LouLife [1]

Photos by Herb Marynell

Keith Henderson is used to long odds.

His first stint as a prosecutor, in Crawford County, Ind., came in 1998, when he was appointed by the Indiana Supreme Court. One of his first cases? Tackling voter fraud in the heavily Democratic county.

Later, Henderson — a Republican — ran for the same office in equally Democratic Floyd County. His opponent in the 2002 election was a 16-year incumbent Democrat who was considered by many to be nearly unbeatable.

Henderson, now 45, handled the voter fraud case. He won the FloydCounty election. And then, earlier this year, he successfully prosecuted one of the area’s most talked-about murder cases. Of course, he did it the most difficult way imaginable — and surprised everyone. 

“I think it’s safe to say that everyone was surprised but me,” Henderson said. “I have a very dedicated staff; they’re a very loyal group, and they don’t question me on much. But they questioned me on this.”

By “this,” Henderson is referring to the Camm triple-homicide, a headline-grabbing murder committed nearly six years ago that has thrust the FloydCounty prosecutor into the national spotlight. When the people in his office learned that Henderson planned to try the case’s two suspects at the same time, in separate courts that sat more than 100 miles apart (one in New Albany, the other in Boonville), they thought he was a bit insane.

Along with the logistical difficulties of one office prepping and trying two triple-homicide cases in separate counties, the case was complex, with literally dozens of witnesses and a focus on evidence so detailed and technical that it could put a CSI wonk to sleep. Secondly, the case was an attention-grabber: The main suspect, David Camm, was a former Indiana State Police trooper, accused of brutally murdering his wife and two young children only hours after allegedly sexually abusing his five-year-old daughter, Jill. And finally, the case had already been tried, Camm already convicted, and the conviction already thrown out by an appeals court.

Convicted again:  Camm enters the Warrick County Courthouse.

Now Henderson was bringing the case back. He was introducing a second suspect, Charles Boney, who was accused of conspiring with Camm to kill Camm’s family. And he was trying to convince two juries — Boney’s in Floyd County and Camm’s in Boonville (Warrick County) — that blood-splatter and gunshot-residue evidence found on Camm and Boney were enough to refute 11 eyewitnesses who said David Camm was playing basketball with them at the time of the murders.

“Certainly, all of that made it very difficult for Keith,” said Steve Johnson, executive director of the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council, on whose board Henderson sits. “I don’t know of any other prosecutor who has had to try two cases, at the same time, in counties 100 miles apart.”

And he certainly didn’t know anyone who had gotten convictions in both cases. At least, not until March, when — about a month after the FloydCounty jury convicted Boney — 12 jurors in WarrickCounty unanimously found Camm guilty of murder.

The paths of Keith Henderson and David Camm first crossed more than 15 years ago, when Camm joined the Indiana State Police. At the time, Henderson also was with the state police. He had become a trooper shortly after college — he received his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Valparaiso University — and spent his first three years in Crawford County,  about 40 miles west of Louisville, handling everything from traffic citations to full investigations in his area.

“Being in a rural area, with a very small sheriff’s department, we handled a lot of things,” Henderson said. “We did a lot of criminal investigations, and I got a lot of experience; the old saying was that, if you could work CrawfordCounty, you could do anything. So I learned a tremendous amount about investigations there, and made a lot of criminal arrests, which gave me an advantage when I became
a prosecutor.”

It was after he’d left beating the streets that Henderson met David Camm. By the time Camm hit the IndianaStatePoliceAcademy, Trooper Keith Henderson was splitting his time between desk work in the ISP’s legal division, law school and teaching courses at the academy. And in one of those academy classes, Henderson taught David Camm.

“I actually looked back in my records and found that I had given him a test; I went back and I found his information,” Henderson said. “Apparently, I taught him traffic law back then.”

It would be many years before the two men met again. In the meantime, Henderson went through a career change. Got married. Had children. And returned to Floyd County — one county over from ClarkCounty, where he’d been born
and raised.

It all began coalescing in 1998, about seven years after Henderson received his law degree, left the Indiana State Police and started a private practice. At the time, the CrawfordCounty prosecutor was a man named Jack Riddle. Riddle also happened to be practicing private law — something not allowed of elected prosecutors, and something that got him booted out of office and forced the state Supreme Court to replace him.

Their choice? Keith Henderson.

“So Keith had an interesting beginning to his career as prosecutor,” Johnson said. “That’s a very rare circumstance, where a prosecutor has been removed, and the Supreme Court has to step in and replace an existing prosecutor.”

About the same time, Henderson met Amy Hallal at a function for alumni at ProvidenceHigh School, where they’d both gone to school at different times. The two hit it off, talking about everything up to and including their mutual Lebanese heritage and their love for Lebanese food. So Henderson asked her out for a Lebanese dinner; one thing led to another and in September 1999 they were married.

