Blood Games (47 page)

When he had endured all the sun that he could stand, he walked to a used book store on Hillsborough Street, Reader’s Corner, and browsed through the music tapes. Beginning to get hungry, he went back to campus, intending to eat at the campus dining hall with a meal card a friend had given to him, but the dining hall was closed. He thought about eating at a campus snack bar, but decided he would splurge on the $3.99 buffet at the Village Inn Pizza on Western Boulevard, not far from the campus.

First, he wanted to go by the library. He dropped off
Moby Dick
and picked up
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

He walked back across campus, went west on Sullivan Street, behind Lee dorm, turned left on Gorman Street. At an intersection one block from Western Boulevard, a car pulled up to the stop sign. A young man was driving, a young woman riding with him.

“Hey, Moog,” the young man called through his open car window. “How you doin’? Where’s your skateboard?”

Bart didn’t recognize him, but he called a greeting anyway.

He took a shortcut through the parking lot of the Sav-A-Center. Two female students that he knew were coming out of the store, and he paused to chat with them.

“So what are you doing?” one asked.

“Just going to eat,” Bart replied.

He took a table in the back of the pizza place, ordered iced tea, made several trips to the buffet bar, making sure he got his money’s worth, stuffing himself with pizza and salad. A terrible thunderstorm came up while he was eating, and he decided to wait it out. A big-screen TV was playing near his table. A movie came on,
Helter Skelter,
about the Manson Family murders in California, but Bart paid it little attention. He was sipping tea and reading
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

When a break came in the rain, Bart decided to try to make it back to campus. He went back by the same route he had come, but after he had crossed through the Sav-A-Center parking lot and cut through King Village, a campus housing area for married graduate students the rain started coming down hard again. He took shelter under an apartment entrance. During his wait, he struck up a conversation with a Korean student who lived in the apartment. The student had a small garden plot nearby, lush with vegetables, and the two chatted about gardening, Bart telling how he had grown up on a farm.

When it began to seem apparent that the rain was not going to end, Bart said to hell with it. He took off his shoes and the Cornell University sweatshirt he was wearing, stuffed them into his backpack, and struck out, walking barefoot in the rain. Soon after he turned onto Sullivan Drive, he saw a campus police car coming toward him, moving slowly.

At 7:06 P.M., Patrolman Terry Wright of the N.C. State Public Safety Department had been driving west on Faucette Drive, a campus street paralleling Western Boulevard, when he spotted a tall, thin young man with long, blondish-brown hair dressed in what he took to be green shorts and a dark blue sweatshirt, carrying a blue backpack, walking in the same direction. Wright had been alerted to be on the lookout for a former N.C. State student named James Bartlett Upchurch, wanted by the SBI for questioning about a murder. He had a photograph of Upchurch in his car, as did all patrol officers. This young man fit the description, but by the time Wright had turned his car around, the young man had disappeared. Wright figured he had slipped into nearby woods. He called for help. Several officers showed up, and they thoroughly searched the area without finding any sign of the young man. It was as if he had evaporated.

Now it was nine-thirty. A severe thunderstorm had swept over the campus and was rumbling on to the east. Thunderstorms always set off alarms in campus buildings, and Terry Wright was headed west on Sullivan Drive to check on an alarm. Rain was still falling hard, and he wasn’t expecting to see any pedestrians in the darkness. But in the glow of the fluorescent street light near West Dunn Avenue, Wright saw a figure approaching. It was the same young man he’d seen two and a half hours earlier, still carrying the blue backpack, but without his shirt and shoes. He was strolling along nonchalantly, a small, portable radio and earphones in his hand. This time Wright took no chances. He radioed immediately for assistance, and keeping his eye on the young man, he turned around and sped back toward him.

At first, Bart started to run, a technique that had saved him several times already, but he was barefoot, which would make running harder, and the cop was already on him. He decided to rely instead on a snow job.

Wright called to Bart from the open window of his patrol car. Bart stepped over to the car, the picture of innocence. What was the trouble?

Just looking for somebody, Wright said. Did he have any ID?

No, Bart said, he didn’t have any with him.

“What’s your name?” Wright asked.

“Edward Michael Owens,” Bart replied.

He went on to say that he was from Tennessee, born on October 17, 1970, and that he had a Tennessee driver’s license but wasn’t carrying it because he didn’t have a car in Raleigh.

As they were talking, another campus police car pulled up, and Sergeant Lenora Mitchell got out. Yet another car quickly arrived.

Bart gave the same false name to Sergeant Mitchell, who seemed not to believe him. She asked if she could look inside his backpack.

“Sure,” Bart said with a shrug.

As she began unzipping it, Bart added, “You won’t find anything in there but a knife.”

The knife, snuggled amidst clothing, toiletries, books, cassette tapes, a baseball, Bart’s diary, and other items was a kitchen knife with a seven-inch blade in a homemade cardboard sheath.

“What do you use this for?” Mitchell asked, examining the knife.

“I don’t carry a pocketknife and I just use it for things you need a knife for,” he said.

Sergeant Mitchell and Officer Wright were certain that this was James Upchurch. Mitchell asked if he would mind coming to the public safety office until his identity could be established. With all the officers surrounding him, Bart realized that he had no choice. He had to play this one out.

At the public safety office, Bart again repeated his false identity. He said that he lived in apartment 203 in the Kensington Apartments on Avent Ferry Road with his girlfriend, Justin Anastanoff, but he’d rather that they didn’t involve her in this. They didn’t have a phone, he said.

He was asked to wait in the upstairs conference room while his identity was established. Couldn’t he just wait at his apartment? Bart asked. The answer was no. How long did they think this would take? Bart wanted to know. He had to get some books back to the library before it closed at eleven. Couldn’t he just run over there while they were doing this?

