Cruel Doubt (35 page)

 

33

Bonnie was called to the stand that afternoon. She wore a plain, black linen dress with a big white collar. Though she realized it only much later, she'd bought this dress to wear to the funeral of Lieth's father. She'd only worn it four other times: to the funerals of Lieth's mother, Lieth's uncle, Lieth himself, and less than six weeks earlier, her own father.

“It was not a conscious decision,” she said later, “but it must have suggested something about the way I viewed the task of testifying.”

Wearing that dress and her thick, rimless glasses, walking slowly and speaking softly, she looked every bit the part of a victim still in the early stages of a recovery that might never be complete. A local paper described her the next day as “a small, dark-haired woman, whose thin, haunted face is framed by strands of gray.”

As she gave a brief chronological history of her married life with Lieth—little more than names, places, and dates—Judge Watts had to remind her several times to speak loudly enough so the jurors could hear her. Between the faintness of her voice, and the slow and convoluted manner in which Mitchell Norton was asking his questions—“After Lieth's father died, Ms. Von Stein, was there anything going on in Lieth's life at that time?”—these early moments were awkward.

It was established that by July of 1987, Lieth had inherited more than $1 million from his parents.

Bonnie—determined not to participate in the painting of what she considered a distorted portrait of her family—said that prior to the death of Lieth's parents, he and Chris “got along as good as any loving father and son could get along,” and that Lieth and Angela “were good buddies.”

After the deaths, Norton asked, was there a change?

“There wasn't any change in the overall relationship.”

“But were there problems on a specific basis?” Norton persisted.

“There were specific instances.”

Then Norton had her admit that Chris's academic performance at NC State had been “mediocre” in the first semester and that in the second semester “I believe he did not do as well as he had in the first.”

“So if he had a mediocre first semester, the second semester was worse?

“I believe so,” Bonnie said. She knew, of course, that it had been; that it had, in fact, been a disaster. But she was determined to make Mitchell Norton work for every inch of this distasteful ground.

She was, however, forced to admit that “a fight almost erupted” between Lieth and Chris during an argument about his grades “sometime during the early summer session of 1988.” She said the incident had occurred in the kitchen.

“We were having dinner,” she said, “Lieth, Chris, Angela, and myself. I don't remember the specifics of what was being discussed. But Lieth stood up from the dinner table and tried to engage Chris in a fistfight. Chris would not participate in that.” She added that afterward she had told Lieth “that Chris had acted in a more adult manner than he had.”

But then she added that “Lieth decided at that point that it would be best if I would render discipline to the children instead of him,” and she conceded that “occasionally” Chris and Angela would refer to Lieth as an “asshole.”

“Was that because he was sometimes?” Norton asked, but an objection to the question was sustained before Bonnie could answer.

* * *

As she resumed her testimony the next morning, Bonnie described how, after she'd noticed Chris's sound system missing from his car, she decided that he ought not to mention it to Lieth, and that she would tell Lieth about it later “because Lieth had been under a lot of strain . . . over the loss of both parents and his favorite uncle.”

To Mitchell Norton, and to a number of others, this seemed among the least plausible elements of the story Bonnie had told from the start. It had been more than a year since Lieth's parents had died. It seemed simply not credible that those deaths could have been the source of the severe and relentless strain that Bonnie said had brought about such changes in Lieth's personality. If, indeed, there was such strain, its roots must have lain elsewhere. But as to its source, Bonnie provided no clues.

She said Chris had left the house on Saturday “to go and visit some friends” and had then prepared the hamburgers for their dinner Saturday night. She said Angela, too, had been out during the day Saturday, with Donna Brady.

As she spoke, it almost seemed as if—this one last time—she would be able to convince herself that nothing more sinister had been evolving.

On Sunday, Bonnie said, she and Lieth had gone to Greenville for breakfast and then “spent all afternoon working on the computer and with the
Wall Street Journal
,” after which they had “shared some private moments in our bedroom.”

Then she went through her story of Sunday night: the drive to Greenville for dinner, finding The King and Queen closed, eating instead at Sweet Caroline's, where Lieth had ordered the chicken special with rice.

The dinner had lasted from seven-thirty or seven forty-five to “around nine o'clock,” when they'd driven home so Bonnie could watch the Ted Bundy miniseries. Lieth “went straight to bed,” which, she said, was customary.

Angela had come home at ten-thirty
P
.
M
., an hour before her curfew, which was not customary. She'd gone directly to her room and had gotten in bed.

Bonnie watched the end of the miniseries, then the start of the eleven o'clock news. “Then,” she said, “I went to the kitchen, went upstairs, woke Lieth up, asked him if he would like a glass of iced tea. He said no and went back to sleep. I got into bed, and I sat there and read.”

This was all routine, Bonnie said. Almost every night, Lieth would go to sleep before her, then would stir when she came into the room. Often, he would want some iced tea to drink; often, he'd even wake up enough to turn on Johnny Carson and watch television for a while as she read. But on this night, he'd simply gone back to sleep.

Angela, she said, “was lying in bed, listening to the radio, reading.” Bonnie also said that even though the house was air-conditioned, Angela had a fan on, as had been her habit, “year-round, since she was a small child.” She liked the comforting hum, Bonnie said, and the feeling of air blowing on her face.

“After I sat in bed and tried to read for a few minutes,” Bonnie testified, “I kept hearing Angela's radio through her bedroom door. So I got up and closed my bedroom door.”

“Could you hear anything after that?” Norton asked.

“No. Nothing.”

Bonnie said that, as “a guess,” she'd gone to sleep “around midnight.” Then: “I was awakened to hearing Lieth scream. There was a lot of confusion. Someone was standing at the foot of the bed.”

