Cruel Doubt (38 page)

“I honestly don't know the answer to that question,” Chris said. “There were many reasons that went through my mind, but I honestly do not know why I came up with this idea.”

“What reasons were going through your mind?”

“Well, money. I would have inherited a lot of money. I wouldn't have had to do anything else. I wouldn't have had to go back to school or anything. I could sit around, buy a house, and do drugs all the time. I could play D and D all I wanted to. And I had a term paper due that Monday that I hadn't even started on.”

He said he'd been taking large quantities of drugs in the weeks leading up to the murder. Alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, Ecstasy, and especially, LSD.

“What effect did LSD have on you?”

“I saw colors. I felt invincible. My mind raced very rapidly. And I had incredible amounts of energy for about six or seven hours straight. Marijuana, it seemed to make music better, it seemed to make TV more interesting, commercials especially. Ecstasy: I felt very mellow. And I just wanted to sit down and contemplate life. Generally, politics. That was what I was contemplating, world politics.”

Norton, who was now, in a sense, having the kind of conversation with Chris that Bonnie had not been able to bring herself to have, said, “All right. Now, you also said you had a term paper due. Surely, you don't mean that you killed your father because of a term paper?”

“What I mean is, that was a thought that went through my mind as one of the reasons, because I was very upset over the fact that I hadn't done it. I was very upset over the fact that my parents would be upset about it. I had already had two talks with my father and mother about my grades. I knew a third would mean that I probably wouldn't go back to school.”

After receiving the phone call from Angela, Chris was, he said, “in shock.”

“Why were you in shock? This was something you had planned.”

“At some level,” he said, “I did not really believe this would happen.”

“But you had sat down. You had planned. You had provided keys. You had provided an automobile. You had supplied a knife for the killing.”

“Yes, sir. But it was just like the game. In the game, you sit down and plan out things. You get your ducks in a row. I knew that this would happen. But at a deeper level, I didn't believe it.”

That changed when he saw Bonnie in the hospital. “She didn't look good. She had been injured, beaten, she was on a—she had a tube in her side, in her chest.”

“Did you hug her, kiss her?”

“I was just happy she was alive.”

“But you'd planned to kill her?”

“Yes, sir.”

Now, for the first time, Chris appeared unsettled. He shifted back and forth in his chair, he began to perspire a bit, and he glanced quickly around the courtroom but would not establish eye contact with anyone.

“Did you go to the funeral?” Norton asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Have any feelings about it at that time, about the killing?”

“Yes, sir, I did. Very strong feelings.” And now Chris put a hand to his face; now tears began to form in his eyes.

“What kind of feelings?” Norton asked.

“Incredible remorse,” he said, quite obviously trying to hold back the tears. “I was thoroughly disgusted.”

“Did you think about the police?”

“Yes, sir, I thought about the police. I thought about keeping myself away from them. I didn't want to be arrested, thrown in jail. I didn't want my mama to know what I had done. So I deceived the police as best I could. I lied to my family and my friends.”

Bonnie and Angela sat still and expressionless as Chris gave a short, muffled sob. He took a deep breath. He looked around the courtroom again, but not at either his mother or his sister. Then he seemed to regain his composure.

He testified that when he had returned to NC State in August, he'd had no contact at all with Neal Henderson, and had tried to avoid Upchurch as well, because “I was afraid of him, and I was disgusted with him.”

There had been, however, one encounter. It was in August. Chris had seen Upchurch at a party and had said he wanted to speak to him. “We went to a room,” Chris said, “I don't remember where it was. It was in the dorm. And he said, ‘You didn't tell me that the window on the back was Plexiglas.' He said he had to cut the screen and break the glass on the side window to get the door. And then, before I could say anything, he said, ‘There was blood everywhere.' At that point, I told him to shut his mouth. I didn't want to hear another word. I told him to forget it and to make sure that Neal forgot it, too. And I walked out of the room.”

“Why was it, Chris, that you didn't want to hear about what had gone on in the house? Why did you tell him to shut up?”

“Because I was disgusted about the whole thing. I didn't want to hear anything about it. I did not want to hear a word about it. And I was afraid of the boy, you know.”

“Why were you afraid of him?”

“Because he was the one that was supposed to have gone in the house and killed my parents.”

The next morning, as Chris returned to the stand, Mitchell Norton asked him about Angela.

“You stated that in your initial plan, the fire plan, you did not talk specifically about Angela, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How about in the burglary plan?”

“Yes, sir, we did.”

“What was discussed at that time?”

“She was to be murdered also.”

“And was there any particular reason for that?”

“Not any particular reason, no, sir.”

“What, if anything, did you stand to gain by Angela's death?”

