The Killing Kind (21 page)

A
s Hembree waited in the woods on November 15, with Randi’s corpse in the backseat of his vehicle, he smoked a cigarette. His eyes darted from one area to another as horseback riders strode around him.

Impatient and scared of being caught in the act, Danny drove a “mile or two” away from there and found a secluded area.

Many who have tried think that lighting a human body on fire is as easy as pouring gasoline over the flesh and flicking a match, vis-à-vis a scene from a Hollywood movie. Yet, if they hang around the scene long enough, most realize quickly that the human body, as complex and durable as it is, does not burn easily. To ignite a human body (which is basically 85 percent water) takes long periods of sustained temperatures in the range of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, hence the need crematoriums have for a furnace.

Hembree parked and grabbed Randi’s body. He placed her on the ground about fifty yards away from his vehicle. He did a complete three-sixty with his eyes to make certain he was alone.

He then poured gasoline all over Randi.

Confident no one would see the fire, he lit “a piece of paper or tissue” and watched as a ball of flames engulfed Randi’s body and made a black puff up into the forest sky.

Hembree, however, did not wait around to watch her body burn: “I went to [my friend’s trailer] and got back into bed with Nicole.”

H
ensley and Sumner were curious about the conspiracy Hembree had mentioned. “Basically,” Hensley asked Hembree, “Randi was set up?”

“I killed her for money, or dope, whatever you want to call it,” he claimed.

As Hembree talked about the alleged conspiracy involving Shorty, Stella, and Stella’s sister, it became clear that he was trying to bring down those he hated. He offered no evidence other than his word and a motive that Stella and her sister believed Randi had had something to do with Heather’s murder.

Hensley and Sumner listened, but they had a tough time with this story.

“I didn’t believe him,” Hensley said. (And later, as Hensley investigated this allegation Hembree had made, the detective spoke to all three and proved it was nothing more than Hembree having a little fun. Furthermore, as law enforcement asked Hembree to give up details regarding the time, place, and when the first conversation about a conspiracy occurred, Danny could not do it.)

Hembree got back on track, talking about the facts of Randi’s murder and where they could find evidence. Randi’s blood, he said, would be all over the inside basement closet, where he had placed her body. He had “covered [the blood] with plastic and . . . stuffed a teddy bear in the corner to keep Momma from finding [it]. And Randi’s boots are downstairs. . . .”

To Sumner and Hensley, it was obvious Danny Hembree didn’t want to disappoint his mother in any way. He’d mentioned this several times. It was strange, seeing that he’d killed two women and stored their corpses inside Momma’s house. Yet as Hembree talked through his crimes, Sumner believed there was something deeper there between Danny and his mother.

“At some level,” Sumner said later, “he and his mom definitely had a relationship that was not like a normal mother/son relationship. But it also seemed like he had some type of respect for her, because he would say things like, ‘I didn’t want to wake up Momma.’ Yet here he was killing these girls—at least one of them—while she read in [her] bedroom down the hall.”

Sumner asked Hembree if he could explain where the scratches Heather had on her side came from. They believed she had been dragged through the wooded area, where she was found.

Hembree got excited, actually, wasting little time: “Yeah, that’s from the tacks in front of where the closet’s at there. There’s . . . some of those old rug tacks. . . .”

Hembree had dragged Heather over the tacks as he stuffed her into the closet. She sustained the injuries, Hembree thought, after she was dead. He added as an insult, “You see, I had to drag Heather because she was so heavy.”

“We had heard,” Sumner stated, “that you had wanted to kill Stella. Is that true?”

“Yup,” Hembree said, nodding his head in agreement. “I was gonna kill Stella.”

“Why is that? Is it because of who she is?”

“Well, that, yes, and she’s been running her mouth.”

“How so?”

“Just getting into mine and Nicole’s business and shit.”

“What about [Shorty]?” Hensley asked. “Did you have plans on killing him a certain way?”

“I was gonna kill him today.”

Getting more into the specifics surrounding Heather’s murder and why he did it, Hembree said, “Look, I didn’t plan on killing Heather.” Then, quite coldly, he offered: “It just seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

Imagine, taking a seventeen-year-old girl’s life—so young, she had decades to rebuild and start over, to love and be loved, to have children, to find a husband, to get a job and live a healthy life—was boiled down for Danny Hembree into eleven words:

“It just seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

He explained how hard it was to kill Heather. He said she went unconscious while he suffocated her with that plastic bag, but her body “wouldn’t stop breathing.” Then he added how he had to place his bare foot over her neck.

As Hembree talked through it, he had trouble explaining how he’d accomplished certain tasks. So he made a suggestion: “I can take you there and walk you through the whole thing. . . .”

Hensley nodded.

“But I don’t want my mother there. I’ll show you where the blood’s at. I’ll show you where
everything’s
at.”

This was not a hard call to make. Break out that video camera and make sure the battery was fully charged. And yet one had to wonder: What was Hembree planning? What was his motivation for bringing these two cops into his mother’s house to show them where he had committed two murders? Glorification? The sheer comfort of knowing he was in control of this interview?

Before they could promise a car ride and walk-through, Sumner brought up something Hembree had told the YCSO.

