The Killing Kind (31 page)

I
t was obvious that fifty-one-year-old Stella Funderburk had been a striking woman once. However, time and life had taken its toll. Stella appeared tired. She came across as a witness who did not want to be there. Not long after Heather was found, Stella told a local-television news station how she’d cried “every day.... I wake up, crying, and [go] to bed, crying.” Some saw this as too little, too late. After all, Stella had invited this monster into her daughter’s life.

Stella spoke in a near whisper and had to be told repeatedly to speak up and move closer to the microphone.

She said she had known Danny Hembree for thirty years.

“Do you have an addiction to controlled substances, ma’am?” Beam asked.

“No. I wouldn’t say I had an addiction.”

“Do you use controlled substances?”

“I have.”

Beam asked what kind.

“Crack cocaine, alcohol,” Stella admitted.

As they talked, Stella claimed Heather had been “in a relationship” with Shorty and that Shorty was supplying Heather with drugs.

“Were you aware of how she supported her drug habit?”

“Well, she was living with [Shorty], yeah. I knew he was going to give [her] drugs.”

“Did she engage in dating other men?”

“No, not that I know of.”

“You didn’t know anything about her dating other men?”

“No.”

“Did you engage in a conspiracy to hire Mr. Hembree to kill Randi Saldana?”

“No, I didn’t.”

They went on to talk about Sommer Heffner, her daughter Nicole’s issues, how Hembree dated Nicole and often stayed at Nick’s during the time Heather and Randi went missing, and how Hembree gave Nick and Stella rides.

Then, as quickly as they got started, Beam had nothing further.

It was unclear why Stella had even been called.

Bell took on Stella’s cross-examination. Stella had an immediate distaste and bitterness in her tone as the DA asked when Hembree first met Heather. This was that alleged encounter Hembree had said he had with Stella and Heather inside a motel, when he supposedly purchased Heather from Stella.

Stella didn’t see it that way: “She went down there (meaning to someone’s house).... All of us went down there. Nicole wasn’t with us, and Heather had told me she had been with Danny . . . . And so, anyway, I went to use the phone to call somebody to come and get me and Heather. When I come out, her and Danny had done left.”

“And you and Danny were dating or seeing each other at that time?”

“No! We weren’t dating.”

“When was the last time y’all dated?”

“We never really dated.”

After this, Stella had nothing to share that amounted to what would become important for jurors deciding Hembree’s guilt or innocence.

Bell asked at one point: “And you told the police on November twenty-third that it was about six to eight months prior [to Heather’s disappearance] that you knew that Danny had sex with Heather?”

“Yes.”

“And that she would have been sixteen at the time!”

“She was seventeen in March. I don’t know if she was . . . I don’t know if she was . . . I thought she was seventeen, but she might have been sixteen.”

Bell seemed frustrated. He’d ask a question and it seemed Stella answered a different one, so he ended his cross.

Beam had a few additional questions, one of which seemed to attack Stella’s and Heather’s characters: “Did you engage in sexual activity for cocaine?”

“No.”

“Did you know that Heather engaged in sexual activity for cocaine?”

“Heather told me afterward, yeah.”

“You say she told you ‘afterward.’ Was that [with] Danny or was that with someone else?”

“Excuse me, what?”

“When you said Heather told you afterward she engaged in sexual activity for cocaine, are you referring to with Danny, or are you referring to somebody else?”

“Yeah, with Danny.”

O
ver the next two days, Richard Beam called several witnesses who did little to put a shine on whatever swampland in Florida he was trying to sell jurors. There was no clear indication as to what Danny Hembree’s defense was getting at with the questions Beam asked or the witnesses he called.

Near the end of the day, October 28, Beam put up Bobby Mercer.

Fifty-two-year-old Mercer said just about everyone he personally knew called him by his nickname, Shorty.

Then there was a little issue of the clothes Shorty wore on this day: prison scrubs. Beam asked and Shorty made it clear he was serving time at the Gaston Correctional Center in Dallas, North Carolina, for possession of cocaine.

