A Case of Reasonable Doubt
During the whole day of November 8, 1983, David Hendricks tried to reach his family back home in Bloomington, Illinois, without success. He had left the previous night on a business trip to Wisconsin, and it wasn’t like his wife Susan to not answer phone calls. When she failed to make it to a family dinner that night, and after David contacted police at least twice, presuming she’d been in a car accident, cops did a welfare check on her and was met with a horrific scene.
Susan Hendricks (30) and her three children --Rebekah (9), Grace (7) and Benjamin (5)-- were lying dead in their beds in the middle of a gory scene. They had been all savagely hacked with an axe and a butcher knife; both weapons were found at the crime scene. There were no signs of struggle, so police theorized they’d been attacked in their sleep, and there were no signs of forced entry either, although the back door was found unlocked.
When David Hendricks arrived back home that same night, he immediately became the main suspect of the detectives in charge. They thought he looked too calm and resigned to the news his family had been murdered, and they didn’t like how he told the press that it had apparently being a burglary gone wrong, because he hadn’t even gone inside the house. Hendricks would later say that’s what someone who’d been there had told him.
Hendricks was 29 at the time, and a very successful businessman. He’d created and patented a popular orthopedic back brace and was making a lot of money with it, that’s why he occasionally left town for business trips and, according to his assistant, it wasn’t unusual for him to leave in the middle of the night. It also required him to meet with several models that were photographed wearing custom-made braces in medical brochures.
He was also a conservative Christian, part of a branch known as the Plymouth Brethen, which was strongly against divorce. After Hendricks was arrested on December 5, 1983, the prosecution came up with the theory that he wanted to pursue other sexual relationships, but because he didn’t want to lose his stand with his community by divorcing or cheating on his wife, he’d decided to kill his family instead. At one point they also pushed forward a more frankly absurd version of this, claiming that David had seen the “temptations of the world” and wanted to protect his family from them, so he’d chosen to “send them to Heaven”.
Needless to say, David Hendricks denied any involvement with the murders and, as you can see in the picture above, he looked appropriately devastated in their funerals. He told authorities that on November 7, 1983, Susan had gone to a baby shower on a nearby town and he’d taken the kids to a Chuck E’ Cheese, where they had eaten vegetarian pizza and played until around 7:30 pm. Afterwards, they’d gone to a bookmobile, where the kids had returned some books and borrowed new ones. A witness confirmed seeing them there at 8 pm.
David said he’d then gone back home and put the kids to bed at around 9:30 pm. Susan had arrived around 10:30 pm, and they’d talked for a while before he left for his trip some time after 11 pm, while everyone was still alive and safe.
During trial, David’s account of the events were put in doubt by the prosecution experts. One of them testified that, after analyzing the children’s stomach contents and finding undigested vegetables from the pizza they’d eaten, their estimated time of death was 9:30 pm, while David was still in the house, meaning he had to be the killer.
However, this evidence had its problems as well. First, with the advance of science we now know that using stomach contents to pinpoint time of death is not as accurate as we used to think, because there’s many factors that play into digestion, including the person’s age and health, among others. Leaving that aside, witnesses at the babyshower claim Susan didn’t leave before 9:40 pm, meaning she would have arrived home after her kids were murdered. Since she was a devoted mother, it’s hard to believe she wouldn’t have gone to check on them when she got home, but she was found murdered in her bed, after getting settled to sleep, which implies she either didn’t see her kids or checked on them and found nothing wrong.
Since they didn’t have any other evidence linking David to the crime, not even in the murder weapons, prosecution put most of the focus of the case in establishing motive. They called more than thirteen models who had worked with Hendricks and tried to show an “escalation of sexual aggression” in his behavior towards them, although they didn’t call them in the correct order they had actually modeled for him. Most of the statements from the models showed David was a bit of a creep, asking them for unnecessary nudity and doing some awkward groping while trying on the braces. One of them testified she believed David wanted to kiss her, and another that he had asked her to show her around town and had attempted to kiss her on the cheek during said “date”. However, models also said that Hendricks never restrained them by force and that he always backed off when they let him know they were uncomfortable. (You can read a summary of the models’ testimonies here).
The defense claimed that the stomach content analysis was dubious, since one of them even showed rests of a vegetable the child hated and wouldn’t eat, suggesting the lab had some mix-up. They also presented an expert who said that blood spatter at the crime scene suggested two killers instead of one.
Eventually, the jury found David Hendricks guilty of the murders. Although a case of this nature would have guaranteed the death penalty, Judge Richard Baner, who presided over the trial. refused to apply it and gave him four consecutive life sentences instead. He explained his reasoning, saying that, although he thought that Hendricks “probably did commit” the murders, he wasn’t convinced of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Hendricks appealed, and although at first the court affirmed his conviction, in 1991 the Illinois Supreme Court overturned it and granted him a new trial. This time they didn’t allow the models’ testimonies of David’s flirting, because it was considered by the court that they were more prejudicial than probative. Without the means to back their motive for the crime, the prosecution was forced to rely only on the actual evidence of the murders, and since it was so weak, the jury ended up acquitting Hendricks and he was released from prison after spending 7 years behind bars.
In one of his court filings, David Hendricks said he believed his brother in law John Lewis, who was at the time married to one of Susan’s sisters, had committed the murders. When that couple separated, Lewis’ ex wife said publicly she thought David had hired John to kill his family. Police claimed they ruled him out as a suspect after he passed a polygraph.
The rest of Susan’s family, including her parents, have always remained on David’s side and believe him to be innocent. Some, however, still think he did it and got away with a very light sentence.
Hendricks now lives in Florida with his fourth wife. He wrote a book called Tom Henry: Confession of a Killer, which tells the story of his cell mate Henry Hillenbrand, who murdered his wife and her lover.