B
ack inside the box, Baker took out his calendar book to make sure he was working with the right dates. Hembree had been unclear about certain dates. Baker, alone with Hembree now, wanted clarification.
Baker asked if anyone had heard from Heather during that time period Hembree said he had dropped her off at the Mighty Dollar and eleven days later, when she was found dead in that ditch.
Using his fingers to count them off, Danny rolled out several times that Nick, Nicole, and Stella had told him they’d seen Heather (or someone they knew had seen Heather) “at some dude’s house” and several other places, including Shorty’s.
“She was always doing dates,” Hembree added, meaning trading sex for dope.
They talked about where Heather stayed. Hembree said Shorty’s, mostly. Then he told Baker they (Shorty and Heather) were making “pornographic movies” with “a lot of them girls who’s underage.”
They talked about this for a while. Russ Yeager came back into the box, sat down, and stared at Hembree without speaking.
Baker asked Hembree if he liked Heather.
Hembree took his time. “Yeah, uh . . . as somebody to hang out and party with. She’s sweet. She’s innocent in her own little way. Yeah, I liked Heather.”
“You like her as much as you like Nicole?”
“Oh, hell no. Nicole’s got a chance. She’s getting her GED and all that stuff.”
The tone Hembree used to describe his girlfriend, it wasn’t clear if he was dissing or complimenting her. “She’s got a low standard, but there’s something about her. There’s potential. There’s something different there.”
After talking about his future with Nicole, Hembree digressed (as he often did) and explained how he once thought about putting Heather and Sommer up in a trailer. Hembree said he had been discussing it with Heather, especially.
It was a strange comment, considering that he had only met Sommer one time and had, just before talking about it, told Baker how much he adored Nicole.
Baker picked up on this thread and asked about Sommer.
“Sommer’s been calling me,” Hembree claimed. “She told me if she found a place to go, she’d dump that old boy she’s with . . . and I told them (Sommer and Heather) what I wanted.”
“What is it you wanted?” Baker asked. After all, Hembree was not going to be paying the girls’ rent without getting something for himself, Baker knew.
“I told them both it was like this,” Hembree explained. “I want eggs, when I get up. I want the house clean, when I get there. I want sex, when I want sex. And what y’all do when I’m gone, do it discreetly. And everything’s fine.”
As the interview continued, Hembree said he met a girl at Heather’s funeral and ended up partying with her.
Baker asked who she was in relation to the Catterton family.
“Heather’s lover—”
“Her
lover
?”
Hembree said yes. He did not elaborate.
They talked about what Hembree might have been doing during those days while Heather was missing, but he conveniently couldn’t recall exact dates, where he had gone, and what he had done. It was very telling to Baker how Danny Hembree could talk candidly about what he and Heather and Sommer and Stella and Nick and Nicole had done in those days when Heather first got out of jail (in detail); but as soon as Heather went missing, Hembree had developed a case of amnesia.
“Heather would jump in the damn car with the ice-cream man,” Hembree said, referring to when she wanted dope. He said he warned Heather and Nicole about “getting into the car with anybody.” He told them they shouldn’t do it, “especially in South Gastonia. She (Heather) was just young and she didn’t think it could happen to her.”
“It.” Subtle word choice there.
Baker asked Hembree if he had any idea who “did this” to Heather.
“I figured she . . . [Someone] told me she OD’d and the way it looked someone woke up and panicked.... Y’all hadn’t even told us how she died, so I don’t know—how did she die?”
“Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
“What do you think?” Hembree asked.
“Well, what I’d like to do is get what
you
think. ”
Hembree said he could “not see her OD’ing” because of how used she was to smoking rock.
“How do you think she died?” Baker asked after explaining he couldn’t tell Hembree everything they knew about Heather’s death.
Hembree played with the cap from his Mountain Dew in one hand and shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t see anybody murdering her without her pants on. [I know someone who] said she wasn’t raped, so . . . I mean . . . I don’t know. . . .”
Why in Clover, South Carolina, and that general area? Baker wondered.
