The Killing Kind (12 page)

O
n the morning of November 24, a meeting took place at the Moss Justice Center out on York Highway. The YCSO had been serving South Carolina in York County since 1786. Within the infrastructure of the YCSO existed a series of squads: Violent Crimes Unit, Crimes Against Property Unit, Drug Enforcement Unit, Forensic Services Unit, Polygraph Unit. The YCSO was equipped to investigate just about any crime committed within its boundary lines. The deaths of Randi and Heather, however, called for a broader level of investigation involving other jurisdictions. Thus, the YCSO wanted to form a task force in search of what most believed was an evolving (and quite possibly highly experienced) serial killer.

Earlier that morning, while conducting a thorough background check on Danny Hembree, it was learned that he had been questioned back in 2007 as the primary suspect in the 1992 murder of another local Gastonia girl. As each layer of his record peeled back, darker and more sinister secrets rose to the surface.

Hensley sat and listened as detectives from several local agencies shared what they knew about the cases. Sitting in on the meeting was a behavioral analyst—some might call him a “profiler”—from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). He took in everything being said regarding how the bodies were found, where, when, by whom, on top of the condition of each victim and state of decomposition, along with the latest information the YCSO had compiled on their suspect.

Additional info was shared about Heather as the meeting focused on her victimology. There was no painting Heather in the light of a princess here—the team concentrated strictly on the facts. Anything less would have not served the victim well. The better an investigator is informed about a victim’s life, the better his chances of zeroing in on her killer. This might sound awfully simple, but there’s no other way to solve cases of this caliber.

According to Hensley’s final report of the case, York County investigators advised the group that Heather “had been a prostitute since the age of twelve.” When that information was presented, a certain pall came over the room. Of course, cops had heard far worse. But twelve years old and selling her body? It was a nightmare life that ended, apparently, with the bogeyman chasing Heather in those dark dreams. Heather had been placed in group and foster homes most of her childhood. She had run away from just about every one of them.

The term “prostitute” was probably not the best way to describe Heather’s behavior. Heather had never been formally charged with the offense as an adult. It wasn’t as though Heather put on high heels, a miniskirt, too much makeup, and went out walking the streets. She might have traded—and several reported this—her body for drugs at times, but it was not some sort of pimp/prostitute life of working the streets at specific locations and times, or even advertising as an escort on Craigslist or Backpage, same as many girls do.

“Heather was a drug user,” said an investigator running the meeting, “crack . . . being her drug of choice. She is . . . a person who is pleasant to be around and easy to get along with.” Heather would date drug dealers, it was reported, and “align herself with drug suppliers.... [She] was known to date white and black males and had been in lesbian relationships.”

“She was,” said the same investigator, reading through Heather’s victimology report, “known to rip off customers. Before her death, Heather had recently been staying with [Shorty].”

An investigator laid out the case as it stood. From all the information the YCSO had collected thus far, it was clear Danny Hembree was the last person to see Heather alive on October 18. He had admitted (during that impromptu interview in the driveway of Nick’s house) that he dropped Heather off at the Mighty Dollar across the street from her home. Heather’s friends and family had last seen her on the night of October 17. Her body was found twelve days later, on October 29.

What happened between October 18 and October 29 was an obvious question that needed an answer. Where had Heather gone? Better yet, where was Danny Hembree during that time?

“Basically, the behavioral analyst,” Hensley later said, “confirmed what York County already knew—that Danny Hembree was looking like our main guy.”

Many in the room believed their main suspect was a serial killer, especially since there had been a third body connected to him back in 1992. Over the past twenty-four hours, the YCSO and the GCPD had dug up all they could on Danny Hembree. It was extreme. Murders aside, he was a very bad man, indeed. Far beyond what anyone close to him had ever known.

S
tella Funderburk had known Danny Hembree for as long as she could recall. “Maybe thirty years,” Stella testified later.

They had gone to school together in Gastonia.

During her lifetime, Stella had little trouble admitting in court, she’d struggled with substance abuse issues. However, she stipulated, “I wouldn’t say I had an addiction.”

Still, she admitted to using “crack cocaine and alcohol.” And her big sister, Cynthia Patterson, backed that up by stating later that Heather had even used crack in front of Stella.

Anyone analyzing Stella’s (and Cynthia’s) comments can reckon that crack cocaine is not a drug one uses socially. With crack, you’re all in, once you pick up that pipe. To make her point, Cynthia testified that although Heather was no walk-the-block working girl, she did often “trade sex for crack cocaine and/or sex for money.”

Stella was not romantically linked to Nick any longer, but she still went over to the house and visited the girls, hung around, and, because of his bad heart, helped Nick out when he needed.

