Fayetteville. “I’ll go to my grave believing Timothy Hennis committed these crimes, and I would not have prosecuted the man for his life if I didn’t believe it,” he said after the case. As for the misconduct charges raised by the defense, he said, “Has the world gone upside down? A triple murderer is a hero and I’m a bad guy.”

No one associated with Tim Hennis’s prosecution would discuss the case.

Jerry Beaver and Billy Richardson reluctantly put the case behind them as well. Beaver’s firm, now with 10 partners, is still one of Fayetteville’s most prestigious, particularly in civil rights law.

The city of Fayetteville never embraced their defense of Tim Hennis. When Richardson ran for the North Carolina House of Representatives in 1990, the daughter of an elderly couple murdered by one of his clients bought a newspaper ad during the week of the election.

“Do you want the same man representing us in Raleigh who represented Henry Spell and Timothy Hennis?” the ad asked. “Billy Richardson is a prime example of a liberal justice system where victims are further victimized, some criminals go free and slick lawyers get rich.”

Richardson lost that election; but tried again in 1992 and won.

He still thinks the Hennis case could be solved if someone had the money and time to compare the state’s and defense’s files. For more than four years, Richardson chased every lead and rumor the state threw out, living in fear he’d find an awful truth. Even after the case was over, he kept learning more about his client. But all of it pointed in the same direction.

He learned that the SBI’s hair expert had determined that the unknown pubic hair was forcibly removed, boosting the defense theory that the hair was lost during the rape. The SBI denied that a forcibly-removed hair means anything.

Four years after the state argued crime-scene contamination, the SBI tested the fingerprints of the officers who went inside the Eastburn home against the unknown prints from the Eastburn house. Detective Robert Bittle’s fingerprint matched a print lifted from the dryer. The other prints still have not been explained.

Richardson learned even more about the rape allegation against Hennis in Minnesota. The victim had described a man with dark hair, an upturned nose, and protruding lower lip, all characteristics that don’t match Hennis. The victim picked four suspects from area high school yearbooks, and none were Hennis. No arrest was made.

But the Minnesota girl had hurt more than Hennis’s lawyers ever knew. Though she was not mentioned in court, the jurors somehow heard of a rape charge from Hennis’s past and discussed it during deliberations. None could remember how it got there, but it didn’t come from the defense camp.

“That’s probably why Hennis didn’t testify,” one of the jurors said during deliberations before convicting Hennis of murder.

Richardson fears the case no more.

“You can look anywhere you want,” he said. “Talk to anybody you want. You’re not going to find Tim Hennis did this.”