A convicted murderer on death row in North Carolina wrote a taunting letter to his hometown newspaper about his life of “leisure” in prison and making a mockery of the legal system.
Danny Robbie Hembree Jr. was found guilty of murdering 17-year-old Heather Catterton in 2009 and was sentenced to death on Nov. 18, 2011.
Hembree, 50, is on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C., but he’s not looking for any pity in the letter he sent to The Gaston Gazette.
“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,” Hembree asked in the letter. “I’m housed in a building that connects to the new 55 million dollar hospital with round the clock free medical care 24/7.”
He also asks if the public knows that the chances of his “lawful murder” taking place in the next 20 years, if ever, are “very slim.”
Gaston County District Attorney Locke Bell said that he has received two distraught phone calls from Catterton’s father today.
“I got a call from the father of the 17-year-old that he murdered, in tears. He said that this is tearing the family to shreds. This is ripping the wound open,” Locke told ABCNews.com. “[The father] said, ‘He murdered our daughter, got the death penalty and now he’s just sitting in jail laughing at us.’”
Danny Robbie Hembree considers himself a gentleman of leisure.
He enjoys colour TV, air conditioning and abundant food. He naps pretty much whenever he feels like it.
He also happens to live on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. But that's not a bad thing, he wrote in a taunting letter to his hometown newspaper, the Gaston Gazette.
