Cruel Doubt (30 page)

He said again he couldn't go to jail. What he needed was to be institutionalized. He said he'd always been insecure, ever since his real father had left and his mother had had to work all the time and he'd had to spend so much time with his grandparents. “I'm not very stable now,” he said, “and going to jail isn't going to help.”

* * *

On October 2, he told Billy Royal his trial date had been set for January 2, 1990. “So now I know what time frame I have to cram my life into. I have to live it while I've got it, and that's what I intend to do. But I've totally lost control. My dreams are dashed. I'm good with words, with the English language. I could write a damned good book. And that's what I want to do, write a novel. My first book would be about my life and trial. The second would be more like journalism—about the evils of drugs.”

He added that he had a lot of nervous energy and a constant desire for sex. He also said, once again, that his mother was “convinced” that Neal Henderson had been the person in her room.

He seemed to Dr. Royal to be growing more tense, jittery, and depressed as the awareness sunk in that he would indeed be standing trial on January 2, and that even his own lawyer already knew he was guilty.

“All during this time,” said Eric Caldwell, “he was drinking a lot, and that would make him depressed. When he was depressed, he'd tell me that he still wanted to tell his mother but he couldn't. But it was strange: he never said he wanted to tell Angela.”

* * *

On October 4, Bonnie saw Jean Spaulding again. It had been almost a month since her last visit.

What clearly was dominating her conscious mind was her vivid recollection of her first look at Neal Henderson. When she began to talk about it, Dr. Spaulding noted a real change in affect.

“This was obviously a traumatic issue. She said he came into the room and she had to leave and could not return until after lunch. For Bonnie, that was just extraordinary. I remember her describing how, when she saw him, it was the neck and the head and the flow between the two that so unnerved her.

“And it was—this is my word—it was more that sense of your hair rising on the back of your neck that she got when she saw him. She had never had that feeling about Upchurch.

“It was hard for her—and this is unusual for Bonnie—even to put into words the impact of having seen Neal Henderson. It was just this kind of in-the-gut sort of reaction that she had. I saw more of an affect bordering on terror. I don't think I'd ever really seen terror from her, but I saw something more in that direction during this description. And she's not the kind to reveal that, if she hadn't had those sorts of emotions. This was really important to her. And this had happened two weeks earlier. She made a point of saying, ‘On that Monday two weeks ago . . .' Yet it was very fresh. It gave you the sense that it had just happened like two minutes before.

“I have not been able to dismiss that reaction. I have to give significant weight to it. It is completely unlike Bonnie to have a reaction where she has to leave a room. She is the sort of person who wants to be there for every detail. She wants to hear it all and process it all and see every
i
dotted. For her to have a reaction that strongly, where she has to leave the room, is very atypical. That was a very big thing.”

Dr. Spaulding said later, however, that Bonnie “didn't tell me anything” about the trauma of September 7. For her to have made no reference whatsoever to the day that she would eventually describe as one on which the bottom fell out of her heart was an omission that the psychiatrist found “incredible.”

Clearly, at their first session together since that day, Bonnie would have been able to recall the events in vivid detail. “But it does not come out. It never comes out. I never hear that. Now we're having real strong evidence of denial. She needed to come and talk about that, and to deal with the emotions about that, and how upsetting it must have been for her to see Chris in that state.”

But she hadn't said a word about it.

“She pushed it back,” Dr. Spaulding said. “It may have just been so painful for her to even contemplate dealing with it that she would push it back that much more.”

* * *

Later in the week, Bonnie and two friends went to a doll show in Newport News, Virginia. On her way, she passed through Little Washington, where she briefly visited a former neighbor.

* * *

“It doesn't sound good,” the neighbor said. “I hear they've got a map that Chris drew.”

“Suppose they do have a map?” Bonnie said. “That doesn't prove anything. Here, let me show you what
I
have.” Then she took from her pocketbook a copy of the report from the polygraph operator in Charlotte, saying that Chris had passed his test. “You see?” she said. “It's not just me. Here's
proof
that Chris couldn't be guilty.”

* * *

Bonnie saw Jean Spaulding again on November 6. Almost immediately, she started talking about Henderson. “She went back into the issue of his size. His size was just like the attacker's. That was still fresh. A month later, that was still very, very fresh.”

But still—even two months after the fact—she made no reference to the change of heart on Bill Osteen's part that had so shaken her on September 7. At no time, even to her own psychiatrist, did she ever express the slightest doubt about her son's innocence.

