Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

The fact was, Bonnie did not want any company. The person whose companionship had meant the most to her was gone forever now, and rather than make the effort even to sustain conversation with her children, she preferred to be alone with her memories.

  She tried to recall only the good times, of which there had been many, at least until the last eighteen months of Lieth’s life.

  Things had begun to turn sour in February 1987 when his father had died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm. For the next thirteen months, Bonnie and Lieth had driven back and forth from Washington to Winston-Salem—a four-and-a-half-hour trip—on all but two weekends. After his father’s death, his mother had needed constant care. As an only child, it was up to Lieth to provide it. His mother had weakened fast, however, and had died within six months of her husband.

  The next to go was Uncle Richard, someone so close to Lieth as to have been almost a second father. He’d become sick with emphysema. Both oxygen and nursing care were required twenty-four hours a day. Eventually, he needed a tracheotomy. Again, Lieth had been responsible for all arrangements. Richard had died in March.

  Camel City Dry Cleaners & Laundry had become the biggest enterprise of its kind in Winston-Salem. So successful that when Lieth’s father died, having sold the business not long before, he left an estate of more than $1 million. Upon the death of his mother, Lieth inherited the entire estate.

  For most people, not having money was a bigger worry than having it, but Lieth—an auditor by trade and a man who’d been raised to respect a dollar sign—found it quite stressful to suddenly control such a sum.

  The Trust Department of the North Carolina National Bank in Winston-Salem was managing the estate, but he was not happy with their performance. Since March, often with Bonnie’s research assistance, he’d spent nights and weekends formulating a stock-trading program, which, on paper, was achieving far better results than the bank’s. Why should he pay them tens of thousands of dollars a year in management fees, he’d asked her repeatedly, to do what he could do better himself? Besides, it was something he enjoyed.

  Lieth subscribed to half a dozen sports-betting services and during the football and basketball seasons had a wager on almost every game he was able to watch on television. The stock market, though it required more work, and though the money involved was far more substantial, was, he claimed, just as much fun.

  Pressure, to be sure—especially when you were playing with a sum more than twenty-five times your annual salary—but Lieth worked hard at fundamental research and had confidence in his trading instincts. He claimed—perhaps dubiously—that he’d never once lost money even on the riskiest of stock market gambles, the trading of puts and calls. Even so, it took a case of Budweiser per weekend to dull his growing anxiety. And increasingly, the beer had been supplemented by vodka.

  By the end of the year, however, he would have been eligible to receive full pension benefits from National Spinning. He could then quit his job—which he’d never liked in the first place—and manage his money full time.

  He and Bonnie could live off the income from his inheritance, plus the profits he’d make from investing. He talked about buying a mobile home, which he could use as an office when they were in Little Washington. When the spirit moved them, they could turn the ignition key and take to the road. Or even to the high seas: What about a cruise? With faxes and radiophones and laptop computers there was no reason why Lieth couldn’t manage their money just as well while en route to a Caribbean island. Suddenly, horizons seemed limitless. By July, the long months of strain seemed almost over. Soon, he and Bonnie could start to really live.

  This had been his mood on the last day of his life, and Bonnie had found herself relieved. Lieth had been so down, so drained, so mentally and emotionally exhausted by the deaths of his parents and his uncle. His nerves had been rubbed raw by the pressure of trying to deal with medical emergencies, then funeral arrangements, then grief, all the while working at a job he didn’t like, in a town he despised, and having to cope also with her teenaged children, who, even she had to admit, could be difficult on occasion.

  She felt she could drive from Washington to Winston-Salem blindfolded after all the trips they’d made for thirteen months. She’d gone with him on every one, even though it meant leaving the children unattended, because he had told her he needed her. He couldn’t face all that misery by himself. She was his wife and her place was by his side, even if that meant nine hours in an automobile every weekend.

