Cruel Doubt (46 page)

“The conflict between us was always there, but most of the time it was like a ghost—not quite tangible. We all knew we weren't okay, but we felt we had to pretend. There was something out there that nobody knew how to deal with, or wanted to try to.

“It came down to the feeling, well, we have to live together, but that doesn't mean we have to like it. Everybody was always on edge. We'd go to restaurants and Lieth would raise hell and complain, but he'd raise hell and complain at home, too.

“And it really wasn't the same with Lieth after Chocowinity. He could just never let that go. So, after that, whenever I could, I just cleared out. When I could be gone, I was gone. Somewhere else. Anywhere else. It didn't matter. And whenever I could be, I'd be drinking. I remember coming home one time totally blitzed. Mom was there, I called her a bitch, then I went out to her car and threw up in it.

“But why did I want them dead? I can't blame it all on the drugs. These feelings had to have been there before. It was just the drugs that brought them out, and the game that gave me a way to do it.”

“Why
did
you want them dead?” I asked. “So they'd never be able to reject you?”

There was a long pause. Then he said, “No. I think I wanted to kill them because if they were dead, I couldn't disappoint them anymore.”

 

42

I also spent time in Little Washington. The best place to eat, incidentally, isn't Wendy's or Hardee's or even the Stage House, where Angela delivered the place mat to John Taylor. The best place to eat in Little Washington is Bill's Hot Dogs on Gladden Street, right next to A. P. Gerard and Son—Feed, Seed, Lawn and Garden Supplies, and just up the street from the First Presbyterian Church.

What you order at Bill's is an All-the-Way, which comes with chili that they make right there in the kitchen; and with mustard, and with most anything else you might want to put on it. You have to order two because, as they say at Bill's, “they're small in size but big in taste.” The preferred drink is Pepsi-Cola, an original North Carolina product. At lunchtime, Bill's is one of the busiest places in town.

* * *

As Keith Mason had told Bonnie at the end of the trial, many people in Washington still believed that both she and her daughter were involved in the murder of Lieth.

I had one long conversation with Mitchell Norton during which, after several hours, and after he'd smoked innumerable Salem Lights, he mentioned what he called his Plan B, which he might have implemented if Chris had been a defendant.

This consisted, in essence, of putting Bonnie on trial for the murder: of suggesting that even though she hadn't been charged, much suggested that she had masterminded the plot in order to collect the money that would come to her when Lieth was dead.

Norton conceded that no physical evidence linked Bonnie to the crime, but none had linked Upchurch either. And Bonnie had a far better motive: a $2 million motive.

His goal, he said, would not have been to convict her—after all, she hadn't even been indicted—but to cause the jury to view her with suspicion and thereby to disregard anything she might say in support of her son.

To imply that she'd been involved, he would have referred to the undigested rice, the letters to Lieth from the woman in California, and the blood-spattered pages from
A Rose in Winter
. He would also have made an issue of Bonnie's demeanor: how she had not displayed grief or sorrow at appropriate times, in appropriate ways. And he would have dragged in Angela, too, as Upchurch's lawyers had tried to do.

* * *

The rice remained an unresolved question. More than a year after the trial, Page Hudson was still troubled by its implications.

“Rice is pretty easily digestible,” he said in an interview. “Cooked chicken is pretty easily digestible. But the rice had undergone very little change. The chicken had undergone very little change. The longer in the stomach, the more frayed-looking the particles become. These didn't look frayed at all. If they'd told me he had eaten ten or fifteen minutes before, I would have said okay. But when they said
four or five hours
 . . .

“I would have expected him to have had an empty stomach, or close to an empty stomach within a couple of hours. By midnight, I would have thought he would have had an empty stomach. Or that the material in it would at least have been practically unrecognizable.

“Look, most everything in life I've found an exception to, so I won't say it's impossible. I'll just say I'm astounded. In many cases, there's an item or two that doesn't seem to fit with everything else. So you sort of go along with the total mass of evidence. I'm not going to get up on a soapbox and say, ‘Hey, justice wasn't carried out here because the rice wasn't digested.' But I'm still terribly surprised. I still have a great deal of difficulty believing that I was looking at five or six hours of digestion.