It only would take a little while, he was assured.

Indeed, Sergeant Mitchell already had called Captain Laura Reynolds, who had long been assisting John Taylor and Christy Newsom in their search for Moog. Reynolds immediately called the number for Lewis Young’s pager.

Young and Terry Newell had left Howard Johnson’s at a little after nine. They were on Western Boulevard alongside the campus, just beginning the evening’s search when Young’s pager began to beep. He went straight to a telephone and soon was talking with Reynolds, who said that their officers were fairly certain that they had Moog in custody. Young and Newell were at the public safety office in minutes.

“Hey, Moog,” Young said when he walked into the conference room. “Do you remember me?”

Bart’s head dropped. “Yeah,” he said with resignation. “I remember.”

Bart was given his socks, tennis shoes, and sweatshirt and was allowed to put them back on. Young told him that he was under arrest and would have to come with him. They went down the stairs and out the door into a tunnel-like opening in the building’s ground floor. The building once had been an athletic fieldhouse, and the opening was a passageway leading to a tunnel beneath the railroad tracks that students used to get from one side of the campus to the other.

Bart was neither handcuffed nor shackled. Both agents had come away without handcuffs that night. Rain was still falling.

“You’re not going to make me get out in the rain are you?” Bart said

Newell said he’d go get the car, an SBI undercover Ford Mustang.

“We’ll wait right here,” Young said.

Newell pulled the car out of its parking space and began backing toward the breezeway. Suddenly, Bart spun to the left and bolted.

Young had kept a hold on the back of Bart’s sweatshirt with his left hand and he clung to it as Bart began to run, pulling Young off balance. Young, who stood six feet tall and weighed just over two hundred pounds, was not about to be dragged far. He recovered after a few awkward steps, grabbed Bart’s shoulder with his right hand, yanked him back, and slammed him against the breezeway wall, thrusting an elbow against his throat.

“Listen,” Young said angrily, his face in Bart’s, “you can go easy or you can go hard, but you’re going one way or the other.”

“Hey, man, no problem, no problem,” Bart said, straining to talk. “I’ll be cool.”

Bart was taken to a suite of rooms on the third floor of the Holiday Inn, where he was handcuffed to a chair. Several SBI agents attempted to get him to talk. Neal had told them everything, they said. They even had found the bat. They knew that Chris had put him up to it. They wanted him to tell them about Chris. One agent tried to get him to sign a waiver of his rights.

“I told them, ‘I think I’d better talk to a lawyer,’” Bart recalled later. “They said, ‘That’s the worst thing you can do. We’ll work with you but you’ve got to help us.’ I said, ‘I want to talk with a lawyer.’ This one said, ‘Okay, if that’s the way you want it.’ Threw the paper down like he was all pissed off.”

Soon afterward, Lewis Young came into the room, carrying a sheaf of papers. “I’m serving a warrant on you for first-degree murder,” he said somberly.

“Right then, the guillotine dropped,” Bart said later. “I said, ‘I didn’t have anything to do with this. I think you’ve got the wrong guy.’ That was when I knew I should’ve left town a long time ago. Before, it all had seemed like a game. For the first time it was deadly serious.”

Bart was taken before a magistrate at the Wake County Jail, then returned to the Howard Johnson’s, where the officers who had searched so hard for him were celebrating with beer and takeout fast food. Christy Newsom had come by, although she couldn’t have a beer because she was on duty. The only thing she was unhappy about was that John Taylor hadn’t actually captured Moog. She knew how hard he had worked to break this case. Some uniformed officers who had assisted in the search dropped by with congratulations. Bart sat alone in an adjoining room, handcuffed to a chair, looking glum, watching a movie about an American mercenary in Nicaragua. He declined offers of pizza and hamburgers, but accepted a Coke.

John Crone had been the first person Taylor called with the good news. Crone wanted Melvin Hope to be in on this moment, and he dispatched him and Detective David Sparrow to Raleigh to pick up Moog and bring him back. It was about 2:00 A.M. before Hope and Sparrow got to Raleigh to hear the story of the capture. A short time later, as Moog shuffled to their patrol car, manacled, Hope said, “I hear you’ve got rabbit blood.”

Bart didn’t respond.

“Well,” Hope went on, “I’m too fat and too old to chase you, but if you try to run, I guarantee you that when I do catch you, you won’t want to run again.”

Hope got into the backseat beside Bart. On the two-hour drive back to Washington, Sparrow kept the car radio on an oldies station. When one Elvis tune came on, Sparrow couldn’t resist looking back over his shoulder grinning and singing a few verses of “Jailhouse Rock.”

39

Wayland Sermons learned of the murder of Lieth Von Stein when he got to the Beaufort County Courthouse on the morning it happened and overheard talk about it. His wife, Penny, called later, upset and worried, as most people were in Washington that day, concerned that a maniac might be on the loose in their pleasant little town.

Sermons hadn’t heard of Von Stein before that day, which was unusual, because he knew most of the town’s prominent citizens. He had grown up in Washington’s privileged class, and it was, for the most part, a small and tight circle.

Sermons was just thirty-four, and he still lived in the rambling, well-crafted house in which he had grown up in a private waterfront enclave in east Washington. His father, a state legislator for a dozen years, owned a chain of tobacco warehouses in North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. His father also built the Carolinian, for decades a popular oceanfront resort hotel at Nags Head on North Carolina’s famed Outer Banks. Wayland had spent all of his boyhood summers at the hotel, working as a lifeguard during his years at a private high school in Washington.

After high school, Sermons entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He soon got caught up in the good times of the fraternity scene, causing his classroom performance to be less than impressive. In his junior year, at the urging of a family friend, he dropped out to work as a political aide for a candidate for lieutenant governor.