Cruel Doubt (29 page)

But should he even wait for the police to come to him? Didn't he have some obligation, as a citizen, to contact them? Bill Osteen and Billy Royal could quite justifiably say that their privileged professional relationships with Chris prevented them from sharing the truth with anyone else, but for Eric it was only friendship, and a sense of loyalty, that caused him to stay silent. And the silence caused him severe discomfort.

September 9 was the first time he'd seen Bonnie since Chris had told him the truth. And suddenly, as John Hubard and Chris stepped into the backyard to smoke cigarettes, Eric found himself alone with her.

He felt awkward, guarded, almost furtive. Even Bonnie was quick to notice the change.

“You and Chris's psychiatrist,” she said, “seem to think I know a lot more about all this than you're telling me.”

Eric did not know what to say. He felt a strong impulse to ease his own burden by sharing his knowledge with her. Once Bonnie knew,
she
could decide what to do, or not to do, after that. But at least she would have the information. And in Eric's opinion, she was certainly entitled to it.

After all, it had been she who'd been beaten and stabbed. And it had been her husband who'd been killed. And now it was she who continued to speak up most forcefully in Chris's defense, and who was spending a small fortune on his legal and medical bills, and who would have to suffer through the trauma of a trial at which Chris's lawyers would argue that he was not guilty of the very offense Eric knew he had committed.

“I get the feeling,” Bonnie said, “that you know a lot more than you're telling me.”

“Well . . . ,” he said. Then he looked away. He could not lie to her, yet neither could he tell her the truth. Or could he? He wanted to. He desperately wanted to. But to do so would be to betray his best friend. But it seemed obvious, just from her comment, that she
knew
Eric had to know something.

“Well . . . ,” he said again. But then he stopped.

Bonnie was the one who spoke next. “Chris is dealing with a lot of things,” she said. “A lot of guilt.”

“Yes, he is,” Eric said.

“Eric,” she said, “I think the police and the lawyers have convinced Chris that he had something to do with it, when the truth is that he actually didn't. A lot of people have got him feeling like he's guilty, even though he had nothing to do with it.”

Eric didn't know how to respond. And before he had a chance to respond in any way, Chris and John came back into the living room and his private conversation with Bonnie was over.

 

26

* * *

A hearing on pretrial motions filed by both the district attorney and by lawyers for both Chris and James Upchurch was held in Little Washington on September 18. Chris, like the other defendants, was required to attend.

The hearing was notable not so much for what was argued or decided as for two other aspects: it gave Mitchell Norton a taste of what it would be like to try a case against Bill Osteen, and it gave Bonnie her first look at Neal Henderson.

For weeks, Jim Vosburgh had been waging a campaign of psychological warfare against Norton. Every time he'd see the Beaufort County district attorney, he'd make it a point to drop some new tidbit of wisdom he'd just acquired from the legendary Osteen, or he'd tell some new (and perhaps, just slightly exaggerated) tale of a courtroom war in which Osteen's skills had reduced an overmatched opponent to ashes.

Vosburgh would say things like, “You know, Mitchell, Bill is really looking forward to coming down here and trying this case. It's not very often anymore that he gets into the ring against someone with your limited range of experience.”

Mitchell Norton would purse his lips and frown and shake his head. This was the sort of heckling that contributed to Jim Vosburgh's unpopularity in certain quarters, but he could tell it was taking its toll.

Norton, by coincidence, had grown up in the same tiny hamlet as Billy Royal: Salemburg. He'd gone not to Wake Forest or Chapel Hill or even to NC State, however, but to East Carolina University in Greenville, a notable step down the academic ladder. His law degree came not from Chapel Hill or Duke or one of the nationally renowned law schools, but from the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Alabama.

He was forty years old, a slow talker but a hard worker, married to a woman he'd known from high school. He had a thick brown mustache and a round and somewhat chinless face. He'd never been in private practice. The year he'd graduated from law school, he'd taken a job as assistant district attorney in Washington. After serving for ten years in that capacity, he'd finally been elected district attorney himself. But his was a sparsely populated, largely rural district, seldom visited by lawyers of Bill Osteen's reputation.

On his office walls, Norton had hung large pictures of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He had meant them to serve as inspiration, but in this instance they were only disturbing reminders of what could happen to even the greatest of men when they found themselves overmatched.

Within a year, Mitchell Norton would have to stand for re-election. If he lost, he'd be off the public payroll for the first time in fifteen years. And he was acutely aware that if he failed in the most notorious murder case he'd ever tried, he'd be an exceedingly vulnerable candidate.

