Danny Hembree was a man in his late forties living in Gastonia, North Carolina, when two women died in the Gastonia area in the autumn of 2009. Heather Catterton was 17. Randi Saldana was 30. In December 2009 he was arrested on armed robbery charges, and over two days of recorded questioning he admitted to officers from North and South Carolina that he had killed both women. He went on to confess to a third killing from 1992 and to claim two more in Florida.
The courts treated the cases separately and, in the end, in a different order from the way they began. A Gaston County jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Heather Catterton in November 2011 and sentenced him to death. A second trial, for the death of Randi Saldana, collapsed into a mistrial in April 2012 after he raised an accusation against a prosecutor from the witness stand. In February 2013 he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the Saldana case. In April 2015 the North Carolina Supreme Court voted four to two to vacate the Catterton verdict and the death sentence, and in December 2017 he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in that case as well. The reported combined sentence for the two murders is 50 years. A murder charge relating to a woman who died in 1992 was dismissed, and the claimed Florida killings were never charged.
Danny Robbie Hembree Jr. lived in Gastonia, the largest city in Gaston County, west of Charlotte. He was reported to be 47 when he was arrested in December 2009, which places his birth in the early 1960s. Little is known of his birth, schooling or family. He had been in prison before: the father of Heather Catterton told a reporter in 2009 that he knew Hembree had served time, and at the 2011 sentencing the jury found as a statutory aggravating circumstance that Hembree had previously been convicted of violent felonies. Which offenses those were is not on record.
At the time of the deaths Hembree was living with his mother. The Catterton family knew him through Heather's older sister, with whom he had been in a relationship. Heather's father said that Hembree sometimes stayed at the family's home and that he had noticed nothing unusual about him.
Heather Marie Catterton was 17 and lived in Gastonia with her father. She had an older sister. Her father later described the sentence imposed in 2011 as something that would bring closure. A relative, her aunt, said in 2012 that she hoped Hembree would remain in prison for the rest of his life.
The North Carolina Supreme Court's opinion says that, by Hembree's own recorded account given on December 5, 2009, she died in the Gastonia area in the early hours of October 18. A pathologist who examined her could not determine the cause of death, a fact that mattered to the way the defense framed the case at trial.
Randi Dean Saldana was 30. Her sister was in the courtroom for the trials. The trial court placed her death at about November 11, 2009, in the Gastonia area, roughly three weeks after Heather Catterton's. In an interview in 2022, her sister said that she still did not accept Hembree's version of events and wanted him to say what had happened to a third woman, Deborah Ratchford.
Deborah Denise Ratchford was 30 when she died in Gastonia in August 1992. Her death was unsolved for more than seventeen years. Her mother spoke to a reporter in February 2013 and said she did not want to die without knowing who had killed her daughter.
In December 2009 Hembree confessed to this killing as well. On December 9 he withdrew the confession, along with the two Florida claims. He had also named a man, J.S., as an accomplice in the 1992 death. Charges were brought against J.S. and then dismissed in 2009; J.S. later called the accusation a lie. Hembree was indicted for Ratchford's murder on December 14, 2009. In February 2013, as part of the arrangements that ended the Saldana case, the district attorney dismissed the charge, saying there was no evidence connecting Hembree to it. The trial court in the Catterton case had earlier excluded evidence about her death from that trial. Gastonia police said in 2013 that the case remained open, that they were still looking for leads, and that one possible suspect they had examined had died.
On December 4, 2009, Hembree was arrested in Gaston County on charges connected to a series of armed robberies. The next day, December 5, officers from North Carolina and South Carolina questioned him for several hours. He was given his rights, the interviews were recorded and transcribed, and he signed a written statement. He said he had killed Heather Catterton and Randi Saldana. He also confessed to Deborah Ratchford's death in 1992 and said he had killed two women in Florida. His statements about the Florida women gave conflicting years, 1992 and 2009, and few details. Florida investigators found nothing to support the statements and no unsolved cases that matched.
On December 9, 2009, he recanted the Ratchford confession and the Florida statements. He did not recant the confessions to the Catterton and Saldana killings at that time. At trial in 2011 he maintained that he had not intentionally killed Catterton, and in 2012 he testified that Saldana's death was an accident. Prosecutors answered that the recordings showed otherwise, and the two jury trials that followed turned in large part on the weight to give them.
He was indicted in Gaston County on December 14, 2009, for the first-degree murder of all three women: Catterton, Saldana and Ratchford. The district attorney, Locke Bell, announced that the office would seek the death penalty.
The trial for the Catterton killing opened in Gaston County Superior Court on October 18, 2011, before Judge Beverly T. Beal. On October 24 prosecutors played Hembree's recorded confession in court, with part of it muted for the jury. The prosecution also offered evidence about the death of Randi Saldana, which the trial court had allowed on the ground that it showed a common plan. The court excluded evidence about Ratchford.
