Cruel Doubt (27 page)

“We've just got to make sure she doesn't learn too much,” Osteen said.

“Yeah, but she's gonna be living with this guy again,” Vosburgh said. “We already know he's suicidal. We know they didn't do a damned thing to help him in the hospital, so he's just as bad off as when he went in. Even if he doesn't kill her, what do you think it will do to her if he goes home and kills himself?”

“And what do you think it will do to us,” Osteen responded, “when we have to tell her the reason he killed himself is because we wouldn't let him talk to her?”

“But goddamnit, Bill, we've got a duty to him, as our client, not to disclose anything that could impair his defense.”

Finally, Osteen said, “Vos, if they covered this one in law school, I must have been absent that day.”

“Bill, if they'd covered this one, I would have transferred to divinity school the next morning.”

 

25

* * *

Chris was released as scheduled on August 23 and did no immediate harm to anyone. Two days later, in fact, he helped Bonnie bring Angela to the small college in southwestern Virginia where she'd enrolled for the fall semester.

To Billy Royal, who saw him almost daily through late August, Chris seemed dejected, said he'd been drinking incessantly since his discharge from the hospital, and displayed “notable mood swings.” He said that if he did not have legal problems he could envision a future for himself in which he'd “write a successful novel, have a big house, a fast car.” He also said, “You have no idea how hard it is for me to live with my mother and have to keep lying to her.”

On August 29, Dr. Royal asked Bonnie to meet with him, thinking that getting to know the mother might give him better insight into the son.

* * *

Billy Royal had white hair, a scraggly beard, a shambling walk, and when speaking—as Bonnie had already noticed—a tendency to mutter and on occasion, to drift from what seemed the point. Once one got past this appearance of distraction, however, one found that he possessed a reassuring calmness, and that, even after thirty years in practice, he had a quick and strong sympathy for those who came, or were sent, to seek his help.

“I believe in a goodness in all people,” he once said. What he prized most highly in an individual was “a sense of humor in this crazy world. Nobody understands it.” He added that most people who were described as being evil “are usually just district attorneys.”

Dr. Royal had grown up in the tiny Sampson County village of Salemburg, in the south-central part of the state. Salemburg was so small that the streets didn't even have names. Its center had been dominated by a mighty oak tree, in the shade of which old men sat and played checkers. On May Day, girls and young women did actually dance around a maypole, and the biggest event of the year was the Mother's Day parade. If Norman Rockwell had stumbled upon the town, he would have thought they were putting him on.

Billy Royal's family were merchants. They owned almost every business in the town: the general store, the hardware store, the dry goods store, and the grocery store.

He could empathize with some of the stresses Chris had faced in going from Little Washington to NC State, because when he'd left Salemburg at the age of sixteen, bound for Wake Forest University, he'd lasted only a year before dropping out to join the Navy. He wound up as a hospital corpsman, stationed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where, on the seventeenth floor, he would occasionally see President Harry Truman dropping in to visit a recuperating senator.

After the Navy, he returned to Wake Forest and earned his degree. Then, unsure of what to do with his life, he went back to Salemburg and ran the general store for four years, selling “everything from bras to pork and beans.”

Young men in Salemburg who eyed more distant horizons were generally given three aspirations from which to choose: medicine, the law, or the ministry. Billy Royal knew he didn't want to be a lawyer or a minister, so he drifted into medicine by default.

He did his internship in San Francisco, his psychiatric residency in Chapel Hill, and then, in 1963, with a partner, opened the first private psychiatric practice in the city of Durham.

A first marriage had ended after almost twenty years, and he'd recently married again, to a much younger woman who was also a doctor. From the first marriage, he had four grown children, with whom he stayed in close and affectionate contact, and from the second, a baby daughter.

He was a great fan of the ballet and of the works of William Faulkner, saying that, in Faulkner, he liked “that Southern craziness and weird behavior.”

He was also licensed to fly a single-engine airplane and had spent thousands of hours in the air over his native state, but when traveling to New York City for a psychiatric convention, he would be more likely to take the bus than to fly commercially, even if it meant changing in Pittsburgh, “because people on buses seem to have better stories to tell.”

