Cruel Doubt (23 page)

Thus, the cup was passed to the next name on the list, while Vosburgh waited for the phone to ring.

The call came at five
P
.
M
. The voice on the other end asked, “Is this the Jim Vosburgh of Madison County fame?”

Indeed he was.

On election day of 1960, while still a law student and an active member of the state's Young Republicans' Club, Vosburgh had traveled to the Tennessee border, to
extremely
rural (and Democratic) Madison County, to monitor voting. He'd been told that two years earlier, in the Madison County community of Upper Spring Creek, which had only three hundred registered voters, more than five hundred votes had been cast, none for a Republican. Vosburgh believed that the interests of Richard Nixon would not be well served by having the same feat repeated.

Details had become a little hazy through frequent retelling, but the main point was that Vosburgh had seen some things he hadn't cared for, and his method for trying to deal with them had led the county sheriff, a staunch Democrat, to arrest him on a charge of impersonating an FBI agent.

Eventually, the charges were dropped, but publicity surrounding the incident brought Vosburgh's name to the attention of a number of prominent state Republicans, including a young state legislator from Greensboro named William Osteen.

Now, almost thirty years later, it was Osteen on the phone. He said he'd been representing Chris Pritchard since January, even though no charges had been filed. Vosburgh said he'd be glad to come aboard.

That night, he attended the press conference John Crone held at the Washington police station. He lumbered into the crowded lobby, which was ablaze with television lighting, and saw Crone looking positively military in a freshly pressed uniform and basking in the glow of the attention. Never before in Crone's career had he had occasion to make so dramatic an announcement.

He stated that Christopher Wayne Pritchard, formerly of Washington and currently a resident of Winston-Salem, and James Bartlett Upchurch III, of Blanch, Caswell County, had been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Lieth Von Stein.

He said authorities had “testimony from a witness who told us exactly what happened,” and he added that a third suspect, who was not a resident of Washington, would soon be taken into custody.

He would not say if the witness and the third suspect were the same person, but stressed that neither Bonnie Von Stein nor her daughter, Angela, were implicated.

The chief added that the first break in the case had come two months earlier and had centered around Pritchard. He said the major break had come just two days ago, but he would answer no questions regarding details of the investigation, nor would he offer any motive.

He did say, however, that Pritchard, who had spoken with investigators on several occasions, had stopped talking about six weeks earlier, at the same time he'd hired a Greensboro lawyer named William Osteen.

At this, Vosburgh, who'd been taking notes as fast as the reporters, began to ask questions.

He hasn't tried to flee, has he? Vosburgh asked. He's been available for eleven months and he hasn't tried to run away, isn't that right?

John Crone had been in Washington long enough to know Vosburgh, and he said he wouldn't answer any of Vosburgh's questions, no matter how loudly he asked them, because Vosburgh was a lawyer, not a reporter.

So Vosburgh decided that if Crone wouldn't answer his question, he'd do it himself—forcefully and repeatedly and in the affirmative. Identifying himself as Pritchard's local counsel, hired only that afternoon, Vosburgh told the assembled press that Pritchard had, in fact, been available to investigators for eleven months, had been living in Winston-Salem with his mother, and had never tried to flee, nor had he ever refused to cooperate with investigators.

Vosburgh then left the press conference, climbed into his pickup truck, and drove the few blocks from the police station to the Beaufort County jail, which was in the basement of the courthouse.

Vosburgh saw Chris Pritchard for the first time at ten
P
.
M
. and as had Bill Osteen some months earlier, formed an immediate negative impression.

“Most kids of his age and background,” Vosburgh said later, “when they see the inside of a jail for the first time, it's culture shock. But Chris was walking around in the orange jumpsuit they'd given him acting like he was in the Syracuse University locker room. I got the feeling he thought he looked kind of cute. He certainly didn't seem very concerned. He didn't even ask me any questions. It was as if he'd been thrown in a drunk tank after being rowdy at a party—not like he was being held without bond for first-degree murder.”

For that first night, Vosburgh was willing to assume that Chris's lack of appropriate reaction might be due to the very shock of having been arrested. He figured the next day, after reality had set in—a reality that included the possibility of the death penalty—the orange jumpsuit would not seem quite so cute.

