The Killing Kind (20 page)

D
anny Hembree would not stop talking. He enjoyed this moment of giving to the GCPD what it wanted from the beginning.

Answers.

What Hembree would say next regarding Randi Saldana’s murder, however, was something no one had heard.

“I killed Randi for drugs.”

Hensley asked Hembree what he meant.

“Stella and [her sister] and Shorty gave me an eight ball and a couple of girls and asked me to kill Randi.”

Thus, according to Hembree’s version, Randi’s murder was a conspiracy.

Hembree explained. He said when he and Nicole and Randi went over to Nick’s house that night and got caught smoking crack inside Nicole’s bedroom, it had been Stella’s plan.

“Stella acted like she got mad at Randi for not giving her [something],” Hembree said. As for Stella telling Nick on them, “This was Stella’s way to remove her from the situation [and] put me and Randi alone so I could later kill her.”

From Nick’s, Hembree said, they all drove to Shorty’s, where Randi and Nicole exchanged jewelry. Then he and Randi staged that scene. Nicole got pissed. Randi left.

“I never gave Nicole any of Randi’s jewelry.”

From here, Hembree gave Hensley and Sumner a meticulous, chilling account of Randi’s murder.

H
embree drove up on Randi as she walked down the street away from Shorty’s. According to him, he didn’t need to ask her to get in. Back at Shorty’s, they’d planned to go hang out and smoke some drugs.

As they drove, Hembree said he knew immediately he was going to kill Randi. But instead of taking Randi to his mother’s house (Momma was home), Hembree drove Randi out to that abandoned trailer. He gave no purpose for taking Randi there as opposed to his mother’s house, other than Momma being home.

By nature, serial killers rely on comfort zones they feel safe in, either as a dump site or a kill space. This trailer was a place where Hembree felt he was able to control his girls and whatever situation came up. If Sommer’s boyfriend, George, was not with Heather, Sommer, and Danny as they partied inside the trailer, the possibility existed that Hembree would have murdered Sommer and Heather that night there.

“Serials always want to be in their comfort zones—which means places they feel safe and have less chance of being caught,” John Kelly later commented. “Inside an abandoned trailer, Mr. Hembree could pretty much do what he wanted.”

Indeed, Hembree was master of that domain.

With Randi walking into the trailer beside him, Hembree reveled in that feeling of power he craved so much. Now all he needed was a trigger—something to convince himself it was the right time to take Randi’s life.

At one point, Randi “had made some statement about Heather’s death” that riled Hembree. There was that impetus, putting him in the mood. He didn’t recall exactly what Randi had said, but the implication was that Randi had either asked him if he killed Heather, or accused him of the crime. There were other triggers within this moment that Hembree later talked about, but this one had stirred Hembree’s thirst for blood the most.

Once inside the trailer, he did not waste time. As soon as Randi turned her back, he grabbed her by the neck with two hands and “choked her out.” Randi was so scared, Hembree claimed, “she done pissed herself.”

“What are you doing?” Randi managed to say as Hembree lunged at her.

Choking her unconscious, Hembree knew Randi wasn’t dead. So he sat and stared at her.

When Randi “came to,” she said, “Why’d you do that?” She was coughing and gagging, trying to catch her breath. She was spitting mucus on the floor.

“What you said about Heather. You disrespected me.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Get me out of here,” Randi demanded. “I don’t want to be trapped inside here with no killer.”

“Look, everybody got me down as a suspect who done killed Heather,” Hembree said.

“I’m sorry,” Randi replied. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

Randi must have known by then that Hembree was capable of murder, after he choked her unconscious solely because she had mentioned Heather.

“Look, you want me to just take you back up the road,” Hembree suggested. “Or do you want to go over to Momma’s house?”

“It’s cold in here . . . ,” Randi said, hugging herself. She had dirt all over her from being on the floor. Her short-cropped hair was matted in the back. She had marks on her face. Her neck was sore. Her pants were soaked in her own urine.

After a brief moment, Randi said, “Take me to your momma’s.”

“Okay.”

“Can I take a shower when we get back there?”

