Cruel Doubt (24 page)

She'd been the victim of a vicious attack, in which she'd been badly hurt. She was the widow of a murdered man and mother to a son charged with the murder. Then there was the unresolved question of Angela, her other child, who, while not accused of a crime, was still viewed with suspicion by some. Lastly, Bonnie herself had been a suspect.

* * *

At their first meeting, Dr. Spaulding asked Bonnie to talk about herself and her personal history, deliberately leaving the question open-ended. It soon became apparent that with Bonnie, even more than with many patients, it was not just what was said but what was omitted—not what was emphasized, but what was glossed over—that offered the windows through which insights could be gleaned.

Bonnie started by saying that in 1966 she'd gotten married. (In fact, it had been in 1967.) She did not mention her first husband's name, referring to him only as “a man from Lexington whom I knew for eight or ten months.” She said he was much younger than she was, and “very immature.”

She mentioned the births of Chris and Angela and then said that in July of 1971 (in fact, it had been 1972) her husband had decided to “move out” and “leave the marriage.” She said that after the divorce she kept up payments on both of their cars because she “did not want to hurt her credit rating.” She said her ex-husband offered very little in the way of child support, and she stressed that the children had been
her
responsibility.

She talked about meeting Lieth, about how attractive she had found him, about how he had seemed “unattainable.” In describing their courtship, she became quite demure, almost to the point of blushing when she talked of how they'd started spending weekends together. She talked in great detail about the progression of the relationship, obviously more comfortable reminiscing about a happier time than confronting any one of her traumas. The marriage, the move to Washington, her job history: it came to seem that Bonnie would get through the entire session without even alluding to the events that had brought it about in the first place.

Eventually, to “nudge” her, Jean Spaulding asked what had happened to Lieth. Bonnie said he'd been “killed.” That was it. Not murdered, “killed.” “She could have been describing how he'd been killed in an auto accident,” Dr. Spaulding said. Rushing right past the event, Bonnie went on to emphasize that on January 1 of the following year, Lieth would have been “fully vested” in his company's pension plan. Then she described Lieth's family history—his parents, his uncle, the stresses caused by their illnesses—but always, in Dr. Spaulding's view, going “around the edges . . . leading up and then going away.”

Dr. Spaulding asked Bonnie about her own parents. She said her father had been a bricklayer who'd had to retire when high blood pressure caused nausea and sweats. She described him as a “very strong man.” Her mother, on the other hand, had been a “tearful” and “highly opinionated” person when Bonnie was growing up. It seemed obvious to Jean Spaulding that Bonnie felt much closer to her father than to her mother, even describing herself as being more like him in her ability to “get things done.” She said neither tobacco nor alcohol had been permitted inside her home, and that she'd led a “secluded and mild” life while growing up.

Then Bonnie described each step of her life after leaving home, going in a big circle that led back to her marriage to Lieth. “There was always a lot of warmth from Bonnie, tremendous affect, whenever she talked about Lieth,” Dr. Spaulding later recalled. “She got much closer to tears when talking about him.” Dr. Spaulding asked her to say more about her children. She said her son had graduated from high school two years earlier. Quickly, Bonnie moved to the subject of Chris's arrest. What seemed to upset her most was that John Crone had held a press conference. “Agitated” was the word Dr. Spaulding used to describe Bonnie as she talked about the “injustice” of the way the arrest had been handled. Like Osteen and Vosburgh before her, Jean Spaulding was struck by how much more distressed Bonnie seemed about the process of the arrest than by what the arrest itself might imply.

The session ended with Bonnie still not having directly stated that Lieth had been murdered, or that Chris had been charged with the crime.

* * *

That same afternoon, Tom Brereton turned up at the small house on the south side of Winston-Salem in which Bonnie and Angela were living.

Walking toward the front door, he was afraid he'd come to the wrong place. This ought to have been the home of Lieth Von Stein's parents, who had left their son more than a million dollars, money that now belonged to Bonnie. He found it hard to comprehend that, given such wealth, she could choose to live in a house so small and plain. And why had Von Stein's parents, with all their money, lived like this?

The one-story house was so unimposing and the neighborhood so nondescript that Brereton kept looking at the piece of paper on which he'd written the address, concerned that he'd made a mistake. He himself, even with four daughters to raise on an FBI agent's salary, lived in a fine brick colonial on a shady street in a section of Greensboro that, compared to this, looked like the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

He rang the bell and Angela answered. He introduced himself, explaining that he was the investigator who'd been hired by Mr. Osteen to work on Chris's defense. She looked at him as if she didn't know what he was talking about or if she knew, didn't care. She said her mother wasn't home. He said he wasn't looking for her mother. He was there to copy some materials that Chris had stored in his computer.