* * *

Now, on Saturday morning, Vosburgh spent half an hour with Bonnie in his office, offering the appropriate commiserations, outlining the likely timing and nature of future legal proceedings, and listening to her litany of complaints about the way the Washington police and the SBI had conducted themselves.

As he spoke to her, Vosburgh—like Bill Osteen the day before—was struck by how Bonnie seemed to be focusing on the periphery rather than the core of her son's predicament. He had seen this behavior before. Often, in the first hours or days following an arrest on serious charges, the person arrested, or his family or loved ones, did tend to fixate on the edges of the picture.

What lay at the center was simply too dire to view straight on. That changed with time, Vosburgh had found, as it became apparent where energy needed to be directed. And it seemed to him that Bonnie, being both intelligent and resilient, would soon stop fretting about what investigators had or had not done in the past and would start to worry about what the district attorney might do in the future.

Because it was not during regular visiting hours, Vosburgh, invoking his privileges as attorney, accompanied Bonnie to the jail at noon for her first talk with Chris.

Bonnie seemed most worried about what might have happened to her son overnight. How were they treating him? How frightened was he? What sort of dangerous criminals had he been locked up with? What would happen next? The poor, poor boy, she kept saying.

Chris did not rise to greet them. Instead, he looked up at his mother and asked, “Did you bring me any cigarettes?”

“I don't know about you, Chris,” Vosburgh said, “but I think your mom here sure is in need of a hug.”

Chris glared at the lawyer and still didn't move. Raising his voice at least one notch, and maybe two, Vosburgh leaned over his new client and said, “Goddamnit, son, she's your mom. For the past twenty-four hours she's been worried so sick about you that she hasn't been able to sleep or eat. Now get the hell up and give her a hug!”

He did stand then and stepped toward Bonnie and gave her a brief embrace. Then he slumped back again in his chair. “What about magazines?” he asked her. “Did you bring me anything to read? And I'm going to need change for the vending machines.”

* * *

That afternoon, Bonnie went alone to her house on Lawson Road. She carried a camera. She was determined to document everything she could that had to do with the failure of the police and SBI to preserve the crime scene. So great were her shock and anger at what had happened in the past twenty-four hours that for once logic failed her.

She went about the house, eleven months after the murder, taking photographs that she felt could serve as evidence of police incompetence. Then, in desperation, she went to a telephone and called Wade Smith. Though he had often told her to feel free to do so at any time, it was the first time she'd ever called him at his home.

She said she wanted to go public with what she had. She wanted to correct the misinformation that, for months, had been disseminated in the newspapers. She wanted to set the record straight once and for all. The district attorney had already begun to prosecute his case in the media, and she felt the need to fight back.

In his most soothing manner, Wade said, “Bonnie, let's not make a decision on that until we know what the evidence is. We would be flying blind at this point.”

“But I've got to say something. I
know
my son is innocent.”

Then, aware of how much more he knew than she did, as a result of his June 1 talk with Lewis Young, Wade felt the need to say more. He did not tell her what he knew because he did not think she was yet emotionally prepared to hear it.

So he said, “Bonnie, it's all right. You can believe that as long as you
want
to believe it. But be prepared. There may come a day when you'll have to accept a truth. You are flying over very, very barren territory, Bonnie—pack a lunch. You are flying over territory where there is no food, no shelter, no water. Because you are flying over this horrible landscape, pack a lunch.”

If she had asked him, at that moment, what he was talking about, he would have told her. If she had asked, it would have indicated that she was ready to hear. But Bonnie did not ask.

But the data was out there and would not go away. And so, as soon as he finished talking to Bonnie, he called psychiatrist Jean Spaulding and said it would not be long now before she'd be hearing from Mrs. Von Stein.

As Bonnie was speaking to Wade, Jim Vosburgh was back in the county jail, having a further talk with his new client, asking, as he put it later, “some very detailed questions, based on some of the things I'd been hearing. His answers were vague and evasive. That, combined with this goddamned
attitude
of his, really began to bother me. Everything about him seemed wrong.”