“You know, you develop over a period of time a spectrum of what can or will happen, and when something falls outside that spectrum, you say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. I'm not willing to accept those facts.' I got very much that feeling with the Von Stein case, and I still have it. If I had the chance to see the great instant replays of all cases—if they said, ‘Hey, you can pick a half dozen and go back and see the replay, to see what really happened'—this would be one of my six.

“Something is not quite right about this case. There's something missing here. There's another card yet to be dealt.”

* * *

Dr. Hudson's feeling was shared by both of James Upchurch's public defenders.

“My feeling,” Frank Johnston said, “is if the truth were told, there would be other people involved. I think there was involvement by those we've heard about that hasn't come to light.”

He said he based his view primarily on two factors: the undigested rice and the attitude of Bonnie and her children during trial. “I detected a coldness from Bonnie, Chris, and Angela that shocked me. Bonnie just never showed—and maybe she's an emotionless person—but she never showed any real emotion, whether she was talking about her son or her husband. She's the most controlled individual I have ever seen.”

Asked if he questioned her story, Johnston replied, “I definitely do. When you put in this problem with the time factor and the food not digested and her saying it happened at four or five in the morning, I just think there are things that could have happened that none of us would ever know. It looked to me like the medical evidence completely overruled what the State was saying. The time interval, medically, can't exist. So, either the medical science is not as precise as we think it is, or she's hiding something.”

Wayland Sermons did not go quite so far, but agreed that “Bonnie was very unusual, personality-wise,” and that Dr. Hudson's findings “pointed in an entirely different direction” from the story told by Bonnie, Chris, and Neal Henderson.

“The testimony that the death occurred in the neighborhood of twelve to one to two o'clock showed that Henderson and Pritchard were telling a tale they had manufactured,” he said. And Sermons pointed to “tremendous discrepancies,” even between their two stories, in regard to such matters as how far in advance the planning for the murder had begun, and as to where—the bathroom closet or beneath the cushion of a chair—Chris's car keys had been returned.

Also, in his statement to police Chris had said he didn't care when the murders were done, as long as his car was back before dawn. Yet, according to Henderson, it had not been. As the sun began to rise over Greenville, Henderson had been driving the white Mustang through a car wash.

And even in the absence of the undigested rice, there was the fact that Lieth had gone to bed—as was his custom—at nine-thirty
P
.
M
. By four-thirty, he would already have had seven hours' sleep and might have been awakened far more easily than if he'd been attacked at midnight.

“That is what still makes me wonder,” Sermons said. “There were so many things that didn't add up. I think, at some point, someone's going to find there was someone else in the room.”

For Sermons to have said “someone
else
” suggested an implicit admission that his client had been there, too, but that was not the point he wanted to make.

“I think the someone would probably be Henderson,” he said. “Or Henderson and somebody else. There was just too much going on, too quickly, for one person to do.” This point drew the support of both Page Hudson and Tom Brereton, not to mention of Bonnie herself.

“Henderson had a year to get his story straight,” Sermons said. “And I don't believe for a minute that what he said on the stand is the truth, the whole truth.”

Regarding Chris, he said, “By and large, I think everyone came away from the trial with the impression that poor Chris didn't know the truth. Or maybe he knew it but didn't know how to tell it. Or just that the truth wasn't in him.”

As to his own opinion about what had happened, Sermons said only, “I'd rather not get into my personal beliefs.” He added, however, in regard to Bonnie, “The thing that kept on with me was, ‘Was she involved?'” And he emphasized that his colleague, Frank Johnston, was “incredulous that Bonnie could survive an attack with the superficial injuries she had.”

* * *

Even Lewis Young admitted that for some time, even after she'd passed her polygraph test so handily, he continued to have doubts about Bonnie. “I felt like for the most part, all along, she was not a part of this. But I never ruled out that there was a lot of money at stake here, and she was the first to gain by having survived.

“But I have a hard time thinking that somebody would subject themselves to the injuries she received just to be that convincing. Even though they ultimately ended up being more superficial than life threatening, that bat could have just hit in the wrong place; that knife could have gone just a little bit deeper. And how do you control that?”

* * *

To Jean Spaulding, who examined Bonnie's medical records, there was nothing superficial about the injuries. “Her wounds were severe. They were not wounds you would inflict on yourself, or that you would want inflicted on you.”

