Cruel Doubt (26 page)

* * *

After two hours' worth of frantic phone calls they located a Chapel Hill psychiatrist named Billy Royal, a man experienced in legal matters. By then, an eerie and unnatural calm had come over Chris, as if he'd realized that, for him, the game—whatever it had started as, and whatever it had become—was over now.

Osteen explained to Billy Royal that a young client of his had just confessed to involvement in the murder of his stepfather and the attempted murder of his mother, and that his current condition was something Osteen did not feel qualified to judge, but that it might well be either suicidal or homicidal.

Dr. Royal, much of whose work consisted of evaluating criminal defendants to determine their fitness for trial, agreed to see Chris immediately.

* * *

Having sought the truth, and now obtained it, Bill Osteen was faced with the thorniest ethical and moral dilemma of his long and distinguished career.

With Chris on his way to Chapel Hill, Osteen had a ninety-minute telephone talk with Jim Vosburgh. Before it was over, the two of them had to confront three unattractive facts:

First, it remained Chris's right, and might well remain his inclination, to continue with his plea of not guilty. This would put Osteen and Vosburgh in the unenviable position of trying to win acquittal for a client they knew to be guilty not only of murder, but of the attempted murder of his own mother, a woman who continued to believe in his innocence.

Second, Osteen felt he could not permit Chris to testify in his own defense, for such testimony would constitute perjury. An attorney can harbor many suspicions about the veracity of his client's story, but once he
knows
the truth, and
knows
his client intends to lie under oath, he cannot—under Osteen's standard of ethics—allow the client to take the stand. But jurors—especially in a murder trial—no matter how often they're instructed not to infer guilt from a defendant's decision not to testify, can hardly do anything else. Common sense dictates that an innocent man would
demand
the chance to tell his story, especially with his own life at stake. Chris's silence would count heavily against him at trial, yet Osteen could not permit him to speak.

Third—and perhaps worst of all—Osteen and Vosburgh realized
they could not let Bonnie know the truth
.

The State still had the burden of proving the charges against Chris beyond a reasonable doubt. Without question, the State would call Bonnie to testify. She was, after all, the sole surviving victim of the attack. And when Bonnie testified, she'd tell the truth: of that Osteen was certain. He had come to know her well enough to be certain that she would not lie under oath, not even to save her son.

If Bonnie knew the truth, therefore, Chris would lose
all
chance for acquittal.

The only way in which her testimony could help him—and both Osteen and Vosburgh believed it would help mightily—was if she was able to tell a jury honestly that there wasn't a chance in the world that her son had had anything to do with the crime.

But Bonnie had been Chris's intended victim and she might be again. So did they not also have an obligation to her? Could they let her continue in her ignorance, now that they knew her son had tried to have her murdered?

These were questions Osteen and Vosburgh would put to themselves, and to each other, more than once in the months that lay ahead.

But for now, Osteen said, he'd better call the poor woman to tell her not to expect Chris home for supper.

 

24

Bonnie was at a neighbor's house, having a cup of tea, when the call from Osteen came at shortly after five
P
.
M
.

“I'm sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but Chris is not going to be coming home tonight.”

“What do you mean?” For an instant, she thought he was dead.

“We had a very rough session here today,” Osteen continued, his voice not quite gruff, but with a certain gravelly, matter-of-fact edge to it. In personal style, he was more the steel fist than Wade Smith's velvet glove.

“Tom Brereton and I found it necessary to put some very hard questions to Chris today. We got quite tough with him, as a matter of fact. By the end of the meeting he was very upset. Frankly, I wouldn't have been comfortable letting him go home in the shape he was in, so I've sent him on to a psychiatrist in Chapel Hill.”

Osteen said the psychiatrist's name was Billy Royal, and that he'd been highly recommended by everyone from whom they'd sought a referral. He said Chris was to meet with Dr. Royal at seven
P
.
M
., and he was sure that the doctor would be in touch with Bonnie as soon as possible after that and would answer any other questions she might have.

Any
other
questions? She hadn't even started to ask questions. Yet she found herself almost too stunned to begin. It was as if, just as on the night of the murder, she'd been struck a sharp blow in the head.

In an almost trancelike state, she reached out for pencil and paper and wrote the psychiatrist's name. Finally, she managed to ask, “But what happened? What brought this on?”

“As I said, Bonnie, Tom was pretty tough in his questioning. When he got into some of the nuts and bolts, frankly, it seemed a bit too much for Chris to handle. I don't want to go into detail at this point, and I don't want to alarm you any more than necessary, but by the end of the meeting, we all felt—and Bill Junior was here with us, too—that in the state Chris was in there could be a danger that he might harm himself. We agreed that the best thing would be to send him on to Dr. Royal.”

