Blood Games (64 page)

“Well, I was concerned about his maturity. But I felt if he would apply himself and get into his studies, I had every anticipation of him getting his Ph.D. and one day I would be saying, I taught that genius, that person that did thus and so, that is with NASA, or that discovered this, or that is teaching somewhere and making a big name. I had no question that he would do wonderful things.”

As Slayton spoke those words, Neal sat at the defense table, head down, clearly embarrassed and shamed.

Doc Sawyer, one of Neal’s former band teachers, testified to Neal’s honesty. Neal handled all the money raised for the band’s programs, Sawyer said, thousands of dollars. “And we were never a penny short.”

Michael Paul called John Taylor and Lewis Young as witnesses to say that Neal had come forward on his own without promise of reward.

Judge Watts had some questions of his own for John Taylor

“Did he ever tell you why he made a statement, offer any explanation for his purpose in talking to you?”

“He never come right out and stated he had done this for such and such a reason. I got the impression it was a conscience clearing effort on his part.”

“Did you get the impression that he had analyzed the situation and decided if I don’t come forward now somebody else might and it might be better for me to do it now even though no promises are made?”

“Somewhat.”

“In other words, cut your losses so to speak?”

“Well, we never came right out and discussed that. Any opinions I have of how he felt was stuff I picked up just by being around him.”

Lewis Young backed up Taylor’s impressions of Neal’s motives. “I got strong impressions that this had been weighing heavily on him for months, for the whole year. And I also got a strong impression that he was tired of it.”

Judge Watts also had questions for Young. In reading Young’s investigative notes, he said, he saw many instances in which Neal’s answers to the detectives’ questions had been vague.

“I found him to be very vague in areas concerning certain details that night,” Young said. One area was the bat, he said, another the car. “In talking to him, I immediately realized that I was talking to someone of superior intelligence, but at the same time I felt maybe he did not have the greatest common sense, that the mundane, the ordinary the everyday did not seem to register with him. I noticed that he had problems with dates, and with things that maybe I would have thought I would remember that he didn’t.”

“It was not your impression that he was at all deceiving or being intentionally vague?”

“No sir. I think when he would throw out a date or some fact that he was trying to be helpful.”

If Neal hadn’t come forward, would the case still be unsolved? the judge asked.

“I think it very easily could be still in the ongoing stage.”

Two other witnesses would speak for Neal, his lawyers told the judge, but they would not be available until the next day. The hearing would resume then, the judge ruled. But one other matter had to be attended. With the hearing begun, Neal’s bond was no longer effective. Despite appeals from Neal’s lawyers, Judge Watts ordered Neal taken into custody.

“If ever he was going to try to flee,” the judge said, “this would be the time to do it, because it’s all been prologue until now. We are near about at the final curtain of this drama, tragic tale that it is.”

Neal was led away by a Beaufort County bailiff, who would take him back to Washington for the night so that he would not be in the same jail with Bart.

50

The state had stipulated that the testimony of six character witnesses could be summed up by Chris’s attorney from Washington, Jim Vosburgh, so that the witnesses would not have to make the long drive to Elizabeth City to be questioned.

Those witnesses included a young woman from Washington who had dated Chris during the summer of 1988. Chris always deported himself as a gentleman, she said, and he never used drugs or alcohol in her presence. Another of the witnesses was Carl Smith, an industrial arts teacher at Washington High School, who, according to Vosburgh, “was influential in helping keep Chris on a pretty fairly straight path while he was in high school.” Still another was Chris’s close friend and fellow Dungeons and Dragons player Jonathan Wagner. All said that Chris was of good character when they knew him, and that his involvement in the murder was foreign to everything they had known about him.

With that out of the way, Chris’s Greensboro attorney, Bill Osteen, a silver-haired man with a patrician face and an athletic build, called Dr. Billy W. Royal to the stand. Dr. Royal was a forensic psychiatrist who had a private practice in Chapel Hill and also worked at the Dorothea Dix Hospital for mental patients in Raleigh. A big, gray-bearded man with unruly hair, he had testified in hundreds of trials.

He had first met Chris Pritchard in August 1989, shortly after Chris was released from jail on bond, he said, as a result of a call from Osteen.

“You had a conference with Chris that day,” Royal said, “and he was very disturbed. You were very concerned about his mental stability.”

The situation was an emergency, Royal said, and he agreed to see Chris immediately. Chris was driven to Chapel Hill, where the doctor found him to be “acutely depressed” and “suicidal” and had him admitted to the psychiatric wing of the University of North Carolina Hospital that night.

Since that time, Royal said, he’d had more than thirty-five interviews with Chris, had done complete psychological testing of him, and had talked on several occasions with Chris’s mother and sister.

Asked about his diagnoses, Royal said, “One was depression with suicidal ideation intermittent, meaning that at times he’s been quite depressed and had suicidal thoughts with lots of plans at different times of how he would carry that out.

“Interestingly, early, these involved a great deal of use of an automobile. Chris is a person that’s an automobile addict in a sense—drives a lot and a lot of his activities and fantasies have to do with those. And he had thoughts of going up in the mountains and having an accident and killing himself by automobile, or there were several variations on that. He at one point, when I thought he was quite disturbed and distressed, had possession of a gun that was part of his thinking. And his mother was able to object to the possession of that.

“Another diagnosis is chronic anxiety, which has been a problem, I think, since his youth, of just never being able to relax, always looking behind to see if something were gaining on him, never quite being comfortable in whatever circumstances he’s in.”

