Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  In the absence of any news of an arrest, or even of the naming of a suspect, she continued to fear for her own safety and for the safety of her children. The killer or killers had not been caught. No motive for the murder had been established. Anything might happen at any time. Bonnie had few restful nights.

  * * *

  In the weeks that followed her own successful polygraph test, Bonnie’s frustration with the Washington police and the SBI had grown into full-blown anger. It seemed obvious that, despite all promises to the contrary, they were still doing nothing to find the person who’d murdered her husband.

  She was also becoming even more concerned about Chris’s emotional condition. Neither his therapy nor medication, nor his new girlfriend at Appalachian, seemed to be helping. He was moody, jumpy, and seemed under great strain. He drank too much beer, he burst into anger quickly, he would spend hour after hour closed inside his room, playing games on his home computer, and would then spend half the night out with friends, undoubtedly driving too fast and recklessly.

  Chris had always had a tendency to be a little wild when he got behind the wheel of a car, but now, given his brittle condition (and alcohol consumption), Bonnie worried that he might be more prone than usual to a serious or even tragic accident.

  * * *

  Chris made a quick trip—a very quick trip—to Little Washington in early March.

  He’d spent the night at Eric Caldwell’s house, something he was doing with increasing frequency. Both Eric and Chris’s other new friend in Winston-Salem, John Hubard, noticed that Chris was spending as much time as possible away from home, away from his mother. Since Bonnie struck them both as an extremely easy person to be around—even, for a mother, fun to talk to—they couldn’t understand Chris’s apparent avoidance of her.

  Maybe, they thought, it was her relentless criticism of the investigators, her repeated complaints that they weren’t getting anywhere. That seemed to depress Chris and to upset him.

  Or maybe it was just that even on a warm afternoon you couldn’t open a window for fear of triggering the alarm system, or that at night, if you had to go to the bathroom, you wanted to be sure to push the right buttons before stepping into the hallway, lest you set off the automatic motion detector and get blown away by a Beretta, a .45 automatic, and a nine-millimeter automatic simultaneously.

  On March 8, Chris said he wanted to show Eric the town he’d grown up in. He made the trip in three and a half hours, hitting a top speed of 106 miles per hour along the way. He seemed highly agitated, even frenzied, as he drove.

  Once there, they only stayed an hour. Chris drove Eric down Lawson Road and pointed out his old house, but did not stop. Eric started to ask a question about some detail of the crime, but Chris quickly cut him off, saying he did not want to talk about it. Period.

  They stopped at NC State on the way back, so Chris could pick up a transcript that he needed to send to Appalachian, where he was applying for fall admission. He took Eric to Wildflour Pizza, where he drank seven beers in an hour and a half, looking around nervously all the while, as if worried that someone he might not want to see would walk in. Then he jumped in the car—none too sober—and sped all the way back to Winston-Salem.

  Three days later, with the first scent of spring already spicing the Carolina air, Chris drove out to Appalachian. He and Eric and John Hubard rented rooms at the Econolodge Motel in Boone. Chris’s new girlfriend and two other girls came. There was an indoor pool. They thought they’d do a little swimming, have a few drinks, enjoy a Saturday night. But the event turned sour fast. His girlfriend drank too much and Chris drank more. They had sharp and bitter—if not terribly coherent—words. She retreated to a bathroom to cry. Enraged, Chris jumped into his car and drove off.

  This always seemed his first reaction when confronted with an emotionally stressful situation: to get into his car and drive away as fast as he could, never telling anyone where he was going, probably not knowing himself, and not returning until his anger had subsided. People had been telling him for months that one night he’d get himself killed doing that. Sometimes, it almost seemed that’s what he wanted.

  * * *

  During the second week of March, John Taylor compiled a list of all NC State students who had been mentioned in any report as having been friends of Chris Pritchard’s. Then—amazed to find that no one had done so before—he ran the names through a statewide computer to see if any had criminal records.

  One did. James Upchurch. He was the tall, thin young man, nicknamed Moog, with whom Pritchard had traveled to South Carolina over the July 4 weekend on which his mother had reported him missing.

  While in high school, in Caswell County, in the extremely rural north central part of the state—the biggest town in the whole county was Yanceyville, which had a population of only 1,800—Upchurch had twice been arrested for breaking and entering.

  Taylor called Caswell County. A local investigator described Upchurch as “a smart kid” from a broken home, whose father worked for the state department of social services in Raleigh and whose uncle had once been arrested for growing a large crop of marijuana on his farm. He said Upchurch had broken into the local high school and had stolen a computer. Later, he’d broken into a private home and had stolen, among other things, a hunting knife.

  Not a bad start, John Taylor told himself. Out of the entire universe of Chris Pritchard’s friends, he’d already succeeded in isolating one who had both family drug connections and a record of breaking and entering. And this same friend was the one with whom Pritchard had mysteriously disappeared for two days only three weeks before Lieth had been murdered.

