Cruel Doubt (18 page)

Karen said she'd seen Chris sell marijuana and take acid. But both girls made it clear they liked him. He was good company, fun to be around, even if he was a little obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons.

* * *

Leaving campus, Taylor stopped at the security office to show a picture of James Upchurch that he'd obtained from the probation officer. He said Washington police and the SBI were eager to speak to the young man and asked for help in finding him. He said it shouldn't be hard. “Really,” Taylor said. “A guy with pink hair. Let's find him.”

* * *

On March 30, an FBI lab technician phoned Taylor to say that on the basis of the samples submitted, they could deem it “probable” that Chris Pritchard had written the word LAWSON on the map found at the fire site.

15

The next day Bonnie arrived in Little Washington for the annual dinner of the Humane Society, the one social event that could have brought her back to the town she'd learned to fear and loathe.

That afternoon, she went to police headquarters to ask yet again what had become the one question of significance in her life: Was there any news about the investigation?

She was hoping to see John Taylor, who seemed to her to be the only person connected to the case who displayed even a modicum of courtesy.

Taylor was there, but Lewis Young was also present and greeted her coolly. She complained about the rude and insulting manner in which Newell and Sturgell had questioned her. Then she announced her intention of hiring a private investigator and told the two officers that she expected them to cooperate with whomever she brought into the case.

Young flatly told her that it was not SBI policy to cooperate with private investigators.

Bonnie told him she no longer gave a hoot about SBI policy. In eight months, SBI policy had accomplished exactly nothing, except to let a murderer's trail grow cold. She was fed up with SBI policy. And fed up with the incompetence—or worse—of the Little Washington police department. She was taking matters into her own hands, and if they did not cooperate voluntarily, she would take all measures available to her under the law to force them to.

Lewis Young told her she still didn't seem to understand the situation. They were investigating, and they were making progress. Maybe her problem was that it was progress in a direction that made her uncomfortable.

Young might have looked like a banker, and might be an alumnus of Chapel Hill, but he'd grown up in a strict police family. His father had been a North Carolina highway patrolman for thirty-eight years, and Young had lived all over the state as a boy, moving each time his father was transferred. Police work, he would say, “was in my blood.”

It had also drawn a bit of his blood. One night, in 1977, while still a bachelor, Young had been standing at his kitchen sink preparing a peanut butter cracker. A shot was fired through the window behind him. The bullet had creased his scalp and skimmed the top of his skull. A quarter inch lower and he would have been dead. His assailant, it turned out, was a former Washington police officer Young had once arrested for theft.

For a while after that, Young ate no peanut butter, but his commitment to his work was intensified by the attempt on his life. And once you've been shot in the head at close range, you are not intimidated by a five two, 110-pound woman, no matter how indignant and determined she may be.

Already, Young told her, “a case could be made,” against someone. Already, he said, “there's enough circumstantial evidence to bring someone to trial.” No, he said, he was not going to identify the suspect, but rather pointedly he reminded her that Chris had still not taken his polygraph. He said he wanted that done within two weeks. Arrangements could even be made to have the test given in Winston-Salem, so Chris would have no excuse about the inconvenience of traveling to Greenville. He just didn't buy this new story Bonnie was telling him: that some anonymous therapist had said that the test would prove too stressful for the poor boy.

Lewis Young's voice, and his manner, had an edge that Bonnie had not heard or seen before. It both angered and frightened her. What Young seemed to be implying was that in order to get this case taken off the books, in order to wrap it up and move on, they might file baseless and unprovable charges against someone who was, in a very real sense, a victim, too—her own son.

She left the police station and went to her room at the Holiday Inn. She put in a call to Wade Smith, who was not immediately available. Then she sat down and made a few notes to which she could refer when she did speak to Wade. She wrote:

“Current major concern—LEWIS YOUNG—Does not appear genuinely interested in finding guilty party. He feels case can be made—Many cases have been solved on circumstantial evidence. BULL SHIT!!! I will settle for NO LESS THAN a conviction on cold hard evidence.
Facts
must speak, not circumstances.”

But when she did meet with Wade, on her way back to Winston-Salem, he counseled patience once again. Because he felt she was already bearing a sufficient burden, he did not share with her, on this occasion, the faint sense of unease he'd begun to develop about the direction the investigation might take once the pace did begin to quicken.

Recent conversations with Bill Osteen had left Wade concerned about Bonnie's son, whom he himself had never met. Couching the opinion very carefully in several layers of lawyerlike euphemism, so as not to risk compromising any degree of attorney-client confidentiality, Osteen had conveyed to Wade the distinct impression that the son of Bonnie Von Stein struck him as an insolent and untrustworthy little thug.

