H
ensley and a colleague picked up Nicole at the local jail, where she was spending a few days under a revoked bond. There was some concern that Nicole might have seen the news reports that day of what had become a breaking story highlighting Nicole possibly purchasing the gasoline. (Someone at the gas station ran his or her mouth to the press right after Hensley and Sumner left.) It was a big story this early in the judicial process. If Hembree had accomplices, one being the sister of one of his victims, the implications in the media were going to be huge. Many pictured Nancy Grace getting hold of the story and that night on her Headline News nightly show, trashing Nicole in her Southern speak. They envisioned the rambunctious, seething blond lawyer ranting and raving, calling Nicole every name in the book.
“You guys have the televisions on in here today?” Hensley asked a corrections officer (CO) as he and Sumner walked in.
“Yeah . . . but it wasn’t on a news channel.”
Good thing.
They waited in a small room as the CO fetched Nicole.
“Nicole, we’d like to talk to you about Danny. He’s been charged, as you know. Would you come down to the station with us and discuss some things?”
Nicole said she would.
A female officer transported Nicole from the jail to the GCPD. Hensley read Nicole her rights and she signed a waiver, indicating her desire to speak without an attorney.
So far, so good: no resistance.
The main question was if Nicole had any knowledge of the crimes before or after.
“I had no idea of anything at any time,” Nicole said. And as she talked through her version of the events, Nicole mentioned how she’d had a hard time remembering things lately. Being hit so many times by cars, she said, she’d developed memory loss and didn’t always recall certain events. Hensley later agreed that Nicole seemed willing to remember, but she just couldn’t dredge up all she wanted, due to severe head injuries.
Hensley asked Nicole questions that the GCPD had asked everyone else.
Nicole said everyone believed Hembree killed Heather. She’d heard it from her mother, her father, and many people on the street. Yet, she didn’t believe it. She said she never saw that side of Hembree, if it even existed.
They wondered if maybe Hembree had some sort of hold on Nicole, even now, after being arrested and charged with murder. Was she protecting him? Was she scared?
Nicole said no.
Then Hensley asked about that specific day, November 14, 2009, if Nicole could recall what she did.
“I spent the night before . . . at Gavin Compton’s trailer.” This was the trailer next to the abandoned trailer, where Hembree took his women. “I remember going over to Danny’s mother’s house. I remember talking to Danny’s mother. I was drinking that day. We went to Jacob’s Food Mart . . . to pick up alcohol. We spent the night at Gavin’s.”
She didn’t mention anything about a gallon of fuel.
“You don’t recall going to Kingsway?” Hensley asked.
“Oh yeah! We went to the Kingsway store.”
“Why’d you go to the store?”
“We went there to get Gavin’s son a blunt, but we didn’t buy it. I went inside the store to get a drink.”
“I know that you went inside that store to buy a gallon of gas.”
“Oh . . . yes. Yes. I did.” Nicole said this without any reservation. It came out as though she had forgotten and suddenly remembered—like she had nothing to hide.
“And?”
“Danny sent me in to get it. I used my own money, loose change I had.”
Hensley asked if she thought it was odd that he needed just one gallon of gas in a can?
Nicole said she never thought about it until that moment. “I didn’t know if Danny put the gas into his car or in a container.” She was inside the store the entire time. She didn’t actually fill the container. She just paid for it.
“Did you ever see a container of gas?”
“No.”
They went through the following morning, that Sunday—the day Hembree said he left his friend’s trailer around eight to go and pick up Randi’s body and burn it.
“I saw Danny at the kitchen table when I got up. He was drinking a beer.” She said it was early. “I didn’t see him leave that night or that morning, but he could have, because I slept in.”
Nicole explained how they took off to Florida the next day, a Monday. She mentioned how Hembree filled up his car with gas. For Hensley and Sumner, this confirmed Hembree’s story of tossing Randi’s purse, clothes, and some of her jewelry into a Dumpster behind a store as they drove out of town.
While they were in Florida, Nicole said, she took a call from home, and that was how she found out Randi had been murdered and her body recovered. She said Nick and Stella were worried about her and told her to get home. They said Hembree was responsible for the murders. When Nicole got off the phone with her parents, she said she approached Hembree, saying, “There must be a killer out there.”
He didn’t respond, so she got drunk. Later on, after the booze hit her hard, Nicole said, she accused Danny of killing her sister.
“I did it,” Hembree told Nicole that day in Florida, admitting to murdering Heather.
