Cruel Doubt (3 page)

She made no reply, but as instructed, walked downstairs.

“She didn't seem curious,” Sparrow would later say. “She didn't appear to have any emotion.”

Within minutes, Tetterton came down and spoke to her. “Your mother's been hurt,” he said. “I don't know how bad.” Then he said he thought that Lieth was dead.

Later, he would recall her reaction: “To her mother's situation, she was real calm. To her stepfather, it was slight tears in her eyes, but she was real calm.”

He asked if she had heard or seen any of what had happened upstairs. She said no, she'd been sound asleep until Edwards had come into her room and turned on the light.

Tetterton then asked if, under the circumstances, there was someone—a family member or friend—whom she might want to call and ask to come over.

“Can I call my boyfriend?” she asked.

“Sure,” Tetterton said, “go ahead.”

As she walked toward the kitchen, Tetterton noticed the cats. There seemed to be cats everywhere, running all over the downstairs. Later, when they were all rounded up, there were thirteen. Thirteen cats and a rooster.

When police and rescue personnel had first arrived at the house, they found the cord that connected the kitchen telephone to its receiver disconnected. An emergency medical technician had plugged it back in, so he could call the hospital.

From that phone, Angela called a friend of hers named Andrew Arnold, who lived only about two miles away.

Awakened from a sound sleep himself, and surprised to be hearing from Angela at that hour, Arnold recalled her saying, “Mom and Lieth have just been stabbed and beaten. Can you come over?” He said he would come right away.

She also called her brother, Chris, who was attending summer session at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, about a hundred miles away. She told him essentially what she'd told Andrew Arnold. Then she went back and sat in the living room, amid the cats.

The stretcher bearing her mother was rushed down the stairs and out to the ambulance that waited in the driveway.

Angela watched in silence. Her detachment struck Officer Sparrow as so unusual that he referred to it in the report he wrote later that day: “The young lady seemed to be unemotional concerning the entire traumatic incident. She was never emotional or curious as to what had taken place.”

When Andrew Arnold arrived, he went right to her, put his arm around her, and hugged her. He was her friend, but they did not have a romantic involvement.

Later, he would recall, “There might have been a few tears or a snuffly nose, but she did not cry.”

A policeman said they wanted her to go to the station and make a statement. She walked out of the house without even putting on her shoes. She rode to the station in a patrol car, with Andrew following.

All she could tell them was that she didn't know anything because she'd been asleep the whole time. She wasn't sure how long the detective talked to her. Maybe half an hour. When he was done, Andrew gave her a ride to the hospital. Still barefoot, she walked into the emergency room, looking for her mother.

Bonnie was conscious, with doctors working over her. She told Angela to go back to the house and make sure she gathered up the cats.

* * *

When the phone rang, just before five
A
.
M
., in room 611B of Lee Dorm on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, nobody answered immediately.

Chris Pritchard had been up until three-thirty, drinking beer and playing cards. He'd drunk too much beer. The phone rang and rang, until his roommate, who'd drunk less and who'd gone to bed earlier, finally answered it. He fell back to sleep as soon as he handed Chris the phone.

Angela was calling. Chris listened in silence to what she said. As soon as he hung up, he began thrashing around the room, throwing clothes and chair cushions into the air, and shouting that he couldn't find his car keys.

He dashed out the door and ran down six flights of stairs to the street. Fifty yards from the dorm entrance stood a campus police telephone booth, illuminated by a blue light. Chris sprinted to the phone, picked it up, and started to babble.

He was shouting so hysterically that the dispatcher couldn't even make out his name. But there was something about a stabbing or killing in some place that sounded like Washington. And car keys: over and over, he kept yelling that he couldn't find his car keys.

The dispatcher put out a call at 5:17
A
.
M
., asking a car to go to the blue-light phone on Dan Allen Drive, near Sullivan. She said a person on the line was talking loudly. To campus police at NC State, this was no big deal. More than ten thousand students were on campus for summer session, and the campus itself—as it was all year—was saturated with alcohol and illegal drugs. A middle-of-the-night call on an emergency phone from someone screaming hysterically was not an unprecedented occurrence.