“The entire insurance,” Chris said.

* * *

On cross-examination, Wayland Sermons pressed Chris about all the lies he had told, going back to the first time he'd been questioned by Lewis Young, and continuing up to the moment his lawyers negotiated his plea bargain.

“On the twenty-fifth day of July 1988, at ten forty-five
P
.
M
., you were not telling the truth, were you Mr. Pritchard?”

“No, sir, I was not.”

“On the first of August 1988, at five-fifty
P
.
M
. in the Washington police department, you were not telling the truth, were you?”

“No, sir, I was not.”

“On the twenty-fourth day of August 1988, at eleven-forty
A
.
M
., at the Washington police department, again, you were not telling the truth, were you?”

“No, sir, I was not.”

Then Sermons went into the details of the statements Chris had made. Again and again, Chris admitted, tonelessly, “I was lying . . . I was lying . . . I was lying.”

Finally, Sermons asked, “Prior to making your statement on December twenty-seventh, isn't it true that you knew Neal Henderson was prepared to testify that you asked him to drive your car down to Washington?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And did you not know that Mr. Henderson was contending that Mr. Upchurch actually did the killings?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And isn't it true that you knew that if you were convicted of first-degree murder, you stood a chance of being put to death in the gas chamber of North Carolina?”

His face now openly displaying anguish, Chris said, “Yes, sir.”

“Isn't it true that by your plea bargain, you no longer face that possibility?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you knew at the time you made the deal that that was saving your life, did you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You knew that if you had not made that deal, your life was on the line, didn't you, Mr. Pritchard?”

“Yes, sir.”

The implication was clear, even to Bonnie. If Chris had lied so many times to so many people in an attempt to save himself, why would he not lie this one more time, falsely implicating Upchurch in the plot, in order to escape the death penalty?

For if Norton hadn't been assured by Bill Osteen that Chris's statement would point to Upchurch's guilt, there would have been no plea bargain.

Outside the courtroom, at the end of the day, Wayland Sermons was even less charitable as he spoke to the press. He said Chris “obviously has a reason to lie. It's not the first time someone has testified to save his own life.” He predicted that the jury would “see through” the story Chris had told.

“In four days of testimony,” Sermons said, “the only evidence the State has is from someone who did seventeen hits of acid in thirty days.”

 

35

On Tuesday, January 16, Neal Henderson was called to the stand. He was well-dressed, composed, and reserved. Even Bonnie noted that he “gave the appearance of being respectful.”

She did not experience the same burst of terror as in September when she'd first seen him. Since then, at subsequent motion hearings, she'd grown at least marginally accustomed to the sight of him. Also, she later said, on this occasion, she was fully absorbed by the story he told.

“Speak up as loud as you can, Mr. Henderson,” Judge Watts said. “It's obviously important that all these folks hear what you have to say. And it's important that I hear what you have to say. And I have a terrible cold.”

Henderson said he was twenty-one years old, lived with his divorced mother and his sister in Danville, Virginia, where he worked as an assistant manager at a Wendy's. Before that, he'd worked at a Wendy's in Raleigh.

As early as fifth grade, he was found so gifted that he'd begun to take eighth-grade classes. Then he'd attended Bartlett Yancey High School in Yanceyville, the seat of Caswell County (and if there was a lesser county than Caswell, with a lesser county seat than Yanceyville, few in the courtroom—even in Pasquotank County—were likely ever to see it).

Two things had happened in high school, he said. He'd met James Upchurch, and he'd become obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons. His junior year had been spent in Durham, at the state's special school for students gifted in mathematics or science.

Next came the same sorry tale told by small-town boys from all over the state who had gone off to NC State and been overwhelmed by its size and impersonality.

By the end of his freshman year, Neal Henderson, with an IQ of 160 and SAT scores of 1500–760 math, 740 verbal, the highest in the history of Caswell County—had flunked out of college, unnoticed and unmourned.

He had, however, continued to live near the campus, eager to play Dungeons & Dragons, and unwilling to go home and admit failure to his sorrowing mother. At some point in the summer of 1988—he wasn't sure when—his Caswell County buddy James Upchurch had mentioned that the newest player in the game, Chris Pritchard, was heir to a fortune that might be worth $10 million.

And then, he said, “approximately two weeks, maybe three,” prior to July 25, Upchurch and Chris paid him a visit.

This was the first of the serious conflicts in terms of time. But there was nothing Mitchell Norton could do about it. Chris had already testified that Henderson had not known about the plot until the day before the murder was committed.

