Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  The rumors had begun even before the neighbors had finished scrubbing the blood from the bedroom walls. Even the local paper referred to them, with a spokesman for the Washington police department quoted as saying he had “heard rumors about the incident but discounted most of them as ill-informed or malicious.”

  Still, even as Bonnie lay in her hospital bed with the chest tube firmly in place, all over Little Washington people she had never met were muttering their doubts about the existence of genuine intruders in the night.

  “I must say,” Lewis Young recalled later, “she looked pretty incapacitated. Her head looked bad. My head was hurting just looking at her. If there was all that money involved, she obviously had a motive, but I’d never seen a crime where a person inflicted injuries that serious to themselves, or had them inflicted by somebody else, just to take the heat off.”

  He asked her to tell him about the weekend. She said Chris had been home that Saturday night and had barbecued hamburgers for them all. The next morning, she and Lieth had slept late and then gone to Greenville for breakfast. They’d eaten at The Waffle House.

  It was the sort of thing they liked to do on weekends, the sort of thing they considered recreation. Twenty-five miles might seem a long drive just to get to a place called The Waffle House, but if you stayed in Little Washington, your breakfast options were McDonald’s or Burger King.

  She’d asked Angela if she wanted to join them, but Angela was on her way to the Five Points Equestrian Center to spend the day among horses. Angela loved horses, always had. The chance to ride was about the only thing that could get her up at eight-thirty on a weekend morning. Chris had gone back to school the night before, after the barbecue, saying he had to work on a term paper.

  So it had been just the two of them. After breakfast, they’d made a brief stop to look at mobile homes. Having just come into a large inheritance—Bonnie said it was $1.3 million—Lieth had been planning to quit his job at the end of the year and devote full time to managing his investments. With both children finally in college, they’d be free to travel.

  That afternoon, they’d spent a couple of hours at the computer, entering and updating stock market data. Then, she said with some embarrassment, they’d enjoyed some “private moments” in their bedroom.

  They drove back to Greenville that night, and because their favorite restaurant, The King and Queen, was closed, they’d eaten at Sweet Caroline’s. Lieth drank a couple of vodka martinis and Bonnie a Tom Collins before the meal. He ordered the chicken and wild rice special. She had the blackened steak. They’d had wine with the meal, too, though she herself had drunk, at most, a single glass.

  He’d gone to bed as soon as they got home. Lieth did that. He went to bed early. As she’d said the day before, she had stayed up to watch the Ted Bundy miniseries. Not because she cared about Ted Bundy: just because she happened to like the actor who played the role. Yes, her rooster had been with her. She’d grown up in farm country, she’d loved animals all her life, and she didn’t see anything strange about either having thirteen cats in her house or about bringing her rooster inside while she watched television.

  She had turned off the television shortly after the eleven o’clock news had begun. Then she’d gone upstairs and awakened Lieth to ask him if he’d like a glass of tea. He had said no and had immediately fallen back to sleep. Then she’d had her little chat with Angela—Bonnie had been thinking of going to the beach the next day, and they discussed bathing suits, and also a cassette tape of Angela’s that Bonnie wanted to bring in her car.

  She’d spent a few minutes reading in bed—a paperback Harlequin romance, she couldn’t remember the title. But the music from Angela’s tape player or radio was distracting, so she’d gone to her daughter’s room and closed the door. She’d also closed her own bedroom door. Soon, she had fallen asleep. The next thing she heard was Lieth screaming.

  During the attack, she’d heard a “whooshing” and a “thumping” sound each time that Lieth was hit. She recalled that the attacker, upon leaving her room, had closed the door “softly,” he hadn’t slammed it. Later, she’d heard the same “whooshing” and “thumping” in the hallway, causing her to fear that Angela was being killed, too.

  Young asked if she had any better impression of her assailant than she’d had the day before. Bonnie said she thought he’d been a big man, strong, with broad shoulders that had “blended” into his head, “almost as if he had no neck.” She also said she thought he’d been wearing a ski mask.

