Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  * * *

  And those were comments made by people personally acquainted with the family. Elsewhere in town, what had begun as simple rumor had, in a matter of days, mutated into a variety of grotesque scenarios. In the oppressive, soggy heat, the murder seemed to be all that anyone in Little Washington could talk about, and the stories ranged from the plausible to the preposterous.

  Once word got around about the thirteen cats and the rooster, lurid tales of devil worship and animal sacrifice abounded. But the most common was that Bonnie herself—quite possibly with the help of her children—had arranged, or had even carried out, Lieth’s murder. After all, who had more to gain from his death?

  Young gave this possibility considerable thought. Maybe Bonnie had been worried about losing access to the money her husband had so recently acquired. Conscious of the letters he’d found in Lieth’s desk, he wondered if maybe Lieth had a mistress tucked away somewhere in town, or in another part of the state or of the country. Maybe, now that he’d become a millionaire, he’d planned to leave this reclusive wife and her two bothersome children. And maybe she’d had him killed before he could. “Maybe,” he said later, “she wanted it done, and Chris set it up for her.”

  As a theory, that worked fine, except that Bonnie herself had been so badly hurt. Her chest wound was no carefully self-inflicted surgical incision. She’d had a hemopneumothorax—a collapsing lung into which her own blood was pouring, and which could easily have killed her had she not managed to call police when she did, and had not emergency personnel responded so quickly and skillfully. However much she stood to gain financially, that made it difficult—for Young at least—to jump to the conclusion that Bonnie had engineered the crime herself.

  “I couldn’t totally drop it as a possibility,” he said later, “but I don’t care how much money there was, or how badly you wanted to get rid of the guy, that would have been a hell of a risk to take.”

  But what of Steve Pritchard, the truck driving ex-husband? Perhaps, in desperate need of money, and maybe having harbored a decade’s worth of jealousy, Pritchard had decided to kill Bonnie and her newly wealthy husband, leaving her children—who were also his children—to inherit the estate. Then he could become their loving daddy again.

  Young had a problem with that one, too: the map. The map he didn’t want anyone to know about. His big secret. His best clue. Bonnie had already told him her ex-husband had visited the Lawson Road home several times. Steve Pritchard, the truck driver, would not have needed a map to find his way.

  So what of the map? Lewis Young knew he would have to try to learn more about it. Who had drawn it? Who had carried it? And who had tried to burn it, and why on that particular lonely stretch of road?

  * * *

  One other document Lewis Young studied carefully was the report of Lieth’s autopsy, which had been performed in Greenville by a pathologist named Page Hudson.

  The section dealing with Lieth’s injuries was straightforward enough. Six different head wounds had caused tearing of the scalp, and in some instances, fractures of the skull. These could have been caused by clubbing with a baseball bat, or something similar.

  There had been eight stab wounds: one in the left chest, one high on the right side of the back, and six clustered together lower on the left side of the back. As Young already knew, these could have been caused by the hunting knife found at the fire scene. The stab wound to the chest had penetrated the heart and all by itself, would have caused death “within a very few minutes.”

  There also were bruises and scrapes on the knuckles and hands, and a fracture of the right wrist, which Dr. Hudson categorized as “defense injuries,” meaning that Lieth had sustained them as he tried to fight off his attacker.

  Lack of swelling or color change in body tissue indicated that all injuries had been sustained “pretty close to each other in time.”

  But one aspect of the report troubled Young so much that on Friday, August 12, he drove to Greenville and met with Dr. Hudson in person.

  Page Hudson was fifty-nine, and a native of Richmond, Virginia. He’d been educated at Johns Hopkins and Harvard and had become, in 1968, the first chief medical examiner the state of North Carolina had ever had.

  He’d held that position for eighteen years before moving into semiretirement as a professor of pathology at East Carolina University and director of autopsy service for Pitt County Memorial Hospital in Greenville, which was where Lieth’s body had been taken.

  Dr. Hudson was a large man both physically and in reputation. He stood six three, had thick white hair, and spoke in a deep, commanding voice, which, while never overbearing, exuded both knowledge and authority.

  He’d served as principal pathologist at more than four thousand autopsies and had assisted in at least that many more. In addition, in his capacity as the state’s chief medical examiner, he’d reviewed the records of more than another fifty thousand and had testified in court hundreds of times.

  Dr. Hudson did not hesitate to tell Lewis Young he was displeased by the way the crime scene had been handled by Washington police. It was not uncommon, he would later say, that “for political or whatever reasons” local police tended to resist calling the SBI for assistance, preferring instead “to try to do it themselves.”

  In this case, Dr. Hudson would say, “I question the judgment. Because we’re not talking about an ordinary domestic fuss and someone shoving a knife into their spouse in a kitchen brawl.” He would have preferred to see experienced SBI lab technicians—in particular a man named Dennis Honeycutt (“the most trained crime-scene investigator this side of Raleigh”)—called in. “Not just because the Von Steins were wealthy people,” he said, “but because from the beginning it looked like there was a little bit of subtlety involved here.”