Specifically, he said, he wanted the description and biography of the Dungeons & Dragons character Chris had been developing through many months of playing the game. Angela looked at him as if he were speaking a foreign language.

It was not Tom Brereton's style, when working a case, to spend time on unnecessary pleasantries, but this girl looked so listless and befuddled that he felt compelled to say
something
that would establish some human connection. So he said it sure was hot out.

In response to this innocuous remark, Angela's blank expression vanished, replaced—quite suddenly and remarkably—by a look of bitterness. She said, yeah, it sure was hot, but it wouldn't be so bad if her mother weren't so cheap that she wouldn't even put air-conditioning in the house. “Even the cats live better than we do,” Angela said.

Now it was Brereton's turn to look confused. Angela gestured toward the backyard. “My mother built a house out there for the cats,” Angela said. “She air-conditioned
that
, but we're only people, so we have to sit here and sweat.”

Later, when Brereton described the events of the day to Bill Osteen, he said he thought they ought to pay attention to Angela's attitude. First, they'd seen Chris treat his mother as if she were some sort of incompetent servant. Now, even to a complete stranger such as Brereton, Angela had spoken of Bonnie with powerful resentment.

To Tom Brereton's well-worn eye, something was distinctly not right in the chemistry of what remained of this family. The thought he could not escape was that maybe both of Bonnie's children were disappointed by the fact that she was still alive.

Alive, and in control of $2 million, and—except for her willingness to pay for Chris's defense—apparently not eager to spend any of it to upgrade either her own or her children's standard of living.

What these kids were angry about, Brereton suggested, was that neither of them had been given what they might have considered rightfully theirs. Sure, Chris's friends at NC State thought his mother a soft touch when it came to money, but as far as
real
money went, or any significant change in lifestyle arising from the fact that Lieth had become a millionaire—there had been none.

Where were the new cars? Where were the vacations in the Caribbean? Where were the new wardrobes, or for that matter, where was the new house? There was nothing wrong with Smallwood, or with their house on Lawson Road, but nobody would call it luxurious.

Forget right or wrong, forget whether or not, in Lieth's mind or in Bonnie's mind, the children had done anything to earn it. During the first six or seven years of their lives, there were nights when those kids had gone to bed without enough food in their bellies, and even when they did eat, too often it was beans or macaroni. The way they saw it—or might have seen it—once a million dollars came their way, at least some of it should have been
spent
, not squirreled away in some damned trust fund or used to buy a bunch of stocks and bonds that none of your friends would ever know you owned.

Lieth had been so stingy that there might as well not even have been an inheritance. And even now, Brereton said, the kids had gotten less out of the deal than had the cats.

* * *

The day's real find, however—or, at least, it would have been a find if Brereton had still been working in law enforcement—had come from Chris Pritchard's computer. It was the biography and description of Chris's own Dungeons & Dragons character, to whom he'd given the name Dimson the Wanderer.

To Brereton—who had come into the case knowing no more about Dungeons & Dragons than had Osteen, and who had to keep reminding himself that he was supposed to be working to
help
Chris Pritchard, not to hang him—what popped up on the computer screen when he hit the keys Chris told him to was not merely bizarre, it was chilling.

There was, first, a section titled “Background Information,” which said:

 

Dimson began her life in the underworld of the Drow. But because of an unfortunate accident involving a cave-in, she was doomed to live the life of an upper-worlder.

She was found by a family of thieves and she was nurtured and taught the ways of the upper-world. She was hidden well by the family so that she would not be ostracized and was taught the ancient art of the disguise. She swore that no other living soul would ever see her as she truly was.

She became a master at disguise to the degree that she could appear to be any kind of elf, male or female. She does not talk much as she does not want anybody to be able to tell if she is female or not. The times that she does allow others to know that she is female gives her the advantage because they will think her weak. She does not like physical combat but she is definitely able to hold her own. She prefers to attack the enemy from behind to optimize her backstabbing ability. She also does not like to be cornered, for when she is she goes into a fighting frenzy and will only stop when her opponents are dead.

Her only disadvantage comes during daylight hours. Unless there is heavy cloud cover, she will not travel freely in daylight. No one living in the upper-world has ever seen her without a disguise on, though she prefers to wear her cloak. If anyone dares to remove her hood when she is not disguised, they are subject to a nasty and painful death. If they escape from her, they should fear her revenge, for she has many names.