“You mentioned to York County that there were some murders in Florida?”

Hembree paused. His demeanor changed. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Okay.”

“That took place earlier this year . . . ,” Hembree added without being asked. “And then there’s also that [African-American girl, Deb Ratchford] , who was found murdered in that-there cemetery in Gastonia in 1992.”

If true, that brought his total to five . . .

. . . that they knew of.

S
hellie Nations was suffering greatly from the loss of her sister. As she went about her days after Randi’s murder, waiting and wondering when an arrest would be made, hearing rumors that someone named Danny Hembree was a person of interest, all Shellie could do to lessen the impact of her sister’s death was think back about Randi and the good times. Stay focused on those memories that made Shellie smile—the days when they were two innocent kids having fun.

There was one of those times, Shellie recalled, when Randi had a sleepover. At some point during the night, Randi made up her mind that she was going to do one of the girls’ hair. You know, fix it up. Comb it out. Break out the hair spray and tease it up. Sleepover stuff.

As nothing more than a practical joke, Randi decided to switch the bottle of shampoo for a bottle of Nair hair remover. She thought it would be hilarious. She was so naïve then that Randi had no idea what a bottle of Nair would do to a head of hair. She thought maybe the girl would lose a few hairs and they’d all have a laugh.

The girl never lost any of her hair, but Randi and her friends had that laugh at how strangely dark and sinister Randi’s sense of humor was.

“She didn’t mean no harm,” Shellie said. “It was all in good fun, and nothing happened to the girl.”

Thinking back on that moment made Shellie smile; she felt warm inside. There was so much information going around town, Shellie was beside herself with unanswered questions and thoughts about what had happened. When she heard it later, Shellie was sick to her stomach that Danny Hembree had murdered Heather, and not only slept in Heather’s bed at Nick’s house afterward, but offered to be a pallbearer at Heather’s funeral, too.

At Randi’s funeral, Shellie watched as people passed by her sister’s closed casket, pondering those she had never seen before and did not know.

Is it you? Are you the person who took my sister’s life?

Law enforcement, a presence at Randi’s wake and funeral, explained to Shellie that the type of person who murdered Randi was perhaps the same type to show up at his victim’s funeral and take pleasure in watching the suffering of Randi’s friends and family.

“That scared us,” Shellie said.

Along with the idea that Randi’s killer was still at large—an additional fear Shellie suffered from, and one that tears victims’ families down as they go through the grieving process—were those memories that came on without warning. You could be walking down the street and a recollection of a bridal shower or a party came over you unexpectedly, like a hot flash. In Shellie’s case, it might be just a snapshot of an image: Randi and her unforgettable smile. Randi sleeping. Randi walking out the door saying, “Bye, I love you, Shell.” Or maybe a song on the radio and Shellie was back to a day when she and Randi sang along together in the car, giggling, enjoying life. Those were the toughest moments—the simple ones, the times most everyone else takes for granted.

At home, Shellie was trying to cope with the sting of losing her sister, waiting for that call to tell her Randi’s killer was behind bars. On edge, Shellie had no idea that Danny Hembree, at that very moment, three weeks before Christmas, was describing how he had planned, plotted, and carried out Randi’s murder methodically, maliciously, and evilly because he believed Randi, in his language, was a “whore,” who needed redemption and—oh yeah—he just didn’t like her.

“W
e’re ready to go, Danny,” Hensley said.

“Where?”

“Momma’s house.”

While Hensley and Sumner interviewed Hembree inside the box, several investigators served a search warrant at Hembree’s mother’s house and were already digging around, looking for those items that Hembree had discussed during his confession. They were having some difficulty locating some of the items Hembree had mentioned. It was important for the GCPD to corroborate as much as it could with regard to what Hembree had admitted. Investigators didn’t want Hembree jerking them around, telling them one thing, wasting time, while the facts lined up differently. There had been enough evidence never released publicly to check against Hembree’s story. Every law enforcement agency held back details of crimes for this very reason. Most of it seemed to line up with Hembree’s revelations. But inside Danny Hembree’s mother’s house, according to Hembree, that was where they’d find the evidence that could end Hembree’s life by lethal injection—and maybe Hembree didn’t realize that as he sat and discussed how he murdered two women in cold blood. The information Hembree was sharing, especially in a state like North Carolina, was enough to place him on death row if convicted.

“I want some things from y’all, too,” Hembree said after Hensley brought him a fresh coffee. After brushing his hands off, as if they were dusty, he said, “I want
all
my property released to my mom— my cell phone, a little bit amount of cash.” He slapped his hands together as if to say, “Hey, pay attention now.” It was just Hembree and Sumner. Hensley had gone off to check on the status of them taking a trip out to Hembree’s mother’s house. “I want you to impound that car. . . . I used it during the murder.” He talked about the outrageous financing he was being charged after having to put a new motor in the car recently. “And I want you guys to auction it off and let them all fight for it.” The way Hembree spoke so straightforwardly and confidently about his personal issues, it seemed he had thought about all of this beforehand and had a plan going into the confession.

No sooner was he making demands than Hembree began rambling on about not having any sleep for the past five days, having been “smoking dope constantly.”