Shorty called Heather “a friend.” He said she stayed at his house “every now and again” and he provided her with cocaine “every now and again.”

“Was she engaged in, to your knowledge, was she engaged in the activity of trading sex for cocaine?” Beam asked several questions later.

“Well, when I met her, that’s how the rumor was in the street—that when I met her, she were like that.”

“When you met her, that was the rumor in the street?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you ever give her cocaine?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you ever trade with her cocaine for sex?”

“No! I didn’t treat her that way.”

There was an odd intensity about Shorty. He spoke with a strange authority that was hard to put a finger on. He came across as a guy with secrets; yet, someone speaking his truth, no matter how it affected people. This was the way Shorty lived his life. He had no trouble admitting his faults, crimes, talking about his lifestyle. Sure, there were things Shorty held back—criminals always downplayed their role in things, to a certain extent—but there was also a profound sense of “I don’t care” in his voice, “You can’t hurt me.”

One interesting fact that came out of this conversation was how street-smart and desperate Heather was, this for a sixteen-year-old. Here she was hanging around with a fifty-year-old man (at the time), even living with him on occasion. Shorty said Heather would hide out at his house a lot, dodging authorities and people she didn’t want to see. To Shorty, Heather was a lost soul—a kid whom people used and abused.

After all was said and done, Beam only managed to prove with Shorty’s testimony that Shorty had given Heather cocaine—a fact that had been established on day one of the trial.

Smartly, Bell got right into Randi’s case with Shorty, asking questions that led Shorty to place Hembree in Randi’s presence on the day Randi went missing. Shorty tried stopping Randi from leaving his house that day, he explained, but she wouldn’t listen. He also talked about the fight Hembree and Nicole had—the impetus for Hembree taking off after Randi left.

The jury was getting a picture of Hembree’s MO: Two women went missing; Hembree was with both; and both wound up dead.

After a series of questions about that fight Hembree had with Nicole, Bell asked: “And you accused him of killing [Randi and Heather]—didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And I believe you told the police that when you did, you had a knife in [your] pocket in case he tried anything.”

“Yes, I did.”

“He wouldn’t look you in the eye, would he?”

“No, sir.”

Beam objected. Sustained.

After a few more questions, Shorty was excused by both attorneys.

T
here was the underlying tension of whether Danny Hembree would testify. Would he be able to stifle his hubris enough to make a sound choice for himself in this regard?

Most narcissists would jump at the opportunity to sit and take control of the stage. They believe what they have to say has the power to change minds, to sway jurors, to control the situation and the outcome. They think their truth is the only truth; and they are, beyond a doubt, smarter than anyone else. The Mayo Clinic, in a brief, plain description, defines narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) in its simplest form, noting how the narcissist
[enjoys] an inflated sense of [his] own importance . . . Those with [NPD] believe that they’re superior to others and have little regard for other people’s feelings. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem, vulnerable to the slightest criticism.
¹

Indeed, a clinical description that seemed written on the basis of Danny Hembree’s life.

Still, could Hembree walk away from this courtroom without speaking? Was he actually capable of it?

When Hembree’s defense announced its decision, ADA Hamlin was not the least bit surprised.

Hensley, on the other hand, wondered what in the name of justice Hembree was doing?

“First of all, I was shocked to hear he was going to testify.... The news came just before the lunch break, so we had some time to process it. I was excited. I couldn’t wait to hear what he was going to say, because I couldn’t imagine what he could say that would assist him in his effort to convince the jury he was not guilty.”

D
anny Hembree wore a button-down, striped dress shirt and thick-framed glasses. He walked toward the stand with that incredibly pompous, cocky stride he’d become known for by anyone spending even the slightest amount of time with him. With all of the local media attention the case garnered, with everyone in the room focused on him, Hembree enjoyed this moment in the spotlight more than he had, perhaps, any other since his arrest. Many wondered what he had to gain by opening himself up to cross-examination. But here he was, in all of his inflated glory, waiting to be sworn in.

