Eastburn Family Murders: DNA, Double Jeopardy, and Court-Martial

The Eastburn family murders were the 1985 stabbing deaths of Kathryn “Katie” Eastburn and two of her three young daughters in their home near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Army sergeant Timothy Hennis was convicted and sentenced to death for the killings, won a retrial, was acquitted in 1989, and then in 2010 was convicted a third time and sentenced to death again by a military court-martial after DNA testing linked him to the crime scene. He sits on military death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

What Happened on Summer Hill Road

On the night of May 9, 1985, Katie Eastburn, 31, was home on Summer Hill Road in Fayetteville with her three daughters: Kara, 5; Erin, 3; and Jana, 22 months. Her husband, Air Force Captain Gary Eastburn, was 500 miles away at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama for a 10-week training course.¹

Katie was stabbed 15 times in the chest and sexually assaulted. Kara was stabbed repeatedly in the chest. Erin was bludgeoned and had her throat cut. Jana, the youngest, was left alive in her crib.¹

When Gary Eastburn could not reach his wife by phone on May 10, he asked a neighbor to check on the family. The bodies were not discovered until Mother’s Day, May 12. Jana had been alone in her crib for nearly three days without food or water; doctors later estimated she was roughly eight hours from death.²

Investigators found torn clothing and signs of a struggle in the living room. Luminol revealed blood smears on walls and in the master bathroom, suggesting an attempted cleanup. Fingerprints, hair, and semen were collected. Katie’s ATM card had been stolen, and $150 in unauthorized withdrawals were made on May 10 and 11.¹

How Timothy Hennis Became the Suspect

Two days before the murders, Katie had placed a classified ad in the Fort Bragg newspaper offering an English setter named Dixie for $10. On the evening of May 7, Timothy Hennis, then a 27-year-old Army sergeant, answered the ad, came to the house, learned that Katie’s husband was away, and took the dog home.¹

After a broadcast asked the public to identify the man who had picked up the dog, Hennis walked into the Law Enforcement Center on his own. Detective Jack Watts noted that his face was “nearly identical” to a composite sketch drawn from a witness account. The rest of the case built from there:

A local janitor, Patrick Cone, reported seeing a tall white man in jeans and a black Members Only jacket leaving the Eastburns’ driveway around 3:30 a.m. on May 10, carrying a garbage bag and driving a white Chevette. Cone picked Hennis from a photo lineup.
A woman using the same ATM three minutes after Katie’s stolen card was used on May 11 described a tall, blond man in camouflage trousers getting into a small, light-colored car.
Hennis owned a white Chevette and a black Members Only jacket.
The Saturday after the murders, Hennis burned items in a barrel in his yard and sent his Members Only jacket to the dry cleaner.¹

He was arrested and charged with three counts of first-degree murder and one count of rape.³

Convicted, Then Acquitted

Hennis was tried in North Carolina state court in July 1986. The prosecution leaned on Cone’s identification and the circumstantial evidence, and displayed graphic autopsy photographs projected onto a large screen over the defendant’s head. The jury convicted him on all counts and sentenced him to death.⁴⁵

The North Carolina Supreme Court vacated the conviction. It found that the “grotesque and macabre” crime-scene photographs could have inflamed the jury, and it characterized the underlying evidence as weak, resting on “circumstantial evidence” and “direct evidence upon which the witnesses’ own remarks cast considerable doubt.”⁴

The retrial, held in Wilmington in April 1989, went badly for the state. Between the trials, Cone had accumulated arrests and citations for trying to use a stolen ATM card, public drunkenness, and obstructing an officer. Evidence emerged that Detective Watts had let Cone skate on a failed sobriety test, and a witness quoted Cone saying he could “do anything I want” because he was a prosecution witness. A meteorologist testified that the night of the murders was cloudy and overcast, contradicting Cone’s claim of a clear, starry sky. The defense produced a neighborhood teenage boy who was, in one juror’s words, a “spitting image” of Hennis and who often walked Summer Hill Road late at night. A newspaper delivery person testified to seeing a long-haired man in a light-colored van at the scene at 1:45 a.m. Footprints at the scene were three sizes smaller than Hennis’s shoes, and a pubic hair recovered from the home matched neither Hennis nor the victims.¹

After two days of deliberation, the jury acquitted Hennis of all charges on April 19, 1989. Juror Ken Wells later said the unmatched pubic hair “cried out” that Hennis was not the killer.¹ Hennis went free and eventually re-enlisted in the Army.

