Blood Games (28 page)

Christy was nine when her father started teaching her to shoot, first with a twelve-gauge pump shotgun—“It almost knocked my arm off,” she remembered—then moving on to handguns. When she started driving, he gave her a .38 revolver to carry in her car.

In high school, Christy worked part-time for a local attorney and did school papers on child abuse and sexual abuse. After her graduation from Southern Nash Senior High School in 1982, she, like Bart four years later, went off to Raleigh to college; she chose exclusive Meredith College, just up the street from State. Her intention was to go to law school, but after her graduation in 1986, she began having second thoughts.

“I just couldn’t be a defense attorney,” she said. “I saw too many deals going on.” And she saw little future in becoming a prosecutor in Wake County, where the district attorney’s office was a revolving door for young lawyers.

In college she had interned as a probation officer, enjoyed it, and thought she might like to work at it again, at least for a while. But those jobs were hard to come by and she had to take an interim job with the clerk of court processing arrest warrants for probation and parole violators until a job opened. One finally became available in May of 1987. She was just beginning to get a handle on the job when Bart was assigned to her already heavy caseload.

After reading Bart’s file, she was amazed to discover that for all practical purposes he was not on probation at all. He had paid none of the monthly supervision fees he was supposed to be paying, and he was under no real supervision. Only a couple of times had anybody even bothered to check on his whereabouts. She decided to correct that situation. She found where he was living and began calling his apartment to have him come in for an office visit. But every time she called, she got one or another roommate who would not identify himself. They told her that Bart was not there and they didn’t know when he would be back. She left messages for Bart to call her, but he never did.

Soon after Christy was assigned to supervise Bart’s probation, unbeknownst to her, Bart was receiving another conviction for misdemeanor larceny in Wake County Recorder’s Court, this time for stealing beer.

As he told the story later, he had gotten bombed at a party one night by drinking a six-pack of South African malt liquor called Elephant. He was staggering home to sleep it off when he wandered through the parking lot of the Mission Valley Inn on the edge of the campus. A racing team sponsored by a beer company was spending the night there, their sleek race car in a trailer pulled by a beer truck. Bart noticed that one of the sliding doors on the beer truck was unlocked. He pushed it up, peered inside, and saw cases of beer and a cooler loaded with chicken salad sandwiches. He tossed the sandwiches out of the cooler, reloaded it with beer, and started walking off with it. But one of the race team members spotted him from the motel, yelled, and came out chasing him, followed by other team members and a uniformed police officer on private duty at the motel, all of them yelling for him to stop.

“I wasn’t about to stop,” he said. “I knew I didn’t want to get my shit stomped.”

He was beginning to outdistance them when he heard a different yell: “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” He looked back to see the police officer reaching for his pistol.

“Like a dumb ass, I stopped,” he said.

He set down the cooler and held up his hands as his breathless pursuers surrounded him, the racing team members looking as if they wished the police officer weren’t there.

“You dumb son-of-a-bitch, what did you stop for?” the police officer asked him with a grin. “Did you actually think I was going to shoot? You must go to State. All of you are alike.”

When Christy got no response to her repeated calls to Bart’s apartment on Avent Ferry Road, she went by and left a note on the door, which, she noticed, was covered with drawings of medieval-looking daggers. Still she got no response. Finally she wrote him a letter, telling him in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t appear at her office she would issue a warrant for his arrest and attempt to get his probation revoked so that he would have to serve his full sentence in jail. This time Bart responded, showing up at her office as requested on January 4, 1988. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and carrying a knapsack. A typical, clean-cut, all-American-boy college student, Christy thought. But he had a hollow look that made her wonder if he was using drugs.

Christy wanted this to be a get-acquainted session and they chatted at length. Bart was extremely polite, seemed to want to impress her, and she realized quickly that he was highly intelligent. She also thought that he was trying to play on her sympathies. He told her that he was a perpetual runner-up, always coming close but never quite achieving his goals. He’d been nominated for the School of Science and Math but wasn’t accepted, he said. He’d been a National Merit semifinalist but hadn’t won a scholarship.

