The Killing Kind (8 page)

S
ommer Heffner was a stunningly attractive, petite seventeen-year-old girl with shiny brown hair, bright and alluring aqua-colored eyes, along with the perfect little nose and high chiseled cheekbones some actresses might spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to obtain. Sommer had grown up with Heather. They had known each other, Sommer later explained in her cute, comforting Southern accent, “since we was kids.”

Sommer called Heather “my sister,” describing Heather as “outgoing” and “fun” to be around. “She wouldn’t never hurt nobody,” Sommer told me. Another common phrase associated with Heather from Sommer’s perspective was “heart of gold.”

The rainbow-colored toe socks Heather wore on the day she was murdered summed up the life Heather had dreamt of for herself.

“Heather wanted to work with kids, actually,” Sommer said. “Special-needs kids.”

Like those toe socks, Heather’s dreams were vibrant and varied. There wasn’t one particular color that best depicted Heather’s usual upbeat, jovial demeanor, her far-reaching cheerful attitude, and her optimistic outlook on a life that had pretty much been stuck since as long as anyone who knew her could recall. The color missing from that rainbow, the darkest shade of black, represented the thunderstorm of trouble Heather had been mixed up in during those days before her death.

“You could have the worst day in the world,” Sommer said, “and there was Heather to put a smile on your face.”

Mud pies and water sprinklers and chasing boys were the things Heather and Sommer did as kids. They built Legos. They weren’t the type of girly-girls to play with Barbies or baby dolls. One of Sommer’s fondest memories was the two of them as very young kids planting sunflowers together, something they did every spring, a sign of a new beginning, a rebirth.

Heather’s desire to work with children was born from having to take care of her sister Nicole’s two kids, when Nicole wasn’t around.

“She was only, like, twelve or thirteen,” Sommer explained, “and she was taking care of her sister’s two babies.”

Nicole was sixteen when she had her first child; she was seventeen when she had her second.

According to Sommer, who witnessed most of it firsthand while hanging out at Heather’s house as a child, it was the “environment she grew up in” that introduced Heather to the bottomless, merciless world of hard-core drugs. It was all around her, Sommer said. Everyone in Heather’s life was doing it.

The girl didn’t have a chance.

“And she never really got away from it until she went into foster care,” Sommer said.

Heather stayed with one foster family for a few years.

“But she did miss her own family,” Sommer remembered.

And it was that blood bond that ultimately pulled Heather out of a calm, unchaotic, healthy atmosphere of a family unit enjoying a quiet, normal life. As warm and caring as her foster family was, Heather missed her mother, father, sister, and especially “her [step]brother” and her sister’s babies, Sommer said. That pull, for some, is too much. They often jump back into the dysfunction, even knowing how bad it is for them.

“She missed her [step] brother the most. She was very close to him,” Sommer said. “And she just got tired of that environment [at the foster family’s home] because it just wasn’t what she was used to.”

Sommer was describing how codependency works. Dysfunctional families breed codependency. If left untreated, experts say, codependency gets worse. General symptoms include low self-esteem, not knowing (and exhibiting poor) boundaries, caretaking, control, obsession, denial, not being able to experience intimacy, not being able to take rejection, abandonment, people-pleasing. This was a script for Heather’s life—only she didn’t know it.

Sommer slept over at the foster family’s house one night. She and Heather sat on the bed in Heather’s room and talked about boys and crushes. Sommer wanted to know about the boys Heather liked.

Heather had something else on her mind, however. “I’m running away from here,” she said. “I need to see my [step]brother.” Heather was tired of the structured, disciplined atmosphere of a foster home and missed her family terribly.

So Sommer and Heather busted out a window and took off with the clothes on their backs. They were fifteen.

Heather never went back. She fell deeply into her addictions and started to sleep at friends’ houses and other family members’ homes. She was classified as a runaway child, now part of an institutional system she would begin to spend time locked up in.

“She just went from house to house to house,” Sommer said. “And that was when she started smoking crack.”

The life destroyer.

Crack.

Poison.