Indeed, Dr. Spaulding considered any suggestion that Bonnie herself might have arranged or participated in the murder to be ridiculous. “Having known Bonnie very well as her psychiatrist, I do not feel she has the capacity to have taken part in or to have planned anything like this. Not a murder in general, and certainly not the murder of Lieth, who was so important to her on so many levels.

“Every time Bonnie would go back to Lieth, in conversation, that's where I could see the warmth. That's where I could see so much humanity from her. The meaning of Lieth for Bonnie was bigger than life.”

* * *

But even Bill Osteen, for a time, had his doubts. For Osteen, the problem was not Bonnie's seeming detachment or unusual degree of self-control, but something much more concrete.

“I think Bonnie really was trying to do well,” he said. “I think she was trying to stand by her children. And I think Bonnie is—my guess is that she is a good person. But I'll tell you something I've never mentioned before.

“I think,” he said, well after his involvement in the case had ended, “if you go back, you will find a couple of letters that were found in Lieth's office drawer. And I think those letters could be interpreted as giving rise to the possibility of a relationship with a lady in California. And I always wondered, during all that time, could this possibly be a plot which was beyond all of us here, that these people know about?

“I've discarded that. I really have. But I looked at those letters and said, ‘Am I missing something? Is this more than it appears to be?' And that's a tough thing to say because, good gracious, if Bonnie has had the strength and fortitude to do the things she's done, if she's been able to withstand the heartache, then it's terrible to think, ‘Well, at one time I had to consider you a suspect, too.' ”

* * *

That left, of the items on Mitchell Norton's dirty-laundry list, only the four blood-specked pages from
A Rose in Winter
. In the chaos of the crime scene, no one recalled when or where the book itself was found. John Taylor remembered that at one point he was holding it in his hand, but does not know how he came to have it.

As to the pages, however, Lewis Young's recollection—supported by Taylor's crime-scene photographs—was quite specific. They
were
stacked neatly on top of the typewriter stand. And they had been spattered with blood. A T-shirt of Bonnie's, hanging on a chair just beyond them, was also blood flecked. To Young, this indicated that the pages were on the typewriter before the blood had been shed.

Also, it seemed unlikely to him—given the disregard they'd shown for other potential evidence—that an EMT or Washington patrolman would have carefully gathered the pages from the floor and stacked them neatly, in proper numerical order.

Yet Bonnie had testified at trial, “When I went to bed, there weren't any books that were torn apart or disassembled or had pages out of them.”

Asked if she'd read this particular book, these pages of which bore such an insidiously close resemblance to what had occurred in the room where they'd been found, she had replied, “I don't remember the story. I read it several years ago.”

And that was where the matter rested. No one seemed able to take it any further. At least not until Angela said in an interview, on June 14 of this year, 1991, that she knew the book well.

“Yeah,” she said, “I've probably read it three times.” An intriguing comment, given the nature of the book and the fact that Angela did not have a widespread reputation as a voracious reader, and that in March 1989, she'd told SBI investigators Newell and Sturgell she did not remember the book.

But in June 1991, she acknowledged that she knew what action occurred in those particular pages. She said the way she figured it, the book could have been open by the bed because she thought her mother was reading it at the time.

* * *

By June 1991, Chris's ex-roommate Vince Hamrick was also able to remember some intriguing details and to offer some provocative opinions.

First, in addition to his baseball bat, James Upchurch had kept a Japanese martial-arts weapon in his dorm room. This, made of two pieces of bamboo strapped together and bound at the handle, was a powerful weapon, not some sort of flimsy reed. The kind of weapon that—while it might not fracture a skull as easily as a baseball bat would—could certainly inflict damage to a forehead, especially if swung by someone standing over a woman who was lying on a floor. The thing he most remembered about the weapon, Hamrick said, was that it made a whistling sound when it was swung hard.

Second, for two weeks after the murder of Lieth, while Chris was away from the campus, James Upchurch had moved into the room and had slept in Chris's bed, becoming Vince's temporary roommate. At the time, Vince had seen nothing strange about it since they all were hanging around together so much anyway, and Moog had never discussed the crime, but in retrospect Vince found it odd indeed.