Blood Games (18 page)

In 1952, five years after her husband’s death, Carolyn, now thirty-seven, remarried. Her new husband, Charles Thomas, a widower of only six months, father of three grown children, was almost twenty years her senior. She had known him all her life. A busy man, always on the go, he now owned what was called The Big Store, a general store in downtown Danville. It filled a huge brick building that had been used as a prison during the Civil War. He had used his store profits to buy land in Caswell County when it was very inexpensive during the Depression, and his holdings were among the largest in the county. He owned twenty-two tracts, ranging from eighty to several hundred acres, all of them farmed by tenants who made the crops and paid him a share of the income. His health had begun to fail, and he had turned his store over to a manager and retired to indulge his passion for bridge. That was how Carolyn had become reacquainted with him.

Thomas had a house in Danville, but after their marriage, he moved into Carolyn’s small brick house in Yanceyville so that she could complete her teaching contract. She soon learned that he tended to be impatient with children. Both of her sons were having problems, and the situation only irritated her new husband. Bill, the elder son, pitched terrible, uncontrollable tantrums. Jim began having crying spells after his new stepfather moved in. They became so bad that Carolyn finally took him to a doctor in Danville who told her that the problem likely would take care of itself, and after a period of months it did.

Carolyn quit teaching again, and she and Charles played bridge as often as they could. Two years after their marriage, Carolyn discovered that she was pregnant again. Soon afterward, Charles Thomas suffered a devastating stroke. Her third son, John Thomas, was born seven months later, on September 21, 1955, and Carolyn found herself in the unenviable position of having to care for a new baby and an invalid husband at the same time.

As his son grew, Charles Thomas gradually deteriorated. In his last years, he was mostly bedridden, although with help from Carolyn he sometimes could sit in a wheelchair. His condition eventually became so bad that Carolyn had to put him in a local nursing home. “I just needed a rest,” she said later. “I was about to fall apart.”

Charles Thomas died on November 27, 1960, leaving most of his estate to Carolyn. Carolyn returned to teaching for a while, then toured Europe and came back to Caswell County to restore old houses and fill them with the antiques that she loved collecting. Her three sons all finished high school at the same school from which their mother had graduated, then went off to college. Carolyn had great expectations of all three. She had reared them in the small Episcopal church that her family had helped to found, and she had tried to instill in all a sense of history, family, and a deep respect for education. Her dream was that Bill, like his grandfather, would become a lawyer, and later, possibly, John, too. She wanted Jim, with his deep and thoughtful silences, to be a priest. And if they should choose to live in Caswell County, she would be very proud. All three sons eventually did return to Caswell County to make their lives and rear their families near their mother, all on farms that Charles Thomas once owned. Carolyn had become a well-known figure in the county by that time, and with her wealth of land, she reigned over her family as a respected matriarch.

“They’re just solid old Caswell cornbread aristocracy,” one prominent Caswell County resident said years later of Carolyn and her sons. “They’ve been around here for generations.” This person had been in Caswell County for only twenty-eight years and recognized that she was still considered a “newcomer.” “There are a lot of things acceptable for those families that aren’t acceptable to newcomers,” she went on, “a tolerance of idiosyncrasies that doesn’t exist for others.”

In coming years, there would be idiosyncrasies in Carolyn Moore Upchurch Thomas’s family that would stir much talk in the county and even be tolerated. But there also would come a time when idiosyncrasies would step beyond the line of tolerance: when they led to charges of murder.

17

Carolyn Thomas’s two older sons showed no indications of living up to her dreams for them.

Bill, the eldest, went off to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but stayed only a semester before dropping out and joining the Air Force.

His younger brother Jim, followed him to UNC but with no intentions of becoming the priest his mother hoped that he would be. Although he had been briefly an acolyte in Yanceyville’s Episcopal church, he had no genuine religious leanings of any type. His major was history, but his major interests were drinking, partying, and chasing girls, and his grades showed it.

