Cruel Doubt (16 page)

Once there, they only stayed an hour. Chris drove Eric down Lawson Road and pointed out his old house, but did not stop. Eric started to ask a question about some detail of the crime, but Chris quickly cut him off, saying he did not want to talk about it. Period.

They stopped at NC State on the way back, so Chris could pick up a transcript that he needed to send to Appalachian, where he was applying for fall admission. He took Eric to Wildflour Pizza, where he drank seven beers in an hour and a half, looking around nervously all the while, as if worried that someone he might not want to see would walk in. Then he jumped in the car—none too sober—and sped all the way back to Winston-Salem.

Three days later, with the first scent of spring already spicing the Carolina air, Chris drove out to Appalachian. He and Eric and John Hubard rented rooms at the Econolodge Motel in Boone. Chris's new girlfriend and two other girls came. There was an indoor pool. They thought they'd do a little swimming, have a few drinks, enjoy a Saturday night. But the event turned sour fast. His girlfriend drank too much and Chris drank more. They had sharp and bitter—if not terribly coherent—words. She retreated to a bathroom to cry. Enraged, Chris jumped into his car and drove off.

This always seemed his first reaction when confronted with an emotionally stressful situation: to get into his car and drive away as fast as he could, never telling anyone where he was going, probably not knowing himself, and not returning until his anger had subsided. People had been telling him for months that one night he'd get himself killed doing that. Sometimes, it almost seemed that's what he wanted.

* * *

During the second week of March, John Taylor compiled a list of all NC State students who had been mentioned in any report as having been friends of Chris Pritchard's. Then—amazed to find that no one had done so before—he ran the names through a statewide computer to see if any had criminal records.

One did. James Upchurch. He was the tall, thin young man, nicknamed Moog, with whom Pritchard had traveled to South Carolina over the July 4 weekend on which his mother had reported him missing.

While in high school, in Caswell County, in the extremely rural north central part of the state—the biggest town in the whole county was Yanceyville, which had a population of only 1,800—Upchurch had twice been arrested for breaking and entering.

Taylor called Caswell County. A local investigator described Upchurch as “a smart kid” from a broken home, whose father worked for the state department of social services in Raleigh and whose uncle had once been arrested for growing a large crop of marijuana on his farm. He said Upchurch had broken into the local high school and had stolen a computer. Later, he'd broken into a private home and had stolen, among other things, a hunting knife.

Not a bad start, John Taylor told himself. Out of the entire universe of Chris Pritchard's friends, he'd already succeeded in isolating one who had both family drug connections and a record of breaking and entering. And this same friend was the one with whom Pritchard had mysteriously disappeared for two days only three weeks before Lieth had been murdered.

Upchurch had been placed on probation for the breaking and entering offenses, but his Raleigh probation officer told Taylor he had disappeared several weeks earlier and there were three warrants outstanding for his arrest. The offenses included drunk driving with insurance revoked and failure to appear in court for probation revocation. The last time she'd seen him, the officer said, he'd had both sides of his head shaved, leaving only a strip of bleached-blond hair down the middle.

“Well,” Taylor said, “at least if he shows up in Washington, he shouldn't be too hard to spot.”

* * *

On March 13, Crone met with Taylor and established three priorities:

—to obtain a sample of Chris Pritchard's handwriting

—to find James Upchurch

—to learn more about Dungeons & Dragons

From the little he'd heard and read about it, Chief Crone had the sense that the game could inspire unhealthy, even dangerous fantasies: the kind that could lead to violence. He knew it wasn't quite witchcraft or satanism or the occult, but he had the uneasy feeling that Dungeons & Dragons was not the sort of activity with which psychologically well-balanced college students would be obsessed.

What he wanted most, however, was a sample of Pritchard's printing. However unscientifically, he wanted to compare it with the LAWSON on the map.

Officials at NC State said they had a document on which Pritchard had printed LAWSON ROAD. But they said they could not release it without a subpoena.

On March 14, Mitchell Norton, the Beaufort County district attorney, issued the subpoena.

* * *

By March 15, Bonnie felt well enough—and desperate enough—to once again drive to Little Washington, this time to confront either Lewis Young or the new chief person to person, in order to ask one simple question: In the two months since she and her daughter had passed the polygraph, what had been done to find her husband's killer?

Young was out of town and the new chief was not immediately available, but she did succeed in speaking to John Taylor, who informed her that Chief Crone had recently placed him in charge of the investigation.

Bonnie was struck by Taylor's youth. How much confidence could she have in someone so inexperienced?

He shook her hand and told her, “I have only one assumption—that you didn't have anything to do with it. I don't have any other assumptions.”