  Helplessly, she had watched as Lieth’s depression deepened, as he grew more irritable and quarrelsome and both physically and emotionally fatigued. He would come home from work, head straight for the beer in the refrigerator, and drink until he went to bed. And he’d taken to going to bed as early as eight P.M. This wasn’t healthy, she knew it wasn’t, just as it wasn’t healthy to go through a whole case of beer on a weekend, plus a fifth of Jack Daniel’s or sometimes vodka, or entire bottles of wine.

  By the last day of his life, however, she had allowed herself to start hoping that most of the worst might be behind them, and that the new life he envisioned would come to pass. It had been, she’d later say, “a day filled with bliss and togetherness.” She reminded herself—and others—that her last meal with Lieth had been one of the happiest and most romantic they’d ever shared.

  She said the thought had even occurred to her, as they’d driven back from Greenville after the dinner: at least there are no more family members left to die.

  * * *

  A memorial service for Lieth was held in Winston-Salem. Bonnie’s mother, who grew orchids in a greenhouse behind their home, made a spray of the flowers and placed it around the urn that held Lieth’s ashes. After a service at the funeral home, the urn was taken to a cemetery. How do you bury ashes? Bonnie wondered. It seemed unnatural. But for days now nothing had seemed natural. She no longer knew what natural was and doubted that she ever would again.

  She was surprised by how many people stood at the graveside. People she had worked with at Integon, old high school friends of Lieth’s, even her ex-husband, Steve Pritchard. And of course, Angela and Chris.

  But that was only one day. There were all the other days to get through, too. The chills did not subside. Nor did the sleeplessness, nor the sorrow.

  And as the days passed, despite her father’s best efforts, and despite the emotional solace offered by her childhood home, Bonnie could not entirely rid herself of her icy fear.

  This was not something she felt she could talk about, because she didn’t want to worry others, but as she sat wrapped in blankets in her father’s den, she grew more frightened, rather than less, at the prospect that whoever had tried to kill her would come back.

  She tried to force the fear into the background by making herself look logically at what had happened. But there had been no logic to it. Who could have killed Lieth? And why? Who could have come so close to killing her?

  She knew it might seem farfetched to blame the North Carolina National Bank Trust Department, just as it was farfetched to blame a rival or enemy of Lieth’s from National Spinning. But no supposition, no accusation, no crazy guess, could be as wildly unlikely as the fact that it had happened at all.

  She grew weary of thinking about it, but there was nothing else to think about.

  Why hadn’t there been an arrest? How hard could it be to find someone who had done such a terrible thing? This wasn’t New York City, Los Angeles or Detroit. This had happened in the Smallwood subdivision in Washington, North Carolina, where nothing like it had ever happened before. Surely, this could not be a hard crime to solve.

  In the hospital, Bonnie’s only consolation—other than that Angela had not been harmed—was knowing the police would surely make a quick arrest, and the killer would be in jail before she ever set foot on the street. But that hadn’t happened. The hours had turned to days and now to weeks. What was wrong w
ith these so-called investigators? What were they doing?

  Even in her weakened state, she already was angry at what she considered police incompetence. She’d read crime books. She’d watched TV. She knew crime scenes were supposed to be preserved so physical evidence could be gathered. Yet her neighbors—voyeurs was what she considered them—had been allowed into her home with buckets and mops only hours after the murder, telling police they wanted to clean up the master bedroom so that when she came home from the hospital, she wouldn’t have to face the disgusting mess.

  And the police had let them—effectively abandoning the crime scene to any do-gooders or sightseers who wandered by. That wasn’t right, Bonnie kept saying. It couldn’t be. Not only did she feel that her privacy—which she valued strongly—had been violated in an elemental way, but that potentially vital clues might have been lost.

  And now, with each call to the Washington police or Lewis Young producing the same unsatisfactory response—there’s nothing new, we’re working on it, we’ll keep you informed—a new and even more desolate feeling spread inside her: whoever did this might never be caught.

  Even as she sat shivering through the sweltering August afternoons, Bonnie had to consider that she might spend the rest of her life not knowing who had murdered her husband, nor whether they might someday try again to murder her.

