“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
When Kathryn Eastburn and two of her daughters were brutally murdered near Fort Bragg just before Mother’s Day in 1985, police quickly closed in on a suspect: Master Sergeant Timothy Hennis was tried and sentenced to death the very next year.
But in 1989, Hennis won the right to a new trial; this time, he was acquitted.
That might have been the end of his part in the story. After all, the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that no one can be twice prosecuted for a single crime. But there are some loopholes there, and one of them tightened around Hennis’s neck: Civilian and military courts operate independently. Hennis was acquitted by a civilian court, but, according to most accepted interpretations, the Fifth Amendment does not prohibit a court martial for the same crimes.
In 2010, in view of DNA evidence based on technology not yet available during his earlier trials, a military court sentenced Hennis to death. Hennis still maintains that he’s innocent. His lawyers are still disputing the legality of the court martial. And the Eastburns are still mourning Kathryn and the two girls.
Overkill
Gary and Kathryn Eastburn married in 1975 after meeting at a softball game. He became the chief of air traffic control at Pope Air Force Base, near Fayetteville, North Carolina. In 1985 he accepted a transfer to a job in England.
Worried about putting their English Setter in quarantine as UK pet regulations demand, they decided to leave her behind. Kathryn Eastburn took out an ad in the Beeline Grab Bragg, a free classifieds paper serving Fort Bragg and Pope AFB, offering the dog to a good home for just $10.
Timothy Hennis and his wife, Angela, decided to take the dog, if it got along with their Spitz. On a May Tuesday, he met with Kathryn Eastburn at her home at 367 Summerhill Road and left with the dog.
Gary Eastburn was at squadron officers’ training school in Montgomery, Alabama. He started worrying when he didn’t receive his wife’s planned Saturday morning phone call. On Sunday, Captain Eastburn finally got a call, but it was from a detective.
Neighbor Bob Seefeldt had noticed that the family’s newspapers were starting to pile up and he hadn’t seen anyone for a while. When Seefeldt dropped by to knock on the door, he heard a crying baby. He called police, who encountered a grisly scene.
Kara, 5, had been stabbed repeatedly. Erin, 3, had been bludgeoned to death. Kathryn “Katie” Eastburn had been tied up, apparently raped, and stabbed fifteen times. Those injuries were more than enough to kill the woman and the two girls; in a shocking example of what police call “overkill”, the attacker had also slit each of their throats.
The Eastburns’ third daughter, Jana, 22 months, was in her crib. Doctors later told Eastburn that when Seefeldt and the cops found her she was within eight hours of death by dehydration.
Some cash and an ATM card were the only things missing from the house. The assailant seemed to have tried to clean the place up. But Sgt. Timothy Hennis’s presence wouldn’t go unnoticed.
Another neighbor, Patrick Cone, told police that he’d seen a man leaving the Summerhill Road house Thursday night, the same night that forensics experts believed Kathryn Eastburn and two of her daughters were murdered. Cone described a tall man wearing a black Members Only jacket and carrying a large garbage bag as he walked from the house to a white Chevette.
When police released a sketch of the man Cone saw and a description of the car, Sgt. Timothy Hennis and his wife saw it on the evening news. It was only then, he would always claim, that he realized that the victims were the family who had sold him the dog. He voluntarily went to investigators. He was the spitting image of the man in the sketch and he drove a white Chevette. And he had brought a black Members Only jacket to a dry cleaner that Friday. Neighbors said he’d been burning unidentified material in an oil drum in his backyard that morning too.
Cone picked Hennis out of a line-up. Hennis willingly provided blood and saliva samples, and he seemed confident in his loose alibi. He told cops that on Thursday night he’d dropped his wife and children off at his in-laws and gone straight home to work on the dollhouse he was building for his daughter. Later, ex-girlfriend Nancy Maeser would tell detectives that Hennis had made a brief, unannounced visit to her home that night, presumably to rekindle their relationship. They talked about his money problems and he claimed he and Angela were splitting up, but she sent him away.
The missing ATM card provided another lead. Cops located the customer who had used the machine just a couple minutes after the Eastburns’ card was used. Lucille Cook recalled that a man wearing camouflage pants had used the ATM; looking at police mug shots, she matched the ATM user with Hennis’s photo.
The case quickly went to trial.
The Army could have court martialed Sgt. Timothy Hennis, but because the crimes against Kathryn Eastburn and the children occurred off-base, they chose to let the case go to the Cumberland County Superior Court in the summer of 1986.
Lead prosecutor Willam VanStory offered Hennis a plea bargain; Hennis refused. VanStory mounted a case that suggested that Hennis had returned to Eastburn’s home because he was attracted to her and knew her husband was away, and that he turned violent when she rebuffed him.
Gerald Beaver and Billy Richardson — the lawyers that Hennis’s father, a retired IBM executive, had hired — fought the accusations in vain. After a three-week trial and ten hours of deliberation, the jury found Hennis guilty on three first-degree murder charges and one rape charge.
During the sentencing hearing, Beaver and Richardson showed a series of photos meant to depict Hennis as a kind, loving family man and thus spare his life. The judge nonetheless sentenced him to death.
An anonymous writer once sent him (and the sheriff’s office) a letter confessing to the murders, but Hennis spent years on death row in Raleigh, NC. His lawyers kept fighting.
Acquittal
In 1988, the North Carolina State Supreme Court announced that it agreed with Sgt. Timothy Hennis’s lawyers: The graphic photos of the crime scene and of the bodies of Kathryn Eastburn and her two oldest children had unfairly influenced the jurors. Hennis won the right to a retrial.