Aware that no less an expert than Wade Smith was persuaded that the State's case against Chris rested on a firm foundation, Dr. Spaulding recognized that Bonnie was displaying a classic example of denial mechanism.

“I don't mean that in a negative way,” Dr. Spaulding said later. “It's a method for defending against difficult circumstances, defending against conflict, and therefore allowing a person to function. And then when we consider her maternal instincts here, which were quite strong—this is the woman who had had to work those long hours and pay those bills her ex-husband had left her with, and keep that home going for those children—she's going to fight tenaciously.

“But she was not
choosing
. This was an unconscious mechanism. All defense mechanisms like this are unconscious processes—they are things learned so early in life that essentially there is no choice. You kind of automatically kick into whichever one was an operant for you in your family structure. So this was not something she chose.

“She is not a stupid woman. And basic moral values are important to her. If she had known as a fact—if some divine providence, or Mr. Osteen or Wade Smith, came and said to her outright, ‘Chris is guilty,' then she's the sort of person who would probably take him right to the judge.

“She would not scheme and plot, but by contrast she's the sort who's going to fight tenaciously for her children, and if that means that she pushes some information back into the far recesses of her mind, consciously or unconsciously, I think she would do that.

“She's also not a cowardly woman. She is very courageous. And when you go back to all these different roles that she's had to play—and not play them out sequentially, but play them out simultaneously—it's almost more than you can imagine a person having to endure.”

 

27

With each passing day, Bill Osteen felt even more keenly the desire not to have to defend Chris Pritchard in court. Trial was only six weeks away, and he not only knew his client was guilty, but that he'd confessed to at least five people, any one of whom, at any time, could notify a law enforcement agency.

Even in the absence of that threat, Osteen didn't want to try the case. The day he'd first met Chris Pritchard and had formed his instant and lasting dislike, it had not even occurred to him that there might ever be a case to try. Now there was, and he knew his client was not only dishonest and insolent, but guilty of murder.

There were lawyers who, even knowing of the guilt, would have let Chris tell any story he wanted on the stand. This question, like that of how hard a lawyer should press his client for the full truth, was one of both ethics and tactics, and honorable practitioners disagreed.

One view was that the adversarial process required the defense attorney to do everything possible—short of making a knowing misrepresentation himself—to win his case. If that meant permitting a client to testify untruthfully, so be it. It was the job of the prosecutor to reveal flaws in the story, and of the jury to make the ultimate determination of truth. The lawyer's job, purely and simply, was to help the client achieve the result the client wanted.

“I know there are people,” Osteen would say later, “who perceive defense lawyers as trying to cover up information and even allow their clients to testify untruthfully. But there are a lot of people out here doing good work who do not practice like that, and I believe I was among them.”

Having extracted the truth in the privacy of his own office, Osteen was now stuck with it. The result was, he had two reasons for not wanting to defend Chris in court: one, he stood a chance of losing (which meant the strong possibility that Chris would be sentenced to death); and two, he also had a strong chance to win.

“One of the problems,” he said later, though not every lawyer would view this as a problem, “was that it looked like we had a pretty good chance.”

In July, he'd learned of the content of Neal Henderson's statement to authorities. John Taylor, in an attempt to minimize Bonnie's hostility toward investigators, had taken her to lunch and had spelled it out in detail. In all significant aspects, it comported almost exactly with the story Chris told in August.

Osteen, however, was also aware of the flaws in the State's case: the lack of physical evidence; the mess made of the crime scene; the impossibility of
proving
, on the basis of only three or four printing samples, that Chris had really drawn the map; the flimsiness of the unsupported testimony of one person, Neal Henderson, who appeared to be the only witness who could link Chris to the crime.

“Do we take it to trial and take a chance on winning?” Osteen asked later. “What's going to happen to Chris if we do that?”

The answer was, he would go free, and only then would Bonnie learn that he had, in fact, been responsible for the murder of her husband and for her near-murder, and that he'd lied successfully about it. What would that awareness do to the rest of her life, and to her relationship with him?

Or perhaps she'd never be told. Osteen had noticed that Chris's passion to confess in order to earn his mother's forgiveness seemed to be waning quickly as the date for trial approached. If he was acquitted, would he still feel the need for her forgiveness?

If not, Osteen, his son, Tom Brereton, Jim Vosburgh, and Billy Royal—and even, really, Wade Smith—would live out their days aware that Bonnie's son had gotten away with murder, and that Bonnie herself might never know it.