On the evening of August 29, Bonnie found him “a strange bird” and said, “I did not relate well to him at all. He irritated me. He gave me the feeling he was putting
me
under a microscope, asking all sorts of personal questions that I considered irrelevant to what was happening with Chris.

“For example, he dwelled on Steve Pritchard and our divorce. I thought he was looking at me as another potential patient for himself. He even asked me if I thought I needed a psychiatrist, which was a question I considered quite offensive. I can't say I liked him, and that made me wonder if he was really going to be able to help Chris.”

* * *

The next day, for the first time in weeks, Bonnie saw Jean Spaulding again.

The session began with Bonnie saying she and Chris had been able to go to the beach together and that they “had a very quiet time for a week.” Only after that did she mention, with no notable inflection in her voice, that he'd been kept in jail for six weeks and that, since his release, he'd spent eight days in a psychiatric facility, due to “depression.”

“Then,” Dr. Spaulding said, “she said a boy had confessed. At this point, she didn't use the name. Said a boy had confessed that Chris had said, ‘I hate my mom and dad. Let's kill them and we'll be rich.' She did not believe that. That fell into the category of almost extraneous information. There was no way that she could believe that Chris was capable of doing that, or saying that.”

* * *

Eric Caldwell, the shy and bespectacled computer whiz who had become Chris's closest friend, spent the Sunday night of Labor Day weekend at Chris's house. “We stayed up talking until five o'clock in the morning,” Eric said later. “The crime was definitely on his mind. He made a lot of suggestions and I made a lot of inferences, but nothing was said directly. But he told me without telling me. By the time I fell asleep on Labor Day morning, I knew he had done it.”

On Monday night, Chris was explicit. He called Eric at home and told him all he had already admitted in Bill Osteen's office, and all he had told Billy Royal.

He said that, as he spoke, he was sitting on his bed, holding his loaded gun in his hand.

“I'm lying to my mother,” he said. “I can't tell her the truth. What reason do I have to go on living? Even if I don't kill myself, I'll get the death penalty. Why wait for them to do it to me if I can do it to myself right now and spare my mother all the extra agony? Not to mention the expense.”

Eric had talked people out of suicide before. He'd also contemplated the act himself, on one occasion, and had rejected it, later writing a poem about the experience of coming so close.

He stayed on the phone with Chris for more than two hours. “You've read my poem,” he said. “And when you read it, you agreed that nothing was more stupid than suicide. So how can you be thinking of it now?”

“You don't understand,” Chris said. “It's my goddamned lawyer. He won't let me tell my mother the truth. And I can't go on dealing with her if I can't tell her. The fucking lawyer isn't giving me any choice.”

* * *

On Tuesday, Chris had a regular seven
P
.
M
. appointment with Dr. Royal. He told his psychiatrist that over the weekend he'd confessed his guilt to his best friend. Then he said he'd also called an ex-girlfriend and had told her.

Dr. Royal asked if finally telling the truth to close friends had made him feel any better.

“No,” Chris said. “But it didn't before, either.” Then he explained that during his eight-day stay at Memorial he had confessed his guilt to three other patients.

Well, Billy Royal said to himself, it's like I kept telling them. The lid was bound to blow off.

After Chris left, Dr. Royal called Bill Osteen. This, he said, was where the strategy of keeping Bonnie in the dark had gotten them: Chris had confessed to at least five people already, three of whom were mental patients.

For Osteen, this might have been the worst night of them all. In August, he'd obtained an admission of guilt from his client that would severely limit his options at trial. Then, in order to preserve some hope of mounting a successful defense, he'd stuck fast to his insistence that Chris not be permitted to tell Bonnie the truth, even when told that his position might be endangering the lives of both mother and son.

It had not been an easy time for Bill Osteen. At no point had he been sure his course was correct. So far, both suicide and homicide had been averted, but now the crazy little coot had started confessing to boyfriends, girlfriends, and
total strangers from a mental institution!

Any one of those people could pick up the phone at any moment and call the SBI or the Washington police or the Beaufort County district attorney's office and—just out of a sense of civic duty—report what Chris had told them.