  Young wanted to know more about Lieth. Bonnie said he was a gentle man who would not allow weapons in the house. She was not aware of his having any problems at work. She had no knowledge or suspicions of any extramarital affairs. Their marriage had been filled with happiness.

  Lieth had been kind to her children, had wanted them to have good educations. A vocal man, he would let you know right away if something was bothering him, but he didn’t carry a grudge. He’d had no problems with Chris or Angela or with any of their friends. They really had been, she said, just one medium-sized happy family. Nothing out of the ordinary in any way, except that maybe, over the past couple of years, faced with the stress of his parents’ illnesses and deaths—and the death, too, of an uncle who had been almost like a father to him—and the need, through all this time of sickness and death, to make the four-and-a-half-hour trip to Winston-Salem almost every weekend, Lieth had begun to drink more than she thought was good for him.

  He showed her a picture of the green canvas knapsack that had been found on the floor of the hall that led from the back door to the kitchen. She said it did not belong to anyone in her family and that she’d never seen it before.

  Next, Young asked about the inheritance. She said Angela and Chris both knew Lieth had inherited a significant sum, but because theirs was not a family in which such matters were openly discussed, she doubted that either child had any idea just how much was involved. One thing the children did know was that in the event she and Lieth were both to die, whatever assets they left behind—and when Lieth’s life insurance was added to what he had inherited, the total came to almost $2 million—would be held in a trust until Angela, the younger child, turned thirty-five.

  When Young asked her if she had any new ideas about who might have committed the crime, she said he might want to consider the trust department of the North Carolina National Bank. Lieth had informed them of his decision to close out their $1.3 million account because he was dissatisfied with their performance and fees. Perhaps, she said, the bank had arranged Lieth’s murder to prevent him from taking the money away from them.

  This struck Lewis Young as the most ridiculous notion he’d heard yet concerning a motive for the murder. But looking again at Bonnie’s battered forehead, he was inclined to think that the combination of physical injury and emotional shock might be responsible for any sort of farfetched idea.

  He asked her one more question about the book she’d been reading in bed. She could not remember the title, she said, but she assured him it had not been A Rose in Winter.

  4

  It was shortly after six P.M. on Tuesday, July 26, the day he’d had his first talk with Bonnie in the hospital, that Lewis Young received a call from the Little Washington police informing him that, in the excitement surrounding the murder of Lieth Von Stein, this had been forgotten, but a hog farmer named Noel Lee had called to report that at four-thirty on the morning of the murder he’d seen a fire burning at the edge of State Road 1565, the Grimesland Bridge Road, just across the Pitt County line.

  Young called Lee, but he was out. At eleven P.M., Lee returned the call. By eleven-thirty, Lewis Young was standing at his front door.

  It was only a quarter mile from Noel Lee’s house to the site of the fire. Just beyond a curve and a dip in the road, at the edge of a wooded, swampy area. With a flashlight, Lee pointed out where the fire had been. About e
ight feet off the shoulder of the road was a burned area, not large, no more than three feet in diameter, and shaped more like an oval than a circle.

  Using his own flashlight and crouching at the edge of the oval, Young saw what looked to be ashes. Digging a bit, he detected a faint odor of gasoline. He also found scraps of burnt clothing, a partly burnt shoe, and a burnt hunting knife with a six-inch blade. He placed each of these items into plastic evidence bags.

  Then Young played his light out beyond the edge of the burnt area. He spotted a singed and crumpled piece of paper about two feet past the ring of ashes. This, too, he placed in an evidence bag.

  It was dark and it was late. He thanked Noel Lee for his help. He said yes, by all means, calling had been the right thing to do. He apologized for the fact that it had taken so long for anyone to respond. Lee said no problem, no need for apology, he wasn’t even sure it had been worth bothering anyone about, but then, after seeing on the TV about the murder, he figured, what the heck, might as well call.