In all fairness, actually, this was Hembree’s only chance. By this point in the trial, Hembree was looking at a guilty verdict as his best-case scenario, and a death sentence as the worst. He would need to begin to mount some sort of lifeline and hope to reach one juror.

“All right, sir,” the judge said. “Now, have you talked about this decision to testify with your attorneys?”

“For the last two years,” Hembree said defiantly.

“Do you understand that if you do testify, you can be asked questions on cross-examination?”

“I understand that.”

“And do you understand those questions can include questions about your prior convictions for a period of ten years in the past for crimes for which the punishment is more than sixty days in jail or prison?”

“Yes, sir. Intend to open the door for that!”

“All right. Now, after thinking about this matter and talking about this matter with your attorneys, is it your decision to testify on your own behalf in this case?”

“It is.”

Hembree was told to stand and wait for the jury to walk in and follow the clerk’s instructions.

“Do you wish to swear on the Bible or be affirmed?” the judge asked.

“It don’t make no difference. The Bible will be aw-right.”

Hembree had an odd way of speaking, making motions with his mouth and lower jaw as if he had dentures and they were loose. It was distracting.

“All right. Sheriff, let’s bring in the jury.”

Several additional instructions were given by the judge as the gallery stirred. With Hembree, this part of the trial could go two ways: smoothly or out of control. There was no middle gray area in the world where Hembree lived.

The judge asked if he was perfectly clear that in agreeing to testify on his own behalf, his testimony could “arise questions about matters you said to the police officers other than what’s already come into evidence?”

“Your Honor,” Hembree explained, seemingly frustrated, “the way I understand it is, that’s the only way the truth can get out.” He paused. “So I welcome it.”

Stephanie Hamlin sighed.

Danny Hembree started at the beginning: his birth, his marriage, his divorce, his kids, where everyone lived, where he had worked, his substance abuse issues. He said he did not discriminate when it came to using drugs: “Just about anything you could get high on or drunk. . . .”

Beam worked his way into:

Hembree’s lifetime dependency on prescribed medications (some for back pain, others for his various psychiatric ailments).

How many doctors he’d seen.

The prescriptions he’d been given.

How much booze he drank every day.

Who his friends were.

How he met Nicole.

How long he had known Stella.

That trailer park and the abandoned trailer he frequented.

When given the opportunity, Hembree trashed Nicole, airing all of her issues. There was a clear “I’m better than all of these people” tone to Hembree’s posture and voice. The implication was that yes, he hung around with Stella, Nick, Heather, Nicole, and some of the others. He even liked some of them, sure. But he was much smarter, far superior, and they should count their blessings he allowed them into his life.

Beam asked about Heather and how they wound up together in October 2009.

“I was stock sober,” Hembree said for some strange reason. “I done seen Heather in October, because October the eleventh—the reason I know is because Heather was in prison in Raleigh, and she was scheduled to get out the seventeenth.”

He explained how Nick was ill then, so Stella “made some phone calls” and wound up making “arrangements where [Heather] could be released a week early” to go see Nick. “But prior to that . . . I was scheduled to go pick Heather up on the seventeenth.... It didn’t pan out.”

“Well, did you . . . After she was released on the eleventh, did you see her during that week?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you see her at?”

“Well, I had talked to her on the phone. She called me when she got home.... She was there with Nicole at her daddy’s house, and she wanted to know if I was going to come over. I was at my mom’s house, and . . . I told her no. I had something else to do and I would catch up with her later on during the week.... And I didn’t see her again until the seventeenth.... Heather was over at [Shorty’s] house. I had never met [Shorty] or been over to his house at that time.”

Hembree then explained how he, Stella, and Nicole drove to Shorty’s “and picked Heather up, and from there we went to West Gastonia and picked up [some other friends].”