There was some indication Stella had dated Danny Hembree at one point in her life, but not while he was with Nicole, Stella made a point to say when asked by law enforcement. Regardless, Danny was Stella’s, Nick’s, Heather’s, and Nicole’s source of transportation a lot of times. He often gave them rides wherever they needed to go, albeit always for a price, one way or another.

Danny generally never had an issue doing favors (especially rides) for any of them—until, Stella claimed, the week Heather went missing.

On November 11, 2009, a day and night that would turn out to be a focal point for cops in their investigation, Stella and Nicole went over to Shorty’s house to get something, Stella later said. “It was when I met Randi.”

Randi was at Shorty’s that night, according to Stella and several others hanging around the house. Randi and Shorty knew each other. It wasn’t a strange circumstance for Randi to be at Shorty’s.

Danny brought Stella and Nicole to Shorty’s. While Stella was at Shorty’s with Nicole, Nick called.

“I need to go to the hospital.” He sounded out of breath and scared.

“We’ll be right there,” Stella told him.

According to Stella’s recollection, Danny drove her, Randi, and Nicole to Nick’s. She never said why Randi went along for the ride, but others claimed Randi was in the mood to party that night and Danny always had the money to buy the dope and dangle it in front of the girls.

Nick was in trouble. He needed to get to a hospital.

Upon their arrival, Randi had even “given her condolences” about Heather to Nick. She told him how sorry she was for his loss, which was obviously taking an unfavorable toll on the guy’s health. Nick had taken Heather’s death particularly hard.

“Danny, can you take me?” Nick asked him.

“No,” he answered, refusing to drive Nick to the hospital. The request for the ride was in that control zone that Danny loved to work in. He knew the ride was another bargaining chip he could use that night to get what he wanted out of the girls.

“Come on, Danny,” Stella pleaded.

He shook his head. He coldly said again, “No.”

Stella watched as Danny, Nicole, and Randi walked into Nicole’s bedroom. Stella knew what they were going to do.

“Stella, what are they doing in there?” Nick asked.

“I don’t know, but maybe some drugs.”

One thing Nick hated was when the kids did drugs in his house. He frowned upon it. If they were going to destroy their lives, he was not going to sit by and be a party to it.

Nick got up. He walked over to the bedroom and opened the door.

“I saw Danny sitting there with a crack pipe in his mouth.”

Nick was pissed. “Oh no!” he said. “Get out of my house. I don’t want that shit in here. Y’all gotta go. Right now.”

So Danny took off, with Randi and Nicole, and went back to Shorty’s.

“We’ll come back later and give y’all a ride to the hospital,” Danny said as they were leaving. Stella knew they were heading back to Shorty’s to party.

Stella couldn’t wait. She wouldn’t wait. Danny Hembree was being the power-hungry prick that he could be. Nick was huffing and puffing. Catching them smoking dope didn’t help. So Stella called an ambulance.

After the ordeal inside the ER, doctors gave Nick the okay to go home and told him to take it easy. Nick and Stella did not have a ride back to Nick’s house. Stella waited with Nick inside the reception area. She wanted to make sure Nick was going to be all right. It was near midnight. Nick was falling asleep. Stella called Danny Hembree.

“No,” he said to a ride home from the hospital.

Danny, Randi, and Nicole were with Shorty inside his house, partying. All four were on a bed in a back room, sitting, talking, laughing, joking, and smoking (except Nicole, everyone later said). There was even a moment, Shorty later claimed, when he saw Randi and Danny mocking Nicole behind her back, making adolescent gestures to each other and laughing at Nicole.

Nicole figured it out and got pissed at them. “Assholes,” she said. “Stop it.”

“I’m leaving, anyway,” Randi said.

Randi got up and made a call; then she told Shorty she was taking off. She had someone coming to get her. She was meeting her ride up the street. She didn’t say who, though.

Shorty followed Randi out the door.

“Stay here, Randi,” Shorty pleaded. (Shorty liked Randi.)

“No, I can’t. Thanks, though. I’ll see you later.”

Randi took off, walking up the road.

Sometime after that, Shorty walked up the same block toward another friend’s house, four houses away.

After hanging out a bit at that house, Shorty walked back toward his party house. As he was coming down the street, a figure came up the same street toward him: Nicole.

“She were mad, talking junk,” Shorty recalled.

Nicole was upset about Randi and Danny teaming up on her. She thought that maybe Randi and Danny had a thing going on behind her back. The way Shorty saw it, Nicole and Danny had an obvious blowup. Shorty guessed it was over Randi and all that goofing around earlier, along with the possibility that Randi and Danny were sleeping together.

As they talked in the street, both saw Danny drive up the road in his red car. Strangely enough, though, when he spotted them in the road (he did not expect to see Nicole and Shorty), he abruptly made a U-turn and drove away.