Then where would they all be? Chris would be on death row, Bonnie would probably be in a mental hospital herself—if not a funeral parlor—and Osteen would spend the rest of his life blaming himself for letting the case, the client, the whole mess, spin so far out of control.

He spent a near-sleepless night and arose thinking perhaps he should withdraw from the case before any more damage was done. Let someone else step in and face the hard decisions that still lay ahead. He had given this his best effort, but maybe, for this client, for these circumstances, he was not, in fact, the right man.

He placed a call to Jim Vosburgh. “You sitting down, Vos?” he asked.

These were words that, coming from Osteen, Vosburgh had already learned to dread.

Osteen broke the news about Chris's five confessions. “And these are only the five we know about so far,” he said. “There could be more. By the time trial comes, he could be confessing to the jurors while we're up there arguing that the State has failed to prove its case.”

“You know, Bill,” Vosburgh said, “there are only two things wrong with that boy. He's got a loose screw and a fat lip and both keep running all the time.”

Yet, after another long and anguished conversation, they decided they couldn't walk away.

No matter how much they disliked Chris, no matter how much disgust they felt for his crime, no matter how dismayed they were by his current self-destructive behavior, no matter how much fear they had about what each new day might bring, neither lawyer felt comfortable with the prospect of abandoning a young man who was in such obvious, and perhaps terminal, distress.

Nor could they just walk away from Bonnie. It was bad enough that they had kept the truth from her and were still doing so. It would be worse now to leave her all alone.

“The bottom line,” Osteen said later, “was that, ethically, I didn't think I could justify leaving a client worse off than he'd be if I continued to represent him. I knew I was no miracle worker and I knew I was making decisions that could prove to be terribly wrong, and that if they were wrong, they could have truly awful consequences. But at least I, and Jim Vosburgh, knew Bonnie and Chris.

“Maybe we didn't really
know
them, but at least we'd had experience dealing with them, and we were familiar—all too familiar—with the case. And this was one that could blow up in our faces at any moment, in any one of a dozen ways.

“So how could we turn everything over to somebody brand new, who didn't know anything? This wasn't a situation where a new lawyer would have the luxury of a few weeks or months to get up to speed. Chris
was
a time bomb, and he had already started to go off.

“If I'd walked away, and then things had blown up completely, I would have wondered for the rest of my life if staying in might have made a difference. In the end, I think Jim and I both decided that we owed Bonnie—and even Chris—the benefit of our knowledge, at least, if not our wisdom. But there wasn't one day that passed, then or later, when both of us didn't wish we'd taken the other path.”

* * *

Chris told Billy Royal he'd started confessing because he'd needed to see what would happen if people he cared about knew the truth. Would he be shunned, or would he be accepted despite his crime? As Dr. Royal saw it, these first confessions had been a rehearsal for the moment when he would finally be permitted to tell Bonnie.

More strongly than ever, Dr. Royal felt that that moment could no longer be delayed. The situation had reached such a point of crisis, he told Osteen, that, even contrary to the lawyer's instructions, he might feel bound by his own code of ethics and professional responsibility to ease the psychological pressures that threatened to destroy his patient by orchestrating a scenario in which Chris would admit to Bonnie what he had done.

It is Dr. Royal's recollection that Osteen called back at three-fifteen that afternoon, Wednesday, September 6, to say he agreed that the moment for full disclosure had arrived, legal consequences notwithstanding. He added, however, that he felt it was his responsibility to break the news to Bonnie first, and that he would do so the next morning in his office.

Dr. Royal then arranged to see Bonnie and Chris separately the next afternoon and evening, saying he also wanted to meet with them together at eight
P
.
M
. In that joint session, he felt, with the truth finally on the table, he could assess their reactions and perhaps try to help them with the task of going forward under what would be a new and—for Bonnie, at least—appalling set of circumstances.

He would see Bonnie first, so he could gauge her reaction to Osteen's disclosures. He also wanted to tell her how Chris had been stricken, almost fatally, with guilt over what he'd done, and to suggest to her that full and unquestioning forgiveness—if she was capable of it—would be the greatest gift she could ever give her son.