Two officers reached the phone at 5:19. Chris Pritchard, who'd been slumped against a lamppost on the sidewalk, jumped up and ran toward them, waving his hands frantically in the air.

“I lost my keys! I can't find my fucking car keys! My mother and father have been beaten and stabbed. In Washington. In Beaufort County. I've got to get down there! But I can't find my keys!”

Chris was five nine and weighed only 150 pounds. He was wearing a baseball cap, sweatshirt, and shorts and looked too young to be in college. To the officers, who had some experience in such matters, he seemed either drunk or high on drugs. He wouldn't shut up. He just kept babbling the same thing. They couldn't tell if it was a hoax or not, so they took him to campus police headquarters and called the Washington, North Carolina, police from there.

It was no hoax. And at a few minutes past six
A
.
M
., with Chris lying down on the backseat, a campus police car set off on the two-hour drive to Little Washington. He fell asleep almost immediately and slept almost all the way home, until they reached the outskirts of Washington and had to wake him to ask directions to his house.

 

2

John Taylor was twenty-six years old, a slender and dark-haired man with a neatly trimmed mustache who spent most of his waking hours with a toothpick in his mouth. His real name was Haskell Taylor, Jr., but he'd been called John almost all his life, nicknamed after the Jimmy Dean song “Big Bad John.”

Born in California, he had moved to eastern North Carolina at the age of twelve. He'd worked as an electrician and then for Texas Gulf, before joining the Washington police department in 1984. For the past two years, he'd been a detective. He liked to think he knew the town, knew who was who among its residents. But as he stood in Lieth Von Stein's bedroom, taking pictures of the bloody body on the bed, he had to admit that the name was not one with which he was familiar.

Taylor had seen crime scenes more gross, but none that seemed such a personal intrusion. Whoever he had been, Von Stein had met a terrible end. Clubbed and stabbed to death in his own bed, after having apparently been awakened from sleep for just a startling, savage moment.

Taylor moved to his right, stepped over a stack of
Wall Street Journals
that lay on the floor beneath a personal computer, and bent down to take another photograph. The poor bastard. Whoever had done it hadn't taken any chances. Taylor leaned over the blood-soaked mattress and took a picture from directly above.

Von Stein. Von Stein. John Taylor was certain: it was not a name he'd ever heard before. Guy didn't look old. Maybe early forties, a little overweight. Kind of balding on top, there where he'd been smacked with the club. Had a little beard that might have looked reddish in color if it hadn't been for all the blood.

The wife had been taken out before Taylor arrived. Rushed to the hospital, still alive, but unconscious and bleeding heavily from the chest.

Taylor backed up against a wall and tried a shot that would show the body's position on the bed.
Christ, there was a lot of blood
. It was six
A
.
M
., just starting to get light. It would be another very hot and humid day: one of the sad facts of life in North Carolina in July.

As he continued to photograph the body, John Taylor decided he might be more comfortable if the bedroom were just a little bit cooler, so he stepped to the thermostat and turned up the air-conditioning.

He spent about another twenty minutes in the bedroom, then brought his camera downstairs, where one of the other officers told him they'd finally collected all the cats.

Strangest thing he'd ever seen: thirteen cats at a murder scene. Thirteen cats and a
rooster
. When Taylor had first arrived, terrified cats were running all over the house. It had taken three officers, plus the daughter and a couple of her friends, to round them up and put them in carrying cases so they could be taken to a veterinarian's office. The daughter said her mother was a member of the Beaufort County Humane Society. She also said the rooster was a pet.

Taylor walked through the kitchen and into an enclosed porch area that led to the backyard. There, he photographed a green, canvas, Army-style knapsack that lay on the floor, near the door. The knapsack appeared empty.

He also photographed the only signs of damage he could see. A hole had been smashed in a large, double-paned plate-glass window adjacent to the back door. Shards of glass lay on the floor, near the knapsack and door. Stepping through the open doorway, Taylor saw that a screen outside the plate-glass window had been slashed twice, each cut about twelve inches long.