  * * *

  Early the next morning, Young received a call from George Bates, who said his fears about Chris’s involvement were growing worse. The day before, he told Young, he had driven Chris back to his dormitory at NC State in Raleigh. Chris’s roommate had apparently found the missing car keys under a chair cushion, and Chris had wanted to get his car.

  All the way up, George Bates said, Chris had continued to act jittery. “Boy, was he nervous. He was shaking.” He had not expressed the slightest sorrow about the death of his stepfather or concern about his mother’s condition, or even curiosity about what might have happened. Instead, he’d rambled on about how deeply involved he’d gotten in the drug scene on campus, and about how he would have to “get off that junk.”

  But the really strange thing, George Bates said—and this was what had prompted the call—was that after retrieving his car keys from the dorm room, Chris hadn’t seemed to know where the car was.

  He had said he thought it was parked in a “fringe lot,” about a quarter mile from the dorm. But as George Bates had driven him to the lot, Chris had kept saying he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find the car right away.

  He’d said, “I was at a party all night and got stoned out of my head.”

  “But you weren’t stoned out of your mind when you parked the car before the party started,” his uncle had told him. “What do you mean, you don’t know where it is?”

  As it turned out, Chris’s white Mustang was just about the only car in the whole lot, and so he had been able to spot it right away. But it had struck him as strange, and it troubled him, George Bates said, that Chris had worried that he wouldn’t be able to find his own car. It might mean nothing—in fact, all of his talk about Chris might be way off base, George Bates acknowledged—but it was one more thing he thought he should pass along.

  * * *

  Later that morning, at Washington police headquarters, with the young detective John Taylor standing at his side, Young, having already examined the partly burned hunting knife and partly burned shoe and the scraps of burnt clothing, opened the last plastic bag.

  He removed the crumpled and singed piece of paper and exercising great care, slowly unfolded it.

  He saw lines and squares and drawings of four-legged animals. The word LAWSON was printed above the longest line.

  The lines appeared to denote streets, the blocks looked like symbols for houses, and the animals appeared to be dogs. Unlike the lines and blocks, the dogs were not just stick-figure representations, but had been drawn as if to illustrate a medieval fairy tale.

  “That’s Smallwood!” Young exclaimed.

  Although only the word LAWSON indicated a specific street, Young quickly recognized that the other lines, crisscrossing at various angles, represented roads in and adjacent to the neighborhood. There was the Market Street Extension. And behind the line that had the word LAWSON printed above it was another, which would be Marsh Road, and then the one behind that, which was Northwoods.

  Of the little square blocks drawn along the line that represented Lawson Road, the fifth from the top was surrounded by more detail than the others. Even with a portion of the map burned away, Young and Taylor could see markings that indicated a fence, a drainage ditch, and a small shed in the backyard.

  The drawings of two medieval mastiffs placed them in yards on either side of the fifth house on the block.

  The fifth house, Lewis Young knew, from the time he’d already spent at the scene, was the house in which Lieth Von Stein had been murdered.

  John Taylor photographed the map. Young sent the hunting knife to the pathologist who’d done the autopsy on Lieth Von Stein. The doctor’s findings were what Young had expected: the blade was consistent with the type of instrument used to inflict the stab wounds on Von Stein.

  Why the map hadn’t been consumed by the flames was something neither Young nor Taylor, nor later, the Beaufort County district attorney, Mitchell Norton, nor anyone else who came to be involved in the Von Stein murder investigation, was ever able to explain.

  Had it been just casually tossed at the edge of the pile of bloody clothing, then been blown clear of the flames when the gasoline that was poured on the clothing had ignited?

  Or had it been tossed toward the already burning blaze as an afterthought, as the person who’d set the fire hurried back toward a waiting car?

  Or was the fact that it had survived the fire nearly intact—survived a blaze hot enough to partly melt a hunting knife—no more, no less than an act of God, as the district attorney would eventually argue to a jury?