She has no friends and she does not care to have them. She prefers solitude and quiet when she is not out looking for a way to destroy all thieves' guilds.

If either Brereton or Osteen had been a psychologist skilled at interpreting the underlying meaning of a fantasy, he might have been intrigued by any number of elements contained in this description of Dimson.

There was the confusion of sexual identity, the “nasty and painful death” that would befall anyone who penetrated her disguise; the “unfortunate accident involving a cave-in” in her early years, which could be seen as a reference to the collapse of young Chris's life when his real father left; of her being “doomed to live the life of an upper-worlder,” and her determination that “no other living soul would ever see her as she truly was.”

Even the name itself: Dimson. Dim-son. Dim son. Was that not what Lieth had made it clear he considered Chris to be? Or, at least, was that not how Chris had come to perceive himself?

Of course, neither Brereton nor Osteen was a psychologist. Like Bonnie, they tended more toward direct, literal interpretations of data. And on that level, they saw something that they did not like at all.

There was a section in the description of Dimson entitled “Special abilities and spells.” A lot of it was jargon that would have meaning only in the context of the game. Such things as, “may fight with two weapons without penalty . . . infravision to 12″ . . . detect secret doors . . . can surprise on a 1-4 chance if well ahead of the party and 1-2 if a door must be opened: can only be surprised on a 1 in 8.” Weird things, the kind of stuff that, as far as Brereton and Osteen were concerned, a healthy and well-balanced young man would not be engaged by.

But one Dimson trait virtually leaped off the page. Included in the “special ability” category was the capacity to tell an “undetectable lie.”

 

23

Bonnie saw Jean Spaulding again on July 7. The psychiatrist began this session by asking Bonnie how what had happened so far had affected
her
. Bonnie said, very calmly, that, well, the previous November and December had been difficult. She'd been afraid to leave her house after dark. She'd had a “fear of nightfall.” But then she had simply made herself go out. She said she'd used her father's philosophy of how to get through things, which was: “You get through by getting through.” She had decided to confront her fear, and once she'd done so, things had improved.

It was an incomplete answer to a very small part of a very big question, but Dr. Spaulding didn't press. Already, she had learned that Bonnie would tell you what she wanted to. She would try to be scrupulous about the accuracy of what she said, but she was not inclined to plumb emotional depths.

During the fall, Bonnie continued, “they”—meaning law enforcement authorities—had, for a time, considered her a suspect. Here, Dr. Spaulding got a first glimpse of something that hinted at irritation, but wondered, “Where was the anger?” Her husband had been killed, she'd nearly died herself, then she'd learned that
she
was a suspect? One might have expected a stronger emotion than irritation.

Next, Bonnie described her own injuries. In talking about them, Bonnie “skipped over
all
emotion.” Nonetheless, the description was chilling. To Jean Spaulding, it was also reassuring. This was the first time she had heard the full extent of Bonnie's wounds, and the description laid to rest any concerns that she may have had about Bonnie's possible involvement in the crime.

Bonnie explained how, after she'd gone to her parents' house, she'd had problems with fluid in her chest and the doctor had wanted to put her back in the hospital. Bonnie had adamantly refused. Now, she was quite blunt in stating that her forcefulness had arisen from “fear.” She had been terrified that something awful would happen to her if she went back. She said she knew it wasn't rational—and for Bonnie, this was a considerable admission—but she'd had a deep fear that she would
die
if she was readmitted to the hospital.

“Hearing her say this,” Dr. Spaulding observed later, “convinced me of the level of trauma she'd been through.”

Then Bonnie began talking about how someone named Lewis Young had decided back in August that Chris was guilty, and that there had been a map and she'd asked Chris, but he'd said he didn't remember drawing any map.

It was coming out in a rush now and was quite confusing to Dr. Spaulding, who was not yet familiar with the details of the case. She interrupted with a question about the map. Bonnie explained that, for months, she'd been hearing rumors that a partially burned map, supposedly drawn by Chris, had been found somewhere near the scene, along with bloodstained clothes and a knife. More recently, she'd been told that the boy who confessed had said he'd been only the driver.

Bonnie still wasn't sure whether she'd seen one, or maybe two intruders in her room, but she was sure that the attacker was “not my son.”

She emphasized this: “not—my—son.”

Angela had been asleep down the hall, and her son had been asleep in his dorm in Raleigh.

She mentioned regaining consciousness in the hospital and seeing Chris—who she again referred to not by name but as “my son”—standing at her bedside, holding her hand and crying.

