Blood Games (17 page)

Hope and Young were not leaving the case completely at rest, however. When they learned that Bonnie would be visiting in Washington early in December, they arranged to meet her at the police department for yet another interview.

Chris was doing a little better since he had left college, Bonnie told them. He was living with her and had a job at a tire store in Winston-Salem, working every day but Tuesday and Sunday. Every other Tuesday he was seeing a psychiatrist. He would continue working until he felt ready to return to N.C. State.

Angela would finish her first semester at Greensboro College soon, Bonnie said, but she had hardly studied and was seeing a psychologist who felt that it might have been a mistake to put her in college so soon after Lieth’s death. Angela would drop out after this semester, Bonnie said, and next fall she would be going to a small college in Virginia that had a strong equestrian program.

Bonnie spent an hour and a half with the detectives, and just as the interview was about to come to a close, Young asked the question that both officers had been wanting to ask for a long time.

How would she, Chris, and Angela feel about taking polygraph tests?

Bonnie answered without hesitation. She’d be happy to do it, she said, and she was certain that Chris and Angela would too. She told Young to go ahead and set up a date for the tests.

The polygraph examinations were set for January 17, 1989, one week short of the sixth-month anniversary of Lieth Von Stein’s murder. The detectives had put off any further investigation pending the outcome of the tests.

But when Bonnie met them at the SBI office in Greenville that day, only Angela was with her.

Chris couldn’t come Bonnie said, because he had an appointment with his psychiatrist. Pressed about when Chris would be available, Bonnie finally said, “I don’t know, and it will be his decision whether or not he takes it.”

Later, the detectives learned that after agreeing to the tests, Bonnie had consulted with John Surratt, who said that she needed to see a criminal attorney. She had sought out one of the best-known, and most expensive, in the state, Wade Smith of Raleigh, who had helped to defend Green Beret Dr. Jeffrey McDonald against charges of killing his wife and children, and he had advised that Chris not submit to the test.

SBI polygraph examiner William Thompson administered the tests to Bonnie and Angela. He asked three key questions of each.

Of Bonnie, he asked:

“Did you plan your husband’s death?”

“Did you help plan your husband’s death?”

“Do you know who stabbed your husband?”

Bonnie answered no to each question.

Of Angela, Thompson asked:

“Did you help someone stab Lieth?”

“Were you involved in stabbing Lieth?”

“Do you know who stabbed Lieth?”

Angela also answered no each time.

After studying the results of the tests, Thompson determined that both Bonnie and Angela were telling the truth. Bonnie’s results were well on the side of truthfulness, Angela’s less so. Under former standards of grading, Angela’s results were close enough to the line separating truthfulness from deception to be called inconclusive. But more recent standards called for determining any results above the line to be deemed truthful, anything below the line deceptive.

Regardless of the finer points of Angela’s examination, the results were enough to convince the detectives that neither Bonnie nor Angela had played a role in Lieth’s death.

But Chris’s reluctance to take the test only reaffirmed what they already believed: that he knew exactly who had killed Lieth. And as soon as they could arrange their schedules, they intended to begin questioning his friends and others to find out who that was.

Part Two

COMING OF AGE

MY MOTHER GROANED! MY FATHER WEPT.
INTO THE DANGEROUS WORLD I LEAPT;
HELPLESS, NAKED, PIPING LOUD,
LIKE A FIEND HID IN A CLOUD.

—WILLIAM BLAKE

16

Even today Caswell County remains the image of what North Carolina once was: a bucolic vision of verdant land, old, two-story white farmhouses at the end of tree-lined lanes, slanting, unpainted sharecropper houses by the edges of farm fields, and rows of ancient log tobacco barns, mud-chinked, rusty-roofed, and vine-entwined. Few other counties in North Carolina have remained so unchanged by the sweep of “progress” that has so radically altered the character of the once rural and small-town state in the last half of the twentieth century.

Although the county lies in the teeming Piedmont, North Carolina’s center of population and industry, less than an hour’s leisurely drive north from burgeoning cities such as Durham and Greensboro, no four-lane highway penetrates it. Indeed, the county boasts only a single stoplight, and that of recent vintage.