“James and Chris came in,” Henderson said. “We chatted for a couple of minutes about Dungeons and Dragons. Then James said he and Chris had a plan for Chris to come into his inheritance early. I remarked to them, ‘Oh, you're going to rob the place?' And James shook his head and said, ‘No. We are going to murder his parents so that he inherits.' ”

“And what did you say?”

“My exact words were, ‘Isn't that a little extreme?' Chris laughed. James said, ‘No, no. We are serious. Here, let me show you.' And they started outlining a plan.”

Henderson—who Mitchell Norton feared would come across to the jury as a “plastic man,” and who, to Upchurch's defense attorneys, resembled “a robot”—said mechanically that Upchurch had done “most of the talking,” while Chris sat nearby, drawing a map.

The plan was for Upchurch to enter the house, to steal enough small valuables to make it appear that a burglary had occurred, “and then go upstairs and murder Chris's parents. I don't think at that exact time we talked about methods, or anything like that.”

That first meeting, Henderson said, had lasted about an hour. They'd gone over the map in great detail, explaining just where he was supposed to drop off Upchurch, how to find the cul-de-sac at the end of the dirt road where he was to park, and the route Upchurch would take on foot from the car to the Von Stein house and back again. But, he said, no date was set.

“They asked me to drive the car down. Just drive it down, drop him off, pick him back up, and drive him back.”

They told him they'd give him “either two thousand or twenty thousand dollars, I am not sure exactly which.” He said, no problem, he'd be glad to drive the car.

“Two or three days” later, he had dropped by Upchurch's dorm room and had found Chris there. “They were sitting around talking,” he said. “If I remember correctly, they were talking about Dungeons and Dragons. When I got there, the conversation turned to the plan. Mostly, about what would happen afterwards. Chris said he was going to become very depressed after the murder, and he was going to listen to a suggestion that someone was going to make, most likely James, to take a beach trip to cheer himself up. He was going to invite all his friends. Everyone was going to the beach—whoever he could find. At that point, he was going to feel much better and then buy everybody a car.

“You see, James was concerned that if only he received a car, people would wonder why he was getting a car. Well, Chris said, that was no problem. He would buy everybody a car.

“Maybe three or four days after that, late evening, I happened to come by James's room. He was there alone, and we started talking about the plan. He pulled a bat out of a closet and laid it on one of the beds in the room. He said he'd been thinking about how he was going to do it, and he had the bat as the primary weapon he was going to use. He also showed me a knife that he had gotten.” This, too, contradicted Chris's story. Chris had testified that he'd not bought Upchurch the knife until the day before the murder.

“He said he wanted something that would knock someone out in one hit. He was not at all sure he could use just a knife and quickly do anything. But he said one good hit from the bat should do what he wanted. For as long as I've known him, he's always had a bat like that.

“Then he opened the drawer on his desk and pulled out a pair of gloves. They were the type batters use. And with, I think it was shoe polish, he blackened the gloves. They were black and white batting gloves, and he blackened the portion that was white.

“Then he said we were going to try for a day in the upcoming week. I think this meeting was on a Thursday or a Friday. He said Chris had either already left to go home or was going to go home the next day to find out the family's plans for the upcoming week, and I think, to get a house key. He asked me what my schedule was for the coming week, and I told him I had Sunday night off. He told me to keep it open—that that would probably be the night we would go.”

Henderson made no mention of any prior plan to burn down the house, saying only that on the morning of Sunday, July 24, Upchurch came to his apartment to give him the map Chris had drawn two or three weeks earlier.

“He told me he would meet me later that night, at about eleven-thirty, twelve o'clock, and he told me where the car would be parked: in a lot known as the fringe lot, on Sullivan Drive. He told me to just keep the map until that night, look it over.”

Henderson said he'd stayed in his apartment for the rest of the day, spending much of it with his girlfriend, Kenyatta, who was James Upchurch's cousin. In order to have an excuse for spending the night away, he'd told Kenyatta that evening that he'd just taken a hit of LSD, knowing that this would infuriate her, and that she'd tell him to get out and stay out until all effects of the drug had worn off.

At about eleven-thirty
P
.
M
. he'd met Upchurch by Chris Pritchard's car. Upchurch carried a green canvas knapsack and a baseball bat. The knapsack, Henderson said, “contained some clothing that he was going to change into.” He said Upchurch changed as they drove, putting on a black sweater, black running shoes, and a black hood or ski mask.

When they reached Washington—coming in on a back road so Chris's loud and distinctive white Mustang would not be noticed—“James asked me to pull into the Smallwood area on Lawson Road. He wanted to see the area in front of the house. So I pulled in. We went by Chris's house from the front. James kind of counted down five houses and said, ‘That's the place.' ”

By then, Henderson said, it was about two-thirty
A
.
M
.