She was not comforted by this remark. Of course,
she
didn't have anything to do with it. But who did? Hadn't they made
any
further progress?

“Mrs. Von Stein,” Taylor told her, “if we can't clear you and Angela and Chris, we don't feel comfortable going anywhere else.” He then reiterated that in his own mind
she
was cleared, but added that he couldn't yet say the same for her children.

Bonnie was openly displeased. This was exactly what she'd heard for months from Lewis Young, and she did not like having it repeated now by some young man who looked more like a
police cadet
, or a prospective boyfriend of Angela's, than a qualified homicide detective.

* * *

The next day, John Taylor made the first of what would be his many drives to Raleigh.

He handed his subpoena to the appropriate official at NC State and was given a small white card on which Chris Pritchard, in applying for on-campus housing, had printed the word LAWSON.

The young detective was tempted to jump into his car and race back to Little Washington as fast as he could, so he and his chief could sit down and compare the printing on the card with that on the map.

But he had other business on the sprawling, crowded campus. He interviewed the two girls, Karen Barbour and Kirsten Hewitt, in whose room Chris had been drinking beer and playing cards the night of the murder. They verified Chris's story, but added other details that Taylor found intriguing. They said Chris and his friends—including James Upchurch, known as Moog—were
heavily
into both drugs and Dungeons & Dragons. Moog, they said, was called the Dungeon Master. He would determine the scenario for a particular game, and the other players would follow his instructions. By rolling dice, he'd determine the outcome of violent confrontations.

At least once, the girls said, Chris and Moog and the others had acted out one of these pretend adventures by wrapping toilet paper around broomsticks and setting the paper on fire. On other occasions, they'd gone down into the steam tunnels.

Kirsten said she had an especially clear recollection of Chris's being in her room the night Lieth was killed because she'd kept asking him to leave. From one
A
.
M
. on, at least every half hour, she'd said to him and his friend Daniel Duyk, “I'm really tired. Could you guys please go somewhere else?” The unusual thing was that Chris, who was usually considerate in such matters, had refused, saying he wasn't ready to stop playing cards.

Over the next two and a half hours, with growing impatience, she'd pleaded with him to leave. Finally, he'd asked what time it was. When she said three-thirty, he'd left immediately. It seemed, she said, as if that particular time was what he'd been waiting for all along.

* * *

Taylor was back in Little Washington by five
P
.
M
. He went directly to the chief's office. He put the housing card on the chief's desk, next to a photograph he had taken of the map.

LAWSON LAWSON

Neither John Crone nor John Taylor was an expert in handwriting analysis. But in this instance, neither felt he had to be.

The words appeared to be a perfect match.

 

13

After seeing the two words side by side, Lewis Young decided a couple of the SBI's more aggressive investigators should have a talk with Bonnie and her children.

He called her on March 21 to say John Crone felt there had been some fresh developments. Young said he wasn't at liberty to discuss them, but he told her two new SBI agents would be coming to see her the next day. Their names were Newell and Sturgell, and they worked with a special division that handled only the most important cases around the state. He said one of them was tall and thin, the other short and round. Their nicknames were the Thin Man and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

They'd be wanting to talk not only to her, but to Angela and Chris. They wanted to see her at two
P
.
M
., Angela at four, and Chris as soon as he finished working at Triad Tires at eight that night.

Bonnie considered this good news. New people might mean new ideas, a new approach. Maybe, finally, some progress would be achieved. It did not occur to her that the meeting was something about which she needed to inform either Wade Smith or Bill Osteen.

With no lawyers present, Newell and Sturgell could play by any rules they chose. And the rules they chose—while not in any way beyond the bounds of what was permissible under law—were definitely those of what was, psychologically speaking, a contact sport.

Bonnie met them at Winston-Salem police headquarters. They questioned her for two hours. The early stages were not so bad. They asked her the same old questions, and she gave what were, by now, the same old answers. Such as, according to their notes, “Mrs. Von Stein stated that on Saturday night, Chris and Angela cooked hamburgers.”

But soon, Bonnie felt, they became rude, confrontational, and accusatory. It was as if she'd never taken and passed the polygraph. She couldn't believe this was happening all over again. They were harassing her, badgering her, as if trying to extort some sort of confession.
Eight months had passed since Lieth had been killed, and she was still being treated as a suspect
.

One of them, the Doughboy or the Thin Man—she never was able to keep them straight—placed some black-and-white photographs on a table and asked her if she could identify them. They were photos of the four pages from
A Rose in Winter
. Bonnie said she remembered it vaguely. The author was one of her favorites. She'd read this particular book a couple of years earlier and had later found it in Angela's room. Thinking, she said, that she might want to reread it, she'd placed it on a typewriter stand next to the bed in her bedroom.

