Cruel Doubt (4 page)

Autopsy showed that Lieth Von Stein, Caucasian male, forty-two years of age, five six, 185 pounds, had been hit on the head with a blunt object five times, hard enough to pop open the skin and to cause small, linear cracks in the skull. He had also been stabbed seven times in the back and once in the chest. The stab wound through the chest had penetrated his heart, killing him. A broken wrist, as well as bruise and scrape marks along his forearms, indicated that, for a time at least, he had attempted to ward off the blows.

No alcohol was detected in his blood, though a fatty liver suggested to the pathologist “a rather stiff, consistent use of beverage alcohol.” In his stomach, the pathologist found “a rather large amount” of undigested chicken and rice.

 

3

It has been written of North Carolina that when the essential unpretentiousness of its citizenry is contrasted with the vanity displayed by Richmond aristocracy to the north and the haughtiness manifested by Charleston gentry to the south, the state can be viewed as “a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.”

That being the case, there are few places within it that have more to be humble about than Beaufort County, and that county's seat, Little Washington.

The county lies well to the east of the triangle formed by the relatively thriving and sophisticated cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. In size, the eighth largest of North Carolina's one hundred counties, it sprawls all over the state's coastal plain, but fails to reach the sea. There are farms, more farms, then more farms—the biggest crops being soybeans and tobacco—as well as a few lumber mills and an occasional textile plant. And then there is Washington, the county seat.

The town of Little Washington—a name much resented by local residents but widely used by people elsewhere in the state to avoid confusion with Washington, D.C.—sits at the point where the Tar River widens into the Pamlico, thirty miles inland from Pamlico Sound. It has a population of almost ten thousand, a high school, a hospital, a daily newspaper, and a lot of heavy lumber trucks rolling right up its middle, along Route 17. The best motel is the Holiday Inn, where a double room goes for $42 a night. For lunch, even the lawyers eat at Wendy's.

Twenty-six states have towns or cities named Washington. Of these, Washington, North Carolina, its name dating from 1776, is one of three that claim to be the original.

During the Civil War, Little Washington briefly became the “capital” of North Carolina. This was the result of a misadventure that grew out of the erroneous perception, formed by one Edward Stanley, recently returned from California, that North Carolina's allegiance could be transferred to the Union side. President Lincoln, seeing nothing to be lost, named Stanley provisional governor of the new “Union” state, and he set up his headquarters in Little Washington.

The attempt did not prove successful, though Stanley, who survived, was rewarded for his boldness by being appointed, after the war, North Carolina's attorney general. Later, he served five terms in the United States Congress where he earned the dubious distinction of participating in the last duel ever fought between members of Congress. Neither he nor his opponent was injured.

There are some fine, old, well-maintained homes near the center of Little Washington, by the river. In one of these, built about 1830, the great-grandfather of Cecil B. deMille once resided.

The Beaufort County Courthouse, at the corner of Second and Market streets, is a square, two-story brick structure built in about 1800. In the basement is the Beaufort County jail. There, in 1974, a twenty-one-year-old black woman named Joan Little killed a sixty-two-year-old white jailer by stabbing him eleven times with an ice pick. He was naked from the waist down when his body was found. She was charged with murder, accused of enticing him into her cell and then killing him. She claimed self-defense, saying he had tried to rape her. After a nationally publicized trial held in Raleigh, she was acquitted.

Union soldiers burned the town to the ground in 1864, and another fire, in 1900, destroyed it again. In construction since then, grace and charm have not been among the higher priorities. If fresh paint has been applied anywhere in town at any time since the end of World War II, its presence is not readily apparent to the visitor.

Of the residents of Little Washington, much the same can be said as has been written about the natives of Beaufort County as a whole: “The hankering for greener pastures does not infect Beaufort people. Most of them have been here a long time, and it might as well be admitted that they have learned to relax . . . the Beaufort native is not as rich as he'd like to be, but he doesn't see any point in straining himself to earn money so he can buy some leisure for his old age. He already has it.”

Neither the county nor the town are the kinds of places you'd be likely to stumble across, and, if you didn't have business there, not places you'd be likely to seek out.