  For some facts, there are no explanations. But that doesn’t mean there are not consequences. It would be many months before the consequences of the map’s survival would be felt. But when they were, they would be drastic and everlasting.

  5

  Welcome, North Carolina, where Bonnie Lou Bates was born, was the sort of small Southern town where the church was the center of all social life; where a mother, over her lifetime, would make dozens of quilts and hundreds, if not thousands, of chicken pies, and where even a shy, plain girl such as Bonnie would grow up knowing everybody for miles around.

  Although it was only about ten miles south of Winston-Salem, one of the leading industrial cities in the state, Welcome was not merely in another county: it seemed to be in another world. Driving those ten miles south from the city, one abruptly left behind all traces of urbanization and entered an almost fairy-tale land of Southern farm-country America. If you wanted to go anyplace from Welcome, it would most likely not be Winston-Salem (unless you worked there), but Lexington, a town of fifteen thousand, which was five miles farther down the road.

  There may have been about three thousand people in Welcome, or maybe even four thousand. No one was quite sure, since the town was unincorporated. It was the kind of town where the gas stations advertised “Clean Restrooms and Ice Water,” and where, if you stopped by Elwood Blackmon’s barbershop (Elwood, as a matter of fact, had been in Bonnie’s high school class), you could actually hear someone say, “Welcome is so small, it’s just a wide place in the road.”

  Most of the barbershop talk tended to be more specific: whose road just got tarred, how long it took, whose tractor wasn’t working, or where the newest patch of dewberries—a cross between raspberries and blackberries—had been found.

  There wouldn’t be a whole lot of political talk, since almost everyone already felt the same way: Davidson County, of which Welcome was a small part, was more than three-quarters Democratic, and the Republicans, even when in need of a haircut, had the good sense to stick to tractors and dewberries when they spoke.

  There were only two ways into town, and either way, you’d pass a sign that said, “Welcome to Welcome.” Otherwise, there were no street signs because it was presumed that if you were there, you already knew where you were going. If the Mayberry o
f television’s old “The Andy Griffith Show” wasn’t really based on Welcome, it might as well have been.

  The townspeople had always been known for three traits: being hardworking, friendly, and religious (as well as for voting Democratic, which was not so much a trait as a reflex).

  It was the friendliness that gave the town its name. Back at the turn of the century, the settlement was called Hinklesville, because so many people named Hinkle lived there.

  But in 1910, when the Southland Railroad proposed to run its first train through the community and a station was built to receive passengers, the townspeople decided that enough among them were not named Hinkle that the town should have a new name. Thinking that the first word a stranger would like to see when disembarking from a train would be “Welcome,” they decided to call it that.

  Trains still passed through Welcome—one in the daytime, and two at night—but they had long ago stopped carrying passengers, hauled only freight, and no longer stopped. The farmers got up early, raised their corn and wheat for grain, which the flour mill ground for horse feed and glue, and also grew soybeans, tobacco, and fruit. You could also find a lot of livestock in Welcome, mostly cattle, chicken, and pigs.

  There was no police department. On the rare occasions when law enforcement was required, the Davidson County Sheriff’s Department would do the job. If you were looking for the center of town, the post office would probably be the place to go.

  Welcome always had two restaurants—both of them featuring traditional North Carolina barbecue (smoky and vinegary shreds of pork, not to be confused with the gluey, tomatoey concoction consumed in Texas). First, there were Pope’s and Dan’s; later, Andy’s and Kerley’s. The Bateses always favored Kerley’s.

  Only eight hundred feet above sea level, surrounded by low, rolling hills and lots of streams, and a tough, five-and-a-half-hour drive from the beach, Welcome had never fancied itself a tourist attraction. Like Little Washington—though much more of a classic rural, small town—Welcome was not a place in which you’d be likely to find yourself unless you already had relatives living there.