Hensley came back into the room. He had his jacket on. “Let’s go.”

A
s they pulled up to Momma’s house and looked at the yard, it had the feel of autumn, with the sunburst-colored leaves from the maples strewn about all over. The stray tree branches, dead and fallen, lay about the grass like the limbs of rusted and fallen old-school TV antennas. Although winter, indeed, there was a fall essence to the look of the Hembree home.

It was 9:41
A.M.
when Hembree, Sumner, and Hensley arrived at the redbrick ranch house that Hembree lived in with his mother. A third investigator had gone along beforehand and documented a walk-through on videotape before Hembree and the others arrived. The video is eerie, displaying how the simplest, most basic, everyday items, under such a dark context, can magnify into creepiness when you know what happened. For example, a green plastic watering can sitting on the entrance porch into the Hembree home, a half-opened umbrella hanging off the railing, a shaky hand behind the video camera capturing the images as the cameraman walks into the house, all now had an ominous, almost surreal, black-and-white
Blair Witch Project
effect.

There was no narration or explanation of what was being filmed, just a video of the inside of the home. The GCPD wanted a clean copy of the house, as it was when they arrived.

The house could have used a makeover. Carpets were old; curtains were faded and dirty; closets overflowed with clothing and other common household items; graffiti had been written on the inside of one closet; linens, a touch out of date, were dirty; the kitchen overflowed with clutter. Yet, there was still a someone-lived-here sense to it all. This was a home. It wasn’t until the den that blood showed up on camera. The one piece of furniture in the den—a blue couch, with white polka dots—had a few obvious dried bloodstains. There was a pillow that seemed to have plenty of blood spatter and drippings. Likewise, the carpet had several areas where dried blood could have been present. Luminol would tell that story later, and when the lights were turned off and the chemical reacted to the bodily fluids, it would probably illuminate the room like the Milky Way galaxy.

Down in the basement, stuff was strewn everywhere: black garbage bags filled with clothes and odds and ends, old appliances that no one used anymore, books, hubcaps, old lights, laundry baskets, chests, and other items most people would have tossed into the garbage long ago. Of interest to the man behind the camera were dried spots of blood spread about a large area on the concrete flooring. There were also white garbage bags with blood droplets on them, and then a pillow without a case. Blood turns almost black when dried and coagulated, days or weeks old. On this pillow was what seemed to be an enormous amount of dried blood.

Back upstairs in the den, the cameraman found a pair of Hembree’s work boots with specks and spots of dried blood around the toes.

And then the video tour was done.

Cut and print.

Hembree got out of Hensley’s Crown Vic and popped a cigarette in his mouth, lighting it as he walked up to the front door. Obvious was an incredible swagger. Danny Boy Hembree was in his element here: the cat bringing his master his catch of the day. He was gloating (buzzing) as he walked, no doubt thinking that all of this—cops, their cameras, their questions, their eagerness while awaiting his responses—was all by his design.

I did this.

It’s my work.

This time, right now, is mine.

No one can take it away from me.

Indeed, this was “The Danny Hembree Show.” He led the way.

It was one thing walking through a crime scene with a video camera and taking images of empty spaces and what might have happened here or there. It was quite another when you had a killer walking you through that same scene, pointing things out, talking about what he did.

Hembree wasted no time in getting right down to it, stepping into the house with a lit cigarette, nearly running down the hallway toward the den, stating, “Right here . . . this is where I strangled Randi.”

The first words out of his mouth.

“This is where I strangled Randi.” It said a lot about the mind-set of the guy as he walked into his home for what was likely going to be the last time.

Officers lifted the cushions off the couch. With his hands cuffed, Hembree spouted off: “Blood there . . .
there
. . . right
there
. . . that, right there, that’s her blood, too. That’s blood,” he said loudly, pointing to the corner of the couch. Then he stood up straight, looked down on the carpet below him, pointed, and proclaimed: “And that-there [spot] is where she shit.”

It seemed the amount of blood Hembree described coming out of Randi had to be generated by more than a bloody nose or cut above her brow from a fist blow to the head. But no one was going to challenge Hembree here. Not now. This was his game.

They were curious about the stain on the carpet in front of the couch, where Hembree said Randi had moved her bowels.

“Was she naked when you strangled her?” Hensley asked. This was not what Hembree had said back in the box.

“No.”

“Well, at any point, did you, um, take her clothes off—”

Before Hensley could finish, Hembree said, “I stripped her down, took all of her jewelry and everything off.” Hembree stared at the floor as he described the moment, reliving it. “Carried her down and put her in the closet.”

Sumner watched and listened. He took note of how “detailed Mr. Hembree was as he explained things to us. But what I noticed, too, was how emotionless, flat, and so very nonchalant. On the inside, we were kind of freaked out by that.”

It was chilling to hear Hembree talk about such horrifying moments with such a stark, cold demeanor. He didn’t care. He had no feelings for these girls and the way he treated them. They were things.

Objects.

Hensley indicated he wanted to head into the basement. As the detective led the way down the stairs, he asked Hembree, who was following closely behind, “Any weapons down here?”