After hanging up, Bonnie returned to her own home and sat alone, as the muggy evening turned to dusk and darkness. She knew it made no sense, she knew she was in no greater personal danger now than at any other time since the attack, but she went to her bedroom and got her gun anyway and placed it on the arm of the chair in which she sat, waiting for the phone call from Dr. Royal.

It was ten
P
.
M
. before the call came and when it did, the news was not good.

Billy Royal was sixty-two years old, North Carolina born and bred, a soft-spoken man with a gentle manner and a voice that, especially on the telephone, tended to trail off before he reached the end of a sentence. His voice did not possess the crisp authority of Bill Osteen's or the hearty good-fellowship of Jim Vosburgh's or the comforting composure of Wade Smith's. His voice sounded tired, resigned, even maybe a little bit sad about all its owner had been exposed to over the years. It also, quite frequently, was a voice that contained a hint of subtle humor, good cheer, and profound appreciation for those aspects of life that did not involve forensic psychiatry, but those were not qualities that Bonnie would ever have an easy time detecting, and certainly not now.

Billy Royal—and Billy was his given name, not William—told her that he'd had Chris admitted to the psychiatric service of Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill because, after an extended interview with Chris and a conversation with William Osteen, he thought Chris might be suicidal.

He added, however, that Chris was, for the present, perfectly safe and suggested that Bonnie not visit until the next day.

* * *

Early the next morning, Osteen called Wade Smith. As Wade later recalled it, Osteen, speaking “hypothetically,” and in the most vague and indirect language he could muster, tried to suggest some of what had occurred the day before, and to describe the dilemma with which he found himself confronted.

In this talk—as can happen when two skilled and experienced attorneys speak to one another about so delicate a matter—information was conveyed so inexplicitly that anyone looking at a transcript of their conversation would have had a hard time determining even what the subject was, much less what conclusions were reached.

“Wade, there are some things I can't tell you,” Osteen said.

“Bill, don't tell me anything that you don't want me to tell Bonnie, because I'm going to have to tell her if I know something that I think is relevant to her welfare.”

Osteen fell silent.

“So,” Wade said after maybe thirty seconds had passed, “I guess there will just have to be a lot of things I don't know.”

“That's right, Wade. We're going to have to have this understanding. I'm going to know things that you can't know. But in effect, I want you to understand something, and that is, it is conceivable that Chris did this. I'm not telling you anything more, but I'm telling you it
is
conceivable, and you need to take any action you feel you need to take in that regard. I don't want you to be blindsided.”

And so Wade had to engage in his own wrestling match with his conscience and ethics and sense of professional duty.

“I was walking down a tightwire,” he said later. “I had a duty to tell my client things I learned about the case. I can't just keep a secret from my client. But the ethical constraint that is requiring me to tell my client things is not anything like the ethical constraint that is keeping Bill from telling me things his client tells him. Still, I couldn't hold things back very long, and I couldn't hold back things that put Bonnie in danger.

“Was she in great danger? Would Chris try to hurt her in some way? That was a burden. I worried a lot about that. My view was that Chris might do something to himself, but he wouldn't do anything to Bonnie. But it was a risky moment.”

Risky, in particular, for Bonnie. Especially given the fact that Wade had never even met Chris.

For the moment, however, he decided that the best thing he could do was to be sure that Jean Spaulding was kept apprised of the direction in which events seemed to be moving.

* * *

After speaking to Wade, Osteen called Bonnie. He told her he knew Chris had been hospitalized and that he thought Dr. Royal had made the right decision. But he told her, too, that before she visited Chris, it was imperative that she meet with him.

She reached his office at one-thirty
P
.
M
.

Osteen seemed sympathetic and concerned, but his first words struck Bonnie as uncharacteristically vague.

“Some of the things we'd hoped were correct we now have to question,” he said. “Certain facts turned out to be not as we had anticipated. Bonnie, there's no way for you not to be concerned at this point, but oftentimes we think things are one way when they're not.”

She just nodded, barely listening, not comprehending any meaning behind the words. All she knew was that Chris was suffering a new and more acute kind of pain, and that she wanted to do whatever she could to ease it.

But then Osteen said—with no vagueness whatsoever—that the real reason he'd asked her to come by was because he had to tell her something extremely important, and he wanted to be sure she fully understood how vital it was in terms of Chris's interests.

Osteen said that beginning immediately, and continuing until he personally told her otherwise, it was imperative that under no circumstances was she ever to ask Chris any questions about
anything
surrounding the events of July 25, 1988.

Before she even had a chance to wonder why this new prohibition was being put into effect, Osteen added that it would not be possible for him to explain. He would not be able to tell her any more than he'd already told her, but it was essential that she follow his instructions to the letter.

She and Chris could talk about anything else, but they were absolutely not to discuss any aspect of the circumstances surrounding the weekend of Lieth's murder.

