One
SEPARATED BY MURDER
One brother was a saint but his identical twin was a sinner. Yet Greg and Jeff Henry were inseparable—locked together in a sadomasochistic relationship that would end in a grisly death.
It is a twisted tale of a strange, dysfunctional Southern family that could have come straight out of the pages of an Erskine Caldwell novel.
Throughout their lives Greg delighted in intimidating and terrorizing his meeker brother, ordering him to fetch beer after beer and then clean up. To reinforce his dominance, Greg often fired his .22 caliber rifle at Jeff to scare him, spraying their apartment walls with bullet holes.
The Henry brothers lived and worked together in a strange master—slave relationship for nearly thirty-seven years, until they were ripped apart by a single shotgun blast at their home in rural Georgia.
Killed instantly was Greg, the brutal power monger, who finally pushed things too far one night after a marathon drinking session, when he threatened Jeff with a shotgun. For once the docile brother turned, savagely killing his twin before giving himself up to the police and being charged with murder.
Even as babies, Greg and Jeff Henry faced an uphill battle for survival in a world they could never quite come to terms with. They were born on January 23, 1955, in Dublin, Georgia, during a freak snowstorm. It became a family joke that the real reason the town’s antiquated switchboard broke down from too many calls wasn’t the snow, but the arrival of the Henry twins.
Their father, Dick Henry, was a successful executive, managing a local chemical plant, and their mother, Sue, once the most beautiful girl in Dublin, had won many local beauty contests in her youth.
Dick and Sue, who already had two boys, were overjoyed when the twins were born after a difficult Cesarean section. But within a few months Greg became sick and almost died. He was diagnosed with a brain disorder and had to have his spine tapped to save his life.
As infants, the Henry twins captured the imagination of the town. Sue, then thirty-six, would proudly push them through the streets to church every Sunday in their double stroller. And they caused quite a stir at Dick’s country club, where they would play with their two older brothers, Chris and Mike.
From the very beginning they were known as “the twins” and never referred to by their names. Even their mother couldn’t tell them apart and would ask them to raise their shirts to identify them, as one had an inner bellybutton and the other, an outer.
Sue Henry dressed them alike in fabulous no-expense-spared outfits and the twins became her pride and joy. She spoiled them rotten. As infants Jeff and Greg were inseparable and even sucked each other’s thumbs. They played together and slept together and seemed like a single person inhabiting two identical bodies.
“If you had one, you had them both,” declared their mother. “I don’t remember them being any different.”
Even before they could talk English they had instinctively developed their own language, which no one else could understand. They would happily jabber away for hours, using strange words like “Jogabawamama” and “Debogdoogwotama.”
But the Henrys’ perfect world fell apart when, in April 1958, Dick was diagnosed with brain cancer and died a year later. While he was on his deathbed, Sue brought Greg and Jeff into the hospital to say their final good-byes.
“Aren’t they adorable?” said their dying father as he kissed them for the last time.
So at the age of forty, Sue—or Ma, as the twins called her—found herself a widow with just a small trust fund to support the twins and their two brothers.
“I’m a survivor,” says the tough Southern belle, who became a secretary to make ends meet. “You do what you have to do to get by.”
There seemed to be an almost supernatural, psychic bond between Jeff and Greg as they grew up. At the age of five Greg disappeared and couldn’t be found anywhere. When Jeff was asked where his brother was hiding he immediately walked off and found him a mile away from their home. Somehow he was just drawn toward him.
Together the twins created their own world of fantasy and didn’t seem to need anyone else. But from their earliest days Greg appeared to dominate Jeff, assuming the role of leader in all their games. By the time they started at a private pre-school and kindergarten, Jeff cheerfully took a back seat to his more extroverted brother, who always got better grades and made more friends. And wherever Greg led, Jeff followed.
From a young age the twins discovered a fascination for electrical appliances. When they were seven they surprised their mother by completely rewiring their bedroom, connecting every appliance to a single master switch so they could turn on everything at once.
