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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.
noted that there was a letter in it. and the letter said that tim didn't do it. and you were hearing rumors like that. >> and billy goes to the sheriff's department and he has to pretend that he is investigating another case, because if it was this case, it would have set off bells and whistles. and sure enough, the wallet belonged to a fellow named shawn buckner. >> it belonged to a friend of pat cone, the prosecution's star witness. the letter called his testimony into question. >> that letter called his testimony into doubts. it told his fiance about doubts, and to the point they wrote each other a letter about it. >> so richardson flew to louisiana where he was in training with the air force, but when he got there, buckner closed the door in his face. he did not want to get involved. >> he had to decide whether or not to betray his friend and help someone wrongly accused of a triple murder. and shawn buckner had no reason to help tim hennis.
that the prosecutors knew exactly who john raupaugh was. >> the state basically hid him from us. >> and then the attorneys told the judge what they discovered about the pro cougs cougs's conduct. >> they had him bring the jacket and the hat and they had taken it from him, and they had put it in one the trunk of one of the detective's cars, and returned it to him after the trial. fr and that is the type of evidence that could have tilted the evidence in his original trial. >> and we were plain mad at that case. >> you get mad enough you go another way. >> we had sat there in the courtroom to thinking that he had been guilty to not sure that the jury will not find him guilty, to then they will find
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
with the alleged motive for the murder. >> the prosecutor says that you lost your cool, and went in there and tried to have sex with her, and when she refused you snapped and killed her. >> and they were trying to provoke him on the stand and he had to calmly say, i did not, i did not. and he said, i never had sex with that woman, and it did not happen. and when it was over, they did not get the reaction they wanted, and it was a different light that the jury had seen, and it made a huge difference. >> in the absence of the blood on the jacket made a difference in the first trial insisting that the dry cleaner had removed the blood stains. but richardson saw it differently. >> and the dry cleaner said that you have to use a special chemical to remove blood. i said, did you use it in this case, and he said, no. >> and so when they challenged it, richardson was ready with his own expert.
but that day. so the prosecutor had a field day. >> but before the second trial, richardson discovered why the paperwork went missing. >> the reason why is because the prosecutors had it. they didn't take a copy and leave it, they just took it. so this piece of evidence that would have exonerated him in 1986 was kept in the prosecutor's custody all of that time. >> and richardson also uncovered information that would undermine eyewitness pat cone. >> pat cone had helped them out in between trials and he was arrested using a stolen bank card. on another occasion, he was drinking and being disruptive, and the state dropped the case. and he is known for telling people that the state couldn't touch him, because he was a prime witness. >> and pat is not a strong-willed person, a nice guy, and don't understand me, but he got into trouble there, but it was minor things. >> and still, richardson was not sure he could convince a jury
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
him guilty, to not. >> and then after three hours the jury announced the verdict, not guilty on all counts. >> we just broke down and started crying, because i knew what they had been through. and next to marrying my wife and the birth of my children, that is probably the happiest day of my life. >> knowing what they had been through, it is a tremendous, tremendous load off of my shoulders. >> the jurors came out, and they were adamant that they needed to reinvestigate the case, and quit picking on the guy. >> why were they bothering this poor man and has he not suffered enough? talking about hennis, and hasn't he suffered enough? he had killed two children and a woman. and how much will he suffer for
in 2010, timothy hennis went on trial for a third time for the murders of katie east burn and her daughters. but a scandal rocked the state lab that identified hennis' dna. the lab had been skewing results to help prosecutors. >> the woman who handled the sample back in the '80s got in trouble for mixing up some dna samples in another case and almost put an innocent guy in prison. >> they didn't do a good job of preserving the evidence. three people had been arrested for evidence tampering. >> hennis' lawyers asked for a postponement to investigate the lab. the judge refused. meanwhile, military prosecutors found a second smear from the rain k rape kit. they sent it to a lab and the
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 you had an