This judgment was so much at odds with the portrait Bonnie had painted of Chris that it caused Wade to have his first twinge of misgiving: If the boy Bonnie described and the boy Osteen had seen were so different, might there someday prove to be a corresponding discrepancy between what Bonnie was so convinced of and what investigators would find?

* * *

As April began, the search for Moog intensified. “A really weird fucker,” Taylor said. “He didn't seem to live anywhere.”

They talked to his father, who, indeed, worked for the department of social services in Raleigh. No, he hadn't heard from James for quite some time. They talked to his mother, who, indeed, lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia. No, she hadn't heard from James for quite some time.

It seemed that Taylor was driving back and forth to Raleigh every day. In the company of Upchurch's probation officer, Christy Newsome, who, in one of life's pleasant small surprises, turned out to be not only competent but extremely good-looking, he staked out virtually every bar in which an NC State student had ever ordered a drink.

Sadlack's, The Watering Hole, the Brewery, the Fallout Shelter, Bourbon Street, I Play Games. Taylor thought The Watering Hole was “the worst damn looking place I'd ever seen. I didn't even want to go in there. Nothing but blacks and motorcycle guys. But Christy had guts. She'd walk right up to the bar and start showing that picture around and didn't even look over her shoulder.”

You wouldn't think, Taylor said, that in 1989, as opposed to 1969, some guy with pink hair and a knapsack—and yes, they had learned that Upchurch carried a knapsack with him wherever he went—would be that hard to spot in Raleigh, North Carolina. But even with the help of the Raleigh police, as well as the NC State security officers, Moog could not be found.

* * *

Back in Washington on April 21, Taylor called Bonnie Von Stein. From the start, more than any other investigator, he had treated her with sympathy and respect. It was no act. He liked her. He also felt sorry for her, and he expected that before this was all over she would have to face agonies even worse than she'd already endured.

He said he believed she really did want to help. No matter what anyone else might say or suspect, he thought neither that she'd had anything to do with the murder nor that she was trying to cover for her children. He said he had a couple of questions that might turn out to be important, but added that he couldn't yet tell her his reasons for asking them.

He asked whether she knew where Chris's friend James Upchurch, also known as Moog, might be found. This, he reminded her, was the person with whom Chris had disappeared in early July.

Bonnie said she'd ask Chris as soon as she could. “I knew,” she said later, “that I wouldn't get a straight answer from either John Taylor or Lewis Young if I asked them why they were looking for that young man, so I didn't even bother to ask. The only way I was surviving was by taking their questions at face value and doing all I could to answer honestly.”

Taylor said his second question concerned a map. He told her—and this was the first time Bonnie had learned this from anyone—that investigators had reason to believe that at some point prior to the murder, Chris had drawn a map of the Smallwood neighborhood, showing the precise location of their house.

She said, in her calm, matter-of-fact tone, “Well, if that were the case, there wouldn't be anything surprising about it. He could easily have done so in order to provide directions for out-of-town friends, or one of his cousins.”

But later, when she asked Chris, he said, no, gee, he couldn't remember ever drawing any sort of map of their neighborhood. And when she asked about Upchurch, he said, no, gee, he had no idea what might have happened to James Upchurch. He hadn't heard anyone speak about Upchurch for months.

Angela, however, volunteered that she had met Upchurch once, when she'd gone to NC State to visit Chris. Bonnie asked her what kind of person he was. She responded, Bonnie recalled later, that he was “a nice, quiet young man who might appear a little bit weird.”

* * *

Taylor's questions might have sounded idle enough to Bonnie, but to the considerably more sophisticated ear of former federal prosecutor Bill Osteen they seemed ominous.

Osteen was already annoyed, to put it mildly, that Chris had drawn a map of his neighborhood and had printed the name of his street for the SBI. He was equally displeased that neither Chris nor Bonnie had even bothered to tell him that the SBI had wanted to question Chris. Had he known, he would never have let such a meeting occur, at least not unless he'd been present himself.

This sort of loose-cannon stupidity got clients into a lot of needless trouble. Why bother hiring a lawyer, he said to Chris, in a distinctly nonavuncular tone, if you weren't even going to tell him you were planning to go off and have little private meetings with investigators who might well consider you a prime suspect in a murder case?

Osteen had no idea why the SBI had wanted the printing or the map, and Chris—who struck him as the kind of kid who you'd think was lying if you asked him on December 25 what day it was and he said, “Christmas”—said he couldn't imagine a map having any possible relevance to anything.