When Christy asked why he had gotten into trouble in the first place, he told her that he’d done it for attention, to make up for never being recognized by his parents and schoolmates.

When Christy asked about his parents, Bart said that he wasn’t seeing them at all. His mother lived in Virginia, and his probation didn’t allow him to travel out of state without permission. He wasn’t close to his father, he said, and called him only when he needed something.

He told her that he wanted to be an anthropologist, planned to return to college, and intended to live a clean and trouble-free life. And that included paying his probation supervisory fees and keeping his monthly appointments with her. “I didn’t trust him at all,” she said later. “I had an eerie feeling about him and I even went to talk to my supervisor about him. He was one I knew I was going to have to watch. He was always thinking about what I was going to say so he could outsmart me. Bart derived self-satisfaction from knowing that he was smarter than anybody else around him.”

In February, Bart decided that he wanted a new car. He sold his 240Z and found a 1983 Camaro T-top for $4,500. His father arranged a loan through the State Employees Credit Union with payments of $160 a month, and Bart picked up the car on the day he got the check and drove it to work that night at the Fast Fare.

He had just got out of bed the next afternoon when a friend and three acquaintances dropped by the apartment to see his new car. “Let’s see what that Camaro will do,” one of them said, and the five young men piled into the car and struck out on Avent Ferry Road for the expressway that encircled the city. Bart was driving fifteen miles over the speed limit when he pulled out to pass a BMW in a curve and lost control of his car. It went into a spin and the left rear smashed into a roadside power pole, snapping it in half. The rear window flew from the car, shattering on the pavement. Power lines fell, sparking on the ground.

“Get out! Get out!” somebody yelled. “It’s going to blow up!” And five startled young men came piling out of the top of the car—none of them, miraculously, injured—and ran to the other side of the road, away from the wreckage.

“Damn,” said Bart. “How did that happen?”

The car did not explode, but it was damaged beyond repair. The police officer who came to investigate was less than sympathetic when he discovered that Bart was driving with a revoked license. He arrested him on the spot and took him to jail, charged with driving without a license, careless and reckless driving, and driving without liability insurance. Opie came to the jail and bailed out Bart later that day.

Soon after the short trip that produced the accident, Bart had another trip: his first on LSD. Hank had been telling him for months that a lot of LSD was around. “I said, ‘Might as well try it and see what it’s all about,’” Bart said later. “I gave him some money and said, ‘If you run into any, buy us some. One day he said, ‘Hey, I got some. Want to try it?’”

Each did a whole hit while sitting in the apartment one evening, listening to Opie’s stereo. For half an hour, nothing happened.

“I didn’t feel anything at all,” Bart said later. “I said, ‘Let’s make a joint and see what happens. Thirty minutes later, everything just went wild on me. I felt like I had to go do something but I didn’t know what. I went to the refrigerator and just stood there and asked myself, ‘Why did I come here? Oh, yeah, to get a beer. ’”

A red neon Budweiser sign that decorated one wall of the apartment added an eerie glow to the scene, and suddenly, as Bart later put it, the walls seemed to be breathing. He and Hank drank a few more beers, relishing the hallucinogenic effects of the drug, while Bart tried to decide what it was that he had to do.

Opie was at a keg party at an Air Force ROTC fraternity house, and Bart and Hank finally decided that what they had to do was join him there. Hank had bleached his hair blond, and Bart had been allowing his hair to grow long in the back. Neither had shaved in days, and both felt immediately out of place at the party, “kids from hell” among the ROTC straights, as Bart later described himself and Hank.

“We started feeling real paranoid,” he said.

They left the party on foot, beers in hand, staggering down Avent Ferry Road, back to their own apartment. Once there, they put Jimi Hendrix on the stereo and went out into the parking lot to sit on car hoods listening to the music and admiring the stars.