A third diagnosis, the doctor said, was drug and alcohol abuse. After he got to college, Chris’s use of drugs and alcohol accelerated until it was out of control.

On the day that Chris was admitted to the hospital, he had told his lawyers for the first time about his involvement in his stepfather’s murder. He also told the doctor that night. But one important person had not been told: his mother.

“Was there a concern of Chris as to how his mother was going to accept this situation, or what her reaction was going to be?” Osteen asked.

“That was probably almost the foremost concern.”

“At that time, his attorney, and in this case it was I, told you that Chris could not discuss what actually had happened with his mother, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Were you having some problem dealing with the mother and the son on a basis of that Catch-22 situation?”

“Absolutely. My initial impression was that the suicide and the depression could not be resolved without resolution of the issue between he and his mother, resolution that allowed him to tell her what he had done, which was something that he wanted to do. I thought that ought to occur during hospitalization so that the issue could be dealt with in a therapeutic setting for him and for his mother.”

“Now, you even explained that, I believe, to his lawyers, that you thought that ought to be done at that time?”

“That’s correct.”

“And what response did you get from his lawyers?”

“His lawyers did not feel that should be done if there was any way around that.”

“Did his lawyer explain to you why that was necessary at that time not to be done?”

“Yes.”

“Why was that?”

“Because the fact that if he had told his mother and it came to trial, that she would have to relate that and that, as I understood the contract that you had with his mother, that she had told you to do what you could to protect Chris.”

“Now, Dr. Royal, let’s move back. What is there in Chris’s background that may shed some light on where he sits today?”

Two basic things determine how everybody develops, the doctor said: genetics and environment.

“Chris had several things going on with his background in terms of environment. His mother was married and had two children within a few years. Her husband was younger than she, and I gather, immature in some ways. When Chris was less than three, the father reportedly abandoned the family. Mrs. Pritchard was working trying to support the family, and the information that I’ve gotten from her is that economic conditions were quite distressful. Stressful, I guess, in terms of requiring assistance from her family not only in the financial economy, but in looking after the kids.

“The abandonment by the father, which resulted in little contact for a number of years, according to all information, affected Chris very much in terms of anxieties, behaviors. And in my view, it’s been an insult to his psyche that he has never compensated for, because you can’t go back and compensate for something like that at that age. He has therefore been insecure, anxious, depressed throughout his life.

“And his psyche has always been engaged in an attempt to deal with that, to deny that, to cover that over. I think as a result of that, he developed certain personality activities, enough so that I have made a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, because I think he’s got a significant number of personality problems. Even so, he was able to survive, cope with some difficulties until he went away to school.

“Unfortunately, at that time his stepfather’s parents and uncle all became ill and died in a sequential period over thirteen months that removed the stepfather and, in some degree, his mother from contact with him, for the support of the relationship. As young people do going away to college—and this is not uncommon regardless of any other consideration—they get in a different environment, and Chris did not do well academically. He got involved gradually in drugs, alcohol. Significantly, he became more involved with a game that he was familiar with, Dungeons and Dragons, and became obsessed with that so that he and this group then began to play this game, at times almost consistently neglecting schoolwork and other activities.”

Osteen interrupted to ask Royal what he knew about Dungeons and Dragons.

“Well, it has received notoriety in the last few years. There has been a great deal in the press about it. It’s a game that involves skill, daring, a lot of intellectual kind of things, adventure, and there have been a number of tragedies with people that are involved in this game. Not infrequently meaning some people get hurt or killed through the use of the game or playing the game.”

“Dr. Royal, specifically referring to Chris’s participation in the game, are you familiar with the effect that in the playing of Dungeons and Dragons, people fantasize and create by allusion to themselves their own characteristics for the characters they play?”

“Yes. In my understanding, there are certain base kinds of games. They also have a dragon master who can create the game, assign people to have different characters, which are at times quite bizarre. And these people carry out certain activities. And they often involve aggression, war, things of that nature.”

Combined with drugs and alcohol, the game became “a kind of modus operandi” for Chris and his friends, Dr. Royal said. “And to some degree this group became a family that was together a lot and involved a lot with each other. And that this game, with the alcohol and drugs, created for Chris a situation in which there was a separation from life, from his ordinary functioning, from what’s going on in reality, into this fantasy world. And in my view then the plans that were developed and carried out regarding Chris’s stepfather were a direct result of this kind of activity coupled with the past history of all of these people that were involved.”

Did he see any significance in the testimony that Chris was going to take his inheritance and buy a house where he and his friends could live and take drugs and play all the Dungeons and Dragons that they wanted?

“Chris was trying to find a solution that he was not going to be abandoned, that he was going to live a life that he didn’t have to depend on other people in a sense, that he was not going to be hurt. And that he would create a nirvana where you wouldn’t have to tolerate those potentials.”

“Dr. Royal, I don’t believe we’ve talked about this before, so forgive me for asking you this question. But do you have any knowledge of the results that are obtained by a person from the use of such drugs as LSD?”

“Well, all of these affect your brain chemicals and your thinking, how you perceive, how you look at things. Some people become only psychotic, have hallucinations, delusions. They alter the brain. They alter your thinking. If you use them very long, they permanently make alterations in how you function, how you perceive, so that people lose their initial personality totally and become another person, because of chronic brain damage from the drug.