The Killing Kind (32 page)

It’s important to note here that in Hembree’s new version, Heather would have been dead for up to seven or even eight hours. It takes, generally, only three hours for rigor mortis to begin setting in. The peak of rigor takes place at around the twelve-hour mark. If Heather was cold, as Hembree had testified, she had been dead for at least six hours. (Under a conditional room temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit, a body does not become cold in fewer than six hours.) Rigor would have been firmly set. Heather’s body would have been unmistakably stiff to the touch. There is no way one could say “she was kind of heading that way” with regard to rigor in this situation.

Danny Hembree was clearly lying.

“Once you saw that, what did you do?”

“Drank my beer, tried to figure out what I was going to do, kind of freaked out, weighed my options, and made a selfish decision.”

“What did you decide to do?”

“I decided to hide her body and not tell anybody that she died in my bed.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Well, I can’t think of any circumstance or anything that would make me call the police and tell them that I’ve got a dead female in my bed that died probably from drugs that I had given her, with my criminal background.” He repeated how “selfish” it was to think of storing Heather’s corpse in the closet before dumping her body in the woods. “But it was a no-brainer for me.”

“Why did you tell the police on these DVDs—that the jury has seen—that you killed her?”

“I was picked up for armed robbery in Gastonia. . . .”

With that answer, Hembree broke into an elaborate, illogical story about how he faced years behinds bars for several armed robberies he had recently committed after being picked up. So he thought,
What the hell. I might as well admit to murdering the girls, and the heat will be taken off the robberies.

The obstacle in telling this lie was getting around the notion that burglary and robbery were more severe crimes than first-degree murder. If what Hembree was saying was to be believed, this had to be his thought process. It didn’t make sense. It almost seemed—as it rolled off Hembree’s Southern tongue—as though the questions Beam fed him to arrive at these answers made Beam look naïve and gullible. The theory was so preposterous and implausible that it had to insult the jury’s intelligence.

Yet, in Beam’s defense, he had to cater to his client’s wants. This was Hembree’s story. Beam had to go with it, regardless of what he believed personally.

“Well, you’re doing what’s best for you to tell the police that you killed Heather Catterton—how is that the best for you?”

“Well, here’s the way it is, and this is what went down. When I confessed to the police there, I confessed to
multiple
murders and other multiple felonies. As I started telling Detective Hensley about my crimes, the stories started getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and I was just saying stuff as I went along. But the reason for that was . . . to gain leverage and bargaining power with the district attorney’s office in Charlotte. Because when I went back over there, I knew that I was going to have to deal with these armed-robbery charges.” He explained the robbery charges, adding, “By me confessing to all this other stuff, it took the light off of the armed robberies, and they was willing to negotiate with me. . . . I successfully negotiated them down to . . . two of the armed robberies into one charge, run it consecutive with the other charge, and got an additional forty months added to my time.”

In Hembree’s crooked way of thinking, he thought he could sell to jurors that he “wasn’t worried about these confessions, or none of that stuff,” as he put it, “because when all the evidence came out and everybody looked at everything, and I explained and they got a chance to see the whole truth, and not the practiced and polished, edited version that the state has presented with stuff blacked out and muted and all that stuff—”

Bell objected. Hembree was trying to use what the jury could not hear to his advantage. He couldn’t have it both ways.

The judge overruled the objection.

W
hen she heard Hembree spew his latest version of why he had confessed to a murder he did not commit, Stephanie Hamlin thought:
Well, this is par for the course.
“At that point in the trial,” she added, “nothing Danny Hembree did surprised me. His explanation as to . . . [the murders] was so absurd to me. I could not believe it.”

Bell and Hamlin would have their chance to challenge all of this nonsense soon enough; but for now, this was still “The Danny Hembree Show.”

As he continued, Hembree stated that the walk-through with Hensley and Sumner throughout Momma’s house was a “performance.”

Hembree explained further by saying, “I mean, I was selling Hensley a car.” He played down those moments in the video when he described killing Randi and Heather and showed them where he hid their bodies. “This was a big feather for [Hensley’s] cap, the biggest case of his entire career—with enough media attention to share with Locke Bell, there, to give him the spotlight. It was a big case. They were under pressure from the media to solve these cases.”