  Upchurch had been placed on probation for the breaking and entering offenses, but his Raleigh probation officer told Taylor he had disappeared several weeks earlier and there were three warrants outstanding for his arrest. The offenses included drunk driving with insurance revoked and failure to appear in court for probation revocation. The last time she’d seen him, the officer said, he’d had both sides of his head shaved, leaving only a strip of bleached-blond hair down the middle.

  “Well,” Taylor said, “at least if he shows up in Washington, he shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”

  * * *

  On March 13, Crone met with Taylor and established three priorities:

  —to obtain a sample of Chris Pritchard’s handwriting

  —to find James Upchurch

  —to learn more about Dungeons & Dragons

  From the little he’d heard and read about it, Chief Crone had the sense that the game could inspire unhealthy, even dangerous fantasies: the kind that could lead to violence. He knew it wasn’t quite witchcraft or satanism or the occult, but he had the uneasy feeling that Dungeons & Dragons was not the sort of activity with which psychologically well-balanced college students would be obsessed.

  What he wanted most, however, was a sample of Pritchard’s printing. However unscientifically, he wanted to compare it with the LAWSON on the map.

  Officials at NC State said they had a document on which Pritchard had printed LAWSON ROAD. But they said they could not release it without a subpoena.

  On March 14, Mitchell Norton, the Beaufort County district attorney, issued the subpoena.

  * * *

  By March 15, Bonnie felt well enough—and desperate enough—to once again drive to Little Washington, this time to confront either Lewis Young or the new chief person to person, in order to ask one simple question: In the two months since she and her daughter had passed the polygraph, what had been done to find her husband’s killer?

  Young was out of town and the new chief was not immediately available, but she did succeed in speaking to John Taylor, who informed her that Chief Crone had recently placed him in charge of the investigation.

  Bonnie was struck by Taylor’s youth. How much confidence could she have in someone so inexperienced?

>   He shook her hand and told her, “I have only one assumption—that you didn’t have anything to do with it. I don’t have any other assumptions.”

  She was not comforted by this remark. Of course, she didn’t have anything to do with it. But who did? Hadn’t they made any further progress?

  “Mrs. Von Stein,” Taylor told her, “if we can’t clear you and Angela and Chris, we don’t feel comfortable going anywhere else.” He then reiterated that in his own mind she was cleared, but added that he couldn’t yet say the same for her children.

  Bonnie was openly displeased. This was exactly what she’d heard for months from Lewis Young, and she did not like having it repeated now by some young man who looked more like a police cadet, or a prospective boyfriend of Angela’s, than a qualified homicide detective.

  * * *

  The next day, John Taylor made the first of what would be his many drives to Raleigh.

  He handed his subpoena to the appropriate official at NC State and was given a small white card on which Chris Pritchard, in applying for on-campus housing, had printed the word LAWSON.

  The young detective was tempted to jump into his car and race back to Little Washington as fast as he could, so he and his chief could sit down and compare the printing on the card with that on the map.

  But he had other business on the sprawling, crowded campus. He interviewed the two girls, Karen Barbour and Kirsten Hewitt, in whose room Chris had been drinking beer and playing cards the night of the murder. They verified Chris’s story, but added other details that Taylor found intriguing. They said Chris and his friends—including James Upchurch, known as Moog—were heavily into both drugs and Dungeons & Dragons. Moog, they said, was called the Dungeon Master. He would determine the scenario for a particular game, and the other players would follow his instructions. By rolling dice, he’d determine the outcome of violent confrontations.

  At least once, the girls said, Chris and Moog and the others had acted out one of these pretend adventures by wrapping toilet paper around broomsticks and setting the paper on fire. On other occasions, they’d gone down into the steam tunnels.

  Kirsten said she had an especially clear recollection of Chris’s being in her room the night Lieth was killed because she’d kept asking him to leave. From one A.M. on, at least every half hour, she’d said to him and his friend Daniel Duyk, “I’m really tired. Could you guys please go somewhere else?” The unusual thing was that Chris, who was usually considerate in such matters, had refused, saying he wasn’t ready to stop playing cards.

  Over the next two and a half hours, with growing impatience, she’d pleaded with him to leave. Finally, he’d asked what time it was. When she said three-thirty, he’d left immediately. It seemed, she said, as if that particular time was what he’d been waiting for all along.

  * * *

  Taylor was back in Little Washington by five P.M. He went directly to the chief’s office. He put the housing card on the chief’s desk, next to a photograph he had taken of the map.

  LAWSON LAWSON

  Neither John Crone nor John Taylor was an expert in handwriting analysis. But in this instance, neither felt he had to be.

  The words appeared to be a perfect match.

  13

  After seeing the two words side by side, Lewis Young decided a couple of the SBI’s more aggressive investigators should have a talk with Bonnie and her children.

  He called her on March 21 to say John Crone felt there had been some fresh developments. Young said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss them, but he told her two new SBI agents would be coming to see her the next day. Their names were Newell and Sturgell, and they worked with a special division that handled only the most important cases around the state. He said one of them was tall and thin, the other short and round. Their nicknames were the Thin Man and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

  They’d be wanting to talk not only to her, but to Angela and Chris. They wanted to see her at two P.M., Angela at four, and Chris as soon as he finished working at Triad Tires at eight that night.