Unless, as Osteen understood Billy Royal to have said was possible—knowing that Bonnie was all that stood between him and half of a $2-million fortune—he might decide to try it again.

The fact was, since August, when he'd first learned the truth, or what he supposed was a good part of the truth—with Chris, he felt, one could never be sure one was hearing it all—Osteen had been growing ever more persuaded that the best service he could render his client, and not so incidentally, his client's mother, would be to negotiate a deal that allowed Chris to plead guilty to a lesser charge and receive a sentence of something other than death.

He just didn't know how he could persuade Mitchell Norton that such an arrangement would also be in the best interests of the State.

* * *

Bill Osteen and the eight or nine others to whom Chris had confessed by late November
knew
he was guilty. But even within Bonnie's family, some had come to suspect it. Chris's uncle and his wife, of course, had voiced their doubts to Lewis Young at the start, but there was also his grandfather.

Bonnie's younger sister, Ramona, remembered a dinner in Little Washington, while Bonnie was still hospitalized, at which George Bates, Sr., had said to her, sounding truly depressed for the first time in his life, “I'll bet you, when it comes down to it, the young'uns are involved.” Whether he meant one or both was not clear, and she did not ask.

Ramona also recalled a later episode. “It was in the summer, but before Chris was even arrested. We'd gone fishing, and suddenly Daddy lay on the ground. At first, I thought he'd had a stroke, but he said, ‘No, I'm all right, I just need to rest. I've got a lot on my mind.'” After a long pause, he had added, “I hate it that Chris has done this, but in my heart I know he did.”

Peggy Bates, too, could remember a moment, just about at the time of Chris's arrest, when she was sitting under a shade tree in the backyard in Welcome, having just laid wooden steps down to the greenhouse where Bonnie's mother was cultivating orchids.

“We somehow got talking about Chris,” she said, “and his granddad said he knew without a doubt that Chris was guilty. That's the only time I heard him come out and say it, but there were hints in other conversations. He knew it darned good and well.”

And Bonnie's brother, George Jr., remembered feeling, “yes, he thought Chris had something to do with it. Even before the arrest. He just came right out and said, ‘Something's rotten in Denmark here. Something's rotten in Denmark.' ”

Knowing how strongly Bonnie believed—and needed to believe—in Chris's innocence, her father had never breathed a word of this to her. It would have broken Bonnie's heart to hear him say it. Instead, he continued doing what he'd done since the day of the murder: being there for her, giving love and support.

At Thanksgiving, he even told her what he'd decided to do for the trial.

Bonnie had cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving. This was something she had not done since she and Lieth had lived in Indiana. In more recent years, they'd spent the holiday in Winston-Salem with Lieth's parents and had dined at a nearby country club.

This year, Bonnie was determined that the holiday would be as homey and traditional and family-oriented as she could make it. The trial was less than six weeks away. She was scared. She knew that, despite the best efforts of Bill Osteen and Jim Vosburgh, by the time the next Thanksgiving rolled around, Chris might not be present at her table.

Her mother and father came up from Welcome. Chris and Angela were there. The turkey was plump and moist and flavorful. There was stuffing, potatoes, creamed vegetables, cranberry sauce, two kinds of pie: the meal was everything Bonnie had hoped it would be.

Chris seemed nervous throughout the day and did not linger for conversation when dinner was done. He was up and out the door as fast as possible.

Sitting in Bonnie's living room after the meal, her father told her he was worried about Chris, and about her, too. Due to extensive and prejudicial pretrial publicity, the trial had been shifted from Washington to Elizabeth City, a fishing and farming town an hour and a half away, near the Virginia border, in the extreme northeast corner of the state.

But even away from the poisonous atmosphere of Little Washington, the trial would be a terrible strain for both Bonnie and Chris. Bonnie had already decided that the best thing for Angela, psychologically, would be for her to continue with her studies at her new college, and to stay as far from Elizabeth City as possible. She'd also asked other members of her family to stay away, insisting that she didn't need “baby-sitters” and could cope perfectly well on her own.

Her father, however, knew better. Regardless of his feelings about Chris's involvement—or maybe even more so because of them—George Bates had no intention of letting his daughter endure the trial alone. He knew how self-reliant she was, and what a point she'd always made of not letting her own troubles affect others, but in this case, he said, she would have to make an exception. He would travel to Elizabeth City with Bonnie and Chris and would stand by the two of them from the first day of trial to the last.