Situated on the Virginia line, Caswell County is hilly and lushly forested, a haven for deer, wild turkey, bobcats and other wildlife, even an occasional black bear. The state-maintained fifteen-thousand-acre wildlife preserve in the heart of the county attracts hunters from all over the state. In hunting season, pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles carrying the carcasses of deer are common sights on county roads. Most males in Caswell County are hunters. Boys are taught to shoot and stalk and kill at an early age. Camouflage clothing is common year-around. And venison roasts, squirrel stews, fried rabbit, baked quail, and wild turkey are regular dishes on many local tables.

The land is Caswell County’s primary sustenance. Its soil is a sandy loam, underlaid by a thick, rich layer of red clay, ideal for growing tobacco, the county’s primary crop and the base of its economy for two centuries. Tradition is important in this county steeped in history, and that history is inextricably bound with tobacco. Caswell’s soil attracted planters who established big plantations early in the nineteenth century. Using slave labor, they cleared and planted hundreds of acres in tobacco. The county prospered and produced an aristocracy of planters, manufacturers, and merchants who lived in stately columned houses attended by hosts of servants. Prior to the Civil War, Caswell was one of only sixteen of North Carolina’s one hundred counties in which slaves outnumbered free people. But Caswell was an anomaly among those counties, the rest of which lay in the low country to the east, where the plantations depended primarily on cotton.

A happy accident in 1839 brought more fortune, even fame to Caswell County. Until that time, cured tobacco was dark brown, heavy, and splotchy. But that fall one barn of tobacco on the farm of Abisha Slade cured to a fine texture, with bright, unblemished yellow-gold leaves that proved to be of immensely superior quality.

In attempting to find out what had caused this, Slade learned that a slave named Stephen who was tending the fires in the barn went to sleep and let the flames die. When he awoke and discovered what he had done, in panic he dragged some charred log ends from a blacksmith’s fire and threw them on the dying embers. The sudden rush of heat from the charcoal came at just the right moment in the curing process and produced the bright golden leaves. Slade and his brothers began experimenting with techniques using charcoal until they could produce the same leaves every time. Their crops brought higher prices than ever before had been paid for tobacco and created a sensation.

The tobacco that Slade developed was first called Bright Leaf, later flue-cured, and it brought a revolution to the tobacco business, making possible the big tobacco conglomerates such as R. J. Reynolds and American Tobacco that came many years later.

Although no battles were fought there, Caswell County was devastated by the Civil War. The economy was destroyed and the county never completely recovered. Without slaves, the plantations could not produce, and the land grew wild. The tobacco factories closed, never to reopen. Merchants moved away. Commerce withered. Towns shriveled and died. The families of planters who did not lose their land continued on proudly in their big houses under greatly reduced circumstances. Some slaves fled, but many had no place to go and remained, eking out meager livings as sharecroppers. But never again did the county experience the prosperity to which it had been accustomed before the war.

Isolated by geography and circumstances, Caswell County became a place with little to offer its most promising young people. The offspring of its educated, aristocratic families continued to become leaders in business, politics, education, religion, but most had to go somewhere else to do it. By the turn of the century, Caswell was a place to leave, not to go to, the sustaining land offering little opportunity.

Yet Ernest Frederick Upchurch saw it differently. Upchurch was an ambitious young lawyer from Wake County with political aspirations, and in 1909, he, his wife, Mary, and their four-year-old son, Norman, set out in a buggy for their new home in Yanceyville, the county seat of Caswell County, where Fred Upchurch set up a practice. Caswell had a reputation for being wary of strangers and newcomers, but the young family found a hospitable reception. Within six years, Fred Upchurch was returning regularly to Raleigh as the state senator from Caswell County. Later, he became the county’s prosecuting attorney, a job he held for many years.

Fred and Mary Upchurch had three more children after moving to Caswell County: two sons, Fred Jr., born in 1910, and James, called Jimmy, born two years later, were followed by a daughter, Emmy Lou, born in 1919. The Upchurch sons all followed their father to Wake Forest College, a Baptist institution, and all of the Upchurch children were reared with the strong sense of right and wrong and the fear of hellfire that came from regular attendance at Yanceyville’s First Baptist Church, where their parents were staunch members.