Henderson had a daughter, Anastasia (now 14), from a previous marriage. But when the couple’s next child, Alexandra, was born very prematurely, it led the family back to the Louisville area for treatment — and, eventually, back to FloydCounty, where Amy had grown up, for good.

“(Alexandra) was born one pound, 10 ounces,” Henderson said. “So she had to have a lot of care in Louisville, in (Kosair) Children’s Hospital. She was there about 80 days, and we practically lived there. That, along with other reasons, led us to move back here.”

Two years later, in 2002, a year after the couple had son Andrew — and at the official /files/storyimages/to his term as Crawford County prosecutor — Henderson decided to run for Floyd County prosecutor. Despite the steep odds against beating16-year incumbent Democrat Stan Faith in a largely Democratic county, he won.

From the moment he inherited the Camm case Henderson knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Camm had first been convicted more than a year before Henderson took office in FloydCounty. But there were issues with how the case was conducted, moving the state Supreme Court to overturn the conviction and set David Camm free in mid-2004. Almost immediately, Henderson held a press conference, announcing that he would try the case again.

The move, and the subsequent way Henderson went about prosecuting the case, drew criticism from some — particularly Camm’s family. They accused him of using the case for personal gain, to further political aspirations, and to get his name in the paper, on the news and into people’s minds.

It’s a charge that, even after the trial, Camm’s family and friends firmly believe.

“Overall, the decision to charge Dave Camm always was, and always will be, a political one,” said Katharine Liell, Camm’s defense attorney. “Keith had two great opportunities to set Dave free, but that would not be a very popular decision with his constituents in FloydCounty. So despite the fact that an appeals court let Dave free — and their decision against his first conviction was one of the harshest I’ve ever seen — Keith chose to prosecute again anyway.”

Henderson insists that politics had nothing to do with his decision. “I was driven in this case because of the victims – Kim, Brad and Jill,” he said. “Them, the surviving family and the challenge of the case were where my drive really originated.”

Camm’s family did not return calls to comment on this article.

While Camm’s family and defense lawyers had claimed in the first trial — and would again claim in the second — that Camm was a patsy, the victim of a “rush to judgment” by investigators, it was evidence to the contrary that Henderson said convinced him of Camm’s guilt. As a former state police trooper, Camm was familiar with police investigatory techniques and procedures. And his treatment after the murders did not jibe with that of someone being railroaded.

In fact, it was quite the opposite.

“Knowing police procedure, I saw fairly early in this thing that (police investigators) were allowing him to do things you wouldn’t allow a suspect to do,” Henderson said. “For example, they believed there was a sexual assault on Jill early on — the next morning, in the autopsy. But they didn’t take David Camm in to do a suspect kit at the hospital. They didn’t force him into the hospital until nearly two days after the murders — after he’d showered, and any physical evidence was lost. They did that because they didn’t want to believe he was a suspect.

“So, knowing what was done, and how it was done, gave me very little doubt of his guilt; then, as I worked through the evidence myself, I had no doubt.”

So Henderson dedicated himself to the case. Because of the publicity blitz that had surrounded the first trial — as well as the overturned conviction — he requested a change of venue, and had Camm’s trial moved to WarrickCounty.

Then came the bombshell: Charles Boney. While re-investigating the case for Camm’s new trial, detectives found Boney’s DNA on a sweatshirt found at the crime scene. At first, this seemed something of a coincidence; Boney agreed to talk with police, and they began the process of ruling him out. But more and more evidence led to the second man’s arrest.

Unfortunately for Henderson, several legal maneuvers failed to get him a joint trial for the two men; in fact, it all led to the 100-mile split between the two trials. But, as Henderson would later say, the two were inextricably linked, and “if I couldn’t try them together, I was at least going to try them at the same time.”

His reasoning? The only other option, based on trial judges’ court-date decisions, would have been to try Camm first, then Boney. And Henderson didn’t want Boney taking the stand after Camm, because he was afraid that by then Boney would have nothing to lose and might change his story on the witness stand.

So Henderson did what seemed insane: He accepted simultaneous trials.

From the beginning, Camm’s attorneys felt Boney’s involvement was undersold.

“I really think we were hampered in our ability to present a defense by the trial court excluding evidence regarding Boney and his involvement,” Liell said. “These jurors never got a complete picture of who Boney was and why he killed the Camm family.”

In fact, the Camm case jurors got to hear nothing at all about the Boney trial — they knew only that it was happening simultaneously. Instead, the majority of their time was focused on expert witnesses: blood-splatter experts, gunshot-residue experts and expert doctors who testified to the condition of Jill’s body during autopsy (more on that in a moment). And while such technical evidence didn’t make things easier for the prosecution, it all looked much easier than explaining why 11 people would testify that David Camm was playing basketball with them at the time of the murders.

“So there’s no question: the Camm case was a very difficult case,” Johnson said. “And I don’t think anyone could have tried it better than Keith Henderson did.”