“Hank says, ‘You got thirty dollars?’” Bart said, recalling the night several years later. “‘I know where some hookers are if you want to go get laid.’ I said, ‘Are they worth a damn?’ ‘Yeah, they’re young and good-looking.’”

As Bart told the story later, it sounded more like an adolescent fantasy than an actual event. They walked to a nearby apartment, where they were greeted at the door by an attractive blonde young woman in black lace underwear who knew Hank and invited them in. Inside were more young women, “chicks,” Bart called them, all beautiful, all college students, in various states of undress. A stereo was playing Top Forty tunes. A bar offered many brands of liquor in tiny bottles like those sold on airplanes. A black dude sat at the kitchen table with an array of drugs spread out before him. Everybody knew Hank.

“I was sort of enjoying the whole scene, saying, ‘Wow!’” Bart remembered, “I said, ‘How long has this been here?’ Hank said, ‘Since we’ve been living here. Hell, where do you think all my paychecks have been going to?’ I said, ‘And you didn’t tell me!’”

They were just beginning to talk with the girls and enjoy themselves, Bart said, when a guy made a pass at Hank.

“He was a fag working at the whorehouse,” Bart said. “Hank flew into a rage and knocked him down. The pimp comes out all mad. He was an Arab guy, had a gun. He’s yelling. I said, ‘Come on, Hank, let’s go, let’s get out of here.’ Hank wanted to stay and beat up the fag, but I got him out of there. The whole evening had an alcoholic, dreamlike quality about it.”

Later, Bart said, somebody asked him what it was like taking his first hit of acid. “He said, ‘How was it?’ I said, ‘Neither me nor Hank has any words to properly express the experience.’”

On March 1, Christy Newsom was at the Wake County Courthouse, passing by a courtroom, when she looked inside and saw Bart standing before the bar. Bart was pleading guilty to the charges that resulted from his wreck. It was the first Christy knew that he had been arrested.

Bart received a six months’ sentence, suspended for a year, and was placed on supervised probation. He was fined two hundred dollars, ordered to pay court costs, and instructed not to drive again until his license was properly restored.

Christy followed him out of the courtroom as he left.

“I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘I was scared. I thought you would put me in jail.’ I told him, ‘If you would tell me things versus me finding them out on my own, it would be a whole lot easier on you.’ I chewed him out and told him to come by my office the next day.”

Bart didn’t show up for his appointment, and Christy went looking for him, leaving a note on his apartment door to no effect. She didn’t talk to him again until March 14, when she got him on the phone and demanded that he come to her office. He said he would be there that day, but he didn’t appear until March 25, following several more threatening messages left with roommates.

Why was he not keeping his appointments?

“His answer to everything was that he was afraid of me,” Christy said later. “He thought that was flattering to me, but it wasn’t. He figured if I thought I was an authoritative figure to him that I would back off. I told him he wasn’t afraid of the devil himself. He just looked at me and grinned.”

She set his next appointment for April 11. When he failed to appear, she sent him another letter, instructing him to be in her office at 10 A.M. May 3. He didn’t come. Fed up, she cited him to court, intent on revoking his probation.

On May 30, Bart appeared before District Court Judge George Greene. Christy had gotten to know Judge Greene during her internship in college. She liked him, had attended parties at his house, thought of him as a friend. But she had little respect for him as a judge. He was, she thought, too soft on criminals.

Christy presented her case against Bart, citing his failure to appear for meetings, the recent charges against him, the supervisory fees he hadn’t paid. She made it clear that she thought Bart should be in prison, his probation revoked.

“I said, ‘What else can the Probation Department do?’” she said later. “‘He’s going to do what he wants to do. This judgment to him is nothing more than a piece of paper. He needs to learn that fire burns.’ The judge told me, ‘I’ll decide who needs to go to jail.’”