Blood Games (33 page)

“Somebody broke into Chris’s house last night and attacked his parents,” Chuck told them.

Chris’s stepfather had been killed; his mother was in the hospital. Both had been stabbed and beaten. It apparently had happened in the early morning hours. Campus police had taken Chris home. Beyond that, not much else was known. A burglary of some sort. Shocked, Sandra and Sybil returned to Sybil’s room. Poor Chris, they thought. Poor, poor Chris.

Neal got up when the ROTC officer came, but he begged off talking with him, saying that he was sick, making apologies and asking for a later appointment. Afterward, Neal went back to bed and didn’t get up until well after lunch, when Bart and Brew showed up to tell Neal and Butch what had happened to Chris’s parents. Neal seemed surprised at the news and asked questions, but Bart and Brew had few answers. Kenyatta couldn’t remember the group being so sobered. Later, she recalled that they all agreed that what had happened was terrible, and they were sorry for Chris.

Sandra, Sybil, Brew, Bart, and Chuck gathered in Chuck’s room late that afternoon to watch the TV news, hoping to learn more about what had happened at Chris’s house, but the news offered no mention of a murder in Washington, and they were left to speculate. Nobody knew if there had been an arrest, or even if there were suspects. Who could have done it? Somebody who knew that Chris’s family had a lot of money, more than likely, they figured. Whoever did it, Sandra, Sybil, and Brew knew one thing for certain. It wasn’t Chris. He was with them, playing cards.

Two days after his friends at State learned about the murder, Chris returned briefly to campus to pick up his car and some clothes. He came with his uncle, George Bates. Sandra, Sybil, and Bart all went to Chris’s room to see him. Chris was not his usual self. Nobody expected him to be, but he seemed more than saddened: he seemed depressed. Nobody really knew what to say to him, except that they were sorry. Chris didn’t talk much about the murder, and his friends were reluctant to ask. His mother was still in the hospital, he said, but she was going to be okay. Lieth’s funeral would be tomorrow. He wouldn’t be returning to finish summer school.

In the days that followed, Bart and Brew recalled the conversation in which they and Chris and Tim Parker had been laughing and joking about Chris “offing” his parents so that he could go ahead and collect the millions he would inherit while he was young and could enjoy it. Each expressed regret at having been part of that conversation. They also asked one another if perhaps Chris could have taken it seriously. Could Chris have been somehow involved in the murder? Both said they couldn’t imagine it.

“Chris is a little crazy,” Bart said, “but he’s not
that
crazy.”

On Friday, August 5, four days after his mother was released from the hospital, Chris and his sister, Angela, came back to State so that Chris could officially withdraw from summer school and pick up the remainder of his belongings. With Chris’s approval, Bart had moved into Chris’s room with Chuck for the more comfortable accommodations, and Chris called ahead to tell them that he was coming and wanted to have a party, a real blowout. He wanted all of his friends to be there, and he wanted plenty of liquor and beer. Bart and Chuck got the liquor—half a gallon of tequila, half a gallon of vodka—and two cases of Coors Light. But Bart was concerned about one thing.

“I got on the phone and called everybody I knew and told them, ‘If Chris comes looking for acid, don’t sell him any. He doesn’t need that on his mind right now,’” Bart said later.

When Chris and Angela went to California Pizza that night with Sandra, Sybil, and several others, Sandra and Sybil later recalled that he told them he was giving up drugs. “My mother doesn’t need me doing that,” he said

Somehow, though, neither Sandra nor Sybil was surprised at what happened at the party later that night. Chris was drunker and higher, wilder and bolder than any of his friends ever had seen him. He smoked pot, chased shots of Pepe Lopez with Coors Light, took one hit of acid, then another—and soared into hysteria. A bad trip, everybody called it later. But to Chris it was a nightmare.

“I can’t breathe,” he kept yelling. “I’m dying. I’m dying. Somebody call an ambulance.”

