A
ny good cop listens to his gut. To a certain extent, he might even rely on it. Yet, within that investigatory DNA we could argue great cops are born with, he never allows his instinct to overshadow where the evidence leads him. Being in his late twenties, with just over a year behind the gold shield, Detective Matt Hensley had a lot to prove, perhaps. Still, within just a short time, Hensley had developed a sixth sense for major crimes. There are some guys who take to the job so naturally they find themselves getting up every morning and going to work with a feeling that catching bad guys is the reason they were put on this earth. For Hensley, it was more than just his calling; it was something he
had
to do.
“Detective Hensley is one of a kind,” said Gaston County assistant district attorney (ADA) Stephanie Hamlin, who has worked side by side with Hensley on many cases (and would soon step into the current investigation involving the murders of Randi and Heather). “He is able to get people to open up and talk to him.”
Some in the district attorney’s (DA) office call Matt Hensley the “perv whisperer,” a strange nickname that might sound a bit unusual to the outside world. However, when you have a guy like Hensley with a reputation and “such great success in getting sex offenders to confess to him,” Hamlin added, you reward him with a moniker.
“Hensley is a very hard worker and perfectionist,” Hamlin offered, “but never talks down to others and always approaches his work with an open mind. He is always willing to lend a hand to anyone who needs help.”
Some might claim Hamlin has a biased opinion, but you ask people in Hensley’s circle about him and you’ll hear different versions of Hamlin’s statement.
That abandoned trailer gnawed at Hensley after he viewed the Coinstar video a few times and took in all of what Sommer had to say. The way Sommer explained it was that she and Heather, while inside the trailer with Danny and George, “put on a show,” and the trailer seemed to be a fairly significant place to their older friend. He was familiar with it. He felt comfortable there.
Knowing that Danny Hembree had a prolonged, perhaps fetish-like relationship with prostitutes, picking them up and plying them with dope, Hensley thought:
This trailer might be a common place for Hembree to take his girls.
More than that:
a possible crime scene.
Hensley tracked down the owner of the trailer.
“I own all those trailers . . . ,” the guy said. “That one in particular there, it’s been vacant for quite a while.”
Hensley only gave the guy the details he needed to know without any particulars involving the YCSO’s growing suspicions and case against Danny Hembree. All detectives involved worked under the assumption that their suspect knew all the players and had consistent contact with them. He was the intimidating type, for sure. He’d threaten. Once Hembree realized it was focused exclusively on him, he’d meddle in the investigation.
“Sure, go on ahead and search the trailer—you have my permission. I got no problem with you looking in that one or any other trailer on the lot.”
“Can you meet us out there?” Hensley asked.
“Not now, I’m having a Christmas party.”
Two YCSO detectives drove to the trailer park landlord’s house and had him sign a consent-to-search form. Hensley headed to the trailer park and waited for YCSO detectives to arrive with the signed warrant. As Hensley waited, he couldn’t help but think about the case and where they were.
“When Sommer started talking about these trailers,” Hensley recalled, “you know, criminals generally behave the same. If something is working, they are going to continue to do it. It’s what they’re comfortable with. If Hembree was comfortable taking druggies and prostitutes . . . over to those trailers, I’m thinking,
This could definitely be where the murders took place.
”
Matt Hensley was familiar with the area. He knew if Danny Hembree was murdering girls inside one of the trailers, nobody was likely to hear a struggle for life and death. And serials, especially, once they get cozy within a kill zone and it’s “working for them,” as Hensley pointed out, they rarely deviate from it—until, that is, it stops working.
One of the early assumptions Hensley had when he stepped into the case turned out to be a miscommunication between agencies, a common problem before so many different agencies huddle up together to form a task force and share information.
“Look,” Hensley noted, “I thought Hembree’s house had already been searched. Part of everything that had been going on, I just worked under the
assumption
that Hembree’s house had been searched.”
There was so much interest, in other words, in Danny Hembree as a suspect, Hensley took it for granted that the YCSO had served a warrant on his house, searched it, and came out of it with nothing. That made Hensley consider with even more certainty that the trailers were a good bet for a crime scene.
As he learned, however, the YCSO had searched Danny Boy’s mother’s house, but “it was kind of a hasty search with the consent of his mom. A walk-through of the upstairs.”
This was not taking a jab at the YCSO, Hensley was quick to make clear.
