Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
RALEIGH, N.C. — A death row inmate accused of killing three women has written a taunting letter to his hometown newspaper, predicting he’ll spend many years as a gentleman of leisure, watching color TV and enjoying frequent naps.
In fact, Hembree wrote, the state of North Carolina has taken the “death” out of death row.
“Kill me if you can suckers,” Danny Robbie Hembree Jr. wrote in a letter to The Gaston Gazette. A story about the letter and its contents was published on the front page of Tuesday’s issue.
No one has been executed in North Carolina since 2006 because of a series of legal challenges about the use of lethal injection and whether executions must be overseen by a physician.
“Is the public aware that the chances of my lawful murder taking place in the next 20 years if ever are very slim?” asked Hembree, 50. “Is the public aware that I am a gentleman of leisure, watching color TV in the A.C., reading, taking naps at will, eating three well balanced hot meals a day?”
The inmate also pointed out he gets free government health care.
Hembree is on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh for suffocating Heather Catterton, 17, in 2009. He’s also accused of the 2009 killing of 30-year-old Randi Dean Saldana, whose burned remains were found near Blacksburg, S.C.
Hembree admitted to taking drugs and having sex with Catterton and Saldana the day they died, but he told jurors he did not kill them or dump their bodies. He is scheduled to go on trial in March in Saldana’s killing.
He is also charged with killing 30-year-old Deborah Ratchford, whose body was found in a Gastonia cemetery in 1992.
Gaston County District Attorney Locke Bell complained about the tangle of legal issues that have effectively halted executions in the state for the past five years.
“He’s sitting down there looking at the law and laughing,” said Bell, who prosecuted Hembree.
Copyright 2012 Pittsburgh Tribune-Review