“So I smashed his windshield,” Nicole said. “He called the cops. We left for home the next night.”
Nicole never gave a reason why she didn’t report what Hembree had said in Florida, but she denied, time and again, having had any knowledge whatsoever of Randi or her sister’s murders, either before or after. Additionally, she wasn’t scared to drive back home with Hembree after he had admitted killing her sister.
Hensley couldn’t shake his original suspicion: Who purchases one gallon of gas (and winds up with a dead girl’s jewelry) and doesn’t fit it all into what happened? It seemed remarkable that Nicole did not see the writing.
“Nicole held true the entire time, though,” Hensley commented. “She said she traded jewelry with Randi and had no idea about Heather or Randi’s deaths.”
Hensley presented some evidence against Hembree to Nicole and asked her what she thought about it. “Look, you’re living with the guy in your father’s house. Your sister’s been murdered. . . .”
Nicole seemed to understand the logic, but she said she didn’t want to walk away from the guy.
It seemed to investigators that Danny was giving Nicole the kind of attention she craved. Perhaps he was good to her. He likely supported any habits she had. And so it was easy for her to stand by him.
Hensley knew Hembree was just staying close to the Catterton family, telling them what they wanted to hear, and keeping an eye on the case.
“He was a manipulator, a sociopath.”
Yet, as time would soon tell, it didn’t mean he was stupid.
T
hose additional cases Hembree mentioned gnawed at Hensley as he watched the tapes of the interviews over the course of a few days. Still sitting in the local jail, Hembree said he and Bobby Johnson had beaten and shot two people and left them for dead in the woods near Kings Mountain. The way they learned both had not died was through the newspapers.
Hensley thought,
What if I head down to the library and conduct a microfiche search?
As Hensley considered the idea, he took a call from a Brevard County detective.
“We spoke to Bobby Johnson.”
“What did he say?”
“Said he didn’t know anything about any murders in Florida and wasn’t involved.”
“That all?” Hensley asked.
“He did confess to those attempted murders Hembree talked to you about, that store clerk in Bessemer City and the man they kidnapped from a hotel in Kings Mountain.”
More reason to conduct that archival search, Hensley told himself. Maybe he could locate those victims and interview them.
As Hensley watched the interview tapes, another important piece of information emerged. During the interview Hembree had given the YCSO before Hensley and Sumner interviewed him, he claimed on two separate occasions that “no one knew he killed Randi and Heather.” Yet, when he spoke to Hensley and Sumner, Hembree fingered Stella, her sister, and Shorty in conspiring to have Randi killed.
He was caught in a quandary if he wanted to pin Randi’s murder on them. He was lying. It was clear by his own admission.
D
anny Hembree had a reputation among law enforcement for confessing to crimes. Inside the box, Hembree liked to run his mouth. As far back as 1993, Hembree was known to be a suspect who liked to talk. As a thirty-five-year-old, Hembree was picked up by the GCPD in 1997 as a suspect in a forgery case. While questioned, Hembree confessed to several armed robberies—serious crimes. They asked him why he did this.
“I want to go to prison,” Hembree said. “I want to kick my cocaine addiction and live a normal life.”
The checks Hembree was being questioned about were his father’s. Hembree had swiped several checks, forged the old man’s signature, and cashed them. During the interrogation, not only did Hembree talk about the armed robberies, but he also mentioned “a rape, beating and kidnapping of a Bessemer City convenience-store clerk.” It was the same case that Matt Hensley was looking into.
Interviewed by the
Charlotte Observer
at the time of his arrest in 1997, having already done eight-plus years for various offenses, Hembree said: “I wanted to make sure I either never got back out or got help with my addiction. . . .” He explained that the pending armed-robbery charge could put him away for life, but, he told reporter Jeff Diamant, “I believe if people see I genuinely want some help, and I’m willing to put my life on the line to get this help, somewhere along the line I’ll get help.” If he couldn’t get the help he needed, or if it did not work, “I might as well be locked down like an animal the rest of my life.”
In total Hembree fashion, even back when he was, arguably, honing his craft of justifying his crimes, he told that same reporter he “always used a BB gun or a blank pistol, and that the stolen money supported his drug addiction.” And this, in his mind, made it okay, a nonviolent crime. “I never used a real weapon in any of my robberies. The only person that ever could’ve got hurt in any of the robberies was me. . . .”