“I had asked them if they searched the house, [and] they said they did. I didn’t say, well, how
good
did you search it, or how thorough did you go through it?”
Regardless, when the YCSO went knocking on the Hembree home, it was early in the investigation. They did not have enough information leading them to do a complete rip-through of the Hembree residence, turning over cushions, emptying drawers, looking in closets, and so on.
Hensley was thinking now about how Sommer and Stella had put Danny back at his mother’s house on the night Randi went missing
and
on the night Heather went missing. So things had changed a bit. What’s more, they had spoken to Sommer’s boyfriend, George Baston, and independently confirmed everything Sommer had given them.
That Hembree house needs to be searched thoroughly,
Hensley told himself.
Next door to the abandoned trailer, where Hensley waited for the YCSO to arrive, was where Danny, Heather, George, and Sommer had started out the night. Gavin Compton (pseudonym), Danny’s friend, was home when Hensley pulled up.
Gavin came out when he saw Hensley sitting there.
“How’s it going?” Hensley asked, getting out of his car. He could tell Gavin had been drinking. The guy was stumbling.
“What are y’all doing?” Gavin asked. His speech was slurred.
Hensley explained, somewhat.
Although amped up on booze, Gavin guarded what he knew. Hensley could tell that he was being mindful of what he said.
“Danny Boy’s crazy,” Gavin said.
“Yeah, how so?”
“I been battling with DSS (the state child and youth services) over my kid because of Danny. I got in a fight with Danny.”
Hensley wanted details: When? What happened?
But Gavin didn’t want to explain.
“I don’t want no trouble, man.”
“No, course not,” Hensley said.
Gavin Compton went back inside his trailer.
Armed with a consent-to-search form, investigators pulled up just then. They had someone in the car with them.
Sommer.
She got out and walked over to the trailer in question, pointing out the exact one they had partied in. “That’s it. Right there.”
As they made their way to the trailer, Hensley looked around. The street was short, the tar broken up and in pieces. The trailers were old and in need of maintenance, to put it kindly. All around the back of the park, which consisted of about nine trailers on foundations, was a dense wooded area.
Walking around, Hensley saw smoke. He found the trailer park’s maintenance man, who was burning some items behind one of the trailers.
“What’a y’all doing over here?” Hensley asked.
The guy claimed he was cleaning out a few trailers, burning some trash, and putting some in a Dumpster on site. “The landlord asked me to clean them out.”
“Can you show me that Dumpster?”
The man explained that it had already been emptied for the day, earlier that morning.
“Can you tell me if you cleaned anything out of 107?” Hensley asked. That was the trailer in question—the one Danny Boy had taken Heather, Sommer, and George to.
“I removed a blanket . . . but don’t recall much about what it all looked like or anything.”
“What about 103?” Hensley queried, asking about another trailer Sommer had pointed out.
“There was furniture in it left by the previous tenant, but I tossed that out in the Dumpster.”
“You know a guy by the name of Danny Hembree?” Hensley asked. Worth a shot. People around here seemed to know him, since he was one of those hard-to-forget guys.
“I know Danny and his cousin Manny Alverez (pseudonym). They hang out at Gavin’s quite a bit.”
There was smoke billowing all around them. It smelled toxic, like melting plastics and metallic.
Hensley asked about Danny and what he did when he came around.
“Danny and his cousin, they liked to take girls in the trailers and use drugs and have sex with them.” The guy walked out from around the trailer, where they stood. He pointed to another trailer over by the two they were focused on. “I just done seen Danny parked between those two trailers there [101 and 103] and he was with a girl. It was early in the morning.”
“Can you tell me what she looked like?”
“I don’t remember.”
Hensley believed him. It wasn’t as though the guy was trying to cover for anyone. The conversation didn’t have that feel to it.
“I can tell you that I am sure he had a girl with him,” the man continued, “and he was parked like he was trying to hide his car. I saw him walk into 103, the vacant one. I noticed it was Danny. Then I saw him leave.”
“Thanks.”
Hensley walked over to unit 103. Sommer was standing outside the door. She was talking about a blanket she remembered seeing inside the trailer.
This was important. Maybe blood? Maybe semen? Maybe a mixture of the two? If they could put Danny Hembree here with one of the victims, they had him.
Inside the trailer they uncovered all sorts of items. Fibers from the carpet indicated evidence of drug use. That blanket Sommer described wasn’t there, however.
“We also found this,” said a YCSO investigator.