But now that a detective from Little Washington was calling to ask further questions about a map, Osteen could see that Chris was becoming—indeed, had already become—a target, perhaps
the
target of the probe. Another try for a useful polygraph result suddenly seemed a higher priority.

Osteen scheduled the second test for April 25. Chris stopped taking his Buspar well before it. Bonnie drove him to Charlotte. There was little conversation on the way, but, as she recalls it, he didn't seem at all tense. Indeed, she thought that his psychological state had begun to improve. He seemed much less depressed than he'd been in winter, much less apt to become tearful or to fly into a rage. He seemed, in fact, to be working and living normally. And Angela seemed better, too.

Despite all the harassment from, and lack of progress by, investigators, and despite the fact that the ache in her heart caused by Lieth's death had not subsided, and despite the fact that she and Angela and Chris continued to live in constant fear—their little home a virtual arsenal—Bonnie felt that they were not just surviving, but actually beginning to recover, bit by bit.

Chris's polygraph examination consisted of two questions considered “relevant” by the operator:

First, “Did you set up the murder of your stepfather?”

Second, “Do you know the name of the person who stabbed Lieth?”

To each, Chris answered, “No.”

The operator's report said, “Based upon my analysis of the nature and degree of the tracings on the three polygraph charts, it is my opinion that the psychophysiological responses of Mr. Pritchard, when answering the above relevant questions,
are not
indicative of deception.”

In other words, he passed. The operator gave Chris and Bonnie the good news immediately. Neither of them seemed to show much emotion. It came, of course, as no surprise to Bonnie. She'd never had a moment's doubt. But Bill Osteen, for one, was greatly relieved.

For the first time since her release from the hospital, Bonnie felt that matters were sufficiently under control so she could take a few days to be by herself, to get somewhere new, to feel something different. And so, at four-thirty on the morning of April 26, 1989, she climbed on a tour bus in Winston-Salem for a four-day trip to Disney World.

 

16

On Monday, May 1, the decision was made to confront Chris and his mother with the evidence the SBI and Washington police had already gathered.

“It wasn't going to be pretty,” Taylor said later, “but we'd decided to have it out with Bonnie and Chris.”

Young called Bonnie to say he would be coming to Winston-Salem the next day, bringing with him all the items of evidence she'd been wanting to see since early August. He told her he'd be wanting to speak to Chris and Angela, too. Eight o'clock tomorrow night, he told her, at the Forsyth County Sheriff's Department in Winston-Salem. They were going to lay all their cards on the table.

Without hesitation, Bonnie told him, “We'll be there.”

At ten forty-five the next morning, Lewis Young stepped out of SBI headquarters in Greenville and walked toward his car, where a young assistant district attorney named Keith Mason was waiting. On the off chance that, after seeing the case they were building against him, Chris might want to make a statement, the district attorney had wanted someone from his office standing by.

Young was only a few steps from the car when his beeper rang. The message was that an attorney from Greensboro named William Osteen had called his Little Washington office, trying to reach him.

“I'll be right back,” Young said to Keith Mason. Knowing he'd be on the road most of the day, Young decided to return the call before setting out on the trip. Having spent most of his career in eastern North Carolina, Young was not familiar with the name William Osteen. He called the Greensboro number.

* * *

The timing of the call was pure coincidence. Bill Osteen had had no idea that, even as he was trying to contact Lewis Young, the SBI agent was preparing to drive to Winston-Salem to try to obtain a confession from his client.

It had just seemed to Osteen—who knew nothing of any comparisons of printing samples—that since Chris had passed a private polygraph exam, the SBI test no longer loomed as a threat. In fact, if Chris passed it—and given the results from Charlotte, Osteen was confident that he would—investigators might finally cross him off their list of suspects.

And so he introduced himself to Young as an attorney who'd been retained “to represent Chris Pritchard concerning the polygraph.”

“It's my understanding,” Lewis Young said, “that Chris Pritchard doesn't want to take an SBI polygraph.”

“That's not necessarily so,” Osteen said.

“Well, good,” Young replied. “I'll ask him about it when I see him tonight.”

There was a brief silence.

“Tonight?” Osteen asked, sounding surprised.

“Yes,” Young said, but already with the sinking feeling that he'd said more than he should have. “I'm on my way to Winston-Salem right now. I'm interviewing Chris and his mother and his sister tonight.”

“Well, I'm sorry,” Osteen said, “but I can't be there tonight.”