  8

  Unless you are at the beach, or maybe way up in the mountains at the state’s western edge, the month of August in North Carolina is hellish. This is nowhere more true than in the steaming flatlands of Beaufort County, which lacks even the temporary diversions that cities of substance can provide. The night is wild with the noise of insects, and by day the sun is a vicious, potentially deadly foe. Even the fish have it bad. In the Pamlico and Tar rivers, fish die by the thousands, literally suffocating in water from which life-sustaining oxygen has been sucked by Carolina summer heat.

  One comes to crave air-conditioning more than sex, food, or sleep. Torpor reigns. There seems little, if anything, so urgent that it cannot wait another hour, another day, even a month. In short, it is not the best of times to press forward with a homicide investigation.

  Lewis Young tried, but he soon ran into problems beyond the weather. The function of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation was to provide assistance to local law enforcement authorities when requested. Young, however resourceful and tenacious he was, had no authority to conduct an independent inquiry. He could not answer a call to action if none was given. If the Washington police didn’t ask for help, he couldn’t force it upon them.

  And in August of 1988, the Washington police were somewhat in disarray. The town manager (who soon would resign for unrelated reasons) was trying to exercise direct operational control over the investigation. The chief of police was preparing to quit. And the detective to whom the Von Stein case had been assigned was not the young and industrious John Taylor, but an older man who often seemed distracted and seldom pursued leads. Interviews were conducted, but at a desultory pace more in keeping with the season than with the gravity of the crime.

  Still, reports did drift in. As they did, Lewis Young read them. As he read, he began to sense a pattern. But it was not one that tended to implicate either a frightened or disgruntled employee of the National Spinning Company, or an avaricious vice president of the North Carolina National Bank.

  In homicide investigations, Young knew, the old rules were still the best. And the oldest rule of all was that once you’ve identified your victim, the first place to look for suspects is in the immediate family. This particular family had apparently been unknown to almost everyone in Little Washington, but not so unknown, he continued to learn, as to be immune from unattractive stories:

  * * *

  —An ex-colleague of Lieth’s from National Spinning confirmed that Lieth had been upset with his stepson’s poor college grades; that he’d said, “If he doesn’t make it this semester, that’s it; I’m not going to pay for him to flunk out.” Another said Lieth would often “fantasize” about how good his life would be once his stepchildren were grown and gone.

  —Chris’s first-semester roommate at NC State said Chris would frequently get drunk on Canadian Mist and spend hours at his computer. He also said Chris used marijuana, but didn’t have the money to buy cocaine. He said Chris spent more time reading Dungeons & Dragons books than studying and barely avoided flunking out.

  —Another ex-roommate said Chris had never mentioned his parents, but had a lot of money and just “threw it around” on alcohol and drugs, to the point where he’d have to borrow to pay his bills. He described Chris as “easygoing” but “easily influenced by others.” Chris had played Dungeons & Dragons “almost every night” with a tall, skinny guy named Moog, two guys named Daniel and Neal, and some others. Mostly, they’d confine the game to their rooms, but on occasion would act out scenarios in the steam tunnels that ran beneath the university campus. Included in their equipment were darts and knives. Chris “never had much luck with the ladies” and “couldn’t get a piece of ass” and didn’t do well in class. He had used marijuana and on at least two or three occasions, LSD.

  —A high school friend confirmed that Chris had behaved oddly on the day of the murder: chain-smoking, rocking back and forth in a chair, seeming “jittery and nervous but not grief stricken.” He’d heard Chris was using marijuana, cocaine, and LSD on a regular basis. He’d heard Angela was a drug user, too. He’d also heard that Lieth had been murdered by drug dealers because Chris owed money for drugs.

  —Another high school friend said Chris and Angela were “not in love with” Lieth. There had been many arguments and clashes of personality. Chris would often say, “He lit into me again.” He’d been closer to his mother than to Lieth, but even Bonnie, while not “disinterested” in Chris, pretty much let him do what he wanted. Lieth would order a curfew and Bonnie would rescind it. She’d spend a lot of time “trying to keep peace” among the others, but wasn’t very “involved” in Chris’s life. She was, in fact, such a “bleeding heart,” this friend said, that she seemed to give more affection to her animals than to her children. Chris was described as “a smooth talker who gets into messes but thinks in the back of his mind that he can wriggle out of anything.”

