Pat Hendricks knows what people think about her. She senses it, or hears it nearly every day.
”I was looking at dresses in a shop one day when a woman came up to me and said: `Lady, I know who you are. Your husband cut his kids` heads off and put them on the fireplace mantle,” she recalled.
”I told her she was wrong and that she should read up on the case and get some intelligence.”
On Dec. 20, 1988, this twice-divorced, born-again Christian and mother of three from Toledo, Ohio, married her third husband, Oak Park native David Hendricks, 37.
The ceremony was conducted in a small office at the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Ill. Pat`s two children by her second marriage, Ryan, now 9, and Rachel, now 4, were present.
The groom, formerly a wealthy businessman and a fundamentalist Christian, was then serving four life sentences for the 1983 ax and knife murders of his then-wife and their three young children in their Bloomington home.
The murder of the family in an affluent neighborhood in this central Illinois white-collar center received national attention, sparked a best-selling book and challenged the state`s court system.
But Pat Hendricks, 40, said she was involved in her own life in Toledo and unaware of the sensational murders and trial. She said she initially heard of Hendricks through a friend in church, and befriended him out of curiosity and religious faith.
And she married him out of simple love, not for some complicated or twisted purpose, she said.
”Some people think I`m nuts. They think I married him to be in the limelight, that I couldn`t make a marriage work on the outside so I married a man behind bars, or that David is just using me until he gets out of prison. . . . I`ve even been told that women are attracted to murderers because murder is the `ultimate macho act.` . . .
”But none of that is true in my case,” she said. ”People are always coming up to me saying, `I know who you are.` Well, I know who I am too.` ”
On the day after Pat and David Hendricks were married at the state prison, the Illinois Supreme Court announced that it had upheld Hendricks`
conviction for the murders committed five years earlier.
At that point, Pat Hendricks moved with her children to Chester, where her husband was imprisoned, accepting that he probably never would be released.
New trial ordered
But nine months later, in a rare reversal, the state`s high court announced without explanation that it would reopen Hendricks` case for additional arguments. The court hearings that followed led to a reversal of Hendricks` conviction and an order for a new trial.
Jury selection began last week, and the new trial is expected to begin soon in McLean County Circuit Court in Bloomington. Pat Hendricks will be in the courtroom as she has been at nearly all of her husband`s hearings since their marriage.
Her position is front row, where she is poised and attentive to every utterance from the judge, the defense lawyers, the prosecutors, witnesses and, especially, her husband the defendant. During breaks, she first sees to her husband`s needs and wishes, and then to those of any family members.
Pat Hendricks is attentive also to the reporters who have followed her husband`s case. She schmoozes with them, subtly and not-so-subtly putting her husband`s spin on the testimony and evidence of the day, touching an arm here, cracking wise there.
She has been known to publicly and loudly question the court`s devotion to justice. She lobs stage whispers like verbal grenades at detectives and expert witnesses for the prosecution.
Dark-haired and petite, the former high school cheerleader and debate team member is a highly motivated and effective lobbyist for her husband. She founded FAITH, Friends Against Injustice To Hendricks, to aid in his defense. And she is equally adept at defending herself against all of the innuendo that surrounds her marriage to a man convicted of unspeakable crimes.
”I heard once that you shouldn`t marry a person that you can live with, you should marry a person that you can`t live without,” she said. ”Well, I finally did, but I didn`t find him in church, I found him in prison.”
Her first husband was ”my ticket out of a bad situation,” she said. He was her boss. She was a 19-year-old medical secretary in a hospital in Ohio. He was a bacteriologist intern.
Her parents had divorced when she was 6, and Pat lived with her mother. Insecurities about her split family drove her to prove her worth to herself and others, she said, through cheerleading, the debate team, student council and a parade of school clubs.
The first marriage came immediately after graduation from high school and ended after 10 years and a son, now 15, who lives with his father. A second marriage to a man she met in the Baptist Church ”just went bad” and ended after five years and the two children, who now call David Hendricks ”Daddy.” Her third marriage made headlines, but it, too, began with the church she had begun attending at age 28, she said.
A woman friend there had a son who was a prisoner at Menard. She had met Hendricks and his parents while visiting her son. The friend was taken by Hendricks` intelligence, his religious faith and his insistence that he had been wrongfully convicted.
The mother was especially impressed that not only did Hendricks` parents support his pleas of innocence, but so did the parents of the wife that he had been convicted of murdering.
Business trip his alibi
Hendricks` supporters said his conviction by a jury came despite a complete lack of physical evidence connecting him to the crime. They believe detectives fixed on him as the killer immediately after the bodies of his family were found and refused to thoroughly consider other suspects.
Hendricks claimed he had left the house to drive to Wisconsin on business after his family had gone to sleep. He said he learned of the murders the next day after he sped home, unable to reach the family by phone.
