Blood Games (61 page)

Mitchell Norton had been the district attorney for the Second Judicial District for five years, an assistant district attorney for ten years before that. He was of medium height, with a slight paunch. His hair was thinning dramatically on the right side, where he parted it, but longish in the back. He wore a drooping mustache to distract attention from his receding chin.

It had become clear during the trial that more than the normal courtroom tensions separated him from the defense attorneys. They did not move in the same social circles, as lawyers so often did in small towns. Despite having spent fifteen years in Washington, Norton still was not accepted by the old families of the establishment. Although a native of eastern North Carolina, from Sampson County, he had not attended prestigious universities, as had Sermons and Johnston. He was graduated from East Carolina, in nearby Greenville, which had a widespread image as the redneck branch of the state’s university system. His law degree was from a little-known university in Birmingham, Alabama.

Norton had a slow, methodical, almost country manner about him, and he played it to great effect before the juries of his district, often saying “ain’t,” using sentences that weren’t quite grammatical, now and then employing the eastern North Carolina colloquialism
wont
for
wasn’t.
“It wont something they sent invitations to,” he would say in explaining why Neal and Chris didn’t have other witnesses to verify their nefarious activities with Bart.

“The question you have to face,” he told the jury, “is who done it?”

But Norton left no reason for doubt about why it was done.

“The motive in this case is not strange. It’s not supernatural, it’s not Dungeons and Dragons gone crazy. The reason for this is age old. The motive in this case is greed, fast money, fast cars, easy living.”

Chris, he said, was “caught in a world of pizza and beer and drugs and Dungeons and Dragons with no responsibility whatsoever, a world centered around me and self-gratification.”

His answer to his problems: “Kill ’em and get the money. Yes, it’s cold. Yes, it’s heartless. Yes, it’s cruel. Instant gratification.”

Norton acknowledged the inconsistencies in testimony.

“These cases do not come tied in nice little neat packages,” he said. “They come turned and twisted sometimes by time and faulty memories. But when tested and sifted by the rules of reason and common sense, the evidence in this case does point unerringly to the fact”—he walked to the defense table and pointed at Bart—“that the man who accompanied Neal Henderson to Washington, North Carolina, sits right here at this table.”

Among the problems with the case that Norton recognized was one that Frank Johnston had touched on in his closing argument: the mystery of the undigested dinner in Lieth’s stomach, which the medical examiner had testified was consistent with a much earlier death.

Norton suggested that the stress caused by the death of Lieth’s parents, his inheritance, his problems with Chris was the cause of the disruption in digestion.

“If you believe, as they contend, that the rice had to be gone in two hours, if he was not under enough stress, then Lieth Von Stein was dead at eleven o’clock. And if Lieth was dead at eleven, Bonnie had to know about it. She had to be part of it. Neal Henderson and Chris Pritchard have admitted their part in this, but after an investigation of over a year and a half, there is not one shred of evidence, not one statement anywhere, that it didn’t happen just like she said. And if he was dead at eleven o’clock—this is what they would have you believe, create a case out of air, not reason—if he was dead at eleven o’clock, what in the world was Neal Henderson doing, coming down here from Raleigh for five and a half hours, with the body lying in the bed and him sitting there and wait until four-thirty to go out and dispose of the clothes?”

The contention that Bart was being framed was specious, Norton suggested.

“Why frame James Upchurch? Why say something about James Upchurch that isn’t so?”

It was Bart and Chris who were close friends, Norton reminded the jurors. Neal only played Dungeons and Dragons with Chris and had nothing else to do with him socially. “Socially, Neal Henderson was a nonentity,” Norton said. Wouldn’t it follow, Norton asked, that if Chris wanted help in killing his parents, he would turn to his good friend Bart, who had gone on trips with him and used drugs with him, not to Neal? And if they wanted to make up something to frame Bart, Norton said, “Don’t you know they could have made it fit a lot better than they did?”

The defense, he said, was “grabbing at straws.”

As he neared the conclusion of his argument, which had gone on for more than two hours, Norton picked up the burned map that had confirmed Chris’s role in the murder.

“I don’t know what saved it from the fire,” he said, holding it up. “Something kept it. Was it luck? Was it fate? Or was it some other power that kept it from being consumed by the fire and being chopped up by the bush hog? They want to talk to you about supernatural things. Supernatural things have nothing to do in this courthouse. But look at the map closely. Look at the burn marks on the map.”

He held it up to his face, the two holes burned near the center of the paper became eye holes, creating a mask.

“Are you looking at the face of death?”

He paused, slowly turning the map upside down.

“Or when you reverse it, are you looking at something more sinister?”

Now the mask seemed to have horns, a face of evil.

“I submit to you when you look at the evidence in this case it points unerringly to the fact that James Bartlett Upchurch III was a part and parcel of the conspiracy to commit murder and did, in fact, carry it out.”

47

Bart had buoyed himself with so much hope before the trial that he could not see the damage that had been inflicted by Chris’s and Neal’s testimony. Although some of his family had become increasingly dismayed after hearing Chris’s and Neal’s stories, Bart had grown more hopeful, despite his disappointment in the cross-examination of Neal. He thought that Chris had seemed “loopy” on the stand and Neal robotic and coached. He looked at the differences in the testimony, not at the similarities, and persuaded himself that the jurors would see that both were lying, trying, as Bart later put it, “to cleanse their souls” with deception.

He was especially encouraged that Bonnie had admitted being frightened by her first sight of Neal and not by seeing him. He thought that the medical examiner’s testimony would raise serious questions in the jurors’ minds about the whole scenario of the murder.

