Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant in 1985, when he paid a visit to the home of Katie Eastburn, the wife of an Air Force captain. A few days later, he was arrested for her murder. “I hope you guys know what you’re doing,” Hennis told law-enforcement officials. Photographs by Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office; Courtesy Gary Eastburn

On May 7, 1985, Tim Hennis, a twenty-seven-year-old Army sergeant in Fayetteville, North Carolina, responded to a classified ad from a local woman trying to sell an English setter. The posting appeared in the Beeline Grab Bragg, a newspaper serving the military community in the area surrounding Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg. After talking it over with his wife, Angela, Hennis drove across town to see the dog. According to his later account, shortly before 9 P.M. he parked his white Chevette in front of 367 Summer Hill Road, a ranch house with a brick façade and black shutters. He walked up the driveway, holding a leash.

Hennis knocked on the door, and Katie Eastburn, the woman who had placed the ad, invited him inside. She was petite, with short dark hair, a bright smile, and a pale complexion. At six feet six, Hennis towered over her; he was sturdily handsome, with heavy eyelids, a light mustache, and thin blond hair parted on the right. Eastburn told him that she had just put her three young daughters to bed.

Her husband, Gary, an Air Force captain, was away at squadron officers’ school in Alabama. The family planned to move, later that year, to England, where Gary was slated for a job as a liaison to the Royal Air Force. The couple worried that Dixie, the English setter, wouldn’t tolerate quarantine; as Hennis later recalled, Eastburn told him that they were just seeking a good home for Dixie and had included a nominal price in the ad, ten dollars, to “keep the cranks away.” Hennis liked the dog and wanted to take it home, to make sure that it got along with his spitz. Eastburn watched from the driveway as Hennis led Dixie into his Chevette and drove off.

Four days later, Gary Eastburn phoned his wife for their regular Saturday-morning conversation. She didn’t answer. He tried again and again, without success.

Sunday was Mother’s Day, and the Eastburns’ neighbor, Bob Seefeldt, noticed three uncollected newspapers in their driveway, suggesting that Katie and the girls were away. But their Toyota station wagon hadn’t moved in days. Seefeldt went next door and rang the doorbell several times. He heard a crying baby inside and told his wife to call the sheriff’s office.

An officer arrived at the Eastburns’ house. He cut a window screen and climbed into a bedroom, as Seefeldt stood by. Inside, twenty-two-month-old Jana was wailing in her crib. The officer passed Jana back through the window to Seefeldt. There was a strong odor in the house. When the officer stepped into the hallway, he saw dead bodies at the end of the hall. He radioed the homicide unit.

Robert Bittle and Jack Watts, detectives from the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department, came to the scene a few minutes after 1 P.M. Watts headed the homicide unit; Bittle had previously run a racehorse farm. They entered the house through the carport door. It was a warm spring day and the windows were shut. “Death has a smell, its own aroma,” Bittle told me. “I’ll never forget the smell in there.” The detectives proceeded into the home, inspecting each room along the way. In the living room, they saw a pair of jeans, two buttons that had been ripped off a blouse, and a pair of torn ladies’ underpants. Then they found five-year-old Kara, curled under a Star Wars blanket, stabbed repeatedly in the chest. Next, they entered the master bedroom. Erin, a three-year-old, lay on one side of the bed, bludgeoned in the chest and back. On the other side lay Katie, naked from the waist down. She had been stabbed fifteen times and had apparently been raped; semen was found inside her body. All three Eastburns’ throats had been slit.

Not long afterward, at the base in Alabama, the phone rang in the hallway outside Gary Eastburn’s room. “It’s for you!” one of his colleagues hollered. Gary leaped up and asked who was calling. “Some detective,” the colleague said.

Watts was on the line. “There’s been a death in the family,” he told Gary. “You need to come home.” Watts refused to elaborate.

Gary flew to Fayetteville, accompanied by another officer, and went directly to the police station. The detectives pressed Gary for leads. He told them that Katie had recently given away Dixie, but said that he didn’t know anything about the man who took the dog.

Later that night, Bittle and Watts returned to the house, which was cordoned off with police tape. Crime-scene technicians had found fingerprints and hair. A Luminol test, which produces a glow when the chemical reacts with the iron in hemoglobin, showed faint smears of blood on the walls and in the master bathroom, as if someone had tried to clean the place up.

Shortly after midnight, a young African-American named Patrick Cone sought out investigators. He told Bittle that on Friday morning, at around three-thirty, he had seen a tall white man, wearing jeans, a knit cap, and a black Members Only jacket, leaving the Eastburns’ driveway with a garbage bag slung over his shoulder. Cone, a janitor whose shift started that day at dawn, was walking along Summer Hill Road. “Leaving a little early this morning,” the man in the Members Only jacket said, as he headed in the opposite direction. When Cone stopped and turned around, he saw the tail-lights of a white Chevette glow before the car pulled away.

That Tuesday, Cone worked with an agent from North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation to create a composite sketch of the man. Across town, Gary walked through his home with Bittle and Watts, looking for any missing items. An envelope of cash, Katie’s A.T.M. card, and a piece of paper with the A.T.M. password were gone.

On Wednesday, Tim Hennis was at home having lunch with Angela when they saw a special news broadcast on television. It announced investigators’ interest in a man who drove a white Chevette and had picked up an English setter from 367 Summer Hill Road the previous week. “My wife and I were shocked,” Hennis said later. “It was the first time we realized that the lady who had been murdered was the one that I had picked up the dog from.” Hennis, Angela, and their newborn daughter, Kristina, drove to the Law Enforcement Center in downtown Fayetteville. An officer led Hennis into a room for questioning. When Watts saw Hennis, he paused: Hennis’s face and the composite sketch were nearly identical. “I knew we needed to talk to this man,” Watts told me.

The authorities had determined that the murders likely took place on Thursday night, as Katie had been seen by the neighbors earlier that evening and the newspapers had begun piling up on Friday morning. So Watts asked Hennis to recount his activities that night. Hennis said that he had driven his wife and daughter to his in-laws’ and then returned home, after stopping for gas. He answered many questions impatiently, and Watts found him arrogant. Nonetheless, Hennis stayed for almost seven hours and provided blood, saliva, and hair samples, as well as fingerprints and palm prints. When Watts asked him about Katie Eastburn, Hennis acknowledged picking up the dog on Tuesday, but said that he never saw the woman again; he had not even got her name. Hennis claimed that Katie had called him on Thursday night to see how Dixie was getting along with the spitz. That was it.

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Hennis was a challenge to interrogate. “Tim Hennis is not a dumb man,” Watts told me. Indeed, Hennis had scored 128 on an Army general-aptitude test, placing him in the ninety-seventh percentile. If he was hiding something, he wasn’t likely to slip up.