Blood Games (5 page)

Bonnie’s marriage had been shaky from the beginning, but children made it unworkable. Later, Bonnie complained that her husband was immature, irresponsible, and wouldn’t keep a job. They separated four days before Bonnie’s twenty-eighth birthday, four and a half months shy of their son’s fourth birthday. Bonnie later maintained that she and her children had been abandoned. With her family’s help, she remained in the house on Winchester Court and struggled to pay the bills she and her husband had accumulated. Her children often stayed with their grandparents and other nearby relatives while she worked. On November 9, 1973, Bonnie and Stephen Pritchard were divorced, the judge ordering that Stephen pay Bonnie $750 for debts they had incurred, plus $160 a month in child support.

Although Lieth Von Stein had several close female friends, he had no girlfriends that his friends knew about, nor did he date much.

“He was very unusual, very humorous, very bright,” recalled one of his female friends, “but he wasn’t handsome. I always thought he would have liked to have had dates, but he was uncertain about asking.”

One of his closest male friends, with whom Lieth spent much time talking about women, thought that Lieth may have had more dates than friends realized. “He was so secretive about his relationships,” he said. “He didn’t let people know if he was seeing somebody.”

That was brought home to him in an embarrassing fashion. Lieth spent nearly three years at Integon designing forms on computers, but he found the work boring and unchallenging. He quit in September 1975 to take a traveling job as an internal auditor for Federated Stores, a conglomeration of department store chains, with headquarters in Cincinnati. He moved into an apartment across the Ohio River in Kentucky.

One weekend when Lieth was home for a visit, his friend who thought him secretive about his relationships got a call from Lieth’s mother, Marie.

“Is Lieth there?” she asked.

“Is he supposed to be?” Lieth’s friend asked warily.

“He told me he was spending the weekend with you,” Lieth’s mother said, and his friend began trying to cover for him.

“Okay, what are you up to?” Lieth’s friend demanded when he saw him later.

That was when he learned about Bonnie.

When he met her later, he was surprised. She and Lieth were so unalike and had so little in common, except for their work with computers, that he wondered what the attraction was. He was not alone. Other of Lieth’s friends, after meeting Bonnie, asked one another, “What in the world is he doing with her?”

“She never really made any impression at all,” said one of his friends from his days at Guilford. “She could blend into the wall.”

Lieth left Federated Stores in May 1977 and moved to South Bend, Indiana, to become a traveling auditor for The Associates, a financial services company with loan offices throughout the country. During his two years in Cincinnati, Lieth was seeing less and less of his old college friends, but he kept in touch with Bonnie. He had not yet been in Indiana two years when he came home for a visit and called Rob Lorber. He was thinking about marrying Bonnie, he said.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Lorber asked.

He thought so, Lieth said, but he was worried because of her two children. He’d never been around children, he said. He didn’t know whether they would accept him or if he would be a good father.

Lorber thought the concerns were normal. He chose to listen and not advise. He felt that Lieth had already decided that marriage was what he wanted, and he was right. When next he heard from Lieth, it was to be told that he and Bonnie were getting married.

The wedding took place on August 17, 1979. She gave up the job that she had held at Integon for fifteen years, and she and her two children moved into a house with Lieth at 1842 Acorn Court in Mishawaka, a suburb of South Bend. Chris was three months shy of eleven; Angela was nine. Lieth continued traveling after the marriage and was home mostly on weekends, making the transition for him and the children less traumatic.

The company for which Lieth was working was in the process of moving its headquarters to Dallas, but when it decided to leave its computer operations in South Bend, Lieth began looking for a new job, preferably in North Carolina. He did not like the fierce winters that blew in off Lake Michigan. He also was concerned about his parents getting older and being far away from them. In the spring of 1981 he was hired as head of internal auditing at National Spinning Company in Washington, N.C.

Bonnie and Lieth and the two children he had taken as his own moved to Washington in July of 1981 and settled in the modern, two-story frame house at 110 Lawson Road in Smallwood. Lieth later got a loan from his father to pay off the mortgage, allowing the monthly interest to be kept in the family. Lieth had to travel during his first two years in Washington, but after that he began spending most of his working hours in the big plant on the western edge of town. In the fall of 1983, Bonnie took a job teaching data processing at a community college in adjoining Martin County. In late summer of 1984, she went to work as a programmer analyst at the big Hamilton Beach appliance factory only a few miles from her house, a job she would keep for the next two years.

In 1982, with his health beginning to fail, Richard Hensel retired from the laundry he had operated for more than half a century in Winston-Salem, turning the company over to his brother-in-law, Howard Von Stein. By then Camel City had seven outlets in Winston-Salem and other nearby towns. Howard’s reign at the top was short. Two years later, he and his partners received an offer from a Texas company that was hoping to create a nationwide chain of laundry and dry cleaning plants by buying out regional companies. “It was one of those offers they couldn’t refuse,” said one person who had some knowledge of the deal. The partners sold the laundry, and Howard joined his brother-in-law in retirement. His share of the proceeds from the sale and his investments over the years had made him a wealthy man, but few people realized it. He and Marie still lived frugally and without ostentation in the same small, modest house they had moved into in 1950. They felt no need to change the habits of a lifetime, but Howard did splurge and buy a new Buick Century.

Howard’s retirement was to last only three years. He died suddenly of an aortic aneurism on a Saturday morning in February 1987 at the age of seventy-nine, leaving an estate valued at more than $1.2 million, most of it in two trusts he had established for his wife and son. He had named his only child to be his executor.

Lieth had little spirit for dealing with his father’s estate. He was too worried about his mother. A heavy smoker, she had suffered for years from emphysema and heart problems. Her grief for her husband was more than she could bear. She began deteriorating, and Lieth and Bonnie frequently made the eight-hour round trip from Washington to Winston-Salem to attend to her. In July she died in the same hospital in which her husband had died four and a half months earlier.