But by then, in Judge Watts's courtroom, it was five-twenty
P
.
M
., and he declared a recess until morning.

* * *

That night, Bonnie drove to a waterfront restaurant half an hour out of Elizabeth City. This was not something she'd done before, nor would she do it again. Normally, she would eat a quick, simple, and solitary meal near her motel. Some nights, she would just get a takeout order from a fast-food restaurant and eat alone in her motel room.

But Neal Henderson's quiet recitation of the circumstances that had led to the murder of her husband and very nearly to her own death had affected Bonnie deeply. She had been stirred by listening to this total stranger describe how casually, how thoughtlessly—almost with indifference—he had involved himself in a scheme that would have seemed preposterous if its consequences had not been so tragic.

For so long, she'd felt it necessary to deny, even to herself, her feelings of sadness and loss. For so long, it seemed, she'd been engaged in combat with law enforcement. For so long, she'd been defending her son as he had lied.

But now it was almost over. Henderson would tell the rest of his sordid tale the next day. And yes, there would be other witnesses. And perhaps some sort of defense from Upchurch's lawyers. And then the verdict, possibly followed by a sentencing: life or death.

Bonnie was not sure it even mattered anymore. Just as, she thought, it did not matter why Lieth had not digested his rice. Her life was broken beyond repair. In only another week or two, her son would be taken from her, less violently but with no less finality than her husband had been.

She felt more weary than ever before, and especially exhausted by the effort of keeping every ounce of emotion locked inside.

Bonnie brought her notebook to the restaurant. After placing her order, she started to write. And for the first and only time during the trial, she wrote something that went beyond fact:

“As I was sitting in the courtroom, listening to Neal Henderson's accounting of what happened, I began to realize the tremendous loss suffered here. It became very difficult to suppress the emotion which began to come forward within me. I had to work very hard to try & prevent any juror from seeing into my feelings. Suppressing one's emotions for as long as I have done is bound to have some effect in the long run.

“As I sit here, I find myself once again dealing with feelings & emotions beyond my control. The realization that Lieth is never, never coming back is overpowering my thoughts at this moment. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to isolate myself in Elizabeth City. The feeling of complete and total loneliness is like no other I have
ever
experienced.”

There was a pause as the waitress served her meal. Then Bonnie began to write again:

“Thank God for the interruption of my attentive waitress! Enough of this self-sympathy. This is really a nice, quiet, small restaurant. There were only three other tables of guests when I arrived. Two of those have left already. There is soft background music from a local radio station. Just the kind of place Lieth and I could have enjoyed finding together.”

And then, for the first and only time, she addressed herself directly to her dead husband:

“Dear Lieth, I need you now as much as I ever have. I miss the time we shared; your compassion; your passion. Right this moment, I miss our lovemaking together. These things I have desperately avoided thinking about over the past year and a half. Why now? I am alone tonite by choice. Will I always be alone, or will I be brave enough to move forward to new experiences? You always had a lot of faith in my strength. I suppose in many ways I am strong. Why do I feel so weak now?”

* * *

The next day, Neal Henderson told the rest of his story.

They parked the car at the end of a dead-end dirt road behind the Von Stein house. “We both got out of the car,” Henderson said. “He told me to wait for him for about half an hour, and he would come back to meet me at this point at the end of the road. He put on the sweater. He got a ski mask ready, but he didn't put it on. Went ahead and put his gloves on. He had a flashlight and he turned it on. It didn't work very well. The batteries seemed to be weak.”

Mitchell Norton handed Henderson a photograph of a baseball bat.

“This is the bat that James had that night,” Henderson said. “I remember him taping the handle. And there's a circle of black triangles around the bat that he drew with Magic Marker. I remember him drawing that.”

Then Norton handed Henderson the bat itself. This was, for Norton, one of the trickiest moments of the trial. When Henderson had first told his story to John Crone and Lewis Young, he'd mentioned the bat. He had said he thought Upchurch might have thrown the bat out of the moving car, as they drove back toward Raleigh. Later, he'd revised this, saying he was not sure, but it was possible that when Upchurch returned to the car after having committed the murder, he had already disposed of the bat.

The next day, in a small, wooded area across from Lawson Road, Crone found a baseball bat that had obviously been exposed to the elements for some time. The bat had been sent to a laboratory for analysis, but the report came back negative. There were no traces of blood, no hairs, no fibers—nothing that could link it to the commission of any crime.

Only Neal Henderson could do that. And now he was: saying, yes, this was definitely the bat that James Upchurch had brought with him. Those faint and faded traces of Magic Marker were proof enough, even though, he admitted, “there's no tape, and it's a lot darker and it has dirt on it.”