Before He Wakes (52 page)

“I want to add,” said Cindy, “that an opportunity was not given to my brother to live a minute past February first, 1988, but a great opportunity has been given to allow Barbara to continue living. How can justice be served?”

Then she put her arm around her mother and started to lead her away. “I’m sorry,” she told the reporters, “she’s already gone through enough pain.” Rick Buchanan hurried to take Doris’s arm and escort her through a side door to drive her home.

While the reporters had been gathered around Doris, the Terrys and their friends had hurried from the courtroom. As Doris and Henry Ford were leaving behind them, a reporter stopped them.

“In a sense, I am disappointed, but I still know God makes no mistakes,” Doris said. “Maybe in time we’ll understand.”

To a friend she said, “How can I be so sad when God knows why He’s allowed this? I’m not going to be bitter and sad.”

Soon the courtroom was empty except for a small group of reporters comparing notes. Suddenly, a rear door burst open and a jubilant Arthur Vann came striding back into the courtroom as if he had forgotten something.

“I want you to put this in the paper,” he told the reporters. “Mr. Vann said, quote, ‘This is a righteous verdict.’ ”

“Is that the King’s English, Mr. Vann?” one reporter asked.

“That’s the King’s English.”

Epilogue

On the day that Barbara’s lawyers had begun presenting her case during the resentencing hearing, Doris and Henry Ford had returned to the courtroom early after lunch, and there, sitting all alone, was Bryan, their first grandson, who had been gone from them for more than fifteen years now. He was just five years younger than his father had been when he was killed, and he was the very picture of Larry. He was so much of their blood, yet so alien to them; so physically close, yet so far away. He looked so forlorn and lonely that they both burst into tears.

“It hurts,” Henry said. “It hurts.”

The Fords knew that Barbara had poisoned Bryan and Jason against them, but for years they had held out hope that their grandsons might want to find out the truth for themselves someday. They were convinced that Barbara held her sons in a psychological bond as tightly as her own mother had held her, yet they had no idea how to break through that. Bryan in particular had to have questions about all that had happened, they thought, and they hoped that someday he might find the strength to raise them and confront the truth at last. Only by doing that, they were convinced, could he and Jason ever break the bonds of the lies that skewed their visions of life. Only by doing that could they face the future with any realistic hope. Only by doing that could they restore their heritage and accept the love that their grandparents ached to give them.

On the following day, the Fords arrived at the courthouse and saw Bryan sitting on a bench in the hallway amid a group of Barbara’s family and friends, all soon to be witnesses in her behalf. Doris couldn’t resist her instincts. She walked straight up to her grandson and hugged him, feeling the rigidness of the tension in his body. “Bryan,” she said, “we love you.”

He continued to sit stiffly erect, saying nothing, and did not return her embrace. “But he didn’t push me away,” Doris said later, clinging to any sign of hope.

Barbara avoided looking at the Fords during her hearing, but they had no problem facing her. They had forgiven her, but they doubted that she ever could forgive herself. That, they knew, would require her to acknowledge that she was indeed a murderer twice over. That would cost her the faith of her sons and make them her victims, too. It might also cost her all else that she had left: the undying loyalty of the family and friends who trusted so fervently in her innocence and avowed Christianity. Yet failing to face her sins, the Fords believed, would be at the price of her soul.

“You cannot serve two masters,” Doris said.

The Fords did not doubt the good in Barbara. They had become convinced that there were two Barbaras, one good, the other bad, and the good Barbara simply could not acknowledge the other. They thought that her mother was at the root of her problems, but whatever their source, the problems and their mysteries clearly were tightly entwined with religion. Every time the bad Barbara did something wrong, the good Barbara always sought sanctuary in church, the Bible and prayer. Deep within her subconscious, the Fords thought, the good side of Barbara wanted the bad side to pay for what she had done. Her guilt over Larry’s murder had pushed her to kill Russ in the same way, leaving a trail of evidence that was almost certain to assure that she would be caught and punished. Once the bad Barbara had been exposed, though, she had been banished, and only the good Barbara remained, steadfastly proclaiming her innocence.

“To this day I think of her as the little girl that something terrible made her into what she is,” Doris Ford had said not long before Barbara’s new sentencing hearing. “I don’t hate her. I feel a deep sorrow. How can you hate somebody who’s got one foot in hell itself?”

Doris Stager did not see Barbara in such complex terms. To her, Barbara was simply evil. She had chosen wickedness and become a consummate actress and pathological liar to cloak herself in piety so that she could disguise that she truly was an agent of Satan.

“Satan is the ruler of this world, and God has given him that power until Christ comes again,” she said. “He tries to get everybody in his group and those he can he does and those he can’t he keeps on trying. Satan has power, power, power on this earth.”

Only by facing the murders, admitting her sins and truly accepting Christ did Barbara have any hope for salvation, Doris believed, and, like the Fords, she thought that never would happen.

After the sentencing hearing, Doris fell into another deep depression over the realization that in a relatively few years Barbara would be free again, perhaps to find another unwitting husband, some other mother’s son.

Although she had filled her house with photos of happy family times (Barbara’s image had been carefully snipped from every picture in which she had appeared), her home was not happy any longer, and at times it seemed as dark and icy as a tomb. A month after the resentencing hearing, Doris put the house up for sale. She planned to move to Tennessee to be near her daughter.

One night soon after fall had arrived, she sat at her kitchen table talking about the terrible and lasting impact Barbara had had on the lives of so many people who had been close to her.

“Can you ever forgive her?” she was asked.

Doris paused, deep in thought, and remained silent. The silence stretched on and on, as she stared back in time and into herself. Finally she spoke in a soft voice.

“God really is the only one who can forgive,” she said.

Gallery

The house on Fox Drive was Barbara Stager’s dream, but Russ Stager had second thoughts when the time came to close the deal. (
Jerry Bledsoe
)

Russ and Barbara Stager’s marriage was undergoing great stress when this family portrait was taken in 1984. Russ had adopted Barbara’s sons, Bryan, who was 16 at the time, and Jason, who was 10, and he held the marriage together because of them. (
Olan Mills Studio
)

LEFT: As a high school senior, Barbara was looking forward to going to college and becoming a teacher. (
Courtesy Northern High School annual
) RIGHT: Barbara dropped out of college at the end of her freshman year after becoming pregnant with her first child. She and Larry took snapshots of each other holding Bryan soon after his birth.

Barbara had taken on a far more matronly look for her trial in 1988, during which she frequently broke into tears. (
John Page, Greensboro
News & Record
)

Sergeant Rick Buchanan could not believe his good fortune when Barbara agreed to reenact Russ’s shooting on videotape. The tape proved to be vital evidence in her trial. (
Joseph Rodriguez, Greensboro News & Record
)

LEFT: The check at the top caught the attention of Russ’s former wife. Jo Lynn, and proved to be the clue that provided the motive for Russ’s murder. Russ wrote the check at bottom as his weekly tithe to his church on the day before his death. The other two checks were written by Barbara to clear his accounts upon his death. (
Joseph Rodriguez, Greensboro News & Record
) RIGHT: Barbara got a friend to help her buy the .25 caliber pistol at left. He showed her how to fire it just hours before Larry was killed. Russ bought the other .25 for Barbara’s protection. He had shown her how to use it only a few months before he died. (
Joseph Rodriguez, Greensboro News & Record
)