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.
defense s request to test other items. i can t imagine a judge in a civilian court not allowing that. you had the evidence. why not test it? without dna results pointing to a different suspect, hennis lawyers decided to offer an alternate explanation for the incriminating sperm. at the very end they threw out there the theory that tim hennis had consensual sex with mrs. east burn within a day or so of the homicides. when he said that, you could feel the love leave in that room. i mean, everybody went, i don t believe he said that. i mean, there are certain things you can do in front of a jury and there are certain things you can t. it would not have been how i would have done it. the 14-person court martial jury declared unanimously that timothy hennis was guilty of murdering katie east burn and her children. their next task would be to decide whether hennis deserved
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.
rape took place. what is male dna doing under mrs. east burn s fingernails? it s not tim s. there s dna under the daughters finger nail and it s not hennis. underneath the fingernails, that s not timothy hennis. but what is that vaginal swab? to me male dna under the finger nail of a woman who is raped is pretty damaging evidence. who is it? the finger nail scrapings weren t enough for a full dna profile so the defense asked to test all the crime scene evidence that might point to a different perpetrator, including a blood-soaked towel. now, whoever had sex with her didn t necessarily kill her, but you can t argue that whoever cleaned up the blood didn t have something to do with it. let s find out what happened. in the military, if you need a test done, you have to ask a judge to make the army do it for you. the judge, though, denied the
was dead. so we wanted him to come in ahead of time to get him to plead before it came out. but to richardson s surprise, hennis refused to consider a plea deal. he said something that haunted me. he said, they can test whatever they want, i was not in that house, i did not do it, and it is just that simple. and when the lab reports with blood type, footprints and fingerprints came back, they corroborated hennis account. the physical evidence had not matched tim hennis. none of it had. inconclusive or negative. inconclusive or negative. not a shred of physical evidence linked him to the crime. and so then the viewpoint was i must get this man exonerated, because i believe you. someone other than my client committed this crime. from that point on, i was totally convinced that he was innocent. but even without physical evidence to link him to the crime, tim hennis was about to go on trial for his life. (vo) dogs have evolved,