“W
e’re continuing to build this circumstantial case against Danny Hembree,” Matt Hensley explained, “and we were going to continue to do that until the leads ran out.”
The momentum of the investigation tipped toward Hembree. He was involving himself in the investigation, taunting cops with his macho, catch-me-if-you-can manner.
Danny immersed himself into the growing suspicion surrounding his potential involvement as the interview with York County went on for two-plus hours. He actually enjoyed himself, sitting, believing he was controlling every aspect of the interview. There was a hard edge to him that gave him an air of sovereignty as he spoke. He talked fast and skipped over pivotal portions of a preplanned narrative he was laying out for cops.
In his mind, Danny wanted to keep them guessing. He spoke with an increasing amount of delight in taking part in the progression of the case. His narcissism was evident and obvious, as if what he had to say was the most important information to date. These cops were going to sit and listen, no matter what he had to say, because he was driving this bus. And yet within all of his hubris, the one clear, undisputed indication was that Danny Hembree knew exactly what he was saying and why he was there. If the guy ever planned to stage a mental-illness argument, this one interview, in all of its candidness and simplicity, spoke of a man not insane or mentally ill, but rather someone carefully and excitingly flexing his self-absorbed, ego-driven muscle.
Danny Hembree, after all, could have gotten up and walked out of there or asked for an attorney at any moment.
He never did.
After Heather went missing, Danny Hembree took Nicole on a road trip to Florida. Investigators had gotten wind of this trip and wanted to know from Hembree why he decided to head south. The insinuation was:
Were you running?
“When I first got out [of prison], I lived down there about three months,” Danny explained. “I took all my winter clothes and stuff down there and I been meaning to try to get back down there and we decided to just go . . . load up my stuff and just come back.”
Baker brought up Shorty and “that night,” as he called it, that Danny spent with Nicole and Randi and Shorty. Baker, however, never mentioned Randi Saldana by name.
“Y’all talking ’bout with that Randi girl?”
This was Danny Hembree: “That Randi girl?” He was speaking as if he barely knew her.
“Uh-huh,” Baker said, shaking his head.
Hembree took a deep breath; then he looked off to his left side and told his version of the night. He explained that he and Nicole were driving around with Stella, and Stella, Hembree said, “wanted to get [something]. . . .”
When they got to a particular drug house, which Hembree claimed he had “never been” to before that night, “that girl Randi was there.” Hembree said he’d seen Randi before, “way back in January.” She was with “Stella and Nicole.”
Randi was “breaking bread with everybody” on that night, Hembree said. Sharing the dope she had, in other words. Randi had a bottle of liquor “because she knew Nicole. She don’t do crack.”
He skipped over the entire party. Then: “We went over Nick’s house. When we got to Nick’s house, that girl Randi gave Stella a piece. . . .”
Hembree recollected how Stella “got pissed” over something and ran off and told Nick they were smoking rock in his house.
Nick made everybody leave, Hembree confirmed.
Leaving Nick’s, they went to find Shorty and headed over to that dope dealer’s house, where they’d started the night.
Inside the house, Hembree said, he and Nicole, along with Randi, retreated to a back bedroom and partied. He also clarified that it wasn’t Shorty’s house they had all gone to (which was the one differing fact from what the others reported).
“Shorty kept coming back in there because he was the one scoring the dope.”
At this stage of the interview, Hembree said something quite interesting, which came out of him almost as an afterthought. It was as if he wanted to make sure Baker and his YCSO boys had this information: “And we was back there talking and I think they’s swapped a necklace or ring or something like that. [I wasn’t paying no attention.]”
Randi then talked about an Alcoholics Anonymous coordinator she had to call. So Hembree let her use his cell phone, he said, picking his cell up off the table and referring to it.
“I gotta go.... I gotta go.... I gotta go,” Randi kept telling Danny and Nicole.
Forty-five minutes went by. They had not seen Shorty in that time, so Hembree figured he’d left.
Then Randi said it again, “I gotta go.” She walked out of the room.
“I seen the way she was looking at you,” Nicole said to Danny.
“What? Come on?”
Nicole then slapped him, Hembree claimed.
So he left and went to look for Randi. Finding her, Danny brought Randi back into the room to tell Nicole, “That shit ain’t right.”
The owner of the house told Hembree to get out.
“So I just got in my car and took off. I done that a lot.”
Baker asked Hembree about Randi. “You give her ride” when you left?
“I didn’t see Randi no more after that,” Hembree said, shaking his head slowly, right to left. His hands were folded; his fingers were crisscrossed and set on his lap. He was comfortable.
“What was she wearing?”
Hembree shook his head and looked off to the side. “Dark clothes . . . I . . . That’s all I can tell ya.”
“She was a sharp-looking girl, right?” Baker asked.
“Oh yeah, Randi was pretty sharp. I don’t think she looked as good as Heather when Heather was fixed up. . . .”
“What else can you tell me about Randi?” Baker pressed.
“That’s basically it. I know she talked about wanting something better for herself and she said that a . . . a . . . The next day was her two-year-old son’s birthday. Other than that, I didn’t pay no attention.”