Vosburgh laid out the evidence as he had come to understand it. While the details of Neal Henderson's statement were being closely guarded by the district attorney's office, Vosburgh knew that some damning allegations had been made. He also knew about the map that had been found at the fire. He told Chris he thought there were serious problems.

“Until then,” Vosburgh said later, “he really seemed to think there was no basis for any case against him. It was like he'd really come to believe that the whole thing was a politically motivated frame-up, and that he'd have no trouble beating it.

“But even when I told him, he just shrugged. I couldn't get through that detachment.” This boy, Vosburgh kept telling himself, was in a
world
of trouble. Yet he seemed totally uninterested in his plight, or in what it could lead to, which, in his case, was the gas chamber.

22

On Monday morning, June 19, having spent a fretful night at the Holiday Inn, Bonnie went to district court for what she expected to be the hearing that could lead to Chris's release on bond.

While sitting in the courtroom with Angela and Angela's friend Stephanie Mercer, waiting for the proceedings to begin, she experienced an eerie sensation, as if, she later said, “someone was staring holes in the back of my head.”

Turning, she saw a man seated a few rows back, gazing straight at her. His hair was tied in a long ponytail and he wore a collarless shirt of the type favored by hospital orderlies. But that wasn't what upset her so. It was that he
was bulky across the shoulders and seemed to have almost no neck
.

This was the first time since the night she'd been attacked that Bonnie had seen a person whose body had the same irregular shape as that of the person who'd tried to kill her. Jim Vosburgh, seated next to her, saw her grow pale and break out in a sweat. He had no idea what was happening, but thought she was about to faint.

The sight of this man so distressed Bonnie that she rose from her seat and left the courtroom, feeling chilled and nauseated.
Those bulky shoulders, the way the head rose straight up from them, almost as if there were no neck
: that was exactly the impression she'd had of her assailant as she'd lain on the floor of her bedroom, looking up.

It turned out that this man was a Little Washington resident who'd come to court on unrelated business and was in no way connected to the murder.

It turned out, also, that there was no bond hearing. Mitchell Norton, the district attorney, succeeded in having the proceeding transferred to Superior Court, which meant there would be a delay of at least a few days.

Vosburgh told Bonnie that the authorities intended to hold Chris without bond as long as possible, in the hope that he would break down and confess.

“He can't
break
,” Bonnie replied. “He's innocent.”

That night, John Taylor was eating at a Little Washington restaurant called the Stage House, which, while not exactly a haven for gourmets, at least had the advantage of dim lighting.

Several tables away, Angela was seated with Donna Brady and her other friends Laura and Stephanie, and Stephanie's brother, Glen.

Just as Taylor was preparing to leave, Angela walked over to his table. Grinning, she handed him a red paper place mat on which a note had been written:

 

John—Hi! Just wanted you to know everyone (except Glen) over here thinks you are mighty sexy (nice tight ass). It's ashamed [
sic
] that you are a married man, or can you make an exception?——Just may be an experience you will never forget. I realize we are being childish, but—

 

Desiring you!

Stephanie, Donna, Angela, Laura.

 

Taylor folded the place mat and put it in his pocket, smiling at the girls as he left. It was, he reflected, a peculiar message to receive from the sister of someone he'd just arrested on a charge of first-degree murder.

Later, Angela would say she'd only delivered it as a joke, “just fooling around,” because she considered John Taylor—whatever his official role—to be almost a friend.

But it was also true that since the day Chris's printing had been found to match the printing on the map, Angela had been relegated to the role of minor curiosity. Since the day of Neal Henderson's statement, investigators had given her no thought whatsoever. And since Chris's arrest, even Bonnie had paid Angela little mind. It may have been that she was just hungry for attention.

* * *

On Tuesday, June 20, Bill Osteen and his son arrived from Greensboro, bringing with them a tough and experienced private investigator named Tom Brereton.

Brereton was a heavyset New York City Irish Catholic who had graduated from Fordham University and had spent twenty years in the FBI. In the opinion of both Osteen and Wade Smith, he was as good a private detective as there was in the state. He also had a personality that made Jim Vosburgh's seem positively demure.