At some point that day, he took everyone to see Nick in rehab. Stella drove, Hembree said, because he was too drunk.

“Now, what happened when you got back to Nick’s [house]?”

“We was just messing around. Me and Nicole was sitting in the bedroom where Nick usually slept . . . and Stella [and her boyfriend] were in the living room . . . and Heather was there doing something . . . [and] I got into a fuss with Nicole about something. She wanted me to buy her [something], and I told her . . . I probably would have bought her some.... But when she would take a lot of [them] , she would get pissed off and start smacking me around, you know, beating on me. . . . She’s kind of got a violent temper . . . so I didn’t. . . .” When he refused, Nicole left.

Beam and Hembree talked back and forth. Hembree was playing up his role as leader of a group of people that, by his view, was going nowhere in life. Hembree made it sound as though he was their only hope, as if they all looked to him to make decisions and give advice as to how to lead their lives. He took pleasure in being the Svengali—someone they turned to for everything.

Then Beam asked about that night with Sommer, Heather, and Sommer’s boyfriend. How had it started?

Hamlin and Bell listened, took notes, shook their heads, clearly disgusted by most of what Hembree had to say. There was an agenda here within Hembree’s testimony. It was heading somewhere. He had an end game up his sleeve.

“Well, I went into the bathroom with Heather,” Hembree explained, totally contradicting what he had said on several previous occasions, and also what Sommer had testified to. “I talked to her on the phone, and I wanted to be with her, so I told her, ‘Do you want to go hang out? Let’s party.’ And she said something to the effect that, well, she didn’t want to leave Sommer, because Sommer was her friend, and they just . . . they hadn’t seen each other in a while.” He did not recall Sommer being inside the bathroom with him and Heather, as both Sommer and Nicole had reported. “And I said, ‘I don’t have a problem with that. Sommer can go with us.’ And Sommer said, ‘Well, I can’t leave my boyfriend because, you know, I just can’t do that, you know.’ So I said, ‘Well, hell, he can go, too.’ ”

The way Hembree made it sound was like they were talking about going bowling. He described the conversation like a cordial, general discussion. He did not recall all of it taking place in the bathroom as Heather sat in the tub.

Hembree said the Marlboro Man pulled up to Heather’s house and blew his horn. So he went out and asked him what he wanted. Hembree had never seen the Marlboro Man before.

The Marlboro Man said he wanted Heather.

Hembree told him to leave and call Heather later.

Beam then digressed. He asked Hembree how and when he first met Heather.

“It was Valentine’s Day . . . 2009. And the reason I remember that is because I got paid fifteen hundred dollars that day for a roofing job, and it was Stella’s birthday, and I was dating Stella at the time. Matter of fact, I done give Stella fifty dollars for her birthday to buy some boots with, which she later spent on [something else].” He stopped talking. “Okay. I’ve lost my train of thought here.”

They moved on.

Hembree mentioned driving to a hotel on that day he first met Heather.

“Did you go in?” Beam asked.

“I did.”

“What did you do once you went in?”

“I looked around,” Hembree testified. “There was a big bed sitting there, and Heather was sitting on this side and some blond-headed girl sitting on this side.” He used his hands to elaborate. “And they were in . . . They wasn’t naked, but they, you know, they was putting their clothes back on. And there was, like, four or five old men sitting in chairs down beside this bed.” Hembree claimed Heather and the other girl, by his best guess, were “putting on a show. I guess they (the old men) was paying to see it. . . .”

Bell didn’t like where this was heading and objected.

“Objection sustained. Question?”

“Anyway, once you observed the gentlemen sitting in the chairs and the girls . . . putting their clothes on, what did you do at that point?”

