O
n Friday morning, November 27, Detective Matt Hensley took a call from a York County investigator. “We’re picking Hembree up . . . and want to question him at your department.”
Game on.
YCSO detectives Mike Baker and Russ Yeager hauled Danny Hembree into the GCPD and sat him down in the box. Staring at the suspect on a video monitor from an adjacent room, Hensley had no doubt he was looking at Heather and Randi’s killer. The cop felt it. Hembree had a way about him: a hubristic swagger to his walk and demeanor as he made his way into the nondescript interrogation room and sat down. He had a look in his eye as though he wanted to play. This sort of thing was fun to a guy like Hembree. He enjoyed the process.
As he waited for investigators to come in and question him, Danny picked at his cuticles and sat calmly, an elbow on the arm of his chair at times, or cradling his chin, as though the entire moment was under his total control. He smoothed his mustache with two fingers and was no doubt going over in his mind what he was going to say, how he was going to stage it, believing unreservedly he was going to be able to outsmart these cops and feed them a line of bullshit they would eat up.
The interview suite had whitewashed walls with nothing on them but paint, bare as a sheet of paper. There were four cushioned chairs set up around a small table, one of which Hembree sat in. He wore a dark gray—almost charcoal black—shirt and pants. He sported dyed black hair, same as his black mustache and eyebrows. There was a pasty quality to his skin—especially his face—as though he’d been on a binge and was perpetually hungover. As intense as this moment was (after all, he was there to be questioned about two murders, there could be no mistaking that reality, no matter how law enforcement had packaged the interview to him), he didn’t flinch. It seemed to him to be just another day.
This space was familiar to Hembree. He had been questioned by police about crimes ranging from rape to robbery, and seemingly everything in between, more times than he could recall. The cops interviewing him on this day no doubt knew of his wide-ranging history of violence and lawbreaking. Hembree was a serious offender, quite capable of the crimes he was being asked about.
“Mr. Hembree was charged with assault in the 1980s against a man,” said one law enforcement source. “And then a rape/assault against a female and even admitted to it later—but was never charged with that crime.” Hembree had a codefendant in those cases, and his “codefendant . . . was interviewed [later] and admitted to the horrible acts they committed.... His [rape] victim remembers the case vividly and it still haunts her to this day (twenty years after). She is lucky to be alive. The male victim was a black man, and Hembree and his codefendant brutally assaulted him.”
Detective Mike Baker explained to Hembree that he was not under arrest and could leave at any time. The YCSO appreciated him coming in to talk.
“Can you tell me what you got?” Baker asked Hembree.
“You ask the questions and I’ll answer them best I can,” Hembree responded firmly. He wasn’t about to start offering up anything.
“Well, you said you thought you had some information.”
“Just what I’ve already told you,” Hembree said, using a hand to gesture a “let’s get this thing going here” type of rolling motion, before beckoning a familiar name Hembree liked to bring up whenever he was being backed into a corner regarding Heather: “Stella . . .”
Danny told a story about how, when he first got out of prison after his last bid in January 2009, he “boarded” with Stella. And while he was living there, he did a roofing job for a local guy, which put some money in his pocket. When Stella found out, she asked him if he would take her out.
“And when I got up there and went to pick her up, Heather came running out,” he explained. “And I didn’t know Heather was her daughter. Because a week prior to that, I had seen Heather inside a hotel room and I wouldn’t let her go with me because she didn’t have no ID on her. She looked like she was twelve years old. So I left her up there.” He continually used his hands to make his points, gesturing with them at times, using a chopping motion,
1-2-3,
on the table at others. “Anyway . . . we got down there, about eight or nine of us, and I bought Stella [some things] . . . . So me and Heather and Stella, we go to a back room and, well, I feel like I’m getting played now.” The resentment and anger in his voice was obvious and intense. You could tell he was restraining himself because he was sitting in front of cops. But there’s no doubt he wanted to unleash and relive those moments when Heather and Stella pissed him off. He was pinning all of the drug use and whatever else went wrong on Stella and the others. None of it, he insinuated over and over, was his fault. He was simply being a nice guy and buying dope for everyone, same as he generally did.
As Danny Hembree continued to tell this story, he stared into space and at the wall in front of him. Within every lie, any cop knows, there’s a grain of truth. And here was Hembree, making sure the right lie was told at the right time.
