Blood Games (4 page)

“Can you give…”

“I don’t know how somebody got in.”

“You advise which door was unlocked?” Edwards called.

“She says she doesn’t know how they got in,” Michelle told him. “Stand by. I’m trying to get you more.”

“Okay, I got the back door open,” Tetterton radioed. “The back door’s been forced open, I believe.”

“The back door is open…” Michelle told the other officers, and Bonnie heard her over the phone.

“Oh, my god,” Bonnie said.

David Sparrow had arrived at the house and jumped from the car carrying a twelve-gauge Ithaca shotgun.

“The front door, David,” Edwards called to him as he unholstered the .45 on his hip and hurried to the back to meet Tetterton.

“You just lay right there,” Michelle was saying into the telephone. “Don’t get excited, okay, Bonnie?”

“The front door” Edwards again called to Sparrow. “Don’t let him out.”

“You calm down,” Michelle was telling Bonnie. “Calm down, okay?”

Tetterton and Edwards entered the back porch cautiously, Tetterton carrying his .357 Magnum, both shining their Mag-Lites into dark comers. Cats cowered and skittered before the beams. Through a window the officers could see a light inside the house, apparently in the kitchen. Both were tense as they opened the door that led from the porch into the house, not knowing if a crazed person might be lurking inside, waiting for the right moment to attack.

“I have cats,” Bonnie was saying into the telephone. “Please, I don’t want my cats hurt.”

In the kitchen, a fluorescent light was on over the sink, and Tetterton and Edwards saw cabinet doors open under the microwave oven to the right of the sink. A woman’s white pocketbook lay on a stovetop built into an island in front of the sink, the contents strewn.

“Somebody’s dead,” Edwards said in a near whisper. “I can smell it. Smell the blood?”

Rooms led off from the kitchen in two different directions.

“You take the right,” said Tetterton. “I’ll go left.”

“Okay, Bonnie, you just calm down and think good thoughts,” Michelle was saying. “I’m not going to hang up with you until Officer Sparrow comes in and talks with me. Okay?”

“Okay”

“Officer Sparrow is my husband. Okay? So you ask for him…”

“Okay.”

“… And tell him I’m on the phone and let me talk to him.”

Tetterton and Edwards had made quick sweeps through the darkened downstairs, Tetterton taking the dining room-den, Edwards the living room. They met at the foot of the stairs that led to the second floor from an alcove at the front door.

“All clear down here,” said Tetterton.

If the intruder wasn’t downstairs, there were only two other possibilities: he’d already fled, or he was waiting upstairs. Tetterton took a deep breath. “We gotta go for broke,” he said. “You ready?”

“Ready,” said Edwards.

“I’ll go right, you go left,” said Tetterton.

He flicked on a light switch at the base of the stairs and both officers charged up, to be greeted at the top of the steps by five closed doors leading off a hallway. One door was immediately to the right at the top of the stairs, and Tetterton stopped and rapped on it lightly.

“Please come in. Please come in,” Bonnie called to him from inside the room, but he couldn’t hear her.

He rapped again.

“Please come in!” she called louder.

“This door?”

“Yes, please,” Bonnie pleaded as Tetterton opened the door to see only darkness.

“Okay, I’m with you,” Tetterton said, although he couldn’t see her yet.

“Turn the light on,” she said.

Tetterton swept the room with his flashlight, the beam jolting to a halt on the most horrible sight of his twenty-six years of police work. The whole room seemed red with blood. Lying diagonally across a bed, face-down, was the body of a burly man wearing only cotton briefs that once had been white but now were blood-red.

Several stab wounds were visible in the man’s upper back and shoulder on his left side, and there was such a huge, ragged tear in the back of his head that Tetterton at first thought that he could peer inside his skull.

Tetterton had grown up on a farm near Washington, each fall participating in the ritual of hog killing that provided the winter’s meat for his family, and the first image that came into his head on seeing the man’s body was that of a hog, eviscerated, and laid out on the carving table for rendering.