Heather was a fragile girl who had experienced a lifetime’s worth of grown-up activity (and emotional pain) by the time she hit puberty. Now she was messing with one of the most addictive drugs (cheaper than alcohol) the street had to offer.

B
ack on October 17, the day before Heather went missing, Sommer took a call from her best friend. “I just got out [of jail] and I’m at my dad’s house,” Heather explained. She sounded defeated and tired, but was happy to hear Sommer’s voice. It was clear Heather wanted to see her BFF. “I need you to come here now.”

“I’ll be right over.”

Heather and Sommer often met at Nick’s house in Gastonia, using the house as a staging area to decide where they were going to party for the night. It was early afternoon on this day. Sommer was with her boyfriend, George Baston (pseudonym). They had no way of getting over to see Heather, so they started walking from George’s house.

As they trekked down the road toward Nick’s, Danny Hembree came rolling up. Danny was the type of guy that preyed on the young girls around town and lured many of them to have sex with him by providing drugs. He had a fixation with this: paying girls to pleasure him.

“He’s a sex addict,” said one girl who knew him.

Violent sexual deviant was more like it.

Danny Hembree was driving down the road and spotted Sommer and her boyfriend walking. He pulled up beside them.

“Hey, I’m Danny,” he said, with his arm hanging out the window. There was that pronounced Southern drawl, obvious in every word he spoke. “Where y’all going?”

Sommer explained.

“Heather sent me to pick y’all up,” he said. “I want to take you to see her. Get in.”

Sommer looked at her boyfriend, who deferred to her judgment.

“Okay,” Sommer said. “That’s fine. Save us the walk, anyway.”

Weirdo
was what Sommer thought upon seeing Danny Hembree that first time. He just had that look in his eye, she later said. Like in his mind, he was always up to something, contemplating, scheming.

Of course, Danny knew the Cattertons. He was a regular fixture over at Nick’s these days. He had dated Stella Funderburk, Heather and Nicole’s mother, and had known Stella “since [we] was kids growing up.” Sommer didn’t know it, but Danny was dating Heather’s sister, Nicole. Sommer had heard of Danny Hembree, but this was the first time she had met him.

The backcountry, simple way Danny once explained how he had gone from dating a mother to her daughter sounded as though he was doing them both a favor by gracing each with his presence: “I had promised Stella some things that I was now giving to Nicole.”

As they drove, he took a different route from what Sommer knew would take them to Nick’s. She looked over at her boyfriend, wondering what was going on, and then asked Danny, where was he headed?

“Momma’s house. To see my daughter,” he said. Danny had that hard, weathered prison look about him: a somewhat-crater face, at times a ragged gray-and-brown mustache (which he dyed tar black on occasion), dark (almost black) beady eyes, greasy dark grayish brown and black hair (with streaks of gray and white), and a strange, cocky smile off to the side of his face, indicating how his mind was always cooking up something that was probably illegal. His criminal record was longer than a college transcript. The guy had spent more time in prison than he had out of prison. He fashioned himself a badass, someone to be feared. He believed—and there can be no doubt about this fact—that he was better than anyone within his circle of friends and family.

The Hembrees lived in an area of Gastonia known as Chapel Grove, named after the main road in town. It is a section of town where bursts of well-populated Southern-style neighborhoods blossom around acreage of thickly settled woods. At the corner of Camp Rotary and Chapel Grove Roads is the Chapel Grove Baptist Church. Beyond that is the church’s day care center. It’s quiet here. People keep to themselves and generally take care of one another. The word “serial killer,” or even “killer,” is not something locals think about. Those types of evil things, as they say, happen somewhere else. God is a driving force in this community. People fear Him. They worship regularly.

As they pulled up to Danny Hembree’s mother’s house, Sommer and her boyfriend saw a rather pleasant home, all considering. The house was small, one of those redbrick, ranch-style box homes with black shutters. The yard and outside of the home (in the front) were kept up rather well. The backyard showed some suburban decay: fence that needed painting and repair, porch stairs that needed replacing, an empty in-ground pool, its liner ripped and cut, various brush and leaves scattered about. Danny lived here, too. He had a bedroom and den area to himself down the hall from where his mother slept.