Norton wasn't concerned about Wayland Sermons, the thirty-four-year-old local attorney who'd been appointed Upchurch's public defender, or about Frank Johnston, a more experienced Washington lawyer who would be working with Sermons. Wayland and Frank were perfectly competent, and fine fellows besides, but they were men Norton had known for years, and against whom he had tried many cases. Win or lose, with Wayland and Frank, there was no chance for embarrassment.

The same could not be said about Bill Osteen, whose renown had begun to cast a long shadow over Beaufort County, and particularly over Mitchell Norton's state of mind. To lose the case against Pritchard would be bad enough. But to be made a fool of, in front of his own people—that could spell the end of his career in public life.

In truth, nothing that Osteen said or did in court on September 18 marked him as possessing mythical powers, but that first hearing was really no more than a pregame warm-up: one in which, metaphorically speaking, Osteen didn't even bother to take off his sweat suit.

But even under those circumstances, Mitchell Norton was conscious of a presence that, by its very understatedness, was all the more intimidating. And from that day on, with Vosburgh's continuing encouragement, the county district attorney came to view Chris Pritchard's attorney as someone not only to respect as an adversary, but to fear.

* * *

Fear of a much more immediate and acute sort was what Bonnie felt that day. All three defendants, Upchurch, Henderson, and Chris, were required to be present in court as the various motions were argued. Bonnie had seen Upchurch before at his bond hearing and had experienced no reaction whatsoever. But now, upon getting her first glimpse of Neal Henderson, she had an even more severe panic attack than in August when, in district court, she'd noticed the man who'd seemed to have no neck staring at her.

Neal Henderson had exactly the same build
. He was bulky across the chest, and his shoulders seemed to flow almost directly from the bottom of his head, as if he, too, were virtually without a neck.
This was what she remembered from the attack. This was the bulky and neckless upper body of the man who'd stood above her, beating her head with a club that made a “whooshing” or “whirring” sound
.

Feeling, once again, as if she were about to faint from fright, Bonnie jumped to her feet and fled the courtroom. She went directly to Jim Vosburgh's office and stayed there for the remainder of the hearing.
That was the man she'd seen in her bedroom! That was the man who'd tried to kill her!

Mitchell Norton and the SBI were claiming that all Henderson had done was drive the car, and that James Upchurch, and Upchurch alone, had committed the murder.

But of course that's what they'd claim, Bonnie realized. Henderson, after all, was the one who'd come forward to cooperate, and who would be testifying against both Upchurch and Chris. Of course, Lewis Young and John Crone and John Taylor and the rest of them would want to believe that all Henderson had done was drive the car. That way, he wasn't really a killer. That way, in return for testimony that could send her own son to his death, he'd be rewarded with the lightest sentence possible.

Even as she sat, still trembling, in Vosburgh's office, Bonnie could envision the conspiracy taking place.

She knew one thing, though, and she knew it not logically this time, she
felt
it as strongly as she'd ever before felt anything in her life:
it had been the form of Neal Henderson, not James Upchurch, that she'd seen as she'd looked up, dazed, bruised, and bleeding, from her bedroom floor, and had reached out to touch her dying husband's hand
.

In an attempt to compose herself, Bonnie, the data processor, sat in Vosburgh's office and wrote down her impression of the morning's events. As was so typical of her, even in notes intended only for herself, she did not commit to paper the intensity of emotion that all those near her in the courtroom had witnessed.

She wrote; “All three defendants were present. I looked around for Neal Henderson. My physical reaction was unexpected. It made everything more confused, because his upper-body outline is the same as that of the person in my bedroom on July 25th. Every instinct says I fear this person greatly. The shoulder bulk, the head sitting close to the shoulders, as if there is no neck—it makes the effort to remain unemotional near impossible. . . .

“I went to the rest room to compose myself as much as possible. Then proceeded to let Mr. Osteen be aware of my concern. I don't know if that was the right thing to do. I really
need
to talk to Wade Smith about what I should do, without involving Chris's attorneys unnecessarily.

“Mr. Osteen felt it could be advisable to not return to the courtroom, so I went back to Mr. Vosburgh's office. I arrived around 12:19
P
.
M. . . .

By two
P
.
M
., she had regained enough control to return for the afternoon session.

* * *

Two days later, on September 20, Osteen and Vosburgh met with Billy Royal in his Chapel Hill office to assess Chris's mental condition and to explore the possibility of an insanity defense.

As was his manner, Billy Royal started slowly and took a good leisurely ramble around the conversational track. For quite some time, he talked about how he had established a very solid professional relationship with Chris, and how—as often was not the case—he'd been given sufficient time and opportunity to formulate an opinion that was supported by extensive contact with the patient.