* * *

All the way to Winston-Salem, Lewis Young stewed.
Young, you ran your big mouth off
, he told himself, repeating the thought aloud to Keith Mason. “I blew it,” he said. “I've screwed this one right into the ground.” Osteen hadn't come right out and said he was going to instruct Chris to cancel his interview, but Young was sure he would. “That lawyer,” he said, “is going to call that boy and tell him there's
no way
he's going to talk to us tonight.”

Keith Mason had to agree. Lewis Young might not have been familiar with the name, but Mason was. In fact, he'd been in law school at Chapel Hill with Osteen's son. He told Young that Bill Osteen was a former United States Attorney and one of the most respected and renowned lawyers in the state.

At five-ten
P
.
M
., as soon as he'd checked into his motel, Lewis Young called Bonnie.

She quickly gave him the answer he'd anticipated.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “but Chris won't be there tonight. His attorney, Mr. Osteen, does not want him interviewed unless Mr. Osteen can be present himself.”

“And how long,” Young asked, “has Mr. Osteen been involved in this case?”

“I retained him to represent Chris in January,” Bonnie said. “He was recommended by the attorney I retained then, Wade Smith.”

Wade Smith!
Young was staggered. “As soon as I heard that name,” he said later, “it rang all sorts of bells and dollar signs.” Young might not have been familiar with Bill Osteen, but every law enforcement officer in the state knew of Wade Smith. He was, quite simply, the biggest name there was in criminal law in North Carolina.

What in the hell, Young asked himself, are these victims doing with lawyers like Osteen and Wade Smith?

“You mean to tell me,” Young demanded of Bonnie, his temper rising fast, “that you've had Wade Smith and this fellow Osteen representing you and your family since
January!
”

“That's right,” she said. “One attorney for those of us who were present in the house at the time, and another for Christopher, who was not.”

“You never told me a damned thing about having
any
attorneys involved!”

“I didn't think it was any of your business,” she said mildly, adding that she'd long ago lost confidence in the ability of the Washington police and the SBI to find her husband's murderer. She said, in fact, that she'd come to fear they might be not only incompetent but dishonest, and that in order to cover up their own mistakes, they might make a serious accusation against an innocent person.

By now, Lewis Young was fuming in a way he seldom did. His charm and courtliness were nowhere in evidence. Bonnie had never told him about Osteen or Wade Smith. Instead, she'd played so dumb and helpless—jerking him around all year long—as she secretly retained two of the highest-caliber lawyers in the state.

Since January
Osteen had been in the case. Ever since Chris had backed out of the polygraph. Goddamn it.
Goddamn it!
She'd promised him that Chris would take that polygraph. Then, at the last minute, she'd changed her mind.

Now, she'd promised him that Chris would appear for an interview. But the very day it was to take place a lawyer whom she'd hired
in January
had intervened to prevent him from talking.

“I guess blood
is
thicker than water,” Young said.

“What do you mean by that remark?”

“I mean, you've known all along that Chris was involved and you're doing everything you can to cover for him.”

“I assure you,” Bonnie said, “that nothing could be further from the truth. Angela and I will see you, as planned, at eight
P
.
M
.”

Lewis Young slammed down the phone. So much for poor little Bonnie. Tonight, that little lady would see a different and much less pleasant side of Lewis Young's personality.

* * *

That night, as Bonnie entered the meeting room, she observed that Lewis Young had not come alone. He was accompanied not only by John Taylor, but by her nemeses of March—the Thin Man and the Doughboy.

Young, still incensed, jumped to his feet before she could even take a seat and picked up a large stack of papers.

“You know,” he said, in a much harsher voice than she'd ever heard him use before, “I came to Winston-Salem with every intention of going through this stuff with you, but now I'm not going to do it. As a matter of fact, I'm not ever going to discuss the case with you again.”

He threw the papers on a table. Then Newell began to talk. Or maybe Sturgell. Then Lewis Young again. They were coming at Bonnie from all sides. Chris was involved. They had evidence. He hadn't committed the murder himself—he wasn't even in the house at the time—but he was involved. He'd lied to them. They could prove it. No, they wouldn't discuss how they could prove it. They would have been happy to tell her if she hadn't gone out and hired attorneys. The presence of attorneys changed everything. It put her and the investigators on opposite sides of the fence. Since when did victims need attorneys?

Chris's involvement might have been innocent, they said. He might not even have realized he'd provided information that led to her husband's murder. But he realized it now and was lying. They were willing to make a deal with somebody, to plea-bargain, but it would only be with whoever came forward first. And the talk would have to be in the absence of attorneys. If Chris wouldn't talk to them without a lawyer present, they had no further interest in talking to Chris. They'd just go ahead and build their case against him.