The trial judge, Richard Baner, who also is presiding over the new trial, noted before sentencing Hendricks, ”Based on the evidence admitted on trial against the defendant, I am not personally convinced that he has been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Family members suggested in court that a relative jealous of Hendricks` business success committed the murders.
A best-selling book, ”Reasonable Doubt,” was written about the Hendricks case by Bloomington radio newsman Steve Vogel, who also questioned the jury`s findings.
Prosecutors in the first trial characterized Hendricks as an inherently evil and troubled man capable of cunning manipulation. They said he led two lives.
Hendricks, who graduated from Oak Park High School in three years and studied at Northwestern Medical School for one year, presented himself to the community as a respectable businessman devoted to family and faith, and extremely charitable to the needy, police said.
But prosecutors also portrayed him as an aspiring playboy and philanderer who was fond of motorcycles and airplanes, and given to clumsy come-ons to young women who modeled for his orthopedics-equipmen t catalog. Police said he murdered his family because he wanted to lead the second life unencumbered.
When Pat Hendricks` church friend presented all of this to her and suggested that she write David to encourage him spiritually, she was skeptical.
”Being very naive, I said if he was in prison, he must have done something,” she said. ”Like most Americans, I believed that the justice system works.
”My friend said he was innocent, but what did I know about him? I told her that my life was complicated enough, trying to raise three kids. And I told her I wasn`t that desperate for companionship. I didn`t need to write to somebody behind bars.”
”I also told her that I didn`t want somebody capable of something like that to have my name and address,” Pat Hendricks recalled.
A package arrives
In March 1987, a package from David Hendricks arrived in the mail for her. The friend had given him Pat`s address in Toledo.
”I let the letter sit there for a week, and I prayed on whether I should open it,” she said.
She did open it, out of curiosity and faith that it had come for a purpose, she said. Hendricks had mailed her a letter and photographs of the family he was convicted of murdering: his wife of 10 years, Susan, 30; and their children, Rebekah, 9; Grace, 7; and Benjamin, 5.
In the accompanying letter, Hendricks was casual but direct. He wrote that if Pat replied to him, he would correspond further, if she did not, he would tear up her address.
”He said that he understood that not everyone would want to write to a prison inmate like him,” Pat said. ”He also wrote that he was looking for pen pals, and I thought that was kind of a nice, old-fashioned term to use.” Before writing back, she telephoned Hendricks` parents, who had moved from Oak Park to Allendale, in southern Illinois, to be closer to their son. They talked for hours, and she was moved by their loyalty and their arguments. She decided to write to their son.
”But I told him right away that it was only to encourage him spiritually,” she said.
”I said I`d been through two marriages and I was sick of men. I wasn`t really interested in dating or in a relationship at that point, but I thought David might be disillusioned with his religion and God. I thought I could help him there.”
Through her correspondence with Hendricks, Pat became intrigued by his claims of wrongful conviction, she said.
”When I see an injustice, I go crazy,” she said. ”I felt if he was really innocent, it was my responsibility to check it out.
Just under 5 feet tall and scarcely 100 pounds, Pat Hendricks said she has always been one to fight for the underdog.
She recalled once stopping her car outside her son`s school to break up a fight in which a small boy was taking a pounding from a much larger one.
”I grabbed the big guy by his hair and I pulled him off and told him that his next swing had better be at me,” she recalled.
She said she also once chased a window peeper after she`d caught him spying in her bedroom window. ”It took four blocks for it to dawn on me:
`What would I do with him when I caught him?` But I was mad.”
Releasing the doubts
As the Hendricks family won her over, she began regular 10-hour trips to visit David in prison. Their relationship, though never intimate, evolved intellectually and emotionally during those visits and discussions, she said. She held her feelings for Hendricks at bay for a year and a half because of her concerns that he might never get out of prison, and that her children might suffer from such a complicated and controversial relationship.
”I had decided I could deal with it if David never got out of prison for the rest of his life, but I didn`t know if I could subject my children to that,” she said.
She said Hendricks, who has occasionally slipped and called her by his first wife`s name, and her children by the names of his murdered children, also had his doubts about that aspect of their relationship.
”It wasn`t an easy decision to get married,” she said. ”At one point, when we were still talking about it, David said he would probably have to break our relationship off because he didn`t think it would be good for the kids, but I cried and said I couldn`t walk away from it at that point.”
On a recent jail visit with David, Pat`s daughter suggested to him,
”I`ll break the glass, and you run.” But the mother said she believes the marriage has been positive for her children, and she is convinced the new trial will result in his release to his new family.
”It would be better for them if their daddy was not in prison, but he`ll be home soon.”
”I don`t believe God brought us this far just to walk out on us.”