Hembree recognized someone in the room as a drug dealer he knew. So he decided to purchase some dope and “made a deal . . . and I bought, like, a quarter ounce. And I asked him about the girls. I said . . . ‘I want a girl.’ And he said, ‘Well, I ain’t got nothing to do with those girls. They can do whatever they want to do.’ So I went to the bathroom, and the blond-headed girl, she done come back out. I talked to her for a few minutes, and I just really didn’t like her. And so when Heather came back there and I seen her in the light real good, she looked like she was about twelve years old with a lot of makeup on, and I asked her how old she was. She said, ‘I’m nineteen. ’ And I said, ‘You’re not nineteen.’ ”

Hembree asked Heather for identification, he said. “You know, I was just kind of kidding around, right? And she basically told me to go fuck myself, and she walked out of the bathroom. So I left without either one of them.”

It was sometime later when he met Heather again, inside another motel room. She was with Stella. Playing it down on the stand, Hembree testified he hadn’t actually tried to purchase Heather from Stella, but asked Stella if he could have sex with her daughter. He said Stella was shocked by this statement, but she ultimately said what Heather did was her own business.

Beam led Hembree back onto that night when Hembree left with Sommer and Heather and Sommer’s boyfriend, George. Up to a certain point, Hembree stuck pretty much to the script he had written with Hensley and Sumner—a script, mind you, Sommer’s version of the same events backed up.

When it came time to explain the “show” Sommer and Heather put on for Hembree and Sommer’s boyfriend inside the abandoned trailer, however, Hembree wanted to clarify something. He wanted the jury to know he was not some guy who went around dangling crack in front of the neighborhood girls, hoping they would trade sex for it. That was not how he operated. He was not that type of person.

“Did you give it (crack) to them?” Beam asked.

“Yeah, I did. I gave it to them,” Hembree said.

“Was that before or after they engaged in their show?”

“Let me see if I understand your question. I want to elaborate. At
no
time was the cocaine in exchange for sex. There wasn’t no deals made like that. The cocaine—originally, I bought it for Heather and me, but Heather wanted her friend to come, so I shared my cocaine with them.”

“Everybody understood there was going to be cocaine and sex involved, right?”

“Obviously, I mean . . . yeah.”

Hembree talked about going back to Momma’s. She wasn’t home, so they partied inside the house. And then, after they started looking for the money, Sommer’s boyfriend had swiped some or all of it, Hembree believed. He got pissed and threw the boyfriend out. Hembree said the boyfriend handed him a twenty-dollar bill at one point and apologized for stealing it.

Then Hembree bought more dope before he “got rid of” Sommer’s boyfriend by ditching him at the liquor store.

After scoring the drugs, Hembree told Sommer either to come alone and get high, or go back with her boyfriend, but he and Heather were going back to Momma’s house.

Sommer, of course, chose the former.

“And once you got back to your mother’s house, what did you do at that point?”

“We went back to my den and watched porn and smoked crack and had sex.”

“And then what did you do?”

“Well, like I said, we smoked dope and had sex till probably until two-thirty or three o’clock in the morning. Then we . . . left the den and went to my room and got into bed.”

“What did you do once you got to your room?”

“Well, went to sleep. But it took, you know, hour, hour and a half. I was drinking, you know, while I was in there. I usually went to bed with alcohol and woke up with alcohol.”

“What was Heather doing?”

“She was laying beside me.”

Up until this point, Hembree’s story of the night was somewhat probable and could line up with the evidence that law enforcement had and what Hembree told the YCSO, Hensley, and Sumner.

Hembree, however, proclaimed a new revelation after Beam asked him: “Now you indicate you were laying there in bed and went to sleep. When was it that you woke up?”

“Ten, eleven o’clock the next day.”

“Anybody else there in the residence at that time?”

“No.”

“When you woke up, where was Heather Catterton?”

“She was still laying beside me.”

“What did you do when you woke up?”

“I slipped out of bed, went into the kitchen, got me a beer, and came back to the room. Attempted to wake Heather up.”

“When you attempted to wake Heather up, what, if anything, did you discover at that point?”

“Well, I touched her and she was cold. She wasn’t stiff or nothing, but she was kind of heading that way. I knew she was dead.”