Blood Games (42 page)

Christy Newsom was on her way out of the office to lunch on Tuesday, June 6, when the computer began making one of its random calls to a detainee under the house arrest program. She immediately recognized the case number of James Upchurch, her most troublesome client, when it popped onto the screen. Always wary when it came to Bart, she paused to listen to the call. Nobody answered. She knew that that likely meant only one thing: Bart had run, just as she knew he would.

Forgetting lunch, she called for a colleague, and the pair rushed to Neal’s apartment.

Neal answered the door looking bleary-eyed, wearing red running shorts with an N.C. State Wolfpack emblem on the side. He seemed nervous.

“Where’s James?” Christy demanded.

“I don’t know,” Neal replied. “He just left. He didn’t say anything to any of us.”

“I want to come in and have a look,” Christy said, and Neal stood back and invited her in.

The apartment was dark, all the blinds pulled at midday. At least four people were asleep on the apartment floors, one with the mattress on top of him. None bothered to stir as Christy threaded her way through bodies and garbage and debris. She found Bart’s leg band, neatly severed, lying atop the receiver, where it was still busy confirming that he had not strayed.

“I know you know where he is,” Christy told Neal.

“No, I don’t.”

“You know I can have you charged with obstruction of justice if I find out you’re lying to me.”

“I don’t know, honest,” Neal persisted.

Despite her limited experience with Neal, Christy knew that he would cover for Bart. He would try to protect anybody who befriended him, she thought, but more than likely he was afraid of Bart. She realized, too, that Neal was weak and that she could pressure him. Her intensity prompted Neal to suggest that perhaps Bart had gone to Virginia, where his mother lived. He’d found two unused Greyhound bus tickets in the apartment, he said, and he was sure that they belonged to Bart.

Neal fetched the tickets for Christy. One, bought on May 13, was one-way from Richmond to Williamsburg. The other, bought the following day, was one-way from Raleigh to Richmond.

Why would Bart buy a ticket from Richmond to Williamsburg before buying one from Raleigh to Richmond? And why didn’t he take them when he fled? Neal had no answers.

Christy and her colleague cut through the campus of N.C. State, searching everywhere. No sign of Moog They went to the sandwich shop where Hank worked. Hank was off. Nobody had seen Moog. They went to Hank’s apartment. No answer. Finally, they returned, dejected, to the office, where Christy notified her superiors and the police—and called John Taylor in Washington.

“Guess what?” she said, remembering all those long hours she and Taylor had searched vainly for Moog.

“Don’t tell me.”

“You got it.”

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Taylor exclaimed.

Taylor went immediately to tell Crone of this not altogether unexpected development. In one way, it was discouraging. Moog was once again out of their reach, perhaps already hundreds of miles away. But in another way, it was a cinching factor. No doubt about it, Moog was their man. Earlier, he could claim that he had been on the lam because of fears of prison from his probation violations. But the probation violations had been cleared, allowing him to avoid prison. Now the situation was different.

“The only thing he could have been running from,” Taylor said later, “was us.”

Although he made fun of it, calling his friends and telling them to come and see how he had been banded like some lumbering creature on the old TV show
Wild Kingdom,
the five days that he had been under house arrest had been miserable ones for Bart.

“House arrest was a lot worse than being in jail,” he said later. “It’s a lot more annoying. You’re still locked up, but you’re sitting out there in the world with all the temptations. Unless you’ve got a steady girlfriend coming by to see you, it’s just horrible.”

It was primarily the temptations of freedom, he later claimed, that prompted him to cut his band and leave, but he acknowledged other reasons, too. He knew that John Taylor was not coming by so frequently without purpose. He knew that he was as suspect as Chris in the murder. Hank came by regularly to see him and they had talks about that.

“I don’t see how you can stand it,” Bart later recalled Hank telling him. “This thing’s going to drive you crazy before it’s over. SBI and these guys, they’ve come too far on this. They’re too stubborn to think they’re investigating the wrong guy. They’re going to try to hang your ass. If I was you, I’d skip town. You ought to leave.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bart said. “You’re right. I know.”

But Bart also was aware that running would be a tacit admission of guilt. “SBI’s going to say, ‘He must’ve had a guilty conscience.’ They’re going to arrest me for sure. Up to this point, I’ve been like a guy walking up a hill seeing an avalanche coming and saying, ‘It ain’t going to hit me. It ain’t going to hit me.’”

Now, however, he realized that the avalanche was certain to envelop him unless he ran and dodged.

On the night before he made his decision, a party was going on in an apartment across the street. Bart sat on his doorstep with one of Neal’s roommates, talking about girls, sipping rum and Coke and watching the merriment. Several young women were drinking beer in the parking lot and one called an invitation to join them. The realization that he couldn’t do that was the final frustrating factor in his decision, Bart later claimed.

He waited until the computer made its final call of the day to check on him, sometime around midnight, then he cut his band, left it atop the receiver, joined the party, and had a good time smoking pot, drinking and laughing until the early morning hours. When he returned to Neal’s apartment, everybody had gone to sleep, sprawled about the floors. He packed all of his belongings into a single suitcase and a nylon backpack, waited for the computer to make its first check of the new day, and left on foot.

Later in the morning, he called a friend who lived in a suburban apartment.

“Hey, man, let’s get some liquor and go camping,” he said.

Despite Bart’s fears, he was in no danger of being arrested for the murder of Lieth Von Stein. Nobody in the investigation had any evidence to connect him to the case. Now Taylor, Crone, and Young decided they would have to leave Bart to Christy and the Raleigh police until they could find some solid reason to join the search for him. They had to concentrate on finding somebody else to connect Chris and Moog to the killing.