“Yeah. But we gotta wait until Momma goes to sleep so I can sneak you in.”

When they got to Hembree’s mother’s house, Danny parked his car and told Randi to be quiet. He needed to sneak her in through a window on the side of the house. He gave police no reason why.

They tiptoed through the yard like burglars, brittle leaves crunching underfoot. Then they made it over to Hembree’s bedroom window.

“Shhh,” Hembree said, a finger to his lips. Tree branches cracked and popped like burning firewood as they moved around. In the deep darkness of the night, far away, a dog yelped. Beyond that, it was quiet. Suburban serenity. All of Hembree’s neighbors were sound asleep.

Hembree pushed open his window, helped Randi get up onto the edge of the windowpane, and pushed her on the ass, heaving her into his room.

He then climbed in behind her, so he claimed. And as he mentioned this fact during the interview, something happened. Hembree stopped himself. He stared at the table. He collected his thoughts for a brief moment as he took that carefully constructed pause (perhaps realizing that this part of the story didn’t gel), and then blurted out, almost as a correction, “I climbed back
out
[the window] and went in [through the back door] and told Momma I was home.”

He then walked from his mother’s room down the hallway into the den just outside his room. Randi was sitting on the couch.

Hembree turned on the TV in the den. Momma was reading in bed, maybe thirty feet away.

“Momma never comes down there, because she know I like to watch porn and shit,” he told Hensley and Sumner.

After watching television for “ten minutes,” while sitting on the couch next to Randi, Hembree presumed Momma was sleeping. Without saying a word, he reached over and, without warning or fanfare, strangled Randi down to the floor.

He gave no explanation regarding what he was thinking at the time. All Hembree could recall from this chilling moment was “She went pretty fast. A
lot
faster than Heather did.”

Hembree didn’t know, however, if Randi was alive or dead moments later when he cocked his fist back and punched her as hard as he could, right above her nose, between her eyes.

This injury caused a tremendous amount of blood, which now spilled all over the couch. The floor. All over Randi.

Shit . . . ,
Hembree thought.

He looked for a comforter or blanket, found one, and placed it over Randi.

Then he went into his bedroom and rested for “two or three hours,” or until he was certain Momma was sleeping deeply. During the ordeal, Hembree later claimed, Momma never left her room.

When he went back for Randi, he stripped off her clothes, rolled her up in the blanket, hoisted her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and walked her through the house. As he got to the kitchen, he realized she was still bleeding and had left a trail of blood throughout the house from the den to the kitchen.

Son of a bitch.

After Hembree had murdered Heather and gotten himself something to eat, he went back and checked on Heather to make sure she was dead. Downstairs in the basement of his mother’s house was a closet. Hembree had placed Heather in the closet and left her there. It was days before he removed Heather from the closet and dumped her in that South Carolina ditch. Considering that it had worked for him once already—serial killers always fall back on the comfort of routine—he dragged Randi down the same basement stairs after, he said, cleaning up the “damn mess she made” (blaming the victim, of course!).

Then he stuffed Randi in the same closet.

She stayed there for several days.

“Danny, what’s all that blood on the couch in your den?” Hembree’s mother asked him a day after he murdered Randi. Hembree had tried best he could to clean it up, but there were stains on the couch itself, two of the cushions, a pillow, and the rug. None of the stains would come out.

“Uh, Momma, just a bloody nose I done got. Nothing to be worried about.”

Hembree spent the night of November 14 at his friend’s trailer (the trailer next door to the abandoned one) with Nicole. He had decided to dispose of Randi’s body in a way that law enforcement would not find her. His objective with leaving Heather outside in that ditch was to allow law enforcement to find her. He didn’t want Heather’s family to wonder. The way he made it sound was as if he was doing a good deed by not burying Heather somewhere where she would never be recovered.

Wide-awake on the morning of November 15 by “seven or eight,” Hembree rustled Nicole up and told her he was going out. Nicole mumbled something and went back to sleep.

Hembree’s friend was already up. “I’m gonna go get some cigarettes,” Hembree told him as he walked out the door. “I’ll be back.”