In 1981, Lieth Von Stein was offered the job of director of internal audits for the town's largest employer, a textile company called National Spinning.

Lieth was a native of Winston-Salem, the big industrial city in the central part of the state. His wife, Bonnie, had been born and raised in the farming village of Welcome, a dot on the map about half an hour south of Winston-Salem. For the past two years, they'd been living just outside South Bend, Indiana, where Lieth had been employed in the field of finance. He had just been laid off, however, and he and Bonnie had decided it was time to go back home.

Their first choice would have been something in or at least closer to Winston-Salem. If not there, maybe the Raleigh—Durham—Chapel Hill area, where there was culture and a progressive spirit and economic growth. Or even Charlotte, which, though not big on charm, was the closest thing to a metropolis in the state.

But the first acceptable job offer Lieth received was from National Spinning, located in the backwater town of Little Washington, four hours of hard driving from family and friends.

It was a good job, director of internal audits, paying more than $40,000 a year to start—quite a high salary in Little Washington in 1981—and offering prospects for advancement. Lieth, aware that he had not only Bonnie but her two children from a previous marriage to support, was not inclined to shop for better.

And so they moved, the four of them—Bonnie's two children were Chris, twelve, and Angela, eleven—into a small ranch house on Lawson Road in the new Smallwood subdivision, which, with new homes costing as much as $95,000, came as close to luxury housing as could be found in Little Washington.

But Lieth never grew to like the town. He didn't want to live there, he didn't plan to stay a moment longer than he had to, and it certainly was not the place in which he would have chosen to die.

He was a short, balding man with a trim red beard, a sharp sense of humor, and a quick temper.

Bonnie was a pale, shy, frail-looking woman with thick eyeglasses, and a soft, almost inflectionless voice. She wore no makeup, and acquiring fashionable clothes was not a priority.

They bought a small outboard motorboat and took it to the river on weekends, bringing a picnic lunch and spending whole days on the water. When the children got older, they took the boat over to the little town of Chocowinity, on the south side of the river, where there was a restaurant you could pull right up to in your boat. Bonnie and Lieth had always liked exploring for new restaurants. It was one of their major forms of recreation.

But they were not social people, or even sociable. Outside of work, Lieth had very few acquaintances in town, and the closest that Bonnie came to civic activity was her membership in the county Humane Society. There was no one in Washington whom either Lieth or Bonnie ever came to consider a close friend.

Their families, their friends, their real lives, were four hours away, in Winston-Salem and in the tiny village of Welcome. Little Washington was not a town where you had to do much to be noticed, but Bonnie and Lieth were so private, so withdrawn, that even after seven years—even on the morning of the murder—they remained as unknown to most of the community as they had been the day they arrived.

* * *

Bonnie received Darvocet for her chest pain, then Demerol, then Phenergan after a morning episode of vomiting.

She would be awake for a while, then asleep. She felt pressure in her chest. Her head hurt. It was hard to breathe. The worst pain came from where they'd inserted the tube. Lieth was dead. “At least he's not suffering,” she mumbled to a nurse. “He tried to save me.” Then, “The police said they couldn't do anything for my husband. He's dead.”

Chris was there and then he wasn't. But she would never forget the sight of him standing beside her when she'd first opened her eyes. She'd never forget how tightly he'd squeezed her hand, or how hard he had cried.

She slept again. When she awoke, two policemen were there, asking her questions. It was hard to hear them, hard to think, hard to talk. She just wanted to sleep and never wake up. But Angela had not been hurt—the one piece of good news she'd been given.

What happened? they kept asking. How many intruders? Black or white? What did she see? What had she heard? What could she remember?

She'd seen only one, but there could have been ten or fifteen. She didn't know. She couldn't remember. Her head hurt. Despite seeming “alert” to her physician, Bonnie felt she could not get her mind to focus. They'd already told her she'd lost 40 percent of her blood. How much was that? How long would it take to get it back?

Beneath the bandages that covered her forehead, Bonnie's face was haggard and drawn. She spoke in a voice so soft that listeners had to strain to hear her. Even so, speech exhausted her. Tubes still seemed to be everywhere.