  —Steven Outlaw, the friend with whom Chris had been arrested a couple of years earlier in Chocowinity, said that throughout their teenaged years the two of them had been “serious” Dungeons & Dragons players, largely because “there are not a lot of activities for teenagers in Washington.” He said Lieth had been “very upset” by the Chocowinity incident, even going so far as to ban Outlaw from the house. “Lieth was old-fashioned. His views were definitely ‘gold’ to him. Nothing else mattered. And he was really bossy. He’d yell, ‘Bonnie, come upstairs, please,’ and then he’d talk to her and she’d have to come down and tell Chris what it was that Lieth didn’t want him doing now. Her job was to carry the instructions from Lieth. She tried hard to mediate between them, and between him and Angela, too, but it didn’t always work.” Then Outlaw described a fight between Chris and Lieth that had erupted in the kitchen or dining room, apparently after Lieth had been drinking and sarcastically berating Chris for poor performance in school. “Lieth stood up and took a swing, but Chris just pushed him away and ran into the little bathroom downstairs. Chris was so mad, though, that he punched a hole right through the door.”

  —A former boyfriend of Angela’s said that Lieth had been strict and hard to get along with; that if Angela had wanted to do something of which Lieth would disapprove—which was almost anything—she and her mother would devise a plot designed to keep Lieth unaware. The boyfriend said his relationship with Angela had ended when she’d caught him with another girl. After that, she had supposedly dated someone who’d served time at a youth correctional facility in Raleigh. Supposedly, she’d used pot and speed. Supposedly, Lieth was worth $3 million after his parents died
, but according to Angela, he was so stingy that it probably wouldn’t make any difference to their lives. This ex-boyfriend said Angela and Chris seldom referred to Lieth by name, instead calling him simply “the asshole.” He added that Chris was “obsessed” with Dungeons & Dragons.

  —Donna Brady mentioned that Chris’s radio had been stolen from his car, but that he’d been afraid to tell Lieth. She said Angela referred to Lieth as “an asshole” because he was too strict about her hours and the male company she kept, but also that Angela had said the murder could only have been committed by someone from National Spinning. She said Angela was a lot like Bonnie in that she did not easily display emotion, even under circumstances when others might expect it, and that this could be misunderstood as a lack of caring. She said Chris was so immersed in the world of Dungeons & Dragons that even on the way to the funeral service for Lieth in Winston-Salem, he’d read books on how to become a better player. She also said that sometime on the day of the murder Chris had called Angela aside, saying, “I have something to tell you.” Angela had never again referred to this incident, and Donna had no idea what Chris might have told her.

  —Other acquaintances said that while Chris was “easy to get along with, genuine, and agreeable,” it was also true that “he could never understand, after living so poor when he was young, why if his family now had all that money, there wasn’t more of it coming his way.” These people said they “could not understand” why Chris and Angela had spent so little time at the hospital with their mother. They added that Chris was “in love” with the game Dungeons & Dragons.

  —And one of Chris’s best friends from high school said there had been “constant tension” between Chris and Lieth. A couple of years earlier, Chris had actually gotten himself baptized by immersion in a river “just because he knew Lieth wouldn’t like it.” This friend said, “I’d tell him Lieth wasn’t that bad, but he’d say I just didn’t know how bad he was. Lieth was the kind of guy who would insist that he was always right—you never were. You got the feeling, being around them, that Lieth didn’t have much warmth or affection for Chris, and Chris returned the lack of it. Angela, too. And the problem was, Bonnie was always on Lieth’s side. She would do almost anything for him. Whatever Lieth said, she’d go along with it.” In general, this friend said, Chris “tried too hard to be somebody he wasn’t. His major thing was trying to fit in with the crowd. And he always had trouble with girlfriends.”