  Bonnie considered this good news. New people might mean new ideas, a new approach. Maybe, finally, some progress would be achieved. It did not occur to her that the meeting was something about which she needed to inform either Wade Smith or Bill Osteen.

  With no lawyers present, Newell and Sturgell could play by any rules they chose. And the rules they chose—while not in any way beyond the bounds of what was permissible under law—were definitely those of what was, psychologically speaking, a contact sport.

  Bonnie met them at Winston-Salem police headquarters. They questioned her for two hours. The early stages were not so bad. They asked her the same old questions, and she gave what were, by now, the same old answers. Such as, according to their notes, “Mrs. Von Stein stated that on Saturday night, Chris and Angela cooked hamburgers.”

  But soon, Bonnie felt, they became rude, confrontational, and accusatory. It was as if she’d never taken and passed the polygraph. She couldn’t believe this was happening all over again. They were harassing her, badgering her, as if trying to extort some sort of confession. Eight months had passed since Lieth had been killed, and she was still being treated as a suspect.

  One of them, the Doughboy or the Thin Man—she never was able to keep them straight—placed some black-and-white photographs on a table and asked her if she could identify them. They were photos of the four pages from A Rose in Winter. Bonnie said she remembered it vaguely. The author was one of her favorites. She’d read this particular book a couple of years earlier and had later found it in Angela’s room. Thinking, she said, that she might want to reread it, she’d placed it on a typewriter stand next to the bed in her bedroom.

  But the book hadn’t been found on the typewriter stand, she was told. The book had been found on the floor, with these pages missing. Only these pages, spattered with blood, had been found on the typewriter, next to the bed where Lieth had been stabbed.

  So what? Bonnie said. They told her that they considered these pages potentially “significant” evidence. Then they told her to read the text. She did.

  If someone hadn’t just read those pages—containing a scene where a man is killed with a dagger—and torn them from the book and placed them next to the bed where Lieth was attacked, then why were they spattered with blood?

  Bonnie calmly said she didn’t know. She hadn’t been reading the book. If she had been, it would have been among a stack of paperbacks on the floor next to her side of the bed, not on the typewriter stand. She had no idea why those particular pages had been torn from it, or when they’d been torn from it, or why they’d been found where they had been, or how they’d come to be spattered with blood.

  It seemed perfectly plausible, she said, that the book, which had been lying atop the slippery vinyl cover of her typewriter—and which had not been the book she’d been reading that night, or at any time in the recent past—had been knocked off during the struggle, and the last four pages had fallen out as it hit the floor. It was only a paperback, it had been read maybe a dozen times by various members of her family—she and her sisters often exchanged favorite titles—and pages were always falling out of cheaply bound paperbacks, even when there wasn’t a life-and-death struggle raging in the immediate vicinity.

  It also seemed plausible that one of the first patrolmen or emergency medical technicians to reach the bedroom had spotted the blood on the pages and in order to protect them, had gathered them from the floor and stacked them on top of the typewriter. Or else, maybe her neighbors had done so, while they were destroying what was left of the crime scene that afternoon.

  Though she later described her “mode of response” here as “pretty mild and unconcerned,” she told the Thin Man and the Doughboy that the fact that even months after the murder they were still trying to develop this sort of absurd scenario—something, she said, that seemed to have b
een lifted directly from the pages of Fatal Vision, where Jeffrey MacDonald had been accused of using Esquire magazine stories about witchcraft and the Manson family as inspiration for his fanciful tale of drug-crazed intruders in the night—convinced her that every previous assurance she’d been given had been a lie.

  Lewis Young had promised that once she passed the polygraph, the investigation would move beyond her. Well, she’d passed with the highest score possible. Yet now, more than two months later, here were these two new detectives who seemed not only to be back to square one, but even worse: instead of investigating, they were concocting grotesque scenarios that belonged in the kind of escapist fiction they were now attempting to use as evidence.

  The Doughboy and the Thin Man seemed unmoved. Not only, they said, did those pages suggest that just before her husband had been stabbed to death she’d been reading about a stabbing—in which a young man named Christopher had wielded a knife—but before that she’d sat up alone, watching a television movie about a serial killer.

  They put the photos back in an envelope. Those pages had been removed from the book, they repeated. Those pages had been spattered with blood. Bonnie gazed at them, still in her “unconcerned” mode. They said all right, she could leave now. They were ready to talk to her daughter.

  The truth was, neither Newell nor Sturgell considered Bonnie a likely suspect. The location and content of the pages might have been no more than a weird coincidence. But even if the pages had been placed at the bedside for some sort of ritualistic purpose, it seemed improbable that Bonnie would have done it herself, or even known about it.

  Like the partly burned map found at the edge of the fire, the pages might have had some sort of mystical significance. But Newell and Sturgell had not been thinking along such tangled lines.