“Oh, my god in this world,” he said, falling back instinctively from the sight, back out of the room, pulling the door closed as he went.

“Officer,” Bonnie called from the floor beyond the bed. “Officer. Officer Sparrow.”

Tetterton was on his radio, calling communications.

From the floor, Bonnie had seen her husband on the bed in the ray of Tetterton’s flashlight. “Oh, it’s not a dream,” she said into the telephone.

“Dispatch rescue ten-thirty-three,” Tetterton was excitedly calling to Michelle Sparrow. “Call the rescue!”

“Ten-four I hear. I got ’em on the way.”

“Advise them it’s ten-thirty-three traffic,” Tetterton said.

“Four-thirty-one,” Michelle called to the ambulance that was now streaking toward Lawson Road. “Ten-thirty-three! Four-thirty-one, ten-thirty-three!”

5

Lieth Von Stein liked to joke about the reason his parents never had more children. “They only had one,” he said, “because they were afraid to risk having another one like me.”

Born in Queens, in New York City, where both of his parents came from prosperous families of German descent, Lieth was brought to North Carolina as a baby. His father, Howard, a philosophy graduate of Brown University, had been a professional musician, playing saxophone in several big bands, before going off to fight in World War II. After the war, he returned to find the big band era gone and work as a saxophonist hard to get. With a wife and a new baby to support, he had to have a job and he took one offered by his brother-in-law.

Richard Hensel, who was married to the sister of Howard’s wife, Marie, had come to North Carolina as a salesman of laundry equipment in the ’20s and stayed to buy a Winston-Salem laundry called Camel City. He was getting ready to expand, and he hired his brother-in-law as general manager.

Howard and Marie settled happily in Winston-Salem in a modest frame house on Konnoak Drive on the city’s south side. They became faithful members of St. John’s Lutheran Church, and Howard, quiet and gentlemanly, began playing with a small dance band on weekends, an activity he would continue into old age.

Marie, who was lively and outgoing, doted on her only child. “She had him a little bit spoiled,” recalled a family friend. “She was always waiting on him. He kind of had his way.”

By the time Lieth was in high school, Camel City Laundry and Cleaners had become one of the most successful laundries in the country, with several branches and more than 130 employees, and Howard had become part-owner. Lieth had no interest in the laundry business, however, and never even took a part-time job at one of the plants.

He had decided on another field, and before his graduation from James Gray High School in 1964, he was accepted into the School of Engineering at N.C. State University. He did okay there his first two years, but his junior year brought difficulties.

“I think he got burned out,” said a fellow engineering student. “He was a numbers guy, but not to the engineering standpoint. He just got very tired of engineering school, and he got into the party routine. We used to party strong.”

His grades fell precipitously, and by the end of his junior year, he had flunked out and was invited not to return to N.C. State. That was in 1967. The Vietnam War was raging and Lieth had just turned twenty-one. He was drafted before the year was out. His years at State got him assigned to clerical work, and instead of going off to war in Southeast Asia, he was sent to his family’s homeland, Germany.

After his discharge in 1970, Lieth returned home and enrolled at Guilford College in Greensboro, this time as a business major. Guilford was a small Quaker college with a liberal bent. Some faculty and students held a weekly silent vigil against the Vietnam War on the federal courthouse lawn. Although basically conservative (“He was the most Republican guy you ever met,” one friend later said of him), Lieth had come to share the views of many of his fellow students about the war. “He kept asking, ‘Why are we there? What are we doing? We ought to get out of there,’” recalled his friend Rob Lorber.

While he was at Guilford, Lieth let his hair grow to shoulder length, wore a headband, blue jeans, and the tiny, round, wire-rimmed glasses made popular by John Lennon. He often went for a week or two without shaving. And he frequently smoked marijuana in late-night bull sessions. Friends teased him by calling him “the weird hippie.”