  If Honeycutt had been there, the bloody sheets would never have been draped across the boat; the neighbors would not have been permitted in with scrub brushes and soap buckets; and some crucial procedures that were omitted would have been done.

  “In a perfect world,” Dr. Hudson said later, “the first officer on the scene, or the first detective, would have gotten a deep body temperature, a rectal temperature. And then, since they’re not just going to grab the body and run off with it—they’re going to get measurements and photographs and all that stuff—the body is going to stay there a few more hours. So, every half hour, you get another temperature, so you don’t just have one point in time. Instead of having a single point, you’d have multiple points on a plot, indicating at what rate the body temperature was falling. That helps you figure back to when it was ninety-eight point six, which can help you determine the time of death.”

  And the time of death was precisely the point that troubled Lewis Young. The autopsy report suggested that, if almost eight hours had elapsed between the time Lieth had finished his last meal and the time he died, the chicken and rice—especially the rice—found in his stomach at autopsy should have been far more digested than was the case.

  Young asked Dr. Hudson about this. “Ordinarily,” the pathologist said, “I would have expected the material in his stomach to have pretty well all cleared out and been into the small intestine within an hour or two.”

  Young asked if the fact that it wasn’t suggested the possibility of a much earlier time of death.

  “It certainly is consistent with an earlier death,” Dr. Hudson said. Another possibility was that Lieth had eaten the meal later than had been indicated. But Lewis Young had already obtained the credit card receipt from Sweet Caroline’s, which confirmed that Bonnie’s recollection of the meal time had been accurate.

  The only remaining explanation, the pathologist said, was that at the time of his last meal, and in the hours that followed, Lieth Von Stein had been under such acute and severe stress that his digestive system had simply shut down.

  But that was not at all consistent
with Bonnie’s account of her last meal with her husband as having been a time of relaxation, warmth, and even romance.

  And so Lewis Young left Greenville that Friday afternoon with yet one more puzzle to solve. Besides the blood-spattered pages and their contents, and in addition to the mysterious map found at the edge of the fire, he now had a stomach full of undigested rice to think about.

  * * *

  Much as she dreaded it, Bonnie had to return to Little Washington. Her doctors wanted to take new X rays of her chest. Besides, she felt she needed to talk to Lewis Young in person about the progress—or lack of progress—of the investigation. She was not satisfied with the vague responses she’d been getting when she called.

  Bonnie knew the journey would intensify her terror. Her father and mother would drive her because she was still too distressed to travel by herself, but even their presence would not be enough to keep a potential killer at bay.

  She called a security agency in Greenville and hired bodyguards to be with her every minute she was in Little Washington. The company arranged motel accommodations for her in Greenville so she would not have to sleep in Washington. They told her they’d put a man in a room adjoining hers and another in the hall outside her door. Even that did not seem sufficient. She could have had the entire U.S. Secret Service protecting her and still she would have been stricken by panic the moment she crossed the Beaufort County line.

  She rode to Greenville on Sunday, August 14, and met with Young at ten A.M. the next day. She said she could not understand why they hadn’t yet made an arrest. She asked if he had followed up on any of the leads she’d given him—National Spinning, or North Carolina National Bank—and she renewed her complaint about how the Washington police had so quickly abandoned the crime scene to outsiders.

  Young, as usual, was polite and sympathetic. But he didn’t want to talk about the things she wanted to talk about. He had questions of his own, almost all of which seemed to do with Bonnie and her children, and the life that they had led with Lieth.

  This annoyed her because she considered it a waste of time when too much time had already been wasted. She’d made it clear once that their time together had been filled with love and happiness, and now he was making her go over the same ground again, when he should have been out looking for the killer.

  Bonnie answered his questions, however, describing again how Lieth had come into her life almost as a medieval knight sent to rescue her from her prison of poverty and loneliness.

  She talked in even more detail about their life in Little Washington, saying it was so full and so fulfilling that they really had not had time to form friendships with other people. For a while, Lieth had taught part-time at a nearby community college, and when the data processing instructor there had been hurt in an auto accident, Bonnie had replaced him.

  Although her shyness made her uncomfortable in front of a group, she taught both day and night classes for two years. Five days and four nights a week. It had been hectic. She’d have to rush home after the day class, cook dinner, then leave again in fifteen minutes to teach at night. But it had felt good to be back in touch with the field that had been her career.

  Eventually, Lieth complained of neglect. He told her he wanted her around the house to fix his meals, and to be there to talk to in the evenings, so he wasn’t stuck alone with just her kids. In early 1986, she stopped the teaching.

  Not that Lieth didn’t love her children. It was just that when they got to be teenagers, he found it harder to relate to them. And their friends running in and out of the house all the time began to aggravate him. Unlike Bonnie and Lieth, both Angela and Chris were very social—if not particularly gifted students—so there was more traffic through the house than Lieth could easily tolerate. “Teenagers,” he liked to say, rubbing his balding head. “They’ll drive you nuts.”