DNA and the Cold Case

The case reopened almost by accident. At a 2005 seminar for homicide detectives, a crime analyst named Billy Crawford presented it as a study. Journalist Scott Whisnant, who had written a 1993 book on the murders, was in the audience.⁶ Whisnant told Detective Larry Trotter of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department that the semen collected from Katie Eastburn’s body in 1985 had never been run through modern DNA testing.⁷

Trotter, assigned to review cold cases, pulled vaginal swabs the sheriff’s office had held since 1985 and sent them to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation crime lab. In 2006, results returned a match to Timothy Hennis. A forensic biologist later testified the sample was “1.2 quadrillion times more likely to be from Hennis than from any other white person in North Carolina.”¹

Why a Third Trial Was Legal

The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment barred North Carolina from trying Hennis again after the 1989 acquittal. The path around that came from the separate sovereigns doctrine, which treats the federal government and a state as distinct sovereigns; a prosecution by one does not block a prosecution by the other for the same conduct. The military justice system is a federal entity and, on that theory, a separate sovereign from North Carolina.⁵

The specific hook was Article 3(a) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 10 U.S.C. § 803(a), which allows a court-martial of a person who committed offenses while subject to the UCMJ if that person “cannot be tried in the courts of the United States or of a State.” Because double jeopardy prevented any state prosecution and no federal civilian statute covered the conduct, the military argued Hennis fit the statutory definition.⁸

Hennis had retired from the Army in 2004. In late 2006, the Army recalled him to active duty to face a capital court-martial. CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin explained that while a single prosecutor cannot get a “do-over” after an acquittal, “if a different prosecutor in a different court comes up with a different way to frame charges in the same crime, then that is generally permissible.” By all accounts, Hennis is the only person in American history tried for his life three times, with both guilty and not-guilty verdicts along the way.⁹

The 2010 Court-Martial

The court-martial convened at Fort Bragg before a panel of Army officers and enlisted personnel. Hennis was charged with three specifications of premeditated murder under Article 118 of the UCMJ. The statute of limitations on the rape charge had expired, so it was not included.¹

The DNA match was the centerpiece. Forensic examiners testified that the semen recovered from Katie Eastburn’s body matched Hennis with “near-statistical certainty,” and DNA testing also excluded an alternative suspect the defense had proposed.⁸ The defense argued the original investigation had been “deeply flawed” and sought to call three witnesses supporting an alternative-suspect theory. The military judge denied those requests for lack of relevance, particularly because DNA had excluded the proposed suspect. The defense also challenged the DNA sample as small and possibly compromised.¹⁰ Hennis’s later petition for certiorari noted that three subsequent tests by two other laboratories “did not replicate the SBI’s result,” though the military courts did not find that sufficient to overturn the conviction.⁴

On April 8, 2010, the panel convicted Hennis on all three murder specifications. On April 15, it unanimously sentenced him to death, along with a dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and reduction to the lowest enlisted grade.⁸

Appeals and Where the Case Stands

Hennis challenged the court-martial’s jurisdiction on appeal, arguing that his 1989 honorable discharge broke his service and that the Army could not recall a retiree to prosecute crimes from a prior enlistment. He also argued that offenses without a direct military connection should not fall to a court-martial.

The Army Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed on October 6, 2016. It held that Article 3(a), applied at the time charges were preferred rather than at the time of the offense, supplied jurisdiction: because double jeopardy blocked a state prosecution, Hennis was someone who “cannot be tried” in civilian courts. On the service-connection point, the court cited Solorio v. United States (1987), which makes military status at the time of the offense the sole criterion for court-martial jurisdiction. The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, the military’s highest appellate court, affirmed on February 28, 2020.⁸ On January 11, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari without comment.¹¹

Hennis remains on military death row at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The U.S. military has not executed a service member since 1961, and any execution requires presidential approval.¹² Some forensic questions in the file remain unresolved: reporter Scott Whisnant has noted that a head hair found in the victims’ bed did not match Hennis, and unidentified DNA was recovered from under Katie Eastburn’s fingernails.⁹

1
The New Yorker. Three Trials for Murder
2
The Seattle Times. 25 Years Later, Widower Recalls Slain Family
3
ABC News. Soldier Convicted of Eastburn Triple Murder Appeals
4
U.S. Supreme Court. Hennis v. United States, Petition for Certiorari
5
Army.mil. Hennis Court Martial Begins at Fort Bragg
6
News & Observer. Eastburn Murders in Fayetteville
7
CNN. Death Row Stories Transcript
8
Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. United States v. Hennis, No. 17-0263
9
CNN. Death Row Stories: Hennis
10
WRAL. Hennis Trial Coverage
11
U.S. Supreme Court. Hennis v. United States, No. 20-301
12
Army Times. What Death Row Executions May Mean for These Four Soldiers at Leavenworth