The loss of both of his beloved parents in so short a period—soon to be followed by the death of his Uncle Richard—hit Lieth hard and settling his parents’ estates occupied much of his time in late 1987 and early 1988. It also brought him a considerable amount of frustration and irritation.

“I’m so relieved. I’ve just settled this thing,” he told an old friend. “Don’t ever get involved with the trust department of a bank. It’s just so unbelievable.”

With his father’s wealth now at his disposal, Lieth had the opportunity to do something that he had been thinking about for several years: change his life.

He had settled into a boring routine. On weekdays, he got up at seven, showered, had coffee with Bonnie until about eight-fifteen, left for work. Because he had gained so much weight (he was only 5′6″, but he had ballooned up to nearly 170 pounds), he rarely ate lunch anymore, often settling only for a piece of fruit. He was home in late afternoon, always had a few beers before supper, which was always at six-thirty. After supper, he watched
Wheel of Fortune
and
Jeopardy
on TV, and was in bed by eight-thirty or nine. On weekends, when he and Bonnie were not visiting with her relatives, they went to Greenville for breakfast, always to the same restaurant.

Lieth had fallen into a rut. He was aware of it, and it worried him. He thought that he wouldn’t live long. He was overweight. He drank too much. He didn’t exercise. Shortly after his mother’s death, he took out another life insurance policy, this one for $350,000.

In the spring of 1988, Rob Lorber heard that Lieth was in Winston-Salem, staying at his parents’ house, which he did not plan to sell. They rarely saw each other anymore, but Rob decided to drop by.

“I yelled at him for not getting in touch with me more,” Rob recalled later. Rob’s and Lieth’s senses of humor had always meshed and fed off one another. “We were really silly together,” Rob recalled. No matter how infrequent or short their visits, they always fell back into the old routines, joking and laughing.

That happened on this visit, too, but Rob thought that he detected an underlying sadness in Lieth, a sense of fatalism about his situation.

Rob knew that Lieth didn’t really like his work and never had. His new wealth, though, could change that. Indeed, Lieth already was thinking of quitting his job at the end of the year, of using the money his father had made to make more of his own. So work alone could not account for the sorrow Rob sensed in Lieth. Other factors, no doubt, prevailed. Family factors, perhaps.

Lieth rarely talked with friends about his relationship with Bonnie, and as far as they knew, it was fine. But all of his friends knew that his relationship with Bonnie’s children wasn’t so fine. They knew that had to be especially distressing to Lieth, because he had wanted so desperately for them to accept him and love him as a father.

Some of his friends thought that Lieth had made a mistake all too common to stepparents: he had tried to buy their love. He bought Chris and Angela whatever they wanted, and although he tried to attach responsibility to the gifts, that never quite worked. In Indiana, he had bought both children expensive bicycles, paying nearly six hundred dollars each for them. When Chris went out and wrecked his, Lieth got him another one. Later, when Chris wanted a classic Mustang for his sixteenth birthday, he got it. When he wanted an expensive stereo for his car, he got it. When he asked for a computer, that, too, was quick in coming. Yet there was always an underlying tension between Lieth and the children, especially between Lieth and his stepson after Chris got into his teens.

“It’s hell trying to raise teenagers,” Lieth told one friend. “We just don’t know what to do with Chris. He won’t do anything. He’s not interested in anything.”

“Respect for his parents and the work ethic were so deeply ingrained in Lieth that it was hard for him to relate to someone who didn’t have those values,” Lieth’s friend said. “I think that was what he was struggling with with Chris. He had the feeling that Chris was a total fuckoff and didn’t care about anything.”

Even to coworkers and casual acquaintances Lieth frequently had remarked that he would be happy when both of Bonnie’s children were grown and gone. And as the summer of 1988 approached, that time seemed imminent.

By fall, Angela would be in college in Greensboro. And if Chris didn’t flunk out, which seemed highly possible, he would be back at N.C. State for his sophomore year. Lieth and Bonnie would be alone, and Lieth soon would be quitting the job he never had liked.

Lieth should have been excited by the prospect, but to his old friend Rob Lorber he seemed resigned, as if he sensed that life had passed him by.

6

While Bradford Tetterton was calling frantically for the rescue squad, Danny Edwards began trying the other upstairs doors, still uncertain whether an intruder was hiding behind one of them.

He opened one door, shined his flashlight inside, and saw a form lying in bed. He switched on the light to a scene of teenage disorder. Clothes were strewn. The walls were covered with posters of rock stars, horses, a frosty mug of beer, a string of Budweiser long-necks. Shoes, socks, a hair dryer lay on the floor by a rug that had “Horse Country” on it. A big square fan hummed, blowing directly on a young woman with short light brown hair and freckles, sleeping soundly in a T-shirt.

“Ma’am … ma’am,” Edwards called.

The young woman stirred and sat up abruptly, frightened.

“What is it?”

Edwards recognized her, although he didn’t remember her name. Before he’d joined the police department, he’d been security chief at the mall, and he remembered seeing her many times with the other teenagers who regularly gathered there.

“Something has happened,” he said. “You need to get up and get dressed.”

He stepped out of the room to leave her alone and began checking the other doors: a closet, a bathroom, another bedroom, this one with posters of cars on the walls, Ford Cobras, obviously a boy’s room. Nobody in any of them.

The young woman emerged from her room as Edwards completed the quick search. She had pulled on shorts and sneakers.

“Is there any way to get into the attic up here?” Edwards asked her.

“There’s an opening in my room,” she said. “In the closet.”

Edwards went into her room and opened the closet, but it was so jammed with stuff that he knew nobody could have gone through it to hide in the attic.