The Killing Kind (7 page)

A
cold chill fell over those towns within the York County boundary where Randi and Heather had been found. Not from the weather. This was an ominous, gloomy, unspoken sentiment: It appeared that a sadistic serial killer was roaming the streets in search of his next victim. Residents looked at one another squint-eyed and accusatory:
Is it you?
After all, until this guy was behind bars, it didn’t seem young females were safe to walk the streets. Over at the Bear’s Den, a local bar outside one of the gates into the park where Randi had been found, patrons did a lot of head shaking, wondering to themselves what was going on within their otherwise calm, pleasant Southern community. One guy, taking a moment from his drink to talk to a local reporter, couldn’t believe what he’d heard. Right there, just beyond the doors of the tavern, someone had tried covering up a murder by burning a human body—a woman, no less.

“I’m worried for all the small girls,” that man told a local-television news outlet. “That’s who they seem to be hitting on, and like [everyone] said, it might be a serial killer.”

Law enforcement didn’t want to take chances. Police departments sent out warnings. More than they had in the past, men probably said “I love you” to their daughters and wives whenever they parted ways. Several women went on record to the local newspapers saying how scared they were, but they did not want to use their names, fearing, of course, that a serial killer was watching, listening, targeting.

The YCSO caught up with Tim Gause, the guy Randi had been living with at the time of her disappearance. In speaking with Tim, the YCSO was able to pinpoint that on the previous Thursday, November 12, at some point that evening, Randi left the Shannon Bradley Road home in Gastonia she was staying at, a solid fifteen-mile ride north of Apple Road in Kings Mountain State Park, where her corpse had later been located.

Tim was an obvious first person of interest. When the YCSO caught up to him, he explained that Randi had left the house on Thursday night to “go see a friend.” He didn’t say who it was, or where she was headed.

“I would never hurt her for nothing in the world,” Tim told reporters. “I would never put my hands on her.”

There was a corner gas station just down the block from the house that Tim Gause and Randi Saldana lived in. Investigators picked up surveillance-camera footage from the store from a camera pointed toward their residence. Disappointingly, however, there was a tree in the way of seeing if Randi had left the house when Tim said she had.

The next few days were busy for the YCSO. There was a lot of work to do, on top of getting the word out that a potential serial killer was stalking women of the region. They were challenged to accomplish this without spreading total fear and panic throughout the community. There was a fine line in that regard. People needed to know—especially young females living high-risk lives, but investigators didn’t want to send the community into a frenzy. That would scare away potential witnesses and deter them from coming forward.

“Before another girl comes up missing,” Heather’s grief-stricken father, Nick Catterton, came out and told a local-television news station, “somebody needs to find out who this guy is.”

Nick thought he knew the perp personally, but he wasn’t saying it publicly. He’d tagged Danny Hembree as the guy—that creep who’d been hanging around Nick’s house and taking off with his daughter, Nicole. She had since returned from Florida with Danny, telling her father he was crazy for thinking her boyfriend was a serial killer.

As Nick began to consider the chilling reality that Heather’s and Randi’s killer was sticking close to him and his family, he thought back to how Danny had offered to help carry Heather’s casket during her funeral, but then he bailed out on the service at the last minute.

For a serial killer, there can be no other high than hanging around the family of one of his victims. In law enforcement’s view, as one detective standing on the periphery of this case for the time being, later told me, there were good reasons for this behavior: “He wants to know what the family knows. Keep track of the investigation from the inside out. Be one step ahead at all times.”

E
arly in the morning, November 17, YCSO investigator Alex Wallace called Danny Hembree. There was a feeling among investigators that they had to scratch him off their list, or put him at the top. There were too many coincidences surrounding Danny Hembree to simply write him off: his connection to Heather and his overall life of crime. He had alibis for both cases and was open to talking to police. But how much of what Danny was saying turned out to be truthful? And who could verify his alibis besides him and his girlfriend, Nicole?

“Listen, Danny . . . how are you?” Wallace said, opening up the conversation. Danny was familiar with Wallace and the YCSO.