Hembree testified. He said he and Catterton had spent the evening together, that he did not kill her, and that he found her dead when he woke. The defense argued that her death was not intended. After closing arguments on November 7, the jury asked about an hour into deliberations for transcripts of the testimony and the recorded interviews. On Tuesday, November 8, 2011, it found him guilty of first-degree murder, after deliberating for under six hours by one account and under four by another.
The sentencing phase followed. The jury found two statutory aggravating circumstances, that he had previously been convicted of violent felonies and that the Catterton killing was part of a course of conduct involving violence to other people, and it found fourteen mitigating circumstances. The defense had pointed to physical abuse in his childhood, a history of mental illness and self-destructive behavior. On Friday, November 18, 2011, the jury recommended death and the court imposed it. A juror told WSOC that the decision was not difficult and that the jurors reached it quickly. After the sentence was read, Hembree called out "I love you" to his family, apologized to the Catterton family and asked to read the words of a Johnny Cash song about prison. Heather Catterton's father said of the verdict, "This is gonna bring closure." Bell said it showed that Heather's life "had value." He added that he would decide the following week whether to try Hembree for the two other deaths.
In January 2012 Hembree wrote a handwritten letter from Central Prison in Raleigh, where North Carolina held its male death row inmates. It was sent to a newspaper in his home county and reported by WSOC on January 24, 2012, and then by other outlets. In it he described himself as a man of leisure who watched television in air conditioning, took naps and received free medical care. He wrote that his trial had cost taxpayers $500,000 and that the chance of a death sentence being carried out in the next twenty years was slim. The letter drew wide notice in North Carolina and a proposal in the state legislature to bar death row inmates from watching television, which did not pass.
The Saldana case was set for trial in March 2012, and prosecutors said they would again seek death. In February the defense told the court that it planned to use the police inquiry into the Ratchford death as part of its case: Hembree had falsely implicated J.S., the defense said, and if he had lied about the 1992 killing he might have lied in his confession about Saldana. A relative of Catterton said she hoped the judge would block the argument.
The trial began and ended in the first days of April. On Monday, April 2, 2012, Hembree testified and, in the course of cross-examination about his letter from death row, raised an anonymous letter making a personal allegation about him and one of the assistant district attorneys trying the case. He said the letter came from a former partner with a grudge. He told the court: "Why not let them all hear the whole thing? Laugh, but the truth is the truth." The prosecutor denied the claim, and the district attorney called it baseless. Prosecutors noted that Hembree had been in jail throughout the period in question.
Hembree told the court he had a conflict with his two lawyers. The lawyers said the North Carolina State Bar had told them that staying on could make them part of a fraud against the prosecution, and the judge allowed them to withdraw over the prosecution's objection. Bell argued against stopping the trial. The judge, Beverly Beal, declared a mistrial because of what she called ethical issues. During the same testimony Hembree admitted that he had killed Randi Saldana, saying her death was an accident. Saldana's sister cried out at him that he had killed her sister, and deputies removed her and other relatives from the courtroom. Hembree asked the judge not to jail her.
Bell said that a retrial would not take place for at least a year, since a new defense lawyer would need time to learn the file, and that the state had spent less than $10,000 on the Catterton and Saldana trials. The expensive part of a capital case, he said, comes in the appeals.
A retrial for Randi Saldana's death was set for March 11, 2013. On Tuesday, February 5, 2013, Hembree surprised the court by pleading guilty to second-degree murder. Asked by the judge whether he was guilty, he answered, "Yes I am." The sentence was 313 to 385 months, reported at the time as adding 26 years to his term. Under the arrangement the prosecution dismissed the Ratchford charge. District Attorney Bell said the county had been assured that Hembree "will die in prison."
Saldana's sister said in court that she forgave him, though she did not accept the apology his lawyer relayed on his behalf, "I am sorry for your loss." Saldana's mother did not attend the hearing because of the strain it would have caused her.
Because the Saldana conviction rested on a plea, it stood independent of the death sentence still under appeal in the Catterton case. By 2016 it was regarded as difficult to overturn.
Hembree appealed his Catterton conviction and death sentence to the North Carolina Supreme Court. On April 25, 2013, while the appeal was pending, he also filed a motion for appropriate relief. The court decided the appeal on April 10, 2015, in State v. Hembree, No. 86A12. By four votes to two, it vacated the conviction and the sentence and ordered a new trial. The motion was dismissed as moot.
The court held that the cumulative effect of three errors had denied him a fair trial. First, the trial court had admitted too much of the evidence about the Saldana killing, including more than a dozen photographs; the court found that the Saldana evidence was admissible for the purpose of showing a common plan or design, but that the amount had been excessive under the state's rules on evidence of other crimes and on unfair prejudice. Second, Saldana's sister had been permitted to testify about her sister's good character, which was irrelevant and should have been excluded. Third, the prosecutor's closing argument had suggested that the defense lawyers had helped Hembree lie on the witness stand; the court called it grossly improper and said it had not been corrected. The two dissenting justices, Paul Newby and Chief Justice Mark Martin, would have held the errors harmless given the strength of the confessions and the physical evidence.
