Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in 1985 when he was charged with the murder of a woman and her two young daughters. His case has gone to trial three separate times, and the military’s intervention has raised questions about what constitutes double jeopardy:
That Saturday, Hennis’s neighbors recalled, he had poured lighter fluid into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and stoked a bonfire for at least five hours. Had he burned evidence? Hennis did go voluntarily to the police station, but Bittle told me that this was a tactic regularly employed by a certain class of criminal. “Why do people rob banks? They think that others didn’t know how to do it right. That was Tim Hennis’s attitude: ‘You can’t get me. I am smarter than you are.’”
“Three Trials for Murder.” — Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker (Nov.14, 2011)
I watched a television documentary about this and still had to read the entire article—it’s just so bizarre.