Hensley walked over to have a look.
It was a small blood spot found in the rear bedroom, near the center of the floor.
The only bit of blood found in the entire trailer.
D
anny Hembree was a man who viewed life through a prism of events that he could manipulate to his advantage. Born six days before Christmas, 1961, Danny grew up in a home with an alcoholic father, he later told Dr. Claudia Coleman, a psychologist he began to see in 2009. It wasn’t long after, Coleman later noted after speaking lengthily with him, when Danny hit his teens and was “viewed as possibly having bipolar disorder.” There wasn’t an actual diagnosis, but Coleman believed after reading through his psychiatric history that his early behavior showed clear signs of the disorder.
Lithium was a drug that Danny became acquainted with before he was out of his teens. Lithium is serious medication; according to most reputable medical websites,
[it affects] the flow of sodium through nerve and muscle cells in the body.
It’s the sodium in the bloodstream that creates “excitation” or “mania.” Essentially, when a child or adult is exhibiting severe and even routine episodes of manic depression, and nothing else works, lithium is prescribed. The list of behaviors and characteristics associated with mania include hyperactivity, rushed speech, poor judgment, and reduced need for sleep, aggression, and explosive anger.
According to Dr. Coleman, Danny Hembree displayed all of these symptoms. And as he grew, he developed antisocial disorder, personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and, of course, substance abuse.
Dr. Coleman, who earned a Ph.D. and her undergraduate degrees in clinical psychology from the University of Mississippi, had thirty years’ worth of experience by the time she met Danny. What interested Coleman after evaluating him was the range within his intelligence tests.
“His overall score was in the average range at ninety,” Coleman indicated. “But the . . . part that was most salient to me was the fact that his verbal skills were higher than that at one hundred five, and his performance or mechanical skills were at seventy-five. That kind of thirty-point difference is extremely rare, except for individuals who have brain dysfunction. . . .”
As a child, Danny worked in “the family machine business.” However, he had trouble holding down jobs because of his explosive fits of rage. Kathy Ledbetter, Danny’s younger sister by four years, a psychiatric nurse by trade, said in court, “In a lot of ways, we thought we were like everybody else.” She was referring to the Hembree family growing up together. “We had two parents, my mom and my dad.” She described her mother, Jacqueline, as “very stoic. She doesn’t show a lot of emotion—she never has. I think we always felt she loved us, but she was not affectionate.”
Their father “was affectionate,” Kathy recalled, although the man “was a very severe disciplinarian.” Although he “was an alcoholic,” Kathy added, she didn’t “think the alcoholism had anything to do with the discipline. He was a severe disciplinarian regardless of alcohol.”
On the one hand, Kathy said: “I can’t sit here and say he went out, got drunk, and beat his family, because that’s not how it was. How it was, he would punish Danny and David [their brother] for things that he thought they did wrong.... He thought he was disciplining them, [that] he was justified in doing what he did.”
What type of “discipline” did Mr. Hembree inflict on his boys?
“He would whip them with a belt,” according to Kathy. “He would beat them. He thought he was doing what was right. It was wrong. He did later regret that.”
This wasn’t, Kathy went on to say, the sort of old-school whipping whereby a man places his boys over his knee and unleashes a few pats on the ass with an open hand. No. For Mr. Hembree, Kathy claimed, he committed the abuse often and hit the kids with a belt “from shoulders to feet. They would have to lean over the bed. . . .”
Kathy said she was never allowed to watch. But worse, “Mostly, I heard it. I was sent to my room, and I would hear it more than I would see it.”
It was the slaps of the belt hitting the boys’ skin that tore through the house and pierced her ears, Kathy explained.
“I would hear the screams.”
She was five years old when her father started beating the boys. She recalled the day she first learned of it. After school one day, she came home to the house.
What in the world is going on?
she asked herself while walking up the house path. She could hear screaming coming from beyond the front door.
So she ran inside.
It had been report card day. The boys’ grades weren’t up to snuff, apparently, because Mr. Hembree was whipping both of them savagely with his belt as they screamed in terror.
Like most of the times he whipped them, the beatings went on for “fifteen to twenty minutes,” Kathy remembered.
There was only one time, she explained, when she was subjected to a beating herself. She’d lied to her parents. Some kids from school had stolen her candy. Embarrassed, she told her parents she lost it.
Her dad found out and got the belt out.
When little Danny heard his sister being whipped, he ran into the room and began crying and screaming for Pops not to do it.