The two Osteens, Vosburgh, and Brereton met with Chris that afternoon. Vosburgh, who had seen Chris at least twice a day since his arrest, was now sufficiently uneasy about his new client's demeanor to advise Osteen, “There's something really weird about this guy.”

“You don't need to tell me, Vos,” Osteen replied. “I haven't liked him from the start.”

The meeting with Chris lasted most of the afternoon. Later, Bill Osteen would recall it as one of the most disturbing he'd ever had with a client. “Nothing was right,” Osteen said later. “No reaction I saw was proper.”

The sheriff had permitted Osteen and his group to meet with Chris in a vacant office adjacent to the jail. He'd come in wearing leg shackles and complaining that they were hard to walk in, but seeming not really bothered by them; indeed, almost
proud
that he was such a dangerous character that this sort of restraint was required.

He also wore thongs on his feet, which he kicked off as soon as he seated himself. Then he assumed what Vosburgh, at least, was beginning to recognize as his characteristic fetal position: knees up to his chin, arms clasped around his legs.

Bonnie was present for the start of the meeting, but Chris's only greeting to her was, as usual, to comment irritably that he needed more cigarettes and that she
still
didn't seem to realize just how many quarters were required for the vending machines.

“He didn't even say, ‘Hello, Mom,'” Osteen recalled later. “Just, ‘What did you bring me? Where are my cigarettes?' She could have been the canteen manager, or one of the jailers. Finally, I had to say, ‘Chris, this is your mother. Say hello.' ”

“He wouldn't look at her,” Tom Brereton said later. “Even before he opened his mouth, his body language told me something was very wrong. This was his mother, and he'd been accused of trying to have her murdered. You would think, every chance he had, he'd be jumping up to tell her, ‘I didn't do it.' Instead, he acted like he wished she'd go away.”

Even more troubling to those who witnessed it—Bonnie left early, so Chris could have time alone with his lawyers—was the change in demeanor and energy level triggered by mention of Dungeons & Dragons.

As soon as Tom Brereton asked his first blunt question—“What the hell is this Dungeons and Dragons bullshit all about?”—Chris's sullenness and insouciance dropped away, and an entirely different young man—excited, engaged, capable of vivid and detailed description—was revealed.

“It was like flipping a switch,” Brereton said later. “You pressed the D and D button and you got a whole new person. It was like there were two separate sides to his personality. Actually, it was like there were two separate personalities.”

No one present in the room that afternoon—or at any other time when the subject of Dungeons & Dragons was raised with Chris—ever lost his sense of amazement at the totality of the transformation. Bill Osteen termed it “unbelievable.” Osteen's son said he was “shocked.”

When Chris began talking about Dungeons & Dragons, the outside world and all its inhabitants seemed simply to vanish into some black hole deep within his psyche. Indeed, it was as if the outside world and all its inhabitants were not real at all, but only a dull and pallid facsimile of the
true
reality, which was the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

In this world, the scrawny, drug-abusing, sexually unfulfilled, and academically underachieving Chris Pritchard was magically metamorphosed into a vibrant and commanding figure, and his affect when he spoke about it was so completely contrary to that which he displayed under any and all other circumstances that, to the three lawyers and the private detective, it was almost as if he'd been possessed by a spirit or were under some sort of spell.

“It set me reeling,” Osteen said. “What in the world was going on here? To these kids, or to Chris at least, this wasn't just a game played with invented characters. They
were
the characters.”

* * *

Driving back to Greensboro that night, Bill Osteen took his thinking about Dungeons & Dragons a step further.

“Are we dealing with a man who knows what he's doing?” he asked his son and Tom Brereton. “Or is he under some sort of spell? Or, since everything in that game seems to be built around the effort to deceive, could this whole thing be some kind of set-up? Someone else setting him up to get caught?”

Was such a thing possible? Osteen didn't know, and neither his son nor Brereton could help him out. But all three now had to consider the possibility that—quite by accident—they had stumbled into a carefully shrouded world of the occult.

* * *

For Bonnie, the weeks following Chris's arrest brought even greater frustration, exhaustion, and stress than the weeks before.