Danny told Sommer and her boyfriend to wait in the car. He said he wouldn’t be long. “Just running in to get some money and see my daughter.”

They waited about thirty minutes. While alone with her boyfriend, Sommer said, “He’s weird, huh?”

“Sure is,” George replied, staring at the house.

(“You know how you can just
tell
when people are strange?” Sommer later commented. “
That
was Danny Hembree.”)

Sommer wasn’t the only one who later described a suspicious, peculiar vibe emanating from Danny Hembree. Women, mainly, felt an odd sense of unkindness and nastiness when they were around the guy. Many said it was hard to explain, but think about someone you’ve met for the first time and there was a wisp of immorality in the air hovering over them—a gut response that there’s something wrong with them.

Danny returned to the car, said nothing, and proceeded to Nick’s house.

“With their upbringing, the Catterton sisters were doomed, essentially,” said one law enforcement official. Heather had tried time and again, but the pipe had gotten hold of her at that young age and would not let go. According to Sommer, Heather did what she needed to do in order to fund her habits, same as a lot of girls in Heather’s position. But quite contrary to what the media and others would later say, Heather had never been arrested or charged with solicitation or prostitution.

It was a sad story, and yet one that played out across America in towns where the economy had ravaged families, education budgets were slashed, and help for the poor and starving was just not there anymore. In many cases, kids only do what they are taught by those in charge of rearing them. Often drugs become a way to deal with the pain of growing up in a home where love is not enough to overpower the pull of addiction and abuse.

At the Catterton house, Danny, George, and Sommer got out of the vehicle and walked in. Danny went about his business of hanging out with Nicole, while Sommer’s boyfriend sat in the living room. Sommer found Heather in the washroom, taking a warm bath. As Sommer later put it, she was “getting ready for the night.”

This was the first time Sommer had seen Heather since Heather had been released from jail. Heather had done a stint of several months after being convicted in February (2009) of possession of drug paraphernalia and felony possession of a controlled substance. She’d put on some prison weight, but she was still strikingly attractive, and yet as much a child at seventeen as any kid her age.

Heather and Sommer hung out in the washroom and talked while Heather finished bathing. Sommer had been clean for a time and had not used drugs. She was drinking that day, however, and they talked about what they were going to do to celebrate Heather’s homecoming. As they conversed, Danny and Nicole walked in on the conversation.

Nicole asked, “What are you guys up to tonight? You have plans?”

Heather and Sommer didn’t seem too interested in hanging out with Nicole and her weird boyfriend. Neither of them could reconcile why Nicole, so young herself and attractive, was dating the guy, anyway. He was twice her age. There was no doubt Danny had some sort of sexually transmitted disease—his skin was as yellow as a summer squash at times. Perhaps the jaundice was connected to hepatitis. He had no job, and got up in the morning with a beer in one hand and went to bed with a crack pipe in the other. What in the hell did he have to offer anyone?

Nicole picked up on the cold shoulder and walked away.

Danny waited until Nicole was out of earshot before he spoke. “Y’all want to come off and get high? Come on. I’ll buy some dope.” He paused a moment. Let it sit. Then, when Heather didn’t respond: “I promise a good time if you come.” He had that devilish, cocky look about him. This was Danny’s pickup line: “I’ll buy the dope if you come and party with me.” He knew and understood the girls’ weaknesses and exploited each one of them any chance he got. Crack was Danny Hembree’s carrot; he knew the girls in town who could not resist.

Sommer believed Danny was making the offer to Heather. He knew Sommer was with George. So his plan was to party with Heather, who thought Nicole was also included. But according to everyone in that circle, Nicole did not smoke crack.

Danny liked what he saw in Heather. She had just gotten out of jail. Heather didn’t have a lot of street miles on her. She had been sober for months. In his way of speaking, she was “clean.” He wanted her.

“I ain’t going anywhere without Sommer,” Heather said. “Get your ass outta here.”

Danny took a look at Sommer, eyeing her. “I don’t mind her going.”

“I don’t know you,” Sommer piped in. “I’d never go with you, without my boyfriend.”