Inside the house, except for the contents of a purse scattered across a kitchen counter, nothing appeared to be disturbed.

To John Taylor, it didn't look like a burglary. It looked as if someone had come to the house to murder Lieth Von Stein.

* * *

At the hospital, Bonnie drifted in and out of consciousness. She was as pale as the sheets on which she lay. A tube was in her chest where a lung had collapsed, and through another, in her arm, she was receiving a blood transfusion, and through another, intravenous fluids. Her hair was matted with blood, her eyes were glazed from sedatives, and there were gashes in her forehead where she'd been struck by a club.

By four-fifty
A
.
M
., when she'd arrived at the emergency room, her blood pressure had dropped to ninety over sixty. A pair of inflatable antishock trousers had been placed on her legs in an attempt to stabilize her blood pressure.

The two-inch-long stab wound in her chest had punctured her right lung, causing such severe internal bleeding that she required an immediate two-pint blood transfusion. When a tube was first inserted into the collapsed lung, more than five hundred cubic centimeters of bloody fluid were sucked out.

In addition to the stab wound, she had a large bruise on the right side of her chest. She'd also been hit three times on the forehead with a blunt object, each blow producing both a bruise and a cut severe enough to require suturing. She also had a fractured thumb.

Had she not managed to call the police, she might easily have slipped into shock and died from blood loss, or other complications of her punctured lung. By seven
A
.
M
., however, the doctor who examined her was able to write that she was “alert and conscious and responding well to stimuli.” He termed her condition “stable,” which was not to say she had not been very badly hurt, or that she was yet out of danger.

By shortly after noon, she had improved to the point where not only was her physical condition termed “stable,” but a doctor who examined her wrote that she was “emotionally controlled, pleasant, and cooperative.”

Within hours, in various quarters of Little Washington, this demeanor would come to be described as being not at all what one would expect from a woman whose husband had been brutally murdered in the middle of the night, and who herself had been seriously injured—unless, of course, the event was just what she'd been hoping for, and what she might even have managed to arrange.

* * *

Chris reached the house shortly after eight
A
.
M
. He did not go in. His facial features, small and still not fully formed, gave him a childish appearance, which, combined with his slight build, always made him seem younger than he was, no matter how many days he went without shaving.

On this morning, he looked like hell. He hadn't shaved in three days, his spiky brown hair was greasy, his breath foul. He was wearing the same NC State “Wolfpack” sweatshirt he'd had on when he'd collapsed into bed hours earlier. His hands were shaking, his voice was high-pitched, and his eyes were so big and queer-looking that anyone familiar with the effects would have guessed that at some time in the not too distant past he'd consumed a drug stronger than beer.

Angela was sitting on a lawn across the street from her house. A group of her friends, having heard the news, had already begun to gather. They were smoking and talking and looking across Lawson Road at all the policemen running in and out, and at the television trucks starting to arrive.

Chris spoke briefly to his sister, who left her spot at the edge of the lawn long enough to tell him that Lieth was dead and that their mother was in intensive care.

A Washington patrolman gave him a ride to the hospital. He went to his mother's bedside. She looked as close to being dead as anyone he'd ever seen. Tubes seemed to be everywhere, pouring fluid in and sucking fluid out. Her whole head seemed caked with dried blood.

But she opened her eyes as he stepped toward her and made a small sound that let him know that she knew who he was.

As soon as she did, he squeezed her hand and started to cry. For minutes, he just stood there, bending over her, and crying as if he'd never stop.

* * *

Lewis Young, resident agent of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation based in the town of Washington, got to the house at nine
A
.
M
. A big man, about six two, he was good-looking in the understated way that capable plainclothes investigators often were. He'd been with the State Bureau of Investigation for fourteen years. The SBI was a North Carolina version of the FBI, called in to help local police with major crimes.

Mitchell Norton, the Beaufort County district attorney, had called Young as soon as he'd heard about the murder. This one looked too big to be left solely in the hands of the Washington police.

Of all the SBI's resident agents, Young was one of the very few—in fact, he knew of no other—to have graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From his superiors, he'd always received the highest possible ratings for thoroughness, intelligence, and ability to get along with both colleagues and the public.