“And my dad stopped,” Kathy said.
And never hit her again.
“Once or twice a week,” Kathy concluded, “I would say between [the ages of] nine and sixteen,” the boys were beaten.
A day that crushed Danny Hembree and his sister, despite being beaten by the same man while growing up, took place on December 29, 2000. It was Danny, his mother, and his sister in the hospital room. By then, Danny’s brother, David, had been killed in an accident. They stood over the Hembree patriarch and, together, removed the ventilator keeping the old man alive. He’d developed pneumonia and sepsis, shock from an infection. Suffice it to say, it was a hard thing to do; Mr. Hembree had a strong heart and would not go into cardiac arrest.
“In fact,” Kathy recalled, “his heart was so strong they had to OD him on the morphine so that the death process would not be horrific, because they said he would gasp for air.”
With Danny’s brother and father now gone, it was Danny whom the women in his family looked up to for guidance, protection from the outside world, and masculine love. Danny was the be all and end all in the minds of these smart women—a fact that would become utterly apparent as their lives together carried on.
While interviewing Hembree, Dr. Coleman noticed an inherent narcissistic characteristic he could not hide from. Danny Hembree had been known by then to have admitted to crimes he had not committed, and Coleman wondered why he would do such a thing.
“I might be given more consideration by authorities,” he explained.
Manipulation. Danny was an expert at it.
When he lied to authorities and, in his mind, built himself up into something he wasn’t, Danny told Coleman, it resulted in “providing him with more amenities or different custody placements when he was incarcerated.”
Danny Hembree got something out of lying and controlling the situation. The more he did it, the better he became at doing it—and the rewards became better. Through this, Danny learned he could control the system by telling them what they wanted to hear. If authorities believed he was confessing to crimes, he thought they’d ply him with what he desired. Lots of criminals develop this tactic.
“I also want to die,” he told Coleman during a session one afternoon. They were talking about how he felt about himself, how he viewed himself in the world.
“Die?”
“I have created stories and lies about myself all my life,” he said, “in order to bolster myself because I have always felt so insignificant.”
Later, Coleman would say his “narcissism is kind of the over-the-shell overlay of the insecurity.”
His father, it was a good bet, made Danny feel as though he was an object—a “thing” with which the old man could do what he wanted. Danny would go on to treat women he viewed as below him and “his kind” on the social scale in this same way.
As far back as 1986, his mother is on record saying her son would lie to hospital staff whenever he was committed and often “exaggerated about his behavior.” This so-called false confession history he had throughout his career as a criminal was something Coleman later explained in court: “Well, oftentimes [they do this] to build up [the] ego. They like the excitement of it. They want attention. They have a high desire for attention from others. They typically make those claims repeatedly over time. It’s usually not just one instance, and it is usually for some sort of short-term incentive or gain without any consideration of long-term consequences.”
After speaking with her patient on four separate occasions, Dr. Coleman established how difficult it was for her to determine if he suffered from bipolar disorder because of a severe substance abuse problem, which often masked itself in symptoms similar to bipolar disorder. So Coleman was not confident in making that diagnosis. What Coleman was certain of, however, was that Danny Robbie Hembree had “long-standing difficulties with impulsivity,” a “low tolerance for frustration,” an “unstable mood,” plenty of “self-defeating behaviors,” a terrible “disregard for the rights of others,” in addition to acting out “in antisocial ways.”
Coleman concluded in her assessment that Danny Hembree frequently found a way to manipulate “the legal and prison systems for personal gain,” and he had been somewhat successful at it throughout his life.
The more pressing issues Coleman had firm opinions about pertained to his being perhaps “insane,” or out of his mind. Did the guy suffer from mental illness that seemed to control his thoughts and actions, literally disallowing him to be responsible for what he did? Was Danny Hembree crazy?
No opinion can be made,
Coleman wrote in her report.
The idea was that Danny Hembree had lied so often, so many times, twisting the truth in ways that served his purposes and desires, that his behavior indicated an “underline” narcissistic personality disorder.
But Danny Hembree knew what he was doing. He understood right from wrong.
When one looked at this report, the only conclusion can be that he was a ticking time bomb. The trigger for him, generally, was women he viewed as below him on the social ladder, and what they said and did. If he didn’t approve of what a female in his life did, that fuse—so short—was lit. And if you were near him when the fuse reached its end, guess what?
You wound up dead.