Blood Games (49 page)

“I didn’t do it, Mom,” Bart kept saying. “I didn’t do it. Please don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

Later, Bart would recall his mother being hysterical. “She said, ‘How many times have I told you you’ve got to watch the type of people you’re hanging out with? You can’t hang out with white trash.’ I said, ‘Mom, I wasn’t hanging out with white trash. The people who got me into this trouble were rich white kids.’”

A year after their separation, Jim and Joanne had agreed that their children really should be with their mother, and they had gone to live with her in Virginia. A week before Bart’s call, Joanne had sent her two daughters, Carrie and Alex, to North Carolina to spend several weeks with their father and grandmother. Their father had taken them camping along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and they had returned on Saturday. Jim had dropped his daughters off at his mother’s house in Milton, then gone on home to the farm.

Carolyn was happy to have her granddaughters with her, and when the phone rang Saturday evening and she heard Joanne’s voice on the line, she assumed that she was calling to check on the girls.

Instead, Joanne said, “You’d better sit down. I’ve got something terrible to tell you.”

“What on earth?” Carolyn said.

“Bart has been arrested for murder.”

Carolyn immediately called Jim.

“Jim, I’ve got something to tell you. Bart is in jail in Beaufort County.”

“What for this time?” he asked, not in the least surprised that Bart was again in jail.

“For murder,” Carolyn said aghast.

A long silence came from the other end of the line.

“I was numb,” Jim recalled later. “Disappointed. Let down. Defeated and helpless. Here was the culmination of all my worries. You’ve talked and talked and begged and tried to get him to do what he needed to do, and here he goes again, back into another mess, but this time far worse than anything before.”

Wayland Sermons returned home from the beach Sunday night and had a conference with the district attorney on Monday morning. “Mitchell Norton says no way to bond hearing in district court,” Sermons wrote in a memo to himself. “Case’s going to grand jury today.”

Lewis Young spent more than an hour outlining the case against Chris, Bart, and Neal for the grand jurors that morning before they returned all of the indictments requested by the district attorney.

Bonnie and Angela had driven to Washington after Chris’s arrest, and on Saturday Bonnie had met with James Vosburgh, the Washington lawyer who had represented Chris when he got into trouble in high school and had handled other legal problems for the Von Steins. Vosburgh, whose own son had graduated from high school with Chris, met with Chris for more than an hour in the jail Friday night. He accompanied Bonnie on a visit to Chris on Saturday. On Monday Vosburgh told a reporter for the Washington
Daily News,
Mike Voss, that Chris was frightened by the murder charge.

“His reaction is one of shock, amazement, and disbelief,” Vosburgh said.

Bart’s cousin, Kenyatta, went to Raleigh on Monday to comfort Neal on the night before he was arrested. He called and asked her to be there with him. “He was scared,” she said. “He cried that night. I hemmed his pants. We washed his clothes. He didn’t have any good shoes except for the ones that went with his Wendy’s outfit. We polished those.”

John Taylor and Lewis Young left Washington for Raleigh before seven Tuesday morning. Neal was ready when they got there, and they were back in Washington before noon. Reporters and photographers were waiting to get a look at this third suspect. At a little before five that afternoon, Neal was brought into Superior Court wearing shackles and the standard orange jumpsuit. Judge Herbert Small questioned him about his ability to hire an attorney.

Speaking in a voice so soft that it was barely audible a few benches back, Neal said that he couldn’t afford a lawyer. He had only $10 in the bank and $40 in his pocket when he was arrested, he said. His job paid him $4.15 per hour. He was to have received a raise the following Monday, he noted, when he was to have been promoted to shift manager. Although he didn’t mention it to the judge, that was the promotion that would have given him the courage, as he had promised Kenyatta, to go and face his former teacher, Weldon Slayton, again.