While reaching to take a sip from a Mountain Dew he had in front of him, Hembree mumbled something along the lines of “You hear shit so much.” It was obvious Hembree was casting a line.
Baker took the bait. “Well, what have you heard?”
“What do you mean,
what
have I heard?” Hembree snapped.
“Well, you say you hear shit. What does that mean?”
Hembree paused. He took a pull from his soda, staring at Baker the entire time. Then he placed his drink down slowly, saying, “I’ve been hearing so much shit.... I heard that . . . the girls coming out of [Shorty’s and the other guy’s house] are being targeted . . . but that’s bullshit. . . . Shorty told me hisself that when he found out who did Heather, he was going to do him. . . .”
As long as Baker allowed Hembree to think he was in control, the guy was going to keep talking.
Watching from another room, Hensley shook his head. He knew what Hembree was doing. “To him,” Hensley commented, “he had all the power and control during those interviews. He loved talking to investigators and would, as long as he felt he was in control.”
Baker asked Hembree where he went when he left the dope house.
“I went home,” Hembree said. Then he told the story of Stella calling from the hospital and asking him to pick her and Nick up. “And I told her if he’s out by one-thirty to call me back . . . and I’ll come and get ya.”
Again, in Hembree’s narrative, he never put himself in a position of being the bad guy. He was always the innocent bystander doing dope because of the peer pressure (the girls pushing him) within a circle of dopers that he hung around. He wanted to come across as a man who never raised his voice or became aggressive.
For the rest of that night when Randi went missing, Hembree said, he was at home and “passed out” by two or three in the morning. The following day, he got up and drove to Nick’s.
“So you went home, home—Momma’s home?” Baker asked.
“Yeah.”
“Was Momma home?”
“Oh yeah, Momma let me in.”
“Where’d you stay at then—in your room, in the den?”
“I stayed in the den.”
For whatever reason, perhaps his sheer willingness to up the cat-and-mouse angle, Hembree said out of nowhere: “There was another girl up there. . . .” He was referring to the night he got in that tiff with Nicole and Randi and left them at the dope house. “And for a twenty-dollar bill, I took her down the road for a little while. . . .”
“And she gave you a blow job?” Baker asked.
“Yup,” Hembree said, nodding his head.
Then the question came up why he would go off with someone else (and pay) when he had Nicole and “other girls,” each of whom he could have easily gotten oral sex from (according to him).
“I don’t know . . . she’s a pretty good old girl,” Hembree remarked, referring to the girl he paid $20. It came across as though he was doing her a favor.
“So, what do you think happened to Randi?”
Hembree did his characteristic look off to his left side, a clear indication that this question made him uncomfortable and he had to think about what he said before he said it.
A pause.
Then he picked at his fingernails.
Finally: “I have no idea.... Somebody said that she”—and here Danny looked at Baker squarely, as though taunting him—“got set on fire.”
Baker shook his head.
Game on.
Danny Hembree stared Mike Baker down. In a near whisper, Danny repeated himself: “I. Don’t. Know.” He paused. “In my honest opinion, I don’t think Shorty had anything to do with it.” And his reason for thinking that, Hembree said, was nothing in particular. “Just a gut feeling.”
“Is there anybody that you do suspect of it?”
Hembree mentioned how the circle he ran in was “so deep.... It’s just what they do.”
If you ran with the Devil, Hembree seemed to say, you sometimes got burned.
T
he interview with Danny Hembree could have carried on all night, perhaps. Hembree was used to the structure of the box. If Baker and Yeager thought they were going to get him to give it up by tiring him out, they thought wrong.
At least, it appeared to be the case on this day.
Hembree knew how to spoon-feed detectives just enough information to keep them guessing, but also come across as though he was answering their questions. And yet, while Hembree played a game of his own, Yeager, Baker, and Hensley were doing the same thing. While around Hembree, the detectives displayed a set demeanor, Hensley later explained: The idea that they were hot on Hembree, sure; but they were also still digging and confused about the cases. Outside the box, however, all three detectives worked under the assumption that Hembree was their guy and it was only a matter of time before his shoulders dropped, he took a deep breath, wiped his brow, and gave it all up.
Certain cops can smell an admission before it arrives.
Baker and Yeager had questioned lots of suspects. They knew what to do with a guy like Hembree, how far to push, and where to take things.
Baker mentioned how odd it seemed that with so many people in that circle Danny ran with, someone had not known what happened to Heather. Maybe Randi wasn’t such an engrained part of the group he hung around every day, but Heather was. Baker pointed out that with a tight group of dopers hardly ever leaving their comfort zone of a few houses around town, why was Heather’s body found in South Carolina? That part of the scenario didn’t make sense, Baker explained. The dump site was only ten miles away; but in the confined world of a doper, it might as well have been in Los Angeles.
“Well, Heather’s gone down to York . . . a couple of times, from what I understand,” Hembree offered, again looking off to his left side before taking a pull of his Mountain Dew.
“What do you know about that?”
“All I know is that her brother . . . told Nicole that she was at a hotel in York.” From there, Hembree tossed Nicole’s brother into the flames by telling Baker and Yeager where they could find him and how he had a “bunch of copper” he was scrapping for cash. Hembree said he wanted no part of stealing copper. “I don’t want to go back to jail.”