“As Stella got into the bathtub,” he continued, “Heather, she took off her top.”
“What’s up?” he asked Heather as she stood there before him with her breasts exposed. (Mind you, this was a girl he claimed to believe was only twelve.) “What’s up?” was street-speak for, Hembree explained, “What is it you want me to do?”
“Well,” he claimed Heather said to him, “aren’t you and my momma kind of dating?”
“Yup, but we ain’t married. So what’s up?”
Hembree walked over and sat on the bed in the room. He said Heather came over to him and “started to give me a hand job”—and he used his hands again to explain what he was saying—“and I said, ‘No, no, no . . .
hell
no.’ ”
Just then, a second investigator walked into the room and handed Baker a Diet Coke, breaking up Danny Hembree’s story.
Baker asked the detective: “Hey, maybe y’all want to sit in, since you two knew each other back in the day?”
“No, no,” the detective said. “I got some other stuff I gotta do.” He walked out of the room.
Continuing, Hembree said he walked over to Stella, who was still bathing in the tub, and said, “You got a problem with me fucking Heather?”
Hembree claimed that Stella said, “ ‘Give me a hit.’ ”
So Hembree gave Stella the crack pipe.
After that, “she got upset about it.” He meant Stella. “And she left.”
Which gave him, Hembree said, the opportunity to take Heather and get another eight ball.
After copping the crack cocaine, Heather and Hembree went back to the room and “we rolled, and I ain’t done seen her since she got out of prison.”
“That was back
when
?” Baker asked.
“That was Valentine’s Day—because it was Stella’s birthday.”
“So what you’re saying is that Stella basically
offered
her to you?” Baker wanted this clarified. After all, the way Danny Hembree worded it, he was accusing Stella of selling her daughter for a hit of crack.
Before answering, Danny Boy shifted in his seat and sat up straight, a clear indication that this question—or the behavior itself—rattled him. In his mind, the idea of Stella selling her daughter’s vagina for a hit of crack cocaine was revolting. Every nuance of his body language as he spoke of this event communicated that feeling.
“She’s been tricking them girls out for a long time,” Hembree answered.
D
etective Mike Baker found a groove Danny Hembree seemed to feel comfortable in. So Baker next asked Hembree if he could talk them through that time when Heather got out of jail until the last time he saw her.
Hembree broke into a familiar story to investigators by now: picking Sommer and her boyfriend up that day on the road and driving over to the Cattertons’ house; seeing Heather in the tub getting ready for the night; then ditching Nicole and taking Heather, Sommer, and George out to that trailer to party.
Listening to Hembree, monitoring his temperament and bodily semantics, a fact emerged: The guy had a fixation with Heather Catterton. It was clear in the way he responded, his movements, his speech patterns, and the words he chose. Danny had a thing for Heather.
As he told the story, Hembree mixed up Sommer and Nicole at times, interspersing the names. Baker corrected him when he did, and Hembree responded as if their names or who they were didn’t matter. The story was a shorter version of the events Sommer had described. Hembree stuck mostly to that script, taking it one step further into the night, adding, “When we got back to my mom’s, we was there about forty-five minutes, and I told Heather just to go to bed, because that’s what she said she was gonna do, but she done said she wanted to make some more money.... She was going to call the Marlboro Man.”
Hensley looked on from that second room and thought how Hembree often implicated this “Marlboro Man” in things to bring in another potential suspect. “The Marlboro Man is a person Danny just threw out there at us to try to throw us off track,” Hensley explained. “We found out the Marlboro Man was a guy that would give cigarettes to the girls in exchange for sexual favors. That’s how he got his nickname.”
When Heather said she was thinking of going to see the Marlboro Man, Hembree responded, “Well, I’m not gonna take you back up to your house because Nicole already done called and left me messages threatening to knock the windows out [of my car].”
The mention of Heather going to see the Marlboro Man angered Hembree. It was as if he had a thing going on with Heather that night, that she was his girl. There she was at his mom’s house, getting ready to nestle up to him in bed and spend the night. The Marlboro Man, clearly, was not part of the fantasy Hembree had envisioned.
Nicole, on the other hand, was mad because her boyfriend had taken off earlier that night without her.
