Blood Games (53 page)

The prosecutors felt better knowing that Neal could break. Perhaps he could look human and sympathetic on the stand, after all.

Bart’s mother, Joanne, always grew sentimental at Christmas. Each year, she took a treasured collection of ornaments from storage when time came to decorate the tree. From the time Bart was a year old, she had made a special ornament each year for each of her children, matching ornaments to personality. For the first time, Bart would not be with her for Christmas; indeed, he might never be able to spend Christmas with her again. She cried when she brought out the ornament collection this year and saw all of the ornaments she had made for Bart over the years: the clown, the teddy bear, the egg from first grade, and the first one she ever made for him, the one celebrating Woodstock. Just as she had in the past, she hung all of them proudly on her tree.

Two days after Christmas, six days before the trial of Bart and Chris was to begin, the phone rang in Wayland Sermons’ house shortly after 10:30 P.M. Sermons was in bed and already had nodded off to sleep. He answered the call groggily but immediately recognized the district attorney’s voice.

“Wayland, Mitchell Norton. I just wanted to let you know that Christopher Pritchard has decided to plead guilty.”

Part Four

An Eye for an Eye

DIOGENES STRUCK THE FATHER WHEN THE SON SWORE.

—ROBERT BURTON

42

In August 1989, Jim Upchurch had taken a job with the North Carolina Department of Human Resources, inspecting nursing homes in a wide area of North Carolina’s mountains. He worked out of Black Mountain, near Asheville, but he still drove the 230 miles home to Caswell County every weekend. He had spent Christmas Day, Monday, with his mother, and had driven back to Black Mountain the day afterward. He was planning to spend New Year’s Day in Caswell County, and already had arranged time off from work to be with Bart at his trial in Elizabeth City, starting on January 2.

He was at his desk at work on Thursday, December 28, when the telephone rang. His former wife was on the line.

“We’ve got a problem,” Joanne said.

Wayland Sermons had just called to tell her that Chris Pritchard was pleading guilty and would be testifying against Bart. Sermons said that Bart still was denying any role in the murder, but Jim knew that this was a devastating development. It instantly devoured the glimmer of hope that he had been able to muster about Bart’s chances.

Sermons wanted both of them to come to Washington immediately, Joanne said, and Jim arranged to meet her there shortly after noon the following day. He left at 4:30 A.M. for the eight-hour drive.

Sermons was at the jail with Bart when Jim and Joanne were ushered into the private cell where they had been allowed to talk out of the hearing of jailers and other inmates.

Two days earlier, Chris had spent nearly nine hours telling his story to John Taylor, Lewis Young, Mitchell Norton, Keith Mason, and his own attorney, Bill Osteen. Osteen had let Sermons have his handwritten notes of the marathon interview, and Sermons was grim when he revealed the essence of their contents to Jim and Joanne. Although there were some inconsistencies, Chris was backing up Neal’s story that Bart was the murderer.

The day before, Sermons and Frank Johnston had come to the jail to tell Bart about the situation. It came as no surprise to him. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve known he was going to do this all along,’” Bart recalled later. “It wasn’t a shock, but it was a tremendous, depressing letdown.”

With two witnesses ready to testify against him, his lawyers told him, he stood a good chance of getting the death penalty. He should think about pleading guilty and letting them go to the district attorney to try to save his life.

“Bart didn’t flinch,” Sermons recalled later. “He said, ‘I am not going to take a plea bargain. I’m going to trial.’”

Sermons and Johnston felt that Bart hadn’t thought about the situation, that he didn’t realize how real it was. Now Sermons explained that to Bart’s parents, hoping they could get him to change his mind. He went outside to give Jim and Joanne a chance to talk with their son alone.

In the beginning, Bart had told Sermons and his father that Hank could give him an alibi for the night of the murder. When Sermons had called Hank soon after Bart’s arrest, Hank told him that he wanted to help if he could, but he couldn’t really remember where he or Bart or any of his friends were on the night of the murder. Later, he told Sermons that he thought he had gone to Bart’s room between two and three that night and Bart was there. Still later, he became wary and began backing away from that statement. He had dodged the private detectives who tried to talk with him, just as he had attempted to dodge John Taylor, Lewis Young, and Christy Newsom when they came to question him. Sermons realized that he would be of no use as a witness.

Now Bart was telling his parents that he possibly was with a girl that night. But what girl? And where was she? And would she be willing to stand behind him? Bart was vague.

Sermons had brought to the jail the evidence against Bart that had been provided by the state to this point. It included copies from the pages of the journal Bart had been keeping just before his arrest. Joanne had been going through the material and she began crying as she read the journal entries. She handed one page to Jim, but he saw that some of it was about him and put it down, unread. That, he thought, was private, and he would read it only if Bart asked him to.

Jim left Joanne talking with Bart and went outside where Sermons was waiting.

“What do you think?” Jim asked.

“I don’t know,” Sermons said.

“It doesn’t sound too good,” Jim offered, hoping to draw Sermons out.

Sermons agreed.

“What’s your gut feeling?”

“I’ll go with whatever Bart says,” Sermons said. “If he wants to go to trial, I’ll go to trial.”

Bart had turned twenty-one in the Beaufort County Jail. He was legally responsible for his own decisions. His parents could advise him, but they could not direct his defense. His attorneys were in the same position.

Sermons returned to the cell with Jim to explain what likely would happen if Bart did plead guilty. He’d probably get life plus twenty years for murder. Maybe a little more, depending on what they were able to work out on the other charges.

“What does that mean in terms of active sentence?” Jim asked.

“Could be thirty years.”

“I’d rather die than spend thirty years in prison,” Bart said.