“Good, good,” he responded. “What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to know if you’d come on into the sheriff’s office and take a polygraph for me and clear some things up. We just want to confirm some information we have.”

The main thrust of the YCSO asking Danny Hembree to take a polygraph was based on the information they had regarding him being the last person to see Heather on the night of October 18. The YCSO had heard this from a credible source.

“I’ve been forthcoming with information,” Danny explained. He was clearly a bit agitated. “I’m getting pissed now, though. Y’all got me fired from my job.”

The YCSO had put some pressure on Danny Hembree since Heather’s disappearance. They followed him and asked around town about him. They’d questioned some of his friends and party buddies.

“How so, Danny?”

“Y’all went up there to my work site and talked to my boss.”

Wallace tried to say something.

Danny interrupted, speaking over him: “My mom is thinking of kicking me out of the house, too.”

“Come on, Danny—” Wallace started to say, but he couldn’t get a word in. Danny was on a roll.

“Y’all went to my momma’s house and you done told her I was smoking crack!”

“We never went to your job site, Danny—and we did
not
tell your momma anything that she didn’t already know.”

Danny took a moment. Then he got loud; pure rage spewed out of him: “Fuck you! Don’t call me again!”

He hung up.

T
im Gause claimed to have nothing to hide. On Wednesday, November 18, the YCSO approached Tim and asked him if he was willing to take a polygraph. There was something about the guy that investigators just didn’t like. He seemed sketchy, acting odd during those immediate days after finding out the woman he claimed to have loved had been found murdered, her body torched. The key here for investigators was that Randi’s body had been burned, meaning that her killer was desperately trying to hide evidence. This indicated that perhaps Randi knew her killer. Or was worried his DNA could be traced easily back to him.

“I have nothing to hide,” Tim announced.

What’s more, Tim and Nick both claimed that Randi and Heather knew each other casually from the street—that they weren’t simply acquaintances from jail, as some had suggested, but had actually hung out together.

“She stopped by our house,” Nick said, talking about Randi. “She came by to see Heather.”

Nick had no idea how the girls might have met, but he was certain they had been together in those days before Heather was last seen. He explained this to the YCSO.

“I think Randi and Heather knew ‘of each other,’ had some mutual friends, but did not
know
each other, hang out, et cetera,” a law enforcement official told me. “There was a big age difference between them.... If you are involved in the world of drugs and have been to jail, you tend to know the other people involved in the same activities.”

Tim voluntarily went into the YCSO on Friday, November 20. Of course, they asked him several questions, but the main reason for the visit was put to him across the table quickly: “Did you have any role in the deaths of Heather Catterton and/or Randi Saldana?”

“I did not hurt either girl,” Tim replied.

He was asked the same question again.

“No,” Tim said a second time.

Once more.

“No!” Tim stressed.

Tim Gause had been talkative with the local media. He came out that same night of his polygraph and discussed it with a local television news station. Beyond saying how he had responded “no” to hurting either of the girls, Tim sent a warning out to the public, “If I was a female friend of Randi’s . . . I would be
very
afraid right now.”

The sense was that Randi and Heather’s killer was targeting a certain group of local girls. He was choosing each girl. It was almost as if he was at home, sitting, tacking up on a wall the photos of each victim. A spread of additional photos—future victims—on the table in front of him. He instilled fear—not only with the female population in town, but with law enforcement, too, many who now felt they were working against a clock.

“I don’t know if it was the lifestyle, or if it was where they were going,” Tim told local television news station WCNC, “I wish I knew more.”

An aunt of Randi’s came out and told the media that Randi had fallen “into a rough crowd” lately, and her lifestyle had made it such that she was around some of the seedier characters in town. Investigators knew that lifestyle choices can result in death.

In this part of the state, the failed economy had taken a drastic toll on locals. Hard-core drugs were more prevalent than they had been in the past. In this regard, as Gaston County law enforcement sniffed around and became more interested in the people associated with the cases, they were now sending messages into the community when the opportunity arose.

Whenever a sheriff found a girl walking by herself, he or she stopped. “Hey, be cautious. And always let someone know where you are and where you’re going.”