Now, on Tuesday, January 23, as Bart paced the floor of a secured room on the east side of the courthouse, smoking one cigarette after another—a habit he’d picked up in jail—he was certain that it would be only a matter of hours, if not minutes, before his innocence would be proclaimed and he would walk out of the courthouse to the congratulations of family and friends and go on about his life.

Mitchell Norton had concluded his final argument so late the day before that the judge had put off final instructions to the jury until Tuesday morning.

Before sending the jurors out to deliberate at 10:00 A.M., Judge Watts had one more thing to say.

“These are not my words. I can’t claim credit for them. I wish I could. Someone far wiser than I first put these words on paper. I think that he probably summarized in about three sentences your duties and responsibility. The highest aim of every legal contest is the ascertainment of the truth. Somewhere, somewhere within the facts of every single case the truth abides.”

“You are sworn jurors with the duty to perform. That duty is to take the evidence as it came to you from that witness stand, to take the law as it has been given to you by the court, sift through the evidence and determine the true facts of the case, apply the law which I’ve given you to those facts, and thereby render a verdict which will speak the ever lasting and abiding truth about these alleged incidents on the morning of July 25, 1988. You twelve ladies and gentlemen may retire, deliberate, and see how you find in these matters.”

Bart had not been impressed by the judge’s words and did not believe them.

“Justice is a pretty gray concept,” he said later. “The truth didn’t matter one damn bit. They didn’t care for the truth. What they wanted was facts. Seemed to me it was like one big game of who was going to paint the best picture, but the game had a pretty large pot.”

Now, as Bart waited to see who had painted the best picture, who would claim the pot—his life—he kept trying to figure out what the jury was thinking.

His father, who had asked his attorneys what they thought after the evidence was complete, summed it up succinctly for him. “Bart, if they believe those two boys, they’re going to find you guilty,” Jim said.

Joanne gave him a hard look “Don’t be so pessimistic,” she said.

The trial had brought Jim and Joanne together in a public display of harmony and support for their son, but the situation had been strange and strained for both, and as the jury deliberated, the differences between them surfaced.

“Somebody’s got to point out the goddamned facts,” Jim said.

Joanne was encouraging Bart’s hopefulness, but Jim thought it wild, wishful thinking.

“He was fantasizing, grabbing at straws,” he said later. “I wanted to bring him back down to earth so that he could face the reality of this thing.”

The jury was sent to lunch in a group and returned to continue deliberating. As the afternoon wore on, Bart’s nervousness and tension increased. The long deliberation no doubt meant dissension within the jury. That was hopeful in that it meant that at least somebody thought him innocent, discouraging in that it also meant that somebody must think him guilty. His optimism flagged only to the extent that he began talking of a hung jury, which surely would mean the ordeal of another trial.

At five, Bart, his parents, and attorneys were summoned back to the courtroom. The judge had decided to call a halt to deliberations for the day. The agony of waiting would continue into Wednesday. Before leaving for the day, the foreman asked the judge if he would start the next day’s session by instructing the jury again in the law on the charges of conspiracy and first-degree burglary. If they were still struggling with conspiracy and burglary, acts which had to occur before the murder, then perhaps there still was hope for acquittal.

After receiving those instructions the next morning, the jury began deliberating again at nine-thirty-seven, and Bart and his parents continued their strained and anxious wait. At twelve-twenty-five, they were called back to court again for the second lunch break since deliberations had begun.

This time the judge had questions for the jury. Had they reached a unanimous verdict on any of the charges? They had, said the foreman. On the charges that had not been decided, was the numerical division the same on all the charges? It was different from the day before, the foreman said.

“Do you feel that you are making some progress?” asked the judge.

“Yes,” said the foreman.

This could not be good, Bart’s attorneys realized. If the jury had reached a verdict of not guilty on any of the charges, they likely would have quickly voted not guilty on the others as well. But they did not convey this gloomy prospect to Bart.

During his lunch break at the jail, Bart was handed a letter marked “urgent,” addressed to him. Bart recognized the name on the return address, a young man he had met in the Beaufort County Jail who claimed that he had gone to high school with Chris, now an inmate at a youthful offenders’ institution in Raleigh.

The young man wrote that he had been in the same cell with Chris at the Beaufort County Jail and Chris had told him that Bart knew nothing about the plot to kill his parents, but he might have to place the blame on Bart if things got tough for him.

Bart gave the letter to Sermons, who knew the young man who had sent it as a chronic liar. He’d had dealings with him in other cases. Sermons checked with Keith Mason and discovered that the state would easily be able to refute the letter. If he tried to reopen the case with it, he would end up looking foolish. Sermons told the judge about the letter but offered no motion with it. The letter was accepted as a court’s exhibit, ordered sealed by the judge, not to be opened.

At 4:05 P.M., Bart and his parents were again summoned to the courtroom. The jury was coming back.

“I don’t even know that they have a verdict,” the judge said. “They may simply be coming to ask some question, but assuming that they do have a verdict, let me say this, that I will not tolerate any outburst.”

The jury filed in to take their seats at 4:09. Jim Upchurch noticed that none would look at Bart, who sat impassively in his brown tweed sportcoat and brown paisley tie. That, Jim thought, was a very bad sign.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen, and Mr. Foreman in particular let me ask you this question, and please answer it with just a simple yes-or-no answer, sir. First of all, have you agreed upon your verdicts in this case, sir?”

“Yes.”

Had they filled out their verdict forms? They had. The judge asked the bailiff to hand him the forms.

“Members of the jury, I don’t know what your verdict forms are. In just a moment I’m going to read them aloud. Following the reading of each, I will ask you a question: Is this your verdict, so say you all? And if you agree you should answer yes. If you did not agree, then you will have a chance to hold your hand up. Everyone understand that? You must answer one way or the other.