Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  Lieth, Bonnie said, had just shaken his head. He didn’t even want to speak to Chris, so convinced was he that the whole story was a lie. Bonnie, too, felt that Chris wasn’t telling the truth. And this upset her because, as far as she knew, this was the first time he’d ever lied to her.

  The second incident had occurred on the weekend of Lieth’s death. Chris arrived from school late Friday night and said he wanted to cook dinner on Saturday. He asked Bonnie to buy some ground beef and hamburger rolls. Then, late Saturday morning, he went out to see friends.

  When Bonnie came back from the market that afternoon, Lieth told her he’d just received a peculiar phone call from a woman who identified herself as the mother of a fifteen-year-old Raleigh boy.

  She’d asked if a Chris Pritchard of that address also had a house in Raleigh where he might have employed her son to do yard work. The boy had presented her with a $35 check signed by Chris and had asked her to cash it. On the bottom, Chris had written the notation “yard work.”

  Lieth said no, Chris Pritchard did not have a house in Raleigh. He said Chris was out but that he’d ask him about the check as soon as he came home. He took down the woman’s number and said he’d call back as soon as he had more information.

  As Lieth told Bonnie this story, she began to get a “really bad feeling” that somehow drugs might be involved. But as always with her children, she wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. And when Chris came back that afternoon he had a ready explanation. He’d been short of cash and he’d been at a grocery store a long way from the nearest cash machine, and this kid who’d been hanging around with him and some of his friends had given him cash for the groceries and Chris had written him a check. When Bonnie asked him why he’d put “yard work” on the check, Chris said he didn’t really know.

  You hate to accuse your own son of lying was Bonnie’s feeling, especially when there’s nothing concrete. You want to believe him and to trust him. But she and Lieth talked it over that afternoon and decided they’d better monitor Chris’s money more closely. They asked him to start keeping a record of his expenses, because the $50-a-week allowance they were sending him seemed to be running out faster than it should. Quite willingly, he had agreed to do so.

  That evening, after Angela and her friend Donna Brady got back from the beach, Chris eagerly cooked dinner for them all, making hamburger patties and grilling them, while Bonnie herself made french fries and baked beans. After the meal, Chris had been “visibly anxious” to get back to school to work on his term paper. That wasn’t typical for a Saturday night, Bonnie acknowledged—Chris wasn’t exactly a workaholic—but after the phone call about the check and the subsequent conversation, he might just have felt more comfortable away from the house.

  When she had walked him out to the car to say good-bye, she’d looked down at the dashboard and had seen a gaping hole where his radio and tape deck had been. Chris explained that the equipment had been stolen while the car was parked on the NC State campus.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just go on. I’ll tell Lieth sometime next week.” She didn’t want to burden Lieth with this new piece of bad news after all the strain he’d been under, especially because Lieth was already “apprehensive” about Chris.

  Still concerned about the check, however, she’d said to Chris, “Just be careful. And if there’s ever anything you feel the need to talk about, we’re here. We love you, and you know you can tell us anything.” Chris had said, “I know. Thank you.” And he’d kissed her on top of her head.

  Then, a few days later, as she lay in the hospital with her head bandaged and a tube in her chest, Chris had tearfully told her he’d been lying. He said he’d actually written the check to try to buy one ounce of marijuana, but the fifteen-year-old had never delivered the drugs. Chris told her a person couldn’t walk down a dormitory hall at NC State without encountering drugs. He said “everyone” at State except himself was selling drugs.

  He also told her the story he’d made up about the Fourth of July wasn’t true. He and his friend Moog had actually gone to Inman, South Carolina, just outside Spartanburg, to visit his aunt Ramona, Bonnie’s sister.

  This upset Bonnie even more than the confession about the check because Ramona had been one of the people she’d called when she was so frantic with worry about Chris. And Ramona had said she hadn’t seen him.

  As soon as she felt well enough, Bonnie had confronted Ramona, who was terribly apologetic. She said Chris had been standing right by the phone, begging her not to tell Bonnie he was there because he was supposed to be on campus, studying. Ramona hadn’t realized how upset Bonnie was because Bonnie hadn’t sounded that upset—she never did—and Ramona didn’t want to get Chris into more trouble with Lieth, who was already annoyed by Chris’s poor grades, so, without thinking, she’d just told Bonnie that she hadn’t heard from Chris for weeks.

  Bonnie’s meeting with Young ended in the early afternoon. She was exhausted by the physical and emotional effort she’d expended and frustrated by the investigators’ apparent lack of progress. But at least, she felt, she had succeeded in putting to rest once and for all any questions the authorities might have had about her family.

  9

  Nine days later, at headquarters, Washington police conducted an interview with Chris. Their questions were somewhat more pointed than Lewis Young’s earlier ones.

  Drugs? Well, yes, Chris admitted. “A while back” he had done drugs, including LSD. The check? Yes, it had been for marijuana. Drugs were all over the NC State campus, Chris explained.