For more than a year, Henderson and his office — including Deputy Prosecutor Steve Owen, who handled the Camm trial while Henderson was arguing at Boney’s trial — prepped for the trial. As Johnson noted, this wasn’t the kind of case that could be simply thrown together, and trying both suspects at once made it even harder. They had to find experts, learn their thoughts on the blood splatter, gunshot residue and other technical matters. They had to att/files/storyimages/depositions for both sides’ witnesses, and figure out how to def/files/storyimages/their experts.

All of that before the first gavel fell. “It’s just a massive undertaking,” Johnson said. The prosecution team spent several weeks dealing exclusively with the blood-
splatter issues.

Yet after all that, most who watched the trials described Henderson as surprisingly calm as things got under way. Whatever stress was under the surface didn’t show up in the courtroom; in fact, many of the reporters watching the trial for the Louisville and Evansville (which neighbors Boonville) media joked that he was too relaxed — and even a little boring.

According to his wife, though, the lack of apparent stress was typical. “He really always stays pretty level and cool; he handles stress very well,” Amy Hallal Henderson said. “Just recently, since the trial was over, he finally was able to acknowledge to me, ‘That’s the kind of stress that could kill somebody.’ . . . During the trial, though, he just took it in stride.”

And fortunately — despite the media jokes — Henderson didn’t bore the jury.

“I just think he was being very careful about how he came across to the jury,” said jury foreman Robert Crowell. “He didn’t want to come across as overly emotional; he wasn’t trying to create any smoke, which I think is just the opposite of what (Katharine) Liell did. And while she was certainly more interesting to watch, I don’t think it was particularly helpful for her.

“This wasn’t really meant to be something that’s entertaining for the jury. We had a serious issue to decide, and so we didn’t really consider (Henderson’s entertainment value).”

The prosecutor said he intentionally tried to pick an “exceptionally intelligent” jury — one that could not only stay awake, but also keep up with the technical evidence, and not be swayed by “theatrics.”

Just in case the weeks of blood-splatter talk lost any of them, though, he saved what the defense called an unfair “bomb” for the /files/storyimages/of his argument. That was when he brought up Jill Camm’s body, and the evidence that she had been sexually abused the day of the murders. Crowell said that (along with blood splatter) weighed heavily on the jury’s decision; for that reason, Liell believes it was highly unfair to her client.

“That argument is so inflammatory that, as a matter of human nature, it switched the burden of proof to us,” Liell said. “All of the sudden, the jury needs us to explain why he didn’t (molest Jill). And you can’t prove a negative.

“So it was incredibly unfair that the prosecutors were allowed to speculate at this as a motive, and had several detectives speculate as to the motive, and then, in closing arguments, (Henderson) speculated that (Camm) had molested his daughter. There was no evidence of that . . . yet there was clear and unequivocal evidence that we weren’t allowed to use that Boney’s sexual obsession with regard to women — which had always motivated his prior crimes — was alive and well on Sept. 28, 2000. Not being able to discuss that was like being in a boxing ring with one hand tied behind your back.”

It will be one of several grounds on which the defense will appeal, Liell said.

The molestation move may or may not have led to Camm’s conviction — after the trial, jurors told Henderson they’d spent a day and a half of deliberations simply discussing blood splatter, which suggests that they weren’t swayed only by the trial’s “big” moments. Whatever evidence made it happen, Camm — like Boney before him — was convicted. And now, after six years, two trials, and countless hours of work, the Floyd County prosecutor’s office finally has put the murders of Kim, Bradley and Jill Camm to rest — though it may resurface in appeals.

“The guilty verdict was a dramatic moment,” Henderson said. “We had put so much into it, and we had run so hard for so long. . . . I heard guilty, and it was quite a weight off my shoulders, and I immediately turned my attention to the victims’ family behind me, and I felt the same for them — that it was quite a weight off their shoulders.”

By now, both Henderson’s supporters and his detractors have suggested that this success could lead him to higher political office (though the two groups’ tones differ greatly when discussing the issue). And, while Johnson said he believes Henderson would be “excellent” should he choose to run for higher office, the prosecutor said he really hasn’t given the idea serious thought.

In fact, most of his attention now is focused on taking a break. Two days after Judge Robert Aylsworth sentenced David Camm to life in prison, Keith Henderson and his family left for a week’s vacation. Just before leaving, the prosecutor noted how excited he was to go somewhere with no work to be done; in fact, he had even refused to work on planning the trip, simply telling his family he would drive wherever they decided to go.

But the rest may be short-lived. Upon his return, Henderson will face an appeal in the Camm trial as well as all the work of the Floyd County prosecutor, plus the work of running for the one political office he has considered: Henderson already has filed to run in this November’s election for a second four-year term in the
prosecutor’s office.

Whether there is another office after that is a decision for 2010 — after the next term is up, Henderson said. But whatever he decides, Henderson already has gained plenty of attention for yet again bucking big odds.     

“I think, certainly in our organization, Keith has always been viewed as a rising star,” Johnson said. “He’s certainly there now.”