Sage advice. That clock
was
ticking. Everyone felt it. And if this maniac wasn’t stopped soon, another body was certain to show up.

T
wenty-eight-year-old Gaston County Police Department (GCPD) detective Matt Hensley was at SWAT school during the second week of November when news of a potential serial killer roaming the streets of his jurisdiction broke. Hensley had heard about Heather’s murder and the ensuing YCSO investigation. However, when a second body turned up, and it was learned that she was also from Gastonia, the case took on an entire new level of intensity for all law enforcement within Gaston County.

Once a year, cops head out and undertake firearms and tactical exercises in several different areas—i.e., SWAT school training. There are various competitive sessions during the week. In this day and age of terrorism (both homegrown and international), law enforcement has to be ready and trained for anything. Not to mention those types of routine calls that law enforcement agencies receive: such as a suspect holed up in a house or hotel with an arsenal of weapons, looking to go out in a blaze of bloodshed.

Hensley was a North Carolina transplant, yet no stranger to the South, having grown up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His family moved to Gaston County when Hensley was in his teens. It wasn’t some sort of childhood dream to become a cop. Hensley went to college and majored in business. His first job out of school was with Lowe’s Corporation in its corporate offices near Mooresville, North Carolina. Yet, after a short stint at Lowe’s, working within that corporate environment, Hensley found the work to be rather unfulfilling.

“I wanted to become a detective,” Hensley realized. He craved excitement and the pressure of performance. Toiling inside a cubicle farm all day, counting beans—with all due respect to his former coworkers for their chosen profession—wasn’t what Hensley realized he wanted to do. He wanted to be out in the world, solving puzzles, dealing with the public, helping people. Not to mention, within his family, Hensley had a pedigree to fall back on. Effectively, it was that law enforcement bloodline Hensley could not escape.

While away at SWAT school, Hensley had heard how several of his GCPD colleagues were at the Heather Catterton crime scene in North Carolina. Gaston County law enforcement had been called in on that original case to support the YCSO. Hensley read about the case in the papers while away at training school and heard various insider bits of info from colleagues.

When he returned to work, Hensley was brought into the case because of the connection both victims had to Gastonia. Hensley was deeply engrained in the Gastonia drug culture; he had informants on the street. He knew people. With Heather and Randi being Gastonia residents, the case was setting itself up to become a collaboration of agencies. The YCSO had been bringing witnesses and even a few early suspects (who were quickly ruled out) into the GCPD station house in downtown Gastonia to question. The GCPD had the facilities for videotaping and recording interviews, along with being close to Heather and Randi’s stomping grounds. It was a natural fit to use the GCPD facility and its resources.

With a second body now found, along with early reports of the two girls running in somewhat similar circles, the YCSO was leaning toward forming a task force. Two weeks, two bodies. They did not want to see—but anxiously feared—a third body showing up soon.

“Both Heather and the second girl, Randi, had the same sort of people they interacted with,” Hensley explained. “So the idea for York County was to form this task force, which consisted of them, us, the Gastonia Police, and even law enforcement from Charlotte. We all needed to figure out the next course of action.”

The YCSO did have a prime suspect they liked for the crimes. However, Hensley pointed out, “There was so much information coming up on the girls and other people as possibly having motives or being seen with the girls, we needed to hunt down those leads as well.”

As an investigation such as this begins, sometimes it can be hard for law enforcement to keep track of all the information coming in. You have two victims, two crimes scenes (and in this case, both crime scenes were secondary scenes, or dump sites, not murder scenes), two different states, all sorts of seedy drug-culture characters involved, on top of witnesses coming forward.

None of that, of course, mattered to the families of the victims, who wanted answers. It didn’t make any difference that these women might have done things for drugs they weren’t proud of, or that they knew scuzzy people. They were human beings with loved ones, people who missed them, and their murders were being felt by everyone in the community. Law enforcement, moreover, looked at these victims as women and members of the community and did not define them by their behavior.