First one, then another of his friends took him outside, walked him, and tried to calm him. Finally, they got him into his loft bed, where he eventually passed out

“I knew he shouldn’t have taken that acid in his state of mind,” Bart said.

After that night, all of Chris’s friends at State agreed on one thing about the murder of Chris’s stepfather and the attack on his mother: Chris was taking it awfully hard.

By the time Chris returned for the party, Bart had not gone to class for more than a week. He knew that he was going to flunk both courses and that his attempt at reinstating himself as a student was doomed for now.

“I figured what the hell, it wasn’t no big deal,” he said later. “I’d just take the classes over.”

But the end of summer school meant that Bart no longer had a place to live and had to make another decision. He had been talking with Brew and another friend about getting an apartment together. They finally decided to do it and found one at 2001-B Gorman Street in a different section of the complex in which Bart had lived with Hank and Opie, just off Avent Ferry Road.

Bart had not worked since April. He had been living off the insurance payment from his car wreck. In addition, he was helping to make ends meet by writing bad checks.

“I got into the habit of it,” he said of the check writing. “I got a big kick out of it. I was buying beer under age with bad checks. We figured you had to have balls to do that. I figured I’d just pay the bad checks back if they caught up with me.”

Many of the bad checks were to restaurants, often for food that was delivered. And a couple of times the recipients did catch up with him, sending big, stern guys who cornered him and said, “You gonna pay for those subs you got.”

“Hey, man, no problem,” Bart told them, although once he had to borrow quickly from friends to make good.

Others sought legal recompense, issuing warrants for his arrest. “I never wrote a bad check unless I was drunk,” Bart said later. “It got completely out of hand. It all added up to a lot more than I figured.”

Bart didn’t have money to pay off the checks or to pay his share of the apartment rent and deposit, but he did still have the big ’66 Ford convertible that he had bought in the spring. It still was at the shop where the brakes had been fixed. He’d left it because he couldn’t afford to pay the repair bill. If he could find a buyer for the car, Bart reasoned, he would be able to pay the repair bill and still have enough to pay off his bad checks and ante up his share of the rent. True, he still would be left with a car payment and no car, but that really wasn’t his problem. His father had cosigned the note and it would fall to him to take care of it.

A maintenance worker at State bought the car. Bart paid off his bills—his mother sent money to cover a couple of the bad checks—and he, Brew, and another friend moved into the apartment in mid-August.

Through June and early July, Bart had kept his regular appointments with his probation officer, Christy Newsom. But soon after moving off campus, he awoke after noon one day too hung over to make his 2 P.M. appointment. No problem, he figured. He’d just go next day. But the next day he was lying by the apartment pool when he realized that he had failed to go again. Oh well, he thought, if she wanted to see him bad enough she would find him. No need to worry about it.

That Bart failed to make his appointment came as no surprise to Christy. She had expected him to fall back into his old habits. But she had no intention of allowing him to get away with it.

Kenyatta was relieved that August was coming to an end. Her dream of a romantic summer with Neal had turned into a nightmare. August had brought the worst weeks. Clearly, Neal was lapsing back into the depression that had had such a strong hold on him earlier in the year.

“I couldn’t even communicate with him,” she said later. “He never smiled. He was never happy. He wouldn’t talk to me. He wouldn’t do anything with me. I couldn’t make him happy. I couldn’t even make him smile.”

She was relieved when the time came for her to move out of the misery of the apartment on Ligon Street and return to the campus of the N.C. School of Science and Math in Durham for her senior year of high school. She still loved Neal but she had begun to realize that they probably couldn’t make it together.

Chris returned to campus for the beginning of the fall semester at the end of August. Bart saw him several times. “He was acting really paranoid,” Bart recalled. “Really jumpy.” He told friends that his mother was afraid that the killer might return and try to get her and other family members. He said his mother had hired former Green Berets as bodyguards. He was taking care of his own protection, however. He showed off a .22 semiautomatic pistol that he kept in his car.