John Crone still thought that Butch Mitchell was their best prospect. His story of the D&D game and the hair found in the burned shoe indicated that he could have taken part. On Friday morning, June 9, Crone and Taylor drove to a county near Raleigh to talk with Butch’s mother.

She was concerned about their reasons for wanting to talk with her and tried to put them off, but they finally persuaded her to tell them about Butch.

Butch, she said, was the eldest of her four sons. Their father had died of diseases related to alcoholism. Butch, she said, had a lot of anger in him. His biggest problem was losing his temper. She’d never known him to do it with anybody outside the family, but when it blew, it really blew.

“I don’t know what makes that boy go off like that,” she said.

She worried about her son, she said, and once she had sent him to the county’s mental health center because he wouldn’t communicate with her and had so many problems with his brothers.

He was smart but lazy, with a vivid and extravagant imagination that tended toward fantasy. Sometimes he had trouble separating fantasy and reality, she noted.

She thought that her son was just bragging when he claimed to be such a good fighter. But he had studied karate, and she thought that he was capable of hurting somebody with his hands. She didn’t think that he would ever shoot anybody, but he had practiced, she acknowledged, with a knife.

Crone left the meeting with Butch’s mother more convinced than ever that Butch could be their killer, but Taylor still couldn’t picture Chris putting his trust in a braggart with obvious emotional problems. He thought that Butch couldn’t resist telling about it if he’d been involved. As they talked about it on the drive to Raleigh, Crone and Taylor decided to talk with Neal about Butch. Neal had been his roommate. Maybe he knew something. They called Neal, but he said that he had to go to work at Wendy’s. He was working a split shift and would be back at his apartment after two-thirty.

The detectives arrived to find that Neal had left a message. He had to stay over at work, but he could take a few minutes to talk with them there. Only a few customers were in Wendy’s at midafternoon. Neal, still wearing his Wendy’s smock, joined the officers in the empty sun room on the western side of the building, where nobody could overhear their conversation. Neal sat at a table with his back to the window. Crone and Taylor sat facing him.

Crone began by asking about the Dungeons and Dragons game Butch had described to the officers. Neal recalled the game but said his character hadn’t been hired to go on the adventure. Butch would never do that, because he was jealous that Neal’s character was so much more powerful than his own. Indeed, Neal said, immediately after that adventure, Butch had made such a fuss about hating his own character that Neal killed off the character to accommodate him, which also made Butch angry.

Butch, said Neal, as he had told the officers before, was psychotic.

“What’s your definition of psychotic?” Taylor asked.

In this case, Neal said, it was someone who could keep his temper at times, then go berserk for no reason. That was Butch.

Had he ever known Butch to hurt anybody?

No, but he thought that Butch might have gotten drunk and hurt somebody in the past. He wasn’t sure. He really didn’t know about Butch’s past.

Did he think Butch could beat someone to death?

No.

Did Butch ever confuse D&D games with reality?

Not that Neal had ever seen.

Did he think that Butch could have murdered Chris’s stepfather?

It was possible, Neal said, but he really doubted it.

How about Moog, James? Had Neal noticed any change in his attitude and personality since the murder?

Not really, but he knew that James was worried about something more than his probation violations. He had talked about being tired of house arrest and tired of the murder investigation before he cut his band and took off. He had tried to impress people by talking about the large scale of the investigation, Neal said.

Did James know anybody he could have gotten to commit the murder?

“He knows some pretty shady people,” Neal said.

Did he think that James could be involved?

“It would be an uncharacteristic risk, if he was.”

“What would you think if we told you that Chris was involved?” Crone asked.

“I don’t know,” Neal responded.

Neal appeared to be completely in control, not in the least nervous or uncertain about his answers. Both Crone and Taylor thought that he was telling the truth.

At this point, Crone remembered his wife, Cindy. They were supposed to meet in Raleigh, then go on together to Mooresville for a weekend visit with her parents. She was to call Lewis Young at SBI headquarters in Raleigh to find out where her husband was so that they could meet. Young was unaware that she was to call. Crone asked Taylor if he would mind stepping out to the pay phone in the parking lot to give Young a call and let him know about the situation.

When Taylor left, Crone looked at Neal, sitting diagonally across from him and thought that he saw vulnerability.

“I thought, what the hell,” he said later. “Might as well give this thing a shot.”

“Look,” he said. “We know Chris is involved. We know that for a fact. This whole thing is about to go down. Anybody who’s involved could get the gas chamber.”

The SBI already had talked to Chris’s attorneys to let them know they’d be willing to listen if Chris wanted to come clean and work out a plea bargain deal, Crone said. The first person to come forth would find the going a lot easier than for any others. Chris might come over at any time.

“I think you know something,” Crone said, looking Neal straight in the eye. “If you do it would be better for you to tell us now while we still can help you.”

Neal looked away but he said nothing. For a few moments he sat silent. Crone felt a sudden chill run down his back.

“What if I just kind of gave them some advice?” Neal said softly.

Crone’s pulse quickened, but he tried not to show it.

“It depends,” he said. “What do you mean by advice? A lot of it depends on how much you’re involved. If you know something, you can clear that up by just telling us. But if you’re involved in this thing, then I need to get the DA up here.”

“Well,” Neal said. “I guess you’d better get the DA.”

“Look,” Crone said, “it’s a two-hour drive up here from Washington. If he comes up here, are you going to have enough information to make his trip worthwhile?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Neal said “I can lay the whole thing out for you.”