But the book hadn't been found on the typewriter stand, she was told. The book had been found on the floor, with these pages missing. Only these pages, spattered with blood, had been found on the typewriter, next to the bed where Lieth had been stabbed.

So what? Bonnie said. They told her that they considered these pages potentially “significant” evidence. Then they told her to read the text. She did.

If someone hadn't just read those pages—containing a scene where a man is killed with a dagger—and torn them from the book and placed them next to the bed where Lieth was attacked, then why were they spattered with blood?

Bonnie calmly said she didn't know. She hadn't been reading the book. If she had been, it would have been among a stack of paperbacks on the floor next to her side of the bed, not on the typewriter stand. She had no idea why those particular pages had been torn from it, or when they'd been torn from it, or why they'd been found where they had been, or how they'd come to be spattered with blood.

It seemed perfectly plausible, she said, that the book, which had been lying atop the slippery vinyl cover of her typewriter—
and which had not been the book she'd been reading that night, or at any time in the recent past
—had been knocked off during the struggle, and the last four pages had fallen out as it hit the floor. It was only a paperback, it had been read maybe a dozen times by various members of her family—she and her sisters often exchanged favorite titles—and pages were always falling out of cheaply bound paperbacks, even when there wasn't a life-and-death struggle raging in the immediate vicinity.

It also seemed plausible that one of the first patrolmen or emergency medical technicians to reach the bedroom had spotted the blood on the pages and in order to protect them, had gathered them from the floor and stacked them on top of the typewriter. Or else, maybe her neighbors had done so, while they were destroying what was left of the crime scene that afternoon.

Though she later described her “mode of response” here as “pretty mild and unconcerned,” she told the Thin Man and the Doughboy that the fact that even months after the murder they were still trying to develop this sort of absurd scenario—something, she said, that seemed to have been lifted directly from the pages of
Fatal Vision
, where Jeffrey MacDonald had been accused of using
Esquire
magazine stories about witchcraft and the Manson family as inspiration for his fanciful tale of drug-crazed intruders in the night—convinced her that every previous assurance she'd been given had been a lie.

Lewis Young had promised that once she passed the polygraph, the investigation would move beyond her. Well, she'd passed with the highest score possible. Yet now, more than two months later, here were these two new detectives who seemed not only to be back to square one, but even worse: instead of investigating, they were concocting grotesque scenarios that belonged in the kind of escapist fiction they were now attempting to use as
evidence
.

The Doughboy and the Thin Man seemed unmoved. Not only, they said, did those pages suggest that just before her husband had been stabbed to death she'd been reading about a stabbing—in which a young man named
Christopher
had wielded a knife—but before
that
she'd sat up alone, watching a television movie about a serial killer.

They put the photos back in an envelope. Those pages had been removed from the book, they repeated. Those pages had been spattered with blood. Bonnie gazed at them, still in her “unconcerned” mode. They said all right, she could leave now. They were ready to talk to her daughter.

The truth was, neither Newell nor Sturgell considered Bonnie a likely suspect. The location and content of the pages might have been no more than a weird coincidence. But even if the pages had been placed at the bedside for some sort of ritualistic purpose, it seemed improbable that Bonnie would have done it herself, or even known about it.

Like the partly burned map found at the edge of the fire, the pages might have had some sort of mystical significance. But Newell and Sturgell had not been thinking along such tangled lines.

Their tactic had been straightforward. While presuming Bonnie herself to be innocent, they, like Taylor, Crone, and Lewis Young, had grave doubts about her son. They also thought it distinctly possible that Bonnie herself shared their doubts and—by not letting Chris take a polygraph test, for example—was trying to protect him from their scrutiny. The more they shook her, they thought, the quicker she might be to let go of Chris. This assumption, however, was based on a profound misreading of her character.

* * *

Bonnie left the office, went straight to a telephone, and called Wade Smith. She was as angry as she'd ever been. At first, she had thought the investigators were merely incompetent. But with each new insult to her and her family, she had begun to suspect them of something worse, and this had been the worst yet.

“I feel like they're trying to build a Jeffrey MacDonald case against me,” she told Wade.

He assured her that on the basis of everything she'd told him so far, as well as her impeccable polygraph result, she had nothing to worry about in that regard.

“But they're not following up on any of the things that they should be,” she said. And who were these new men, anyway? And why had the old chief of police resigned? What was going on in that little town she'd never liked? It seemed to her, Bonnie said, that
they
were trying to cover something up. She didn't know what, and she didn't know why, but she was not going to stand by and let it happen.