While Neal was in the courtroom, Jim Upchurch was talking for the first time with Bart’s lawyer. Jim had been so dispirited after receiving the call about Bart’s arrest, so resentful about being sucked into another morass of misery into which his son had wandered, that he had put off calling. Now Sermons told him that Bart appeared to be in shock over his arrest and that he kept adamantly insisting that he had had no part in any murder.

Until talking with Sermons, Jim had thought that Bart must be involved in some peripheral way. He would not have been surprised, he told Sermons, if he had learned that Bart had been arrested for any number of other things, but to be accused of actually killing somebody, sneaking up on a sleeping innocent and beating and hacking him to death was beyond his comprehension.

“I just can’t believe that Bart could do anything like that,” he said. “He’s not an aggressive or violent person. I’ve never even seen him get into a fight or hit or shove anybody.”

Sermons was reluctant to talk about details over the phone. The case was a big one, he said, with local political implications, and he was wary that his phone might be tapped. Jim told him that he would drive to Washington on Saturday.

Bart looked completely different when he was brought into the tiny cell where Jim was allowed to meet with him in the Beaufort County Jail that Saturday, nearly nine days after his arrest. His long, bleached hair had just been shorn, the locks still lying in a jail corridor where they had been swept. He looked pale and thinner than when Jim last had seen him a few months earlier. The atmosphere was less tense than Jim anticipated, almost casual.

“How you doing?” Jim asked.

“Okay, I guess.”

“So what’s going on?”

The story came from Bart in a gush. It was all about Neal. Neal had framed him. Neal was lying. Neal must’ve been the one who did it. Neal was going to the gas chamber for sure.

“He was a little cocky,” Jim recalled later. “Bart can get cocky when he feels like he’s in trouble.”

“Where were you when the murder happened?” Jim asked.

“I was at the dorm that night,” Bart said.

“Did anybody see you?”

It was hard to remember, he said, but he thought that a couple of people did. Hank. And a girl maybe.

Would they be willing to testify?

Bart was sure that they would.

Jim felt better after talking with Bart. If he had an alibi and witnesses, he at least had hope.

But mainly Jim felt better just because he had come.

“I think he was glad to see me,” Jim said later, “I was glad I was there. I felt guilty about waiting that long.”

40

By the first of July, the Beaufort County Courthouse was swamped with lawyers filing motions on behalf of the three defendants in the Von Stein murder case.

Two Washington lawyers, Michael Paul and Chris McLendon, who would be running for a judgeship soon, had been appointed to represent Neal. He had done fine they told him, but now it was time for him to quit talking and let them take care of matters, their first priority being to get him out of jail on reasonable bail.

Frank Johnston, a Washington native and Wake Forest University law graduate who had been practicing in the town for more than seventeen years, had been appointed to work with Wayland Sermons on Bart’s behalf. Their major problem was finding out just what evidence the state had against their client, who proclaimed complete innocence and said the police had come after him only because he was the only one of Chris’s friends who had been in trouble before.

Chris’s attorneys, Bill Osteen, his son, Bill Jr., and James Vosburgh, who was assisting the Osteens in Washington, were having similar problems.

During the last week in June, all of the lawyers filed detailed discovery motions seeking to know all of the evidence that the state had accumulated about their clients.

The state had by no means finished gathering evidence. For John Taylor and Lewis Young, the case was ongoing.

Two days after arresting Neal, Taylor and Young were back in Raleigh, calling once again upon the friends of Bart, Chris, and Neal, telling about the arrests, warning that lawyers and private investigators might be calling, trying to decide who would make good witnesses and who would not, attempting to tie up loose ends. Quincy Blackwell looked at photos of the bat John Crone had found and said that it looked like one Moog had in his dorm room the previous summer. The markings on it were familiar, he said; Moog liked to diagram stuff like that.

Sandra Goodman told them that she’d recently had a long talk with Brew and he was frightened that the police might be trying to implicate him and Chuck in the murder. He assured her that he knew nothing about the attack on Chris’s parents either before or after it happened, and he was positive that Chuck didn’t know anything either.

