The Killing Kind (9 page)

O
n November 23, Hensley and Wallace sat inside an unmarked police vehicle in the parking lot of a bowling alley down the street from Nick Catterton’s home. The YCSO and GCPD had good information that Nicole had a piece of jewelry that had belonged to Randi. There wasn’t a judge in the county who wouldn’t sign a search warrant for the Catterton home and Nicole’s body after being told of the events leading law enforcement to this place on that day.

“That looks like Hembree’s Ford Escort right there,” Hensley pointed out to Wallace.

The car was parked in the Catterton driveway.

“Hembree must be in the house,” Wallace said.

Hensley called GCPD CSI detective Chris McAuley, who was in the process of getting the search warrant for Nick’s house signed, and told him to add the red Ford Escort to the warrant. Thus, when McAuley arrived with the warrant near eight o’clock that night, not only was the body of Nicole, whose actual name on the warrant was “Wendy,” and Nick’s residence part of the search, but it now included the red Ford Escort and any other vehicles “located on the curtilage.”

What a bonus.

Beyond Wallace, Hensley, and McAuley, Sergeant Myron Shelor joined an additional investigator to help with the search.

Nick answered the door. Because the Catterton house was located in Gastonia, a part of Gaston County, the GCPD—not the YCSO—had to serve the warrant. McAuley, who knew Nick from his days of neighborhood policing and local drug investigations, said at one point, “I’m just here tagging along.”

“I haven’t vacuumed the house . . . ,” Nick said. The comment kind of broke up the moment, relieving any tension that might have been present. Searches can go two ways: resistance or surrender.

“Can we go on in and search your residence, Mr. Catterton?” Hensley asked.

“Yeah, go on in. I’ll help you out any way I can,” Nick said, eager to assist.

Hensley said Nick was “very cooperative and wanted to help us out in the search. He was encouraging us to find out who killed his daughter.”

Nick’s house is located just a few steps from the heavily traveled Highway 321. The house is sandwiched between the 321 and a mostly inactive train track out back. Inside the house was close quarters. You walk in through the front door and there’s a small foyer area where a washer and dryer sit crouched together. The one bathroom is on the right. A few steps beyond that is a small kitchen. Take a right from there and head into a bedroom where, just outside that, another bedroom, a wee bit bigger than a closet, is situated. It’s a square little house—homey, cute, but rather nondescript. A lot of the houses in this section of town share the same characteristics.

As they headed inside, someone asked Nick who lived in the house with him.

“Me and Nicole—and Danny. He been staying here,” Nick said. “But mainly just me and Nicole and, well . . . Heather.”

Heather
—the reason why they were all there.

Nicole was twenty-three years old at the time police searched her father’s house, just about to turn twenty-four. Nicole had flowing brown hair, charming green eyes, and a clear complexion. She was a quite attractive young woman, and the resemblance between her and Heather was impossible to ignore. Later, Nicole would deny being Danny Hembree’s girlfriend, telling law enforcement and reporters, “We was just friends.” But it was a proven fact that she and Danny had been together since Nicole walked out on her other boyfriend earlier that year.

Nicole had her share of physical difficulties. Just under her neckline, she sported a rather large flower tattoo. Above that was a hole in the center of her throat, a tracheotomy Nicole had to have in order to breathe properly. Nicole had been hit by a car while crossing the street in front of her house. (This happened on three separate occasions!) She had been badly injured, had undergone several surgeries, and was scheduled for several more. She had to use a tracheotomy because “her throat had been paralyzed,” a friend later told police.

The street outside the front door of Nick’s home, Highway 321, was a main thoroughfare between North and South Carolina that people traveled all day long. Some of these motorists drove very fast. Although uncommon to be struck two times—better yet three—it’s one of those streets that if you stood for a time and watched cars go by, you could picture someone losing her balance or not paying attention to where she was walking and being struck.

“Some of these cars that go by here,” Nick explained to one investigator as the search inside his house began, “they fly.”

Nicole was every bit the big sister to Heather, looking out for her at times while dealing with personal issues herself. Nicole had known Danny Hembree for years and never knew of him being anything other than a good soul, she later claimed.

“He was always nice . . . ,” Nicole remarked, adding that she’d never seen him get violent with anyone and certainly never felt threatened by him in any way. She didn’t understand what all the interest in the guy was lately.

