Roger Smith argued Barbara’s case to the state Supreme Court on May 6, 1991, nearly two years after her trial. As expected, he emphasized the evidence of Larry’s death, arguing that it never should have been allowed. When it came to the similarities between the deaths of Russ and Larry, Smith pointed out that similarities weren’t always relevant.
As an example, he cited a famous list of incidental similarities between the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. But three justices interrupted to point out that nobody had tried to claim that those killings were accidents.
Wasn’t it relevant, asked Justice Burley Mitchell, that a person charged with murder in a death that she claims to be an accident is discovered to have had a similar incident in the past? “After a while,” noted the justice, “you begin to smell a rat.”
The reaction of the justices to Smith’s arguments heartened District Attorney Ron Stephens, who thought that the court was leaning toward upholding Barbara’s conviction. He had far less hope, however, that her death sentence would stand.
More than a year earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued an order that voided an instruction routinely given to jurors in capital cases in North Carolina. Previously, jurors had been told that they had to agree unanimously on mitigating factors. Not so, said the court, and the ruling was expected to affect at least seventy of the state’s eighty-five death row prisoners, including Barbara. All likely would get new sentencing hearings as their individual cases came before the state’s Supreme Court.
On August 14, that court ruled just as Stephens had expected. The justices clearly believed that Barbara was a murderer, and her conviction was upheld. But she was granted a new sentencing hearing because of the judge’s instruction on mitigating factors.
Stephens was pleased. “A major concern to us obviously was to convict Barbara Stager of first-degree murder,” he told a reporter. “We are happy and excited that the Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Now we’ll just have to prepare for resentencing.”
“If you had a son who was shot and killed in his sleep, how would you feel?” Doris Stager said to a reporter who called to ask for her reaction. “I’ve turned the whole thing over to God and ask that His will be done. That’s what I have to depend on.”
Barbara had been so confident that she would be granted a new trial that she lapsed into depression upon hearing the news and was unable to sleep. A psychiatrist consulted with her six days after the ruling and prescribed an antidepressant, doxepin, to help her sleep, but Barbara had a bad reaction to the drug. When Benadryl was prescribed, she began sleeping again and soon was responding once more to the encouragement of family and friends, who, while disappointed that her conviction had been upheld, were heartened that at least she had been granted another chance to save her life.
To lead that fight, her family turned to another lawyer. At one time Arthur Vann had been Durham’s best-known criminal lawyer. “If you’re guilty,” it was said in Durham, “get Art Vann.” Other criminal lawyers in Durham still considered Vann to be “a true warrior,” as one of them put it, but he was past seventy now, and many thought that he was well past his prime. But Edward Falcone, the quiet young lawyer who had handled the sentencing phase of Barbara’s trial, was an associate of Vann’s, and he was well versed in Barbara’s case. They would handle the resentencing hearing together.
The hearing would in essence be a second trial. New jurors would have to be chosen. All the evidence would have to be presented. The primary difference would be that the jurors would be deciding only whether Barbara should live or die.
As Cotter had done before him, Vann began filing motions to get the sentencing hearing moved, to keep the jurors from being told about Larry’s death or hearing the tape of Russ’s voice. He succeeded only in getting the hearing moved, this time to Pittsboro in rural Chatham County. But Chatham adjoined populous Orange County, and Pittsboro was only fifteen miles from Chapel Hill, the home of the University of North Carolina and the state’s seat of liberalism. For years Chapel Hill had been spilling over into Chatham County, and Barbara’s chances of finding a juror there who would not go along with the death penalty were far better than they had been in Lee County.
With the hearing set to begin on August 16, 1993, Vann took a step that Cotter had not. He hired a psychologist to prepare a psychological evaluation of Barbara. Dr. William Scarborough of Durham met with Barbara early in May. He administered two exams, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory—2 and the Rorschach Ink Blot Test. He conducted a long interview with Barbara and a telephone interview with her parents.
Both Barbara and her parents portrayed her childhood as normal, without “significant psychological or physical trauma,” as Scarborough later would write. Barbara denied any physical, emotional or sexual abuse in her youth. Indeed, the only problem she could claim was that she was “overprotected.”
The tests showed that Barbara had no major personality disorder, that she functioned much like other people. At the same time, she was socially isolated, immature, excessively introspective and prone to focus on her negative features. She did not have strong needs for emotional closeness, which she probably viewed as “threatening and dangerous,” and her relationships were apt to be superficial because she had “little real interest in others.”
“She may attempt to escape into unrealistic views of herself as a means of avoiding what she perceives to be unresolvable stresses,” Dr. Scarborough wrote. “There is a conflict between the person that she projects herself to be around others and the person that she truly sees herself as. When this public self is challenged, she may experience significant distress resulting in loss of thinking ability.”
Scarborough’s findings had similarities with a pop psychology test Barbara had administered to herself just seven months prior to Russ’s death from a book titled
Please Understand Me: Character & Temperament Types
by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, which had been found during the raid on her house.
In the answers she had given, Barbara had revealed herself to be, in her judgment, realistic, careful, punctual, practical, orderly, structured, objective, serious and determined, a person who favored the routine over the whimsical.
It bothered her to have things incomplete. She wanted matters to be settled and decided, and she was always more comfortable after a decision had been made than before. She thought herself to be more hardheaded than softhearted, more reserved than approachable. The option to buy gave her more pleasure than having bought. She was more comfortable making logical judgments than value judgments. She would wish for herself clarity of reason over strength of compassion. And she was swayed more by circumstances than by laws.