A week after Neal’s arrest, Taylor dropped by the jail to visit with him. Neal, Chris, and Bart were kept in separate cell blocks and couldn’t communicate with one another. Taylor wasn’t on business. He had come to like Neal and he had gone to a used book store and bought a stack of science fiction for him. He just wanted to drop off the books and reassure Neal that things would work out for the best.

A week later, Taylor and Young returned to Winston-Salem to interview Chuck Jackson at his summer job. As before, the officers got the impression that Chuck wanted them to leave him alone, that he’d answered all the questions he wanted to answer about Chris and Moog. They showed him the bat, the knapsack, the knife. He claimed he’d never seen any of them.

Did he remember seeing Neal on the day before the murder?

A private detective had asked him the same thing a few days earlier, Chuck said.

Taylor and Young were surprised that a private eye was already making rounds. He had to be representing Chris. Obviously, Bill Osteen didn’t intend to waste any time in preparing Chris’s defense.

Chuck said he told the detective that he thought Neal had come by his and Chris’s room that night, but he really didn’t remember whether Neal had come by or not. The private eye had asked him repeatedly about whether or not he had found Chris’s car keys after Chris left on the morning of the murder, he said, and he’d told him that he did. Actually, he said, he couldn’t remember whether he did or not, which was what he had told Taylor earlier.

Chuck did remember one thing. Shortly after noon on the day of the murder, he had looked out and seen Chris’s car parked where he usually left it, between Sullivan and Burgaw dorms. He was certain about that.

Both Sandra Goodman and Sybil Cook had told the detectives the same thing. Yet Neal maintained that he had left the car in the fringe parking lot that morning when he and James returned. And Neal claimed that he had hidden the keys in a bathroom closet in Chris’s suite. Had somebody driven the car later that morning?

Nearly a month after the arrests, the Von Stein murder was still big news in Washington. On Wednesday, July 12, the residents of Beaufort County got their first indication of motive when a story appeared on the front page of the Washington
Daily News
under a big headline that said “Murdered Von Stein left $2-million.” Until then, Von Stein’s newly acquired wealth hadn’t been made public. Quoting probate documents, the newspaper set the value of his estate at $1,940,206.92, including life insurance of $770,000, all of which was left to his widow. The report went on to note that if Bonnie had died in the attack, her children would have inherited the entire amount. In Washington that day, many people were commenting that now they could understand why Chris had been charged. Many also were noting that Bonnie would be coming out of this ordeal well fixed.

That night, Bonnie called John Taylor at home and asked if he would mind having lunch with her the following day. She wanted to talk about the case, but she didn’t want it to be an official meeting. They agreed in advance, Taylor later said, that it would be personal and private. Neither would take notes. Taylor accepted because he wanted one more chance to try to persuade Bonnie that they were only prosecuting, not persecuting, her son. Bonnie suggested the King & Queen Restaurant in Greenville, and Taylor agreed to meet her there at noon.

He called the district attorney after talking with Bonnie to make certain that he wasn’t doing something wrong. Norton didn’t object, nor did he instruct him as to what he could say.

Taylor was nervous about the meeting. He wanted to do everything right, and he especially didn’t want to make any faux pas. The King & Queen was not the type of place where he normally dined. He knew that it was very expensive, and he was uncertain whether he should try to pick up the check, since Bonnie had invited him. He called his close friend and confidante, Lila Howard, the city personnel director, to ask for tips on etiquette. She told him to let Bonnie pay if she attempted to do so and assured him that he would do fine.

Taylor arrived at the King and Queen to find Bonnie waiting and the restaurant closed for lunch. She was wearing Bermuda shorts and a blouse. He had forsaken his blue jeans and cowboy boots for dress slacks, a tie, and short-sleeve shirt. Bonnie suggested Sweet Caroline’s, the restaurant where she and Lieth had their last meal together, and Taylor followed her there.