Then they told her Chris was in danger. They called him a “weak link” who could lead them directly to the killer and said the killer had strong reason to want Chris quickly and permanently silenced. They said Bonnie and Angela were in danger, too.

“We're stepping up the pressure now,” one of them said. “We're starting to push a lot harder. We're closing in. Somebody could come after you at any time. If you don't have any protection, you'd better get some.”

This sounded to Bonnie very much like a threat—as if they were trying to scare her into capitulating. They did not succeed—bullying was not a tactic that would ever succeed with Bonnie—but they did make her both angrier and more frightened than she'd been since the previous July.

“I know for a fact,” she told them, “that Chris didn't do it. He had nothing at all to do with it. I have my own proof of this.”

They sneered at her. One of them said, oh, yeah, she must have arranged a private polygraph. For her poor little darling who was afraid to take a
real
polygraph test.

“You get what you pay for,” one of them said. “If you buy the polygraph, you can be sure you'll get the result you want. But it isn't worth a damned thing.”

Then they got even more personal. “You say you want the truth!” Lewis Young shouted, in a most uncharacteristic manner. “You say you want to find the guilty person! But that's only true as long as he's not your son!”

“That's not true,” Bonnie said, her own voice betraying more emotion than usual. “I want the guilty person in jail no matter who it is.”

But she couldn't help adding, somewhat desperately, “It's not Chris. I tell you again: Chris is not involved.”

And they told her again: the first person to come forward would be the only person with whom they'd deal. This might be Chris's last chance.

She told them again to call Mr. Osteen if they really felt they needed to talk to Chris.

They told her again that they would not deal with any lawyers. Then Lewis Young told her the meeting was over. He said he'd be in town overnight and left a number where she could reach him if Chris was willing to talk—without an attorney.

“It looks to me,” she said, her voice quavering, “that since you're not able to find out who really did it, you're going to try to make someone a scapegoat.”

She took the number, stuffed it into her purse, and left the office. Angela was waiting outside. Now, it seemed, they didn't even want to talk to Angela. Just Chris. And Chris only without a lawyer.

“Just remember,” Young called after her. “There are unknown people still out there. Unknown people who might try to kill you at any time. So take this as a warning: I'm formally advising you that your life is in jeopardy.”

“I cried all the way back to the car,” Bonnie said later. “I walked a few steps and then I couldn't see through my tears to walk. Angela thought I was going to pass out. She asked me what was wrong and I told her I'd tell her and Chris all about it when I got home.

“I was so upset myself that I don't remember how Chris reacted when I told him. I felt so desolate, lost, run over. I felt as if I'd been raped by the very people I'd been depending on.”

One thing she didn't feel was any doubt about Chris's innocence. She knew that her own son could never have wanted her beaten and stabbed, could never have wanted Lieth murdered.

At nine-forty
P
.
M
. she sat down and made notes of her recollection of the meeting, so that when she spoke to Wade Smith in the morning—which was the first thing she intended to do—she would be as organized as possible. The notes themselves, however, reflected not her analytic skills but the raw emotion of what she'd just been through. She wrote:

“I feel like I have just been raped by the law enforcement that I depend on to solve the murder of Lieth. What are my legal rights in obtaining the information these guys have collected? This dangling carrot (blackmail) has gone on for far too long. . . .

“By now I know that all the delays and blackmail used to this point are exactly that—
BLACKMAIL!
i.e. ‘After you take polygraph we will sit down & go over info we have.
Then
, after
Chris
takes polygraph—same. Then when Chris will not yet take polygraph they are still prepared to go over info. until Bill Osteen calls and says Chris will not be at meeting.

“My thoughts at this moment: these 4 men are probably feeling pretty good right now about how they must have unsettled me. They are probably sure I will call the number to reach Lewis Young. They're probably ‘laughing it up' over the victim they have just
emotionally raped!

“Sometime during this Stomp on Bonnie routine, I related to them that my options of a private investigation were destroyed along with all other evidence possibly remaining in my house. . . .

“Lewis accused me of not wanting the investigation to include my family. (‘You want to find the persons involved as long as it isn't a member of your family.') I told Lewis I wanted the
GUILTY
person/persons in jail, no matter who! I also told him again Chris was
not
involved.”

Now, Bonnie was alarmed in a way she had not been before. “They were so adamant,” she said, “so certain, that I thought maybe, somehow, without having any idea he was doing it, Chris
had
given someone the idea he wanted his family dead. I also worried that maybe, in a completely innocent way, he
had
drawn a map.