when that jury said he s guilty, you still had faith he was telling the truth? always. never once. not a doubt in your mind? no, never. that time i felt like we got our man and felt good. this is the one case that truly screamed out for the death penalty. tim hennis had spent his entire career serving the military. now he was serving time on death row. not long after his arrival, hennis received a mysterious letter. said mr. hennis, i did the crime. you are doing the time. mr. x. the letter provided no concrete leads, only adding to hennis torment. he got visits from his family
no double jeopardy in this country. i understand that. but i think there might be cases like this, got this dna now that says he was a man who raped this woman and killed her. i think you should be able to. i think somehow the judicial system will have to work around that. that was the d.a. iefs to decide to see if the army would try him for the murders. a team of lawyers from the ranks helped evaluate the case for the army. my personal opinion about why this is important to the military is the military sent gary eastburn for duty in alabama and his family was left behind and they were murdered. i m sure there was debate in the military. it is high profile. it s controversial but you had an enlisted person killing an officer s wife. how do you let that go? two years after he retired, timothy hennis was recalled to
defendant tested by army crime lab. you had two chains of custody. the defense could not attack the slide. for prosecutors the dna results swept away all previous doubts. i went back and replayed the first two trials. some of the old discredited instances. patrick cohen seeing sergeant hennis. fact hennis took a member s only jacket to the dry cleaners, numerous pieces of evidence that tied him though crime. for hennis defenders the prosecution s had serious flaws and the top priority was getting their own evidence in front of the jury. a ton of evidence in the house they can t explain. they found a head hair in eastburn s bed. it s not tim hennis. there is a pubic hair where the rape took place. what is male dna doing under
it to the dry cleaner. the blood was there. hennis jacket had no signs of blood. richardson had turned the prosecution s evidence against them. richardson was prepared for lucille cook, who swore she saw hennis at an atm two days after the murder. lucille cook had made dozens and dozens of atm transactions around the time of this one. they asked her, could she remember those and of course she could not. bank logs showed a 3 1/2 minute gap between the victim s card being used and lucille cook s transaction. that doesn t seem like a lot of time until you sit there and time it. we had the jury sit there to see how long it was. it was the longest three and a half minutes. why would the killer wait three and a half minutes? one of the jurors said they got
tim is our client. if he dice we live with it. the case became a text book example of wrongful prosecution. scott spoke about the case, was even adapted to a tv movie. the case put people on notice that not everybody in prison is guilty. north carolina now has a commission that actually has released a number of innocent people. despite the attention to hennis acquittal the eastburn murders would go unsolved for another 16 years until 2005 when scott spoke about the case at a criminology seminar. fayetteville detective larry trotter was in the audience. the premise is there are other unknowns out there. people that potentially may not have been interviewed. if he s innocent than who s guilty? the state of north carolina didn t pursue this for 17 years. why isn t someone trying to find who s guilty. someone was stalking that