  He described himself as an “arrogant son of a bitch” and “very impulsive,” but said he did not remember ever telling anyone he was rich. As a matter of fact, as far as he knew, he wasn’t. He did know that Lieth had had some sort of trust fund, but didn’t know the purpose of it. That wasn’t his business, that was his parents’ business.

  He said he’d “had a buzz on” but hadn’t been drunk when he’d received the call from Angela about the murder. He described again how he hadn’t been able to find his car keys, but said his roommate, Vince Hamrick, later found them beneath a chair cushion.

  His car had not been parked directly outside the dorm, but in the “fringe lot” about a quarter mile away. He said he’d parked it there Sunday night after returning from supper at a place called Wildflour Pizza. He’d done so in order to irritate the two girls he was with, Karen and Kirsten, by making them walk farther to get to the dorm. He said it had just been a whim, he was a very impulsive guy. The reason he hadn’t used the phone in his room to call the campus police was because he’d wanted to let his roommate get back to sleep.

  Then they asked him about Dungeons & Dragons. For the first time, Chris became animated, as if they’d finally hit upon a subject that piqued his interest.

  He explained that it was a fantasy or role-playing game that had been his favorite pastime since he’d been eleven years old. You created a character who inhabited a mythical world and embarked upon all sorts of adventures. The game required you to be imaginative and creative and was a lot of fun when played with a good group. At State, Chris had played two or three times a week. Usually, each episode would last several hours, but it could take weeks to play out a whole scenario. Those he played with included someone named Daniel Duyk, and others whom he knew only by their first names, including someone he knew only as Neal. There was also, he said, a fellow whose nickname was Moog.

  Yes, he said, on occasion they’d go down into the steam tunnels. For one thing, the tunnels were a good, safe place to “get trashed.” For another, he and his game-playing pals had wanted to “map out” the tunnels, so they could incorporate the map into one of their Dungeons & Dragons scenarios.

  * * *

  In the days that followed her return from Little Washington to her parents’ house in Welcome, Bonnie found she was feeling worse instead of better.
She was still sleeping poorly and often heard noises that alarmed her in the night. By day, she had dizzy spells and was finding it harder to breathe. X rays showed more fluid in her chest cavity. She went to the hospital and they put a catheter in her back and drew out a full liter of bloody liquid.

  At unpredictable times, she could feel herself blacking out, or lapsing into a daydream state, almost as if she were having a type of epileptic seizure. She had an EEG and CAT scan done, but nothing abnormal was found.

  She saw and heard so little from Chris and Angela that they might as well have been on another planet.

  Her scarred forehead began to depress her and she decided to have plastic surgery. “I’m not a vain person,” she said later, “but the first thing you see every morning is your face, and it’s not mentally healthy to look at that reminder at the start of every day.”

  * * *

  Just before the start of the fall semester, Chris and Angela turned up unexpectedly at NC State. Some friends encountered them at Wildflour Pizza, which had always been Chris’s favorite drinking spot. He was already drunk by late afternoon, bragging that he now had a gun and he was going to find whoever it was who’d killed Lieth and settle the score. He also said he was tired of hearing people whisper that Angela had been involved. If he heard any more of that kind of talk, he’d settle a few other scores.

  Nobody took him too seriously. It was part of Chris’s problem in relating to the world that few people ever took him seriously. There was always such a gap between his words and his deeds. Chris talked a great game but seldom played one. After a while, even his better friends tended to discount 90 percent of what he said. More casual acquaintances ignored him entirely.

  Drunkenly, he began sobbing that his mother really needed him now and that he was going to clean up his act. Then he talked about Angela, saying how worried he was because she seemed to be in a state of denial about the whole tragedy—trying to act as if nothing had happened. He knew, he said, that couldn’t be healthy. As awful as reality might be, you had to deal with it squarely. There was no sense pretending. You couldn’t wish your troubles away.

  He and Angela stayed on campus that night. There was a party. Chris took acid. He had a very-bad trip. He began screaming that he couldn’t breathe, that he was dying. People at the party got scared. Some wanted to call an ambulance, call the police. Get Chris some help, fast.

  But his friend James Upchurch, whose nickname was Moog, was at the party and took control. Moog said there was no need to call for outside assistance. It was just a bad trip. He’d seen them before and knew how to deal with them. He was Chris’s friend and he’d stay right there with him and talk him through it. Everyone else should just leave the two of them alone.

  Chris was vomiting and screaming and crying all at once. He was as sick as anyone at the party had ever seen anyone get. But Moog insisted everything would be fine. There was no need Moog repeated, to call for help. He knew about bad acid trips. They were scary—both to experience and to witness—but there was nothing life-threatening going on. Do not, Moog repeated, call an ambulance. Do not call the police. That would only get Chris in lots of trouble.

  Eventually, Chris stopped crying and trembling and throwing up. Eventually, he fell asleep. Later, everyone remembered how concerned Moog had been, what a good friend he’d been, sitting there by Chris’s side through the worst of it. Later, when Chris was calmer, Moog drifted off, away from the party. He wasn’t living on campus anymore—he wasn’t enrolled for the fall semester—so no one was quite sure where he’d spent the night. For that matter, no one remembered much about Angela, either.