Hennis’s attorney Gerald Beaver resumed his role. He established that there was a mysterious stranger who may have committed the crime: The Eastburns had been plagued by threatening phone calls for months before Hennis met the family. There were blood stains and hairs at the scene that belonged neither to the victims nor the accused. The extreme brutality of the crime suggested someone with a longstanding anger toward the family, not a man miffed at a singular rejection of a casual sexual interest in his victim. The anonymous confession letter that Hennis had received in prison helped too.
The defense also attacked the witnesses’ credibility. Patrick Cone had had trouble with police. Lucille Cook had at one point denied recognizing Hennis from the ATM.
Calvin Colyer and John Dickson, prosecutors for the 1989 trial, seem to have been overconfident. They failed to convince jurors that Beaver’s arguments didn’t hold up. Hennis got off.
He returned to the Army and was soon promoted to staff sergeant. He was shipped to Saudi Arabia, then to Somalia, then to Fort Lewis, Washington. (Capt. Gary Eastburn, after finally making the delayed transfer to England, eventually moved to Puyallup, Washington, never realizing he was just miles from the man he still believed killed his wife and daughters). In 2004 he retired.
Meanwhile, developments were afoot that could snare Hennis after all.
By 2004, new DNA technology meant that it would be possible to determine with near-certainty whether the semen left in Kathryn Eastburn’s body came from Timothy Hennis. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t matter much. Typically, Hennis’s acquittal wouldn’t permit a second trial.
But a controversial 1987 precedent asserted that the military could court martial its members even if they’d already been tried in civilian court.
The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office sent the new DNA evidence incriminating Hennis to the Army. In 2006 the Army recalled the retired staff sergeant to active service at Fort Bragg — and they promptly charged him with a triple murder.
Prosecutors Capt. Matthew Scott and Capt. Nate Huff based their case at Hennis’s 2010 court martial around new technology. The key piece of evidence was DNA collected from semen in Kathryn Eastburn’s vagina after her death in 1986. At the time, the DNA was useless. But in 2010, State Bureau of Investigation forensic analyst Jennifer Hooper was able to testify that the odds were 12.1 thousand trillion to one that the DNA belonged to Hennis rather than to anyone else.
Hennis’s defense attorney, Frank Spinner, insisted that, while the DNA evidence showed that Hennis and Eastburn had had sex, it didn’t mean it was non-consensual. Forensic examination hadn’t shown any specifically rape-related injuries (not that this is unusual in rape cases), and the DNA match itself didn’t prove that Hennis had raped Eastburn much less that he had killed her and her children. As the statue of limitations on rape had passed, he wasn’t being retried on the rape charge.
Much of Spinner’s defense was repeated from the second trial. He brought up the blood and hair at the scene that belonged to a never-identified figure and didn’t match Hennis. He tried to minimize the reliability of the witnesses who’d seen Hennis near the house or using Eastburn’s ATM card.
Yet the witness testimony and the DNA evidence conviced the jury, made up of Hennis’s fellow soldiers. They found Hennis guilty on three counts of premeditated murder. Like the first time around, the defense’s attempt to portray Hennis as a committed family man and soldier failed. Only a two-thirds majority is required in a court martial; that the verdict was unanimous meant that Hennis would receive the death penalty. He was also dishonorably discharged and stripped of his rank and military pay and benefits.
His team appealed the verdict.
On January 21, 2011, at a Fort Leavenworth appeal, Timothy Hennis’s lawyers argued that reported irregularities at the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation meant that the DNA evidence against Hennis had potentially been compromised and that Hennis should have a fresh trial. Brenda Bissette Dew, who’d worked on the Hennis materials, had been cited for writing misleading reports in two dozen other cases. According to Lt. Col. Andrew Glass, this important piece of information would have discredited Bissette Dew and her lab report, which might have changed the outcome of the trial. Prosecutors countered that the defense didn’t question the reliability of the DNA tests at the 2010 trial, nor did they present the results of their independent tests.
In January 2011, Col. Patrick Parrish denied Hennis’s request for a new trial. The request then went to Maj. Gen. Rodney Anderson, who served in place of Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick, deployed to Iraq.
Meanwhile, Hennis’s attorneys simultaneously argued that the Army should not have called him back to duty for a court martial on a case that had been tried in a civilian court. The break in his service, they argue, made him ineligible for this court martial. They appealed the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that he should not have to exhaust his military appeals before seeking a federal court ruling. Allen tried to persuade the court that the military appeals process would take too long and was unfairly postponing the life of what he maintained was an innocent man. As of November 2011, the arguments were still pending.
Perhaps writer Scott Whisnant’s pet theory will still get a shot. Covering the case for the Wilmington Morning Star and then for his controversial 1993 book, Innocent Victims, left him wondering if this the Eastburn murders were connected another strange case in the area. In 1970, Fort Bragg Army surgeon Jeffrey MacDonald was accused of killing his pregnant wife and two children. He blamed LSD-crazed hippies for his family’s murders and his own minor wounds, but was found guilty in 1979. The Eastburns’ babysitter, Whisnant notes, was obsessed with the case and corresponding with MacDonald. Whisnant has told the New Yorker he still believes Hennis is innocent.
But Gary Eastburn hopes the case won’t go for a fourth trial. He told the New Yorker that the trials get tougher as he gets older. He’s remarried (he and his second wife are planning a return to England), but it hasn’t erased the pain of losing his wife and two of their babies. Their third daughter, Jana, still finds her life overshadowed by the tragic deaths of family members she doesn’t even remember.