On November 23, Matt Hensley acquainted himself further with the case. He sat in on an interview that the YCSO conducted with Stella Funderburk, Heather’s mother, which took place inside the GCPD station house.

Hensley was in the sergeant’s office watching the interview on a closed-circuit video monitor. He was with YCSO detective Alex Wallace, who briefed Hensley on all they knew by then about each case, bringing him up to speed on every detail of the investigation.

Wallace mentioned a few names to Hensley, saying, “We served a search warrant on Tim Gause’s house. He’s been our focus really.” Wallace also talked about Nick’s prime suspect, Danny Hembree, who was a repeat violent offender. The YCSO had learned that Danny Hembree had been in and out of jail and prison for most of his adult life. Law enforcement knew his name well.

“Hembree’s the boyfriend of Nicole Catterton, Heather’s sister,” Wallace explained. “According to several people we interviewed, he was the last person to be with Heather, along with a few other people.”

“Where’s Hembree living?”

“He’s been staying with the Catterton family.”

Hensley was immediately interested in Danny Hembree, as was the YCSO. Anyone involved in the amount of crime that Danny had been connected to needed to be looked at closely. There was also a report, Wallace added, that Danny Hembree had been seen with Randi before she disappeared. But they were looking to track down the source of the information and button it up. If true, the evidence was overwhelming on that alone: Same guy last seen with two dead girls. What were the chances he didn’t have anything to do with their deaths?

“He drives a red four-door Ford Escort,” Wallace explained, looking at his notes from the case as they talked. “Nicole and Hembree, they lived at the house with Heather and Nicole’s father, Nick.”

Nick was probably as good a source as anyone else to interview.

Hensley and Wallace turned their attention to the interview the YCSO was conducting with Stella Funderburk, who had explained how she’d been hanging around the house one day earlier that week and something happened she thought might be important. Stella was still feeling the effect and sting of her daughter’s death. Heather’s murder had been devastating to her family, an already broken bunch. They had no idea how to deal with it. Not being the mother she had dreamt of being to Heather, Stella was dazed by the blow.

Nicole had walked into the room where her mother sat, Stella explained to detectives, as Hensley and Wallace looked on from the other room. Nicole was wearing what Stella described as “new jewelry.” This was something in the Catterton house everyone noticed: It wasn’t every day that Heather or Nicole wore flashy jewelry. So it stuck out, Stella said, when one of them had something new.

Nicole never had any money, so Stella asked about the necklace.

“Where’d you get it?”

Nicole said, “It’s Randi’s.”

Nicole had been wearing a piece of Randi Saldana’s jewelry.

This was a major lead, if it was true.

“We spoke to Randi’s family,” Wallace told Hensley as they watched. “They claimed that Randi was very protective of her jewelry, especially, and would never give it to anyone.”

Law enforcement brass was in the midst of creating a task force, figuring that to catch a serial killer before he killed again, two hands were surely better than one, but a dozen was even better than that.

“There’s a meeting tomorrow morning,” Wallace told Hensley.

Hensley said he’d be there.

“You know,” Hensley commented later, “South Carolina had two bodies, and with this task force, they were hoping to stop another body from showing up before it happened. Of course, we found out that both the girls were drug users . . . and ran in similar circles. We needed to look at their lives.... When both were last seen, we confirmed, each had been with Danny Hembree.”

Danny Hembree seemed like the perfect candidate to place inside the box (interrogation room) and interview. If nothing else, they needed to conduct a complete study of his life of crime and interview people who knew him. Find out what he’s been up to the past few months—a guy like Danny Hembree, he could be ruled in or out quickly.

Law enforcement decided that a search warrant of Nick’s house was in order. It was based mostly on that devastating (and quite promising) information from Stella that her daughter was in possession of Randi’s jewelry. This was potentially explosive evidence. Why in the world was the sister of one dead girl wearing the necklace from a second dead girl?

But then you added the common denominator to that question—Danny Hembree—and it all seemed to come into focus.

Hensley and Wallace agreed to sit on the Catterton house as they waited on the warrant. They would park down the block and keep an eye on the ebb and flow of the residence.