“Well, whoever it was didn’t have no place to take her so they put her out there.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I mean, it’s obvious. It’s secluded. If they had a place to take her, they would have put her
there.
If they had a place to bury her, they wouldn’t have just shoved her off in that field there.”
Baker went back to something Hembree had said earlier about Heather not having pants on. He was confused. He wanted Hembree to elaborate on his “theory” of what he thought happened.
Hembree looked straight ahead, past Russ Yeager, who sat more relaxed, elbows on his knees, hands folded, staring at Hembree. Danny said, “I mean, if
I
was gonna kill somebody . . . I wouldn’t kill them with their pants
off.
”
“What if I got all mad at her and pissed off or something?” Baker suggested.
“Then she would have marks or something. She didn’t have marks, according to [what I heard].”
If it was an accident, Baker tossed out, why wouldn’t the person she was with call 911?
“That’s what I would have done,” Hembree said twice.
Someone had gone out and purchased a coffee for Hembree. Yeager and Baker then walked out of the room as Hembree prepared his coffee with milk and sugar. Hembree put his jacket on; and when Baker returned, he indicated he wanted to go outside and smoke a cigarette.
After his smoke, Hembree was back in the box.
Baker wanted to clarify. “There’s nothing that I missed.” He looked at his notes.
An interesting fact about Hembree’s life came up and Baker wanted to know how Hembree picked up his girls. There had been so many, according to Danny. But that one girl walking down the street—what about her?
Hembree said he didn’t know her name, where she was from, or much else about her, adding, “She was just walking down the road and I asked her if she was working, and she said ‘yeah,’ and I said, ‘Well, I got a hit. . . .’ ”
So there was Hembree’s pickup line: “I got a hit.”
He took her to his favorite spot—that abandoned trailer.
The anecdote Hembree gave Baker showed how little Hembree valued the lives of the women he had sex and partied with. He viewed these women—Sommer, Heather, Nicole, and Randi included—as lowlifes: females he could do what he wanted with because they were out there in the world smoking dope. In Hembree’s skewed view of life, they were below everyone else. They didn’t matter because of the choices they made.
Hembree was asked again what he had done during the weekend of October 24 and 25.
He kept saying he couldn’t recall. “I’ll have to talk to Nicole and figure it out.”
Two hours and four minutes into the interview, Hembree stretched. “Look, man, if we’re gonna do something, let’s
do
it,” he said. “Because I’m about tired of hanging out in here.”
The interview ended as Hembree stood and popped a cigarette in his mouth. They left the box without a confession. Yet, in the days to come, Danny Hembree’s vanity would be his worst enemy. His unchecked narcissism would come back to bite him.
W
orking out of the Gaston County Police Department headquarters, YCSO investigators picked Shorty up and brought him in. Shorty’s name had come up so often within the scope of the investigation that law enforcement knew he was going to become a good source for intel inside that tight-knit group of Gastonia dealers and dopers. Still, had investigators focused on Hembree too closely and missed something with Shorty? Had Shorty, a guy with a soft spot for Heather, someone who had wanted to “rescue” her from the street life, become jealous and enraged by the lifestyle Heather was involved in?
Average height, at about five feet nine inches, quite scruffy around the edges, fifty-year-old Shorty, an African American, was one of those old-school Southerners who had a thick, hard-to-understand accent that sounded as if he spoke a language of his own. Shorty had his own problems with the law. He’d been arrested and charged with drug possession. He later admitted that while Heather, Randi, Danny, and Nicole were hanging around his house, he was providing them with controlled substances. Despite his reputation as a dealer, Shorty said he had never gone to Heather and traded drugs for sex. There was a certain type of scourge that did that sort of thing, and Shorty made it clear he wasn’t it.
The main theme Shorty got across became that Heather was someone many, many people took advantage of, especially the older women Heather hung around with. They used her. They abused her adolescence and lack of street smarts.
“People would come to my house looking for her and I would turn them away,” Shorty said.