Was there any chance for a lesser sentence? Jim asked.

The DA would ask for the maximum, Sermons said, and the judge no doubt would go along with it. The time for bargaining clearly was past. The only hope that a guilty plea offered now was to save Bart’s life.

“Bart, do you know of anything that you could tell us?” his father pleaded. “Is there anything you’re hiding? Are you protecting somebody? Now’s the time to speak. This is your life at stake.”

There was nothing he was hiding, Bart said, nobody he was protecting.

“We’ll go with whatever you say,” his father told him. “Just make sure you know what you’re doing.”

“I can’t live with myself if I plead guilty to something I didn’t do,” Bart said, and for a moment the only thing that could be heard in the room was his mother’s sobbing.

“I knew you were going to say that,” she said.

Everybody in the room realized that Bart understood what he was doing. It had been spelled out to him as clearly as possible, and he had made the decision. He would play out the ultimate game, win or lose, his life the treasure at stake. But this time Bart would not be the dungeon master.

43

Elizabeth City was in many ways like Washington. Although larger by a few thousand people, it, too, was a river town, the river in this case being the Pasquotank, named for Indians who once lived in the area. The Pasquotank emptied into Albemarle Sound, giving Elizabeth City access to the sea, and the town had sprung up as a site for shipbuilding.

Like Washington, Elizabeth City was proud of its history, which dated back more than three hundred years. The town could claim many firsts: the first land deed in the state, the first General Assembly, the first public school. The first soybeans grown in this country were planted at a plantation near Elizabeth City.

In another important way, the town was very much like Washington. Its people were largely conservative, many of them fundamentalist Christians, strong supporters of U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. They believed fervently in Old Testament edicts of justice: an eye for an eye.

If Bart had any concern about that, he did not show it on the day his trial opened in an austere second-floor courtroom at the brick colonial-style Pasquotank County Courthouse. Judge Thomas Watts, a short middle-aged man with a balding head and heavy-rimmed glasses, asked Bart to stand so that the courtroom full of potential jurors might identify him. Bart rose, smiling, pointed at his red tie, and bowed slightly, tugging at the back of the blue blazer that his mother had brought for him to wear during the trial. It was not an auspicious beginning. Throughout the trial, observers would be talking of the bow he took at the beginning, as if he were an actor savoring his role.

The tedious process of jury selection was speeded somewhat because potential jurors had filled out information sheets about themselves, but it still went on all week. Joanne came to the courtroom every day, driving back and forth from her home in Virginia. Jim stayed for the first day of jury selection, then drove back to work in Black Mountain until testimony began. Bonnie came to court every day and sometimes took notes. She had told friends that she planned to write a book about the case and had hired a photographer to take pictures of the trial participants.

The jury that would try Bart for his life was made up of eight women and four men, nine of them white, three black, ranging in age from twenty-two to fifty. Half had attended college, but only one had received a degree. Both alternates, a man and woman, were white. All had said that they could in good conscience sentence Bart to death if they determined that circumstances warranted such a penalty.

As Bart was being led manacled into the courthouse for the opening day of testimony in his trial on a blustery, rainy Monday morning, January 8, the news media was waiting. Reporters and photographers had come from newspapers in Washington, Raleigh, Norfolk, from TV stations in Washington and Greenville. Bart smiled and answered their questions.

“You innocent?” one asked.

“Yes sir,” he said.

“Are you sorry it all happened?” another called as he reached the door.

“I’m sorry I’m where I’m at now,” he said over his shoulder.

Despite the pessimistic outlook of his lawyers and his parents, Bart still had hope. He thought that the jury would see Chris and Neal as liars and he was certain that he could convince them of that if he got onto the stand. His mood appeared to be one of jaunty confidence.

The appearance Bart was giving was of concern to his lawyers. His natural facial expression made him look as if he were smirking. When he smiled, which was frequently, that appearance was amplified. Added to his natural cockiness, that could lead jurors to think that he held the entire process in contempt. And although that was indeed the case, Bart’s lawyers saw no point in letting the judge and jury know it. If such an attitude were perceived, it could only lessen whatever slim chances Bart might have. Throughout the trial, Bart would be reminded not to smile and to put a finger to his mouth to keep from giving the appearance of smirking. His lawyers gave him a legal pad when he sat at the defense table beside them and encouraged him to take notes to keep him occupied.

Before opening arguments and testimony could begin, another matter had to be decided. News organizations had petitioned to have the trial opened to photography from both still and TV cameras. Judge Watts overruled objections from both the state and defense to allow that for the first time in the First Judicial District.

In his opening argument, Mitchell Norton detailed how the state would show that three bright boys from good families entered into a conspiracy to kill Lieth Von Stein so that Chris Pritchard could come into an early inheritance. These boys, he said, had been brought together by Dungeons and Dragons, which he described as “a medieval game of clubs, daggers, knives, and sticks.”

“But this is not the story of a game gone crazy,” he said. “The game simply influenced the way they thought and lived. It accustomed them to thoughts of ‘me.’”

Norton promised evidence that would be “unusual and bizarre,” and warned the jurors that they could expect to hear some discrepancies in testimony—which was quite normal, he pointed out. But in the end, he said, the state would prove that Bart alone had done the “cold, calculated killing.”

“The state doesn’t have any absolute evidence that shows Bart Upchurch did this,” Frank Johnston responded in his opening statement, which revealed the defense strategy—to cast doubt on the word of Neal and Chris.

Why, he asked, had it taken Neal eleven months to have “this great conscience breakdown”? And why had Chris waited until days before the trial to admit his part? “By the evidence from his own mouth, we know that he conspired to carry out this dastardly act. He thought of this and pursued it.”