Hembree skipped right to dropping Heather off at the Mighty Dollar, across the street from her house, sticking to a familiar story surrounding that night he had already planted for investigators on several other occasions.
“I pulled in and let her out,” Hembree said. “And that was the last time I done seen her.”
“What was she wearing that day?”
“Ah, she had on a gray hoodie,” Hembree said, staring off into space again, “and a . . . a . . . a pair of jeans.” He then looked over at Baker to gauge his reaction to the statement. After all, Hembree had just described what Heather was wearing on the day she died.
Smartly, Baker kept his poker face.
There was an awkward moment of silence.
“The reason I know that,” Hembree offered without being prompted, “was because Nicole said theys was her jeans.”
“Where were y’all at when you were at your mom’s doing all that?”
“In the den and another room.... Well, me and Sommer, and me and Heather and Sommer, when we was together, we was in a room beside the den.”
“Your bedroom? Or what?”
“That is my bedroom, but I sleep in the den mostly.”
Baker and Hembree talked about the information Danny had left out of his narrative, which the YCSO had obtained from other sources. Hembree cleared up the confusion. Moments before this explanation, another investigator, Detective Russ Yeager, walked into the room and sat down, not saying a word. Instead, Yeager got comfortable and opened the lid to a sixteen-ounce cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and, taking a sip, stared at Hembree.
In all of Hembree’s explanations, whenever he talked about Nicole, Stella, Sommer, and Heather, there was a steely crassness to his voice, as if to suggest he was better than those women.
“Was there anything else about that night you can recall and tell us about?” Baker asked.
“Just that Sommer’s boyfriend was an asshole . . . and he couldn’t do nothing”—get an erection—“and so I wound up with Heather and Sommer.”
The braggart: Hembree routinely touted himself as “Mr. Love Machine.” Here was that arrogance and grandiosity of Hembree’s. The reality was far different. Sommer had told police it was also Hembree who could not get an erection that night.
After dropping Heather off at the Mighty Dollar, Hembree explained, “I went back home to my momma’s and stayed till about . . . ten o’clock [the next morning], when my son came over. And then Stella’s boyfriend . . . called and that’s when he came up there.”
Returning home from dropping Heather off, Hembree explained, he “watched some porn” and fell asleep. It was strange that he mentioned this detail: Why not just say television? Why porn specifically?
According to expert John Kelly, “It seems Mr. Hembree always had an interest in porn. In fact, you could say he was addicted to it. His porn viewing, I suspect, escalated to where it became boring to watch it on television. Being bored by the television version of porn, he upped his excitement and fantasy levels, as we see in him watching it up close and personal.” (Kelly was referencing when Hembree would ask Sommer and Heather and other women to perform sexual acts in front of him.) “Having the drug-addicted females perform live for him while he controlled them with drugs shows his progression to sexual control, the sexual degradation of the women.... Most power and control serial killers are hypersexual. It’s a murderous progression. They can’t get enough. As the sexual fantasy escalates, so does their controlling and murderous sexual behavior. Ted Bundy is a good example of this. There are many more.”
During the interview, Hembree said he was upset that Heather left him that night; but it was something she had done before. He wanted her to stay. Without realizing it, delving back into that fantasy he had built around him and Heather, Hembree said he wanted to cook Heather breakfast when she got up the next morning. But the fairy tale of them sleeping together, spooning all night, waking up, and then having breakfast like a real couple was quashed when, he said, Heather bailed out (after the drugs were gone). He insisted that she asked to be dropped off at the Mighty Dollar. This request told Hembree that Heather was with him
only
because he was providing her with drugs.
The next morning, Hembree saw his son and then drove to Nicole’s house.
Stella had called. “Nick’s not mad at you anymore, Danny,” she said. “Come on over.”
He arrived at noon.
“That Nicole sounds pretty rough,” Baker said as Yeager stared, taking a pull from his coffee. “Now, you don’t seem like the type of guy that somebody would mess with, but everybody round here been talking ’bout how Nicole slaps you and, well, she rules the roost.”
“Yup, well, you know, I love her. I pretty much get my way. And she don’t hurt me none, or anything like that. She wrecked my phone and kicked my windshield and kicked my radio. No big deal.”
“Is she just that jealous or what?”
Hembree took a deep breath. He looked to his side, then down at the carpet.
“She’s obsessive. . . .”