“Back down the same way Randi had gone,” Shorty said later.

Nicole got a ride to the hospital. She walked in, upset.

“What’s wrong?” Stella asked.

“Danny and me, we’s been fighting,” Nicole explained.

Stella called Danny on his cell to find out what the hell had happened. It was near one in the morning. Everyone was tired. It had been a long day and a longer night. Stella still needed to get Nick home.

“Yeah?” Danny said, answering.

“Where are you?”

“At Momma’s.” He sounded winded, out of breath, Stella recalled. He didn’t want to talk. He was preoccupied. He was in a rush to get off the phone.

“Can you give us a ride home, Danny?”

“No,” Hembree said. It was clear he did not want to be bothered. He hung up.

A
s that task force meeting continued on the morning of November 24, it became clear to everyone that the common denominator in the deaths of Randi and Heather was Danny Robbie Hembree. There was Nicole, too, but law enforcement didn’t think Nicole had a hand in murdering her sister and Randi.

The investigator running the meeting explained how Danny Hembree admitted he had last seen Heather when he dropped her off at the Mighty Dollar on October 18, late that night, after another round of partying.

“Mr. Hembree is known to use crack cocaine, drink . . . and pick up prostitutes,” he explained, adding how the suspect had a penchant for girls who sold their bodies for drugs. It was maybe even a fixation—a morbid, twisted fascination he couldn’t control. It was an obsession for Danny Hembree, some said, to have two or three girls at once, but they had to be girls whom he paid for and bought with drugs or cash.

Profiler of serial killers, psychotherapist, social worker, certified addiction specialist, and fellow at the American College of Forensic Examiners, John Kelly (who studied this case for me and is my profiling guru for
Dark Minds
on Investigation Discovery) said guys like Danny Hembree give themselves away in their behavior. They cannot hide from who they are; it always comes out.

“Mr. Hembree is a power and control–focused killer,” Kelly commented. “The killer that likes to use drugs as payment is extending his pleasure, by extending his time and length of power and control. This is very different than the killer that shows a victim a twenty-dollar bill and gets her in a car, drives to a location, and kills her. That’s too fast for these guys. More time equals more power and control—which, in turn, equals more pleasure.”

John Kelly was, in fact, one of the first clinicians to label serial killing an addiction in his 1993 published paper, “The Alcohol/Drug Serial Killer Connection.”

Danny Hembree fit into this mold: He enjoyed every bit of dangling drugs in front of the girls and making them beg for it, once he hooked them with a free hit.

“By having control over two women who are drug users,” Kelly added, “and who would do anything for the drug, he doubles his pleasure.” Consider Sommer and Heather. “He enjoys watching them grovel and beg. He would get double, maybe triple, the sexual gratification and excitement by having two people, under his power, doing his bidding. For these types of serials, the more people you control in a degrading manner, the more gratification you get out of the experience.”

Kelly said Danny Hembree’s fantasy “was fetish-driven,” by controlling the girls’ sexual performance on each other.

“In many cases, these guys ejaculate watching the fetish phase take place and can’t get an erection afterward. One serial killer whose fetish was bondage, the girls later said, if you did what he wanted and allowed him to tie you up and control you, that was enough for him, and he had an orgasm. Problems took place and he got violent only when they didn’t obey him. Some killers are impotent as well, which enrages them, and just can’t get an erection.”

In those cases, “they blame the girl,” Kelly said.

If you place Danny Hembree into a clinical structure, he becomes the poster child for what experts determined a serial killer was during the 1990s (criteria that has changed somewhat since those days, but has, likewise, stayed the same in many ways): white, middle-age, lives with parents, drinks alcoholically, frequents areas where prostitutes hang out, addicted to hard drugs, criminal history, violent (sudden) rage that, to those around him, seems to come up out of nowhere, loner type who chooses carefully the people he hangs around.

“There’s an indication that Mr. Hembree visited some relatives in Florida after Miss Saldana’s body was uncovered,” said the task force investigator to his group.

Matt Hensley took extensive notes during the meeting. It was almost a certainty that he was going to become one of the lead investigators in the case as it now seemed to be focused on Gastonia, where both women had likely been murdered.

One of the big reveals from this meeting was how Danny Hembree had been questioned in that 1992 murder. With three bodies connected to the same guy in various degrees, how could they not focus on him?

That 1992 case involved another man, who had been brought into the investigation by Danny Hembree. It was a guy named James Swanson. He and Danny knew each other, but they were not friends—still, Danny tossed James Swanson’s name out when questioned. Thirty-year-old Deborah Ratchford was found in a Gastonia cemetery (a wooded area) in 1992 with nasty slashes all over her body and neck. Not the same MO as Randi and Heather, but the dumping of the bodies was similar. On top of that, serials evolve: Danny Hembree could have started out using a knife and realized it was dirtier and messier and turned to strangulation and/or asphyxiation. Many serials begin killing one way, realize it is going to get them caught, and so they choose a different manner that is more conducive and necessary to the way in which they stalk and pick up their girls.