Then she described her injuries again. She talked of frontal blows, the knife wound in her chest, losing two pints of blood. She said she'd had “memory deficits” and would find herself lapsing into “daydreamlike states.”

As the session drew to a close, she started talking about the polygraph. How
demeaning
the experience had been. How, three days later, she'd suffered an attack of shingles around her eye. Even though Bonnie had passed with the highest score possible, Dr. Spaulding noted, “She was
very
upset about the polygraph.”

* * *

On August 1, six weeks after his arrest, having read many science fiction books and having smoked innumerable cigarettes, Chris Pritchard was released from the Beaufort County jail on bond of $300,000, posted by his mother.

At his hearing, District Attorney Norton, a stocky man with a prominent mustache and a painfully slow way of talking, acknowledged for the first time that the prosecution would not contend that Chris had taken part in the murder, or even that he'd been present at the scene.

Norton reiterated, however, that the state intended to seek the death penalty for Chris, a comment that led to press speculation that Chris would be tried for murder for hire: that the allegation would be that he'd paid Upchurch and Henderson to kill Lieth, and presumably, Bonnie, too.

Bonnie met Chris at the county magistrate's office in mid-afternoon. Outside, the press, such as it was in Beaufort County, had assembled.

“It was a ridiculous scene,” Bonnie said later. “Cameramen tripping all over each other, sticking microphones under Chris's face, asking him if he was glad to be out.” Neither Bonnie nor Chris made any statement or answered any questions.

Instead, as the Washington
Daily News
reported, “nattily dressed in charcoal gray slacks, a light gray sportcoat, white shirt and purple print tie, [and] arm in arm with his mother . . . Pritchard crossed Market Street, with lawyer James Vosburgh leading the way.”

That night, Bonnie, Angela, and Chris shared a room at the Holiday Inn. Some might have thought it strange that a young man of Chris's age would sleep in a bed next to his mother and sister, but neither he, Bonnie, nor Angela saw anything unusual about it. Bonnie, in fact, felt the need for physical closeness, even while she and her children were separated by an emotional gulf.

“I was still scared,” she said later. “Not only for my own safety, but for theirs. The closer we were, the more comfortable I felt. And even if we weren't having deep conversations, at some level we were still
clinging
to each other.”

The next day, Bonnie was back in court to attend the bond hearing for James Upchurch. Bond for Moog was set at $500,000, and unable to raise it, he was returned to the Beaufort County jail.

Bonnie had gone to the hearing not because she was concerned about the outcome—Vosburgh had already assured her that there was no way Upchurch could raise the money needed for his release—but because she wanted, for the first time, to see this person who had been accused of murdering her husband and of trying to kill her. She thought she might experience some shock of recognition.

But there was nothing. If anything, there was a shock of
non
recognition. Upchurch was tall and skinny, with unusually narrow shoulders and a notably long and slender neck.

She did not see Neal Henderson because he'd already been released at an unpublicized hearing held earlier, in a different county.

* * *

The following day, August 3, Bonnie and Chris drove back to Winston-Salem. After only one night at home, Bonnie drove to Ocean Isle Beach, at the southern end of the North Carolina shoreline. This was the beach to which she and Lieth had always gone. She'd rented a three-bedroom condominium for a week. Chris and Vince Hamrick drove down together. A day or two later, Angela and Donna Brady arrived.

“We just relaxed and went our separate ways,” Bonnie said. “We'd meet occasionally for meals. There was no talk about Chris's situation. After six weeks in jail, the last thing in the world the poor boy needed was to have everybody harping on his problems. This was a restorative time, a time for rest and rehabilitation.”

One by one, as the week drew to a close, the others left. Alone, Bonnie walked the beach for miles.

With Chris free on bond, with Bill Osteen firmly in control, and with as capable an investigator as Tom Brereton on the case, Bonnie thought it was not illogical to hope that better days might truly lie ahead.

* * *

Bill Osteen's law office was on the third floor of the Gate City Savings and Loan building in downtown Greensboro. It had neither the quaint and rustic charm of Jim Vosburgh's narrow poolroom annex in Little Washington, nor the opulence of Wade Smith's Raleigh headquarters. Plain and serviceable, it was quite obviously a place where business was conducted without frills or fanfare, by a man who knew his business well.

While Bonnie, Chris, and Angela were at the beach, Bill Osteen spent a great deal of time in this office, thinking about what to do next. Chris was no longer a potential suspect, he was now an accused. And not too many months down the road, a trial would come. A trial that could result in Chris's being sentenced to death.