As the team of investigators walked about the home, Danny came out from a bedroom and sat down on the couch in the living area. He seemed agitated. He focused on the television set and hardly ever looked at investigators as they searched the house around him.

Hensley asked Nick to sign a consent-to-search form.

“No problem,” Nick said.

Danny Hembree and Hensley stared at each other. Danny had a brash arrogance about his gaze, as if taunting Hensley for some reason.

“He seemed to be disgusted that we were there,” Hensley said later.

“Just out of curiosity,” Danny said at one point, “what in the world are y’all looking for?”

“We want to be able to say that in all the locations where Heather was, we looked—we’re just covering our bases,” said an investigator.

“Yup,” Hensley reiterated.

This seemed to satisfy Danny Hembree.

In an audio recording of the search, the television set came across loud. Nick walked from room to room with investigators, helping out where he could, pointing out areas where they might find what they were looking for.

Wallace and a colleague took Nicole into her bedroom and asked about the necklace Stella had reported was Randi’s. Could Nicole produce it, or were they going to have to turn the house upside down?

Hensley stayed behind, searching in the living room, keeping a close eye on Danny Hembree.

“He ignored us most of the time and watched TV,” Hensley recalled.

As he watched Nicole enter her bedroom with investigators, Danny yelled out, “What are y’all doing, going in there?” Then he directed a comment at Nicole: “You don’t have to let them to go in your bedroom.”

Nicole didn’t respond.

Hensley laughed.

“Unless they give you a paper, they cain’t do the search, Nicole,” Hembree uttered with a sneer in his signature drawl.

They had that
paper,
as Hembree referred to it. Nicole knew this. She had no trouble adhering to the law. (“Nicole never revoked consent and was very cooperative,” Hensley said.) Nicole and Nick wanted authorities to find Heather’s killer. Why was Danny Hembree being so belligerent and unhelpful? Was it just his nature to butt heads with cops?

Nicole and Nick wrote off Danny’s attitude as a characteristic “bad guy” versus “good guy” showdown. Their houseguest hated cops because they disrupted his lifestyle: burgling, robbing, smoking dope, and drinking.

Inside her bedroom, despite Danny Hembree’s verbal resistance, Nicole broke out all of her jewelry.

“We can search your room—you don’t have a problem with that, Miss Catterton, right?” one of the investigators asked.

“No, no . . . ,” Nicole said. “Of course not.”

At first, this comment made investigators wonder about Stella and the information she had given them. With Nicole being so willing, if she knew she had a dead girl’s necklace in her possession, would she be so eager to roll out the red carpet for a look at her personal belongings?

Hensley soon found his way into Nicole’s room and got busy, asking Nicole, “Can I go into the closet?”

“Yeah, sure,” Nicole said. “Some of that stuff is Danny’s, though. It’s not all mine.”

Detective Hensley went to work.

Nicole helped him.

“Can you explain for me, if you can, what’s yours and what’s Danny’s?” Hensley asked.

Hensley looked on as Nicole felt around inside the closet. On the opposite side of the room, investigators were busy bagging and tagging other items, including several cigarette butts from an ashtray.

“DNA, right?” said one investigator to the other, out of Nicole’s earshot.

“Yeah . . . Hembree’s in CODIS.”

CODIS (or the Combined DNA Index System) is a national FBI database set up for ongoing investigations (and cold cases), giving investigators a direct link to repeat offenders. It’s a computer software program operating under local, state, and national databases, indexing the DNA profiles of convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence, and missing persons information. If a cop develops evidence from a crime—DNA, hair, trace, blood, etc.—out in the field, the first thing he or she would do is pop it into CODIS to see if a connection to an offender or an open, cold-case crime within the database pops up.

As Nicole went through the items in her closet, Hensley spotted something of interest. He bent down.

“That’s not mine!” Nicole said. She stood by Hensley, who was staring at a piece of cut electrical cord. That was something you don’t find every day in a person’s closet.

“Whose cord is this?” Hensley asked.

“That’s Danny’s,” Nicole said.

S
ommer Heffner and her boyfriend waited at Danny Hembree’s friend’s trailer well into the night of October 17, 2009. Danny and Heather had gone off to his mother’s house in search of more cash so he could buy more rock. Danny said something about $200 or $300 in cash his mother had stashed inside the house.