Suddenly, Mitchell Norton was right there, at what he considered the most crucial moment of Bonnie's testimony, and perhaps the whole trial: her description of the intruder.

He established that she wore “thick” eyeglasses, that she was “very nearsighted,” that she'd taken her glasses off before going to sleep, that all the lights in the bedroom were off.

But that wasn't enough. He still didn't trust her. So he told her to take her glasses off, right there in the courtroom. Then he asked, standing about twenty feet from her, “Can you see me? Do you recognize me from where you are now?”

“I can tell you have brown hair, have on a gray suit, red tie, and a white shirt.”

“Other than that, can you see anything else?”

“I can tell you have eyes and a mouth, but I can't tell what they look like.”

“How about my mustache? Can you see my mustache?”

“No.”

“Can't see that?”

“No.”

“All right. Now you may put your glasses back on.” That should be good enough, he thought. No matter how definite she might try to be about the shape of an upper body glimpsed amid that murderous confusion in the dark, he'd already demonstrated that without her glasses the poor woman simply could not see.

“What was it that first awakened you?” he asked.

Until that moment, Bonnie had been in such total control of her emotions that a number of observers wondered if she was feeling anything at all. Now, however, she began to chew on her lip. “The sound of Lieth's scream,” she said.

“Can you describe Lieth's scream for us, please?”

“It was short. It sounded piercing right in my ears. Just a series of short screams, very loud to me.” She chewed harder on her lip.

But Mitchell Norton wanted more than that. “You say it was very loud. As best you can, can you duplicate for us here in the courtroom the scream that awakened you?”

She tried, but sitting there on the witness stand, in full view of judge, jury, and press, the soft-spoken Bonnie Von Stein was not able to scream loudly. It wasn't good enough for Mitchell Norton.

“No,” he said. “I mean with the volume that Lieth used, that you heard that night.”

“I don't know if I can or not.”

“Can you try? Is there some reason that you feel you can't do it, Ms. Von Stein?”

Now, Bonnie had to fight harder to maintain composure. “Yes,” she said. “That's one thing that I've not been able to face.”

“Can you explain that?” Norton demanded. “That you can't—I mean, can you explain?”

Finally, Judge Watts stepped in, putting a halt to that line of questioning, allowing Bonnie to say simply that she didn't know how many screams she'd heard, but “when I heard the screams and I was awake enough to know that something was wrong, Lieth was in a sitting position. I believe I reached my hand toward him.”

“What happened when you reached over towards Lieth?”

“I was struck with some kind of instrument. I believe, on the hand.” This blow, she said, had caused a fractured thumb. Then she said, “The person standing at the—near the end of the bed struck Lieth, hitting my hand in the process. Then I was struck in the head. Then Lieth was struck again. I don't know where. And then I was struck again. And I don't remember after that for a while.”

“Was Lieth still screaming?”

“Yes.”

“During the time that this individual was striking him?”

“Yes.”

Bonnie testified that she'd been struck twice on the right side and once on the left side of her forehead. She said the bedroom was dark, but a light—“it wasn't a bright light”—shone in from the hallway.

Now Norton returned to what was, for him, the crux of the matter.

“Could you tell what type of clothing the individual was wearing?”

“No. Everything looked dark, black, everything looked black to me. It was just dark.”

“Could you discern anything at all about the facial features?”

“Nothing. He had his hand raised up over his head, had something in his hand, and was striking us with it. He looked bulky, big through this area”—here, Bonnie gestured to her shoulders and chest. “It looked like he didn't have a neck. It looked like the head just sat right up on top of his shoulders.”

At the defense table, James Upchurch sat slender and long-necked. The short-necked and bulky Neal Henderson would not be seen by the jury until he was called to testify.

Mitchell Norton didn't want to talk about shoulders and necks. He wanted to talk about what Bonnie had
not
seen. “Could you discern anything at all,” he asked, “about the nose, the mouth, anything at all?”

“No.”

“All right, now after you were struck on the hand, struck in the head, you said you didn't remember anything. What was the next thing that you can remember? Lieth is screaming. Your thumb is broken. You are hit in the head.”

“I remember being conscious, and I was lying on the floor. There was someone standing at my feet that I assumed was the same person I had seen earlier. Again, with his hands raised and something in his hands. And I was struck again.”

“Where were you struck at that time?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't know where you were struck?”

“No.”

“Where were you?”

“I believe I was lying right next to the bed, on the side that I slept on, with my head near the wall.”

“Do you know how you got on the floor, Ms. Von Stein?”

“No.”

“Do you recall being struck in the chest?”

“I don't remember that now, no, sir.”

“Did you receive some injury to your chest?”

“I was stabbed in the chest. There was internal bleeding and my lung collapsed.”

“And were you hospitalized?”

“For seven days, I believe.”

“And what about the injury to your head?”

“I had long, open wounds on my head. One on the right side, from my eyebrow up to my hairline.”

He made her get down from the witness stand and walk close to the jury and pull her bangs aside and show them—even after all the plastic surgery—the extent of the scarring that remained. And he made her put her fingers on her chest in the exact spot where she'd been stabbed.

She then testified that she'd had “some seizure-type activity,” presumably as a result of her head injury. “I would be in the shower,” she said, “or driving down the highway, and all of a sudden it was like I was standing on the outside watching somebody else doing something totally different. And it was explained to me as a daydream-type seizure.” No, she said, she'd never had anything like that before being attacked.

“Now,” Norton asked her, “how many times did you see—actually see, or look at, the individual there in the room that night?”

“Two times that I recall. When I first awoke and saw the person standing near the end of the bed, and then again when I regained consciousness on the floor, he was standing at my feet.”

“And what was the next thing that happened as you were lying on the floor?”