It got to a point where Baker needed to get things moving. After explaining how the YCSO and GCPD had gone around and around with these cases, studying them backward and forward, no matter which way they disassembled the homicides, it always circled back to one guy.
“I already know I’m the number one suspect,” Hembree acknowledged.
Baker nodded his head in agreement.
“I ain’t had nothing to do with it!” Hembree announced emphatically. “I ain’t got nothing to hide. Y’all do whatever y’all gotta do.”
Baker asked about a fresh DNA sample from Hembree.
Hembree balked a little at first, but then he said, what the heck, the Department of Corrections (DOC) has his DNA on file, anyway. “So I ain’t got no problem with that.”
This request made Hembree particularly uncomfortable. It rattled him. He shifted in his seat several times and rubbed his chin nervously. The walls were closing in. He felt the pressure. His mind raced. And it was obvious he was thinking about his next move.
After sitting, staring off into an empty space, Hembree shifted to the other side of his chair and again spoke while staring at the wall, away from Baker’s line of sight.
Hembree decided he had to tell them. He had no choice.
“The only thing that you’re gonna find is that both of those girls . . . was in my car right before they disappeared. And you know, I’m not a rocket scientist, but I’m not stupid, neither. And I’m not a killer, neither. As far as women goes, I’m not . . . I take . . . I’m one of those, whatcha call it . . . gigolo types of deals. There’s places I can go lay down and that’s because I done treat people right.”
In one breath, the guy had gone from placing the girls in his car to comparing himself to Richard Gere’s character in
American Gigolo.
What in the name of Southern barbeque was Danny Hembree talking about now? Did he even realize what he had said? Did he know what the word “gigolo” meant?
It came out of him as if he couldn’t help it: Hembree wasn’t the lonely troll people were making him out to be, some Green River type, driving around, picking up girls, killing them for sport. He qualified that argument by telling Baker to check each one of his robberies. There they’d find that Hembree, as he claimed, had “never used a real gun” in any of them.
The mention of taking a DNA sample put Hembree on the defensive. Agitated now, he wanted to know why the YCSO was running around telling people he was their main suspect. He had an accusatory tone in his voice.
“Well—” Baker started to say.
“Did you talk to Nicole and tell her you wanted to get her into a shelter?”
“Yup, yup, we did.” Baker explained why, saying if they believed Hembree was a suspect in two homicides, why would they want to put Nicole’s life in danger, too? They wouldn’t be responsible cops if they didn’t think ahead.
Using a finger to articulate a circle on the table, Hembree said: “Well, I want y’all to get everything you need today . . . because I’m all done. . . .”
That was it, Hembree said. This would be the last time he sat with detectives and talked about these cases under these circumstances.
Wearing a button-down blue shirt, tie, and dark slacks, Matt Hensley walked into the room with a buccal swab DNA kit and read the consent form to Danny Hembree, who then signed it. It was perfect timing. Hensley entering the room broke up Hembree’s negative burst of energy.
Baker said something to Hensley about taking Hembree’s car in for a more thorough forensic search. Hembree said he didn’t mind: “As long as y’all fill it up with gas.” It was on
E
and he was busted, no cash.
The way Hembree begged for gas sounded pathetic. Here was a grown man, forty-seven years old, no money, no job, providing dope to down-and-out females (some of whom were clearly underage) in exchange for sex, smoking crack every chance he got, drinking alcohol every day, living in his mother’s house.
Nothingman.
As Hensley prepared the DNA kit, Hembree mumbled how they were likely going to find his DNA on Heather because he’d had sex with her three times that night. On each occasion, he felt the need to announce, he had ejaculated in her mouth and vagina without using a condom.
Sommer’s interview, they all knew, contradicted this statement.
“What about Randi?” Baker asked.
“I’ve
never
had sex with Randi.”
Hembree went quiet; he was thinking. Then, rather randomly, he said how Randi had rubbed his arm that night, suggesting that they might find his DNA on her because of this subtle touch.
Hensley didn’t say anything. He finished swabbing Hembree’s cheeks—which made Hembree tense up—and left the room.
“So there shouldn’t be any of your DNA, sperm, saliva, nothing like that, on Randi at all?” Baker asked, clearly letting Hembree know that a rub of the arm was not enough of an exchange to leave DNA.
“No, no. . . .”
“Nothing?”
“Well, there might be a little from a kiss on her neck or something.” It seemed that Hembree then realized what he had said:
neck.
Then he quickly added: “Or on her
cheek.
But there shouldn’t be—”
“So you never had sex with Randi?”
“Not that I know of. I only met her twice. You guys gotta understand. I’ve been with a
lot
of women—three or four a day for a while.”
While Mike Baker continued interviewing Danny Hembree, Hensley and Yeager found out that Hembree’s vehicle was parked at Nick’s. They had consent from Hembree that as long as they filled his car up with gas upon returning it (Hembree actually wrote this as an addendum on the consent form), they could tow it to the GCPD and give it a thorough forensic sweep.