Near eight o’clock at night, Danny and Heather returned.

“It seemed like forever,” Sommer remembered.

Danny produced a large jug of pennies, explaining it was all he had left to his name. They hadn’t located any cash back at his momma’s house.

Someone suggested they find one of those turn-change-into-cash machines at a local supermarket and pour all of the pennies into it so they could come away with some party money. There was no drug dealer on the planet who wanted twenty pounds of pennies.

By eleven at night, they had exchanged the change for cash at a supermarket and Danny purchased more crack cocaine. It was time to party once again.

That abandoned trailer wasn’t going to do at this late hour, however. So Danny took everyone over to his mother’s house. If they were quiet, they could party downstairs in the basement. It was warm. It didn’t smell as bad as the abandoned trailer, and there was also the potential they could help him find that $200 to $300 he knew was in the house somewhere. But damn it all, he warned everyone, you had better be on your best behavior in Momma’s house.

As they partied in the basement of his mother’s house, on October 17, the idea was for Danny and Sommer’s boyfriend to swap Sommer and Heather. However, it didn’t work out so well. “Because, you know, crack cocaine makes it to where men can’t perform right,” Sommer explained.

So, instead, they smoked more rock.

When the crack was gone, Danny revisited that earlier idea. He was fixated on the money he believed his mother had hidden. He could not let it go. With the fever of crack he started smoking earlier that day running through his blood, Danny wanted more. He needed more.

“Look, there’s like two hundred or three hundred dollars stashed somewhere in the house,” he explained. “We just need to find it.” He sounded like he was sending everyone on a treasure hunt.

It was enough money, Danny knew, to buy a lot of dope—enough to last well into the next day. Plus, dangling that much rock in front of them—after giving the girls a taste—he could get whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. Though he wasn’t telling anyone, Danny also had a plan to get rid of George so he could be all alone with Sommer and Heather.

They all went about “ransacking” the house in search of the money.

When they failed to find any cash, there came a point when Danny “began to get real violent” with George, Sommer said. A switch had flipped in Danny. He had gone from hunting down money, willing to buy cocaine for everyone, to a pulsating maniac, blaming everyone around him for not being able to purchase more rock.

Danny soon went after George, charging at him, saying quite angrily, “I’ll shoot you, man. I’ll whip your ass, stab . . . cut . . . kill you!”

He was in a violent rage. He was a different person. He had suddenly turned into that guy everyone had heard about: the violent sociopath who just didn’t give two shakes about anyone else when a volcanic fury, pent up inside, erupted. He had turned, just like that, into a monster that didn’t care about anybody but himself and his needs.

Danny locked George out of the house after accusing him of finding and stealing that money.

“Please, Danny,” Sommer pleaded. “What are you doing?”

“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” Heather announced. Heather and Sommer were scared. Danny was seething. Something had come over him from deep within. Heather had not seen this side of him. Not ever.

George, who had found a stash of booze earlier, was blasted drunk, coming down from a crack high. Now he was locked outside.

Total chaos had exploded within the blink of an eye.

“It’s freezing cold out there, Danny,” Sommer said. “Please.” She put on her shoes. “I’m just gonna walk home if you ain’t gonna let George back in.”

Danny approached the door and stood before it; then he opened the door and motioned with his hand for George to come back in.

“You sit on that couch,” he said in a clenched-jaw, gruff voice. It was clear he meant what he said. Here was a guy who had been in and out of prison all his life and learned the hard way how to take care of himself. He didn’t muck around when it pertained to getting his way: Danny Hembree always struck first.

“You do not move and you do not leave this living room,” he said as George sat down. “You fucking understand me?”

Danny Hembree was impatient and furious, more so because he couldn’t find that money and needed to get high. Paranoid, he also mentioned again and again that perhaps George or one of the girls had found the money and kept it.

Sommer ran over and sat down next to her boyfriend, now concerned that George was going to say something to Danny that he didn’t mean.

Heather and Danny, after he suggested it, continued to search the house for the money.

“Look, it has to be here somewhere,” he said.

By now, it was after midnight.

“Let’s go,” Danny ordered after the latest search proved fruitless.

“Where we going?” Heather asked.

He explained, and then added, “Alone, just you and me.”

Heather looked at him. She thought about it.

“I’ll be back,” she told Sommer. “I’m going with Danny.”