In addition, there were several cases dating back to the early 1980s that he would later admit to being involved in with another man, where the victims were terrorized and beaten savagely and left for dead. These cases fall in line with the way in which Deborah Ratchford was murdered.

“When Hembree went out there [to the Ratchford crime scene] with . . . officers, he was
very
particular about where the murder took place, about this, about that,” one of the prosecutors in the Deb Ratchford case later told me. “It wasn’t like he was saying, ‘Over there and here....’ He was very particular about the area. And he was right on about it. Another thing was his details. If you are going to make something up and lie, you don’t give as much detail as he did. He gave us details about, ‘Yeah, we picked her up. I was irritated because I had to get out of the car to let her in the backseat....’ We were like, why would he say this stuff if he wasn’t reliving it back in his head as he told us?”

James Swanson was arrested and charged in early 2007, but those charges were dropped two weeks later when investigators could not find a shred of evidence linking him to the murder (other than his co-perpetrator saying he was involved).

Danny Hembree had a reputation for planting notions in investigators’ minds to throw them off. That was another textbook trait for a serial killer. He liked to toss out red herrings and send cops on wild chases. He thrived on the back-and-forth aspect with cops that went along with being involved.

On paper, Danny Hembree was not stupid. He had dropped out of high school as a teen, but he later obtained a GED while in prison. He had not failed any of his grades in school. He had an IQ, said one source, of 90. An IQ of 80 to 90 is considered “dullness,” while 90 to 110 is “normal or average intelligence.” It’s not until one reaches the 110 to 120 and above that superintelligence comes into play. So an IQ of 90, if he scored in that range, did not mean he was unintelligent.

In the relationship department, Danny had been married for fifteen years, from 1980 to 1995. He had three kids (two sons and a daughter). He had a brother, David, who died in a car accident in 1999. (It was David who had been good friends with James Swanson.) Danny’s father died a year after his brother.

“He has an extensive criminal record,” said the task force investigator running the meeting. “Been in and out of prison most of his life.”

Burglary and robbery were his crimes of choice. Violence was there, within the infrastructure of his criminal past, but it was thieving—and maybe killing—that he lived for.

When they finished discussing Danny Hembree, the meeting then moved on to Randi Saldana. At the time of her death, Randi was thirty, five feet seven inches tall, 125 pounds. The task force described Randi as a “crack cocaine user . . . that was known to use heroin on occasions.” Randi had an arrest record dating back to 1997: robbery, forgery, larceny—all common crimes that chronic drug users often commit.

“Randi Saldana was not a prostitute,” said one law enforcement official. “Mr. Hembree claimed that she was, but really there was little proof to that. . . . She was convicted of misdemeanor larceny in 1998, 2007, and 2009, Intoxicated and Disruptive in 1998, Misdemeanor Simple Possession of Marijuana in 2001, Driving While Impaired in 2002, Resisting an Officer in 2002.”

“Randi was known to run in the same circles as Heather Catterton,” the task force manager told the group. “People who knew Randi said she was not afraid to fight. . . .”

This was an important point, Hensley noted. Randi was someone who could take care of herself. She was not a naïve girl, running in a crowd where she couldn’t handle the issues that came her way. It was one more reason to believe Randi’s killer knew her—because Randi walked into a trap. There was no doubt in Hensley’s mind. She was lured to her death, same as Heather.

The task force manager said, “Randi . . . was last seen on November eleventh at . . . Shorty’s, with Shorty, Danny Hembree, and Nicole Catterton.”

This fact was indisputable.

It was the night Stella, Nicole, and Randi had all partied at the same house with Danny and Shorty, and he and Nicole had that blowup. It was the same night Nick ended up in the hospital.

“According to witnesses, Randi was last seen walking down the street leaving [that house]. It has been confirmed through phone records that Randi made three calls to [the father of her first child] from Mr. Hembree’s cell phone. [He, the father,] told us she asked that he come and pick her up. But when he got there, she was gone.”

It felt as though all they had to do was connect the dots and Danny Hembree would be wearing metal bracelets by the end of the week.

Hensley got up as the meeting adjourned and felt good, as did just about every investigator involved from that first moment when Heather’s body appeared out of the brush.

And yet no sooner did everyone have their mind set on Danny Hembree, when a tip came into Crime Stoppers that would throw the investigation into somewhat of a tailspin and send Hensley and two detectives heading in another direction entirely.