  * * *

  As the fall semester started, Chris seemed oddly subdued. His roommate, Vince Hamrick, recalled that whenever Chris was asked about what had happened that summer, he’d say only, “I don’t want to talk about it.” If anyone persisted, he’d walk away. He seemed to be drifting into a world of his own, a world in which he didn’t want company.

  Angela enrolled at a business college in Greensboro, a city about an hour and a half west of Raleigh, and about half an hour east of Winston-Salem.

  In her own way—which was quite different from his—she seemed just as upset as her brother. As she herself put it later, “I shouldn’t have even tried to start school. All fall I didn’t do anything but waste gas and money trying to be around my friends as much as possible.”

  She also said, “Gradually, it dawned on me that I was a suspect, but I didn’t let that bother me.”

  * * *

  In late September, a school psychologist called Bonnie to say that Chris was going through a “very bad emotional period,” and that the school’s counseling service was not able to provide adequate help.

  The psychologist said Chris seemed still so unsettled by the trauma of his stepfather’s death and the attack upon Bonnie herself that a medical leave of absence was indicated. Chris lacked the emotional stability necessary to cope with the demands of a new academic year. He needed to be home with his family for a while. He needed more intensive therapy than the school could provide. Quite possibly, anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication would be required. Apparently, his continuing grief was more than he could tolerate.

  With that, Bonnie recognized that she would have to leave Welcome and provide—on her own, once again—some sort of shelter for both herself and her son.

  The place she chose was Lieth’s parents’ house in Winston-Salem. The mechanics of the transfer would be simple because, as Lieth’s widow, she already owned the house.

  Besides, it had other advantages. It was only ten minutes south of the center of the city, at the very edge of what seemed an endless expanse of shopping plazas, malls, and restaurants. It also was less than a mile from the nearest entrance to Interstate 40, the main east-west road across the state, and less than half an hour north of Welcome.

  It was already furnished, which meant she’d neither have to ship anything in from Washington (which she didn’t think she could bear to do) or buy anything new (which she didn’t feel able to do either). Also, she knew the house well, having stayed there with Lieth during all those weekends when they were tending his sick and dying relatives. And Bonnie’s father said he could easily build a shed in the backyard to house her pets.

  But beyond that, it was a small house on a busy street—small enough, and with few enough entrances, so that an unbreachable security system could be installed. It had small, dark rooms, the kind in which Bonnie felt more secure, and it was surrounded by many other small houses.

  The house, in fact, was so nondescript that it would have been hard to find even if you were looking for it.

  Even if you’d been given directions, or had a map.

  * * *

  And so, by the end of the month, Chris left his college campus and moved into the dark little house, locked tight as a bank vault, in which his mother had secluded herself.

  They kept the curtains drawn and the alarm system on, night and day. In addition to the outside alarms, there were motion detectors along interior hallways, which they turned on before going to bed.

  And each of them, mother and son, slept with a loaded gun under the pillow. Despite her own distaste for firearms—and fear of them—this lover of small, harmless pets, this Humane Society board member, bought handguns for herself and her children.

  No action she’d ever taken seemed more out of character, more alien to all that she thought herself to be.

  But someone had killed her husband and had tried to kill her, and there was no guarantee he wouldn’t try again.

  Much later, in writing, she tried to describe her psychological state at the time: “The feelings that come to mind when I try and go back to the time when I armed my children with handguns are these: anger, desolation, agony, fear, uncertainty, aloneness, heartsickness, failure.

  “It was one of the most agonizing thing
s I have ever felt the need to do. My frame of mind at that time was beyond comprehension by anyone who has never experienced the fear I felt for my family. I had lost all confidence in the law enforcement officers investigating the case, and knew they were not willing to help protect us. Lieth had lost his life trying to protect himself and me. How could I possibly think I could protect my two children?

  “I wasn’t sure I would be able to pull the trigger against another person if it came right down to it, but maybe Chris or Angela would in order to protect themselves. There were also times when I was not present in the house, when they might need to defend themselves.

  “At that time, I did not know any more about what had happened on July 25 than I did on that night. This act of arming my children was against everything I had ever believed in, but at that time I just didn’t know what else to do.”

  * * *

  For Bonnie, that fall, the hardest thing was to go out after dark. But by November, with darkness coming earlier each day, she began to force herself. She knew that otherwise she’d become a total recluse.

  It wasn’t so bad if Chris was home, but Chris wasn’t home much. He’d gotten a job with Triad Tires, at one of their several locations in Winston-Salem. He was working hard, changing and rotating tires all day. He’d come home filthy and exhausted, drop his greasy clothes on the back porch, go up and shower, and then, within the hour, be out again.

  He’d made some new friends since moving to Winston-Salem. One was Eric Caldwell, who had been a high school friend of Vince Hamrick’s, and who came home most weekends from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, two hours west of Winston-Salem. Another was a cousin of Eric’s named John Hubard, who was training to become a city policeman and working as a security guard at a nearby mall.