As uneasy as he was about much of what he already knew about Chris, Bill Osteen was even more troubled by how much he still did not know. “There were some gaps,” Osteen said later. “I thought we had to press harder to get to the complete truth, because I didn't believe we had been there.”

Among defense attorneys—even defense attorneys whose abilities and ethics are beyond question, as in the case of Bill Osteen—there is debate over how hard a lawyer must press his client in an effort to obtain the full truth before trial.

Some argue that while an ethical lawyer cannot let a client take the stand and give sworn testimony that the lawyer knows to be false, in many instances it is in the client's best interest for his lawyer not to be overinformed. In the gray area between certain knowledge and reasonable doubt much strategic maneuvering of the sort necessary to best serve the client can take place. Surely, the one thing a criminal defense lawyer does
not
want to do is come right out and ask a client whether he's guilty, let alone try to make him confess.

Advocates of this approach contend that it is the job of plenty of people on the other side of the aisle—with the full resources of the State at their disposal—to try to demonstrate a client's guilt. And that, no matter what his personal view of the evidence—or his personal feelings about the client—the defense attorney has a clear and compelling obligation not to do the prosecutor's job.

Bill Osteen was not a member of this school. God, family, justice, and truth: these were the cornerstones of Osteen's life. The son of a federal probation officer, younger brother of a West Point graduate who rose to the rank of major general, himself attracted to FBI service, then later, for five years, the chief federal prosecutor for all central North Carolina, Bill Osteen was, by temperament, training, and religious belief, more comfortable with black and white than shades of gray.

Speaking of himself and his colleagues in the firm of Osteen & Adams, he said, “We would never, ever take a case in which we did not try to get at the truth ahead of time. We would never, ever just turn our backs on an area because we didn't want to know the answers. We just don't operate that way. If we're going to represent somebody, we're going to want to know the truth.”

Not only did Osteen see this as the moral approach to the practice of law, he'd come to believe, after years of work as both prosecutor and defense attorney, that it also carried with it practical advantages.

Regarding Chris, he said, “We were going to have to make a decision whether to recommend that he go on the stand. In order to make that decision, we had to know what the answers were going to be. And we have a feeling that there is no U.S. attorney we know of, and no state prosecutor, who can ask tougher preparing questions than our office does, in order to get people where they ought to be so they can protect themselves in questionable areas; so that they have answers that are not only truthful, but sound reasonable when they come out. It's often the case that you can give a truthful answer, but the doggone thing sounds so preposterous. We don't want to be caught short, and we don't want our client caught short.

“So we really do grill our clients as if one of us is the prosecutor. All of it is geared toward, ‘When you get through answering our questions, you need have no fear that any prosecutor is going to trap you.' We do that every time we have a case. And in Chris's case, there were some glaring weaknesses.

“For that reason, we wanted to make sure Chris had answers. Sometimes, you have to push hard on somebody to get the right thing done. We felt like, if we could break through and get to the truth, it could help Chris.”

And also, perhaps, help his mother. For this was the other, less typical, element involved in Bill Osteen's representation of Chris. He was the client, but she was his mother, she was paying the bills, someone had already tried to kill her once, and Osteen felt—as had Bonnie's brother months before—a moral duty in regard to her personal safety.

“There was,” he said later, “a side to this that was gnawing at us from the standpoint of, ‘Here's Chris, with his mother over there, and we've got to make sure we're not protecting somebody who should not be protected.' So we really did give him a good going over.”

To make sure it was good, Osteen brought Tom Brereton in to handle much of the questioning. It was, as Osteen said later that day to Bill Junior, “time to shake the tree and see what falls out of the branches.”

The danger, of course, is that if too much falls out, it can make a big mess on the ground.

* * *

The session began at nine-thirty Monday morning, August 14, the day after Bonnie got back from the beach.

“We began,” Osteen said, “thinking Chris was going to be able to give us truthful answers; answers that really did make sense. But as we got into it, things didn't make quite as much sense. There began to be more questions in my mind. So, then, we sort of zeroed in.”

But it was Tom Brereton's recollection that the intent from the start had been not merely to shake the tree, but to uproot it.

“Bill had told me to go at him,” Brereton said later. “So I came in that morning fully intending to break him. My intention was to get him to confess. From the first day I saw him in jail, I knew I could take him up or down attitudinally. His character was no stronger than a piece of paper. Once he realized he wasn't floating above it all, in total control, there was nothing to the real Chris Pritchard. Maybe Dimson the Wanderer could tell an undetectable lie, but Chris Pritchard wasn't going to be able to bullshit me.”