By the end of his sophomore year, Jim’s attentions had fastened on a single girl. Her name was Joanne Ensley, and she was from Gastonia, a textile town west of Charlotte, a three-hour drive from Chapel Hill. But Jim didn’t have to drive that far to see her, for she was a student at Greensboro College, less than an hour away.

Joanne had grown up in a family of military men, the second of three children. Her father was in the Air Force, her uncles were all marines. “It was ‘yes sir,’ ‘yes ma’am,’ ‘no sir,’ and a great deal of respect for your parents as well as your elders,” she later recalled. Respect was sometimes difficult. She came to despise her father, who was abusive to her mother. Her parents went through a bitter divorce when she was in the fourth grade. Afterward her strong-willed mother supported her three children by working as a secretary to a textile mill executive. The children grew up in the First Methodist Church and regularly attended gatherings of their mother’s big family, most of whom lived nearby.

Joanne was an honor student in high school, and her major interest and favorite activity was serving as a Candy Striper volunteer at Gaston Memorial Hospital. She dreamed of being a nurse, but that was not to be.

In her senior year of high school, Joanne won a full four-year scholarship given through the textile industry, and in the fall of 1966, she began classes at Greensboro College. By this time she had developed into a striking young woman with a slim, voluptuous figure, light brown hair, and intense, blue-green eyes. As a teenager, she was very close to her mother. So close, indeed, that later she would come to think that her mother tried to live out her own dreams through her. “I went to GC because that’s where my mother wanted me to go,” she said later. “I wasn’t really given a choice.”

Her roommate, Gloria Myers, was a brilliant student from Caswell County. Gloria was dating a young man from Caswell County, Ricky Frederick, a close friend of Jim Upchurch. It was on a weekend visit to Gloria’s house that Joanne first met Jim. Not long after, Jim and Ricky were driving from Chapel Hill to Greensboro almost every weekend to see Gloria and Joanne.

One classmate of Joanne’s, the novelist Candace Flynt, later remembered thinking of Joanne and Jim as being glamorous and sophisticated. “They both were gorgeous people,” she recalled. “Everybody thought they should get married just for their gorgeousness.”

By December 1967, marriage was on both their minds. “I think I’m pregnant,” Joanne told Jim shortly before Christmas. She hadn’t yet been to a doctor, but she knew somehow that it was so.

“Find out for sure,” he told her.

She did.

Abortion was illegal in North Carolina at the time and never was considered. For Joanne and Jim, there was only one alternative.

The wedding was set for February 3, 1968. It was to be a small affair, just for family and a few close friends, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Yanceyville, Jim’s family church. Joanne’s mother, Margaret, was distressed when she learned about it. She didn’t think that Jim, quiet and reserved, was a proper match for her smart and outgoing daughter. She had other dreams for Joanne. “My mother always planned for a huge wedding at First Methodist Church,” Joanne recalled later, “but it was
her
wedding, not mine.”

The wedding was Joanne’s first independent stand against her mother, and although her mother was upset, she still attended the ceremony and paid for a catered champagne reception, but she passed out drunk in retribution.

The young couple settled on one of Carolyn’s many farms, near Leasburg in eastern Caswell County. The farm was called Cedar Hill for the ancient and gnarled cedars that lined the rocky lane leading to it. The story-and-a-half red farmhouse, built in the nineteenth century, had a huge stone fireplace and an airy sunroom and sleeping porch on the back. Carolyn had just finished refurbishing it. The old house was isolated, far off the paved highway, with no neighbors in sight.

Faced with the impending responsibility of fatherhood, Jim dropped out of college and got a job at a textile plant in Roxboro in an adjoining county. Joanne, to her mother’s great dismay, gave up her scholarship to be a farm wife and mother.

“That was a real change for me,” she recalled later, “but I did like it. I was very happy there.”