District Attorney Bell said he would retry the Catterton case, and the date moved several times. In March 2016 Hembree asked the court to dismiss the charge if he had to wait for a retrial, said his lawyer should be ready, and added that he would represent himself if not. The district attorney announced plans for a trial in September 2017, and later it was set for January 2018 and moved to Catawba County.
On Tuesday, September 5, 2017, Hembree asked the judge to let him dismiss his lawyer, Ted Cummings, whom he accused of sabotaging his case. The judge refused. He then said he would represent himself, and Cummings was reported as continuing to represent him at the January retrial. Hembree also said, in the same period, that he and J.S. had killed a woman in 1992, repeating the accusation that had led to the dismissal of charges against J.S. in 2009. J.S. called it a bald-faced lie. Saldana's sister told a reporter that the news sickened her and that she had moved her family out of the county because she feared Hembree would escape.
On Thursday, December 7, 2017, during pretrial motions, Hembree pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Heather Catterton. He had been offered the plea about a year earlier. The reported sentence was a combined 50 years for the two murders. Bell said the office would not seek the death penalty and that Hembree "will die in prison."
Hembree told the judge he wanted to put the case behind him and that he had repeated heart problems and had recently had a stroke. He said: "I'm sorry for the destruction and chaos I caused in my entire life." He also apologized to the two prosecutors for what he called dirty tricks and aggravation in the earlier trial, including his false allegation about one of them.
For the first years after 2011 Hembree was on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh. After the 2015 ruling the death sentence no longer stood, and his lawyer expected him to be moved. In May 2022 WSOC interviewed him at Warren Correctional Institution in Warren County, North Carolina, where he was serving his sentence. He said he had a pacemaker and liver problems and that he deserved to stay in prison for the rest of his life. He also said his earlier confessions had been lies meant to mislead investigators and that he had not intended to kill the women. That account is his own and conflicts with the recordings of December 2009, with his guilty pleas and with his testimony in 2012 that he had killed Saldana in an accident. Locke Bell, by then a former prosecutor, said he "will die in prison." Randi Saldana's sister did not accept the account.
No later hearing or change in custody has been reported.
Proven by final convictions on guilty pleas: the second-degree murders of Randi Saldana (2009, plea February 5, 2013) and Heather Catterton (2009, plea December 7, 2017). The earlier first-degree conviction and death sentence in the Catterton case (2011) were vacated in 2015 and are not convictions in force.
Charged and dismissed: the murder of Deborah Ratchford in August 1992. Hembree confessed to it on December 5, 2009, recanted on December 9, and the charge was dismissed in February 2013 because there was no evidence connecting him to it. The charge never came to trial. His accusation that an accomplice was involved was followed by the dismissal of charges against that man.
Confessed and recanted, never charged: two killings in Florida. Investigators there found nothing to support the statements. A reporter in 2022 described him as having confessed to five murders in all; three were charged, and only two led to convictions.
Points that remain uncertain: the length of the jury's deliberation in November 2011 (under four hours, under six hours); whether the second victim's surname is spelled Saldana or Saldona; the number of years added by the 2013 plea (described as 26 years; the sentence itself was 313 to 385 months); and whether the 2017 plea applied to a separate sentence for Catterton or produced a combined sentence of 50 years for the two killings.
August 1992: Deborah Ratchford, 30, dies in Gastonia.
October 17 and 18, 2009: Heather Catterton, 17, dies in the Gastonia area, by Hembree's own account.
About November 11, 2009: Randi Saldana, 30, dies in the Gastonia area, by the trial court's finding.
December 4, 2009: Hembree is arrested in Gaston County on armed robbery charges.
December 5, 2009: He gives recorded statements to North and South Carolina officers.
December 9, 2009: He recants the Ratchford and Florida statements.
December 14, 2009: Gaston County indictment for three first-degree murders.
October 18, 2011: Catterton trial opens.
November 8, 2011: Jury convicts him of first-degree murder.
November 18, 2011: Death sentence.
January 2012: His letter from death row is reported.
April 2, 2012: Saldana trial ends in a mistrial.
February 5, 2013: Guilty plea to second-degree murder (Saldana); the Ratchford charge is dismissed.
April 10, 2015: North Carolina Supreme Court vacates the Catterton conviction and death sentence.
September 5, 2017: Judge refuses his request to dismiss his lawyer.
December 7, 2017: Guilty plea to second-degree murder (Catterton).
May 2022: He is interviewed at Warren Correctional Institution.