It inspired them to want to become inventors when they grew up and they started reading everything they could about technology.
In 1962, Ma Henry remarried a local man named Jack Wright. The seven-year-old twins hated their new stepfather, a strict disciplinarian who tried to rein them in. Jeff and Greg considered him physically abusive and would avoid him at all costs.
At home there were frequent arguments and fights between their mother and new stepfather, who did not get along. Ma Henry turned to drink to overcome her problems, finally divorcing Wright in 1973.
Painfully shy and far slower than his smarter brother, Jeff struggled through Henderson High School as a “C”- and “D”-grade student. The introverted Jeff was physically frail and far weaker than Greg, and developed an inferiority complex after failing to have his brother’s success with the girls.
Jeff could barely read or write, but he found that he had a talent for fixing radios and stereos, spending hours happily tinkering away with the electronic devices. The tall, skinny teenager, who sported long, blond hair, dreamed of inventing revolutionary machines that would change the world, like the ones he read about in science fiction comics.
Though they looked alike, the twins were as different as chalk and cheese. Unlike his nervous brother, Greg was a fearless daredevil. He loved racing his bicycle up and down the hallway of his high school, showing off to the other kids with his patented wheelies.
During their late teens the twins fought over everything and had an increasingly troubled relationship. Greg seemed to enjoy humiliating his shy brother in public, ridiculing his whimsical ideas. But if Jeff ever dared to stand up for himself and criticize Greg, it always ended in a fight.
“They were going through that rebellion thing,” their mother would later explain.
The Henry family was torn apart when the twins’ eldest brother Richard was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized in the late 1960s. It had a profound effect on Jeff who began to fear insanity might run in the family.
At the age of eighteen the twins graduated high school, finding jobs in the mailroom of a local company. Now that they were financially sufficient they left home to get an apartment together.
Both standing six foot two inches and weighing just one hundred and sixty pounds, the wavy-haired, pencil-thin Henry twins were an imposing sight. Their fellow workers found it almost impossible to tell them apart, before getting to know them. Then it was easy to pick out Greg by his loud bullying ways as opposed to his quieter, more easy-going twin brother.
“We used to kid him and call him a little wimp,” said Ma. “He was so passive.”
Two years after leaving high school, the twins were briefly separated for the only time in their life when Greg married his girlfriend, Julie. Jeff, who had never had a girlfriend of his own, couldn’t bear to be apart from Greg and moved into the basement of the house the couple bought. But the marriage was short-lived and Jeff was overjoyed when Julie left and the twins were reunited.
Taking a large apartment on Seville Drive in Clarkston, Georgia, Jeff and Greg decided to become rock stars. Greg bought a set of drums and Jeff tried to teach himself bass. They recruited a couple of friends to join their band, rehearsing late into the night in the basement of their new apartment.
During band practices Jeff and Greg would down cases of Budweiser beer until they could hardly stand up. And the more beer Greg drank, the meaner he became to Jeff.
Friend and fellow band member and Jason Hill remembers Greg Henry constantly picking fights with his weaker twin brother.
“When they weren’t drinking they were pretty much normal,” said Hill. “But when they started drinking—I don’t mean a twelve-pack of beer but two or three cases—Greg turned into a different person.”
The brothers were so proud of their drinking that they would save each empty beer case to stack up against the wall as trophies. And they delighted in proudly showing off their collection of empty beer “suitcases” that soon reached to the ceiling.
Fueled by beer, Greg would pound his drums late into the night, refusing to allow the other band members to go home. On one occasion when Hill insisted on leaving at 2 a.m. so he could go to work the following morning, Greg flew into a rage, kicking his drum set across the floor.
“As we left you could hear Greg screaming at Jeff to carry on playing,” remembered Hill. “You would have to drag him off those drums to stop him.”
Greg...