When she thought about this later, Bonnie said, she'd just assumed that Osteen—recognizing how unscrupulous a prosecutor could be—simply wanted to be sure no ambiguous remark she or Chris might make to one another could ever be twisted into something that sounded sinister.

“He made it very clear that this was important to Chris's defense,” she said, “but he in no way indicated that Chris was responsible. And my thoughts, believe me, were elsewhere than on the implications. I was still in a state of shock. My main concern was just to get to Chapel Hill and be with my son.”

And so, with that meeting, there commenced a weeks-long sequence of miscommunication and semantic confusion, of vague hints and expressions of partial truths, conveyed in a language thickly encoded so as to maintain at least the appearance of ambiguity. When combined with a loving mother's powerful and continuing desire not to hear the worst of all possible truths about her son, this led to a series of misunderstandings and flawed perceptions which would have been almost comical had the matter not been fraught with such intractable legal and ethical problems, and had it not threatened such potentially tragic consequences.

* * *

Bonnie drove on from Greensboro to Chapel Hill, an hour away. Memorial Hospital was a large, modern, confusing complex, yet the psychiatric wing was reassuring. In many ways, especially given that most of the patients seemed to be about Chris's own age, the setting struck Bonnie as a slightly more orderly version of his dormitory at NC State.

They sat and talked in a small lounge. It was late afternoon by the time Bonnie arrived, and she wound up staying for dinner. She sat with Chris and a few other patients and did not find the conversation to be any less rational or controlled than at any other dinner she'd ever had.

What was not so reassuring was Chris himself. He seemed exceedingly nervous. He could not keep his arms or legs from quivering. He chain-smoked cigarettes, lighting one from the butt of another with trembling hands.

He was, she said, “withdrawn, distraught, and apologetic. Apologetic for having to be in the hospital, for causing me so much concern.”

The last thing Bonnie wanted was to put more pressure on him by asking too many questions—or any at all. It was obvious that, for whatever reason, he already was under more pressure than he could handle.

“I just wanted to reassure him,” she said later. “I wanted him to see that I was there and that I loved him and that I wanted him to get better and to feel better about himself.”

It turned out that although Dr. Royal had arranged Chris's admission to Memorial, he himself was not on staff there and was not present in the hospital that night. On her first visit, in fact, Bonnie was unable to find any doctor to whom she could talk about Chris's condition, or about what treatment he would receive.

* * *

That night, however, Dr. Royal called Osteen with a recommendation that complicated matters even further. “We've got to get Chris and his mother together,” he said. “Until he sits down and tells her what he did, he can't possibly start to get better.”

Dr. Royal explained that, in his view, the cause of Chris's suicidal impulse was guilt about his role in the original crime, and about his having lied to his mother ever since.

What it came down to was this: having broken through such a momentous barrier the day before, by admitting the truth in Osteen's office, Chris was now perched on a suicidal precipice from which he could not even begin to retreat until he made a full confession to his mother and sister.

“I can't let that happen,” Osteen said. “I can't let him. I simply cannot let that happen.”

“The problem is,” Dr. Royal said, “from a psychiatric standpoint, I think we might be talking about a matter of life and death.”

“Well,” Osteen said, “this may sound melodramatic, but from a legal standpoint, I
know
we're talking about a matter of life and death.”

* * *

But Billy Royal called again the next day. He said Chris would be “acutely suicidal until he gets this resolved with his mother,” then added that the best place for such a confession to take place would be in the supervised setting of the hospital.

Osteen, however, reiterated that he could not allow such a conversation. He also reminded Dr. Royal that he, Osteen, had retained the psychiatrist, and that whatever the doctor's personal feelings might be, he did not have the freedom to do or say anything, or to cause or to allow to happen anything contrary to Osteen's explicit instructions.

“Well, all right,” Dr. Royal replied, “but I want to be on record as having given you my professional opinion that this boy is a time bomb waiting to go off.”

* * *

Chris remained in the hospital for eight days, receiving no treatment, and Billy Royal saw no improvement in his condition. Yet hospital officials determined he was ready for release on August 23.

The night before, Billy Royal called Osteen yet again. He said Chris was still bursting with the need to tell his mother the truth, and that until he did, he would remain not only suicidal but also a danger to others—in particular to Bonnie. If he couldn't relieve his internal pressure by telling his mother he'd tried to have her killed a year ago, there was a risk he would instead kill her now.

Osteen, not normally a man given to spasms of self-doubt, called Vosburgh again. Although the problem of what to do about Bonnie—which was another way of describing this clash between Chris's psychological and legal best interests—had tormented both lawyers since the night of his admission to Memorial, it took on even more urgency now that he was about to be released.

They talked on, late into the night, changing their own minds, then changing each other's, then finding themselves back where they started.