Beam asked: “Did you use a plastic bag to suffocate Heather Catterton?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you use a cord to take her to the ground?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you stand on her throat in your mother’s laundry room in the basement?”

Hembree laughed under his breath. “That’s ridiculous. Absolutely not. Did not.”

“Did you kill Heather Catterton?”

“I did not.”

After several more questions, the judge requested a lunch recess.

Even if Hembree was now saying he did not kill Heather, he still had that one little problem of how Randi died (a second dead woman in his presence). One woman addicted to drugs who overdosed in his house was slightly plausible—if one tossed out the three separate confessions Hembree had made, on top of all the evidence. However, a second woman whose body was torched by Hembree, and whose blood was found inside Momma’s house, was something else entirely.

“It was clear they were going to harp on the toxicity level of cocaine in Heather’s system,” Hensley recalled. “I didn’t think the jury would believe it. But I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Okay, Danny, how are you going to explain Randi’s death?’ ”

That was the question.

After a lunch break, Beam set up Hembree’s explanation of Randi’s death by asking Hembree to go back to that night he met up with Randi.

As Hembree talked his way through, he made sure to trash Nicole and Stella whenever the opportunity arose. And when it came time for Hembree to explain how he had taken off with Randi, he said the argument he had with Nicole was part of a plan to get Nicole out of there so he could be alone with Randi.

“I decided just to pick a fuss with Nicole,” he testified. “It was real easy to do. The least little thing would piss her off, so that’s what I did. After Randi had left, pretending like she was going to meet her ride—[but] to meet me down at the end of [the street]—I picked a fuss with Nicole, and then I just walked out of the house, got in the car, went up to the end of the street, made a U-turn, and came back down.”

“When you came back down, what did you do?”

“I stopped and let Randi in the car.”

“And when you let Randi in the car, what was your purpose in doing that? Why did you do that?”

“I was going to go have sex and party.”

Beam asked: “What happened when you got to that trailer?”

“We went in the bathroom and lit a candle, and we did a couple hits.” The way he made it sound was as if he and Randi were on a date. “I remember it was kind of cold. It wasn’t, like, freezing, but it was cold.... She asked me, if she stayed all night, would I take her to drop her off at her baby daddy’s house the next day?”

“After she said that, what happened then?”

“Well . . . we was going to go down to . . . where it was warm out. Like I said, it was kind of chilly. The bed that was in the trailer, there weren’t no covers in that trailer. We went down to [a friend’s house] and then I realized . . . it was a weeknight. . . . [But my friend] has a son . . . and when he’s there, [my friend] don’t have nobody over. No drugs, no alcohol, except for him. . . . So I told Randi, we can go to my momma’s house, but I would have to sneak her in because, you know, Momma just wouldn’t . . . let me bring women to the house. . . .”

Hembree said he drove around “to the back and pulled up under the sundeck, next to the swimming pool, and told Randi to wait.” He went up the steps onto the sundeck, and through the sliding glass door. Hembree could see Momma “sitting at the bar, reading—the same place she’s been reading for thirty years, the same time every night.”

Hembree knocked on the door and Momma let him in.

He sat down.

“We talked for a few minutes, and I smoked a cigarette, and I got up and went down to my den down the hallway and unlocked the window and pushed it up.”

Then he told Momma good night.

“And I went back, but instead of going to the den, I went out . . . the front door. I left it open and I told Randi to come on. And my intention was to bring Randi in the front door and down the hallway. But then I thought better of it, you know, because if Momma was to come through the door to use the bathroom or something, I mean, it was right there. She would see, and, you know, that would be the end of that plan. . . .”

“And did you get her into the house through the window?” Beam asked.

In Hembree’s version, he and Randi had made a fun time out of getting Randi into the house through the window because they were both high and drunk. It was difficult, he said, because the window was so high off the ground.

“But finally,” he continued, “when I got her up there, she started in the window and she hit the . . . bridge of her nose” on the metal portion, cutting herself. “It was hardly bleeding. I think, you know, just a little bit. When I done that, she said, ‘Son of a bitch’—I mean, not cussing me, but just that was what she said. So she goes on in, and I went back around to the front door, went in, shut the door, went down to the den, put in a porno, and we sit there, started smoking and partying, waiting on Momma to go to bed.”

