Blood Games (51 page)

Later in the interview, Sirgenson quizzed Bart about the investigation, why the police had begun looking at him, why they had talked to Neal. Bart said that he figured they came after him because he had a prior record and was hiding out because of his probation problems.

“Not long after I dropped out of sight, they talked to Henderson. I don’t know if they had some evidence on Henderson or whether Henderson decided to come clean, but apparently Henderson told them that I was the actual hit man in this murder and he was the get-away-car driver and Chris Pritchard was the mastermind behind it all.

“Okay. That does not really follow. For one, Chris is not really that smart. Two, I don’t see why they needed a get-away-car driver. In the first place, why would he want to bring in a whole bunch of people on something like this? Now I can drive as well as anybody else. I guess the main-line reason we are going on now is that Henderson is faced with the possibility of a lot of time, and to do something to cover his ass, I guess he decided to implicate me.”

A few minutes later, Sirgenson said, “Let me ask you this. Did you, and I want you to answer truthfully, did you have anything to do with this murder, either planning it, doing it, or knowing about it right after it happened? Or before it happened?”

“After it happened, like a couple of weeks after it happened, everybody sort of got the details, knew what was going on. Every once in a while, when we were sitting around drinking beer, we would sort of start discussing what went on, you know, and what did we think really happened, and all of this. Like having a bull session. It was then I reflected back to what Neal was talking about, that he had a house he could hit and that he could make a lot of money on it, and you know, he said it was going to be a big one. He was expecting to make several thousand dollars.”

“I’m going to ask you the question again,” Sirgenson said. “Did you have anything to do with it?”

“Oh, no sir. Not at all. Not at all. No hesitation about that. No sir.”

“Did you know about any of this beforehand?”

“No sir.” Bart rambled on about Chuck calling to tell him about the murder afterward.

“All right, I want you to look me in the eye. Did you have any knowledge beforehand? Was there any discussion of doing this around you before the murder?”

Bart, who had a habit of holding his head down and glancing away from people while talking with them, looked him in the eye. “There was never any discussion of anything like this. There were people would occasionally make jokes along the line of, you know, ‘Well, Chris, when are you going to off your folks?’ Chris knew about it. Everybody knew about it. It was like the common joke.”

Later, Sirgenson said, “I want to ask you another question before we leave. Who did the killing, do you think?”

“Probably, if Neal didn’t actually do it himself, I would think maybe Butch or Quincy, one of his roommates, because Butch told the SBI that he would kill someone if he was paid enough. I know Butch had a history of being violent when drunk, or whatever. There was one time he and Neal almost got into a fight.”

Bart knew that when the police detectives first came around, they asked many questions about Butch and Quincy especially about Butch; he would have known that had to be for some purpose.

A few days after the private detectives interviewed Bart at the Wake County Jail, Paul Davis questioned Butch Mitchell at his apartment on Ligon Street and came away with some startling information that Butch had not told the police.

“Were you involved in that murder in any way?” Davis asked Butch.

“No, not deliberately, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

“Well, then, what way?”

“Well, they know that I’m hurting people, and like, we usually play these D&D games. They ask me, like pertaining to the game, what would I do, what would you do to kill somebody?”

“Yes.”

“And I told them—I didn’t think nothing of it—I told them and that was it.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them that, like in the game, when you go kill someone to make sure. Kill them fast and don’t make noise. What you would do is wait till they’re asleep, the person be laying there, you get the easy side, I don’t know how many people you got, you get the easy side, and then you all attack at the same time. That way you get as much damage as can be done. There’s no way for them to scream or yell out.”

“Okay.”

“And you do something else to make it look like it was a robbery. You just happen to go in there to rob them and surprise them. And make sure you have somewhere to corroborate an alibi. Because the alibi is the main thing. Show up someplace so people can see you. At a party, you gonna see somebody for a few minutes and then leave. You can leave and come back and nobody knows the difference.”

“How about this particular murder? Did you advise anybody on this particular murder, how they could do it? Was this particular murder discussed? That’s what I want to know.”

“No.”

“Did they ever sit around and talk about how they could get rid of Chris’s father?”

“Not that I heard.”

A couple of minutes later, Davis asked, “Who do you think committed the murder?”

“You mean the actually stabbing and stuff like that? I think they all did it.”

“When you say ‘they all,’ you’re referring to Chris Pritchard?

“Yes, Chris Pritchard.”

“Neal Henderson?”

“Neal, you know, may have done it.”

“James Upchurch?”

“Yes, Moog.”

“Do you think James Upchurch was there the night the murder was committed?”

“He was with them. He said he was with them.”

“Did you hear him say that he was with them that night?”

“Yes.”

“You heard Moog say he was with them when the murder was committed?”

“Yes, because he say, I asked him, ‘If you all went and came to pick up Neal, why didn’t you let me go?’ He say, ‘You don’t go there because there was, like, a lot of dope and stuff like that there.’”

“Were they doing acid at that time?”

“They said they had some drugs there.”

A little later Davis asked, “Do you think anybody else was involved in this besides the three you told me?”

“I understand there was two more guys.”

“Who do you understand there were?”

“I don’t know. It had to be somebody that I don’t know.”

“You never heard names?”

“No. They ain’t said. If they were doing something, they never told me about it.”

“But you think there were five involved?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think Chris actually went down there with them?”