She tried to persuade him that this would not be necessary; that she really could manage on her own; that at his age he ought not to put himself through such stress. But George Bates would have none of it. He said his mind was made up.

And for once, Bonnie did not insist. The truth was, she felt so frightened of what lay ahead that her father's announcement came as a comfort and relief.

* * *

On November 30, Bonnie's mother and father drove up from Welcome early in the morning. Her mother climbed into the front seat of Bonnie's car while Bonnie gave her father a hug and said they'd see him the next day. She and her mother were heading for Elizabeth City to find a place for her and her father and Chris to stay during the trial.

The trip took almost six hours. Elizabeth City, even less accessible by modern highway than Little Washington, had a population of 16,500 and was at the lower edge of a vast marshland known as the Great Dismal Swamp. This tangle of cypress and honeysuckle, running almost forty miles from north to south, was inhabited by bear, possum, and an abundance of poisonous snakes.

Elizabeth City itself, a not quite quaint and not quite charming town—though it tilted a bit further in those directions than Little Washington did—was the seat of Pasquotank County, a fringe area of North Carolina that found itself more in the orbit of Norfolk, Virginia, than of any of North Carolina's larger cities.

It also happened to be the home of Superior Court judge Thomas Watts, who would be presiding over the trial.

As in Little Washington, the largest and least offensive accommodation appeared to be the Holiday Inn. But Bonnie did not want to stay there. Judge Watts had already explained in open court that the Holiday Inn was the best place to stay and had offered to make reservations there for all connected with the case.

Mitchell Norton and Lewis Young and John Taylor would be staying at the Holiday Inn. The press would be staying at the Holiday Inn,
Neal Henderson
, still free on bond, would be staying at the Holiday Inn when he came to testify.

There was no way—even with her father by her side—that Bonnie would stay at the Holiday Inn. Instead, she chose a locally owned motel called the Goodnite Inn. It was small. One would be hard-pressed to call it cute. But it was only 1.3 miles from the courthouse, a five – to eight-minute drive, depending on traffic, and in a neighborhood that did not appear disreputable. The management was courteous and the rates were reasonable—$38.95 for a double, compared to $54 at the Holiday Inn.

Bonnie and her mother spent the night there. It was quiet and clean and perfectly tolerable. In the morning, Bonnie made arrangements to book a room beginning Monday, January 1, 1990, with the understanding that she and her father and her son would be occupying it from Sunday night through Thursday night each week for several weeks after that.

On the drive back, Bonnie and her mother stopped in Burlington to look at fabric and pottery, breaking up what was otherwise an arduous trip. This meant it was well after dark before they drove into Welcome, and down the narrow two-lane road, bordered on both sides by dormant farmland, that led to the house in which Bonnie had been raised.

Even from a distance, she could tell something was wrong.

The driveway outside the house was filled with cars.

That should not be.

There should only have been the one car, which belonged to her mother and her father.

But there was her brother George's car, and her sister Kitty's and Sylvia's and even Ramona's van from South Carolina.

It wasn't right.

She didn't need logic, only gut instinct, to tell her that, as she put it later, “something bad was in the wind.”

Chris!
Oh, dear Lord, the stress had finally gotten to him and her son had killed himself.

Bonnie parked as quickly as she could, and she and her mother got out of the car in a hurry.

The front door opened and her brother came out to meet them in the driveway.

“What's going on?” Bonnie's mother asked.

“Come on inside and I'll tell you.”

“No, tell me outside, right now.”

Bonnie didn't wait. She knew the answer as soon as she saw her brother come out the door. For whenever anyone came to his house for any reason, it was always George Bates, Sr., Bonnie's father, who greeted them first. But he wasn't there.

Bonnie ran past her mother and brother and into the house, crying, “Where's my daddy? Where's my daddy!”

He wasn't there. He'd been back in the woods behind the house that afternoon, cutting down a dead tree, an activity he'd engaged in for more than half a century.

But on this day, December 1, 1989, exactly one month before he was to go to Elizabeth City to attend his grandson's murder trial, he'd failed to clear a path for himself and had cut the tree the wrong way and it had fallen on him and killed him.

He'd died right there in the woods—only a quarter mile from where, on Pearl Harbor Day, he'd carved the lines from the Joyce Kilmer poem—with his only living brother cradling his head in his arms.