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Place to be, but you have been on death row, and there were not a lot of employers who would take that on, and the army had to take him back, so he stayed in. after readjusting to army life, tim hennis built a successful 25-year career in the military. tim hennis served in somalia and desert storm honorably, and tim s supervising colonel told me that he was without a doubt the best nco that he had ever worked with. he retired in 2004 and he and angela had a son who they would not have had if he had not gotten his life back together. but tim had no idea that the eastburn case was about to be breaking wide open. in 2006, a rape kit yielded new results. and the prosecutor called gary eastburn and said that there was a hit on the dna. and he said, who? and they said hennis. ....
Cases, and as i went through the docket, i realized that there was a vaginal swab that never had been sent off for testing, and when the murder happened, dna was in the infancy, and the obvious thing was to send it off for testing. for over two decades gary eastburn had lived without closure for the devastating murder of his wife and two daughters. we had done a great injustice to this man. and how he withstood it, i don t know. you just wanted to do something for him, and you wanted to find out who did this. in may of 2006, the state lab contacted the sheriff s department and said they had found a positive match for the dna. detective bittle called gary eastburn to tell him the news. i said, are you sitting down? he said, yeah, why. i said, take a seat. i got something to tell you. ....
Adjudicated and not guilty. and therefore south carolina was not going to try him again. we fought a revolutionary war because somebody could be tried over and over again for the same offense. and the founders put it in the constitution that there is no double jeopardy in this country. i understand thatbut certain cases like this, that you have a dna now that says this is the man who raped this woman and killed her, you should be able, and somehow the judicial system has to work around that. that was the d.a. s office who decided to see if the army was interested in bringing him off of retirement and trying him for the murders. a team of lawyers from the ranks helped to evaluate the case for the army. my personal opinion about why this is important to the military is that the military sent gary eastburn for duty in alabama, and his family was left behind, and they were murdered. i am sure that there was debate within the military. it is high profile, and controversial, but ....
The death penalty. when you ve got a man that for 25 years after this occurred did nothing but raise his family, serve in two wars, honorably discharged and still married to the same woman, why are you just going to look and say, that s the monster? he leads prayer at church, he gives cookies to kids, doesn t make any difference. we re not there to say how could he do it. we re not there to say why did he do it. we re there to say he did it. the prosecution ended their presentation with another slide show. gary east burn counted out that birthdays he s missed with his daughters. anniversaries. baptism. one of my trial partners asked gary, what do you miss the most? and he just from his heart with ....
he came home empty handed hoping that buckner would eventually change his mind. the retrial of timothy hennis began on january 27th, 1989, almost four years after the brutal murders of gary eastburn s wife and daughters. the state had a re-trial, but the defense had an entirely different case. we were going to drill him and film him and let him watch it. did you kill these three people? no, i did not kill these people. i have a daughter of my own, and i could not hurt any children at all. did you do this crime? no, i did not. and we felt that if he showed rage or emotion, the jury would say, there, you see, he could get to this point. how does this all make you feel? extremely upset and angry. on cross-examination, the prosecutor confronted hennis ....