Jimmy, the youngest son, always his mother’s baby, had the shortest and perhaps most tragic life of the four Upchurch children. He contracted tuberculosis, apparently from his mother. Although the disease went into remission, allowing him to resume a normal life, he seemed to some family members to be without drive or direction. He married and drifted from job to job before his disease flared anew. He died at thirty-five, leaving two young sons as his legacy to the county that had taken in his family and become their home.

The town of Milton, hard by the Virginia line in north-eastern Caswell County, has been described as “a museum without walls,” a picture-perfect image of a nineteenth-century American town. The town’s beginnings date to 1796, when a station to inspect tobacco and flour was built near the Dan River by act of the state’s general assembly. A warehouse was constructed. A few houses grew around it. A store opened, then a tavern. By the early 1800s, the town was thriving and lots were selling for high prices. In the decade preceding the Civil War, Milton was the home of five tobacco factories and one of the most modern cotton mills in the South. But Milton, like the rest of Caswell County, deteriorated after the war. By the time Carolyn Moore was born there in 1915, Milton was practically a ghost town.

Carolyn Moore’s ancestors were among Caswell County’s earliest settlers, and she grew up in Milton in a two-story brick antebellum hilltop house just up the street from the old tavern-turned-residence in which she was born. She was a sensitive child with an interest in history and a fancy for art and reading.

At age fifteen, Carolyn was at the house of a friend, Mary Motz, when an acquaintance of the Motz family stopped by for a visit. He was a slim young man with short, curly red hair and sharp good looks. Although he was quiet and reserved, Carolyn was impressed by his obvious intelligence and quick wit. He was eighteen, she learned, a student at Wake Forest College, and his father was one of Caswell County’s most prominent men. The young man’s name was James Bartlett Upchurch, but everybody called him Jimmy. His father had given him his middle name in honor of one of Caswell County’s most famous figures, Bartlett Yancey, a U.S. congressman elected in 1815 who sometimes presided over the House in the absence of his close friend, Speaker Henry Clay. When next Jimmy Upchurch drove his father’s cumbersome Packard to Milton, he was coming to call on Carolyn Moore.

Carolyn went on to graduate from Caswell County’s only high school, then attended Appalachian State Teachers College at Boone in the mountains of western North Carolina. During that time she saw little of Jimmy Upchurch. In her first year at Appalachian, he fell ill with tuberculosis, and his worried family was seeing that he got the best treatment available.

Soon after Carolyn returned to Caswell County with her degree in 1936, she and Jimmy began seeing one another again. His disease was in remission and he had regained his strength and his spirit while working as a bookkeeper in the mountains of Virginia, where the pure air was thought to be a help to his condition. They were wed two years later.

Carolyn gave up teaching at the local elementary school when her first child, a son named William Nanning, was born on March 28, 1943. Wanting a bathroom of their own, the family moved out of their apartment over Fred Upchurch’s law office into a one-bedroom apartment in an old, two-story house, the Johnson House, next to the Methodist church. A second son, this one named James Bartlett Upchurch, Jr., was born on October 2, 1945. By the time James Jr. was born, his father’s tuberculosis was reactivated.

Jimmy was working then at a clothing store in Burlington, twenty-five miles away, but he had to give up his job as his condition worsened, and with Carolyn not working, Fred Upchurch had to help out with expenses. Jimmy deteriorated quickly and soon had to be committed to a sanatorium in Danville, Virginia, just north of the Caswell County line. Carolyn, whose father had died when William was eight months old, took her two young sons and moved back in with her mother in Milton to be closer to her husband. She went weekly to visit him, taking the children and holding them up outside so that he could see them through a window. But after Jimmy had to be moved to a state sanatorium in eastern North Carolina where the most contagious tuberculosis patients were confined, she had to make a long trip by bus to visit him. She only got to see him a few more times before his death on January 27, 1947. Jimmy Upchurch’s eldest son was not yet four when his father died, and later he had only the faintest memory of him. His youngest son, and namesake, was not yet sixteen months old, and later had no memory of his father at all.