Wade, as usual, counseled patience and caution. He said he was sure that the interview had been a difficult and even degrading experience. He knew how those things could be. But it was over now, she'd answered all their questions, just as Angela was in the process of doing, and just as Chris would be doing that night.

He knew what a strain this was for her, but the hard truth was there really wasn't much she could do. She'd managed to hang on this long, she should just try to last a little longer—at least until they saw what happened next.

Bonnie said she could not wait. She would have to initiate some action of her own. She told Wade that she wanted him to find the best private detective in the state—for that matter, the best private detective in the country—and hire him to solve the case. She didn't care how much it would cost. There could be no better way to spend the money Lieth had left her, she said, than to finance the quest for his killer.

If the police were unable or unwilling to do it, well, then, Bonnie Lou Bates of Welcome, North Carolina, would just have to do it herself.

* * *

Angela's interview with Newell and Sturgell lasted only half an hour. Later, she told Bonnie that they'd asked the usual questions and she'd given the usual answers, which were that she'd slept through the whole thing, she knew nothing, and that her best guess was that someone from National Spinning had probably been responsible for the murder.

She said they'd also showed her the pictures. She'd told them she had no idea how the pages had come to be spattered with blood, or how they'd come to be torn from the book. She said she didn't even remember the book. There were a lot of books in the house, a lot of books in her room. Some she'd read, some she hadn't. About this one, she just didn't know.

Chris's interview, that evening, lasted longer. Newell and Sturgell began the way everyone else had, asking Chris to go over in detail his every action on the weekend of the murder.

He'd gone home that Friday night, he told them, and had either stayed in watching television or had gone out with friends, he wasn't sure which. On Saturday night, after cooking supper, he'd gone back to school, leaving his house between seven and eight
P
.
M
. He was driving his Mustang fastback.

Sunday, he'd drunk beer and eaten pizza at Wildflour Pizza, a typical activity any day of the week. By ten-thirty
P
.
M
. he was in Karen and Kirsten's room, playing cards and drinking more beer. He stayed until three-thirty, when he went back to his own room and to bed.

He described the phone call from Angela, saying that when he couldn't find his car keys in his pants, he'd stopped looking because he didn't want to wake his roommate again. He'd gone to the car, hoping that he'd left the keys in it, but had found it locked. Then he'd returned to his room and continued looking for the keys. When he still couldn't find them, he'd gone to the campus security telephone and called for help, explaining that he had to get home to Little Washington because his father had been murdered and his mother had been stabbed.

Newell and Sturgell began to press him a bit about the car.

When was the last time he'd driven it that night? He said, no later than eleven
P
.
M
.

Why had he parked it so far from the dorm? Because that lot was better lit, and a car parked there would be less likely to be vandalized than one parked in the lot closer to the dorm. He explained that his car had been broken into earlier that month while he was visiting his aunt in South Carolina and that his radio and tape deck had been stolen.

Where did he eventually find his keys? He said Vince had found them under a chair cushion sometime after he'd left for home.

Let's go back to that Sunday. Tell us again who you were with
. During the day, he said, Hamrick, Upchurch, who was also known as Moog, Karen and Kirsten, and Daniel Duyk.

Where are they now? Where is Upchurch? Where is Duyk?
Chris said they'd both dropped out of State. Duyk was working as a bartender. The last time Chris had seen him was about six weeks earlier, when he'd passed through Raleigh. Upchurch, he hadn't seen in months. He said Upchurch's mother lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and was either separated or divorced from his father.

Okay, let's talk about drugs
. Chris admitted to using marijuana, cocaine, LSD, and Ecstasy. He said his first summer roommate, not Vince, had gotten him started on drugs.

Where'd you get the money to buy these drugs?
He explained that he had a job at the Miller and Rhoades men's clothing store in the Crabtree Valley Mall near the campus.

What does that pay?
Four dollars an hour, he said.

What kind of drugs can you buy for four bucks an hour, especially if you're only working part-time?
Chris said he also got a $50-a-week allowance from home, which he used for drugs, and that he'd charge a lot of regular expenses to his credit cards, which his mother would then pay off. Also, if he got real short of cash, he could always ask her and she'd give him more.

Then they zeroed in on Sunday night.
Tell us again. Take it real slow. Who was where when? Who was with whom? Who did what when?
The answer was that the only ones who'd made it to Karen and Kirsten's room after the beer drinking at Wildflour had been he and Daniel Duyk. He said Moog and Vince had gone to study.

How the hell can you study after drinking beer for four hours?
He said he and Daniel had done most of the drinking; Moog and Vince had not drunk that much.