After being asked, Shorty gave investigators the first glimpse they had into what Heather did on the morning before she was last seen alive. This was important. It was another piece of the victimology puzzle, another piece of Heather’s life before she went missing that law enforcement could now fill in.
Heather had been over at Shorty’s that morning. She’d been hanging around, as usual. Stella, Danny, and Nicole came by soon after Heather woke up and picked her up. Shorty had no idea where they ran off to, but he guessed they took Heather back home (to Nick’s).
Nicole called Shorty later that day; through that conversation, Shorty learned Heather had taken off with Sommer and Sommer’s boyfriend, George. Nicole never mentioned Danny as part of the crowd, or the one who actually came up with the idea to take off without Nicole.
Shorty went about his day. As the night progressed, Sommer called several times. Each time she called (Shorty never said why), he asked to speak with Heather to make sure she was okay.
“But Sommer wouldn’t let me talk to her.”
Then Sommer called back and asked Shorty, “Can we come over there?”
“Sure,” Shorty said.
“But they never showed up,” Shorty told investigators.
What made Shorty think something was wrong took place the following morning. Heather never called. By then, he was used to Heather checking in with him at least once a day, if not several times. Not calling “was unlike her.”
After Heather was considered missing, Shorty said, he worried something had happened. No one had heard from her. This was important to Shorty, who knew Heather could not go a day without talking to someone from that group.
Shorty talked about a friend of his—a real piece of garbage—who had sold his truck after Heather disappeared. It seemed suspicious, he explained, because he knew the guy and his girlfriend had been with Heather at some point during those days before she went missing.
“Why? What would be their motive?”
“Competition,” Shorty explained. The guy’s girlfriend, according to Shorty, was jealous of Heather because guys generally chose Heather over her. The indication was that the two of them—the guy who sold his truck and his girlfriend—hated Heather.
After a simple check, Hensley and the YCSO learned that the property where Heather’s body had, in fact, been found was owned by a relative of the girl’s.
Coincidence?
Shorty thought it just might be.
Why?
Because he believed in his heart that Danny Hembree had murdered both Heather and Randi.
“Danny was raised in those areas where both bodies was found,” Shorty said.
Red flag.
Shorty talked about the night he last saw Randi (giving investigators details about that fight Nicole and Hembree got into after Nicole found out Randi and Hembree were making fun of her behind her back). Listening, detectives realized Shorty was confirming lots of details from the night that others had reported. Three people now said Hembree had taken off in his vehicle toward the direction where Randi had left the house and started walking.
“I saw Danny turn around and drive toward where Randi was walking,” Shorty said. He was certain of this. “I believe Danny picked her up.”
“Why?”
“I done put two and two together,” Shorty said.
“Two and two?”
“I think Randi and Danny planned it together in the room without Nicole knowing.”
So that fight Nicole and Danny had after Nicole caught them making fun of her was staged—a plan by Danny and Randi to take off and go party together. This was the first time law enforcement had heard this theory.
It sounded plausible.
“Randi looked clean that night—she looked good!” Shorty said.
Hembree liked this about her: the same as when Heather had gotten out of jail and bathed and cleaned herself up.
Hembree didn’t like being turned down, Shorty explained. He hated when girls told him no. He believed he was entitled, as long as he had something to give them.
Motive.
There was another girl Hembree had wanted to take out and trade drugs for sex. Hembree had just met her. She knew Randi and Heather. Shorty said when the girl refused Hembree, he became enraged and “bucked at her,” threatening to pummel her. They were at Nicole’s house. Nick was gone. Nicole was out. Danny and the girl were alone in the house. He placed a “couple of hits of crack” on the kitchen table.
“What’s your price?” he asked the girl.
“I ain’t no call girl, asshole!”
“Everyone’s got her price. If I done had me a thousand dollars, you’d take it.”
“I would not. I’m no call girl.”
Hembree exploded. He grabbed a kitchen table chair and slammed it on the floor.
(“He was enraged,” the girl later told Matt Hensley after he tracked her down. “Danny is
crazy.
”)
Scared of Hembree, she ran out of the house.