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Handed, hoping 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 went into a retrial-a replay of trial 1. 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 with the alleged motive for the murder. the prosecutor says that you lost your cool, and went in ....
whether you 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 another 16 years until 20005 when scott whisnant spoke about the case at a criminology seminar, and he spoke at a seminar with larry spoke at a seminar with larry was in the audience. there were potentially other evidence out there. well, if he is innocent, who did it? the state of north carolina did ....
of the fingerprints, blood, semen found at the crime scene none of it linked to hennis. down here, we didn t have the equipment and the facilities that they have up north. we had no dna down here when this crime occurred. i would have liked to have had a fingerprint. he left a shoe or something that he dropped to tie him to it, but i thought that we had enough to justify the case in the trial. the trial began on may 27th, 1986. everybody wanted in that courtroom. the bailiffs a couple of times had to break up fistfights. the prosecutors called it the show. they wanted to emphasize how gruesome the murder was, so they built a screen that took up the whole wall, and they took the ....
Didn t do it. 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 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. richardson came home empty ....
He said, talk to that kid who walks the street all of the time. and they didn t know who he was, so billy did a vigil and it became this quest for the mythical figure for the walker. you can twin case for the walker. so i sat there for six weeks. richardson even hoped that he might find the real perpetrator, but he came up empty handed. and then before the second trial, richardson hired an investigator the renew the search, and finally, they found the mystery man, no murderer, but a high school senior who worked at the lope s at the local supermarket. a guy by the name of john rupauh, lived down the street from the eastpursuants. and highway had a habit of walking the road, and he was a big blond kid with a blond mustache. and it fit, fit like a glove. so during the discovery, he ....