Such was his reputation that even if the murder had occurred hundreds of miles away, Young might have been called to assist with the investigation—he was much in demand for difficult cases—but by geographical fluke, the crime had occurred in his own territory, and thus he was at the scene within hours.

Even before entering the house, Young could tell he'd have problems. In the backyard, blood-soaked sheets hung from a small outboard motorboat. Young winced. This was a crime scene. The scene of a
murder
. At a crime scene, you were supposed to preserve the evidence, not drape it all over a boat.

As he approached the back entrance to the house, Young noticed the slashed screen and the shattered window, the edge of the window being about ten to twelve inches from the edge of the door. He noted also that what looked to be small panes of glass in the door itself, several of which would have given much easier access to the doorknob, had not been broken.

The thought occurred to him that, if one were intending to break into a house, it would have been far easier to crack an eight-by-ten-inch piece of single-pane glass that gave easy access to the lock on the inner knob below than to smash a large Thermopane, double-thick window, in a place from which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to reach the inner knob in order to unlock the door.

From his first look, in other words, Lewis Young, with all his experience and expertise, thought the evidence suggested not an actual forced entry, but rather that someone had tried to
stage
a scene that looked like a break-in.

To Young, it seemed at least a strong possibility that someone had smashed the glass and slashed the screen as an afterthought—on the way out.

As John Taylor had, Young noted that there was little, if any, evidence of theft. And like Taylor, Lewis Young quickly concluded that whoever had come through that door—and however he, or they, had gained entrance—had come with killing, not stealing, in mind.

Young considered the possibility that the killer, or killers, had entered through the front door. But a quick check with the first officers and emergency medical personnel at the scene confirmed that the front door had been locked when they arrived. Thus, it seemed a near-certainty to Young that the back door had been the point of entrance and exit.

* * *

John Taylor, before leaving the scene for the day, conducted a small personal experiment to test Young's hypothesis that the shattered window had not provided the killer or killers with access to the inside of the house.

Even discounting the added concern that, in darkness, groping toward the doorknob from the small hole in the double-paned glass meant risking a cut from one of the shards protruding from the edges, Taylor later said that, in order to even
reach
the doorknob, “I had to hold the doorframe and stand on the edge of the steps and reach my hand all the way around and reach around the casing that covers the window, and the casing that covers the door, and it was difficult.”

Thus, he, like Lewis Young, from the very first hours, thought that not only had theft not been the motive, but that the shattered glass and slashed screen were meant only to confuse and to distract those who would come to investigate.

As Lewis Young climbed the stairs to the room in which the murder had been committed, he wondered, who were these people?

Like John Taylor, Young had lived in Little Washington for years. As he drove home each day, his route took him through Smallwood, along Lawson Road, right past the Von Stein house. He must have driven past this house hundreds, if not thousands, of times, yet Von Stein was a name he'd never heard.

But unless this murder was simply a random event—a possibility Young considered most unlikely—someone had known the name. Someone had known it well enough to want to kill the man whose name it was.

He called for one of the state's mobile crime labs, but none was available. That morning, all mobile-crime-lab personnel were at a statewide meeting in Raleigh. It would be hours before a van could return to Washington, and the local police didn't feel like waiting. They proceeded to process the scene.

Young did not have authority to make them stop. As an SBI agent, his role was only advisory. He could—and did—advise them to stop. But they could—and did—disregard his advice.

He did, however, have the presence of mind to pay attention to what he saw before the crime scene was forever altered beyond usefulness or recognition.

And one thing he saw was this: next to Bonnie Von Stein's side of the double bed was a typewriter stand, on top of which sat a typewriter, its vinyl dustcover in place. And on top of the typewriter, stacked very neatly, were four pages from a paperback book.

At that point, Lewis Young did not concern himself with the words on the pages, only with the fact that on the top page he saw spatters of blood. Blood-flecked paper next to a bed where a murder and a near-murder had occurred was evidence—and in this case, evidence not compromised by the bungling of the local police.

He placed the pages in a plastic bag and took them with him when he left the house.

* * *