Desperate Sisters + Helpful Parents = Dead Husbands

Desperate Sisters + Helpful Parents = Dead Husbands

When all seems wonderful and you feel relaxed enough to take a deep breath – along comes the scandalous and shameful.  Here is the freakish case of two men gunned down by a hitman, who had been hired by their very own wives.

Debra Sims was 19 years old when she married 31-year-old Joe Banister, becoming Banister’s third wife.  Debra was a loan officer at Sun Bank, and Joe, an air force veteran, worked at Western Electric. They appeared to have a charmingly romantic marriage and had two loving children.

How tragic it must have been for Debra when Joe died in a car crash in Bradford County on Feb. 2, 1985. His car, however on suffered superficial damage and urged the Sheriff to have an autopsy performed. How horror must have struck her when the autopsy found Joe had been killed by two gunshots.

Marlene Sims was 15 years old when she married 21-year-old Cecil Batie, and lived in Alachua County.  Although they had two sons, they divorced 5 years later.

Poor Batie was shot while asleep on his couch, through his front window.  What a bizarre and sorrowful case – two sisters having their husbands gunned down.  The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office thought it strange as well.

“Here we had two sisters who within a period of weeks had their husbands murdered, and that’s enough of a coincidence that we immediately started to look at it as a single person being involved,” former Alachua County Sheriff’s Detective Farnell Cole described to Oxygen, an online lifestyle magazine.

Investigating officers found their ‘coincidence’ after being told that Debra had surprised attendees of Banister’s funeral. She was escorted by her long-lost cousin, John Wayne Hearn, who no one had heard of before.

Hearn, who was a Vietnam veteran, was under investigation by the Georgia Department of Investigation for placing a ‘gun for hire’ advertisements in the Soldier of Fortune magazine. One of his advertisements, as described in a 1992 Chicago Tribune article, reads, “Ex-marine, ’67 – ’69 Nam vet. Ex-DI weapons specialist-jungle warfare. High-risk assignments U.S. or overseas.”

Debra found Hearn in her search for a hit-man, and started a romance at the same time. After setting a price of $30,000, Debra talked Hearn into accepting $10,000 for killing Cecil Batie. Cecil was in a custody battle with Marlene, and she didn’t want to lose.

Debra and Marlene made the money by burning down their grandmother’s house in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida and scamming insurance.  Their parents, Frank and Iris Sims, were part of the crime. Soon after, Debra persuaded Hearn to murder Joe. Being the beneficiary of Joe’s insurance policy, Debra wanted to build her and Hearn’s dream house. They quaintly put the money in a joint checking account.

After being arrested, found guilty of the killings, and sentenced to life in prison, Hearn avoided execution by testifying of the parts others played in these events. 

Due to Hearn’s testimony Debra was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 17 years in prison. Being charged for first-degree murder, Debra pled no contest and was given an additional 30 years.

Having pled no contest to first-degree murder and arson, Marlene was sentenced to five and a half years in prison. Also pleading no contest, Frank and Iris Sims, the helpful parent, were sentenced to 5 years probation.

In 2004, Debra was released have served only nine years.  John Wayne Hearn remains behind bars at South Carolina’s Perry Correctional Institution.

1 thought on “Desperate Sisters + Helpful Parents = Dead Husbands

Comments are closed.