When he finally reached the first point, he was reassuring: he said Chris's suicidal tendencies seemed to be at least in remission, and that he was “no longer in the danger zone as far as doing immediate harm to himself or to others.” Over the longer term, however, Chris would require a “structured environment,” in which to live.

Osteen and Vosburgh recalled that Dr. Royal then said the insanity defense was out of the question. No matter how unstable Chris might seem now, there was no documented history of mental illness prior to the commission of the crime. All Dr. Royal could do would be to testify at the sentencing phase of the proceedings—if and when one occurred—that Chris's emotional problems had undoubtedly predated the planning of the murder, and that his condition should be viewed as a mitigating factor.

“Speaking of that,” Vosburgh said, “the question the judge would ask you at that point is whether you think there's any likelihood that he would ever do anything like this again.”

“I can't say,” the psychiatrist answered. “He might.”

“Wait a minute!” Vosburgh shouted. “That's the answer you'd give in court?”

“If court were tomorrow, and I was under oath, that's the only answer I could give.”

Later, Vosburgh said, “I felt like I got hit with a baseball bat. I crapped. I didn't know what to do. All the hours we'd invested in this guy analyzing Chris, and the best answer he can come up with is, ‘I don't know if he'll ever try to kill his mother again'?

“I'll tell you what. All three of us—Bill Junior was there, too—were devastated after
that
conference. Osteen says, ‘Gentlemen, it looks like we go to trial with a client who can't testify, at least five people who could fall out of the sky at any moment, telling the DA that our client has confessed, and now our own psychiatrist, who says he's not insane but it's possible he'll try to kill again.' ”

* * *

Billy Royal, however, once again had a very different recollection. He said he never thought Osteen seriously considered insanity as a plea. In his opinion, the lawyers did not thoroughly explore all their options. It had been his view, he said later, that if Chris were in treatment he would be no danger to anyone—even himself. Dr. Royal said he expressed this view clearly, but that none of the lawyers seemed to want to hear it.

At seven
P
.
M
., Billy Royal met again with Chris. During this session, Chris stressed how scared he'd been by actually having to appear in court. The reality of what was looming in the future seemed to be taking firmer hold.

“Even if I don't get the death penalty,” he said, “I'll go away for twenty years. What's life like at forty-one?” He said it had been a very bad day. The sight of Neal Henderson had greatly upset his mother.

He seemed eager to change the subject to girls. “I'll tell them anything to get in their pants.” But he said what he really wanted was a child of his own. “Someone to love,” he said, “someone to be a part of me.”

Two days later, on September 22, he was back. Billy Royal was concerned about him and wanted to monitor his condition closely.

Chris said he had no childhood memories of his sister, he could not recall ever having been disciplined by his mother, he'd been a lot smaller than anyone else his age, he'd started looking at dirty magazines before he was seven years old, he'd masturbated frequently as a child, he'd had one experience of fellatio with an older male cousin, he and his mother never had philosophic differences.

“What makes you angry?” Billy Royal asked.

“When I don't get my way.” He said, “I like to do what nobody I know has done before, so I can brag about it.”

“As a child,” Dr. Royal asked, “how would you compare yourself to other children?”

“I was smarter. I was a runner, not a fighter. But always a thinker. I'm on a different plane from other people. I can concentrate on two things at once.”

* * *

By the following Wednesday, September 27, when he next saw Dr. Royal, Chris's condition seemed to be worsening. As soon as he took his seat, he curled himself tightly into a fetal position and said he'd forgotten what he wanted to talk about.

* * *

“I feel like standing up and throwing things,” he said. He was worried about jail, about getting raped, beaten up, having things stolen. At a weekend party for Angela's nineteenth birthday he'd drunk twelve beers in eight hours. He wanted to scream, he felt as if he were living on borrowed time, he wanted to run away, he knew he would have to go to jail, he'd never be able to have a wife and children.

“I'll be a sixty-one-year-old bum.” Then he lapsed again into a recurrent fantasy of living in a big home, of taking care of Bonnie and Angela. It would be a compound, he said, like the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. He'd have a horse farm for Angela, and for his own children. It would be “one big happy family.” He said, “I could be a damned good father.” Then he said, “I'd rather take my own life than be raped.”

He said, “I used to be a shit, but not anymore. Now I treat girls like they should be treated, I give them roses, I walk and talk with them. I used to just try and get in their pants.”

He said even when he was surrounded by other people, he felt alone. “I've got to live with the knowledge that I caused my father's death. But there's nothing I can do about that. I can't bring him back.” The only person with whom he felt secure was his mother. But now, far from feeling compelled to confess, he dreaded the day when she would finally learn the truth.