the rest of his life. like it or not, tim is our client and if he dies, we will live with it. in the years that follow, the hennis case was the textbook case of wrongful prosecution. scott whisnant spoke about the case, and it was adapted into a tv movie. not everybody sitting in prison is guilty. north carolina now has a commission that actually has released a number of innocent people. despite all of the attention to hennis acquittal, the eastburn s murders would go unsolved for 16 years until 2005 when scott whisnant spoke about the case at a criminology seminar, and he spoke at a seminar with larry fayetteville was in the audience. there were potentially other evidence out there.
other people not interviewed or other forms of evidence. well, if he is innocent, who did it? the state of north carolina did not pursue it for 17 years, and so why didn t they try to find out who it was. somebody was stalking that woman for weeks. mrs. eastburn was writing her husband saying somebody is out there following me. i don t like it. what do i do about it? why isn t that being looked at? who does it lead to? after the evidence was discussed, then he approached him privately. he said, i just want you to know that the way they investigated this case 20 years ago, we re not like that any more. someone should be investigating this case. it should be solved now. technology is improved. that s how we left it. in fact, trotter had been assigned by the sheriff s case office to review cold cases. office to review cold case we had over 100 unsolved
guy. finally, prosecutors presented a surprise witness. a woman who said that two days after the murder, she saw the killer using katy eastburn s stolen bank card. and then they produced a witness that said the killer used the bank card. and she said, i did not tell the truth the first time, because it was a tall white man with a mustache, a blond headed guy, and he got into the tiny white car. that is the guy who used it before i did. and pointed right to tim hennis, and that is who was sitting right there. after she testified, i went into the bathroom and just threw-up. the jury deliberated for three the days. it was a quarter of 5:00 on a friday afternoon when the jury knocked. he was guilty on three counts. he would get the death penalty times three. tim hennis could hear his father sobbing in the courtroom. he had never heard that before.
but the law school i went to stressed the importance of taking unpopular cases. and then days immediately afterwards the news got worse for tim hennis, and he had no alibi and angela hennis was out of town, and in the middle of the night he drug a barrel out to burn stuff. something that his neighbors had never seen him do before. i don t know what it was, but something that he burned. the lady who owns the cleaners and he said that man that you all arrested brought that black members only jacket into my cleaners friday, and didn t look suspicious to me. the bank card of katy eastburn had been used twice. and there was a lot of physical evidence that was being tested and if any physical evidence came back to tim, he
themselves, and within 22 days, they said, give them another trial. it broke all of our hearts, because we had to call gary and say, you have to go through it one more time. billy richardson reinvestigated every aspect of the case. we were so much better prepared for the second trial. when i started digging, we found how many things that we didn t know at the first trial. richardson began with hennis alibi for the night after the murder when somebody used katy eastburn s bank card. tim hennis had 24-hour duty at fort bragg with his unit. he could not leave. the people in his division remember him gluing shingles on a dollhouse for the infant daughter. but army paperwork that would have confirmed it, went missing. the army paperworks everything, paperwork for paperwork. we looked for that and looked for that, and there was a checkout sheet for everything