The test results had revealed Barbara to have a primary drive to serve, a need to be needed. She did things the established way and became annoyed with those who did not. She was neat and meticulous and often turned her irritation inward, creating tension and fatigue.
During her interview with Dr. Scarborough, Barbara revealed that after she married Russ she was always striving for his love and attention. She and Russ had tried to present “a certain image,” she said, and she was always buying things for him and letting him spend money the way he wanted because she was “afraid he wouldn’t love her” if she didn’t.
Russ didn’t like the way she dressed, she said, and would buy her clothes trying to get her to dress differently, making her feel that she “wasn’t pretty enough, good enough for him.” She didn’t tell him about these feelings, she said, because she “was always afraid that he would leave.”
“I was insecure a lot,” she added.
When Scarborough brought up Russ’s death, Barbara became tearful. She had been doing a lot of thinking about that, she said, but she couldn’t tell him exactly what had happened that morning.
“It was not planned,” she said, “not an intentional act.”
She was not aware of doing anything to make the gun go off, she said, yet she acknowledged that “I was aware of what I was doing at some level.”
She had been wondering lately, she said, if she had acted subconsciously. “Did I know what I was doing, yet would not admit it to myself?” she asked, adding, “I would not consciously do something like that.” She loved Russ, she said, crying, missed him and wished it never had happened.
“Maybe I’m better off now,” she said, recovering her composure. “There’s no pressure to be someone that I am not.”
Scarborough thought that Barbara was genuinely remorseful about Russ’s death. She was, he concluded, “a hard-working, church-attending, caring mother whose purpose in life was to please her parents, family, husband and children. Her efforts apparently were based on a very deep need for acceptance and approval.”
Although Barbara was very good at maintaining the appearance of a well-adjusted person, she was filled with serious self-doubts and fears of rejection and abandonment, Scarborough decided, although he was unable to pinpoint the causes of such powerful insecurities.
“The struggle between the two views of herself may have been sufficiently powerful that her psychological defenses against her impulses may have been overwhelmed, leading her to bring about the death of her husband,” he wrote in his report. “She cannot allow herself to think that she could have committed such an act. It follows that she may not have consciously planned to kill her husband but did so unconsciously out of a reaction to the stress placed on her by maintaining a facade of respectability and prosperity.”
So it was the struggle to be middle-class and the strain of living up to an image Russ supposedly had imposed on her that had turned Barbara into an unwitting killer. The implication, in essence, was that Barbara was the true victim, and Russ, with his expectations, had brought about his own death. The question was whether a jury, more apt than not to be middle-class and to understand the stress that being middle-class brings, would accept that reasoning and spare her life.
38
The scene of Barbara’s resentencing hearing was in opulent contrast to the stark courtroom in which she had been convicted four years and three months earlier.
The two-story red brick Chatham County Courthouse occupied the center of the small town of Pittsboro, set on a tiny circular grass island that straddled the intersection of two busy U.S. highways, 64 and 15–501. Built in 1882, the courthouse had been recently renovated and was now a national historic site. Its copper-sheathed, cupola-topped roof gleamed in the sunlight. At its main entrance, facing north, a bronze Confederate soldier stood silent sentry against the possible advance of any hostile hordes from Chapel Hill.
The courtroom had an air of majesty about it. Nine huge gold-rimmed, bowl-shaped white glass chandeliers hung by gold chains from the twenty-foot ceiling. On the sides facing north and south, twelve-foot windows with white shutters lined plastered walls painted the blue of a robin’s egg. The polished mahogany pews were padded and upholstered to match the plush, patterned aqua carpet. On the wall behind the bench, which was paneled in thick, lustrous mahogany, was a huge portrait of the man for whom both county and town had been named, William Pitt, the first Earl of Chatham, resplendent in silk, lace and powdered wig.
As the final week of August 1993 began, a bespectacled, soft-spoken, genteel man of fifty-two, Judge Craig Ellis of Laurinburg in Scotland County, occupied the imposing bench beneath the portrait. A self-professed “country lawyer,” Ellis was a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina School of Law. He had served as a district court judge before being elected to the superior court bench nearly ten years earlier.
Barbara entered the courtroom that morning smiling broadly at the circle of family and friends who had come to support her. She wore the same hairstyle and the same big glasses that she had worn at her trial, and she appeared little changed by her years in prison. She sat now at the defense table beside Edward Falcone, the quiet, studious, pinstripe-suited young lawyer who had led the fight for her life at her trial. In this encounter Falcone would defer to his far more outgoing and flamboyant law partner, Art Vann.
At seventy-one, Vann was lean and tanned with a full shock of white hair. A native of Sampson County in eastern North Carolina, he had practiced in Durham since 1951, and he claimed to have tried more than two hundred murder cases. He still wore seersucker suits and white straw hats on blistering summer days, and he had the affected courtliness of an Old South lawyer. But while he could be solicitous and appealing one moment, he could be irritable and snappish the next, and he would offend as many jurors as he charmed before this hearing was over.
At the prosecutors’ table sat Ron Stephens, still the district attorney of Durham County, the new judgeship he had hoped to win having failed to materialize. Beside him was William Farrell, a native of Pittsboro, the head of the criminal division of the State Attorney General’s Office. Farrell had argued the state’s case against Barbara before the Supreme Court and was well acquainted with all of its intricacies. Sitting inside the bar, directly behind the prosecutors was Rick Buchanan, no longer a detective. A new sheriff had been appointed in Durham County, and only a few weeks earlier he had dismissed Buchanan and several other officers in a political move. Buchanan, who was planning to run for sheriff himself, was now in private security work, but he had taken off to see his biggest case to its conclusion.