Blood Games (8 page)

Young’s office at the Beaufort County Law Enforcement Center was just a couple of doors from Sheppard’s, and when Sheppard arrived at work, he went straight to Young’s office and found him doing paperwork.

“Why aren’t you out in Smallwood?” Sheppard asked.

“What’s going on in Smallwood?”

Sheppard told him about the grisly events of the morning.

“Well,” said Young, “I sort of like to be asked.”

Sheppard intended to make sure that he was. He went straight to his office and called Mitchell Norton, the district attorney for the Second Judicial District, a five-county area. Norton’s office was only a short walk away, and he came straight to the law enforcement building after receiving Sheppard’s call.

“I want you on this,” he told Young.

“I have to be asked,” Young said.

“I’ll see that you are,” said Norton.

Soon after Norton and Stokes spoke by telephone, Stokes and Young rode to 110 Lawson Road together. By the time they got there, Lieth Von Stein’s body was at Beaufort County Memorial Hospital, where Medical Examiner A. L. Potts had already examined it and authorized its removal to the medical examiner’s office at East Carolina University School of Medicine in Greenville. John Taylor had photographed the body from every angle before it was removed, and had photographed the rest of the house as well, knowing that the photographs would be needed as evidence. Taylor also had directed the patrol officers in a grid search of the Von Stein yard, which had turned up nothing significant. Other officers had been dispatched to talk with neighbors to see if any had seen or heard anything unusual in the night, but nothing had turned up there either. Captain Danny Boyd and John Taylor filled in Young and Stokes on what was known so far, and Young attempted to get an SBI mobile crime lab to the scene, only to discover that none was available, because crime lab operators were attending a conference. Left with no other choice, he decided to conduct the meticulous evidence search himself, with the help of Taylor and Detective Arnold Cox.

Meanwhile, Melvin Hope was trying to learn more about Lieth Von Stein. He called National Spinning Company, where word of Von Stein’s death was just beginning to circulate. He was referred to several people before he talked with Brad Hughes, the company’s vice president for finances. Hughes invited him to the plant and offered him access to Von Stein’s office.

At the plant, Hughes told Hope that Von Stein was in charge of internal auditing for the company, overseeing two other auditors. He also did special projects for Phil Wander, the company’s third-highest executive, in New York. Von Stein used to make frequent trips to New York, but not so often anymore. Wander was about to retire, and Hughes was gradually assuming his duties.

An auditor’s job is not one designed to win friends, Hughes acknowledged, but Von Stein was well regarded by his fellow employees nevertheless. Hughes had become perturbed with him once, he said, when he learned that Von Stein recorded their telephone conversations. But he thought there was no sinister motive behind it, that Von Stein simply used the tapes to refresh his memory. Hughes knew of no especially sensitive or unusual audits that Von Stein had been involved in, certainly none that might cause somebody to kill him.

But as he talked with Hughes, Hope learned two things that might offer a motive for Von Stein’s murder. First, Hughes told him that Von Stein had been shopping for a mobile home, for what purpose he did not know. Could Von Stein have been having an affair and contemplating setting up a little love nest? If that was the case, perhaps a jealous husband or boyfriend had discovered the affair and taken out his anger in a middle-of-the-night sneak attack with a baseball bat and a knife. That might also explain the brutality of the assault.

The second revelation that Hughes offered was even more intriguing. Von Stein had recently inherited a lot of money, Hughes said. A million dollars or more, he’d heard. That had caused company officials to wonder how much longer he would continue working at National Spinning.

Hope’s pulse rate quickened at the revelation of Von Stein’s worth. He knew that the man was upper-middle-class, but neither his house and its furnishings nor his cars had indicated that he might be a millionaire. A million dollars, Hope well knew, was more than ample motive for murder.

Hughes allowed Hope to poke around in Von Stein’s office, gave him four cassette tapes thought to contain some of Von Stein’s recorded telephone conversations, and left him to talk with the two auditors who worked for Von Stein, Robin Reid and Earlene Rhodes.

Both women had been stunned by the news of their boss’s death, and neither could think of any reason anybody would want to harm him. He was strongly opinionated, they noted, but he usually offered his views in such a way that nobody took offense. They described Von Stein as an easy person to be around, a person who liked to joke and kid.

Both knew that Von Stein had been looking for a mobile home. When he got calls about it, they said, he would close his office door. But neither could believe that Von Stein had a girlfriend. They just didn’t see him as that type.

Once when they were teasing him, they said, Von Stein had said, “I’m more interested in beer than sex.”

By the time the Washington
Daily News
began hitting the streets shortly after noon on Monday, July 25, news of the murder in Smallwood had already spread through the town by word of mouth, and people were hungry for details. The paper offered little.

WASHINGTON MAN KILLED,
WIFE HURT

From the headline, a reader who hadn’t already known about the murder might have been led to think it had been no more than an accident. Only a photograph of the Von Stein house with a close-up of the crime-scene tape hinted to the casual reader that something far more sinister had occurred in the town’s wealthiest neighborhood.

The news story was brief, quoting only Sergeant Joe Stringer, the police department spokesman. It said that the Von Steins apparently had been attacked by burglars, leaving Lieth dead and Bonnie in guarded condition in the hospital. Stringer was quoted as saying that their teenage daughter, Angela, was not injured and apparently slept through the attack. The house was not ransacked, the story noted, and it was unclear whether anything was missing.