By himself, he drove to his mother’s house with a plan: He would take Randi out into the woods and set her on fire.

Arriving at Momma’s house, Hembree walked out to the mailbox and retrieved the mail. He saw a neighbor as he walked back toward the house.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Hembree gestured as if it was any other day.

The neighbor said hello.

Hembree put the mail on the kitchen counter and went downstairs. There were several old lamps hanging around. He cut the cords off several and used them to tie the blanket around Randi’s body. In the closet, where he’d hidden Randi, there were copious amounts of coagulated blood in the corner by the wall—thick, tacky, and saturated into the carpet.

After securing the blanket, Hembree hoisted Randi up over his shoulder—“Her body was still dripping,” he claimed—and placed Randi in the backseat of his car, which he had driven around and backed up to the basement door. On the night he killed Randi, after stripping her clothes off, Hembree had taken all of her jewelry and put it in a bag. He kept one bracelet and hid it inside the glove compartment of his car.

A serial killer’s trophy, no doubt.

Hembree said he purchased a gallon of gasoline from the Creek-side Store on Chapel Grove School Road, not far from that trailer park, at some point that morning.

It was a lie.

“And I already knew where I was gonna take her,” he said.

When he arrived with Randi’s corpse in the backseat of his vehicle on Apple Road inside Kings Mountain State Park, however, Hembree ran into a problem. It was midmorning. There were several horse trainers and riders out and about. People were coming and going. It was too busy. How was he going to ignite a corpse with all of these people around? Burning human flesh had a distinctive smell—not to mention the smoke and fire itself.

H
ensley and Sumner listened as the man in front of them described murdering two young women and then disposing of their bodies as if he was talking about a football game he had seen the night before on television. To Hembree, the act of murder and getting rid of the bodies was so mundane, so easy to talk about, that at one point during the interview Hembree sounded as though he was bored with it all.

As he first assessed Hembree, Michel Sumner couldn’t help but think, “Here was a guy who wanted to make sure we knew he was in charge. This was his idea [to talk], and he wanted to let us know that we would not have caught him if it were not for him! . . . I remember taking a look at the characteristics of a sociopath—and Danny Hembree was dead on.”

“Oh yeah,” Hembree said as an afterthought about an hour into the interview, just as he took a sip from a large coffee in front of him, “her blood (Randi’s) is also going to be found on my boots in the closet, where I put her.” He greedily slurped a sip of coffee. “But all the DNA you’ll need is on the couch in the den and down in that closet.”

The arrogance and pure narcissism Hembree exuded as he admitted to killing the girls was not something Hensley necessarily noticed or took note of while the moment was happening in front of him. He and Sumner were there to get all they could out of Hembree and allow him the comfort and space to talk through it.

Be his buddy. Tell him what he wanted to hear: “Sure, Danny, no problem. More coffee, Danny? Wanna smoke? Need a light?”

Part of this strategy, Sumner explained, was to allow Hembree to think they were country bumpkin cops who didn’t know what they were doing.

“I noticed he was giving us tidbits, just bits and pieces,” Sumner said. “And when I would ask him for more information, he would only give us so much. We were afraid of losing him. And he knew this. So we kind of had to play the part and act like the dumb detectives he thought we were.”

The information Sumner mentioned that Hembree was holding back was in reference to the Deb Ratchford case and a few Florida murders he had supposedly committed. Hembree had been giving them a point-by-point narrative of the murders of Randi and Heather, where they could locate evidence, and why he had done certain things. But with Florida and with Ratchford, he held back.

Bargaining chips.

“He wanted something in exchange,” Sumner observed. “He wasn’t going to tell us about the others until we were able to get him what he wanted.”

When Hensley looked at tapes of the interview later, the obvious enjoyment Hembree displayed while talking about such horrifying moments was overwhelmingly clear. Yet, something else became evident to Hensley: “Even when Mr. Hembree is going down, he thinks he has control of his destiny.”

This comment would never be more evident than in the coming weeks, months, and years as Hembree slithered his way through the legal system—all the while thinking he could manipulate, control, and make a mockery of justice.