Lieth was dead. Angela had not been hurt. There had been so much blood. So much red, when the police had turned the light on.

She tried to answer their questions. A killer was loose. The man who'd murdered Lieth. The man who'd tried to murder her. These men were trying to catch him. She forced herself to listen, to remember, to speak.

They'd been out to dinner. When they'd come home, Lieth went to bed. That would have been about nine
P
.
M
. She'd stayed up to watch television, the first half of a miniseries about Ted Bundy, the serial killer.

Some would later say it was ironic—and others, less charitable, would deem it suspicious, that in the last hours before the murder of her husband, Bonnie, with only her pet rooster for company, had been watching a movie about the crimes of Ted Bundy. But she saw nothing peculiar about it. She simply liked the actor who played Ted Bundy. Harmon was his name. Something Harmon.

By the time she went upstairs, Angela was already in bed. She told the police that Angela had her fan on, and her radio on, and that the door to her bedroom had been closed.

Bonnie had read for half an hour, then fallen asleep just after midnight. What woke her was the sound of Lieth screaming. Never had she heard screams like that. So loud, so sharp. She didn't know how many screams, maybe ten, maybe fifteen. She didn't know what time this was. She, too, had screamed, then she'd been hit by a club, then she'd been stabbed. She'd fallen off the side of the bed.

As she lay on the floor, she was hit again. Then she passed out. It was terribly exhausting to tell all this. And it was all so jumbled in her mind. When she woke up, on the floor, she had reached up and felt Lieth's hand in the darkness. That, she did remember clearly: feeling Lieth's hand. It was sticky, and she knew the stickiness was blood.

She tried to get to the phone, which was on the nightstand next to the bed, but passed out again. When she next regained consciousness, though too weak to sit, she pushed herself backward across the carpet with her heels until she reached her nightstand. Then she pulled the phone down on top of herself by yanking the cord. With the phone on the floor, in the dark, she pushed the buttons, one by one, until she hit the one that brought the operator on the line. Then she'd asked for the police.

No, she couldn't give a description of the attacker. She said she “couldn't see anything but the dark form of a man.”

* * *

Chris left the hospital that morning in the company of his best friend from high school, Jonathan Wagoner. He asked Jonathan to drive him past his house. There was a big crowd outside. Neighbors, cops, friends, reporters, a TV truck. And Angela still hanging around across the street.

Chris saw the blood-soaked sheets hanging from the boat, garish in the morning light, in plain view of anyone driving by. Chris wanted to stop and find out who'd hung them there and kick their ass, but Jonathan managed to calm him down, driving him away from the house and to the mall a mile away.

He was manic, hyper, on the verge of losing all control. An old friend from high school named Steven Outlaw saw him pacing back and forth outside Frank's Pizza.

“Lieth is dead?”

“That's right.”

“How's your mom?”

“Not too good. She's a mess. They stabbed her and they clubbed her in the head.”

“Who do you think it was?”

“I don't know.” Chris said, lighting one cigarette from another with shaking hands, “but if I ever find out, I'm going to kill them.”

Then Chris turned and walked into Scott's clothing store. He browsed through counters stacked with shirts, and racks of pants. He told Jonathan he'd been working part-time at a clothing store in Raleigh. Then he started chatting with a clerk about prices and styles.

Jonathan Wagoner didn't know much about shock, but he figured whatever it was, Chris was suffering from it.

They went back to the house, where a big crowd was still gathered. Chris spoke to a neighbor who'd just come back from seeing Bonnie at the hospital.

“What did she say?” he asked.

That was strange, the neighbor thought. Not “How is she?” but “What did she say?” And why wasn't he there himself?

“Did she see who it was?” Chris asked.

“No, she just said he had to be young. He seemed strong. She had the sense of a lot of muscles in the chest.”

“Young, what do you mean, young?”

“Chris, relax. Calm down. She doesn't know. She couldn't see.”

But Chris didn't seem able to calm down. “I'm gonna kill whoever did it,” he said. “I can't believe anybody would hurt my mother.”

“He was still kind of fucked up,” Andrew Arnold said. “Still tore up. He couldn't stand still. Said he'd been partyin' all night, taken a few drugs.”