Lieth’s parents took his changes in appearance in stride. “Whatever he wanted to do was all right with Marie,” one friend later remembered. “But he knew how to act around his mother. She was somewhat sheltered from the real world.”

Lieth always took his friends, both male and female, home to meet his mother and father, and his friends all were impressed with their warmth and openness. But more than that, all later would remark about the obvious depth of love and respect between Lieth and his parents. “They were just devoted to one another,” one said.

Lieth’s friends all thought of him as offbeat, just eccentric enough to be charming. They admired his intellect, his outspokenness, his quick, wry sense of humor. “He liked to look at life in the absurd,” Rob Lorber recalled later. “He was a structured person, but he was also a very creative person, had a tremendous imagination.”

Most of his friends, at one time or another, had undergone Lieth’s intense examination of their views. He relished playing devil’s advocate, even to the point of strongly defending positions he didn’t actually believe, especially if he came upon an unwary innocent who didn’t know him and fell into his trap.

“He would absolutely take it to the hilt,” recalled one friend from his days at N.C. State. “Make you prove your point.”

Lieth and Rob Lorber spent many nights in grungy bars drinking beer, proving points, solving the world’s problems, making sarcastic comments about the other customers, usually ending up sometime after midnight arguing about which one was going to marry the waitress.

During one of their late-night drinking sessions, Lieth and Lorber decided that Lorber should run for president of the Guilford student body on the Apathy ticket. Lieth would be his campaign manager. Lieth devised a series of satiric posters for the campaign. In Lorber’s favorite, Lieth photographed three jockstraps that had been hung by thread in front of straight-backed chairs. In a fourth chair sat Lorber, in animated conversation, wearing an aviator cap. “Even after a hectic day on the campaign trail, Rob Lorber still has time to talk to some of his supporters,” said the poster.

Computers were beginning to make heavy inroads into American life at that time, and Lieth became fascinated with them during his two years at Guilford. He was always going to the computer lab to play with them. After his graduation in December of 1972, he got a job working with computers at Integon, an insurance company in downtown Winston-Salem. He cut his long hair, forsook his John Lennon glasses, traded his blue jeans for business suits, and began trying to make his mark in corporate America.

At Integon, Lieth met another person who had taken a strong interest in computers. Her name was Bonnie Lou Bates Pritchard. She was two years older than Lieth, recently separated from her husband, and she had two small children

Bonnie had grown up in the lush and rolling red-dirt farmland of northern Davidson County about ten miles south of Winston-Salem. Her father was a brick mason, and she grew up with three sisters and a brother in a spacious brick house on Hoover Road surrounded by piney woods, grain and tobacco farms, and family, enjoying the welcome attentions of many aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived nearby. She and her family regularly attended Central Methodist Church in Welcome.

Slim, shy, and quiet, Bonnie wore glasses and was not as pretty as her sisters. She liked reading and loved animals. At North Davidson High School in Welcome, she worked on the school newspaper staff and was a member of the Library Club and Dramatics Club. Two years after her graduation in 1962, she went to work for Integon, then called Security Life and Trust Company.

Bonnie was married on August 5, 1967, three weeks after her twenty-third birthday. The wedding took place with her big family in full attendance at Central Methodist Church. Bonnie wore an embroidered wedding gown that she designed and made herself. Her sister Ramona was her maid of honor. Bonnie’s new husband was David Stephen Pritchard, who was working that summer at Miller Tool and Plating Company. He was five years younger than Bonnie. After a brief honeymoon Bonnie went back to work at the insurance company. Her new husband returned to West Davidson High School to finish his senior year as a special student.

With the help of Bonnie’s family, the newlyweds bought a new ranch-style brick-and-frame house on a cul-de-sac in a rural subdivision called Winchester Downs, just two miles from her parents’ house. Their first child, Christopher Wayne, was born on November 25, 1968, in Lexington, the county seat. A second child, Angela Christine, followed in 1970.