  Even so, Bonnie insisted, Lieth was “absolutely wonderful” with both Chris and Angela. “He loved them as if they were his own. He couldn’t do enough for them.”

  While on the subject of Chris, she said—“and if you’re going to hear anything bad about my children, I want you to hear it from me”—there had been some “poor judgment” displayed on the so-called Senior Day at the high school, when most of the class that would soon graduate gathered for a preschool party at which drinks were served.

  Chris, perhaps, had drunk a bit more than he should have and had then been foolish enough to go straight to school and make a bit of a spectacle of himself, which had resulted in his being given a blank diploma on graduation day, and not formally graduating with his class.

  Yes, that had been a disappointment, but it was just teenaged foolishness, and both she and Lieth had let him know that they loved him even when he did make mistakes.

  Which was not to say that Lieth and Chris had never had their runins. These, however, were the kinds of things that Bonnie was sure happened in all families.

  She told Young how supportive Lieth had been when Chris was arrested. Again, it had been nothing serious—just a typical teenage prank blown out of proportion—but when Chris was sixteen, he and a friend were arrested at a football game in Chocowinity one Friday night and charged with all sorts of ridiculous things, such as “carrying a concealed weapon, assault by pointing a gun, carrying weapons on a public school campus, carrying alcohol on a public school campus, possession of alcohol by a minor, and possession of pyrotechnics.”

  The incident wasn’t nearly as serious as it sounded, Bonnie explained. The day before, Chris and his friend Steven Outlaw had driven through Chocowinity in Chris’s Mustang, and Steven, just fooling around, had pointed an air pistol at another teenager they had happened to pass on the street. The other boy had overreacted and had reported to police that he’d been threatened with a handgun. At the football game, Chris’s car was identified as having been the one from which the gun had been pointed. When the trunk was searched, a police officer found some throwing-stars and throwing-knives, two air pistols, a hunting knife in a sheath, a hatchet, a nunchaku, some large firecrackers, and several bottles of wine.

  Chris had explained to Bonnie and Lieth that he’d just been storing the wine for a friend and that the so-called “weapons” were just toys he occasionally used when acting out a Dungeons & Dragons scenario with friends.

  Eventually, she said, he’d paid a small fine—or they had paid it on his behalf—and the charges had been withdrawn. The true importance of the episode, she told Young, was that it demonstrated to Chris that in a pinch Lieth would stick up for him, Lieth could be counted on, in a way his real father could never be.

  There had been, however, one “negative incident” that she should probably mention, since Young might hear a distorted version of it from someone else. It had occurred at the dinner table, sometime during Chris’s senior year, after Lieth possibly had drunk a bit too much and began to criticize Chris’s study habits.

  There had been a “disagreement.” Suddenly, Lieth had erupted in anger. Bonnie had never seen him so mad. His face got red, he clenched his fists, and Bonnie thought he was about to hit Chris. Shocked and frightened, Chris jumped from the table and stepped away. And that was that. The storm passed as quickly as it had boiled up.

  The only aftereffect was that Lieth told her that from that point forward she should act as an intermediary between him and Chris. If there was something he wanted Chris to do, he’d tell Bonnie and she could pass the instruction along. Likewise, if there was anything Chris wanted to share with Lieth, he could tell his mother and she’d communicate it. And while he was at it, he wanted the same policy instituted for Angela, too.

  “They’re your children,” Lieth told her, “and I think it’s up to you to discipline them.” He said his anger was such that he felt he could no longer deal with them directly.

  But that, Bonnie explained, had happened only a few months before Chris had gone away to c
ollege, at a time when Lieth was already under terrible stress.

  She conceded that it was true that Lieth had been disappointed by how poorly Chris did during his freshman year at NC State—getting mostly Ds and Fs and incompletes—but Lieth himself had had trouble making the adjustment to college and understood how hard it could be. As ever, he was encouraging and supportive, as Bonnie, too, had tried to be.

  Then, emphasizing that she had nothing to hide, no family secrets to withhold, Bonnie told Young of two other incidents involving Chris.

  Over the July 4 weekend, only three weeks before the murder, while Chris was enrolled in summer session, Angela went to visit him on campus and spend the night. When she got there, she couldn’t find him and no one knew where he was. She had to spend the night in her car. The next morning, she’d called Bonnie and Lieth in Winston-Salem to report that neither her brother nor his Mustang could be found. After making dozens of phone calls to every friend and relative they could think of, Bonnie and Lieth had filed a missing person’s report with the Raleigh police.

  Returning to campus Saturday night, Chris had been stopped by a school security officer who told him he’d better call his parents right away. They were still at the Von Stein house in Winston-Salem, waiting by the phone for some news. Chris apologized for causing them concern, but explained that he’d gone off with a friend of his named Moog to visit an uncle of Moog’s who lived way back in the hills where there weren’t any phones. He said they’d drunk goat’s milk with dinner and he had become violently ill. A whole day had passed before he was well enough to drive back to school.