Hembree said they spent “three or four hours watching porn, having sex, and smoking.”

Hembree claimed they smoked a lot of crack. “When I smoke cocaine, I like to have sex—and I like to smoke and then have sex, and I like to smoke and then have sex . . . and that makes the crack last—the cocaine lasts a lot longer, instead of just sitting around, smoking it all up, and then, you know, have sex.”

“And you said this went on for three or four hours?”

Hembree agreed.

“Well . . . did you finish smoking the crack cocaine that you had, or what caused you to stop that activity?”

“When Randi . . . ,” Hembree started to say, but he trailed off and paused. Then, without Beam prompting him, he said: “When I killed Randi.”

Hensley, sitting, watching, listening to every word roll off Hembree’s tongue, was shocked by this statement: “When I killed Randi.” After all of that buildup by Hembree, all of those careful explanations of the night. What was he now trying to say?

“I was confused initially,” Hensley recalled. “I couldn’t understand where he was going with it.”

“Well,” Beam said, seeing that Hembree had brought it up and maybe tripped on his own words, “how did you kill Randi?”

Hembree said Randi was sitting on the couch. Once again, he mentioned (just in case anyone had forgotten) how they had “been having sex and we were watching pornos. . . .” But then, with very little fanfare, Hembree made this incredible statement: “I was performing oral sex on Randi while she was sitting on the couch—and I had her leg up over this shoulder, and I had my right hand up around her throat . . . and I just killed her, man.”

So he had strangled Randi by accident, without trying, without realizing it—all while performing oral sex on her.

“I wasn’t trying to kill her,” Hembree stated. “I was just trying to increase her orgasm. I mean, we had done it earlier.”

Ah,
Hensley thought,
here we go.
This was the Hembree that Hensley knew all too well. “When Hembree told the absurd story about the sex act he and Randi were engaged in that resulted in Randi’s death, I thought it was a joke. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and this was actually happening in front of me. I thought it was a mockery. I recall putting forth an effort to control my expression as I looked around the courtroom to see the expression of others after hearing this story. Unbelievable!”

“Laughable” was perhaps a better way to describe what many sitting, listening to this absurd story, felt as Hembree embarked on a maddening fantasy of strangling Randi while having sex with her. But on and on, he went, telling this incredible tale as though jurors were going to buy it simply because he was telling it.

“When you said you ‘had done it earlier,’ what do you mean?” Beam asked, setting Hembree up.

“Well, we was having sex. Randi was riding, like, cowgirl style on top, and I was back, and she had put her hands around my throat. She had been massaging my chest and put her hands around my throat. And while we was having sex, she just squeezed off the air. And when I had an orgasm, it was euphoric. I mean, it was just fantastic. . . .”

Hembree now claimed Randi died while he was performing autoerotic asphyxiation (AEA). This practice is generally associated with cutting off the blood supply to the brain while masturbating. The lack of oxygen to the brain is said to cause sensations increasingly intensified as the airflow to the brain decreases. Accidental death is sometimes attributed to AEA because a person’s judgment at the time is impaired by the act itself. Hembree was saying Randi had introduced him to it that night by performing it on him, and so he was reciprocating by doing it to her while he performed cunnilingus.

“Well, how did you discover that Randi was actually dead?” Beam asked.

With a straight face, Hembree gave his most ridiculous answer of the day: “During the time that I was performing oral sex on Randi and choking her, I was masturbating at the same time.” He went on to say they climaxed “at the same time, and then I just laid my head down on her lap to rest and catch my breath. . . .” And when he “looked up,” Randi’s head was “leaned over like this, right here, and her eyes were just glazed over.”

He actually felt the need to act this moment out for jurors.

So, in a panic, after realizing something was wrong, Hembree checked for a pulse, didn’t find one, and then “pulled her down on the floor.” He was “going to give her CPR, but as soon as I got her down on the floor, her bowels moved, and I knew she was dead.”

This was the second time Hembree had mentioned that one of the dark spots on the carpet in the den was feces attributed to Randi. He’d explained it during that walk-through with Hensley and Sumner. The problem with the story, however, was that it did not hold up to forensics.

“It was never proven,” Hamlin said of that supposed fecal matter stain on the carpet, which Hembree pointed out. “And we never found her clothes. There was a spot on the floor, but it was blood.”