With Angela still to care for in Winston-Salem—“poor little Angela,” she would say later, “so horribly neglected through all of this”—Bonnie had taken to commuting between her house there and the Holiday Inn in Little Washington.

She stayed at the Holiday Inn because she could never again stay in the house on Lawson Road, and because, even having lived in the town for seven years, she knew no one in whose home she would feel comfortable as an overnight guest.

There were few nights when she got to bed before midnight, and even fewer mornings when she was not up by four
A
.
M
. Day after day, she would settle herself behind the wheel of her Buick Reatta and set off across her own private wasteland. She'd once thought that the days when she'd had to do this with Lieth—drive back and forth between Little Washington and Winston-Salem as his parents had sickened and died—had been among the darkest of her life. But how much she would have given, through late June and July of 1989, to have back even one of those days. How hard life had seemed then, but how easy it really had been. She'd had Lieth then, and she'd had a son who was not charged with murder.

High summer brings to North Carolina a formidable density of heat and humidity: a sticky, cloying, stifling haze that presses down upon the land and its inhabitants, soaking clothes and skin with sweat at the same time it sucks the spirit dry. Bonnie felt utterly and abjectly alone. There was Wade Smith, of course, always ready to offer guidance and comfort; and there was her family, but even in her relations with them, as since her childhood, something firm and unbreachable in her makeup limited intimacy. Only her father, with his quiet wisdom and enduring strength, seemed able to reach out and offer consolation.

By the end of the month, with Chris still in jail, Bonnie recognized she could no longer pass over this barren ground unaided.

And so, at four-thirty on the afternoon of Friday, June 30, she drove the hour and a half from Winston-Salem to the tall, green, needle-topped structure called University Tower that rises from the outskirts of Durham like a lost building from the Emerald City. Bonnie had her first appointment with a psychiatrist.

* * *

Jean Gaillard Spaulding was forty-two years old. She was part black, part Caucasian, part Native American. She had long black hair, light brown skin, large round eyes through which she looked both attentively and almost tenderly at those who sat before her, as quick and warm a smile as one was ever likely to find from a psychiatrist, and as fine a sense of clothing fashion as any woman in North Carolina.

Her great-great-grandmother had been a slave in Charleston, bearing four children by the white man who'd acquired her at the age of fourteen. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Jean Spaulding was, for most of the first five years of her life, separated from her mother, who was confined to a tuberculosis sanitorium in Illinois. Later, Jean was raised in a middle-class section of Detroit.

She graduated cum laude from Barnard College at Columbia University in 1968. She also participated actively in the antiwar riots of that spring, occupying a university building before being driven from it by police. (Her activism had started in ninth grade, when her family had picketed a Woolworth's in Detroit.)

After Columbia, turning down scholarship offers from many other medical schools because she'd just married a man from Durham, she accepted one from Duke, thus becoming the first black woman (and only the third black person) to attend the Duke University School of Medicine.

There were some unpleasant moments, such as the September she returned to school pregnant and a professor said, “You must have been rolling around in a watermelon patch all summer,” but she graduated in 1972, despite going into labor during an oral exam. (She gritted her teeth through her contractions and got an A.)

Later, after working in a Veteran's Administration hospital in order to help those who'd actually suffered in the war she'd marched against, Jean Spaulding went back to the Duke University Medical Center for her residency in child psychiatry.

As attractive as she was intelligent, she had married into one of North Carolina's most respected and successful black families. Her husband, Kenneth Spaulding, was a lawyer who had served in the North Carolina state legislature, as had Bill Osteen and Wade Smith.

In addition to her private practice, Dr. Spaulding taught at the Duke University School of Medicine and was a frequent public speaker on the subjects of adolescent depression and teenage suicide. She also cared deeply about her patients and did not stop thinking about them, or feeling for them, even when her workday came to a close. Her warmth and empathy were instinctive, spontaneous, and genuine.

Of all the choices he'd made in his life, selecting Jean Spaulding to try to help Bonnie had been one of those in which Wade Smith had his greatest confidence.

Based on what Wade had told her, Dr. Spaulding viewed her new patient as afflicted by “multiple traumas” or “wearing a number of different hats.”