“Get outta here,” Heather told Danny again. She was in the tub. No free shows for her sister’s boyfriend.

“Oh, well,” he said, shrugging, walking away.

Heather got herself out of the tub and went into her bedroom.

Sommer followed.

Looking through her drawers, Heather pulled out a Hollister hoodie, a strapless red bra and panties to match, blue jeans, and a diamond-studded belt. Then she put on white tennis shoes.

As Heather got dressed, Danny walked into the room. He shut the door behind him. “Come on. Come with us,” he said to the two girls. He made it sound as though Nicole was going along, too. Clearly, he had something on his mind other than getting high.

They told him no. Sommer, for one, certainly wasn’t going anywhere with Danny unless her boyfriend and Heather went along.

“I’m not going anywhere without George,” Sommer said again.

“All right,” Danny gave in, “your boyfriend can come.”

Heather and Sommer looked at each other.

They agreed to go.

According to Sommer’s recollection, Nicole stayed behind and knew nothing about what her boyfriend had offered the two of them.

Earlier, the girls had heard Danny and Nicole arguing. It was one of his central behaviors in this situation: Whenever he wanted to part ways with Nicole, he’d generate a fight.

“Nicole wanted me to buy her [something],” Danny Hembree would say later, recalling this night. “I told her no. She got pissed.”

Sommer later said Nicole talked about heading out by herself that night.

So Heather, Sommer, Danny, along with Sommer’s boyfriend, George, took off to a local store in the area known as the place in town to score some prime dope.

Danny pulled up. Some dude came out from underneath his rock and walked up to the driver’s-side window. He and Danny exchanged a few words—both men very familiar with the other—and Danny gave him cash for a small tinfoil of crack.

Party time.

From the store, Danny drove to a friend’s house out on Chapel Grove, a trailer park on Only Street. His pal was home. But as soon as Sommer, Heather, Danny, and Sommer’s boyfriend arrived, Danny’s pal took Danny’s car and left—almost as if planned beforehand.

Danny wanted to be with Heather. He had a thing for her, many later claimed. When they arrived at the trailer, he knew what Heather wanted; and he also knew how to get what he wanted by dangling the drugs in front of her.

“So they went off into a bedroom,” Sommer said.

Heather and Danny were gone for thirty minutes. At one point, Sommer walked into the bedroom to see what was going on. Make sure things were okay. Sommer did not trust Danny.

“They was just butt naked,” Sommer said. “On the bed. Heather seemed fine.”

George walked toward the room, but Sommer stopped him before he could go any farther than the doorway. “They’all’s naked, George. Let ’em be now.”

“That’s fine,” Heather said. “He can come in.”

“And afterward,” Sommer said, “when they was done, we all got high.”

After smoking that first round, Heather and Sommer wanted more. A crack high lasts about five to ten minutes and then, if you don’t continue, that big crash comes on like a stomach bug. The world ends. You want to strangle yourself. The depression is so all-consuming, those who smoke say, you’ll do whatever you can to continue. For an addict, the goal is to keep that high going as long as possible. And yet, as most addicts will agree, it is an itch that one cannot scratch hard enough, no matter how hard one tries. In many ways, you’re constantly chasing that first high. Problem is, you never catch it.

Danny told everyone he wanted to go hang out inside another trailer. It was nearby—a particular trailer that had been abandoned. It was a filthy mess. Beer bottles and empty crack foils and vials were everywhere. There were blankets, dirty and bug-infested and musty, broken glass, boarded-up windows. No electricity. Mold. Mildew. And the smell—rotten, like a flooded basement in the middle of summer.

When they got inside, Danny indicated he wanted Heather and Sommer to have sex together so he could watch. And if they wanted to smoke more dope, they’d get on with the show right away.

“So Heather and me,” Sommer admitted, “we put on a show.”

After another round of smoking, the dope was gone.

When they finished partying in the abandoned trailer, Danny had a suggestion.

“Me and Heather, by ourselves, we’s going back to my mother’s house so I can get some more cash to continue the party. Any y’all got a problem with that?”

Sommer and George said they didn’t; they’d wait inside the trailer.