“Yes. His car was there. He ain’t gonna let nobody go with his car.”

Just as John Taylor had done, the private detectives and Bart’s attorney’s discounted Butch’s version. But Wayland Sermons knew one thing for certain: He wouldn’t be putting Butch Mitchell on the stand.

By the end of October, Judge Tom Watts had sorted through the sea of motions and settled most of the major issues in the Von Stein cases. There would be two trials, one for Neal, a combined trial for Bart and Chris, who would be tried for their lives. Judge Watts also ordered that the trials be moved from Beaufort County to Elizabeth City in Pasquotank County, one hundred miles northeast of Washington, where there had been little news about the case. The first trial, that of Bart and Chris, was set to begin January 2, 1990.

Bart’s attorneys were distressed that they did not win a separate trial. That might have allowed them to keep out some evidence, such as the map, which had been tied only to Chris. Also Chris’s trial undoubtedly would have been first and they could have used it to learn the state’s entire case. As it was, they knew very little about the state’s evidence. Despite all their motions for discovery, they still didn’t even know exactly what Neal had told the police, their only knowledge coming from the bits and pieces that had been disclosed in the state’s own motions.

By early November, after spending three weeks in the Wake County Jail, Bart was back in Beaufort County, his family friend, George Daniel, now a state senator, having succeeded in getting any hearing of his probation violations postponed until after his murder trial. He was now taking an active role in his own defense, placing calls to feel out potential witnesses, keeping notes for Wayland Sermons.

On Wednesday, November 7, he called Kenyatta at her dorm room at the university. He was pleased with the conversation and made these notes after they had talked:

*She’s dating Phillip Thompson.

*No shoe ID from her.

*Said Neal expects to be free.

*Said she knew Neal was stealing for sure.

*Got along real good w/her, she’ll be glad to testify at trial.

*She’s talked to Neal about once a month until a couple of months ago when she pissed him off by telling him about other guys she’s seeing.

His notes about his conversation with his cousin were indicative of Bart’s ability to delude himself. Kenyatta’s view of the conversation was decidedly different.

“He called me up from jail, talking just as sweet and nice. ‘How you doing? How’s Carolyn?’ I’m thinking, bull, bull, bull. Then he says, ‘So what did Neal tell you?’ It really pissed me off. He thought he was going to use family influence to tell his lawyer stuff to get him off. I felt totally harassed. I told my grandmother, ‘I have no loyalty to James at all. There’s a lot you don’t know and a lot you don’t want to hear.’ I hated him. I thought he was total pond-scum. I thought he was the worst person in the world. I wouldn’t do anything to help him. I got sick of my family protecting him. I just got sick of it.”

Further evidence of Bart’s ability to delude himself lay in notes he made about a conversation with a fellow inmate, a former military policeman turned drug dealer, jailed on child molesting charges. “Fairly smart,” Bart noted.

The inmate claimed that he had met Neal on a bus in Williamston in 1987 and later had seen him several times in Washington “down around the block,” a drug-dealing area in a black neighborhood near downtown. At one point, the inmate said, he had talked with Neal for twenty minutes, each remembering the other from the meeting on the bus. The inmate said that at least three people who worked selling drugs for him had seen Neal and sold drugs to him at various times in the past year and a half. Bart noted that this inmate might be willing to testify.

“Is he lying?” Bart wrote. “He has nothing to gain.”

Five days after calling Kenyatta, Bart telephoned Weldon Slayton, the first time he had talked with him in more than two years. Slayton was surprised to hear from him and told him that a Caswell County detective had checked with him the week before to find out if Bart ever had been on the baseball team. Bart was pleased with the call and was certain that Slayton would make a good witness in his behalf.

“What could he testify to at trial?” Bart wrote for Sermons.

“1. Was I ever aggressive in high school during four years he knew me?
No.

2. Was I greedy?
No.

3. Was I ever ambitious?
No.

4. Did Neal and I appear to be very close friends, anywhere near close enough to conspire together for murder?
No.”

Bart continued making notes about who could testify in his behalf.

“Hank and Opie can testify to Neal’s criminal activities and his fascination with throwing stars, knives, Book of Poisons … etc. Who could testify towards my apathy towards assassin in D&D? Chuck? Coy? Butch? All of the above can testify that me and Neal never did anything together … Brew, Chris and Hank, etc., can all testify to do acid by oneself can lead to bad trips, i.e., poor association with reality, inability to distinguish fact from fantasy, a feeling of being alone. Being in a group lends a calming effect because any action is talked out as to whether it would be safe, i.e., climbing into trees, crossing streets, playing with guns, etc.”

Two letters that Bart wrote to Hank in November revealed how much he had become divorced from the reality of his own situation. In the first letter, he enclosed a collection of newspaper articles about the case that Hank had been asking to see. After an introductory paragraph about the dippings, he got to a more important point: drugs, acid.

If you send any doses, put them under a stamp on a letter and mail them to Wayland Sermons office. He’s handling my mail to ensure I get it fairly untampered with. Don’t send them on a package because sometimes they throw the wrapping away before I can get it.

I’m getting Wayland to send this out so I don’t have to worry about it being screwed with…

Sermons was unaware that Bart was attempting to use him as a courier for drug deliveries and wouldn’t learn about it for several weeks.