Joanne deeply loved her maternal grandparents, whom she called Mama and Papa Jenks. Papa Jenks always grew a large garden, and Mama Jenks canned, froze, and otherwise preserved its produce. Joanne always admired them for that. Now she began emulating them. Jim planted a garden. Joanne froze, canned, and dried the vegetables. Joanne surrounded the old house with great banks of flowers, just as her grandmother did her own house.

Carolyn, who lived only a couple of miles away in the village of Leasburg in another antebellum house she had preserved, came to visit occasionally, but mostly it was just the two young lovers on the isolated farm until James Bartlett Upchurch III was born August 16, 1968, at Danville Memorial Hospital, the same hospital in which his father had been born. He weighed six pounds, eleven ounces, and had pale blue eyes. His father was twenty-two, his mother twenty, and neither was sure that they were prepared for parenthood.

“Dr. Spock was the reference book,” Jim later recalled. “That was our Bible. We kept that thing well-thumbed.”

Fortunately, Bart, as his parents called him, was not a fretful baby. Caring for him presented no special strains. Bart began walking at seven months without ever crawling, convincing his parents of what they already had suspected: that they had a precocious child.

By this time, Jim had decided that he needed to return to the university, and his mother was happy to pay for it. He got his degree in history in 1970 and took a job with the Caswell County Department of Social Services in Yanceyville. The following November, his second son, Emory, was born, expenses paid by Carolyn.

In the spring of 1974, four years later, Carolyn suggested that Jim and Joanne move into the house in which she had been living in Leasburg. She had bought another historic house just across the street from her childhood home in Milton which she was restoring and planning to move into.

Historic houses in Caswell County all have names, usually those of the families who built them or first lived in them. The house in which Carolyn had been living in Leasburg was called the Thompson House. Jacob Thompson, a congressman, U.S. secretary of the interior from 1857 until 1861, and a Confederate secret agent in Canada during the Civil War, was born in the house. It sat in an island of greenery cut off by roads on three sides, its back to the major highway that passes through Caswell County, U.S. 158. A huge, two-story white house with dark shutters and monstrous chimneys, it offered much more room than Jim and Joanne had in the cramped farmhouse at Cedar Hill. With the boys growing quickly, they needed more space, and they moved in June. Joanne loved the house but worried about its location on the highway, fearing for her children’s safety, even though the yard was fenced and cut off by a barrier of trees and wild growth.

Bart, who was two months shy of turning six and beginning first grade, was particularly taken with his new surroundings. He loved the grounds and garden, the huge, woodpecker-riddled pecan tree that yielded tasty treasures, the giant oaks, and the nearly tame squirrels that lived in them. “It was like living in a park,” he recalled years later. The collection of outbuildings offered new prospects for adventure, and prowling there one day he discovered a big boxful of old comic books and immersed himself in them, the beginning of a fascination that would endure.

Bart had proved himself to be not only precocious but independent and willful as well. Joanne read regularly to her sons, and Bart had begun to read well before he was old enough to go to school. Later that summer, when he began school at High Rock Elementary, more than five miles from his home, his mother wanted to pick him up at the end of the first day. He would not allow it. He insisted on riding the bus with the other children. Joanne would never forget the image of him arriving home that day. He was wearing red shorts, a red-and-white striped polo shirt, white socks, and navy blue Keds. “I remember him getting off that bus,” she recalled. “He had the biggest smile on his face. He felt like he had accomplished something on his own and he was so proud.”

Bart tested well above most of his fellow students in first and second grade, but halfway through the second grade, his parents were concerned. He was losing interest in school, didn’t want to complete assignments, seemed frustrated. “Bart was bored,” his mother said. “He was not challenged.”

That could not be allowed. And although it troubled their liberal instincts, Joanne and Jim removed Bart from public school and placed him in the only private school in the county, all-white Piedmont Academy. They felt better when his grades and interests began to improve, and the following year, when Bart was starting third grade and Emory was to begin first grade, they put Emory in Piedmont Academy, too.