As the newspapers were first hitting the streets, Detective John Taylor was setting up a video camera in the autopsy room at the medical school at East Carolina University in Greenville. At twelve-thirty, he began taping the autopsy of Lieth Von Stein. The operation was being performed by one of the country’s leading pathologists, Dr. Page Hudson. Until a year and a half earlier, Dr. Hudson had been North Carolina’s chief medical examiner, a job he’d held for eighteen years. He had stepped down to teach, write, research, and garden, but he still liked to take up the scalpel, the bone saw, and the other tools of his trade now and then, especially in intriguing cases. Although he had been an effective administrator creating the state’s system of medical examiners and establishing databases to help law enforcement agencies investigate homicides, suicides, and different types of accidents, he relished the role of medical sleuth above all others. He had conducted more than four thousand autopsies, many of murder victims, and he was a noted authority on arsenic poisonings. He even had discovered a new technique for detecting arsenic in the body. Despite all that he had seen, he never ceased to marvel at the horrible things that humans do to themselves and to one another, and the body of Lieth Von Stein was a prime example.

Von Stein, Dr. Hudson discovered, had died from a stab wound to the heart. He had bled to death within minutes of receiving it. He likely was unconscious when he was stabbed. His skull had been fractured under the biggest laceration on the back of his head, and his brain had suffered a contusion and hemorrhaged. That blow to the head alone might have killed him if he hadn’t been stabbed.

In addition to Von Stein’s major wounds, his right wrist was broken, and he had numerous scrapes and bruises on his hands and arms, typical defensive wounds. But he also had fresh scrapes on his shins, particularly on the right leg and ankle. These wounds were more common in cases where the person attacked had been standing rather than lying in bed.

Other than having a mildly fatty liver, the result of drinking too much alcohol, Von Stein had been in good health and could have expected to live a long life.

Dr. Hudson found no alcohol in his blood, but he did find one thing that was curious indeed. When he cut into Von Stein’s stomach, he found it full, as if he had just consumed a large meal. Among the foods that could be identified were chicken and rice. Normally, those foods were easily digested and should have passed from the stomach within an hour or two of being eaten.

If Von Stein had been attacked shortly before 4:00 A.M., that would have meant that he had eaten a large meal around two or three, which seemed unlikely. If this was his Sunday night supper, then he might have been attacked much earlier than the police believed, although severe stress, Hudson noted, might delay digestion by a few hours.

Earlier that day, the detectives at the house on Lawson Road had decided that Bonnie could still be in danger. When word got out that she had survived the attack, the killer might return to finish the job. They didn’t have to point out that it would be terribly embarrassing if she were murdered in her hospital room. The merest thought of such a thing was enough to convince the chief that he should immediately assign officers to protect her around the clock.

By mid-afternoon, the Washington Police Department had already received numerous calls about the murder. Some callers were merely curious and wanted information. Others were provoked by fear. Was a mad killer loose? Had an arrest been made? Would one be made soon? Still others were trying to be helpful. They had information that they thought the police should know. Some of these calls were deemed important enough to check out.

Lewis Young and Melvin Hope went to talk to a man who was the local sales supervisor for a large bakery. The man had driven down Lawson Road shortly before four o’clock that morning on his way to work. As he was leaving Smallwood, he said, he had seen a car turning into the development. A Japanese car. Not old, not new. Baby blue. Had a luggage rack on top. He was sure of that. And he was almost certain that it was a station wagon. Anyway, there were two “scroungy looking” young white men with long hair inside. The one on the passenger side was slouched in his seat, his knees on the dashboard. The man knew that, because his headlights had shined directly into the car when it turned in front of him. But he couldn’t tell how the young men were dressed. He was suspicious of the car, because he drove through Smallwood every morning on his way to work, and that was the first time in ages that he could remember seeing a car out in the area at that early hour. He just wished he’d gotten a license number.

The man also told the officers that a coworker who didn’t want to get involved thought that they should check out a fellow who had been living in a tent in some woods near Smallwood. The fellow, who was thought to be feeble-minded or emotionally disturbed, had been spotted early that morning riding a bicycle near Smallwood. And he had a bandage on his arm.

Hope and Young dutifully added one more item to the scores of things they had to check out.

Before the detectives could go chasing after half the crackpots in the county, however, they first had to know more about the people most directly involved in the crime: the Von Steins.

And shortly after four-thirty that afternoon, they returned to the Washington Police Department to meet Angela Pritchard and begin prying into the family’s life.

The officers began by asking Angela to recount her activities of the day before, and she did, telling everything right up to the time she went to bed. The next thing she knew, she was being awakened by a police officer. She reiterated that she hadn’t even been aware that the attack was going on. She had since seen her mother at the hospital, however, and her mother had told her about it. Her mother was certain that if she hadn’t fallen off the bed, she would have been killed, too, Angela said. Whoever had done it, her mother had told her, had to be young and strong.

Hope asked if she knew anything about a mobile home that her father might have been thinking of buying. Yes, her parents were looking at house trailers so that her grandparents would have a place to stay when they came to visit. So much for the love nest theory.

The officers asked about her natural father. His name, she said, was Steve Pritchard. He was a long-distance trucker who lived in South Dakota, but he was thinking of moving back to North Carolina and going into the real estate business. He was supposed to come to see her and her brother sometime soon.

Did her natural father have any feelings about Lieth Von Stein?

“He thought he was the best thing for me and Chris,” she said.

Angela offered only sketchy information about her stepfather. His father, mother, and uncle had died recently and he had inherited some money. But she didn’t know how much.

Her brother was in summer school at N.C. State and would be a sophomore in the fall, she said. He lived in Lee dorm, room 611-B, and she had called him there about five that morning to tell him what had happened.

How did she and Chris get along with their stepfather? Lewis Young asked.