He failed to say, however, that back in 1980, using one of those “fake” weapons, he forced a woman out of a store and into a waiting truck, where he and Bobby Johnson then took her into the woods at three-thirty in the morning. Both men repeatedly raped the woman, according to one account of the crime. Then they beat her and slashed her with a knife several times before dumping her body out of a moving vehicle. She was unconscious. She only survived because she awoke at 5:00
A.M.
and managed to find her way to a nearby house and asked for help.
In that same 1997 article, Hembree said he “had information about that particular crime,” and claimed to have had nothing “to do with it—but I can sure solve it.”
He later admitted to Sumner, though, and then to Hensley, that he took part in this crime. It was 1980—the same year Hembree was married. Furthermore, Hembree, who had pleaded with cops in 1997 for help with his addictions—claiming that locking him up was the only way to solve his problem—would escape two times from custody after being incarcerated on the armed-robbery and forgery charges.
O
n December 8, 2009, Hembree was charged with the murder of Deborah Ratchford. An accomplice, whom Hembree had fingered during interviews, was also charged. James Swanson denied any part in the murder, however, saying Hembree was making it all up.
This new charge produced a theory that cold-case murders in the area would have to be checked out thoroughly under the pretense that Hembree had committed them. There was no telling how many girls Hembree had murdered. A serial killer such as Hembree doesn’t kill one girl in 1992—Ratchford—and then cool off for seventeen years and kill two more within a few weeks. Serials with the mind-set and psychology Hembree displayed need to fulfill their fantasies continually—murder becomes another addiction. If he killed Ratchford, Hembree could have a dozen more bodies to his name.
In court, Hembree did not respond to the charges as Locke Bell stated emphatically that his office would seek the death penalty.
The judge said Hembree could plead against the charges at a later date. This was a formal court date to charge him and enter into the record the fact that the state was seeking to execute Hembree. Hembree’s run of crime, apparently, had come to an end. He was staring down the barrel of death himself now, perhaps feeling the hands of the state around
his
throat.
Yet, what nobody knew—and couldn’t, really—was that Danny Hembree was working on a plan to make a mockery of the system designed to adjudicate him. And the things he was going to do in the coming months would shock the state of North Carolina and make national, and even international, headlines. It seemed Danny Hembree wasn’t quite finished with his game of control. For him, as he smiled out of the corner of his mouth and blew kisses to his sister and mother during this recent court appearance, Hembree was laughing on the inside, preparing to stage the show of his life.
H
ensley sat in the tranquility of the local Gaston County Public Library and scrolled through articles, in search of those cases Hembree had mentioned. There had to be something written about both, Hensley believed.
The image Matt Hensley couldn’t get out of his mind was Hembree standing, smoking a cigarette outside the GCPD in back of the building, talking about this “old stuff,” as Hembree labeled it, in a tone reminiscent of a man describing a cookout he had gone to with his family.
No feeling.
No emotion.
Certainly, no remorse.
It was the Crowders Creek crime, specifically, that alarmed Hensley most—where Hembree talked about abducting a woman from a convenience store. The details Hembree offered were disturbing and shocking enough, and this was banking on the theory that he was likely holding back and glossing the crime over by at least half.
“We’re standing there on the back-porch area of the police department,” Hensley recalled, “and he’s telling us what he did to this woman.”
Hembree described how he and Bobby Johnson took the girl out into the woods after forcing her into a truck and then violently raped her. That crime was evil enough. But then Hembree told Hensley how he had taken the woman up to the mountaintop with the intention of killing her. He brought a shovel along.
Confused, Hensley thought maybe Hembree was planning on burying her alive.
“I was going to cut her head off with the spade of the shovel,” Hembree said.
Hembree described how he had told her to stand and face the opposite way. He took the shovel and swung it like a baseball bat, hoping the spade portion of the tool would slice off her head.
“But he missed . . . ,” Hensley said. “He told me he missed her neck.”
The woman let out a terrible, shrieking scream. It scared Hembree and Johnson enough that they took off.
Both figured because Hembree had sliced her with the shovel on the back or side, she’d fall down and bleed to death. Hembree said he was certain he’d seen something in the newspapers after the crime that told him she survived.
So now, Hensley was wading through rolls of microfiche, hoping to come up with a name. If she had survived, he could possibly pay a visit to the woman to get her side of the story. And maybe she could even testify—or at least give the GCPD a statement to put into Danny Hembree’s file.
After hours of searching on that first day, Hensley found nothing.