The opening of fall semester is always a big party time on campus, and Chris still made the parties, still drank heavily. He confided to several friends that he was afraid that he might be an alcoholic. Once that fall, Bart later recalled, Chris got terribly drunk, whipped a long dagger out of the back of his pants, and began jumping around, slashing wildly at the night air.

Chris’s worried mother kept a closer watch on him than ever, and as he began skipping classes again and acting more depressed and erratic, she encouraged him to seek counseling. Chris began seeing a college psychologist, who advised him that he should drop classes temporarily until he had more understanding of his problems and better control of his emotions.

Chris withdrew from classes at the end of September, to go and live with his mother in Winston-Salem. He told friends that he was dropping out to look after his mother. After all, he said, he was the man of the family now.

Christy Newsom still had not found Bart. Early in September, she had called Student Information at State and discovered that Bart was not registered. Two days later, she went to the campus looking for him without success. The next day, she got his father’s number at work in Raleigh. Jim had left his job at the Social Services Department in Caswell County and gone to work for the Department of Human Resources in Raleigh, each day commuting the fifty miles back and forth to Caswell County. Jim was surprised and upset to learn that Bart wasn’t in school, and he didn’t know his whereabouts. Jim tracked Bart down by calling Hank at his mother’s restaurant. He then called Christy and gave her Bart’s address at 2001-B Gorman Street. When Christy went by the apartment, nobody answered her knock. She sent Bart a letter telling him that he was again in violation of his probation and that she was going to have him arrested. Still, she heard nothing from him.

Bart and Brew had become very close and spent many hours talking about life, philosophy, and politics over beer. They had much in common. Both were smart. Both had been playing D&D since junior high. Neither knew what he wanted to do with his life.

“You’re so smart and so capable of doing so many things that you’re scared to do anything, because the minute you start doing one thing, all your options are closed,” Brew said later, echoing words Bart had said earlier.

Unlike Bart, Brew did have one certainty in his future. He had a girlfriend, and he planned to marry her when he finished college.

“His girlfriend was a really private thing with him,” Bart said later “We didn’t really know her.”

In October, Bart came into the apartment one night and found Brew sitting in front of the TV with a half-empty bottle of vodka and an empty Valium bottle at his side. His girlfriend had found somebody else.

“Brew just went off the deep end,” Bart said later. “His girlfriend was the one anchor of his life. It just threw his whole life into chaos.”

Bart and his other roommate sat up late that night, trying to keep Brew awake and to get him to talk about his feelings. “He really wouldn’t talk that much,” Bart said. “He just wanted us to go get him some beer. We wouldn’t do that. Finally, he just went in and crashed.”

When Bart got up the next morning, he discovered that Brew was gone. The next he heard about him, Brew was in the hospital.

“He went to his grandma’s house, took every pill in the medicine cabinet, almost died,” Bart said.

“I didn’t try to kill myself,” Brew said much later. “I was really hurt and I wanted to stop hurting.”

Brew’s mother came to the apartment while he was still in the hospital, packed up his belongings, and took them away. Brew would not be returning, she said.

To Bart, as he later put it, “everything seemed to be turning to shit” that fall. Chris and Brew had flaked out and gone away. Without Brew, he and his roommate couldn’t afford to keep the apartment. He was broke, out of school, with no job. He soon would have no place to live, and he had no place to go. Well, there was one place to go: Christy Newsom was again threatening to send him to jail. She had issued a warrant for his arrest.

On October 21, Bart went to the probation office and said that he had come to turn himself in. Christy was not there. The person Bart spoke with told him that the paperwork had been turned over to the Wake County Sheriff’s Department. He would have to go there.

Bart left, but he didn’t show up at the sheriff’s department. He’d made the effort, he figured, and if they didn’t want him bad enough to keep him, that was their problem.